text:
The internet has been abuzz over this thing that happened:
[…] a Planet Fitness gym in Midland, Michigan revoked the membership of a woman who complained that the trans woman she was sharing a locker room with looked too much like a man.
Of course, this event has stirred up a bunch of conversation around whether trans people (often trans women) should have access to certain gendered spaces, namely bathrooms and locker rooms. Trans people and allies are basically of the opinion that it's no big deal to let people pick the bathroom that's appropriate for them and cis people need to shut the hell up about it. The opposition centers around how it can make (cis) women uncomfortable, and how there's a chance that (cis) men could dress as women any time they wanted to gain access to these spaces and maybe attack the cis women.
It occurred to me recently that if a cis dude wanted to dress as a woman to enter a gendered restroom, he would have to a) pack the clothes and change into them right before entering the bathroom, risking detection by anyone paying attention, or b) wear the clothes out in public on the way to his dirty deed of peeking or whatever. (Which–if peeking is what you're worried about–would mean that any cis women attracted to women would also not be allowed in the women's room. Just saying.)
Does anyone realize that cis men would have to be willing to put themselves in the position of a trans woman in order to accomplish this particular act of subterfuge? If they walked around dressed as women but still visibly male, they would literally be putting themselves at risk for the kind of violence that trans women face, just for the sake of gaining access to a women's room. They would also be even more likely to be stopped before entering the restroom, or to have someone contact management about their presence since they wouldn't have been doing any of the regular feminizing routines that many trans women maintain.
It also occurs to me to mention that, though I'm not a criminal psychologist, I suspect the type of guy who would attack women in a public restroom would probably just walk in and do it without the preamble of dressing as a woman. And claiming to be a trans woman isn't going to nullify those sexual assault charges anyway.
On that thought, there are trans women who rape people. There are also cis women who rape people. Making public facilities accessible to trans people isn't going to generate rapists where there weren't any, no matter what their gender is. Not to mention that most rapes are perpetrated by someone the victim knows personally, not random strangers in bathrooms.
Trans women are at risk for violence just like cis women are at risk, let's not forget. Preventing trans women from using women's restrooms is going to force them to go into men's rooms, where they will be at greater risk of harassment or violence. I don't mean to diminish the fact that violence against cis women from cis men is a huge problem, but cis men are not trans women, and taking away trans people's access to certain gendered facilities isn't going to stop or even deter that violence. It's just discriminatory and othering, and is going to put more trans people at risk of harassment and possibly arrest since so many places are trying to codify laws restricting restroom use.
Bringing this back around to the Planet Fitness thing, the cis woman who complained did so because she thought there was a man in the locker room. The trans woman was reportedly wearing leggings and a baggie t-shirt, but she acknowledges that her body appears masculine from behind. Although, she has breasts and was carrying a purse… Point being, I've seen people arguing "But how can we tell if they're trans and not just a dude in the ladies' room if they aren't wearing hyperfeminine clothing and haven't been taking hormones?" To that I say, fuck you. Hormones cost money, and so do those feminizing routines I mentioned earlier. Let's not pretend that standards of attractiveness aren't being used to gatekeep trans women from accessing women's spaces.
And to anyone who thinks that Planet Fitness responded too strongly by revoking the cis woman's membership, I give you this:
She returned to the gym Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday "to get the word out" to other women that they "let men in the women's locker room," she said.
"Every day I said 'just so you know, there's a man they allow in this locker room and they don't tell you that when you sign up,' " she said.
And also this:
Cormier said she then got a call from Planet Fitness' corporate office telling her that she was violating their "no judgement" policy. She says they asked if she was going to stop talking to other women in the locker room and she said she would not.
Cormier said the representative told her she was no longer welcome at the gym.
This cis woman was aggressively returning to the gym specifically to 'warn' other members of the gym that Planet Fitness allows people to use the locker room suited to their gender identity. She was causing a disruption and creating an unsafe environment for trans people. Planet Fitness prides itself on being a no-judgment zone and she was clearly creating a judgmental environment by enflaming her fellow cis women. It makes perfect sense that they revoked her membership. And now she's suing Planet Fitness for something like $25,000, so we'll see how that goes.
In trying to come up with solutions to these bathroom debacles, some people have proposed making additional facilities for trans people or making all single-stall bathrooms gender-neutral, or even making all bathrooms gender-neutral, period. Here's a Laci Green video talking about some of that:
I agree with Laci that making separate facilities for trans people is kinda separate-but-equal-y. Which is not good. I see no reason why all single-stall restrooms shouldn't be gender-neutral, and I have seen "family" restrooms available, which seems perfectly reasonable. I'm also not particularly opposed to having all multi-stall restrooms be neutral as well, except for having cleaned men's bathrooms before and they are.. not pleasant. Maybe we'd need to simultaneously introduce the concept of cleaning the bathroom after ourselves, like they do in French airports.
Ultimately, we need to collectively mind our own business and let people determine for themselves which bathroom they need to piss in. FFS.]]>
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Did you know that parents tend to see newborn boys as larger and newborn girls as smaller, even when they're the same size? Welcome to Gender Analysis.
Last time, we talked about how transgender people are affected by the expectation of passing – the idea that we should blend in as if we're cis people. We discussed how this can force us to become secretive about every part of our lives, how it can keep us from advocating on our own behalf, and how it can isolate us from other trans people.
Now I'd like to examine passing in practice. Most people think of passing as a one-way street, as though the responsibility for passing or not falls solely on trans people. We often see cis people feign helplessness and protest that they just can't see us as our gender. This serves as an excuse to misgender us.
But we're not the only variable in this equation. It's easy to assume that perception is an objective sense – that we all reliably see a person exactly as they are, just like pointing a video camera at them. Yet perception isn't really like that at all, and this means that there are aspects of "passing" that are completely external to trans people.
Passing and media exposure
In episode 04, I mentioned a trans support group from the 1980s that largely refused to be a part of any media coverage about trans people (Bolin, 1988). They felt that any wider public awareness would only serve to inform people on distinguishing features that could be used to identify us. In other words, they believed that passing isn't just about what we look like – it also comes down to how much other people know.
I've received hundreds of thousands of comments on my videos since 2008, and I've heard from people who always thought I was a cis woman until they learned otherwise. And yet, to this day, I also get commenters saying I still look like a man. They're looking at the same person, but their perceptions couldn't be more different.
This is a real phenomenon, and there are numerous studies showing that our impression of someone's appearance is based on more than just their appearance. These judgments are influenced by what we know about a person, the stereotypes we hold, and biases against people outside of our social groups.
Attractiveness and assumed personality traits
Passing is about appearances, but what we believe about someone's personality can influence how we see them. In a 2014 study, people were asked to rate the attractiveness of a series of faces. Two weeks later, the same participants were asked to rate the same set of faces – but this time, one group was also shown words for positive personality traits, and another group was shown negative personality traits. Faces accompanied by positive personality traits were rated more attractive on the second pass, while faces accompanied by negative traits were rated as less attractive.
Another study offered data on judgments of attractiveness and attitudes toward trans people. Participants were shown several composite images representing trans people, and were asked to provide their opinion on various character traits of these hypothetical people, one of which was attractiveness. The participants who scored higher on a measure of transphobic prejudice rated the images as much less attractive.
False alarms: Bias and over-exclusion
Passing can feel like being under a microscope, and there's a reason for this: prejudice can change the way that people are scrutinized and categorized. A study in 1975 asked participants to classify people's photographs as Jewish or as Gentiles, and found that subjects who ranked higher on a measure of anti-Semitism classified more photographs as Jewish. The authors state:
"…it appears that anti-Semites do achieve higher accuracy scores than unprejudiced subjects at the cost of a higher false alarm rate."
In other words, people with higher levels of bias tended to err on the side of incorrectly excluding people like themselves, rather than risk including outsiders in their own group.
Another study on categorization by race asked participants to classify photographs of black people and white people. It was found that subjects with higher levels of racial prejudice spent a longer time looking at ambiguous photos than they did at photos that were clearly black or white.
Imagination and gender perception
Our perception of gender can be especially malleable. Recent studies on adaptation in perception asked subjects to imagine a woman's or man's face, then showed them a set of androgynous faces. After imagining a woman's face, people tended to evaluate these faces as more feminine; after imagining a man's face, they tended to rate them as less feminine. They were looking at the same faces, but they perceived the gendered features of these faces differently.
Ignoring and misperceiving: Appearance and genital knowledge
People can even ignore what's right in front of them based on their interpretation of someone's gender. A study in Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach used overlays of gendered features to create drawn figures with a blend of different traits: long or short hair, wide or narrow hips, breasts or a flat chest, body hair or no body hair, and a penis or a vagina. All of them had a gender-neutral face. People were then shown these figures and asked to assign them a gender.
