Last night, I wrote a blog in which I apologized for using the word tranny. I said I'd try my best not to use it in public any more. Well, I did try my best and it made me feel miserable. I cried myself to sleep, and I woke up crying. I woke up feeling weaker than I've felt in a long time.
I like the word tranny. It makes me feel strong and happy when I do use the word tranny. I like other people who use the word tranny affectionately with one another. I don't want to stop using the word. Of course I don't want to be mean to people who are hurt by the word, but the fact is I have never used the word tranny with the intention of being mean to people.
I've been on an extremely rigorous tour schedule for the past few months, and I'm exhausted. I made the decision to post last night more out of fear and overwhelm than out of strength of conviction. So, I've reconsidered what I said and why I said it, and I've taken down that post.
I'm going out on tour, and I'm not leaving the comfort of my writing chair. You can come along too!
The reviews are coming in on Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation: one a day for the next nine days. Seal Press is the publisher of the new anthology. Their slogan is Groundbreaking Books, By Women, For Women. Well, they're stretching that slogan all out of shape. They came up with the fun idea to arrange for a tour of reviews from nine different corners of the feminist/trans/trans-friendly/and genderqueer blogosphere.
I've already had a chance to read the first posted review today. It's by Everett Maroon, and it's up on I Fry Mine in Butter. No puff journalism, this. It's a wonderful essay. I've posted a comment to the blog, and I hope to read and comment on each of the reviews as they're posted.
(Oh! I'm enjoying this almost as much as I enjoyed working with S. Bear Bergman and Seal Press to put this anthology together in the first place!)
So, here's the rest of the schedule. Enjoy the perspectives!
Friday, 10/8 – Mr. Sinclair Sexsmith posting on SugarButch!
I'll be tweeting each stop on the tour as it goes up. So… enjoy the next couple of weeks of binary-blowing gendernalysis. And please do join in the conversation along your way with comments on each of the reviews, and right here if you like. I am SO all aquiver!
Thank you for your continued or new interest in my work.
For the past fifteen years, I've been touring college campuses, conferences, and rallies with pieces that have focused primarily on deconstructing sex and gender binaries—and more recently, I’ve added suggestions on how to stay alive once you've done that. I’m adding layers of social justice, coalition-building, and laying open the very real heart connection that can be found in putting queer theory into practice.
With the publication of Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (co-edited with S. Bear Bergman), up-to-date information on the ever-changing state of gender is yours to study, experience, and have fun with… right now! I understand that this isn't necessarily good news for everyone. It's hard to be the new kid in the clubhouse. What's more, the presence of new identities within a group puts a strain on the group's values and definitions. Oh, what to do!?
By combining what I've learned through writing Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and other Outlaws with what I've learned from all the amazing contributors to Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, I've been able to come up with a perspective and point of view that fosters inclusion over exclusivity, trust over suspicion, and compassion over bullying.
To that end, I've put together an all-new touring catalogue for 2010-2011, which includes several new lectures and talks, including my shiny new workshop, The Outlaws Are Coming! The Outlaws Are Coming! with which I hope to co-create with you a safer space for you and other teens, freaks, and other outlaws.You can peruse the PDF right here, right now:
That's my work these days. That's what I'd like to help you with on your campus, at your conference, in your town, business, or place of worship. I hope to see you soon.
I've just returned home to New York City from this year's Femme Conference in Oakland, California. The theme was "No Restrictions." My head is still dizzy and swirling. I met wonderful people, connected with many dear friends, and found myself a whole new set of dangerous dreams and damned desires to consider.
I didn't finish writing the address until the night before I delivered it to over 500 beautiful femmes, and those who love and celebrate us. I was scribbling notes on my notes until half an hour before I stood up. I told my twibe on Twitter that I'd make a copy of the text available for download, so I've integrated all the versions, and here it is in PDF format: Download KB_keynote_Femme2010.
Okay, it's late, Mercury is in retrograde, I'm exhausted and exhilarated and I'm missing my femme family. I hope you enjoy the keynote address and that it helps make life more worth living for ya.
I meet many eloquent people on Twitter. I just loves my twibe. One of them, @ShamanOfHedon, maintains a kick-ass blog that bears subscribing to. I admired her take on the film, Ticked Off Trannies With Knives. And I am LOVING her take-down of internecine trans-tribal warfare.
