inter/sectionality and false exclusivities
Apparently I am a middle-aged white guy.
It's a funny contrast with the ridiculous bumper-sticker on my beat-up truck: "STRAIGHT UP PINAY FOREVER," tattoo-style. That, and my epic nose.
Now, this is interesting, but it's come up a bunch of times that people are struck this way, and I think it's worth looking at. "Whoa," said people when I met them face-to-face at a blogger meet-up. "I really expected you to look different." How different? Well, for one, they figured I was in my forties. For another, they figured on my being bigger, paler, and more interested in men. We're not even going to get into people's assumptions about my relative attractiveness.
It's not the first time. During the whole mess over my "The Seam of Skin and Scales" piece, it came up: people figured on my being a middle-aged, rich, post-operative, Caucasian, mainstream male-to-female transsexual. Who, I might add, looks like a man in a dress.
It came up again the other day, with a progressive collaborator having thought I was a white man.
People keep expressing surprise: that I'm twenty-four years old, that I'm brown, that I'm partnered with a woman. That I'm only first-and-a-half-generation American on one side. That I'm not culturally urban.
In all of these situations, for the most part, when I can get an explanation out of people, it comes down to one factor: I blog about being transgendered. In each of these instances, people have admitted: their stereotype of a trans woman is a manly-lookin', man-loving, upper-class white American of middle years. Even though I allude pretty regularly to my racial background, my age demographic, and my orientation, they fade out as soon as the "trans" part comes up. I think this is fascinating, especially since there's only one time this fact of my life fades out: when people only know me from my blogging about race issues.
Then they forget I'm queer.
Let's flip it: in this recent Bloglandia dust-up, the emphasis in my comments and contributions has been on my being a young woman of color. And as soon as that happens--that that's people's entree into who I am--the assumptions shift. People new to dealing with me miss that I'm transgendered, and the womanhood part tends to go unquestioned, but the fact that I'm primarily oriented toward other women fades out. That and people assume, well, young woman identifying as of-color, using the word "multiracial," one of those races is probably "black."
The picture shifts. You hand people the one label--young WOC writer--the picture is a cisgendered black woman, from what I've seen. Maybe, if folks are paying attention, it shifts to "Latina."
People can go to my blog's front page and read the header; they can read any of the posts of mine that have gotten wider exposure. The information is all there, and comes up a lot. But it seems like only part of it can show up at a time, with both allies and antagonists: that I'm a trans woman or a woman of color. I can emphasize that I'm mixed-race, mestiza, Pinay; the options people fill in, if they're not really paying attention, are "black" and "white." There have to be neat boxes.
I started this blog out trying to emphasize writing about street medicine, progressive activism, postcolonial feminism, current events, and the religious left. That was the plan. But what got the attention and the exposure were my posts about trans and queer issues, and as soon as that happened--that the label "trans" was firmly attached to me online--my race vanished. If I was talking about stuff from my own heritage, it was assumed to be cultural appropriation. I wasn't listed as a POC blog. All that was interesting was the trans stuff. I admit--I turned down a very kind and generous invitation for hosting on a trans-specific site, and this was a lot of it: that I didn't want to never write about anything but trans stuff again. I didn't want to get stuck in that box and be another "trans blogger." But the more work I did in that vein, the more attention I got, and the more all my other topics--religion, street activism, postcolonial issues--faded into the background. The more publically transgendered I got, the whiter I got.
I've been watching the blogrolls I appear on. A lot of them are split up into categories, and if there's a trans-issues category, I'm in it--not in the "feminism" section, not in the "POC/WOC issues" section, not in the "religion" or "politics" sections. Maybe I make it into "multi-issue" or "queer." And that's been interesting to watch, now that I'm more involved in the radical WOC section of the blogosphere--the renegotiations. How am I primarily identified? If "trans" comes into it, it ends up coming first, over and over.
I don't know what it is. Maybe it's that some of us are still letting sink in the notion that queerness, or trans-ness, are a "white man's disease." Maybe we're just internalizing the stereotypes about these things being sole products of late-twentieth-century North America. Maybe it's just the saturation of media images of one type only--the Transamerica, Jenny Boylan, Christine Jorgensen, confessional-memoir narrative. Either way, I don't even get to claim complexity in my own gender presentation, let alone in every other aspect of my life.
I feel like I have to pick and choose. And as someone who's also multiracial, with an upper-class parent and a working-class parent, raised in three different religious traditions, ambidextrous--it just seems par for the course. It also seems frustrating and ridiculous. what do I emphasize? What does that say about what matters most to me? How do I organize the priorities, in both daily life and activism? By what affects me most, on a daily basis? Is that gender? Is that gender history? Is it the color of my skin? Is it my cultural upbringing? My class background? Do I try to be an anti-racist who also happens to be a queer feminist, or a feminist who also happens to be an Asian-American trans person, or a religious-left activist with family background in Judaism, Catholicism, and ancestor veneration, who is heavily influenced by Third-Worldist and postcolonial ideas? What's it going to be, on any given day?
