What Semenya’s Critics AND Defenders Fear

Reading David Zirin and Sherry Wolf’s piece, Sex-Testing Victim Semenya Stands Tall, originally published by The Nation, and a somewhat different version in The Globe and Mail, it was reading the latter that something quite fundamental, and quite invisible, struck me.

While it is clear what is illuminated here, particularly in the hurtful comments by those Semenya defeated–and part of a long, if not venerable history in women’s sport–ascribing her success to maleness, is a truth not many, for all the commentary, acknowledge.

The history of female athletes of superlative performance has long been one of their adopting feminine gender expression–and emphatically so–not only to offset their physical male characteristics, musculature, lack of breasts, endurance, deep voice, not usually associated with a female body but also to deflect the slur of homosexuality–and the consequence of sex-testing, which indignity Semenya is now undergoing.

This strength of this accusation, not only in sports, does not simply derive from the irrational fear of those who have sex with those whose sex is the same as theirs.

Do we actually see the persons so attacked in intimate moments with those of the same sex?

I suspect I must actually answer this, to me, rhetorical question. This is because the near universal answer to the hate attracted by people like Semenya is that, of course, it is their sexual orientation that is the cause–and no evidence for this is needed.

But, no, we do not see these targets of hate having sex with anyone.

What, then, do we actually see?

We see people who present the physical characteristics of the opposite sex–specifically, male characteristics. And it is these characteristics that, it is assumed, must be the reason for her success. Since it could not possibly be her dedication, her talent or her training.

It is a surprisingly abstract process that jumps from the perception of seen physical characteristics to unseen sexual behaviour–and it is a common one.

It is even more surprising, and to me very curious, that gay and lesbian people, almost universally–and uncritically–promote this complicated intellectualleap.

Clarity of thought is not something usually associated with hate; but I would have hoped it might come from other quarters.

I repeat, what is it that we actually see?

What is it we are actually judging?

We see, and judge, male characteristics in one who presents as female.

We witness as Zirin and Wolf describe, the conclusion of Semenya’s critics that she has illicitly benefited from male characteristics–as if she has taken performance-enhancing drugs/steroids.

As Zirin and Wolf declare:

A country’s wealth, coaching facilities, nutrition and opportunity determine the creation of a world-class athlete far more than a Y chromosome or a penis ever could.

Both Semenya’s critics and defenders see sexual orientation as the essence of this issue. Well, not see, I suppose, but feel.

Such a curious consensus and agreement among the most unlikely partners, one might even say allies.

What struck me in all of this–and leads me to dare this statement–is precisely what Zirin and Wolf emphatically point to:

the underlying societal  assumption that it is better to be male.

So fundamental is this assumption it cannot even be seen, so normalized is it in society. It is so invisible that even Semenya’s defenders must conjure up an abstract logic to explain what is happening.

Because they, themselves, share this assumption.

This assumption is the flip side of the attacks, not limited by sexual orientation, political philosophy, religious belief or adherence to feminism, on those who seek to abandon apparent maleness.

This, too, is met with the slur of homosexuality.

While there are certainly those who say these fundamental physical characteristics are gender and gender variant presentation is itself part of  “all things associated” with homosexuality, I cannot accept these assertions.

When, for example, we learn that Semenya wore pants when we was young, this, certainly, is part of gender expression. And we can also say that the response to her physical presence is gendered in some way. But my somewhat attenuated hope is that, in the way we approach freedom, equality and dignity, we would seek clarity in what we assert.

Frankly, all I see in most of this controversy is confusion.

Am I saying Semenya is transsexual? Of course not.

Am I saying she is intersexed? I’m sure after all the sex-testing ordeal she is enduring, we may well learn this.

What I am saying is Semenya’s ordeal demonstrates prejudice that is not limited to those who criticize her performance, and that this points to a very fundamental anxiety shared by people regardless of sexual orientation.

Not only does this have to do with those who change their physical sex characteristics, or simply present opposite-sex physical characteristics, but in particular this anxiety is heightened when it has to do with those who appear to abandon maleness as well as those who seem to inappropriately benefit from maleness.

There is a lesson here I suspect will be lost on most.

Tools for the Struggle

(UPDATE – UPDATE II)

This a bit of an experiment. Though I have not been posting to this blog for some time–issues around available time, particularly in relation to keeping up full time work, and my penchant for doing rather involved pieces that have much thinking and drafting to do.

I have, nevertheless, been posting comments to various lists and sites over the months, finding the motivation of responding to be very helpful in getting something worthwhile, I believe, out.

This is one such response to this.

There were no other comments. I debated whether to post this because after an interesting and necessary discussion to a previous post, there was silence. There remains silence.

This is an ominous sign.

Over the years, I have read with interest, great respect and admiration the work of catkisser whose contribution includes not only this blog, but others and a body of advocacy I can never hope to emulate.

I regret from this point our paths diverge.

To abandon the tools of privilege and power relations analyses is to voluntarily give up what is most effective in the struggle for empowerment.

The need for one to “own one’s womanhood,” to posses one’s self-esteem, are certainly foundational pre-requisites for ANY struggle, including the struggle for equality–which remains a struggle.

The vision of anarchism in the Spanish Civil War was not limited to women, but was one shared by all those, Spanish and not Spanish alike, who answered the call–forever changing them.

The challenges faced by those men and women were different at least in degree from those we face today–I would even argue the degree of difference we face today passes the threshold to difference in kind.

The most visible collective of women in Canada, with a long and respected, by some, history of working for the benefit of women, is the group that founded Rape Relief and the Vancouver Women’s Health Collective and Pharmacy, called Lu’s, which have SUCCESSFULLY excluded those women not born women–those of use who DO NOT BLEED.

I have myself been attacked by those who wield “horizontal” beliefs–white, middle-class, gay men who argue there is no difference between either our status or struggles.

This, when gay and lesbian people have have had explicit human rights in Canada for more than a decade, hate crime protections for almost that long, and same-sex marriage–called in Canada “equal marriage”–for more than 5 years in most parts of my country and everywhere since.

And MANY other administrative law and collective agreement benefits.

There is no explicit human rights protection in Canada–except North West Territories–for transgender or transsexual people, no hate crime protection, nor FORMAL equality anywhere.

There is a Rainbow Health Ontario agency that seeks to improve health care in Ontario for ALL of us whose adherence to the social
determinants of health does not move them even to acknowledge that this FORMAL exclusion from society has any effect on transgender and particularly transsexual people.

Once, this very much upset me on a deeply personal level until I worked out my own grief and despair, finding my own healing path,
taking ownership of my womanhood and finding my self-esteem.

While my transition has completed, I continue on my healing path.

The tools you declare should be abandoned are those I see put to good use, by the women I admire, in the empowerment of those oppressed by the primary structures of oppression–race, age, gender/sex, sexual orientation, class, etc–and all their intersections in the lived lives of all of us.

Without these tools, there is no way to answer the charge that there is no difference between the struggles of those excluded from the mainstream of society and those closer, nor able to gauge this exclusion and what maintains this–the simple exercise of raw power.

And more importantly, to challenge it.

The time has long since past when we can withdraw into our communes and communities and celebrate the Goddess in each other and ourselves to the exclusion of this struggle–balanced with what we need to keep ourselves healthy in the world, which DOES include celebration and mutual recognition.

The Spanish Civil War, among its MANY lessons, gave us this very painful and very bitter one.

Regardless of my own yearnings for the glory of the past–and my grief for being forever excluded from it–there is nothing I can do to resurrect what WAS right and good.

All I can do–merely contribute, really–is to build for the future with all the tools I can muster in the face of the ever-perfecting
machine, maintaining my balance along the way as best I can.

It saddens me more than I can express that the two of you, whom I admire for what you have endured and accomplished, call on us to abandon the very essence of the consciousness and empowerment that it is to be a woman.

UPDATE: When I wrote about silence, it was not in reference to the posts, but to the absence of comments to them.

The comment refers to a discussion in response to my comment.

I do not see a discussion, of the sort that was in response to this post. I just wonder where the discussion in comments is to the more recent posts.

UPDATE II: Another comment to the original post.

I believe the starting point of feminism–well, maybe second wave feminism–in North America–one in which few “women” actually had a part in–were the ‘bitching’ or consciousness-raising sessions.

Out of these came the awareness of power-relationships on the one hand and privilege–male privilege–on the other.

Cultural differences are the inevitable result of, well, different cultures.

One of the goals of social work is to work at cultural competency–not always succeeded or even understood. Feminism is very much a part of the practice and theory of social work.

But my point, which I don’t believe you have addressed, is that out of one’s taking ownership of being a woman and coming to one’s self-esteem–a difficult process given the oppressed state of being a woman, and yes, being a woman of transsexual history–comes empowerment.

This empowerment is entangled with understanding privilege and power relations.

This is the gift of feminism to all those who struggle against oppression. What has been absorbed into what is called anti-oppression practice and theory.

Feminists work in all parts of the “woman’s movement,” including those we both have challenged. These women do the Goddess’s work in their lives and in living their lives.

What they–we–do with our lives after taking possession of our empowerment is not for another to say.

This just gets us back to where we started.

What should be the basis for hope?

(UPDATE)

I agree hope is one of the most important things in our lives, particularly for those who are marginalized in society and around whom is rarely anything more than silence.

