What the Women's March Means For a Transgender Medievalist

"Cheseth youreself
which may be moost plesance"

The Wife of Bath's Tale

______________________________

______________________________

The Trans Medievalist's Armor

As a transgender woman in the public eye, I often do not comprehend what my presence means to those around me. This ignorance is inevitable, because I can't read minds, but also a self-defense mechanisms. I am inundated on a daily basis with stares, offensive comments, and sometimes physical assault that whether or not I want to know what others think of me I have the abusive answer forced on me. In what I am aware is classic conditioning, I have been trained by society to assume that most people around me don't like me and don't want me around. That is the ingrained lesson deep in my brain and muscles, everywhere where scar tissue exists and remembers. Yet I am rationale and work to protect myself, so I built an armor of indifference. Actively, I can take it off and receive compliments (often not knowing how to take them) but passively I have affixed to my mind and heart the statement, "you don't know what others think of you and you don't need to know." It's true, I don't and I don't. It is better to shut down the question than constantly be receiving the logical answer to the stares, shoving, and insults. I don't know what they think of me. They really don't know me. Their violent reaction to me is as ingrained as my defense against them. When I can be charitable, which is often enough, I tell myself that however badly they might have reacted against me, they will go home and have to ask themselves what they think about me. It is more important that they ask that question of themselves than me to ask that question of them. They need that question. I don't. So I try not to ask. The benefit of this armor is that it helps me in other areas of my life, like being a woman and a medievalist. The armor of unknowing helps me process sexist and objectifying comments from men and second readers of my articles. Don't get me wrong, the words still hurt but my trained reaction is to separate the comments from the person. I can hate what they said without hating the person. Hating people, even people that hate me, is too exhausting and soul-destroying. It is better then that I focus on the words. That is part of why I study literature and rhetoric. 

Arriving at the Women's March on Washington, one becomes aware of how many others feel very similar. These queer, trans, straight, cis, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, non-believer immigrant, citizen women of color know what it means to be the targets of hate in ways that overlap like a venn diagram, intersecting in parts and extending some extra more in others. Entering into this crowd of hundreds of thousands, I still had up my armor. But I could read the armor of others as well. Some wore their armor in the layers they wore. Some wore army or police uniforms. Others wore suits. My partner wore her collar marking her as a member of the clergy. I had asked her before we left, "what is my medievalist uniform?" She laughed when I asked and then laughed harder when I came down the stairs. "You did it!" she said, looking me over. "You are certainly wearing your medievalist uniform." For me, these were my teaching / conference clothes but she agreed that I represented my work well. Others at the march wore their armor in the clothes they didn't wear. Mothers nursed their children. Young women bore their breasts openly in the January air with little strips of black tape over the nipples. Some augmented their bodies with face and body paint. Venus's mirror, a common symbol of womanhood, was drawn around people's eyes. Nasty woman was written on arms and cheeks. Then again, buttons, t-shirts, and signs were everywhere. The march was an overload in rhetoric and language. Some signs were funny. Some were angry. Some said a lot, listing the many immediate issues that need to be addressed by the government on six-foot signs in tiny lettering. Others indicated there was too much to say, with one woman holding a sign saying just that, "there is just too much..." For our part, the family brought with our flags that we hang in the front room of our apartment: a transgender pride flag, a rainbow LGBT pride flag, and a Black Lives Matter flag. Throughout the day, as we wore the flags around us or extended the flags between us, folks would come by and say a few words to us or take a picture of us. We met others who had similar ideas. The biggest advantage of the flags was that they could be seen by those who were not at the march. They would be visible in media and social media pictures as well as video. Those describing the event would likely include mention of these recognizable symbols. In a crowd with so much to say, we wanted to keep our statements simple but important, and leave it to others to say all the rest.

What mattered most to us was to speak with our presence. Like the hundreds of thousands around us, we were asserting our voice and power in the most peaceful way we knew, by silently standing together in a crowd. Images of the march had trouble capturing and comprehending how many of us were present. Estimates of all U.S. cities suggest that around 3 million people, mostly women, walked in protest this day. Aziz Ansari commented on Saturday Night Live that evening how Trump and his campaign/administration must have recognized that they did something wrong to piss off an entire gender. 3 million marchers do not represent the entirety of women or even just one gender but the massiveness of our presence made a statement. It was a statement that no one of us marching or those who saw the march could control. What does it mean when so many women, feminists, allies, and Trump protesters collect together? What does the Women's March have to say? What do women want? The question had many answers - some certainly better than others - but overall the massiveness of the march asserted how important the question was regardless of the answer. The Women's March stated that we were a force to be reckoned with and reckoned we will be. Immediately the news and politicians began spinning, trying to control what the Women's March meant. But no one description does justice. The March was too big to be contained by fences, roads, police barricades or by hashtags, news bulletins, or governmental pandering. The Women's March cannot be contained not only because it is so big but because it is made up of so many parts. The population of the march cut across race, religion, sexuality, disability, political party, class, and gender. The Women's March asked a big question but did not speak just in one voice but in many voices each with their own language, experience, dialects, and subquestions. What the Women's March means is an important question to ask but is inextricable from the question, what does it mean that a transgender medievalist and her family marched?

