search and seizure
Note: There's some issues I want to tease out, but in order to do so, I'll have to talk about work. In the effort to maintain both my anonymity and my job, I will be modifying details. I am employed as something of a jack-of-all-trades at a modestly-sized, liberally-aligned institution with various troubles and underbellies we will call, for the purposes of this entry, the Ministry of Space*, with attendant identifying details altered. While I tend to do everything from vehicle maintenance to emergency first aid to clerical and administrative work to plumbing in the course of my job as Girl Friday, my actual job description is pretty gendered, on the masculine end, and I am generally called on--as, ah, an Assistant Deck Chief at the, er, Ministry of Space--to wear a uniform that is not, shall we say, flattering to the figure. I end up pretty androgynized, with functionality presiding over form.
Julia Serano, in Whipping Girl**, makes an interesting observation about the mid-transition period when she notes that she got to a certain point where, minute-to-minute, people began making unpredictable, but different and definite, assumptions about her gender and sex and running with them. They didn't think, "Well, hmm, that there is an androgynous person." They immediately shuffled her as either "woman" or "man" and then from there assumed that she was androgynous-for-a-man or androgynous-for-a-woman until confirmed or given to understand otherwise; the notion of "other" almost never came up. It was never clear, in any given interaction, which way they'd go, but she observed that it really had nothing to do with changes in her clothing or mannerisms, day to day, hour to hour, second to second. People just sort of picked.
I quibbled with this for about a second, remembering the two? maybe three? friends who'd told me, after a while of knowing me, that they sort of registered me as genderless, as an "other." The more I thought about it, though, the more true it seemed. People had to have me stored one way or another in their heads, right away, with very few exceptions. Some people managed to switch back and forth, depending on what I was wearing on a given day, but for the most part even those people were either thinking of me as a woman-sometimes-crossdressed or a man-sometimes-crossdressed, This was even before I was on hormone treatment.
Now, much further along, I have wandered deep into the unpredictable territory Serano was talking about, and I find it fascinating. So I thought I'd illustrate, and chase a few trails it brings up for me.
The other day I got called up, at work, to deal with an emergency. A child had been hurt behind a locked door, and I was called on to get in there, get the door open, and make sure the kid was okay. Now, when I showed up and took care of the situation, the two women present on my arrival were full of thanks--and grateful phone reports to others--about the woman from the, ah, Deck Chiefs' office, who had come to help. She--that is, me--had been helpful, this, and we watched her do that and that. It was even more explicit with the one of them who used Spanish: ella, not el, and so on. A few minutes later, the kid's mother showed up, and was immediately talking, third-person wise, about the deck-crew guy who'd saved her kid, the man from the Ministry, he, him, and so on. When the paramedics arrived to help, they were, pronouns-wise, sort of split down the middle. Were people biased by whether I was rushing in to deal with a kid, or making official phone calls, from one minute to the next? Cooing at a crying child to calm her down, or offering medical advice? I don't know. Maybe.
Nobody asked, mind you. They all just guessed, and I had other priorities--like helping a hurt child--than correcting any of them. But it had been a pretty high-stress situation, so I went down to the corner store afterward for a cold drink. While I was in line, an older male contractor, salt-and-pepper-moustachioed and drawling and everything, sidled up to me, winked, and said, "They sure do hire good-lookin' folk down at the Ministry of Space, don't they."
I blinked: "Oh?"
"You're up there on the deck crew, right?"
At this point, apprehensive, I assented. He leaned in closer.
"Well, I remember when you came out to help me with that job up at the moon base, and I thought t'myself, well, that there's a good-lookin' gal, what's a pretty little lady like her doing workin' on a deck crew?"
I swallowed; it's always thin ice when you realize that a straight guy who doesn't know you has been harboring a crush, flattering with definite undercurrents of I-hope-he-doesn't-get-violent-if-he's-disabused-of-his-assumptions.
"Your boss came out the next day, and I asked 'im, where's that good-lookin' gal came out yesterday? Why didn't y'all send her? He said you needed a day off now and then. Guess I can't argue with that, but you're a pretty little gal." Another wink.
At this point, I just felt awkward: "I, well, uh...thanks. Guess I do need days off now and then."
"Well, you sure do hire nice-lookin' folks."
"Well, thanks, guess I'd better get back." I moved to extricate myself, and he leaned down and winked again:
"I'll see you around."
I waved and bolted as politely as I could.
