The following excerpts are from Usenet archives, and represent things that I found interesting in some way. The language may seem archaic (e.g. 'transies' seems to be an affectionate term used by the communitiy to self-refer), and there's a lot of differentiation among the community using acronyms.
This post is from Dana Leland Defosse, and contains the first Internet use of the word 'cisgender' to differentiate 'transgender'. The wording is so progressive that it wouldn't stand out as dated today, despite having been written 30 years ago.
Some people are just so far ahead of the curve, but also the issues for transgender people remain largely the same, despite a lot of progress having been made.
From: leland@lenti.med.umn.edu (Dana Leland Defosse)
Subject: transgender research
Date: Wed, 25 May 1994 14:32:12 GMT
I am currently researching several aspects of transgenderism and
am seeking help with my work in the following areas:
1) I am interested in theoretical works addressing transgender issues
that contain critical, systematic analyses of the oppression of differently
gendered persons (historical or cross-cultural welcome). In particular I would
like to find studies of political, social, economic and cultural aspects
of the subjugation of transgendered persons that explore reasons for
oppression and transphobia and prescriptions for liberation and empowerment.
I will share and acknowledge contributions made to this search.
2) I am trying to assess campus climates for the transgender
community, both at my own institution and at other campuses. Any
information regarding this subject would be tremendously helpful to this
effort. Personal testimony, activism, organizations, experience of
providers and human service workers, etc. Issues of interest are
transphobia, hostility, general knowledge and understanding, attitudes of
the queer community and cisgendered people, etc. I am interested in
building coalitions and will share any info with others.
3) Queer scholarship--I am also trying to determine the degree to
which lesbian and gay studies programs contain material relevant to
transgenderism and what the quality of that material is. Experiences from
prof's TA's, students are helpful. Syllabi are really appreciated and I
will disseminate syllabi I receive to others who request it.
4) I would appreciate finding out about any listservers or other
bulletin boards that deal with any aspects of transgender issues.
Please forward if you can!
Thanks to those who can help--it is very appreciated and I will do my
best to reciprocate!
dld
University of Minnesota
The following post is from someone called LD Blake (Laura Blake), and a search on 'her' produces a record of some interesting historical drama.
THE FAILURE OF TRANSEQUAL.... By L. D. Blake, August 1996.
TransEqual began in 1989, as CATS (the Canadian Alliance of
Transsexuals), in the aftermath of several cases of severe
discrimination suffered by its founding members. CATS, however,
suffered a quick death of apathy. Its work was continued under the
TRIO (Transgender Rights In Ontario) banner until late 1992 when, on
the heels of several very successful negotiations, it was decided to
expand the legal efforts beyond the borders of Ontario.
TransEqual was essentially a letterhead agency, who's primary mission
was that of obtaining Transgender Equality within Canada's many
recourse providers. In spite of its successes in the human rights
arena, on September 1, 1995, in the midst of mass objections from
within the transgender community itself, it was decided that there was
no value in continuing our efforts. It is hoped that the information
provided here may serve to guide others who take up transgender
related equality seeking causes.
In Canada, all rights are for the individual. There are no lists of
recognized minority groups, and there are no "special rights" set out
in any legislation. This means that, in Canada, legislated equality
must apply fairly to every individual.
This mandate of unversality is set out in our constitutional law, by
two specific sections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms:
Part 1 says "The Canadian Charter Of Rights and Freedoms guarantees
the rights and freedoms set out in it, subject only to such
reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified
in a free and democratic society." And part 15 says "Every individual
is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal
protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination, and in
particular without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic
origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability."
From these two clauses it should be apparent that any aspect of law or
policy that may affect the universality of human equality in Canada is
at risk of being struck down as "unconstitutional". The Charter set
the stage for us to make a completely valid claim of "me too", but it
also placed one important constraint upon our activities. Clearly, in
the process of seeking equality, whatever TransEqual did had to meet
the same standard of universal applicability as that set out for all
other legislation; we were using the law and, in the process, we
became entirely subject to it.