How is it that even in ostensibly progressive circles, we still find all of these things mutually exclusive, like you can only be one kind of minority at once?
This is a liminal life I live--always between and around, rarely in or through. I tend to expect, though, that when all the information people have on me is what I present to them, that what I present to them will be--absorbed? noticed? When the only information I give about my racial background is my Pinay mother and Ashkenazic father, when I'm up-front about my age, or orientation, or class background, or gender status--I suppose I tend to assume that other people will have as little trouble letting all of these things be simultaneously true as I do.
And they don't. Somehow I manage to be a lot of people I'm not, really. Maybe it's another part of the monstruousness--invisibility.
For those of you out there dealing with and negotiating similar intersections, I'd love to hear your perspectives on this whole tangle. How do you work it out? What do you prioritize? Why? Where do we go, if we want to go toward integrating all this?
It's a funny contrast with the ridiculous bumper-sticker on my beat-up truck: "STRAIGHT UP PINAY FOREVER," tattoo-style. That, and my epic nose.
Now, this is interesting, but it's come up a bunch of times that people are struck this way, and I think it's worth looking at. "Whoa," said people when I met them face-to-face at a blogger meet-up. "I really expected you to look different." How different? Well, for one, they figured I was in my forties. For another, they figured on my being bigger, paler, and more interested in men. We're not even going to get into people's assumptions about my relative attractiveness.
It's not the first time. During the whole mess over my "The Seam of Skin and Scales" piece, it came up: people figured on my being a middle-aged, rich, post-operative, Caucasian, mainstream male-to-female transsexual. Who, I might add, looks like a man in a dress.
It came up again the other day, with a progressive collaborator having thought I was a white man.
People keep expressing surprise: that I'm twenty-four years old, that I'm brown, that I'm partnered with a woman. That I'm only first-and-a-half-generation American on one side. That I'm not culturally urban.
In all of these situations, for the most part, when I can get an explanation out of people, it comes down to one factor: I blog about being transgendered. In each of these instances, people have admitted: their stereotype of a trans woman is a manly-lookin', man-loving, upper-class white American of middle years. Even though I allude pretty regularly to my racial background, my age demographic, and my orientation, they fade out as soon as the "trans" part comes up. I think this is fascinating, especially since there's only one time this fact of my life fades out: when people only know me from my blogging about race issues.
Then they forget I'm queer.
Let's flip it: in this recent Bloglandia dust-up, the emphasis in my comments and contributions has been on my being a young woman of color. And as soon as that happens--that that's people's entree into who I am--the assumptions shift. People new to dealing with me miss that I'm transgendered, and the womanhood part tends to go unquestioned, but the fact that I'm primarily oriented toward other women fades out. That and people assume, well, young woman identifying as of-color, using the word "multiracial," one of those races is probably "black."
The picture shifts. You hand people the one label--young WOC writer--the picture is a cisgendered black woman, from what I've seen. Maybe, if folks are paying attention, it shifts to "Latina."
People can go to my blog's front page and read the header; they can read any of the posts of mine that have gotten wider exposure. The information is all there, and comes up a lot. But it seems like only part of it can show up at a time, with both allies and antagonists: that I'm a trans woman or a woman of color. I can emphasize that I'm mixed-race, mestiza, Pinay; the options people fill in, if they're not really paying attention, are "black" and "white." There have to be neat boxes.
I started this blog out trying to emphasize writing about street medicine, progressive activism, postcolonial feminism, current events, and the religious left. That was the plan. But what got the attention and the exposure were my posts about trans and queer issues, and as soon as that happened--that the label "trans" was firmly attached to me online--my race vanished. If I was talking about stuff from my own heritage, it was assumed to be cultural appropriation. I wasn't listed as a POC blog. All that was interesting was the trans stuff. I admit--I turned down a very kind and generous invitation for hosting on a trans-specific site, and this was a lot of it: that I didn't want to never write about anything but trans stuff again. I didn't want to get stuck in that box and be another "trans blogger." But the more work I did in that vein, the more attention I got, and the more all my other topics--religion, street activism, postcolonial issues--faded into the background. The more publically transgendered I got, the whiter I got.
I've been watching the blogrolls I appear on. A lot of them are split up into categories, and if there's a trans-issues category, I'm in it--not in the "feminism" section, not in the "POC/WOC issues" section, not in the "religion" or "politics" sections. Maybe I make it into "multi-issue" or "queer." And that's been interesting to watch, now that I'm more involved in the radical WOC section of the blogosphere--the renegotiations. How am I primarily identified? If "trans" comes into it, it ends up coming first, over and over.
