Recently I’ve heard a lot of trans people using the phrases “male bodied” and “male identified”, and been kind of thrown.

Most of the problems with “(fe)male bodied” would be pretty apparent from my post about “biological”, but I think that it’s worth discussing here specifically in its contrast to “(fe)male identified,” and “(wo)man identified.”

The problem with ____-identified is that it’s not just _____; what the hell is the point of saying “woman-identified-woman” unless a)you mean a political lesbian (the original meaning of the term) or b)not all women are “woman-identified” or not all who identify as women really are?

This is, I suspect, the exact opposite of what those who use the phrase intend to be conveying–which is, to be clear that they are legitimating the person’s identity, not using “male” and “female” coercively. But its use, like “gender identity” (“we can’t discriminate against trans women because, unlike other men, they have this weird internal identity as women that’s legally protected” as opposed to ‘the right to define one’s own gender is federally protected, and one cannot discriminate on the basis of the reasons underlying that definition’) reserves the unmodified term for other use, rather than using the unmodified term and clarifying if need be (for example, for advertising a woman-only space, ‘questioning the legitimacy of any participant’s womanhood and all other acts of gender policing are unacceptable in this space.’).

“(Fe)male bodied,” on the other hand, is used supposedly as a means of talking about a person without making a judgment on hir identity. But there are two problems: who does “male bodied” refer to, and how do we know?

It’s not always clear, when someone says “male bodied,” whether or not they mean to include me. As I wrote in Biological, it makes no sense to refer to me as “male bodied,” because
1)I identify & define my body as female
and
2)while some characteristics of my body would be read male under a coercive, “objective” scientific lens, others (e.g. hormone levels; softness, dryness, and depth of skin; breasts; fat distribution, the smell of my sweat) are pretty clearly female.

What “(fe)male bodied” does is try to avoid the messiness of respecting our identities and categorizing us solely that way and find an “objective” way of talking about people that you can use just by looking at them or by knowing their histories. But this Cartesian mind-body dualism is bunk–my body is still my body, and defining it was male or female is still defining me as male or female, and my body is not this thing that exists wholly separate from my mind, that cannot know or feel things or from which my sense of self can be divorced. My sex and my body are my self determination, don’t try to pry in with the crowbar of coercive language.

Part two is that not only do some people use the term to classify me as “male bodied” and others use it to classify me as “female bodied”–but that there’s a reason for this ambiguity. This “objective” “neutral” “real” body that they want to jump to just isn’t there. Some people mean chromosomes, some mean presence or absence of a penis (cunts don’t count y’all), some people mean hormone levels and how your body appears socially, some people just aren’t thinking about trans and intersex people’s bodies. But the assumption of using the phrase is that people will have half a clue of who you mean, which positions all bodies as belonging to pre-acknowledged sexed categories unambiguously and objectively. Regardless of what categories persons are placed in and how transphobic that placement is, by “empowering” the listener to do the placing, the term nullifies self-definition of sex/embodiment, and undermines resistance to the binary medical model for being trans.

So while I fully support all people speaking of their bodies as male and/or female (and/or other possibilities), don’t use “(fe)male bodied” as a category of people (based on body parts) as opposed to an individual’s self definition–even if you’re trans.

My body is my identity, my identity is my body. Don’t try to separate them, I went to a lot of effort to help them learn to play nice with each other.

My jumping off point here is a post by Helen G, of Bird of Paradox, Trans-Friendly Books for Children (and some related (and obnoxious, transphobic) discussion here):

There seems to be a comparatively large number of books written around the subject of gay and lesbian relationships but we could find nothing about transsexuality. It occurs that this is an area which perhaps should be given more attention by authors and publishers, given that it’s not uncommon for trans children to know at quite an early age that they have a degree of gender dissonance.

OK, I say, this is a good point, but I think it’s missing something–the analogy is flawed. But! My POV was (kind of) expressed in a cited post:

There was a time I naively assumed that I wouldn’t have to worry about sexism in my child’s books until at least story books, maybe not even until chapter books. Surely board books, written to start reading to infants so young they only understand the rhythm and rhyme of the words, would be immune!

