Posts tagged bodies
genderqueer
beyond the binaries
"Beyond the Binary: How Shall I Describe My Body?"
“Female bodied” or “male bodied” are common phrases in my trans arsenal, ones I use frequently but have been feeling more and more uncomfortable with recently. It took reading this article to help me articulate why I dislike the terms. To call myself, a trans guy, “female bodied” reinforces cultural norms about what constitutes female sex and forecloses re-imagining of how gender and bodies relate by imposing the boring and restrictive binary model. I find s.e. smith’s suggestion that we replace “female bodied” with something like “read as female” incredibly compelling— the femaleness is a faulty projection, not some authoritative truth emanating from one’s sex (which is also culturally constructed). An excerpt:
“Recently, I read a genderqueer person describing ouself as “female bodied” and after I scraped my jaw off the floor, I started deconstructing this. I sometimes describe myself as “read female” or “read as a woman” and sometimes I identify, specifically, as a genderqueer woman or femme genderqueer. But I wouldn’t describe myself as “female bodied” because my body is not “female,” it is genderqueer. I have a genderqueer body. Describing it as “female” not only erases my gender identity, it conflates gender and sex, it reinforces a binary view of gender, and specifically it reinforces a cis binary view of gender. A determinist view.
Would I describe a trans man as “female bodied”? No I most certainly would not. A trans man is male bodied, just like a trans woman is female bodied. For those of us who are outside the binary or who are not gendered at all, there are no standard words to describe our bodies. But I don’t think that this means that we should utilize the binary gender structure to describe ourselves. Indeed, it kind of defeats the point and contributes to our own erasure.
How shall I describe my body?
When I describe myself as “read as,” it puts the emphasis on the observer, and specifically on observer error. People see my body and they make assumptions about my gender on the basis of what my body looks like, the same assumptions made at my birth when my genitals were seen and that in turn was used to assign a gender identity. Many people think that my body looks like a “woman’s” body should and thus they believe that I have a female gender identity.”
Dean Spade on body modification and resistance
“Countless people who purportedly share my feminist values have argued to me that rather than having my body modified, the proper course of action would be to come to view it differently, such that it was not in contravention to my internal gender picture. Sometimes folded into this argument is a notion that trans surgery is a part of the capitalist construction of dichotomous gender. Rigid binary gender serves capitalism by setting a norm of extreme masculinity and femininity that none of us can achieve, so that we must constantly try to buy our way out of the gender dysphoria we all feel, In extreme cases, the argument goes, trans people buy gender transition procedures in order to cure ourselves of the fundamentally political condition of gender dysphoria, and we therefore sell out our own resistance to the binary gender system. I wholeheartedly agree with most of this analysis, except for the part where trans people are selling out everyone’s chances at gender resistance when we alter our bodies.
What this argument misses is twofold. First, there is no naturalized gendered body. All of our bodies are modified with regard to gender, whether we seek out surgery or take hormones or not. All of us engage in or have engaged in processes of gender body modification (diets, shaving, exercise regimes, clothing choices, vitamins, birth control. etc) that alter our bodies, just as we’ve all been subjected to gender related processes that altered our bodies (being fed differently because of our gender, being given or denied proper medical care because of our gender, using dangerous products that are on the market only because of their relationship to gender norms, etc). The isolating of only some of these processes for critique, while ignoring others, is a classic exercise in domination. To see trans body alteration as participating and furthering binary gender, to put trans people’s gender practices under a microscope while maintaining blindness to more familiar and traditional, but no less active and important gender practices of non-trans people, is exactly what the transphobic medical establishment has always done. This is why trans people are required to go through years of bullshit proving and documenting ourselves in order to get gender-related procedures, while non-trans people can alter their gender presentation through normabiding chest or genital surgeries and hormones as quickly as they can hand over a credit card.
The second blindspot here is in the assumption that trans surgery has a single meaning.” (read on…)
Dean Spade is a trans activist, lawyer and scholar.
Re: Dear Ron
My friend Ian, from NYC, sent me his reactions to this post, and I felt it would be good to post it (original post here):
I’d like to start off by mentioning how excited I get whenever I meet another transmasculine person who identifies with and embraces their femininity. In a world that requires transmen to prove their manhood even more stringently than it does cismen, it’s refreshing to find people who object to the definition of man-as-butch. Which is not to say that butch men aren’t men, just that ya’ll aren’t the only ones. So I’m coming from a place of being very much on your side.
Now: I’ve been thinking for a while about the different things that people say make them know they’re trans. And I think all of them are valid, I just think it’s important to note that we’ve got a lot of different reasons. For example, the original poster seems to feel that he is trans because he wants a penis. I know a lot of transguys who say they’re trans because being a woman never felt right to them, or because they feel they have no femininity to them. I know a bunch of guys for whom both of these things are true. I am, however, a transmasculine person for whom neither of those things is true. I’m trans because that’s how I feel more comfortable, because at some point, I stopped assuming that the things that people told me about myself were true. I decided to figure it out on my own, and I found a lot of clarity through my process.
And sure, I’m not a guy—my current working label is makeup-wearing, high-femme, female-bodied, male-centered, genderfucked androgyne with a passion for facial hair and women’s shoes. Being a girl was totally fine for me until I started to think too hard about it and I realized I didn’t want to live in the binary. Girlhood (I was only really a woman for like a year, so I don’t have much experience there) had its weirdnesses, but I’m pretty sure everyone’s got that, no matter their gender. And I really don’t want a penis.
