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.

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• 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.

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

  She even argues that “most transsexuals conform more to the feminine role than even the most feminine of natural-born women.” 8 This fact does not surprise Raymond, since she believes that femininity itself is an artificial by-product of a patriarchal society. So despite the fact that trans women may attain femininity, Raymond does not believe that they become “real” women. (To emphasize this, she refers to trans women as “male-to-constructed-females” and addresses them with masculine pronouns throughout the book.) Thus, Raymond builds her case by relying on the same tactics as the media: She depicts trans women as hyperfeminine (in order to make their female identities appear highly artificial) and she hypersexualizes them (by playing down the existence of trans people who transition to male). Unlike the media, Raymond does acknowledge the existence of trans women who are not stereotypically feminine, albeit reluctantly. She writes, “I have been very hesitant about devoting a chapter of this book to what I call the ‘transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist.’” 9 Because she believes that lesbian-feminists represent “a small percentage of transsexuals” (a claim that she never verifies), she does not seem inclined to discuss their existence at all except for the “recent debate and divisiveness [the subject] produced within feminist circles.” 10 Being that Raymond believes that femininity undermines women’s true worth, you might think that she would be open to trans women who denounce femininity and patriarchal gender stereotypes. However, this is not the case. Instead, she argues, “As the male-to-constructed-female transsexual exhibits the attempt to possess women in a bodily sense while acting out the images into which men have molded women, the male-to-constructed-female who claims to be a lesbian-feminist attempts to possess women at a deeper level.” 11 Throughout the rest of the chapter, she discusses how lesbian-feminist trans women use “deception” in order to “penetrate” women’s spaces and minds. She says, “although the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist does not exhibit a feminine identity and role, he does exhibit stereotypical masculine behavior.” 12 This essentially puts trans women in a double bind: If they act feminine they are perceived as being a parody, but if they act masculine it is seen as a sign of their true male identity. This damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don’t tactic is reminiscent of the pop cultural “deceptive”/“pathetic” transsexual archetypes. Both Raymond and the media ensure that trans women—whether they are feminine or masculine, whether they “pass” or not—will invariably come off as “fake” women no matter how they look or act. While much of The Transsexual Empire is clearly over the top (the premise of the book is that “biological woman is in the process of being made obsolete by bio-medicine”), many of Raymond’s arguments are echoed in contemporary attempts to justify the exclusion of trans women from women’s organizations and spaces. In fact, the world’s largest annual women-only event, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (often referred to simply as “Michigan”), still enforces a “womyn-born-womyn”-only policy that is specifically designed to prevent trans women from attending.

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

  55 Another major flaw with these theses is that they rest on the assumption that people identifying and living as members of the sex other than the one they were assigned at birth was a novel phenomenon, one that did not exist prior to the invention of sex reassignment procedures. However, numerous historians and anthropologists have described the existence of trans people in other eras and cultures. 56 In fact, many of the original gatekeepers, including Harry Benjamin, only “discovered” the existence of transsexuality after trans people approached them about the possibilities of physically transitioning, and many of the earliest transsexuals, such as Christine Jorgensen (the first transsexual to gain mainstream attention) and “Agnes” (who is discussed in more detail in chapter 9 ), self-administered hormones prior to consulting with doctors about their desire to physically transition. 57 Indeed, the gatekeepers didn’t “invent” sex reassignment, but were dragged into it kicking and screaming. And the fact that the gatekeepers almost universally favored strict restrictions that greatly reduced the number of people undergoing sex reassignment clearly indicates that they were, at best, reluctant advocates. A similar attempt to remove transsexuals from any historical or cross-cultural context can be found in Bernice L. Hausman’s 1995 book Changing Sex. Despite the fact that Hausman is aware of people throughout history who have lived as members of the other sex, or who do so today without using hormones or surgery, she nevertheless chooses to narrowly define transsexuality as the act of changing one’s sex via physically transitioning. 58 This allows her to put forward the thesis that “developments in medical technology and practice were central to the establishment of the necessary conditions for the emergence of the demand for sex change.” 59 The amateurish nature of this argument is astounding; it’s akin to discounting the existence of all nonmotorized vehicles (bicycles, sailboats, horse-drawn carriages, etc.) to make the claim that transportation is a modern construction dependent on the discovery of fossil fuel and combustion engines. Of course, there is an obvious reason why Hausman chose to define transsexuality so narrowly: To do otherwise would subvert her entire thesis. After all, if she were to acknowledge that trans people have existed in varied cultures and throughout history, her readers might view transsexuality as part of a natural rather than culture-specific phenomenon and thus understand trans people’s desire to live in their identified sex as being primarily driven by their own intrinsic inclinations rather than by social forces.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  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)

