I confess to having, and being troubled by, similar ambivalent feelings as the author quoted below, about transgendered celebrities like Chad Bono's & Caitlin Jenner's ideas about masculinity & femininity - for example how Bruce now Caitlin's looking forward to wearing nail polish, or how Chelsea now Chad Bono says he dislikes talking about his feelings now he's male - since those ideas seem to fail to realize that such ideas of femininity & masculinity are social constructs, i.e. learned behaviors as opposed to something inherent to gender. I am happy to read that I'm not the only one who "winced" when hearing them say such things. And I wondered whether all transgendered people were like that.
Thinking about it, I realized that I
do know a transgendered woman who
doesn't conform to those stereotypes, that to think that Chad & Caitlin represented all transgendered people was just silly, and was happy to read MsPea's comment on the following article, which ran along the lines of something I'd guessed:
Having hidden their need to dress and act like women all their lives, [some transgendered women] go a little overboard when they first transition. So what? There's nothing like the extremism of the convert. The same happens when people find God, find AA, fall in love. The strong feelings die down after a while, and probably so will Caitlyn's enthusiasm. She'll be wearing no makeup and baggy sweats in no time.
I hope that's the case, and that you'll have time/interest to read the following.
What Makes a Woman?
Do women and men have different brains?
Back
when Lawrence H. Summers was president of Harvard and suggested that
they did, the reaction was swift and merciless. Pundits branded him
sexist. Faculty members deemed him a troglodyte. Alumni withheld
donations.
But
when Bruce Jenner said much the same thing in an April interview with
Diane Sawyer, he was lionized for his bravery, even for his
progressivism.
“My brain is much more female than it is male,” he told her, explaining how he knew that he was transgender.
This
was the prelude to a new photo spread and interview in Vanity Fair that
offered us a glimpse into Caitlyn Jenner’s idea of a woman: a
cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect
of regular “girls’ nights” of banter about hair and makeup. Ms. Jenner
was greeted with even more thunderous applause. ESPN announced it would
give Ms. Jenner an award for courage. President Obama also praised her.
Not to be outdone, Chelsea Manning hopped on Ms. Jenner’s gender train
on Twitter, gushing, “I am so much more aware of my emotions; much more
sensitive emotionally (and physically).”
A part of me winced.
I
have fought for many of my 68 years against efforts to put women — our
brains, our hearts, our bodies, even our moods — into tidy boxes, to
reduce us to hoary stereotypes. Suddenly, I find that many of the people
I think of as being on my side — people who proudly call themselves
progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination —
are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female
brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered
destiny is encoded in us.
That’s
the kind of nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries. But
the desire to support people like Ms. Jenner and their journey toward
their truest selves has strangely and unwittingly brought it back.
People
who haven’t lived their whole lives as women, whether Ms. Jenner or Mr.
Summers, shouldn’t get to define us. That’s something men have been
doing for much too long. And as much as I recognize and endorse the
right of men to throw off the mantle of maleness, they cannot stake
their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on mine as a
woman.
Their
truth is not my truth. Their female identities are not my female
identity. They haven’t traveled through the world as women and been
shaped by all that this entails. They haven’t suffered through business
meetings with men talking to their breasts or woken up after sex
terrified they’d forgotten to take their birth control pills the day
before. They haven’t had to cope with the onset of their periods in the
middle of a crowded subway, the humiliation of discovering that their
male work partners’ checks were far larger than theirs, or the fear of
being too weak to ward off rapists.
For
me and many women, feminist and otherwise, one of the difficult parts
of witnessing and wanting to rally behind the movement for transgender
rights is the language that a growing number of trans individuals insist
on, the notions of femininity that they’re articulating, and their
disregard for the fact that being a woman means having accrued certain
experiences, endured certain indignities and relished certain courtesies
in a culture that reacted to you as one.
Brains
are a good place to begin because one thing that science has learned
about them is that they’re in fact shaped by experience, cultural and
otherwise. The part of the brain that deals with navigation is enlarged
in London taxi drivers, as is the region dealing with the movement of
the fingers of the left hand in right-handed violinists.
