Contempt

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.

Page 217 of 253 · 20 per page

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

  While the transvestite/transsexual dichotomy fails to account for the broad spectrum of MTF transgenderism, it has predominated because it mirrors the predator/prey dichotomy that many psychiatrists implicitly buy into. Until very recently, to be considered a MTF transsexual, one had to express a desire to be female, be sexually attracted to men, be feminine in gender expression, wish to have a vagina rather than a penis, and appear unquestionably female post-transition. In other words, psychiatrists required transsexual women to be willing and able to become desirable sexual objects in the eyes of heterosexual men. For many decades, those MTF spectrum trans people who failed to meet any one of these criteria (i.e., who were unwilling to meet all of the prerequisites of a sexual object) were denied their requests to physically transition and were often presumed to be “merely” transvestites. Unlike MTF transsexuals, who were typically perceived as sexual objects, transvestites were viewed as men, and thus sexual aggressors. Their desire to dress as women was viewed not as a self-empowering or even neutral act of gender expression, but rather as a fetish for wearing feminine clothing. This sexualization of feminine gender expression has been codified in the psychiatric diagnosis transvestic fetishism, which is so vaguely written as to suggest that all heterosexual men who crossdress are driven by this “sexual paraphilia.” 7 The bizarre assumptions built into the transvestic fetishism diagnosis—especially its specific exclusion of nonheterosexual men who crossdress—suggest that it has been created for the sole purpose of reinforcing the predator/prey dichotomy. In a sense, Transvestic Fetishism misconstrues feminine gender expression in heterosexual males as a somewhat “normal” (albeit misdirected) example of male sexual aggressors who sexually objectify femininity. Homosexual males are presumably exempt because women are not their sexual object choice (as that would undermine the labeling of their crossdressing as a fetish) and/or their expressions of femininity are presumed to primarily facilitate their own sexual objectification by other men. Over the years, the MTF transsexual/transvestite dichotomy has increasingly been called into question, as it has become apparent that many (but certainly not all) self-identified male crossdressers eventually come to see themselves as transsexuals and choose to physically transition to female. 8 This occurs despite the fact that they often remain primarily attracted to women and/or that their gender expression may not be viewed by others as sufficiently feminine.

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

  32 Of course, the one thing that these theories all have in common—besides the fact that they all blame the mother for her son’s feminine inclinations—is that they cannot be applied to (nor do they even attempt to account for) the existence of exceptional gender inclinations in those born and raised female. Effemimania in sexology has led to the creation of additional labels and subcategories for MTF spectrum trans people that are rarely, if ever, applied to FTM spectrum individuals. The most common of these is the distinction between transvestites and transsexuals. According to gatekeeper lore, transvestites are male-identified, are attracted to women, and show no interest in transitioning, while MTF transsexuals are female-identified, attracted to men, and wish to fully transition. Some gatekeepers continue to rely on such stereotypes despite the overwhelming evidence that such cut-and-dried categories do not exist: Some male transvestites are bisexual or gay, and many who seem heterosexual often fantasize about having sex with men; many MTF transsexuals are bisexual or lesbian; some MTF trans people choose to live full-time as women without undergoing sex reassignment; and a significant percentage of transvestites eventually come to identify as transsexual and seek out sex reassignment. Another common classification system specifically designed to describe variations among MTF spectrum individuals is the distinction between primary and secondary transsexuals. 33 According to this model, primary transsexuals fit the classic archetype of “true” transsexuals: They tend to become aware of their female gender identity very early in childhood, they are often very feminine throughout their lives, and they are generally attracted to men. Secondary transsexuals tend to discover their female gender identity much later in life (usually during puberty), they are typically less feminine than primary transsexuals, and they are usually attracted to women. A hypersexualized version of this model recently garnered attention with the publication of J. Michael Bailey’s 2003 book The Man Who Would Be Queen. 34 Bailey refers to primary-type MTF transsexuals as being “homosexual” and claims that they are merely feminine men whose decision to transition to female arises from their desire to be intimate with men. Bailey further claims that secondary-type transsexuals are “autogynephilic”—essentially men who are attracted to women and who seek sex reassignment because they are turned on by the idea of having female bodies themselves.

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

  8 In response, many of those who were positioning themselves as gatekeepers argued in favor of an approach that was quite different from the one Benjamin initially advocated, one that would regulate and limit the availability of hormones and sex reassignment procedures only to those trans people who would be able to successfully blend into society as “normal” women and men. According to this strategy, the gatekeepers’ job was to sort out the “true” transsexuals (who would be allowed to fully transition) from all other trans people (who would be denied any medical intervention other than psychotherapy). This highly dichotomous approach to treating trans people reflected the fact that most other sexologists who became involved in transsexuality—such as John Money, who pioneered the use of nonconsensual genital surgeries on intersex infants, and Richard Green, who is renowned for his use of behavioral modification to eliminate femininity in young boys—seemed to be primarily interested in “curing” (i.e., eliminating) sex-, gender-, and sexuality-related ambiguities. By the late 1960s—with the establishment of several U.S. gender identity clinics and the publication of Green and Money’s medical anthology Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment —a standard protocol for dealing with people who requested sex reassignment had started to emerge. 9 These guidelines for treatment were later codified with the release of the original HBIGDA Standards of Care in 1979, and while they have evolved somewhat over time—especially since the mid-1990s, when HBIGDA finally began to incorporate changes suggested by the transgender community—they follow the same basic outline today. 10 While this chapter is largely written in past tense (to maintain grammatical consistency), it should be said that most gatekeepers today still follow this same basic protocol, and many still evaluate their trans clients based on the oppositional and traditional sexist criteria that I discuss throughout this chapter. The first step in this process was a period of psychotherapy (lasting at least three months, often more), during which time a mental health professional would evaluate the client. If the trans person received a recommendation from that therapist (which today comes in the form of a diagnosis of gender identity disorder, or GID), they would then be allowed to begin their “real-life test”—a one- or two-year period during which they were required to live full-time in their identified sex.