Answering the question of what the March meant to me will be a task that will take a long time to ponder, but what it meant to others with whom we marched is surprisingly easier to articulate. As soon as we began walking onto the National Mall, stopping by the fountain in front of Congress so the children could rest, I began to be approached by people. One women walked over just to tell me, "you are so beautiful!" This caught me by surprise because covered in my winter gear, medieval uniform and mom-equipment (for our hungry, tired kids) I didn't think I looked at my most attractive. Functional, competent, matronly, yes. But not beautiful. This also caught me by surprise largely because of my defense mechanism that insists I don't wonder what others think of me. If I ask, "does she think I'm beautiful?" I am prone to also ask, "does he think I'm ugly?" Often it is easier just not to ask either. But when someone comes up to me and tells me what they think, it is a surprise. I don't want the armor to deflect it but I can fumble - and did - as I had to take down these defenses and try to catch the compliment. I tried to switch the befuddled look on my face into one of gratitude. It is easier to shift into thanking them for the kind words. Again, focusing on the rhetoric and language is easier than assuming I know what was the personal intention behind them. Yet as the Women's March continued and others kept coming up to me to share their thoughts and experiences, pieces of the armor began to fall off. More and more I was able to release myself from trying to understand the meanings of their words and just receive their presence. In turn, I did feel more vulnerable. Because not only were they being present with me but I became more present with them. My meaning met and joined with the meaning of others. What does it mean for a transgender medievalists to be present at the Women's March on Washington? How does that feel? To consider this question, one must think like a transgender medievalist and that means considering the Wife of Bath for a moment.

______________________________

______________________________

The Wife of Bath's Feminism

On twitter, Chaucer Doth Tweet announced that he would be at the Women's March, provoking the question whether the Wife of Bath would be there as well. Modern feminists have much to admire about the Wife of Bath's liberty, strength and strategy. Too often medievalists have to correct students when they call her a "proto-feminist" or a "modern woman" because they want to declare her an honorary woman of their age. This impulse comes from a place of love and a recognition that if the Wife of Bath were walking among us today, she would likely be marching with us as well. But what such claims can elide, what we can pass over too quickly in our declaration of her modernity, is how her fight for women is so very medieval. She fought for herself and became a model for women in the fourteenth century. Most women and feminist medievalists won't be able to miss how patriarchal and subordinating of women the Middle Ages were. Indeed, as the revelation of "FemFog" last year made clear, the patriarchy and the subordination of women continues in the study of the Middle Ages as well. We share experiences and battles for sexual liberation with the Wife. Our oppression is linked over centuries to her oppression. The one came from the other. Yet the distinction of the Wife of Bath as a medieval woman (or medieval feminist, if you will) is as important as other intersectional identities. A woman of color (WoC) is affected not only by being a woman but being of color. Often it is hard to distinguish which element is at play more in any given act of prejudice, but reading the narratives of women of color demonstrates differences as well as similarities exist with WoC and white women. Likewise, 9/10s of the experience of being a transgender woman may overlap with cisgender women but the 1/10 that is specifically transgender and the way that 1/10 colors the rest is critical. In this way, the Wife of Bath being a medieval woman matters. Her medieval world and language affects how she understands and expresses her acts of resistance. Being a medieval woman affects how she would understand us, transgender women, and the Women's March. 

