Identity Failure

evieeliot:

Ok, this is the scary post.
This is the one where I threaten to undo myself.

The recent attempts to compare Dolezal and Jenner, or to question why, if one can transition “from one gender to another,” the same should not be true of race, have been painful to watch.
As I said in my last post, one of the most painful parts of this for me personally has been watching how quickly trans supportive liberal allies (almost all of whom were white) leaped at the opportunity to start cross examining trans identity.
Seeing all this unfold hurts.
But there’s another part of this which is more insidious, more frightening, and more painful to look at.

That’s the part of me that wondered “what if they’re right?”.

The problem I keep running into, is that while I can find well reasoned defense of the ways in which race and gender and not equivalent, I can’t find one that is both easy to understand and persuasive.

For me that is a REAL problem.

It’s a problem because the “you can’t be for one and against the other” argument is a simple as it is persuasive.
The people who are able to wrap their heads around the intricacies of race and gender sufficiently to see what’s wrong with all this, are the people who were already fully committed to the causes of trans and racial justice.
We can’t afford to have an argument that will sell only to the choir.
We need to do better.

It took me 32 years before I’d learned how to trust people enough that I felt able to come out as trans.
No one comes out as trans without an awareness of just how much we are despised by much of the rest of society.
The “brave” trope may be worn threadbare at this point, but making the decision to step over that brink requires a serious commitment.

Saying aloud that I am trans was hard, saying that I am a woman was even harder.  
The idea of having to give that up, after how much it took to get here, is nearly unbearable.
I’m starting to realize however that this thing, this identity, I hold so tightly to, is built of the same material that the institutions that taught me to hate myself are built of.

I’m starting to suspect that no matter how hard I’ve fought to get here, what I’m fighting for is just another part of the same old Corporate Colonial/Patriarchal cess pool, and I’m starting to realize that one of the biggest problems we face when discussing issues of social justice is that we are forced to fight on the enemy’s terrain.

That is, the problem is one of framing.

As a transgender person, when I say I identify as a woman, I must still use the language of a gender binary where male is the default, and female is defined in opposition to that default.
Cis gendered language does not allow for an accurate description of how I understand myself, because cis gendered language is constructed on the false premise of male vs female.
Not only does it fail to allow for trans identity, it fails to accurately describe what it means to be cis either!

We start to see the cracks whenever we see a cisgender person object to being called cis, or when TERFs proclaim that we must “abolish gender” yet are unable to usefully express what that would actually entail.
The unease that they are experiencing when confronted with trans identities comes perhaps not from “transphobia*” per say, but rather from the subconscious churning that one feels when realizing that one’s sense of self if fundamentally built upon a lie!

As a trans woman, the realization that I am not a cis man came relatively easily, but the process of building my trans feminine identity has been much harder.
It’s been hard because the only language available to me has been that of cis womanhood, and a great deal of that is frankly awful.
That should hardly come as a surprise, society isn’t known for thinking too kindly of women.
Every conversation I’ve ever had with the incredible cisgender women I count amongst my friends on this topic has revealed the inadequacy of the language to fully embrace or express the strength, intelligence, creativity or compassion of these people.
Elinor Burkett’s painfully bad “What makes a woman” piece in the New York Times illustrates this beautifully.  Every cis woman I know who read it did a spit take over that mawkish piece of nonsense.
Equally, of the many great cis men I know, when confronted with definition of cis masculinity, they too find it a very poor fit.
However, if we accept a more fluid definition of gender, the difference between cis and trans becomes one of degree and not one of kind. Increasingly I want to say in response to those who reject my trans feminine identity “fine, then I don’t believe in cis (and neither should you)”.

The sad truth is that everyone is hurt by this system.
For each time I see us explain that cis is not a slur, I see another trans person spit it out like a curse, and who can blame us?
We are the ones who have found this false dichotomy to be the most unbearable, and who, in our attempts to escape one unbearable gender role, find our only alternative is to adhere to another that, while more comfortable, is likely to get us spat upon, beaten, or killed.
If we don’t ever get to truly self identify, then why should you?
Accept you ill fitting cisness as we must accept our reviled transness.

But this isn’t a zero sum game.
Gender is a construct, and it always will be.  
The solution is not to abolish it, but rather to rebuild it, and to do so purposefully.
Those of us in the trans community have all had to learn how to redefine ourselves in the most fundamental of ways, it’s time for the cis community to do the same.
What we need to do is to re-frame our understanding of everyone’s gender identity so that cis, trans, and non binary identities can become mutually supportive rather than antagonistic.

I have told cis people “You shouldn’t need to understand what it means to be trans before you accord me my basic humanity”, what I should add is “You need to understand my transness so that you can accord a basic humanity to yourself”.

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*Or perhaps this is the best possible understanding of transphobia – The existential threat that trans identity embodies to the prevailing social paradigm, manifest as an individual’s need to either reject trans identity, or begin to seriously deconstruct their own.

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Post script.

I had thought to touch on issues of race, and I believe that there are functional parallels here.
I suspect that a big part of overcoming racial divisions in this country, and around the world, is going to require that those of us who are white develop a fundamentally different understanding of whiteness than we currently have, one that is supportive of the identities and lived realities of people of color.  
I’m also sure that if this is the case I, as a white person, am not going to be able to provide a lens through which to understand what such a shift would look like, and so I shall humbly leave that to those people whose lived experience it is, to lead the way.

Well thought, written, and presented. I’ve always believed those who can see more sides to a topic than most should go into law and argue for those less fortunate to amend, write new, and defend legislature.