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

  Thus, in order to challenge sexism, people must “perform” their genders in ways that bend, break, and blur all of the imaginary distinctions that exist between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, and so on, presumably leading to a systemwide binary meltdown. According to the principles of subversivism, drag is inherently “subversive,” as it reveals that our society’s binary notions of maleness and femaleness are not natural, but rather are actively “constructed” and “performed” by all of us. Another way that one can be “transgressively gendered” is by identifying as genderqueer or genderfluid—i.e., refusing to identify fully as either woman or man. The notion that certain gender identities and expressions are inherently “subversive” or “transgressive” can be seen throughout the queer/trans community, where drag and gender-bending are routinely celebrated, where binary-confounding identities such as “boy-identified-dyke” and “pansexual trannyfag” have become rather commonplace. On the surface, subversivism gives the appearance of accommodating a seemingly infinite array of genders and sexualities, but this is not quite the case. Subversivism does have very specific boundaries; it has an “other.” By glorifying identities and expressions that appear to subvert or blur gender binaries, subversivism automatically creates a reciprocal category of people whose gender and sexual identities and expressions are by default inherently conservative, even “hegemonic,” because they are seen as reinforcing or naturalizing the binary gender system. Not surprisingly, this often-unspoken category of bad, conservative genders is predominantly made up of feminine women and masculine men who are attracted to the “opposite” sex. One routinely sees this “dark side” of subversivism rear its head in the queer/trans community, where it is not uncommon to hear individuals critique or call into question other queers or trans folks because their gender presentation, behaviors, or sexual preferences are not deemed “subversive” enough. Indeed, if one fails to sufficiently distinguish oneself from heterosexual feminine women and masculine men, one runs the risk of being accused of “reinforcing the gender binary,” an indictment that is tantamount to being called a sexist. One of the most common targets of such critiques are transsexuals, and particularly those who are heterosexual and gender-normative post-transition. Indeed, because such transsexuals (in the eyes of others) transition from a seemingly “transgressive” queer identity to a “conservative” straight one, subversivists may even claim that they have transitioned in order to purposefully “assimilate” themselves into straight culture. While these days, such accusations are often couched in the rhetoric of current queer theory, they rely on many of the same mistaken assumptions that plagued the work of cissexist feminists like Janice Raymond and sociologists like Thomas Kando decades ago. 2 The practice of subversivism also negatively impacts trans people on the MTF spectrum. After all, in our culture, the meanings of “bold,” “rebellious,” and “dangerous”—adjectives that often come to mind when considering subversiveness—are practically built into our understanding of masculinity. In contrast, femininity conjures up antonyms like “timid,” “conventional,” and “safe,” which seem entirely incompatible with subversion.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Alas, our fearless leader was deeply single and trying to be at peace with it. I wondered if she even had a boyfriend. How could she lead a group on sex and love issues? Who would want to take love advice from a single woman who convinced herself she was happy using store-bought sayings she posted on her wall? And what kind of doctor was she anyway? I didn’t see a PhD next to her name. Was she a doctor of love? Dr. Jude had yellowish teeth and a Dorothy Hamill haircut. I guess the yellow teeth meant that she accepted herself and would not be changing for anyone. I was oddly intrigued by her positivity in the face of the abyss, as though I were an anthropologist encountering a new culture for the first time. But when she quoted E. E. Cummings in an attempt to say that we could only be ourselves, I decided she was stupid. Also, she used the words radical acceptance a lot. I didn’t want to radically accept anything. When I returned to Phoenix I wanted everything to be radically different. I didn’t like her. But compared to the disaster that was the rest of the group, Dr. Jude seemed like a winner. Our youngest member was Amber: mid-twenties, built like a female wrestler, sweatpants covered in dog hair. Amber had been in the group longest and was furthest along in terms of “doing the work” in the personal growth and love department. She made sure we all knew that. Immediately, in my mind I called her Chickenhorse, as her head was long and horse-shaped but she had a beaky nose and big pink gums that resembled a chicken’s comb and wattles. She seemed to get aroused by telling all of us we were wrong. Dr. Jude had encouraged Chickenhorse to start dating again, but she had not yet begun. Instead, she focused on problematic interactions she had with people in her life. “My boss is emotionally abusive. He’s victimizing me,” she said. “Can you tell us more?” asked Dr. Jude. “I can’t explain it, it’s just a feeling,” she said. “And as the victim, I don’t think I should have to explain myself.” “Understandable,” said Dr. Jude. “It’s my truth. And I’m afraid to bring it up to his supervisors, because this is what happened with my last boss too. He was another abuser; there’s a pattern of abuse. When I came forward about it at my last job, everyone started gaslighting me by acting like I’m the crazy one.”

