From Little Light:
This is how we internalize the lies. This is how we accept the yoke of oppression. By living in a world where the truth that we are beautiful and worthy and lovable is even more painful to accept than the lie that we are none of these things, because all sense of fairness or order vanishes when you look the truth in the eye. If we are beautiful, we are in a world that does not care about our beauty, and even grinds it in the mud. If we are strong, we are living in a world so heavy that it saps our strength until we are tired all the time. If we are ourselves, we are living in a world that systematically strips away our selfhood like roast chicken scraped from the bone.
Until we are strong enough to look this in the eye and fight it, to stand up and fight and make the part of the world we stand on more okay no matter how hard it is or what it takes–until we are so very strong that we remember we are strong, and beautiful, and true, worthy of no end of love, no matter what–it’s just too much to bear. So we accept false stories instead, about how we’re dirty and ugly and weak and unlovable. We have to. I had to.
That’s just a small part of a much larger post; go over to read the whole thing.
I feel a bit weird tagging this in Alas’ trans issues category. It is that, as Little Light’s analysis is bound with and comes out of Little Light’s life. But I think that many, perhaps most, people in any marginalized group, taught to hate themselves, will find elements of Little Light’s narrative that resonate with their own.
I think what she said about how it’s easier to accept that the way the world is structured is right, even if it means you are wrong, than to believe in yourself when it means that the world is fundamentally wrong, is both beautiful and true. Thanks for linking that.
However, I was a little put off by the beginning of the post, where she seems to accept as unproblematic that little boys who identify as boys are being shaped by violence. I assume she doesn’t really think it’s unproblematic, but it comes off that way when the horror she describes is not the horror of violence, but the horror of having violence be perpetrated on a particular person.
There may be an extra brutalizing element to being segregated on the basis of sex and treated a certain way because of your sex when that’s not your gender, but I don’t think I’d find it horrifying in the way she expects unless the underlying segregation and treatment were themselves horrifying. The male-only military draft may have especially bad effects on those who are wrongly identified as male, but I’m not going to be bothered by that so much unless the draft itself is bad.
Amen to Little Light’s post.
These words really resonate with me right now. Tuesday night I was at an incredibly contentious and hostile school board meeting (with about 400 people attending, about a dozen police sheriffs, and at least one instance of peripheral violence). We were there to protest the school’s use of offensive and stereotypical Native American imagery. I sat there with the group of about 50 protestors and listened to them being told that these images honored them, and that their objections to the images made them bad baaaad Indians. They went so far as to attack a student’s personal life in order to discredit his views. Native Americans who disagreed with our stance stood up and questioned his legitimacy as a Native American on the basis of his mixed heritage.
I’m a white chick, so horrified though I was, the injury to me was not so personal. I was ashamed of what my community was doing, but I wasn’t being retraumatized in the same way. I wasn’t being told that I should accept being treated like I and my community are extinct, should feel honored at images that insult my sense of inner and outer beauty. I can only imagine what that is like.
PG, to clarify, I absolutely find the violent ways that masculinity and manhood are taught to boys unacceptable. However, due to the gender-segregated society we currently live in, I would say that it has an especially damaging effect to subject a young girl to a system that is already destructive in the first place, because part of what that system so cruelly teaches to boys is the mistreatment of girls and women.
The magnitude of what’s wrong–and the pain of admitting that even things we take for granted as given about how the world works are destructive and abusive–is hard to take in all at once. I deliberately started with one of the small parts of it that hurt me personally in order to find a pathway to widening my point, because it’s difficult enough just admitting the part I was subjected to, let alone to acknowledge the ways that ideas we accept as akin to laws of physics are fundamentally broken.
Still, there is also a bit of Patriarchy Hurts Men Too in what I’m hearing, here. Of course the system does harm to boys and men, but it does more harm to girls and women. Of course the system harms cissexual and cisgender people, but it does more harm to trans people. The boys around me were shaped and restricted by violence, and that’s not okay. But I didn’t watch them having their entire sense of subjective reality systematically stripped away, which is a whole ‘nother ballgame. I didn’t watch them get told they were delusional so many times that they had to accept it in order to hold together some semblance of selfhood. And as abusive as the system for them was, because it was accepted as a longstanding status quo by nearby adults, there were failsafes for them that didn’t exist for a person not considered real or valid.
Does that make sense?
