When I talk about cis gay men being angry at trans women for existing, it's not the same thing as cis gay men being angry about being confused for transsexual women or transsexual women being angry about being confused for cis gay men. It's stuff like, "transsexual women are really just cis gay men who want to be straight," for example, and arguments as to why we should not be allowed to transition and should be forced to be cis gay men instead, as if they're entitled to have us in their community (even though we're not men, and our identities do not overlap, except to people who think that sex assigned at birth has more meaning than who we say we are).
I meant by "er, yeah," that I've been challenged for being in women's restrooms too, and in one instance (at a school) I was banned from using the women's restroom and required to walk a block or so to the nearest public restroom or use the men's room in the school itself. When a cissexual butch lesbian tries to invoke her restroom difficulties as a reason why she has it worse than me, she's pushing a rather sensitive button. I do empathize and sympathize about bathroom policing, but the oppression olympics there is infuriating, because the anecdote is used to say that trans women have it easy and butch lesbians have it hard.
Could you clarify what you mean about not making a distinction between gender and sex?
I think the distinction is very important for trans people and intersex people both. I mean, everyone's assigned a sex at birth against their will, but in most cases it turns out to be congruent with their gender identity. For intersex people, there's a chance that it's congruent, but they're still frequently subjected to surgical assignment, which can and frequently does cause problems for them, never mind those who are assigned the wrong sex. Trans people are assigned the wrong sex at birth, and have to live with our expectations of our bodies clashing with what our bodies actually are. How do you talk about these things if you refuse to make a distinction?
Yes, I meant GQ. And yes, I think the defensiveness around non-binary identities is a function of cisgender = normal. And the added layer for trans people is that so many cis people try to shove us into non-binary categories, insisting we should be happy to be defined outside "man" or "woman" because that's how they did it in some other country or because we don't know what it's like to be raised a member of our proper genders - that's on top of the valuing of binary genders over non-binary, not to say that getting defensive about anyone's gender is okay.
I was sticking to gender-related privilege and oppression deliberately. Yes, race needs to be there too, because of course race definitely affects how anyone's gender is viewed (how black man carries a different meaning than white man for the "man" part and not just the race part, because of course, you can't separate everything out). I'm sorry about erasing race, because obviously you can't ignore it.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-21 11:22 pm (UTC)I meant by "er, yeah," that I've been challenged for being in women's restrooms too, and in one instance (at a school) I was banned from using the women's restroom and required to walk a block or so to the nearest public restroom or use the men's room in the school itself. When a cissexual butch lesbian tries to invoke her restroom difficulties as a reason why she has it worse than me, she's pushing a rather sensitive button. I do empathize and sympathize about bathroom policing, but the oppression olympics there is infuriating, because the anecdote is used to say that trans women have it easy and butch lesbians have it hard.
Could you clarify what you mean about not making a distinction between gender and sex?
I think the distinction is very important for trans people and intersex people both. I mean, everyone's assigned a sex at birth against their will, but in most cases it turns out to be congruent with their gender identity. For intersex people, there's a chance that it's congruent, but they're still frequently subjected to surgical assignment, which can and frequently does cause problems for them, never mind those who are assigned the wrong sex. Trans people are assigned the wrong sex at birth, and have to live with our expectations of our bodies clashing with what our bodies actually are. How do you talk about these things if you refuse to make a distinction?
Yes, I meant GQ. And yes, I think the defensiveness around non-binary identities is a function of cisgender = normal. And the added layer for trans people is that so many cis people try to shove us into non-binary categories, insisting we should be happy to be defined outside "man" or "woman" because that's how they did it in some other country or because we don't know what it's like to be raised a member of our proper genders - that's on top of the valuing of binary genders over non-binary, not to say that getting defensive about anyone's gender is okay.
I was sticking to gender-related privilege and oppression deliberately. Yes, race needs to be there too, because of course race definitely affects how anyone's gender is viewed (how black man carries a different meaning than white man for the "man" part and not just the race part, because of course, you can't separate everything out). I'm sorry about erasing race, because obviously you can't ignore it.