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I liked the Beats for a second when I was fourteen. By sixteen I realized they were mostly just good for picking out a douchebag. There was something about douche bros and the Beats. They just gravitated there. “Yeah, I love them,” I said. “Who is your favorite?” “Kerouac,” he said. “I’m really into Kerouac, Burroughs, and Bukowski. Kerouac just keeps it so real, like the way he writes his characters it’s just so—legit. I would love to write like him someday.” “Right,” I said. “So how about that walk?” he said. Outside it was almost dark. He lit up a cigarette and offered me one. I declined and watched him squint and inhale, then exhale. Clearly he had studied that move: a James Dean kind of smoking pose. But he was no James Dean, and his hands were even more monkey-werewolf than the rest of him: monkey in the way they curled around the cigarette like they were clutching a banana and werewolf in the way his arm hair crawled well over his wrist and onto the hands themselves. He was hairy to the knuckle. We started to walk and I felt like I was going to vomit. I kept wanting to say, “You know what? Thanks, but I’m not feeling so great and I’m just going to walk home.” But we kept walking. Suddenly he grabbed my hand and said, “Can I kiss you?” But he didn’t wait for me to respond. His palm was sweaty, but his lips were full and I closed my eyes and it felt shocking to be kissing someone new. The new mouth shape was exciting, also strange. After eight years I forgot that lips could come in different shapes and feels. Also, the taste of cigarettes and whiskey was exciting. I was half nauseated and half turned on. I felt rebellious and young. “What?” he said. “Nothing,” I said, giggling. “You’re just cute.” Looking at him, I really didn’t think he was cute. But I didn’t know what else to say so I shut my eyes and took the back of his head in my palm and pulled him toward me. Then he introduced his tongue, much deeper into my mouth, circling it in a clockwise motion. What the fuck was he doing? He was ruining it. I started to put my tongue out as a guard, to try to stop his rotating tongue, but I guess he just took this as a sign that I was turned on—that I was into it—because he continued with the circling, only deeper in my mouth, almost to my throat, gagging me. I put my finger up between our mouths, pretending to trace his lips, but really trying to create some distance. Then I closed my lips a lot, guiding him into softer and gentler kisses. I kept my eyes sealed shut. I could have just cut it off there. I’d gotten what I said I wanted. I’m not sure why I didn’t.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  The candle had melted all over the deck and I spent a good half hour scraping wax, which was congealing—thinly—in the sun. I decided I would take Dominic for a walk over to the Santa Monica farmers’ market, try to be like other humans on a Sunday. Maybe buy some fruit and be swept away in some bullshit of the day. Maybe I could just be a woman and her dog buying fruit. The farmers’ market was full of families. I don’t like families. There was a band doing covers of Crosby, Stills & Nash and children getting pony rides. It made me want to never eat anything organic again. By the locally farmed corn I ran into Claire, the redhead from group. She smiled and waved. I guess she was a little better. At least, she was no longer crying. “I’m never going back to that group again,” she said. “Fuck them and their shite, they know fuck-all about me. I don’t believe in love addiction. I don’t believe in withdrawal or taking time off from dating or anything that puritanical or black and white can fix my problem.” “Yeah, they’re pretty depressing.” “The worst,” she said. “And I just had a date with a hot younger man. His name is David, a total crumpet. I’m already enamored, probably on the road to obsession. But I think that if I can just keep them coming—you know, have more than one boy I’m fucking, maybe two or three—then I won’t get so fixated on one of them.” “That seems smart,” I said. “I’m already interviewing a harem. I’ve been going to polyamory events. I met this one guy, Trent, at an event in Topanga. He is a little older, did porn. He has a ponytail and I can’t tell if it’s scraggly or scrummy, but I think scrummy. He has a wife. She has boyfriends. I’m going to fuck him tomorrow night. I also met this other guy named Orion; he’s, like, barely eighteen, very twee. He was wearing a kilt. He’s pansexual. We made out all night. But he lives in Vermont and already went back, so I’m still looking for a third. I might shag this guy who works at Best Buy. We’ve fucked in the past. He’s a Jamaican guy, super cut, really nice to me.” “Are they all poly? Is David poly too?” “No, he’s, like, I don’t know what. A computer programmer. Might be on the spectrum. Does yoga, though. Huge cock.” “So fun,” I said. “I’m jealous.” “You should really be doing Tinder,” she said. “Or come with me to these poly things.” “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m worried about getting obsessed with someone else. And Dr. Jude said—” “Rubbish,” she said. “How else do you think you are going to get over him? You think you are going to just heal?

