Divided we Fall
Divided we Fall
(Copyright © 1996)
When I first talked to straight friends about the need to build understanding and respect between the transsexual lobby and Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual groups in the UK, one or two expressed surprise.
Here I was, having patiently explained to them at such length how gender and sexual preference were so unrelated. "What on earth do you have in common?", they asked. "Aren’t you in danger of perpetuating the very myths we believed till you explained it to us?"
Just to be on the safe side, perhaps I ought to repeat the simple facts here too …
If you’re a lesbian woman, it doesn’t mean you’re not a woman, or that you wish to be a man. Being gay has nothing to do with a person’s gender identity.
People seem to be able to appreciate that idea quite readily. The converse usually needs to be spelled out though …
Having a feminine gender identity in an originally male-looking body doesn’t dictate who you want to sleep with. There are lesbian transsexual women, attracted to other women, and there are gay transsexual men, attracted to other men. Equally, of course, there are plenty of heterosexual transsexuals.
Naturally enough people get very confused about what’s homo- and what’s hetero- too, until they really stop to think about the nature of sexual relationships. As a transsexual woman, my relationship with a man isn’t homosexual. The dynamics aren’t defined by the anatomy we were both born with, but by the desires and erotic needs we have. I didn’t alter my body and the way I’m appreciated by other people because I was a gay man and wanted to get my sex in a socially acceptable way. In fact if I’d wanted to be a gay man then that’s what I’d have been. It would have been a lot easier than to be a transsexual woman. … To be a member of a large and politically powerful minority, rather than a small and misunderstood one. And I didn’t go through all this just to have sex as a woman either. I went through it all to be me. And sex is a very small part of my life.
But, to get back to the point, if we’ve only just about got that message through some people’s heads then why should we campaign under the same banner as Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals?
I think if you’d asked me a few months ago, then I’d have probably agreed at the time that such an association did seem to be a counterproductive thing, as it would apparently serve to reinforce those stereotyped ideas. It doesn’t mean I rejected my lesbian friends or was "selling out" to straight culture though. I wasn’t crawling into a closet and leaving those friends to face the flack. It was simply that I was rather keener to major on the point that GID is as innate as being clever or any other human characteristic (including homosexuality) … and that’s easier if you stick to one argument at a time.
Transsexuality is more common than, say, exceptional talent. There have been only a handful of Einstein-level scientists this entire century. Only one Olga Corbett. One Yehudi Menhuin. Pick your field and the proportion’s probably about the same. In comparison I work it out that there are well over half a million people like me on the planet at any moment ….
Yet one rarity is a gift from God, the other potentially viewed as a natural "mistake" to be eliminated or "cured". And that is the common characteristic which we share with all other minorities.
It’s not sex- or gender-connected discrimination that we have in common. It’s discrimination full stop.
Stepping aside and trying to take an outsider’s view of what we’re saying, I’m less happy now though about building an image that overemphasises the notion of "transsexual as nature’s victim" … which it’s tempting to do if you want legislators to stop looking at you as a capricious deviant and start thinking in sympathetic terms. I’ve moved on. I’ve become more self aware. I’ve questioned where I got my self-image from. Who defined me? Who said I should grow up to feel guilty just to be myself?
Who should call this example of nature’s wonderful diversity flawed?
I’ve realised that although it’s a harder and more argumentative battle, the place that all minorities have to get to is the point where equality is reached on our own terms. And, if you think about it (and forgetting that women aren’t even a numerical minority) that’s what feminism is about too … the inalienable right to be different but equal, and to celebrate our differentness rather than having it narrowly defined by others. To value the qualities we claim as feminine and to establish those intangibles as the root of our self-definition, rather than the physical attributes valued or devalued by others.
Just to underline that commonality, consider that the nearest human experience that compares for needing to be wrested back from medicine by the subjects is probably pregnancy and childbirth … once a natural event, then (in this century) a condition to be "treated" without regard to the subject’s feelings, and now (belatedly) reclaimed as a woman’s personal experience.
