For those stuck in an annoying-ass argument with someone who just doesn’t understand what’s wrong with transphobic jokes, here’s your resource.
A collection of videos showing instances of the great liberal heroes, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, being transphobic.
Trigger Warnings on every post!
If you have any I haven’t posted or catch any errors, please feel free to let me know!For anybody still living in “but it’s SATIRE” land. Or the equally popular “I won’t believe it until I see some PROOF” land.
Grandma: He doesn’t like the thought of you with another girl, it’s a “man thing.”
Me: So it’s a “man thing” to be a bigoted asshole?
He honestly doesn’t feel this way at all. My grandma is projecting and looking for a way to justify misgendering my fiancee.
When I was thrown in the headlines for my Twitter/Tumblr commentary on the saga that is Azealia Banks vs. Perez Hilton, I knew I needed to occupy some space to expand this matter - hence my xoJane piece “How I Landed In the Ring with Azealia & Perez”.
It’s about the weight of our language, about our society’s creation of victims-villains, and about how we must all - media makers, famous folk and pop culture consumers - hold one another accountable for our biases, words and actions, no matter what bodies they come from and the ones they hit.
yes, i realise the katy perry quote is fake
yes, you can stop sending me messages about it
yes, i am sorry for reblogging a falsity
yes, i still think katy perry shouldn’t have won that award and is a crappy ally
yes, you are free to disagree
no, i don’t want to hear about it
i agree with you completely. anyone who has a song that claims that kissing girls is “not what good girls do” is not someone i’d consider a great ally.
Yeah but why are we holding her responsible for a song she wrote like six years ago? I mean, I’m kind of neutral on the whole thing, I don’t think she’s a shining beacon of LGBT support but I don’t think she’s an awful ally; but I think this example is dated. I mean, I’m bi/pan and try really hard to always think about what I say and shit, but in the past I’ve definitely made offensive and not prudent comments. I think that’s probably true of most of us?
I don’t even think this paragraph is that well articulated actually, so never mind.
Just because she wrote the song in the past doesn’t mean that she’s automatically absolved of it years later. She’s never issued any sort of formal apology for that, or another song she wrote called Ur So Gay which is full of homophobia. She also made a ton of transphobic comments and has never apologized for them either.
I don’t get why we’re so quick to apologize on someone else’s behalf when it happened “in the past”, as if it makes everything okay.
The most difficult thing for me to communicate to people who don’t live it is what it is like to fear for Minerva’s physical and emotional safety any and every moment that she is in public while away from me. How do I find the words that accurately articulate what that puts me through? And if I could find them, would you truly understand? Do you have the life experiences necessary to form a basis of understanding, a context for what that feels like?
Now, I’m not saying you’re an idiot, I’m not saying you’re cold hearted, but what I am saying is that she is treated completely differently than you. People stare and yell and interrogate her, questioning her existence and her right to be, her right to take up space. When we leave this building she will check her pocket for her knife, and as she is double checking that she could pull it out quickly enough if she needed to, I will look around the corners and in the shadows to make sure that no one who has that look is there, the look that says “Who you are makes me confused and angry and I will want to hurt you if you come near me.”
I can recognize that look in an instant from twenty feet away, because I have had to learn to feel it seeping out of your pores for our safety. When we are together in public, we cannot risk to get too distracted by each other, we cannot afford to let our guard down, and we have developed a nonverbal system that means “Look out that person looks upset at us for being, brace yourself for staring or interrogations about genitals or yelling or denial and refusal of her identity or worse.”
I have felt the need to run and she has had to reveal her knife before. We have had to learn whole new meanings to the words ‘Be safe’ ‘Be careful’ It doesn’t just mean avoid dangerous situations anymore, because if we don’t actively protect ourselves, if we are not constantly aware of who is around us, we will get hurt.
Maybe you think I’m judgmental. Should I really take one look at someone and decide if they are gonna be the asshole who asks if she’s a dude or a girl? Should I seriously make the call based on the privileges you have? Let me ask you a question- Can we afford not to? With the knowledge and reality that her sisters make up almost all of the murders against trans* people, can we risk it?
And yeah, we can talk about privilege; that likelihood goes down a little because she is white. Still, if you’re listening you can hear that what I’m really saying is “Oh, good thing she is slightly less likely to be murdered, how lucky.”
People with more privilege are less likely to understand what it is to be oppressed, are less likely to understand what we go through, are more likely to be confused and angry, and why? Because they don’t have to think about any of this shit. When we leave the grocery store with out incident, there is reason to celebrate. “How lovely was it, Minerva darling, that we weren’t subject to discrimination, staring, or other hate crimes while we were selecting and making our purchase?”
