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Sep. 19th, 2002 03:15 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
wooden-boy.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
transsorry for crossposting.
This is from james green's column on planetout.
i say, right on, mr. green.
**********************************
I was very happy to see the news about Sue Bartone, the openly transgender Green Party (why didn't I think to create that party myself?) candidate for the Massachusetts legislature. Bartone has a female body and a distinctly masculine appearance. Her friends call her Steven. I imagine many FTM/transmen can identify with M. Bartone's situation, and I've got to hand it to her for owning her identity and not letting her gender variance hold her back.
Fifteen years ago and more, I would not have had the courage to do what she is doing, and that is part of the reason I chose to transition, to change my body and my legal sex to male. I wanted to stop having to explain what sex I was in every casual social encounter I had every day. Forty years of being perceived as male while living in a female body, and worrying about the fact that my presentation made some people very upset, was enough. I had no idea at the time that MTF people often (though not always) had the opposite experience: Actualizing a hidden feminine identity often brings out gender variance in MTFs, while actualizing a masculine one usually (though not always) obliterates that variance in FTMs. Prior to my transition, I allowed my gender variance to keep me from choosing certain career paths and from fully expressing myself in many aspects of my life from my clothing to my sexuality, and even in my writing.
S. Bartone clearly has been liberated by the transgender movement that so many of us have been advocating for the past decade. And while we may celebrate her courage, she may also, for some transsexual men, symbolize or re-embody our own sense of frustration with the gender system that we struggled so mightily against before we transitioned. Seeing someone like Bartone, who is managing her variance successfully without a transition and yet identifying with our movement, too, can generate feelings of anger or jealousy. It can bring up our old frustration with battling the status quo, and the choices we faced when we gave up the category of real (unmodified) people and started taking hormones and having surgery to alter our appearance, fighting the battle for our own authenticity. Bartone might inspire in some transmen a desire to assert privilege -- to claim that they are better than she is because they transitioned to live full time as men, to become, in their own minds, real men as opposed to just a woman in a suit and tie. They might be tempted to assert that of course she is masculine enough that she, too, will be transitioning someday, as if they know how she feels. Well, that's not necessarily true, and it's her choice, not ours.
Some of us might wish that we never did transition, that we never took those hormones or had that surgery that didn't turn out just the way we wanted, that we didn't have the battles with employers and institutions that won't change our names or our birth certificates or honor our relationships, even as we defend our actions and the freedom of others to undertake a similar path. Seeing someone like Bartone being able to identify as transgender and assert herself as masculine without feeling the need to alter her body -- and be successful with that assertion where perhaps we were not able to be so confident -- can hurt because we might wish we could have done what she is doing. But we didn't. We chose another path. And I believe it is critical that we don't succumb to the temptation to create a hierarchy of realness among ourselves, because invalidating anyone can backfire and result in our own invalidation. What we must do is create a universal system of gender validation that honors each and every expression of gender as equally real and valid. That is what the transgender movement is about, and Sue and/or Steven Bartone is a perfect example of it, as perfect as any transsexual man or woman who has met with personal success on his or her own terms.
Bartone's willingness to take on the transgender label, to be open about the fact that her friends call her by a male name, her refusal to change herself to conform to others' gender-conventional expectations of her because of her female body, and her courage to do this in the face of an often brutal Massachusetts press in a potentially vicious political contest, all show that she is willing to risk losing the affection of constituent communities -- including the lesbian and gay communities -- that she might have been able to count on otherwise. Though she supports LGBT issues, such as same-sex marriage and nondiscrimination against transpeople, she is running on an issue-based platform and on her record of community service, not on her affiliation with any particular characteristic of her own, like her faith or her sexual orientation or her family dynasty, that are not germane to her ability to make decisions about all the issues that face a legislature in its duty to ensure and improve its citizens' quality of life. To me, she is demonstrating extraordinary strength of character, and she has my admiration. Whether or not she takes hormones or has any surgery, if she wanted to be a brother of mine, I'd definitely be proud to have her as one. That is the brave new world of transgender reality: that we each can be who we are regardless of what others think about who we ought to be.
