Trans stuff
I’ve been putting off this post for a while. After the reaction to my exclusive language in this post, I realized I was trying to process multiple things at once. It’s like getting into a heated argument about Russian history, when you completely agree, and what you’re actually upset about is 1) the other person’s tone, 2) your shitty day at work, and 3) the last fight you had with this person about Russian history. So there you are, communicating all these three points to them, except using another language, the language of “I agree with you about Russian history,” which is not a language made to express the nuanced feelings of, “You sound awfully snide to me, and it reminds me of the report my boss made me process today.”
So. I had some things I wanted to say about that post, and I just barely managed to restrain myself from using the language of “Trans stuff” and/or “Feminist blogging stuff” to express “I feel socially anxious and these fucking trolls aren’t helping.” I knew I had to work out the social anxiety piece before I could address, in any coherent way, any of my thoughts about the trans stuff or the blogging stuff. Which is why the personal life blarghing before this. I’m glad I not only took the time to work that stuff through, but also decided to post about it, because it gave me a springboard for some of the stuff I want to address.
Gotchas
I know I’ve told this story before, but I love it, so I’m telling it again. In my first African-American Studies class, my professor started out with this:
“Imagine that racism is the water. The pond. It’s where we all live. We are all fish swimming in the water. So there’s really no point, is there, in accusing another fish, ‘You’re wet.’”
He gave this little speech because, like me, most of the students were in that class because it was a required ethnic studies. It was likely going to be their first exposure to difficult, uncompromising discussions about race. But there wasn’t going to be any “discussion” if none of us talked, which none of us would if we were living in a state of perpetual social anxiety about being called racist. That’s not to say we weren’t likely going to say some racist shit, and that we shouldn’t have discussions about how what we just said was racist. But he wanted us all to start with the assumption and understanding that we were all racist. We all had some stupid, ugly shit in our head. We were all likely to say some stupid, ugly shit out loud. And that’s what had to happen in order to get that shit out of our head, to work on it, expose it, dissect it. We all had to feel that we were in a safe space where our ideas and assumptions could be attacked, but not our integrity and worth as people.
This is a fine line to be riding. It’s not appropriate everywhere, though classrooms and other spaces meant for education are a good place for it, I think. But it easily slides over into less helpful territory, such as: I demand you educate me, I absolve myself of all responsibility for my beliefs (Society Made Me This Way!), or You are required to attend to my journey to understand and accept you, and no, I don’t want to hear about how much that hurts you, this isn’t about you.
I don’t mean to say it’s up to any given individual to hold another individual’s hand, to prioritize their development above yours, even and especially when their development involves evolving to the place where they view you as a human being. But I do mean to say that in this big toxic pond of oppression and inequality that we all live in, everybody needs a safe space to recover, because everybody is breathing in the sickness. The oppressed need a safe space where they can let loose all the negativity and anger and hatred that has built up about the privileged, without having to hear the privileged blather about how they’re not really like that, and anyway have you thought about how hard it is for them? The privileged need a safe space where they can express their confusion and curiosity and ignorance and guilt and fear about the oppressed, without having to hear the oppressed tell them how hurtful, wrong, and unwell they are. And everybody needs to work to find those places at appropriate times, which is an ultimately rare event, because these are not objective issues that are routinely discussed in a robot-like fashion. These are issues that strike to the deepest core of all people, and so the amount of appropriate, thoughtful, and considerate work that gets done often seems more like an accident in the morass of emotional, frightened, angry, insensitive lashing out and withdrawing away.
Additionally, the privileged have very few role models. A basic feature of oppression is physical and cultural segregation. The privileged do not live or closely interact with the oppressed, or if they do, they have the privileges of defining the temporal, physical, and emotional boundaries of that “closeness”; i.e. “Our maid is just like one of the family! Why, no, we don’t let her eat with us at the table. Why, yes, I do cry on her shoulder, but no, I don’t know the names of her children.” The privileged live in a cultural environment that does not routinely depict the oppressed in any realistic or three-dimensional way. The oppressed are identified by their features of oppression: their subservience, their poverty, their uncanny ability to be the victims of violence more frequently.
What all this means is that the privileged are rarely in social situations in which they are required to voice their innermost feelings concerning the oppressed in any way that disturbs them, and they are even less likely to be in a social situation in which another individual does not share their opinions and is willing to disclose and discuss this.
I was thinking about my tremendous social anxiety. So much of it seems to be built on the fact that I don’t have a realistic perception of mistakes and consequences. Growing up in abuse has taught me that mistakes are met with erratic, unpredictable, traumatic, unforgivable, and grossly disproportionate consequences. I’ve learned how to endure those consequences, and I’ve learned how to withdraw completely from social contact in order to avoid those consequences. I never learned a middle ground. I never learned that, 90% of the time, the worst that happens is your companion rolls their eyes at you, and you feel kind of dumb for a while. Even if I can intellectually understand that’s what happens, my brain still hasn’t created a synaptic pathway to process that. All social missteps immediately travel upon the more well-worn and familiar synaptic pathway of, “YOU FUCKED UP AND NOBODY WILL EVER LOVE YOU.”
