No More Transphobic Hand Wringing

A friend dropped this article this article onto my facebook wall this afternoon, and while it came with a bit of a disclaimer from the person who posted it, I clicked right on through. I was interested because what little I've skimmed about Bad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's oldest biological child has excited my gender politics. Also it's exciting to see a famous (tiny) transmasculine person. But my oh my, was I ever disappointed by what I clicked into.

My skin first began to prickle when this Jazz Shaw character put quotation marks around the words "identifies as male" and "gender assigned". The quotation marks display the fact that this writer is either being sarcastic or clearly does not want their* readers to believe they think John (or anyone) identifying as such is legit. But then my skin went into full on curdle at the predictable repulsive gem "politically correct". The only people who use that term seriously do so in effort to deride others for being considerate to other humans and as a means to dissuade others from seeking ways to reduce the harm they do with their language/actions. Seriously, whenever I hear/read those words I automatically assume this author is going to be an oppressive asshole to someone and has chosen this moment to refuse to apologize for it in advance.

So yeah, this writer has a serious problem, and NO it's not the problem they refer to at the end of their article. Which I guess is the problem of confusing our children with the complexities of gender or something? “children around the world are looking at [John] and thinking, “I wonder if that’s who I am too?” This is not a solution. It’s a problem.”

UGH! Just NO. No. No.

By Shaw's decree all parents should be saving their children from the dangerous corruption of anything outside cisgender and cissexual experiences. This is troubling in 3 very distinct ways:

1. It is deeply transphobic. It assumes that there is something bad or damaging not just about being trans, but also that just knowing that gender and sex can mean more than just man/woman and male/female is somehow harmful. (hey almost like how some idiots used to think all gay men are pedophiles huh?)

2. It disrespects the agency of one child in particular and all children in general. Assuming that a child doesn't know what they need and that the adults know better. Just because it is a child's decision to look, act, or speak in a particular doesn't mean that that decision is less valid or real. Which leads me nicely into

3. It's hurtful to non-binary people like me who DO go through radical changes in our desires to express our genders. It tells anyone with a gender that is too complex to fit into a tidy spot on a narrow spectrum all of the fucking time that our experiences are too confusing, and inappropriate for children. It erases us. It calls us obscene.

I was particularly pained by Shaw's mournful cry of "What is to become of this little girl". And their trying to explain away young Pitt-Jolie's behavior as temporary. As if temporary-ness of someone's explicitly stated expression or identity is reason enough to ignore and invalidate them. My family members pull this shit with me sometimes. And when they mourn my decision to not have children and the beauty I coulda been or whatever and it hurts in a way that sticks with me. It's just a change dammit not a fucking funeral. Seriously, people respect it when names are changed for marriage, even though about half of those things end up being pretty temporary.

I don't mind the above being faulted as unnecessarily venomous. I can risk being called that today because this morning my twitter stream was filled with necessary discomfort of confronting suicide within the trans community. Specifically the suicide of transgender youth. It's why I found Shaw's disrespectful article so particularly revolting. Because it espouses the exact attitudes that prevent adults from providing trans kids with access to life saving resources.

No. Not on a day like today**. I just can't let a thing like that stand. No more transphobic hand wringing. I've had enough.

PS:

Now that I've verily skewered Shaw,  I do want to say that there's one point on which we probably agree (but for differing reasons). And this is a hard thing for me to fess up to because boy do I ever want me an adorable transmasculine spokesperson who goes by the pronouns I prefer, but dammit, John is 8 years old. They're not an actor or someone who's chosen public life. Their gender or gender expression should not be something we're morbidly interested in. But we are, because part of celebrity culture is about obsessing over and criticizing the family and parenting decisions of famous people. Which is weird and creepy. Let's not do that.

*I very intentionally chose to refer to Jazz Shaw by "they/them/theirs" in this article. Yes, I neglected to the research Shaw's preferred pronoun. In this case alone I'm proud to return the misgendering fire. For John, my dapper little sibling in arms.

**Today is only special because I am hearing about the loss of one of my trans siblings. These losses happen all the time. On Transgender Day of Remembrance, we read a list naming the people we've lost to violence and suicide. These lists are so long that you can't make it to through them without ending up numb, checked out, or chocked up, with your face in your hands. All slippery hot from the accumulation of ache and fury.

Appropriation Is Erasure

Preface:

Alright, let's get this out of the way.  I am a white person about to write about race. And I am scared to do it. 

