A cartoon by me and Becky Hawkins.
Help us make more cartoons by supporting my Patreon! Here at Barrypatreon headquarters, we will serve no sheep before it sleeps and brew no glue before it’s true.
When I think about how I became a cartoonist, I think of a original Sunday Pogo page that my parents had on their wall when I was a kid. It was hanging over a sofa in the den; I remember standing on the sofa, facing the wall, reading and rereading that Pogo strip. I was fascinated by the way I could, when I looked closely, see traces of Walt Kelly’s blue pencil lines still visible under the lush black brush strokes.
That childhood experience is part of my personal “childhood clues Barry would be a cartoonist” narrative. It was an early sign of whatever I have in me that’s obsessed with telling stories with sequential pictures.
But by telling that story, I’m not claiming that all children who are obsessed with comics for a while are cartoonists.
There are many (but not all) trans women who, thinking back on their own childhoods, will remember early signs of their true sex – including wanting to play with toys that are traditionally associated with girls, like Barbie dolls. That’s part of their personal narratives. And after all, toy choices are a common way for children in our culture to express their gender.
(Is it sexist that our society assigns gender to toys? Yes, of course it is. But acknowledging that our society has gender associations with different toys, and that commonly affects the toy preferences of children, isn’t the same as endorsing those gender associations.)
When supportive parents of trans kids try to explain how they knew their child was trans, they often mention gendered toys or clothes their child was drawn to. Again, this is part of their and their kids’ life stories – not a claim that all tomboys are actually trans boys.
But transphobes, in transparently bad faith, pretend that’s what’s being claimed. (That link is to a transphobic op-ed piece, so don’t click if you’d rather not see that.) It’s something I’ve seen tranphobes argue or allude to in countless arguments, and it’s annoyed me each time. They have a pre-existing narrative, and they’ll warp and misinterpret what trans people say to crowbar it into that narrative. So that’s what this comic strip is about.
Becky created “The JAQ Off” TV talk show for a strip she drew back in May. It seemed natural to bring it back for this strip – although now that I think about it, this may be the first time that two #PoliCartoons I’ve worked on have been set in the same shared “universe.” Watch out, MCU!
Becky and I went back and forth on if we should reuse the host character from that earlier strip, or if Becky should instead model the host visually on Kathleen Stock, a well-known British transphobe. In the end, Becky reused the host character, but not before she’d also penciled the strip with the Stock-looking character.
[The following was written in December 2021, when I originally posted this cartoon on Patreon.]
This is the last cartoon I’ll post in 2021. Thank you all so much for supporting these comics! I’m really proud of the body of work me and my collaborators have created in 2021 – both artistically, and that we frequently do cartoons on subjects that almost no other professional political cartoonists cover. And it literally could not have happened without y’all.
I’m very lucky to be spending this New Year’s Eve with my sister’s family in New York. We’ve had a bit of a Covid scare earlier this week – my niece tested positive for Covid and was under the weather for a couple of days. But she’s feeling much better now, and the rest of us (who are all vaccinated and boosted) also feel fine, and so far have tested negative for Covid (knock wood).
It could have been SO much worse, and it’s made me think about how lucky my life is, and I’m grateful (although, being an atheist, I’m not really grateful to anyone in particular) (it occurs to me that I’ve never done any comics about atheism! Maybe in 2022….). I hope we’ll all be lucky in 2022. Have a fabulous New Year, everyone.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels. Each panel shows a TV talk show studio; there’s a table that the host and guest sit behind (the table has the words “Just Asking QUESTIONS” printed on it in large letters), and a couple of large potted plants on either side of the table (the planters have “The JAQ Off” printed on them), We can see a couple of big TV lights hanging down from the ceiling, lighting the scene.
Behind the table are two women. On the left is Nadia, a woman with wavy light brown hair, wearing a pink blouse with a white jabot tie. On the right is the host, a woman wearing a pink blouse under a dark gray blazer; she has catseye glasses and her neck-length dark brown hair looks professionally styled. Both women have a coffee mug on the table beside them.
PANEL 1
Nadia looks straight into the camera, smiling with a wide-eyed “wow I’m actually on TV!” expression. The host has turned to face Nadia. She’s smiling, and raising one palm in a “just asking a question” sort of gesture.
HOST: Our guest today is Nadia Alves, of the “Valley Trans Coalition.” Welcome, Nadia.