Except now.

First, the Alberta Government decided to add sexual orientation to its human rights law a decade after the Supreme Court of Canada declared sexual orientation a right analogous to those in Chapter 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms–in ruling on a challenge from Alberta–that effectively added sexual orientation to the Alberta law, making this addition symbolic, but important. But not adding gender identity and gender expression.

Second, it decided to defund sex reassignment surgery, funding it had maintained during the decade Ontario had not funded this surgery. Ontario refunded SRS last June.

In the coverage generated over this decision to defund, there has been much mention the Ontario Human Rights Commission ordered the Ontario Government to refund surgery as a basis for hope. In fact, the Ontario Government agreed that if the Commission in Hogan, et al. ordered it to, it would.

But the Commission didn’t.

This is the only Ontario Human Rights Commission decision I am aware of concerning funding of SRS in Ontario: Michelle Hogan, Martine Stonehouse, A.B. and Andy McDonald v. Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Ontario as represented by the Minister of Health and Long-Term Care (Tribunal Decision) in 2006 which is reported on the OHRC website here.

In summary, four transsexual people filed a human rights complaint on the basis that delisting funding for SRS–which the Mike Harris government did just about a decade ago–violated the human rights of transsexual people.

Three of the complainants were in the queue for surgery when funding was delisted, but not at the point which the Harris government recognized as far enough along, the fourth transsexual person was not in the queue. The tribunal ruled the Government of Ontario must pay for the three who were in the queue–it simply finessed the point at which they were recognized to be “in the system.” The ruling was that Ontario either pay for surgery for these three or, for those who had paid for surgery by other means, reimburse them.

The fourth transsexual person, not being in the system at all, was ruled not th have had his–I believe he was a female to male transsexual person–rights violated.

This was an extremely disappointing outcome.

One of the four tribunal members, in a minority and dissenting opinion, ruled that “the government’s decision to remove public funding for sex reassignment surgery was discriminatory, arbitrary, reckless and an abuse of power. She would have ordered the government to fund sex reassignment surgery for all four complainants, since all four met the criteria for funding that had existed prior to October 1, 1998.”

It is my understanding discussions between the former Ontario Minister of Health, George Smitherman, the Trans Health Lobby Group AND others lead to the ministerial decision to relist SRS in Ontario.

It is unclear whether a Human Rights Agency would order a government to establish a spending program, however small–so-called positive rights–as opposed to rectifying individual situations, when they are currently based on negative rights including employment, accommodations and services; that is, not spending programs but causing people, entities, etc, NOT to do things, like discriminate. .

This is also illustrated in the B.C. Tribunal decision to order the B.C. Government to pay for a female to male procedure; “it was ordered to pay for the phalloplasty of Louis Waters because his sexual reassignment from woman to man was underway when B.C. de-funded the procedure.”

Personally, I am not convinced the current regime of implicit protection of gender identity under the statutory categories of sex and especially for surgery, sex AND disability, is enough to leverage governments to list, or in the cases here, relist surgery without other pressure.

Even explicit and formal creation of the category of gender identity (and I would personally hope for the creation of the category of gender expression, also) may not do what is needed. However, the raising of the public profile of transsexual people, our embodied lives, struggles and needs, not only for surgery, but also for counselling, hormones and hair removal as publicly funded services, as part of a campaign for explicit human rights, might.

Such a campaign in Alberta has recently been reported on Xtra.ca, here, and elsewhere, with Mercedes Allen being prominently mentioned.

I would find more hope in an overt political campaign, even including human rights complaints, as long as the limits of human rights agencies are explicitly understood.

UPDATE: I have been struck by the language used in the campaign to relist SRS in Alberta. The Egale Canada press release uses the language “transsexual and transgender people,” which is a change since Mickey Wilson took over trans policy–the term has been “transgender” only. The apparent leader of the movement, Mercedes Allen, is also using the term “transsexual” whereas previously the term has been “transgender” only–as in “transgender surgery.”

This usage has been mine all along, though I have been criticized for even using the word “transsexual;” I have found it incoherent to use the phrase “transgender surgery.”

Hope is not based on an imposed and inaccurate unity.

For me, distinction and difference, respected, is the basis of hope.

Perspective of the Oppressor, Updated

Egale Canada has held its panel on Homophobia and Transphobia in Canadian Schools and posted more documents to its website. Another press release here. And the executive summary of the survey here.

After all the back and forth, including recent criticisms of my negative statements on Egale Canada and other organizations–criticisms that resolutely refuse to engage the facts and arguments marshaled in this blog–the study’s principle investigator and member of Egale’s Education Committee, Dr. Catherine Taylor, makes this statement in the press release

We need to take the next logical step and develop policies to tackle transphobia as well, because youth are suffering in their absence.

I’m not sure what could be a clearer expression of Egale Canada’s failure to do what it claimed–in Egale Canada’s usually ambiguous manner–and an indictment of all its spin, which I have documented, that this study was really also about trans youth and transphobia.

In the executive summary there is more than a little confusion, such as here, under Impacts where it is stated

Over a quarter of the LGBTQ students and almost half of the transgender students had skipped school because they felt unsafe, compared to less than a tenth of non-LGBTQ.

I had thought LGBTQ already included T.

This is simply one of many conceptual confusions in this summary.

This is reminiscent of Helen Kennedy’s statement in a previous press release for the survey, Egale Canada’s Executive Director

We may have human rights for LGBTQ people in Canada, but you’d never know it based on these results.

In the current controversy in Alberta, not only regarding the delisting of sex reassignment surgery, but also its human rights law, not only has sexual orientation not been formally added to Alberta’s law–a formality given the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling a decade ago–but gender identity and gender expression are absent also. And just before the release of the budget defunding surgery, the Alberta government proposed to add sexual orientation to its law–but not gender identity or gender expression.

What is the value of a study which demonstrates such a fundamental methodological flaw that, on the one hand, separates what it calls transgender youth from gay youth, but on the other, repeatedly conflates them?

Are they the same or are they different?

Difference is the most basic building block of knowledge. Here there is clearly demonstrated conceptual confusion of identity and experience. This is the result of the ideology of required single identity.

Overall, I argue this admission by its principle investigator, with the now very open posting of the executive summary, The First National Climate Survey on Homophobia in Canadian Schools, makes it impossible to deny that Egale Canada, its Education Committee–historically unable to conceive trans people have identities and experience different from gay people, and unsympathetic to those who raise this concern–remain unable to address the concerns of transgender and transsexual people, especially youth. Even though it maintains the fiction that it does.

In its recommendations the study falls back on Gay-Straight Alliance clubs as the approach to address the concerns raised.

In a time when there is a movement for Rainbow Alliances, whose name does not explicitly exclude nor reinforce the gay-only ideology, such as this one and this one, one can only wonder why Egale Canada and its supporters maintain a blind preference for the dominance of sexual orientation and exclusion of gender identity/expression, as the Gay-Straight Alliance name so clearly does–and an inability to establish a co-equal coalition, not a policed single identity movement, based upon explicit and expressed recognition of the status, needs, embodied lives and struggles of all LGBTQ people–a co-equal message between sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.

This is a fundamental and, from all the evidence, invisible challenge, because even the name, Rainbow Alliance, is something that cannot be spoken or conceived.

Until this challenge is explicitly met, Dr. Taylor’s hope will remain a convenient, if sad, bait and switch.

Until the view, routinely demonstrated, that transgender and transsexual youth are nothing more than a subset of gay youth is explicitly challenged.

Why does it remain necessary for trans youth to be excluded from the name of organizations that purport to struggle with and for them? Why are trans youth required to be considered gay certainly to join in explicitly gay organizations? If these are not gay organizations, why is it impossible to conceive of an inclusive organization name? If it is not necessary for trans youth to be explicitly recognized in the organization name, why is it necessary for gay youth to be so recognized? Why the different treatment?

What foundation for future action, advocated in her statement, is conceivably made by recommending organizations that have excluding names, and apparently, excluding missions?

Why is it inconceivable for an LGBTQ organization to mount a struggle
exclusively for transgender and transsexual people? It seems quite
routine for such organizations to mount struggles exclusively
for gay and lesbian people–under a variety of names. Why is this?

The solution to transphobia does not reside in some indefinite future time, it must be started now, in the present, in the acceptance by organizations of their established, explicit policy promises. In other words, LGBTQ must mean LGBTQ, not simply and casually a politically expedient way to say gay and be backed up by action that explicitly reflects this. Not what we routinely see.

The inability even to conceive of inclusivity in the struggle for safer spaces in our schools, and equality and dignity in society at large, is part of an inability to conceive, understand and embody anti-oppression principles and practice, once a guiding light of Egale Canada, and the clear symptom of a major, systemic disorder.

And, sadly, not only in Egale Canada.

Productions such as this survey, its publicity and panel, even if less significant than the struggle for same-sex marriage, effects the same marginalization and subjugation, repudiation and erasure.

How can anyone who believes in equality and dignity for all LGBT people concur with a strategy that explicitly accepts second class status and the declaration that trans youth will have to wait for “the next logical step”?

Again!

Wait until when?

Commentary on Gender Identity

[This was an invited commentary for the 25th anniversary of Pink Triangle Serices, now simply PTS.]

Gender Identity is not yet a term with the universal recognition and understanding of sexual orientation.