Yes—believe it or not—there are some trans people who despise other trans people, purely for the kind of trans people they are. And yes of course this sort of internal hierarchal transphobia has been going on for a long time. Well, Shaman of Hedon exposes a nest of that hatred on Shaman's latest blog. It got me all fired up, so I wrote the following comment (which is way longer than a blog comment should be, so I'm posting it here.)
**************
Wow, Shaman. You sure do manage to ferret out some of the juiciest cuts of our sprawling trans culture's carcass. Firstly, thanks for your eloquence and passion. It's a satisfying kick-ass response to the soul-less vitriol spewed by Miss Josephine, who believes she is more of a "real" woman and a better transperson than YOU.
But heck, there are still a LOT of people in the world who think that Hispanic, African-American, and Asian people are not "real" people like Caucasians. Those scary racial bigots use *science* to justify their claims. Well that's what I think you've unmasked here, oh far-seeing Shaman: a trans sub-culture that uses science to "prove" their ultimately self-directed bigotry. Here's their mission statement:
TS-SI is dedicated to the acceptance, medical treatment, and legal protection of individuals correcting the misalignment of their brains and their anatomical sex, while supporting their transition into society.
I've been checking out TS-SI's website for people who believe there's a both a biological imperative and a cultural classist mandate for real gender, real humanity. The only good trannies—the better ones, anyway, for the TS-SI mindset holds as self-evident that we're all diseased—are the trannies who comply with both the biological and classist imperatives.
The TS-SI website is SMART. There's all sorts of political ramifications to the science they believe in. In fact, it's so smart that I bet ya can't read all the words in the headlines of their home page without using a dictionary. Smart = educated = well-monied = so much more to lose = more frantic to defend the ground they stand on.
So it's boiling down to class again. Poor things. No, I mean it. They haven't been able to find the sustaining joy of breaking free of biological and classist imperatives. They've opted for the life-sucking security of class superiority.
OK, so the class argument for "real" gender can easily be torn apart by compassion. But I still don't get the science argument. Really, not being snarky here. Aren't all our different organs and body structures based in the same bio-goo? Sure, the bio-goo shifts and recombines over time into mostly male and mostly female, but it's still the same goo. It's like the argument about when is a fetus a human being. Well, you can start measuring life at any time. Ditto biological gender.
I think the important thing to keep in mind is that while yes, of course there are two major biological genders, that life itself goes well beyond just that—and it's life itself that has yet to be respected by the majority of people on the planet.
Once again, Shaman, I bow to your wisdom, passion, and eloquence.
kiss kiss
Your Doting Aunt Kate
(who begs you to forgive her for using the t-word. I just had to, I was on a rant.)
I'm going to keep this short and sweet, to keep myself from wandering off intoMobius stripsof postmodern theory. I've been paying attention to some trans activists who are using the word cisgender.According to its very own Wikipedia page:
"The word has its origin in the Latin-derived prefix cis, meaning "on the same side" as in the cis-trans distinction in chemistry. In this case, "cis" refers to the alignment of gender identity with assigned gender."
Who knew? Not me. I'd only begun to hear the word about a year ago but according to its own Wikipedia page, cisgenderhas been in use on the internet since 1994. So this is me trying to play catch up.
Here's what I've got worked out so far.
1) Cisgender/Transgender is a valid gender binary. I don't like the prefix cis, but that'smyproblem. A global binary exists that is worthy of examination for its impact on the quality of our lives.
2) Identifying people with fixed gender identities as sex partners is key to both the identities and desires of cisgender lesbians and gay men, as well as to heterosexual men and women. Bisex,Polyamory,Asexuality,et albreak cisgender rules of fixed desire.Trans,Genderqueer,Drag et albreak cisgender rules of fixed identity.
3) To hold on to any power gained thru classimilation, middle class cisgender lesbians, gay men, and heterosexual men and womenmustdefend their desires/identities as both correct & natural.
4) Cisgender people who are sex positive & gender embracing are more than allies, they're family. That's where the idea of any othering of trans by some monolithic cisgender identity ultimately falls apart.
5) Sex positivists and gender anarchists are simply too sexy for inclusion in any middle class arena, including the current "LGBT" movement whose agendas are set by mostly middle class cisgender lesbian women and gay men.
OK. That's as far as I've gotten. Ithas not been my intention to offend anyone. This is a theory in progress.I believe thatno valid theory of identity, desire, or power can other a single sentient being. If you feel offendedI was wrong.I'll do my best to right the wrong.I'm talking about this on Twitterso if you've got a comment please tweet me. I've got faster and more frequent access to Twitter than I have to this blog.
