trans discourse

I have lots of updates to make about the tortures of finishing a dissertation (can I get an amen?), and the joys of parenting a one-year-old (I know I can get one for this!), and the pleasures of reconnecting (dates and renewed communication) with your love after the first year of co-parenting, so stay tuned for all of that. But J and I have been talking a lot lately about gender, and – partly inspired by this post over at Love Invents Us, and the fact that, like Yogi’s mama, I’ve also been reading T Cooper’s Real Man Adventures* – I thought I’d reach out here to see what this community has to say about the big ole’ off-limits topic of transitioning.

I want to say out the gate that none of my thoughts about transitioning are absolute. I don’t believe that I’m the best one to make decisions for anyone other than myself and, for now, Bram. I think there are lots and lots of reasons that women transition to become men (which is what I’ll talk about here; I won’t discuss MTF women), and I would hate it if I implied that those reasons are all unsound. This version of happiness – the one I’ve carved out for myself – wouldn’t work for most people, and I wouldn’t expect it to. I give my money (limited though it is) to organizations that spend most of theirs fighting for trans rights, and I feel plenty good about doing that. I know that we have trans readers, and even if it were any of my business (which it’s not), I would absolutely, unequivocally support them. Support and respect them.

In truth, my concerns about transitioning are less about transitioning at all, and more about the way we respond to it in contemporary American culture. I get worried whenever something, anything, becomes off limits in terms of critical discourse. When you can’t ask questions about its implications, its consequences, its motivations without being shut down, or accused of being hostile, or accused of being phobic, or accused of being unpatriotic (whatever the specifics). I get worried when we’re not supposed to talk about something, when we’re just supposed to maintain silent agreement or else. And I think that’s happened around the fairly sizable new wave of transmen.* And I find this especially worrisome because it means that we’re not supposed to ask questions about a choice that lots and lots of people are making even though that choice means the life-long injection of synthetic hormones and the surgical alternation of bodies. In my opinion, the seriousness of these steps calls not for silence, but for a robust conversation. And we’re the ones to have it because, frankly, these are our people we’re talking about. Or they start out that way. The only other people who are going to talk about this are actually transphobic. They are bigots. So for fuck’s sake, let’s don’t let them dominate the conversation.

As for my thoughts, they come from an admittedly biased place. Though it took me some time to narrow it down, I am deeply and profoundly attracted to masculine women. My wife is the single sexiest thing I’ve ever seen, and that’s no lie. My wife in tailored men’s pants and a tie? Well, you don’t need to know about this. ;) J. Halberstam. Judith Butler. But to be fair, I’m plenty attracted to transmen too. Read: my still abiding crush on T Cooper. I don’t find him as sexy now as I once did, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t there. And though I can’t imagine she’d ever make this choice, if J decided to transition again in the future (has she written here before about the two years she spent as a man?), nothing about her draw for me would change. I love female masculinity, but trans masculinity will do.

I’m just a little concerned right now to see us subscribe so unquestioningly to the intense medicalization of identity. And when I say “unquestioningly,” I don’t mean individual transmen because I’m sure they’ve questioned plenty; I mean us at large. When we’re finally talking about the media-driven body image issues that bring women (and men) to the brink of starvation, or under the knife, or just to sustained self-loathing, I worry about sending a whole new category of people there too. Moreover, if J did decide to transition again, I would worry about the health risks of T. I mean, we try not to take aspirin when we get headaches, you know? So, I worry.

I also wonder about the message of still working so damn hard to fit within the binary gender system. I mean, there’s a lot of pleasure to be had in issuing a resounding fuck off to the notion of being either a woman or a man. A mama or a papa. A girly-girl or macho. Truly: why the hell haven’t we picked at least one non-gendered pronoun and made it stick? I remember reading Sandra Bem’s research on gender, and how she discovered that we’re healthiest, psychologically-speaking, when we possess LOTS of both stereotypically female AND stereotypically male characteristics. That we’re UNHEALTHY if we possess neither (if we’re sort of ungendered), but that we’re also not doing so hot if we manifest one to the exclusion of the other. I am for sure on one side. I love most of the stereotypical “girl” stuff: red lipstick, and empathy, and Downton Abbey. :) And J is in lots of ways intensely masculine. Still, I’d say there are areas of overlap, and I’d say those areas are important to us. My worry about transitioning is that in order to pass, transmen have to exaggerate one set to the exclusion of the other. Otherwise they might be found out. Otherwise they might be in danger of hateful bigots. But if they’re exaggerating and suppressing, that’s not so authentic either, right? That worries me.

