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)

  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.”9 Women who engaged in feminine beauty practices were perhaps the biggest target of such criticism, as they were accused of donning “symbols of oppression,” being manipulated by “thought control,” alienating themselves from their own bodies, and taking part in “self-imposed passivity.”10 Of course, one of the biggest caveats in the unilateral feminist argument that femininity is artificial and only exists to oppress women is the fact that some people who are assigned and socialized male also express femininity. 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 transmisogynistic 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.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  The naval officers with their well-dressed wives and clean white babies inhabited another time-space dimension than I. The well-kept old women in chauffeured cars and blond girls in buckskin shoes and cashmere sweaters might have been San Franciscans, but they were at most gilt on the frame of my portrait of the city. Pride and Prejudice stalked in tandem the beautiful hills. Native San Franciscans, possessive of the city, had to cope with an influx, not of awed respectful tourists but of raucous unsophisticated provincials. They were also forced to live with skin-deep guilt brought on by the treatment of their former Nisei schoolmates. Southern white illiterates brought their biases intact to the West from the hills of Arkansas and the swamps of Georgia. The Black ex-farmers had not left their distrust and fear of whites which history had taught them in distressful lessons. These two groups were obliged to work side by side in the war plants, and their animosities festered and opened like boils on the face of the city. San Franciscans would have sworn on the Golden Gate Bridge that racism was missing from the heart of their air-conditioned city. But they would have been sadly mistaken. A story went the rounds about a San Franciscan white matron who refused to sit beside a Negro civilian on the streetcar, even after he made room for her on the seat. Her explanation was that she would not sit beside a draft dodger who was a Negro as well. She added that the least he could do was fight for his country the way her son was fighting on Iwo Jima. The story said that the man pulled his body away from the window to show an armless sleeve. He said quietly and with great dignity, “Then ask your son to look around for my arm, which I left over there.”

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  Bailey and I hated him unreservedly. He was ugly, fat, and he laughed like a hog with the colic. We were able to make each other burst with giggling when we did imitations of the thick-skinned preacher. Bailey was especially good at it. He could imitate Reverend Thomas right in front of Uncle Willie and never get caught because he did it soundlessly. He puffed out his cheeks until they looked like wet brown stones, and wobbled his head from side to side. Only he and I knew it, but that was old Reverend Thomas to a tee. His obesity, while disgusting, was not enough to incur the intense hate that we felt for him. The fact that he never bothered to remember our names was insulting, but neither was that slight, alone, enough to make us despise him. But the crime that tipped the scale and made our hate not only just but imperative was his actions at the dinner table. He ate the biggest, brownest and best parts of the chicken at every Sunday meal. The only good thing about his visits was the fact that he always arrived late on Saturday nights, after we had had dinner. I often wondered if he tried to catch us at the table. I believe so, for when he reached the front porch his little eyes would glitter toward the empty dining room and his face would fall with disappointment. Then immediately, a thin curtain would fall over his features and he'd laugh a few barks, “Uh, huh, uh, huh, Sister Henderson, just like a penny with a hole in it, I always turn up.” Right on cue every time, Momma would answer, “That's right, Elder Thomas, thank the blessed Jesus, come right in.” He'd step in the front door and put down his Gladstone (that's what he called it) and look around for Bailey and me. Then he opened his awful arms and groaned, “Suffer little children to come unto me, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Bailey went to him each time with his hand stretched out, ready for a manly handshake, but Reverend Thomas would push away the hand and encircle my brother for a few seconds. “You still a boy, buddy. Remember that. They tell me the Good Book say ‘When I was a child I spake as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’” Only then would he open his arms and release Bailey.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  When we enrolled in Toussaint L'Ouverture Grammar School, we were struck by the ignorance of our schoolmates and the rudeness of our teachers. Only the vastness of the building impressed us; not even the white school in Stamps was as large. The students, however, were shockingly backward. Bailey and I did arithmetic at a mature level because of our work in the Store, and we read well because in Stamps there wasn't anything else to do. We were moved up a grade because our teachers thought that we country children would make our classmates feel inferior—and we did. Bailey would not refrain from remarking on our classmates' lack of knowledge. At lunchtime in the large gray concrete playground, he would stand in the center of a crowd of big boys and ask, “Who was Napoleon Bonaparte?” “How many feet make a mile?” It was infighting, Bailey style. Any of the boys might have been able to beat him with their fists, but if they did, they'd just have had to do it again the next day, and Bailey never held a brief for fighting fair. He taught me that once I got into a fight I should “grab for the balls right away.” He never answered when I asked, “Suppose I'm fighting a girl?” We went to school there a full year, but all I remember hearing that I hadn't heard before was, “Making thousands of egg-shaped oughts will improve penmanship.” The teachers were more formal than those we knew in Stamps, and although they didn't whip their students with switches, they gave them licks in the palms of their hands with rulers. In Stamps teachers were much friendlier, but that was because they were imported from the Arkansas Negro colleges, and since we had no hotels or rooming houses in town, they had to live with private families. If a lady teacher took company, or didn't receive any mail or cried alone in her room at night, by the weeks' end even the children discussed her morality, her loneliness and her other failings generally. It would have been near impossible to maintain formality under a small town's invasions of privacy. St. Louis teachers, on the other hand, tended to act very siditty, and talked down to their students from the lofty heights of education and whitefolks' enunciation. They, women as well as men, all sounded like my father with their ers and errers. They walked with their knees together and talked through tight lips as if they were as afraid to let the sound out as they were to inhale the dirty air that the listener gave off. We walked to school around walls of bricks and breathed the coal dust for one discouraging winter. We learned to say “Yes” and “No” rather than “Yes, ma'am,” and “No, ma'am.”

