In the Court of the Transsexuals
A defining attempt to break the trans community into separate camp revolves around the media’s use of transsexual activists and writers to rail against broadening rights for trans folk. This divide is created around the medicalisation of trans bodies, who has treatment and who has not. Often transsexual writers will state that they understand they are male bodied, that women’s rights are sacrosanct, and that us transsexuals know our lesser place in the world. It is a classic technique used by oppressors across history to keep minorities in check, and it is worth examining the implications of this for the trans community.
Two recent groups in world history have had the same tactic applied to them to keep their rights down: black Americans and European Jews. Historically Jews have been persecuted simply for being Jewish from birth, with often limited recourse even if they assimilated into society. Court Jews were doctors, bankers, merchants, and other professionals deemed necessary to royal courts, but even those limited protections were at the whims of the State. Black Americans post-emancipation suffered a similar treatment by White America, with the elevated few lauded as exemplars at the cost of the vast majority’s rights. Transsexual activists are the same sort of patsies whether they realise it or not, suitable for holding up to the light, but still tugging their forelock to those who withhold fundamental rights from all trans folk.
What about the women they cry. They believe in a lesser womanhood (it is always transsexual women writing these pieces) for themselves, accepting the house rules that define womanhood narrowly enough to include just enough of their identities but exclude many other women in need of protection. The Court of the Transsexuals seats usually older trans women of a certain generation whose transition was fraught, and who were unable to transition at a young age. They carve out a space for themselves that says we are the anointed and anything other than our definition of trans is mistaken. To be trans is to undergo the surgeon’s knife, to take pill or put on patch, to live a real life experience as set down by cisgender norms, to behave as closely to cis normativity as to be a cis normative marionette. To be trans for the Court of the Transsexuals is to be Pinocchio without the Fairy Godmother, forever wishing to be a real girl but forever looking out of the shop window.
This is inherently problematic on many levels, least of all because it diminishes all womanhood down to a handful of pernicious stereotypes. To be a woman is to be something beyond societal expectations, it is to live life in your own skin, exist as you see fit. No matter the attempts, there is no gold standard womanhood any woman lives up to. Being a woman is messy, complicated, bold, beautiful, and to live under the shadow of patriarchy. Transsexual activists who insist on narrow, lesser, womanhood for trans women fall into the trap set for them by the patriarchal structures that defined transsexual in the first place.
Writers like Debbie Hayton think that by placating right wing readers with sops to women’s rights that somehow their own rights will remain intact as the tide regresses. A lowering tide carries all boats further from the shore, and the sandcastle that is the Court of the Transsexuals will be washed away along with the rest of us. Getting a seat at the bottom of the table may look like power, but it is still far from where the decisions are made. Using those who are forced to beg for scraps of rights as an intellectual footrest is both dishonest and fails to recognise that those transsexuals at the table are being made fools by the rest.
Court Jews faded from power because they became expendable and irrelevant at the end of the 19th Century. Black Americans raised into positions of authority in the 1960s and 70s have seen their power ebb as more radical approaches to business, sport, and politics took over. Trans rights has also seen a changing of the guard over the last decade. The Court of the Transsexual may wield crumbs of power in the form of Blair White and Buck Angel, but the radical trans voices are pushing further and faster than they ever imagined. To be a Transsexual advocate is to be Canute without the wisdom, to sit in your chair by the sea and will the tide back to where we were twenty years ago. The Court of the Transsexuals suits only those who pay the shilling to the shills, and the sooner those trans women recognise it the better and healthier it will be for them.