HOST: Nadia, can you explain why trans activists insist that all boys who like dolls must “really be girls?”
PANEL 2
Nadia looks bewildered. The host, ignoring Nadia, has dramatically clutched her hands to her sternum, and has her eyes closed and an “oh the tragedy” expression on her face.
NADIA: What? Of course boys can like dolls.
HOST: I was a tomboy — if I were a girl today trans activists would force me to be a boy!
PANEL 3
Nadia explains, looking worried about the turn the conversation has taken. The host is suddenly furious, pounding the table so hard her coffee mug bounces up. To indicate the host’s fury, Becky has colored the background of this panel red, and the host’s head is suddenly much larger than it is in the other panels. (Plus the host has a furious expression, of course.)
NADIA: Nobody is doing that. Obviously not all—
HOST (yelling): Why are trans activists so regressive? Newsflash: Not all girls wear dresses! It’s like you’re stuck in the 1950s!
PANEL 4
Nadia is turning her head left and right, looking around with a confused expression. The host smiles and talks directly to the camera, making a “can you believe this person?” gesture indicating Nadia. Unnoticed, the host’s coffee mug has spilled, and coffee is dripping off the front of the table.
NADIA: Who are you talking to? Is there someone else here?
HOST: I try talking to trans people, but they just don’t listen!
I like the ambiguity of “Just asking questions”; it usually means “I mean no harm”, but in this case, it means “I’m not interested in listening to answers”.
Usually people who say “I am just asking questions” don’t actually want answers.
Same with people who preface a question by saying “honest question.”
I often find myself wondering how often that’s a narrative given for it’s ease of acceptance vs how often that’s the real narrative. And how those percentages change with different age cohorts of trans women.
That makes sense. I know that trans scholars have said that the “born in the wrong body” narrative was so predominant for a while, to a great extent, because that’s what gatekeepers of treatment (virtually all cis back then) wanted to hear.
Honestly? I just knew even though I had no interest in dolls and all the interest in baseball and statistics and arithmetic. There wasn’t anything in particular I just knew.
But I know that my experience isn’t the universal experience and so there must be some number of people for whom that narrative is absolutely true. Just as there are some for whom the “born in the wrong body” narrative is absolutely true.
I’m a little sad that we’ll never come close to knowing the answers to my questions, though.
It wouldn’t provide any absolute answers, but I’d be really interested in seeing a well-done, anonymous poll of trans people asking about these sort of experiences and perceptions.
But of course, even when people answer honestly, for many their honest answers will still to some degree be influenced by the attitudes of society around them, their friends and doctors, etc.
I’d be curious to have a similar poll of cis people, too. How many of us actually feel like we’ve been born in the “right body”? Versus those of us that just didn’t have a strong sense of our gender to begin with so just went along with what was simplest, and grew comfortable with that over time? Or for some other reason?
I’m not just saying this because I’m trying to take a conversation about trans people and make it about cis people. Rather, it’s because I think just asking trans people for their experiences buys into the paradigm that cisness is the default, “normal” mode, and we have no reason to question it, only question why people deviate from it. I think if we want to dismantle cis hegemony, cis people need to realise that our paths to our identities are not quite as obvious as we like to think.
If I may inquire, WHEN did you know? Can you think of a specific event or occasions that caused you to make this reflection and draw this conclusion? And, in particular, how old were you when you reached this conclusion?
I don’t ever recall much consciousness of my status as a cis boy. But I recall that in middle school I was invited to pick people to do a project with, and I naturally picked my friends–who all happened to be boys. The teacher sighed and remarked that, pretty soon, I’d recognize girls, too. This was the first time I can recall consciously focusing on the boy/girl distinction among my peers–and on the idea that I would be expected to change my behavior on the basis of this distinction in the future.
Certainly by 4th or 5th grade. There was nothing specific, no Aha! moment. It just coalesced into conscious thought somewhere around there, although it was definitely couched in the terms of its time when there was no such thing as trans to common knowledge.
Thinking back, it seems pretty obvious I also felt that way as far back as 1st grade, I just didn’t understand what I was doing was different or that there were any other possibilities. I had nothing to model my feelings on.
Absolutely true. The words and concepts I use now are influenced by the world around me.