“You
can’t pick up a brain and say ‘that’s a girl’s brain’ or ‘that’s a
boy’s brain,’ ” Gina Rippon, a neuroscientist at Britain’s Aston
University,
told
The Telegraph last year. The differences between male and female brains
are caused by the “drip, drip, drip” of the gendered environment, she
said.
THE
drip, drip, drip of Ms. Jenner’s experience included a hefty dose of
male privilege few women could possibly imagine. While young “Bruiser,”
as Bruce Jenner was called as a child, was being cheered on toward a
university athletic scholarship, few female athletes could dare hope for
such largess since universities offered little funding for women’s
sports. When Mr. Jenner looked for a job to support himself during his
training for the 1976 Olympics, he didn’t have to turn to the meager
“Help Wanted – Female” ads in the newspapers, and he could get by on the
$9,000 he earned annually, unlike young women whose median pay was
little more than half that of men. Tall and strong, he never had to
figure out how to walk streets safely at night.
Those are realities that shape women’s brains.
By
defining womanhood the way he did to Ms. Sawyer, Mr. Jenner and the
many advocates for transgender rights who take a similar tack ignore
those realities. In the process, they undermine almost a century of
hard-fought arguments that the very definition of female is a social
construct that has subordinated us. And they undercut our efforts to
change the circumstances we grew up with.
The
“I was born in the wrong body” rhetoric favored by other trans people
doesn’t work any better and is just as offensive, reducing us to our
collective breasts and vaginas. Imagine the reaction if a young white
man suddenly declared that he was trapped in the wrong body and, after
using chemicals to change his skin pigmentation and crocheting his hair
into twists, expected to be embraced by the black community.
Many
women I know, of all ages and races, speak privately about how
insulting we find the language trans activists use to explain
themselves. After Mr. Jenner talked about his brain, one friend called
it an outrage and asked in exasperation, “Is he saying that he’s bad at
math, weeps during bad movies and is hard-wired for empathy?” After the
release of the Vanity Fair photos of Ms. Jenner, Susan Ager, a Michigan
journalist, wrote on her Facebook page, “I fully support Caitlyn Jenner,
but I wish she hadn’t chosen to come out as a sex babe.”
For
the most part, we bite our tongues and do not express the anger we
openly and rightly heaped on Mr. Summers, put off by the mudslinging
match that has broken out on the radical fringes of both the women’s and
the trans movements over events limited to “women-born women,” access
to bathrooms and who has suffered the greater persecution. The insult
and outright fear that trans men and women live with is all too familiar
to us, and a cruelly marginalized group’s battle for justice is
something we instinctively want to rally behind.
But
as the movement becomes mainstream, it’s growing harder to avoid asking
pointed questions about the frequent attacks by some trans leaders on
women’s right to define ourselves, our discourse and our bodies. After
all, the trans movement isn’t simply echoing African-Americans,
Chicanos, gays or women by demanding an end to the violence and
discrimination, and to be treated with a full measure of respect. It’s
demanding that women reconceptualize ourselves.
In
January 2014, the actress Martha Plimpton, an abortion-rights advocate,
sent out a tweet about a benefit for Texas abortion funding called “A
Night of a Thousand Vaginas.” Suddenly, she was swamped by criticism for
using the word “vagina.” “Given the constant genital policing, you
can’t expect trans folks to feel included by an event title focused on a
policed, binary genital,” responded @DrJaneChi.
WHEN
Ms. Plimpton explained that she would continue to say “vagina” — and
why shouldn’t she, given that without a vagina, there is no pregnancy or
abortion? — her feed overflowed anew with indignation,
Michelle Goldberg
reported in The Nation. “So you’re really committed to doubling down on
using a term that you’ve been told many times is exclusionary &
harmful?” asked one blogger. Ms. Plimpton became, to use the new trans
insult, a terf, which stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist.”
In January,
Project: Theatre
at Mount Holyoke College, a self-described liberal arts college for
women, canceled a performance of Eve Ensler’s iconic feminist play “The
Vagina Monologues” because it offered an “extremely narrow perspective
on what it means to be a woman,” explained Erin Murphy, the student
group’s chairwoman.
