-
-
"A dream you dream alone is only a dream; a dream you dream together is reality." -- Yoko Ono
"In my heart, I think a woman has two choices: either she's a feminist or a masochist." --Gloria Steinem
Oct
8
You don’t have to be straight to be an ass
Filed Under LGBTQ issues, assholes, bigotry, discrimination, gender, human rights, legislation, patriarchy, politics, stereotypes | Posted by Cara |
Who would have thought, right?
This Salon opinion piece by John Aravosis, about why it’s completely acceptable to bail on transgendered people to secure the passage of ENDA sure is a treat. A really offensive treat that will make you vomit a little in your mouth. Not only because it’s disgustingly self-serving and intellectually shallow, but because Aravosis also attempts to portray himself as some kind of poor, suffering martyr who is the only one brave enough to stand up and speak the “truth.”
I have a sense that over the past decade the trans revolution was imposed on the gay community from outside, or at least above, and thus it never stuck with a large number of gays who weren’t running national organizations, weren’t activists, or weren’t living in liberal gay enclaves like San Francisco and New York. Sure, many of the rest of us accepted de facto that transgendered people were members of the community, but only because our leaders kept telling us it was so. A lot of gays have been scratching their heads for 10 years trying to figure out what they have in common with transsexuals, or at the very least why transgendered people qualify as our siblings rather than our cousins. It’s a fair question, but one we know we dare not ask. It is simply not p.c. in the gay community to question how and why the T got added on to the LGB, let alone ask what I as a gay man have in common with a man who wants to cut off his penis, surgically construct a vagina, and become a woman. I’m not passing judgment, I respect transgendered people and sympathize with their cause, but I simply don’t get how I am just as closely related to a transsexual (who is often not gay) as I am to a lesbian (who is). Is it wrong for me to simply ask why?
It’s not wrong to ask why, if you genuinely have difficulty understanding. It is wrong to ask why and then stick your fingers in your ears screaming “I CAN’T HEAR YOU” while someone takes the time to give you an answer. Surely, poor martyr that he is, the only one brave enough to champion this “cause,” he must have heard the answer before, but just in case, let me try repeating one variation of a very reasonable response.
Because we live in a heterosexist culture. The prejudice of heterosexism requires that anything outside of narrowly-defined heterosexual behavior– a cissexual male and a cissexual woman engaging in sexual contact– is seen as “other.” Transgender people are a part of the LGBTQ community because they don’t fit that heterosexual mold. A transman who is attracted to women is not defined as “straight” either by heterosexist society or even by many in the LGBTQ community, because they recognize the baggage that the term “straight” implies and that a trans individual can never fully encompass that label under its current rules. And some transmen also like other men. [For the record, I have no qualms about a trans individual identifying as straight, gay, bi or queer. I do think that it's an interesting discussion, but if a trans person tells me that they're "straight," then they're straight. If they want to be called "queer," then they're queer, etc. Period.] Trans individuals are latched onto LGB individuals because they are similarly shunned for sexual preference and for sexual identity.
It doesn’t take a genius or a particularly well-read person to know that the LGBTQ movement and prejudice against the community isn’t just about who they fuck. It’s a hell of a lot about gender and about self-representation. Cissexual lesbians who intend to remain women often get a lot of shit for their perceived masculinity. Of course, all lesbians are not masculine, but that’s the stereotype. And the stereotype is used against them. It’s almost as if society just wishes they would put on a bit of lipstick and some heels, and then everything would be just fine and dandy and society would accept them. That’s not exactly true, but it is more true than I wish it was. How can we say that sexual identity is not also about gender? When people ask why lesbians “dress like men,” that’s about gender. When people ask a feminine lesbian “why can’t more lesbians dress like you?,” that’s about gender. When gay men are called “fairies,” it’s gender, when men are mocked for wearing the color pink, it’s gender, when a woman gets called a “dyke” for having a short haircut, it’s gender.