May have inadvertently trod into your own “who’s ‘we’?” moment here. There’s a whole generation rightthissecond doing just that, with very little bother, and navigating the discovery of cis being (novelly) a partially marked identity just fine. After all, that’s part of the actual but unspoken objection to universal voluntary pronoun disclosure, right? That it is predicated on cis people also occasionally spot-checking their own alignment and surviving such a plight unscathed and perhaps even a little happier and more comfortable. A little self knowledge is, for the usual suspects, forever a dangerous, dEcAdeNt, point-tipping thing.
Personally speaking, it’s often reassuring to take a private moment to distinguish between who I’d very much like to be, what I undoubtedly am, and why desires regarding the former sometime reinforce the banal reality of the latter.
IIRC, Ophelia Benson, formerly of scienceblogs and last I checked monarch of her own sad terfdom, was often very plaintive about how “most women” (meaning cis women) chafed under the yoke of public womanhood and didn’t necessarily “feel” like women, according to some strict essentialist definition*, either, which always felt to me very question-beggy in a rudimentary fashion on top of being deeply, almost pathologically unimaginative in the extreme. Surely every woman under the sun has cast her eyes on greener pastures, but that doesn’t change reality and fond yearning makes neither a trans woman nor a cis woman any more male than she is. Sometimes it is the yearning itself that makes us so.
*these same people both decry and stage off with their self-styled “rad” hand but cling to with their other, bigoted one
I don’t agree that the tropes you’re addressing here are necessarily due to “gatekeepers.” Most of them are not only very old, but global. Some of the “gatekeepers” are themselves gay or trans, and they express those assumptions because they share them with the dominant culture. Don’t fall prey to the “false consciousness” fallacy.
I co-ordinated the LGB (later also T) Speakers Bureau at Indiana University for a quarter century, and was a volunteer speaker with it for a couple of decades before that. Because I’d been prompted / inspired to come out by Gay Liberation ideas, I often found myself at odds with other speakers, but I also found that the ideas I’d assimilated contained contradictions, some of which I’m still disentangling. (One example was the claim that Kinsey showed that most people are bisexual, with only a few at the ends of the scale; this is false, but for some time I was claiming it at the same time that I was giving accurate figures.)
So, some version of the “a man’s soul trapped in a woman’s body,” which was originally popular among gay men before it was adopted by some trans people, goes back centuries. It’s also the assumption that underlies almost all born-gay “science,” which so many gay people love because it pleases them; when scientists began walking back the claim, gay men didn’t just follow authority, they denounced anyone who took their biological determinism out of their hands.
A young gay man on Speakers Bureau loved to tell audiences that his mother wasn’t surprised to learn that he was gay, and showed him a photo of him as a little boy, happily holding her purse. I argued that a photograph means little; I have photographs of me happily playing with toy guns at the same age. (I also played with dolls.) This didn’t go over well, because the gender assumptions he retailed are very popular among gay men, including (even especially) those who denounce “stereotypes” and effeminacy. This is another of the contradictions I mentioned: first, I’m gay because I’m female at my core; second, how dare you claim that I’m gay because I’m female at my core!
I’ve been neglecting my blog. I need to dig into these issues again.
“But of course, even when people answer honestly, for many their honest answers will still to some degree be influenced by the attitudes of society around them, their friends and doctors, etc.”
Well, of course. But where do those attitudes come from? Minority though we are, gay men contributed to the formation of the pseudo-scientific consensus that arose in the 19th century and is still with us. And contrary to a popular belief, that consensus wasn’t new or even a conceptual break with what had been believed before.
I thin the core problem is that when it comes to matters of identity, people only REALLY understand their own experiences despite many people’s best efforts. It is tremendously difficult not to put someone else’s story through the lens of your own experience. For me, it was hard to understand why gender and its expression is so important to so many people, since it not a large part of my own identity. Since I don’t really feel any particular gender (male, female, or non-binary), I can readily picture how someone can consider gender a choice. Someone who feels their gender very strongly might be able to imagine gender as a choice (or if they are cis that someone might not be the gender they were assigned at birth).
I think that having a narrative that helps conceptualize other people’s experiences is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it can help bring understanding of experiences outside of ones’ own, but on the other, it can constrain people into being forced to demonstrate that they are really X by performing that narrative and in general narrowing conceptions of what it means to be X (for whatever X is: culture, race, religion, gender, etc).
