don’t be jealous of me, or we’re all quirky girls

my first post on Cisnormativity got greeted with a pretty serious firestorm of criticism on Reddit’s r/transgender and though the prime hater deleted most of her commentary, the accusation that my life requires a “trigger warning” still stands. at one point the poster famously compared me to “racist white trash” for…well, even i’m not sure. i guess for pointing out that the empress had no clothes…

i know we consider it de rigueur to tear each other down in the “trans community”, a subset of yesterday’s post, given how much it always feels to me a lot like the tearing-down is modeled on a media stereotype of how women writ large behave. the difference, you see, is that i am very familiar with the workings and operation of generalized female jealousy…we tear each other down about little things (sense of fashion, smells like cat pee, saggy butt) and though i am not saying it’s okay or rationalizing it, i know how to deal with it because i grew up with it. we also often are bitchy behind each other’s backs but make nice and get along in public, because, after all, we don’t want people calling us “bitches”, now do we?

i don’t like generalized Western female-sphere cattiness, but like much of the things we do to each other as women, it preserves the hegemony’s grip on us as much as it seems like a good “outlet” for how we feel about something. i don’t willingly play the game, but sometimes subconsciously i get clowned when talking about someone with my co-workers or friends and get sucked in. i dislike myself for a few days afterwards, but oftentimes rationalize it  with how i feel about that person, their actions, their gossipyness…in other words, i’m part of the problem, and for better or for worse i realize i’m part of the problem.

tea break: Gala Darling has some things to say about this, and i really think what she has to say is a useful interlude before we go any further. plus, i’m seriously making tea, so the flow of the post will change. go take a gander at “Jealousy is the killer of GIRL LOVE” …it ain’t perfect but Gala usually says some pretty valuable stuff.

before i change the tenor here to talk about the trans “community” and jealousy, i want to interject what one of my friends had to say about current love/hate object Zooey Deschanel, an American actress/musician who has pretty much made a career for the past decade out of behaving like many of us do, basically being a little bit erratic, awkward, and quirky but unlike the rest of us, being gorgeous. said friend’s mantra is that “Zooey Deschanel just makes us jealous and that’s why we hate her, not because she’s a bad person.” (pop culture has been particularly cruel to Ms. Deschanel recently…i’m sure the timing is coincidental and has nothing to do with that her getting divorced has been big “news”, which means that sexist jerks like TMZ and Page Six start policing you for being a rogue woman. so, yeah, hands off Zooey. let her be adorable and quirky if she wants to but let’s not buy into the idea that we should be a jerk to her for being like you or i but more popular and beautiful…hell, we should be happy for her.

the method of tearing down in the “trans community” just feels different to me. i think it’s that there’s often this attitude of competitiveness about being a woman, and…i don’t know how to be competitive at that. i mean, i’ll kick your butt in tennis and i am a formidable goalie in field hockey…but i just don’t know how to compete at being a woman. i mean, aren’t we all already women? i don’t really want to hear comparisons being done using statistics to prove who is or isn’t better; stats have a place and a time, and a value-neutral arena in which to share ones that matter would be great, but much like people who argue about whose SRS surgeon is better, all i really can do in these discussions is sit there and blink vacantly.

this is why jealousy is so hard on me when sprayed in the direction of people i care about. we are whole people, and when you’re jealous of little aspects of our lives, you’re reducing that person to that aspect. it’s cruel, it’s othering, and it often comes with a number of fantasies and values that get projected onto that person. in other words, knock it the fuck off. because we are whole people it’s unfair to let one aspect control your entire perception of a person. there are things which carry enough of a taint (Anne Lawrence being a rapist, say) but small details of a person’s life really shouldn’t. plus, it completely ignores that there might be ways that the person you’re “jealous” of is full of their own differences and insecurities.

it also fails to take into account that we are all different. i am awkward, weird, and quirky, too. i’m superstitious, very shy around people i don’t trust (and probably too loud around people who i do trust) and i’m eternally scared that i’m not good enough, not smart enough, not (whatever) enough. i’m terrified of new social situations when they matter, and blasé when they don’t, and as a result i often end up impressing random jerks but don’t really excel in situations where there are new people i care to have in my life, and this terror often makes me make even dumber decisions because i’m so scared of screwing up. when someone focuses on one aspect of a person and steamrolls everything else, all these concerns and realities go away and are replaced with their fantasy version of that person. i’m sure fantasy erica is probably way better than real erica, but there’s one little problem: real erica actually exists, and i inhabit her policed body, damaged mind, hand-me-down clothes, and far-too-small checking account. in other words, i can’t live up to those fantasies because they’re an unfair bar.

we have to learn to see the whole person rather than judging over small aspects of a person’s life. after all, it is part of letting go of our hatred for ourselves and our selves as much as it’s about letting go of our hatred of each other, and this, my dear readers, is powerful. respect your inner quirky person, and remember that once we get away from competition, we’re healing ourselves as a community, which in turn helps more of us heal our selves.