I think the privileged experience something similar when it comes to discussing anything about the oppressed. Privileged people don’t usually grow up with role models who help walk them through these difficult situations, who teach them that the worst consequences for saying something shitty are feeling embarrassed, guilty, angry, and afraid, and that these feelings will pass and become easier with time. I think for most privileged people, their first experiences with discussing the oppressed are ultimately traumatic and unprepared. Either another embarrassed privileged person shushes them with shame and nonsensical or non-viable explanations — “We don’t see race in this household” “But his skin is brown!” “Don’t say that out loud!” — or a rightfully angered oppressed person (who a person of privilege already has little experience understanding or interacting with) makes them feel as if they are a wrong, stupid, bad person for daring to speak out loud the stuff that “everybody knows.” Privileged people end up taking responsibility for their own segregation, taking action to segregate themselves further, because the perceived (erratic, unpredictable, traumatic, unforgivable, and grossly disproportionate) consequences for making a mistake are too high to risk. It takes a pretty big leap of faith, a lot of dedication, and quite possibly a mentor, to convince privileged people that there is a way to discuss oppression without being made to feel like the worst human beings on the face of the earth.
There’s a flip side to that as well. A small story:
I talk REALLY loud. It’s just a feature of my voice. I do not need microphones in auditoriums; my voice is literally booming. When I become anxious, my voice gets louder. Way too loud. Embarrassing to myself, obnoxious to others.
My dad and Flint picked on me mercilessly about this. My dad would demand that I speak quieter, which of course made me anxious, which made me louder. He would get angrier, because I was “intentionally disobeying” or “intentionally provoking” or “expressing how little you love me.” He’d threaten to go have me tested for deafness or retardation, and if I didn’t test positive for either, he’d put me in a psyche ward for my psychotic failure to obey. Did I learn how to moderate my voice? No. I just learned how to stop talking entirely.
Flint was appropriately horrified at these stories (please note that all abusers are awfully horrified about the actions of some other abuser, who they are not like at all no sir), but then offered to “help” me. If I ever spoke loudly around him, no matter if we were with friends or in front of his family, he would make me stop and repeat myself, over and over, quieter and quieter, until I reached a volume that suited him. When I told him how humiliating that was, he said I needed that humiliation to motivate me. Who would I rather be humiliated in front of – him, or an employer at a job interview, who wouldn’t hire me because I yelled like a child? Because, Harriet, nobody is going to hire you like this. Nobody’s even going to want to talk to you.
Both Flint and my dad rationalized their abuse with the excuse that they were “helping” me. My dad was helping me learn how to obey rules, and Flint was helping me learn how to act like a grown-up. But really, what they were interested in was controlling my behavior for their own sense of power. When I told my bear the story of Flint and my voice, he remarked bitterly that Flint must’ve gotten a hard-on every time. That’s a pretty succinct way of putting it. If you have power over how somebody speaks, whether they speak, what they are allowed to speak about, that’s pretty excessive.
I was thinking about this, and thinking about discussions about oppression that go bad. It was hard not to see the parallels. If a person can be made to feel completely awful, like they are the worst and dumbest person alive, like they do not even know how to speak like a grown-up, the person who can make them feel that way has got to have a lot of power. The person who can dictate the ability of another person to speak out loud is a person exercising an excessive amount of control.
There are conversations about oppression that are meant to inform, share, and educate. There are consequences to mistakes in these discussions. A privileged person saying the wrong thing is likely to feel awfully shitty, and an oppressed person (or privileged person trying to identify with the oppressed viewpoint) may realize that they don’t want to be having this discussion, that they have made the wrong choice between an attempt to change the world and their ever-diminishing internal resources. Those are mistakes without disproportionate consequences. They can be fixed. They can be gotten over.
Then there are conversations about oppression that are meant to shut everybody up. Conversations that aren’t meant to establish the value of an idea, but the value of the person espousing the idea. And, by the same token, conversations that are meant to establish one idea as the “right” idea, and the person espousing the idea as the “right” one. And all those opposed are automatically wrong, and ought to shut up or repeat the “right” view over and over until the “right” person feels they’ve stated it correctly.
Since my blog has gotten popular, I’ve discovered this fascinating new thing. It’s like ye old forms of battle: if you defeat the leader, you are the new leader. You acquire all goods the leader once had. You acquire all status, without having to actually work for it. Since the leader is the best of all the people, by transitive property, you are better than all the people, without having to fight them.
Before my blog was popular, nobody was coming here to argue with me. Granted, that’s also because very few people were reading my blog at all. More people is going to equal more viewpoints, and I know that. But there have been a few comments (and more that I deleted outright) where I suspect the commenter is not coming here to discuss, dissect, educate, inform. I suspect they are coming here to say, “Gotcha!” Since I’m now (somehow) considered An Authority On Stuff, if somebody can come and defeat me in battle, they will now acquire the title of Authority Stuff Lady. They do not have to have a blog and work on posts, or engage in thoughtful and difficult discussions; they just have to find one thing I (possibly did or did not) say or do wrong, point it out, and then acquire my goods with a big fat smirk.
Please note, I am talking about very few commenters here, and you can probably guess who they are (if I let them comment at all). I am not saying that everybody who has ever disagreed with me on my blog is a smarmy little fuck. I think it’s pretty obvious who the smarmy little fucks are, and it’s not the people who are all like, “Hey! Point of interest, but I can’t say I agree with how you said X. Have you considered Y?” It is the people who are all like, “Hey! You forgot to say Y. You are wrong. Wrong and ugly and cowardly because you will not admit that I am right.”