I’m feeling pretty damned good about ground gained in western culture by transgender people. I was there at the beginning of this loosely-knit yet somehow united movement, and things are a whole lot better for trans people today in Western culture than they ever have been.
There are many people who are claiming and living lives far beyond man or woman. There are many people who live fluidly gendered lives. There are many people who know the dangers of gender when it plays itself out as an unconscious social binary.
It’s not Mission Accomplished, not by a long shot. But talented trans people are scaling the walls of political power and artistic genius. There are deeply compassionate trans people who are religious scholars and clergy. Transdora's box is wide open and we're never going back. I am tranny, hear me frakking ROAR!
And then along comes Germaine Greer—genuine warhorse and goddess of feminism—on 20 August, 2009 with an Op-Ed piece in The Guardian she calls Caster Semenya sex row: What makes a woman? In this new piece, Ms. Greer refers to transwomen—me and my brave sisters and mothers and daughters—as “ghastly parodies” of women.
I’m not going to talk about Caster Semenya’s dilemma beyond saying that she’s being treated with intolerable rudeness and disrespect by the media. It’s the same savagely uncaring journalistic strategy used against Dr. Renée Richards when she was so rudely outed to the world in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yes, yes. Ouch. It hurts to be called a ghastly parody. And that kind of talk feeds transphobia across the world. So, shame on The Guardian for printing these hateful words. But who is Ms. Greer to be hurling these invectives, and why? Greer is no one to dismiss as an idiot or complete jerk. Through her relentless work, Ms. Greer has raised the volume of women’s voices in the world. She got people around the world to start taking women more seriously.
And here's the problem: all the time she was doing that great social activism, Greer believes to the core of her being that woman is an essential identity. The gender battleground on which Germaine Greer fought and learned her political strategies was gender-as-man-and-woman-only. On that battlefield, it's easy to attack transgender people as freaks.
The good news is that Germaine Greer's transphobia is more the exception among todays scholars, artists and activists. They work as tirelessly as Greer herself on issues of gender rights, freedoms, parameters, and dignity. Postmodern gender theory has been taught in colleges and universities around the world for over fifteen years. It's over-spilling the walls of academia. The battlefield/playground has shifted. Nothing is essential any more.
Germaine Greer's tragedy is that she has not considered as even possible the theory of gender fluidity. For her kind of activism to work, MAN and WOMAN can and must be essential as well as easy to tell apart from each other. Greer is a fierce warrior, but to nail down the gender binary, she concludes her op-ed piece by saying,
“People who don't ovulate or menstruate will probably always physically outperform people who do.”
Ms. Greer is claiming that biology is, in fact destiny.
The price of being a writer of vitriol is that it reveals your most private fears, which you've penned in the form of an attack on someone else. And sadly, that makes Ms. Greer a ghastly parody of herself. What she wrote was painful and destructive. But the loss of her fierce presence on the front lines of feminism is more to be mourned than scorned.
And the point of all this is to assure you: it really has gotten a lot better for transgender people. There's a long, long way to go. But it's much, much better. I promise.
This is Doris Fish, San Francisco's pre-eminent drag queen in the 1980's. She died in 1991 from AIDS-related diseases. She was generous, flamboyant, kind, and ultra talented. Her charisma rating was off the top of the chart. She'd moved to San Francisco from Sydney, Australia—then (and some say now) the undisputed home of the world's most fabulous drag queens. Doris took me under her delightfully feathered wings.
I was afraid of her raw sexuality, but bowled over by her courage. Doris was amused by my quest to become a real woman.
I learned from Doris that in Australia, from the 1960's through the 1970's, most all of the male-to-female spectrum of gender outlaw began their transition in the fabulous world of sexy, over-the top drag performance. Like me in the late 80’s in San Francisco, the majority of MTF transsexuals just wanted to live their lives as closely as possible to whatever their notion was of "a real woman." They considered drag queens beneath them. The drag queens were amused by the MTFs pursuing the dream of real woman.
No matter what ideas you might have about transsexuals or drag queens, if you were M headed toward F in any fashion at all, you moved into, through, up and out of the drag queen community. So there was always a bond between the drag queens and the MTF transsexuals in Sydney. The bond was so strong, they invented a name for the identity they shared: tranny. It was a name that said family. Doris Fish taught me that she and I were family.