I think it makes sense, but I also think that if we’re going to discuss what masculinity’s effects on boys are — which I realize was not the topic of your post, and I don’t think it should have been the topic of your post, so I’m not criticizing you for not getting into this — but if we’re going to discuss it here — I think we should also be conscious of the fact that it matters a lot how well a cis boy is able to perform masculinity.
A cis boy who is successfully able to perform masculinity is going to have a very different childhood than a wimpy, “effeminate” cis boy who isn’t able to perform masculinity in a way the other boys find acceptable. This is problematic, since as you said, the ways boys enforce masculinity is violence. And the person being picked on is blamed for the violence, since they are told that they could avoid it if they just acted normally.
There are obviously essential differences, which I don’t want to forget or obscure; but for cis boys who simply aren’t able to perform masculinity, there are some significant ways their childhoods parallel the childhood you described in your post.
I didn’t watch them get told they were delusional so many times that they had to accept it in order to hold together some semblance of selfhood. And as abusive as the system for them was, because it was accepted as a longstanding status quo by nearby adults, there were failsafes for them that didn’t exist for a person not considered real or valid.
I guess I’m not clear on why the injury of being told you’re delusional — which indisputably is an injury — isn’t distinguished from the injury of being forced to live in a social group where violence is standard. It seems like the injury of a trans-person being told s/he is delusional is the same regardless of whether s/he is a boy or a girl. So you were hurt because you were trans the way our society hurts all trans people, and you were hurt because you were categorized with boys the way the patriarchy hurts all boys, but I guess I’m being stupid about how the overlap sort of becomes more than the sum of the parts, if that makes sense.
I should say that I wasn’t raised as a boy, had no brothers, didn’t hang around boys when I was little except those who were my age or younger (and thus weren’t able to push me around any more than my sisters did) and therefore I don’t know what the particulars of intra-group male violence are, and what the failsafes are for cis-boys that don’t exist for people whom adults are insisting are boys but who do not identify as boys.
For example, if a cis-boy likes to play with dolls (to use an incredibly cliched example) and another boy steals and tears up the dolls and then hits the cis-boy for playing with them, if the adults are invested in enforcing masculinity, what recourse does the cis-boy have either? As Amp says, it seems like in practice the enforcement of masculinity, especially through violence, wreaks just as much injury to the cis-boy who fails to enact that masculinity, though I do realize that the average cis-boy will enact masculinity without the damage to a sense of self that is done to a trans person.
But it seems like the particular brutality of the system toward those who are different isn’t based so much whether the child identifies as boy or girl, as whether the child plays out masculinity (or femininity) to the satisfaction of the peer group and surrounding adults. The cis-boy who can’t or won’t play along escapes the injury of being told he’s delusional, but he doesn’t escape the other injuries.
Amp, I think you have a really good point, and PG, I think you make salient points as well. And I think this is a conversation that needs to be had.
I didn’t cover it in my post because I began by writing about my own experience, and I have never experienced being a cis boy, nor will I ever. It was from my perspective and partially based in the extreme difficulty of allowing myself to have a perspective at all.
I do think the nature of how boys are acculturated is important to talk about and to change. I think it’s very important. But I’m also not going to have someone who admits to never having been through what I went through minimize or dismiss it as not particularly different than something else they never experienced, either.
It was difficult enough to hold that this was true, let alone write it, let alone put it where it could be seen, without yet another example of being told I don’t really know my own experience. I absolutely agree with your sum-up in your last sentence, but frankly, that’s not what this post was about. The fact that I didn’t cover someone else’s important issue in a given post because I was busy addressing my own important issue doesn’t mean I don’t care about it. It means that in that post I didn’t cover it because I was prioritizing something else.
“The fact that I didn’t cover someone else’s important issue in a given post because I was busy addressing my own important issue doesn’t mean I don’t care about it. It means that in that post I didn’t cover it because I was prioritizing something else.”
And I find it difficult to believe that if a cis-gendered man was writing about the trauma of his experience growing up as a boy, without mentioning how traumatic it was for trans sexuals also, he would be chastised for his acceptance of transphobia.
Yes! Thank you, Mandolin.
It would be ridiculous to expect you to write about or include the experiences of cis boys in an autobiographical post, Little Light.
I didn’t say “just as much,” PG, because I’d have no idea how to make that comparison.
It seems to me that how much someone is injured depends on so many things, not least how deep their resistance or inability to meets the norms of masculinity are, and how socially sanctioned their punishment is. In general, I’d expect that trans girls stuck in boy society will have it worse than even than wimpy cis boys do, because their resistance to boyhood may be higher, and because violence against trans people has more social sanction.