I guess I don’t have much of a resolution to that. I guess I just wanted to say, I see what you did there, and yor doin’ it wrong. Conversations about oppression are hard enough; “gotchas!” don’t help anybody except yourself.
What I Did Wrong
I don’t think I did something wrong or inappropriate by using the word vagina in that post. As I tried (somewhat clumsily) in this post to elaborate, I can only speak from my perspective. All these posts are from my perspective. And my perspective is cis.
That wasn’t something that needed much elaborating when this was the functional equivalent of a livejournal with three visitors a day. It’s not that anymore. Now it’s a blog that is apparently meaning some things to some people, which thrusts me into a spokesperson role that I was not prepared for, and still am not. It requires much more thoughtfulness and consideration in what I share, which wasn’t ever the purpose of this blog, though it’s a purpose I think I’m willing to give a go.
One of the things I realized I needed to make clearer was my position on speaking from outside of my perspective. I am not trans. I don’t know any (out) trans people. I have a vague knowledge of trans stuff (is there a better phrase for trans stuff?) from the couple of units I got in college. That maybe puts me a step above Joe Schmoe, but not much farther. Trans stuff is something I am always feeling I ought to learn more about, but it falls under that large umbrella of the five million other people, cultures, ideas, histories that I am always feeling I should learn more about. In the meantime, until I have made an effort to acquire more knowledge and familiarity, I feel that talking about trans issues is really arrogant and privileged of me. I don’t know shit about what it’s like to be trans. I’m sure there are many similarities that I could identify with. I’m sure there are just as many things I will never fully get with my current life experience. Because of that, I’m not willing to modify my posts to be “inclusive,” because I don’t feel they really will be. To me, “inclusive” requires “informed.” I can change my pronouns, but that’s just window dressing; it doesn’t mean I’m actually saying anything that pertains to trans.
Talking about the post in question, do rapists targeting trans women target them under the impression that they are cis, and thus have vaginas? Probably some do. Do rapists who target trans women target them because they identify them as trans? Probably some do. What happens when a rapist discovers their trans victim doesn’t have a vagina, or has a vagina they didn’t expect? What happens if a rapist doesn’t discover anything? That’s something I know nothing about. I can guess, but it would only be a guess, a guess from a very high peak of privilege. I don’t want to write about the experiences of trans women. I am going to get it woefully wrong, and I don’t want to take the words out of the mouths of trans women.
So, I don’t think I did anything wrong using the word “vagina” in that post.
My big privileged misstep was in not realizing, not identifying, not even consciously noticing, that I was only talking about cis women. In my mind, writing that post, trans women didn’t exist. It wasn’t that I thought of them, decided I couldn’t adequately write about their experiences, and made a conscious choice to focus on cis women. They just didn’t exist. That’s a blind spot, and blind spots, as always, exist only within privilege.
A few years ago, my bear announced to me that he was no longer comfortable with the word ‘bitch,” not in any context. I didn’t have a problem with the word. I was pretty much on the, “Oh, that’s totally been reclaimed,” boat. But, out of respect for my bear, I made an effort to stop using it.
I never realized how many people, things, and attitudes I described as “bitch” until I had to make a conscious effort to use another word. I never realized how many people, things, and attitudes I described as “obnoxious and female at the same fucking time” until I realized there really wasn’t any other word for what I was trying to say. I didn’t just mean “whining” or “shitty mean lady” or “wimpy boy”; I wanted to describe these things in a special, specific way that had an extra punch of ugly. Accurately describing these things didn’t do my anger justice, which made me realize that “bitch” did. It has been ridiculously difficult to stop using the word “bitch,” and ridiculously apparent how often it’s used by other people and media outlets, which has made me re-examine just how “reclaimed” or inoffensive it really is.
Something similar happened here. Once it was pointed out that I had, completely unconsciously, erased the existence of trans people, I started to notice just how often I do that. I started to notice just how many of my posts are exclusively about cis women, yet were written with no thought to that exclusivity. Again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me writing exclusively about cis women, but if I had identified that these posts were cis-exclusive, or at least knew that in my own head, even if I forgot to announce it, this wouldn’t be something I have to admit is a mistake, an oppressive misstep. But neither of those conditions were true. I didn’t identify the posts as cis-exclusive, because I didn’t even remember that trans people existed in any way, shape, or form that required me to consider them.
So, my apologies. Thanks for pointing it out, and thanks for bearing with me as I sort it out. I am still opposed to editing my past posts, because I do not like erasing my mistakes. But I will certainly make a better effort in the future to recognize my exclusivity, and own it, and announce it.
Comments are closed.
One of the things I love about my work is that we frequently – almost constantly – have conversations about privilage, more specifically about race, more specifically about Aboriginal people and white people in Australia.
One of the things I hate about my work is that we frequently – almost constantly – have conversations about privilage, more specifically about race, more specifically about Aboriginal people and white people in Australia.
