Whipping Girl

THE MAJORITY OF MY EXPERIENCES as a trans activist and spoken word artist have taken place in what is increasingly becoming known as the “queer/trans” community. It is a subgroup within the greater LGBTIQ community that is composed mostly of folks in their twenties and thirties who are more likely to refer to themselves as “dykes,” “queer,” and/or “trans” than “lesbian” or “gay.” While diverse in a number of ways, this subpopulation tends to predominantly inhabit urban and academic settings, and is skewed toward those who are white and/or from middle-class backgrounds. In many ways, the queer/trans community is best described as a sort of marriage of the transgender movement’s call to “shatter the gender binary” and the lesbian community’s pro-sex, pro-kink backlash to 1980s-era Andrea Dworkinism. Its politics are generally antiassimilationist, particularly with regard to gender and sexual expression. This apparent limitlessness and lack of boundaries lead many to believe that “queer/trans” represents the vanguard of today’s gender and sexual revolution. However, over the last four years in which I’ve been a part of this community, I’ve become increasingly troubled by a trend that, while not applicable to all queer/trans folks, seems to be becoming a dominant belief in this community, one that threatens to restrict its gender and sexual diversity. I call this trend subversivism.

Subversivism is the practice of extolling certain gender and sexual expressions and identities simply because they are unconventional or nonconforming. In the parlance of subversivism, these atypical genders and sexualities are “good” because they “transgress” or “subvert” oppressive binary gender norms.¹ The justification for the practice of subversivism has evolved out of a particular reading (although some would call it a misreading) of the work of various influential queer theorists over the last decade and a half. To briefly summarize this popularized account: All forms of sexism arise from the binary gender system. Since this binary gender system is everywhere—in our thoughts, language, traditions, behaviors, etc.—the only way we can overturn it is to actively undermine the system from within. Thus, in order to challenge sexism, people must “perform” their genders in ways that bend, break, and blur all of the imaginary distinctions that exist between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, and so on, presumably leading to a systemwide binary meltdown. According to the principles of subversivism, drag is inherently “subversive,” as it reveals that our society’s binary notions of maleness and femaleness are not natural, but rather are actively “constructed” and “performed” by all of us. Another way that one can be “transgressively gendered” is by identifying as genderqueer or genderfluid—i.e., refusing to identify fully as either woman or man.

The notion that certain gender identities and expressions are inherently “subversive” or “transgressive” can be seen throughout the queer/trans community, where drag and gender-bending are routinely celebrated, where binary-confounding identities such as “boy-identified-dyke” and “pansexual trannyfag” have become rather commonplace. On the surface, subversivism gives the appearance of accommodating a seemingly infinite array of genders and sexualities, but this is not quite the case. Subversivism does have very specific boundaries; it has an “other.” By glorifying identities and expressions that appear to subvert or blur gender binaries, subversivism automatically creates a reciprocal category of people whose gender and sexual identities and expressions are by default inherently conservative, even “hegemonic,” because they are seen as reinforcing or naturalizing the binary gender system. Not surprisingly, this often-unspoken category of bad, conservative genders is predominantly made up of feminine women and masculine men who are attracted to the “opposite” sex.

One routinely sees this “dark side” of subversivism rear its head in the queer/trans community, where it is not uncommon to hear individuals critique or call into question other queers or trans folks because their gender presentation, behaviors, or sexual preferences are not deemed “subversive” enough. Indeed, if one fails to sufficiently distinguish oneself from heterosexual feminine women and masculine men, one runs the risk of being accused of “reinforcing the gender binary,” an indictment that is tantamount to being called a sexist. One of the most common targets of such critiques are transsexuals, and particularly those who are heterosexual and gender-normative post-transition. Indeed, because such transsexuals (in the eyes of others) transition from a seemingly “transgressive” queer identity to a “conservative” straight one, subversivists may even claim that they have transitioned in order to purposefully “assimilate” themselves into straight culture. While these days, such accusations are often couched in the rhetoric of current queer theory, they rely on many of the same mistaken assumptions that plagued the work of cissexist feminists like Janice Raymond and sociologists like Thomas Kando decades ago.²

