Dealing with complex emotions: Why trans politics is not always as easy as it should be
One of my firmest political stands is that my trans advocacy is for all trans folk, not just those who have been through medical intervention like me. It would be politically easier for me to advocate for certain bodies to be excluded from certain spaces, to state that womanhood is bounded by gender reassignment surgery, and that anyone who cannot pass as cisnormative deserves to be excluded. All of these are patently false notions, because normative is always in the eye of the beholder. If I were to only advocate for a narrow band of bodies it makes me no better than those who seek to exclude in the first place. Yet, there is still a part of me that conceptually struggles to be complete in my allyship, always learning and adapting. And this is okay, because that is how allyship grows and develops.
My recent foray into Twitter has shown me that no matter how much I knew, there are always scenarios and rhetorical traps that others will roll out consistently to counter trans inclusivity. Pictures of folk dress in clothing in an attempt to bait me into saying they are men in dresses, showing that being inclusive has its limits. Pictures of trans folk convicted of sexual offences, as if their horrific crimes negated their gender identity. Attacks on non-binary folk erasing their very identities as woo. On some of these, such as the images, I simply ignore them because they are stripped of all context and it is impossible to say. On others, such as rapists and sex offenders, there is a fine line between affirming their identities and appearing to support their crimes. It becomes complex and messy, and people really just want simplicity and easy soundbites.
Then you have trans activists who advocate violence against exclusionary feminists. I have said it before and I will say it again that I do not believe violence or threats of violence work. Period. Any side that resorts to harassment to argue a point are bullies in my eyes. Yet, for all the perceived trans harassment it is exclusionary feminists and their allies who have deluged me with abuse, harassment, and attempted cyber-bullying. Of course they will point to the extreme trans activists, but they need to take the whole damn lumber yard from their eye before they point the finger at the splinter in trans eyes.
And this is where my activism does become complex. I have been accused in the past of not listening to trans activists, of ignoring that only violence or threats of violence have impact, and that by advocating for a peaceful route I am enabling oppression. I call this rubbish, and indeed harmful to the cause. Threats of violence rile up the opposition, as demonstrated by Sarah Jane Baker. No amount of threats of violence will bring about the change you desire, especially because trans folk make up such a small minority. Yes, those threats are cathartic and grab headlines, but they only serve to entrench exclusionary feminists’ sense of victimhood.
A yet more controversial point that has to be made is that the hyper sexualisation of certain elements of the trans umbrella is potentially actively harming the cause. Yes, each of us has the right to express ourselves as sexual beings, and yes social media allows for a far more expressive version of yourself, yet nothing online is ever truly private. Every image, every comment, every post has a digital footprint that can be used against you if it falls into the wrong hands. My singular rule when it comes to posting anything is could that post be potentially used against me in malicious hands. Those trans folk who post sexual or sexualised images of themselves online do not deserve to be mocked or harassed for those posts, yet in posting the image there is potentially a lack of self-awareness of the impact it could have on their lives. No victim ever deserves to be bullied.
If you advocate for all, is there ever a line that must be drawn? Can you call out ill-conceived behaviour or outright ill-behaviour? Yes, of course you can. Life is never free of consequences, just as it is never free from the morality of yourself and others. Trans identities have always been inherently sexualised ever since sexology emerged to study them. To be trans has always carried the whiff of cum shot, of being on the scientific frontline as they prod and poke your body to establish what type of invert you actually are. We have been the freaks, the butts of jokes, the porn postcards and scientific curios, bodies that are never truly our own. Of course our politics are so damn complicated, because we have been treated as complications across most of the last 160+ years. All the arguments used against trans people are rooted in our bodies, and the moment we seek to liberate them we are immediately critiqued for our biology.
So, yes, when trans folk sexualise their bodies online, when we show our penises in places a woman never should, when we simply exist as all folk have existed we become inherently political because society has made us political. If we were normalised this a woman with a penis would simply be a woman, not trans. My complexities in dealing with these issues is not inherently the fault of the trans folk themselves, it is the social conditioning I have been raised with to see trans bodies as foreign objects abroad in the land. It is the unpacking of those ideas and social constructs that leads to most of the complexities when dealing with exclusionary feminists.
Whatever my personal feelings on the matter are, there will always be trans folk who are outliers and exceptions to whatever rules and assumptions we have as a society. No body ever survives contact with other people’s ideas, no body every survives virtual vivisection by a thousand tweets. If you are trans inclusive you must consider the outliers and exceptions, because the moment you ignore or dismiss them is the moment you start to become exclusionary yourself. However, that does not mean that laws and guidelines can cover every eventuality, there will always be texture around the law which excludes, meaning there will always be the need for vigilance and a further progression of rights. It is up to each of us to be as inclusive as possible to ensure that the maximum number of people are included, and those left in the cold are then lifted up as they emerge.