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  Finally, the weapon of Christ is identified inaugurally as a “sharp, two-edged sword” (1:16; 2:12) and thereafter specified as the “sword of” or “sword that came from” his mouth (2:16; 19:21). That sounds rather symbolic or parabolic, but what results from this metaphorical sword? “From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty” (19:15). If, for Christ, the sword of his mouth is metaphorical, the slaughter it produces appears all too realistic. Indeed, Revelation is filled, repeatedly, relentlessly, and ruthlessly, with metaphors for actual, factual, and historical violence to come. Think, for example, of those infamous four horsemen. Those riders on white, red, black, and green horses are all symbolic, to be sure, but they are symbols for conquest, war, famine, and pestilence, and such events promise realities, not more metaphors. Revelation’s promise of a bloodthirsty God and a blood-drenched Christ represents for me the creation of a second “coming” to negate the first and only “coming” of Christ; the fabrication of violent apocalypse to deny nonviolent incarnation; and the invention of Christ on a warhorse to erase the historical Jesus on a peace donkey. Jesus’s nonviolent resistance to evil is replaced by Christ’s violent slaughter of evildoers. The challenge was never the Jesus of history versus the Christ of faith but the Jesus Christ of nonviolence versus the Christ Jesus of violence. Still, for me, Revelation’s worst aspect is not its gleefully venomous presumption of an avenging God nor even its ferociously violent description of an avenging Christ. The worst aspect appears when you compare the Kingdom’s consummation in the writings of Paul of Tarsus and in that of John of Patmos. Compare, then, the metaphorical model that each of these authors uses to portray that climactic event. When Paul imagined the cosmic consummation, his metaphorical model for Christ’s advent was the peaceful, nonviolent, and celebratory visitation (parousia in ancient Greek) of the emperor or an imperial legate to one of Rome’s great eastern cities. Indeed, by the 50s CE , after eighty years of the Pax Romana, who could even remember any other sort of imperial advent, any other meaning for an official parousia but a joyful greeting (apantēsis ) and a communal celebration for a job well done? For Paul, therefore, Christ returns to celebrate the successful consummation of the Kingdom of God (1 Thess. 2:10; 3:13; 4:15; 5:23) and to hand it over to the God of Kingdom (1 Cor. 15:23–28). That was not, however, the metaphor or model by which John of Patmos imagined his consummation. First, the focus of Revelation’s attack is “Babylon” (14:8; 16:19; 18:2, 10, 21), which quite clearly means Rome because, as the Babylonian Empire destroyed Israel’s first Temple in 586 BCE , so the Roman Empire destroyed its second Temple in 70 CE .

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

  Of course, anyone who has spent any significant time in the transgender community—beyond interviewing folks at a nearby gender identity clinic, a local crossdressing support group, or the tranny bar scene (where Bailey apparently conducted much of his research)—realizes that there are countless exceptions to all of these models.36 Rather than trying to shove all trans people into some rigid, dichotomous model, one could instead easily explain the vast diversity that exists in the transgender population by assuming that gender expression, subconscious sex, and sexual orientation are determined largely independently of one another (as I did in chapter 6, “Intrinsic Inclinations”). This would not only account for the variation seen among transgender people, but can also explain why some trans people consciously identify as the other sex from their earliest memories, while others come to this realization later in life. After all, prior to puberty, social distinctions between girls and boys are almost solely based on gender expression and gender roles. Thus, a physically male child who has both a feminine gender expression and a female subconscious sex is likely to come to the conclusion that they are (or should be) a girl rather than a boy. On the other hand, if that same child were masculine in gender expression, they might initially identify as a boy—both because of their physical sex and their tendency to exhibit stereotypically masculine behaviors—and might not become consciously aware of their female subconscious sex until puberty, when physical sex becomes the predominant distinguishing characteristic between females and males. This model can also explain why many cross-gender-identified boys grow up to be gay or bisexual rather than transsexual: Their early cross-gender identification arises from their feminine gender expression rather than from a female subconscious sex. So if a relatively straightforward intrinsic inclination model can explain all of the variation among trans people on both the MTF and FTM spectrums, then why have so many gatekeepers continued to put forward effemimanic, MTF-specific models to describe transgenderism? Because effemimania is first and foremost an expression of traditional sexism. And because the gatekeepers often work from the implicit assumption that femininity is inferior to masculinity, it should be no surprise that they view “male femininity” to be a greater concern than “female masculinity.” Such assumptions are illuminated in Phyllis Burke’s 1996 book Gender Shock, which focuses heavily on Richard Green’s Feminine Boy Project. 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