The people who are more likely to understand how complicated it is when she needs to pee in public are the ones who are less likely to harass us. And if the world can take one look at a person and based on that treat them with a certain amount of privilege, I can also take one look and see what kinds of privilege you have.
Do you appear to be white? Straight? Cis gender? Male? Are you wearing a suit? Are you conventionally attractive? These are just some of the things that I consider about every single person who comes near her.
If you would like to take a moment here to insist that you don’t see these things, you don’t see race or sexual orientation or gender or class, you just see people, keep in mind that in doing so, you are denying their history and experience and identity. You are denying who we are.
You don’t see gender? You don’t see her gender? Do you know how fucking hard it is for her to prove her gender to the world? How rare it is to be around someone who embraces her gender? Nevermind that, it’s nearly impossible to find anyone who even acknowledges that her gender exists. This world is designed to invalidate her existence as a trans lady and she has to exert exhausting amounts of effort in trying to say,”No really! I’m a girl!”
“I don’t see gender.” Do you really fucking think she wants to be told that? Listen to that- her gender doesn’t matter, because all you see is people. Yeah, she knows her gender doesn’t fucking matter to you, because every day most people will look right past her presentation and see something she’s not and then insist on telling her, “No that’s what you really are.” See her gender. Acknowledge it. Respect it. Understand the history that comes with it and consider what it means about her life experience. Hear me when I tell you that I got fired when my coworkers met her. Understand that because of existing systems, no I fucking can’t do anything about it.
I am so sick of trying to explain to privileged people that this world is not set up to be in favor of a brown person who is dating a visibly trans person. I am so frustrated by trying to find the right words to express to you what it feels like going through life knowing that people hate her because of her transness. She walks around with the knowledge that most people’s understanding of trans women is the stereotypes that say she is a rapist, she is a prostitute, she is a joke, she is pretend. Can you feel what that is like?
In order for you to grasp it, I first must teach you about the systems that we are navigating. I know there are a lot of concepts I talk about that this world doesn’t generally teach people to think about, like privilege and what transphobia feels like. Another reality is that I don’t have the time or energy to explain it to every person I walk by. Being trans and queer and brown has no job description and I am not responsible for being your educator.
So do us a favor and educate yourself, because it takes more than not being an asshole to make space for oppressed people. You are taught to internalize cissexism. Have you ever taken a biology class that tells you that males have penises and females have vaginas? That’s cissexism. Being nice to us isn’t what makes you not transphobic, actively checking your privilege and making an effort to understand how someone else’s life experience is completely altered by being not cis is a good start.
And then when we are uncomfortable with your cis-ness, understand why. Don’t try and convince us that you’re not like that, because the people who will feel the need to prove themselves to us are the ones who refuse to respect why we feel unsafe and who will ignore our boundaries. When we walk down the street and don’t trust someone, it isn’t because we assume they’re a horrible person, it’s because they come from a completely different life experience that places them higher in the social order than us and they probably don’t understand that it exists and that feels unsafe. I don’t think that every person is going to be an asshole to her, but it could be any person. And I can’t risk letting my guard down. I will fucking protect her however I see fit and I don’t want anyone to tell me that we ought to just relax or stop being so afraid, because this is real and this is how we have to live.
And after all this I feel like these words aren’t important. Who will hear them, I mean really hear them? Who will do something about it? I feel so fucking angry that I don’t feel like this is considered an important issue and so fucking hurt that most people will have never considered any of this. She has been and will be one of the most important people in my life. She has taught me how to love myself and stand up for myself and that having panic attacks doesn’t make me a horrible person and that sex can be exciting and consensual and that I am capable of having a healthy, loving relationship. She is wonderful and inspiring and to know that there are people who want people like her to be dead? It’s hard for me to feel like anyone else knows what that’s like.
I’m crying because I only know these two beautiful people over the internet but they have touched my heart so deeply. Their words are powerful and needed. Their existence is revolutionary and they are so strong to hold up against the scrutiny and the hatred. Knowing they both are in this world makes me want to be a better person. Their courage inspires me and I’m just in awe.
Thank you Galileo, thank you Minerva. I don’t even really know you, I may never get to meet you or hug you, but I love you.
This is super relevant for me, I go through this every single day. I am crying because you’ve summed up everything. Thank you for making this video.
And yes, it’s time to unmask another one of the feminist icons, Gloria Steinem as a transphobe.