Universally confused with sexual orientation, especially the belief among some that it is equally protected, this often intentional confusion merely marginalizes and subjugates those who are already forced from the mainstream by the majority’s response to their nature.

Our lives are governed by the interaction of our nature with the environments around us usually described with the misleading term nurture—for the response usually given to those whose lives cannot be described as stereotypical cannot be termed nurturing.

Even though it is now generally accepted that by a very early age one’s sexual orientation is determined—and cannot be changed—one’s early certain knowledge of oneself as male or female, both or neither, is currently controversial among some gay and lesbian people, some feminists, some religious people, some politicians, some physicians, some gym owners, some journalists, indeed those who refuse to accept claims of being mis-sexed—those who repudiate—are not limited to any political, social, philosophical or religious category.

Those who accept this claim are not limited to any category, either.

Regardless of any specific biological origins of core sex identity (what I believe Julia Serano would understand as subconscious sex)—no more important than that of sexual orientation—the self-identification flowing from this must be recognized and protected both in human rights and hate crimes legislation.

Core sex identity is not obvious when the doctor stands over us at birth and declares “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” This assigned sex becomes the path we stray from only at our peril.

When one’s internal certainly does not conform to external assignment dissonance in gender identity is the first danger. When one begins to live this certainly, no longer able to endure dissonance and affirms one’s inner knowledge, violence and death often lurk nearby. At the very least, one should expect to lose everything: family, friends, job, career, recognition and achievements. This happens, however, less and less as this aspect of human nature becomes more and more widely known and understood.

Sometimes the word “transsexual” is used to describe those whose certainly drives their path to the opposite sex, including hormonal replacement, surgery and the achievement of their affirmed sex. Sometimes surgery or hormones are not possible due to medical, financial or philosophical reasons—though this should not detract from the intention and achievement of an affirmed life.

Precisely as those who do not need to conform their external sex to their inner certainty—cissexual people—transsexual people can present their gender in either stereotypical or non-conforming ways. Many transsexual people do not choose to be gender non-conforming—though many, particularly early in transitioning from assigned to affirmed sex, appear non-conforming.

Precisely as cissexual people, transsexual people may be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or asexual because sexual orientation and gender identity are not the same and have no connection, other than that all people have them both.

The decision to live one’s inner certainty is not lightly taken.

For some it may lead to life in public; for others it may simply lead to family and private satisfaction. For some the cry is “blast the gender binary;” some may simply confirm it. Any advocacy around gender identity must be open enough to include both, otherwise this advocacy becomes the same marginalizing and subjugating convention that has destroyed the lives of far too many.

What is social exclusion?

On the Public Health Agency of Canada’s website, there is a section on social determinants of health. In particular, there is a sub-section on social exclusion.

All of the documents on this site are not necessarily the opinion of the Agency, though I suspect that placing these documents on the site, originally presented at a conference in 2002, implies some support.

2002 is an interesting year.

It was the the year Sven Robinson refused to include gender identity and gender expression in his private member’s bill which, with rare all-party agreement in the Parliament of Canada, amended the Criminal Code of Canada hate sections to include sexual orientation. After his bill passed, Robinson vowed to work for the inclusion of gender identity and gender expression.

Gender identity and gender expression remain outside both the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act–and all provincial human rights laws–to this day.

This may explain the inclusion of sexual orientation in these documents on the Agency’s website but not gender identity and gender expression.

There are four aspects of social exclusion

• Exclusion from social society
• Exclusion from social goods
• Exclusions from social production
• Economic exclusion

Any one of which significantly degrades wellbeing–I argue, not controversially, I hope, that this not only describes the status of gay and lesbian people, but, because of the formal legal exclusion of transgender and transsexual people from human rights and hate crimes legislation, social exclusion presses with particular and unique emphasis on transsexual and transgender people.

In the struggle I was part of while working at Canadians for Equal Marriage, we spoke about bringing gay and lesbian people from the margins to the mainstream of society by legally recognizing their relationships–we even spoke about this being the natural extension of their human rights.

The healing of gay and lesbian people from the trauma of homophobia, and its consequent exclusion from society, began with the formal and explicit recognition of this exclusion–and this recognition was not limited to gay and lesbian people and their organizations, but was quite wide-spread throughout society, including health and social service organizations and professional organizations of service providers.

This explicit recognition, including express statements pointing at the void in human rights and hate crimes legislation, was part of the healing from this trauma. The explicit declaration that gay and lesbian people are part of society.

Nor is it, I hope, controversial to say this explicit recognition, including express statements, was the indispensable step, necessary even before legislation and certainly before moving “beyond law reform” as Laurie Arron declared after Prime Minister Harper gave up the campaign to repeal the same-sex marriage law

As we move beyond law reform, we face the challenge of changing hearts and minds, and of making everywhere across Canada safe and welcoming for LGBT youth, LGBT seniors, LGBT families and their children.

My critique of this position is quite simple–why now, after the legal achievements regarding sexual orientation have been made, but before those concerning gender identity and gender expression have hardly been begun, is it appropriate to abandon transgender and transsexual people in the legal and social void that gay and lesbian people have, since 2002, left for the mainstream?

Why is silence on the very same legal and social void appropriate when it concerns transgender and transsexual people?

Why are not all our allies–of equality and human rights–past, present and future, explicitly and expressly speaking out and pointing at this void?

Rainbow Health Ontario (RHO) is one of the sponsors of Egale Canada’s April 1 event on homophobic and transphobic violence in Canadian Schools. I have previously had the opportunity of commenting on Rainbow Health Ontario.

This was in connection with their declining my application for the position of Community Engagement Team member for the Champlain Local Health Integration Network–which includes Ottawa and Cornwall. They decided to go with a gay man who has a long and impressive history working with gay men and their health needs. Capital Xtra about a year ago lauded his successful political efforts to put gay men back into the campaign against HIV/AIDS.

I had the opportunity to meet him once during the years I have been active in the struggle for trans rights and services. And once he came into the book store where I work.

My concern with RHO was with its statement in its notice for the Community Engagement Team members, repeated on its website–created since then–under Why is this Resource Needed?

Despite significant improvements in human rights of LGBT people in Canada, there are still gaps and inequities in services and in the health status of LGBT people.

In my Open Letter to RHO, I laid out the history of gaps and inequities in human rights status. The legal and social void where gender identity and gender expression should be.

There is nothing transsexual and transgender people can point to regarding our inclusion in society in what many consider the foundation of that inclusion.

This is quite similar to the statement Ottawa Pride made in 2005–in the euphoria just two months after the passage of the Civil Marriage Law, i.e. the same-sex marriage law:

All LGBT people in Canada have human rights and its time to celebrate.

I discuss my concerns with this repudiation here.

This becomes all the more concerning when placed beside RHO’s commitments, its beliefs and principles, which include social determinants of health

We believe that the social, cultural, political and economic context of peoples’ lives has a big impact on their health.

In many of the discussions I have been privy to, both online and in various agencies’ meetings, the question of the mental wellbeing of gay men has come up, particularly in the context of the homophobia experienced, the alienation from the mainstream and the impact this has on the physical and mental health and risk taking that often follows–and consequences with respect to HIV/AIDS.

This was certainly the reason Capital Xtra celebrated the achievement of the man who was accepted by RHO for its Community Engagement Team for the Champlain LHIN–the explicit recognition of gay men as being disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS.

There can be no doubting this.

(We simply have no quantitative information regarding the effect of HIV/AIDS on transgender and transsexual people.)

The Supreme Court of Canada supported this also, when it recognized sexual orientation as an analogous right to those enumerated in Chapter 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms:

Deliberate exclusion of sexual orientation resulting in serioux discriminatory effects, including denial of access to remedial procedures and psychological harm from implicit message that homosexuals are not worthy of protection. (p. 25)

The Court has not yet been asked this question with respect to transgender and transsexual people–but can anyone doubt their answer?

Can anyone doubt the “psychological harm resulting from [the] implicit message” that transgender and transsexual people “are not worthy of protection” also?

Also in the repudiation by Ottawa Pride and RHO?

The Canadian Human Rights Act Review Panel was asked; this is their answer:

Although the Panel recognized that the Act currently protects these individuals from discrimination on the ground of sex or the combined grounds of sex and disability, it felt that the law fails to acknowledge the particular situation of transgendered persons and thereby render them invisible. In view of the substantial harm that can be suffered by these persons, the Panel recommended that the Act expressly provide them with legal protection.

Why do I even have to raise this concern, not only once, but for the second time?

Yes, RHO is collaborating with the Trans PULSE Project, but I wonder why it is silent on the human rights status of transsexual and transgender people and the impact this has on our health.

Is this not considered a significant contributing factor to wellbeing with disproportionate effect on transsexual and transgender people?

Is an imposted unity perspective, like that I identified in Egale Canada and its supporters, the ideology that only LGBT issues can be addressed and declared–not those of a subset of LGBT–at work in RHO?

Does this ideology mean that even a commitment to social determinants of health, particularly the apparent recognition that social exclusion “has a big impact on [our] health,” will be compromised to maintain unity?

Why does RHO refuse to acknowledge probably the most significant social determinant of health for transgender and transsexual people–our formal exclusion from human rights and hate crimes legislation?

This repudiation and erasure throws us into the social and legal void.

