Month: December 2021

I am always fascinated by stories of trans survival and the ways in which trans and gender nonconforming people attempt to explain their experiences with gender to cis people. There’s a consensus among trans people that cisgender people generally never even bother to question their gender, or how they know that they are their gender. They just don’t put much thought into it. This gives me a sense of kinship with other sexual minorities. Straight people do not generally put much thought into their sexuality, because they have the privilege of remaining ignorant. The same appears to be the case for cis people.

Never having bothered to question one’s gender means that you aren’t even ready for Gender 101, you need the remedial course. You need to understand just how divorced the concepts of sex and gender really are. You need to understand that both sex and gender are social constructs. Even though they may serve some useful purposes, they are completely made up, and both are more of a mass system of classification and communication than any kind of quality inherent to one’s personhood.

The need for educating cis people on these particular facts is made even more apparent when one becomes aware of the old trans survival strategy of “spontaneous transition”. You may have seen a story about this floating around social media. Essentially, in the past, some trans people reportedly explained their transition to the people around them, and greater society, by claiming that they suffered from a pathological condition that resulted in their “changing sexes”. They could have said that they had something like a tumor, or just a general medical condition that caused “this most wonderful transformation”. (“A Man-Woman – Digital Transgender Archive”) But before we get to the specifics of this strategy, let’s take a look at some older representations of gender queerness.

Ancient Trans Survival in a Cisgender World

Trans people have been here since there have been people, thus the means to trans survival have existed since people have existed. I could not find ancient personal accounts of trans survival, but representations of the concept of “changing gender” are found in some of the most ancient stories and traditions. People who do not strictly adhere to a single, fixed, gender have historically been represented as gods. One of the most notorious examples of this in Western culture is Loki from Norse mythology.

He’s been a fly, he’s been a falcon, he’s accidentally conceived children by eating a burnt giantess’ heart. In a particularly memorable incident, he turns himself into a mare in order to seduce a horse and save the rest of the gods (long story). There’s also a bit in ‘Thrym’s Poem’ in which Thor refuses to disguise himself as Freyja because everyone will think he’s unmanly and that would be Terrible, and Loki replies with, essentially, ‘You’d rather the giants invade Asgard than have to wear a dress? Seriously?’
An Examination of Gender in Viking Age Scandinavia

I feel I should include something of a disclaimer here. It should come as no surprise that the word transgender, which was coined in an academic paper in 1965, is a modern descriptor applied to people who understand their gender to be different from the sex they were assigned at birth. This definition is itself a modern one, as a sex assignment at birth that is registered and recognized with some kind of governing authority seems to have shown up as late at 1811, which is when the Dutch started registering a baby’s sex along with other identifying information, such as the child’s name. Taken together, we can understand that when looking to the past, we should seek representations of behavior without using modern descriptors as classifying labels.

Understanding that, we can take a look at some Sumerian and Akkadian texts from 4500 years ago that document the existence of gala. These gala were priests who today are understood to have been individuals that identified outside of simple male or female gender identities. Archeologists have also found multiple burial sites of people who were buried with objects typically attributed to “men” or “women” whose anatomy did not match the supposed social status of the objects found.

Archaeologist María Fernanda Ugalde has raised a similar issue in her analysis of over 3,000 clay figures from Ecuador, dating from as early as 3500 B.C. Other combinations of physical and clothing features than the ones fitting Western notions of sex and gender were present in those figurines: For example, breasts were depicted with male dress and a lack of breasts with female dress.
Gabby Omoni Hartemann, Stop Erasing Transgender Stories From History

Modern Trans Survival Strategies

CW: Transphobia, cisnormativity, and general cis nonsense

Since we have established the ancient existence of trans people, let’s skip way into the future to arrive at the not-so-distant past of 1868. It is here, in a small town called Waterloo, Iowa, where we find an article in a newspaper entitled “A Man-Woman”. Intrigued, we read on to find the story of one Edgar Burnham, as told by some secondhand source, not Mr. Burnham, himself.