That said, I actually don’t think that “just as much” — or “worse,” or “better” — comparisons are actually very useful. In fact, especially when discussing someone’s autobiographical story — as we are in this case — I think such comparisons are to be avoided. I’m sorry if I seemed to be making such a comparison in my earlier comment; that wasn’t my intention.
This was very powerful. Thank you for writing it and sharing it (and thanks, Amp, for linking it).
little light,
I’m sorry that I sounded like I was minimizing or dismissing your experience — I didn’t intend to do that, and I *really* didn’t mean to be dictatorial about what anyone should write about, especially when she’s opened herself up generously as you have done.
This may have been the wrong thread for what I was doing, which is trying to figure out to what extent this is a problem for people who aren’t trans. I tend to think in terms of how to get the greatest number of people invested in making a change, and usually that’s to get them to feel that they have a stake in it. I think among decent people it’s increasingly recognized that to force people who identify as one gender to live in another is wrong and dehumanizing — this is how some states, localities, employers etc. have added gender identity to their laws democratically instead of by court order — but I suspect many of those folks don’t see the problem with enforcing masculinity on cis-boys or femininity on cis-girls.
I’m also trying to think through — perhaps too much out loud and probably at a fairly infantile level* — about whether it makes sense to have a kind of cis/trans binary. Or if it’s more like a spectrum, where cis-boys who are close to the point at which they’d be more comfortable identifying as girls are suffering damage similar to that of trans girls. Or if that’s the wrong framework to bring and that there’s kind of a big tipping point at which the harm being done is not just slightly increased but exponentially greater, because of the conscious difference in identification that doesn’t exist for cis-people, who may think “I don’t want to be that kind of boy/girl” but still aren’t being coerced into a core statement of identity that violates their sense of self.
*If anyone can recommend some reading on this, that would be great.
I have heard many stories of cis girls being raised among boys and doing fine, at least until puberty. I think they’re accepted as being sufficiently “not like other girls” to be part of the boys’ gang, but they don’t get too much violent gender policing because nobody expects them to be “real” boys anyway. Whereas a trans girl is seen by many as a failed or defective boy, so she has a much harder time. Unfortunately, this damaging view is shared by many adults as well as the kids, so she doesn’t get any protection from her tormentors.
I do think that masculinity training through violence is a real problem, both for cis boys who pass the test but at the cost of internalizing violence and alienation, and for cis boys who don’t match up and deal with assault and social exclusion. I definitely don’t blame Little Light, or trans women in general, for this problem, though. I don’t blame female-centric feminists for not making it a priority.
Rigid gender expectations hurt nearly everybody, but that doesn’t make transphobia acceptable. The widespread abuse and violence against trans folk, sanctioned if not perpetrated by the people who are supposed to protect the vulnerable, is a huge social issue, and people who care about it shouldn’t be expected to dilute their efforts by caring about every other social issue out there just as much. Actually I disagree with Amp generalizing from Little Light’s post to the suffering of Little Light wrote specifically about her experience as a trans girl / woman, and it’s diminishing that powerful account to respond with platitudes about how lots of people face discrimination for lots of reasons.
Didn’t sound like a platitude to me. It sounded thoughtful and sincere.
How does it diminish Little Light’s account to say that it has echoes in the experiences of other marginalized people? I don’t understand.
Dona, I’m not accusing Amp of being insincere. And Amp, I’m sorry for making you an example of the kind of thing I have a problem with; it’s not personal, I assure you.
The point is that if someone gives a very personal account of their experiences with a certain type of oppression, it’s not very useful for would-be allies to respond, wow, oppression is really bad, everybody hates being discriminated against and marginalized. Sure, everybody does, but the focus has been moved away from the original writer’s personal experiences.
We try to avoid “oppression olympics” and competing over who has it worse, but that doesn’t mean all forms of oppression are interchangeable. It’s as if Amp were saying, hey, I totally understand what it’s like being a trans woman, because even though I’m a cis man I get oppressed because I’m fat and nerdy / wimpy and asexual… I don’t think that’s the intention of Amp’s comment on the link, it’s just that it comes across that way a bit.
Individ,
I can’t speak for Amp, but I suspect he was particularly talking about the paragraph he quoted — which is more generalizable than the rest of the post.
