Not that this is a unique problem to People, but this article is a perfect example of a pernicious issue in the way trans* people are discussed in the media or even by the people around us.
What’s so bad? You might be asking that. I mean look, they used the right pronouns, the right names, etc. Whatever could they have done wrong, cake and pats on the back all ’round, yes?
Well … no.
Oh, bugger, they’ve edited it already! Well, in that instance congratulations! But as it’s important we’ll continue as if they hadn’t for rhetorical sake.
The original text had been: “[…]Stephen was born a girl[…]”
Now, some people might not realise what’s wrong with that. Well, that’s where we get to the importance of connotation, of perception, of what language does on a more psychological level.
In short, let’s discuss why we must choose our words wisely. I’m in favour of accuracy in language. Not the “concrete” imagery of some literature and “creative writing” courses that say you should never say ‘azure’ just say ‘blue’, no … that’s muddying the language. I’m not talking about some aspects of the political correctness movement that wants to reword the language in idiotic ways that sound good to social justice ronins, but pisses off the groups that are being crusaded for who might prefer the “un-PC” term/phrase. I’m talking about logical language analysis here.
Let’s look at that statement. “Stephen was born a girl” or “Jaye was born a boy”. First and foremost, it’s simply wrong and inaccurate. He was not born a girl, if he were he would be a girl. I was not born a boy, if I were I would be a boy. He was assigned female at birth, and I was assigned male at birth. Semantics? No, very much not so.
The former states the inaccuracy as if it were a given fact. It implies that we used to be X and have elected to become Y. We have not. It implies terrible things about trans* people that are a lot of the ignorance that lurks behind the bigotry and rejection we face.
The latter, on the other hand, that accepts and acknowledges us. Not our “preferred” gender, not our “preferred” pronouns, not our “identified as” or anything of the sort. It says that the doctors and parents made an assumption, regardless how statistically likely to be correct, based on the anatomy they found between our legs and that that assumption was mistaken. No one is to blame, really, besides an arbitrary methodology, or an antiquated ID system that bothers with such idiot details before the child is old enough to answer if asked which they are, etc. Not any person‘s mistake, and not anything wrong with the trans* individual, just a reason why such assumptions are no better than any other assumption.
Some people have never heard of transgender, transsexual, trans[whatever]. If the first time they do they see it as “Mary was born a boy, but when she was 16 …” or, worse, “Mary was born a boy, but when he was 16 …” they store the word as a choice. They see it as “Mary was born to Catholic parents, but when she was 16 she converted to Buddhism …”. But, if the first time they hear/read about a trans* person it is seen as exactly what it is they come away with Understanding.
Please don’t take this away just related to talking about trans* issues, not just for even LGBTQ+ issues. Please take away from it that while, yes, I do think the political correctness movement and social justice movements, feminism, LGBTQIA+etc activism, and so on do go too far sometimes and more importantly that some people go too far … occasional extremists and periodic extremism does not change that we really ought to consider our language and our word choice. “Sticks and stones …” et al is well and good, but sometimes the harm isn’t to the person as an individual; the harm in your words can be harm on a larger scale that impacts the person by dint of being part of the demographic you just hurt in broad terms.
So … let’s be careful what we say so as to say what we mean. Lazy language, at best, makes us look foolish, at worst you may hurt a lot of people in ways you may have never imagined.
I’ve been thinking about Leelah Alcorn’s death and her suicide note a lot lately. There’re numerous reasons that hers would affect me in ways more personal than most … but they all come around to, that note resonated a little, uncomfortably, close to things I’ve thought or felt at various points. I, thank all the watching gods, have a wonderful family who is supportive and understanding of who I am and that led me to have … well, it’s why I’m able to be 33 and happy instead of the alternatives.
They’ve made me think long and hard about the way I tend to see the world and the people in it. I don’t know that Leelah was a bookworm. I don’t know, if she was, if she liked the sort of stories I write. It doesn’t matter, she’s gone from the world, but there’re others still here facing a struggle similar to her own – even the happy (or maybe I should say “happier“) ones.