This is from james green's column on planetout.
i say, right on, mr. green.
**********************************
I was very happy to see the news about Sue Bartone, the openly transgender Green Party (why didn't I think to create that party myself?) candidate for the Massachusetts legislature. Bartone has a female body and a distinctly masculine appearance. Her friends call her Steven. I imagine many FTM/transmen can identify with M. Bartone's situation, and I've got to hand it to her for owning her identity and not letting her gender variance hold her back.
Fifteen years ago and more, I would not have had the courage to do what she is doing, and that is part of the reason I chose to transition, to change my body and my legal sex to male. I wanted to stop having to explain what sex I was in every casual social encounter I had every day. Forty years of being perceived as male while living in a female body, and worrying about the fact that my presentation made some people very upset, was enough. I had no idea at the time that MTF people often (though not always) had the opposite experience: Actualizing a hidden feminine identity often brings out gender variance in MTFs, while actualizing a masculine one usually (though not always) obliterates that variance in FTMs. Prior to my transition, I allowed my gender variance to keep me from choosing certain career paths and from fully expressing myself in many aspects of my life from my clothing to my sexuality, and even in my writing.
S. Bartone clearly has been liberated by the transgender movement that so many of us have been advocating for the past decade. And while we may celebrate her courage, she may also, for some transsexual men, symbolize or re-embody our own sense of frustration with the gender system that we struggled so mightily against before we transitioned. Seeing someone like Bartone, who is managing her variance successfully without a transition and yet identifying with our movement, too, can generate feelings of anger or jealousy. It can bring up our old frustration with battling the status quo, and the choices we faced when we gave up the category of real (unmodified) people and started taking hormones and having surgery to alter our appearance, fighting the battle for our own authenticity. Bartone might inspire in some transmen a desire to assert privilege -- to claim that they are better than she is because they transitioned to live full time as men, to become, in their own minds, real men as opposed to just a woman in a suit and tie. They might be tempted to assert that of course she is masculine enough that she, too, will be transitioning someday, as if they know how she feels. Well, that's not necessarily true, and it's her choice, not ours.
Some of us might wish that we never did transition, that we never took those hormones or had that surgery that didn't turn out just the way we wanted, that we didn't have the battles with employers and institutions that won't change our names or our birth certificates or honor our relationships, even as we defend our actions and the freedom of others to undertake a similar path. Seeing someone like Bartone being able to identify as transgender and assert herself as masculine without feeling the need to alter her body -- and be successful with that assertion where perhaps we were not able to be so confident -- can hurt because we might wish we could have done what she is doing. But we didn't. We chose another path. And I believe it is critical that we don't succumb to the temptation to create a hierarchy of realness among ourselves, because invalidating anyone can backfire and result in our own invalidation. What we must do is create a universal system of gender validation that honors each and every expression of gender as equally real and valid. That is what the transgender movement is about, and Sue and/or Steven Bartone is a perfect example of it, as perfect as any transsexual man or woman who has met with personal success on his or her own terms.
Bartone's willingness to take on the transgender label, to be open about the fact that her friends call her by a male name, her refusal to change herself to conform to others' gender-conventional expectations of her because of her female body, and her courage to do this in the face of an often brutal Massachusetts press in a potentially vicious political contest, all show that she is willing to risk losing the affection of constituent communities -- including the lesbian and gay communities -- that she might have been able to count on otherwise. Though she supports LGBT issues, such as same-sex marriage and nondiscrimination against transpeople, she is running on an issue-based platform and on her record of community service, not on her affiliation with any particular characteristic of her own, like her faith or her sexual orientation or her family dynasty, that are not germane to her ability to make decisions about all the issues that face a legislature in its duty to ensure and improve its citizens' quality of life. To me, she is demonstrating extraordinary strength of character, and she has my admiration. Whether or not she takes hormones or has any surgery, if she wanted to be a brother of mine, I'd definitely be proud to have her as one. That is the brave new world of transgender reality: that we each can be who we are regardless of what others think about who we ought to be.