Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From How God Became King (2012)

  We should know by now that this simply won’t do, but because we haven’t got an alternative framework to offer, we seem unable to break out of the trap. We still seem to think that bombs and bullets can deal with “evil,” liberating people who, once the “evil” has been thus obliterated, will turn out to be nice liberal Western democrats after all. This is just one of the many traps into which Western culture has allowed itself to sleepwalk. I believe the gospels can help us to break out of all such traps and to see the world and its multilayered continuing “problem of evil” through new eyes. But the problem we face lies deeper within the mind-set of the critical scholarship of the past two hundred years. As I said earlier, it was axiomatic for early modern biblical scholars that the kingdom of God, as announced by Jesus, did not arrive. Those scholars who thought that when Jesus spoke about God’s kingdom he was referring to the usual kind of armed revolution were able to point out that that hadn’t happened. Those who supposed that Jesus was referring to the end of the world were able to point out that that hadn’t happened either. Whichever way you went in the scholarly debates, it seemed that Jesus had promised something that hadn’t arrived. Either way, the theory then ran, the church found itself obliged to shuffle the cards of Jesus’s deeds and words and to deal them out in a new pattern to make something fresh and lasting out of Jesus’s failed vision. “Some people standing here,” says Jesus in Mark, “won’t experience death before they see God’s kingdom come in power” (9:1). Well, say the critics, that didn’t happen for a start. Well, of course it didn’t—if you think Jesus meant either a military coup or the end of the world. And of course it didn’t—if, with the same critical scholarship, you bracket out the resurrection as a later self-justifying bit of ecclesial mythology. What the critics failed to realize, not because it was obscure, but because the philosophy of the European Enlightenment demanded that they close their eyes to it, was that Jesus announced and inaugurated a vision of God’s kingdom that he was constantly redefining, through actions and parables, and that would be inaugurated by his own vindication . The importance of Daniel 7, of the exaltation and vindication of the “one like a son of man,” cannot be over-stressed here—and of course it is at that very point that critical scholarship has again done its best to neutralize a central element of the evidence. At the risk of repeating something that alert readers will have picked up already (but that remains enormously important), the critical scholarship of the past two hundred years was born in a world (that of the European Enlightenment) where it was felt vitally important to separate religion and politics.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  In the taxi on the way to the doctor’s office to have the cast removed from Hudson’s hand the week before our trip, a video clip came on, showing a young couple getting engaged on a quiet pier in the city. I scoffed noisily, disparaging the couple for their inability to see the inevitably grim and broken future that awaited them. I had been trying so hard to keep my anger in check, just days earlier weeping on the phone with Erika as I told her I was terrified that my once easy-going demeanor had been permanently expunged, wholly replaced by bitterness. I was not lacking self-awareness, and yet I could not seem to stop myself, resentment seeping out of my pores over the way in which I had been so egregiously wronged. Hudson eyed me mournfully, then looked out the window, away from me. I could accept that I was now openly dismissive of romance and commitment, but I was horrified to be passing that along to my kids, especially Daisy and Hudson, who were around the age I was when I first started to have sexual experiences. Maybe they’ll do better than I did , I thought, understanding that I had to try harder to keep that option intact for them. At the doctor’s office, the cast came off, but with instructions not to ski for a while. I saw Hudson’s eyes well with tears. “Listen,” I said to the doctor, “I’m a big rule follower, but Hudson has ADHD and the lack of activity is making him depressed, on top of which we’re going through a family crisis that would knock any kid out, so I’m confessing to you that I’m going to let him ski this weekend. I’m letting you know that I hear your medical advice but I’m not going to follow it and it’s not because I don’t have a ton of respect for you.” Her eyes met mine without judgment and she nodded understandingly as she directed Hudson not to be a total daredevil just yet. I could have flung myself at her, I was so grateful for her compassion. When she left the room, Hudson whispered a thank-you to me. I put my hand on his shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze, connecting us for just a moment. Hudson, Georgia and I were determined to stay in good spirits on our road trip to Vermont. Hudson was thoughtful and attentive, carrying bags and helping Georgia, and I was moved as I witnessed their deep connection to one another. I reminded him that I valued his help but he needn’t be the man of the house, that I was still the parent and quite capable despite the current circumstances. I was proud of him for jumping out of the car to get our luggage and holding Georgia’s hand as we crossed streets, but I wanted him to feel like a kid and I did not want him to worry about me.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  The main reason why trans-woman-exclusion evokes such passion and frustration in me is precisely because it is both anti-trans and antifeminist. And as a feminist, it gravely disturbs me that other self-described feminists are so willing to overlook or purposefully ignore how inherently sexist trans-woman-exclusion policies and politics are: They favor trans men over trans women, they rampantly objectify trans female bodies, and they privilege trans women’s appearances, socialization, and the sex others assigned to us at birth over our persons, our minds, and our identities. And what saddens me even more than the irrational trans-misogynistic fear and hatred displayed by the vocal minority who most adamantly oppose our inclusion is the apathy of the silent majority of queer women and feminists who enable that prejudice: those who continue to attend women’s events that exclude trans women; those who excuse or choose not to confront antifeminist/anti-trans-woman comments and actions made by members of their own community; those who tacitly give credence to antifeminist/anti-trans-woman