I have read the arguments that identify the Wife of Bath as being like a transgender woman but feel that a critical trans reading of her Prologue and Tale points us elsewhere. True, she is a strong woman and transgender women are strong. This may be understood as masculinity in the same way that feminists in the early 20th century were called "shemales" by way of an insult; as if being transgender or intersex was an insult. But I do not think a woman needs to be transgender or intersexual to be strong, even in the Middle Ages. I don't discourage anyone who wishes to read the Wife of Bath as sort of trans. I welcome her into the trans sisterhood. I would gladly march beside her because many of our struggles are the same. This reading of the language and rhetoric others (including the narrator) use to describe her is not wrong but does not interest me as much as other things that the Wife of Bath says her self. My interest in the Wife of Bath is in her Tale. The Tale as a whole offers excellent analogies by which we can better understand the Wife's medieval moment and our own. The premise of the Tale describes a maiden who is raped by a man of the governing class. Many of us in the march have been raped, abused, or traumatized by the current governing class of men in the United States. In response to the transgression, a court of women collect in order to assert their power and offer judgement on the man. While the march was not able to enact the same force of law, matriarchs and women present at the march certainly passed down judgements on a man of many transgressions. The take away of the women's court was the command that the rapist patriarch (a stand in for the patriarchy) must come to understand on question: what do women want? Any man or watcher of the Women's March that does not turn away considering the same issue, what women want, have not read closely. The question is apparent but the answers are manifold. The knight is told in turn that women want: "richesse" (riches), "honour" (honor), "joylenesse" (fun), "lust abedde" (sex), "rich array" (clothing), "oftetyme to be wydwe and wedde" (often to be widowed and wedded), and "flaterye" (flattery). The signs and speeches of the Women's March made similar demands for the funding of women's healthcare, dignity, roles in entertainment, sexual freedom, freedom of expression, freedom to marry and divorce, and to be considered a constituency that the government cannot neglect.

All of these demands are true in the Middle Ages as today but the riddle of the Tale is not complete until the answer is given by the figure I most identify as trans in the Wife of Bath's texts: the shapeshifting "elf-queene" (elf-queen) and "fayerye" (fairy) who the patriarch must marry and the court must accept. The knight encounters the woman as she is dancing in the privacy of her fellow fairies, as a man might see a trans woman in a club surrounded by her queer and straight allies. The man desires her and pursues her but when he gets her alone, outside of the fairy/club atmosphere and dress, she is not what he thought she was. The knight in the Tale sees her as "a fouler wight" (a foul creature) that is often identified as an old woman but connect more broadly to the "loathly woman" trope in medieval storytelling. The commentary on age and youth is still useful because it draws attention to how women's beauty is often associated with their ability to sexually reproduce, ergo a young or cisgender woman is more beautiful than an old or transgender women who the man cannot impregnate. Yet beyond the question of age, the main conclusion is that this woman is not the standard of beauty and womanhood the patriarchy desires. The modern anti-transgender slur for this could be a "trap." Some use this term to describe beautiful (trans) women who trick (i.e. trap) men into sex by passing as cisgender women. Of course, in most likelihood transgender women or this elf-queen were not trying to trick anyone but were just having fun with their friends when the man broke into the queer space of his own choice. The shameful descriptions of her appearance reflect the reactive patriarchy that must dismiss the trans person they once desired for fear it might comment on their own desires. And indeed, the trans figure holds the answer to the patriarch's problem with women - as trans folk might who have been forced by society and body to see the world on either side of the gender divides. The answer she gives is that which a medieval feminist or a medieval trans feminist might give: "Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee" (women desire to have liberty).

Yet the Wife of Bath's elf queen is not done with the patriarchy, because she is not only a woman but a trans woman. It is not enough that trans persons are used to promote feminism for all women, they must be allowed to speak to the specific needs of trans women. After giving the knight the answer, the elf-queen demands he marry her. If one is to work with transgender people, one must be prepared to stick by them in solidarity and not abandon them after they cease being useful. This marriage also serves to introduce a sub-problem and question for the knight. The trans wife asks the patriarch:  "Chese now," quod she, "oon of thise thynges tweye: To han me foul and old til that I deye, And be to yow a trewe, humble wyf, And nevere yow displese in al my lyf, Or elles ye wol han me yong and fair, And take youre aventure of the repair That shal be to youre hous by cause of me, Or in som oother place, may wel be" ("Choose now," she said, "one of these two things: To have me ugly and old until I die, And be to you a true, humble wife, And never displease you in all my life, Or else you will have me young and fair, And take your chances of the crowd That shall be at your house because of me, Or in some other place, as it may well be"). Within the Tale, the trans figure asks him to choose whether she will be ugly but subordinate or beautiful but insubordinate. Outside of the Tale, we might understand the choice as a trans person saying, "I can be openly transgender but can keep silent on the need for liberation or I can pass as a cisgender woman but then will need to fight for liberation." Such a question for the knight is supposed to be a riddle for the reader, "what would you chose?" By way of making a point, the Wife of Bath has the patriarch make the best decision. He says, "Cheseth youreself which may be moost plesance" (chose yourself what you most want). This is a lesson for the medieval patriarch as well as the modern feminist. If you want trans persons to fight for your liberty and the liberty of all women, you need to let trans people be trans people. In the end, it is best for all. The knight magically gets a woman who is beautiful and free. Feminism gets trans women who fight for women and the trans community. The Wife of Bath's feminism is not just transhistorical, it is intersectional.