I think, in our society, there’s an odd balance between the status known as celebrity (no matter how minor) and privacy. I think, too, that while we spend a lot of time trying to erode the privacy of some kinds of celebrity, we’re willing to provide virtual anonymity to others. To most people, for example, a writer – be it a columnist, a journalist, a novelist, a poet, a playwright, screenwriter, et al we tend to let those who wield quill and parchment all the reclusiveness she might crave and be content for her to be naught but a byline and maybe a short, uninformative bio at the back cover or last page of a book and one that neither the text nor photo of ever changes in the course of a 30 year career.
But in today’s world, with social media and everything else, we find ourselves able to interact on a quasi-personal level with those authors we love. Twitter, Facebook, Ello, and … okay, I’m not really big on the whole social media business so I’ve exhausted me list of interact-able venues. Well, Goodreads, somewhat and, of course, our blogs.
English writer Neil Gaiman. Taken at the 2007 Scream Awards. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
More and more authors are gaining a level of celebrity. We do start to learn about them as people. They suddenly do have a face. We know things about the lovely Ms Rowling, the quirky Mr King, and the hilarious Sir Pratchett that, maybe even 20 years ago we never would have.
There’ve ever been the ones who were very open, forward, and willing to share and interact with the world. I present as Exhibit A, the sweetest and most generous human I’ve ever had the pleasure to speak with: Mr Ed Greenwood. There’re so many wonderful stories from the early days of TSR of him at gaming cons being just the most personable “star” anyone’d ever met; like a bearded and jolly George Takei or James Doohan (the latter, I suppose was fairly jolly himself, now I think on it).
I’ve guarded my own privacy … well, there’re many ways one can use the phrase “guarded jealously”, and I feel rather like I might be justified in claiming more than one of them. In my own defense, I do not think in terms of caring who an author is as a person. I make an assumption that the photo of Dennis L McKiernan, in the back of my copy of Dragondoom, is actually him so I know he’s a) a him (or it’s a reasonable assumption) b) he’s bipedal c) humanoid d) apparently monochrome! e) incredibly young! (I’ve an OLD copy of the book). All I much know about him is he’s good, and I love his work. Then I realised, I do know more. Because of the internet I know that Mithgar grew out of his own pen & paper RPG sessions.
We can’t, I think, avoid learning bits and things about the people whose books we enjoy. Human curiosity and the internet work together to ensure we can learn more and we often go looking for it.
I’ve guarded my privacy because I didn’t want people to say they love or hate my work because of me, I wanted them to do so because of it. I wanted Lauren and Sally, Allison and Jake, all the rest, to be the role-models and to be judged by my skills and talent as a writer. I’ve said before, and I know it’s a real thing that people who know a book is by a woman, or a homosexual, or a 17′ tall rabid badger from Mississippi will buy it or reject it just because of that. It grates against my sensibilities. A person can have a wonderful library of diverse characters and tremendously wonderful role-models of setting and characters and every single last one of those works can be by rich, straight, white, ennobled, cisgender men. All it takes is for those authors to be empathetic, sensitive, thoughtful, imaginative, intuitive, creative, and talented story tellers. Exhibit B: John Scalzi. I can’t, to be honest, speak related directly to his novels, I’ve never read them (my wife has, but only one so she’s no help), but if his blog is any gauge …
Maya Angelou with Bloomberg and Nadler (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
That said … to hell with it. My own examples: Ed Greenwood, John Scalzi. I’ll add the likes of Neil Gaiman, Seanan McGuire, and Patrick Rothfuss … yeah, lot of those are SF/F authors, I told you that’s most of what I read. They all interact with the public. And I’m no recluse living in a cave with no social media accounts or ones only known about and accessed by some intern working for peanut butter and saltines.
I don’t follow their blogs. I don’t read them every day. But I do read an enjoy their blogs when the whim strikes me. I do get to know them as people. I’ve interacted with Ed Greenwood, mostly via Candlekeep.com, but I have. With the Takei’s … these days celebrity aren’t lofty, remote deities to be admired from afar.
I forget, too, I grew up in the 80s, and early 90s. I own (no, not past tense, I still have it) an 80286 with a 2400 baud modem. I’ve got floppy discs with Prodigy on it from before there was an internet for it to access. I’ve used BBSes, FIDONET, and IRC. I remember with ICQ was brand new, and Search.com was what Google is now. Maybe I see the world, sometimes, through the lenses of an 80s kid instead of a 21st century one. I’d have had virtually no way to know the sexuality or birth-assigned gender of a favourite author. I’d only know their race if the book had a photo, and I’d have their name (and said not-guaranteed-to-be-present photo) to guess their gender … but today that’s just not true. When books really make an impression on people it often includes the author becoming someone they might look up to. I’m no Maya Angelou, but … then again, early in her career … was she?