rhetoric by referring to the issue of trans-woman-exclusion as a “controversy” or a “debate.” I would submit to them that there has never been a legitimate debate regarding this issue, as the overwhelming majority of dialogues and discourses on this subject have taken place among cissexual women in the absence of any trans women. Perhaps the most naive and condescending refrain apologists for the trans-woman-exclusionists make is that these apologists are working hard to change these women-only organizations and spaces from within. This is a seriously flawed notion. If you look back at history, there has not been a single instance where people have overcome a deeply entrenched prejudice without first being forced to interact with the people they detest. Mere words cannot dispel bigoted stereotypes and fears; only personal experiences can. The queer rights movement would not have made the progress that it has if activists merely relied on queer-positive straight people to lobby on our behalf, to speak as our proxies. Social progress was only made through both the frontline work of outspoken activists shouting, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” and that of committed straight allies who absolutely refused to tolerate anti-queer remarks and discrimination from members of their own communities. Similarly, I entreat all feminists and all queer women to recognize that the divisive issue of trans-woman-exclusion will continue to be with us as long as we fail to directly confront and repudiate antifeminist/anti-trans-woman policies and rhetoric wherever they exist. Preface With the exception of a small expansion of the trans-terminology section, this preface was written in 2015 for the second edition of the book.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  This saying has become so popular and widespread that it’s safe to say these days that it’s far more often parodied by cissexuals than used by transsexuals to describe their own experiences. In fact, the regularity with which cissexuals use this saying to mock trans women has always struck me as rather odd, since it was so clearly coined not to encapsulate all of the intricacies and nuances of the trans female experience, but rather as a way of dumbing down our experiences into a sound bite that cissexuals might be better able to comprehend.Unfortunately, the popularity of the “woman trapped inside a man’s body” cliché has become a lightning rod for cissexuals who are disturbed by transsexuality. Some cissexual women, for instance, have accused trans women of being arrogant or presumptuous in claiming that we “feel like women” when, prior to our transitions, we had only ever experienced living in the world as men. Often such criticism is followed with catty remarks such as “How just like a man to say such a thing”—the implication being that our attempts to claim the identity of “woman” are merely (and rather ironically) a by-product of male entitlement.Speaking for myself, I can honestly say that I never “felt like a woman” before my transition. Even as a preteen struggling with the inexplicable and persistent desire to be female, I understood how problematic that popular cliché was. After all, how can anyone know what it’s like to “feel like a woman” or “feel like a man” when we can never really know how anybody else feels on the inside? Most people whose physical and subconscious sexes coincide generally fall rather seamlessly into womanhood or manhood; as a result, they take for granted the identity of woman or man. My gender identity always felt more like a puzzle that I had to put together myself, one in which many of the pieces were missing, where I had no clue as to what the final picture was supposed to be.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  After all, one only has to look at how apologetic people become when they accidentally misgender another person, or how insulting it is generally considered to be to suggest that someone’s femaleness or maleness is suspect in any way, to understand that ungendering is an inherently demeaning process. If Foucault and Garfinkel had instead chosen to pick apart the gender identities of young people who were not gender-variant, the process of ungendering would have undoubtedly (and appropriately) seemed intrusive and disrespectful. But because society typically views transsexual and intersex people as illegitimate and unnatural—even inhuman—Agnes and Herculine could be depicted as mere objects of inquiry without any chance of the audience identifying with them or sympathizing with them. While Foucault and Garfinkel may have seen their subjects as nothing more than interesting case studies, I found both of these writers’ accounts—specifically, the way these gender-variant young people were dehumanized and used as pawns to forward academic theories of gender—to be horribly exploitive. Having experienced firsthand what it’s like to feel a disconnect between my own physical sex and gender identity, having deeply internalized the shame that’s associated with having a body that defies public expectations of what is natural and normal, and having experienced the profound sense of isolation that comes with being a young gender-variant person, I found the lengthy, graphic depictions that Foucault and Garfinkel provide shamelessly voyeuristic. These accounts are akin to offering an explicit play-by-play description of a rape scene for the sole purpose of making some rather generic point about human sexuality. Unfortunately, the ungendering of transsexual and intersex people does not end with Foucault and Garfinkel. Garfinkel’s work has influenced a slew of sociologists, including Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna (mentioned in chapter 7 , “Pathological Science”), whose much-celebrated book Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach includes a chapter called “Gender Construction in Everyday Life: Transsexualism,” where transsexual gender identities and transitioning strategies are dissected to demonstrate how all people “do” gender. 22 And Foucault’s writings—which, ironically, focused on how institutions produce and regulate sexual identities—have formed the foundation of queer theory, a field that has practically institutionalized the practice of ungendering gender-variant persons in an attempt to demonstrate how our culture’s notions of binary sex/gender are socially constructed. One particularly illustrative example of how dehumanizing academic ungendering can be is found in Bernice Hausman’s book Changing Sex (discussed previously in chapter 7 ) . In the preface, Hausman describes the difficulty she had finding a topic related to identity and feminist theory for her dissertation: “No matter how much I applied myself to the task, most of my thoughts on the issue seemed uninspired, boring, even obvious.” 