By folks across the gender spectrum
Not for the first time, I ask what the hell is “transfeminism”? Fake feminism? Pretend feminism? Not-real feminism?
Sinister Wisdom, that styles itself a Multicultural Lesbian Literary & Art Journal, interrupts itself to talk about “trans feminisms” instead of actual feminism. So much for the Lesbian part.
Trans/Feminisms
Sinister Wisdom is seeking submissions of writing and artwork by folks across the gender spectrum for our issue Trans/Feminisms. Sinister Wisdom invites all trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, genderfluid, two-spirit, gender non conforming, intersex writers and artists to submit. To put it simply–if you trouble, research, or think about gender, we want your work.
So…does that include lesbians? Or no? Does it include lesbians who are gender nonconforming but not the other kind? Butch ok but femme stay away?
More to the point, why is a lesbian journal doing this? Is it because they think lesbians are now the domineering capitalist lords of the manor, oppressing and exploiting the poor starved trans people whose ribs are poking through their skin?
Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary & art journal that publishes four issues each year. Publishing since 1976, Sinister Wisdom works to create a multicultural, multi-class lesbian and queer space.
Perhaps that’s our answer. Lesbian and queer. Lesbian isn’t good enough any more, is that it? Lesbian equals Karen, is that it? You have to bring in some “queer” people to ward off the Karenization, is that it?
What perspectives do trans lives bring to the field of feminist thought and practice? What does it mean to hold a conversation about being trans? What does it mean to be a part of that conversation? How do the crossroads of difference affect the conversation? Trans/Feminisms is dedicated to exploring and celebrating transness. We seek work that appeals to and from transness in a range of mediums: interdisciplinary, genre-bending poetry, fiction, transcribed interviews, manifestos, essays, historical and theoretical deep dives, comic strips, visual art, photography, and beyond. Interviews, oral histories, intergenerational conversations, and collaborations are especially encouraged.
I long to read the historical and theoretical deep dives. I’m sure they’ll be more brilliant than we can possibly imagine.
Won’t be much of a conversation, willit, given they’ve decided in advance that it will be
No doubt it will be brave and stunning.
This invitation to submit is really rather helpful, in an a completely unexpected and unintentional way. Putting the whole list of gender variations (or least a good chunk of them) in one spot lets you see just what a mad, disparate, incoherent, contradictory mess it all is. The only way that some of these subunits can exist in the same room together is by keeping their definitions vague and non-commital to the point of meaninglessness, as normally several of the groups would be mutually exclusive, or distinct without actually being different. (Some of them may accidently include actual lesbians, like the occasional, unintended peanut that can show up in candy bars made in factories that are not nut-fee.)
Trans We know that transgenderism is supposed to encompass, amongst other demographics, autistic girls trying to escape womanhood, and AGP males attempting to break into it. To be somewhat more generous, it is an attempt or desire to “live as” the biological sex one is not, in order to match an internal “gendered” concept of the self, which would otherwise be in conflict with the physical body. Yet if gender is distinct from sex, why try to modify the body in an attempt to match the gender it allegedly houses? Why not leave each alone? How can there be a conflict if they’re different, unrelated, and independent? How does dysphoria arise? Why assume the “gender” is right and the body is wrong? Why force a “match” between them?
Nonbinary A supposed gender identity which apparently rejects either sex as a “target” identity. How does this fit with “transness,” which posits a mismatch between the gendered “identity” and the physical body? What is the “mismatch” here? This seems more like a refusal to engage in the stereotypical gendered sex-roles expected of each sex. Why would this require body modification at all? There are no “sexless” people to act as a “target” sex. Here we seem to have a conflation between sex and sex roles.
Genderqueer Let’s join two terms, one ill-defined, the other shorn of almost all meaning entirely, and pretend it’s something edgy and special. It would seem that a vital ingredient is hair dye. Be as cishetero as you like, but do it with purple or green hair and BAM you’re genderqueer. No, I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean; I think that’s the point.
Genderfluid Puts the lie to the whole “gender is innate and fixed” claim. Looks to me more like a lack of commitment than an actual “identity.” Think Philip/Pippa Bunce (when he wants to win a women’s race yet still be paid at the men’s rate, or Eddie Izzard when he used to move between boy and girl “modes.” Please. Make up your fucking minds.