I don't know what it is. Maybe it's that some of us are still letting sink in the notion that queerness, or trans-ness, are a "white man's disease." Maybe we're just internalizing the stereotypes about these things being sole products of late-twentieth-century North America. Maybe it's just the saturation of media images of one type only--the Transamerica, Jenny Boylan, Christine Jorgensen, confessional-memoir narrative. Either way, I don't even get to claim complexity in my own gender presentation, let alone in every other aspect of my life.
I feel like I have to pick and choose. And as someone who's also multiracial, with an upper-class parent and a working-class parent, raised in three different religious traditions, ambidextrous--it just seems par for the course. It also seems frustrating and ridiculous. what do I emphasize? What does that say about what matters most to me? How do I organize the priorities, in both daily life and activism? By what affects me most, on a daily basis? Is that gender? Is that gender history? Is it the color of my skin? Is it my cultural upbringing? My class background? Do I try to be an anti-racist who also happens to be a queer feminist, or a feminist who also happens to be an Asian-American trans person, or a religious-left activist with family background in Judaism, Catholicism, and ancestor veneration, who is heavily influenced by Third-Worldist and postcolonial ideas? What's it going to be, on any given day?
How is it that even in ostensibly progressive circles, we still find all of these things mutually exclusive, like you can only be one kind of minority at once?
This is a liminal life I live--always between and around, rarely in or through. I tend to expect, though, that when all the information people have on me is what I present to them, that what I present to them will be--absorbed? noticed? When the only information I give about my racial background is my Pinay mother and Ashkenazic father, when I'm up-front about my age, or orientation, or class background, or gender status--I suppose I tend to assume that other people will have as little trouble letting all of these things be simultaneously true as I do.
And they don't. Somehow I manage to be a lot of people I'm not, really. Maybe it's another part of the monstruousness--invisibility.
For those of you out there dealing with and negotiating similar intersections, I'd love to hear your perspectives on this whole tangle. How do you work it out? What do you prioritize? Why? Where do we go, if we want to go toward integrating all this?
Labels: building blocks, feminism, metablogging, postcolonial, queer, race, trans
posted by little light | 12:55 PM
28 Comments:
sorry, little light. i missed your banner because i mostly read your blog from my reader. :)
When I first added you to my blogroll, you were posting on a broad range of issues, so multi-issue seemed relevant. As I went on, the categories just seemed *wrong*, not least of which the distinction between 'feminism' and 'women of colour' when I looked back at it made me go "uh, wtf was I thinking?". Because there were so many that didn't fit; so many that, the more I read, the more I saw that they, too, bled over the edges of 'neat categories', and those were the ones I loved the most. I realised that's what I liked, because that's what life is like, so it seemed weird the divide everyone up, after that.
As for my own intersections, I'm still trying to work it all out. In some ways, I tend to prioritise my gender over my race/culture or queerness, because I'm still trying to work out how my Chineseness bleeds into my whiteness, how my interest in women bleeds into my interest in men, and how the fact that I'm in a relationship with a man and that I mostly 'pass' as white ties into that. And yet, and yet, the fact that I'm not so conflicted about how my womanness is, is all tied up in the privilege I have from being cisgendered.
So, I guess the short answer to your questions is 'I don't know'. I'm still trying to hold all these thing simultaneously for myself, so in some ways I suppose I'm more likely to expect others to be less able to hold all of it simultaneously.
As part of my growing comfort with and identification with my genderqueerness, I removed the gender information from a lot of places I conversed online -- like my headers and .sig for usenet posts. (My blogger handle is probably the most gendered thing I got these days, but only obviously so if one has passing familiarity with Middle Egyptian spelling conventions.) I don't correct people who refer to me with the 'wrong pronoun'.
I got sirred once, maybe a year ago, in a movie theatre. The woman who had done it was apparently horrified to have misidentified my genitalia; I was mostly amused.
One of the things that I find in dealing with people out in the world where we can see each other is that most of my transgressive adjectives are invisible. I can be identified as a biofemale fairly readily (except, apparently, when I can't); my mental illness, intermittent physical issues, my polyness, my genderqueerness, my kink, my obscure religion that most people only refer to as a canonical example of something people don't believe anymore, all of that stuff -- pfft, nobody knows it unless I specifically do something to draw attention to it, or unless they're really good at paying attention.
Ten years ago, online, I'd give advice that people thought was spectacular until they learned I was a teenager; at that point, I turned into an idiot in their eyes. What I was saying ... the same damn stuff either way.
There's a weird sort of ghettoisation that goes with the monstering, I think. If someone gets filed into one specific labyrinth, that's the only place they're expected to be heard -- if there's something else to say, some sort of thinking outside the maze, people tend to react with the OMGthemonster'sbreakingloose rather than considering that people are more complicated than that. (And funny, just before I read this, I made a post over on my place with a line that was something like, 'If your life can be characterised by one thing, you're probably boring.')
One of the reasons I enjoy interacting online is that it's possible to put forward the stuff that actually is important as a priority. Not always consistently -- like you commented on the way people snag particular things and construct these whole visions of you around them -- but it's possible for someone to react to me on first encounter as something I am which is actually identity-significant to me, whereas in person I get a lot of stuff that's aggravatingly filtered through biosex.