______________________________

______________________________

Intersections with the Past

Standing in the National Mall, straining to hear the speakers in front of the Washington Monument, I was approached by a youth. They came up to compliment my flag and affirm their gratitude that other transgender persons were present at the March. They were done up in their protest apparel and buttons. What struck me most about them was how young they looked. In their eagerness for community, I saw how many of our trans youths are hungry to see themselves in the world. Too often, the world fails to present an image (Imago Mundi), a history, or a future that includes transgender. They didn't stick around for long. They were nervous and flew off to be with their friends. I don't think they would have braved those nerves for anyone and that they did mattered to me. Their presence here mattered to me. Their hunger mattered to me. For that moment, I was at the Women's March for them. Later, the exchange repeated itself as another community member in a transgender flag came over to introduce themselves. They were older and a little braver. I introduced them to my family. They seemed particularly happy to see that we brought our kids. Beyond this, I cannot say what our meeting meant to them but they did ask to commemorate it with a picture. I got one too. Funny enough, we had to same rose-gold pink camera phone. These words and pictures will stay with me for some time. Their meaning will grow as new words and associations build on them. Being present for one another allowed for dialogs to be generated and continued between us and between those witnessing our community-making. Because Marches are where many different lines of flight cross, tangle, and rub up against each other so that at a common intersection our struggles and lives mix. Our meanings, lives, and liberations are no longer our own. They join the collective discourse going on around us. Our voices joined the invited speakers in Washington DC and around the country. Some I heard at the March and others I heard through videos later as their trajectories criss-crossed online.

One of the speakers we were present for at the Women's March in Washington DC was Janet Mock, a transgender woman of color, whose speech insisted that feminist liberation must be intersectional. "It will find us struggling together and struggling with one another," Mock admits in her remarks. "Just because we are oppressed does not mean that we ourselves do not fall victim to the same unconscious policing, shaming, and erasing. We must return to one another." This idea of return sticks with me as a trans activist and a medievalist. So much of being transgender is fighting for the ability to put our lives back together after gender divisions and assignments have pulled us apart from our communities, stories, and embodiments. Trans activism then becomes the way in which we collectively fight to put our shared lives back together, bringing one another back from the isolating margins and into life giving community discourse. Medieval studies too is the work of going into the archives and bringing dead stories to life or bringing dead elements of those stories out from historical silence. In each of these works, we may individually become the enforcers of divides as we struggle to put things together. This is why it is important that we interrupt each other. A youth stepping into a conversation with my partner brings me out of my shell and reminds me of the stakes of being present. A photograph with a young adult returns me from family time to consider how my family may serve to grow the community and carry on discourse. Janet Mock standing on the National Mall declaring the place of trans women of color in the Women's March calls us all to step out of our individual feminisms and stand together, march together, and speak together. Silences can exist between those we are standing next to as they can in historical archives. The Wife of Bath may need to interrupt a conversation as much as my wife may need to interrupt me to point out someone trying to talk to us. We don't do as much or as well alone. Together we are able to continually call one another to return to the work and return to the work of co-liberation.

What the Women's March sent me home with was a renewed purpose to keep on fighting and to continue to be present. For me, this also meant connecting with the other marches once I left DC. In the Women's March in Maine, Jacie Leopold spoke on inclusion while an American Sign Language translator interpreted her words for the audience. "I was asked to represent the transgender community," she said as she told her story of becoming a victim of assault and overcoming this victimization. "I came to a place where I could flourish, do all the things in life a person should do without the having the word transgender define who I am and limit my opportunities." It is important for Leopold that others not tell her what her life means. Others cannot tell her what the March means to her. Yet the trans woman's presence can raise the question and get people talking. "You can create the dialog that gets people discussing, learning, and growing," she told the crowd. By asking the question of what transgender means, its meaning can grow. Yet this growth and dialog must keep moving if it is to stay alive. Like the movement of the March, if we are to liberate ourselves and reclaim the meaning of our lives, we need to keep opening ourselves up to others. Leopold then turned from her story to the stories of other transgender women, naming how transgender women of color face the greatest number of assaults and murders. She confessed how her experience brought her closer to understanding of mutual struggles with them without fully comprehending their struggles. In the wake of these struggles, male assaulters are often let off with minimal sentencing. This is in part allowed because the law sees these transgender women as men, reclassifying the assaults as men assaulting men. The logic of these excuses demonstrates how the patriarchy not only hurts transgender persons, women, but also men. Man on man violence is more acceptable so it is used to excuse violence against trans women. In this system, everyone is victims. The law itself demonstrates how it is victim to sexism patriarchal biases that delegitimize the law as law. By opening up what womanhood means, we give life to one another, including transgender women. By redefining what violence is, we give protection to one another, including men. By entering into dialog with others, we create roads where we might meet each other at the intersections of gender, race, suffering, life, and liberation.