we can’t all be pretty: dangerous tropes ahead.

it’s dawned on me of late that one of the reasons i end up with such trouble in trans space is that i break a lot of tropes that the “trans community” (which, in this case, refers to trans women who serve as gatekeepers to trans-inclusive social space…) is deeply dependent on to justify its existence. they use a lot of “helping” language, saying it’s things like “passing tips”, but that’s kind of how female abusers often work: they make their abuse insidious, and impossible to avoid as a condition of presence.  i’m an abuse survivor and i can tell you that the way that the “community” eats newcomers is not entirely unlike how my mother justified years of abuse.

these include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. You have to be pretty to “pass”. this is offensive for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s just not true. not all trans people care about passing, anyways; i sort of have to because i don’t come from many positions of privilege and passing privilege is one i certainly have in spades. (someday, if i get rich, talk to me again…) the reality is, at least if you ask me, that it’s a lot easier for “plain” girls to pass because nobody’s looking at us as sexual objects. either way, as the wonderful Natalie Reed put it on Twitter last night: The “passability = beauty, beauty = passability” trope needs to die a horrible, painful death. I couldn’t agree with her more, and there’s a lot of us out here trying to kill it in our everyday life.
2. You have to be skinny to be a woman. i feel like i missed this memo. maybe it’s too much feminism, maybe it’s the reality that women come in many shapes and sizes, maybe it’s that something as ridiculous as “fat trans women always look like men”  (<—this came from Reddit, people), or maybe that we’re often denied safe medical access based on weight before we even get to the lack of safe medical access for trans women generally. again, it often feels like this memo didn’t make it to cisworld; our bodies as fat women are policed, yes, and often treated with disdain, but our gender isn’t invalidated because of the size of our asses.
   
3. You have to be able-bodied/minded to be a woman. brb, going to ask my friend’s women’s wheelchair basketball team how this is working out for her. again, being a disabled woman comes with a kind of policing and often an assumption we’re not sexual (ha ha ha), but it’s not used to invalidate our gender wholesale except in the “trans community” and its handmaidens of hell, gatekeepers. for those of us who are disabled, this is especially annoying, since it’s so mind-numbingly stupid that it barely deserves comment; it implies that there’s something wrong with being disabled and that’s just…disgusting, ableist, and downright stupid. and, remember, folks, stupidity is not a disability.
   
4.  Only other trans women will tell you the truth about your appearance. …because the outside world, which provides daily cues as to what you’re doing, both good and bad, doesn’t. oh, wait…they *do*. i get reminders about what i’m doing right and wrong every day, as do most people, from “your hair looks great!” to “that’s an…interesting…top.”   i mean it might not always be the politest feedback but it’s a lot better than what you get from the “community”…according to the “community”, i require $60k+ of facial work to pass. according to the rest of the world, that doesn’t seem to be an issue at all. sure, facial surgery could make my nose smaller or the folds on the sides of my eyes “normal”, but…my face is my face. it’s pretty enough for me, thank you very much, and i don’t want any other one. this may change, but the decisions we make about our bodies are ours alone and should involve the input of lots of people. that said, since this is always a fiery topic: if you choose to get facial surgery i am behind you 100%. if you choose not to get facial surgery i am behind you 100%. no exceptions.
5. You’re too tall. It doesn’t matter how tall you are, you’re too tall. i’m a little south of 5 feet 10…probably close to three quarters of an inch south, but i round up because i’m an optimist. number of times someone has said my height must mean i’m a man: 0.  number of times someone has said something complimentary about my height: about every other day. sorry, world, i see a lot of trans women online believe that their height is a barrier, and i’ve been told by the “community” upon trying to enter its space that i’m just “too tall to pass” and…i love how tall i am, thank you very much, and most of the world seems to agree.  this was a special added bonus section inspired by the six-year-old girl standing behind me in line at the supermarket just now, who told me she wanted to grow up tall and pretty like me…i guess maybe sweatpants, a ponytail, and a t-shirt flatter me more than i thought?
6. Trans women have to be femme to be women, or seen as women. i hate this because it’s super-insulting to everyone, from femmes to butches to all the people in between. it creates an environment of expected compulsory femininity (not entirely unlike what existed for all women prior to about 1960), which diminishes the identity of trans women who choose to be femme as well as invalidates those of us who aren’t. in other words, like most forced expectations, it wounds everyone. this expectation prevents people from being able to choose to be themselves and is often a very large part of formal and informal gatekeeping alike, two things that often are used to exclude trans people, especially trans women, from access to medical, social, and legal resources to assist in building their selves.
7. Trans women have to be (this) or do (that). reality check, people: all these toxic tropes only support the patriarchal construct that is the same thing that HBSers, wadfems, and the patriarchy itself all conspire to do: claim that you are not good enough and keep their boot on your neck. there are a lot of insecure people out there in “the community” just like there are in the outside world, and behaving in ways that invalidate yourself to validate their existence and hegemony. i know that feminism has a colorful reputation in trans space, but for a lot of us who grew up exposed to both academic-formal and social-informal feminism, we see great common strands in that female self-empowerment helps change our lives, change our laws, and change our possibilities. i believe equally that trans female self-empowerment will help change our position, both as disdained in queer culture and as outsiders in our own worlds, but we have to actually do it and we need our allies to stand behind us and let us get together and figure out what to do next. it won’t be Seneca Falls, but it will be the beginning of the fall of the people who strive to keep us on their chain.

