I’ve just read the new Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
She-males and drag queens and bois, oh my.
Bornstein & Bergman found not just the outlaws but the outliers, the people who have deconstructed, reconstructed and reimagined their genders, for whom gender is not just an identity or expression but the last tool in the toolbox. Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation is a good way to get up to speed on the shifting, new, and created identities of Genderland.
Vive la Revolution.
I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but it includes a contribution of mine, so I’m glad you liked it!
So now we’re supposed to be cool with people using the term “shemales.” Anyone in the queer community can use it whenever they want… is that right? Kate and Bear the guardians of what’s hip and trans have OK’d it? And anyone who objects to it is just reactionary, and non-queer positive?
I don’t care if you think you view yourself as an ally, if you’re some PoMo Queer, who your partner is, if you don’t happen to like the term cis… I’m feeling really disrespected when people assume they can use language like that much less make it into some silly little joke. No doubt we’ll have trans men droning on about how they’re reclaiming shemale in solidarity with sexworkers. The next step is trans women being called “queer men” by people who are convinced any form of physical transition is irrelevant and buying in to the binary. Go fuck yourself.
hey, genderkid, i’d love to know which one is yours.
gina, the person who wrote the piece on being a she-male will surely get – & has already gotten – plenty of email from people eviscerating her for the identity tag she prefers for herself. i would never call anyone a she-male, unless of course they insisted, & in that piece, she is. (she does give very interesting reasons why, too).
the book *is* called Gender Outlaws (accent on the outlaw). i echoed “lions & tiger & bears” exactly becaue the identities i mentioned are scary to our culture at large, no matter if you’re trans or not.
but the point of a blurb is to let people know whether they need to read a book or not. for you, not. so the blurb has done its job.
ginasf,
You remind me of those proto-christian-fascists during the ’80s that railed against the Last Temptation of Christ without having seen it or read it.
As such, I have as much respect for you as I did for them. Fuck you very kindly.
From reading a few books, including Gender Outlaw and Genderqueer, I realized that while I am sometimes interested in genderqueers and others who bend and break the rules, I don’t relate to them personally. That’s not my story. My story is ever so much more conventional — born transsexual, transitioned, now happily female. I’m definitely part of the sexual (physiological) binary scheme, and I’ve never felt constrained by any kind of gender (behavioural) binary. I’m not making any statements with my life. I’m just me.
So when I read books like the above, I’m reading about someone else, not me, and I have no problem with that. The only problem is when people lump us all together and think we’re all radical gender-benders. I could be flattered, I suppose, to be considered avant-gard, but really, I’m no ground breaker. I leave the ground breaking to those for whom it’s the right fit.
I didn’t “eviscerate” the person who wrote about ID’ing as a sh*male (and if you ever read ads in Craigslist, you’ll know she’s not alone), I’m criticizing the non-trans writer who quoted that term and put it in her blurb. Yup, sh*male is okay to put on GLEE and feature in book blurbs. It’s no different than “boi” (an innocuous term which reeks of Peter Pan Syndrome but is hardly controversial) and “drag queen” *yawn*. To pretend those terms have anything in common is careless. And yes, it IS trading in the shock value of the term to help ‘sell’ the blurb and the book.
gina, you baffle me. by using an identity term used by someone in the book in the book blurb about the book in which the essay written by the person who uses that term appears… I’ve – what? stated the obvious? what have i done besides provide an accurate description of the book? which you haven’t read, of course, but you get the idea from my blurb. it’s not about about people who are trans. it’s about people who are intentionally trans, genderfucking, genderqueer, kicking in doors.
the only thing i’m saying those terms have in common is that they are identities explored in the book. nothing more.
gina, this too: that some moron might call a woman (of trans experience) a she-male is a problem. that is, if anyone decides that what they get to call someone is based on the goddamn porn industry, that’s a problem. i’m still upset about the reclaiming of “bitch” and its use as a compliment, no less.
“shock factor” is half the point of the book, & half the point of someone self-identifying as “she-male.” that is, the shock value was there in the book, intentionally, long before i wrote my blurb.
btw, i appreciate you using “non trans” up above. out of respect, i will not use “she-male” ever again, unless i am directly quoting someone else who says it.
Helen,
I agree with you that ‘shock factor’ is sadly the point about a lot of writing about trans people. I have issues with people who assume trans identities for the purpose of being “outlaws” or “shock troops” and especially, about lording over other trans people what they should or shouldn’t be upset about. I still say those terms don’t belong with one another… anyplace. It’s like saying “coon, housewife and cub scout” and not pointing out that one of those has a highly loaded history (okay, so does housewife). (and “coon”like shemale was used by many African American blackface performers and on thousands of titles of American popular music and mainstreamed to the point where most people of that era wouldn’t have equated it with “nigger” and would have suggested it as a legitimate entertainment term for black people.)
Btw, I highly recommend Patrick Califia’s critical deconstruction of Bornstein’s writing in his book: Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism.
Yes, I admit to being incredibly sick of the Bornstein cult and the uncritical sway zie has over Gender Studies departments.
Gina
Have you ever written a piece about the term that explains its history & why it’s offensive? I would like to read something like that, & it’d be a good thing to establish for academia.
I’m not sure if youv’e ever read The N Word, but it’s amazing:
http://www.amazon.com/Word-Who.....0618197176
Maybe I’m mistaken, but what I know about “she-male” is that it’s an old term that was adapted for pejorative use of trans women, that it’s used primarily as a “marketing” term in the porn/sex work industry, & is obviously intentionally de-humanizing, etc. Or is it the specific use by Raymond that makes it so historically offensive? That’s what I want to know.