That naivete lasted until maybe five minutes after the Boychick got his first book.

The truth is even board books, even modern board books, are rife with sexism, heterosexism, racism, and of course, what’s a good word, cisgenderism? (One can’t even call it transphobia, for it’s more the complete lack of acknowledgment that gender isn’t always obvious, simple, and binary. Transphobia might be a step up.)

I disagree with the terminology question–refusal to incorporate the fact of our existence in one’s actions in the world is one of the most deadly forms of transphobia:

When these corporations do justify their denial of basic medical care to trans people, one rationalization comes up repeatedly: the U.S. Federal Food and Drug Administration has not given approval for the use of any medications for transgender body modification. The Federal government does not supervise, regulate, approve or acknowledge the use of hormones to alter the gendered characteristics of one’s body. The FDA has never acknowledged, I believe, that trans people even exist.

When I buy my finasteride and delestrogen, they come to me, as most medications do, with small neatly-folded inserts outlining their proper use and potential side-effects. These texts are carefully regulated by the FDA. Nowhere in those long texts am I mentioned. They never discuss their use by transgender people, never acknowledge their potentially transformative effects when used with certain bodies, never even acknowledge that anyone under 50 would ever have a reason to take them. Similarly, I am never reflected in the advertisements for these drugs. Their extensive websites or occasional magazine ads have no trace of trans bodies. In the vast, proliferating world of consumer capitalism, trans people just don’t constitute a market niche when it comes to drugs.

I am invisible to my health insurance company, invisible to the FDA, and invisible to the pharmaceutical industries. This invisibility is how these institutions express their transphobia and the hatred of trans bodies. We are not seen. For some, this lack of institutional acknowledgement has dire consequences. Already excluded from the wage economy, many poor trans women in Philadelphia turn to sex work to pay for their hormones. Poverty, police abuse and HIV have taken a severe toll on the lives of trans women in the city. As trans people modifying our bodies, we are using these corporation’s drugs towards unapproved and unacknowledged ends: the gendered rebuilding of our bodies. We pay the bill, and we live with the consequences. For me, choosing to take hormones is the best decision I’ve ever made.

Michelle O’Brien, “Tracing This Body: Transsexuality, Pharmaceuticals, and Capitalism”

But regardless, I’m right there with Arwyn when I say that transphobia is integrated into these books, that it’s part of our culture down to the way infants are taught language, and that that foundationalism (ha!) is true of sexism, racism, homophobia, etc etc., to the point that explicit/bigoted transphobia can even be helpful, in that it acknowledges our potential existence, and only denies that existence a place in our understanding of reality through violence.

When Helen writes I can remember very clearly the day when, aged five, I realised that “something wasn’t right with my body”. But I had neither the language nor the resources to say or do anything about it, I think she elides an even more crucial point–that by the age of five, she had been successfully indoctrinated into believing that her identification as/desire to be/discomfort with ‘not being’ a girl was an affront to symbolic reality. It’s not. Without a preexisting identification of cissexuality with Reality, that wrongness, that lack-of-fit, doesn’t exist. The only thing separating pre-pubescent trans kids from living their genders is the demand that they not do so–not hormones, not height, not anything, physical differences between cis boys and cis girls at that age are practically nil.

Before trans kids can think of themselves as “wrong,” they have to be introduced to the idea that their genders are inauthentic–the separation of cis and trans has to occur, and then the possibility of transsexuality has to be, in psychoanalytic jargon, foreclosed–the incompatible idea is rejected as if it never existed. The very potential for transsexuality would make our theoretical “ground” when writing about sex and anatomy nonexistant. Western culture depends on transphobia to create meaning in the world. I’m not saying that the whole thing would come crumbling down without transphobia, but that concepts we can’t even think currently would have to come in to replace it in order for the whole thing to *not* come crumbling down. Refuting cissexuality-as-reality, cissexuality-as-default is tantamount to refuting positivism/the scientific method/the idea that Truth is or can be objective–which is part of why we have to search for a “cause”–because we need something to help us acknowledge being trans as valid while maintaining that there isn’t anything wholly interior/subjective/qualitative about personhood. I hope you see the problem.

