It seems that The New Yorker piece has provoked some outrage on the RadFem left for trying to offer a balance, and dancing on the right as an example on the right of the left eating their own. There's not a lot of attention yet, but it's this week's magazine and just getting attention. Like the Newsweek piece, it's fairly short and almost tentative. Neither covered new ground and to me they were important simply for being in those magazines. For existing. It seemed to me TNY was simply showing it had cred in the current awareness of T people, and recognizing that there was a nasty fight going on. I didn't find it controversial in itself, though I know that people on both sides feel very highly committed to how language is used and to their ideological positions.
I did a google search to see who was covering it so far, which is mostly bloggers, and I looked at a few sites and burrowed down to comments. As expected, they were depressingly angry and vitriolic. In the past, I read these sorts of articles more with curiosity than anything else and almost detached. Now I find that I feel uncomfortable. My reaction now is not so much to the article, which is fairly benign as an attempt to observe the fight between SOME feminists and SOME T people, but about my own feeling of distance.
My own transition took place is relative isolation form any greater T community, and I had plenty of local options as I live in a major metropolitan area. I was in no support groups and I have no T friends that I know of. I just dance to my own tune. I think I also don't want to be seen first as T. But these sorts of articles and comments pierce that. I worry that I won't be allowed to be left alone. I also wonder about whether I should choose to be.
My transition is certainly not secret in a community I have lived for decades (ugh) and where I can't walk down the street without meeting several people I know and who want to talk. I go about my life as I did before. Yet, I also know I have been very lucky in not having encountered angry reactions, and certainly nothing that made me feel "other" or unsafe. When I have felt invisible, it has been as F not T. When I read articles and comments like the ones in the New Yorker and the blog, and the adamant pure hate, I wonder how cocooned I have been, or is this the internets being the internets. Unfiltered, out of context, and given to overwrought and irrelevant swamps and backwaters.
To me, any gender marker was secondary to who I am as a person. I don't say that it doesn't matter to me, otherwise I would not have transitioned. I just don't feel it defines me. This may also be why I waited so long to do anything about it. Life had other priorities. I have a hard time understanding RadFem, not feminism. I get feminism, I feel it. I just don't see it as defining me either, and I am not a misandrist as the RadFems seem to be. I also have not waded into T politics and advocacy. Being T didn't define my life. It was something to take care of and move along with. I felt I didn't need to do more and that being as everyday and involved in my community as I was is my contribution. But then I worry about what is holding back the anger on the far left and far right, though I know we are talking about fringes. At least I hope we are. I wonder what legitimizes and unleashes such hate into the mainstream, and how much is misdirected frustration from other perceived wrongs?
Most of the time I feel like an observer who happens to be T, just like I happen to be auburn haired. I'm not sure that's always healthy. I question how engaged I am or am not. On the one hand, I want to respond to the intense and often irrational hate. On the other I realise it's just that: intense and irrational hate, and people who cannot be reasoned with directly. I feel the world reacts differently to us than they ever did to gays and lesbians. Some of that is probably because it's easier to understand the motivations of attraction and love than of feeling out of sorts in your body. I still remember my mother asking, can't the therapist talk you out of the problem? Can't they give you testosterone instead? There was no point of reference for her, and she has many close friends who happen to be gay. This is where I think the RadFems and the part of the T community who fight with them miss the point: They are incapable of grasping or refuse to accept a reference point, they feel too much is at stake and perceive an existential threat. That threat is so overpowering they want to stomp the other out or at least marginalised them. But that is where they came into ongoing play in the first place. It's no better than what they feel they received at the hands of others. They learned nothing and they won't. And that's what makes me uncomfortable. They won't go away, and they will continue to bite and kick each other, and someone, sometime will get out of control and someone will get hurt.
My temptation is to say, this is a fringe, let them have at it until they get tired as long as no one gets hurt. The problem is, when it's in The New Yorker, it makes it sound more than it is, as if this is the struggle to define who T are. If there is one thing these boards show, it's that we won't be pigeonholed and defined easily. The genie is out of the bottle, we slowly go mainstream. I think some will be more non-conformist than others and more visible, but in the end largely unremarked. And that's all I want, to be unremarked as a woman and remarked as a person.
edit: Way too long for a post. Sorry.
