jose melendez said:
deconstruction,
All of what you say makes perfect sense. Where I get confused/frustrated is when it means that what I think of as normal use of language becomes bigoted etc. For example, Trilicek's Whip mentioned elsewhere that Joss Wheedon had said something nasty about trans people.
When I looked it up it was this.
Apparently some portion of the trans community is really upsed and offended by this. I sort of see this in the catergory of the "Night of a 1,000 vaginas" world.
What I wonder is whether this is really an issue of some elements of a community looking for trouble, or is there bigotry so engrained in our language that I'm just rolling with it.
Basically, as we learned in the racist yoga thread, I'm looking to make this all about me... But more seriously, it's less about how I talk and about individual people--it's obvious to me that if someone wants to be identified as she, one should honor her wishes, but more how I talk about categories of people? Generalization is all kinds of trouble, I know, but it's also useful sometimes.
This is pure and simple misgendering.
This is going to meander. Ever since the Dr. V piece was released, I've been working on it in my mind and wanting to formulate my opinions. And I'm not going to get it all down here but I want to start somewhere.
Everyone's level of offense varies and I am loathe to post here too much about trans issues because 1) it can turn into "Political Correctness/Thought Police!!1" outrage or crosstalk, which I don't want, and 2) my own identification is complicated because it's vastly different from (to cite this thread) Dr. V's, or Delonte James Jr. (who I thank for being so honest and forthcoming).
My own identification is complicated because how I identify isn't always how I present to the outside world. And I don't love the choice of terms I have, though "genderqueer" probably comes closest.
Most of the time (99% of my living and working life) I present as male to the outside world. I also present as female, on average 2-3 times a month. On the terminology tree (which again, I don't love because it doesn't quite encapsulate my own experience), this would make me a crossdresser. But even within the community itself I'm often taken to task for my "trans-ness," so to speak. I'm either not enough to some, or too much to others. And it's all based on how I look at any given time. That's human nature: the visual, the first impression, the smell test or eye test.
At work (presenting as male) I'll often have painted nails. And my eyebrows are definitely well-kept, thinner, and tweezed. And it sometimes attracts looks or double-takes. But nothing really severe. I've been assumed to be gay because I'm wearing nail polish. When it's black, incidentally I don't get as much pushback or questions as when it's any other color. Because I guess black nails on a man is "acceptable," but red or gold or pink isn't.
The lines that get drawn are, taken abstractly, absurd. But often someone sees me and in the eye test or smell test needs to classify me. And usually the classification is "man or woman?" Challenging that binary isn't something most people are forced to do. Or that they ever want to do. So "oh you have a niece that did your nails" or "it was a prank/joke/lost a bet" or "you're gay" is what one may say (and has said) to wrap their minds around it and move on.
[Ten years ago or so "metrosexual" was the buzzword, and it's a terrible marketing idea and trope. Because it still subscribes to a male/female only binary. As in "men don't usually pay so much attention to their skin or grooming unless they are a little gay, but I'm not gay so metrosexual is okay." It's #nohomo-adjacent, a qualifier that reinforces ones preconceived notions or bias.]
As for the 1% of the time I present as Tiffany: for eight years I've hosted monthly parties at a bar/club. While they're open to everyone they are primarily geared towards the TG community.
Even in that space, which averages 70-80+ people identifying as TG each month, the conversations I have when I am out/presenting as Tiffany often funnel quickly or immediately into my physical attributes. Basically they are the cookie-cutter equivalent of what
Katie Couric did to two of her TG guests on a recent segment of her show and for which she was rightly excoriated. As Carmen Carrera herself said to Couric, interviews "always focus on either the transition or the genitalia" and "there's more to trans people than just that." Focusing only on the body parts and transition from M2F or F2M dehumanizes and objectifies human beings.
There are better ways to ask questions and seek information, as this thread has demonstrated.
So back to Joss. His flip remark presumes and assumes only two types of gender: men have penises
and testicles and women do not. Because Joss makes it clear it's not just penises. It's "peeny and balls," which differentiates and draws the line darker and thicker. It obfuscates an entire community's worth of experience that isn't merely either/or. It perpetuates the fixation on body parts, when Whedon (like Hannan and Grantland and Simmons and Couric) had an wide and broad audience that wasn't educated on these issues at all. So to reduce it back to genitals is a missed opportunity before a huge stage.
It may not be his job to be the mouthpiece but he has the floor, and the influence, and even simply not making the same tired jokes would have been a better impulse. His reference was with an "amirite?" assumption. That his audience would respond with ingrained, knowing nods or shrugging indifference. Misinformation perpetuates.
I get it. He said it off the cuff. He didn't think about it. He's quiptastic. He's one of America's beloved nerds that writes strong female characters (another argument, perhaps, but that is the perception and there is a track record with some of his work).
But as a white straight male who's not exposed to trans issues daily, or moment to moment as some are (like DDJ has eloquently put forth in conveying her mindset as she transitions), it's certainly easier for him to toss it out there, unthinking of the ripples in the Twitter ocean. [With, I might add, a huge swath of the community also fans of his work and likely fellow nerds.]
In a way one's worldview is like a kind of autocorrect. But for someone with his background and relative privilege to this issue, he (and all the other straight white cis-personalities I referenced above) has to understand (or try to understand) that his experience and how he identifies in the world does not automatically mirror that of everyone else's.
And his doubling down reaction on being called out doesn't help. Because even if he disagrees he should acknowledge that people are having real feelings about what he says. [This
short item summarizes his tweet, his response to the community's responses, and references a clumsy metaphor he made at 2013 Comic Con that sort of comes off as sneery towards anyone he may offend].
And at this point even the mea culpas and "teachable moments" after the fact are hollow. Because the Dr. V article, as a teachable moment on Grantland (and the revenue it continues to generate), is a painful reminder that for some, every moment of every day is a potential wave of judgment or rash of "Your, your, your private parts are different now, aren’t they?” as Couric so eloquently put it. Or worse. So the news cycles die down but the "two steps back" feelings of it remain.