Now, getting hit on in this way is always a strange situation. Advances like these are inappropriate--in the oily and infantilizing way he presented it, anyway--and in my head they go in the same category as catcalls and sketchy pickup lines in bars. On the one level, as they do with most women, they make me pretty uncomfortable. But on another level, they confirm that I'm being read as female--not only being read as female, but being read as female by people who're pretty concerned with making sure, for the sake of their machismo, that the person they're addressing is definitely female. I feel dirty for getting a bit of a warm feeling from something that I find objectionable. I feel both safer and more vulnerable, all at once. And there's always that specter: the safety of "passing" opens you up to the ever-present accusation of deception. The consequences of that "deception" can be pretty awful.
Case in point, another example, from a much more serious place: the airport. I flew out to visit my partner in California last weekend, and I was frankly terrified. I haven't flown since beginning transition. With a combination of basic nervousness for flying and airports coupled to the post-9/11 fear of travelling while young, alone, and brown with a Semitic nose and getting someone riled up enough to either make a scene or get security to put me in a little room, I was edgy enough before; but now I have legal documents that don't match up, and it takes real effort to look male like my passport and other paperwork say I am. That's bad when you're trying to convince armed people whose job it is to be suspicious that you're not in disguise, trying to pull something, or using someone else's ID.*** Add to that my very justifiable fear of law enforcement officials behind closed doors, and we have a winner. I was not looking forward to this trip.
So I did my best to dress down and not make waves. Jeans. Doc Martens. T-shirt, with a second button-up shirt to help cover up my sports-bra-compressed breasts. Hair pinned up in a tight bun. Stud earrings. No makeup. I walked up to the security gate with my bags, probably looking edgy as all get-out, and the TSA guy looked at me, no blinking, and said, matter-of-factly, "Ma'am, would you please step forward?" Well, I wasn't going to argue--and that's when my hairpins set off the metal detector, and I had to take them out, which brought my hair tumbling down past my shoulders. I got led to the little glass box where you wait for pat-downs, and there was a little commotion as they found a female officer to search me; then I got patted down, and told, "Miss, you can be on your way," and got my belt and shoes back on and headed for the boarding gate.
Now, a minute-to-minute shift in that context could have had terrible consequences--a humiliating public scene at best, with a "worst" end of the spectrum that was really too awful to contemplate thoroughly. I got lucky. Bureaucracy saved the day, and all I got was a faintly apologetic pat-down. That kind of thing is awkward at work, and often funny in my social world, but in the wrong situation--drunk guys on the street, tense law enforcement officials--it's a recipe for nightmares. This unpredictable middle ground--where in a half-hour at work I can be addressed as a butch man, a femme woman, a butch woman and a femme man by people standing right next to each other--is one thing in a world like my kitchen or my workplace, but it's entirely another in a place where I don't have any power. At the next flight, from another airport with me much more confident about my getting by, the man checking my ID peered at it for a long time, checked it from a couple of angles, stared. He blinked, said quietly--eyes level with the pushed-up breasts under my tight t-shirt****--"to your right, Sir," and waved me along. No scene, but he sure had the option. The next station was just interested in moving me through, and by then I was "ma'am" again. Once more, the potential was there for me to be in trouble--he could have called over an official to discuss the incongruity, any number of things could have happened--but I got lucky.
I'm not sure what the lesson is, here, but if I had any doubts about Whipping Girl's assertion that this happens, they're gone now. Liminal spaces are in short supply in people's heads, even people who're more likely to accept variant gender presentations. They still want you, in their heads, to be a variant male or a variant female, in my experience. I'm not sure what to do with that.
All I know is that tonight out at the barracks, while I was performing first aid, my patient decided not to even guess. I'm not sure whether or not she kept changing her mind or what, but it seemed like she was alternating pronouns sentence by sentence. Seriously, people. Just ask if you have to.
*Possibly only Mags is nerdy enough in the right ways to get all the layers of this joke.
**Which I'll be holding a large discussion of at Feministe next month! You should all come. Bonus points if we can get Dr. Serano to drop by and tell me I'm a moron; I hear she uses the inter-tubes on occasion.
***I've been searching like crazy for the couple-years-old news story I'm referring to, and I just can't find the reference. It regarded a TSA airport-security memo dictating a policy of carefully searching anyone who appeared to be cross-dressed, because Terrorists could be using it as a disguise so they could Do Evil. It was a ludicrous, transparently bigoted policy in its wording, and a lot of bloggers wrote about it incredulously, and now I just can't find any of those old entries. Anyone?