What is social exclusion?

This refusal of Rainbow Health Ontario to explicitly recognize that transsexual and transgender people are excluded from human rights and hate crimes legislation is social exclusion.

Perspective of the Oppressor, Revisited

(UPDATE)

My purpose in writing commentaries for this blog is to explore and discover why certain things happened and, more importantly, why certain other things did not happen in the course of my work in organizations with self-declared and democratically arrived at commitments to all sexual and gender minorities.

This grew out of posting, first, to Egale Canada’s national trans list and to the national, now main, list. After a system-wide crash at Egale Canada some years ago, the trans list was never relaunched, unlike the more general list which, previously, had been primarily for issues of sexual orientation.

Since I have been writing for this blog my purpose for posting to the main Egale list has changed–particularly as my comments have become less welcome over the years. It has become an opportunity of some research interest–not that it is any kind of accurate quantitative sampling of the opinion of gay and lesbian people (and some who might self-describe as transgender) but a way to do qualitative soundings regarding the attitudes of those who claim to be knowledgeable about trans issues and who care.

It has been alleged there I criticize Egale Canada–and the list–in terms of, on the one hand, they don’t care and on the other, I have accused ‘them’ of being transphobic.

To take the second allegation first, I challenge anyone to do a word search on either my posts, or this blog, for the frequency of the appearance of the words “transphobic, transphobia.” Other than this comment, I quite doubt they appear.

On the contrary, I agree with Christopher Shelley’s contention that transphobia is more appropriately applied to the kind of violence that Allen Andrade committed on Angie Zapata this past summer in Colorado when he hit her on the head with a fire extinguisher twice, and when she got up, hit her a third time and killed her. When caught in her car a week later, he declared that he killed “it.”

That is transphobia.

As Susan Stryker, in Transgender History (recently short-listed for this year’s Lambda Award), states:

Because people have great difficulty recognizing the humanity of another person if they cannot recognize that person’s gender, the gender-changing person can evoke in others a primordial fear of monstrosity, or loss of humanness. That gut level fear can manifest itself as hatred, outrage, panic, or disgust, which may translate into physical or emotional violence directed against the person who is perceived as not-quite-human. (Transgender History, p. 6)

While useful, I believe Stryker enters on the same kind of “homogenizing” project, from the opposite direction,  that the gay rights movement embarked upon from shortly after Stonewall–and that Egale Canada embarked upon most clearly since John Fisher stepped down as Executive Director in 2002. Simply put, in the politically necessary strategy for large political entities, the only strategy known in any practical sense is that of the policed single-identity movement, often inaccurately called “coalition.”

One of the most useful comments on the Egale list was that “LGBT organizations cannot serve the interests of any ’subset’ of LGBT.” In other words, regardless of express and explicit commitments made, in the form of mandates, constitutions and policies–all established through organization wide discussion and decision making–only LGBT unity interests can be served.

In practice, this has lead Egale Canada, since the departure of John Fisher, only to support issues of sexual orientation.

The tactical support for this ideological imperative is now well-established, though it continues to be invisible to those who believe in this ideology of “unity.”

These are now the most common tactics to exclude and erase transsexual people and often transgender people:

1) Create subsidiary entities to escape the constraints of express and explicit commitments while using all the organizational resources for this subsidiary, to the detriment of issues other than sexual orientation. The creation of Canadians for Equal Marriage by Egale Canada is the prime example. This is a conflict of interest, never declared or resolved–and obscured.

2) When inconvenient to go through the effort of creating a subsidiary to escape express and explicit commitments, simply establish a project outside of the organization as Gens Hellqvist, executive director of the Canadian Rainbow Health Coalition, and, as Xtra.ca has called them, five other “Canadian queers” did when they launched a personal human rights complaint against Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada on behalf of gay, lesbian and bisexual people, defined to include two spirit people (“Aboriginal GLB people”) and “gender non-conforming” people, defined to be part of “all things homosexual.” Thus, transgender people are defined as GLB–leaving only transsexual people on our own. All the while using their organization’s resources. This is another conflict of interest, never declared or resolved–also obscured.

3) The easiest tactic is the current one of Egale Canada. Ignoring the clearly separate needs of trangender and especially transsexual youth from gay youth Egale simply enforces a gay identity on trans youth, thereby marginalizing them further. This is the tactic used in its recently announced panel discussion in response to its National Climate Survey on Homophobia in Canadian Schools, which can be found here. And in long time publicity for this survey. This is the most blatant, because most casual, conflict of interest, undeclared and unresolved.

First National Climate Survey on Homophobia in Canadian Schools

This is the formal title of Egale Canada’s school climate survey, which can be found here; I encourage readers to take a look and see how often transphobia and trans youth are actually referred to in the survey itself.

After reviewing the survey, the next document to review is the PDF backrounder on the survey which can be found here; it is called Egale Canada First National Survey on Homophobia in Canadian Schools; Phase One Results. Again, I encourage readers to investigate for themselves how often transphobia and trans youth are referred to–it is consistent with the survey itself.

The final document to review is the press release Egale Canada posted to its website which can be found here; it is entitled Gay Teens Surveyed Feel Unsafe in Schools. So far, the documents are consistent. However, in the first sentence things begin to go awry.

St. Johns: Results just released from the first phase of Egale Canada’s National Survey on Homophobia and Transphobia in Canadian Schools reveal that over two-thirds of those students who identify as lesbian, gay, bi, trans and Two-Spirit, queer and questioning (LGBTQ) feel unsafe at school.

Now, it is possible I have missed the other survey on Egale Canada’s website where transphobia and trans youth are specifically included, not simply added at the publicity stage to buff this product and to, ostensibly, conform to Egale’s express and explicit commitments to trans-identified people as indicated in its Mandate. (As I try to access Egale’s front page, with its Mandate including gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans-identified people on March 26, I find it to be inaccessible. Even checking Google’s cached version, dated March 22, it is also not available. Maybe a change is coming?)

In this press release, Helen Kennedy, Executive Director, declares

We may have human rights for LGBTQ people in Canada, but you wouldn’t know it from these results.

I simply cannot accept that the Executive Director of Egale Canada is unaware of the explicit absence of formal humans rights recognition in Canada for transgender and transsexual people–unless she wishes to herself recognize a second class of unexplicit human rights, which the Canadian Human Rights Act Review Panel, as cited below, rejects.

It is here in the publicity for the survey that the pretzel-twisting begins: the survey has nothing to do with trans youth as trans youth–though there are probably some who will argue that trans youth are really gay youth and/or are victimized by homophobia, also. But this doesn’t recognize trans youth as the people they are. The survey publicity creates a false unity of trans and gay youth in its erasure of trans youth.

It is hard to escape the conclusion this survey, certainly the use to which it is put, is intellectually dishonest and deceptive.

I want to point out a contrast to the work Egale Canada is so proud of, the recent study by the Gay Lesbian Straight Educators Network (GLSEN) in the United States, Harsh Realities. This is the summary

Transgender youth face extremely high levels of victimization in school, even more than their non-transgender lesbian, gay and bisexual peers. But they are more likely to speak out about LGBT issues in the classroom.

If there were the sort of identity between trans and gay youth it seems necessary to Egale Canada to maintain, it is unlikely GLSEN would have come to the conclusions it has given the similarities between our countries. Given these broad similarities it is hard to escape the strong indication of significant differences between the everyday lives of gay and trans youth in Canada, too. At the very least, GLSEN’s study points to the urgent need for this sort of work to be done in Canada–and to move away from the inherent ideological bias and policed single identity in Egale Canada’s work.

It would really have been interesting, and certainly helpful, to see what a similar approach in Canada would have uncovered–if anyone had actually been interested in the lives of trans youth in Canada.

Pretzel-twisting, as is becoming common in Canadian gay and lesbian circles, is merely an attempt to make polically correct what is incorrect and simply wrong.

Why is it wrong?

Recognition is an important element in moving from the margins to the mainstream–as we argued at Canadians for Equal Marriage–and an important step in healing the trauma of both homophobia and transphobia.

This is what the Supreme Court of Canada said in its ruling in Vriend v. Alberta, in 1998, which recognized sexual orientation as an analogous right to those enumerated in Chapter 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Deliberate exclusion of sexual orientation resulting in serious discriminatory effects, including denial of access to remedial procedures and psychological harm from implicit message that homosexuals are not worthy of protection. (p. 25)

Maybe some will argue recognition is only appropriate for gay and lesbian people, not for transgender and certainly not for transsexual people?

A similar point was made by the Canadian Human Rights Act Review Panel in 2000 (as a direct result of the lobbying of John Fisher, then Executive Director of EGALE, as it was then known).

Although the Panel recognized that the Act currently protects these individuals from discrimination on the ground of sex or the combined grounds of sex and disability, it felt that the law fails to acknowledge the particular situation of transgendered persons and thereby renders them invisible. In view of the substantial harm that can be suffered by these persons, the Panel recommended that the Act expressly provide them with legal protection.

Can Egale Canada do any less?

This was the express policy of EGALE, even before it had adopted the Mandate now inaccessible, and before the trans advocacy policy it formally adopted in April, 2005. What has changed?

This has been the crux of the work of this blog.

Now to address the first allegation concerning my ongoing critique of Egale Canada.