The practice of subversivism also negatively impacts trans people on the MTF spectrum. After all, in our culture, the meanings of “bold,” “rebellious,” and “dangerous”—adjectives that often come to mind when considering subversiveness—are practically built into our understanding of masculinity. In contrast, femininity conjures up antonyms like “timid,” “conventional,” and “safe,” which seem entirely incompatible with subversion. Therefore, despite the fact that the mainstream public tends to be more concerned and disturbed by MTF spectrum trans people than their FTM spectrum counterparts, subversivism creates the impression that trans masculinities are inherently “subversive” and “transgressive,” while their trans feminine counterparts are “lame” and “conservative” in comparison. Subversivism’s privileging of trans masculinities over trans femininities helps to explain why cissexual queer women and FTM spectrum folks tend to dominate the queer/trans community: Their exceptional gender expressions and identities are routinely empowered and encouraged in such settings. In contrast, there is generally a dearth of MTF spectrum folks who regularly inhabit queer/trans spaces.³

To me, the most surreal part of this whole transgressingversus-reinforcing-gender-norms dialogue in the queer/trans community (and in many gender studies classrooms and books) is the unacknowledged hypocrisy of it all. It is sadly ironic that people who claim to be gender-fucking in the name of “shattering the gender binary,” and who criticize people whose identities fail to adequately challenge our societal notions of femaleness and maleness, cannot see that they have just created a new gender binary, one in which subversive genders are “good” and conservative genders are “bad.” In a sense, this new gender binary isn’t even all that new. It is merely the original oppositional sexist binary flipped upside down. So now, gender-nonconforming folks are on top and gender-normative people are on the bottom—how revolutionary! Now, I understand the temptation for a marginalized group to turn the hierarchy that has oppressed them upside down, as it can feel very empowering to finally be atop the pecking order, but it’s absurd to claim that such approaches in any way undermine that binary. If anything, they only serve to reinforce it further.

Subversivism’s binary flip is very reminiscent of another binary flip that was forwarded by cultural feminists in the mid-1970s. While subversivism reverses oppositional sexism, cultural feminism sought to reverse traditional sexism by claiming that women were naturally creative and cooperative and therefore superior to men, who were seen as inherently destructive and oppressive. While it is always difficult to draw comparisons between different social/political movements for fear of oversimplifying them, there are other striking parallels between subversivism and cultural feminism that are worth bearing out. As historian Alice Echols describes in her book Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975, cultural feminism evolved from its more outwardly focused predecessor, radical feminism.⁴ While radical feminism—which asserted that neither sex was inherently superior to the other—actively engaged the mainstream public (and men in particular) to challenge and change their sexist ways, cultural feminism was a more insular movement, focusing on creating women-run organizations and women-only spaces rather than organizing public demonstrations. And unlike radical feminism, which attempted to accommodate a variety of different female perspectives (in fact, issues over “difference” in class and sexuality consumed much of the movement’s energy), cultural feminists forwarded the idea of “sameness” and “oneness”—that all women were part of a universal sisterhood, united by their female biology.

This concept of female “oneness” was perhaps most responsible for cultural feminism’s exclusionist, even separatist, tendencies. After all, if one believes in a female “oneness” that is distinct from, and superior to, maleness, then anyone who brings that distinction into question automatically becomes threatening. Indeed, that’s exactly what happened throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s. Those women who disagreed with cultural feminist dogma—or who engaged in certain gender expressions and sexual practices that were associated with men—were derided as promoting masculine values and being “antifeminist,” and were accordingly excluded from the movement. Further, as Echols points out, while cultural feminists “used the language of sisterhood, they often assumed a patronizing stance toward those ‘unliberated’ women who were still living in ‘The Man’s’ world.”⁵ This exclusionary shift from a movement that sought to benefit all women (i.e., radical feminism) to one that only sought to benefit a select group of women was made possible by cultural feminism’s binary flip and its sense of “oneness.”