Given the state of law, it rapidly became apparent that any policy or
precedent we sought would only endure if it could be applied to every
citizen of Canada, cisgendered, transgendered, transsexual,
crossdressing, crossliving, pre-op, post-op and non-op alike. This
mandated that TransEqual's methodology had to apply just as well to
someone who never once considered a "gender issue" as it did to those
of us who struggled with it on a daily basis. Were we to conduct
ourselves otherwise we risked losing everything we had gained for our
peers, on the first appeal.
A secondary consideration also arose when we studied the existing body
of legal precedent. It rapidly became apparent that many equality
seeking efforts (and the groups mounting them) had gone off on a less
than profitable tangent. By and large those cases already tried
tended to focus entirely upon transsexualism and the lifestyle of
transsexuals. This was problematic on three fronts. The first, and
by far the most devastating, was that legal methodology almost always
deflected attention away from the misconduct of those who would
discriminate against us and onto the lifestyles of their victims,
granting our oppressors virtual immunity from prosecution in the
process. Secondly, the cases we studied tended to be "accomodation
seeking" exercises which accepted a dual standard of law rather than
seeking to eliminate it. Finally, since there were literally no cases
involving transvestism or transgenderism to be found, legal attention
had become focused almost entirely upon the post-operative aspects of
transsexualism, which hardly seemed conducive to the establishment of
universality in law or practice.
I recall being intrigued, then, by the observation that while most of
the legal and political advocacy was coming from the crossdressing and
crossliving contingents in our peerage almost all of it concentrated
soley upon transsexual issues. We had, at that time, no way of
knowing why this was the case but there it was, clearly spelled out in
a foot high pile of papers on the floor of TransEqual's dining room
office. As we were to learn later, there was more in the mix than any
of us knew.
Given all that was before us in the fall of 1991, nothing was more
clear than the need for a thorough re-assessment of both the legal
efforts and the dominant reasoning in our emerging community. All the
evidence we'd accumulated pointed to a struggle for understanding,
conducted by both the legal community and our own peerage. All
efforts were focused, almost obsessively, upon a single question:
"Why?". Transies and legal pros alike were struggling to understand
the motivations behind sex-change.
At this point the whole thing took on a curiously personal twist. As
we looked for the "Why" of transgenderism, we were also looking to
understand our own crossliving motivations, something we had accepted
as "unknowable" only a year before. We now needed to provide more
than a simple legal strategy, we also needed to explain our own
motivations in life.
Looking into the world wisdom accomplished nothing. After hundreds of
hours spent pouring over psychiatric and peer publications we
discovered only that everyone who was getting published was grappling
with the issues of understanding gender and ignoring many other,
potentially more important questions in the process. We found nothing
of value either in the understanding of our issues, or the promotion
of social equality for our peers. So much importance was placed on
the "Why?" question that almost no real insight into transgender life
had reached the public eye.
Then, in the best tradition of "dumb luck" the answer arrived on our
television screens. In a manner that can only be described as "out of
the blue", I received a phone call from one of the TransEqual team,
saying only "Turn on CBC Newsworld, now!". When I did, there was
"BrainSex", a documentary about gender differences in the human brain.
I watched with rapt attention as one after the other the answers I'd
been seeking for years fell into place.
The next morning we held a brainstorming session, and the answers to a
hundred long standing questions fell out of us in an excited exchange
punctuated with frequent exclamations of "This changes everything" and
"Of course this is how it works". That day we finally understood that
gender was not about body shape, but rather it was a function of the
mind. As such it is a natural proclivity shared by all, a universal
human characteristic.
The concept we devised was simple enough; in each person cisgendered,
transgendered, transsexual, or crossdresser there existed a mixture of
masculine and feminine traits and the question of manhood or womanhood
could be answered simply by examining the balance of these
characteristics in each individual. In the same manner as manual
dexterity, wherein a person still uses both hands but favors one hand
over the other, gender was simply a question of dominant and secondary
personality traits. In short, gender identity (as a man or a woman)
was a question of whether the masculine or the feminine was favored in
each person's sense of identity.
Also, that day, our long term insight into sex assignment (at birth)
gained a new significance. The sex of the body was almost universally
recorded in accordance with simple observation of the newborn's
genitalia. Babies with penises were deemed "male" and babies with
vaginas were deemed "female", and it needed be no more complex than
that. Moreover, since sex was assessed at a time when gender was
unknowable, this process ends up being totally unbiased, a simple
statement of observable fact. Given this, sex could be (and already
was) viewed as an independent and universal human characteristic.