It is always nice when people care about those more marginalized than themselves, but unless it actually results in commitment to action it is of little value–especially when it is used as an excuse for doing nothing, certainly nothing equal to what their own issues receive in a, supposedly, equally serving organization.

Frankly, I don’t care whether the gay and lesbian people who run Egale Canada or who support its ideology care about trans issues or not. I call on them, as on any who have made binding organizational commitments, to honour them.

The question always raised by this ideological repeal of express and explicit commitments without public discussion or decision making–unlike their establishment–and of the demand for endless discussion and decision making to actually fulfil long established mandates, constitutions and policies–as Capital Xtra’s former editor/publisher Gareth Kirkby has demanded–is one of fundamental democracy and commitment to human rights.

More satisfying reasons for this ideological repeal are erasure and repudiation.

Erasure is a term I first heard when I became involved with Egale Canada in 2004, originated by Vivian Namaste, who writes:

the theories concerned with the production of transsexuality have got it wrong: transsexuals are not, in point of fact, produced by the medical and psychiatric institution. Rather, they are continually erased from the institutional world–shut out from its programs, excluded from its terms of reference. . . .I enquire about the relevance of writing theory that cannot make sense of the everyday world, and that actually contributes to the very invisibility of transsexuality that a critical theory needs to expose. (Sex Change, Social Change, p. 3)

This has become generalized to describe the very phenomena I chronicle in this blog.

For myself, however, the simple act of erasure has never constituted adequate reason for this happening. Nor does the frequent lament, there are not the resources to focus on the issues of gender identity and gender expression. There always seem to be resources for issues of sexual orientation–including the attempt to make trans people gay people–even if mobilizing these resources requires the pretzel-twisting I describe above.

It has been pointed out that ideology is a good explanation for these direct actions, though most of those who do these things are reasonably well-intentioned people; but they seem never to be able to see anything beyond issues of sexual orientation. The current example is the ‘homogenizing’ project–just policed single-identity–Egale Canada is adding a new chapter to, which I detail below.

The only explanation that works for me–and gives me some peace, actually–is Christopher Shelley’s notion of repudiation:

Subscription and faithfulness to a conscious or default political ideology does not necessarily point to the primacy of fear as the affective motivation for rejection and hostility. Hence, repudiation, a process of disavowal and negation that often includes fear yet also contains other schematic dynamics. . . . .repudiation connotes a multifaceted dynamic, often unconscious, a reactive process of ambivalence to an object that can evoke simple defensive negation through to extreme responses. (Transpeople: Repudiation, Trauma, Healing, p. 33)

Repudiation underlies a continuum from the erasure of transgender and transsexual people as practiced by Egale Canada and the “six Canadian queers” associated with the Canadian Rainbow Health Coalition–to the murderous transphobia of Allen Andrade.

In recent days, on the Egale Canada email list, Egale Canada has announced a panel discussion on:

High levels of Homophobic and Transphobic Bullying in Canadian Schools. The Reality of Homophobic and Transphobic Violence in Canadian Schools; A panel of educators, policymakers, researchers and students responding to Egale Canada’s First National Climate Survey on Homophobia and Transphobia in Canadian Schools. To be held April 1, 2009, at the OISE Library in Toronto.

The list of sponsors is

The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies of the University of Toronto in conjunction with Egale Canada, the Elementary Teachers Federation of Canada, The Centre for Leadership and Diversity, OISE, The Centre for Urban Schooling, OISE, Central Toronto Youth Services, Griffin Centre, Rainbow Health Ontario, and The Triangle Program.

Maybe they are privy to another survey I cannot find on the Egale Canada website that respects trans youth as the GLSEN survey does?

Maybe this bait and switch is not noticed or is of no concern?

Maybe the issue of erasure and repudiation is of less importance to all those involved in this project than it is to the Supreme Court of Canada and the Canadian Human Rights Act Review Panel?

Maybe they simply cannot see trans people–repudiation–and that we are treated differently by the law and by the public, as well as by them?

Maybe they simply cannot see this is an act of marginalization and subjugation so shamelessly to submerge the identities of trans youth in the identities of gay youth?

Shouldn’t these organizations be in the business of protecting trans youth, seeking evidence as those in other countries do that is not twisted out of all resemblence to the truth by ideological concerns to maintain the dominance of their identity?

The only way I can understand any of this is as the perspective of the oppressor.

UPDATE: A comment on the Egale list agrees with my request actually to look at the survey, but not to look at the Backrounder, and to see how trans youth are included.

This is precisely my point. Trans youth are so included, there is no way to distinguish them. Hence the contrast I posit with the GLSEN study Harsh Realities.

This blindness to the very real and very separate identities of trans youth–and trans adults–seems to be something quite invisible to this supporter of Egale’s ideology, which requires the erasure and repudiation of all those who are captured by the category of gender identity; gender expression now seems to contested territory, as indicated by the NOT Canadian Rainbow Health Coalition human rights complaint.

It is the unity perspective which is so damaging.

What’s in a Name?

(UPDATE — UPDATE II)

“Six Canadian queers,” as Xtra.ca describes them, including the executive director of the Canadian Rainbow Health Coalition, Gens Hellquist, have filed a Federal Human Rights Complaint against Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada on behalf of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and, somewhat secondarily, two spirit people and people who are “gender non-conforming.”

Two spirit people are mentioned in the body of the Complaint, not at the beginning and only as “Aboriginal GLB people.” (p. 6)

The first, explicit claimants of this Complaint of the Canadian Rainbow Health Coalition–whose mandate nominally includes trans people, but not here–who are gay, lesbian and bisexual are claimants this country has grown accustomed to from the long standing non-inclusive advocacy of Egale Canada. But it is the inclusion of “gender non-conformity” as part of “all things associated” with gays and lesbians and “homosexuality in general” (p. 1) tucked away in the definition of homophobia that is truly significant and possibly novel.

It has allowed the logjam in my own thinking regarding what transgenderism is to break.

Thank you!

This was not my first reaction, however.

I thought this was just the usual imperialism of sexual orientation colonizing trans territory–i.e. transgender identities–while leaving the remaining minority, transsexual people, alone to fend for ourselves. The whole thrust of my advocacy has been to include both transgender and transsexual people, to advocate for both gender expression and gender identity, more or less respectively. Those who have read, listened and truly heard me over the years know this.

My first reaction was anger.

It has always been clear what advocating for transsexual people means; similar clarity with respect to transgender people has previously escaped me. It was an article of faith–as well as practical politics–if not something I could rationally articulate.

A little history.

Discussion at the Trans Issues Committee of Egale Canada in 2004-2005 was marked by a strident refusal by one member to countenance use of the term “gender variant” because, in this member’s belief, “variant” equalled “deviance.” Any space for discussion of gender expression was closed down as a consequence of this stridency. Now, with an undeniably positive turn, and expected wide currency, “gender non-conformity” opens up the discussion again.

Moreover, by their claim to “gender non-conformity” the Canadian Rainbow Health Coalition has explicitly, though somewhat secondarily–trans people are always secondary to gay and lesbian people–tied it to sexual orientation: tied sexuality and transgenderism together.

In some ways, this reverses the entire history of the ‘gay rights movement’ which has been one of excluding those perceived to detract from the ability of middle-class, middle-age, white gay and lesbian people from assimilating into society–a policed single-identity movement.

The liberationist wing, somewhat represented by Pink Triangle Press, the Xtra papers and website, has not recently been in ascendance, particularly in the wake of the successes of the assimilationist wing.

This claim has the rather routine effect of leaving transsexual people out in the cold.

There is absolutely no mention of transsexual people in the Complaint as published–and, of course, no mention of transsexual people in Xtra.ca’s rather short piece.

Much routine creativity and energy is being expended on the Egale Canada email list to justify this routine silence. In fact, the spin there is is that this exclusion–not decided by any transsexual people–is really good for trans people–there is yet no comprehension of the inclusion of transgender people.

This is a routine observation on that list.

The Complaint also, interestingly enough, claims two spirit people, declaring quite definitively: “Two-Spirit refers to Aboriginal GLB people.” (p. 6) This counters what I have learned from two spirit teachers who declare their teachings do not concern themselves either with what is between the legs or what is done with it or with whom.

This claim reduces spiritual teachings I have great respect for to mere physicality.

It is true Virginia Prince coined the term “transgender” in the mid-sixties explicitly to counter Harry Benjamin’s articulation, though not invention, of “transsexual.” I would argue–and I believe I’m not alone in doing so–that it wasn’t until the first publication of Butler’s Gender Trouble in 1990 that “transgender theory” really took off. For those who understand her, and those who claim they do, Butler provides a strong foundation for both “transgender theory” and “queer theory.”

The notion of performative gender is very useful in arguing there is no necessary or biological basis for gender or sexuality–if not also sex–and provides freedom for those who need it–or need to argue it.

But not all of us seek to leave biology behind.

I believe there was, at that time, a short flirtation with the notion that homosexuals, particularly lesbians, were some sort of third sex. I don’t believe it continues today. On the contrary, in vigorous debate on the Egale Canada email list over the years at least one gay man declared that in sex with men he was never less a man, but hypermasculine. No lesbian was ever so emphatic but it always seemed clear a woman having sex with a woman is no less a woman, either. Neither are some sort of third sex.