I plan to begin trying to write a for really real author bio for the places I’ve got my current silly one. I may miss one, please feel free to point this out to me, I’ll be very grateful. I may begin to include one, though probably a bit different, in my books. Certainly I’m going to be more open about myself from now on.
George Takei on the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Pride 2006 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
If my books had only 1/10 the sales figures I do, I might assume that too few people know I exist to actually care, but I have hit best seller charts. I have sold as many or more copies of Love or Lust than most first printings of a new author’s first book. I finally had to admit to myself, like it or not, a blog with some 500ish followers, a decent daily hit rate, etc. means I’m achieving some degree of notice and that translates to celebrity even if it is very minor. More bluntly, people know who I am, know what I wrote, and might be curious about me. Some of those people might be Leelahs, and I want them to know that it can (I won’t say does, that depends on factors both in and out of the individual’s control, but it undeniably can) get better. On the outside chance that there’s someone struggling with sexuality or gender identity or whatever who needs someone to look to for an example of that “can get better” business … I present myself.
Hello, world.
I am Ms Jaye Em Edgelciff. I am a transsexual lesbian living in the Georgia in the United States and from the Ozarks part of Arkansas. I am happily married to a woman who I met in college, I have two ridiculously odd, but wonderful little kittens and a hyperactive (as in for the breed) black-mouth cur. I, sadly, do not have any children … yet. I’m 33, and my birthday is 8 July 1981. I’m an Army brat who never got to see too many places but I did get to live in San Antonio and Honolulu. I’m a geek, and always have been. Hard as it is, looking at the world today, but even if I’d known what I was as a little girl I could not have transitioned … it just wasn’t done back then. I didn’t know what I was, or why I felt the ways I did. I was awkward, I was shy, I was … I won’t say unhappy, as I had wonderful friends and a good family, but I was terribly depressed and had more than a few suicidal thoughts growing up. As a teenager I finally started to get words around how I felt … I clearly had spent many of my past lives as a woman and had made the exceedingly foolish choice to come back around as a man (or had done something awful and was being punished with a penis, in some of my more self-hating moments). Eventually I learned what transgender and transsexuality actually were (as opposed to the rather limited and skewed understanding I had under the term “sex change operation” where one envisions a guy going to get it cut off because he wants to be made into a woman … language matters, and connotation of sentence choice makes all the difference in the world).
With the help of hormones, and all the other fun things that go along with transitioning I am now a much happier, much more confident, much more me person than I was when I was young.
I don’t really write my books for myself. Joe doesn’t exist to represent me or what I am. Joe exists because, in the ficton of Now & Forever, Joe exists and is a transsexual man. Lauren and Sally don’t represent myself and my wife … the most we have in common is I’ve red hair and hazel eyes, but Lauren has those features because Lauren has those features … my own eye and hair colour are rather different shades from hers and while I’m fond of them, clearly I’m not so vain as to force them onto someone else. My stories are just for you to enjoy. If they have any social purpose, any moral reason then it’s is only to remind people that we are all of us people. To quote Stranger in a Strange Land, “thou art god, thou art goddess”. I write what I write and the characters I do because they had the story I loved enough I wanted to take the time to write it down and share it with you, and if that story happens to illustrate a point you can take away and maybe see the world differently then that’s a bonus. I read for pleasure and entertainment, I’m not about to write something with a purpose other than that; but I will admit there is a moral message that evolved as I wrote, but it was a pretty easy one … but it comes back to the Golden Rule which Bronson Alcott proved ages ago is so simple and obvious that 5 year old children are able to reverse engineer it with a little help from the Socratic method.
I do not feel that I am really all that interesting a person. There’s not a lot about myself to talk about. I enjoy cooking, though not much lately due to having an exceedingly tiny kitchen that makes cooking more a chore than a pleasure. I enjoy foods, especially sushi and pasta. I play video games, and board games, I love nature and hate cities. I’m quiet. I don’t get out a lot, but I also live somewhere that there’s nowhere to go if I wanted to get out. I’m average height, if a bit petite in build. I’m black, Cherokee, Irish, Dutch and German that I know of. I’m a distant cousin of George Straight and that’s about as exciting as my universe gets.