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

  HEY GIRLS, DID YOU HEAR the news? It’s just been scientifically proven that barrettes are dangerous! So are bracelets and bric-a-brac. It’s a fact. And don’t be fooled by thick-necked macho men who pretend that “girl stuff” is boring or frivolous, because that’s just an act. Because as soon as you ask that guy to hold your purse for a minute, he will start to squirm, as if your handbag were full of worms, as he holds it as far away from his rugged body as possible. Because “girl stuff” is made with the gender equivalent of Kryptonite! That’s right, just watch fathers in Sanrio stores standing like petrified trees, like deer caught in Hello Kitty’s headlights. Or teenage boys buying their girlfriends flowers, acting as disinterested as possible as they ask the florist for a dozen “whatever”s. That’s why they always buy roses, that’s why engagement rings are always diamonds. These things are not romantic, they are just clichés—the only types of flowers and jewelry that most men will admit to knowing the names of. And god forbid you were to ask your husband to pick you up a box of tampons. (And men, it’s true, the cashier really does think you’re buying them for yourselves.) “Girl stuff” is dangerous, and I should know because I’m a secret double agent. See, I lived as a boy for most of my life and I have insider information straight out of men’s locker rooms and college dorms. Hell, I even went to a bachelor party once, so I know this stuff firsthand. And I have a battle plan for absolute sexual equality, but you have to trust me on this. See, feminists have made it okay for girls to explore what used to be an exclusively boy world. But true equality won’t come until boys learn to embrace girl stuff as well. So here’s the deal: If you want your boyfriend to treat you with respect, then tell him that you won’t sleep with him until he starts putting barrettes in his hair. And I’m not talking about secret bedroom kinky shit. Make him wear them to work! The next time he buys a pair of shoes, make sure they’re Mary Janes (and don’t forget the white lacy anklets to go with them). Because as soon as he realizes the pure bliss of wearing a frilly, pink, poofy party dress, maybe he’ll finally relax a bit and loosen up that uptight male swagger. And maybe once he lets his guard down, he’ll look around and realize that the world doesn’t revolve around him.