For a transgender medievalist, this intersectionality must also apply to history and difference in historical periods. The Middle Ages are transgender. The Middle Ages marched. The elf-queen marched on Camelot. The Wife of Bath marched on Canterbury. Eleanor Rykener marched on Cheapeside. Saint Joan of Arc marched on Orleans. Narcissus marched on the woodlands. Hermaphrodites and Amazons marched on islands. Saint Marinos marched on the monastery. The trans Middle Ages marched and so trans medievalists marched. We marched because we know our history and carry on our history into the streets. We carry on their lives. We carry on their resistance. We carry on their liberation. We carry on the good. And unfortunately we too often carry on the bad. We march to move forward. We march to bring those along behind us. At the intersection of the past and the future, we find ourselves marching. In many ways, I am less certain of the future than I am of the past. That is the gift of being a medievalist. I know about manuscripts and relics, memories and fragments. I know about persisting through time. I know about change over time, how things transform by being different in some ways and the same in others. The trans-exclusive patriarchy in the fourteenth century experienced by the Wife of Bath is not the same as the patriarchy we know today but ours is a cultural descendent. In the face of today's patriarchy we can see the whole genealogy: in the rhetoric of a man who "caughte hire by the queynte" (grabbed her by the pussy, the Miller's Tale); in the rhetoric of a man who calls someone a "hogges toord" (nasty, the Pardoner's Tale), or in the man who rapes women and then goes to women looking for their support (the Wife of Bath's Tale). Our struggles are not only our own and that is why we march. That is why we may ourselves present and open ourselves to interruption, to compliments, to debate, and to liberation. Because the patriarchy works to make us feel alone, and small, and momentary. Because the patriarchy works to cut us off from each other and our past. Because after each failure, we turn and return to one another.

______________________________

______________________________

For more about transgender intersections

in the Middle Ages

______________________________

______________________________

Environments of Hate: The Anti-Transgender Politics of Bathrooms

“The Anti-Trans Bathroom Nightmare 
Has Its Roots in Racial Segregation"

Gillian Frank

_________________________

_________________________

Transgender Bathroom Laws

On November 3rd, 2015, Houston Texas voted over the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) that would protect transgender persons' rights to use public bathrooms that coordinate to their gender identities. It has been variously described by conservative news outlets as, "the LGBT 'Equal Rights' Ordinance" (TexasValues). Such political editorializing stresses the LGBT aspect of the bill and putting 'equal rights' in quotations begs the question that anti-transgender politicians are expressing: among socially progressive politics, transgender activism is a step too far. Across Texas, anti-trans politics reframed the protection of transgender persons by redefining their identities. Such political punditry claimed that trans women in the women's bathroom is nothing other than "men in the women's bathroom." Describing transgender protections as allowing "men who wear women’s clothes — and sexual predators — to use public women’s bathrooms," Erin Owens lauds those who voted down the ordinance (DailyCaller). As in the picture shown above, the groups pictured trans women as men glaring at women and little girls, suggesting the threat of rape. The outright claims or moves to paint trans persons as rapists and pedophiles follows a long tradition in white male supremacy of picturing threats to the patriarchy as sexual aggressors and the patriarchs as the saviors of vulnerable women. 