Human rights laws have provided legislated equality of the sexes for
several years.
Not only did we suddenly have the answer to our own crossliving
motivations, we had the legal approach we needed. The answer to both
was simply that "Genitalia does not determine identity." By taking
BrainSex only one small step further we were able to see that not only
are gender and sex natural characteristics, they are also independent
human characteristics, each worthy of legal and social consideration
in its own right.
Gender, if appreciated as a "gender orientation", could then be
depicted in much the same manner as sexual orientation. If we did not
connect this to genitalia, it could easily be shown that manhood and
womanhood are self-declared (either verbally or behavioraly) by each
individual. More importantly, we could argue that the ascription of
rightness or wrongness to any combination of body sex and gender
identity was little more than a moral judgement based wholly upon
social expectations. Therein lay the key to understanding the
mechanism of discrimination suffered by so many transgendered people;
they were victimized when people tried to enforce the common belief
that everyone with a penis is a man and everyone with a vagina is a
woman. They were victims of "transphobia" just as homosexuals were
victims of homophobia.
Next we needed legally admissible substantiation of the concepts we
had developed. This turned out to be far and away the easiest part of
the process. Moir and Jessel's book, "BrainSex" provided a wealth of
research references which, when followed, lead almost inescapably to
the conclusions we had reached. In particular the work of Gunter
Dorner lent credence to the notion that gender identity is between the
ears while body sex is between the legs. His work set out not only
the basic hypothesis, but also went on to describe an entirely
believable process by which more than two possibilities of sex and
gender could exist.
But it was not enough to argue a new concept. If we were to bring
about meaningful change we also needed to expose the flaws in the
dominant world wisdom; arguing for one thing does not amount to
arguing against something else.
After following the leads in BrainSex we then lacked only the means to
argue that the psychiatric concepts, the "Disorder Model", lacked a
solid basis for its depictions of our realities. This part of our
argument materialized in the negative form. The substantiating
psychiatric document, the one in which it was conclusively shown that
transsexualism and transgenderism were mental illnesses simply doesn't
exist. Everything we found on the topic began with the unquestioned
assumption that transsexualism wasn't supposed to happen. Several
promanent researchers were unable to meet our challenge to produce
"document 0" for us. One well published researcher even went so far
as to brush us off with the simple comment: "What else could it be?".
I suggested that it might be natural, only to experience a disconnect
on the line.
This two pronged investigation of the conventional wisdom lead to the
1992 "Transgender Identity" essay that was to form the core premise in
our work. The argument was simple: since gender can be viewed as an
orientation, the law must recognize that each person does indeed have
an innate motivation to live either as a man or a woman. We argued
that this must be a free choice, made without undue influence. The
BrainSex insights allowed us to also argue that this choice is not
related to the genitalia. The final step was showing, through our own
anecdotal reports, that discrimination does occur on the ground of
gender. Living according to our gender orientations is, in short, the
exercise of our personal freedoms and as such it is entitled to and
deserving of fair protection under the laws of the land.
Armed with this presentation and a number of supporting essays we took
our case to the Canadian and Ontario human rights commissions and,
there, we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Within a few weeks of
beginning to work with Transgender Identity's "social model",
TransEqual had letters of support from provincial Premiers, Attorneys
General, prison officials, bureaucrats and legislators. We then went
on to obtain policy changes in other key agencies such as the The
Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, The Ontario Police
Complaints Commission, and the Ontario Ombudsman. But even more
importantly we heard a simple invitation from each of these recourse
providing agencies: "Bring us cases, help us set new precedents."
They were anxious to cement all they had learned into practice and the
legal part of our game was now afoot.
These were heady days for the TransEqual team. We were in the papers,
on television, and we were at the center of attention in several key
bureaucratic circles. Our popularity as what one human rights officer
jokingly called "Transvisionaries" soared. Letters of inquiry began
to arrive. People wanted to hear these new insights, and many of
those who inquired were in positions of power. The stage was clearly
set for the legal equality of transies, our goals were in sight and it
was time to cement the whole thing into practice with a really good
human rights case. With the support we had garnered, one case
presenting our social model would have been enough to bring the entire
thing to fruition.