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

  To me, the most surreal part of this whole transgressingversus-reinforcing-gender-norms dialogue in the queer/trans community (and in many gender studies classrooms and books) is the unacknowledged hypocrisy of it all. It is sadly ironic that people who claim to be gender-fucking in the name of “shattering the gender binary,” and who criticize people whose identities fail to adequately challenge our societal notions of femaleness and maleness, cannot see that they have just created a new gender binary, one in which subversive genders are “good” and conservative genders are “bad.” In a sense, this new gender binary isn’t even all that new. It is merely the original oppositional sexist binary flipped upside down. So now, gender-nonconforming folks are on top and gender-normative people are on the bottom—how revolutionary! Now, I understand the temptation for a marginalized group to turn the hierarchy that has oppressed them upside down, as it can feel very empowering to finally be atop the pecking order, but it’s absurd to claim that such approaches in any way undermine that binary. If anything, they only serve to reinforce it further. Subversivism’s binary flip is very reminiscent of another binary flip that was forwarded by cultural feminists in the mid-1970s. While subversivism reverses oppositional sexism, cultural feminism sought to reverse traditional sexism by claiming that women were naturally creative and cooperative and therefore superior to men, who were seen as inherently destructive and oppressive. While it is always difficult to draw comparisons between different social/political movements for fear of oversimplifying them, there are other striking parallels between subversivism and cultural feminism that are worth bearing out. As historian Alice Echols describes in her book Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975, cultural feminism evolved from its more outwardly focused predecessor, radical feminism.4 While radical feminism—which asserted that neither sex was inherently superior to the other—actively engaged the mainstream public (and men in particular) to challenge and change their sexist ways, cultural feminism was a more insular movement, focusing on creating women-run organizations and women-only spaces rather than organizing public demonstrations. And unlike radical feminism, which attempted to accommodate a variety of different female perspectives (in fact, issues over “difference” in class and sexuality consumed much of the movement’s energy), cultural feminists forwarded the idea of “sameness” and “oneness”—that all women were part of a universal sisterhood, united by their female biology.

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

  However, many other deconstructive feminists have interpreted Butler’s writings to mean that one’s gender is merely a “performance.” According to this latter view, if gender itself is merely a “performance,” then one can challenge sexism by simply “performing” one’s gender in ways that call the binary gender system into question; the most often cited example of this is a drag queen whose “performance” supposedly reveals the way in which femaleness and femininity are merely a “performance.”15While unilateral feminists typically view femininity in exclusively negative terms, deconstructive feminists believe that femininity is context-dependent: It can be “good” (when it is used to subvert the binary gender system) or “bad” (when used to naturalize that system).16 In other words, deconstructive feminism only empowers and embraces queer expressions of femininity, while straight expressions of femininity are typically portrayed as reinforcing a sexist binary gender system. Thus, both deconstructive and unilateral feminism share the belief that (1) femininity is not a natural form of expression, but rather one that is socially imposed; (2) most women are “duped” into believing that their femininity arises intrinsically rather than due to extrinsic forces such as socialization or social constructs; (3) people who are “in the know” recognize that gender expression is artificial and easily malleable, and thus they can purposefully adopt a more radical, antisexist gender expression (e.g., androgyny, drag, etc.); and (4) because feminine women choose not to adopt these supposedly radical, antisexist gender expressions, they may be seen as enabling sexism and thus collaborating in their own oppression.The Ramifications of Artificializing FemininitySo why has the artificializing of femininity become a preoccupation for many feminists over the last several decades? I believe that it has to do with the fact that many of the women who have most strongly gravitated toward feminism are those who have found traditional feminine gender roles constraining or unnatural. In many cases, this is due to their own inclinations toward exceptional forms of gender expression. Because their personal experiences with femininity felt uncomfortable and contrived in comparison with their experiences with androgyny, masculinity, or other gender expressions (which they found more liberating and empowering), they mistakenly projected their own experience and perspective onto all other women. While not necessarily done maliciously, this extrapolation was nevertheless an act of gender entitlement, one that denied that any diversity in gender expression might exist among women arising out of their very different class, cultural, or biological backgrounds and predispositions. By arrogantly assuming that no woman could be legitimately drawn toward feminine expression, these feminists permanently relegated femininity to the status of “false consciousness.”The feminist assumption that “femininity is artificial” is narcissistic, as it invariably casts nonfeminine women as having “superior knowledge” while dismissing feminine women as either “dupes” (who are too ignorant to recognize they have been conned) or “fakes” (who purposely engage in “unnatural” behaviors in order to uphold sexist societal norms).

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

  Burke describes Green’s line of reasoning as involving “a devaluation of all that is traditionally feminine when it appears strongly in a boy. Girls are not chosen [as playmates] by boys because they like them; they are chosen because they can be dominated, or are not a threat. Activities are chosen not because they are enjoyed, but because boys fail at masculine activities, because if the boys could succeed at masculine activities, why would they bother with feminine activities?” 37 Some might be inclined to view effemimania as simply a manifestation of homophobia or transphobia, but this would be inaccurate. Effemimania specifically targets femininity rather than homosexuality or transsexuality as a whole. For example, in her 1991 essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick discusses how Richard C. Friedman, a psychoanalyst and the author of Male Homosexuality: A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspective, speaks rather admirably about gay men who exhibit masculine traits, while correlating “adult gay male effeminacy with ‘global character psychopathology’ and what he calls ‘the lower part of the psychostructural spectrum.’” 38 And while all forms of transsexuality are still formally pathologized, it has been quite common for gatekeepers to claim that trans men are more psychologically “stable” than trans women. 39 Often, such comments are made without any further explanation, leading one to suspect that these characterizations stem from the gatekeepers’ unspoken assumption that masculinity and the desire to be male are, in and of themselves, more rational and healthy tendencies than femininity and the desire to be female. Another issue that seems to fuel effemimania is our cultural tendency to sexualize femininity and femaleness in all its forms. While countless feminist writers and theorists have analyzed the ways in which the sexualization of femaleness and femininity permeates virtually every aspect of our culture and has a negative impact on most women’s lives, they have typically ignored the way this tendency creates an environment in which “male femininity” is almost always considered in purely sexual terms. For example, most popular images and impressions of trans women revolve around sexuality: from “she-male” and “chicks with dicks” pornography to media portrayals of us as sexual deceivers, prostitutes, and sex workers. And of course, there are the recurring themes of trans women who transition in order either to gain the sexual attention of men or to fulfill some kind of bizarre sex fantasy (both of which appear regularly in the media, and also in Bailey and Blanchard’s model of MTF transgenderism).