Because so often it slips across that line and it’s people weilding power. And I don’t feel that I can tell them that. That I feel silenced and unable to contribute in ANY way, let alone a constructive way. And I want to. I really, truly do. But sometimes there is so much yelling that I get defensive (you say that it’s a white problem, not a black problem, but you won’t let me try and address the problem since I’ll never understand cos I’m white? Well, fuck you) and then I shut down. And then I think, essentially ‘what? You’re just going to yell at me that I’m wrong every time I try and talk? Ok fine. I’ll be over here with my privilege.’
Especially when it SHOULD be a space like an educational space. I understand that oppressed people don’t have many, or any, places they can go for respite. But that is shit. So don’t make it the same for me, because that is what we’re trying to FIX. You know what? Sometimes I DO need to pretend that ‘white’ is ‘normal’, and that the way I experience life is normal and not a complete win in society. For a little bit. So my brain can adjust. Then you can remind me again, please, because I don’t want to stay that way.
Thankyou for articulating that. I am thinking of a couple of team meetings in particular, where the atmosphere got so poisinous that I felt that I couldn’t, physically, speak, even when asked to. And I am a huge loudmouth, so that’s a big deal! I just shook my head mutely because I knew that whatever came out of my mouth would be wrong in some way. So why bother trying to get it ‘right’ when there is not ‘right’?
Not helpful.
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This is level headed, honest and personal. You modeled accountability here in simple, direct language.
Bravo.
-arvan
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I have only recently started to read blogs about race, and the one big thing that I learned is kind of a cat-macro-influenced observation that difficult discussions are difficult.
I am a white, cisgendered person who decided to focus on being part of the solution rather than the problem, and I still find it freaking hard to think about racism and sexism and all the other flavours of evil, and engage fellow humans in doing so. Because then you are not just dealing with the social and moral complexities of oppression and how it works, but also with the emotional factor of the conversation itself, because as you said, it is a sea of intense experiences, beliefs, emotions and touches everyone at their core.
I think that everyone involved is going to make missteps because of this, and the biggest moral requirement for absolutely everyone in talking about these issues is to think before speaking, and to address the others with responses on thought and conscience, not on the desire to come out ahead in the debate, to dominate, to avoid responsibility or to take revenge. Because those things just recreate the evils being addressed and that is wrong and should not be.
All of this is to say that I think ur doing it, and that maintaining critical thought in the face of social injustice is damn hard because social injustice runs on the absence of critical thought and will fight like hell to keep it out of the picture.
I kind of like how you refuse to erase your mistakes – it helps me accept the yummy foot I seem to constantly find in my mouth
The hateful thing about those well-worn neuron paths is that there is no way to unlearn without risking exposure to potential Consequence of Doom and letting the brain soak in the fact that this time, the C of D did not occur. It’s fucking scary and 50% of why some days I really don’t want to leave the house.
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Thank you. You have given me a vocabulary and a way to think about my own privilege, and it’s been incredibly valuable to me. A whole new life skill, and that’s a big deal. I should send you the $110 an hour my therapist makes.
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The words have to come out so the feet can fit! And it happens to all of us.
Thank you much for this post, and your efforts to own your blind spots. I’m working on mine, too. Reading you helps.
-Emery
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Wow… It’s true, I think you are our leader…
You are so clear in your writing and your reasoning. Thanks.
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Harriet, I really love your blog. I have been lurking without commenting for a while now, but I just needed to say something about this sentence:
I can change my pronouns, but that’s just window dressing; it doesn’t mean I’m actually saying anything that pertains to trans.
Maybe this is just a typo, but I’ve seen so many people use trans this way that I think it’s worth saying anyway: trans is an adjective, it requires a noun. Maybe you mean trans issues, or trans people? I realize this may sound like a nitpick, but it’s an important point – trans and transgender are words that modify, not things in and of themselves. Transgender people, transgender communities. You have no idea how freaking many times I see people talking about “transgenders” and it’s so aggravating. I know that other words that identify some part of who we are can be used in this way – a catholic woman can be a catholic, if that’s really the point of what you’re talking about. But because of how transgender people are treated in our society, using “transgender” or “trans” as a noun reduces trans people and communities to the aspect of their lives that people use as an excuse to dehumanize them, which totally blows. I know that wasn’t your intention, but that is how that usage reads, and I wanted to explain it beyond “it’s an adjective” so it would be clear this is not just an academic exercise.
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Thanks, this is good stuff. I was struggling throughout the post with terminology, because I am pretty ignorant about it, and some schoolin’ is always welcome. In that sentence in particular, I wanted a word that expressed “issues, ideas, beliefs and experiences that are of interest to trans-identified people and/or non-trans-identified people who are concerned with gender binaries and the effects thereof,” and was at just a complete and total loss.
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Really good post.
What you said about how your dad and Flint would talk about you speaking too loudly.. my abusive ex would do the opposite, say that I spoke too softly and not clearly enough. And he would start by acting angry without saying anything, then he would start always telling me I didn’t speak clearly.. and.. well, I would just stop talking. You put it really well that it’s ALL about control and not about “helping” me communicate better.
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Neato. I don’t feel like I completely fucked that up anymore.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with “trans stuff,” but you could also say “trans issues.”
BTW, some trans women do have vaginas, and some have both, if they are intersex. Basically, genitalia has nothing to do with gender.
Usually, the rape turns into a rape-and-murder, or rape-and-brutal-beating, and in the latter case, she can expect to be left to die or to be further abused by medical personnel who discover her trans status, or if she survives, she can expect to be denied access to rape counseling services and/or women’s shelters, because they’re limited to “women-born-women” (aka cis [non-trans] women).