It seems like everyone sort of prioritizes among their many labels. I guess for me, I was always aware of racism and ethnic identity before I knew I was queer, and although I was aware of sexism, it didn't really seem to have the same impact on my life as racism did.
Besides, attending our Alma Mater it was pretty clear that race was a lot more difficult to talk about than feminism or queer or even class issues. So I guess that's why I chose what I chose. It's not that I think that feminism or queer issues are not important or that they don't affect me, but they just don't speak to me in the same way I guess.
I started intermittently reading your blog about six months ago, when the feminist blogs exploded about trans issues. At that point in time I did know that you were a transwoman of colour, so I tended to file you under a broader rubric of "feminism" than with radical woc.
The reasons for that weren't that I see these as categorically separate, but that they problematise dominant feminist conceptions in particular ways. Radical woc have things in common with each other about how they define womanhood, how they see the problems in the world, etc.
Given that I started reading your blog through reading about trans issues, I figured you took multiple approaches to problematising and broadening feminism.
In general, though, I feel a lot of pressure to fix one arena of identity as the primary one. And I don't necessarily want to do that. But at least for me there's been some element of choice about it. It kinda sucks that other people are making those assumptions for you.
I have some more stuff to say about (gender)queerness and whiteness, but I'll have to save that for later because I'm mulling it over now.
Hi little light, I've been reading your blog lately because of the trans 'dust-up', and got here via Feministe, but it was clear that there was no easy way to categorise you as a blogger, or as a person, when I started reading your posts.
Your point about the assumptions people make about transpeople is spot-on. In the US at least, the most visible transpeople are white, and transpeople are, on the whole, imagined to be white. (I'm in Australia, and it's the same here.) Do you think that happens in a particular context, of being online and blogging? That is to say, non-white transpeople are part of the imaginary universe of trans representation or visibility, but only as victims of murder/rape/assault, as sex-workers, as drug users -- as Venus Xtravaganza, as Gwen Araujo. This is obviously wrong, because there are plenty of movers and shakers in trans organising who are non-white. But I also think it's specific to online communities (and so many transpeople are online) -- that assumed perception of a real gap between the "writing, speaking" transpeople [coded as white and middle-class] and the "silent" transpeople [coded as non-white], who are spoken for, and who are imagined to exist in a different, more harsh reality. People seriously cannot imagine that division being crossed. I guess this especially applies to transwomen, too, maybe. And while it's good that people are aware of how much more vulnerable to violence transwomen of colour are, it looks like that racialising process makes it more difficult to speak from a trans, non-white perspective in this online context.
Anyhow, I don't know if what I'm saying is very clear, but I've been thinking a lot recently about the racialisation of trans communities/activism/discourse, and I hear what you're saying about being assumed to be white. It sucks.
Well, you know, for what it's worth you're in my bloglines under "people."
It's a fascinating sort of "On the internet, nobody knows you're a" sort of thing. Which can be played all kinds of ways -- I know Little Light has talked with me in the past about women who attend services at online mosques, after all.
That's a really fascinating point. Since people thinking Little Light was a rich 40 yr. old white guy pretty much matches the profile (I would guess)of what would generally come to mind of people were asked to describe who they think of as a blogger.
So perhaps, in some people's minds anyway, everyone is coded white?
I'm not sure if it's because of the blog circles I'm in (mostly feminist) or my introduction towards social use of the internet being through slash fandom, which is 90% female, but I'm in the strange-it-seems mental position of assuming that anybody I meet on the internet is default female unless it's clear otherwise. I still have things like "white cisgendered adult" as unmarked cases in my mind...but I'm occasionally surprised to find out that someone is in fact male.
I'm not sure if this makes me any more aware of my unmarked cases most of the time, but at least it gets me thinking a bit.
And I generally think of you as older than me, and looking like yourself, the physical feature of which that sticks most with me is your hair. I'm bad with abstract categories of people precisely because it's impossible to get them right -- if I had a system, people like you would break it. I also find myself thinking of sexuality more of definite relationships than anything abstract -- I know you're interested in women because you're dating one, but I don't draw a whole lot of far-reaching conclusions from it, and would be more likely to answer a question "well she's dating so-and-so" than with a label.
I'm rambling. Sorry. I always like reading your stuff, it makes me think. Thanks for posting.
little light--i have you under my "power creating community" section. And I'll be honest--I identify you as trans first, but I think that's because for the longest time, those are the posts you commented on on my blog. so it's a case of me being self-centered (haha)--none of the rest of the world exists except my blog.
but the other reason I have you there is because i kinda revolt at the idea that you, as somebody that identifies as trans, should be subsumed under category "woman"--because I *do* see the choice to identified as trans as being very political--that it is refusing all the boxes. but in doing that--in seeing you as trans first, and in identifying with that identity most, I also have erased your racial identity as well.
ay, i have to think about this. this shit makes me think so hard, I can literally feel my brain twisting about in my skull.
thanks, seriously, cuz it keeps my brain young.