I’m also a little concerned about the degree to which this is sometimes (maybe?) a furtherance of sexism. In the passage Yogi’s mama is talking about in her post, Cooper (the character?) says: “the word lesbian? I have never and would never use that term in reference to myself. Never. In fact, I’m probably one of the most lesbophobic people on the planet, probably because of my won fucked-up issues of not wanting to be assumed to be one. I got no beef with lesbians; I’m just not one. I’ve never seen even one episode of the The L Word. Never been to the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, don’t know who Dinah Shore is, and coertainly never donned a thumb ring or ear cuff” (15-16). Sigh. Maybe it’s just me, but does this read as sexist to you? And do you think it’s unique to T Cooper? It feels to me like transitioning is, to some degree, a rejection of the vestiges of femaleness that one can’t shake with the right clothes, or haircut, or body carriage. And of course that’s okay: we are entitled to reject femaleness if it’s not our thing. But is there any point at which that rejection might be said to be reflective of the sexism that we seem intent on maintaining in this culture? And if so, if it’s just still better to be a man, isn’t that a conversation worth having? Because here’s the thing: that’s a way out of fighting for gay rights. If our masculine women all become men, we can get legally married. And have benefits. But does that make us straight? And by doing it, are we saying that straight is best?

Question: If J transitioned, would that make me straight? And if a choice she made made me straight, doesn’t that mean that none of this (straight, gay, man, woman) is quite really real anyway?  And if it’s not quite really real, shouldn’t we be having lots and lots of conversations about what it means?

I don’t know. I have questions, but no answers. What I do have, though, is a true and abiding love for queer people, so I care about this choice, to which so many queer people are turning. I respect anyone who struggles to find themselves amidst all of the voices that try to distract us. I’ll call anyone whatever they want me to. For the most part, I’ll even think of them however they want me to. I love my masculine wife, and I’d love her if she were my masculine husband. Still, I’m glad she’s my masculine wife. I love that she’s chivalrous towards me. T Cooper’s wife says that being with him makes her feel more like a woman than she’s ever felt before, and I get that because that’s what J has done for me. But I also love that my masculine wife breastfeeds our children, and that she does it in ties, no less. I love the contradictions, the assumptions she upends, the offhand way she dismisses what is expected of her in favor of what feels authentically right. Had she gone through with her plan to transition all those years back, she wouldn’t have given birth to our perfect son. That’s unimaginable to me, though it could have happened. I mean, how could she have known how important her female body would come to be for her family? I hate it when people call her a “lady,” because she’s not that, but she isn’t a man either. I’m glad we’re sending the message to our son that gender categories need to be exploded. Now. And I worry about sending the message that they should be adhered to, which feels like a part of transitioning.

I also worry about our resistance to the simple, difficult fact that we are only able to have this human experience because we live in these human bodies. That, though these bodies are flawed, though they fail us, they are our only ways into life. I don’t know what it’s like to be born in a body that doesn’t reflect my gender. But I do know what it’s like to feel deeply, devastatingly let down by my body. Letting go of the narrative of pregnancy and childbirth – which was for so long deeply embedded in my beliefs about what it is to be a woman – has been crushing and painful, but it’s also been profoundly beautiful and formative: a matter of surrendering to my basic humanity, which is, in the end, vulnerable and exposed and disappointing. Which is something.short.of.what.I.want.but.so.much.more.than.I.have.a.right.to.ask.for. I could fight to fulfill the thing that I expected of my body, to bring my body to meet the standards I hold for it. But would I risk losing something of my basic humanity if I could just fix the ways I feel let down? Is there something to be gained from meeting my body where it is instead? I don’t mean these questions rhetorically; I really mean them. Are we purely blessed by our ability to overcome so many of our perceived weaknesses, or is there something meaningful in just not doing that sometimes?

I ran across this line in a Stacey Waite poem this morning: “I will not be the kind of boy who can not bear the memory of her body.” Is there something in this?

Truly, I’d love your thoughts. Please keep them kind, though. Breaking Into Blossom has only ever been a space of compassionate community. I very much want to keep it that way.

* Do you have a friend who would go to a reading of one of your favorite writers, and get copies of their books that you teach with signed for you, and buy you their new book, and get it signed too while they’re at it? Because we do. And as T Cooper himself notes in his inscription to us in said book, that is one “nice-ass friend.”