Hmm. This is how I feel about *ist mistakes: they are bad because they hurt people. If you mess up, you should try to mitigate that hurt as best you can. If you don’t want to edit, you should still attempt to give people from that oppressed group the ability to avoid being blind-sided by whatever you said. I’m really glad you made this post, because that’s one of the things it does: it warns trans readers that you said a cissexist thing a while back.
I’m also very glad you’re going to try to be more conscious of your cis privilege. But, I’m confused as to what you want to happen if you mess up again anyway. Do you want someone to say so in the comments? (The commenting policy post really made me think you didn’t.)
What if they’re rude? I mean, my tone was all “whoops, you forgot something,” but also I’m a cis person, and I’ve never been beaten or denied care for being a woman who doesn’t have a vagina. I’m sure you can see how someone who has might be less polite.
And, what do you think the warning thing?
Thank you for listening.
Blogs for when you do decide to learn more about trans stuff:
Debunking Cis (If you get an LJ account — which is free — you can join, view locked entries, and ask questions.)
Questioning Transphobia
Taking Up Too Much Space (Ex: Cis Privilege Checklist)
Cartographies
Loca del Rio Penobscot
Taking Steps (Amazing writing.)
No Designation
Caoimhe Ora Snow
Memoirs of a Genderqueer Femme Anarchist
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I hope you would bother trying because you care about being a good person, or not contributing to the oppression of an entire group of people, or something.
This is a place that is specifically for white people to talk to other white people and work through their racism. There are no rules about no one making you feel bad, but it is an educational space where people are meant to say stupid shit, and they have a rule that no one can say “Just google it.” So, maybe better than your meetings.
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(Did my other comment go through? I can’t see it in moderation. If so, you can delete this.)
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I’ve seen “transness” used in kind of that way.
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Found it! It went through the spam queue. Approving.
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I am going back and forth on editing to provide warnings. Right now I’m on the side of not doing it. Part of that is based in the very simple practicality of knowing myself, and knowing that there have been multiple times I have decided to go back and edit a post, and none of those times have I ever actually gotten around to doing so. So I don’t want to promise to do something that I’m not sure I can deliver. I am thinking about making my About Me section a little more specific, and actually addressing this in there, so it’s not up to any newcomer to track down the post where I explain my non-editing policy. I’ve got a lot of changes I want to make at once to the About Me section, so that’s still brewing as I suss those out.
I am also struggling somewhat with the transition of having a blog that is “for me” and changing it to a blog that is accommodating to others. I understand that people are finding good stuff here, and that that’s put me on a sort of spokesperson pedestal. That’s sometimes nice, but so far, it’s very intimidating. I started to blog, and I enjoy blogging, because it helps me work out my own thoughts and leave a record that I can return to. I feel like going back to edit is like going back to write retrospective notes in my diary. I understand that my experience of my blog is totally different than a visitor’s; to me, this is a diary, and to others, this is somewhat of a social space. I am still struggling with how much I want to identify with the visitor’s experience of my blog, and how much I want to keep this contained and completely for and about me.
I guess what I am saying is that I am working at a snail’s pace to figure out how and if I want to change my blog, ever, in any given way, for other people. That might be something that costs me readers, but this wasn’t ever a project to acquire readers. It’s something I do for my own development entirely, and readers are just a bonus. For readers just now coming in, this might look like it’s an established blog with established readers. For me, this is all so so new. I am still in a massive state of flux, and all of this is evolving very slowly. It’s also sucking up way more of my time than a blog was supposed to, and I’m trying to balance my real life with the time it would take to create a better blog space. To make this blog the kind of blog I’d like it to be for as many readers as I’m getting, I would need much more time than I currently have. And I never started this blog with the intent of getting and keeping as many readers as I’m getting, so the transition time is awfully slow here. I’m not saying I won’t ever decide to edit posts. I’m just saying that, for right now, I won’t.
I have a lot of complicated reasons for not wanting to edit past posts. One of the main reasons, though, is that if I were speaking to somebody and said these things out loud, I wouldn’t ever be able to take them back. I could apologize, and that could mitigate the hurt some, but the fact that I said and thought these things is still going to be there. I like, in some ways, having my blog imitate real life in that aspect. I fuck up, then I apologize. I don’t like the idea of adding disclaimers that make it seem, somehow, that I am “over” these things, or that because I apologized I am now a safe and okay person to talk to, or read. I am pretty sure these are issues that are A) deeply personal and B) will eventually be something I realize is irrelevant to blogging and making everything more complicated than it should be. But I have a really deep commitment to having this blog reflect my inner process inscrutably, which means it’s going to end up deeply personal, and going to end up slogging around in stuff that seems really banal and irrelevant later.
