Linkblogging: RLE and detransitioning

Not much of a content post this time around, but some links to chew on. At Pam’s House Blend, Autumn Sandeen and LenaD discussed “Real Life Experience” and detransitioning, in this case focused on the public de-transitioning of LA Times sportswriter Christine Daniels back to her original name, Mike Penner. I find this paragraph of Autumn’s post especially interesting:

I know there are other reasons than the ones my therapist cites. Sometimes the reason is relating to faith, where one becomes an “ex-transsexual” or “ex-transgender” (the trans equivalents to “ex-gay”). Sometimes it’s because the person really isn’t a transsexual, and an unsuccessful RLE catches them before they experience transsexual regret. Since my therapist doesn’t practice conversion (or reparative) therapy, she wouldn’t see those who are detransitioning for reasons of faith. But, it is interesting that in all the years of her practice, she’s never seen a transsexual who has detransitioned due to because the detransitioner has figured out that he or she really wasn’t transsexual — all of her detransitioners have detransitioned due to external pressures.

I’m not really sure what I think on all of this and don’t feel qualified to comment; I’m more in the “listen and process” stage. However, this did strike me as interesting in light of Lisa’s post at Questioning Transphobia on “I wouldn’t wish transsexuality on my worst enemy.” If nothing else, the assertion that ‘those who detransition do so due to outside societal pressure’ matches up with her belief–a belief I agree with–that “being trans is just like being cis, except, well, for not being cis. It’s not worse or better.”

Media attention. Good until it’s not.

Most recently, the article “A Boy’s Life,” in this month’s edition of The Atlantic, has been floating about the blogs. It’s a fairly traditional trans youth story, even in its inability to keep from overemphasizing and indulging in manufactured ‘trauma.’  

There’s one thing I’ve noticed which I have yet to see people comment on as I read this story and others: How the rise in stories focusing on trans children, especially young children, are the perfect reinforcement of the ”born in the wrong body” medical narrative and traditional gender roles, the true/false dichotomy. As the general culture becomes more willing to validate and accept the feelings of trans youth, in particular young trans youth, it enforces even more strictly the need to match obvious binary gender standards.

Trans children must express certain symptoms to receive treatment, because it is presumed children are so innocent they will not express their transness except in the two traditional gender categories. A young butch trans girl? Impossible. Butchness is something regailed to adults, a ‘purposefully transgressive’ identity. Instead, girls are “tomboys,” in a phase they will grow out of. And let us not wander over to the idea of a “sissy” trans boy, the medical trans gatekeepers silently declare.

Thus, those youth who don’t fit these classic narratives and molds are silenced because they are young, innocent, given to a shifting of ideas, easy to talk down to; it is always more easy to invalidate a person’s feelings when they are not felt in the right ways.

I admit, I am one of those kids who would have been talked out of their transness. I never “felt I was a boy,” but after watching a special on intersex children wondered for years after if I had been born intersex and my parents chose the wrong gender–I felt acutely that life would have been easier for me had I been able to present as a man. Not ‘be’ male, but present as such. My personality and mental space are ungendered, essnetially me. Only the exterior would change.

And what would have happened had I expressed these feelings but been convinced of their falseness, Zucker-ed into the ‘right’ gender slot? Would I have eventually transitioned anyway? I can’t say. However, Rosin’s article and medical professionals set up a kind of “trauma threshold:” ‘You must be this much of a dysfunctional basketcase post-therapy and express said trauma in certain acceptable ways to really be trans enough to eventually need treatment.’

This entire idea places in question the ‘rightness’ of huge swaths of people: late transitioners, genderqueer individuals, butch trans women, femme trans men, just to list a few. And this is why it is very important to be cautious of stories that focus on trans children. For all the good they do in making visible the idea of accepting transness as more ‘inherent’ and less ‘manufactured,’ they’re also extremely harmful in their emphasis on the incorruptable, essential innocence of children.

An innocence constantly connected with binary gender expression.

A Case for Safe Space, or Because Sometimes You Really Just Need to Take A Piss

I like bingo cards; I did, after all, create the Trans Discussion Bingo Card. They’re great for when you’ve been up against a wall of stubborn privilege for an exhausting discussion and need a quick shot of vindication. But they’re also blunt objects at best when it comes to educating someone about their privilege or for arguments that transend the obvious and enter that murky area between privilege and legitimate concern.

And of those that does require a finer touch, arguments which fuse a bunch of different squares in a jumbled, personalized mess are the hardest to counter. The language of these arguments is not directly transphobic, but hedges its transphobia in terms of the personal, complicating attempts to get at the underlying problematic argument by making contradiction look like an attack.