You're more than welcome to skip this preface and proceed onto what this post is really about. Trust me, my clumsy thoughts on racism and appropriation and art are much more interesting than my fears. But I must speak them.

I have been afraid of blogging about race in the past. I still am. The only other times I have written about race I've either used a disclaimer, or not addressed it directly while making note of implications I was skipping. The fear I experience is complex (like most human emotions) but mostly boils down to three basic thrusts. 

1. I don't want to further enforce oppressive structures, and/or harm those whose experiences/cultures I'm speaking about. 
2.  I am afraid of bumping up against the spots in my world view that've been made blind by my privilege. I am afraid to find in myself those deeply lodged flecks of violence and oppression I've yet to eradicate.
3. I am afraid to have this process laid bare in public, because I ultimately want to be thought of as a "good guy". But giving up being the "good guy" is part of challenging power structures that put me and people who look/act like me in power (and gives us the freedom to call ourselves "good guys" and be believed). So here goes.

Before you read any of the following please at least skim  DEFINITELY READ ALL OF Nicholas Powers's Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit. In fact, if you only have time/energy to read one take on this topic make it his not mine.

I strode to the front, turned around and yelled at the crowd that when they objectify the sculpture’s sexual parts and pose in front of it like tourists they are recreating the very racism the art was supposed to critique. I yelled that this was our history and that many of us were angry and sad that it was a site of pornographic jokes.

Among the many thoughts and feelings I had after reading this, this is proof positive for me that more comprehensive interdisciplinary arts education is necessary. I want a clear connections drawn between art and social justice. There is such a fucking failure in our schools and at large to connect past atrocities and suffering to current occurrences and artistic trends.

Unfortunately Powers's experience is only a glaring example of how the centering of white folk's contexts for experiencing erases the culture and history of others. I mean look at how "exotic" art (whether it be foreign, "urban", Native American, or otherwise "tribal"/"primitive") is presented in film/tv. They're used as props or background and all too often end up as the butt of some throwaway joke. Those jokes as well as those photos people were taking of the Kara Walker exhibit are as naked a portrait of appropriation as I can imagine.

The very reason that experiencing art itself can be transformative at all this that it asks us to consider and in theory inhabit contexts other than our own. But so many white and otherwise privileged people have been insulated from this process. So much so that when they encounter anything that seems outside of their experience/history they assume that it must only exist for their entertainment. The viscous cycle of erasure and appropriation is fed by this consistent failure to connect with the cultural contexts of those either deemed "other" or simply not spoken about at all.

In one of the presentations at my residency last month someone said "people who have suffered are smarter". That phrase clicked with me then but I think only now am I understanding why. People who suffer and are made "other",  are forced to, and for their own survival, become adept at understanding contexts and experiences other than their own. This was the "smart"ness referred to.*

The mechanism of appropriation laid bare at the Kara Walker exhibit, is the process of reducing the art of "the other" to the frivolous, exotic, and/or racy/trendy (and usually profiting from that redefinition). And I am ashamed. But more important I'm livid.

Livid that the insular straight-up dumb assumption, that "if [x piece of art/culture] is not about me/my experience then it must not be that important (to anyone)." is part of my culture as an american and as a white person. The comfort of that privilege is NOT making us smarter, or better people. It only makes us more comfortable (at the expense, erasure, and discomfort of others).

*After drafting this I was informed that this context switching "smartness" is known as "outsider-within" perspective in feminist stand point theory. Source

In it, but also against it.

Recently in the zine Moonroutes I found this passage by Jackie Wang:

As a white, lower-middle class, gender-and-otherwise-queer, I'm struggling with how to remember to "Live in it but also: against it". As I fill out my applications for grad school part of me hungers for legitimacy; to be let into and recognized by the system. For an artist/writer such recognition is often crucial to financial survival.

But I will to work to ensure that my hunger for "success" is equaled by my hunger to understand "the hidden brutality" that my life depends on. I know that my ability to further my craft has been enabled by the resources I've personally been afforded. Such resources have not been given to others (who have creative and critical capacities just like I do) as a means of systematic silencing/erasure. I don't want to forget that I am lucky to have the chance to TRY and be heard. If I forget I will become more complicit in the oppression that I am living in.

Part of being "in it but also against"  for me it means remembering to trust that the people dehumanized by our culture are no less capable of creating incredible artistic and literary content than I am.

It's arrogant of me with all my privilege to assume I'm above oppression just by knowing that it exists. I need to actively talk about who we are leaving out and who has been left out historically.