But we had a problem. The time limits on our own cases had expired,
and those we had in the system prior to the summer of 1992 were
withdrawn to protect the new insights. We simply didn't have anyone
in our little group who could bring the social model into a human
rights tribunal.
Now, we needed to go to the transgender community to find a case we
could take under our wing, someone whom we could champion as a means
of getting that one much needed human rights case into the system.
Without this, the whole thing threatened to fall flat on its face. As
I pointed out at the time, without a win in the courts everything we
had done would be nothing more than a really nifty legal theory, one
that in the end would have done nothing to help anyone.
Our primary concern was that of filing cases that were a close fit
with existing human rights practices. Cases falling into Commerce
(purchase of goods or services, and access to facilities), Employment
or Housing were of special interest, as these were the best understood
areas of human rights law. As such we could draw upon a wealth of
information and precedent in other areas in the formulation of our
cases. The Ontario Human Rights Code was our preferred jurisdiction
since it most clearly covered these areas. Also during our research
we had talked to a large number of people who described situations
that could easily be litigated under our preferred guidelines. Quite
a number of people had described being hassled by landlords, bosses or
store owners about transgender related matters, so we held a high
expectation that we could find our ideal case without much trouble.
We immediately managed to find a couple of people privately. We
helped them get their cases into the system, but because of the
complex and highly medicalized nature of these complaints we held
little if any hope of their success. Because these cases dealt with
psychiatric policy and sex-change, they tended to be deeply rooted in
areas of human rights that were either ill defined or totally
untested. None the less, these cases were a good starting point
because even in their worst outcome they would succeed in introducing
our "social model" before the human rights commissions.
In the summer of 1993, the ideal case was still to be located. This
case would hopefully be a total "no-brainer", something like a
crossdresser kicked out of a woman's wear shop or a transgenderist
evicted from their apartment. We needed something that was inarguably
the direct result of transphobic attitudes. The simpler the case, the
more likely it was to succeed. What we really needed was a case that
could be won upon the simple allegation that "The respondent adjudged
the complainant's lifestyle to be inappropriate because of the
complainant's biological sex." Such a complaint would fall very
neatly into the tenets of every Human Rights Code in Canada and would
thus provide an adequately simple example for others to follow.
In the late summer of 1993, to attract a larger group of potential
complainants we sent fliers to all the transgender and crossdressing
groups in Canada. We also sent press releases to all the transgender
community "zines" and newsletters we could find. In these releases we
described our bureaucratic victories and suggested that people
interested in coming forward with their cases should contact us. Our
offer was simple: work with us to file test cases, and anything gained
in either settlement or tribunal was theirs to keep. Since we held no
interest in money at this point, we offered the service free of
charge. Other than helping people overcome discrimination, our
primary concerns lay in setting our much needed legal precedent.
TransEqual's first hint of trouble on the horizon came from the
response to our fliers and announcements: there was none. We didn't
receive even so much as a curious phone call. We knew from our
experience with CATS that apathy would be a problem and decided to
give it some more time. After about a month we began following up on
our announcements by first providing copies of selected documents to
the various groups, and then following up a week later with phone
calls to every group on our mailing list. We solicited people's
opinions, and suggested that there was a very real reason to stand up
and fight back against the many issues that faced our community. Our
legal equality was at stake.
I still recall the day we received the first response, and the
excitement in the room as we opened it and read it, each in our turn.
I also recall the blank stares on our faces as we discovered, one
after another, that our much awaited first response turned out to be
nothing more than a transsexual telling us that "your kind should not
be allowed to exist". And I recall our growing sense of
disappointment as the responses that followed were little more than
chastisements for butting in where we were not wanted. Over time the
situation became more and more heated, with the responses growing ever
more vehement. The kindest came from a total stranger and said "I'm
glad you are there if I ever need you, but please leave me alone."
On average the response was more like "You have no right to dictate
our lives to us." and many amounted to little more than "fuck off".