Individ-ewe-al, I really appreciate your recognizing the particularity of the account to my experience. At the same time, I also want to say that Amp’s not wrong–I did use my own experience, widened to a statement about trans experience, to look at the dynamic of internalized oppression on a more global level.
It’s a dynamic that’s very confusing, after all–why would someone learn to identify more with those hurting them than with their own perspective? How does someone come to accept as good and just a system that does them harm and teaches them they are worthless? And I really think it does come down to: the truth hurts more. The truth of how unfair it is, the truth that you deserve better and oppression doesn’t make sense, the truth that you’re okay, that’s one of the most painful truths of all. So we eat the lies instead, because then we can at least get through the day. And that’s true of my experience as a woman of color, and as a queer woman, not just as a trans woman. Like most of what I write, I hope people who aren’t like me get something out of it, too, and I hope the basic message resonates with a lot of people–because they ought to hear it.
Hm.
There may be an extra brutalizing element to being segregated on the basis of sex and treated a certain way because of your sex when that’s not your gender, but I don’t think I’d find it horrifying in the way she expects unless the underlying segregation and treatment were themselves horrifying. The male-only military draft may have especially bad effects on those who are wrongly identified as male, but I’m not going to be bothered by that so much unless the draft itself is bad.
I think I understand what you’re saying. I agree with you that a fiercely controlling system is damaging to all of the people in it, whether or not they succeed in fitting in. I agree with your later comments about masculine boys being no less false to themselves. However, I think that the special punishment meted out to trans people is not so much an extension of this system as an extension of its paranoia. That’s why it’s a special situation to grow up trans, and an especially cruel one.
Boys and girls–the good, the incompetent, and the malcontent–are all ordered to alienate parts of themselves in order to present acceptably, and punished for failure or resistance. But our ideas about what makes gender real are based on boxes that specially exclude trans people from validity. There doesn’t seem to be any way for trans genders to be shaped acceptably: they are not a deviation so much as a contradiction.
piny,
There doesn’t seem to be any way for trans genders to be shaped acceptably: they are not a deviation so much as a contradiction.
That’s an interesting way of putting it, and seem to fit with the idea of a cis/trans binary rather than a spectrum.
Little Light, thank you for that explanation. I have a bit of a bugbear about people just smooshing all oppressions together and generically agreeing that Oppression is Bad. But really interesting point about internalized oppression, I appreciate that.
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Well, but then again…
I think that gendervariance can definitely be described as a spectrum–well, but then again….
I think “spectrum” might be a bad way of looking at the idea of gendervariance, because it implies that each person can be set on a point in a single register. Instead, I think it’s like this: each of us is given a perfect model, and each of us fails in our own way. An “effeminate” man who has a wife and two kids is gendervariant; a bodybuilding bearish gay leather daddy is gendervariant. I’m not sure either one is more gendervariant than the other; both are punished at different times and in different ways for failing to fit in.
Transsexuality is treated as a kind of gendervariance, and transsexual stereotypes mostly center on the idea that trans people are trying and failing to be gendertypical. “Man in a dress,” for example. So the treatment of trans gendervariance–the policing, the cruelty, the unexamined idea of gender failure–is very similar to the treatment of cis gender variance.
But yes, I think that transsexuality might be different in that one way. Gendervariance isn’t just punished; it’s used to delegitimize trans people.
Of course, Little Light et al. might have a completely different take on this, and I can only speak to my experience.
Am I just being less clear? Probably.
Right now, I’ve transitioned back to cissexual womanhood. People read me as a woman, and they agree that a woman is what I’m supposed to be. Nobody treats my female status as probationary or fallacious.
And I feel constrained and demoralized by the role I’m expected to play. I spend a lot more time agonizing over my body now, I’m more aware of the space I take up, I’m more conscious of my appearance during things like temp assignments and trips to the grocery store, I get a lot more sexualized treatment from strange straight men, and so on and so on.
However. Fucking up means that I’m a failed woman who needs to be taught to be a better woman. It doesn’t also mean that I’m a nonwoman.
A trans woman who gains a little bit of weight, who sits with her legs apart, who lets her hair air dry at work, who tries to walk down the street with her breasts right out front on her chest like that–she will suffer for fucking up womanhood. She’ll be knocked down for failing to conform to other people’s expectations of women.