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

  There are many different (but often overlapping) forms of gender entitlement and gender anxiety. For example, one of the most frequently discussed forms of gender entitlement is heterosexism, the belief that heterosexuality is the only “natural,” legitimate, or morally acceptable form of sexual desire. Heterosexist gender entitlement can lead to homophobia, which is an expression of gender anxiety directed against those people who engage in same-sex relationships. Similarly, the gender-entitled belief that all women are (or should be) feminine and men masculine—which some have called cisgenderism—gives rise to transphobia, a gender anxiety that is directed against people who fall outside of those norms. While homophobia and transphobia have both received mainstream attention, thinking in terms of gender entitlement and gender anxiety also allows us to consider less well-known (but just as disparaging) forms of gender and sexual discrimination. For example, many gays and lesbians who believe that all people are “naturally” either homosexual or heterosexual often express biphobia, a gender anxiety directed toward bisexual people because they challenge the presumption that people can only be attracted to one sex or the other. I have also met some people in the transgender community who feel that identifying outside of the male/female binary is superior to, or more enlightened than, identifying within it. Such people often express gender anxiety (binary-phobia?) at people who identify strongly as either female or male. What should be obvious by now is that all forms of gender entitlement and gender anxiety are, at their core, expressions of insecurity. After all, people who are truly comfortable with their own desires and expressions of gender and sexuality do not have any need to be bothered or concerned by dissimilar expressions and desires in others. However, when we indulge in our own insecurities and resort to gender entitlement, we not only deny the variation that exists in human gender and sexuality, but we arrogantly presume that other people should curb or conform their inclinations and desires in order to meet our expectations.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  8 Stamps, Arkansas, was Chitlin' Switch, Georgia; Hang 'Em High, Alabama; Don't Let the Sun Set on You Here, Nigger, Mississippi; or any other name just as descriptive. People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn't buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days he had to be satisfied with chocolate. A light shade had been pulled down between the Black community and all things white, but one could see through it enough to develop a fear-admiration-contempt for the white “things”—whitefolks' cars and white glistening houses and their children and their women. But above all, their wealth that allowed them to waste was the most enviable. They had so many clothes they were able to give perfectly good dresses, worn just under the arms, to the sewing class at our school for the larger girls to practice on. Although there was always generosity in the Negro neighborhood, it was indulged on pain of sacrifice. Whatever was given by Black people to other Blacks was most probably needed as desperately by the donor as by the receiver. A fact which made the giving or receiving a rich exchange. I couldn't understand whites and where they got the right to spend money so lavishly. Of course, I knew God was white too, but no one could have made me believe he was prejudiced. My grandmother had more money than all the powhitetrash. We owned land and houses, but each day Bailey and I were cautioned, “Waste not, want not.” Momma bought two bolts of cloth each year for winter and summer clothes. She made my school dresses, under-slips, bloomers, handkerchiefs, Bailey's shirts, shorts, her aprons, house dresses and waists from the rolls shipped to Stamps by Sears and Roebuck. Uncle Willie was the only person in the family who wore ready-to-wear clothes all the time. Each day, he wore fresh white shirts and flowered suspenders, and his special shoes cost twenty dollars. I thought Uncle Willie sinfully vain, especially when I had to iron seven stiff starched shirts and not leave a cat's face anywhere. During the summer we went barefoot, except on Sunday, and we learned to resole our shoes when they “gave out,” as Momma used to say. The Depression must have hit the white section of Stamps with cyclonic impact, but it seeped into the Black area slowly, like a thief with misgivings. The country had been in the throes of the Depression for two years before the Negroes in Stamps knew it. I think that everyone thought that the Depression, like everything else, was for the whitefolks, so it had nothing to do with them. Our people had lived off the land and counted on cotton-picking and hoeing and chopping seasons to bring in the cash needed to buy shoes, clothes, books and light farm equipment.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  6 Reverend Howard Thomas was the presiding elder over a district in Arkansas that included Stamps. Every three months he visited our church, stayed at Momma's over the Saturday night and preached a loud passionate sermon on Sunday. He collected the money that had been taken in over the preceding months, heard reports from all the church groups and shook hands with the adults and kissed all small children. Then he went away. (I used to think that he went west to heaven, but Momma straightened me out. He just went to Texarkana.) Bailey and I hated him unreservedly. He was ugly, fat, and he laughed like a hog with the colic. We were able to make each other burst with giggling when we did imitations of the thick-skinned preacher. Bailey was especially good at it. He could imitate Reverend Thomas right in front of Uncle Willie and never get caught because he did it soundlessly. He puffed out his cheeks until they looked like wet brown stones, and wobbled his head from side to side. Only he and I knew it, but that was old Reverend Thomas to a tee. His obesity, while disgusting, was not enough to incur the intense hate that we felt for him. The fact that he never bothered to remember our names was insulting, but neither was that slight, alone, enough to make us despise him. But the crime that tipped the scale and made our hate not only just but imperative was his actions at the dinner table. He ate the biggest, brownest and best parts of the chicken at every Sunday meal. The only good thing about his visits was the fact that he always arrived late on Saturday nights, after we had had dinner. I often wondered if he tried to catch us at the table. I believe so, for when he reached the front porch his little eyes would glitter toward the empty dining room and his face would fall with disappointment. Then immediately, a thin curtain would fall over his features and he'd laugh a few barks, “Uh, huh, uh, huh, Sister Henderson, just like a penny with a hole in it, I always turn up.” Right on cue every time, Momma would answer, “That's right, Elder Thomas, thank the blessed Jesus, come right in.” He'd step in the front door and put down his Gladstone (that's what he called it) and look around for Bailey and me. Then he opened his awful arms and groaned, “Suffer little children to come unto me, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Bailey went to him each time with his hand stretched out, ready for a manly handshake, but Reverend Thomas would push away the hand and encircle my brother for a few seconds. “You still a boy, buddy. Remember that.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  On the other side comes Antony with barbaric might and motley arms, victorious over the nations of the dawn and the ruddy [Indian] sea, bringing in his train Egypt and the strength of the East and farthest Bactra; and there follows him (oh, the shame of it!) his Egyptian wife. (8.678–688) But that battle is more than Augustus Caesar and his admiral Agrippa against Antony and his wife, Cleopatra. It is more than Italy against Egypt, or even West against East. It is this: “Monstrous Gods of every form and barking Anubis wield weapons against Neptune and Venus and against Minerva” (8.698–699). The grand finale in 29 BCE is “Caesar, entering the wall of Rome in triple triumph” (8.714–715) for his victories in Dalmatia, off Cape Actium, and at Alexandria. In conclusion, I return to an earlier question. As our post-Enlightenment eyes read the texts, view the artifacts, or survey the ruins of Roman culture, we can ask, did some people, most of them, or all of them across the Roman Empire take Rome’s imperial theology literally or metaphorically? They knew that distinction, of course, but seldom confused—as we so often do—the literal/metaphorical divide with the real/unreal one. You might, far example, have lived if you told Augustus his divinity was metaphorical but probably not if you told him it was unreal. Regardless of how literally those titles of Augustus were taken, we know that they were taken seriously, practically, functionally, programmatically—and really. That is also, by the way, how Christians took them for Christ. And it was enough. Think about it this way. Cleopatra had a son with Julius Caesar nicknamed Caesarion. She also had twins with Marc Antony named Helios and Selene. Caesar was Octavian’s adoptive father and Antony was his sworn enemy. You would think that Augustus would destroy the children of his defeated enemy and protect the child of his deified father. But he did exactly the opposite. Augustus took the twins to Rome, where they were reared by Octavia, sister of Augustus and rejected wife of Antony. But he had Caesarion murdered because there could be only one divi filius, son of the deified Caesar. (I wonder, as the killers prepared to strangle Caesarion, did the teenager protest, “I am only a metaphor”?) Where Are We Now and What Comes Next?THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK WE have seen again and again how the matrix of time, place, and situation slowly but surely subverts assertions of divine radicality back into claims of human normalcy. In Chapters 9–11 we saw this happen to John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth; in Chapters 12–14 it happens to Paul of Tarsus. But by then you will already know How to Read the Pauline tradition and Still Be a Christian . I had a double purpose with this chapter.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  “Yes, sir, Brother Stewart. Back where you started, bless the Lord.” Momma could not take the smallest achievement for granted. People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed. “That's just who get the credit. Yes, ma'am. The blessed Lord.” Their overalls and shirts seemed to be torn on purpose and the cotton lint and dust in their hair gave them the appearance of people who had turned gray in the past few hours. The women's feet had swollen to fill the discarded men's shoes they wore, and they washed their arms at the well to dislodge dirt and splinters that had accrued to them as part of the day's pickings. I thought them all hateful to have allowed themselves to be worked like oxen, and even more shameful to try to pretend that things were not as bad as they were. When they leaned too hard on the partly glass candy counter, I wanted to tell them shortly to stand up and “assume the posture of a man,” but Momma would have beaten me if I'd opened my mouth. She ignored the creaks of the counter under their weight and moved around filling their orders and keeping up a conversation. “Going to put your dinner on, Sister Williams?” Bailey and I helped Momma, while Uncle Willie sat on the porch and heard the day's account. “Praise the Lord, no, ma'am. Got enough left over from last night to do us. We going home and get cleaned up to go to the revival meeting.” Go to church in that cloud of weariness? Not go home and lay those tortured bones in a feather bed? The idea came to me that my people may be a race of masochists and that not only was it our fate to live the poorest, roughest life but that we liked it like that. “I know what you mean, Sister Williams. Got to feed the soul just like you feed the body. I'm taking the children, too, the Lord willing. Good Book say, ‘Raise a child in the way he should go and he will not depart from it.’” “That's what it say. Sure is what it say.”

