Transphobia in the Gay Community, Part II

[Shana A]

Transphobia in the Gay Community, Part II
Filed by: Dr. Jillian T. Weiss
December 13, 2009 11:30 AM

http://www.bilerico.com/2009/12/transphobia_in_the_gay_community_part_ii.php

When Christine Jorgensen made headlines in 1951, she was viewed as a homosexual by all, including her doctors. She understood her identity very differently. Today, in our LGBT world, the difference may seem abstract, particularly to younger people born in a different social climate. I will try to recreate here from the dry historical facts the climate of the times in which transphobia took root in the gay community. Please read this not as a history of facts, but as a history of emotions, and powerlessness, and how those led us directly to the situation today.

Many in the homophile movement of the time recoiled in horror at Jorgensen, and the ways in which her story was being used. If the transsexual idea -- Jorgensen's "treatment" and "cure" -- gained power among the public, it could lead to worsening rounds of recriminations against gay men and lesbians. It could lead to a strengthening of the push for psychiatric treatment, mandatory injections of hormones with strong and dangerous effects, a resurgence of "scientific" experiments so beloved in the mid-twentieth century, such as lobotomies, electroshock treatment and cutting up the sexual organs of gay men and lesbians, as well as more criminal and legal limitations upon homosexuals not accepting the "cure", and courts mandating treatment based on criminal convictions or the loose civil commitment statutes of the time. One of the roots of transphobia in the gay community is the quite understandable panic among gay men and lesbians that attended this power struggle. This is not merely a historical artifact, as it is still occurring in places such as Iran, where forced sex reassignment surgery is one of the ways to escape hanging.

[Alyssa M.]

This is the heart of the problem, as I see it:

[Inclusion of "transgender" under the LGBT umbrella] conflicted with the goals of many of the coalition builders, increasingly professional political operatives, which was to capture public sympathy by appealing to an image of homosexuals as people "just like" the majority of U.S. voters, middle class people (or people with middle class yearnings), who held steady jobs, had long, loving relationships with partners of the same sex, and who wanted the same lives that the majority of U.S. voters wanted. As a result, some gays found themselves agreeing with straights, who see in transgenders an assault on normative reality...

A whole lot of queer people just don't want to be seen as queer. They'd rather be seen as straight but for one little tiny thing, be it that they were "born in the wrong body" or they love A rather than B. In other words, they buy into all the prejudices and assumptions about normative behavior that lead to prejudice against them in the first place. Whenever people do that, they start to deny other people's identity, not least because they tend to overcompensate by being more strict in their normativity in other ways to show what good, upstanding members of society they are. As this article demonstrates, it's a two-way street, and it happens all over queer circles -- trans people who don't want to be seen as gay, gay people who don't want to be seen as trans, middle-class suburban gay businessmen versus lower-class urban drag queens, crossdressers and transsexual women who don't want to be associated with one another, post-op versus non-op, young and old transitioners, etc. It all amounts to different ways people try to maintain some remnant of straight privilege.

But if you express your identity in a positive matter -- what you are rather than what you are not -- and try not to get caught up in deciding whether other people's identities are valid, then it stops mattering as much whether you fit into mainstream society.