The Spectrum Cafe

(note: this is a modified and updated version of a posting I made on FaceBook as a note shortly after I ended my writing at Dyssonance.com.)

I had, for some damn fool reason, figured that people would finally realize to leave me the hell out of the stupid who is and who isn’t arguments and the whole asinine concept that somehow transsexuals are being erased by whatever other form of trans person there is out there when I ended writing on my blog.

Like I said, damn fool reason.

Instead, one side brought it back to me, and it has been brought back to me with a renewed vigor, and it posits that I am, in some amazing, magical way (I suppose because of people on that side dubbing me the Oz of Transgender) to be counted among the people that are most dangerous to their dogma. Or at the very least as people they just really don’t like because I’m not one to suffer fools gladly for the most part.

And there is much within that dogma that I do have problems with because it is the dogma of the unreasonable, the uninformed, and the ignorant.

Take, for example, the use of the phrase “medical condition“.  Many of these same people will tell you that they oppose the DSM inclusion, and they will argue with you that it is not medical.

When, in fact, the DSM is a book that is entirely medical, and is created by a field of medical people who have to follow all the rules and ethics of medicine, and deal with all the laws around medicine, and when it comes to the APA that produces the book — where the P stands for Psychiatric —  that these are people who have to do clinical work and study just like any other doctor. These are people who look at “erectile dysfunction” and wonder why it is in there because there’s no “physical” aspect to it, forgetting that it is in there because there is a physical aspect to it.

In the last few days I’ve seen fuckwittery of a startling degree in many areas and from people who I’m startled to see do it.  From the asinine and incoherent dogma of “psychiatry isn’t medical” to things like “transgenders think this and transsexuals think this”, all of it is, in the end, one great big huge steaming pile of equine feces. The recent post at my old digs by Mercedes is a very good post, and came at a fascinating time.  It shows that there is a community that exists around transness and that everyone is a part of it, even if they don’t feel like they are a part of the sub-groups and phenotypes and categories therein. And these people often missed the point that she raised — a point I’ve raised in the distant past and will probably raise again in the future — that beneath all the idiocy and foolishness, underneath the use of terms like “fetish” and ableist language, beneath the thick swath of lookism and internalized transphobia that causes them to misgender, beneath the vulgar and insipid base truth that they do this to make themselves feel better, there very well could be a real point.

And it was around that time that I started using the term “trans”, instead of transgender.  The later categorization that I did came later — and despite the attempts they’ve made, they are unable to answer, accurately, simple questions like “what is sex”, “what is a woman”, and so forth.

And it is not a community that is built on identity, either — as the constant use of the terms identity in all the internal battling shows: if it were about identity, then there would not be a need to split as it would have never been unified. The lessons of people of mixed race have been ignored.  The lessons ofthe lighter skinned people who are still black have been ignored.

There’s one peson who calls manyof this type of people white women.  And while its not entirely accurate, it very much describes the cultural concepts and the ethnocentric viewoint that dominates that particular viewpoint. And it is very much an ethnocentric viewpoint, based entirely on USian values and ideas, and it functionally erases the identities of other people who are transsexual (who are then labeled as not transsexual, or who have articles written on them three years after the fact where people say they are “just now” claiming to be transsexual, thus literally erasing those people’s identities and resulting in the incoherence I noted earlier, as one cannot have a coherent belief system that is logically sound if one is going to say that using “transgender” erases others when that same person then goes around to other people and informs them that they aren’t “good enough” or that they are “betraying” or that they simply aren’t transsexual when that person actively identifies as such — see that earlier link for four people who are transsexuals and who are being described as transgender with transgender being used as a negative and lesser statement). It is a viewpoint that functions on the basis of all the  intersections that I’ve written so much about in the past: racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, heteronormativity, assimilationism, and so forth.

The other recent thing I got was that I’m somehow uses “trans” as a replacement for “transgender” — that I’m inventing a new umbrella.  Which is falsehood, for one, as I’m not inventing diddly here, and idiocy for another since they inevitably fail to understand the distinction here.

Is “car” an umbrella term?  Or is it a generic appellation applied to a wide range of vehicles?

Is Apple and umbrella term — or is it used to describe a particular segment of pomaceous fruit?

Is Woman an umbrella term or does it only apply to a particular segment of the population — and what is the line there when even the best and brightest minds in the world throughout history have failed to come up with a definition that meets all people’s needs?

Those are not, to me, umbrella terms.

They are descriptive terms used to help us communicate certain things. To me, by the same logic I’m hearing from these people, the term “words” is an umbrella term.