The queer and transgender movements came into their own in the early 1990s in response to this sort of exclusionary “oneness” that was promoted by cultural feminists and many mainstream gay rights activists. The words “transgender” and “queer” came into vogue during this time as umbrella terms: “Queer” attempted to accommodate lesbians and gays as well as the growing bisexual and transgender movements; and “transgender” was used to promote a coalition of distinct groups (including crossdressers, transsexuals, butch women, femme men, drag performers, intersex people, etc.) that previously believed they had little in common with one another. These alliances were not based on a presumed shared biology or set of beliefs, but on the fact that these different groups faced similar forms of discrimination. In fact, the notion that transgender people “transgress binary gender norms” came about to create a cause for its varied constituents to unite behind, not as a litmus test or a criteria for them to meet. At that time, the idea of “shattering the gender binary” was outward-focused; if we could push our culture to move beyond the idea that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive “opposite sexes,” that would make the lives of all transgender constituent subgroups far easier.

Just as cultural feminism’s binary flip fostered that movement’s inward focus on women-only culture and spaces, I believe that the recent rise of subversivism may be an early sign that the more outward-looking, changing-the-world-focused transgender and queer movements of the 1990s are shifting into a more insular and exclusionary queer/trans community, one that favors only a select group of queers and trans folks, rather than all people who fall under those umbrella terms. Indeed, unlike our predecessors in the groups Queer Nation (who held public “kiss-ins” in suburban malls) and Transsexual Menace (who staged protests in small Midwestern towns where trans people were murdered), many in the queer/trans community these days often seem more content celebrating our fabulous queer selves or enjoying the safety of our own organizations and events.⁶ While there is nothing inherently wrong with creating our own queer/trans spaces and culture, what troubles me is that we are clearly sacrificing diversity in the process. For example, in queer/trans spaces, one rarely sees MTF crossdressers (despite the fact that they make up a large portion of the transgender population) and there are very few trans women. Some might suggest that these groups are choosing not to attend of their own accord, but that only leads to the next question: Why are they choosing not to come? Often when trans women ask me when I’m performing next, and I tell them that it’s a queer/trans event, they will tell me that they’d rather not go because they do not feel comfortable or safe in those spaces, that they have been dismissed or belittled at such events before. Even trans women who are dyke- or bisexual-identified often don’t feel welcome or relevant in queer/trans spaces. And whenever a trans woman or ally points out aspects about the queer/ trans community that contribute to these feelings of irrelevancy and disrespect—such as the way our community coddles those who support trans-woman-exclusionist events or who make trans-misogynistic comments—we are described as being “divisive.” This use of the word “divisive” is particularly telling, as it implies that “queer/trans” represents a uniform movement or community—a “oneness”—rather than an alliance where all voices are respected.

Perhaps the only thing more ironic than the fact that the transgender movement’s “shatter the gender binary” slogan is now being used to enforce a new subversive/conservative gender binary is the fact that the queer/trans community’s growing sense of “oneness” evolved out of a well-meaning attempt to prevent exclusivity. From the outset, many early transgender activists feared that one particular transgender subgroup might come to dominate the transgender community, that they would begin to police the movement’s borders and enforce their own sense of “oneness.” Because the exclusivity of cultural feminism and the mainstream “gay rights” movement seemed to center on disputes over identity—who counts as a “woman” or who is legitimately “gay”—many activists advocated the idea that the transgender coalition should be borderless, one where there was no set criteria for an individual to join. Many also worked to play down or blur the distinctiveness of individual transgender subgroups in order to prevent any kind of hierarchy from developing. The transgender movement, in effect, became an anti-identity movement.

