BY C. BAIN
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt of a longer essay by the author that largely responds to JK Rowling’s transphobic statements, which can be read in its entirety here.
THE IDEA THAT ANYONE HAS ONE FIXED GENDER OVER THEIR LIFE COURSE IS ABSURD
Listen, it is a lie. It’s a lie that there is a gender binary that works for most people, and then there are some people who need to go from one polarity to the other, and then there are some people who occupy a third nonbinary location. Every human being is selecting and constructing their gender not from a binary, but from an infinite range. We do this every day, every hour, of our lives.
I was told i’ll need to substantiate this claim. LOL. I could try to refer you to other writers defending this position, but the reason i know this is not because of other writers, it’s because i am alive in a body and i am paying attention. Other people of course give me freedom (and inspiration, through their example, through their survival.) But the information itself is inside us, inside every person. We have been sold a fiction of immutable, binary, biological sex, and a further fiction of gender roles and power hierarchies that emerge from that system.
Think about what gender is. Then think about whether Amber Rose and Tina Fey are “the same gender.” Think about who you were when you were nine, or twelve, or sixteen, and who you are now, and ask yourself if your gender was the same.
The reality that some people detransition is used (by you, for example) to delegitimize trans identity, when in fact it argues for the need for a destruction of the conception of gender that we live under more clearly than anything. You seem to be concerned with young assigned-female people losing their ability to have children in the conventional way. This seems to replicate what the “demeaning” reduction of womanhood to reproductive capacity which you decry, when you think someone is calling you a “menstruator,” but setting that aside i think you misunderstand detransition.
Detransitioners are not uniform, their experience is not the same. Some move into another phase of transition because the feelings that initially guided them guide them somewhere else. Many are faced with the reality of transphobia, familial rejection, and the difficulty of passing (or accessing adequate medical interventions they would need in order to pass) and then try to return to the painful relative safety of living in their former lives. Neither outcome indicates, to me, that transition (or access to medical technology that facilitates transition) is a problem.
Gender is not so different from style. (I am trying to not make this a thing with references, but this isn’t my independent idea — Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have written extensively on this.) It is, or it should be, trivial.
It is only not trivial because people die for it, are killed for it. People are not upset with you for being glib or ignorant or even insulting, though you have been all those things. People are upset with you because when someone with your enormous platform asserts that trans women are not real women because they don’t menstruate, there is a connection between rhetoric and violence. In the week that i have been writing this to you, six Black trans women have been murdered in America.
And to say that what should be preserved, in the face of murder over the failure to perform gender “correctly,” is the validity of womanhood, the sovereignty of biological sex, is tantamount to blaming victims for their own murder.
DIFFERENCES IN VIOLENCE: REPRESENTATION AND HISTORY
Like the preoccupation with gender, when gender is mostly gesture and style, it would be nice if the concern about “representation” were trivial, but it is not. Cultural production is important. We understand what a society values by looking at its artifacts.
They gave us enough TV shows that we are at a cultural tipping point, it’s so stupid. The western-media-consuming-mind is the dumbest. Like a little transparent blobfish. They put trans people on television thinking we would exist as a fetish, ornament, virtue signal of the producers’ tolerance and progressive values. And then we began to tell our own stories.
Because we’ve reached this critical mass of trans representation and are having a weird trend moment, a lot of cis people seem to be under the impression that trans people are new.
Trans people have existed since people have existed. And the cis need for trans people has existed for a long time too. The cis need for trans people is the need to subjugate the body, deny the sex drive, sanitize and gatekeep the idea of masculinity as the seat of power.
How long has it been. Focusing on “Western” culture, some thinkers pin the emergence of split between the mind-soul and body (and therefore, the assessment of the body as un-valuable, dirty, dangerous) to the Hellenic period in Greece.
I have heard some spiritual teachers trace the problem earlier, to the advent of agriculture. In a pre-agricultural society (which had plenty of brutality and problems of its own) people were in constant communication with each other and with the land, in order to survive. We were interdependent. The communities were small, and the connections deep. You relied on your environment. Then, as agriculture emerged and land became something you could own, nature something you could protect yourself from, other problems of ownership arose. Who owns whom. To whom does the family “belong.” A need for role rigidity and subjugation emerged.
Whether you trace the need for gender policing to Ancient Greece or to the shift to agrarian society, once the need for subjugation arose, trans people (and other “othered” bodies— queers, enslaved people, women,) became receptacles for the terror and desire of the people who had power over them.
We do this shadow work for “normal” people all the time, whether it is conscious or not, whether we consent to it or not.
The way that gender functions in society (and the way society functions, as a consequence) is seismically shifting. I know you hate it. Can it be stopped? Can you be successful, in your attempt to recloset, detransition, delegitimize the trans people you attack under the guise of earnest thoughtful feminist questioning.