Ariella, just, well, yeah. And passing privilege is a funny issue with me, too. I grew up in a small, overwhelmingly-white town. I still live in a small, overwhelmingly-white city. And so frequently I either stick out like a sore thumb, brown brown brown, even though I'm relatively light-skinned; or I vanish, because people are so unfamiliar with what a mestiza or hapa or Pinay looks like that they just sorta shrug and go, uh, well, maybe she's Italian. A lot of them just default to "exotic" and stop thinking, but then, that's when happens when you use words like "exotic" on people.
Anyway, I just--yeah. It's all a work in process.
dw3t-Hthr, I find it fascinating that you got sirred. Interesting interesting. I'll have to mull over this filed-in-one-labyrinth thing for a while, but your point about the specific noodly parts of negotiating complex identities online is probably needs even more consideration.
Fire Fly, I'm looking forward to the rest of what you have to say. I think you're going in some interesting directions. Would you say it's a fundamental thing about activism and identity politics that one generally has to focus in one direction, or at least one direction of problematizing am ovement like feminism? I know the pressure's there; I'd like to know whether or not it's structural.
Az, please please please keep running with this.
It's clear and I think it's a really vital point, the one about there being two imagined communities of transpeople--one we talk to, and one we talk about.
The bifurcation is something important to tease out--between upper-class white trans people, who Write and Speak and Advocate and Assimilate, and this vast mythicized field of of-color or working-class trans people, who are Victimized and Exploited and Commemorated, at events like the Day of Remembrance. The community is huge, and it's diverse, and this gets forgotten until it's time to point out the abuses and hurts and murders--and then the brown portions, and the poor portions, of the community get trotted out. Meanwhile, the white portion of the community gets stuck in this straitjacket narrative of How to Speak, you know?
God forbid any of us break out of that expected role, as the exploited sex worker and tragic martyr. That's not to say, in any way, that those harms and oppressions don't go on, or that they shouldn't be organized around, but those people have voices, too. And so do those of us who fiddle with those expectations.
I've had a couple of different counselors tell me--I'm not kidding--to exploit this dynamic, now I think about it. They basically said that as a person of color, I should use people's assumptions about transgender-as-a-white-thing to go stealth more effectively: people would assume any "irregularities" were ethnic, rather than due to wonky bodily history, that "odd" mannerisms were "cultural," and so on, without jumping to the possibility of a trans life history.
When you let something like that sink in...whoa, you know?
And Allie, you're a cheater, seeing as you knew me first and my blog second, but the point's taken. And the notion of various corners of the 'net being predominantly female bears examination, I feel. When it comes to, say, slash writers, or Livejournal, or whatever, you're right--the assumption is often on unmarked femaleness, not maleness. I wonder how process it over in this corner here?
Well, BFP, some of it is my own jackassery in not commenting enough at your place, you know? Besides, first impressions count. That's sort of what I'm exploring. Still, it's interesting, these impressions you got. I'll have to think on all this.
It makes my brain twisty, too.
I suspect the sirring may have been related to the hefty black leather jacket I was wearing at the time, but goddamn if I don't have the femmiest fucking biker jacket ever these days. It has fringe, for crying out loud.
The first Feri training retreat I was in, I was chatting with a gay man who commented that I had a lot of male energy. Maybe the concessions clerk was picking up on that, who knows?
I got a "Whoa, Sam's a girl?" last week, but that was doing a Warcraft run with voice-over-IP coordination, and the MMORPG world is really strongly coded 'college-age male'. And I hadn't had my headset working since the first move, because we misplaced it somewhere along the way, so no way for the filtering to get out.
On identity politics -- I don't know whether it's required that one have one and only one category for effective identity politics, but it comes across to me as a really common failure state. Back to the 'lifestyle' rant, people who sort of fold all of their everything into one focus point scare me, and that's what I see fairly frequently when it comes down to hardcore identity politics. Everything gets folded in to being about the chosen identity, even when it's a stretch of plausibility -- and if it stretches too far those traits have to be downplayed as irrelevant.
If I do identity politics, it's probably with the identity "I am a weirdo", and the procedure "Here's where I contradict your assumptions about me with more facts".
I have another thought, I will put it in a separate comment.
This will be a little tangential for a moment, but I'll pull it back in.
I think it's a really vital point, the one about there being two imagined communities of transpeople--one we talk to, and one we talk about.
A couple of years ago, I got into a drop-down drag-out argument with someone who figured that anyone who was polyamorous would be both politically energised and in favor of a certain left-wing agenda, and thus that he was fully qualified to speak for what poly people wanted as someone who fancied himself a community leader.