My commenting policy was more about me realizing I can’t respond to every comment anymore. It was already sucking up my time and energy when it was just positive comments, but when some of them got negative and/or critical, so much of my time and daily thought process was about the blog. I realized I couldn’t sustain that way, especially when I often felt like I was just repeating myself to people who hadn’t read through posts or comments. The comments get this way sometimes, with somebody saying, “Hey, you neglected to mention X,” and I say, “Oh, thanks, X,” and then ten more comments pop up in the next few hours about, “I can’t believe you never said X!” or “Just my two cents: X.” IT IS CRAZY-MAKING. I had to find a way to set a boundary for myself to make that less crazy-making, and I decided the boundary would be to announce my intentions and ideas and boundaries and limitations clearly in one visible and accessible place, and then stop the endless task of copying and pasting that to everybody who didn’t read it. This comes along with the new need, suddenly, to figure out my intentions and ideas and boundaries and limitations so I can announce them, and that’s still in process.
What I want to happen whenever I mess up is kind of irrelevant. This is a public blog, and as long as it’s public (and people are reading), every time I mess up, somebody will call me on it, whether that’s what I want or not. That’s good and healthy stuff, ideally, but sometimes it gets expressed in a way that I can’t say I’m okay with. If I feel that I am personally being attacked, or another commenter is personally being attacked, I won’t let those comments through; I feel like approving those comments gives my implicit approval, and that’s an ethical boundary for me. That’s a totally subjective call on my part, but, well, you get what you pay for here, pretty much.
I am much more nebulous about rudeness. I want people to feel safe to speak out. When somebody is issuing personal attacks, nobody feels safe. When somebody is being rude, that is not the safest it could be, but I’m willing to see where it goes before I shut it down. Sometimes people just get upset, and calm down after having a space to talk. Sometimes people are just about being rude. I can’t always tell which is which, especially not at first, and I can’t make any hard or fast rules about it. I feel okay giving my implicit approval to people who are criticizing me, questioning others, or upset about something they feel is hurtful, because I feel like those are all healthy things for me to be around. I don’t feel okay giving my implicit approval to people who are speaking in a way that I can’t see as anything other than a fully conscious and intentional attempt to cause another person pain, shame, fear, or guilt. In my life, that’s not healthy, and since this blog is my life, too, I extend my personal boundaries here.
One of my co-workers has a transracial family, and has described to me how she talks to her kids about racism during different ages. For her youngest, the two of them got blindsided one day by a racist woman in a grocery store. He told his mom that the woman had made him feel bad, and she asked where in his body he felt bad. He said his tummy, so she told him that in the future, if somebody makes him feel bad in his tummy, he should get away from them. I kind of use the same rule for comments. A comment can make me grimace or roll my eyes or re-evaluate an unpleasant part of myself, but very few of them make me feel bad in my tummy. The ones that do, I kick to the curb.
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Totally. I would be careful about gender binary stuff – plenty of trans people are just fine with the binary, and have genders that conform to the binary just fine. Certainly there are plenty of trans people who are not down with the binary; it’s just that binary opposition isn’t a given.
If you haven’t, I would check out http://questioningtransphobia.wordpress.com/
It is not updated super frequently, but is a good, smart read, and contains many posts that are very 101 accessible, though not spoon-feedy. Very excellent for just reading along and trying to get your bearings. I highly recommend it.
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A couple things. First–and not that I’m asking you to answer this for me, my dear Harriet–I realized while reading your description of your father and Flint’s efforts to control your speaking tone (or: control you by controlling your speaking voice), and the paragraphs that led up to that description, that I, in many ways, act like an abused person in my interpersonal relationships, even though I’ve never considered myself abused. Interesting, to me anyway. I keep wondering if to be a woman in this society = to be (driven) insane. I think this idea stems from one of your posts, actually–something about how we are always supposed to act a certain way, but then we are also usually punished for our behavior. A kind of related query: I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie “Gaslight,” but that pretty much sums up male-female interaction, for me.
Which is all to say, thanks for making me think. You always inspire.
Thing number two: It’s not that strange that we were both thinking about the kinds of discussions the oppressed and the privileged have, since we both read your blog. But the earlier comment thread that led to this post got me to thinking a bit about how, whenever oppression raises its head in the national debate, everyone rushes in to claim their own slice of oppression pie, effectively turning the discussion away from whatever it was initially meant to be about and towards the subject of me. That’s not to say that transgendered people shouldn’t be addressed in a conversation about rape, or that we should just forget about their existence when talking about women, but oh, I don’t know–I guess one just needs to be aware of what the conversation is meant to be and what it’s not.
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softestbullet – actually, being trans is nothing to do with being intersex.
The majority of intersex people are fine with their gender.
Because, as you say, ‘Basically, genitalia has nothing to do with gender’.
I just wanted to point that out.
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Thing #2:
I’m a cis woman and so is the only other commenter who disclosed their status. Trans people have not rushed to claim their slice of oppression pie, here.
I think I know what you mean, though. Often, when people of color are discussing racism, a white person will pipe up about classism, and how they have a lot of problems because of classism, and how they think we should talk more about classism. Then yes, they are derailing, and the correct response is to be like, “No. We are talking about racism right now.”
But — well, do you know anything about the stats for trans women and sexual assault? It’s bad. Trans women don’t have gender privilege over us; they’re a further-oppressed group of women. And the whole concept of real women = having vaginas isn’t some random unrelated problem; it’s all tied up in rape culture.
That’s why I think it isn’t derailing or pie-stealing or whatever to point out cissexism in a cis woman’s conversation about rape.
But if you really think it was, please don’t assign that rudeness to trans people. I’m cis.