This is a great conversation! I’m afab non-binary, and I agree with the notion that everyone experiences trans differently. Being of the younger generation, I’d also like to mention something that greatly affects trans youth: the truscum vs. tucute debate. I’m not really sure how aware the older generations are of this, so I’ll explain:
Truscums, also known as Transmeds, believe that dysphoria is necessary to be trans. They are often portrayed as gatekeepers and exclusionists by the opposing side. They usually believe the “born in the wrong body” narrative, and that being trans is innate and sometimes medical.
Tucutes believe that dysphoria is not necessary to be trans, and if you identify as a different gender you’re trans. They are called “Transtrenders” by truscums, because some of them use identities seen as weird or cringe, or don’t seem to experience “true” dysphoria.
Arguments between these groups can get really heated, and both sides truly believe they are doing a good thing by attacking the other. I’m far from a centrist, but I have made a choice not to take a side in this particular debate.
It reminds me a lot of liberal vs leftist debates (I consider myself both), where people argue whether minority justice or class equality are more important while the right is attacking both. It’s ok to have infighting in a party or group, but when that distracts us from the actual problem (racists, classists, transphobes) the argument is harmful. Sorry for the essay, but I’d like to know you guy’s thoughts on this! (Great cartoon, by the way)
I don’t think being neutral on that debate is helpful. Doing so invalidates the people on one side of the argument.
To use your comparison, one side of the other issue is: “Race issues are more important.” The other side is “Class issues are more important.” The neutral position is “I do not know whether race or class issues are more important.”
In the other situation, one side is saying: “We are trans and you are not.” The other is saying, “You are trans and so are we.” The neutral position is “I believe the first group is trans, but I don’t know whether the second group is trans or not.”
It’s more comparable to: “Race issues are more important, but class issues are also significant” and “Class issues are more important and race issues don’t exist.” Taking a neutral position on that is “Class issues are significant, but I don’t know whether racism exists.”
I’ll go ahead and say as someone with a weird relationship to dysphoria that I think being willing to tell one side of the argument “I’m neutral because I don’t care to decide whether your identity is legitimate or not” feels neither supportive nor netural. It feels like you are, in fact, trying to play both sides despite unequal effects. And in doing so, you have taken a position.
If somebody tells me that they’re trans, I believe that they’re trans.
I do side more with the tucutes, so I’m not completely neutral, I just avoid calling myself a tucute and attacking the opposing side. I don’t like truscums for the most part, but some of them are just confused because they experience dysphoria a certain way and think it should be like that for everyone. You do make some good points, I may need to revise my position. I’m still figuring out who I am myself. I fully support “weird” identities (I have a few of my own), and believe that if a person says they’re trans, then they are. I just avoid calling myself a tucute because the argument feels like it sometimes does more harm than good. Sorry for the confusion, and thank you for letting me know what you think!
I should probably stop commenting here because I always end up phrasing everything awfully
Sorry, Em. Trans issues are rough for me. I’m glad I misread you.
Not taking a label in the debate seems totally reasonable.
Don’t stop commenting on my account! I’m barely here anyway, plus I absolutely understand what it’s like not to express things exactly as you mean. I think we all do.
Thanks, that made me feel a lot better.
I’m planning on being a political Youtuber, so I obviously need to get better at taking criticism- criticism from the usual trolls doesn’t bother me, but when someone on my side makes me feel like I did something wrong, it hurts. I’m also very impulsive, so I should probably learn how to think before posting.
“I should probably stop commenting here…” I hope you don’t stop! You’re too hard on yourself. And being disagreed with – even being wrong – isn’t the same as not thinking before posting.
When you start posting on YT, feel free to link in an open thread here!
Duncan, thanks for your comment.
I’m not saying the “born in the wrong body” trope wouldn’t exist if not for gatekeepers. You’re right that it would exist regardless.
But I do think – based on accounts I’ve read from trans people who were seeking medical help in the 70s and 80s – that there was pressure from doctors for trans people to take on that narrative as strongly as possible, and that probably led to some people taking on that narrative, or taking it on more strongly, than they would have done without that pressure.
It would be really weird if pressure from gatekeepers didn’t have an effect.
Lol yeah I get that a lot. Thanks though, I appreciate it!
I’ve been wrong quite a lot and that never stopped me from being even more obnoxious than I’d already been! And I bet I thought more than 50% of the time before posting, too!
Being wrong takes practice.