  And so Jesus goes to his death, with the royal claim above his head: “JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS” (19:19). Pilate knew it was provocative, but went ahead. From his point of view, it was a slap in the face for the Judaean rulers as well as additional mocking of the utterly unkinglike Jesus. But from John’s point of view this means that Pilate, like Caiaphas eight chapters before (11:49–53), is saying far more than he knows. Jesus is enthroned as king of the Jews, and from now on he is also king of the world. The cross in John, which we already know to be the fullest unveiling of God’s, and Jesus’s, love (13:1), is also the moment when God takes his power and reigns over Caesar. From now on, the ruler of this world is judged. This great scene, to which we shall return in more detail, summarizes the dimension we begin to hear in the music when we have turned the fourth speaker up to its proper volume, so that all four are balanced. But what then did Jesus mean in that strange but world-famous little saying about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s? Render unto Caesar? All three synoptic gospels record Jesus’s short exchange on the subject of paying tribute to Caesar. Here is Mark’s version (Matt. 22:15–22 and Luke 20:20–36 have more explanatory detail): They sent some Pharisees to Jesus, and some Herodians, to try to trick him into saying the wrong thing. “Teacher,” they said, “we know you are a man of integrity; you don’t regard anybody as special. You don’t bother about the outward show people put up; you teach God’s way truly. “Well then: is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar or not? Should we pay it, or shouldn’t we?” He knew the game they were playing. “Why are you trying to trap me?” he said. “Bring me a tribute-coin; let me look at it.” They brought one to him. “This image,” he asked, “whose is it? And whose is this superscription?” “Caesar’s,” they replied. “Well then,” said Jesus, “give Caesar back what belongs to Caesar—and give God back what belongs to God!” They were astonished at him. (12:13–17)

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

  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. While unilateral feminists almost universally agreed that some or all aspects of femininity enabled sexism, they differed in the proposed solutions for countering it. For example, liberal feminists (such as Friedan) worked within the existing system to try to gain equal access to previously male-dominated areas (particularly professional and leadership positions), often promoting a “women can do anything men can do” philosophy. Implicit in this strategy is the assumption that certain masculine-associated qualities and interests were natural and desirable for women to strive for, whereas the reciprocal feminine qualities were not. Radical feminists argued that women’s oppression would only end by entirely rejecting both masculine and feminine gender roles—which were seen as being inexorably tied to men’s “oppressor” and women’s “oppressed” statuses—and instead adopting a more “natural” androgynous disposition. Cultural feminists took a more essentialist position, arguing that men and women were inherently different, and had distinctive innate traits; for example, men were inherently destructive and oppressive, while women were creative and nurturing. While cultural feminists certainly embraced some feminine traits—even characterizing them as superior to their masculine counterparts’ traits—they were careful to portray such traits as arising from a woman’s “natural” womanliness rather than from “artifactual, man-made femininity.” 6 The notion that sexism can only be overcome if women work to become more masculine, more androgynous, or more “naturally womanly” all artificialize femininity by assuming that one’s gender expression is easily malleable, and can be reshaped according to one’s politics. Such one-size-fits-all approaches falsely presume that femininity is monolithic, ignoring how significant differences in class, culture, and biological predisposition give rise to a vast diversity of feminine expressions and perspectives. 7 Because many unilateral feminists refused to accept this diversity in female gender expression, they often developed rather belittling views of women who were unabashedly feminine, characterizing them as having their minds colonized, being “ego repressed,” and not being a “whole person.” 8 Some unilateral feminists called femininity a “slave status,” equating it with masochism, comparing it with Stockholm syndrome, and believing that it existed only to “communicate a woman’s acceptance of her subordinate status.”

