sophiaserpentia (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophiaserpentia) wrote2007-11-19 03:25 pm
sophiaserpentia) wrote2007-11-19 03:25 pm
Entry tags:
authentic transsexual narratives, against the tide of misappropriation
I spent a good part of the morning being offline while having my work computer "refreshed" - i am very happy with the new one! It just sings along.
While i was waiting for this to be finished i went to the Holyoke center to get a new work ID card with my new name... yet another small piece of the transition taken care of. I looked at teeny snowflakes falling and pondered transsexual transition as an analog rather than a digital process.
I came back and still didn't have my new computer yet, so i read a fairly good chunk of Julia Serano's Whipping Girl, which i finally started reading yesterday. Her primary ideas are elegant and possess considerable explanatory power, but i think i will wait until i am done reading the book before i comment on her primary thesis.
One chapter of the book contains a description of what her childhood experience of gender was like, and it is more similar to mine than any other transsexual account i have ever read. It is fascinating to contrast Serano's account against the typical "woman trapped in a man's body" narrative most people are familiar with. (Consider, for example, Jan Morris's account as given in her famous transsexual autobiography Conundrum.)
For Serano, awareness of her femininity did not start with a sudden realization when she was young that she was "really a girl." Instead it percolated up from her subconscious, as through pores; dreaming that she was a girl, taking on a female persona while playing alone, seeing the rightness of it when looking in a mirror and seeing herself as female. All the while, throughout her childhood she did not really question the fact that other people perceived her as a boy.
This is what happens when you are young and your feelings lead one way while everyone around you is in a conspiracy to say or do something else. You don't learn to 'pretend' to go along with it. You internalize it so deeply that it permeates your conscious thought. The external world reaches in and rewrites your own thoughts so that even your own self is invisible.
Finding your own voice in the face of that is tremendously difficult. It takes a lifetime. It takes years of knowing what feels right and yet not being able to consciously or outwardly admit it. This state of dissonance can become one of the most painful things imaginable.
Serano uses the term "subconscious sex," the meaning of which is best captured in this sentence: "Perhaps the best way to describe how my subconscious sex feels to me is to say that it seems as if, on some level, my brain expects my body to be female" (p. 80).
My own experience is remarkably similar to this. Reading it in print, though, had an effect not unlike the long struggle it took to give voice to the cognitive dissonance of subconsciously knowing i'm female while trying to make it work somehow as a male. Transfolk face a parallel struggle in learning to discern our own voices from the words continually put into our mouths by the non-transgender mainstream, particularly by the media and its depictions of us.
Transfolk are vastly outnumbered by non-trans folk. Far more things are said about us by people who are not trans than are said by us about our own experiences. Consequently it is hard for us to even know what authentic transsexual narrative even sounds like.
In the chapter titled "Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Depicts the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels," Serano did an excellent job outlining the way producers of media pieces about gallae hyper-focus on images of us putting on makeup, shopping for shoes, or obsessing over clothes. These images are sought out even when gallae resist being depicted in that way:
The media only ever shows trans people, and gallae in particular, in very particular stylized ways, which have the effect of reducing us to a harmless caricature. This is true even when the subject is something as serious as the fantastically disproportionate number of transgender youth who wind up living on the streets. So it's no surprise that people who are not trans, even people who know someone who's trans... and even trans people ourselves, come to believe that this is what being transgender is all about.
The media has, until recently, forced gallae into taking on this voice by refusing to print or publish even our own accounts that differed from this narrative they've assigned to us. This cherry-picking has compounded the problem. Many gallae have felt compelled to cooperate, under the theory that at least some media exposure is better than none at all. Finally now, now, we are cultivating the ability to speak for ourselves authentically, with less risk of non-transgender editors slicing off those bits of our narrative that don't fit their preconceptions.
Just like the media, the medical community also tells us to shut up so they can speak for us.
Being buried under the misappropriation of who and what we are only makes it harder for us to find our own voice. It reduces us. Our images are not only misappropriated by the mainstream for its own amusement, but we are silenced so effectively that even we don't know who we really are.
While i was waiting for this to be finished i went to the Holyoke center to get a new work ID card with my new name... yet another small piece of the transition taken care of. I looked at teeny snowflakes falling and pondered transsexual transition as an analog rather than a digital process.
I came back and still didn't have my new computer yet, so i read a fairly good chunk of Julia Serano's Whipping Girl, which i finally started reading yesterday. Her primary ideas are elegant and possess considerable explanatory power, but i think i will wait until i am done reading the book before i comment on her primary thesis.
One chapter of the book contains a description of what her childhood experience of gender was like, and it is more similar to mine than any other transsexual account i have ever read. It is fascinating to contrast Serano's account against the typical "woman trapped in a man's body" narrative most people are familiar with. (Consider, for example, Jan Morris's account as given in her famous transsexual autobiography Conundrum.)
For Serano, awareness of her femininity did not start with a sudden realization when she was young that she was "really a girl." Instead it percolated up from her subconscious, as through pores; dreaming that she was a girl, taking on a female persona while playing alone, seeing the rightness of it when looking in a mirror and seeing herself as female. All the while, throughout her childhood she did not really question the fact that other people perceived her as a boy.
This is what happens when you are young and your feelings lead one way while everyone around you is in a conspiracy to say or do something else. You don't learn to 'pretend' to go along with it. You internalize it so deeply that it permeates your conscious thought. The external world reaches in and rewrites your own thoughts so that even your own self is invisible.
Finding your own voice in the face of that is tremendously difficult. It takes a lifetime. It takes years of knowing what feels right and yet not being able to consciously or outwardly admit it. This state of dissonance can become one of the most painful things imaginable.