I’ve said before, it’s not because of what I am as far as sexuality and gender that are why I’m inclined to care about rights and equality. That’s just who I am. When I thought I was a straight white male I still felt this way. People don’t have to be LGBTQ or black or whatever to empathise and care and understand that equality matters. It also doesn’t require someone to be non-white, not-straight, and/or non-cis* to be discriminated against. White people experience racism in Hawaii, the natives are a little angry about the whole annexing the place at gun point (I’m simplifying the history, but really … Hawaii didn’t want to be a state, dirty pool was used to make it #50), in some forums of the internet there’re LGBTQ who can get just as mean or meaner to straight and cis who venture in there as they might assume that the hetero-cis would be … and maybe turn away a potential ally. Men can be feminist, and we do have unrealistic and harmful stereotypes about men just as we do for women; in short, they face their own brand of sexism and objectification … I think fewer of them seem to care, but it doesn’t change the fact it’s true. In short, you can be the king of flippin’ England and still care about ending sexism, ending anti-lgbt* nonsense, ending racism, etc. just because you take the few seconds to care and to remember:
What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.
And … I know my audience is mostly teens and parents of them.
Parents, please remember that the most important thing any parent can do is to love and support who their child is. Please do not be Mrs Alcorn saying “we loved our son” when speaking of your trans* daughter who has died because of too many of that very statement; and please extrapolate down for the less extreme (and not-trans*) analogues to that statement.
Kids … maybe you’re somewhere, right now, where you’re misunderstood and alone. Maybe you’ve parents who … maybe they’re confused but do love you, or maybe you’re right and they don’t … but if that’s the case they’re no parents; do what you must to be safe, but within that context be you. Do your best to get by, channel your sorrow and pain into determination to have the best schools all banging down your door for you to attend, or if you’re crafty/creative/musical/whatever … use your pain to fuel your exodus into somewhere accepting, tolerant, somewhere that you are at peace and happy. For the trans* kids, yes it is easiest to transition as a child, easier as a teen, but possible as an adult and hey … depending what aspect of it you’re talking about, it’s possibly been within your lifetime that transition was even possible for someone who wasn’t an adult. It can be okay, but you have to hang on long enough to let it do so, and you can’t just cross your fingers and wish for it to get better. The wishes that come true best are the ones you make true. Not every dream can come true. I won’t paint a fairy tale where every mom & dad eventually sees how foolish they were and accepts you for who you are, it happens so don’t give up hope, but if your dream is that … steel yourself that it might not happen, but the fun of the word ‘might not happen’ is it contains the caveat of ‘could happen’. Family has a number of meanings. My wife has little to do with her blood family for a laundry list of reasons, not all of it, but a fair chunk. Her family is, mostly now, mine. You can control your destiny, somewhat, if you give yourself the chance to do it.
And … depression is real. It’s serious. Life can be roses, unicorns, sunshine, and bunnies cuddling and you still hate the world and want to die. I know this, first hand I know this. If you can work through it yourself, fine. But I know that nothing I say will make that pain and those thoughts go away, that’ll take the right help and what that is varies from person to person. Need someone to talk to? Suicide hotlines exist in droves, contact me if you like, friend, pastor, cousin, dog, cat, tree, or rock. Maybe you need someone to care about … of all things, one of the biggest reasons I’m still alive is that I’ve always had cats and I’ve always loved them too much to leave them. Maybe you straight up need meds; fun part is, a competent doctor might recognise (for the trans* I mean, obviously this won’t help for anyone else) your issue and help you get your parents to help you transition … you really are a boy/girl trapped in a girl/boy body and your brain craves the correct hormones and your body isn’t making enough. Everyone else AND some of the trans* folks … sometimes you need anti-depressants, St John’s Wort, Prozac, or whatever. Do what you must and can to make that better, it’ll make the rest of life a lot easier.
There. Now you know me, sort of. If this helps one person, it’s worth it for the loss of privacy and for the loss of that barrier between people judging my work through the lends of who and what I am instead of by simply looking at the page. Because life is far more precious than any of that nonsense.
I’m going to sticky this until I can get ’round to working out what to say in my bio. So please don’t forget to scroll down to see if there’re any new posts made after this.
