justpassingthrough
February 11, 2011 at 2:42 am
You see, the word “woman” is the most important word in a feminist’s lexicon. Like it or not, it’s a word imbued with political, anthropological, sociological, psychological, historical, and, lastly, medical meaning. It is not so much a physical descriptor as it is a biography of half the human race. It says something about where we’ve been, what sorts of issues we’ve faced, what obstacles we’ve had to overcome. It means that when we look into the eyes of another woman, we will always see part of ourselves reflected back to us. That connection doesn’t happen arbitrarily; it doesn’t happen
because we share, or have shared, reproductive organs; it doesn’t happen because
we share “female brain” and love gossiping, shoe shopping and “chick flicks” (ew, ew and eww). That connection is borne of a lifetime of understanding what it means to be a woman, which is to say, the shared rituals, traditions, hopes, fears, trials and tribulations experienced exclusively by girl children raised in a patriarchy. Which sounds, understandably, like the manifesto of the She-Woman Trans Hater’s Club to those former boy children whose personalties did not lend themselves to easy assimilation into the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club of patriarchy. They wanted to jump the fence and hang out with us, they wanted membership in our club because, of the only two clubs in town, it was the club they felt most at home in.Understandable. How could any empathetic former female child of patriarchy deny the necessity of banding together with those you most closely relate to? It’s a logical, if not psychologically expedient, endeavor. So here’s the deal. A person cannot become something they are not, anymore than a scientist can transmute lead into gold. The best that can be achieved is a semblance of the thing they aspire to be. Breast implants, hormone therapy and reconstructed genitalia create the facsimile of a woman – not *a* woman. To argue that womanhood can be procured through scalpels, silicone, and a somewhat chemically altered physiology is reductionist at best and a great whopping insult to those of us who take our womanhood way damn seriously. We’ve fucking earned it. All our lives we’ve been told to make concessions for others, we’ve been told we haven’t got the right to ownership of our own bodies, for goodness sake, and now we’re being told we have to sacrifice ownership of
womanhood – and, yes, that is exactly what it would be, a sacrificial knife to the heart of the biography of half the human race – and all because some members of the opposite sex covet it? How fucking codependent. How fucking typical. Let’s fucking transcend this idiocy already.
I have to admit, it wasn’t very long ago that I felt the exact the same way. But then, something incredibly amazing happened…
I got over myself.
I realized that when trans-men and trans-women spoke out against the discrimination and injustices they were facing, they spoke from their real experiences and with genuine emotion. I was missing pieces of a larger puzzle that were preventing me from being sympathetic to their cause, and it was my job to seek it out. So, I began doing some research.
It would be disingenuous of me to claim any sort of expert knowledge on the issues of the trans-persons. However, in my research I have come to several conclusions:
(If anything in this post is offensive to my trans-brothers and –sisters, please let me know so I can make it right. Like all privileged people, I might stick my foot in my foot in my mouth once in a while. I am trying to learn, however, so I want to apologize now.)
1) From birth, we are raised to conform to a set of socially-acceptable rules as to how our assigned gender should act. (Example: Girls are supposed to play dress-up and boys are supposed to play with guns.) If we stray from the rules, we are seen as weird or strange. (Example: Boys should never wear pink, and girls should always wear their hair long.) Thankfully, as kids grow older, we began to take on an attitude of “anything you can do I do better” and we begin to realize that it’s perfectly okay – and perfectly natural – to cross that blue and pink line…
2) …as long as you were still a “boy” or a “girl”. Transitioning from one assigned gender to another is about more than being a little boy who wants to wear dresses or being a little girl who wants to be more “manly”. I can’t explain why that is because I’ve never been uncomfortable in my own assigned gender; it would be disrespectful and downright ignorant for me to even claim I know what I’m talking about here. What I do know is that being a cisgendered woman – a woman who was born and raised as a woman – is a privilege. I’ll never know what it feels like to have been born in the wrong body, but as a human being it’s my duty to respect those who have.
3) The stick figures in the doors of public restrooms have been lying to us all. Gender, just like sexuality, is not a black-and-white thing. There are cisgendered, transgendered, intersexed, and gender queer people who don’t fit in society’s gender binary. And that’s perfectly fine. Gender roles in society have long been blurred; now it’s time for us to do the same thing with gender identity. Let people lives their lives as they see fit. To force one’s own mores and attitudes on another human being is fascist and wrong. Fuck dat shit!
If you want to learn more about the issues trans-people face, here are a couple of good places to start:
*Don't even get started on the kyriarchy-fail in that thread. >:P Blecch!
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