"Blacks, Jews, and even gays do not require or even seek separate restrooms or other different treatment; they ask simply to be treated like everyone else,” said Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson. “But transgender people demand a special accommodation, not available to others, because of how they feel." Following a tactic often employed against disability justice activism (with whom they are often conflated), anti-transgender parties claim that transgender rights are too expensive and ask too much. This marks a continued attempt to isolate transgender politics and trans persons from their communities of support and alliance. This trajectory is furthered by claims to physically separate trans people away from the general population because they make others feel uncomfortable. Calling for a special transgender bathroom, Carson's critique that trans people seeking to use the bathroom according to their gender identity is a demand for special treatment inverts the very grounds on which the criticism stands. "How about we create a transgender bathroom?" asks Carson. The solution Carson suggests is the addition of a new place for trans people, while the HERO bill works with existing structures to make them more accessible. Again, the patriarchal move becomes to enact aggression and then blame the victims of the violence.

These comments ignore how closely anti-trans bathroom politics replay old white supremacy narratives targeting racial integration. In an excellent article for Slate.com, Gillian Frank writes, "the conservative idea that civil rights protections sexually endanger women and children in public bathrooms is not new. In fact, conservative sexual thought has been in the toilet since the 1940s. During the World War II era, conservatives began employing the idea that social equality for African-Americans would lead to sexual danger for white women in bathrooms. In the decades since, conservatives used this trope to negate the civil rights claims of women and sexual minorities. Placing Houston’s rejection of HERO within the history of discrimination against racial minorities, sexual minorities, and women reveals a broader pattern: When previously marginalized groups demanded access to public accommodations, conservatives responded with toilet talk to stall these groups’ aspirations for social equality." This is the narrative given despite a continual lack of evidence. As the National Center for Transgender Equality reports, to record there has not been one confirmed case of “a transgender person harassing a non-transgender person in a public restroom.” Such narratives seem to invert the flow of aggression as a way of excusing the patriarchy's violence after the fact by painting their victims as aggressors. Evidence of cisgender attacks (especially by men against trans women) are plentiful. Just in my own backyard, DC and Baltimore, where a trans women was beaten in a McDonald's ladies room (Salon.com) and another sexually assaulted in a Dupont Circle bathroom (NBC). Indeed, the premise that women are weak and need men to protect them from trans women (qua "other men") is a narrative that reinforces female subjugation to a male supremacy that gets to play both abuser and savior, oppressor and liberator.

Without evidence and pragmatism on their side, the patriarchy falls back on its narrative of female dependence and need for subjugation to men. “It is not fair for them to make everybody else uncomfortable,” Carson said after suggesting that there be a separate bathroom for trans people, away from the general public. “It’s one of the things that I don’t particularly like about the movement." Rather than taking the position of the trans women at risk in the men's room, Carson speaks for cisgender women, claiming that trans women are inconsiderate of the discomfort they cause the traditionally sexist environment they are reforming, "how typical women might feel about a person with a penis sharing their restroom.” The comfort defense is one that is particularly insideous of what I call, "polite hate." "Uncomfortable" has long been a word I've witnessed people use as a way to enact "polite transphobia," "polite homophobia," or "polite racism." Once you unpack what that means, it is a way of excluding others, shaming, and excusing oppression. It is an attempt to turn privilege into a right, the oppressor into a victim, yet if one takes it seriously it severely underestimates the discomforted person. It assumes that they have no intelligence, no stamina, no empathy with which to overcome their own ignorance and hatred. Polite racism instills in its proponents a kind of passivity and deniability. Male supremacy comes to function by using people as tools to create environments of hate then convincing those who built it that they are trapped. It breeds dependency, not so much to particular patriarchs, but to an ideology of weakness and dependency on the patriarch, whoever he is, who has the superior power to summon the monsters of difference and slay them. In the "15/"16 presidential climate, various Republican candidates make clear that they will become the country's paterfamilias by slaying the current threat to the patriarchy: transgender. 

_________________________

_________________________

 Environments of Hate

The most recent debates in Houston are hardly the first or most dreadful time that transgender bathroom legislation that has been moved on by hate groups. While anti-trans politicians paint themselves as victims, the environment of hate that they espouse is the tradition rather than the innovation. The tide of legislative attacks on trans persons around bathrooms and locker-rooms have been big conversations this year. Back in April 2015, Florida lawmakers were pushing through a bill that would punish any trans person using the bathroom corresponding with their gender identity with a fines of up to thousands of dollars or up to a year in prison - all for peeing in "the wrong toilet." Many activists, including myself, traveled to Florida to oppose the law through public acts of civil disobedience - simply by using the bathroom. Twitter photos in both bathrooms (#occupottty & #wejustneedtopee) and a few demonstrations with toilets put outside of either men or women's restrooms were publicized as "shit-ins" to draw attention to the extraordinary level of invasive legislative power the government was trying to exercise. Unlike in Houston, the protection of trans bathroom rights were upheld. Beyond the laws themselves, however, which despite the posturing are very difficult to enforce, the real danger is the rhetoric and environment of hate the anti-trans politics create.