In retrospect, I would say that the assumption that distinct identities would automatically lead to exclusivity was entirely misplaced. After all, an identity is merely a label, a descriptive noun to express one particular facet of a person’s experiences. And if we look beyond gender and sexual identity politics, we can find many examples of flexible and fluid identities. For example, if I were to identify myself as a “cat person,” nobody would be outraged or confused if I said I also loved dogs. Further, when I tell people that I’m a “musician,” no one makes unwarranted assumptions about what instruments I play or what styles of music I prefer. Nonpoliticized identities like “musician” and “cat person” allow us to see that the recurring problems in gender and sexual identity politics arise not from identity per se, but rather from opposite-think (e.g., that a cat person cannot be a dog person, and vice versa) and from a sense of “oneness” (e.g., the assumption that all musicians are or should be punk rock guitarists.)

I believe that if the transgender movement had simply continued to view itself as an alliance of disparate groups working toward a shared goal (like making the world safer for gender-variant folks), it may have avoided such exclusivity while respecting the distinct differences and specific concerns of its various constituents. Instead, by promoting the idea that we must move beyond the supposedly outdated concept of “identity,” the transgender movement has created its own sense of “oneness.” Rather than viewing ourselves as a fragile political coalition of distinct subgroups, some activists instead encourage us to see ourselves as one big homogeneous group of individuals who blur gender boundaries. Rather than learning to respect the very different perspectives and experiences that each transgender subgroup brings to the table, the transgender community has instead become a sort of gender free-for-all, where identities are regularly co-opted by others within the community. These days, many transsexuals assume that they have the right to appropriate the language of, or speak on behalf of, intersex people; similarly, many cissexual genderqueers feel they have the right to do the same for transsexuals. This needlessly erases each group’s unique issues, obstacles, and perspectives.

This sort of “gender anarchy”—where individuals are free to adopt or appropriate any identity as they please—might seem very limitless and freeing on the surface, but in practice it resembles gender-libertarianism, where those who are most marginalized become even more vulnerable to the whims of those who are more established. In this case, it leaves those of us who are cross-gender-identified susceptible to negation at the hands of the greater cissexual queer community. Indeed, it has become increasingly common for people who are primarily queer because of their sexual orientation to claim a space for themselves within the transgender movement.⁷ This is particularly true in the queer women’s community, which has become increasingly involved in transgender politics and discourses due to the recent sharp increase in the number of (1) previously lesbian-identified people transitioning to male, (2) dykes who now take on genderqueer or other FTM spectrum identities, and (3) non-trans queer women who seek a voice in the transgender community because they are partnered to FTM spectrum individuals.

Because of our history, the fact that cissexual queers now dominate transgender and queer/trans communities and discourses is highly problematic for those of us who are transsexual. During the 1970s, transsexuals and other cross-gender-identified queers were banished from the “gay rights” movement as it began to focus solely on sexual orientation. This was a calculated maneuver: By jettisoning cross-gender queers (who were typically seen as the “most deviant” by a reluctant mainstream public), sexuality-queers could make the case that they were just like “normal people” except for their sexual orientation. And from the perspective of a lesbian or gay person, this strategy was highly effective. Sexuality-queers, while still marginalized to a certain degree, have made tremendous legal gains with regard to domestic partnership, including reversing “sodomy laws” and gaining protection against discrimination. They now have their own social and political organizations, cable channels, university departments, and even their own Olympics. There are out lesbian and gay politicians and celebrities, and popular TV shows that revolve around lesbian and gay characters. Gaythemed jokes in the media are now more likely to make fun of someone for being homophobic than for being homosexual. Perhaps most significant of all, it has become generally accepted among most Americans—even among those who are stern opponents of “gay rights”—that there is natural variation in human sexual orientation. (Or, as the popular saying goes: “Some people are just born that way.”)

As a direct result of the exclusion of cross-gender-identified trans people from the “gay rights” movement, public awareness and acceptance of our identities and issues are about twenty years behind those of lesbians and gays, because the transgender movement didn’t gain momentum until the 1990s. Because of this exclusion, our cross-gender identities and perspectives are not acknowledged to nearly the same extent as lesbian and gay identities and perspectives. For example, when I come out to people as a transsexual, I am often barraged with highly personal questions about my motives, my physical body, and my male past. In contrast, I have never once been interrogated by someone upon coming out to them as a lesbian; that aspect of my person is generally accepted at face value. In other words, I am allowed to exist without question as a lesbian in ways that I am not allowed as a transsexual. In a climate where same-sex attraction has become a given while cross-gender identification has most certainly not, the merging of “sexuality-queers” and “gender-queers” (as seen in the queer/trans community) essentially subsumes transsexuals within the more well-established cissexual queer community. The more inclusive the word “transgender” becomes, the more thoroughly the voices of transsexuals and other cross-gender/cross-living individuals are drowned out by those who do not share our perspectives and experiences.