I hope I’m not reading too much Spivak to make sense anymore.

So here I come back to transsexuality-as-an-issue:

Targetting that particular demographic makes good sense, but I wonder if perhaps children themselves should be given access to the tools they need to help them in their own self-identification. To paraphrase Ruth, “I am thinking of something the five-year old Helen could have read that might have helped… but also something that the five-year old Helen would have actually been likely to read rather than have been stuck in a ’specialist’ bookshop like News from Nowhere whilst Helen read Thomas the Tank and the Hobbit”.

On one hand, I want to praise the move toward “trans kids need access to this info, it’s normal, and it’s something five year olds need to have info about and yes are actually capable of understanding.” But on the other hand, if we approach the world from a perspective that cissexuality isn’t “natural,” if we come from the perspective that all gender & sex are self-determination, then there isn’t a book about dealing with being trans–in the background of every children’s book has to be an assumption that kids are uncovering gender for themselves and making what they wish–it may or may not be foregrounded, but the idea that a kid could look at another kid and say “that’s a boy” or that a character could be glossed as a girl in some abiding, permanent, unconditional/absolute/non-tentative way is impossible if we dare to think gender self-determination. In a trans positive world, there are no trans books because there are no cis books–which, currently, are essentially all books.

Don’t you think offering “trans-friendly” books to CHILDREN is a bit like offering pro-plastic-surgery books, or pro-limb-lengthening-surgery books, or gastric-bypass-friendly books to kids? I mean we’re talking about major pharmaceutical dependence, the long-term consequences of which aren’t yet known, and major surgical intervention against what is in actuality healthy flesh. Are none of these trans-advocates concerned at all about children being indoctrinated and influenced to do themselves bodily harm, when they might under less woman-hating circumstances simply be lesbian women or women who otherwise do not adhere to societal gender roles in style or behavior?

So, this whole bodily harm/self-mutilation idea. Mayhem. What does that really signify? What does self mutilation signify?

“major surgical intervention against what is in actuality healthy flesh”–we are changing something from the real, healthy order of things, the natural to the unnatural–that is the essence of self-mutilation. It’s not self mutilation to have, say, an appendectomy or Laparoscopic Anti-Reflux Surgery–even though both involve the removal of healthy tissue–because the tissue in question is irrelevant to our understanding of personhood and reality–whereas in all the cited cases of surgery, one is talking about social characteristics of the body.

The commenter’s presumption is that one can somehow avoid the “subject” of transsexuality entirely, that existing children’s books are not the opening salvos in a war against trans kids. Every single statement she makes about “boys” and “girls,” by assuming that reality is cissexual, are immediately dependent upon a foreclosure of transsexuality. (that is, rejecting it as if it had never existed) That one can be “trans friendly” but not portray it as part of symbolic reality, as “normal”:

guess I was thinking of “trans-friendly” as being more “pro-trans” because that’s the aura it’s taken online. If it were possible to simply portray it, without making it seem like a good thing, or without making it seem like it’s just as normal as being a non-gender-conforming female, intersex, or male person, then, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.

She’s saying–so long as transsexuality is talked about in a way that makes it clear that it’s still up-for-debate, not a-part-of-the-underlying-reality-that-makes-this-discussion-even-possible, and not “normal”–part of the real symbolic order–just a deviation therefrom, an aberration that doesn’t have to be accounted for when we think about the world, it’s ok with her. Her position isn’t even one of wanting to make sure to denounce being trans, because she’s fine if there’s no material out there–she has *no concern* for the “girls” that she’s supposedly advocating for, only for maintaining cissexual dominance over the meaning of reality.