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

  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. 19 This 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.” Therefore, until feminists work to empower femininity and pry it away from the insipid, inferior meanings that plague it—weakness, helplessness, fragility, passivity, frivolity, and artificiality—those meanings will continue to haunt every person who is female and/or feminine. Feminists’ past privileging of femaleness over femininity has also enabled misogynistic acts that target men who have feminine traits to remain unnoticed and unarticulated. For example, when a gay man ridicules another gay man for being too “flamboyant” or “effeminate,” he may be accused of harboring “internalized homophobia”—a nonsensical turn of phrase to describe someone who is openly gay and has no problems with masculine gay men. Isn’t this form of antifeminine discrimination better described as misogyny? Similarly, straight women who regularly pair up with macho guys who treat them poorly, yet won’t consider dating a “nice guy,” might be described as harboring “internalized misogyny.” Again, isn’t this better described as a form of externalized misogyny directed at men who display qualities that are considered feminine? Some feminists (particularly unilateral feminists) will no doubt have a negative knee-jerk reaction to my suggestion that we extend our understanding of misogyny to encompass effemimania—our societal obsession with critiquing and belittling feminine traits in males. However, as I have argued in past chapters, effemimania affects everybody, including women.

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

  Perhaps sensing that feminine gay men and MTF spectrum trans people brought unilateral feminists’ antifemininity theses into question, many unilateral feminists developed vehemently disdainful attitudes toward these groups. Interestingly (and not coincidentally), the unilateral feminists who have been most outspoken in deriding feminine gay men and trans women also tend to have the most openly hostile attitudes toward femininity in general. For example, Mary Daly, who referred to feminine women as “painted birds” and portrayed feminist women such as herself as being “attacked by the mutants of her own kind, the man-made women,” was similarly resentful of transsexual women (whom she called “Frankenstein’s Monsters”) and drag queens (whom she compared to whites playing “blackface”). 11 Germaine Greer, who has referred to conventionally feminine women as “feminine parasites,” has written multiple trans-misogynistic screeds, one of which assails trans woman Jan Morris for her “obsession with femininity.” 12 And Sheila Jeffreys, who believes that femininity “is the behavior required of the subordinate class of women in order to show their deference to the ruling class of men,” has argued that MTF transsexuality and gay male femininity arise exclusively from sexual masochism. 13 Thus, the anti-gay-male, anti-trans-woman sentiment that persists today among many unilateral feminists has its roots in their traditionally sexist views of femininity. Many of the unilateral feminist positions that I’ve discussed so far have been challenged with the rise of deconstructive feminism in the 1980s and 1990s. Deconstructive feminists, while varied in their backgrounds and approaches, share the belief that the category “woman” is socially constructed and therefore doesn’t exist independent of the societal norms and discourses that bring it into being. Therefore, instead of working to end sexism by highlighting the ways that women are “oppressed” by men (as unilateral feminists had), deconstructive feminists set out to deconstruct our very notions of “woman” and “man,” exposing the assumptions and expectations that enable sexism. They describe “man” and “woman” as being situated within a binary gender system that permeates every nook and cranny of our society, infusing itself into our language, traditions, behaviors, and the very way we think about ourselves and others. This binary gender system assumes that men are masculine and aggressive and attracted to women, who are feminine and passive. If one fails to adhere to these assumptions in any way—for instance, if you are an aggressive woman or a feminine man—then you automatically become unintelligible within this system and are therefore marginalized. Deconstructive feminism differs from unilateral feminism in a number of important ways. First, unlike unilateral feminism, which focuses almost exclusively on traditional sexism, deconstructive feminism focuses primarily on oppositional sexism. In a sense, deconstructive feminism subsumes traditional sexism into oppositional sexism, as it typically depicts the “othering” of “woman” as an inevitable by-product of that identity being binary- paired to “man.” Because this relationship privileges oppositional sexism over traditional sexism, deconstructive feminists have been influential in both feminist and queer theory.