When they believed a figure had a vagina, they would often interpret the gender-neutral face as "feminine" and even decide that a shorter hair length was feminine. Conversely, when they thought a figure had a penis, they saw the face as "masculine" and often decided that longer hair was a "'reasonable' male hair length". They would even believe that wider hips were narrow. When people will so rapidly shift their standards of feminine and masculine appearance based entirely on assumptions about genitals, how can they accurately judge a trans person's appearance? Really, does this dick make my hair look shorter?
Gender-stereotyped body size perception
Even the straightforward perception of height can be distorted by gender stereotypes. A 1974 study examined parents' perceptions of their newborns, and found that daughters were more often described as "little", while sons were more likely to be described as "big". But the difference in the average weight of each group was fewer than five ounces, and their body length differed by less than half an inch.
This distortion continues into adulthood. A study in 1990 asked subjects to estimate the heights of women and men in photographs. Every photo of a woman was matched to a photo of a man of equal height, so that each group of pictures had the same average height. Yet the women were still estimated to be several inches shorter than the men – even when subjects were specifically told that the women and men had the same height, and that they shouldn't use gender as a basis for their estimations.
Passing: A rigged game
Not all trans people aim to pass as cis people – and we certainly shouldn't be expected to. But no matter how we choose to present ourselves, there can be a substantial gap between how we appear, and how we're perceived. People aren't helpless to change how they see us, and we already know what influences that. So stop stereotyping men and women. Stop thinking that trans women are actually men. Stop fixating on our genitals. And please, stop staring at us. It's not your job to decide whether we look the way you think we should – we're not here to be pretty for you. And if you expect us to put that much work into passing, you can start by doing your share.
I'm Zinnia Jones. Thanks for watching, and tune in next time for more Gender Analysis.
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Remarks as prepared for Social Justice Calgary 2015:
Hi, I'm Zinnia Jones. I've been publishing my work on YouTube and on Freethought Blogs for several years now, covering secular and LGBT topics. I'm very honored that the University of Calgary Freethinkers have invited me here.
Most recently my focus has been on transgender issues. I've been transitioning for a couple years, and I've covered this topic like I would pretty much any other aspect of my life — telling the internet everything I think about it. I've also done a lot of research on it, because it seemed like no one else could really tell me all the things I wanted to know about going through this. So that's a gap I've felt I should try to fill by sharing what I've learned with a wider audience.
My talk today is essentially about that. It's about basic awareness of trans-related things, and specifically the positive or negative effects this can have on trans people's self-understanding and self-realization: the process of coming to know that they're trans. It's my belief that by studying and targeting the factors involved in this, we can help facilitate trans people's personal development on both an individual and societal scale — or, to put it simply, spawn more trans.
The only one?
When reading through trans people's descriptions of their early sense of their gender, there's a very common theme: they often think that they are the only person in the world who feels this way.
One woman stated, as she began high school: "At that time, I still thought that I was alone in the world." Another person said: "I guess back then I felt a freak because there was no-one I knew who was like me."
And it keeps going like that:
"When I was much younger I felt like the only one in the world." (Bolin, 1988)
"Until I found out there were others, I knew I was alone." (Bolin, 1988)
"I thought I was the only one in the world that was going through this. I didn't know about hormones yet. I didn't know what SRS was — sex reassignment surgery. I didn't know what the procedure was." (Kuklin, 2014)
Some of these quotes are from people who grew up in the '60s or '70s; some are from later. That last one is from a teenager who was interviewed last year. This is an ongoing issue.
Now, are they the only ones in the world? Far from it. Estimates of prevalence from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders have stated that trans women are 1 in 30,000 and trans men are 1 in 100,000, which would imply there are only about several thousand of us in the United States.
But more recent research has shown that this is off by a couple orders of magnitude: a study in 2011 estimated that there are about 700,000 trans adults in the US. That's about the same size as the population of Winnipeg or Seattle. Extrapolating this figure to the global population, there are about 16 million of us — almost half the size of Canada.
Finding the words
So what's going on here? When there are 16 million trans people around the world, what's making people think that they're the only one who feels this way? In large part, there's just not enough cultural awareness that being trans is a thing. People haven't learned that their experiences are not an isolated anomaly, but rather an instance of a very widespread phenomenon.
Trans people have often said that they didn't know there were even words for this. They've said:
"I didn't know of 'trans' as a word or definition."
"I didn't know that I was transgendered or transsexual at an early age because I had never come across those terms."
When people don't know of any conceptual structure to fit their experiences into, their feelings can often just seem vague and confusing until they find a way to make sense of this. And the gap in time here between becoming aware of these feelings and putting a name to them has actually been measured. A survey of trans people in 2010 found that they became aware of their own gender variance in some sense at an average of 8 years old. However, it took until they were 15 years old before they actually learned words like "transgender" or "transsexual". Another study of trans youth aged 15 to 21 reported that they knew they had some kind of gender discordance at an average of 10 years old, but it took them until age 14 to realize that the term "transgender" applied to them.
Historical challenges to self-recognition
This is a gap of years between knowing there's something different about their gender, and knowing that there's a word for it. It takes people time to stumble upon this and realize it fits them. So what are some of the moments that spark this realization? Some trans people have cited media coverage of Christine Jorgensen in the '50s or Renée Richards in the '70s. Others were first exposed to the concept via literature from trans organizations or images of trans people in adult magazines.
What's interesting is that the age at which trans people learn of the idea has been decreasing. People who grew up in the '50s and '60s heard these terms at an average age of about 20, but this later decreased to an average of 14 years old.
So what influenced this? Decades ago, access to transitioning through the medical system was extremely restricted. At one point, hospitals turned away thousands of people who applied for surgery, and accepted only a handful (Meyerowitz, 2002). Doctors would often treat only those trans women who looked the most conventionally feminine — and since those women hadn't yet been allowed to access these treatments, this made it something of a catch-22. They were expected to be heterosexual and to have a lifelong history of exaggeratedly feminine behaviors, to the point of being almost offensively stereotypical.
Those who were allowed to transition were told to keep their history a secret for the rest of their lives. They often had to quit their jobs and move to a place where nobody knew them (Bolin, 1988), and they were taught to come up with false pasts to serve as substitute life stories (Kessler & McKenna, 1978). So for decades, there were fewer of us who were able to transition, and fewer of us who could be open about it. It's taken the medical community a disappointingly long time to realize that not all of us take on stereotypical gender expressions and gender roles, and many of us aren't okay with just giving up the lives we've made for ourselves.
Modern-day possibilities for discovery
Another factor that started to open things up for us was increasingly widespread internet access. This gave people the opportunity to set up their own online resources and connect with others who have similar interests. For us, this held a lot of advantages over older forms of media and private in-person support groups. There may be millions of us out there, but we'll still pretty sparsely scattered, and there might be only a handful of us in some smaller towns.
Openly considering transition comes with considerable social risks, as does being out, and this can keep us apart from one another. But online, we can reach out to people around the world, without the dangers of having to reveal our names, identities, or locations. We can search for information and explore various topics without having to commit ourselves to a certain label or identity.
Crucially, we don't have to wait for it to come to us. We're no longer waiting for news coverage of maybe one or two trans media stars a decade, or looking around libraries for obscure and inaccessible trans literature. Now it's available in our homes whenever we happen to get curious about it. If you were in the middle of nowhere 40 years ago, you might not have any idea of where to go for help with this. Now you can post questions on a certain section of Reddit and get answers from other trans people in a matter of hours. That's how far we've come.
From sensational to personal
The few trans people who were able to go public in previous decades typically represented a narrow cross-section of transness: they were the ones who were able to meet the restrictive standards of the time and successfully navigate that system. So, in turn, that was the only concept of transness that was widely represented.
The perpetuation of these standards in the public consciousness could be a significant barrier to trans people's self-recognition. Sure, more people were aware that transitioning was possible — but after they learned the words for it, they could be misled into thinking this didn't apply to them. Suppose they weren't straight or extremely feminine from a young age, or maybe they didn't feel that the "trapped in the wrong body" cliché applied to them. Those experiences weren't reflected by the predominant media image, so they might end up unnecessarily doubting their own transness and putting off transitioning.
So what can address this issue? What raises awareness of being trans, without presenting only very limited ways of being trans? It's not a hard problem, it just wasn't possible before. Nowadays, more and more trans people are able to be out and open about their very different experiences — trans people who are queer, androgynous, or nonbinary. Our representation isn't limited to homogeneous, distant celebrities who may or may not relatable. Now everyone can see that trans people are just everyday people like anyone else, and they're all around us.