But she will also be treated as a failed trans person–in a system where trans isn’t real. That’s the difference. My acceptable gender is based on the idea that our ideas about gender are valid, and that my “woman” identity is the correct one. Hers is also based on the idea that trans genders are invalid. It’s a really damaging, painful double bind, and I think that it does increase the weight of the punishment that trans kids suffer. They’re supposed to prove their own nonexistence.
Regarding Individ-ewe-al’s criticism, I think the fault is mine for bad writing. Rereading my post, it does seem to have a high-handed “brushing aside all this irrelevant trans stuff” approach. I think that LL understood that wasn’t my intent (and it really wasn’t), but it could sure come across that way.
(I wrote this post while walking on a treadmill, because I didn’t want to wait and take a chance I’d forget. I’ve noticed that my writing is sloppier if it happens on a treadmill)
piny,
Thanks for your comments — they’re really helping me think about this in more depth.
An “effeminate” man who has a wife and two kids is gendervariant; a bodybuilding bearish gay leather daddy is gendervariant. I’m not sure either one is more gendervariant than the other; both are punished at different times and in different ways for failing to fit in.
I would agree except that it seems like most people want to break sexual orientation out from sex/gender. That is, I have felt myself to be in a minority in thinking about sexual orientation as being a form of sex discrimination; the majority view is that it is its own distinct form of discrimination and should not be categorized under sex discrimination. Most arguments about SSM prohibitions, for example, frame it as a form of discrimination against homosexuals instead of as a form of sex discrimination that wrongs both men and women.
Under what I perceive to be the majority view, the leather daddy is orientation-variant because he has a same-sex attraction, but he is not gender-variant. He complies with the norms of masculinity except insofar as masculinity is defined by attraction to people with vaginas, and that aspect of masculinity has been moved into a different category called “sexual orientation.” The effeminate man with a wife and two kids is gender-variant but orientation-compliant.
This shakes out in the laws in some odd ways, as with conservative states allowing lesbian transwomen to marry their cis-female partners because the transwomen’s gender isn’t recognized, so the state defines this as an opposite-sex marriage that’s perfectly acceptable (of course, to marry in the conservative state, the transwoman must deny her gender identity and pretend to be a man for the purpose of obtaining the license). But many relatively progressive states (e.g. NY) won’t allow lesbian transwomen to marry cis-female partners because the state does recognize trans identity but doesn’t have SSM.
PG:
I would agree except that it seems like most people want to break sexual orientation out from sex/gender. That is, I have felt myself to be in a minority in thinking about sexual orientation as being a form of sex discrimination . . . Under what I perceive to be the majority view, the leather daddy is orientation-variant because he has a same-sex attraction, but he is not gender-variant. He complies with the norms of masculinity except insofar as masculinity is defined by attraction to people with vaginas, and that aspect of masculinity has been moved into a different category called “sexual orientation.” The effeminate man with a wife and two kids is gender-variant but orientation-compliant.
Do you disagree with this majority view? I see what you mean, of course, about the weird ways this plays out in law, and I do think much orientation-based discrimination should be categorized as sex discrimination, but I think the framing important nonetheless.
Heterosexism is a form of sexism and heteronormativity is part of the gender system and heterosexuality is an important component of conforming genders. But, sexual orientation and gender expression/presentation are indeed two separate axes — that’s why we can have lesbians who are butch, femme, androgynous and otherwise, and feminine straight men and masculine straight women and on and on in every combination. It’s important to maintain the conceptual distinction — to break orientation out from sex/gender — so that we can acknowledge this variety, and so that we can parse what’s really happening in the oppression of queer people. My very feminine girlfriend and I face similar pressures because we’re not straight, but I face a whole other set for being genderqueer; at the same time, she faces more daily misogyny than I do (harassment from men, etc). And that’s just the difference between two cissexual queer women — there’s way more variety and complexity out there.
There is not a single, one-dimensional spectrum of gender variance but a multidimensional arena in which gender expression, sexual orientation, trans/cis status, etc. are separate axes.
Daisy,
I’m disinclined to the majority view because I think it gives too much up to people who want to criminalize, or at least continue bias against, the variance. I prefer to conserve and consolidate victories, and there’s a better-established norm that the law and public institutions (schools, employers, etc.; as distinct from private relationships) ought not distinguish, in determining what is permissible, between people based on whether they have this or that genitalia.