& Yes, I have read Patrick Califia’s book, but it was a while back & I have to say I can’t remember the finer points of his critique of Kate. It’s an amazing book all around.
In the meantime, I would really like to find a well-written narrative by a woman who transitioned younger, lives stealth, etc. If you know of one, let me know. Right now the only ones I can think of are Blumenstein’s Branded T and the 30-year old Canary Conn memoir (which are both problematic in different ways). I’d really like to see a happy trans memoir by a productive, cool woman. Ironically, it’s what’s missing from the trans canon.
The book “The Woman I Was Not Born to Be” by Alesha Brevard isn’t a great work of literature, but it’s very picaresque, gutsy and often hilarious. She was a hick, worked as a female impersonator (at Finocchios in SF) during the late 50s-60s, castrated herself, got SRS in the late 60s (this was before Stanley Biber even started his practice), worked as a Playboy Bunny, as a showgirl in films and on the Dean Martin show, made some cheezeball movies, went back to school and got a masters in theater, acted, was a teacher of theater at a college, was married 3 times and now lives near Santa Cruz. (she’s also mentioned by crazy humor writer Jonathan Ames as a cougar he slept with!). It’s sometimes harrowing but it’s not a depressing book in the least. Brevard is the ultimate classy dame but she’s old school. The other one that’s a great book of a contemporary of Brevard’s (but unfortunately not in English… only French) is Marie-Pier Ysser (AKA Bambi’s) autobiography “J’inventais ma vie”. She transitioned young, lived as a famous show girl, but then went to the Sorbonne, got a degree and then went into stealth, taught French in a high outside of Paris for 30 years and, upon retirement, wrote her book and came out yet again in a very publicly way. Happy… I don’t know, be she’s an incredibly grounded, chic and wonderful woman in her 70s.
If you’re looking for modern, hip queer-positive… they don’t write books, they’re on forums or, sometimes, blogs. Honestly, the women I know who did transition young and really lived in stealth weren’t what I would call happy characters (although some are very accomplished). But tellingly, quite a number of them have come out (in the forum world anyway) as they got into middle age. It’s hard to find someone who did that who doesn’t have a certain amount of bitterness.
I’m not an etymologist (and barely know how to spell it). Obviously as it is now, “shemale” is owned by the sex industry (and I would argue “tranny” only slightly less so if we’re truly honest about it). Which is why I compare it to coon, a similar word which had its beginnings with a different meaning (it originally referred to countrified white people while shemale was occasionally used in the 19th century towards women who did man’s work), was used as an occasional pointed pejorative for black people later in its history (as Janice Raymond did with ‘shemale’) but “came into its own” when used by minstrels (there was a famous hit song called “zip coon” basically about an urban/dandy black man) and it came into popular (though not polite) usage for the next 40-50 years and constantly appeared in song titles, stories, humor monologues, etc. (including those written and performed by black people… albeit targeted for a white audiene) It commodified and codified an oppressor’s image of black men. Shemale does much the same thing. It turns trans women’s bodies into commodities and objects of oppression… as coon did with the black men. But, like coon, it has pretensions to being “a joke” or part of the entertainment world. The supposedly humorous aspect allows the term to assume a mark of irony and satire which (in our PoMo world) is often used to shield terminology and expressions of oppression against criticism. The reality is, in this society, most (not all) young trans women who do porn are doing it for survival. The endless stream of Brazilian and Asian Anyway, Someone like Susan Stryker or Lisa Harney could do a much better job with this than I could.
I just want to add Kate Bornstein’s frequent reference to how “tranny” is a community-generated term originating in Australia is a crock. Zie admits hir sole source of information was Aussie drag queen Philip Mills (AKA Doris Fish). This is akin to believing a white woman really did get on all fours in an elevator because a black man entered it with his dog and said “heel”… because someone you know told you so and saw it happen. Yet zie continues to repeat this “fact” no matter how flimsy the source. Zie is a writer/performer/ex-scientology bigwig, not any kind of acknowledged expert (whatever that means) on the subject of gender nor an activist. So why do gender studies departments give hir such a free pass and accept everything zie says at face value? I think it’s because zie tells them what they want to hear. Once a Scientologist, always a …
I haven’t read the N Word, but I heard him at an Author’s Talk speaking about his book on Obama.
@Veronique
Hi Veronique! Your position is sort of where I am. I have less interest in tearing down the binary than I do in reforming it. This is why I resisted at first when asked to contribute to the book.
However, Bear and Kate assured me that they wanted to include my viewpoint, even if it didn’t seem to match the radical genderbender archetype. I was a little wary, but soon I was very happy with how openminded and welcoming they were!
Ryka
Ryka, you convinced me. I bought the book this past weekend when I was at Powell’s in Portland. Looking forward to reading it!
hi there! I’m just catching this thread…I’m in the book too. It’s interesting how heated some responses to reviews have been. “These people don’t speak for me” is a recurring theme. I feel as squelched as anyone – I feel lucky to have been given a voice here! And my own message, my experience, is that transitioning shifted my consciousness and opened me up to an experience of connecting with ALL beings, not just human.
My message is that I love you; you’re amazing. You don’t have to share my vision(s) – they’re mine – but given the amount of human hate heaped upon us, I hope some of us can hear how gorgeous and spectacular and ordinary and wonderful we are. ALL of us.
love.