Sunday, December 2, 2012
The Transsexual Empire, Transnormativity, and other Bugaboos
Posted by Dr. Cary Gabriel Costello at 4:23 PM
http://trans-fusion.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-transsexual-empire-transnormativity.htmlI'm around 50 years old, and a lot has changed in the queer community since my youth. And yet, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and I want to discuss some of these ironic consistencies with you. They relate to gender policing.
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As you might imagine, I had a hard time fitting in to the "lesbian and gay" community of my college years. At my university, there were two organizations at the time, one "lesbian and gay" collective that was really understood as the gay men's group, and one lesbian separatist organization. Having never identified as a lesbian, I started going to meetings of the mostly-gay-men's collective. I was there because, inside, I identified with the men, but the idea of a trans* man was not yet on anyone's radar, and even I only thought of myself as sort of spiritually akin to the boys. My deepest secret—that I was born with a sex-variant body—I told no one. Like most intersex people of the time, I understood my differences to be a shameful secret, and my sex assignment a permanent status I would always live with. So while I was attending the guy's meetings, and feeling I was in the right place, nobody, including myself, thought of me as being there because I was "really" a man. The best I could do at the time was to fill the role of one of the few token women participating, and keep my private incohate identity to myself.