Rapid transgender population growth
In recent years, there's also been an interesting demographic shift in the population of trans people: it appears to be growing more rapidly than you'd expect. Over the past four years, the number of trans youth referred for treatment in the UK has increased fivefold. And a 2011 report found that the number of trans people in the UK seeking treatment is on track to double every six and a half years.
So does this mean that the proportion of the population that's trans is actually growing? Has something suddenly caused the prevalence of transness to spike drastically in recent years? That's not actually necessary in order to explain these statistics. Keep in mind that they're only counting the trans people who can be counted. So the actual number of trans people doesn't need to be going up — just the number of trans people who are aware that they're trans. We know that people can be trans and not know it until something activates that awareness; nowadays, people have more of an opportunity to learn about this than ever.
A 2002 study shows the effect of the internet on trans people's self-awareness: out of 19 trans men, 15 of them said the internet helped them come out to themselves or others, and it was tied in first place with books, ahead of TV, movies, or newspapers. 14 said online groups and mailing lists facilitated their identification as trans.
And a 2009 report from the UK suggests that there is a "large reservoir" of trans people from which relatively few have emerged to seek treatment. They state that some of the reasons this number is growing are "the dissemination of information via the internet", a "buddy effect", and online discussion groups that help trans people connect with each other.
At the edge of realization
I've experienced this firsthand from both sides of the process. When I was a teenager, I didn't really think about why I was uncomfortable with growing body hair or my voice dropping — I just thought it was something I had to deal with. But once I grew up, I found some trans IRC channels that I spent a lot of time in, and knowing dozens of trans people made the idea of it a completely normal thing to me. When I started thinking about transitioning, there were people I could ask about the protocols for therapy and the effects of hormones. All of this made it so much easier to reach a point where I could know who I was and what I needed to do.
And after I went public about transitioning, I eventually realized that this was actually having an impact on others. I had a decently sized platform when I began, in terms of my presence on YouTube and other networks, and this meant everything I posted about being trans was reaching thousands of people. And some of those people were trans and didn't know it yet — until they watched my videos. I know this because they told me this. I've gotten dozens of messages from people who've told me that what I said helped them come to that realization.
On my blog, the most-read post I've ever written is about the somewhat less obvious signs of gender dysphoria — certain kinds of discomfort that don't always seem related to gender but may improve when you start transitioning. I still get search traffic every day from people who are looking for symptoms of gender dysphoria, or how to know if they're trans. I'm not special here — in an absolute sense, I'm pretty much nobody. The thousands of people who find my work are just a very small fraction; imagine how many more must be out there searching for an answer.
Every day, I'm looking into that gap in time as people move from feeling to knowing. And if this process can be inhibited, then it can be accelerated. We can do that — I've seen it happening. When we talk about our own experiences with gender, we can help some people get closer to being able to do the same. We aren't limited to a few potential role models or rare opportunities for realization anymore. We're a sprawling network that's paying it forward every day, in a world where any of us can be the beacon that finally guides someone home.
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Hi, welcome to Gender Analysis. The term "passing" is typically used to describe whether or not a trans person is perceived as noticeably trans. For a trans woman, to "pass" is to be seen as a cis woman in everyday life, and vice versa for trans men. Most people tend to assume that passing is or should be a goal for every trans person, and it's easy to see why. Some of us do find it necessary to look like cis people of our gender, because that's what it takes to relieve our dysphoria. In other cases, the changes that we need in order to feel comfortable just happen to push us more in the direction of passing. And when people don't know we're trans, it can eliminate some of the insecurities that can arise when people do know, like wondering if they really see us as our gender or they're just humoring us.
More than that, being visibly trans in public can be dangerous. In a study of over 6,000 trans people in the United States, those who were seen as "visually non-conforming" were more likely to be harassed in retail stores, hotels and restaurants, and they were more likely to be attacked when using public accommodations such as restrooms. Practically all of us have faced the fear or the terrifying reality of being heckled by strangers just because of what we look like. Passing isn't just about aiming to reduce our own dysphoria – it's also about keeping ourselves safe from everyone else.
"Men in dresses": Cultural pressures in passing
All trans people should have the choice to express their gender in the way that's most comfortable for them, but there are many such pressures that limit our choices, and passing can have more to do with cis people's comfort than our own. Pediatric endocrinologist Norman Spack pioneered the usage of puberty blocking drugs for trans teenagers in the US, allowing them to experience a puberty that's appropriate for their gender. This can be a lifesaving treatment for trans kids, and it can help reduce their need for future procedures to remove unwanted masculine or feminine features. Yet in a 2013 TEDx talk, Dr. Spack used one of his patients as an example of how his treatment can make trans people physically nonthreatening to others in restrooms:
"There was a bill that would block the right of transgender people in Maine to use public bathrooms, and it looked like the bill was going to pass, and that would have been a problem, but Nicole went personally to every legislator in Maine and said, 'I can do this. If they see me, they'll understand why I'm no threat in the lady's room, but I can be threatened in the men's room.' And then they finally got it."
A trans person obviously doesn't become more or less of an actual threat to anyone based on how masculine or feminine they look. But when this treatment is advertised as a way to give us a body that cis people are more comfortable around, that's just legitimizing their restroom-related fears and working within them. It leaves that particular prejudice completely unchallenged.
This isn't the only instance where cis people have unwittingly revealed how much they've internalized media stereotypes while trying to express support for trans children. In the 2012 book Far from the Tree, one mother said:
"She won't have testosterone ravaging her body. … So she'll never get an Adam's apple or facial hair. She'll never look like a man in a dress."
That particular phrase, "a man in a dress", seems to turn up over and over:
"I don't know that she would have survived male puberty. You know, how's she going to prove to someone that she is a girl? At best, you know, she would have been shaving every day and been the man in a dress, and that might be great for some people, but it certainly wasn't who she is."
"They were making a transition in their 40s, 30s-plus… And especially in the case of the male to females, they weren't looking particularly female. … If people said 'man in a skirt', a lot of them would have conformed to that…"
Now, are we really supposed to believe that women who transition after puberty all look like "men in dresses"? How much of this comes from an actual understanding of what it's like to be trans – and how much of it comes from cis people who've watched Mrs. Doubtfire and Drag Race too many times?
Physical and financial constraints
Even if we do want to look just like cis people, there are so many factors that can make this difficult or impossible. For instance, an early treatment protocol isn't even available to most trans people: puberty blockers for trans youth were only introduced in the late 1990s in the Netherlands, in the mid-2000s in the US, and in 2011 in England. There are still only a handful of dedicated gender clinics for children in the US, and these treatments often aren't covered by insurance companies, assuming that a child's parents are even willing to help them transition. And this is a moot point for many of us, since not everyone is aware that they're trans from an early age – far from it. A 2009 study in the UK reported that the median age of trans people first seeking treatment was 42 and rising.
In adulthood, there's only so much that transitioning can do for us in terms of appearance. As a group, we display the same wide range of physical masculinity and femininity as cis people, and as many trans people say: your mileage may vary. It's important to remember that gender dysphoria can happen to anyone. This may seem obvious, but not everyone who transitions is going to end up looking like Laverne Cox or Andreja Pejic. There are still limits to what modern medicine can do, and there are aspects of the skeletal structure that can't be changed after puberty, such as height, shoulder width, hip size, hands and feet. When so much of this comes down to biological chance, it's simply unrealistic to expect that every single one of us will be indistinguishable from a cis person of our gender.
As for what is possible, surgical aspects of transitioning can cost tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket, and are rarely covered by healthcare plans. Facial feminization surgery for trans women consists of a number of different procedures, and can easily add up to anywhere from $10,000 to $40,000. Chest surgery for trans men can cost $8,000 or more, and vaginoplasty for trans women can cost $10,000 to $20,000. Given that 14% of trans people are unemployed, 44% are underemployed, and 15% had a household income of less than $10,000 a year, these procedures can often be totally out of our reach. When's the last time you had $40,000 just sitting around for facial surgery?
The social cost of passing
Putting aside the practical aspects of passing, consider what it means when this is treated as something we should all aspire to. I don't want to shock anyone here, but maybe – just maybe – being expected to be completely invisible isn't always good for us. That attitude has wide-ranging implications for our personal comfort as well as our place in society. For instance, look at how dramatically the stakes of passing were portrayed in a recent article in The Atlantic about voice training for trans women:
"If she slips up, the $100,000 she has spent to shed every trace of masculinity will count for nothing."
I've heard from so many people who were worried it was "too late" for them to transition, because they felt that at their age, they would never be able to pass. Some of these people were in their 30s or 40s. Some of them were teenagers. But all of them were under the impression that there was no point to transitioning if they didn't end up looking just like a cis person of their gender. They didn't take into account every other possible benefit of transitioning, like how much this can relieve our dysphoria and improve our mental well-being and physical appearance regardless of whether we pass or not. But when this is treated as all-or-nothing, so many people will feel like their only choice is nothing, when they could have had so much more. It's never too late for that.