She not only wrote some foul stuff centered on Renee Richards in 1977 when hating on transwomen was par for the feminist course, but in the 1983 book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions that was recently republished.
My post last week about the “I date women and trans men” sexuality frame was one of the hardest and scariest bits of writing I’ve ever done. I’ve been heartened to see it shared widely and prompt a lot of discussion, including among a lot of the folks who inspired me to write the piece in the first place. There’s also been a lot of push back, and I want to respond to some of that here.
Specifically, I want to address the arguments that I’m about policing people’s sexualities, that it’s not cissexist to exclude just cis men from a community’s sexuality, and the discussion about excluding trans women because we’ve been socialized male.To be clear, this is a response to critiques from within queer and trans communities. There’s been plenty of push back from radical feminists, too, but I don’t think it’s worth my time to engage. I do think it’s revealing, though, that the arguments I’m hearing from folks who aren’t intentionally transphobic are some of the same arguments coming from radfems. Radfems are deliberately, intentionally writing from a cissexist frame that doesn’t see trans folks’ genders as legitimate or real (it’s pretty ridiculous when they get upset because I’m apparently saying trans men shouldn’t be available to them, as lesbians, for sex). So it says a lot to me about the ideas embedded in responses from the queer community when they’re practically the same.
I get why people don’t want to think critically about sexuality in this way, I really do. It’s very hard to separate critiquing a sexuality frame from judging your individual life choices. I get why folks were offended. But I’m offended by a culture that says – no, shouts – that girls like me don’t belong in the realm of sexuality at all, except as fetish objects. I share this feeling with a lot of people, which is why I took the leap into the conversation.
I see a community that wants to to do gender better drawing lines around sexuality in a way that’s overdetermined by cisnormativity, and I think that’s worth talking about.
I take the critique about policing sexuality very seriously. This is absolutely not my intent, as I said in the original post. I don’t want to police people’s desires, and I certainly don’t want to police who you fuck. I do want to call out the way cissexism is overdetermining a community’s sexuality frame. The “I date [presumed cis] women and trans men” approach is based in the genders coercively assigned to people at birth – on cis genders. There’s a ton of internal community policing to maintain this frame. I’ve seen queer women struggle with not wanting to date any men when they’re community tells them they should be dating trans men. I’ve seen a lot of female assigned folks get shamed for dating cis men, with the flip side of folks being praised for dating trans men.
I wrote about this frame undermining trans guy’s identities because that’s what I hear from my community (all my examples were based heavily in experience). The trans guys I choose to surround myself with work really hard to undo their misogyny and examine their role in patriarchy. Because they are men in the world. Sadly, I’ve also seen and heard about a lot of trans guys who take advantage of this frame to not lose their community, despite the fact that it’s a women’s community. I’ve seen them take advantage of this frame to get laid by folks who say they don’t want to be dating men, but are told dating trans men is different. I might have more complex feelings if these guys were actively working to bring trans women into these women’s spaces and women’s communities, but I’m not seeing that happen.
Finally, I want to talk about the claim that folks don’t date cis men or trans women because both groups were socialized male. This is the same argument that was used to keep my foremothers out of women’s groups in the 70s. Folks said trans women were bringing male energy, taking up too much space, re-traumatizing cis women just by existing (this linked up nicely with the early radfem arguments that our bodies were mutilated acts of rape and should be destroyed). I’m deeply disturbed to see this argument rear its ugly head again.Which brings me to the whole excluding cis men issue. Again, I don’t want to police your personal desires or needs. But I do want to call out the idea that cis men are necessarily different from trans men in some overarching way that can apply to a whole queer community for a whole range of reasons. This is anincredibly essentialist understanding of gender that doesn’t match up with reality. Both cis and trans men can work to be conscious of their role in patriarchy, work to resist misogyny, work to perform maleness or masculinity in non-oppressive ways. They can also both be not-so-masculine (yes, cis and trans folks, including men and women, can both be gender non-conforming). And both can use their male privilege to maintain their position in a gendered hierarchy, to do hurt to women. As I said in the OP, there’s an epidemic of unquestioned misogyny among way too many trans men that’s getting supported in part by the idea that these men couldn’t be misogynist because they were assigned female. Yep, there’s that cissexist understanding of how gender works again. (By the way, making this about bodies is super essentialist and reality-free too: it assumes cisnormative understandings of bodies – the identities applied to bodies by the cis world – are true. It forgets that our understanding of “biological sex” is constructed by a cis-dominant culture. And it misses the diversity of sexed bodies and the way medical transition alters bodies.) There’s also erasure and pushing out of queer cis men, really all male assigned folks, who’s sexualities include female assigned folks.