If I need to back that up I’ll need another post–it just gets kinda convoluted. The short version is that she acknowledges that a certain group is suffering distress, but is only interested in making sure they *don’t* get a certain kind of resource, rather than making sure that they do get other resources. Furthermore, her paranoia about even a single children’s book that “pushes drugs and self-mutilation” on kids is demonstrative that she isn’t really worried about how many kids it might cause to transition–because individuals’ cissexuality is much more robust than that, but society’s isn’t.* Society’s myth of universal cissexuality *is* incredibly fragile, and has to be protected at all times–but what has to be done is not to create a stronger foundation (which they never ever do) but to disrupt any other conversation that’s happening. (see my Radical Feminist Troll series, especially parts two and three)

This is why these “discussions” cannot continue to be tolerated in feminist spaces–because the premise is to keep our very reality in check, our existence and validity as people at bay, our lives up for debate. That frame unmakes us, it strips the connection between transsexuality and personhood, its very point is to undo us, making us objects that make funny sounds that seem almost like speech. They demand that all participants ground themselves on earth that doesn’t hold our weight.

Margie’s whole deal with “oh I don’t care what adults do, just don’t indoctrinate the children” is precisely about making sure that no one comes into this world without the cissexuality-as-reality frame. She has no concern for whether people actually “mutilate” themselves, no concern for the welfare even of her putative victim, let alone trans kids–only that that “mutilation” remain aberration, unreal, only that our purchase on reality is too unstable to actually give us the support to go interpreting that reality, challenging the cissexual supremacist one, and have it taken seriously.

*Ruth’s comment here is kind of amazing:

“We were talking about the gullibility of young children and whether it’s ethical to exploit that in order to make adult people feel better about their pharmaceutical and surgical choices.”

Arrrgh! No we weren’t! Not sure what conversation you were having but the original post was about trans friendly books for children… and now they’re being exploited? What, you think the kind of books we meant were ones that went like this?

“Sally,” said Sally’s Mum, “if you want to play with Lego Technic and have a train set, you’ll have to have an operation.” “Really?” said Sally, puzzled. “Yes. And you’ll have to take some special tablets too.” “Oh,” answered Sally. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.” “Well, it’s either that, or you go back to playing with my little pony.” “Well,” pondered Sally, “I couldn’t cope with any more Rainbow Brite dolls, so I guess I’ll just have to do as you say.”

Comic version by Drakyn:

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“Biological (wo)man”
“Typical biological (fe)male”
“Biologically (fe)male”
“Bio boy”
“Genetic girl”

No. Just, no. Don’t do it.

No really. Don’t. I don’t care if your trans friend uses it. I don’t care if you’re trans. Don’t.

I don’t actually have to explain it. Think for a minute or two. Read a few of my other posts, particularly this one. You have the resources and intellect to figure this one out on your own. Really. I trust you. You can do it.

Don’t click the “more” button if you haven’t already figured it out or at least tried for 5 minutes. The point of what follows isn’t about educating you about why not to say it. That’s stupid. It’s about 1)giving you talking points to explain to other people, and 2)exploring the faulty logic that goes into the usage.

Gender and sex are self determination. “Biological” is determination by other. If we are being honest when we say that it’s self-determination, then what the fuck does some biologist’s view matter?

Besides, if we truly separate gender and sex even in a coercive, trans-negative way, man does not flow from male, nor woman from female, so it makes no sense to say “biological man” “genetic girl” etc etc. This is one case where cissexualist feminism fails itself, where even if cissexual feminists don’t give a shit about trans people, they lose through these statements because it naturalizes the categories (and thereby norms) they supposedly want to end. But that’s only part of it.