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

  I would describe much of this research as stemming from effemimania—an obsession with “male femininity.” One of the characteristic traits of effemimanic research is that it tends to conflate feminine gender expression, male homosexuality, and MTF transsexuality with one another, often treating them as though they were different symptoms of the same “disease.” This is evident in the theories psychiatrists and sexologists have offered to explain the etiology of these phenomena. The most common of these theories is that the combination of a dominant or smothering mother and a passive or distant father leads young boys to identify with their mothers and emulate their mothers’ behaviors. 31 (This theory, which was fiercely forwarded by effemimanic psychiatrist Robert Stoller, has been regularly applied to both male homosexuality and MTF transsexuality.) Variations on this theory remained popular in the psychiatric community for many decades, despite psychiatrists’ inability to explain all, or even most, instances of “male femininity.” Another common theory is that a male child’s developing brain may be inappropriately influenced by the mother’s female hormones in utero. Others have suggested that both male homosexuality and MTF transsexuality may arise from X chromosome-specific mutations or genomic imprinting events that a mother passes on to her son (who is susceptible due to the fact that he has a single X chromosome). 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.

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

  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. 3 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 The Pisces (2018)

  She left voicemails for the landlady every day for two weeks in addition to knocking on their door every night and yelling that nine p.m. was too late to make any noise of any kind. Now her landlady was accusing her of trying to start a rift in the building. She was trying to evict her for harassment, which was unfair, because it was she who had been harassed by their music. This, too, was her truth. I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened to get Chickenhorse in here—only that it involved a married man and a restraining order. I wondered if she’d ever broken anyone’s nose. She seemed more the type to burn your house down. Seated next to Chickenhorse was Sara, who, apparently, was not only sensitive to men but also to light, cleaning products, mold, pollen, gluten, dairy, and sugar. She had fibromyalgia, chronic migraines, and, as a result of her hypoglycemia, was given special permission to eat during group. She said that made the room more of a “safe space” for her. Throughout the ninety minutes she consumed two bananas, a nectarine, one dried fig, a large box of raisins, and an entire two-liter jug of water. Her emphasis on hydration annoyed me. From what I gathered, Sara had been in love with a man named Stan—a researcher at the hospital where she worked—for over twelve years. Unfortunately, while Stan was happy to have sex with her, he couldn’t commit to a relationship. Then Sara woke up at fifty-one—childless, husbandless—and decided that enough was enough. She entered group and began a “detox” from Stan. Was Jamie a Stan? Worse yet, was I a Sara? Unlike Chickenhorse’s ex, Stan wasn’t married to anyone else, but somehow he was still “unavailable.” This was a word I heard repeated by all of the women during the session, echoing throughout in chorus. The plight of the available woman and the unavailable man! But somehow, each of these women convinced themselves that they too were emotionally unavailable. As encouraged by Dr. Jude, they’d come to the realization that their choice of unavailable men actually reflected an unavailability within themselves. Well, they all looked pretty damn available to me. In her attempts to detox from Stan, Sara was taking a ninety-day break from contact with him. She was now on day forty-three and claimed to be doing pretty well. In fact, she said, she barely pined for him at all. “I’m doing me,” she said. “And tonight, I’m going salsa dancing.” Salsa dancing—now, that was the kiss of death, the evidence that Sara wasn’t doing quite as well as she claimed. Who salsa danced? Salsa dancing was the last stop on the suicide express. Whether or not she wanted to admit it to herself, Sara was clearly destined for a crash.

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

  I am sure these women believe that they are protecting the values of lesbian and women’s space by opposing our inclusion at all costs, but in reality the specific points they make generally undermine feminist goals and beliefs rather than support them. After all, at its core, feminism is based on the conviction that women are far more than the sex of the bodies that we are born into, and our identities and abilities are capable of transcending the restrictive nature of the gender socialization we endure during our childhoods. I have yet to meet the person who can explain to me how refusing trans women the right to participate in women’s spaces and events is consistent with this most central tenet of feminism.Indeed, some of the most common arguments used to deny trans women the right to participate in women-only spaces also happen to be the most antifeminist. For example, many argue that trans women should be barred from women’s spaces because we supposedly still have “male energy.” But by suggesting that trans women possess some mystical “male energy” as a result of having been born and raised male, these women are essentially making the case that men have abilities and aptitudes that women are not capable of.Another popular excuse for our exclusion is the fact that some trans women have male genitals (as many of us either cannot afford or choose not to have sex reassignment surgery). This “penis” argument not only objectifies trans women by reducing us to our genitals, but propagates the male myth that men’s power and domination somehow arise from the phallus. The truth is, our penises are made of flesh and blood, nothing more. And the very idea that the femaleness of my mind, personality, lived experiences, and the rest of my body can somehow be trumped by the mere presence of a penis can only be described as phallocentric.It’s distressing that such phallocentric arguments, along with related arguments that harp on the idea that trans women “physically resemble” or “look like” men in other ways, are so regularly made by lesbian-feminists, considering that they are based in the society-wide privileging of male attributes over female ones.