Third sex is now a not uncommon repudiation of transsexual men and women.

In my travels across the ‘net I have encountered transsexual women 20 to 30 years post transition/post operation who bring a perspective to current debates often dismissed.

I exchanged comments with one woman who was part of the National Transsexual Counselling Unit out of San Francisco in the late 60’s, early 70’s which was funded in part by Reed Erickson–a transsexual man who was part of early initiatives not only for gay activism, but also for transsexual activism and what is now called New Age.

There is an important essay by Aaron Devor and Nicholas Matte, ONE Inc. and Reed Erickson: The Uneasy Collaboration of Gay and Trans Activism, 1964 – 2003 in Stryker and Whittle’s The Transgender Studies Reader.

Transsexual women such as my correspondent–as well as those who have posted to comments–add further depth, if such is needed, to Namaste’s arguments, particularly in Against Transgender Rights in Sex Change, Social Change. Certainly a polemic title, but a necessary read for those who wish to rationally argue these issues.

The Canadian Rainbow Health Coalition’s human rights Complaint declares the identities–as it claims them–and health needs of sexual orientation and gender non-conformity have been ill-served by Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada.

I would simply make the parallel argument that the identities and health needs of gender identity have not only been ill-served by Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada, which would, I believe, include transsexual people in the same mandates referred to in the Complaint, but our needs and identities have been ill-served by another organization that has explicitly included us in its mandate but not its advocacy or decision-making.

However, I accept the notion gender non-conformity is an emination, if you will, of sexual orientation, layered on, I would argue, to the sex foundation of identity–layered on to either the cissex or transsex base.

It has always been a commonplace that transsexual people are homosexual (gay, lesbian), bisexual, heterosexual, even asexual in about the same proportions as cissexual people.

Is it any kind of stretch and surely it would be a rational claim that transsexual people are transgender in roughly the same proportions as cissexual people?

This would seem to reverse current arguments of many transgender-identified people that being transsexual is layered on top of being transgender.

I have argued this in Appearances can be deceiving.

I accepted Butler’s argument in her essay on David Reimer that sexual orientation and transgenderism are socially constructed but argued, against Butler, that Reimer’s tragic life demonstrates the persistence of gender identity, including gender identities counter to what is assigned at birth and that, unlike orientation and transgenderism, is not the result of, and is unchanged by, whatever behaviour modification nature or science forces upon us.

I am grateful to the authors of this Complaint for opening another path to this clarity.

A true coalition cannot be formed without a number of conditions being satisfied, among them the laying out with clarity the needs, struggles and embodied lives of the constituents of such a coalition–the precise opposite of policed single-identity movements such as those lead by, historically, Egale Canada and now the Canadian Rainbow Health Coalition.

Yet my gratitude knows no bounds for this “coalition” for it has laid out the grounds for their part of the coalition–not in quotes–which includes not only gay, lesbian and bisexual people but also two spirit and transgender people.

The challenge now comes to those whose primary identification is transgender–those whom I would have thought transsexual–who do not also primarily identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual in the terms of this Complaint to clarify their position, to name themselves as transsexual people have long done, as gay and lesbian people have long done, as two spirit people are doing.

Also as these “six Canadian queers” have now done not only for themselves but also for bisexual people, for transgender people and for two spirit people–whether they will or no.

The choice for those whose primary identification is transgender who do not also primarily identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual in the terms of this Complaint is either to allow themselves to be claimed by this Complaint and sexual orientation or to name themselves with clarity in preparation to join the coalition.

I encourage them to approach this challenge with the same joy I have.

References

Butler, J. (2006). Gender trouble. New York: Routledge.

Namaste, V. (2005). Sex change, social change:Reflections on identity, institutions, and imperialism. Toronto: Women’s Press.

Stryker, S. and Whittle, S. (eds.) (2006). The transgender studies reader. New York: Routledge.

UPDATE: Yes, in reply to comments, Prince coined the term “transgenderist.” I have been reading a number of Journal articles and other publications from as recently as the mid/late 90’s and this is the term. In Access Denied, Namaste’s contribution to CLGRO’s System Failure, this is the usage.

I think by the time the Ontario Human Rights Commission Discussion Paper Toward a Commission Policy on Gender Identity, 1999, this had begun/had already disappeared.

It has such a weird sound.

UPDATE II: (March 8, 2009) In the first paragraph of this commentary, I refer to Gens Hellquist, Executive Director of the Canadian Human Rights Coalition who is one of the “six Canadian queers” who have filed this Human Rights Complaint.

In the third paragraph, I refer to the Complaint as the Canadian Rainbow Health Coalition’s Human Rights Complaint.

I was wrong.

This is just a Complaint by “six Canadian queers”, one of whom just happens to be the Executive Director of the Coalition. I am curious to know what the relationship of the other five is to the Coalition–or what resources, what knowledge or experience gained through the use of Coalition resources was used in researching, preparing and filing this Complaint.

I am thinking that this was the way for these “six Canadian queers” to get around the mandate of the Coalition which includes “a gender identity that doesn’t conform to the identity assigned at birth.”

This is what some say is the reason Egale Canada created Canadians for Equal Marriage, to avoid its constitutional commitment to intersectionality (see section 2.1; which also requires Egale Canada to be located in Ottawa, not Toronto) and its mandate to include “trans-identified people.”

This now seems to be a venerable tactic of gay, lesbian and bisexual people to get around any notion of or commitment to a GLBT community.

Once, Capital Xtra called for discussions whenever gay and lesbian people and their organizations take part in any part of trans issues. The addition of “trans-identified people”, in the case of Egale Canada, and “gender identity,” in the case of the Canadian Rainbow Health Coalition, to their respective mandates, would have constituted such a discussion.

How many times must we have these discussions?

What is the point even to attempting to have these discussions if they can be side-stepped with such nonchalence–and no one but me to call them on it?

Appearances can be deceiving

This started out as a response to comments by Monika, Zelda and particularly Elizabeth’s concern–on the PAR-L list–about the “confusion and contradiction” regarding the “reductive, and of course, essential” aspect of sexual orientation. It started out there, but ended up somewhere else.

The first thing I want to point out is what Stephen Whittle, the current president of the World Professional Association on Transgender Health (WPATH) has said:

I don’t care whether I was ‘born this way’ or ‘became this way’. The question of the ‘gay gene’ or the ‘tranny brain’ is a potentially frightening route to another eugenics programme to destroy the brilliance of difference in the world, and the sooner we reject these projects the better.

I would gloss Whittle’s comment by saying in our culture/society if there is a cause there is a cure; I don’t want to be cured, either

In the history of the evolution of this terminology, where we have, since about the end of the 19th century, been using terms that became gay and lesbian, and from about early 20th century, we have been using terms that have become transvestite, transgender and transsexual, before that time there were people of/about whom we might be tempted to use these terms in the strict demarcations they now have between sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression but it would be incorrect to do so. We cannot retrospectively use modern terms; we cannot project our identities back in time.

From my contact with young people, I suspect they may be going back to something like this.

An historical example–before the elaboration of modern terminology–two women are in a relationship, but because they are women there are probably no records of the most important part of their relationship, what they thought of themselves, each other and their relationship itself.

We could, of course, define their relationship by their anatomy, without regard to their self-identification, whatever that might be–it would be easier and support certain political claims of arguments of identity politics.

But for the moment, at least, I would like to leave this question open.

As well as the question whether there is any connection between GLB and T–which arises in the course of the historical evolution of terminology and certain political claims of arguments of identity politics which both reflect and shape historical reality.

This is by way of a response to Elizabeth’s assertion that sexuality is socially constructed. I might well accept the position that sexuality and transgender identities are socially constructed but I strongly contest that transsexual identities are socially constructed.

(It is from here my post to PAR-L continues.)

In any discussion of social construction it is difficult not to mention Judith Butler, especially in relation to both gay and lesbian identities, and transgender identities. I’m not the first but I reserve for myself an emphatic refutation of equating transgender identities with transsexual identities.

This is, I believe, an unfortunate and widespread category error that simply repudiates and erases the everyday/night lives, struggles and needs of transsexual people, particularly transsexual women.

In reading Gender Trouble, now almost 20 years old, one receives the strongest impression Butler was arguing gay and lesbian people, particularly lesbians, are a kind of third sex. This is curious to me in that this attribution, in more recent years, seems exclusive to transsexual people–and in some way connected to our repudiation.

Much more recently, on the Egale Canada email list, in vigorous debate around this matter, one salient point was illuminated: the gay and lesbian people on that list do not accept they are a third sex. One gay man described himself not less a man in sex with men, but, on the contrary, hypermasculine. No lesbian was equally emphatic but the clear message is they are, as Egale Canada and Canadians for Equal Marriage have argued, just the same as heterosexual people, except for what they do in bed and who they do it with.

Now, Egale Canada is open to much criticism from the perspectives of race and class, among others–as I, among others, have quite vigorously done–but it does represent a position that cannot be ignored.

Pichler has asserted that transsexual advocates argue it is about gender. He has simply made the usual category error of subsuming “sex-changing” transsexual people into “gender-changing” transgender people.

I assert I have not changed my sex, merely affirmed it, even though my appearance, over time, seems to support the contention I have merely changed  my gender.

Appearances can be deceiving.

Which brings me back to Butler.