There is a malicious irony to the sentiment that transitions and accommodations for transgender youths are too dangerous and uncomfortable to pursue: this assumes that the sexist cis-gender structures that currently exist are not already dangerous and uncomfortable. Or rather it excuses the violence and alienation as only affecting the trans students, a population it passively, if not actively, quietly, if not vocally, politely, if not overtly, wishes to eliminate, humiliate, and subjugate. Women, disability, transgender, are all targets where society polices our bodies and even takes away our control and access to our bodies. This is the essence of hate. If the heart of gluttony is the statement, "I have the overruling right to consume you" and the heart of greed, "I have the overruling right to own you," then what we see here is nothing better than wrath, "I have the overruling right to act against your body." We can hide behind fear and phobias but these are just the rationalization of ingrained, systematic traditions of rage against difference and otherness.  In the end, the wrathful (however polite) rhetoric is probably more damaging than the bathroom laws themselves. It is a toxic discourse that turns the world into an unlivable environment for trans persons. I fear most how this poison gets internalized by trans youths, causing them to despair; to give up fighting for their lives. We need to denaturalize hate, call this the war that it is. We don't always fight because we think we can win, we fight because we can't not fight. In the words of Lorde, "It feels better biting down"

As I sat in the nurses office of my Junior High-School, the hallways were quiet except for the distant sound of children panting and shouting in gym class. I tried to mumble a "thank you" (which came out more like "'ank 'ou") when the nurse handed me a new icepack to press against my swollen black and blue cheek. Across the hall, a fellow student was in the Vice Principles Office recounting what had happened. Although I was not told the exact words the boy used, I was given to know that the story matched exactly with my version of events. About twenty minutes earlier, I was in the locker room changing for gym. I was a feminine, nerdy, slender child known for hanging out with a strange crowd of girls and a few boys (half of whom would come out as queer or trans years later). Although it was years before I would publicly transition, in this pre- and early puberty my body enjoyed a kind of androgyny that made the physical differences between myself and other girls minimal - except for those who had begun to change more quickly and fuller than most. Because I was assigned male at birth and channelled through the men's track in school, I had to go through the frustrating and isolating exercise of daily being separated from the girls and made to share a locker room only with boys. Consequently, I was a target for many of the boys to perform childhood shows of male dominance without my friends to surround me. 

In this way, the gender dysphoria in the environment, which we might also call sexism, or perhaps even more accurately, male supremacy, set up this boy and myself to play out a narrative that is too common for trans youths. Gym class offered some respite from a raw, emerging, yet competitive male culture in the form of mixed activities. Even when the boys and girls were separated into two groups - the boys to learn wrestling (as a way of dominating other bodies) and the girls to learn self-defense (as a way of avoiding the domination of boys) - some thoughtful group of parents caused the creation of a third gender neutral group who could practice dance aerobics. Yet each class would be framed by the breaking into the highly gendered spaces where I would have to walk the gambit of young boys vying to gain ascendancy in a culture of male power. As had been the case in other circumstances, the pre-transitioned trans girl became the easy low-risk target for this boy to prove his masculine superiority and work his way up the ranks. These assertions of power came in various ways but mostly through the twice daily (at the start and end of class) shoving me aside and slamming my locker closed. He would take his little bow, showing that he could assault me without consequence - besides reports which I would give to the gym instructor who was neither present in the locker-room nor particularly interested in policing; after all, "boys will be boys."

_________________________

"Who is watching you pee? Forcing #transgender women to use mens rooms is systematic abuse #occupotty #wejustneedtopee"

_________________________

Punched in the Face by the Patriarchy

On this day, however, I decided that if the environment and systems of authority were not going to protect me by merely speaking back to power, I would offer physical resistance to the harassment. I was mostly changed (I tried to get in and out of the locker-room quickly) and my locker door was open. Then I heard the laughter from behind me that signaled that I was about to be shoved. Waiting for it, I felt him press his shoulder against me but instead of following the force of his thrust, I pivoted instead so I would be facing him. Grabbing him by the scruff of his neck (the closest target beside his shoulder and head) I held him at arms length away from my locker and, importantly as I began to consider the choice I had made, away from my body. "Stop," I commanded in rough monosyllabic clarity, like I would to our pet dogs when we found them scratching the couch or about to piss on the carpet. He didn't respond except for a kind of growl and big bulging eyes that read both surprise and fury. He bared his teeth at me and grabbed my arm. Without looking away from my aggressor, momentarily checked, I could notice that no help or escape would be offered for me as his friends surrounded us. Ears pounding with blood, reading the situation, I acknowledged that I knew what would come from whenever I let him go - which I eventually would. 