I’m also baffled by the assumption that trans women were all successfully socialized as normative dudes. Obviously, there is no universal trans experience. In my experience, the socialization failed at every turn. Because I was never a man – that was sort of my body was understood by default (even the shape of my body got policed) because our culture’s understanding of bodies is cisnormative. But I’ve always been a girl who got forcibly put into the boy box. I tried really hard to fit for 22 years, and I failed miserably. My failure was policed with verbal, emotional, and physical violence. I did perform some patriarchal bullshit, like my anti-abortion politics – though I learned a lot of that from cis women, because all women can be agents of the patriarchy, too. I was even a member of an all-male clergy, though the way I performed my spirituality was shamed as well. Other trans women, especially women from an older generation, have attempted more extreme versions of male performance (this is the place that really makes sense to me to talk about gender as performance in relation to trans folks), like getting straight married or joining the military. These actions can be incredibly complex sites of a lot of feelings, including pain and trauma, for a lot of these women – not some simplistic male socialization when you’re not actually male.Once again – this is an incredibly essentialist and reality-free understanding of how socialization works. We don’t just get socialized into a gender up until the age of 4. Socialization is an ongoing process throughout our lives, one that’s dynamic, that we as feminists are called to play an active and deliberate role in directing and resisting.
I found it incredibly easy to unlearn this socialization, because I’d had to try so hard to perform that role. Girl instantly fit better. Sadly, the community I came out in during college, especially my reproductive justice organizing community, wanted my femininity to be about weakness because it was in a person assigned male. I’m still working to unlearn a version of femininity that’s about timidity, about not asking for what I want. I learned this both from being raised in a way that said other people’s issues with my gender were more important than my actual identity, and from the role I was pushed into by my queer and organizing community. Much more than being socialized male, I was socialized to put other’s needs about my body and identity ahead of my own. I’m not alone in struggling against this. I see a lot of my sisters working for strength in a lot of aspects of our lives, including our sexuality.
And what’s with the idea that being “socialized male” is 100% bad when it comes to trans women? Cis feminists are all about unlearning the problematic aspects of female socialization, about being able to do their genders in a range of ways without being policed for it. The fetishization of masculinity in female assigned folks stems partly from a celebration of taking on aspects of what’s understood as maleness that are about strength, about standing up for yourself and speaking your mind. But when it comes to trans women, we’re not allowed to display any of that.
Some of the critique leans on the idea that by calling for the inclusion of trans women and questioning the inclusion of trans but not cis men I’m reinforcing gender essentialism. This is a nice dodge from the way this sexuality frame reinforces cisnormativity. All of the pressure to move gender and sexuality forward is consistently put on the people at the bottom of these hierarchies. While other folks are able to do their identities in a range of ways, ours have to somehow be politically perfect. Trans women have done a ton to move concepts of gender and sexuality forward in a way that benefits everyone. But we’re also fighting for basic inclusion. If a community is constructing sexuality in a way that’s built around gender, it should be legitimately (not cisnormatively) inclusive of trans genders. Full stop.
There are plenty of ways to organize sexuality that aren’t necessarily based in cissexism. Like only dating queer folks, or only dating people with gender politics, or not dating assholes. Or even dating based on the way our attractions are a total mystery to us, cause that’s much more how desire works (*stops self from going into psychoanalytic theory on Feministing*).
I was under the impression part of being queer involves questioning the heteronormativity that gets fed to all of us, and that informs queer sexualities, too. Shouldn’t we be doing the same with cisnormativity?
One thing that bothers me as a proud, African descended trans woman is the ongoing sexist attacks aimed at women of color.
Women come in all shapes, sizes, skin tones and body configurations, but women of color have had to deal with a centuries old ‘vanillacentric’ beauty standard that was not created with them or their bodies in mind and uplifts white women as the ultimate templates for femininity while negatively impacting women of color.
Because of that beauty standard, far too often black women get ‘that’s a man’ or ‘ugly’ shade hurled at them. You only need look at Satoshi’s Kanazawa’s May 2011 Psychology Today ‘Why Are Black Women Ugly’ article as an in-your-face example of the ‘unwoman’ meme gone pseudo-scientific. One of Kanazawa’s assertions in the article was black women were ‘more manly’ due to extra testosterone in their systems. Thankfully, the article was taken down after it generated a worldwide firestorm of criticism and outrage.
