“I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself. I will say this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” Stryker wrote. “Just as the words ‘dyke,’ ‘fag,’ ‘queer,’ ‘slut,’ and ‘whore’ have been reclaimed, respectively, by lesbians and gay men, by anti-assimilationist sexual minorities, by women who pursue erotic pleasure, and by sex industry workers, words like ‘creature,’ ‘monster,’ and ‘unnatural’ need to be reclaimed by the transgendered. By embracing and accepting them, even piling one on top of another, we may dispel their ability to harm us.”
We live in a society where female ways of being are still commonly viewed as second-best, where too much feminine energy can be an obstacle to being taken seriously, where women are expected to conform to stereotypically male communication patterns and expectations in order to have a career and real power. Too often it’s a choice between embracing who you really are and getting what you want in life.
It’s a survival mechanism, especially as someone with depression and anxiety, to try to ignore and normalize the dehumanizing experiences I have to move through in order to live. If I were to allow myself to be bothered by quotidian microaggressions and invalidations and othering, I’d maybe never leave the house.
Here, Dugan and Fabbre share portraits and words from 12 of the 88 people they connected with along the way.
The key to understanding why a self-proclaimed radical feminist group would side with conservatives arguing for the right to force cisgender women into skirts at work is to understand who TERFs are and what they’ve been up to for the past 50 years.
A TSA agent may press the button that corresponds to the sex a passenger was assigned at birth, but the passenger's gender presentation may mean using a chest binder, packer, or breast shaper, which the machine then marks as inconsistent with the expected algorithm for the passenger's sex, thus triggering an "alarm." Alternatively, the agent may press the button corresponding to the passenger's presenting gender rather than the sex they were assigned at birth, which poses its own problems: A "passing" trans woman's penis, for example, will register to the machine as suspicious.
I can only review Euphoria as a gay trans woman who desperately wants to see herself on screen, who desperately wants to see her past, her present, and her potential futures. I can only review Euphoria as a gay trans woman who for the first time on television got to watch a cis girl fall in love with a trans girl. I can only review Euphoria as a gay trans woman who for the first time on television got to watch any girl fall in love with a trans girl.
The most normative gender transitioning story goes something like this: Trans woman realizes she was born in the wrong body from a young age, proves her womanhood to a doctor, starts hormone replacement therapy, gets surgery because of her intense discomfort with her genitalia, and comes out from the operating table as a perfectly cis-passing woman. It’s a cute fantasy, but it’s not entirely true.
The ADF has argued that a transgender person’s mere presence in a funeral home might “disrupt the healing process of grieving families” and that the employer in this case was acting “out of love” for Ms. Stephens by punishing her for being transgender.
What should I think when someone I’ve been flirting with all night tells me they’ve only dated cis women, but lately have considered “opening that up to trans women”? At the end of the night when they don’t kiss me, how do I know if that’s because of me or because they decided tonight wasn’t the night to get adventurous? This is not a rare occurrence.
I did not, could not, transition on a whim; instead, I had to give up the home and family I knew because neither would accept me, and I hated that, still hate that, still cry over it. I had to be approved for hormone therapy first by a therapist, then an endocrinologist, all while being mis-gendered and mocked by hospital employees; I had to legally change my name, all while being mis-gendered and mocked, louder now, at the police station where I had to get fingerprinted, then at the court, where a clerk repeatedly and vociferously called me sir in front strangers; I had to humiliate myself countless times over the phone and in person when someone did not know what to do with my voice or appearance, including a police officer I feared would harm me when he saw the “M” on my ID before I got it changed. I had to fight the urge to kill myself, multiple times, from my despair at thinking I could never bear children and that no one could love a freakish body like my own, after hearing my own mother tell me this, after hearing men who had praised my beauty tell me how revolting I was upon learning I was trans.
A whim?
Lana Wachowski came out as a transgender woman in 2010, and Lilly Wachowski came out in 2016. The Matrix, for all its talk of enforced reality and system-smashing anarchism, was likely never just about power fantasy and combating feelings of insignificance in the daily grind of corporate America. It is a film about transition into a truer, freer version of oneself in a world that resists you doing so, and it is informed by the Wachowski sisters’ experiences as closeted transgender women.
One thing I’ve learned about trans people is that almost all of us end up asking ourselves these questions, in one form or another. As easy as they are for me to answer now, though, these lines of questioning can make you feel hopeless and defeated if you’re trying to work through them on your own. There’s no way to sum up all transfeminine experiences, and everyone eventually has to find their own, unique answers, but if you're a person who was assigned male at birth and is struggling with questions like the ones I had, here are some answers that might help.
My most recent experiences in the classroom, coupled with my experiences while conducting research within the transgender community, however, have convinced me that our current practice of asking that everyone state their personal pronoun is not a good idea. My position is perhaps best explained by sharing two experiences.
In my gender class, as it has come to be known, I ask that students journal in response to readings, class discussions or a prompt on a controversial issue. Occasionally, those entries get personal. In a recent year, a student revealed in an entry that they thought they might be transgender. The next time I spoke with the student alone, with the best of intentions, I asked what pronoun they wanted me to use. Their eyes filled with tears as they answered, “I don’t know.” At about the same time, I asked someone at a conference what pronoun to use, and she burst into tears. She later explained that she had hoped that she “passed” and that my question made her feel like she did not.
The term was intended to explain some parents’ observations that 1) their children came out as transgender seemingly suddenly, often during puberty, and 2) their children also had trans-identified peers and interacted with trans-themed social media. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for reluctant parents to presume that their child has adopted a trans (or LGBTQ+ more generally) identity as a result of undue influence from other children and/or outside sources
La vérité du genre n’existe pas en dehors d’un ensemble de conventions sociales intersubjectives. Le genre n’est pas une propriété psychique ou physique du sujet ni une identité naturelle, c’est une relation de pouvoir soumise à un processus collectif constant d’assujettissement - en même temps de soutien et de contrôle, de subjectivation et de soumission.
When I stopped drinking, I finally realized the deep sadness I'd been trying to drown with alcohol was really gender dysphoria.
Since having a reserve army of labor is necessary, capitalism requires a set of criteria for who will be granted status as a laborer and proletariat and who will be relegated to unemployment. Social marginalization on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and gender identity all serve a crucial role within capitalism to ensure that some people are forced into the reserve army of labor. Social marginalization is actually a fundamental structuring principle of capitalist economics.
There’s little conversation about the bodies of trans women who have not undergone gender confirmation surgery—online, in media, anywhere, really. Where are all the sex guides for trans women who don’t want to have surgery, who aren’t ready, or who haven’t yet had the opportunity?
To create my own, I decided to chronicle my own process, and reach out to trans women friends to ask what’s helped them most. Here's what I learned.
We cannot separate our sense of our gender from the social forces which construct both sex and gender and which influence the ways we think of ourselves. If both gender and sex are constructed, then we can imagine a world where we didn’t have a gendered or sexed idea of ourselves. This would indicate that the concept of gender identity is not a stable and unchanging concept, but is contingent and dependent on socially and culturally prevalent notions of gender.