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

  Because cissexuals have a vested interest in preserving their own sense of cissexual gender entitlement and privilege, they often engage in a constant and concerted effort to artificialize transsexual genders. A common strategy used to accomplish this goal is transfacsimilation —viewing or portraying transsexual genders as facsimiles of cissexual genders. This strategy not only mischaracterizes transsexual genders as “fake,” but insinuates that cissexual genders are the primary, “real” version that the transsexual merely copies. The tactic of transfacsimilation is evident in the regularity with which cissexuals use words such as “emulate,” “imitate,” “mimic,” and “impersonate” when describing transsexual gender identities and expression. It can also be seen in the way cissexual media producers tend to depict real or fictional transsexual characters in the act of affecting or practicing gender roles associated with their identified sex. These depictions of transsexuality as mere affectation undermine the very real gender inclinations and experiences that lead transsexuals to live as members of their identified sex in the first place. Further, they ignore the ways in which all people—whether transsexual or cissexual—observe and imitate others with regard to gender. For cissexuals, such imitation mostly occurs during childhood and adolescence, when they may emulate certain gendered behaviors exhibited by a parent or an older sibling of the same sex. For transsexuals, this process often occurs later in life, at the period just before or during one’s transition. In both cases, imitation is primarily a form of gender experimentation, with behaviors that the person feels comfortable with being retained over time, while those traits that feel awkward or incongruous with their sense of self eventually falling by the wayside. Once we recognize this, then it becomes apparent that transfacsimilation is a blatant double standard that ensures that acts of cissexual gender imitation will typically be overlooked (thus naturalizing their genders), while acts of transsexual gender imitation will be overemphasized (thus artificializing our genders). Another way in which transsexual genders are often dismissed as “fakes” is by applying different standards of gendering to transsexuals and cissexuals. This practice is well-illustrated by the following passage from Patrick Califia’s book Sex Changes: Recently, I had a very educational experience. I found out that one of my long-term women acquaintances is transgendered. ... Given how much work I’ve done to educate myself about transsexuality, I didn’t think it would make that much of a difference. But I found myself looking at her in a whole different way. Suddenly her hands looked too big, there was something odd about her nose, and didn’t she have an Adam’s apple? Wasn’t her voice kind of deep for a woman? And wasn’t she awfully bossy, just like a man? And my God, she had a lot of hair on her forearm.2