23 But then, lucky for her, she discovered transsexuality! “I inadvertently found texts that dealt with transsexualism.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  From this “bi-sexist” perspective, people who identify exclusively as either female or male, feminine or masculine, homosexual or heterosexual, are assumed to have developed such preferences as the result of being duped by binary gender norms and socialization. This view has also led to the creation of another oppositional binary of sorts, pitting those transgender people who identify outside the gender binary (and who are therefore presumed to challenge gender norms) against transsexuals (who are accused of supporting the gender status quo by transitioning to their identified sex). Such arguments—that bigendered and genderqueer people are more “radical” or “queer” than transsexuals—are highly reminiscent of similarly naive accusations made in the past by homosexuals who argued that they were more “radical” or “queer” than bisexuals. The creation of such radical/conservative gender binaries are both self-absorbed and anti-queer, as they dismiss the very real discrimination transsexuals and bisexuals face in favor of establishing pecking orders within the queer community. These examples demonstrate how gender theories designed to free certain people from gender-related stigma or oppression can often inadvertently marginalize other sexual minorities, or even worse, create new gender hierarchies that are just as oppressive as the initial system. There are several telltale signs of flawed gender theories. First, we should beware of any gender theory that makes the assumption that there is any one “right” or “natural” way to be gendered or to be sexual. Such theories are typically narcissistic in nature, as they merely reveal their designers’ desire to cast themselves on top of the gender hierarchy. Further, if one presumes there is only one “right” or “natural” way to be gendered, then the only way to explain why some people display typical gender and sexual traits while others display exceptional ones is by surmising that one of those two groups is being intentionally led astray somehow. Indeed, this is exactly what the religious right argues when they invent stories about homosexuals who actively recruit young children via the “gay agenda.” Those who claim that we are all born with bisexual, androgynous, or gender-neutral tendencies (only to be molded into heterosexual, masculine men and feminine women via socialization and gender norms) use a similar strategy. I take issue with any theory that suggests that people are so easily duped into leading such contrived sexual and gendered lives, as my own exceptional gender inclinations have been too strong and persistent to be ignored or reshaped by society.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  “No, I don’t wish that. Well, maybe just a little I wish that. I’m going to find a place to turn around and we’ll continue our search or else we’ll nap in the car.” Up ahead I saw lights, and my heart swelled. When I got closer, I saw that it was a small hotel and through the lobby windows I could see a man standing at the front desk. I felt like I had just discovered life on Mars. If this hotel is fully booked , I thought, then I give up, the universe can take us and spit us back out into the night and I will tell my kids that I’m sorry, but I’ve got nothing left . Luckily for us, they had a room as warm and clean as the one I had promised to Georgia, and so we were given a reprieve for yet another day. CHAPTER 15Breaking PointMichael and I had limited our contact to once a week in couples’ therapy as our therapist had worried about our ability to communicate with each other without her mediation. I felt certain that therapy was doing us more harm than good. In our therapist’s presence, we lashed out at each other viciously and she couldn’t rein us in. I was feeling beaten down and shouldering what felt like excessive blame. She had started our therapy by declaring that we would not play the roles of victim and villain. “You just gave him an out,” I cried. “I am the victim and he is the villain. Someone has to accept responsibility and it’s not going to be me.” “I’m not condoning his affair, Laura,” she said. “But we won’t get far if we can’t dig deeper than that.” She was determined to get to the underlying causes of the affair, what had been broken in our marriage to give the affair room to grow, but I felt that until he first acknowledged how damaging the affair was, we were dead in the water. I expected him to be contrite, but he was furious at me. He expected me to want to understand why the affair had happened, but I couldn’t face that there was a whole underworld happening beneath the surface of our life of which I had been blissfully unaware. Every week in therapy, he would rattle off all the ways we had been going off course for years and I would sit stupefied, wondering what rock I had been living under, and feeling more and more of my reality slipping away. So now my future wasn’t going to be what I had expected, but even my past was being savagely edited and rewritten? That meant all I had was my present, which was filled with bitterness, anger and hate – I was reaching my breaking point.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Physical sex can be further divided into multiple, separable characteristics: chromosomal sex (XX and XY), gonadal sex (ovaries and testes), genital sex (clitoris, vagina, and penis), hormonal sex (estrogens and androgens), and a host of secondary sex characteristics (such as breast growth in women, beard growth in men, etc.). While we like to think of females and males as constituting discrete, mutually exclusive classes, about two in one hundred people are born intersex. 