The exclusive focus on passing is not new – historically, this attitude has wrapped our lives in a shroud of secrecy and isolation. In the 1988 book In Search of Eve, many trans women stated that living as a woman required an almost total separation from anyone who knew them before they transitioned. For some of them, this meant avoiding family, giving up friends, quitting their jobs, concealing their history of work experience, and starting fresh at entry-level positions in other fields. Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach by Kessler and McKenna describes how trans people in the 1970s would construct entirely new biographies all the way back to their childhoods, just to conceal the fact that they hadn't always lived as a woman or a man. For these people, passing meant having to abandon some of the most important parts of their lives.
This pervasive concern over passing also serves to keep trans people separated from one another. In Search of Eve cites a common belief that going out in groups with other trans people makes us less likely to pass, and that passing is therefore much easier for individual trans people. And a 2014 study of 536 trans people found that a fear of being outed by association was one of four major barriers to their friendships with other trans people.
The social distancing due to anxiety over passing extends further than our circles of friends. In Search of Eve reports that some trans people were opposed to any news coverage about what it's like to be trans. They felt that this would inform a wider audience about certain physical features that are common among trans women and trans men, making it more difficult for them to pass. Some even believed that trans people who did come out, like Christine Jorgensen and Renee Richards, "were indirectly threatening others' ability to pass by sensitizing the audience".
Working past passing
This openness and widespread awareness may actually serve a useful purpose. Polls have consistently shown that personal familiarity with gay people is linked to greater support for gay rights. But while 65% of Americans report having a close friend or family member who's gay, only 9% have a close friend or family member who's trans. A 2012 study found that exposure to a lecture on transgender topics, as well as a speaker panel of trans people, was associated with a significant reduction in transphobic attitudes.
Clearly, outness has its benefits, both for us and for the rest of society. Passing demands invisibility, but how can we advocate for ourselves if we're never supposed to be seen? How can any of us share our experiences or serve as role models for people who are thinking about transitioning, if we can't even say what we are? How could I even do this show if I were trying to pass?
At its core, the very idea of passing contains an incredibly toxic suggestion. When "passing as a woman" actually means "passing as a cis woman", it implies that people won't really see you as a woman if they know you're a trans woman. But why does that have to be the case? If someone knows you're trans, why should that keep them from recognizing your gender? There's no reason why this should be impossible. Countless cis people are entirely capable of recognizing our genders even when we're out about being trans. I've come out to four doctors since 2012, and three of them still asked me about my periods. I'm pretty sure they don't think I'm a guy.
But the glorification of passing completely rejects this reality. It rejects openness. It rejects community. And worst of all, it rejects hope. When passing teaches trans women that if they can't look like cis women, they're really just men, it's pushing them away from being themselves. It's closing off a world of possibilities for them. It's telling them to throw away their dreams.
Passing is a very personal concern, and the way we present ourselves is a decision for each of us to make, based on our own needs and goals. Everyone will have their own answer, but the question must still be asked: Is silence always worth it?
I'm Zinnia Jones. Thanks for watching, and tune in next time for more Gender Analysis.
Like the show? Gender Analysis is supported by viewer pledges.]]>
I wear shorts pretty much all-year 'round. That includes during the winter.
There are a lot of reasons why I wear shorts, and I become more familiar with them as the season progresses. Because people are constantly giving me shit for wearing shorts in the winter and I have to justify myself on a regular basis.
I'm poor and don't have a ton of pairs of pants that are still intact enough to wear. I like to wear long socks that look cool. Long pants that are cut for female bodies are incredibly restrictive, and any sort of long pants make it hard to crouch and move around with ease and agility, as I'm wont to do. That makes it especially difficult to wear pants at the gas station I work at, where I have to walk around and do stuff all day.
But it's winter. And customers tend to lose their minds a little bit over the fact that I wear shorts. Yes, I realize that it's cold outside. However, I perform most of my job duties indoors, where they keep it a balmy 71°F.
I also utilize multiple layers of clothing when traveling from one place to another, or when I have to change the trash cans outside or something. Sometimes I wear leggings under my shorts, and I usually wear long socks that cover most of the skin left exposed by cargo shorts. If it's especially cold, I'll even wear an additional pair of pants which I remove when I get to work.
POINT BEING. We're about halfway through winter and I'm getting irritated with people. So many strangers ask me in incredulous voices if I'm wearing shorts, why I'm wearing shorts, if I know that it's winter, how I'm not freezing to death, etc. Since I'm usually at work when this happens, I have to be tactful even if I allow my irritation to show in these situations. I've been thinking about it a lot, so I think I'm finally able to articulate why I hate this so much (aside from the fact that people frequently comment on what I'm wearing anyway).
This particular interaction strikes me as very similar to the kind of concern trolling that women/femme folks get in the form of Don't-Wear-That-You'll-Get-Raped. The aghast faces, the raised eyebrows, the genuine concern for your well-being that really comes across as patronizing and infantile.
I'm aware that it's cold outside. I take appropriate precautions to ensure my safety when I'm going to be outside (because I'm an adult). Women/femme folks also take precautions to ensure their safety when venturing outdoors, whether they're wearing something revealing or not. We are aware that there is potential risk involved in what we're doing, but we've decided that we're responsible adults enough to handle ourselves in public wearing the clothes we deem fit for the occasion.
This is one of those times I wish I could experiment with the same behaviors but with an outwardly masculine appearance. Would I get nearly the volume of comments about my shorts if people didn't read me as a woman? Curious.
What do you folks think? Am I stretching a bit here, or does this comparison make sense to you?]]>
My dad is presently unemployed, and my step-mom works part-time. Dad has fibromyalgia and other health issues which make it difficult to work. While my uncle is trying to hook him up with a job, Dad has aspirations to work at home making music (Soundcloud) and videos on his YouTube channel, DaveInABottle.
So, as you can imagine, supporting four people on one part-time income doesn't work very well. They need help with groceries and other basics, as well as Christmas presents, if you're feeling particularly generous:
But MOST OF ALL. My dad has a lot of really cool ideas for videos to make. He has a green screen set up, he's acquiring the lights and microphones he needs. The big necessity right now is a second camera, since most of my dad's really cool ideas require the ability to shoot from two angles at once. In order to help with that, I gave them some Christmas money, but they still need about $120 to get the camera they need. I'd be super happy if a few people donated a few dollars to help my dad create a career he can be happy with and proud of, so he can support his family without running himself ragged at a job that means nothing.
Basically, my dad is awesome. His wife his awesome. His kids are awesome. (Myself included.) They're homeschooling humanists with creative needs!
Click here to donate moneys! Thank you so much!]]>
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Hi, welcome to Gender Analysis. Suppose I were to show you some pictures from when I transitioned, and asked you to arrange them from start to finish, in the order you think they were taken in.
But that would be a trick question – they already are.
Contrast that with how someone on Tumblr recently described me:
"…if you watch videos of Zinnia from five years ago and ones from last week, the only difference is that Zinnia has longer hair now and wears lipstick more frequently."
There's an obvious disconnect between this perception and the reality. So, what exactly is going on here?
Hyper-feminine stereotypes of trans women
When it comes to transitioning, many people seem to equate living as a woman with being stereotypically feminine. It's a common assumption that trans women express their womanhood via conventional or even excessive femininity. Movies and TV shows often depict trans characters as far more feminine than most cis women – at times absurdly so. Tabloids focus on conventionally attractive models and actresses; when Christine Jorgensen became one of the first widely known trans women in 1952, front-page headlines described her as a "blonde beauty".
Many scholars and commentators have simply parroted these assumptions, using them to criticize the process of transition and even trans people themselves. In 2004, columnist Julie Bindel claimed that trans people are "stereotypical in their appearance – fuck-me shoes and birds'-nest hair for the boys; beards, muscles and tattoos for the girls." And Germaine Greer described trans women as "people who think they are women, have women's names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody".
As they see it, if trans women all express traditional femininity, then this essentially implies that to be a woman is to be inherently feminine – a notion which many of them understandably disagree with. Janice Raymond, author of The Transsexual Empire, questioned whether trans women "encourage a sexist society whose continued existence depends upon the perpetuation of these roles and stereotypes" (p. 182). And Sheila Jeffreys states:
"The idea of GID is a living fossil – that is, an idea from the time when there was considered to be a correct behaviour for particular body types. Those with penises were supposed to play with particular toys and show "masculinity" such as desires to play aggressive team games and show little emotion. Those with vaginas were supposed to show "femininity" such as desires to be self-denying, do unpaid housework and wear high-heeled shoes."