In her essay on the tragic life of David Reimer–Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality, originally published about 10 years after Gender Trouble–Butler uses Reimer to illustrate her central contention: we are inscribed by the Law of the Father/ the Semiotic/the Symbolic; that we have no existence, ontologically or linguistically, before or after this inscription. This is how the subject, or the “I,” comes into existence.

Running through the essay is a reference to Kafka’s “In A Penal Colony.” In it a remarkable execution machine inscribes on the body of The Accused the law he has been convicted of breaking as it kills him.

Throughout what of her work I have read Butler continually returns to her central contention, illuminating it from many quarters of philosophy, psychology and literature in a manner that justifies the description of her work as literary theory–a point she somewhere describes with some bemusement.

Reimer, as a newborn, in what is often described as an accident during circumcision, left his parents frantic. They came to the attention, or brought themselves to the attention, of John Money–one of the “fathers” of transsexual theory–who recommended Reimer be raised as a girl since our gender, if not sex, according to Money, is socially constructed.

To begin all that was needed was an involuntary sex reassignment surgery. Not uncommon for intersex babies–but Reimer was not intersex anymore than he was transsexual.

Appearances can be deceiving.

Growing up Reimer was subject to a further aspect of Money’s social construction theory, behaviour modification: Reimer and his brother were required to play out stereotypical intimate sex/gender role behaviour in front of Money and associates, surprisingly similar to an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. It is my understanding these theories have evolved into the current work of Kenneth Zucker of the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health in Toronto (the former Clarke Institute of Psychiatry).

All his life, Reimer contended something was wrong, long before his parents revealed what had been done to him. At the point they did they sought out the help of Milton Diamond–a long time critic of Money–who advised Reimer to revert. As best he could.

Butler alludes to these parts of Reimer’s life as inscriptions of first Money’s theory of social construction and then Diamond’s theory of the sufficiency of the Y chromosome to determine maleness–and presumably masculinity.

Butler describes the horror of Reimer’s life and his rage, but in a postscript written after Reimer’s suicide and the death, possibly suicide, of his brother, curiously seems not to understand his rage and suicide.

How could Butler, or any cissexual person, understand our rage at being mis-sexed? Or the repudiation of our claims to being mis-sexed?

Reimer was, of course, no more a transsexual person than he was intersex, but his tragic life illuminates that gender identity is emphatically not socially constructed, that it remains constant through no matter what behaviour modification life throws at us.

Appearances can be deceiving.

I have not forgotten Whittle or Elizabeth’s comments.

In the United States more than Canada, gay and lesbian people, not to mention transgender and transsexual people, must ground their identities, much like African-Americans, in biology to withstand the attacks of the Religious Right, even as the Pope over the holidays promulgated a notion of an “ecology of man” positing “natural roles for men and women” that, like the rainforests, must be protected.

One can see in this “ecology” common cause not only for gay and lesbian, transgender and transsexual people, but women also, many of whom are lesbian, transgender and transsexual.

There has always been common cause for gay, lesbian and transgender people on the one hand and transsexual people on the other. Transsexual people have always been part of what, retrospectively, is called the gay rights movement: Reed Erickson and Beth Elliot before Stonewall, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera at Stonewall, Sandy Stone after Stonewall. Not to mention all of us who are gay, lesbian and transgender in about the same proportions as cissexual people.

Until repudiated and erased from the history we helped create/continue to create.

From a feminist perspective this history and present is more pressing still. As women we are subject to the same objectification and hypersexualization as all women are. I argue, with Julia Serano, that our position is more threatening, having given up male privilege.

This is why transsexual women seem so often to be a “spectacle” society can’t get enough of, unlike the relative anonymity of transsexual men; it is the sex we are now that determines, not the sex we were.

This is quite the reverse of the attitude in gay, lesbian and transgender community(ies).

After all, who would want to be a woman?

References

Butler, J. (2004). Doing justice to someone: Sex reassignment and Allegories of transsexuality. In Butler, J. Undoing gender, pp. 57 – 74. New York: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2006) Gender trouble. New York: Routledge.

Serano, J. (2007) Whipping girl: A transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press.

Whittle, S. (2006). Where did we go wrong? Feminism and trans theory–two teams on the same side. In Stryker, S. and Whittle, S. (eds.) The transgender studies reader, pp. 194-202. New York: Routledge.

Who Names Me?

(UPDATE — UPDATE II — UPDATE III– UPDATE IV — UPDATE V)

I have just read Autumn’s first post on terminology. Much of what she writes, certainly her references to various Stylebooks, I quite agree with.

The references to appropriate attribution of pronouns is one of some interest. In recent months, I’ve been taking an introduction to social work and social welfare at Carleton University in Ottawa in preparation for a change in my life. In this course, I’ve found a welcoming and supportive environment but with one peculiar glitch.

I’ve been invited to be interviewed–not the first time at Carleton–by another mature student in the class for the Carleton Radio Station, CKCU–when the broadcast date is finalized, I will post. Yet, once when we spoke he declared some confusion as to how he should refer to me.

Now, I present in as feminine a manner as I can–I work at it. There is no ambiguity. My friend, though, felt my voice, being not as high in pitch as, say, a teenage girl–pretty much the majority of our class–meant I wished to be addressed as male.

There is some history to this.

In the first months in the course–a large first year lecture–I contributed many comments; I continue to do so. The purpose of taking this course is to have an academic reference for my application to the Carleton School of Social Work; I’m quite happy to say the lecturer was delighted to provide a very nice reference for me.

However, in the fall, one student emailed her with concern there was some–possibly widespread–comments, jokes, silence by other students at my expense. My voice, even as I noticed in that hall, in those seats, might have been lower than I might have preferred. Nevertheless this, as the instructor agreed, is harassment in the definition of Carleton’s Education Equity Statement–including its additions to the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s categories, which don’t formally include gender identity. Carleton has formally included gender identity–and also political affiliation.

I, as all participants in that class, have an absolute right to a supportive and affirming learning environment.

The instructor made a statement to the class regarding respect in the class, adding to her previous statement about respect for visitors. I never noticed what the concerned student emailed about–though I appreciate her concern–and since the instructor’s comment I have received nothing but respect, even–though this was present before–an admiration for my commentary.

My experience at Carleton has been almost overwhelming and I look forward with great anticipation to attending full time in the fall. Yes, I’m quite out there–as I am most places.

No, I haven’t forgotten Autumn’s post.

I have written a number of documents in connection with my course and application which I will post soon. These writing exercises have helped clarify my thoughts; I look forward to the next several years to continue this process.

I’ve been thinking about Namaste’s term erasure and Shelley’s term repudiation.

When I transitioned and came into the “community(ies)” in Ottawa, and to some degree across Canada and North America, the first idea thrust upon me was Namaste’s. In Egale Canada and Canadians for Equal Marriage, in Pink Triangle Services, organizations I’ve been part of, I found her term a good description of my everyday life.

Egale’s notion of inconvenient, divisive and ultimately unnecessary is illuminated by erasure.

More recently, however, I needed to find a foundation for both of these–and I just happened to stumble across Shelley’s book and his notion of repudiation.This illuminates for me the ground of Namaste’s term and Egale Canada’s explicit practice.

Now, what does this have to do with the use of transgender as the umbrella term for both transgender and transsexual people?

In the recent TDOR, our events in Ottawa were, as they have been for five years–as in Toronto–termed “Trans Day of Remembrance.” In a Canadian trans email list, a continentally prominent–almost as prominent as a trans person can be, more so than I, for example–posted the Canadian list of events, changing our term, though keeping the Toronto term intact.

I raised concern regarding this.

Subsequently, our event was removed from the list Ethan St. Pierre keeps–but not the Toronto events, all three of them. After an exchange of email with Ethan, he explained he had been informed listing the Ottawa event would disrespect it, even though our usage has always been transgender and transsexual people, or transsexual and transgender people–and this has been the case for five years and listing had never before disrespected our event, nor been cause to erase it.

Subsequently, this continentally prominent trans person admitted to being Ethan’s informer. Frankly, I believe this imposition of another’s views upon our community, both in the Canadian list and Ethan’s list, to be grossly inappropriate, colonizing, marginalizing and repudiating.

I’m happy to accept other’s self-identification.

I’m happy to have Gender Mosaic here in Ottawa–one of Canada’s oldest transgender support organizations–describe itself as transgender. Trying to be part of Gender Mosaic has always been problematic for transsexual people. We created Gender Quest group at Pink Triangle Services to address the void in Ottawa for services to transitioning persons–in particular transsexual persons–who have no home in a transgender organization.

I believe this notion of home/community to be very important.

In reading for my course, I have rediscovered Alfred Adler and how he speaks quite directly to this void I’ve always felt in my own life and alluded to in my last post.

Gemeinshaftsgeful, community feeling/social feeling, is one of a class of notions Adler describes as “regulatory ideals,” notions so powerful for us they act upon us as if they were real–they act as telos, goals of our lives.

I’m getting back to Autumn’s post–really–and recent controversy on the TGV list.

I feel no home in anything described as transgender. I find it quite difficult to speak of the needs which are at the core of my advocacy–medical, social and legal–in such a context where for transgender people these needs are of lesser concern.