So you know that word “cis” I used above? It means “not trans.” It’s very handy in instances where we want to talk about trans people and not-trans people, but we don’t want say something terrible like, “trans and normal” or “trans and real” or even trans and unmarked default.
So right there, I hope you meant to say “not-trans women,” because otherwise, you are setting up a dichotomy between trans people and women.
(I’m on topic!)
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Thank you!
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*the only other commenter [in that thread that I remember]
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Good lord. I was waiting you out to see how you decided to act. Obviously this is a passionate issue for you, and I was hoping your past behavior was a result of having an emotional button triggered. But time has passed and you haven’t yet managed to make a single post where you are able to offer your points or disagree without doing so sarcastically, or without mocking or insulting another person. I don’t allow people to talk this way around me.
Nobody else who posts here requires a definition of respectful behavior, even when they’re disagreeing with each other about issues they feel passionately about. It’s a tremendous waste of time and energy to make a definition of respectful commenting behavior just for the one person who doesn’t get it, especially when everybody else is able to maintain a respectful tone without being asked or taught. I don’t think this is the forum for you. You’ve got your own blog, and I suggest you use that from now on.
You’re banned.
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On the one hand, I don’t want to reply to someone who can’t reply back. But just in case anyone else is similarly offended, I want to explain that the quote that starts with “That’s not to say” was in reference to the original debate on this site (and I’m not going to go over the whole thing in detail here) and not my response to totally not understanding trans vs. cis concerns.
Re. stats for trans women and sexual assault, I do have anecdotal and experiential knowledge from working as a volunteer advocate. (I go to the hospital to sit with patients and give them information while they wait for the SANE to do the rape kit.) The majority of people we see are: homeless, poor, sex workers, very young, very old, mentally disabled, physically disabled, people in abusive relationships, people in immigrant communities, or trans people. In other words, the powerless, disenfranchised, and ignored. Kind of off-topic, but that’s who I think we’re talking about when we talk about rape. Not just one group, but many.
Also, I apologize for not being clearer overall in my comment. A lot of SB’s criticisms were on target, I thought. For example, I should have pointed out that I wasn’t basing my thoughts on diverting the oppression discussion solely on the Fugitivus comment threads. If I knew you, Harriet, you’d be getting seven-page-long manifestos from me all the time. But you don’t know me. I’m this quasi-person who’s shown up unannounced, with an off-putting name, and god help me, I try (unsuccessfully, at this point) to keep my comments short. This means that I’m almost always going to leave something out or say not quite what I intended to say, and I apologize for that. I apologize also for this long-ass paragraph.
And here I thought I was gonna get called out for my blatant hypocrisy: “Hey, Harriet, what you wrote made me think about ME, let me tell you about it. But what’s with people always wanting to hijack the discussion?” Jeez—what a weirdo.
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I thought SB had on-target criticisms, too. I just wasn’t willing to accept the way she stated them as appropriate for my space, and I wish she could have managed a more respectful tone so that others could keep hearing those criticisms. As it is, she’ll have to make those criticisms in whatever tone she likes on her own blog, and acquire readers there. Probably plenty of people can deal with or dig that particular way of arguing and confrontation and will head over there to have it, but I don’t, so it’s not going to happen here.
I do get a little annoyed by comments that are like, “My life story/entire theory of the universe rant: LET ME SHOW YOU IT.” Sometimes those things just feel like pure sharing, which is harmless, and sometimes they feel a little like, “Here is a blog where there is readership: I will put my life story here, because I cannot acquire readership on my own, and yet despite this glaring evidence of the lack of interest in my life story/entire theory of the universe, I believe this deserves more attention than it’s getting. Hijack!”
I am totally interested in conversations about topics, but I am totally uninterested in targeted proselytizing. Sometimes I feel like the focus has shifted from, “I must state my beliefs and my reasons for believing these things so I can contribute to the public discourse and understanding of these topics” and has shifted toward “I must convince Harriet Jacobs she is wrong, this is the MOST IMPORTANT THING.” The conversation is always worth having, but where I choose to throw down my alliance, and my timeline for going about that, is my own damn business.
I also often get to feeling like, because people like the way I write and because I have readers, I’m being pushed to write about topics, and think about topics, in the ways other people want to see. Which, to me, is just a really long and resource-intensive way around writing your own damn blog. I’m not the mouthpiece for anybody but myself, and my ideas are terrifically flawed. If you have something to say that’s worth saying, it’s worth saying whether or not anybody buys into it, whether or not Harriet Jacobs who is really not that popular or important buys into it.
Anyway, this is all a long way around to say, I am subscribed to your blog, Aunty Christ, because I went and checked it out and I liked it and thought it was good sauce. So if you want to have a seven-page manifesto about issues going on here, I will read it and think about it, because I respect your opinion, I respect the way you conduct yourself, and I respect that you have taken the leap to create your own public space where you share your private thoughts.
That’s all pretty muddled. You guys, I’m pretty sick of comments. It’s like another whole damn blog I’m writing here, a blog I’m writing while surrounded by people saying, “Your boundaries: let me test them.” I’m going to stop responding to comments for, um, the rest of the month.
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In a lot of ways I understand exactly what you’re saying. It can be intensely difficult to function in discussions of oppression when confronted with rage, hurt and other intense emotions. And those emotions will invariably show up. I’m sure there have even been times where you’ve responded to men in much the same way you’re discussing here and those men have just run off from the vitriol.