****Don't you judge me. I'm young, and I wanted to give my girlfriend something to look at before I left.
Julia Serano, in Whipping Girl**, makes an interesting observation about the mid-transition period when she notes that she got to a certain point where, minute-to-minute, people began making unpredictable, but different and definite, assumptions about her gender and sex and running with them. They didn't think, "Well, hmm, that there is an androgynous person." They immediately shuffled her as either "woman" or "man" and then from there assumed that she was androgynous-for-a-man or androgynous-for-a-woman until confirmed or given to understand otherwise; the notion of "other" almost never came up. It was never clear, in any given interaction, which way they'd go, but she observed that it really had nothing to do with changes in her clothing or mannerisms, day to day, hour to hour, second to second. People just sort of picked.
I quibbled with this for about a second, remembering the two? maybe three? friends who'd told me, after a while of knowing me, that they sort of registered me as genderless, as an "other." The more I thought about it, though, the more true it seemed. People had to have me stored one way or another in their heads, right away, with very few exceptions. Some people managed to switch back and forth, depending on what I was wearing on a given day, but for the most part even those people were either thinking of me as a woman-sometimes-crossdressed or a man-sometimes-crossdressed, This was even before I was on hormone treatment.
Now, much further along, I have wandered deep into the unpredictable territory Serano was talking about, and I find it fascinating. So I thought I'd illustrate, and chase a few trails it brings up for me.
The other day I got called up, at work, to deal with an emergency. A child had been hurt behind a locked door, and I was called on to get in there, get the door open, and make sure the kid was okay. Now, when I showed up and took care of the situation, the two women present on my arrival were full of thanks--and grateful phone reports to others--about the woman from the, ah, Deck Chiefs' office, who had come to help. She--that is, me--had been helpful, this, and we watched her do that and that. It was even more explicit with the one of them who used Spanish: ella, not el, and so on. A few minutes later, the kid's mother showed up, and was immediately talking, third-person wise, about the deck-crew guy who'd saved her kid, the man from the Ministry, he, him, and so on. When the paramedics arrived to help, they were, pronouns-wise, sort of split down the middle. Were people biased by whether I was rushing in to deal with a kid, or making official phone calls, from one minute to the next? Cooing at a crying child to calm her down, or offering medical advice? I don't know. Maybe.
Nobody asked, mind you. They all just guessed, and I had other priorities--like helping a hurt child--than correcting any of them. But it had been a pretty high-stress situation, so I went down to the corner store afterward for a cold drink. While I was in line, an older male contractor, salt-and-pepper-moustachioed and drawling and everything, sidled up to me, winked, and said, "They sure do hire good-lookin' folk down at the Ministry of Space, don't they."
I blinked: "Oh?"
"You're up there on the deck crew, right?"
At this point, apprehensive, I assented. He leaned in closer.
"Well, I remember when you came out to help me with that job up at the moon base, and I thought t'myself, well, that there's a good-lookin' gal, what's a pretty little lady like her doing workin' on a deck crew?"
I swallowed; it's always thin ice when you realize that a straight guy who doesn't know you has been harboring a crush, flattering with definite undercurrents of I-hope-he-doesn't-get-violent-if-he's-disabused-of-his-assumptions.
"Your boss came out the next day, and I asked 'im, where's that good-lookin' gal came out yesterday? Why didn't y'all send her? He said you needed a day off now and then. Guess I can't argue with that, but you're a pretty little gal." Another wink.
At this point, I just felt awkward: "I, well, uh...thanks. Guess I do need days off now and then."
"Well, you sure do hire nice-lookin' folks."
"Well, thanks, guess I'd better get back." I moved to extricate myself, and he leaned down and winked again:
"I'll see you around."
I waved and bolted as politely as I could.
Now, getting hit on in this way is always a strange situation. Advances like these are inappropriate--in the oily and infantilizing way he presented it, anyway--and in my head they go in the same category as catcalls and sketchy pickup lines in bars. On the one level, as they do with most women, they make me pretty uncomfortable. But on another level, they confirm that I'm being read as female--not only being read as female, but being read as female by people who're pretty concerned with making sure, for the sake of their machismo, that the person they're addressing is definitely female. I feel dirty for getting a bit of a warm feeling from something that I find objectionable. I feel both safer and more vulnerable, all at once. And there's always that specter: the safety of "passing" opens you up to the ever-present accusation of deception. The consequences of that "deception" can be pretty awful.