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

  As trans-related language has shifted away from the word “sex” and toward “gender,” the term “sex reassignment” (a more formal way to refer to medical and/or legal transition) has given way to the phrase “gender affirmation.” And while some people still identify as “genderqueer,” that term has largely been supplanted by the label “nonbinary.” Occasionally, I refer to people as being male- or female-bodied, or as female- or male-identified. Sometimes this occurs when discussing phenomenological aspects of my own transition: My body used to be physically male, but nowadays it’s physically female, which both is a very different embodied experience and leads people to interpret and treat me differently than before. Other times, I use these phrases to account for the fact that trans people’s gender identities and physical bodies do not always align. Unfortunately, anti-trans activists have since appropriated this language in their attempts to undermine trans people—for instance, they might refer to me as merely a “female-identified male-bodied person” in their attempts to erase my lived experiences as a woman. In response to this, some trans people now eschew or condemn this language. While this is an understandable reaction, it does make it difficult to discuss many nuances of the trans experience, especially with regard to non- and pre-transition trans folks. Finally, while I use the adjectives/acronyms “MTF” and “FTM” to refer to transgender trajectories or spectrums here, these terms have since fallen out of favor, likely because they make it seem as though we are perpetually “in between” those two states. My preferred descriptors for these trajectories/spectrums nowadays are trans female/feminine and trans male/masculine, respectively—this language emphasizes who we are in the here and now, without needlessly referencing the sex that we were nonconsensually assigned at birth. Unfortunately, the language that is most often used to describe transgender trajectories today is “AMAB” and “AFAB.” While there are certainly times when discussing “assigned sex/gender at birth” is useful (I occasionally do so throughout this book), referring to trans people en masse as “AMAB transsexuals” or “AFAB transgender people” goes against everything that trans communities have worked for.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  It’s produced nothing but squabbles, crusades, inquisitions, and witch burnings. The church is part of the problem, not part of the solution.” Well, of course you have to tell the story that way if you are Voltaire, eager to wipe out the “scandal” of the church, or indeed if you are a postmodern journalist ready to sneer at God’s apparent representatives (the often muddled clergy) to stop yourself from having to take God himself seriously. But the failure of Christianity is a modern myth, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of telling the proper story of church history, which of course has plenty of muddle and wickedness, but also far more than we normally imagine of love and creativity and beauty and justice and healing and education and hope. To imagine a world without the gospel of Jesus is to imagine a pretty bleak place, the cultural and ideological equivalent of those horrible 1960s buildings that were structures without spirit, boxes without beauty, all function and no flourish. And of course the reason the Enlightenment has taught us to trash our own history, to say that Christianity is part of the problem, is that it has had a rival eschatology to promote. It couldn’t allow Christianity to claim that world history turned its great corner when Jesus of Nazareth died and rose again, because it wanted to claim that world history turned its great corner in Europe in the eighteenth century. “All that went before,” it says, “is superstition and mumbo-jumbo. We have now seen the great light, and our modern science, technology, philosophy, and politics have ushered in the new order of the ages.” That was believed and expounded in America and France, and it has soaked into our popular culture and imagination. (George Washington contrasted the “gloomy age of ignorance and superstition” up to that point with the new epoch ushered in by the great revolutions of the late eighteenth century, when “the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined.”) So of course Christianity is reduced from an eschatology (“This is where history was meant to be going, despite appearances!”) to a religion (“Here is a way of being spiritual”), because world history can’t have two great turning points. If the Enlightenment is the great, dramatic, all-important corner of world history, Jesus can’t have been. He is still wanted on board, of course, as a figure through whom people can try to approach the incomprehensible mystery of the “divine” and as a teacher of moral truths that might, if applied, actually strengthen the fabric of the brave new post-Enlightenment society. But when Christianity is made “just a religion,” it first muzzles and then silences altogether the message the gospels were eager to get across. When that happens, the gospel message is substantially neutralized as a force in the world beyond the realm of private spirituality and an escapist heaven. That, indeed, was the intention. And the churches have, by and large, gone along for the ride.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The greatly outworn phrase “the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith,” which has meant many different things, naturally reflects this position. There are of course infinite modifications within this picture. It has become commonplace to point out that these liberal portraits of Jesus have an uncomfortable habit of resembling the artists who are sketching them—or at least, the artists as they would like to imagine themselves. By itself, however, that remark is just a cheap shot, however true. We need to dig deeper and see more of what was going on. The attempt to reconstruct a “Jesus” other than the one given by classic Christianity goes back, in the modern period, to H. S. Reimarus (1694–1768). He was writing at the height of the Enlightenment’s rebellion against the classic Christianity it knew and despised. He is the equivalent, within the study of the gospels, of the great eighteenth-century French writer Voltaire, with his battle cry Écraser l’infame, “Wipe out the scandal”—meaning the “scandal” of official Christianity and the posturing and hypocrisy of the church. Whereas some theologians have spoken of “faith seeking understanding,” Reimarus and his later followers and imitators (up to the present day) have been more in the mode of unfaith seeking historical validation. That spirit is alive and well, in both the scholarly and popular markets. But the catch is this. Just like the would-be “orthodox” readings, though for almost the opposite reasons, this reductionist reading of the gospels has simply ignored the story that the gospels themselves were keen to tell. All that these movements have done is to stand the “orthodox” reading on its head, to highlight the middle at the cost of the edges rather than vice versa. But this hasn’t, in fact, really advanced the understanding of the middle material itself. Nor has it begun to address the question of why the gospels told the story the way they did, with their careful and subtle integration of the edges and the middle—indeed, without any indication that they were aware of two different types of material in the first place . Faced with these challenges, would-be “orthodox” Christian scholars and teachers have had one of two reactions. First, many—including the present writer—have accepted the historical challenge and sought to answer it. When we really study all the evidence for all it’s worth, it is possible to offer a historically rooted picture of Jesus that is much fuller and more positive than the one classic liberal reductionism has constructed.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  There are deeper issues afoot as well. In today’s muddled thinking we find, on the one hand, some people who are almost ready to deny the Fall, imagining that the world is a nice, safe place and that nobody needs any “power” to look after it (hence the anarchist dream and its right-wing small-government equivalent). On the other hand, there are other people who are ready to produce a doctrine of total depravity when it comes to anyone who actually has power, so that power is automatically, ipso facto, bad. Both of these viewpoints result in suspicion of actual rulers: the first, because they’re not really needed, and the second, because they are bound to abuse their power. You could of course run the argument the other way, with the charitable assumption attaching itself to rulers and the doctrine of depravity going with the mob. (Another contemporary irony is that the libertarians, who are all for cutting back on police powers and making prisons more comfortable, are often the first in line to call for harsh penalties when violent mobs rampage through their own neighborhoods. ) And, in the middle of this, the word “theocracy” is not one that many people like to hear. It makes them think of Fascist states in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century or fundamentalist states in the Middle East in the first half of the twenty-first. If God is in charge, then—so people suppose—there will be a hard-line “clerical” elite or near equivalent (the Party bosses in Communist or Fascist systems) who claim to be channeling God’s will. No room, then, for dissent or even debate. God says it; they enforce it; that settles it. But does this square with first-century Jewish views of what “theocracy” might look like, and perhaps should look like? First-century Jews knew all about bad rulers, both pagan and Jewish. But when they longed, as many did, for God alone to become king, this vision, rooted as it was in the great biblical kingdom texts, usually envisaged that the way God would become king would be through the appropriate human agency. This, in the Psalms, Isaiah, and many other texts both biblical and postbiblical, meant of course the messiah, the anointed king. And we must never forget, though many today do, that in the ancient scriptural picture of the messiah he is king not only of Israel but, like David and Solomon (at least in principle and in rose-tinted memory), of the whole world. Here again the Psalms are central; Psalms 2, 72, and other similar ones made sure the vision remained fresh in a liturgically oriented worshipping people.

