Teaspoon Politics

This piece originally appeared in February 2013 in the LGBT+ student magazine No Definition. The full issue, with the theme of "Politics", is available in PDF format here.

“All I ever do is try to empty the sea with this teaspoon; all I can do is keep trying to empty the sea with this teaspoon.” – Melissa McEwan, founder of shakesville.com[1]

I never used to have much interest in being “political”. For me, “politics” just meant an argument that you dusted off once every four years at election time, neatly compartmentalised off from “real” life, boring and safely ignorable.

But politics doesn’t just mean which party you vote for. It has another, much broader definition. Coming from the Greek “polis” (city), it encompasses all aspects of being a citizen - part of an organised social grouping of individuals, a society. How any given society organises itself can vary enormously, but it will always have to settle on a system for allocating its collective power.

Politics, or power relations, is everywhere. And being queer can have quite some bearing on where we stand within the system of power.

In 1969, the feminist Carol Hanisch famously said “the personal is political”. The implication was that when we sit down and think about it, a lot of the ‘personal problems’ we suffer don’t just spring out of nowhere, but they have their roots in a wider social context - they are influenced by the politics of the day.

Marriage is obviously a political issue, under the more popular definition of the word: some couples have the legal right to get married, other couples (or members of committed relationships involving more than two partners!) do not. But it’s also political in that it affects individuals’ relative levels of social power. Marriage is not just a personal choice, but something which comes with considerable fringe benefits. Obviously there are legal rights associated with it, such as custody and inheritance rights. But these rights have knock-on effects on other aspects of the couple’s lives. They are more financially secure; they have fewer worries in the way of getting on with their lives, advancing their careers, and so on.

A society which doesn’t allow gay couples to access the rights and benefits of marriage is making a statement: it believes gay people should stay at the bottom of the social power hierarchy, and it will make their lives more financially and emotionally difficult than heterosexual couples’, in order to ensure that they stay there. The same principle is at work in a society which forces transsexual people to go through the upheaval of dissolving supportive marriages made in their birth gender in order to access vital treatment, with no guarantee that they can restore these legal ties once their transition is complete. Societies can load the dice such that gay or trans* people have a harder time getting by, and then, when they fail or give up or break down, legislators can argue that they are clearly more fragile, less well-adjusted, than ‘normal’ people – and therefore less able to cope with, and less deserving of, the rights which they are denied.

But once we realise that our personal problems are so bound up in a wider political framework, we might ask ourselves: what can we do to ameliorate them? After all, electoral politics can seem impossible to change. There might be a hundred “political” issues we feel strongly about (whether clearly within the remit of politicians, such as who has the legal right to marry, or more subtle matters of power relations, such as how bisexual people are treated in society and culture at large). But when electoral politics is presented as the only way of making a “political” difference, we feel that we have to delegate our voice in all of these issues to just one person who, out of a mere handful of choices, looks like ey might do the least worst job of handling them. Thus it’s easy to fall into apathy, feeling as though we have no power.

But we have to remember that although very few of us have power in vast quantities, such that we could change our situation at the flick of a switch, we all have some power. Every day, in every situation, we’re negotiating a matrix of power relations – of politics! – where we can exercise an influence, some influence, however small. Where we can take out our teaspoons and bail out a few millilitres from the sea of inequalities in which so many of our LGBT+ companions are uncomfortably submerged.

For me, being openly transsexual is a political act. Power relations are inevitably tilted in favour of the ‘normal’, and when we as trans* people buy into the idea that being trans* – or ‘not normal’ – is something to be ashamed of, disguised, hidden, we reinforce that power relation within the culture. I’m certainly not denying that some situations are actively dangerous if you don’t try to disguise your trans* status. But boldly and shamelessly standing up and being counted at times when you’re expected to stay humbly silent – when acquaintances are making transphobic ‘jokes’, for example – can act as a reclamation of power.

The balance of power demands that we meekly and uncomfortably sit through these situations, because this is the fate we have earned by being ‘not normal’. But when we refuse, it makes people think twice about what they can get away with – about how stable the power they derive from being ‘normal’ actually is. Suddenly it gives a personality to the faceless mass of ‘otherness’ that they or their companions or the media they consume make jokes or comments or accusations about. And bit by bit, thought by thought, person by person, the “accepted” power hierarchy of ‘normal > not-normal’ changes. Teaspoon by teaspoon, the political landscape changes.

