What About 'T'?

[bcholmes]

WisCon programming goddess extraordinaire, kalmn put me on a panel at WisCon called "What About 'T'" -- a panel in which trans people got to talk about the intersection between transness and science fiction and about trans considerations at WisCon.

I really enjoyed doing the panel, and it was probably the only one where I really felt on the ball. I also feel like the panel went really well, and that there were none of the huge arguments that seemed to characterize panels at, say, trans conferences.

Recently, jedediah posted a link to Cheryl Morgan's review of WisCon, including the 'T' panel. I find her comments kinda weird, I must confess. It's true that she made some of the same comments in the panel itself, but her summary of the essential conflict between trans people and feminists sounds, to my ears, mistaken. Perhaps mistaken isn't the right word. How to say this?

Let's start at the top:

Panels on transgender issues are normally where the Wiscon community tends to turn on itself.

For my part, I haven't seen this. In fact, my experience has been the opposite. WisCon has always struck me as extremely willing to ponder and explore a variety of different ideas about gender, transness and inclusion. I also recall chatting with one self-identified cross-dresser at WisCon who said that zie felt considerably more accepted at WisCon when walking around in drag than in drab (zir drab presentation, I was told, tended to be read as very aggressive).

I've only been going to WisCon since 2000, but I have always been pleasantly surprised by number of trans people in attendance, the discourse about trans-related topics and the complete lack of looking askance.

It has been commonplace up until recently for transsexuals who wanted to be accepted by the feminist community to be forced to agree that there is no medical basis for their condition, because feminist theory holds that there can be no fundamental biological differences between men and women apart from the obvious ones of chomosones, sex organs and reproductive organs.

Wow. That's a view of feminism that, to my eyes, lacks plurality. That definition does seem consistent with what I've heard described as "liberal feminism" (with similarity of name to "liberal humanism"), but cultural feminism and radical feminism have argued very different things. (And hey, what about about "gender feminism" versus "Christina Hoff Sommers feminism"?). I can't imagine Andrea Dworkin advocating that there can be no fundamental biological differences between men and women.

When trans people are shunned by communities of women, (such as happened with the Michigan Women's Music Festival or Vancouver Rape Relief, the arguments seem to be based on either:

• that biology is essential; or
• that biology isn't really the point -- that the point was common past experience and trans people didn't have it.

Cheryl made these assertions in the panel itself, and it really sounded like it was out of left field to me. Cheryl did make some claims about people she knew in England that had been "talked out of" believing that they are transsexuals -- and I was reminded at the time of an essay by Terri Webb in the book Blending Genders, but that's pretty much the only time I've ever heard anyone really espouse that line of argument. I don't have much respect for Terri's essay.

Because of this, many feminists, and pretty much the whole of what has become known as the "transgenderist" movement, has held that gender is a life choice, not a medical or biological condition.

Hurm. Hurm. Er. Well. This is such a bad simplification that I don't even know where to begin.

Maybe I start with a story. A story about how hard I find listening to "true" transsexuals advocating their exclusion from the "transgender umbrella". I have always felt that the fragmentation of trans communities was unfortunate, and I'm saddened when trans communities feel -- as they so often do -- that they really need to make clear that those other trans people have no idea what they're talking about.

When people feel the need to enforce their self-exclusion from the "transgender umbrella", I feel like that's a statement that the differences between trans communities are more important that the similarities, and I have always believed the opposite. I like the idea of safety in numbers; I like the idea of a large "patchwork quilt" trans community. But we don't have a community, we have a precision-bitch drill sqaud. Sometimes, I think trans people are like crotchety old racists, always looking back at how much better things were before those people joined the neighbourhood.

Anyway, as you can see, I have strong feelings on the matter.

But during the panel, when the moderator talked about the transgender umbrella, I raised this other point of view. I said that there were some people who felt that the umbrella was too broad, and that some communities felt that their concerns were lost when the issues were generalized the way pro-umbrella people wanted to generalize them. We had a really good and extremely civil conversation on the point.

And after the panel, Cheryl came up to me and said, basically, congratulations on not letting the transgendered camp dominate the panel. I smiled politely and thanked her for her feedback. But I was kinda surprised at the time and thought: "you probably don't really know what my leanings are in the trans world."

I sometimes say that I collect worldviews. I like to try to understand a whole way of seeing the world through the eyes of people very different from me. And I think that it's a really good skill to be able to describe other people's points of views in the terms that they, themselves, would use. And it bugs me to no end that the best interpretation that Cheryl is able to make of the "transgenderist movement" is that they think the same thing as anti-trans bigots.

Take Laura Blake/Masters (Please). Consistently the first person that jumps to my mind when I hear the term "transgenderist" (with the extra -ist on the end). Last person in the world I'd imagine claiming that trans-ness is not a biological phenomenon.

For once trans-people were allowed to argue their own case, rather than being forced to fit into somebody else’s definition of what they should be. I’m not entirely sure why this should have happened just now. Maybe feminism feels under threat from George Bush and his allies, and realizes that it can’t go around fighting itself when it has such a clear and present enemy.

I feel like Cheryl has been going to a different Wiscon than I have.

Comments

[northbard.livejournal.com]

Not being as up on trans theory or politics as others may be, but being relativaly schooled in feminism (at least as much as someoe on the outside with no academics can be), I was most impressed with the phrase "feminist theory holds that there can be no fundamental biological differences between men and women apart from the obvious ones of chomosones, sex organs and reproductive organs."

Oh good. No more need for all those damned books by so many anoyingly divergent authors. *phew* Room for Harry Potter finally! I can now turn to Cheryl Morgan for the definitive position of feminism, instead of having to syncretize some collective position.

That'll save time.

sheesh.