Case in point, another example, from a much more serious place: the airport. I flew out to visit my partner in California last weekend, and I was frankly terrified. I haven't flown since beginning transition. With a combination of basic nervousness for flying and airports coupled to the post-9/11 fear of travelling while young, alone, and brown with a Semitic nose and getting someone riled up enough to either make a scene or get security to put me in a little room, I was edgy enough before; but now I have legal documents that don't match up, and it takes real effort to look male like my passport and other paperwork say I am. That's bad when you're trying to convince armed people whose job it is to be suspicious that you're not in disguise, trying to pull something, or using someone else's ID.*** Add to that my very justifiable fear of law enforcement officials behind closed doors, and we have a winner. I was not looking forward to this trip.
So I did my best to dress down and not make waves. Jeans. Doc Martens. T-shirt, with a second button-up shirt to help cover up my sports-bra-compressed breasts. Hair pinned up in a tight bun. Stud earrings. No makeup. I walked up to the security gate with my bags, probably looking edgy as all get-out, and the TSA guy looked at me, no blinking, and said, matter-of-factly, "Ma'am, would you please step forward?" Well, I wasn't going to argue--and that's when my hairpins set off the metal detector, and I had to take them out, which brought my hair tumbling down past my shoulders. I got led to the little glass box where you wait for pat-downs, and there was a little commotion as they found a female officer to search me; then I got patted down, and told, "Miss, you can be on your way," and got my belt and shoes back on and headed for the boarding gate.
Now, a minute-to-minute shift in that context could have had terrible consequences--a humiliating public scene at best, with a "worst" end of the spectrum that was really too awful to contemplate thoroughly. I got lucky. Bureaucracy saved the day, and all I got was a faintly apologetic pat-down. That kind of thing is awkward at work, and often funny in my social world, but in the wrong situation--drunk guys on the street, tense law enforcement officials--it's a recipe for nightmares. This unpredictable middle ground--where in a half-hour at work I can be addressed as a butch man, a femme woman, a butch woman and a femme man by people standing right next to each other--is one thing in a world like my kitchen or my workplace, but it's entirely another in a place where I don't have any power. At the next flight, from another airport with me much more confident about my getting by, the man checking my ID peered at it for a long time, checked it from a couple of angles, stared. He blinked, said quietly--eyes level with the pushed-up breasts under my tight t-shirt****--"to your right, Sir," and waved me along. No scene, but he sure had the option. The next station was just interested in moving me through, and by then I was "ma'am" again. Once more, the potential was there for me to be in trouble--he could have called over an official to discuss the incongruity, any number of things could have happened--but I got lucky.
I'm not sure what the lesson is, here, but if I had any doubts about Whipping Girl's assertion that this happens, they're gone now. Liminal spaces are in short supply in people's heads, even people who're more likely to accept variant gender presentations. They still want you, in their heads, to be a variant male or a variant female, in my experience. I'm not sure what to do with that.
All I know is that tonight out at the barracks, while I was performing first aid, my patient decided not to even guess. I'm not sure whether or not she kept changing her mind or what, but it seemed like she was alternating pronouns sentence by sentence. Seriously, people. Just ask if you have to.
*Possibly only Mags is nerdy enough in the right ways to get all the layers of this joke.
**Which I'll be holding a large discussion of at Feministe next month! You should all come. Bonus points if we can get Dr. Serano to drop by and tell me I'm a moron; I hear she uses the inter-tubes on occasion.
***I've been searching like crazy for the couple-years-old news story I'm referring to, and I just can't find the reference. It regarded a TSA airport-security memo dictating a policy of carefully searching anyone who appeared to be cross-dressed, because Terrorists could be using it as a disguise so they could Do Evil. It was a ludicrous, transparently bigoted policy in its wording, and a lot of bloggers wrote about it incredulously, and now I just can't find any of those old entries. Anyone?
****Don't you judge me. I'm young, and I wanted to give my girlfriend something to look at before I left.
Labels: body politic, trans, travelogues
posted by little light | 4:09 AM
8 Comments:
Interestingly, the airport fear that you're talking about doesn't only apply to people transitioning. Anyone who looks out of the ordinary -- more "masculinized" or "feminized" than their driver's license says -- must be careful.
When my hair was cropped short, I had something of a scene in an airport: I was wearing mens' shorts and a baggy t-shirt with my buzz cut, no makeup, assuming that my (large!) breasts and feminine-looking face would be enough to clearly define me as "woman." But in fact, no. My ID was taken when I had extremely long hair and wore makeup -- in short, when I was much more feminized.