Closing my eyes slightly, I released him, dropped my arms to my side and stood firm waiting for what came next. Lightning raced through my jaw as bone hit bone, cushioned only slightly by the padding that a boy's knuckles and my cheek afforded. Tasting iron as my mouth filled with blood I don't remember much until I found myself sitting in the nurse's office with an icepack on my face waiting for my mother to pick me up and take me to the dentist. As it turned out, he had, in fact, broken one of my teeth. After my mother showed up, the boy came out of the office. He came over to me and apologized. I believe he faced temporary suspension. I did not hear much more about it. I didn't ask. Even now, I don't feel much personal contempt towards the boy who caused me to have my third in a line of bully-inflicted broken bones. He was a boy, not even very big for his age, looking to prove himself in a culture that maintained a quiet, polite form of male supremacy. This was a community mixed between working class industrial workers and those who have made their way, proudly, into middle management. The abuse of girls, women, queers, crips, and trannies would be allowed to happen - but there would be a formal apology afterwards and the individual actor would take the fall. I was a trans girl, a feminine target for abuse and subjugation, stranded alone in an epicenter of young, rough, competitive manhood. 

Neither of us created this system or its rules. He wanted power among his male community and I was his way to get it. I had my feminine community and power taken from me, leaving me with the choices of quiet submission or painful resistance. We made our choices as they were given to us. These are the consequences and dangers of forcing trans girls to stay in gender segregated bathrooms and locker-rooms with boys - either by not offering alternatives or else by ignoring the demands for systematic changes and protections. These are also the consequences of long-held systems of gender that define manhood by power and power through the subjugation of the feminine. This is what comes of cleaning up, making politically correct, and offering sacrificial candidates to male supremacy and violence so the inheritance of male privilege will go only to those who will enact its violences or pay the consequences - risking becoming one of those the ascendent abuse. Here we see the irony of claiming that gender transition or trans accommodations for the youth are dangerous: this assumes that the cis-gender segregation of the sexes (based on centuries of male supremacy and abuses) is safer. By refusing these changes, the system clearly states that it would rather put trans youths at risk of assault than make their oppressors uncomfortable. In the end, it was the plans of male supremacy that punched me in the face and gave me this partially prosthetic tooth - more than it was the conscious intents of a hormone raging tween looking for male approval.

A brief note on ethics: In this post, I work hard to reframe the moral debate towards corporate violences and away from personal faults - be they the hateful words of a Republican candidate for the presidency or the fist of a bully. This is an important move in social constructionist theory because it places the focus where bipolitics can be reformed to do the most good. The punishment of individuals rarely solves many problems, either for the victims, society, or the punished. Often, systems of hate and oppression want the conversation to focus on the indiscretions of its agents who screw up and get themselves caught. Indeed, the system may even want to add to the person's punishment as a way to sooth the outrage for justice and distracting it away from the larger violences. Let the individual take the fall to protect the patriarchal super-structures. So long as we are debating whether the abuser took extraordinary liberties or whether the victim somehow "asked for" the abuse, the wider systems of violence that created the environments of hate can continue to chug along unnoticed. I like to say (in a half-truth) that for this kind of ethical debate, it is not about intent or feelings. Hate, racism, sexism, are not feelings but actions and systems of power. You can have the best intentions and do the most violent acts. Nonetheless, as I finish writing this articles, I am still angry, and sad, and hurt. Looking back, it's not only a personal pain I feel but almost as though I am looking at someone else, because I am an adult weathered in taking abuse and this child doesn't know the things I know and isn't prepared to handle them like I am. This child could be any number of children today. And the stories only get worse. The half-truth is, ethics are not about personal feelings but systems of abuse. The other half of the truth is, ethics are all about the vulnerable lives made to feel powerless, alone, and unlovable. Ethics has to do both. It has too be exactly big enough to see the monolithic forest that is male supremacy and exactly small enough to see the twelve year old lost in it.

_________________________

"Governments bully too. Transgender persons need protection from transphobic bathoom laws #occupotty #wejustneedtopee"

_________________________

_________________________

"#transgender women like me could spend half a year in prison for using this Florida women's bathroom #ijustneedtopee"

_________________________