Welcome to the third week of reading Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue by Leslie Feinberg!
If you're just getting started, here's a link to the thread for Chapter 1: https://hexbear.net/post/5178006?scrollToComments=false and Chapter 2: https://hexbear.net/post/5254179?scrollToComments=false
We're only doing one chapter per week and the discussion threads will be left open, so latecomers are still very much welcome to join if interested.
As mentioned before... This isn't just a book for trans people! If you're cis, please feel free to join and don't feel intimidated if you're not trans and/or new to these topics.
Here is a list of resources taken from the previous reading group session:
pdf download
epub download - Huge shout out to comrade @EugeneDebs for putting this together. I realized I didn't credit them in either post but here it is. I appreciate your efforts. ❤️
chapter 1 audiobook - Huge shout out to comrade @futomes for recording these. No words can truly express my appreciation for this. Thank you so much. ❤️
chapter 2 audiobook
chapter 3 audiobook
chapter 4 audiobook
chapter 5 audiobook
chapter 6 audiobook
chapter 7 audiobook
chapter 8 audiobook
Also here's another PDF download link and the whole book on ProleWiki.
In this thread we'll be discussing Chapter 3: Living Our True Spirit.
CWs: Minor mentions of transphobia.
This chapter covers a speech by Feinberg at the True Spirit Conference, a regional conference described as being for "people who are themselves, or who are supportive of others who were assigned female gender at birth, but who feel that is not an adequate or accurate description of who they are."
The "Portrait" section here is written by the conference chairperson, Gary Bowen, who describes himself as "a gay transman of Apache and Scotch-Irish descent, left-handed, differently-abled, the parent of two young children -one of whom is also differently abled - of an old Cracker frontier family from Texas, a person who values his Native heritage very deeply, and who is doing his best to live in accordance with the Spirit, and who keeps learning more about his heritage all the time."
I'll ping whoever has been participating so far, but please let me know if you'd like to be added (or removed).
Feel free to let me know if you have any feedback also. Thanks!
Okay I'm back with some thoughts
Others in the thread have already brought up the mentions of intersectionality, and I don't have anything to add, so I won't get into it. Though I would have liked it if Feinberg went more into detail explaining how the different "hierarchies" (race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, etc.) work to enforce the others, but I do also get that it's a transcript of a speech about a broader subject.
I noticed that zie uses both words "transsexual" and "transgender", which confused me until I realized that by "transsexual" zie was referring to those who had medically transitioned, and "transgender" to those who had only socially transitioned. I only really started learning about what being trans really is within the last 5 years, and mainly from talking to people online where the general consensus seems to be that "transsexual" is a slur with sexual connotations, and "transgender" is the respectful word to use to refer to trans people, with no distinction regarding medical or social transition. I’m curious about when this changed happened and why.
There isn’t any one specific section that gave me this idea, but the whole thing made me think about how the categorizations of masculine and feminine aren’t just polarizing, but in a way limiting, by which I mean there are personality traits and interests that fit into neither category. For example, my true personality is somewhat silly and playful (though of course I’m able to be serious when it’s needed), which falls outside the conventionally accepted masculine personality types of either being aggressive and dominant, or being reserved and stoic (this is what I often default to because it's easier than the former). But it’s also not something conventionally accepted among women, and in some circles makes you immature or nerdy (pejorative). This exclusion of certain things isn’t something intrinsic to humans and therefore immutable since it’s socially constructed; in older generations playing video games as an adult is seen as childish and immature and would thus fall outside both masculine and feminine, but among people born after 1980 it’s fairly normal and accepted.
I liked Gary’s suggestion to look to trans history in other parts of the world, because he’s right that it’s something that people have been doing all over the world pretty much since the beginning of humanity. I’ve known about the historical class of trans people from the part of the world my parents came from, and how they were pretty much genocided by Spanish colonizers, but now I’m realizing there were probably also trans people in Spain being persecuted all the same, at the same time, by the same forces.