Furthermore, even in a gender/sex coercive milieu where the observer determines reality not the person hirself, when a scientist or doctor looks at a body-modified transsexual person’s body or an intersex person’s body and says “Look at this, this, and this! This person is biologically male,” said scientist is also saying “And DON’T look at that, that, or that! Those are just distractions, not natural, not important.” My tits, my skin, the texture of my hair, my fat distribution, my arousal & orgasm patterns are all “biologically female” due to the estrogen and spiro that I take. The carrying angle of my elbows is a better fit to the “biologically female” stats than the “biologically male” standard deviation curve. Furthermore, non-surgically-reconstructed bits of transsexuals who take hormones are not the same, do not act the same, and if you know how to look, do not look the same as cissexual non-intersex bits. I haven’t had any permanent hair removal on my chin, and I don’t shave (part of) it, and you know what? It looks like cis girl facial hair. Even if I grew out the whole damn thing it couldn’t pass for a cis boy’s facial hair. It’s been more than two months, it’s not even a half an inch long, and it’s fine enough as to be hardly visible. It hasn’t affected me passing.

I don’t share these things because I think they make me more validly female/not-male. They don’t. I suspect that everyone, cis, trans, and/or intersex has something that they can point to like that–some of us just have more of them or less of them. I’m bringing these things up to show that it’s arbitrary. If a MAAB person didn’t produce “enough” testosterone, their insurance would cover it, and all the biological changes it would cause would be “real” and “biological”–unlike the biological changes I experience when I take estrogen. What does “biologically male” mean in a trans context? Anatomically male…which characteristics? Hormonally…I’m female. Chromosomally… who knows? (oh and sometimes chromosomes change, btw.)

Look–if aliens came and studied us and sorted us into groups, they wouldn’t put me in with the cis boys. They wouldn’t put me in with the cis girls, either, but it’s only entrenched transphobia in science that allows us to think that I would be put with the cis boys. It’s only this bait and switch, this sleight of hand that allows these things to be clear from an outsider’s perspective. It makes sense if and only if you accept a cissexual supremacist lens, a way of thinking that is designed specifically to erase and undo trans and intersex people. Even in a gender coercive society, this way of thinking is only intelligible through transphobia.

Now let’s get back to the gender self-determination. Here, there are two cases.

1)”Bio male” to mean cis male

So, here, we’re removing the gender/sex conflation of “bio boy” & “genetic girl,” and the presumption is that it’s being paired/opposed to “trans male” (bio female and trans female). The problem here is essentially the same as with “bio boy”–it implies that there’s this legit thing out there, cissexualist science, that lends credence to some people’s self determination, and pretends that by doing so it does not inherently invalidate other people’s self determination. Because if my femaleness is “self determined”, but someone else’s is “natural”, well, we have a problem, right? It presupposes that gender/sex coercion does get some say in the validity of your sex.

2)”biologically (fe)male” meaning “assigned (fe)male at birth”

Here, sex essentialism is rallied to the aid of sex coercion–it says (while you may be able to determine your own gender) you can’t determine your sex, it’s natural, real, etc. “Female man” and Female Masculinity¹ come out of this usage. It denies agency over the body, naturalizes cissexual supremacist science, etc. The short answer is that it’s sex coercive. Again, it appeals to the “reality” of the situation (because our scientific lens is more thoroughly determined by cissexual supremacy than some other lenses are).

It’s also generally paired with/legitimating gender coercion as well. It’s a way to group trans women and cis men together and pretend it’s unproblematic, not transphobic, etc. It’s mobilized in support of cissexual supremacy in order to give false credence to all the various things that cis/non-intersex people (and frequently trans misogynistic trans men) like to assume happen based on one’s ‘real sex’ rather than being dispersed by identified sex, lived sex, or more diffusely.

As such, it’s also tied into trans male / cis female complicity in trans misogyny–in that it creates this “natural” ground upon which to create a community between those two groups, that excludes trans women by extension of excluding cis men, a way of claiming that these spaces are not transphobic/trans misogynistic, a way to pretend that it’s not bloody fucking obvious that the oppression of trans women is misogyny, a way to do the whole trans-men-are-the-ones-who-are-oppressed-by-sexism-in-the-trans-community shtick.

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