Two-Spirit (Mis)appropriation of a First Nations cultural concept so that transactivists can use “White Western Colonialism” as an epithet while they themselves are White, Western Colonialists. Queerness (see “dyed hair” above) means their “whiteness” is now accidental, incidental Whiteness, but not political Whiteness. “Two-Spiritedness” is taken out of context, subsumed under and absobed into current Western concepts and understandings of “transness” and then, anachronistically, projected backwards in time, and continent-wide in space. It is simply assumed to be, monolithically, a part of all First Nations cultures, like tipis, totem poles, and feathered war-bonnets. Can’t get much more White, Western, Colonial than that, can you.
Gender Non Conforming Let’s trans everyone who chafed at the restrictions placed on them by sexist, gendered sex-roles, even though transness itself relies heavily on those very sex-roles to determine the supposed disconnect between the sexed body and gendered soul. Without this, a boy who likes dresses and dolls is just a boy who likes dresses and dolls, not a girl trapped in a boy’s body.
Intersex More appropriation. My understanding is that the preferred term is DSD, or Disorder (or Difference) of Sexual Devlopment. Transactivists prefer this term because it suggests that sex is a spectrum, that male and female are not as cut and dried, that there is some sort of biological no-man’s land, as it were. Even if this were true (which, of course it isn’t) such biological “space’ would not offer any support at all that humans can move between the sexes, however many “shades” there were between them. Using DSD is inimical because it says right on the tin that it’s a Difference or Disorder of Sexual Development. Nothing to do with “gender” at all. It’s a failure of the body to reach one of the two endpoints at which its normal growth and maturation would aim. Also, there are a whole bunch of DSD conditions, but each is particular to only one sex. It’s not a grab bag mixture, or a halfway house between being male or female that offers any kind of hope that one could be both, neither or switch between them. Thus the continued use of “Intersex” by transactivists is appropriative, hegemonic, and instrumentalist. It is a deliberate, bad-faith move that uses a suite of medical conditions as a means of forcing their agenda, dragging DSD people with them, without their consent.
Somehow I suspect that they wouldn’t be interested in the writing of anybody posting here at B&W, despite the fact that we certainly “think about gender” and definitely “trouble” it. I don’t think they like our kind of thinking and troubling, however we identified, or whatever body parts we sport.
Your Name’s Not Bruce: Thanks for that, I was going to post my usual rant about “Two-Spirit” being both colonialist AND appropriative, but you saved me the effort.
Oh do it anyway. The more such rants the better, in my view.
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Well, with an invite like that….
For those not yet aware, “Two-Spirit” was pretty much invented whole-cloth at an intertribal convention for indigenous Americans and their allies (the latter will be important, here). Unsurprisingly, most of the tribes have different approaches to gender. This isn’t to say they don’t know what biological sex is–they had that figured out before crossing the Bering Strait, thank you very much. Rather, they have different social roles assigned to the sexes than you find in Western Europe and societies derived from that stock–again, not surprising. In some cases, these roles were more blurred than they were in, say, 1950s suburban America, especially in certain religious ceremonies.
So one of the attendees, a white ‘ally’ decided to push a concept that put all of these different gender-assigned roles under a single umbrella term. This made it easier to codify for us white folks, since it meant you didn’t have to bother learning the difference between the roles as defined by the Hopi vs. the Cherokee, etc. The vast majority of Native Americans even today will not use the term, instead using the proper terms from their own languages to describe these myriad different cultural practices and roles.
(A very similar process occurs among progressive media when they discuss ‘Hispanic’ or Latino cultures.especially in the United States immigrant population–they like to ignore the fact that Cuban-, Central- and Mexican-Americans are all very distinct culturally, let alone that the various sub-groups of Central American-Americans are very distinct, and the Mexican-Americans themselves often differ on a lot of issues depending on the legality of their first generation’s immigration status, and of course none of them has much in common with Puerto Ricans [note–if you say “Puerto Rican American”, you need to also say “Texas American”]. But it’s easier to pretend this is all one cultural block so that the media doesn’t have to think to hard.)
And so they settled on “Two-Spirit”, which was almost immediately co-opted by the trans movement as a way of claiming the universality of Western-style ‘transness’. So it’s simultaneously Colonialist (in that it utterly disregards the actual cultures its being credited to) and Appropriationist (since it then gets used by White folks who want to be seen as ‘spiritual’). Oh, and I should stress that it is literally anti-Diversity, since it only works if you actually ignore the diversity of the cultures that are being imposed upon.