And when I ask thoe questions, they are ignored in favor of some other thing that the person want’s to talk about, the discourse shifting to something entirely different and unrelated to actually answering the questions I’ve asked.

Then again, on the flipside, I’m also told that the term trans is so ambiguos as to be useless — you know, like car, apple, and woman are so utterly useless and yet are incredibly ambiguous.

These are not social justice advocates doing this.  These are not people who are actually involved in the work, right now, that is needed — work which does not, in the end, actually involve talking to the trans community directly.  It involves talking to the wider community. These are people that are spending their time and their energy and their effort to talk to the community they are part of by the simple act of speaking to it, because this is a community that is based on an information economy — one of our currencies is information, our trade is in information and support and it is critical to remember that this is a community forged not by its own internal working, but by the circumstance and pressures of the wider world.

I referred to these people not too long ago as the conservative branch of the trans community.  And they are — rather than understanding and supporting the combined effort of all these groups, they scream and holaer that some of these groups shouldn’t be in there, and they seek to make an assimilationsit change tothe politics internally, forgetting that those politics are not defined internally, but externally.

The trans community exists because of the oppression that is engaged in against it by the cis world around it. Remove that pressure, and it will fade away.

And note that they are very much a part of the trans community because they are involved in a dialog with it *about* it and are trying to effect change within it.

That this change is ostracizing is irrelevant to them -= instead they speak about boundaries. Save that boundaries which are healthy bondaries are not carved out at the expense of others (as anyone who teaches a good boundary class will tell you), which is what is being done.Then I’m told that I hate them, that I am their enemy, and they always follow this witht hings about me which are literally untrue, and always come from something they’ve added intot he discourse.  Such as someone recently saying that I identify as a transsexual on my campaign website. I do not identify as a transsexual there.  I state that I am a transsexual.  That isn’t a statement of identity, and only an asswipe is going to somehow magically create the idea that saying such *is* identifying as that.  It is a statement of description only — and its an accurate one.

I’m told by people that Autumn Sandeen isn’t a transsexual, that Monica Roberts isn’t a transsexual, that Ashley Love isn’t a transsexual, that  Hexydezimal isn’t a transsexual, that Donna Rose isn’t a transsexual, that anyone who disagrees withtheir view of who is and who isn’t a transsexual isn’t a transsexual, and they all point fingers and yet all of them forget one very, very important thing:I don’t give a flying fuck who is and who isn’t a transsexual.

I read stuff like this:

Transgender goals are completely flipped from ours in that they seek to entrench gender as a pseudo-replacement for sex (pretty much at the beck and call, as well as a *great* side effect of their laziness for the psych institution end of things), whereas we are looking to have sex representation and work with allies like intersex people to build a sex centered community.

and I have to wonder if they truly understand just how wrong they are, and when I try to correct them, I’m told no, no its absolutely the case, and that I’m just spouting more dogma.
It doesn’t matter that this literally flies in the face of the fact that as a sociologist, everything I’ve ever written about is very specific — female/male is sex, masculine/feminine is gender, and the two are separate.  And I can say, absolutely, that I have asked them pointed questions, and been given answers that indicates they literally do not understand what sex and gender are. That they do not understand the very semantic arguments they are using, that they are at best half informed and meeting the old standard of a half educated person is worse than a fully educated one.

But if anyone were to push me, they’d find out that I’m likely to describe as not a transsexual anyone who spends any amount of time saying that so and so isn’t a transsexual. And *mean* it. Especially when the modus operandi of the inquisitors seeking purity is to shoot them all and let god sort ‘em out.

And here’s why I don’t care: it doesn’t make a diffference. One can argue about who’s who and who’s what and what name to use and how many different desriptions and who couts and who doesn’t until the cows come home to nest in hell.  That is, after all, how it came to be that one 64th meant you were black. It is, after all, why I’ve had to deal with internalizing racism and why I’ve had to face the painful and often abusive aspects of colorism. This is just more of the same, an ongoing series of purity tests that no one can ever possibly meet unless they match the ideological measures.

In the end, its still people crapping on you.  In the end, it is supposed to be all about making the laws fairer and the society more tolerant for people who’ve already gone through the hard part. When what people like myself are working towards is making that stuff happen so that no one has to go through the hard part.  THe hard part is wrong.

And sorry, but that means what they are doing is making it harder to people who are transsexual to begin their transition.

The essentialism that is rampant is dangerous.  The Dogma that screams for this particular creed to be followed is asinine, and, as the quote above shows, it is very much a creed based on essentilaism. But, in the end, here’s the thing: one cannot be seeking the liberties and freedoms for all trans folk if one is not including the liberties and freedoms for them.