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  Behind this story lie two great truths. First, there is envy. Even the Greeks saw its horror. The great orator and statesman Demosthenes said: ‘Envy is the sign of a nature that is altogether evil.’ Euripides, the dramatist, said: ‘Envy is the greatest of all diseases.’ There was a Greek proverb which said: ‘Envy has no place in the choir of God.’ Envy leads to bitterness, bitterness to hatred, and hatred to murder. Envy is that poison which can poison all life and kill all goodness. Second, there is this strange and eerie thought that Cain had discovered a new sin. One of the old Greek fathers said: ‘Up to this time, no one had died so that Cain should know how to kill. The devil instructed him in this in a dream.’ It was Cain who introduced murder into the world. There is condemnation for the sinner; but there is still greater condemnation for the person who teaches another to sin. Anyone who does such a thing is banished from the face of God, just as Cain was. So, the writer to the Hebrews says: ‘Although he died for his faith, he is still speaking to us.’ Moffatt comments: ‘Death is never the last word in the life of a righteous man.’ When people leave this world, they leave something in it. They may leave something which will grow and spread like a disease; or they may leave something fine which continues always to blossom and flourish. They leave an influence of good or ill; everyone who dies goes on speaking. May God grant that we leave behind not a germ of evil but a lovely thing in which the lives of those who come afterwards will find blessing. WALKING WITH GODHebrews 11:5–6 It was by faith that Enoch was transferred from this to the other life so that he did not die but passed from men’s sight, because God took him from one life to the other. For, before this change came to him, it was testified that he pleased God. Apart from faith it is impossible to please God, for he who approaches God must believe that God is, and that he is the rewarder of those who spend their lives seeking him. IN the Old Testament, the life of Enoch is summed up in one sentence: ‘Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him’ (Genesis 5:24). Many legends gathered around his name. He was said to be the first man skilled in tailoring and in sewing and that he taught others how to cut out skins in the proper shape to make garments. He was said to be the first to teach people to make shoes to protect their feet. He was said to be the first to write things down and to teach from books.

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

  Another early example of ungendering can be found in the previously mentioned Herculine Barbin. Foucault makes it clear in his introduction to the book that his interest in publishing this nineteenth-century account of an intersex person stemmed solely from the fact that it challenges the modern Western notion that all people have a “true sex.” (At one point, he even boasts that “the narrative baffles every possible attempt to make an identification.”19) It is clear that Foucault had little interest in the desperation and disorientation Herculine felt as she/he grappled with the masculine changes in her/his body and sexuality, as well as other people’s reactions to those changes (which apparently led to Herculine’s suicide). In reference to Herculine’s personal tragedy, Foucault states that he “would be tempted to call the story banal” if it were not for the fact that it provided an example of how society actively imposes a “true sex” onto people.20 Foucault further dehumanizes Herculine by publishing her/his memoir alongside a dossier that includes medical and legal records, including graphic details of Herculine’s body and intersex condition, as well as a sensationalistic fictional account from that time period based on Herculine’s story.21 The needless inclusion of this extra material only adds to the reader’s sense that Herculine is nothing more than a specimen for us to freely examine. The fact that both Foucault and Garfinkel claimed to be making larger points about gender and society (Foucault: that society imposes a “true sex” on all of its members; Garfinkel: that we all actively manage and produce our gendered sense of self) makes their subject choice seem rather dubious. Wouldn’t their cases have been stronger if they’d focused instead on subjects who were not gender-variant—who were not such obvious exceptions to the rule? I would argue that Herculine and Agnes were chosen as subjects not because their conditions offered any unique insight into social gender, but because their gender-variant status facilitated their depiction as specimens. After all, one only has to look at how apologetic people become when they accidentally misgender another person, or how insulting it is generally considered to be to suggest that someone’s femaleness or maleness is suspect in any way, to understand that ungendering is an inherently demeaning process. If Foucault and Garfinkel had instead chosen to pick apart the gender identities of young people who were not gender-variant, the process of ungendering would have undoubtedly (and appropriately) seemed intrusive and disrespectful. But because society typically views transsexual and intersex people as illegitimate and unnatural—even inhuman—Agnes and Herculine could be depicted as mere objects of inquiry without any chance of the audience identifying with them or sympathizing with them.