This “cissexualization” of transgenderism has taken a devastating toll on the ability of transsexuals to articulate our own perspectives and visions for gender activism. Rather than being listened to and appreciated on our own terms, we are instead forced to adhere to lesbian/gay rhetoric and values in order to have a voice within our own community. One can see this in the way that lesbian/gay-specific definitions of “passing” (as a synonym for “hiding”) are inappropriately applied to our decisions to physically transition and live in our identified sex, or in the way that our descriptions of subconscious sex, gender dissonance, and physical transitioning are patronizingly dismissed by cissexual queers who favor social constructionist views of gender. It is evident in the way that queer theorists, ignorant of their own cissexual privilege, nonconsensually ungender us (or blur the distinctions between us and other queers) in order to artificialize gender; claim that “all gender is drag” without recognizing how dismissive that is to the transsexual experience; and ignorantly apply the “gay rights” tactic of calling for the all-out demedicalization of transgenderism without considering the effects this would have on transsexuals’ ability to access and afford hormones and sex reassignment procedures. Finally, as Viviane Namaste has pointed out in her books, the “cissexualization” of the transgender movement ensures that discourses about transsexuals inevitably revolve around the cissexual queer obsession over “identity” (who counts as a woman or man, who is legitimately queer), rather than examining the very real institutional obstacles and biases we face for being transsexual.⁸

I worry that the dominance of cissexual voices in the queer/ trans community, and the exclusionary practice of subversivism, are together fostering a sense of queer/trans “oneness” that excludes trans women such as myself. My fears stem not so much from my own concern about being excluded, or for the many other subgroups not mentioned here who also feel increasingly left out of this community. Rather, I fear that this inward, homogenizing trend represents a lost opportunity to learn from one another and to change the minds of the public at large. If we hope to correct this insular, exclusionary trend, then we must begin to (once again) think in terms of alliances rather than monolithic communities. Alliance-based activism begins with the recognition that we are all individuals, each with a limited history and experiencing a largely unique set of privileges, expectations, assumptions, and restrictions. Thus, none of us have “superior knowledge” when it comes to sexuality and gender. By calling ourselves an alliance, we explicitly acknowledge that we are working toward a common goal (how about “making the world safe and just for people of all genders and sexualities”?), while simultaneously recognizing and respecting our many differences. There can be no legitimate accusations of “divisiveness” in an alliance, as differences of opinion would be expected from the start. Thinking in terms of alliances can encourage us to move beyond the single goal of creating safe queer/trans spaces, to recognize that, in reality, there is no such thing as a “safe space.” After all, the very notion of safety is often predicated on a presumed and exclusionary sense of “sameness” and “oneness.” And unlike subversivism, which fosters a grim and belittling view of the heterosexual, gender-normative majority, alliance-based gender activism recognizes that the only way we will change society is by engaging the mainstream public and working with, rather than against, our straight allies.

If we hope to build alliances that are respectful of all queer and transgender perspectives, then we must stop talking about the gender binary system, as if there is only one. As a trans woman, I deal with lots of gender binaries: male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, cissexual/transsexual, cisgender/transgender, and so on. As someone who is marginalized in queer/trans spaces for not being “subversive” or “transgressive” enough, I find that calls to “shatter the (male/female) gender binary” sound hollow. And when cissexual queers try to frame all forms of gender/sexual discrimination in terms of “heterosexist gender norms,” they deny the fact that, as a transsexual woman, I experience way more cissexist and trans-misogynistic animosity and condescension from members of my own lesbian community than I ever have from my straight friends and acquaintances. The truth is that whenever we enter a different space, or speak with a different person, we are forced to deal with a somewhat different set of binaries and assumptions. Indeed, my experience living in the San Francisco Bay Area—where most straight people I know are very comfortable with queerness, yet many queer people I know harbor subversivist attitudes toward straightness—makes it clear that there needs to be a more general strategy to challenge all forms of sexism, not just the typical or obvious ones.