Rather beautifully put, I thought. Though I do tend to find that referring to things as hetero-privilege, or cis-privilege, white-privilege is often a bit short sighted. I’m not sure it’s a privilege to not always think things through properly or to simply be unaware of an issue or to not be able to quite wrap your head around it.
An example — my own editor is, psychologically, quite androgynous despite identifying as female and as such can at times be rather confused about things that matter to cis-men or cis-women alike around her and some aspects of transgenderism don’t quite … click … for her without a little hand-holding and analogy to help her fathom whatever concept is in question. She’s not suffering from this disease of cis-privilege, there’s room to even debate if she is or is not cis for one thing, she just doesn’t understand because it’s not her issue. She’s bisexual and her issues are not those of the homosexual nor the heterosexual people around her and just as those trans and cis friends of hers must explain things to her, she in turn must explain her androgyny or bisexuality to them. Do they, then, suffer trans-privilege or homo-privilege in addition to the others purportedly possessed of cis and hetero privileges?
This isn’t to say that there isn’t some privilege extended to men, to cisgendered of either side of the binary, to heterosexuals. This is rarely anything that can be helped by the individual, only by society and its expectations. This is the man being, perhaps, more likely to get a job. The white person who isn’t watched by security as closely in the department store. The person dressed in a fashion that suggests wealth being treated with greater deference than the one who, by their clothes, may well be poor. The cisgender who is taken more seriously at work and who is never asked to go to a special restroom at their job or asked for ID by some zealous clerk when taking a pee in some public facility. Cis and straight, regardless of race, are not denied their basic civil rights by any country in the western world that I can think of. That is privilege.
Still, regardless my pet-peeve on the overuse of ‘privilege’ in our language these days, this post makes a fantastic point: If you cannot accept a trans-woman as a lesbian or a trans-man as gay then you are being a) quite sexist and/or b) you are saying that this person whose sex and gender simply do not match is not who and what they say they are. Are we so insecure in our own gender-identities, are we so ashamed or proud of our sex and our sexuality, that we should deny others their right to be who and what God made them?
Friday, May 11, 2012
Cis Lesbian Dismissal of Trans Lesbians, and Why it’s Wrong
Ying posed the following scenario/question: “Recently, I heard a lesbian woman comment about a trans woman (who happens to be a lesbian). She said the transwoman was not “really” a lesbian like she was. It was upsetting to me. No one can define another person’s identity, right? It seemed so petty, too. What skin is it off her nose anyway? What are your thoughts on people not accepting a trans person’s sexual orientation as being valid?”
Something to consider is going into this is that even though many of the LGB portion of our acronym are supportive and allies, that makes them no less cisgender. Just like any non-LGB person, they’re acting from a position of cis privilege, and don’t understand the implications of their actions, because, frankly, they don’t have to think about it much. We pop up once in a while, in a single circumstance here or there, and that’s generally the extent of it. And while they’re our allies for political purposes, I’ve come to find in my experience that LGB people are often woefully ignorant of the issues of the transgender community they support. Which is no surprise, really: We’re a vastly smaller group, a minority within our lgbt minority, so appropriately less time is spent on issues relating to us. (Just a shout-out to the LGBTU student group at The University of Akron, as they break this trend and give trans issues a much larger chunk of the spotlight than we deserve by population, because they’ve recognized the importance of these topics. Well done on them)
So what does this mean for the lesbian in question? Well, she’s invalidating our trans lesbian’s identity, plain and simple. By saying she’s not ‘really’ a lesbian, she’s implying an awful lot, and none of it is good. First and foremost, let’s go ahead and define “Lesbian”: a lesbian is a woman* who is attracted exclusively to other women*. Pretty simple definition, right? Well the two key elements are “Woman” and “Attracted exclusively to other women”. By saying she’s ‘not really a lesbian’ she has to be excluding our trans lesbian from one of the two criteria: and since, presumably, the trans lesbian has been with, or is currently with another woman, and has shown no interest in men, we can assume that ‘Attracted to other women’ is true. This means the only remaining conflict is in fact, our trans lesbian’s womanhood. There’s no other way around it. (Continues here)
Not that this is a unique problem to People, but this article is a perfect example of a pernicious issue in the way trans* people are discussed in the media or even by the people around us.
Jaye Em Edgecliff 