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

  Blanchard has argued that his model is simpler than other psychiatric theories of MTF transgenderism because it subsumes male crossdressers and “nonhomosexual” trans women into one category: “Transvestites, on this view, would be understood as autogynephiles whose only—or most prominent—symptom is sexual arousal in association with crossdressing and who have not (or not yet) become gender dysphoric.”15 This is problematic, however, as some crossdressers and trans women say they have never experienced sexual arousal in the manner Blanchard describes. Perhaps even more common in the MTF community are people who describe being sexually aroused by their own cross-gender expression during their early stages of gender experimentation, but who over time experience a reduction or a complete loss of arousal in response to such feminine self-expressions.16 This is particularly true for many trans women, for whom previous sexual fantasies related to wearing women’s clothes or having a female body may become rather banal or pointless after one has physically transitioned to female and lived as a woman day in and day out. This fact is a serious blow to Blanchard’s model, as it suggests that sexual arousal is not what drives these trans women to change their sex, and that the temporary sexual phase they experienced when they were crossdressing was more related to their overcoming the highly sexualizing cultural symbolism commonly associated with femaleness and femininity. Blanchard tries to get around this caveat by claiming that autogynephilia is not only a paraphilia, but a sexual orientation, and that trans women who no longer experience sexual arousal in response to images of themselves as women have formed a sort of “pair-bond” with their female selves.17 (Perhaps he sees this as analogous to how long-term married couples may stay together despite a reduction in their sexual interest in one another.) Blanchard’s categorization of autogynephilia as a sexual orientation reveals a startling naiveté regarding his understanding of human sexuality. In focusing exclusively on “sexual object choice,” he neglects to consider the role that our own bodies play both in our sexual fantasies and in our realities. Our sexual experiences, whether masturbatory or with partners, typically involve various combinations of sexual attraction and desire for others, as well as sexual sensations and responses to mental, visual, tactile, and other stimuli that arise from our own physically sexed bodies. Since cissexuals are able to take their own physically sexed bodies for granted, they often focus exclusively on that aspect of sexuality which they cannot take for granted—namely, their potential sexual partners. In contrast, pre-and non-transition trans people are unable to take their own physical sex for granted, and thus their sexual fantasies often revolve around physically becoming or being their preferred sex. Every trans person I’ve spoke with about this—whether MTF or FTM spectrum, homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual—has said that their sexual fantasies almost always involve (on some level) their being in the appropriately sexed body.

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

  For someone who claims to have little interest in making a film about the “adventures of a transgender person,” Anderson sure does fancy her film up in all of the accoutrements of the transsexual transitioning process: The dialogue includes discussions about electrolysis, a play-by-play description of how a vagina is created during MTF sex reassignment surgery, and even talk about what breast size Roy can expect after she goes on hormones. At one point in the movie, close-ups of Roy’s hormone prescriptions—Premarin and Spironolactone—precede an early morning family breakfast scene in which Roy, her wife, and her daughter (who has recently had her first period) all start arguing with each other in an apparent hormone-induced frenzy. (Upon watching that scene, I wasn’t quite sure if I should be more offended as a woman or as a transsexual.) In the end, the most damaging aspect of Normal is that it gives the impression of being a serious film about transsexuality without ever incorporating the perspectives of real-life transsexuals. There are countless other movies that, on the surface, seem to be more demeaning or insulting toward transsexuals, but I find Normal to be more damaging than most. At least the Ace Venturas and South Parks of the world don’t even bother to pretend that they know what they’re talking about when they create transsexual characters. Anderson, on the other hand, did just enough homework about transsexuality to make her film dangerous. She poached and pilfered the transsexual experience without any sense of respect or responsibility for the very people she exploited in the process. Another writer who knows just enough to be dangerous is Jeffrey Eugenides. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex centers on an intersex person named Cal, who is raised female until he discovers his condition during puberty. The book follows Cal as he develops male physical attributes and eventually a male identity. So why did Eugenides set out to write a book about an intersex person? In an interview, he explained that he simply “used a hermaphrodite” (a word most intersex people find stigmatizing) as a metaphor for the confusing changes in identity and sexuality that all people face during adolescence.8 So, this time, a main character is ungendered to make a larger point about puberty and metamorphosis.