Aravosis claims to not be bigoted against transfolk. And maybe he’s not. But that would have to make him a bit of an idiot to carry on with his claims.
Civil rights legislation — hell, all legislation — is a series of compromises. You rarely get everything you want, nor do you get it all at once. Blacks, for example, won the right to vote in 1870. Women didn’t get that same right until 1920. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided a large umbrella of rights based on race, religion, sex and national origin, but failed to mention gays or people with disabilities. People with disabilities were finally given specific rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, but gays as a class have still to be granted a single civil right at the federal level. If we waited until society was ready to accept each and every member of the civil rights community before passing any civil rights legislation, we’d have no civil rights laws at all. Someone is always left behind, at least temporarily. It stinks, but it’s the way it’s always worked, and it’s the way you win. . . .
Conservatives understand that cultural change is a long, gradual process of small but cumulatively deadly victories. Liberals want it all now. And that’s why, in the culture wars, conservatives often win and we often lose. While conservatives spend years, if not decades, trying to convince Americans that certain judges are “activists,” that gays “recruit” children, and that Democrats never saw an abortion they didn’t like, we often come up with last-minute ideas and expect everyone to vote for them simply because we’re right. Conservatives are happy with piecemeal victory, liberals with noble failure. We rarely make the necessary investment in convincing people that we’re right because we consider it offensive to have to explain an obvious truth.
Aravosis, you’re right. [MALE] Blacks did get the right to vote in 1870. And women didn’t get the right to vote until 50 years later. And do you know why that is? It’s because black men sold out women, who were originally included in the fifteen amendment. It wouldn’t have passed, otherwise. But would women have been able to vote in 1880 if they had waited? Or 1890? Well, we’ll never know. And we wonder why white feminists weren’t very concerned about Black rights for so long. That in no way makes the way that feminists have historically ignored the Black community right. It’s not. And racism has played an absolutely huge role that I would never want to diminish. But that doesn’t make it the only player.
My point is that I’m tired of selling each other out. I’m tired of being sold out. I’m tired of (white) women working for (white) women and Blacks working for Blacks and then Hispanics being left on their own to work for Hispanics and for gays to have to work for gays. We’re on different decks of the same fucking boat. Some decks might be nicer than some others, and some may just be shitty in different ways but we’re still all at risk of drowning and I’m sick of squabbling over who gets the life-preservers.
Shitty metaphor, but hopefully you get my point. Does that make me a liberal who is happy with noble failure? I don’t think so, because I’m not happy with noble failure. I’m looking for a noble win. I’m looking for a chance to finally recognize in 2007 that we need allies, that we get farther together than alone and that we have the opportunity to do better, to treat each other better, than we have in the past. How can we expect to keep our allies when we’re willing to throw them over the side of the boat at a moment’s notice? I want to know that we’re better than those we’re fighting against. If anyone thinks that trans individuals are going to get their own ENDA passed without the support of the rest of the LGBTQ community within the next 50 years, they’re kidding themselves. Or they just don’t care.
But I, with my bleeding liberal heart, do.
For more excellent analysis, check out Jill and piny.
Popularity: 10% [?]
Comments
13 Comments so far
-
"Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less." -- Susan B. Anthony
Thanks Cara for the kick-ass commentary. Right on. Love it.
Seconding the thanks. That the T belongs in LGBT+ seems pretty obvious to me, but sometimes I wonder if I’m not just living in a (midwestern college-town) bubble.
I love how he switched from “transexual” to “transgendered” in the part when he attempts to declare himself sensitive. What a douche.
Yeah, rereading that quote, I also just realized that he made the fatal ignorant flaw of assuming that all transgender individuals want to have bottom surgery.
They don’t.
My favourite part is - “what I as a gay man have in common with a man who wants to cut off his penis, surgically construct a vagina, and become a woman. I’m not passing judgment…”
Uh huh. No judgement there at all.
Fantastic intelligent post, thanks Cara =)
Frankly, I think y’all are a) taking Aravosis out of context, and b) passing too harsh of judgment upon him.