5 So there is a vast amount of naturally occurring sexual and gender variation in the world. The question becomes: How do we make sense of it all? That’s where social constructs come in. While variation in our sex characteristics and gender inclinations may occur naturally, the way we interpret those traits, and the identities and meanings we associate with them, can vary significantly from culture to culture. In our society, what it means to be a woman or a man—the symbols, customs, expectations, restrictions, and privileges associated with those classes—are very different today than they were fifty years ago. This holds true for both typical and exceptional gender inclinations. For example, in this time and place I am able to identify as a woman, a dyke, a transsexual, and a transgender person—to me, each of these identities represents a slightly different (but somewhat overlapping) aspect of my gender and sexuality. However, had I been born a half century earlier—before most of these labels were commonly used or even existed—it would be impossible for me to identify the way that I do now. Perhaps my female subconscious sex would have led me to try “passing” and living as a woman, as trans people often did before medical means of transitioning became widely available. Or perhaps I would have taken part in the homosexual underground of the time, which was an amalgamation of people who would probably be considered lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender today. Or maybe, unaware of the existence of any other gender-variant people, I might have remained closeted for lack of any obvious alternative. Further, had I been born in some other country, I might have developed a very different transgender identity. Examples of MTF spectrum transgender people in other cultures include Indian hijras, Brazilian transvestis, Thai katoeys, and Native American “berdaches,” or “two-spirit” people. 6 These transgender identities differ not only in name but in their customs, practices, and social roles. Part of the reason these groups differ relates to the fact that their cultures place more emphasis on certain gender inclinations over others. In some cultures, a person’s gender expression plays a larger role in determining gender than we experience in the United States. Other cultures seem to place more emphasis on whether the person in question engages in sexual relationships with women or men. In our culture, we divide people into two groups—females and males—almost exclusively based on their physical sex.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Taking this into account, it becomes rather obvious that when cissexual women deny trans women the right to participate in women-only spaces because of their own tendency to privilege any “mannish” or “masculine” traits we may have over our many female attributes, they are fostering and promoting male-centrism. Of course, trans-woman-exclusion cannot be justified solely on the basis that some of us look or act “mannish” or “masculine”—otherwise, butch women would have to be excluded as well. Indeed, in recent years, as feminism itself has shifted away from gender essentialist theories and toward more social constructionist ones, the basis for trans-woman-exclusion is more frequently our male socialization rather than our male biology. This approach also provides convenient intellectual cover for those who wish to include FTM spectrum folks (who were socialized female) in women’s spaces. But once again, such an approach runs counter to the precepts of feminism. After all, feminists regularly insist that women are capable of doing anything men can despite having been raised as girls and encouraged to take a subordinate position to men. Thus, women can (and often do) transcend their female socialization. It remains unclear why these same feminists would paradoxically insist that trans women are unable to similarly transcend our male socialization. The fact that socialization is a specious argument became obvious to me during an exchange I had with a trans-woman-exclusionist who insisted that my being raised male was the sole reason in her mind for me to be disqualified from entering women-only spaces. So I asked her if she was open to allowing trans women who are anatomically male but who have been socialized female—something that’s not all that uncommon for MTF children these days. 6 She admitted to having concerns about their attending. Then, I asked how she would feel about a person who was born female yet raised male against her will, and who, after a lifetime of pretending to be male in order to survive, finally reclaimed her female identity upon reaching adulthood. After being confronted with this scenario, the woman conceded that she would be inclined to let this person enter women-only space, thus demonstrating that her argument about male socialization was really an argument about biology after all. In fact, after being pressed a bit further, she admitted that the scenario of a young girl who was forced against her will into boyhood made her realize how traumatic and dehumanizing male socialization could be for someone who was female-identified. This, of course, is exactly how many trans women experience their own childhoods. Another popular reason used to justify trans-woman-exclusion is cissexual women’s fears that we will somehow make women-only spaces unsafe.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  The justification for this denial is generally founded on the assumption that the trans person’s gender is not authentic because it does not correlate with the sex they were assigned at birth. In making this assumption, cissexists attempt to create an artificial hierarchy. By insisting that the trans person’s gender is “fake,” they attempt to validate their own gender as “real” or “natural.” This sort of thinking is extraordinarily naive, as it denies a basic truth: We make assumptions every day about other people’s genders without ever seeing their birth certificates, their chromosomes, their genitals, their reproductive systems, their childhood socialization, or their legal sex. There is no such thing as a “real” gender—there is only the gender we experience ourselves as and the gender we perceive others to be. While often different in practice, cissexism, transphobia, and homophobia are all rooted in oppositional sexism , which is the belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires. Oppositional sexists attempt to punish or dismiss those of us who fall outside of gender or sexual norms because our existence threatens the idea that women and men are “opposite” sexes. This explains why bisexuals, lesbians, gays, transsexuals, and other transgender people—who may experience their genders and sexualities in very different ways—are so often confused or lumped into the same category (i.e., queer) by society at large. Our natural inclinations to be attracted to the same sex, to identify as the other sex, and/or to express ourselves in ways typically associated with the other sex blur the boundaries required to maintain the male-centered gender hierarchy that exists in our culture today. In addition to the rigid, mutually exclusive gender categories established by oppositional sexism, the other requirement for maintaining a male-centered gender hierarchy is to enforce traditional sexism —the belief that maleness and masculinity are superior to femaleness and femininity. Traditional and oppositional sexism work hand in hand to ensure that those who are masculine have power over those who are feminine, and that only those born male will be seen as authentically masculine. For the purposes of this manifesto, the word misogyny will be used to describe this tendency to dismiss and deride femaleness and femininity. Just as all transgender people experience transphobia and cissexism to differing extents (depending on how often, obvious, or out we are as transgender), we experience misogyny to differing extents too. This is most evident in the fact that, while there are many different types of transgender people, our society tends to single out trans women and others on the male-to-female (MTF) spectrum for attention and ridicule. This is not merely because we transgress binary gender norms per se, but because we, by necessity, embrace our own femaleness and femininity. Indeed, more often than not it is our expressions of femininity and our desire to be female that become sensationalized, sexualized, and trivialized by others.