[dreadgeek]

Cheryl:

Up until you posted the other day, I honestly thought I was a minority of one. As it turns out, maybe I'm in a minority of two.

Reading the part about the transwoman who was nude in a woman's space makes me cringe and makes me sad. It also makes me sad that NO ONE can have this conversation without being accused of transphobia. The older I get the more I see that the queer community has tried to have the right ethic but implemented it crudely. The ethic that no one should be judged for what they are has been transmuted into one where no one should be judged BECAUSE of what they are. Here's the difference:

Judged by what you are = Because Aj is a transwoman she is...

Not judged because of what you are =
Someone: "Aj, you know that thing you did that just annoyed me..."
Me: "The only reason you are criticizing me is because I'm..."

Both statements are equally ridiculous. In the first, I stand in simply for some label 'transwoman'. Everything I do is filtered through the lens of 'transwoman' and whatever the speaker thinks of when they use that term.
In the second, no matter how open or friendly the speaker may be, I'll deploy my being trans as a shield.

If I should not be judged harshly because I'm transgendered, then I should not be judged loosely based on that criteria. However, it goes beyond that. That is what I would hope to receive from the spaces I move through. That's only half of the contract. The other half is my behavior.

Yes, I need to be aware of my background. I need to be *especially* aware of my background when the question comes round to issues of space and privilege. I need to be hyper-alert to it and err on the side of caution. It means that feminism and taking feminist ethics seriously is non-optional. I'm going to go so far and say that it is non-optional for transwomen. By non-optional, I mean it two senses; I think that transition is hard. At least it was 20 years ago and I doubt that it is significantly easier today. If one is going to transition successfully then I think one must go into the process with a feminist sensibility. If one doesn't then one is going to be blind to male privilege and will drag it around with one. I am not going to say that there are NO vestiges of male privilege in my life. Certain head starts I receive can't be undone.
That means I have something to keep my eye on, something I need to self-monitor throughout my life.

Now, before anyone says that it shouldn't be that way--I agree. It *shouldn't* be that way. I *shouldn't* have a Y-chromosome. Certainly, I didn't ask for it and if I could give it up and have actually gotten to give birth to my son I would do so in a heartbeat. You could even take my one good eye in the bargain! But I don't get to have everything I want in this life, in the time frame that I want it, delivered in the manner I prefer and in the color I like. I just don't and all the exclamations of 'that's not fair' don't change it.

There are always trade-offs, there are always costs. We can try to pretend that there are not but they will still be there and the longer we pretend that there are no costs, no matter what decision path we follow, the more we spin our wheels in these conversations where people go off feeling that they are being accused of bigotry--sometimes even when they are not.

It isn't in the adjectives, it is a bit in the pronouns, but ultimately it is in how we treat people as individuals and how we take responsibility for ourselves. Part of me wants to apologize, on the part of the transwomen who 'get it' but that is not my apology to make. It has not been my path. I have tried to model the idea and to 'spread the gospel of feminism', if you will forgive the phrase, so that transwomen who are just starting their journey will have an easier time of it and transwomen who have been at it for a while and keep wondering why certain kinds of things keep happening will have some reference for what they might want to consider.

We can debate whether people are less 'harmed' by the use of the termed 'colored' or the use of the term 'people of color' (which, by the way, POC strikes me as 'colored people' met coming the other way, just so you know). Or we can decide that adjective games don't help people, treating people as human beings--full human beings capable of agency--helps people.

Honestly, I'm done with identity politics. I was suspicious of it 20 years ago but thought I lacked both the intellect and education to perhaps understand it in its subtlety. Two decades and a lot of pages and discussions and panels and workshops later, I return to where I started but more confident than ever that my first impression of identity politics was right. This emphasis on identity, this idea that *as a black woman* I have certain rights is the wrong way to achieve a noble goal. If bigotry is saying that *because* I am a black lesbian that I am less deserving of certain rights, responsibilities and opportunities anti-bigotry is NOT stating that *because* I'm a black lesbian I deserve those very things. My rights are my rights as a human being *regardless* of whether I am a member of this or that group. Until we decide that you and me and that woman over there are all entitled to a certain level of civility and, perhaps, maybe even the benefit of the doubt and thus are all required to treat one another civilly we will get nowhere.

Do I have a right to be treated civilly. Yes, I would argue I do. But the price of being treated civilly is treating others civilly as well. My being a black, transgendered lesbian does not exempt me from either.


Cheers
Aj

Originally Posted by CherylNYC

Yes, some of my very ambivalent experiences with trans people have been damaging. The individuals were acting as individuals. No one should expect each member of a minority to represent that minority in all their actions. That said, all transwomen have spent at least part of their lives being socialised as male. Aj has written about this eloquently in another thread, but I don't have the patience to find it. She spoke about many small ways in which she was privileged over her sister while growing up because she was a boy. She acknowledges the obvious, which is that she benefitted from this, and probably continues to benefit a bit from that early boost, whether or not she wanted to be a boy. (Apologies for the paraphrase.)

As I wrote previously, my experiences with transwomen who have been socialised as male, who, unlike Aj and my friend A who I mentioned previously, have never questioned their history of privilege, who continue to use male-centric power dynamics they've learned over their lifetimes to gain advantages in personal and business matters, who have always lived by a 'power-over' model rather than a feminist universal empowerment model, are very VERY visible when they enter women's space. Those are the transwomen that make my friend A cringe, and that cause her to fear that she will be judged based on others' bad behaviours.

Denying the reality that some transwomen who haven't questioned their conditioning and socialised behaviours can make other women uncomfortable in what's supposed to be women's space, is painful and erasing for women like myself who rely on women's space for it's relative safety. When I'm told that I must not say the above because it's allegedly transphobic, I hear that my sense of safety is secondary to the safety of people who are acting 'like men'. Their oppression as transpeople is more important than my oppression as a woman, etc.

In real terms that means that when I'm at a women's sex/play party and a crossdressing man exposes his naked dick tied up in a bow, women who know he doesn't belong there don't feel empowered to challenge his invasive presence. That man with all the sensitivity of a tree stump felt emboldened to circumvent my playmates' efforts to shield me from a sight they KNEW I didn't want to see. More than a year later I still think about my anger and feelings of being invaded instead of the lovely scene I was having before Mr. Dick-in-a-bow stuck it in my face. He claimed to be trans. His safety was more important than mine.

...it didn't feel "safe" in a very particular, gut kind of way -- a way which is NOT only individually about me and this person, but about history and reality. That is the part that gets avoided, I think, in the intense focus and care given to inclusive spaces...

We lesbians have the most to lose when we lose women's space. Because issues of trans inclusion have proved difficult, the trend is to dismantle women's space altogether in favor of queer space. Eliminating the language means eliminating the problem, right? Not on my watch.