For example, the law forbids as sex discrimination failing to give a woman a promotion for aggressive, non-nurturing behavior that in a male employee would have been rewarded (gender expression). We are moving toward forbidding a sex-based dress code in the workplace (gender expression). At least one judge has opined that basing legal recognition of a marriage on the sex of the partners constitutes sex discrimination (sexual orientation).
The erasure of sex/gender as a legal category (even if people choose to preserve it in their private relations) is important to me and I think it will accrue to the benefit of people who heretofore have been oppressed among all the axes — gender expression, sexual orientation, trans/cis status — you describe. If the gender with which you identify can cease to be of interest to the government and other institutions, and sex can become a biological shorthand of interest only to your physician in determining whether to be screening your cervix or your prostate for cancer, then gender can become a private statement that no longer has to fit into the government’s boxes and gender identities will have the freedom to multiply infinitely.
Adding more check-boxes to the old male/female — are you hetero or homo? butch or femme? trans or cis? — captures the forms of oppression that are bred from the m/f binary, but also threatens to require fighting more and more political battles as people accede to sex equality in one form but resist it in another.
To me, all of these come back to the question:
Would you be OK with this if the person in question had a different set of genitalia?
would you be OK with the effeminacy, or attraction to men, or private identification as female, if the person had a vagina?
with the refusal to wear makeup, attraction to women, or private identification as male, if the person had a penis?
It seems simpler to bring it back to this question, and when the discriminator says, “Yes,” to point out that it therefore is sex discrimination, every time. little light to some extent uses this question in the post being discussed:
This is an outward-facing stance I’m taking, that presupposes I’m in dialogue with people who haven’t already accepted the wrongfulness of trans, gender and sexuality discrimination, and I acknowledge that it isn’t very sophisticated or well-suited to, say, a graduate seminar in Queer Studies. I don’t think we can afford to use the more complicated concepts in that more political/legal dialogue, yet such concepts have already become widespread terms of debate that make it easier for opponents of equality to squirm away from what they’re doing.
PG: I totally agree that the sex discrimination framing is the most expedient when it comes to fighting for legal equality. My only possible disagreement with you is about whether it’s the most accurate, and whether it’s the most useful one for understanding people’s lives and identities.
This is an outward-facing stance I’m taking, that presupposes I’m in dialogue with people who haven’t already accepted the wrongfulness of trans, gender and sexuality discrimination, and I acknowledge that it isn’t very sophisticated or well-suited to, say, a graduate seminar in Queer Studies. I don’t think we can afford to use the more complicated concepts in that more political/legal dialogue, yet such concepts have already become widespread terms of debate that make it easier for opponents of equality to squirm away from what they’re doing.
Okay, I agree completely; the sexism strategy is very effective in the political and legal spheres for a lot of reasons, and it’s one we should use to the fullest extent possible. But the more sophistacted framing has it’s place with a much larger audience than just grad students majoring in Queer Theory. It’s my impression that this discussion is more or less one amongst queer people and our allies — in this context and similar ones, I think we should use the framing that is most accurate and most useful to queer people. Outward-facing activism is extremely important, but it cannot happen without concomitant internal conversations (i.e. amongst queer people and those who are already allies) in which queer folks name, understand, and share their lives in the truest ways we can.
Without in any way attempting to minimize your own personal experience, I am not in agreement that this is an accurate summary of how young boys interact, and/or how that would affect a girl who was put into a group of boys.
If you put a young girl in a group of young boys and you don’t instruct them that they can only use violence to interact with her (and why would you? And why would you assume the girl would be entirely passive in response?) then it doesn’t seem problematic. It seems normal. In fact, it happens all the time.
That doesn’t mean, obviously, that the results will be good. That doesn’t mean that everyone will end up happy, or that someone won’t get abused, or shat upon, or otherwise horrifically treated. They do–little light did, and that experience is true.
But while I have no problem at all accepting the personal aspects of the post, I am troubled by some of the more general statements and/or conclusions.
I am not going to go into lengthy detail now. Mostly because I realize that although the post is up for comment, y’all may not want to have this debate in this particular thread. So having stated these concerns, I will await comment on the issue before bringing it up again. But IMO this argument seems stated on a lot of “A therefore B therefore C therefore D” type of chains, and it’s not clear that A is really true, so to speak.