And when a society (which starts from a person, which starts from a thought) accepts a minority group as legitimate, full, equal, well-rounded members, that’s when electoral politics are likely to change in their favour. One day, if our society gradually grows to view transsexualism as no big deal, just one of those quirks of human variation, a personal handicap easily resolved by simple procedures, then the pathologizing hoops we have to jump through to access treatment will start to look unsuitable and outdated. It will seem only common sense to allow all trans* people the right to bodily autonomy, rather than only permitting it to those who have been psychologically assessed, who have survived a stressful and potentially life-endangering extended period of living (and therefore dressing, and ideally also finding employment) as their chosen gender, who happen not to transgress their clinicians’ (sometimes simplistic, sometimes binary) ideas of what makes someone a man or a woman or neither. After all, it seems only common sense, these days, to allow gay couples autonomy over who they legally bind their lives with.

This is my manifesto: I will cling fervently to my teaspoon, and I will try to use it whenever I have the strength. I will stand up and be counted. I will never stop believing in the cumulative influence of the infinitesimal power of each action I commit. Because it is we who, if we give up and give in to political apathy, have the most to lose.

[1] Following the initial publication of this piece, I came across criticism of the sometimes problematic behaviour and attitudes of the Shakesville bloggers, including Melissa McEwan. I think the quotation is a useful one regardless of other things McEwan has said, but I understand the criticisms, I do not endorse Shakesville uncritically, and I want to warn readers that clicking through may be triggering.

Body of Evidence

"So then, one last question: What do you want us to do for you?"

The answer in my head was "I want you to help me work that out". But it would have been the wrong answer.

I was there for a diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria, and if you have Gender Dysphoria, then by definition, you must want gender confirmation therapy. You must want to do everything within your power to make your body conform to the right binary gender... no matter what the risks.

There was one question he hadn't asked me. In fact, there was one whole topic he hadn't even touched on. He hadn't asked me how I felt about my body.

He hadn't asked me if I felt nauseous, alienated, at seeing my naked female-phenotype form. He hadn't asked me if in glancing at my hands I subconsciously felt as though they must be someone else's - as though my hands, surely, would be bigger, hairier. He hadn't asked me if instinctively I reached for a penis that wasn't there, if I was overcome with fresh horror every month at the reminder of the thing between my legs that my brain just couldn't process.

In short, he didn't ask me - not even in crude, insightless terms like the ones above - he didn't ask me if I have body dysphoria.

On the whole, I don't. Not every trans* person does. For those that do, of course, gender confirmation therapy is a strongly desirable course of action - the bodies they have cause them genuine pain, pain which hormone therapy and surgery are extremely effective at relieving.

But me? Huh, well. Maybe if I had stubble, I'd get ma'amed less often.

I've blogged about this before; I've been wavering about medical transition for years. It always comes down to this: there's very little I think I'd miss about my female-phenotype body if I put it through a second puberty. And at times, that "very little" feels like a cheap price to pay to escape the pain of being constantly misgendered. But at other times, the scales tip the other way. And at those times, it seems frustratingly ridiculous that in order to be seen as my true self, I should have to change something - my body - which I just do not feel has any connection with my sense of self.

So that was the question I wanted to ask. What can I do? What should I do? How best can I navigate living as a man without having to break things that don't need fixing?

But I know what the answer would have been: if I have no desire to change my body to conform to the male phenotype, I have no business living as a man.

Popular conceptions of transsexualism are frequently - overwhelmingly - boiled down to issues of the body. In laypeople's eyes, "being transsexual" just means "wanting a sex change". (It never seems to occur to them to ask why one would want it. Funny, that, since it's by far and away the most interesting aspect of the thing.) Indeed, it's often argued (by people I have no desire to link you to) that transsexualism didn't, couldn't, exist before the development of medical techniques for gender confirmation. And, when you're a trans* person, the path is so neatly laid out in front of you - hormone therapy, chest/genital surgery, starting a new life and going 'stealth' - that you sometimes forget it can be (has been, might one day be) any other way.

Three days after those questions (the one that was asked, and the one that wasn't), I went on a walking tour of Brighton, focusing on its LGBT history. We heard the story of Dr James Barry, a celebrated surgeon in the 19th century, who travelled the world on army postings as a Medical Inspector, and performed one of the first known Caesarean sections in which both mother and baby survived. It was only when he died, and his body was - against his instructions - examined, that he was discovered to have been assigned female at birth. Had his wishes been respected, nobody would ever have realised.

Nobody would ever have realised.