I argued with him for about two weeks about the relevance of consent to that sort of thing -- that he might have the power to speak for supporters of his organisation if he had one, but to speak for people-of-the-adjective in general was basically presumptuous at best, and honestly he was crossing over to the "lying about other people in order to push his own agenda" level of things.
It took him forever to realise that people could come to having multiple relationships with something other than a save-the-world political mentality. He literally could not imagine that someone who was not a political radical would consider multiple relationships. (And also figured that this radical community needed his help to be organised and effective, which also struck me as poorly thought out.)
There's a privilege to be examined there -- the ability to be seen to speak for a group. And I think that multiple-minority people will have a harder time getting there -- because there will be that subliminal cultural assumption that while maybe a brown transperson might be able to speak for other brown transpeople, only a white transperson can speak for transness in general. Because that's the face of 'normal', right, the unmarked case of human?
But even for those people who manage to speak for one of their adjectives as a whole rather than being limited to the intersections of their experience have to be damn careful about privilege. I do my best to, when I'm speaking, be clear when I'm talking about my experience, when I'm talking about my observations, when I'm talking about what I've seen, when I'm talking about what organisations do and promote; it's one of those ethical things. But people will still sometimes take that and not pay attention to the limitations, make it all look like me, even when I flag it otherwise.
Speaking about stuff one has to keep in mind that a goodly fraction of the audience will tend to universalise, take what they hear as the Real Way to do things, and getting heard is not only a privilege, it's one that will tend to obscure other people's voices.
you might have read julia serano's piece on the two types of trans people allowed. i suppose i'm part of the problem, being middle aged, and white. and trans. unless jews are generally still considered "not white".
funny thing, most of the trans women i know partner with women, or remained with their wives through and after their transition. my husband and i have yet to find even one other couple like us. i suppose like most stereotypes, actual examples are difficult to find.
perhaps because i dislike labels, i don't put links on my blog into categories. so your link is just one of many. though since my blog is certainly considered trans, guilt by association kicks in.
That's really interesting, Nexy; I don't know a lot of other trans women in general, and most of my contact is through the greater queer community, so I'm used to trans women who are partnered with other women, too, because I run with women in general who are partnered with women in general.
I wonder how much of that is what part of the community you or I run in, and how much is based in raw percentages that go unnoticed--I've certainly heard it suggested that orientation breaks down, percentage-wise, in the trans community about the same way it does in the cisgendered community.
I don't, incidentally, think you're "part of" any given problem here; belonging to a perceived or real majority isn't any fault of yours, you know? I almost added a disclaimer to this telling white trans folk "I'm not saying these things to dig at you," or whatever, but it seemed inappropriate, in the "if it doesn't apply to you it doesn't apply to you" sense.
As to Jewish whiteness, well, that's a noodly question. I come from Ashkenazim myself, on one side, and that side of my family certainly considers themselves white, as do most Jews of European descent I know--even Sephardim. At the same time, I know an Ashkenazic girl who's paper-pale with light eyes, who got very upset with me once for implying that she's white, because dammit, she's Jewish. I guess it's sort of your call.
Thanks for the link to the Serano piece, too. I keep forgetting she has a website; having perused the piece you linked, which is a different but no less pervasive binary in some ways, it reminds me that a: I have a post I've been meaning to write on the subject and b: I really, really, really want to read her book.
Would you say it's a fundamental thing about activism and identity politics that one generally has to focus in one direction, or at least one direction of problematizing am ovement like feminism? I know the pressure's there; I'd like to know whether or not it's structural.
I went to a forum on women and identity politics last night, so I feel particularly up to talking about this...
I think intersectional analysis is possible, but difficult. The more axes of oppression/privilege you try to cover, the harder it is to go into depth about them. But of course, we all live along many planes of social in/justice and foregrounding some necessarily requires sidelining others. I think it's possible to do that without writing other possible arenas of oppression out, though (e.g. Marxists who focus on oppression by capitalism and reduce all oppressions to class oppression v. environmental justice perspectives that are open to analyses of racism, sexism, and other oppressions).
You know, more and more I'm thinking at the basis it's a profound sort of laziness - a desire to know not the other PEOPLE but the other ISSUES. I'm guilty of this too, gods know; it's easy when you're dealing with words to focus on the issues and not the people (often to the detriment of the issues, ironically enough). And the more some issue is "something that happens to someone else", the easier it is to kind of break it off and make someone all about a given issue.
For those of you out there dealing with and negotiating similar intersections, I'd love to hear your perspectives on this whole tangle. How do you work it out? What do you prioritize? Why? Where do we go, if we want to go toward integrating all this?
I probably identify as an activist with my religion most, feminism second, racial justice third, romantic orientation rights fourth, genderqueer rights fifth, and disabled rights and awareness sixth. But my attitude is "do no harm" first; the most critical thing, for me, is to alter my worldview and language so that all of my friends who aren't privileged along these continuums are comfortable talking to me and/or not alienated by how I put things and what I say. I also attempt this for those who are privileged along those continuums, but that's secondary.