The article goes on to tell the story of a man named Powell and his former wife, one Ellen Burnham. Burnham is described as having “taught music, had a large number of pupils, and was very attractive.” Powell and Burnham were married for two years, and had one child together. They lived together until “at the expiration of two years, when about 21 years of age, Mrs. Powell’s voice changed, she grew light whiskers, and gradually changed her sex, developing into a man, in all respects, as if nature, anxious for a freak, had turned a portion of herself wrong side out.”

The story goes on to describe how Edgar took on his name, moved to Chicago, and eventually married a former music student of his. My favorite part of this is the second to the last paragraph, which declares “The former girl is now a man, the former wife is now a husband, the former mother is now a father…Truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and the above simple statement of facts borders so upon the marvellous we could not believe it did we not personally know nearly all the parties.” Despite the extremely cisnormative language, I can recognize that this author seems to have a better grasp on transition than some people in this day and age.

What makes the explanation of a “spontaneous” medical transition due to some mysterious “condition” so unique is that it is such a human explanation. What a human frailty is disease. And to use the perception of it as a means of gaining control over your body is such an inherently trans subversion of the very nature of “illness”. For many, illness can be disabling and overall just a terrible thing to experience. The fact that trans people had to lean into the intractable nature of disease in order to be granted the opportunity to exist as themselves in Western cisgender society is something that I see reflected in the modern day.

I’m sure anyone who has spent time in online trans spaces will recognize the reflex that certain modern trans people have to call their transness a mental illness. It seems to me that trans people who claim their transness to be the result of a mental illness are trying to use the same trans survival strategy as Mr. Burnham to justify their existence to the cis people around them, and thus gain access to much needed resources.

I am not here to disparage those who do feel themselves to be suffering from a mental illness because they are trans. I am not here to pass judgement, only to offer a historical perspective on why some people may feel this way. Trans people have had to use many creative coping strategies to survive, and the medicalization of transition is one of them. I do, however, believe that trans people who have access to modern technology owe it to themselves, and the community as a whole, to grow beyond this explanation of their transness.

I can understand how someone who lives in a violently cisnormative culture would be regularly confronted with the need to justify their existence. But if you have regular, and stable access to the internet, you have regular access to higher quality information on the nature of transness and transition than a simple “you have a mental illness”. Every trans person owes it to themselves to get invested in the conversations that are going on around being a modern trans person. Listening and learning are the best places to start when trying to grow, so I urge you to take it upon yourself to actually talk to trans people, and listen to our podcasts, and read our books, essays, and poetry. We are out here practically screaming to the world what our truths really are and at this point, if you can’t move beyond the thinking from 1868, you have a lot of personal work to do, regardless if you are cis or trans.

If you’ve made it this far you are already well on your way, and I would encourage you to take a deeper look into the nature of trans love, what it means to love your body as a trans person, and facing disillusionment with masculinity.

Citations

“A Man-Woman – Digital Transgender Archive.” The Last Sensation, 25 Jan. 1868, www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/g732d9110.

https://www.getrealcambridge.com/2015/03/07/an-examination-of-gender-in-viking-age-scandinavia/

In Virginia, Classism Has a New Face, Transphobia

By J.D.

On December 8, 2021

In History + Research

white elite in Virginia — Photo by Caleb White on Unsplash

My grandfather died without being able to read.

I would like to tell you the story behind this fact which serves to illustrate an event that had a huge impact on, not only my family, but also, the perspective of a lot lower class white people in Virginia.

My dad’s father only had a 6th or 7th grade education because his school closed to avoid integrating black students. Being extremely poor, and having no relatives in other parts of the state, the only option my grandfather was left with was to go to work. By the time most of the schools reopened, my grandfather had been working for years, leaving him with no time, or incentive, to finish his education.