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

  In a tactic that emphasizes their “true” maleness, “deceivers” are most often used as pawns to provoke male homophobia in other characters, as well as in the audience itself. This phenomenon is especially evident in TV talk shows like Jerry Springer, which regularly runs episodes with titles like “My Girlfriend’s a Guy” and “I’m Really a Man!” that feature trans women coming out to their straight boyfriends. On a recent British TV reality show called There’s Something About Miriam, six heterosexual men court an attractive woman who, unbeknownst to them, is transsexual. The broadcast of the show was delayed for several months because the men threatened to sue the show’s producers, alleging that they had been the victims of defamation, personal injury, and conspiracy to commit sexual assault. The affair was eventually settled out of court, with each man coming away with a reported 125,000 British pounds (over 200,000 U.S. dollars at the time). 1 In the 1970 film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge, the protagonist is a trans woman who heads out to Hollywood in order to take revenge on traditional manhood and to “realign the sexes.” This “realignment” apparently involves raping an ex–football player with a strap-on dildo, which she does at one point during the movie. The recurring theme of “deceptive” trans women retaliating against men, often by seducing them, seems to be an unconscious acknowledgment that both male and heterosexual privilege is threatened by transsexuals. In contrast to the “deceivers,” who wield their feminine wiles with success, the “pathetic transsexual” characters aren’t deluding anyone. Despite her masculine mannerisms and five o’clock shadow, the “pathetic transsexual” will inevitably insist that she is a woman trapped inside a man’s body. The intense contradiction between the “pathetic” character’s gender identity and her physical appearance is often played for laughs—as in the transition of musician Mark Shubb (played as a bearded baritone by Harry Shearer) at the conclusion of 2003’s A Mighty Wind. Unlike the “deceivers,” whose ability to “pass” is a serious threat to our culture’s ideas about gender and sexuality, “pathetic transsexuals”—who barely resemble women at all—are generally considered harmless.

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

  A simple preference for crossdressing or simulating female attire meets the diagnostic criterion for boys but not for girls, who must insist on wearing only male clothing to merit diagnosis.” 28 The GID in children diagnosis has come under a lot of scrutiny since it was instituted in 1980, as it is often used as the justification for carrying out behavioral modification (including aversion and electroshock therapies) on children in an attempt to eliminate their exceptional gender expression and prevent them from growing up to be queer. 29 While children of both sexes have been subjected to these procedures, the lion’s share of the research and funding for such projects has targeted femininity in boys rather than masculinity in girls. In fact, the largest grant awarded to this sort of research has gone to the “Feminine Boy Project,” which was conducted by Richard Green and summarized in his 1987 book The “Sissy Boy Syndrome” and the Development of Homosexuality. 30 Green (who is also a former HBIGDA president and coeditor of the book Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment ) is just one of many researchers whose work seems to be primarily focused on studying all varieties of feminine or female-associated behaviors and inclinations in male-bodied people. I would describe much of this research as stemming from effemimania —an obsession with “male femininity.” One of the characteristic traits of effemimanic research is that it tends to conflate feminine gender expression, male homosexuality, and MTF transsexuality with one another, often treating them as though they were different symptoms of the same “disease.” This is evident in the theories psychiatrists and sexologists have offered to explain the etiology of these phenomena. The most common of these theories is that the combination of a dominant or smothering mother and a passive or distant father leads young boys to identify with their mothers and emulate their mothers’ behaviors. 31 (This theory, which was fiercely forwarded by effemimanic psychiatrist Robert Stoller, has been regularly applied to both male homosexuality and MTF transsexuality.) Variations on this theory remained popular in the psychiatric community for many decades, despite psychiatrists’ inability to explain all, or even most, instances of “male femininity.” Another common theory is that a male child’s developing brain may be inappropriately influenced by the mother’s female hormones in utero. Others have suggested that both male homosexuality and MTF transsexuality may arise from X chromosome–specific mutations or genomic imprinting events that a mother passes on to her son (who is susceptible due to the fact that he has a single X chromosome).