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  22 What became lost in gatekeeper discourse regarding transsexuality (especially with regard to incidents of post-transition depression and “transsexual regret”) was any distinction between the trans person’s gender dissonance (an intrinsic matter) and the emotional stress the transsexual experienced as a result of having to deal with the gender anxiety of the cissexual public (which was an extrinsic matter). Indeed, the blurring of these separate issues was codified with the invention of the psychological term gender dysphoria, which made invisible cissexual gender anxiety by conflating it with the trans person’s intrinsic gender dissonance. 23 The regular use of the phrase by gatekeepers illustrates their assumption that it was the transsexuals’ responsibility to shape their lives around the cissexual public’s prejudice against them. And while most gatekeepers surely saw themselves as “treating” trans people, their own insistence that trans people “pass” as cissexual and hide their trans status after transitioning only enabled societal cissexism. Traditional Sexism and Effemimania Gatekeepers also practiced traditional sexism, as evident in the way their research and writings focused almost exclusively on MTF spectrum trans people. This occurred even though their own estimates typically showed MTF transsexuality to be merely three-times more prevalent than in the FTM direction. 24 Of course, as previously discussed, gatekeeper statistics were often just a reflection of their own biases (i.e., if they chose not to examine or treat you, you would not be counted as a transsexual). Today (now that information and access to transitioning is more widely available), trans people seem to be transitioning in both directions at roughly equal rates. This strongly suggests that the higher rates of MTF transsexuality cited in the past were simply an artifact of the gatekeepers’ preferences for studying and “treating” it. Many attempts to explain the gatekeepers’ focus on trans women over trans men have centered on the assumption that traditional sexism was occurring based on the trans person’s assigned sex. For example, many have pointed out that trans women, having been raised male, tended to have more financial resources to afford the extremely costly therapies and procedures associated with transitioning. Others have argued that a female-bodied person who wanted to transition to male would be taken far less seriously than a male-bodied person who expressed a desire to transition to female.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Indeed, the majority of research on transgenderism and transsexuality they produced clearly fit the criteria for “pathological science,” a term used to describe work that initially conforms to the scientific method, but then unconsciously veers from that method and begins a pathological process of wishful data interpretation. 49 Critiquing the Critics Sexologists have greatly shaped the way the public at large views transsexuals (as well as the way many transsexuals come to view themselves), but they are not the only group to position themselves as “authorities” on transsexuality. Over the years, many academics in the social sciences and in gender studies have also written extensively on the subject. Unlike the gatekeepers, who have often expressed consternation and condemnation for those transsexuals who fail to live up to society’s traditional and oppositional sexist expectations regarding gender, many academics have had the reciprocal concern—namely, that transsexuals work too hard to achieve gender normalcy. This concern typically arises from the assumption (embraced by many in the humanities) that transsexuality is a modern construction, something that would not exist if it were not for medical technology, psychological pathology, patriarchy, heterosexism, capitalism, and/or our culture’s rigid binary gender norms. Because academics in the fields of sociology and gender studies have been disposed toward seeking out the societal causes of transsexuality, they have tended to overlook or dismiss the possibility that intrinsic inclinations (i.e., subconscious sex) drive trans people toward transitioning. Framing the issue this way has ensured that transsexuality can only be understood as a form of “false consciousness” and that transsexuals themselves can only be conceptualized in one of two ways: as “dupes” (who are misled into transitioning by gatekeepers) or as “fakes” (who are so distressed by their own exceptional gender expressions and/or sexual orientations that they are willing to go to the extreme lengths of surgically altering their bodies and unquestioningly embracing sexist ideals in order to fit into straight mainstream society). While sociological models of transsexuality and transgenderism have not had as direct an impact on the lives of trans people as sexological models have, both models foster the false impression that cissexual “experts” (whether academic or clinical) are capable of understanding transsexuality better than transsexuals themselves—an idea that is as problematic as suggesting that male “experts” can understand womanhood better than women, or that heterosexual “experts” can understand homosexuality better than gays and lesbians.