just think about what you’re enforcing, people. don’t engage in behavior that you can justify being okay for a trans person that would never pass muster if done to a cis person. remember that though our backgrounds and realities are different, we’re all people and deserve that much basic respect regardless of what the kyriarchy says we deserve…you might find, HBSers, wadfems, and “i’m not transphobic but…” types…that the kyriarchy doesn’t think as highly of you as you believe it does.

and no, before some HBSer claims it: i’m not bitter because i’m not pretty. as Ani Di Franco once put it, in words that resonated the second i first heard them in 1995 and words that i live by to this day:

i am not a pretty girl
i don’t want to be a pretty girl
no i want to be more than a pretty girl

…exactly.

the stunning silence of powerful trans men on CeCe’s plight…

as a trans woman of color, i ain’t gonna lie to you: i occasionally fear ending up in a situation not entirely unlike that of CeCe McDonald. (if you don’t know who i’m talking about, see http://supportcece.wordpress.com/ for more info.) i know damn well that the criminal justice system, a rigged, racist, transphobic/homophobic/younameitphobic system, would not be kind to me if a white man tried to kill me. and, like CeCe, i live and exist mostly in a neighborhood where there is sometimes uneasy interactions between the white folks who come here seeking any one of a number of things they seek in the “hood”. now, calling my neighborhood “the hood” is laughable, but Caucasians just see a bunch of brown faces and turn tail even though it’s safer than their precious little white-ass “gay ghetto”, which is way closer to “hood” than where I live in terms of crime, quality of life, or whatever. i mean, like CeCe, I know damn well the cops aren’t going to protect me or mine.

what’s creepy is that there has been stunning silence from a lot of important trans men, the most glaring of which is Dean Spade, about CeCe’s plight. Mr. Spade identifies as a prison abolitionist, no less, but hasn’t spoken out publicly about CeCe and why it’s time to use her as a fine example of how the state fails trans women of color. this is especially depressing given that Mr. Spade has no problem speaking for people of color generally but somehow his silence on this is deafening. i mean, if CeCe isn’t a poster child for everything that’s wrong with the prison-industrial complex, who is? i don’t think it’d cost someone like Mr. Spade that much credibility with the circle of CAFAB queers to stand up for one actual trans woman after speaking about us in the abstract so much bit refusing to do anything for us in reality. Mr. Spade, the Internet is littered with stories of real-world trans women you’ve done nothing for while talking about us in theory to sell books, and while it won’t fix your fucked-up history of appropriation of trans women’s experiences (or the experiences of people of color) it might be a good start to come down from your Caucasian ivory tower and speak out, publicly and unequivocally, for CeCe. don’t do it to sell books or curry favor with a tenure committee, do it for CeCe. as of 10:30 Central this morning, all we have are crickets.

now, let’s not go painting all trans guys as trouble here…much of CeCe’s organizing team is a bunch of awesome trans guys from Minneapolis/St. Paul, and they deserve big ups for how much they’re doing. please remember that its often daring to stand up for trans women in the CAFAB queer community, so remember they’re awesome even more for doing so.

the issue is that people who have arisen to social and scholarly power, often talking about trans women but never actually fucking working for us are not doing anything once again when it comes to the shocking and screwed-up injustice CeCe is facing at the hands of an entrenched cissexist/racist “justice” system. it’s time we demand that people who have appointed themselves leaders speak up, loud, proud, and without hesitating, that it’s time to free CeCe. after all, if prison abolition is good enough for theory, why can’t it be good enough for CeCe?

when i say it, i still mean it…

i want us all to be strong and free.
this means no cis policing of our identities
and as importantly, no trans/genderqueer-on-trans/genderqueer policing of our identities, and also no more minimizing other trans/genderqueer people for being different from you, no matter what the provided “excuse” is.

if you want to be part of our movement, you must respect that when it comes to my body means i get to make my rules and that my life is my life. no surgery policing, no sexual orientation policing, no use of shame as a compliance or exclusion tool. no unsolicited “passing tips” which are really judgments on someone’s validity. no more “some trans people are more equal than others.” easy peasy, folks: my body, my rules, my life.

if you don’t want to be part of it, keep supporting institutions that don’t include all trans people, keep making excuses for why they keep some trans people out (hint: fatphobia, racism, ableism, classism, and transmisogyny are not valid reasons), keep being the handmaiden of our own demise, and keep selling us out to cis people while deriding the choices of other trans folks. i wish you luck in continuing to appease the oppressor; do tell me how that’s working out for you given that it’s never worked in the past.