I'm of the personal opinion that as long as one person is judged unfairly and objectified along a continuum of being, we're all judged unfairly and the world isn't right yet. I'm sort of a Mahayana Buddhist Progressive, I guess, though I don't really self-identify as progressive.
So, I suppose one could say the way I approach intersectionality is through chosing a role of being (in this case communication and knowledge transferrance) and then trying to stuff as many different oppressions under it as possible.
But that's at the issue level. Issues are easier to combine than people.
I argued with him for about two weeks about the relevance of consent to that sort of thing -- that he might have the power to speak for supporters of his organisation if he had one, but to speak for people-of-the-adjective in general was basically presumptuous at best, and honestly he was crossing over to the "lying about other people in order to push his own agenda" level of things.
Ooh. "people-of-the-adjective." I like it! That's a great distillation of that dynamic. Mind if I use it sometime?
There's a privilege to be examined there -- the ability to be seen to speak for a group. And I think that multiple-minority people will have a harder time getting there -- because there will be that subliminal cultural assumption that while maybe a brown transperson might be able to speak for other brown transpeople, only a white transperson can speak for transness in general. Because that's the face of 'normal', right, the unmarked case of human?
This is also really interesting. I think, along with the privilege, there's ... hrm, assumption of purity there? Like the yelliest feminists - the ones that put oppression as a woman before everything else, and who are most likely to cast everything in terms of their feminist viewpoint - tend to be the upper/middle class, relatively well-educated white ones. Not just because they're privileged and think they should dominate (though yes, that's huge ... and annoying), but also because for them, that's all that's happening. That's the only thing 'holding [them] back.' There's no intersection to be had there.
And because it's their only issue, it's assumed that they have some sort of ideological purity... it must be all femism because it is only feminism (or whatever the issue/group may be). It's a weird essentialism.
As for identification... I'll admit that I kind of cheated too, knowing you from in front of the screen, LL. But before I connected RL-you to online-you, I did envision someone a little more... ponytailed. Not white, because I read your banner and your words... and not female-born for the same reason... but a little more generic-looking. Mostly because people don't really get features until, well, I know what their features are like. If your identity markers are coded in your writing, I assign generic (think department-store-model) features... if anything at all. Most people have voices or feelings associated with them, rather than looks in my head.
But I do norm people to white, and to a little older than I am. I've always done the age thing... in pretty much every walk of life. Mostly because I was always the youngest one in my class, so I assume anyone I'd be speaking to is older, because that's just how it was when I was growing up. A hard habit to break, but not necessarily a dangerous one, I think.
I norm people to white online out of disciplinary habit as much as anything... I ran the Digital Divide numbers in my Technology and Society classes, and I know that most of the people in communities I'm likely to be involved with (given my language - US English - , education -college going into grad school -, tastes, etc.) is going to be mostly white, mostly male, mostly at-least-a-little-well-educated, and mostly my-age-or-older. This, of course, changes by focus (more women for the feminist stuff, more POC for the race stuff, more non-US people for MMO stuff, etc.) ... but the basic template of the internet, for my bit of it, is white, male, US-centric, and slightly older.
But there's also that bit of me that's still steeped in the white-male-as-unmarked thing, and I know that contributes too. It's not like the internet wasn't white in my head before I had numbers to back it up.
Hmmm. As far as how I manage the intersectionality and plurality stuff... I'm contrary. When priority is on the white voice, I prioritize POC stuff. When priority is on the male voice, I prioritize feminist stuff. And so on and so forth. Not always with my blogging, mind, but in general, in conversation, I'm likely to try to first get a snapshot of the big picture (like the dynamics I kept pointing out in the book stuff), and then spotlight the issues that are getting lost in the shuffle.
I know there are bits of my identity that get lopped off when people are talking to/about me... few people realized I was a WoC before I started really talking about the book stuff, for instance. That's probably because I don't have any "about" bits, and I really only started seriously blogging recently.
*laughs* I had you on my blogroll under "people I know" for a while, before I merged everyone into "map my blog niche."
"I wonder how much of that is what part of the community you or I run in, and how much is based in raw percentages that go unnoticed--I've certainly heard it suggested that orientation breaks down, percentage-wise, in the trans community about the same way it does in the cisgendered community."
i've heard the orientation equivalency theory as well. all i can say is that the therapist who saw me through transition had 63 m2f patients during that time. *one* other transwoman was dating a man beside myself. *one* other transwoman expressed her het orientation, though was not dating at the time, and the other 60 were either lesbian identified, or remained with their wives.
is this something specific to new jersey? there was one other trans-focused therapist in nj - were there 60 m2f patients using her services who were het? somehow, that doesn't seem to make too much sense to me.
of the 25 or so transwomen in the az based support group i was a part of for a year or so, none of them were currently dating men. and while my husband was always willing to come with me to the meetings, he was the only male partnered with a transwoman in every meeting but one. and that other couple drove out from yuma - a three hour drive. we never saw them again.