** Does anyone have figures for this? Recent studies as to the percentages of lesbians who are now choosing to transition? I know it’s growing, but I don’t know how much.

Post-publication edit: There are already great comments here, which I’m SO thrilled to see. I would love for this to become a thriving conversation: so many of you have insights to offer. Please especially check out the the comment from Maybe a New Leaf, whose author speaks eloquently from the position of a trans guy. And thanks to all of you who trust this space enough to share. 

.you can call me pomo.

I’ve written on here before about the fact that TTC, pregnancy, and childbirth were strange bedfellows with my usual gender representation. I am a very masculine female. As such, there have been many aspects of pregnancy (and now breastfeeding) that were uncomfortable. My clothes had to adapt to my changing body (and male maternity clothes are pretty much out of the question, though if I had more time and energy, I think I could come up with a kick-ass line of androgynous maternity clothes!). Nearly all of the pregnancy and childbirth books that I read were geared toward a feminine heterosexual readership. The mere fact of my being pregnant made my social interactions with strangers very different from my usual way of walking through the world. And while I loved being pregnant with Bram, I am happy to get back into my usual mode of being. I’m back into almost all of my pre-pregnancy clothes (albeit, a bit more “snuggly”), and, with the exception of breastfeeding, I think that I am back to relating to the world in my particular way.

The world of parenting, though, has brought with it a slew of new gendered expectations to dismantle. Everyone assumes that because I gave birth to Bram, because I’m breastfeeding him, I must be his “mother.” And while, obviously, I am one of his mothers, I see R as his “mothering” figure. What I hate about this whole conversation, though, is how always already sexed it is. There is no existing way for me to talk about parenting Bram based on my particular strengths, weaknesses, and preferences as an individual without having that language tied to my sex and/or gender representation. For R, the parenting “shoe” fits better. She’s a feminine woman. She is every bit the traditional “maternal” figure. She is nurturing, empathetic, consummately patient, and highly attuned to Bram’s desires. She offers him routines and stability throughout each day (and I don’t think this is just because she’s home with him full-time). As he grows, I expect that she will be the parent more likely to offer reassurances for bumps and bruises, gentle discipline, and consistent boundaries.

The gendered binary that society has constructed around parenting roles would then thrust me into a father’s role, a “paternal” figure. But that’s not sufficient to describe what kind of parent I am to Bram (and our future children). It’s true that, right now, I’m the breadwinner, but that likely won’t be true even two years from now. It’s also true that I tend to be silly and fun, I like spontaneity with the baby, and I tend to get frustrated more quickly when I’m not able to “fix” the situation. I handle our finances, our car, and fixing things around the house. I will likely be the person to teach our kids how to handle these areas of their own lives. I love all of the aspects of parenting: stories, songs, snuggles, baby wearing, feeding, bathing, massage, yoga, etc., but I’m less likely than R to initiate and maintain rituals and routines over time. All of these components put me into the stereotypically “paternal” camp. But concomitant to all of this, I love to breastfeed this baby, and I will likely induce lactation in order to breastfeed future adopted babies. I love intimacy and vulnerability with my family. I want Bram to sleep in our bed once it’s safe (we don’t have an appropriate family bed right now). I offer him sweetness and kisses and soft voices. In these ways, I can be seen to also “mother” him. Bram doesn’t need a traditional mother and father. He needs two committed adults who love each other and brought him into the fold of our family because of that love. He needs to know that he’s safe, that he’s valued, and that he will always have a supportive place to turn throughout his life.

Before he was born, R and I assumed that we would go by “mama” and “mommy,” respectively. These are the terms that we each call our own mothers, so they felt the most natural to us. But now that he’s here and we’re doing this daily work, I feel drawn to a different term. I like the moniker “pomo” for myself. It feels like a hybridization of “papa” and “mom.” It’s also a nickname for postmodernism, whose relativism appeals to me in this regard. It’s a sweet little nickname. And since it’s only mine, it doesn’t come saddled with linguistic baggage that builds constraints and/or expectations into its usage.