The first sentence of the paragraph whose quote, in this blog, begins “Civil rights legislation — hell, all legislation…” actually begins in Aravosis’ article as “The main argument, which I support: practical politics.” And he’s right. Yes, I agree fully that it sucks that women did not get the vote (federally) for fifty years after black men. And I fully understand the consternation of everyone on account of that. However, and I am saying this as a white gay female — I think it is better for a minority to be partially represented than Not Represented At All. Furthermore, if you get into the history of the suffrage movements, for one thing it was a huge step for black men to even be recognised as men (and for black women to be recognised as women), and for another, there was precedent for -men- to vote. Women voting, no matter what their race, was a whole other kettle of fish for the country to deal with.
Does this make it right? Hell no. Never, at all. But it -is- the political evolutionary process. Things take time because people are stubborn. For me (or anyone) to argue passage of ENDA with the T or not at all, we would have to cease taking advantage of civil unions, domestic partnerships, and the domestic benefits offered by some employers. Why? Because our ultimate goal is marriage, and anything less is an insult, right?
I disagree — while I would prefer (of course) federally recognised marriage, right now I would be happy knowing that any kids/cats/wealth I produce with my future wife would go to her if something hideous happens to me, and vice versa. If the government has to call that a civil union in order for that to happen, then so be it.
I fully understand that my example is different from the “T or not to T” issue — but my point is that -any- step towards protection for the nontraditional/heterosexual community is a step in the right direction, and I believe that would be the point which Aravosis is arguing.
As for Aravosis being judgmental, the full sentence reads “I’m not passing judgment, I respect transgendered people and sympathize with their cause, but I simply don’t get how I am just as closely related to a transsexual (who is often not gay) as I am to a lesbian (who is). Is it wrong for me to simply ask why?”
So the man is saying that he does not identify with the transsexual/transgender experience, but that he DOES identify with the gay experience. It looks to me like he’s being honest. He is not being judgmental; he is saying that he does not feel related to a man who identifies as a woman. What’s wrong with that? I cannot begin to identify with the experience of any given black person, and you know what? I cannot identify with the transsexual or transgender experience either.
Does this mean that I, and therefore Aravosis, find that the T does not deserve protection? By his own words, no, and neither do I.
The passage of ENDA (sans the T) at least puts the gay community into a better position to provide support and protection for the T community, and that alone is reason enough for its passage. Is it ideal? Not at all, and as soon as it passes we have to immediately begin work for an amendment to include the T, but progression and reform in this country has NEVER happened at once, it has NEVER been anywhere near good enough on the first go (just look up how Jim Crow affected the black man’s vote), and it has NEVER affected all parts of any community equally.
We have to keep working for that, and in the interim, turning on people who dare be honest about their opinions (which may or may not coincide fully with our own) will be only a slide backward.
Okay. Well, you are entitled to your opinion, though I certainly do disagree with it. But you keep pointing out “full sentences” and saying that I took something out of context, which is absolutely false. I didn’t cut off any sentence. The only time that I would cut off part of a sentence in quoted text would be if a transitional phrase at the beginning of the quote did not work outside of the context of the full piece. And if that rare occassion were to arise, I would make that clear by putting the first capital letter in brackets, indicating that the sentence did not originally begin that way. Sometimes sections of an article need to be truncated in a post for the sake of brevity, which is why the whole article is linked to. The example you use is actually a misquote. The sentence does not read “The main argument, which I support: practical politics.” It reads “Their main argument, which I support: practical politics.” Which naturally leads to the questions who? And then I would have had to quote more text in order for that sentence to make any sense, even though the previous text was not relevent to the immediate point that I was making.
And I would just like to close by saying that one should not need identify with a person to recognize and fight for their rights. I cannot relate to the experiences of black women. But I still support and fight for their causes as a feminist, and if legislation was being passed that would somehow benefit predominently white women while primarily disadvantaging women of color (a taxation or health care bill, for example), I would in no way support it. Because I don’t want my life to be better at the expense of anyone else’s life being worse. If you support the transphobic ENDA, that’s your right. But do not lie to yourself that you are not abandoning the transgender community and making their fight for equal rights much, much more difficult.