Sailorman,
As a girl who spent a lot of time among boys growing up, the opening of the piece did not match my own experience and in some ways I did not really understand it until I had read further into the piece. But I think in general there is a lot more acceptance of tomboyish girls than of effeminate boys, and it is not hard for me to imagine that a child who is understood by those around them to be a boy but who understands herself as a girl would be much, much more likely to meet with violence and that that violence would be more likely to be sanctioned by adults. Piny’s comment at #21 was really helpful to me in thinking about this. I think there is a difference in how people react to a boy or a girl (or a man or a woman) who falls somewhere outside expectations on the femininity or masculinity scale and someone who refuses to be what everyone else thinks they are. Being neither trans nor a man, the amount of light I can shed here is pretty limited, but I wanted to comment because I had a similar reaction as yours to the opening, but I also think people who are trans may have a more clear-eyed (and frightening) view of what goes into enforcing gender than those of us who are what we are perceived to be. Little light may have grown up among particularly violent and bullying boys, but it also is possible that if she had been a boy, even a somewhat wimpy or nerdy or effeminate one, she would have been subject to less violence than she was.
chingona,
not to ignore you, but I suspect we’ll be asked to move this somewhere else. I’ll save my response for there.
Speaking as one such cisgirl-raise-among-boys, I was deeply affected by the violence my friends enacted in front of me (much of it sexualized, or outright sexual assault), even though after middle school I was not subject to it. I had to deny my perceptions of the world around me in order to stay a part of that group. Watching it was very much differently-traumatic than experiencing it, and I would never claim equivalence, but it certainly affected me and my future relationships with people of all genders.
My gender expression also continued to be policed by the boys I was with even after I was too Other to be part of their violent culture. I was ostracized for being gay, even before I knew myself that I was, for example, whereas the femme girls were able to be openly lesbian and included in female culture at my school. I had to constantly walk a fine line, whereby I was non-threatening but not Too Girly to be included. In order to participate in the activities I enjoyed, I had to choose a self that fit between those boundaries, as well as accept misogynistic beliefs that belittled all other women.
“Doing fine” may be a relative term.
PG, I agree with a lot of what Daisy has said–at least, that it’s important to talk with specificity about transphobia and homophobia. I respect the decision on the part of activists to speak in detail. I think, too, that this is one reason people are resistant to the GUT sexism theory–it’s been used to ignore specific experiences and problems. This is part of what LL was doing: she tied transphobic brutality to misogyny that we might more easily see, but spoke about it on its own terms.
I think it’s accurate to say that homophobia and transphobia are both based on ideas about what “makes” men and women–but that we don’t exactly think about sexism in such an inclusive way. And it’s really easy to fall into the trap of seeing trans women as simply “failed men,” or butch women as “fake men,” or femme lesbians as heteronormative pseudodykes.
So I think that there might be another reason, an “outward-facing” one, for the refusal to link homophobia and transphobia to sexism. I think many people are still unapologetically sexist to the extent that they are cissexist and heterosexist. I think many people–not genderqueer people–are unwilling to see cissexism and heterosexism as oppressive or artificial. They’re normal, natural, and socially responsible. They just make sense. They definitely aren’t hateful.
If you read the comments thread on LL’s post, you’ll smack into “Transphobia is JUST NOT THE SAME as sexism” pretty fast. That fence is up around a different estate, but it’s the same motive.
piny,
I think many people–not genderqueer people–are unwilling to see cissexism and heterosexism as oppressive or artificial. They’re normal, natural, and socially responsible. They just make sense. They definitely aren’t hateful.
But people like this generally are sexist too, in the sense that while they may protest that they think men and women are “equal,” they also think there is something irreducibly different about men and women that is socially imperative. Women are nurturers, men are violence-prone, it’s all inevitable due to hormones; if you’re a stay-at-home cissexual hetero dad you’re failing your gender obligations.
Honestly, I don’t see how someone could be heterosexist unless she believes that sex/gender is one of the most important things about a person. And if she believes that, how is she not sexist?
I know this seems out of nowhere, but does anyone know what’s going on with Little Light? She hasn’t updated Taking Steps since June. I posted a comment on her last entry asking if she was okay, and she hasn’t replied. Is she okay? I’m worried that she might be hurt or sick or worse.
Okay, never mind my last comment. Little Light posted a reply to my comment on Taking Steps where I was being all mommy and worrying about her. She’s okay, just overwhelmed in real life right now. Whew!
I’m really glad to hear that!
I’m sorry I didn’t respond to your earlier comment — I meant to, but then got all distracted by life.
No sweat, Amp. We all get overwhelmed by the nine and a half zillion things that seem to constitute life. :)