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The case was now transferred to the council, which at its fifteenth session, July 6, 1415, passed a compromise measure condemning the doctrine that a tyrant, in the absence of a judicial sentence, may and ought to be put to death by any subject whatever, even by the use of treacherous means, and in the face of an oath without committing perjury. Petit was not mentioned by name. It was this negative and timid action, which led Gerson to say that if Huss had had a defender, he would not have been found guilty. It was rumored that the commission which was appointed to bring in a report, by sixty-one out of eighty votes, decided for the permissibility of Petit’s articles declaring that Peter meant to kill the high priest’s servant, and that, if he had known Judas’ thoughts at the Last Supper, he would have been justified in killing him. The duke of Burgundy’s gold is said to have been freely used.395 The party led by the bishop of Arras argued that the tyrant who takes the sword is to be punished with the sword. Gerson, who was supported by D’Ailly replied that then the command "thou shalt not kill" would only forbid such an act as murder, if there was coupled with it an inspired gloss, "without judicial authority." The command means, "thou shalt not kill the innocent, or kill out of revenge." Gerson pressed the matter for the last time in an address delivered before the council, Jan. 17, 1417, but the council refused to go beyond the decree of the fifteenth session. The duke of Burgundy got possession of Paris in 1418, and Gerson found the doors of France closed to him. Under the protection of the duke of Bavaria he found refuge at Rattenberg and later in Austria. On the assassination of the duke of Burgundy himself, with the connivance of the dauphin, Sept. 10, 1419, he returned to France, but not to Paris. He went to Lyons, where his brother John was, and spent his last years there in monastic seclusion. The dauphin is said to have granted him 200 livres in 1420 in recognition of his services to the crown. It remains to speak of Gerson as a theologian, a preacher and a patriot.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I was so nervous the afternoon I flew to see her that I got drunk on the plane. I couldn’t tell if she or Steve could smell it on me when I landed, although he looked at me funny. I was sitting in the backseat of their Prius and watching him gently rub her neck when the call came in. Jamie’s shoot had been extended and he was not going to be able to come. I spoke to him calmly and tried to contain my anger. I didn’t want Annika, or especially Steve, to see that I had any rage. If I could fool them then maybe I wouldn’t have to feel it myself. But that night I got so drunk on white wine that I puked all over Annika’s guest bed. Apparently, in a blackout, I talked to Steve about suicide. I wasn’t threatening to do it, just discussing its merits as a practical solution for the problems of life. I spent the remainder of the trip on good behavior. I used the bums to triangulate, inquiring about them often, giving them money. I thought that in the light of the bums I wouldn’t look so bad. I made up a game, “billionaire or bum,” in which I would ask Steve to place a bet on which one he thought a straggly-looking bohemian was. Apparently he was offended. She continued to invite me out there, especially once they got Dominic, but I always told her “soon.” I didn’t invite her to see my world. Now it was the bums, especially the kids who ran away out here, who kept Venice from becoming a total Google campus—at least so far. They graffitied the palm trees, made sure the drugs were still flowing. I felt drawn to them, particularly the younger ones, how they just let everything go. How they were able to do that. Palm trees in pristine locations depressed me. But with a little grit they were sexy against the setting sun. “Fuck me,” I said to the palm trees. When I was on Abbot Kinney, the long yuppie strip of contemporary blondewood-and-metal shops that cut across Venice diagonally, I felt out of place, more aligned with the homeless. Here were so many beautiful women: ombre-headed twentysomethings in boho-chic dresses, minimalist French women clad in black leather with angular jewelry, models even, who made me look at my toe hair and fuzzy legs in disgust. I had stopped shaving since the breakup. My hair, which had always been frizzy, was now even more coarse thanks to an infestation of gray. I was no longer even using henna. The cottage cheese on my hips stood out against my skinny legs. I had stopped giving a fuck. Looking at these women now, I thought, What if I could get really hot while I was here? What if I became the old me, or the very old me, or someone entirely new?

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  However, if I meet a man in a more social situation (e.g., at a party or a bar), he rarely stoops to blatantly crass, sexualizing comments, even when he is flirting with me. However, in social settings where I am known to be transsexual (e.g., at events where I perform spoken word poetry), men do often blatantly sexualize me: I have had men immediately engage me in conversations about how much they enjoy “she-male” porn, flat-out tell me “I’m turned on by ‘girls like you,’” and explicitly describe the sex acts they have had with other trans women in the past. And numerous times I have received unsolicited emails, presumably from men who found my website during a search using the keyword “transsexual,” in which they describe their sexual fantasies about trans women in gory detail, or ask me graphic questions about my body and sexual activities. These emails are always centered on my transsexual femaleness; I do not receive similar emails from people who presume that I am a cissexual female. Some might suggest that the reason why I experience more hardcore sexualization as a trans woman has to do with the fact that transsexuals are rather rare, thus leading others to view us as exotic. While rareness may contribute to this phenomenon, I don’t believe that it’s a sufficient explanation. After all, there are plenty of types of women who are relatively rare, but they are not all sexualized in the same manner that trans women are. Perhaps a better explanation lies in the responses I receive when I make it clear to these men that I am troubled by the explicit nature of their comments. While it’s a given that any “respectable” woman would be offended if a strange man immediately began sharing his sexual thoughts and fantasies with her (in fact, many catcallers seem to enjoy provoking these very feelings of insult or embarrassment in the women they harass), I find that the men who sexualize me as a trans woman are often dumbfounded and angered by my unwillingness to engage them on a sexually explicit level. I have even had a man accuse me of misleading him, as if the only legitimate reason for me to be out as a transsexual was to signal my sexual availability or to solicit sexual attention from men. This assumption—that I am somehow “asking for it”—is eerily similar to the attitudes some men have toward women who they believe are dressed or behaving in a sexually provocative fashion. Once again, this sort of thinking stems directly from the predator/prey power dynamic, where a woman can never truly be seen as a sexual aggressor, only a sexual object.