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alexandraerinThere's a phenomenon you can see at work on the comments of news stories dealing with Chaz Bono's transition to living openly as a man. (Note: I'm not linking to any. You can do the search if you want to see it. I'm not going to risk reading these conversations again.)
There are some people in the comments saying that if Chaz doesn't have "the surgery" (meaning some variety of phalloplasty, though they're probably imagining some kind of cartoon dick transplant), then that means he's "still a woman". And then somebody else will say, "Even with the surgery, [his] DNA still says [he's] a woman!" and the person who just above was saying that the lack of surgery is the sticking point says, "Yeah, I agree."
Well, that little bit of honesty there at the end is kind of refreshing. Since it's not likely Chaz is going to run out and have some major surgical procedures done to silence his critics, the people clamoring for genital-altering surgery as the gold standard will never have their bluff called. So it's nice to see them revealing that it is a bluff, that if he did have the surgery they'd just move up some other criteria.
And what if there was gene therapy that could safely rewrite the structure of somebody's somatic DNA, turning XX into XY or XY into XX? Would all the people who deny Chaz's manhood now go, "Oh, well. Okay."? It's possible that some few people would be satisfied, but my guess is we'd see exactly what we should expect to see when this same demographic starts by saying "Surgery would make Chaz a man!" and then says, "But the DNA's the same, still a woman."
That is, they'd say "DNA or no DNA, if you're born a woman you stay a woman and that's that."
And if Chaz Bono or anyone else whose genitals and genetics were being held up to the scrutiny of random strangers on the internet decided to run out and get the procedures being held up as the gold standard of the moment, some the detractors would no doubt say that the fact that anyone could be so desperate to prove them wrong showed that they weren't really as sure of their gender as they think.
Now, this post is not going to go into all the problems with treating the human race as something starkly divided between men and women, categories strictly delineated by distinctly different genitalia and chromosomes, mainly because in most cases any invocation of anatomy or genetics in a conversation about trans folks by cis folks isn't actually about those things, it's about drawing drawing lines and erecting barriers.
And it really doesn't matter what the barriers are built out of... they'll do it using whatever's handy. And if someone gets past that barrier, they'll just retreat and re-trench.
If all this seems eerily familiar to someone who doesn't think on trans issues very often but does follow U.S. politics, that's because it's the same principle that's at play in the Obama citizenship "debate". Whatever proof is released is never enough for some because it's never about proof, it's about having a firmly held conviction and trying to construct what seems like the most reasonable/least objectionable defense of it.
"I don't care what people do with their bodies and their lives," the transphobe says. "It's just science. I'd change it if I could, but you can't change science."
"I don't judge people based on their skin or for having a foreign-sounding name," says the xenophobic racist (who has a good All-American name like Johnson, Smith, Klein, McDonald, or Kowalski). "It's just the Constitution. You do want to make sure we're following the Constitution, right?"
All of this... it's not the reason I'm not personally pursuing surgery. But it's the reason I don't even feel one tiny solitary inkling of ambivalence based on the idea that surgery would lead to "acceptance". If someone can't accept me as a woman before I've spent thousands of dollars and years of my life altering my body to suit them, there's no reason for me to expect their acceptance after it.
(I haven't done this for a while, but conversations we won't be having here include but are not necessarily limited to the following:
There are some people in the comments saying that if Chaz doesn't have "the surgery" (meaning some variety of phalloplasty, though they're probably imagining some kind of cartoon dick transplant), then that means he's "still a woman". And then somebody else will say, "Even with the surgery, [his] DNA still says [he's] a woman!" and the person who just above was saying that the lack of surgery is the sticking point says, "Yeah, I agree."
Well, that little bit of honesty there at the end is kind of refreshing. Since it's not likely Chaz is going to run out and have some major surgical procedures done to silence his critics, the people clamoring for genital-altering surgery as the gold standard will never have their bluff called. So it's nice to see them revealing that it is a bluff, that if he did have the surgery they'd just move up some other criteria.
And what if there was gene therapy that could safely rewrite the structure of somebody's somatic DNA, turning XX into XY or XY into XX? Would all the people who deny Chaz's manhood now go, "Oh, well. Okay."? It's possible that some few people would be satisfied, but my guess is we'd see exactly what we should expect to see when this same demographic starts by saying "Surgery would make Chaz a man!" and then says, "But the DNA's the same, still a woman."
That is, they'd say "DNA or no DNA, if you're born a woman you stay a woman and that's that."
And if Chaz Bono or anyone else whose genitals and genetics were being held up to the scrutiny of random strangers on the internet decided to run out and get the procedures being held up as the gold standard of the moment, some the detractors would no doubt say that the fact that anyone could be so desperate to prove them wrong showed that they weren't really as sure of their gender as they think.
Now, this post is not going to go into all the problems with treating the human race as something starkly divided between men and women, categories strictly delineated by distinctly different genitalia and chromosomes, mainly because in most cases any invocation of anatomy or genetics in a conversation about trans folks by cis folks isn't actually about those things, it's about drawing drawing lines and erecting barriers.
And it really doesn't matter what the barriers are built out of... they'll do it using whatever's handy. And if someone gets past that barrier, they'll just retreat and re-trench.
If all this seems eerily familiar to someone who doesn't think on trans issues very often but does follow U.S. politics, that's because it's the same principle that's at play in the Obama citizenship "debate". Whatever proof is released is never enough for some because it's never about proof, it's about having a firmly held conviction and trying to construct what seems like the most reasonable/least objectionable defense of it.
"I don't care what people do with their bodies and their lives," the transphobe says. "It's just science. I'd change it if I could, but you can't change science."
"I don't judge people based on their skin or for having a foreign-sounding name," says the xenophobic racist (who has a good All-American name like Johnson, Smith, Klein, McDonald, or Kowalski). "It's just the Constitution. You do want to make sure we're following the Constitution, right?"
All of this... it's not the reason I'm not personally pursuing surgery. But it's the reason I don't even feel one tiny solitary inkling of ambivalence based on the idea that surgery would lead to "acceptance". If someone can't accept me as a woman before I've spent thousands of dollars and years of my life altering my body to suit them, there's no reason for me to expect their acceptance after it.
(I haven't done this for a while, but conversations we won't be having here include but are not necessarily limited to the following:
- The completely non-bigoted reasons why you think Chaz Bono doesn't count as a man.
- Similar reasons for any person, or for trans people in general.
- How it's not racist or xenophobic to want more proof of President Obama's citizenship.