I know that in many situations I’ve felt the exact same way you’ve described, that there’s no way I can do anything right and I’m a horrible awful person and I might as well give up and rot in my privilege as a white, semi middle class, American because all I’ll do is constantly screw up.
On the other side of the coin, it is so intensely hard to be nice and civil with folks with privilege when it takes so much effort just to survive and not get beaten to death when I go out to buy milk or something. Or the fact that I can’t go to a rape crisis center or a rape support group without a pretty high chance of being turned out of it, despite very much needing that support.
So I guess it ends up being… complicated. I know that there are times in the past when I read through your posts and connected and commented and really get a lot out of it. And there are times where I read through your posts, felt completely and utterly erased and invisible and I just walked away because having to go through one more conversation about trans issues with someone who doesn’t get it after the 100th time is just too tiring for me to deal with on that day. And I did kind of disappear from reading your blog for a while because of that.
This post helped though. Unfortunately a lot of people operate just on cis, not because they recognize that their lack of perspective leads to the danger of poorly representing stuff (like you do), but because they simply do not care. It doesn’t occur to them to care and even when they find out about us, their lack of caring remains. The thought that you, who I generally admire, could be like that was what drove me away.
Even though, to me, this says that this blog is probably not going to be a place that will really be of much help to me as a trans woman, even a trans woman victim of rape and abuse, it does say to me that there’s a good reason for that and that you’re making sure you don’t misrepresent us.
And that’s a lot more than 90% of everyone else does.
Wow, I rambled. A lot x_x Anyways, thanks for explaining. I don’t feel alienated anymore and I’m glad I actually know what’s going on now.
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Meant to say the 100th conversation. Not the 100th time talking to you. x_x
Words and me aren’t working together so great lately.
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I don’t feel I can write anything worthwhile about trans women and their experiences. I think, even if I got educated about it, the best I could do is parrot back what I’ve learned to the audience that reads my blog. Which isn’t worthless, but it doesn’t feel like much, and it certainly wouldn’t be anything you or other trans women and trans men haven’t heard before. I can’t write this blog to speak to you; I am clueless about your experiences.
So, serious offer:
Would you like to write a guest post?
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I personally found the book “Whipping Girl” by Julia Serano to be incredibly enlightening about trans issues. She talks about feminism and gender and sex roles in a really insightful way that was very useful to me as a cisgendered feminist, as well as really opening my eyes to what it means to be transgender. Highly recommend it.
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Sure. I could do that.
I would need a little time though. Things have been really busy lately.
Thank you.
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Thanks for the kind words, Harriet. I of course love your blog to pieces, but I think you know that already. Effing amazing sauce.
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As a trans woman, I just want to say thank you. I felt considered and respected by this post, and that’s no small thing.
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Indeed, “genitalia has nothing to do with gender” — but it DOES seem that the custom of “assigning” a gender to an intersex child at birth can lead to issues down the road, and sometimes they feel very strongly that the gender they were assigned doesn’t work for them.
I know “the plural of anecdote is not data,” but I do know three trans women who are intersex. One didn’t find that out until starting medical transition, and the baseline numbers were enough off to raise questions.
Biology’s a stranger thing than most people think about.
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Um, quick question. How should I contact you when I get that guest post done? Things have been wicked busy so I’m still working to get to it.
Should I just comment here?
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Oh, this is recursiveparadox by the way. I moved my blog to wordpress.
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You can email at jacobs.harriet at gmail, or you can comment. Whatever works.
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I know this post is quite old but I just found your site and have been reading your posts and had to comment after reading this one.
I was in a relationship with a man for many years. He was always very loving and supportive toward me — until the end when he moved in with me and then he became someone else. One of the things he did was tell me I almost screamed when I talked. This confused me because usually people (including him) often ask me to repeat myself because I talk so quietly. Now however, he said it drove him nuts that I talked so loud. I remember one night we were laying in bed talking and he said to me in a manner that made me feel like I was a rather perplexing and obstinate child, “Hun, are you aware you’re yelling right now?” I just looked at him for a minute because I’d actually been talking very quietly because it was late and his girls were asleep. Nevertheless I talked quieter, pretty much whispered, at which point he jumped out of bed pissed off because, “Why can’t you just talk normally?!?” Pretty soon he was displeased with the content of my speech as as well. Finally I just stopped talking because nothing I said nor the tone/volume of my voice when I said it was “right”. Then? He asked why I never talked to him anymore!
As ridiculous as it sounds, even though I’ve had 2 years to think about it, I didn’t realize this was a control issue until I read what your boyfriend said after you told him about Flints behavior. Now it makes sense. He was actually controlling about most everything. He made comments intended (he said) to “help” about my weight, my appearance, my clothes, and most everything else. If I appeared hurt about his comments he got mad because I was “too sensitive”. By the time he moved out I was so insecure and unsure of my every move I was almost paralyzed. Looking back it’s obvious this indeed gave him the biggest boner in the world. Made him feel… important? Superior?
I should have figured out it was a control issue long ago but I didn’t put the pieces together until I read your extremely similar experience with the voice thing. I have a lot of scars where this man is concerned and this knowledge makes it a little better. Thanks
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