Red letter syndrome: The power of the T
Salem’s witch trials and Nazi German showed the power of scarlet letter and declaratory iconograph worn as badges of shame and othering. Crimes of biology, belief, and heritage worn about the self so all the ‘respectable’ folk would at the very least cross over the street. More likely, spitting, kicking, shunning, and much worse. Which is why I always have concerns with using trans sobriquets about myself. Transwoman, trans athlete, transgender (both as a noun and verb), the othering is literal and visceral. Granted, for me it is a personal choice, one that I am privileged to be able to make, but as history has repeatedly show, when you other a group you make it easier and simpler to eject them from society.
Non-cisnormative identities have existed throughout human cultural history. In the last half of the twentieth century western cultures decided to pathologise, catogorise, and put any non-cisnormative person into discrete boxes. You were either cis, or some untermenchen only worth of cabaret, tawdry news headlines, sex work, or murder. I over exaggerate, but not by much. By pinning the T on those who transgressed gender boundaries it made it easier to shove them to the margins, chide us for trans panic, and attempt to ‘cure’ them of a perceived mental illness. Why on earth would respectable people want to reject all those wonderful gender norms?
I am in no way ashamed of my identity or self, hell I readily disclose it when necessary, but the very fact I, and many people like me, have to disclose this about ourselves shows just how othered we are. No-one comes out as cis, no-one seeks psychiatric help in coming to terms with the alienation they feel, and no-one goes under the knife to conform to some mythological beauty standard that is almost impossible to uphold. Obviously the last one is a lie — many people undergo surgeries to conform to societies standards, but for cis people it is treated as one of those things. For trans people it is a matter of survival.
That there is such as things as cis and trans speaks much to societal need to pigeonhole people into discrete boxes. Why is it that a person has to be ‘male’ or ‘female’; why is that the genitals observed at birth track up until the day we die into a mode of being; why are the genetics we have no control over so constricting? The break down those questions, to question one’s very sense of identity, biology, and internal compass, then come out the other side with a recombination is somehow seen as aberrant and deviant. The red letter branded in invisible ink signifies society’s shame, not ours.
Being trans is not a matter of simply swapping wardrobes or wearing a raiment of flesh re-sculpted and adjusted to our own prevailing winds. It represented a reordering, a mode of being that puts the self in the centre of gender, accepting and acknowledging within ourselves that the very boxes meant to bind us to a pathway are unfit for purpose. The me shaped box is not gender X, but something a lot closer to Y. This is our original sin, to be exorcised in shunning, pain, and death. Or whatever passes for that in polite society.
Being othered closes doors, and not in the many doors remaining to be opened kind of way. Being othered leaves us at the edge of conversations, beyond normality, objects of fascination and magnified spectacle. Oh, look cis people, there are those non-cis types, look how different they are. This is not a matter of politics or social norms, for those change on the winds and tides of time; no, this is a matter of breaking down traditional structures too fast and too soon. Too fast for those who cry havoc at our very deeds, and too soon for those who hope to conserve some halcyon idyll of yore.
Even as non-cis folk constrict themselves back into some form of cisness, even as our flesh is cut and shaped, even as our bones break, this is never enough. For the T brands us all. Brands until the last heartbeat. Through no fault of our own we are othered, for normality is this land of boxes and roles, and we consciously step off the shore into a gender sea that salves our souls in ways no ointment ever could.
The power of the T is being whip and liberation. Whip hand held by those who cling to boxes and old orders of things; liberation for us who stepped out into this vast hinterland beyond. Ask and my red letter runs through my very core like Blackpool rock, yet it is not a badge of shame. Nor should it ever be.