When we leave out the historical and current realties of oppression the context is incomplete. Any art viewed or created without acknowledgment of how it fits into the oppressive systems of our culture is missing context. I can't always fight under the simple, safe, and vague banner of "equality". Sometimes I need to be against something. Because I am never not participating in the status quo.

There is a danger in thinking about equality for the less privileged in oversimplified terms. When those of us with a particular privilege talk about equality one of the things we are talking about is equalizing the distribution of that privilege and extending access to people without that privilege.

When those in power are afraid of sharing the privilege of deciding what is and isn't going to be part of our cultural future we/they end up replicating the current status quo. There may be a(n appropriated) veneer of marginalized culture in order to bill such efforts as progressive and "for equality", but the exclusion of oppressed voices is still happening under the surface.

Nowhere is this gatekeeping more flagrant than in the creative/artistic world. An unfortunate side effect of capitalism is the misconception that good art can only be created in environments of excess. While there is some merit to Virginia Woolf's Room of One's Own in terms of people needing subsistence and access to seclusion for gaining and maintaining  mastery of artistic craft, it's foolish to think that good art is only produced the privileged.

To think that depth of experience and expression are only possible for people who's experiences include privilege further dehumanizes marginalized people and can even serve to justify the current dehumanization they suffer.

Those of us already privileged by the status quo who seek to end this and be advocates for equality need to remember that those we are advocating for aren't likely to want the exact same privileges we have. We should also remember that those we extend resources to aren't likely to use our now shared privileges in a way that is familiar or comfortable to us.

Practically advocating for people with less privilege means imagining and accepting uses of resources that differ from current or even currently imagined uses. The only way to forge a more equal world involves trusting in the creative and critical capacity of the oppressed. We must see shared privileges/resources not as a cost or even a sacrifice to the future of equality, but as a simple an necessary act of collaboration. In such sharing resources simply and freely it mean surrendering any expectations previously held about how such resources might be used. Equality won't look like what those in power think it will look like.

The importance of radical non-presence in maintaining intersectional integrity

Note: This is an idea I am still very much mulling over and would LOVE to hear any feedback folks have about privilege, oppression, & intersectionality as it relates to presence/non-presence.

As a teenager, before I explored myself sexually, before I maturbated, before I began writing about my fantasies, & before I began to interrogate my own desires, I accepted the romantic paths society laid out for me. More simply put: I identified as straight until I was 23. Fortunately during my sexual oblivion I gravitated toward the queer youth space in my hometown. I attended weekly meetings and identified myself as a straight ally. My very best friend had come out to me in middle school and I wanted to be the best ally I could.

These meetings provided vital challenges to the way I conceptualized my world. I encountered and began to process the reality of trans and genderqueer folk for the first time. One of our regular leaders spoke with raw vulnerability about living with and contracting HIV. I was blown away. I value what I learned there more than I can say.

A year into my attendance of these meetings a decision was made that the meeting space would available to LGBTQ -identified individuals only. I considered saying I was queer or questioning, but back then straight still felt most comfortable. Conflict & anger burbled in my belly and often escaped my mouth in the shape of resentment as I spoke about the group’s decision. “It’s mean and discriminatory and I feel like I’m being unfairly excluded”.

After listening to my complaints, calmly and at length, my best friend opened his mouth haltingly but without apology. "Sometimes, it's just better to be around people who've had the same experiences you do."

Those simple words clicked instantly. I understood the reason my experience of straightness was excluded from a queer youth space. I didn’t have words for it then but it didn’t matter. I understood. I understood that spaces can be more deeply healing and illuminating when the people in that space have a shared experience & history with specific tools of oppression (in this case trans- & homophobia). At 17 I’d never had someone hate or question me for being queer. More importantly, I hadn't had it happen to me on a repeated, systematic basis. My friend was telling me that the most valuable support I could give him was my non-presence as a person full of a lived history of straightness.

The exclusion of my straight 17 year old self from my hometown's queer youth space facilitated deeper, unquestioned explorations of internalized and subconscious trans- & homophobia. The lessons I’d have learned by continuing to share that space would have no doubt been valuable. But my experiences of straightness took up space in that room. I required time and information to connect deeply to others’ experiences of homophobia and transphobia. I wanted to be included in explorations of those tools of oppression. But it wasn’t the job of those suffering from trans- & homophobia to educate me about that experience. It is never the obligation of the oppressed to educate others about the deep level of systematic oppression they experience. This is especially true if they are present to explore that oppression for themselves.