As the Williams sisters, Fantasia, Ciara, Wendy Williams, Grace Jones, Brittney Griner and Caster Semenya can tell you, women who are deemed to have a non-standard feminine presentation, larger-than-life personality, a thin, athletic frame, are 5’7” or taller, wear a double digit shoe size or have a combination of physical traits that are deemed to be more apropos to the masculine gender have ‘that’s a man’ derision hurled at them. Even the late Donna Summer battled rumors in 1978 that she was a transsexual despite being the mother of two children.
Flinging the ‘you’re a trans woman’ accusation at a trans woman has sadly become the weaponized insult of choice by men and women when they wish to disparage any woman they don’t like.
[ALSO READ: A Transgendered Woman On Love And Hip-Hop]
We’ve had an off the charts epidemic of transphobia breaking out in the black gossip blogosphere for several years. While much of it has been aimed at Ciara and Wendy Williams, the latest target in the transphobes sights is Joseline Hernandez of the VH1 reality television show “Love And Hip-Hop Atlanta.”
Because Joseline has some traits that are deemed by the Black Blogosphere Femininity Police as belonging to the opposite gender, she has been savaged by rumors that she is a trans woman. She overreacted to those rumors by tweeting a frontal nude photo of herself that showed her female genitalia backed up by a tweet proclaiming she was ‘100% female.’
Transmisogny is gleefully trafficked by the editors of the blogs and runs amok in their comment threads. In one post by Bossip, they used the derogatory anti-trans slur word ‘shim’ in a post about Ms. Hernandez before it was changed.
Some of the transphobic ignorance displayed in the black gossip blogosphere aimed at Ms. Hernandez is fed by stereotypical and false assertions on what a trans woman looks like. It also has its roots in loud and wrong transphobic writings penned by a depressing long list of radical feminists for four decades such as Janice Raymond, Germaine Greer, the late Mary Daly, Sheila Jeffreys and Julie Bindel.
It hasn’t helped that since trans people began a renewed push in the mid-90s to gain trans human rights coverage, right-wing fundamentalist Christians, including some right-wing gay and lesbian fundamentalists have engaged in anti-trans bigotry and tactics to stop this coverage.
The white trans community has had a plethora of sympathetic popular culture trans characters on shows such as All In The Family, Ally McBeal, The L Word, Ugly Betty, Dirty Sexy Money and the movie Transamerica. The last time a Black trans woman was portrayed on screen without being cast as a sex worker, drag queen or a murder victim was The Jeffersons ‘Edith Stokes’ in 1977, Sheryl Lee Ralph’s ‘Claire’ in Showtime’s Barbershop the Series and Tyra Banks’ ‘Roni’ on the show All of Us.
[ALSO READ: Public Perception Of Trans Women Of Color]
Because the trans narrative has predominately been a white, upper, middle class one, far too often the people tapped to speak for the trans community on panels and talk shows, do the activism, or write articles for the trans community have been in that demographic. The invisibility of trans people of color in the media and LGBT movement resulting from that dynamic has led to a perception that transsexuality is a ‘white thang’ or trans people don’t exist in our communities.
Thanks to the rise of the trans blogosphere and Afrocentric blogs such as TransGriot, supportive trans allies and bloggers such as Womanist Musings and What Tami Said, increasing trans activism, ally organizations such as GLAAD, out and proud trans women such as Janet Mock, Laverne Cox, Valerie Spencer, Angelica Ross and Tona Brown, a tradition of Black trans activism that began in Philadelphia with the 1965 Dewey’s Lunch Counter Sit-In and the 1969 Stonewall Riots, we have begun to push back against the lies, negativity and outright distortions about who and what a trans woman is.
Our media outlets and legacy organizations such as the NAACP, the National Black Justice Coalition, and new ones like the Trans People of Color Coalition are beginning to facilitate the badly needed discussions inside and outside our community about trans women and how we fit into the kente cloth fabric of it.
It’s a necessary conversation we need to have if we are going to stop the trans misogyny aimed at trans women.
This is your reminder that private insurance companies often refuse trans* people not only medically necessary transition care (which is seen by the insurance companies as “cosmetic” even though the medical community agrees it’s medically necessary), but also care which even the insurance companies consider medically necessary, on the grounds that transition is causing whatever the problem is and if you’d just stop transitioning, everything would be okay.
This is also your reminder that we have a feminist to thank for that.
I exist. You'll find out more about me by reading my blog. Or not, I don't care.
Cleo’s Kittens. Photo by catmitt