They have a right to go off and decide on their own who is and who isn’t a member of their little clique, their personal coterie.  They even have the right to try and lay claim to the terminology they choose to term — be it HBS, or Classic transsexual, or just plain transsexual.

They do not have the right to determine who gets to use that term, and for what purpose, or when, or where — even when it comes to describing someone they don’t want it used on. In doing that, they cross the line into limiting other’s freedom of expression — and they begin to decide that what someone identifies as for themselves is their business. As they have done with people already — people who do things like put themselves in harms way for them.

It is not.  So then they say “well, they shouldn’t identify that way because its wrong” — really? You want to tell someone how to identify? That literally what they are saying when they use that line — for it to be wrong, they are making a judgment that they are literally not qualified or competent to make about another person.

I’m a native person — but only a bit more than a quarter.  You going to tell me that I shouldn’t identify as Lakota or Cherokee because its wrong when you don’t even know jack shit about my family?

I do not run up to white folks who say they are two spirit and tell them to stop — I mean, how am I to know their background?

Or they say that ‘well, its all about behavior’ — except that now they are policing other people’s behaviors, and I can note very easily that in doing so they open their own behaviors to policing, and none of them would be able to survive my policing intact because the rules I live by are going to bury them.  Pointedly so — they literally could not live by the rules I have to live by any more than the people they decide that about could live by theirs. And if it is about behavior, then why do they say it is about sex?

I won’t get into details, but let’s just say that some of the more popular people involved here are people who if challenged on things they have done would mean I would have to defend them.  Some of these people were “chasers” before they transitioned, others have engaged in sex work. Others deny it, but are known to have come up through the cross dressing community. And, most interestingly, most of them — especially from the previous wave of them, are not open about who they are or they dance through various names and accounts.  They exist pretty much entirely online — much like Amina or Paula Brooks, who were recently exposed as cis men posing as women on a very popular lesbian blog.

Forget that they often want to say that people that live in cultures and times long ago and far away that literally have little relationship to the culture and people of the US (gee, and they probably wonder why the term “USian” was coined) — let’s just reflect on the fact that they seek to portray a concept that is classist, privileged, and based in concepts and ideals that ultimately erase the value and importance of people of color.

But to them, those concepts are bad  – and they fall into the anti-intellectualism of the day. It is an unending cycle of ignorance.

I encountered one of the more popular people in this grouping the other day, and in the course of a brief conversation I asked her a question. I’ve asked it of other people as well.

Let’s say that there was a law, already on the books, that could, in one fell swoop, fix all the laws in the US as far as Trans people under their description of “medical issue” so that things like employment, surgical availality, hormones, housing, etc etc etc all came to pass.  To make this law apply, all one has to do is to remove a few words.  One of those lines specifically says that transsexuals are excluded from that law.  By name.  Doesn’t say anything about transgender people, I’ll note.  It says

transvestism, transsexualism, pedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments, or other sexual behavior disorders;

Just by doing this little bit, suddenly this law would make happen all the legal stuff that activists have been working hard at doing. But it is a very unpopular concept.

You see, to make it happen, one would have to rely on the medical condition aspect — and one would have to admit that they have been severely impaired in a critical life function (such as being able to live honestly and correctly and facing pain, despair, and all the rest if they cannot). But even for them, this won’t fly, because it has to be recognized as things stand right now.  Right this minute.  Which means they’ll have to recognize that it is an issue of the medical field of mental health.

In short, they would have to accept the cis derived narrative of their being mentally ill to make this happen. The law is the ADA. The person I spoke to — a leader, mind you — had never heard of this.  Nearly every major activist out there for years has.  Most of the people who do the hard work of trying to really make things better have heard of this — hell, its why we rejoiced at the death of Jesse Helms.

It is one example of what I talk abot when I say uninformed.  Current Dogma is holding that the ADA would be bad — it would fix trans lives as crazy and bad. They don’t realize that medicalizing *is* pathologizing.

They do not get that reduction of that really can only happen in an unpleasant and for them seemingly invalidating way.

But here’s the last bit, as well — it doesn’t matter.  The fights are all internal, and the battle that needs to be held is external, and not with each other because then nobody moves forward since it will be a division. So when you have people trying to tell you who is and who isn’t, who counts and who doesn’t, who is “good” for us and who is “bad” for us, who makes us look bad and who makes us look good, remember that they only reality in all of it is that the good and bad ideas come from people and institutions who hold that all of us are no different from each other, that we are all freaks, and that all of us should be thrown off the planet or “fixed” — with fixed being dead an ok result.

To forget that is to invite hell into the living room, and to lose sight of what it meant when “first they came for…” was written…