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

  MTF spectrum crossdressers (who will be referred to simply as “crossdressers” for rest of this essay) are relentlessly mischaracterized and disrespected by the public at large, as well as in specific fields such as psychiatry and gender studies, where their practices are coldly dissected and critiqued by those who are not crossdressers themselves. This lack of personal experience allows these clinicians and academics to naively and conveniently assign motives to crossdressers. Some of the more common of these assumptions are that crossdressing is a form of appropriating or objectifying womanhood; that it is an expression of latent homosexuality, exhibitionism, autogynephilia, or some other form of “sexually deviant” behavior; or that some males take refuge in femininity because they are unable or unwilling to live up to masculine ideals. As someone who identified as a crossdresser for twelve years, and who has shared many intimate conversations with other crossdressers during that time, I offer this essay as a (hopefully) more enlightened and thoughtful perspective on the MTF crossdressing experience. The explanations I offer here stem directly from my personal experiences as a crossdresser—one who has since gone on to identify and live as a woman—so it is likely that what I have to say will not resonate with all crossdressers, particularly those who happily embrace that identity throughout their lives without transitioning. My purpose here is not to insinuate that all crossdressers are transsexuals-in-waiting, nor is it to project my individual experience onto other people’s very different gendered experiences. This should simply be seen as my personal take on this very complex and misunderstood identity. Effemimania and Feminine Expression If you ask crossdressers their opinions about why this is a predominantly “male” phenomenon, most will mention the gross disparity between what is considered acceptable and unacceptable cross-gender expression between the sexes. While a hundred years ago, much of society considered it deviant for women to wear pants or other traditionally “male” articles of clothing, today women can wear such items without anyone making a fuss. In fact, a female-bodied person pretty much has to be dressed in full male-specific attire to even be considered crossdressed, whereas a male-bodied person may be considered a crossdresser if they wear a single female-specific article of clothing (such as a dress or a skirt). Thus, the liberalization of dressing norms that women have experienced over the last century has not been reciprocated to nearly the same extent for men.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  6 Reverend Howard Thomas was the presiding elder over a district in Arkansas that included Stamps. Every three months he visited our church, stayed at Momma's over the Saturday night and preached a loud passionate sermon on Sunday. He collected the money that had been taken in over the preceding months, heard reports from all the church groups and shook hands with the adults and kissed all small children. Then he went away. (I used to think that he went west to heaven, but Momma straightened me out. He just went to Texarkana.) Bailey and I hated him unreservedly. He was ugly, fat, and he laughed like a hog with the colic. We were able to make each other burst with giggling when we did imitations of the thick-skinned preacher. Bailey was especially good at it. He could imitate Reverend Thomas right in front of Uncle Willie and never get caught because he did it soundlessly. He puffed out his cheeks until they looked like wet brown stones, and wobbled his head from side to side. Only he and I knew it, but that was old Reverend Thomas to a tee. His obesity, while disgusting, was not enough to incur the intense hate that we felt for him. The fact that he never bothered to remember our names was insulting, but neither was that slight, alone, enough to make us despise him. But the crime that tipped the scale and made our hate not only just but imperative was his actions at the dinner table. He ate the biggest, brownest and best parts of the chicken at every Sunday meal. The only good thing about his visits was the fact that he always arrived late on Saturday nights, after we had had dinner. I often wondered if he tried to catch us at the table. I believe so, for when he reached the front porch his little eyes would glitter toward the empty dining room and his face would fall with disappointment. Then immediately, a thin curtain would fall over his features and he'd laugh a few barks, “Uh, huh, uh, huh, Sister Henderson, just like a penny with a hole in it, I always turn up.” Right on cue every time, Momma would answer, “That's right, Elder Thomas, thank the blessed Jesus, come right in.” He'd step in the front door and put down his Gladstone (that's what he called it) and look around for Bailey and me. Then he opened his awful arms and groaned, “Suffer little children to come unto me, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Bailey went to him each time with his hand stretched out, ready for a manly handshake, but Reverend Thomas would push away the hand and encircle my brother for a few seconds. “You still a boy, buddy. Remember that.

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

  One of the earliest examples of this approach is sociologist Harold Garfinkel’s 1967 book Studies in Ethnomethodology, which attempted to elucidate how members of society “produce stable, accountable practical activities, i.e. , social structures of everyday activities.”16 While Garfinkel could have examined how the average person makes sense of their own gendered experiences, he instead focused on someone who didn’t have the privilege of taking their own gender for granted. That person was Agnes, a trans woman who (unbeknownst to Garfinkel) had taken female hormones for a number of years and posed as intersex in the hope of obtaining sex reassignment surgery (during the 1950s in the U.S., such surgeries were regularly carried out on intersex individuals, but not transsexuals).17 Garfinkel devoted seventy pages to describing Agnes’s attempts to reconcile her female identity and feminine behavior with the fact that she had male genitals. The account is extraordinarily objectifying, and not only with regard to Garfinkel’s descriptions of Agnes’s body (such as, “Her measurements were 38-25-38” and “she was dressed in a tight sweater which marked off her thin shoulders, ample breasts, and narrow waist”).18 He spends page after page relishing the details of how she managed to “pass” as a woman, highlighting her anxiety around the discrepancy between her anatomy and gender identity, and pointing out what he believed were inconsistencies in her personal history and her claims that she always felt like a girl. The entitled way he picks apart Agnes’s life, graphically chronicling her fears, secrets, embarrassments, and insecurities, shows no regard for her as a person or for the immense difficulty she must have faced in simply trying to survive and make sense of her life as a gender-variant person living in the 1950s.Another early example of ungendering can be found in the previously mentioned Herculine Barbin.