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

  After all, one occasionally sees behind-the-scenes programs about Hollywood makeup artists and costume designers who can drastically change an actor’s appearance, yet they are never given the sensationalistic spin that these other types of transformations receive. There are also plenty of programs that feature nonsurgical makeovers (for example, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and What Not to Wear ), but they tend to have a more laid-back and informative feel, seducing the audience with their you-can-do-this-yourself attitude, in contrast to plastic surgery and sex reassignment shows, which have a far more cold and voyeuristic feel to them. And while a woman who changes her hair color and style, or a man who shaves off his beard, undergoes a significant transformation, one that often leaves them looking like a completely different person, the audience is not encouraged to gawk over their before-and-after pictures in the same way they do with the subjects of plastic surgery and sex reassignment programs. I would argue that the major reason that plastic surgeries, gastric bypasses, and sex reassignments are all given similar sensationalistic treatments is because the subjects cross what is normally considered an impenetrable class boundary: from unattractive to beautiful, from fat to thin, and in the case of transsexuals, from male to female, or from female to male. Of course, attractiveness as a class issue permeates much of what we see on TV—it determines who gets to be the protagonist or love interest and who ends up being the nerdy next-door neighbor or comic relief. And while TV advertisements may encourage us to buy various beauty products that are supposed to make us look incrementally more attractive, or dieting and exercising programs that are supposed to help us lose that extra ten, twenty, even forty pounds, it is commonly accepted that we each have certain physical limits that we are unable to overcome, limits that generally determine our social status regarding attractiveness. In fact, the large amount of effort that many of us put into attaining the relatively small improvements in our appearance that are achievable by exercising, dieting, and purchasing beauty products is a testament to how much we are judged (and how we judge others) based on conventional standards of beauty and size. So when somebody does cross those supposedly impassable boundaries, essentially changing their social class from not-so-attractive to stunning, or from “morbidly obese” to thin, it can change our thinking about beauty and attraction.

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

  Friedan discusses femininity in relation to what she calls the “housewife trap”—the expectation that middle-class women should become full-time homemakers, a role she believed stifled women’s emotional and intellectual growth. To make her case that femininity is a trap (rather than something many women naturally gravitate toward), Friedan spends much of the book discussing the ways in which companies, advertisers, the media, psychiatry, and others actively manipulate women into buying into feminine trappings. The Feminine Mystique was a rather narrowly focused book, in that it only dealt with issues that affected middle-class American women, and with those aspects of femininity that are associated with the “housewife trap.” But it helped reinforce a notion that would appear repeatedly throughout unilateral feminism—that femininity (or at least certain aspects of it) is an artificial, man-made ploy designed to hold women back from reaching their full potential. Looking back at unilateral feminist writings, one finds that sexism is often described as arising from a patriarchal system that kept women oppressed via two interrelated tactics: (1) placing belittling meanings and assumptions onto women’s bodies, and (2) coercing women into femininity, a program that was seen as inherently stifling and which fostered (or was the product of) women’s subservience and subjugation to men. Thus, unilateral feminists viewed the oppositional sexism faced by women as part of traditional sexism. Because masculinity was viewed primarily as a position of privilege, oppositional sexism against male-bodied people remained obscured. Indeed, the very idea that a man might find masculine expectations restrictive seemed as nonsensical to many unilateral feminists as a rich person complaining about being oppressed by their own wealth. The unilateral feminist notion that women were coerced into femininity was further facilitated by the growing use of the sex/ gender distinction, which differentiated between one’s sex (which arose from biology) and gender (which arose from one’s environment, socialization, and psychology). 4 This gave unilateral feminists the theoretical means to challenge the traditionally sexist messages projected onto women’s biology and bodies while ignoring or disavowing the negative messages associated with femininity. In fact, it’s clear that many influential unilateral feminists believed that qualities such as helplessness, deference, and passivity were essentially “built into” feminine expressions and practices. 5 In other words, these feminists not only failed to challenge sexist interpretations of femininity, but often accepted those interpretations at face value.