I hope not, but i think that a kind of backward movement is possible, yes. I think we could be erased as agents of our own stories, turned back into some pervert menace or a bunch of confused children. You could erase our ability to be human in the general consciousness, but you could never erase the image of the tranny from the “normal” men’s sexual imagination. Sexually depraved, hermaphroditical, chimerical, insatiable, best of all the worlds at once. We exist as an ur-fantasy on a substrate of cis erotic consciousness, a reservoir of disgust, a lightning rod for possibility. Ultimately you cannot erase us because we are part of you. You need us too badly.
Yes, we are in a moment where the attitude and social consciousness towards trans people is revolutionizing. Revolutions create problems too, which is one reason (aside from the secret hope that oppression will continue forever,) that institutions are so invested in selling us on incremental change. Incremental change is less disruptive, less harmful, by a logic that is willing to ignore the harm inherent in preserving a status quo.
If this is a moment of revolution, what are you and the other gender critical types on the internet trying to accomplish. If this is revolution, what comes after revolutions. If this is freedom, what is the reconstruction.
THE INTERNET AND HOW WE TALK
I tried again to stop writing this. Then that letter came out, in Harpers, on the importance of “justice and open debate.” Then the pr*sident talked about cancel culture in his speech where he bemoaned the tearing down of monuments to slavery. I am having a problem of scale and perspective. Things are flattening. This is probably evident, in that i am talking to a random famous author as though she were a person in my life. In normal times, i’d try to remedy this perspectival loss by getting off the internet, but right now the internet is the only game in town.
As social networking platforms have discovered how to monetize themselves, they prioritize communication less and less. What twitter wants, as a financial entity, is virality and engagement. It is a machine which, sometimes, has been minorly subverted in the hands of the skillful or the desperate. Revolutions, uprisings, have been facilitated by twitter, despite itself. It has, in some ways, democratized information, and has allowed some people who would otherwise have no platform to speak out powerfully. And yet it is still SO BAD.
I don’t care that much about you being personally attacked, though i guess it’s counterproductive for people to be attacking you, rather than your bad ideas. In a sense it’s not your fault that anyone gives a shit what you say. You’re just famous, and it’s a broader social failing that famous people are now regarded as experts.
Here is where, through a mobius strip of reasoning, i do begin to agree with you. There is a problem in how we talk.
Everything starts to mobius around itself. The “free speech” crew are upset about being attacked and deplatformed, so they end up ouroborosing into a demand for civility. No amount of “civility” will erase the fact that powerful people can now be critiqued when they say fucked up things. Conversely, yes, “cancel culture,” or the emotional fragility and empathic failure that makes it impossible for people to continue to be in shared space when there is perceived harm, does exist. Sometimes the outcome may be an improvement. But the overall mechanism, (fragility, intolerance, black-and-white thinking,) is an outcome of the same values that suppose that sufficiently punitive rules will force people into good behavior. It is a culture of fear.
i think you should read Conflict Is Not Abuse. I think you should look at the thinking of the folks who worked on the #8toabolition campaign. Because the call to accountability is a call to remain in communication, to admit that there is some thread of community and mutual reliance which runs through all of us. And that implies, yes, that people should not threaten your life on the internet, just as it implies that you could listen to the ways in which your reasonable speech encouraged violence and discrimination towards a vulnerable group of people and be accountable to that.
The idea of a world without violence, beyond violence, (no cops, no masters, no mean dad gods,) is easy to dismiss as utopian and childish. But it’s what we must try to move towards. Nothing else is worth striving for. Any other formulation leaves us with this tyranny somewhere. If it’s not her stepfather, it’s a children’s book author. If it’s not president-rapist it’s president-other-rapist. It may not feel possible, or realistic, but the change that we need, if we are going to redeem ourselves as a species, is radical in the extreme.
I think there will be a world beyond this violence, if we survive at all. (Big if!) But a precondition of that world is that the people who need to be having this conversation die. We’re the dinosaurs, but it’s ok. You’ll die. And i’ll die. I look forward to that.
Writer’s Note:
There are ways to help and support trans people. I encourage looking online for individuals who need support (#transcrowdfund and #openyourpurse are tags people use, many people act as aggregators.) I recommend seeking individuals because for those of us with trauma histories taking action to access resources through any organization can become an obstacle, (even asking for direct aid, of course, is an obstacle.) There are organizations that work closely with impacted communities as well, two that come immediately to mind are The Okra Project and Black Trans Travel Fund.
C. Bain is a gender-liminal multi- and inter-disciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Bain’s book of poetry Debridement (Great Weather for Media) was a finalist for the 2016 Publishing Triangle Awards. His writing appears in journals and anthologies including PANK, theRumpus.net, BOOTH, Muzzle Magazine, BOAAT, them. and the Everyman's Library collection Villanelles. He has a long history in poetry slam, and has shared stages with Jim Carroll, Patricia Smith, Dorothy Allison, and Saul Williams.