These critics conceive of transition as a kind of Sorting Hat for gender: since society often disapproves of men being feminine and women being masculine, transitioning functions to ensure that all feminine people are women and all masculine people are men.
But all of this still rests on the assumption that trans women are universally feminine. Why would that be the case? Gender and gender expression are not the same thing, and womanhood isn't synonymous with femininity. Most people know better than to assume that cis women all present themselves like housewives from a 1950s sitcom. Are trans women all that different? How stereotypical are we, anyway?
Measures of gender stereotypes among trans people
As it turns out, there's a test designed to measure just that. The Bem Sex-Role Inventory lists 60 different personality traits, and asks respondents to rate how accurately each trait describes them. Some traits are stereotypically masculine, some are stereotypically feminine, and some are gender-neutral. Respondents are recorded as masculine, feminine, androgynous, or undifferentiated based on whether they show higher masculinity, higher femininity, high levels of both, or low levels of both.
Because this is a measure of gender stereotypes and not gender itself, cis people don't all fall into either masculinity or femininity. While cis men may be classified as masculine more frequently than cis women, cis people in aggregate tend to be spread across these categories. So how do trans people compare?
A 2002 study in Poland used a derivative of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory to evaluate 132 trans people and 438 cis people. Among the cis men, 4% were classified as feminine, 48% as masculine, 24% as androgynous, and 24% as undifferentiated. In comparison, trans men were more likely to be rated feminine, less likely to be masculine, and more likely to be androgynous. These results don't really align with the suggestion that trans men exhibit stereotypical or excessive masculinity. And among cis women, 34% were rated feminine, 16% masculine, 28% androgynous, and 22% undifferentiated. While no trans women were classified as masculine, only 52% were rated feminine, with the remainder being androgynous or undifferentiated. Trans women were actually more likely to be rated androgynous than cis women.
A 2012 study in Spain used the inventory to examine 156 cis people and 121 trans people, with somewhat different results. Here, trans women were less likely to be rated feminine than cis women, and more likely to be rated androgynous and undifferentiated. Trans men were, again, more likely than cis men to be classified as feminine, and less likely to be masculine.
Neither of these studies supports the idea that trans people are any more extremely masculine or feminine than cis people. Instead, we see that trans people express their gender in diverse ways, much as cis people do.
Historical criteria for diagnosing gender dysphoria
So, what accounts for these stereotypes? Where do people get the idea that trans women are, as Suzanne Vega sang, "more girl than girls are"? To understand this, it's necessary to look at the history of how gender dysphoria is defined and diagnosed.
In the 1950s and '60s, the medical community finally began to recognize gender dysphoria as a treatable condition. They now faced the questions of how to determine if a person is trans, and whether transition treatments are appropriate for them. At a time when the very idea of medical transition was widely unfamiliar to the public, therapists and doctors aimed to make the process seem legitimate and unchallenging to social norms.
To defang the idea as much as possible, they established stringent criteria for who could transition, which sharply limited the number of people who received treatment. In 1964, UCSF announced that their doctors had performed only three transition-related surgeries in the past decade (Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, p. 217). When the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins opened in 1966 and began to perform operations, doctors planned on merely examining just two potential patients a month, with no guarantee of whether they would receive treatment. Psychiatrist Robert Stoller privately noted that the hospital would provide surgery to almost no one, and that thousands of people would be turned away (p. 221).
While the criteria of the clinics were supposedly in place to minimize the chances of regret among patients, and to shield doctors from legal action, they also served another purpose: ensuring that any trans people who were accepted would conform closely to gender stereotypes. In a 1973 paper, Dr. Norman Fisk of the Stanford gender clinic listed certain factors pertaining to "the overall team decision as to acceptability for sex conversion". Among these were "appreciation of core gender principles" and "physical passability" – the degree to which a trans woman was perceived as indistinguishable from a cis woman.
So what exactly were those "core gender principles"? A 1971 paper by Stoller contains a lengthy description of what he believed to be the defining features of trans women and trans men. As children, trans women are depicted as "developing a feminine gracefulness of movement", drawing "beautiful women", identifying with feminine women in television or movies, and enjoying "trying on jewelry and makeup". In adolescence and adulthood, he describes them as "avoiding masturbation" and "avoiding intercourse with females", and expects them to have no history of marriage to women or of having children. Instead, he states that trans women will have a relationship with a heterosexual man, and, when possible, get married. Altogether, he describes them as having a "lifelong identification with femininity and feminine roles".
Stoller conceives of trans men as equally stereotypical, stating that as children, they are "already walking, talking, and fantasying [themselves] as male" and identifying with their father's "masculine interests". These are said to include hunting, fishing, playing sports, carpentry, farming, and "whatever activities already reflect father's masculine role". He describes adult trans men as "exclusively heterosexual", with their ideal partner being "a woman whose past history seems unfailingly heterosexual".
Finally, he explains the clinical relevance of these descriptions:
"Only those rare patients who fulfill the criteria described above – the most feminine of males and the most masculine of females – should undergo sex transformation."
A 1979 paper by psychiatrists at the Indiana University Medical Center sets forth similar norms, describing "primary (true) transsexuals" as follows:
"Cross-dressing often begins early, even in preschool years." "They feel literally trapped in the wrong body… They abhor their genitals… They get no pleasure from their genitals. They are generally not interested in erotic pleasure… There is little or no active sex life with members of either sex."
This group is contrasted with "secondary transsexuals", who are said to be lacking a "very early onset", while "Sexuality and the capacity to enjoy their genitals is present at some time in their history." The authors state that their clinic's policy considers only "primary transsexuals" as eligible for genital surgery.
Other doctors were somewhat more blunt. A 1982 paper quoted one surgeon as saying that his diagnostic process was to bully his patients, with trans women being judged as genuine if they cried. Another doctor stated that they were no longer accepting Puerto Ricans as a whole, because "they don't look like transsexuals. They look like fags." Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach by Kessler and McKenna cites the opinions of two other practitioners:
"A clinician during a panel session on transsexualism at the 1974 meeting of the American Psychological Association said that he was more convinced of the femaleness of a male-to-female transsexual if she was particularly beautiful and was capable of evoking in him those feelings that beautiful women generally do. Another clinician told us that he uses his own sexual interest as a criterion for whether a transsexual is really the gender she/he claims." (p. 118)
Even the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders incorporates gender stereotypes in its descriptions of trans people. In the fourth edition's diagnosis of gender identity disorder, young trans women are said to have "a marked preoccupation with traditionally feminine activities", and "particularly enjoy playing house, drawing pictures of beautiful girls and princesses…". The text further adds that "Stereotypical female-type dolls, such as Barbie, are often their favorite toys…" "They avoid rough-and-tumble play and competitive sports and have little interest in cars and trucks". As adolescents, behaviors such as "shaving legs" are considered to suggest "significant cross-gender identification". Meanwhile, young trans men are said to "prefer boys' clothing and short hair", and "Their fantasy heroes are most often powerful male figures, such as Batman or Superman." The fifth edition of the DSM, released in 2013, repeats many of these descriptions under the diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
The "transsexual narrative"
Trans people had a powerful incentive to meet these clinical standards: their ability to transition was at stake. The problem, of course, was that these criteria were based on archaic gender norms. Women were expected to be feminine, conventionally attractive, interested in jewelry, straight, emotional, lacking sexual interest, and married to men. Men were expected to be masculine, interested in sports and construction, and take straight women as partners. Dr. Fisk actually stated that the Stanford program offered "grooming clinics where role-appropriate behaviors are taught, explained and practiced".
In short, these clinics seemingly aimed to produce only people who were as stereotypical in their gender as possible, perhaps not realizing that cis women may also be tomboyish, sexually outgoing, or attracted to women. There is evidence that this kind of selection process is still occurring: a 2004 study of 325 trans people seeking treatment in the Netherlands found that patients were more likely to be referred for hormone therapy when their appearance was perceived to align more closely with their gender.
So, when trans people were forced to follow these strict standards or else be denied treatment, how did they cope with this? Well, what would you do if your very gender were at the mercy of doctors who expected you to be as conforming and stereotypical as possible? Trans people learned to work the system, leading to the emergence of the so-called transsexual narrative. Not a transsexual narrative – the transsexual narrative.
When trans people were rejected from these clinics, they didn't always walk away or give up. They would often share what they had learned about these standards with other trans people, or even read the published literature on these treatment protocols. In this way, trans people figured out how to adapt their presentation to fit what was expected of them. They crafted a narrative that matched the standards: a life story in which they were inherently feminine or masculine, exclusively heterosexual, "trapped in the wrong body", distressed by their genitals, and aware of their gender from an early age. As early as 1968, doctors at Johns Hopkins realized what was going on, and stated:
"In data from interviews a high degree of patient motivation to obtain surgery is noted. Patients tend to skew memory and report only those feelings of belonging to the opposite gender. Most transsexual patients describe previous psychiatric experience as anxiety-provoking. Throughout the interview the patient's strong desire to be accepted in the acquired gender role and the prospect of secondary gain may be expected to strongly influence the response to questions."