Years earlier, when I went through my gender change from male to female, I glided through life under the commonly accepted assumption: I was finally a real woman! That worked for me until I ran into a group of politically smart lesbians who told me that I wasn't allowed to co-opt the word "woman." Woman was not a family word that included me. My answer to this exclusion was to call myself a gender outlaw: I wasn't a man, I wasn't a woman. By calling myself a gender outlaw, I had unknowingly reclaimed the right to name myself outside the language generated by the bi-polar gender system. Under that system, each of us needed to fit neatly into a pre-fab sex/gender identity.
Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and The Rest of Us was first published in hardcover by Routledge in 1994, just over 15 years ago. The book hit the world of academics, feminists, and sex and gender activists at a critical time—feminists were getting tired of being alone as gender's only activists. Gender Outlaw made it okay for more and more people to name themselves outside of a system that would rather see them dead for disobeying its rigid binary rules. The people who stepped outside their lines early on added a new energy to feminism by giving feminists allies and resources to tear down the sex and gender system that was—and still is—oppressing all of us.
Over the past decade and a half, people have been using Gender Outlaw as a stepping-off point on their personal gender odysseys. People of all sorts of birth-assigned genders have been naming themselves, and they've been getting together with groups of people who've done the same sort of self-naming. And now we’ve arrived at a time when the next generation of gender outlaws get to call the shots. To that aim, Seal Press has commissioned what we hope will be a ground-breaking new book: Gender Outlaws, the Next Generation, edited by S. Bear Bergman and yours truly, the older generation.
Four weeks ago, Bear posted a call for submissions on his blog. In the interests of keeping the call as open as possible, we agreed to include as many trans-identities as we knew, so we used the word "tranny." And that's where the activist shit hit the postmodern fan base. People have been pissed. Here's their argument: FTMs are co-opting a word that belongs to MTFs. The word "tranny" belongs to MTFs, reason those who were hurt by our use of the word, because it was a denigrating term reclaimed by MTFs—ergo, only MTFs could be known as trannies. I spoke with Bear, and we agree that’s wrong on several counts:
Tranny began as a uniting term amongst ourselves. Of course it’s going to be picked up and used as a denigrating term by mean people in the world. But even if we manage to get them to stop saying tranny like a thrown rock, mean people will come up with another word to wound us with. So, let’s get back to using tranny as a uniting term amongst ourselves. That would make Doris Fish very happy.
It's our first own language word for ourselves that has no medical-legacy.
Even if (like gay) hate-filled people try to make tranny into a bad word, our most positive response is to own the word (a word invented by the queerest of the queer of their day). We have the opportunity to re-create tranny as a positive in the world.
Saying that FTMs can’t call themselves trannies eerily echoes the 1980s lesbians who said I couldn’t use the word woman to identify myself, and the 1990s lesbians who said I couldn’t use the word dyke.
At one phase in the evolution of transpeople-as-tribe, it was the male-to-females who were visible and representative of trans to the rest of the world. They were the trannies. Today? Ironically true to the binary we’re in the process of shattering, the pendulum has swung so that it's now female-to-males who are the archetypal trannies of the day. The generation coming up beyond the next generation, i.e. my tribal grandchildren are the young boys who transition to young girls at the age of five or six. They’re the next trannies. None of us can own the word. We can only be grateful that our tribe is so much larger than we had thought it would be. How to come together—now that’s the job of the next generation of gender outlaws.
Labels aren't all that bad when they're used consciously, but a major downside of using labels to describe an identity—even the labels we wear proudly as badges of courage—is that lables set up us-versus-them scenarios. The next generation of gender outlaws is seeking to dismantle us-versus-them. As a people, none of us deserves to hear the words “You’re not welcome here,” or “You’re not good enough,” or “You’re not real.” My Goddess, we just have to stop saying that to each other, all of us whose identity somehow hinges on gender or sexuality. We have to stop beating up on each other. The Sydney drag queens and transsexuals knew that when they came up with the word tranny to encourage mutual respect.
What’s more, the time has come for those who are coping with sex and gender oppression to raise ourselves up to a level of respectability of other marginalized groups—those working for equity along the lines of class, race, age, looks, religion, ability, family status, and citizenship. We’re not taken seriously precisely because our focus is on sex and gender. In the eyes of this culture that makes us morally suspect. What the fuck does our sex or our gender have to do with our morality?! We need to de-Puritanize this fucking culture, that’s what we’ve got to do. It's time to reclaim more than names. It's time to reclaim the moral high ground.