I bring this up because I recently encountered this in someone who argued discussions of trans issues “excluded” them by not including their experiences as a queer person who had issues with childhood gendering.

What’s funniest about this to me is how much of a reversal it is to my daily life. For all the times in all-purpose queer organizations around here I have to fight for recognition that there are trans people in said groups who’d like to feel like they can talk about themselves and their issues without judgment, one of the more successful discussions I’ve had in awhile focused on trans issues is decried as exclusionary to those who don’t identify at the cisgendered/sexual end of the gender spectrum but are in that fuzzy middle ground of “queer.”

And it’s easier to claim exclusion with issues of gender due to gender’s socially constructed nature. Unlike issues of race, class, or other categorizations, everyone experiences gender. Everyone has probably experienced judgment by others for not fitting into society’s strict gender norms at least once. With gender, everyone can and often does have an opinion. But that doesn’t mean one should necessarily feel it is their right to share said opinion.

Trans people need space to talk about trans issues because of the way our society–and more to the point, the medical establishment–have constructed ‘acceptable transness.’ It’s not just one’s transgender/transsexual identity but the struggle that trans people have to go through to become the ‘right’ kind of trans person or have the right kind of gender presentation that necessitates a safe space. The ideal personal narrative, the process of transitioning, and finding acceptance are issues for all varieties of people, but they have unique connotations for trans individuals. Gender for trans people is not only theorized creation, but the solid reality of restrooms, dressing rooms, and doctors.

As I write this, I feel like I’m retreading ground so many others have covered before. But it’s ground that will keep needing to be re-covered as long as there are days when all I wanted to do was take a piss without destroying the very fabric of society as we know it.

Self-Defense: Buddhist Perspective

During a discussion last weekend, a very close friend told me it sounded  “selfish” and “irresponsible” to her to hear me say that if I were threatened I would not actively take steps she viewed appropriate (namely, using directed violence toward an attacker) to defend myself, especially as a trans person who is statistically more likely to be targeted with violence. And I think this is a discussion that doesn’t often come up (or at least, it hasn’t in teh spaces I’ve been in): what is appropriate self-defense for queer people. Should they prepare to use violent means to defend themselves and others?

At the time, I ended up improperly articulating my position by virtue of feeling defensive, but what she said did hit home. I have long thought about ways to defend myself and am planning to take more active protections, but carrying a weapon on me is not one of them. And this is not to say I never considered it–I for a very long time considered making it a policy to carry with me a switchblade at all times. But after thinking, really thinking about what that meant, I chose not to.

And the reasoning behind this really goes to the core of my Buddhism.

In carrying a weapon and acting harmfully to defend myself, I would not be remaining true to the principle of Right Thought, or “to be able to put into practice what is rightly understood. Realizing that the world is how it is, one must understand that the reality is already perfect.” Note that while on the surface the statement that “reality is already perfect” appears nihilistic, it is actually enabling and hopeful–instead, the perfect reality is constantly changed and affected by people attempting to act on their clinging, thinking it will end their suffering. As such, it is Right Effort to work non-violently to end their suffering while following as closely as possible the Five Precepts in order to allow them to have the same understanding of a perfect, unchangeable reality.

In my case I hope to best defend myself through compassionate work to end systematic Suffering which creates in others a desire for or need to resort to violence. But at the same time, I don’t view all weapons as bad. In his interview for the NPR program Speaking of Faith, Zen master Thich Nat Han speaks of the “fierce bodhisattava.” Though I don’t have an audio clip, I point to the brief summary included on SOF’s page:

Rather than trying to escape the cycles of samsara and suffering in the world, Thich Nhat Hanh teaches, an enlightened being must embrace the negative aspects of things in order to discover their positive uses. The larger forces of peace and safety can be realized through seeing the interrelatedness of all things, which first must be countered on the individual level by using compassion and wisdom to combat greed and anger.

It’s always positive for one to be prepared to defend themselves, and if one is able to reframe the negative aspects of weaponry and directed violence into positives, then so be it. But I am not one of those people. I feel too often our society emphasizes ‘right’ over ‘responsibility,’ devolving the discussion over guns and violence into a debate over if someone will or won’t “take away your guns.” It is not the gun that is the issue, but a refusal to see or consider the interrelatedness of all things before taking karmic, or “motivated and purposeful,” action (i.e. all possible actions).

But in the heat of the moment when defending oneself, those can be hard decisions to make. For all that I feel and think about how society creates and encourages transphobia, those discussions don’t deal with these very personal decisions of ethics and responsibility to oneself and others. I know how I feel, but I wonder how others come to their decision and the reasoning behind it.