We responded by attempting to explain that our objectives were the
exact opposite of what many seemed to think they were. We were being
called "anti-surgery", when in fact we had already sponsored several
litigations aimed at making surgery more easily available. We were
accused of interfering in people's lives, when our entire effort was
predicated upon reinforcing freedom of choice and freedom of
expression for our peers. It soon enough became apparent that people
who knew quite literally nothing of what we had done were angry at us,
for reasons I seriously doubt even they understood.
Our weekly meetings slowly changed from discussions of "Here's what we
need to do next" to pondering "What the hell is happening to us?" We
were suddenly far more concerned with damage control than anything
else. We found ourselves increasingly confused and frustrated by the
spreading notion that we were up to no good. In one hand we had the
opportunity to establish our community's legal equality, and in the
other we had the growing opposition of our peers. None of it made any
sense whatsoever. As time marched on and we went first to FidoNet and
then to the Internet looking for a venue in which to present our
information, the problems just became more and more omnipresent in our
lives. Not only did we not understand the reactions of our peers, we
had no idea where or how all the disinformation got started, at the
time.
So, in the heat of the backlash we took our final meeting in August of
1995 and decided that it was no longer worth the effort. The
bureaucracy was informed of our decision, and as of September 1,1995
all political and legal aspects of our activities ceased. TransEqual
was history.
Now, almost a year after the fact, all but one of the cases we helped
file are dismissed and we are still grappling with the many issues
this has raised. Most of us have returned to what is left of our
previous lives, none of us wants to have anything more to do with the
transgender community and what remains is a festering bitterness and
anger that, despite our personal efforts to deal with it, is not
likely to abate for some time to come. All of us have expressed open
hatred for our own peers and I for one think this is well justified,
considering all that has happened. To be sure, it is hard not to be
bitter when you have done something of great worth for so many people,
only to be told to screw off by those who would benefit the most.
It is quite easy at this point for people to lay the blame upon our
angry attitudes, but doing so would be little more than a facile
exercise in self-vindication on part of TransEqual's enemies. There
is no denying that we three all were --and still are-- very bitter
about the outcome, but we did not start out that way. It should be
obvious that we would not have succeeded so well with the bureaucracy
and we would not have been able to get those preliminary cases into
the system if we carried anger and bitterness into even one of the
many discussions needed to accomplish our goals. TransEqual's work,
conducted almost entirely above the signature of Laura Masters, would
not have succeeded were it conducted in any fashion short of carefully
orchestrated and credible lobbying.
It would be just as shallow for us to point a finger at the small
number of truly messed up transsexuals who engaged in campaigns of
unreasoned opposition. To be sure we were very disappointed in the
behavior of these people. They reverted to lies, ad hominem, and more
than a little distortion in their persistent attempts to discredit
TransEqual's work. In the end, they were simply written off as
"crackpots" by the human rights people, but not before a couple of
them became so annoying as to receive letters from government agencies
telling them to cease and decist in their attempts to draw the
government into the middle of the community's intra-mural conflicts.
In the end, despite their volume and vindictiveness, these people were
little more than an annoyance, empty barrels (the kind that make the
most noise) who did more to help establish TransEqual's credibility
than anything else.
There isn't even much point in discussing legal strategies at this
point in time. Ours worked, the others didn't; it really is just
about that simple. What we really need to discover is why a winning
strategy, accepted by mainstream society, was roundly rejected by
transies of all stripes, and for that we have to delve into the
dominant ethos of the transgender community, and its membership.
During the past 40 years, since the highly sensationalized mid-1950s
outing of Christine Jorgensen, we have seen a steady stream of
information depicting transsexualism as either a mental illness, a
disorder, or a sexual paraphilia. These messages have been
everywhere, in the tabloids, on television, in the movies, and on all
nature of talk shows. The inescapable message is that transgender
identity, a long lived and world spanning aspect of human identity, is
disordered, sick, and not to be tolerated in modern society.
In all of it, the cisgendered ideals (manhood in males, womanhood in
females) has been held out as the goal to which all should aspire.