Let
me get this right: The word “vagina” is exclusionary and offers an
extremely narrow perspective on womanhood, so the 3.5 billion of us who
have vaginas, along with the trans people who want them, should describe
ours with the politically correct terminology trans activists are
pushing on us: “front hole” or “internal genitalia”?
Even
the word “woman” has come under assault by some of the very people who
claim the right to be considered women. The hashtags
#StandWithTexasWomen, popularized after Wendy Davis, then a state
senator, attempted to filibuster the Texas Legislature to prevent
passage of a draconian anti-abortion law, and #WeTrustWomen, are also
under attack since they, too, are exclusionary.
“Abortion
rights and reproductive justice is not a women’s issue,” wrote Emmett
Stoffer, one of many self-described transgender persons to blog on the
topic. It is “a uterus owner’s issue.” Mr. Stoffer was referring to the
possibility that a woman who is taking hormones or undergoing surgery to
become a man, or who does not identify as a woman, can still have a
uterus, become pregnant and need an abortion.
Accordingly,
abortion rights groups are under pressure to modify their mission
statements to omit the word woman, as Katha Pollitt recently reported in
The Nation. Those who have given in, like the New York Abortion Access
Fund, now offer their services to “people” and to “callers.” Fund Texas
Women, which covers the travel and hotel expenses of abortion seekers
with no nearby clinic, recently changed its name to Fund Texas Choice.
“With a name like Fund Texas Women, we were publicly excluding trans
people who needed to get an abortion but were not women,” the
group explains on its website.
Women’s
colleges are contorting themselves into knots to accommodate female
students who consider themselves men, but usually not men who are living
as women. Now these institutions, whose core mission is to cultivate
female leaders, have student government and dormitory presidents who
identify as males.
As Ruth Padawer reported in The New York Times Magazine last fall,
Wellesley students are
increasingly replacing the word “sisterhood” with “siblinghood,” and
faculty members are confronted with complaints from trans students about
their universal use of the pronoun she — although Wellesley rightly
brags about its long history as the “world’s pre-eminent college for
women.”
The
landscape that’s being mapped and the language that comes with it are
impossible to understand and just as hard to navigate. The most
theory-bound of the trans activists say that there are no paradoxes
here, and that anyone who believes there are is clinging to a binary
view of gender that’s hopelessly antiquated. Yet Ms. Jenner and Ms.
Manning, to mention just two, expect to be called women even as the
abortion providers are being told that using that term is
discriminatory. So are those who have transitioned from men the only
“legitimate” women left?
Women
like me are not lost in false paradoxes; we were smashing binary views
of male and female well before most Americans had ever heard the word
“transgender” or used the word “binary” as an adjective. Because we did,
and continue to do so, thousands of women once confined to jobs as
secretaries, beauticians or flight attendants now work as welders,
mechanics and pilots. It’s why our daughters play with trains and trucks
as well as dolls, and why most of us feel free to wear skirts and heels
on Tuesday and bluejeans on Friday.
In
fact, it’s hard to believe that this hard-won loosening of gender
constraints for women isn’t at least a partial explanation for why three
times as many gender reassignment surgeries are performed on men. Men
are, comparatively speaking, more bound, even strangled, by gender
stereotyping.
The
struggle to move beyond such stereotypes is far from over, and trans
activists could be women’s natural allies moving forward. So long as
humans produce X and Y chromosomes that lead to the development of
penises and vaginas, almost all of us will be “assigned” genders at
birth. But what we do with those genders — the roles we assign
ourselves, and each other, based on them — is almost entirely mutable.
If
that’s the ultimate message of the mainstream of the trans community,
we’ll happily, lovingly welcome them to the fight to create space for
everyone to express him-, her- or, in gender neutral parlance, hir-self
without being coerced by gendered expectations. But undermining women’s
identities, and silencing, erasing or renaming our experiences, aren’t
necessary to that struggle.
Bruce
Jenner told Ms. Sawyer that what he looked forward to most in his
transition was the chance to wear nail polish, not for a furtive,
fugitive instant, but until it chips off. I want that for Bruce, now
Caitlyn, too. But I also want her to remember: Nail polish does not a
woman make.
Elinor Burkett is a journalist, a former professor of women’s studies and an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker.
