Beyond understanding?
You don’t need to understand why someone is different to respect their right to be different
By Claire McNab (Copyright © 1998)
Sometimes, it’s easy to get lost in the detail — and miss the big picture. As trans people, it’s particularly easy for us to fall into this trap. After all, our lives are punctuated by so many trouble-spots: so many hurts and obstacles and little difficulties and big disasters as well as all the joys and triumphs, that it’s often tempting to wish "if only they understood…"
If only the other women in the discount store had understood enough about me not to flee the changing room when I entered it in the early stages of my transition; if only those dozen teenage girls hadn’t gathered round to laugh at me in the shoe shop; if only my GP understood enough about who I am to see why the offer of a referral to a notoriously repressive "Gender Identity Clinic" was an insult rather than a way of helping me; if only my friends going to the Charing Cross clinic met psychiatrists who could understand the pain and indignity of being subjected to endless delays and pointless tests. If only…
A few weeks ago we watched the ugly spectacle of a trans woman who was courageous enough to allow the TV cameras to record her transition being subjected to a flurry of hostile media comments on her appearance. As Christine Burns noted at the time, the only consolation to Councillor Ros Mitchell is the perverse satisfaction that she was being subjected to the exactly the same sort of personal attack which all women in politics fear, and which all too many have to learn to survive on a regular basis — or allow themselves to be bullied out of public life.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the television reviewers who make a nice living scribbling a few hundred words of oh-so-clever denigration understood what they were writing about? If they understood just how a trans woman has to develop in adulthood all the presentational skills that other women absorb from childhood; if they knew about the rigours of electrolysis to remove facial hair and the fact that hormones cause slow change rather a magical transformation? If they knew more about the agonies of trying to summon up the courage to transition? If they had realised that trans men and trans women come in a range of shapes and sizes — just as all men and women do.
Nice, perhaps; but it’s not necessary. And it’s not just unnecessary: there are times when even looking for that understanding can be positively unhelpful.
If that doesn’t make sense, try looking at something completely different, and ask yourself whether that group of people should have to explain why they do what they do, or why they are what they are? Taking an example from my own town, should Muslims have to explain to all and sundry about the details of their faith before being allowed to practice it? Do we legitimise those who attack Muslims because the thugs have never heard an explanation of all that Islam has to offer? Do we blame the victims of religious discrimination for not explaining the Koran to those who deny them jobs?
Of course, some folk make just that sort of judgement. All too many people attack that which they don’t understand. And we have a word for them: bigot.
We don’t need to understand why someone prays to respect their right to pray. We don’t need to understand why someone seeks a same-sex partner to respect their right to make that choice. And as someone who hates sport, I don’t need to understand what it is that motivates people to wear weird trousers and perform strange rituals on short-cut grass — I respect their right to do so, even though the impulse to play golf is a puzzle which no amount of explanation can resolve for me.
My tolerance of golfers is, of course, utterly selfish. A world in which golfers were free from ridicule and harassment only if they had first convinced others of the merits of their game would be one in which I was free to pursue my leisure activities only if explained why I derive so much pleasure from baking bread and digging stones out of the ground (yes, apart from talking to people, those really are my two favourite pastimes!).
Of course, there are countries which require just that sort of explanation from their citizens. States which criminalise activities their rulers don’t like or don’t understand, such as Stalinist Russia, which had a short way with creators of such inexplicable vices as "bourgeois art", or Malawi under Hastings Banda, where men risked compulsory haircuts or worse if they dared deviate from the regulation short-back-and-sides.
We have a word too, for that sort of country: dictatorship. Most people are glad not to live in such a repressive climate, and many of those unfortunate enough to find themselves in such a regime are risking their lives to change it.
In a free society, we have rights partly through being granted them by law. But mostly we have them through a shared understanding that freedom for other people is the best guarantee of our own freedoms: that it’s hard to justify our right to practice our religion if we deny that freedom to others. It might well be possible for people like me to form a majority of non-golfers, and persecute those with wheeled bags of clubs unless they could give a very good justification for their "deviance": but if I were to do so, I know that the I’d be pretty vulnerable to anyone who felt like picking on stone-digging bakers. (Don’t even ask me to try explaining that one…)
Which brings me back to trans people. There aren’t many of us: maybe 5,000 to 10,000 in the UK who would fit the classic definition of "transsexual", and several times as many again who’d fit a broader definition of "transgendered". We’re an easy target for the narrow-minded; an easily overlooked minority for anyone who likes to believe that the world is perfect. We’ve all met people who fall into both categories — and we read some of them when they review television documentaries.
When we do, we can explain ourselves, tell them what it’s like to be a trans person. But we can also look them in the eye, and ask them: who’s next? Are they Jewish? Or Catholic? Or black? Or gay? Or a single mother? Do they have a disability? Watch "Prisoner Cell Block H"? Wear flares?
Because if it’s safe to sneer at us, or to discriminate against us, the day may come when they’re next. All we’re asking for is the same rights as they have: the right not to be unfairly discriminated against, the right to be free from ridicule, harassment, and breach of privacy.
On the front page of this website, we state it as "Seeking no more but no less than what YOU take for granted". One of those freedoms which others take for granted is the right to live their lives without justifying themselves. We can ask for that too.
We can explain transgender issues when we talk to people; we can ask people to read the literature — books such as Leslie Feinberg’s "Transgendered Warriors" which chronicles how there have always been trans people, pamphlets such as "The current medical viewpoint" (also available in printed form, by order from PFC); we can draw their attention to the brain research by Gooren et al.
But we can also ask people to consider just what sort of a world they are making for themselves if they require those explanations of us, if they demand "proof" of the reality of our lives. How many aspects of their lives they would like to have to defend publicly? Everyone is different in some way — and that includes those who point fingers.
We can explain, and it can be fun to explain; it can be rewarding to share our self-knowledge with others and help them see a side of life which they may have missed. But rights is rights is rights, and that includes the right to do inexplicable things or to be an inexplicable person.
No-one’s rights are safe unless they defend ours, even if they have no idea why we are different. In some ways, there’s nothing terribly special about trans people: we’re just another sort of people who are different in some way.
We’ve moved beyond looking for pity. Isn’t it now time to move beyond looking for understanding, and stop accepting a lack of understanding as excuse for the sort of intolerance and discrimination which too many of us still encounter?