I had several delays when people tried to decided if I was really a chick and expressed their doubt about my ID; got called "sir" throughout the process, and ultimately felt pretty humiliated at how difficult it was for these people to recognize the fact that I was a woman.
And this was at the Portland airport! And I'm not trans!
That was really the flight that brought home to me how incredibly idiotic the TSA can be. I understand the need to search people, and yet, I think about the reactions even my not-so-very transgressive clothing choices elicited, and I wonder if a large part of the point isn't just to give people a chance to harass other people and make them afraid.
"...if I had any doubts about Whipping Girl's assertion that this happens, they're gone now."
i experienced the same during transition, especially when i'd fly down to dallas for electrolysis, face full of whiskers, and actually get "mam'ed". and yeah, flying post 9/11 with i.d. that doesn't match, is a harrowing experience at best.
m'dear, all other things aside, you have a fascinating opportunity to study firsthand various responses to actual or perceived gender -- and you're doing it. i think it's fascinating. you're dealing with the personal/emotional, too, and i care about how that goes (obviously). i'm also interested in posts like these, where you step back and intellectualize. so thanks.
Oh yeah. I don't think a single person has ever asked me what my gender is, or preferred pronoun. I think for the majority of people, that question is experienced as deeply insulting and humiliating, so they can't imagine that for others it would actually be a real courtesy. I don't really know why being identified as the "wrong" gender would be any less humiliating than not being identified at all.
But yeah, it think it comes down to a deeply ingrained binary logic, and inability to even conceive that there might be other categories than male and female.
I read an article in Make/Shift magazine about Julia Serrano's take on this stuff, and also found it fascinating.
I'm still not sure if I was actually mistaken for being a boy once, or if the person was pretending to mistake me for a boy in order to "punish" me for not looking acceptably (in her eyes) like a girl. I had shaved my head and I'm five feet tall and was fairly sucked up at the time, and I was in an elevator and an old woman *insisted* that I was a thirteen year old boy. I was 26 at the time and probably it's wrong that I was so giddy about the 13 year old part. But I did get some shit for being a (usually "obvious") woman who refused to have hair for a while. Which is not to say that I had a hard time of it (I loved having a shaved head and a lot of cute people tended to want to rub it when I was out in the world...ah, I miss those days). It's just that your post and this topic made me think about stuff like that. Where and how people wig out about gender expectations and others' failures to meet them, or that people tend to psychologically self-require that they make a designation in their minds, based on often random things.
I love your blog and your writing.
One of the things I've found quite disconcerting about the times people realise they've flagged me as the wrong sex is how big a deal they treat it as.
It's one of those places where I would be much happier if they'd either just pick something and stick to it or swap without comment rather than spending handwringing minutes apologising and blowing it up into something that matters at all (let alone matters in the grand scheme of things), which is a level of 'making a scene' that I find infinitely more embarassing than being mispronouned.
One night I went out to eat with a friend of mine. He's FTM, but elects to dress femme and not to have surgery; regardless, he has a baritone voice, short hair and a thick goatee, and facially passes unmistakably, to my mind. (He's said people do mistake him for MTF.) I was pre-T, but presenting male. The waiter addressed us politely as "ladiEEEZZ" with a sort of desperate upturn in his tone. And did so at the end of each sentence.
Initially I was irked by it -- more on behalf of my friend than on my own behalf -- but when I remarked on it, and he said he wasn't too upset, I started examining my own responses, trying to give all due sympathy to the people involved in the situation. Then I realized that the waiter was trying to do his job, and couldn't: that part of the "be a good waiter" program was a subroutine in which he was supposed to address people with gendered niceties, and that if he failed at this, it was in some way detrimental to his completing the script correctly. That he was sort of mentally stuck on "ladiEEEZZ" like a skipping record because he didn't want to fail at his task. And that caused me to feel sorry for the poor waiter, stuck in such a trap.
(I think if we'd corrected him, he'd have switched fine but been embarrassed about it. There are some days that it's worth the trouble. Others-- maybe not.)
madeline: can we trade?
this used to happen to me all the time at work, as a pre-t ftm. if i needed assistance with a customer, my bosses and co-workers would refer to me as she in the conversations, but the customers would call me he. it always made me nervous, because i didn't know how my bosses would respond to the incongruity, if they would make a big deal about it once the customer had left. but that never happened. they completely ignored it, which made me wonder if they had even noticed, or if they were just too uncomfortable to mention it. but at the same time i also felt happy that the customers were reading me right. so weird.
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