Robert Stoller noted that "those of us faced with the task of diagnosing transsexualism have an additional burden these days, for most patients requesting 'sex change' are in complete command of the literature and know the answers before the questions are asked". Dr. Fisk likewise wrote:
"…virtually all patients who initially presented for screening provided us with a totally pat psychobiography which seemed almost to be well rehearsed or prepared… it was apparent that this group of patients were so intent upon obtaining sex conversion operations that they had availed themselves of the germane literature and had successfully prepared themselves to pass initial screening."
And in 1973, Dr. Richard Green explained:
"…few preoperative patients report any ambivalence to psychiatrists about their 'proper' gender or about any of their conventional sex-typed behaviors beginning with childhood. Nor do they report events from their life history that do not fit the well-publicized autobiographies of 'successful' transsexuals." (The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality, p. 8)
Trans people themselves acknowledge doing this. In 1987, Sandy Stone wrote:
"…the reason the candidates' behavioral profiles matched Benjamin's so well was that the candidates, too, had read Benjamin's book, which was passed from hand to hand within the transsexual community, and they were only too happy to provide the behavior that led to acceptance for surgery."
And in the 1988 book In Search of Eve, a researcher spoke with 16 trans women, one of whom said:
"What right do you have to determine whether I live or die? Ultimately the person you have to answer to is yourself and I think I'm too important to leave my fate up to anyone else. I'll lie my ass off to get what I have to . . . [surgery]." (p. 65)
Another stated: "You must conform to a doctor's idea of a woman, not necessarily yours" (p. 108). Other women reported telling their friends about which therapists were friendly to trans people and would allow them to access treatment quickly and easily (pp. 65-66).
I've actually done this myself. Where possible, I've referred other trans people to doctors who are known to be accepting, and otherwise, I've told them about the traditional stereotypes that therapists might still expect to hear. For several people I know personally, this information seemed to streamline the process of transitioning. Trans people all over the internet compare notes on their experiences at various clinics, simply to help each other out.
Because the treatment criteria so often required conformity with traditional gender norms, generations of trans women were forced to pretend to be far more feminine than they're comfortable with. And what do we get for it? We get commentators and critics attacking us for being too feminine. In the same year that Janice Raymond complained we're encouraging a sexist society by perpetuating roles and stereotypes, doctors at Indiana University were demanding we embody sexist roles and stereotypes. 30 years after members of the American Psychological Association admitted they judge our eligibility for treatment based on their own sexual interest, Julie Bindel mocked us for wearing "fuck-me shoes".
Cis people set these stereotypical standards. We conformed to them against our own inclinations. And cis people now have an entrenched stereotype of us as overly feminine. Well, whose fault is that?
Negotiating trans stereotypes in everyday life
To some extent, a similar dynamic is at play in society at large. Before I started medically transitioning, my gender felt fragile – it was as if the slightest crack in my presentation would make people see me as a man. I paid inordinate attention to my hair, makeup, voice, clothes, and anything else I felt was relevant. I was extremely anxious about it, and this was stressful to those around me. Crucially, I wasn't doing this to satisfy my own sense of how I should look – this wasn't driven by any personal discomfort with my appearance. I was doing it to satisfy what I believed was other people's sense of how I should look. But in doing so, I was uncomfortable: I had to present myself as more feminine than I actually wanted. Women interviewed in the 2005 paper "Transsexuals' Embodiment of Womanhood" reported a similar phenomenon: "the initial retraining of their bodies intensified self-monitoring and feelings of inauthenticity".
For us, certain aspects of gender presentation are more complicated than they would be for most cis women. We may wish to choose not to shave our legs or not to do our makeup; however, these choices carry the risk of being perceived, not as a slightly un-feminine woman, but simply as a man. To be seen as women, we may find ourselves having to embrace some of those archaic stereotypes of femininity – even when we don't want to. It's a difficult double-bind. As one trans woman in the 2005 study said:
"…I've always kind of rejected things that oppress women; you know, the way women are traditionally treated in society. A lot of this clothing and makeup are things that I've always thought were ridiculous. … I'm wondering if I do have to start wearing a lot of makeup and dressing in more traditionally feminine ways and try to get people to think of me as female."
Many people evidently see transitioning as an acquiescence to this trap, a choice to embrace and embody these stereotypes. In reality, transitioning can actually serve as a way out. Kessler and McKenna present a study of various bodily gender cues and how people perceive certain mixed combinations of them, something which is obviously relevant to trans people. It was found that the only reliable sign that a figure was female was simply the absence of male-designated gender cues (p. 150). Several female-designated cues were necessary to ensure that a figure would be perceived as female nearly all of the time (pp. 151-152).
For trans women, transitioning tends to involve a reduction in attributes perceived as male, and an increase in attributes perceived as female. On our own, we can grow our hair out, change the way we dress, and practice altering our voice and how we walk. Medical treatment can change our facial appearance, give us a more feminine body shape, reduce our body hair, and enhance our breast growth. If the Kessler and McKenna study on gender cues is applicable to everyday life, this suggests a newfound abundance of female cues could mean we don't have to pay as much attention to maintaining all of them. Once many of them are solidly in place, it might start to feel less like we have to push our gender cues to the maximum.
In my experience, the difference has been substantial. Before, I felt like I was walking a tightrope, constantly making sure my presentation was in perfect balance to avoid being misgendered. But after two years of transitioning, I've realized that I just don't care – and now, neither does anyone else. Nowadays, makeup is a rare indulgence. I've shaved half my hair off because I just felt like it. I don't need padded bras anymore, and I don't usually bother with bras at all. I have a huge trans tattoo on my chest. For me, transitioning didn't mean turning into Bree from Transamerica – I'm more like some kind of frumpy dubstep housewife. That's because my gender is finally for me, not for everyone else.
The 2005 study on embodiment and womanhood lends support to the idea of this increasing comfort in our genders as we continue transitioning. The authors write: "As interviewees practiced at home, in the car, at support group meetings, and at public outings, their newly adopted voices and body movements became a taken-for-granted aspect of their practical consciousness." They further added: "interviewees' transformation of secondary sex characteristics increased feelings of authenticity…. Growing breasts brought forth unprecedented feelings of authenticity as women." As one participant stated: "I can see the woman. She's there. It's not pretend."
This is the key point that so many people miss: It's not about playing with Barbies and being sexy and settling down with a husband. It's just about being a woman. It's not about dresses and makeup and spending hours getting ready to go out. It's about being able to roll out of bed and stagger to the grocery store in your pajamas. It's not something I put on in the morning anymore – it's just who I am.
Transitioning made my gender feel less pretend and more real than ever. It gives us the breathing room we need: safer and more comfortable access to the same vast array of gender expressions exhibited by cis people. Transitioning doesn't mean we're stereotypical – we're just typical.
I'm Zinnia Jones. Thanks for watching, and tune in next time for more Gender Analysis.
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So, yes! This past weekend, Skepticon happened. It's the second one I've been to, the first being back in 2012. Apparently I took no pictures except a couple selfies of me being pretty before the prom Saturday night, which is classic Me. XD
The venue was different than the last Skepticon I went to. The Oasis Convention Center via the Ramada is a pretty nice place. The tables for various groups were constricted to a relatively small hallway thing though, which was sometimes less-than-comfortable, but otherwise the hotel experience was lovely. (My hubby and I actually stayed across the street, but w/e.)
There were lots of amazing talks and workshops, some of which will be available to watch on the internets. There are only four at the time of this posting, but time inexorably marches on. I didn't see all of them, but I did thoroughly enjoy the ones I caught.
There's always room for improvement, but I like that Skepticon tried to include more minority speakers than is typical at many atheist conferences. They also started out the weekend with signs on the bathroom doors within the convention center that explicitly stated that each bathroom was gender neutral. From what I heard, the hotel has rules against having things on the walls, and possibly something about Missouri laws and bathrooms? I haven't looked into it further at this point.
It's always lovely to see old friends, to meet people you've known online for forever, and also chat with new people. Plus, the hugs are great. Hugs are possibly one of my favorite parts of conventions in general. I'm a cuddle fiend and hugs are basically the next best thing.
TL;DR, it was a lovely time.