I have some reservations in making this switch, though. I worry that, because I’m the more masculine parent, using a non-normative name will cause me to be perceived by others as a secondary parent to R’s “mama.” In some ways, I’m okay with this. I already have the biological connection, the breastfeeding relationship, and automatic legal rights. In this way, it makes all the sense in the world that we should find ways to promote R’s equality in the eyes of the world. I also worry that other parents, namely straight women, might perceive two mothers as being in competition with one another for primacy in the “mother” role. But it’s like comparing apples and asparagus. We are two very different people, occupying two unique and necessary roles, both in our marriage and our parenting. It’s why I hate it when people say “same-gender marriage” or ‘same-gender parenting.” My gender has nothing to do with my sex. Two people with the same genitalia are perfectly capable of possessing wildly diverse skill sets, interests, and desires. This variance is really important to the health and well-being of a child. It’s important to see different subject positions growing up. It’s also important to bear witness to how two different people work together to find balance and harmony. This is where the crux of the movement for the rights of gay parents should be focused. It’s not about two men, two women, or a man and a woman; it’s about two individual people working together as a team to foster the health and development of a child into a contented, capable adult.

I think we’re limiting the expertise of parents through the gendering of parental roles and terms. We’re making mothers and fathers feel like failures when they may offer their children the perfect manifestation of their particular talents. We carve out arbitrary lines whereby one parent can feel judgmental of (or encroached upon by) another parent. R and I are practicing attachment parenting, but I’ve been disappointed by the foundational heteronormativity of this parenting model. I was even more disappointed to learn about the overt homophobia of some of its main champions (namely, Dr. Sears and Jean Leidloff). AP makes the biological bond between mother and child so sacrosanct that the other parent is helpless to do anything but work to foster and emulate that bond. And while there are certain essential truths to most parenting relationships (heterosexuality usually begets a biological connection; breastfeeding usually happens with the gestational parent), these are the lines drawn by early parenting. Yet we see these roles manifest throughout the parent/child relationship long after weaning.

There’s a lot of work to do here. I know that I’m barely scratching the surface in this post. The work of writing about this is important, but the work of finding a way to live my life as an expression of these thoughts is more important. I want to be the very best “pomo” that I can be to Bram, to be the best spouse that I can be to R, and to be a strong, autonomous, androgynous woman to boot. I’ll keep pushing my tie out of the way of my breast pump at work. I won’t be afraid to go to Bram each time he cries. I’ll revel in nursing him in the middle of the night, knowing that this early time is fleeting. And I’ll look forward to the many adventures we’ll have together as a team, as a family. It’s a blessing (albeit often in disguise) to be this conscientious, this intentional, in building our lives. It’s an awesome journey.

.gender dissonance.

The folks over at Regular Midwesterners posed this question earlier in the week, which really caught my attention:

Do you think of yourself as a “mother”? A “father”? Something in between? Why?

Interestingly, while I occupy a very physically maternal role at current, I suspect that my long-term relationships with my children will be defined by a more progressively paternal approach. And while R, as the non-gestational parent, is currently occupying a traditionally “father” oriented role right now, I trust that she will be pure-mama once this Rabbit is born.

I have become increasingly aware of the dissonance between my gender representation and my newfound status as a gestational parent. Since my early teenage years, I have identified as a masculine female. This identity marker has run a gamut of manifestations, from the bad bowl cut and ripped jeans of high school to the two years in my early-twenties spent experimenting with permanent transition while living in male monikers. In recent years, my gender has come to rest in a very metrosexual masculinity. I wear ties and eyeliner. I love tailored pants and expensive haircuts. My body has become an increasingly comfortable vehicle for moving about the world in. Generally speaking, I am interpreted as female. This is in stark contrast to my late teens and early twenties (spent in the deep south) where I often coded as male. But, these days, I feel most often coded as simply queer. I occasionally bristle when faced with scowls from the women in the ladies’ room. I am very rarely hit on by heterosexual men (though I have occasionally been cruised by nearsighted gay men in dimly lit establishments). I really love the kind of female that I’ve grown into.

And then, there’s pregnancy. I have truly begun to love the experience of being pregnant. Yes, it’s bittersweet, as this wasn’t Plan A. Yes, it can be very uncomfortable at times (especially the first trimester). But I do love the pleasure of feeling physically connected to our son. I do love the peace I feel (for the first time, in many ways) towards my female reproductive self. But they don’t make metrosexual maternity clothes. And I find in my day-to-day interactions a sense of having lost my queer card. I value not having heterosexual privilege. I don’t like the dance in and out of heteronormativity that so many of the more feminine lesbians in my life (R included) have to do on a daily basis. Questioning when and how to come out? Wondering if it’s safe? Wondering what the underlying motives of a person’s interest in lesbianism might be? Overall, I’ve dodged all of these issues, as my gender representation gives up the ghost of staying closeted in most situations. And while I’ve dealt with my share of violence and homophobia as a result of this consistent “outness,” I’ve always felt proud to wear my truth on my sleeve.