And then there was the story of "Colonel" Victor Barker, whose exploits with the National Fascisti in the 1920s remind us that trans* people can be flawed human beings just like anyone else (and whose Wikipedia page genders him as female), but who played the role of a retired colonel like such a natural that his peers never suspected that he was legally female until it was revealed during a court case. And those are just the famous stories - the ones where the "truth" was uncovered, the ones where the person involved was important or notorious enough for the story to hit the news. Who knows how many other lives have been lived contrary to assigned gender?

What it means to be trans* has changed a lot over the years. For untold centuries before our modern, medicalising era, it could simply mean putting on the right clothes and forging yourself a new life. That's if you were one of the lucky ones, of course - if you had the means and connections to start afresh, and if you 'passed' well enough to go unsuspected (which, I'm well aware, is often far easier for the male-identified than for the female-identified). But it's notable that after Dr Barry's posthumous outing, acquaintances were quick to step up and testify to his smooth skin and high voice. If his female-coded attributes were such a giveaway, how come nobody challenged him when he was alive? It's conceivable that back when gender roles were much more rigid and segregated, the idea of anyone female-assigned putting on trousers and going through medical school was so unthinkable that not even a whole host of 'giveaway' cues would arouse suspicion.

I certainly don't want to idealise the past with that observation, but it's intriguing in the light of the following: Gender confirmation therapy first started to become widespread in the 1970s, a time of unprecedented freedom of expression for both genders, and yet its gatekeepers would only treat those trans* people who rigidly conformed to "traditional" ideas of masculinity or femininity. Trans* women ran the risk of being refused treatment if they didn't attend appointments wearing skirts and makeup, a situation which persisted long after such sartorial expectations became outmoded even for cis women - and woe betide you if, in-role as your chosen gender, you identified as anything other than 100% heterosexual.

The simple fact is, a lot of people who like to consider themselves "normal" have a lot invested in the idea of the gender binary. And for them, the existence of transsexualism is scary: it raises the possibility that they might not be as "normal" as they thought. It makes them feel better if they can claim that only the manliest FAABs and womanliest MAABs ever want to transition; that everybody who transitions is at least upholding good old traditional gender roles in the bedroom; that nobody would ever want to admit to such a shamefully not-normal thing as having a trans* history; that nobody would want to transition to anything other than "male" or "female". For decades, gatekeepers have pandered to such people's gender anxieties when setting up the hoops for transitioners to jump through. And slowly, slowly, many of these requirements have been eroded away, as even the gatekeepers admit that they're starting to look outdated. But it's too late for anyone who, in the seventies, desperately needed relief from eir body dysphoria, and was faced with the choice, for one reason or another, between lying or losing out.

We can't say for certain whether Barry and Barker were "actually" trans men. "Trans man" is a label which, like many others ("lesbian", "genderqueer", "asexual"), belongs to our time - it only makes sense within the context of modern (and Western!) ideas of "man", and of "transness", and of the interplay between them. We don't know their motives, we don't know their true desires, and we don't know how they would have identified, or what steps of transition they would have taken, if they had lived today. All we can say is that they did what they felt they had to in order to forge out a satisfactory life within the society they had to live in.

And that's all that anyone who's lived contrary to their assigned gender has ever done - whether they took hormones or not, whether they had surgery or not, whether or not they [would have] identified with the label "trans*" (or "fa'afafine", or "hijra", or any of the dozens of other non-Western cross-gender identities). If I did undergo medical transition, I'd undoubtedly feel more comfortable within the society I have to live in (and, note, that is definitely not to be sniffed at). But I would always be uncomfortable knowing it's not the society I want to live in. I would always, deep down, rather live in a society where the phenotype of my body mattered as little to other people as it did to me; one where I could politely explain I was a man and that was that. And I would always worry that our society might never reach that stage without reckless self-important idiots people like me choosing the road less travelled, swimming stubbornly against the tide, expending the energy they are lucky enough to have in politely explaining, again and again, until that is that.

As my clinician was fond of mentioning, he's been "doing this" - that is, diagnosing people's genders - for 25 years. (I doubt he would have taken the point that so have I.) But in that 25 years, much has changed. And - with any luck - I'm going to be living as trans* for another 25, 50, maybe even 75 years. Do I really want to sacrifice my voice, my surgical virginity, my comfortably post-pubescent hormonal cycle, on the altar of what cis people expect of me now?

Some men have breasts. If I can't get over that, then who will?

Gender in theory and in practice

Drafted on 26/3/12


My GP is an exceedingly nice guy, and he's not - can't be expected to be - a trans* expert. He performed the last(?) of his gatekeeping duties for me this morning with endearing humility, constantly apologising for being so "challenging" as he asked me probing questions. As he explained, in future referrals, people were going to be similarly challenging, trying to make sure that I wasn't making a bad decision.