The only thing that kind of sucked for me was being misgendered a lot. It's pretty much to be expected, but that doesn't stop it from bothering me. Saturday, I grabbed a nametag and below my name wrote "they/them <3″. I've been meaning to buy a pronoun badge tag thing for a while but I'm a procrastinator! I tweeted about it on the #sk7 tag, which sparked a conversation about pronouns. Then someone mentioned it to the organizers, who I'm told are considering how to implement a way for attendees to state their pronouns for other people's use. Which is awesome and actually kind of unexpected, mainly because I forget that I'm an adult and people take my opinions seriously now.
I also forget that I'm a person with a platform sometimes? A person at con told me they recognized me from somewhere, and I noncommittally said that I'm around at places. People often tell me I remind them of someone, so I didn't think about how I write for a blog and people read it. Eventually we ended up in the same area again and they told me they recognized me from my picture here. I'm silly.
Basically, Skepticon is a great convention. The organizers are awesome, the speakers are awesome, and the attendees are awesome. I would love for more people to come hang out next year. <3]]>
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Hi, welcome to Gender Analysis. Imagine if the light switches in your house turned all your lights on or off at the same time. You flip one switch, all the lights are on. Flip another switch, all the lights are off. That would seem kind of bizarre, right? If you're just going to the kitchen for a midnight snack, why do you need the lights to be on in the laundry room and the office and everywhere else? That's pretty unnecessary.
What if they were all dimmer switches instead, so that every light in the house could be brighter or darker in synchrony? That kind of flexibility still wouldn't help, because it wouldn't address the underlying issue: why are all these lights stuck together? Who would design a house's electrical wiring like that in the first place? What sense does this make? It's almost like they missed the point of having different light switches.
And yet this is the way that many people tend to think about gender, gender expression, and sexual orientation. Conceptually, they see these as just a handful of light switches that are ultimately linked to only one thing. To them, all of these concepts are locked together, moving with each other in synchrony – they think changing one thing can affect the rest.
The new gender binary
This is related to the gender binary, the notion that aspects of gender and sexuality fall into only one of two opposing categories: people are either male or female, masculine or feminine, attracted to women or attracted to men. Under this model, there are men and there are women; men do this, women do that; men look like this, women look like that.
Pretty much everyone knows this isn't actually true, because the idea of such a binary is easily refuted by reality. Some people are nonbinary and their gender isn't completely and exclusively male or female. Notions of how men and women are "supposed" to look have changed significantly over time, and plenty of people present in ways that could be considered androgynous or gender-neutral. And, of course, lots of people are attracted to men and women, or to neither, or to people who aren't male or female.
This is pretty basic stuff. But even when people see that space exists outside of two narrow categories, they often still treat these categories as endpoints of a spectrum – a single spectrum. They seem to think that at one end, there are people who are male, masculine, and attracted to women; at the other end, there are people who are female, feminine, and attracted to men. Instead of seeing that gender, gender expression, and sexual orientation are separate variables, all of these distinct features are collapsed into a single position on a single axis. Because a shift in one of these features is seen to shift the rest along with it, this means using one aspect of a person to deny, redefine, or reclassify their other aspects.
A unifying theme in gender fallacies
I've started calling this model the Gender Axis of Evil, because it's a misconception that underlies so many stereotypes about gender and sexuality, both well-known and obscure. It might be called an anti-pattern – a term used in software design and management to describe a bad solution that people keep coming up with, even when it causes more harm than good. In this case, the generalization of people into these two clusters might seem like a useful rule of thumb, considering how many people do tend to be male, masculine, and attracted to women, or vice versa. But this model breaks down when people try to force it into situations where it clearly no longer describes reality.
The Gender Axis of Evil first became obvious to me when reading a comment from someone who doesn't really like me. They stated that they don't consider me to be a woman, noted that I have a wife, and compared me unfavorably to "convincing" trans women:
Zinnia "I am a boy pretending to be a girl" Jones no longer gets a "she" from me. … Good drag queens and convincing mtf trans people will always get a 'she' from me — because they seem like women (to those of us who are such fucking assholes that we believe in the gender binary) and they've done the work. "Zinnia" seems to want to make a big point of being able to … keep his cock, have a girlfriend (wife?) … but wants me to consider him to be a "woman" whose opinion about womanhood matters.
Within one paragraph, they managed to invoke practically every aspect of the Gender Axis of Evil: because they perceive me as insufficiently feminine, that makes me less of a woman in their eyes, and being attracted to women is just further evidence against my womanhood. Their opinion of my gender expression and sexuality led them to position me further away from the female/feminine/attracted to men endpoint of the axis, and their perception of my gender was dragged along with this. The idea that a woman could be attracted to women, or choose to express her gender in her own way, was apparently incomprehensible to them. That's the Gender Axis of Evil in action.
The axis and sexuality
It also plays a part in stereotypes about gay men and lesbians, many of which are ultimately gender stereotypes. Gay men are seen as feminine – their attraction to men is seen as dragging them closer to the female/feminine/attracted to men endpoint of the axis, even if some gay men don't express themselves in a way that's considered feminine at all. Conversely, lesbians are seen as masculine – being attracted to women brings them closer to the male/masculine/attracted to women side of the axis. Even straight men and women are sometimes suspected of being gay or lesbian if they're respectively perceived as feminine or masculine – their gender expression is seen as bringing them nearer to the endpoints of attraction to men or attraction to women.
As a result, femme lesbians and masculine gay men are often invisible, not being readily perceived as gay because so many people use gender stereotypes as a misguided proxy for recognizing sexual orientation. Because they're feminine or masculine, they'll often be told nonsensical things like "you don't look gay". Does this mean there actually is a specific, narrow way that gay people look, by definition? Of course not. Anyone who says someone doesn't "look gay" is talking about a stereotype, not the reality of gay people. All gay people look gay, no matter how they look – because they are gay, regardless of whether their appearance aligns with a stereotype. So, from one direction, sexual orientation is used to stereotype people's gender expression, and from another direction, their gender expression is used to call their sexual orientation into question. And that's the Gender Axis of Evil.
The axis and trans women
Trans people are specifically subject to this in many different ways. As with the earlier comment about my perceived femininity or lack thereof, the validity of trans women's genders are often judged on the basis of how they express that gender, and sometimes their sexual orientation as well.
Sexologist Ray Blanchard went so far as to propose a typology of trans women, placing us into two distinct categories on the basis of our orientation. Under his model, trans women who are exclusively attracted to men are considered "homosexual transsexuals" – the label "homosexual" is used because he considers them to be extremely gay men. In other words, their orientation is shifted so far to the female/feminine/attracted to men endpoint of the axis that it's dragged their gender along with it.
His other category encompasses lesbian and bisexual trans women, and regards them as men whose female gender is not really a gender at all, but rather an expression of a sexual fetish. Because they're attracted to women, Blanchard proposes that they're sexually attracted to the idea of themselves as women. Researcher J. Michael Bailey later tied this into gender expression, bluntly stating: "Most homosexual transsexuals are much better looking".
Here, sexual orientation is explicitly tied both to gender and gender expression: straight trans women are considered to be more intensely feminine because of their exclusive attraction to men, whereas lesbian and bisexual trans women are dragged toward the male end of the axis, and depicted as un-feminine men with a sexual fetish. And when lesbian and bisexual trans women do express femininity – for instance, by transitioning – this femininity is explained away as a result of their attraction to women, which is then used as evidence of their supposed masculinity. Combined with the near-total subjectivity of whether someone is "good looking", the Gender Axis of Evil is rescued from any inconvenient facts that might contradict the model.
When trans stereotypes break down
As with any other stereotypes, the sharp divisions of Blanchard's typology are refuted by the diverse realities of human experience. In a study of over 500 trans women, 23% of straight trans women also exhibited the so-called "transvestic fetishism" that Blanchard considers definitive of lesbian and bisexual trans women. Conversely, 18% of lesbian trans women and 32% of bisexual trans women did not experience this supposedly characteristic "transvestic fetishism".
So how is it that a significant portion of straight trans women are both exclusively attracted to men, yet also attracted to women as supposedly dictated by the presence of this "fetish"? How are they ultra-feminine and "better looking" members of the first group because of their exclusive attraction to men, while also unattractive and masculine because this alleged "fetish" places them in Blanchard's second group? Ultimately, this model is little more than a naked reiteration of the stereotypes of cisgender lesbians as masculine and cis gay men as feminine. Such an assumption hardly holds true for cis people, so why would it hold true for trans people?
Trans women wearing pants
And yet trans women's genders are still often subject to scrutiny on the basis of our gender expression. People often believe that trans women are compelled to be so extremely feminine that it inexorably drives us to transition and live as women. So, when a trans woman isn't stereotypically feminine, her transition is seen as inexplicable and perhaps even invalid. For instance, residents of a women's shelter in Maine once questioned whether a trans woman was really a woman at all – because she was wearing jeans. After all, it's not like department stores have entire sections for women's jeans, right? In this case, strict and stereotypical notions of gender expression were used as grounds to question someone's gender. If their gender expression isn't far enough to one side of the Gender Axis of Evil, then maybe their gender itself isn't, either.