Now I wear my truth somewhere under the stretch pants that come up to my increasingly ample bra. While I’ve done my best to choose maternity clothes that are closer to my pre-pregnancy style (pants, neutral color palette, fitted everything), it’s incredible to me how differently I feel in my daily interactions with new people. This has been especially true as I’ve begun this new job. It’s particularly interesting to consider the assumptions that many folks probably make about R’s gender representation by proxy to me (as no one has actually met R yet). Obviously, there are other queers and feminists in my workplace who, I’m sure, can appreciate that my appearance pregnant is likely not congruent with my non-pregnant self. But for many others, men in particular, I imagine that I code very much as a feminine, pregnant woman. I’ve felt the same disconnect in spaces with other pregnant women (at pre-natal yoga, at the midwives clinic). It’s akin to the sense that I had in the women’s locker room in high school. That I didn’t belong there. That someone had made a mistake in letting me into the club.

When R was pregnant, I loved occupying a more paternal role. I reveled in telling everyone I met that we were expecting. I loved taking care of R’s needs, of talking to E each night through R’s belly. I felt confident and at peace. This role, though, has taken some getting used to. When R was pregnant, there were times in my day when I felt totally “normal” (read: not defined by our pregnancy). Those times are getting very few and far between now, especially as I can feel the Rabbit moving around consistently, which I do love. Maybe this doesn’t make much sense, but it takes humility to put down the vanity of wearing the kinds of clothes that I like, vulnerability to know that people I encounter are making assumptions about my sexuality that simply aren’t true, and patience to trust that (while forever changed by the experience), I will be able to return to a non-pregnant, masculine self post-partum. I’m far from perfect at it, but I’m learning to find peace in the divide.

fatherhood

It’s Father’s Day, which – since I’ve been thinking a lot lately about parenting roles – seems like the perfect occasion to write down a few thoughts. As I hope is obvious, I don’t believe that children need “a mother and a father.” What I do believe is that children have innumerable needs, and that those needs can be met in almost as many ways. We’re used to categorizing parenting roles across gender lines, but very few of the families I know – even two-parent, heterosexual families – actually work this way. In an ideal world, maybe we would have a day just to celebrate people who devote themselves to the safekeeping of children.

In those terms, here are the two people who most parented me:

And here are the two people who most parented J:

These four people did plenty of things that were in line with gender expectations. But they also did plenty of things that weren’t. When I think of them, I think of them as parents, as individuals. My relationship to them is less a product of cultural expectations for mothers and fathers, and more a product of who these people are, and who I am.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about fatherhood since J got pregnant. If I had to guess, I would say that once Rabbit River gets here, I’ll likely behave in more traditionally “maternal” ways than my wife. For now, though, my role is much more traditionally “paternal.” I am the secondary caregiver. J grows our baby; I take care of her so that she can best focus on doing so. When she gives birth, I’ll be there to help her get through it, but it won’t be me pushing our child into the world. When we adopt, we’ll both fill similar roles with regards to our new baby – or at least those roles will be more fluid – but this time, right now, I am J’s support, and she is our baby’s bio-mom.

This reality (and, to be honest, the difficulty of this shift for me) has led me to reach out to a few of the (exceptional) fathers I know. I wonder about their experience of this process: Did they ever feel left out? Did people treat them like child-bearing was somehow less visceral for them? How did they put their own needs (fears. insecurities.) down to care for their pregnant wives? How did they feel in the moment their child entered the world? What does it mean to “father” a child? (It’s not about DNA: lots of heterosexual families have to turn to sperm donors to help make their children.) What does this feel like to someone who grew up knowing that this would be their role? What could it feel like to me, if I gave myself over to it fully?

The only child I’ll ever “mother” into existence didn’t get to live. Giving birth to her was a crushing, and not a joyful, experience. That’s what I know of that tiny piece of motherhood. My other children will all be brought into being by other women: my wife, strangers. This is an odd reality. It requires its share of surrendering.

I know single mothers who fill both parental roles astonishingly well. I know children for whom those roles are filled by about a dozen people, children who are parented by communities of love. I’m settling into this role, learning to appreciate this new subject position. So today I wish a happy Father’s Day to everyone out there who fills a not.so.simply.defined role in a child’s life. It’s a joy to be among you.

(This last photo is one of me in my dad’s arms. Happy Father’s Day, daddy.)