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

  One of the most common targets of such critiques are transsexuals, and particularly those who are heterosexual and gender-normative post-transition. Indeed, because such transsexuals (in the eyes of others) transition from a seemingly “transgressive” queer identity to a “conservative” straight one, subversivists may even claim that they have transitioned in order to purposefully “assimilate” themselves into straight culture. While these days, such accusations are often couched in the rhetoric of current queer theory, they rely on many of the same mistaken assumptions that plagued the work of cissexist feminists like Janice Raymond and sociologists like Thomas Kando decades ago.2The practice of subversivism also negatively impacts trans people on the MTF spectrum. After all, in our culture, the meanings of “bold,” “rebellious,” and “dangerous”—adjectives that often come to mind when considering subversiveness—are practically built into our understanding of masculinity. In contrast, femininity conjures up antonyms like “timid,” “conventional,” and “safe,” which seem entirely incompatible with subversion. Therefore, despite the fact that the mainstream public tends to be more concerned and disturbed by MTF spectrum trans people than their FTM spectrum counterparts, subversivism creates the impression that trans masculinities are inherently “subversive” and “transgressive,” while their trans feminine counterparts are “lame” and “conservative” in comparison. Subversivism’s privileging of trans masculinities over trans femininities helps to explain why cissexual queer women and FTM spectrum folks tend to dominate the queer/trans community: Their exceptional gender expressions and identities are routinely empowered and encouraged in such settings. In contrast, there is generally a dearth of MTF spectrum folks who regularly inhabit queer/trans spaces.3To me, the most surreal part of this whole transgressingversus-reinforcing-gender-norms dialogue in the queer/trans community (and in many gender studies classrooms and books) is the unacknowledged hypocrisy of it all. It is sadly ironic that people who claim to be gender-fucking in the name of “shattering the gender binary,” and who criticize people whose identities fail to adequately challenge our societal notions of femaleness and maleness, cannot see that they have just created a new gender binary, one in which subversive genders are “good” and conservative genders are “bad.” In a sense, this new gender binary isn’t even all that new. It is merely the original oppositional sexist binary flipped upside down. So now, gender-nonconforming folks are on top and gender-normative people are on the bottom—how revolutionary!

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

  Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage) in 2015, social-conservative politicians began proposing “bathroom bills” that would make it illegal for trans people to use public restrooms that do not match their “biological sex.” While those efforts were unsuccessful at the time, they set the stage for subsequent anti-trans legislation and political attacks. A second faction is anti-trans feminists. In earlier chapters, I discussed the writings of Janice Raymond, Mary Daly, Sheila Jeffreys, and others, who took a unilateral approach to feminism, one that opposed trans people, butch/femme relationships, femininity, pornography, BDSM, and sex work, on the basis that all these things supposedly “reinforced the patriarchy.” During the late 2000s, feminists who held such views came to be known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists (or “TERFs”); sometime during the mid-2010s, many of them began calling themselves “gender critical” (sometimes abbreviated “GC”). As I argued in the last chapter, GC/TERFs are probably best understood as cultural feminists, who oppose traditional sexism while remaining heavily invested in oppositional sexism (and particularly the notion that women are inherently “good” and “pure,” and men inherently “oppressive” and “dangerous”). Despite its cultural feminist origins, use of the term “gender critical” has since exploded, particularly in the United Kingdom, where it now mostly serves as a euphemism for “anti-trans.” GC/TERFs’ adherence to oppositional sexism is where they find common ground with social conservatives, as both groups relentlessly make appeals to “biological sex” and its imagined mutual exclusivity and immutability. In addition to providing funding for certain anti-trans feminist organizations and causes, conservative groups have adopted GC/TERF talking points regarding how trans acceptance supposedly results in “female erasure” and “threats to girls and women.” 15 While social conservatives and GC/TERFs play highly visible roles in anti-trans activism, a third faction has largely operated behind the scenes, yet has arguably done more to facilitate this moral panic than any other group: the anti-trans parent movement. 16 This movement began to garner momentum in 2015–2016 with the founding of three parent-run websites: 4thWaveNow, Transgender Trend, and Youth Trans Critical Professionals. These sites offer a counternarrative that appeals to reluctant and skeptical parents of trans children, one that emphasizes the “doctors rushing kids into hormones and surgery”–type concerns that I addressed above, but which also insinuates other, more sinister plots.