Thank you, I was confused about that as well.
I answered buh above, but I will make a comment here to ask you to take a look at my response, because it just isn't true that Feinberg was distinguishing transsexual and transgender in the way that buh seemed to interpret it. Transgender was a coalitional term that encompassed many identities (including transsexual), and many of those identities are ones that in the more common way transgender is used now would even be considered cisgender. But it is not correct or accurate to come away with an idea that transsexual is reduced to medical transition, nor that transgender (especially as Feinberg was using it) is about social transitioning. Transgender as Feinberg used it didn't have anything to do with "transitioning" at all: it was about everyone who crossed normative gender roles, including, for instance, a cis man drag queen. You wouldn't say that a man who chooses to wear dresses on the weekend but fully identifies as a man is "transitioning," but Feinberg would say that this man is transgender.
I see. Thank you for the clarification, and for pinging me to come back and read it! So, to make sure I’m understanding correctly, in this context “transgender” indicates that a person transgresses gender norms, while “transsexual” means someone who transitions full-time.
Is the term limited to binary transitions in this context?
That's actually a pretty interesting question. As Feinberg was using it, almost certainly transsexual was referring specifically to men and women, and not nonbinary or third-gender people, nor even intersex people. The language at the time for transsexual was fairly narrow. The thing that makes it so interesting is that, because the language was narrow, there would have been plenty of people who don't fall into the "binary transsexual" category that would have related to themselves and used the identifier of transsexual. So yes, there would have been "nonbinary" transsexual people.
It's impossible to apply concepts and social relations across time, so we can never know: how many people who considered themselves transsexual at the time would have used different language if they had access to it? For the same reason, many people who use terms like nonbinary now would be more likely to have used labels like dyke, butch, and fairy moreso than transsexual.
Not long after this book was written, there was a larger linguistic shift to a "transgender" framework. This is partially due to the success of Feinberg and other's like hir, as well as the rise of queer theory in the American academia. The linguistic linking of a multitude of gender transgressive identities under the single identity of transgender became a standard shorthand, and gained traction in the mainstream. This also functioned as a way to placate bio-essentialist viewpoints, by theorizing a split between sex and gender, and placing transgender as the transgression of socially constructed gender, while not challenging the biological sex.
This had the positive in that it helped cement a larger community identity that was easily recognizable and understandable to the mainstream, which can be helpful in organizing for recognition and rights. However it also had the negative effect of creating a universalizing narrative of what transgender was, which also forced many people originally intended to be encompassed under the term transgender into the position of cisgender. It created, in effect, a new binary: cisgender and transgender, which pushed some transgender people into the cisgender camp, and erased a lot of the nuance and complex identities that existed in favour of something more easily legible. This is also where a lot of the tension between the language of transgender and transsexual in current discourse stems. Transsexual was being replaced, transgender was being flattened to a more "inclusive" synonym for transsexual (not inclusive to cisgender people who were previously transgender, though), and transsexual as a term with its own specificity was being conflated with medicalism and robbed of its validity.
Currently you'll see arguments that transsexual is a reinforcing of bioessentialist or medicalist ideas of sex and gender, but I would argue it's the opposite. By conceding that transsexuality is inherently about medicalist interventionism, you accept that gender is the social construct and sex is the biological reality--but of course, sex is just as much a socially constructed category! And the difference between sex and gender is illegible in most non-English languages to begin with.
Anyway, bit of a tangent because the emergence of new linguistic structures at times of political upheaval are always fraught, and have complex histories. But as Feinberg was using it: transgender was meant to be a coalition of all people and identities that challenged the gender norms ("gender outlaws"), and so nonbinary identities (like hirs) would have been quite comfortable in the transgender umbrella (though usually with other local/subcultural language that was more specific), but likely would have felt just as constrained or unrepresented by transsexual identity as they would in cissexual identity.