The axis as therapy
One instance where the axis is especially overt is in the practice of so-called "reparative therapy" to try and make gay and bisexual people become straight. These programs often involve having men engage in activities that are perceived as masculine, such as playing football and fixing cars, while women are encouraged to discuss fashion and makeup. These programs seem to assume that by inducing a shift in people's gender expression, their sexual orientation will be dragged along with it, until they're closer to the intended endpoint of the axis.
Similar approaches have been tried on gender-nonconforming children to discourage them from being transgender or growing up to be transgender. Psychologist Ken Zucker recommends discouraging children assigned male at birth from playing with dolls or drawing pictures of girls – he believes that if their gender expression can be changed, then their gender itself can be shifted as well.
Neither of these alleged therapies are known to be successful – not that their goals are even defensible – and they're often clearly harmful. But they both target gender expression as a means of influencing either gender or sexual orientation. That's the Gender Axis of Evil.
A universal problem
These are just a handful of cases where this line of reasoning comes into play, but it intersects with so many misunderstandings about how gender and sexuality work. Whether you're queer or straight, trans or cis, anyone can be subject to these stereotypes – they might seem like a diverse array of different issues, but under the surface, they're very closely connected.
Familiarize yourself with the patterns here, so you can avoid these missteps, and call them out when you see them. There's no need to make assumptions about what it means when someone is gay, trans, or feminine. It just means they're gay, or trans, or feminine. Femme lesbians exist. Butch trans women exist. Feminine straight guys exist. It's not a conflict or a contradiction – it's life. And hopefully someday we can all live in a house with more than one light switch.
I'm Zinnia Jones. Thanks for watching, and tune in next time for more Gender Analysis.
Like the show? Gender Analysis is 100% supported by viewer pledges.]]>
The piece, written by Michael Luciano and entitled "Atheists Don't Owe Your Social Justice Agenda a Damn Thing," basically argues that social justice is something you do with your liberal hat on and not your atheist hat. He points out that all the word "atheist" means is that you don't believe in gods and not necessarily that you support "liberal politics."
It seems apparent to me, first of all, that atheism is a social justice issue. Heina points out in their post "Top Five Arguments the Atheist Agenda Doesn't Have the Right to Use" that many things the atheist movement tries to fight for are social issues. A lot of atheist activism focuses on equal representation in and by the government and normalizing atheism, the goals of which are to eliminate the ways atheists are harmed as a minority. Seems pretty social justicey to moi.
"Dictionary atheism" is the argument that the word "atheist" has a specific definition which doesn't imply anything other than not believing in gods. I think PZ accurately describes my feelings on the subject. The sentiment is that we should expect more from atheists because they should be able to use critical thinking to abandon bad ideas of all types, including misogyny and racism. It's pretty clear at this point that being an atheist doesn't automatically cause you to shed all of the terrible ideas that have been impressed on you your entire life.
Probably the best argument I've seen for dictionary atheism was from a post by Jasper on WWJTD. His post helped me finally string together my disparate thoughts about the whole debacle.
At the core of the issue is that "what it means to be a _____", and "being a ____ implies _____" are highly subjective. We may come to a consensus on a more intuitive level. Maybe something just has to be true most of the time, as well as being more immediately associated, before we'll include it as an aspect.
If they're arguing that being an atheist means more than X-Attribute, but instead includes Attributes Y and Z, wouldn't contradicting Y and Z mean that one isn't an atheist?
My atheism is a conclusion to my world view, not the start of it. My atheism certainly isn't a world view in itself. I'd say that Humanism, critical thinking and skepticism would lead a person to abandoning religious-based discrimination. Atheism didn't lead me to any of these things. These things lead me to atheism.
Now we get to my point here, which is trying to communicate things more directly than other people generally do. I agree that, as a label, the word "atheist" means nothing except you don't believe in gods. The definition of the word can't really be argued until our language changes significantly. I don't think people are generally trying to argue that the literal definition of the word should be changed, or that even the connotation of the term should necessarily change.
The "we expect more of atheists" outlook comes from a hope of finding a community in which nobody needlessly hates each other for fundamental attributes. Say you're an atheist woman who lives in a sexist society and whose family is religiously misogynistic. If you stumble on a community of people who prize rational thinking, evidence, and reason above all else, the last thing you'd expect to find is more misogyny, since it's so blatantly nonsensical and often religiously motivated. It would be seriously disappointing to see atheists who oppose negative religious influences parroting sexist views rooted in the women-as-property culture presented in so many holy books.
Aaaaand it's even shittier when there's an active harassment campaign directed at certain people in the movement, many of whom are prominent women.
So, yeah. It's really just a desire to have a safe space with critical thinkers.
The other issue is that atheism by itself isn't necessarily enough to rally around and start fighting for. The main thing we have in common is that we don't believe in gods, which is a good thing in my book. But what do we do with that? This stuff Jasper points out is basically the focus of mainstream "dictionary" atheist activism:
We don't have unicorn-believers passing laws trying to teach Unicornism in schools, or using taxpayer money to proselytize. They're not passing laws restricting non-believers from holding public office. Unicorn believers aren't getting special exemptions from following the laws of everyone else. You can fill in the rest.
However, there mere single fact of not believing in a god is sufficient to be fired (or passed-over for employment/promotions), to be banned from public office (unconstitutionally or not), or even imprisoned/executed. It's sufficient to be disowned by friends/family, etc.
These issues do affect peoples' lives in tangible ways, and should be striven against. Being fired for being an atheist or being barred from public office for being an atheist are definitely serious issues.
Having said that, it could be argued that issues like tax exemption, prayers at public meetings, are somewhat lofty and academic compared to the relative severity of racism, cissexism, heterosexism, and misogyny (among others). Not only that, but these other societal issues can be a barrier to people being active in the atheist movement–or even available to our types of outreach. For example, many conventions are prohibitively expensive or difficult to travel to. People of color, trans folk, women and LGB individuals are all economically disadvantaged and more likely to be barred from participation due to financial difficulties. The "white male problem" atheism has is the resistance to letting the conversation become about things that don't affect the white men making the objections.
If atheists are coming together as a group to do activism, why stop at just normalizing atheism and protesting Ten Commandments statues on government land? If we know we only have one life, why not devote our resources to actively making life better for other people–including all those atheists who otherwise might not even know we existed as a movement? This is part of why the Humanist facet started developing, but the thing is that the entire atheist community could stand up in support of equality in all its forms.
We would be making atheists look good to the broader culture while actively improving life for people, and we would end up bringing more atheists into the fold. Seems like a net gain all around. I'm not saying we should stop fighting for atheist equality. I'm saying we, as a community with resources and a skeptical outlook, can broaden our scope to address issues that affect us all, here, in our one life.
Oppressed peoples have to support each other in order to overthrow the system which oppresses us. We can be allies supporting each others' causes, or we can stubbornly insist that only one cause is important enough to give our attention to. It's okay to be a single-issue person, goodness knows there are only so many spoons. However, it's not okay to disparage people who address more than one facet of oppression, and especially not okay to try to force them out of your community or threaten their safety.


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British woman's selfies shed light on mental illness
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Rebecca Brown was 14 when she started taking selfies to document her struggle with trichotillomania and dermotillomania— disorders that lead to compulsive hair pulling and skin picking.
Now 21, she's created a video montage of selfies many are applauding as an inspiring portrait of living with mental illness.
"It's real and it's beautiful," wrote Australian Mama Mia columnist Aparna Balakumar. "It's a refreshing take on 'selfies' in a world full of filters, enhancers and glamorous poses."
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"The selfie is reprehensible," O'Shea wrote. "The worst selfie site is definitely Instagram. Take a look at the Most Popular pics sometime. Count how many are selfies. Then go ahead and worry about our society."
O'Shea went on to cite a study from the University of Birmingham that alleged that people who post selfies on sites like Facebook suffer from "decreased intimacy."
With her project, Brown defies that stereotype, Upworthy's Alana Karsch contends.
"She's brave and bold to share this with all of us. And she's teaching millions of people about what it's like to live with disorders they've possibly never even heard of. Also? She's letting other people who suffer in silence know they're not alone," Karsch wrote.
Brown affirms on her YouTube channel that she is now in recovery from her illnesses, but it's still a daily challenge. In the meantime, as she told the Daily Mail last year, she enjoys raising awareness about a disease that affects about four out of 100 people.
"I get a lot of post from people who confide in me about their trichotillomania, yet they haven't told their family or friends. I feel very blessed that people trust me like that," Brown told the Mail.
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