In neither case can we do without the medical relationship altogether, of course. Pregnant women and transsexuals are both driven into the arms of the professional by a need for the services which medicine can render. Unfortunately the need once allowed the profession to "take over" and pathologise the experience in both cases. Defining and directing it. The battle to reclaim the reins … for the subject to become an educated and self-aware consumer rather than a helpless patient … was (and in the transsexual case remains) dependent on changes in overall social awareness and sophistication.
Natural childbirth needed the emergence of a new political awareness for women. "Natural gender expression" demands the achievement of a more sophisticated awareness for everybody.
To return to the concerns about "association", however, I don’t think that the transsexual lobby stands to get anywhere by seeming to try and pull the wool over people’s eyes anyway. A significant number of transsexual people settle down to find that they’re attracted to the same gender, or are bisexual as I’ve said. Normal life for that segment therefore means having a normal relationship with the social groups which that sexual preference places them in. If you’re a lesbian and other lesbians refuse to have you around, then that’s as bad (worse in a way) as being heterosexual and shunned by straight people. Like it or not, therefore, we can’t build some bridges and leave gaping ravines elsewhere.
From a purely pragmatic point of view too, although the media may be largely owned by supposedly heterosexual white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males, a lot of its output is produced and edited by a substantial number of people whose ideas and thinking took shape in a setting dominated by the culture and teachings of feminist, gay and lesbian leaders of thought a generation ago. And the reason we’ve been stalled for that same period of time is that many of those opinion makers led the field when it comes to intolerance of the transgendered community.
Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.
The breakthrough of recent times has therefore been the preparedness of minorities to acknowledge their differences but pool resources on the basis of something we all share … gay, lesbian, transsexual … coloured … female … we are all under the knuckle of a system run by another minority … men.
I think that’s exciting. It means that one part of humanity at least has started to learn to live with others and respect each one’s differentness and what we have in common. Getting there hasn’t been a pleasant learning experience for anybody, of course. It’s involved holding up a mirror and showing what hypocrites some discriminated people can often be … so full of their own cause that they couldn’t recognise when they are committing the very sin they condemn in others. And if your philosophy is that badly flawed then how can you expect your own oppressors to accept your own right to equality as self evident?
And that’s why I get upset for feminism too, for I recognise the same potential flaw at the base of that philosophy and it has to be carefully removed and discarded … as an unfortunate mistake that taints the reputation of so many other important truths. If we can’t recognise a woman as a woman other than on the qualities valued by men (her looks and fertility and genitals) then what of all the positive behavioural and personal attributes we ascribe so self-flatteringly to our gender? And that’s the point about gender … it’s a way of being, not a synonym for a particular sexual anatomy. 99.92% of the people who have the socio-cultural attributes we group and label as "femininity" turn out to have had the same genital anatomy at birth. But that’s a lot different from putting it the other way around … for this way recognises that the behavioural disposition is the important thing, not the anatomical fait-accompli. One way lies individualism and self determination, the other way lies a class system based on heredity.
At the end of the day, of course, all these associations are as potentially fragile as other historic coalitions. There are some things that transsexual women don’t share with their born-as-a-girl counterparts. The born-females have missed a whole experience of repression and denial that’s scarred their transsexual sisters too. Likewise, some gays and lesbians will always be suspicious of the fact that transsexual people apparently have the wish and ability to deny their minority status, by asking to be de-stigmatised and reintegrated by medicine and law. And many heterosexual transsexuals will have the same instincts as other straight people towards the lesbians and gays.
Just being a minority doesn’t make people perfect, just a bit more apt to be complacent about their own brand of "goodness".
But once this century American and Soviet people fought together towards a common goal too, with a more obvious form of ethnic threat as the common enemy.
And that’s when things change. When people forget their differences and remember what they have in common as human beings. People, with feelings and hopes, who enter the world with many differences borne of heritage but who leave it absolutely equal.