Serano uses the term "subconscious sex," the meaning of which is best captured in this sentence: "Perhaps the best way to describe how my subconscious sex feels to me is to say that it seems as if, on some level, my brain expects my body to be female" (p. 80).
My own experience is remarkably similar to this. Reading it in print, though, had an effect not unlike the long struggle it took to give voice to the cognitive dissonance of subconsciously knowing i'm female while trying to make it work somehow as a male. Transfolk face a parallel struggle in learning to discern our own voices from the words continually put into our mouths by the non-transgender mainstream, particularly by the media and its depictions of us.
Transfolk are vastly outnumbered by non-trans folk. Far more things are said about us by people who are not trans than are said by us about our own experiences. Consequently it is hard for us to even know what authentic transsexual narrative even sounds like.
In the chapter titled "Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Depicts the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels," Serano did an excellent job outlining the way producers of media pieces about gallae hyper-focus on images of us putting on makeup, shopping for shoes, or obsessing over clothes. These images are sought out even when gallae resist being depicted in that way:
What always goes unseen are the great lengths to which producers will go to depict lurid and superficial scenes in which trans women get all dolled up in pretty clothes and cosmetics. Shawna Virago, a San Francisco trans activist, musician, and codirector of the TrannyFest film festival, has experienced several such incidents with local news producers. When Virago was organizing a forum to facilitate communication between police and the trans community, a newspaper reporter approached her and other transgender activists for an article. However, the paper was interested not in their politics but in their transitions: “They wanted each of us to include ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures. This pissed me off, and I tried to explain to the writer that the before-and-after stuff had nothing to do with police abuse and other issues, like trans women and HIV, but he didn’t get it. So I was cut from the piece.” A few years later, someone from another paper contacted Virago and asked to photograph her “getting ready” to go out: “I told him I didn’t think having a picture of me rolling out of bed and hustling to catch [the bus] would make for a compelling photo. He said, ‘You know, getting pretty, putting on makeup.’ I refused, but they did get a trans woman who complied, and there she was, putting on mascara and lipstick and a pretty dress, none of which had anything to do with the article, which was purportedly about political and social challenges the trans community faced.”
The media only ever shows trans people, and gallae in particular, in very particular stylized ways, which have the effect of reducing us to a harmless caricature. This is true even when the subject is something as serious as the fantastically disproportionate number of transgender youth who wind up living on the streets. So it's no surprise that people who are not trans, even people who know someone who's trans... and even trans people ourselves, come to believe that this is what being transgender is all about.
The media has, until recently, forced gallae into taking on this voice by refusing to print or publish even our own accounts that differed from this narrative they've assigned to us. This cherry-picking has compounded the problem. Many gallae have felt compelled to cooperate, under the theory that at least some media exposure is better than none at all. Finally now, now, we are cultivating the ability to speak for ourselves authentically, with less risk of non-transgender editors slicing off those bits of our narrative that don't fit their preconceptions.
Just like the media, the medical community also tells us to shut up so they can speak for us.
Being buried under the misappropriation of who and what we are only makes it harder for us to find our own voice. It reduces us. Our images are not only misappropriated by the mainstream for its own amusement, but we are silenced so effectively that even we don't know who we really are.
no subject
Do you think this might be related to what our culture values in women, or defines as womanly/feminine? I know plenty of women in real life who never wear dresses or make-up or heels or hose, to whom "doing their hair" involves a quick shower and an air-dry, but you never see that in the media. In the media, a woman wears makeup, and styles her hair, and pays a great deal of attention to her wardrobe and is hurt to the quick when someone calls her fat--there's a very limited range of female images that are accepted in the broader media. I suppose it's easier to signify "female" with recognized external cues.
no subject
Yeah, in the end, this portrayal of transsexual women is just plain old, familiar, boring misogyny. It's just an intensified version of the way they portray women in general as shallow, vapid, and overly focused on their appearance. With regards to gallae though there is the added implication that transsexualism is just an elaborate disguise.
no subject
no subject
no subject
I'm glad I know enough to question these images presented to me now.
I'm glad i do, too.
ETA: I wasn't being snarky, as that sounds. (Apologies if it came across that way.) This is learning in progress for me, too. When i write about this stuff here, it's really just me recounting stuff as i figure it out.
no subject
In a weird, twisted way, you're being treated like those of us born female. Not that that's a good thing.
no subject
no subject
Look at the way the media portrays M-F transsexuals, for example. (I realize that, statistically, there are many more female trannies than males, but I do come across the occasional "F to M trans-formation!" article, and IME, transsexual males who were originally born into female bodies have been portrayed as loony tunes, mentally ill, and just plain frickin' weird.)
We had a local alternative paper profile a F-to-M transsexual. It included the requisite "before and after" photos, but since they'd made sure to find a rather unstable individual for the profile, they had a range of "before and after, and after, and after..." as this person had been born with a female body, had surgery, was unhappy as a man, had a second surgery to become "female" again, then finally one last surgery to be reborn, again, in a male body. At which point he decided he'd actually been a female lesbian all along, but nobody would agree to operate further, so he continued his confused and conflicted life with reporters shaking their heads and audiences snickering.
And asking things like "Why in the world would anyone want to be a 5'3" man?!?" or "Do they take testosterone? Doesn't that make them violent? Are they all ticking time bombs?" or "Haven't you ever heard of feminism? You don't have to be a man to be independent and strong anymore -- be a strong, independent woman!"
And people quoting that whack job with the study you mentioned -- "Do you want to fuck yourself, is that why you went through all that?"
And identical focus on sillystuff -- I mean, really, why would anyone choose to be a short man, when they could be a tallish woman instead?!? We can't see inside the minds of others, so we focus on what we can see, and thus diminish the importance of the things that make a person him- or her- self, the qualities that make a man, a woman...a human being.
no subject