Those are the sort of topics I’d like to see in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. The first generation of gender outlaws made themselves known in the world. The job of the next generation of gender outlaws is to weave all of us gender and sex positivists together as a globally recognized tribe. I'd like to be around to see substantial progress made along those lines.
TO BE CLEAR: Nothing I've said here or anywhere else should be taken as permission to call another person tranny until you know that's a word they use for their own identity—some people find the word extremely hurtful. So, please err on the side of caution and compassion.
kiss kiss
Kate
"Tranny," revisited by me five years later (2014), here:
Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation Submission Details
Submission Deadline: Sept 1 (early submissions are encouraged). Submissions should be unpublished; query if you have a reprint that you think we’ll swoon for. While we hesitate to list a maximum, please query first for pieces over 4,000 words. If you have an idea and need help writing it out, contact us to discuss an interview-style piece or other accommodations.
Submit as a Word document or black/white JPEG (no files over 2MB). Please include a cover letter with a brief bio and full contact information (mailing address, phone number, pseudonym if appropriate) when you submit. Submissions without complete contact information will be deleted unread. Payment will be $50 and 2 copies of the book upon publication in Fall 2010. Contributors retain the rights to their pieces. Send your submission as an attachment to genderoutlawsnextgeneration@gmail.com.
I graduated Brown University in 1969. I’m only the 2nd woman in the world to hold a diploma from Brown University prior to 1970. Before that, women were enrolled in Pembroke College AT Brown University. Even though there was NO difference in our classes or curriculum, women graduating Brown prior to 1970 were awarded diplomas from Pembroke College AT Brown University. Except me. And Wendy Carlos before me.
I was a hippy-dippy actor/director and stoner during my days at Brown, and this year I got an email from our class president. I’d been identified, he said, as among the most accomplished, illustrious, and interesting members of our class. Hah! And, he continued, there would be a panel discussion about how attending Brown in the 60s effected my life, and would I participate? Would I?!
So, this past Memorial Day weekend, I travelled up to Providence, Rhode Island to attend my first ever college reunion in forty years. My partner, Barbara Carrellas, did all the driving and courage-building. Other panel participants included: Ira Magaziner, chairman of the William J. Clinton Foundation’s international development initiatives; Cornelia Dean, writer and editor for The New York Times; John Rizzo, past and current Acting General Consul for the CIA; five other classmates: a banker, a scientist, a philanthropist, a judge, and me. I didn’t find out until the day of the panel that John Rizzo was referred to as the “Architect of Torture.” Yikes.
So, this is me talking to over 200 classmates and their families. They asked me to speak for 5-7 minutes. I came in at 6 minutes, 56 seconds. Barbara Carrellas flipped the video. Enjoy.
I totally didn't make up the title of this post. I don't know who did, but yay to whoever that was. I've been home for almost a week now… with the freakin' flu! It's not swine flu as far as I can tell. Friends on Twitter know that I suspect I've fallen victim to pug flu. But it's nasty. Life is a whole lot of ouch. And my brain is mush, so I can't write very well. Hence, the stolen title for this blog. Again… thank you, whoever you are who came up with that line.
I've just come off my last round of this year's touring season. Over the last two months, I've spoken at several religious gatherings, and leadership conferences. I'm not all that good at being a leader, and I mostly resent being led. As to religion, I haven't yet found one that welcomes me completely… well, other than Bokononism, and the cosmology of the Seven Endless (who make up the tattoo sleeve on my left arm). But I wasn't speaking with Bokononists, and I wasn't at a comics con with a group of people who can get into Neil Gaiman's notion of beings upwards of the gods and goddesses. I was keynoting the 13th Annual Conference of NUJLS, The National Union of Jewish LGBT Students, and the 3rd Annual Transgender Religious Summit. What was I supposed to say?
To my great relief, I found some truly interesting angles on both religion and leadership. I can't sum it up for you. Like I said, my brain is mush right now. BUT, I can give you the notes for my talks. And if you click right here, that's what you'll have.
Last night, I wrote a blog in which I apologized for using the word tranny. I said I'd try my best not to use it in public any more. Well, I did try my best and it made me feel miserable. I cried myself to sleep, and I woke up crying. I woke up feeling weaker than I've felt in a long time. 