So my question for the original poster is, why does your want for a penis make you a man?
Under no circumstances am I saying it’s not legit, or that you should have stayed a straight woman simply because you form romances with people with penises. That’s heteronormative bullshit; clearly your own penis is an important part of you. All I’m saying is that I’m just as uncomfortable saying that the penis makes the man as I am saying that the butchness makes the man. In my experience, gender is more complex than that, and besides, there are lots of different kinds of men—cis-, trans-, or otherwise.
Maybe the disconnect is that I’m not transsexual, I’m transgendered. But the point I’m making is that you can probably have either of those identities without having the other. Though it’s clearly not true in your case, what I’m arguing is that sometimes we forget just how insidious the binary is and in our attempts to escape it, we get stuck on a spectrum—in the back-alleys of the system we claim to be outside of. For instance, I know that I, as a non-binary identified person, am expected to have little to no sense of what is actually true of my gender, simply living in an amorphous “between space,” or be “both.” spectrums are hierarchies too.
So what if someone who was born with a vagina and wanted a penis could step outside of that and say, “hey, I’m a transsexual, I’m a person who would be much happier with the body of a sex I was not born as, and that doesn’t mean that I have to have the gender traditionally associated with the body I want. I’m not transgendered; I’m still a woman. I’m a woman with a penis. We exist too.” or “I’m non-binary identified with a penis,” or a strap-on, or a pack’n’pee, or a meto-dick, or a t-dick, or non-modified genitalia I refer to as my penis, any of these things are options.
The reason it’s so important to me to accept my body for its reality is because I’m trying to bring myself to a place where I can truly embody my belief that bodies and genders are only coincidentally related.
I think sometimes being anti-fashion leads to a false notion that we can be in bodies that aren’t modified, and that any intentional modification or decoration of your body is politically undesirable because it somehow buys into the pitfalls of reliance on appearances. This critique is true, lots of times what we mean to be resistant aesthetic practices become new regulatory regimes. Certain aspects of activist, queer, punk fashions have fallen victim to hierarchies of coolness that in the end revolve around judging people based on what they own, how their bodies are shaped, how they occupy a narrow gender category, etc. Perhaps it is inevitable that the systems in which we are so embroiled, which shape our very existence, should rear parts of their ugly heads even in our attempts at resistance.
More importantly, when we appeal to some notion of an unmodified or undecorated body, we participate in the adoption of a false neutrality. We pretend, in those moments, that there is a natural body or fashion, a way of dressing or wearing yourself that is not a product of culture. Norms always masquerade as non-choices, and when we suggest that for example, resisting sexism means everyone should look androgynous, or resisting racism means no one should modify the texture of their hair, we foreclose people’s abilities to expose the workings of fucked up systems on their bodies as they see fit.
J. Aiden Simon - So Incredible!
Hey everyone,
Posting bright and early this morning from the airport. I discovered an awesome artist and thought I’d share! His name is J. Aiden Simon, he’s a senior at the Maryland Institute College of Art. This past summer, he had an incredible series up at the DC Center called “Member.” According to an interview with Metro Weekly, Simon’s series is based on the idea that:
“Being a man doesn’t mean you have to have a penis, or a penis of a certain size. There are a lot of [existing] photographs of trans people and they are all saying the same thing: Trans people are human. I feel like we should be so much further than we are with art and photography of trans people. I want people to be able to have a space to start a dialogue about being a man, having a body, identifying your body as being a man’s body, and the whole issue of equating having a penis with being a man and how pervasive that is in our culture — and how damaging it is for everybody.”
Fuck Yes.
What “(fe)male bodied” does is try to avoid the messiness of respecting our identities and categorizing us solely that way and find an “objective” way of talking about people that you can use just by looking at them or by knowing their histories. But this Cartesian mind-body dualism is bunk–my body is still my body, and defining it as male or female is still defining me as male or female, and my body is not this thing that exists wholly separate from my mind, that cannot know or feel things or from which my sense of self can be divorced. My sex and my body are my self determination, don’t try to pry in with the crowbar of coercive language.
Part two is that not only do some people use the term to classify me as “male bodied” and others use it to classify me as “female bodied”–but that there’s a reason for this ambiguity. This “objective” “neutral” “real” body that they want to jump to just isn’t there. Some people mean chromosomes, some mean presence or absence of a penis, some people mean hormone levels and how your body appears socially, some people just aren’t thinking about trans and intersex people’s bodies. But the assumption of using the phrase is that people will have half a clue of who you mean, which positions all bodies as belonging to pre-acknowledged sexed categories unambiguously and objectively. Regardless of what categories persons are placed in and how transphobic that placement is, by “empowering” the listener to do the placing, the term nullifies self-definition of sex/embodiment, and undermines resistance to the binary medical model for being trans.
So while I fully support all people speaking of their bodies as male and/or female (and/or other possibilities), don’t use “(fe)male bodied” as a category of people (based on body parts) as opposed to an individual’s self definition–even if you’re trans.
My body is my identity, my identity is my body. Don’t try to separate them, I went to a lot of effort to help them learn to play nice with each other.
