Recently in Trans Activism Category

Note: In our recent Feministing retreat, we decided that some back and forth dialogue between editors would be a cool thing, so every once in a while you may see a post title with "re:" in it - that's how you'll know it's us doing some good old fashioned feminist debating.

Miriam, I'm so happy that you posted this amazing video of An Open Letter to Alix Olson. I thought it was just incredible and I really appreciated your take on MichFest.

I have to say, though, that it really bothers me when MichFest is framed as a feminist "controversy" rather than straight up discrimination. This isn't a controversy - it's deliberate exclusion and it's shameful.

I also find the "Oh, but we're not doing genital checks"(!) just as offensive as a stated and enforced womyn-born-womyn policy. There doesn't have to be a written policy on the website for the discrimination to still be there. If MichFest wants to do the right thing, they'll be proactive and have a statement denouncing their womyn-born-womyn policy and stop hiding behind their silence on the issue.

I personally think the festival should be open to people who identify as women (or womyn), and if there are issues with safety or harrassment (which seems to be a fear) then they should be dealt with directly, not via discriminatory policies.

I totally agree, though I wanted to just point one thing out. I find the "safety" issue really uncompelling - as did Carasande in comments. Not only because it's not just penises* that rape women, but also because it uses rhetoric of the Right. As thebeatles11 noted on the Community blog, the latest anti-trans campaign (tellingly called "Not in My Shower") cites the fear that women will be assaulted as the reasoning behind their discrimination. Feminists shouldn't resort to the language (or actions!) of fear and discrimination - we're better than that!

You mentioned Julia Serano--who I think is probably the most brilliant feminist writing today--and I think that no one talks about trans woman exclusion better than she does. So I thought it fitting to end my post (though hopefully not the discussion!) with her words:

*Because the fear here does seem to be about penises, rather than "men."

This was pretty appropriate since Jessica just posted my favorite Alix Olson piece on Saturday. I found this open letter (via video) to Alix Olson at Questioning Transphobia.

It's also appropriate because this week marks the beginning of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (aka Michfest). It's a festival that has been going on for 33 years, an intentional community that is built out of nothing in Michigan and creates a space for womyn to come together and celebrate music.

I've never been, but the festival has also caused a lot of controversy around it's gender policy. Specifically, trans women feel they are being kept from attending the festival via the "womyn born womyn" policy. There was an incident in the past where a trans woman was removed from the festival when it was discovered (in the communal shower area) that her genitalia did not match the festival goers idea of female genitalia.

In response, Camp Trans was founded, a concurrent festival and protest of Michfest. It happens right across the road and many trans people and allies attend that festival instead. Julia Serrano has written extensively about this exclusion (including in the piece I linked last week) as have other feminists and activists.

Alix Olson, along with many other female artists and musicians perform at Michfest every year, which I assume is the reason she is the audience for this open letter. I actually had the opportunity to meet her at a performance she gave at American University last year, and I asked her about the Michfest controversy. Her response was that of all the conversations she had heard over the years about trans exclusion at the festival, the most productive or important ones had actually happened AT Michigan.

That might be a cop-out, and I know from talking to friends who have gone to the festival that it's complicated since many of them really appreciate the space and community it creates. I personally think the festival should be open to people who identify as women (or womyn), and if there are issues with safety or harrassment (which seems to be a fear) then they should be dealt with directly, not via discriminatory policies.

Today is the Trans Day of Action for Social and Economic Justice, which is organized by the TransJustice working group of the amazing Audre Lorde Project. So if you're in the New York area, come out and march for trans justice.

Jack at Feministe has more.

To the folks at Morning Joe: Shame on you. What pains me is that I generally really like Mika Brzezinski, and consider her a voice of reason in an otherwise frat-boy-gross show. But this is just horrifying.

UPDATE: There's an email form on Morning Joe's website that you can use to complain, or you can check out the general MSNBC contact info.

Check out Alissa Quart's, a friend of Feministing and brilliant journalist, fascinating story on transgender students at our nation's colleges in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. It feels like Christmas in March--a mainstream newspaper acknowledges trans issues and they get a smart journalist with a history of interest in these and other complex issues to do it (in 5,000 words!). Pass the eggnog.

Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, spoken word performer, trans activist, and biologist.

Back in August 2007, I posted a critique of a NY Times article regarding what has come to be known in the transgender community as the “Bailey controversy.� Briefly, in 2003, psychologist J. Michael Bailey published a book, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender Bending and Transsexualism, that forwarded three of the most commonly repeated sexualizing stereotypes of trans women: that we are either gay men who transition to female in order to attract straight men, fetishists who transition in order to fulfill some kind of bizarre sex fantasy, and/or that we are “especially well suited to prostitution.� The book was not only extremely trans-misogynistic, but it was marketed to a largely trans-ignorant lay audience as “science.� A broad consensus of trans activists, allies and advocates found the book to be unapologetically pathologizing, sensationalizing, stigmatizing, and a distortion of both trans women’s experiences and the scientific literature. The resulting backlash against the book was fierce and (as with any backlash) had its ugly moments. But it was also empowering in many ways as it represented the first time that the transgender community en masse stood up and forcibly challenged a theory forwarded by members of the psychological/gatekeeper establishment who hold institutional power over us.

The NY Times article, however, didn’t concern itself with the psychiatric sexualization of trans women. Instead, it portrayed Bailey as a “scientist under siege� who was unfairly attacked by transsexual activists who tried to “ruin� him. This flip-flop of a premise—depicting Bailey as though he was the “minority� who was oppressed at the hands of “powerful transsexual women�—came directly from an article written by Alice Dreger which is slated to be published in the sexology journal Archives of Sexual Behavior (ASB) later this year. ASB is also including 23 “peer commentaries� on her article from people on both sides of the debate. A list of the accepted commentaries has recently been released (the one that especially caught my eye was the sure-to-be-patronizing contribution from sexologist Richard Green entitled “Lighten Up, Ladies�).