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  13 Many of the excuses used to rationalize trans women’s exclusion are not designed to protect the values of women-only space, but rather to reinforce the idea that trans women are “real” men and “fake” women. For example, one of the most cited reasons that trans women are not allowed in the festival is that we are born with, and many of us still have, penises (many trans women either cannot afford to or choose not to have sex reassignment surgery). It is argued that our penises are dangerous because they are a symbol of male oppression and have the potential to trigger women who have been sexually assaulted or abused by men. So penises are banned from the festival, right? Well, not quite: The festival does allow women to purchase and use dildos, strap-ons, and packing devices, many of which closely resemble penises. So phalluses in and of themselves are not so bad, just so long as they are not attached to a trans woman. Another reason frequently given for the exclusion of trans women from Michigan is that we supposedly would bring “male energy” into the festival. While this seems to imply that expressions of masculinity are not allowed, nothing could be further from the truth. Michigan allows drag king performers who dress and act male, and the festival stage has featured several female-bodied performers who identify as transgender and sometimes describe themselves with male pronouns. 14 Presumably, Lisa Vogel (who is sole proprietor of the festival) allows this because she believes that no person who is born female is capable of exhibiting authentic masculinity or “male energy.” Not only is this an insult to trans men (as it suggests that they can never be fully masculine or male), but it implies that “male energy” can be measured in some way independent of whether the person expressing it appears female or male. This is clearly not the case. Even though I am a trans woman, I have never been accused of expressing “male energy,” because people perceive me as a woman. When I do act in a “masculine” way, people describe me as a “tomboy” or “butch,” and if I get aggressive or argumentative, people call me a “bitch.” My behaviors are still the same; it is only the context of my body (whether people see me as female or male) that has changed. This is the inevitable problem with all attempts to portray trans women as “fake” females (whether media or feminist in origin): They require one to give different names, meanings, and values to the same behaviors depending on whether the person in question was born with a female or male body (or whether they are perceived to be a woman or a man).

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  For one thing, there was my physical transition and the countless social changes I experienced as a result of being perceived as female. But for me, being trans didn’t merely involve learning how to navigate my way through the world as a woman. I have the privilege of being appropriately gendered as female, so in my day-to-day life, when I am forced to come out to someone, nine times out of ten it is not as a transsexual, but as a lesbian. It happens every time somebody asks me if I am seeing someone and I reply, “Actually, I have a wife.” It happens every time Dani and I dare to hold hands or kiss in public. It happens when Dani is not around, but someone assumes that I am a dyke anyway because of the way that I dress, speak, or carry myself.After my transition, I began to write not only about being transgendered, but about my experiences living in the world as a woman and a dyke after years of being perceived as a straight man. Not surprisingly, most of what I wrote had a definite feminist bent. It seemed impossible for me, as a trans woman, to discuss my journey from male to female without placing it in the context of the differing values our society places on maleness and femaleness, on masculinity and femininity.Unfortunately, many people tend to artificially separate feminism from transgender activism, as if they are distinct issues that are in no way related. However, I have found that much of the anti-trans discrimination that trans women come across is clearly rooted in traditional sexism. This can be seen in how the media Powers That Be systematically sensationalize, sexualize, and ridicule trans women while allowing trans men to remain largely invisible. It’s why the tranny sex and porn industries catering to straight-identified men do not fetishize folks on the FTM spectrum for their XX chromosomes or their socialization as girls. No, they objectify trans women, because our bodies and our persons are female. I have found that many female-assigned genderqueers and FTM spectrum trans people go on and on about the gender binary system, as if trans people are only ever discriminated against for breaking gender norms. That might be how it seems when the gender transgression in question is an expression of masculinity. But as someone on the MTF spectrum, I am not dismissed for merely failing to live up to binary gender norms, but for expressing my own femaleness and femininity. And personally, I don’t feel like I’m the victim of “transphobia” as much as I am the victim of trans-misogyny.This idea—that much of what is commonly called transphobia is merely traditional sexism in disguise—moved to the forefront of my mind as I began to be invited to do spoken word performances at various queer women’s events around the San Francisco Bay Area.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Femininity is portrayed as a trick or ruse so that masculinity invariably seems sincere by comparison. For this reason, there are few intellectual tasks easier than artificializing feminine gender expression, because male-centricism purposefully sets up femininity as masculinity’s “straw man” or its scapegoat.As feminists, it’s time for us to acknowledge that this scapegoating of femininity has become the Achilles’ heel of the feminist movement. While past feminists have gone to great lengths to empower femaleness and to tear away all of the negative connotations that have plagued women’s bodies and biology, they have allowed the negative connotations associated with femininity to persist relatively unabated. Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that, while most reasonable people see women and men as equals, few (if any) dare to claim that femininity is masculinity’s equal. Indeed, much of what has historically been called misogyny—a hatred of women—has clearly gone underground, disguising itself as the less reprehensible derision of femininity. This new version of misogyny, which focuses more on maligning femininity than femaleness, can be found everywhere. It can be seen in our political discourse, where advocates for the environment, gun control, and welfare are undermined via “guilt by association” with feminine imagery as seen in phrases such as “tree huggers,” “soft on crime,” and pro-“dependency”—where male politicians who exhibit anything other than a two-dimensional facade of hypermasculinity are invariably dismissed by political cartoonists who depict them donning dresses.19This new misogyny still very much undermines women, and it accomplishes this in several ways. First, the majority of feminine people are women, so by default they make up the largest class of those who are targeted by antifeminine sentiment. Second, our concept of femininity doesn’t merely affect how we “do” our own gender expression—it is also an expectation or assumption that we project onto other people’s bodies and behaviors. Therefore, while an individual woman may purposefully eschew femininity in her appearance and actions, she cannot escape the fact that other people will project feminine assumptions and expectations upon her simply because they associate femininity with femaleness. In her book Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women , Virginia Valian makes a strong case that what has come to be known as the “glass ceiling”—the fact that women, regardless of their skills and merits, tend not to advance as far in their careers as similarly qualified men—is best explained by the fact that all people project feminine assumptions and expectations onto women and masculine ones onto men.20 This, of course, favors men, since masculinity is by default seen as “strong,” “natural,” and “aggressive” while femininity is seen as “weak,” “contrived,” and “passive.”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Very angry he grew, and his dinner fermented, dilating his stomach and causing discomfort, so that his wife became anxious about him . ‘Now don’t ee go worryin’, Arth-thur,’ she coaxed; ‘us be old, me and you, and the world be progressin’.’ ‘It be goin’ to the devil, that’s what it be doin’!’ groaned Williams, rubbing his stomach. To make matters worse, Sir Philip’s behaviour was that of a schoolboy with some horrid new contraption. He was caught by his stud-groom lying flat on his back with his feet sticking out beneath the bonnet of the motor, and when he emerged there was soot on his cheek-bones, on his hair, and even on the tip of his nose. He looked terribly sheepish, and as Williams said later to his wife: ‘It were somethin’ aw-ful to see ’im all mucked up, and ’im such a neat gentleman, and ’im in a filthy old coat of that Burton’s, and that Burton agrinnin’ at me and just pointin’, silent, because the master couldn’t see ’im, and the master a-callin’ up familiar-like to Burton: “I say! She’s got somethin’ all wrong with ’er exhaust pipe!” and Burton acontradictin’ the master: “It’s that piston,” says ’e, as cool as yer please.’ Nor was Stephen less thrilled by the car than was her father. Stephen made friends with the execrable Burton, and Burton, who was only too anxious to gain allies, soon started to teach her the parts of the engine; he taught her to drive too, Sir Philip being willing, and off they would go, the three of them together, leaving Williams to glare at the disappearing motor. ‘And ’er such a fine ’orse-woman and all!’ he would grumble, rubbing a disconsolate chin. It is not too much to say that Williams felt heart-broken, he was like a very unhappy old baby; quite infantile he was in his fits of bad temper, in his mouthings and his grindings of toothless gums.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  This tendency to dismiss feminine women is eerily similar to the behavior of some lesbian-feminists in the 1970s who arrogantly claimed that they were more righteous feminists than heterosexual women because the latter group was “fucking with the oppressor.”17 It is an extraordinarily convenient tactic to artificialize, and even demean, an inclination (such as femininity or heterosexuality) when you personally are not inclined toward it. Indeed, this is exactly what straight bigots do when they dismiss queer forms of gender and sexual expression as “unnatural.” When we feminists stoop to the level of policing gender and start inventing etiologies to explain why some women adopt “unnatural” feminine forms of expression, there’s little to distinguish us from the sexist forces we claim to be fighting against in the first place.While femininity is in many ways influenced, shaped, and enforced by society, to say that it is entirely “artificial” or merely a “performance” is patronizing toward those for whom femininity simply feels right. Indeed, one would have to have a rather grim view of the female population to believe that a majority of us could so easily be “brainwashed” or “coerced” into enthusiastically adopting an entirely contrived or wholly artificial set of gender expressions. In fact, it seems incomprehensible that so many women could so actively gravitate toward femininity unless there was something about it that resonated with them on a profound level. This becomes even more obvious when considering feminine folks who exhibit no desire whatsoever to fit into straight society, such as femme dykes (who proudly express their femininity despite being historically marginalized within the lesbian movement because of it) and “nelly queens” (who remain fiercely feminine despite the gay male obsession with praising butchness and deriding “effeminacy”).18The idea that “femininity is artificial” is also blatantly misogynistic. While a handful of theorists in the field of gender studies have more recently begun to focus on how masculinity is constructed, the lion’s share of feminist attention, deconstruction, and denigration has been directed squarely at femininity. There is an obvious reason for this. Just as woman is man’s “other,” so too is femininity masculinity’s “other.” Under such circumstances, negative connotations like “artificial,” “contrived,” and “frivolous” become built into our understanding of femininity—indeed, this is precisely what allows masculinity to always come off as “natural,” “practical,” and “uncomplicated.” Those feminists who single out women’s dress shoes, clothing, and hairstyles to artificialize necessarily leave unchallenged the notion that their masculine counterparts are “natural” and “practical.” This is the same male-centered approach that allows the appearances and behaviors of men who wish to charm or impress others to seem “authentic” while the reciprocal traits expressed by women are dismissed as “feminine wiles.”