I believe there is a profound category error at work here that simply compounds the erasure and repudiation of transsexual people. I believe this category error marginalizes the central concerns of transsexual people–even as Namaste has also argued. This is very close to the core of my criticism of Egale Canada’s past and present marginalization of transsexual people.

So, my usage has always been transgender and transsexual people or transsexual and transgender people. This is the usage of Bill Siksay, the Member of Parliament, who has been leading the parliamentary struggle to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code of Canada to include gender identity and gender expression.

In the organizing for the 2008 TDOR in Ottawa all the other organizers were from Gender Mosaic. They wanted to revert to the more common usage, “Transgender Day of Remembrance.” I argued against it. I suggested using “Transgender-Transsexual Day of Remembrance;” the others were, at one point, willing to use “Trans-Transgender Day of Remembrance.” All I can say, this erasure and repudiation of transsexual people is/was completely unacceptable.

But the question raises itself, why is it always appropriate to so casually erase and repudiate transsexual people?

Why is this category error so normalized?

Do we shame and embarrass not only gay and lesbian people but also transgender people?

Why is the ideology, even among those who, by almost any definition are transsexual people, to impose their views on those who do not accept them–often allying themselves with those who have no interest in our struggles and everyday/night lives?

I have no concern whatsoever in people identifying themselves in any way they wish–I respect this. I simply ask to be granted the same privilege.

Failing that, I ask for the adoption of an open usage that doesn’t erase and repudiate me.

References

King. R. A. & Shelley, C. A. (2008). Community feeling and social interest: Adlerian parallels, synergy and differences with the field of community psychology [PDF Format]. J. Community Appl. Soc. Psychol., 18: 96–107.

Namaste, V. (2000). Invisible lives: The erasure of transsexual and transgendered people. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Namaste, V. (2005). Sex change, social change: Reflections on identity, institutions, and imperialism. Toronto: Women’s Press.

Shelley, C. A. (2008). Transpeople: Repudiation, trauma, healing. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press.

UPDATE: Ethan St. Pierre is quite correct in comments. And in a piece on “naming,” no less. My apologies. I have corrected his name in the text.

UPDATE II: It is difficult to know where to start on comments.

Those who accuse me of being a separatist for wanting an open usage seem to be glued to words rather than actions–even actions through words. I have long advocated for transgender and transsexual people, gender identity and gender expression. I have argued, publicly, against those who would throw gender expression overboard explicitly in terms of not duplicating the removal of T from GLB.

One post seems to dismiss the need for a specific group for transitioning persons. Do transitioning persons not deserve the same support as those who do not?

I guess my commentaries discussing the need for the largest coalition possible were not read. In a coalition, among transgender and transsexual people, with gay, lesbian and bisexual people, just to start, all parts must be clearly identified, their needs and goals explicit, so that–unlike the identity politics of Egale Canada, for example–one identity will not marginalize all others.

There seems to be the same distaste for the word transsexual in comments as during discussions for TDOR 2008.

There seems to be a great fear just to say the word transsexual will do some irreparable harm to someone’s identity–the very identity politics Egale Canada practises. We are diverse and yet the intense desire is to homogenize us into one term, one identity, one life–this is the definition of identity politics.

Name calling does not advance the struggle for the provision of and access to health and social services, legal status or human rights.

It is precisely these actions that alienate, that foreclose the possibility of coalition as opposed to identity politics.

Naming is one of the most important things we do in the world, this is why open usage is so important.

There is no single name–and to insist upon one is to marginalize all those who do not fit. I would have thought all those who have been erased and repudiated by the ideology of inconvenient, divisive and ultimately unnecessary would understand this.

UPDATE III: In the legislation proposed by Bill Siksay there is no trace of identities, embodied in the words transgender and transsexual (Bill uses the same terminology as I do, transgender and transsexual people); legislative language uses categories–gender identity and gender expression.

There will always be a dynamic tension between identities and categories.

All of us, as marginalized people, require naming, hence the “alphabet soup” so dispised, particularly by some gay people–who just happen to always have their identity named.

For the rest of us it is just too inconvenient and divisive for our identities to be mentioned. So we must.

I believe the inevitable multiplication of identities must always be respected–this is the foundation for any coalition which must also be based on anti-oppression principles.

At the same time, there must be a way of making sense of it all–this is the role of categories and their place in legislative language.

Agencies that begin to make the small steps from the time when they all were gay, abandon the multiplication of identities that grew almost out of control for categories.

Pink Triangle Services in Ottawa no longer itemizes the identities in its Mandate–gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, two spirit and queer–but includes categories–issues of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.

These categories include us all.

This step is a long time coming and only a first step in the direction of clarifying the thinking we must do to move forward.

It is, clearly, the hardest step.

UPDATE IV: Shannon poses an interesting question in comments.

A first thought: Transsexual people, certainly transsexual women, are not particularly transgressive, unlike, well Genderqueer, especially Genderfucker and transsexual men.

Even transsexual men in their gender/sex support stereotypical gender/sex roles. Namaste refers to this, as she refers to the stereotypical roles transsexual women support. She makes the strong argument that transsexual people are only heard if they present their lives through the prism of gay/lesbian concerns.

Namaste marshals these as part of her argument that transsexual people, as opposed to transgender people–which include gay/lesbian people–diverge from the goals of gay/lesbian people.

Namaste’s roster of trans opinion leaders who are heard are Leslie Fineberg, Kate Bornstein, Riki Ann Wilkins and the theorist, Judith Butler. But, she argues, where are the transsexual people who support traditional roles.

We can add Julia Serano to this line of argument. Serano has explicitly asserted there is not only a disconnect but a complete reversal between our “connumity(ies)” and the larger society.

In our “community(ies)” those on the F2M spectrum are lauded as transgressive, a high value, particularly in communities, like those valued by Capital Xtra, of sexual freedon–what some have called liberationist.

In society at large, Serano has pointed out those on the M2F spectrum are a cause celebre, objectified and hypersexualized.

In our “community(ies)” femininity, even femaleness, is not valued. It is even worse than that–these values are erased and repudiated–especially if presented by male-bodied persons. The entire M2F spectrum, transgender and transsexual.

Serano’s point is trans women are spectacle in society at large. More even that cissexual/cisgender women because we have given up male privilege.

Society at large does not find it at all out of the ordinary everyone wants to be male/masculine. This is what a masulinist/mysognous/sexist society is all about.

Namaste, less directly, seems to make the same point.

The last step in this argument hinges on the historical predominance of M2F in discussions about trans/transsexuality/transgenderism. This is itself a function of what might be called the Serano reversal.

I often ask at this point: Who would want to be a woman?

UPDATE V: Appearances can be deceiving.

The only topic of conversation in comments, now that Shannon has retired, is gender, gender, gender.

When we are born, what the doctor presiding declares is not a gender, but sex. His (historically a “he”) made this judgement not on the colour of the blanket or the baby’s hairstyle or makeup, but on the baby’s physiology–on primary sexual characteristics.

One may wish to say this is only gender, but that requires a rather sophisticated theoretical structure, built upon the work of Judith Butler.

These do indeed become the foundation for gender signs as the baby grows into a man or a women–gender–though the foundation may remain, apparently, male or female–sex.

If it were all about gender, there might be little need for hormone replacement, certainly no need for surgery. Or the kind of concerns mentioned in Ethan’s last post–maybe for a man and male person these concerns are superficial, certainly a gender characteristic. I cannot describe them in a way satisfactory to one who does not value them.

We could just work for a society in which there is no gender binary. This is precisely what Namaste discusses and points out the very incomprehension transgender have for these concerns of transsexual people.

At base there is a category error which subsumes “sex-changing” transsexual people into “gender-changing” transgender people. On the surfance it appears that all transsexual people are doing is what transgender people are doing, changing their gender.

This may well be the basis for the repudiation and erasure of transsexual people so evident in this and other discussions. Historically, we can look to Judith Butler for, on the one hand, opening up space for “gender-changing” transgender people on the one hand, but closing down space for “sex-changing” transsexual people on the other.

The very tragic life of David Reimer, which I will discuss in my next commentary, illustrates issues at the core of this vigorous debate–and butler’s perspective: the persistence of gender identity–a term which I do not like for obvious reasons, but keep for some of the same pragmatic reasons champions of transgender do: it is not accurate, but everyone understands it.

Has this attitude historically not been the foundation for much misery?

For those who will not accept what Serano calls subconscious sex then nothing Shannon or I have said, clearly, makes any sense.

More than that it threatens their identity politics, world-view and lives, not to mention linguistic habits that are as challenging to change as male/masculine speech habits.

I am loath to resort to biological arguments, especially with those who I would seek to form the coalitions Shannon and I have been at great pains to describe, but, we know the incidence of physical intersex is about 1:2000 births.

Why then is it so hard to accept there is, as Lynn Conway points out, an incidence of  “strong TG feelings” 1:200, “intense TS feelings” 1:500, “TG transitioners (w/o SRS)” 1:1000, and “TS transitioners (w SRS)” 1:2500?

In the arguments presented in comments–except for Shannon’s–I find lurking a justification for excluding those who seek medical intervention, particularly surgery. If we accept the lives and struggles of those who do not need to do what Shannon and I, among many, many others have done, why is there so much resistance to accepting our lives and struggles? As they are?

Is there some shame and embarrassment that marginalizes us from those who should be the first to join in coalition?