Bambi Weavil is founder and CEO of Out Impact, Inc and publisher of its online magazine Out Impact. Based in Wilmington, North Carolina, Bambi spends her days and her nights working to raise money for LGBTQ issues...while also squeezing time to write about pro wrestling and her guilty pleasure, "American Idol."

Here's Bambi...

And so should you.

Dude, Sherri Shepherd just pisses me off.

Today marks the 9th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. Quench Zine (which is a fantastic blog, btw) has a great post up about the day, anti-trans violence and prejudice, as well as a call for more discourse. Check it out.

Contributed by Julia Serano

Tomorrow, Tuesday, November 20th will be the 9th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, which memorializes those who are killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. Trans people are often targeted for violence because their gender presentation, appearance and/or anatomy falls outside the norms of what is considered acceptable for a woman or man. A large percentage of trans people who are killed are prostitutes, and their murders often go unreported or underreported due to the public presumption that those engaged in sex work are not deserving of attention or somehow had it coming to them.

Some trans people are killed as the result of being denied medical services specifically because of their trans status, for example, Tyra Hunter, a transsexual woman who died in 1995 after being in a car accident. EMTs who arrived on the scene stopped providing her with medical care—and instead laughed and made slurs at her—upon discovering that she had male genitals.

Much of the violence that is directed at trans people is predicated on the myth of deception. For example, straight men who become attracted to trans women sometimes erupt into homophobic/transphobic rage and violence upon discovering that the woman in question was born male. Perhaps the most well known of such cases is that of Gwen Araujo, who was bludgeoned to death by a four men, two of whom she had been sexually intimate with. Despite the fact that the men plotted her murder a week in advance, defense lawyers insisted that the murder was merely manslaughter because the defendants were victims of Gwen’s “sexual deceit.�

In the spirit of “deception,� Fox as been airing the British reality series "There's Something About Miriam" all this past weekend (and one of these airings actually falls on Transgender Day of Remembrance). For those who unfamiliar with the show, it follows a group of bachelors who try to court a young attractive woman. The catch is that in the very last episode, she comes out to them as transsexual. The original 2004 UK broadcast of the show was delayed for several months because the bachelors threatened to sue the show’s producers, alleging that they had been victims of defamation, personal injury, and conspiracy to commit “sexual assault�—this last charge apparently stems from the fact that several of them had kissed and hugged Miriam. The affair was eventually settled out of court, with each man coming away with a reported $100,000.

Few attempts to blame the victim are more blatant than when trans people are accused of “sexual deceit� or “sexual assault� simply because other people have chosen to express their attraction toward us. In reality, it is they who are guilty of cissexual/cisgender assumption (when one presumes that every person they meet is nontrans by default). Trans people simply exist, we are everywhere, and the rest of the world has to start recognizing and accepting that. Programs like "There's Something About Miriam" not only reinforce the stereotype that trans people’s birth sex is “real� and our identified/lived sex is “fake,� but they perpetuate the myth of deception and thus enable violence against us.

Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, spoken word performer, trans activist, biologist, and author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity.

Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, spoken word performer, trans activist, and biologist.

This Tuesday, The New York Times ran an article about the continuing controversy surrounding psychologist J. Michael Bailey’s 2003 book The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism. The premise of the book is that *all* transsexual women transition for purely sexual reasons - either to attract straight men or because they are sexually aroused by the idea of being or becoming female. This sexualizing of trans women’s motives is of course nothing new. In the media, trans women are regularly depicted as either sex workers, sexual deceivers who prey on unsuspecting straight men, or as fetishists who get off on the idea of wearing women’s clothing. The media’s (as well as Bailey’s) assumption that MTF (but not FTM) transsexuals transition in order to fulfill some kind of sexual fantasy not only dismisses trans women’s deeply experienced female gender identities, but also insinuates that women as a whole have no worth beyond their ability to be sexualized. (For those interested, I discuss this more in depth in my own book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity).

Much of the transgender community’s initial outrage over Bailey’s book centered on the fact that it was presented to the public as a work of science. It was published by Joseph Henry Press, an imprint of National Academies Press, whose goal is “publishing well-crafted, authoritative books on science, technology, and health for the science-interested general public.� But if one looks beyond the back cover copy, one finds little science at all. Bailey simply rehashes a scientifically flawed theory that was put forward by fellow sexologist Ray Blanchard nearly a decade ago. Rather than providing data to support Blanchard’s theory, Bailey instead attempts to make his points through the use of lurid (and often demeaning) anecdotes, sexist and racist commentary, gross generalizations and unsubstantiated speculations (for specific details, see Joan Roughgarden’s review of the book). In addition, Bailey conveniently claims that trans women and gay men whose personal accounts differ from his thesis are merely lying (he’s used this tactic before: see a 2005 NY Times article called "Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited," in which Bailey insinuates that men who say they are attracted to both sexes are lying).

Of course, this week’s NY Times article doesn’t discuss the hypersexualization of trans women in our culture, and it barely mentions the fact that Bailey falsely presented stereotypes and sexual innuendo as “science� without any hard data to back his claims up. Rather, the article focuses almost entirely on accusations made by Alice Dreger in her forthcoming article in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, in which she claims that several prominent trans activists stooped to conducting personal attacks on Bailey during their campaign against the book. As Dreger comments in the NY Times article:

“If we’re going to have research at all, then we’re going to have people saying unpopular things, and if this is what happens to them, then we’ve got problems not only for science but free expression itself.