A Transgendered Point of View

I noticed a clear lack of trans voices in describing our lives. All to often trans people are described by non-trans experts that work from a perspective (and bias) of their discipline.

Instead most of the academic writing has been of three types: First, there was the psychologist – who described our sicknesses, disorders and dysfunctions making us patients to be studied. Next came the feminist – who appropriated our lives and experiences simplifying them and us to be illustrations as the heroes or villains to their version of gender theory. The third wave was the social sciences – who tried to look at us in cultural isolation examining our customs, rights of passage, and the relationships with the ‘helping professionals’.

All of the volumes and volumes of this academic literature (including much of what we produce) bring up questions irrelevant to our lives, answer them for us and ignore our answers."Aren’t you still male?", "Do trans people reinforce gender stereotypes?", "Are you a 'third sex'?", "Why do trans people divide themselves into women and men – shouldn’t you be 'gender-free'?", "Is sex change surgery voluntary mutilation?", "Is transgenderism a pathology or mental disorder, and is it learned or genetic?" and so on. These questions don’t address our communities or our lives, thus they are not what trans people address. Dialog around these questions creates the illusion of knowing about us while it leaves us more disempowered and exploited than before it started. All this has done has put our performance, identities and expression under the microscope while non-trans people’s performance, identities and expression is safely away from the same type of comparison and at the same time ignoring how we view all people’s performances, identities and expression.

It has only been recently that trans people have been writing and publishing their perspective on all these issues. For many years these theories were quietly discussed at clinics, over coffee after events and more recently during demonstrations and political action. The result is that trans voices have long been silenced, marginalized or over-simplified. While I can not change that, hopefully this site a beginning, something that introduces you to the experiences, theories and dialogs that have been going on unnoticed all too long.

Even as we write as trans people, we cannot write for all trans people. There is a real danger anytime one of us is placed in the role of ‘spokes-trans’. Trans communities (yes plural -- there are many of them) are made of diverse people with a range of identities, views and issues. We would do those communities a disservice if we spoke of “THE trans community” as if there was a single monolithic existence.

My hope is that I balance real life with theory. Trans people are real people with real lives. We need to address the tough questions. Discrimination, victimization, murder, abuse, self-abuse and more all exist in trans peoples lives, to ignore questions like these is to have a discussion that is totally irrelevant to who we are. We need to show respect for the activist working on issues now and the activist that have worked on issues in the past. It was another activist that years ago pointed out to me that, often, when we see so much courage and determination you are dealing with survivors. We should not marginalize trans survivors. There are many trans people activist and not who have survived incest, abuse, rape, death threats, beatings, stabbing, shootings and arrest. This site should do justice to their lives as well as our communities.

Sites like this one are just a beginning to understanding trans people and their lives. Transgenderism is a huge topic, there is no way a site like this could ever cover the range of all trans lives and experiences.