adnittedly, it could be an age thing. i'm 51, and many of the transwomen in nj were also middle-aged (and white, btw). not all though, and i have to imagine that even *one* of them would be het.
regarding jewish and whiteness, i remember "alas, a blog" had a post up about perceived whiteness of various ethic groups. i seem to remember jews scored lower than many. i tried to look for the post, but couldn't find it.
as far as being part of the problem, i do see myself that way, at least in part. especially as i first came out, i found myself speaking for trans-ness in general. and i found my foot in my mouth on a younger trans message board. thier experiences in many ways were quite different than my own, especially with regard to economic privilege. and while i never thought myself as being wealthy (in fact, quite the opposite, probably because i grew up in the smallest house in an affluent neighborhood), financing my transition came relatively easy for me, in large part because i had good credit. though only last year, (8 years after starting transition) was i able to finally get myself out of debt.
needless to say, i am now very cognizant of speaking only for myself when i talk about trans issues.
and yeah, serano's book will be my next book purchase.
Ooh. "people-of-the-adjective." I like it! That's a great distillation of that dynamic. Mind if I use it sometime?
Go ahead and nick it.
I spend a lot of time thinking about [adjective] activism. Which adjective varies, and I see a lot that's generalisable, so I often put things in terms of that sort of language.
I think, along with the privilege, there's ... hrm, assumption of purity there? Like the yelliest feminists - the ones that put oppression as a woman before everything else, and who are most likely to cast everything in terms of their feminist viewpoint - tend to be the upper/middle class, relatively well-educated white ones. Not just because they're privileged and think they should dominate (though yes, that's huge ... and annoying), but also because for them, that's all that's happening. That's the only thing 'holding [them] back.' There's no intersection to be had there.
I think there's a lot to be poked at in that dynamic.
I look at that crowd and ... you know, I wonder if some of my disjunction with feminism as portrayed by that lot is related to the lack of intersections. I never experienced sexism as a primary/sole issue, despite being in pretty much that demographic .... I'm gonna take that thought over to my place, I think.
I think it's actively dangerous to look at situations where someone has the luck to have only one oppression issue and presume that produces a purer, cleaner way of dealing with that particular oppression and/or oppression in general. So much of the systematic issues arises from layers and the way things ripple and get so much more complicated in the interleavings.
(All of which reminds me of my cousin, the learning-disabled black kid who was thrown out of school for being disruptive, because, y'know, brown people don't have learning disabilities or ADHD, they're just trouble. The intersection between his mental stuff and his ethnic stuff was where the problem fell; if he just had the mental stuff, he'd have been Ritalined right quick, if he just had the ethnic stuff he wouldn't have been having trouble in school ....)
I thought you were older, but in retrospect 24 makes sense ... on the blog, people most commonly think I am a Latino male, so I've given up, maybe I am one secretly, who knows! I was thinking of changing my avatar (now a genderless rock) to a Latino male face, just to confuse people further, but decided they would probably complain.
I would say I'm shocked to see people assuming you're a white, older trans woman who fits their "trans woman" stereotypes -- I'd say "Good Goddess, are these people even READING her blog?"
but... yeah. People do that.
This is one reason I'm glad LJ doesn't let me put my linklist under subheaders.
This has now got me wondering what people decide I am "first", what my blog is:
Sadomasoblog?
That disability rights blog?
A feminist blog?
A "sexpos" blog?
...yeah, um. I don't think I want to know.
I want to make a couple of clarifications, here, though part of me bristles at the necessity:
I did not make this post to disavow my trans status or distance myself from it. I am who I am, and I am proud that "trans" is an important part of that identity. This is not any kind of divorce from my continuing to write about and work with trans issues or any kind of disavowal of trans-related activism. Similarly, it is not an effort to draw a dividing line between myself and, say, white trans people.
I wanted to call attention to the dynamic within which once a person is identified as trans, everything else about them seems to fade away into inconsequentiality. I wanted to point out the way that even in progressive, radical and activist circles we keep allowing ourselves to consider queerness or trans-ness and non-white-ness exclusive sets.
I continue to be bothered by this whole process. I can write about my concern that my trans identity eclipses the other, often equally important parts of my identity, and I think some folk end up mistaking it for some kind of referendum either on the worth of my white allies or a decision to shove away my trans-related work and Do Something Else.
It's not. I'm just tired of my gender identity effectively dipping me in bleach for a lot of folk. I'm tired of being boxed away so that, if I'm out and proud and vocal about my trans status, I don't get to be anything but trans.
I don't think that's a notion that's good for any of us.
FWIW, I understood that. I think it's important for you to keep working and writing on trans issues, to destabilise that assumption, that compulsory whiteness and make a space for yourself and other trans people of colour. (Not that it should fall solely to you, or should you choose to hang up your hat and retire to private life, you aren't entitled to cos people expect *you* to change the world for *them*.)
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