Rather than focusing on “shattering the gender binary,” I believe we should turn our attention instead to challenging all forms of gender entitlement, the privileging of one’s own perceptions, interpretations, and evaluations of other people’s genders over the way those people understand themselves. After all, whenever we assign values to other people’s genders and sexualities—whether we call them subversive or conservative, cool or uncool, normal or abnormal, natural or unnatural—we are automatically creating or reaffirming some kind of hierarchy. In other words, when we critique any gender as being “good” or “bad,” we are by definition being sexist. After all, isn’t what drives many of us into feminism and queer activism in the first place our frustration that other people often place rather arbitrary meanings and values onto our sexed bodies, gender expressions, and sexualities? Is there really any difference between the schoolyard bullies who teased us for being too feminine or masculine when we were little, the arrogant employer who assumes that we aren’t cut out for the job because we’re female, the gay men who claim that we are holding back the gay rights movement because we are not straight-acting enough, and the people—whether lesbian-feminists of the 1970s and 1980s, or subversivists in the 2000s—who decry us for not being androgynous enough to be “true gender radicals”?

Some might argue that it’s simply human nature for us to assign different values to different genders and sexualities. For example, if we tend to prefer the company of men over women, or if we find androgynous people more attractive than feminine or masculine ones, isn’t that assigning them a different worth? Not necessarily. There is a big difference between rightly recognizing these preferences in terms of our personal predilections (“I find androgynous people attractive”) and entitled claims that imply that there are no other legitimate opinions (“Masculine and feminine people are not sexy, period”). Similarly, there’s a big difference between calling yourself a woman or a genderqueer because you feel that word best captures your gendered experience and using that identity to make claims or presumptions about other people’s genders (e.g., assuming that “men” or “gender-conforming people” are your “opposites”).

Some might also argue that there is such a thing as “bad” gender—for instance, a woman who feels coerced into living up to stereotypically feminine ideals. As someone who was closeted for many years, I can understand why someone might be tempted to describe genders that are enforced by others (e.g., stereotypical femininity or masculinity) as being “bad.” The problem is that there is no way for us to know whether any given person’s gender identity or expression is sincere or coerced. While we experience our own genders and sexualities firsthand, and thus are capable of separating our own intrinsic inclinations from the extrinsic expectations that others place on us, we are unable to do so on behalf of other people. We can only ever make assumptions and educated guesses about the authenticity of someone else’s sexuality or gender—and that’s always dangerous.

The thing that always impresses me about human beings is our diversity. Even when we are brought up in similar environments, we still somehow gravitate toward very different careers, hobbies, politics, manners of speaking and acting, aesthetic preferences, and so forth. Maybe this diversity is due to genetic variation. Or maybe, being naturally curious and adaptive creatures, we invariably tend to scatter all over the place, exploiting every niche we can possibly find. Either way, it’s fairly obvious that we also end up all over the map when it comes to gender and sexuality. That being the case, if we take the subversivist route and focus our energies on deriding stereotypically feminine and masculine genders, we will inevitably disparage some (perhaps many) people for whom those genders simply feel right and natural. Furthermore, by critiquing those gender expressions in an entitled way, we actively create new gender expectations that others may feel obliged to meet (which is exactly what’s now starting to happen in the queer/trans community). That is why I suggest that we turn our energies and attention away from the way that individuals “do” or “perform” their own genders and instead focus on the expectations and assumptions that those individuals project onto everybody else. By focusing on gender entitlement rather than gender performance, we may finally take the next step toward a world where all people can choose their genders and sexualities at will, rather than feeling coerced by others.