From John A:
…a man who wants to cut off his penis, surgically construct a vagina, and become a woman. I’m not passing judgment…
From your post:
Aravosis claims to not be bigoted against transfolk. And maybe he’s not.
I know that you probably mean “and maybe he’s not” almost as an expression of disbelief that he could be any other than bigoted. But his statement is one of a particularly disgusting level of transphobia, one that ignores our self-identity and that is used to justify violence against us. There’s little difference between his statement and those made by Janice Raymond, Mary Daly, Alix Dobkin, Michael’s Bailey and Savage, and many others.
John A, you may think that I’m some kind of sicko “man” who wants to cut off “his” penis, but you have obviously never actually listened to a trans woman. I was born a woman, just in a body that was assigned male by others, against my will. Get that through your head.
You know, I can deal with cissexual woman who are in favor of the WBW policy at Michfest, especially if they are arguing from the point of having been raised as a girl. While I don’t fully agree with that, I can understand that point of view, and have a reasoned discussion about it (what about trans girls who transition when they are 3 years old?, etc).
But there’s no way to reason with the rank hatred being spewed by Aravosis. He, and people like him, simply need to be stopped.
And yes, unfair as it may be, I am so angry about this and the whole ENDA mess, that my support for same-sex marriage is eroding. Not that I think that same-sex marriage shouldn’t be legal - it should - it’s just that put against the kind of hatred that I’m facing from so many SSM advocates, I don’t feel like putting much energy into it.
Rachel, the term “bigotry” to me means more than just prejudice– it means open hostility and hate. I do think that Aravosis probably is bigoted towards trans individuals. I don’t know, though, that his statements here necessarily confrim bigotry. They definitely reak of prejudice, privilege and a gross misunderstanding of what it is to be transgender. If he knows better than to refer to a transwoman as a “man who wants to cut off his penis,” that is definitely, without a doubt, bigotry. If he doesn’t know any better, it does not excuse him saying it but it is not necessarily an expression of open hostility.
I say this not to contradict or dismiss your comments in any way. As a cissexual woman, I obviously have no idea what it is to be a transwoman and have never faced these obstacles. I’m simply trying to explain to you what my thought process was at the time of writing those words, even though they were largely sarcastic, because I respect both you as one of my regular readers and the trans community as a whole.
I do apologize if I’ve been insensitive or offensive and I appreciate you taking the time to comment about your experiences.
Oh, and for the record, I personally do not support the WBW policy. As you said, you were born a woman. Though I think that transwomen definitely have a different experience of “womanhood” than cissexual women do, I don’t personally find that to be an excuse. I share different experiences from black women, poor women, lesbians, etc., but we’re all women and the policy is bullshit.
Cara, I’m sorry if I came off as critical of your post. I was just a little confused about that one sentence that I highlighted, and I don’t think that you need to apologize.
My vitriol was directed mainly at Aravosis himself, something which I did not make clear in my earlier comment.
RE Michfest, I’m on the fence, and I can understand both views. But maybe that’s because I transitioned late in life and feel that I’ve had more “male” socialization than I like to think, regardless of how much I resisted that socialization. Eh, maybe it’s just internalized transphobia.
But anyway, no worries. You did not offend me.
Glad to hear it :)
I’m really bothered by the assumption in his article that trans people are latecomers to the gay rights movement. Beth Elliot was forced out of the Daughters of Bilitis in 1971, and Sylvia Rivera was among those who started the Stonewall Riots. We didn’t just show up in the 90s and demand a place - we had a place.
Trans people have been working for GLBT rights right alongside GLB people for a long time. We’re also the ones who get shoved aside, vilified, and sacrificed when we become too inconvenient (which is a slippery definition itself).
John Aravosis just doesn’t know his gay rights history.