Almost nothing has been written about crossliving, and I have yet to
find a single published instance of psychiatry recommending
crossdressing or crossliving as valid alternatives to sex-change. The
only accepted cure for the newly exposed affliction of "Gender
Dysphoria" was to change the appearance of the body in a surgical
procedure called "sex-change". Thus, what the public (and the
emerging transie) knows of transgender reality is that "You get this
mental illness, you have a sex-change and you live happily ever
after", and sadly enough that is just about the full extent of the
insight that exists in and about our community. All those millions of
pages that are written about us do little more than examine the
minutia of the unquestioned larger supposition.
This abiding belief that transgender identity is not supposed to
happen has resulted in a "disorder model" creating an illness out of
what is essentially a natural proclivity and depicting sex-change as a
cure for the contrived affliction. What has emerged is a construct of
belief and policy that seeks nothing more noble than the elimination
of the transgendered from society. The present disorder model, with
its "Standards of Care" and its "Real Life Test", does little but seek
to control and manipulate the transgendered. If examined with an
awareness of the truth about sex and gender, these policies cannot
possibly be seen as anything but enactment of the lack of acceptance
emanating from the psychiatric community. The effect of both policy
and practice is that of rendering the transgendered person both
invisible and powerless within society.
Over and above the stigmatizing effect of the psychiatric involvement
in transgender issues, we can also see that there are negative impacts
within the transgender community itself. It is unlikely that a more
deeply combative, shamed or closed minded group exists anywhere else
on earth.
Perhaps the most pronounced effect of psychiatric involvement is that
Internalized Transphobia has become endorsed within our own community
as a good thing. We now have two generations of young transies who
have known nothing other than the disorder model, have no notion of
transgender heritage, and are largely unaware of possibilities other
than sex-change within the community. After a lifetime of being
bombarded with negative messages, these people tend to have
self-esteem problems that sway them all the way into self-hatred. A
great many transies are irreversibly convinced of the wrongness of
transgender identity. Many see themselves as "deformed" or "diseased"
and tend to be so ashamed they will stop at nothing to obtain
sex-change surgery as a means to escape and deny their membership in
the transgender community. These people, who comprise a definite
majority of those who would take up crossliving full time, are some of
the most actively transphobic people I've met.
The disorder model has also created a number of divisions in the
community. Those pursuing surgery form one group, those who
crossdress form another, and those who crosslive without surgery form
a third. Each group is also divided into male and female sub-groups.
Because these people do tend to be transphobic, intra-community turf
wars have become common place. Transsexuals, in particular seem to
disapprove of transgenderists. The transgenderist's crossliving
lifestyle tends to objectify the transsexual's worst fear; being stuck
forever in the transgender community. Crossdressers and
transgenderists tend to rail against each other's varied versions of
gender identity, and social integration. Strangely, once one gets to
know these people, one begins to realize that all three groups are
really saying just about the same things.
Even within the surgery group, there are difficulties because the
psychiatric presumption to judge and reject sex-change candidates, has
set up a highly competitive power structure, wherein transsexuals
compete amongst themselves in the hopes of currying favor from
psychiatry. In a fashion not unlike the dominance heirarchy in men's
prisons, it is thought that assention to positions of power within the
peerage tends to confer a certain benefit. Over time this dominance
heirarchy has formed itself into not only competitive and classist
divisions, but also into a number of cliques, one of which is clearly
in evidence on the Internet. Surrounding this dominance heirarchy,
there exists a series of gatekeepers, who's primary function is to
keep out those who may not be desirable, or beneficial to the
transsexuals who perceive themselves as "kings of the hill".
Upon examination, the whole thing can be seen to be very typical of
people living in captivity. Transsexuals are virtually enslaved to
their psychiatric examiners, who, no matter how benevolent, weild
enormous power over the transsexual's life. Other forms of
subservience can be observed in the relationships between dominant
transsexuals, and those who aspire to mimic them. A dependency exists
that tends to evince a reaction not unlike that noted in "The
Stockholm Syndrome", wherein the captive will actually endorse their
own captivity in order to trade for benefits, or safety.
Psychiatry actually has a long, and well documented, history of
oppressing those in minority positions, often endorsing patient
dependence in the process. The pseudoscience of psychology is itself
predicated upon the notion that non-conformity is most often to be
frowned upon. We medicate, disguise, and hide those who make us
uncomfortable with alarming regularity in present day society. It was
only a few years ago, well within my adult lifetime, that psychiatry
finally stopped treating homosexuality as a mental illness and stopped
off-handedly giving electroshock treatments to gays and lesbians.