Although I can just about get my head round a world in which this has to happen (so what if I made a "bad decision"? why would it matter if I stopped taking testosterone after a few months then spent the rest of my life as a slightly hirsute woman with a low voice and clitoromegaly?), I was somewhat perturbed by the thought that, in order to access treatment, I would have to have my identity, my confidence in myself, constantly "challenged", and to constantly defend it. No wonder the referral process is so emotionally draining for the more fragile of us (and bear in mind that our experiences are likely to have made us fragile).

But what disturbed me more was the idea that the healthcare "professionals" who stand in our way might have such a simplistic, unprofessional idea of gender as was displayed in his questioning. I have been thinking about my gender for over half my life, off and on; as remarked an FTM acquaintance of mine (who on the face of it is the most masculine-conforming obvious candidate for the treatment), you have to deconstruct the binary before you can work out where you stand within it (and then, if appropriate, you put it back together with yourself firmly in the "other" bit). I have read blogs, books, resources, theory; I have answered for myself to my own satisfaction nearly all of the questions that feel relevant connected to the decision to "change sex".

I do not count among them the question "so if you're not planning to have surgery, what would happen if you started a relationship with someone?"

I am a very lucky person. I have an "alternative" worldview and I live in an "alternative" world which supports, celebrates and nourishes it. Very rarely does the "real" world intrude, the one where people aren't broad-minded and over-intellectualising, the one where people eschew critical thinking in favour of shocked instinctive reactions when faced with a "she-man". I've brainwashed reeducated myself more than sufficiently in matters of queer, [a]sex-positive and feminist theory to conclude "instinctively" that all relationships are different, all people are different, all genitalia are different, and there are a million and one ways of having sex, or not having sex, or having a relationship with a person primarily and eir genitalia second. The "professionals" who gatekeep gender have, in many cases and within the confines of what their job description demands of them, thought about these things only so far as concluding that they don't want to accidentally create freaks.

Perhaps it's unreasonable of me to raise an eyebrow at the question; I'm sure there are plenty of candidates for medical transition who don't want to be turned into freaks, or who honestly haven't thought about these things, or who would respond with an "unhealthy" plan for how they'd deal with such matters. But I would really hope that, rather than just being rejected for referral (which might seem to the "professionals" like the "safer" way of dealing with "confused" people, but in actual fact might lead to much greater distress and confusion than an ill-advised partial transition), such people would be given access further down the line to appropriate counselling. And by "appropriate", I mean "grounded in queer-positive theory": giving them the tools to accept that their genital configuration (whatever it is currently, whatever they would like it to be, and whatever it's likely to actually end up as) doesn't make them "freaks", doesn't mean they won't be able to have successful relationships, and doesn't make it "wrong" for them to obtain whatever sexual pleasure is available to them.

Easier said than done, perhaps, if said people are surrounded by that tiresome "real" world in which acquaintances disapprove of their actions. But even if they come to an understanding of themselves, their genders and their bodies which the "normal" people around them will never take the time to understand, it might be the key to their own self-acceptance and self-confidence - things which, if they've reached a point of suspecting themselves to be trans*, might otherwise remain a lifelong problem for them.

I freely admit that I'm an idealist, and perhaps naive with it. But that's because, in some respects, I live in an ideal world. By lucky chance, I've landed in a life situation where, as yet, my trans* status has not once caused me to be harassed, lose a friend or family member, or encounter friction or prejudice at work or in other social groups. I hear about less fortunate people, am "challenged" by my GP to consider how I'd feel if transition led me to encounter one of these negative scenarios, and I'm determined to prove that trans* life doesn't have to be like that. Maybe it won't happen; maybe I will get knocked back by a homophobic (or acephobic, but I've had relationships with men, so in their eyes, who's counting?) consultant, maybe work colleagues will start to swallow their acceptance once they realise it comes with facial hair. But that's the "real" world, and I never liked the sound of it much. I've already proven that, with a measure of good fortune and some boldness in seeking out progressive people, a trans* person can build eir own little world in which ey can live out eir gender happily.

Who really lives in the "real" world, anyway? We must pander to its demands and live under its conditions, and we can desire to change it or try to change it, but all of our happiness and security, all of our meaningful encounters, all of our little everyday triumphs and despairs that together mount up to "living", come from our Own Little Worlds. And the best we can possibly hope for, regardless of what the "real" world thinks of us, is to seek out or build or stumble upon a little world which feels right. I like mine. And if one day someone wants, really wants, to come and live in my corner of it with me, I guarantee that ey will not care about the shape of my genitals.