Normally I just read your fine column on the subway, have a little chuckle and toss EYE WEEKLY in the recycle. But I was so irritated with your response to the guy accused by his online hookup of “transphobia” (“Girls, gurls, grrrls,” Love Bites, April 16) that I decided to spend half an hour of my workday creating an anonymous email address and writing you this email.
You say that there are “differing opinions within the [transsexual (TS)] community on disclosure,” but then you go on to give only one, in which you end up confirming the letter-writer’s date’s opinion that the guy is a transphobic jerk. This doesn’t seem fair.
As a somewhat experienced online dater and hooker-upper, it has always been my understanding that total transparency is crucial from the first moment. Obviously, many people break this rule all the time, and that is why most online dates and hookups end badly or awkwardly. The hot and flirty TS in your response had a responsibility, at least as far as the success of the date was concerned, to disclose her status before the meeting, especially since she was planning on disclosing at the meeting.
Your activist expert Hawks talks about how a TS doesn’t want to have to surround herself with “caution tape,” and that makes a kind of sense. But the underlying assumption is that the TS would feel degraded by putting up the caution tape because she strongly identifies not only with her female gender but also with being a TS.
I confess total ignorance about the anatomical aspect of this situation. Hawks makes it sound like the guy might never know if he weren’t told. If that isn’t the case — if it would be anatomically obvious once they got into the bedroom — then the TS has a huge and obvious responsibility to disclose before things get at all personal. If, on the other hand, it is the case that there would be no way to tell, then the TS girl could presumably commit to living a lie if she were super-identified with the female gender and didn’t want to surround herself with stigma.
But presumably and understandably she would object to living a lie because being a TS is something important to her; it is part of her identity and it’s the baseline from which all her relationships must begin. She would want to tell her partner at some point. And therefore she needs to say something about it before the flirting gets all the way to setting up a meeting. Only a very quick survey of craigslist (to take just one site) shows that many people are comfortable explicitly naming their TS preferences in postings; a TS respondent to a non-TS-specific posting should return the courtesy. ONLINE DISCOURSE
I agree that calling someone transphobic while simultaneously expecting they fully accept the binary-style sex you have been presenting is a wee bit self-serving and you make some interesting points about transparency and double standards. But there’s a roiling undercurrent to your email that says so much more. I mean, come on, “The baseline from which all of her relationships must begin” and “a huge and obvious responsibility to disclose”? Jesus christ, Online, calm the fuck down. It’s not like she ran a concentration camp or gave someone in Mr. Mister a hand job.
As Julia Serano writes in her book Whipping Girl, “Focusing primarily on our physical transformations keeps transsexuals forever anchored in our assigned sex thus turning our identified sex into a goal we are always approaching but never truly achieve.” To be saddled with what Serano describes as an “often mundane” experience as one’s defining feature can be utterly dispiriting as well as enraging.
While non-transsexuals are often completely gobsmacked by news of this event (well, not so much so that they can’t ask the most offensive questions of a total stranger), for many transsexuals, transition is really just another step on the way to womanhood. Good lord, I can’t even imagine what it would be like if every time I said, “I got my period when I was 13” people lost their fucking minds. As such, many transpeople do not want to be on the frontlines with their transition at all times or even ever. They are not gender warriors, gender activists, gender queer or gender fuckers. What they are does not require a courteous confession or a radical neologism nor are they interested in people who seek them out solely for the mysterious thrill of their transsexual company.
Imagine if the world refused you the simple privilege of living the sex you know yourself to be, where so many conversations began with a gruelling questionnaire about your genitalia and where all your accomplishments and even your humiliations paled in comparison to this one thing that you did just to be more comfortable with yourself. When does crisis management stop informing every exchange you have unless you yourself take strides, sometimes awkward and poorly executed ones, to truly own the word you use to describe your sex?
Serano describes this so well in an essay on her website Switch Hitter (www.switchhitter.net): “It reminds me of the Greek mythological character Cassandra — she had the ability to tell the future, but she was cursed so that no one would believe a word she said. To me, transitioning was like that: I would get my dream come true in that I would become female, but I also knew that many people would never truly accept me as such.”
It was never clear by the original letter if the woman mentioned on the date that she was TS or A Good Guy guessed. Either way, accommodating prevailing and outdated assumptions about femaleness and maleness is not the way to deal with this; challenging them is. Transparency and disclosure are complex topics when it comes to gender identity and I would suggest reading Serano’s book if you want to know more. It can be hard for those of us born with the privilege of having our inner sex match our outer sex to hear what she has to say. Sometimes I don’t like it and, yes, there are times when I’m thinking, “Shut up you carping, over-educated baby.” But I’m also impressed. I love the way she gets you thinking about all the assumptions we make about sexuality.
Email sasha@eyeweekly.com