Today, such methodology is viewed as "barbaric" by all but the most
homophobic bigots. It was only a few years before that, during my
grade school days, that sinistralism (left-handedness) was actively
discouraged and thought a disorder. Here too, the treatments
attempted were far more oppressive than helpful. With these and other
admitted attrocities in their past, it is very hard to view the
present psychiatric involvement in gender identity issues as anything
other than one more link in the chain of oppression. I, for one, see
little if any difference between cutting off the genitalia of a
transsexual and either electrically lobotomizing a homosexual or tying
the left hand of a young child behind his back.
The saddest news to be aired here is that the transgender community
has by and large embraced the disorder model. In all truth today's
transsexual position is not much different than the homosexual
position of the 1940s. During the mid-part of this century a great
number of homosexuals were involved with psychiatry, many sought
nothing more than release from their dreaded afflictions, and quite a
few happily lined up for treatment. This openly sought to eliminate
homosexuality from society, and in a severely homophobic society the
gay community was quite willing to cooperate. As one Canadian gay
equality activist has noted "Back then you couldn't find a gay man who
would admit he was gay." Where homosexuals of the 1940s and 1950s
would have done almost anything to become heterosexual and viewed
their sexual desires as a curse upon their lives, transsexuals of the
1990s are convinced that their transgender identities are a curse upon
their lives, and they will do almost anything to live up to the
cisgendered ideal, or at least to hide their transgender identities
from view.
Given the largess of Internalized Transphobia, the high level presence
of external influences and the dominance competition within our own
ranks, it should come as no surprise that community attention would be
deflected away from the concerns of ordinary life, and into what is
surely perceived as a struggle for the right to exist. This attention
has become focused upon working within the psychiatric disorder model,
as dictated to transies over the past 40 years. The deeper the
oppression becomes, the more likely transies become to expend their
legal and social efforts on justification and permission issues. This
is clearly what we were seeing in our original appraisal of the legal
activism back in the formative days of TransEqual.
TransEqual failed, not because our cause was unjust, or because our
insights were incorrect. The correctness of our work is evidenced by
the way it was received within both legal and social bureaucracies in
Canada. Rather, in bringing forward a social model that saw
transsexuals, transgenderists and transvestites in a normalizing
light, as individuals each entitled to legal and social equality in
their own right, we went against the status-quo and effectively
stepped outside of our own community. Once outside of the community,
we found ourselves in competition not only with our peers, but with
their acceptance of the medical model. And once working from the
outside we found ourselves in such a low position on the community's
dominance heirarchy as to be dismissed out of hand by those who dared
not stoop to listen to us for fear of losing their own places in the
ongoing game of king of the hill. In short we failed because we dared
to present a different vision than that demanded by the psychiatric
overseers who are a constant eminence gris in the transgender midst.
I can only suggest that the transgender community needs to engage in a
thorough re-assessment of priorities. Not all issues in the
transgender community revolve around disorders, surgery, medicine or
psychiatry. Issues such as employment, housing, contracts, etc.
should be re-thought and approached on a social rather than a medical
basis. The disorder model may be handy for transsexuals in pursuit of
their surgery, but it does absolutely nothing for non-operative groups
such as transgenderists and crossdressers. If all members of the
transgender community are to achieve social equaility, then all
members must learn to consider the issues of the whole community, and
not just those of transsexuals.
---
L. D. Blake
---
>While I do not understand the torment that you must go through
>each day, I see this as your torment, and not mine.
This is a serious mistake many cisgendered people make. You assume that
because *you* are uncomfortable about transgender stuff, we must be too.
Out of the entire transcommunity, which is about 1% of the population, only
a tiny minority of us suffer any grand prolonged discomfort. Transsexuals
are the ones who just can't accept that they are transgendered, they make up
about 5% (or liess) of our 1%... so they are a lousy basis for understanding
our lives. Newbies who are just joining us often suffer discomfort as well,
but eventually they get beyond it and begin to accept themselves quite well.
The rest of us, are really no more uncomfortable about being transgendered
than you are about being cisgendered.
You really can't project your discomfort onto us... we won't accept it.