Put another way, he was one of the earliest victims of the so called “massive resistance” strategy of the Stanley Plan, which was pushed through the Virginia General Assembly in 1956 by a group of white separatists and the governor at the time, Governor Thomas B. Stanley, for whom the bill was named. This bill was a direct refusal by the Virginia government to adhere to the federal mandate to integrate public schools, and prompted many schools to shut their doors rather than allow any student to attend any school.

I did not know my grandfather very well because he died when I was six. Given this, I cannot personally speak to how this lack of education impacted his political or social views. But we can take this one experience as an example of the white elite in Virginia sacrificing all of their sentiments at the twin altars of class and race. They literally used the rule of law to punish all of the poorest people in their community in an effort to enforce the exclusion of Black people.

But what was their explanation for this? The legislators claimed they refused to fund public education in the state “in order to protect the health and welfare of the people”.

Community leaders saw themselves as more civilized and progressive than residents of the Deep South. As Jill Titus writes in Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia, “Virginia’s interpretation of Jim Crow was stifling to black aspirations but nonetheless distinct from the racial code that governed life in the Deep South. The Old Dominion, after all, had been the aristocratic capital of the Old South. White elites wholeheartedly supported segregation and disfranchisement but shunned vigilante violence as a threat to social stability.” [emphasis mine]
Katie June-Friesen, Massive Resistance In a small town

To me, the above quote illustrates the heart of the issue that many in the Virginian, Christian conservative elite have with both Black people and trans people. We “disrupt” the social order simply through our very existence in what they deem to be their spaces. Or what the rest of us call, existing out in public.

Believing the existence of trans people to be a threat to the social order, makes it easy to cast trans people as not real and simply “promoting a divisive ideology”. Which thereby supports the idea of rejecting us from public life because any good, white, Christian Virginian cannot be seen promoting a threat to the social order!

This is also where we see the enduring influence of the antebellum era social code. Every other type of oppression is predicated on maintaining the social class structure that keeps the white elite in place. The elite go so far as to convince poor white people that the system is also beneficial for them by using racist/ableist/transphobic rhetoric to appear “on the same side” as the poor white people they also exploit. Because if there’s a class of people beneath (or opposed to) them, the poor white person gets to feel superior to someone as well, and is therefore promised social mobility by virtue of their whiteness, and ability to provide profit for the white elite through their labor. Whether this social mobility actually materializes is of no consequence. This promise is offered only to appease the poor white worker into not questioning the structure at large or even noticing how the white elite are oppressing them, albeit not in the same manner or to the same degree as everyone who is not white, or unable to work.

The current generation of parents who belong to the white elite do not want their children mingling with people whose existence challenges the established structure in a number of ways. Chief among these challenges to the existing order is the fact that widespread societal acceptance of trans people would, by necessity, undermine the ability of powerful, white men to oppress people on the basis of sex assigned at birth. But that isn’t what these parents are thinking when they are pulling their children from public schools. They believe they are protecting their children, and in a way they are exactly correct. They are preserving the social order from which they have benefitted and from which they expect their children to continue to benefit. This is the exact same sentiment that motivated the school closures of the ’50s, and continues to drive the recent wave of anti-trans hate and racially motivated violence in this country as a whole.

This is not necessarily intended as an “eat the rich” style diatribe. What I hope you take from this is a deeper understanding of the ways in which the economically elite and politically powerful members of this country continue to use racist, ableist, and transphobic systems to empower themselves at the expense of everyone else. Transphobia is just the flavor of the month in Virginia.

Complement your greater understanding of intersectionality with a deeper understanding of people who call themselves “queer by choice”, and learning more about the history and the enduring effects of this “massive resistance” strategy.

Citations:

https://www.them.us/story/christian-school-enrollment-booming-amid-backlash-over-trans-inclusive-policies

https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/septemberoctober/feature/massive-resistance-in-small-town

Baker, Robert E. “Legislators Get Stanley School Plan.” The Washington Post. August 28, 1956.