Thoughts on "Now That You're a White Man"

by Diana Courvant (more...)
Posted on May 25, 2003

[ Below is in response to Max Valerio's essay, "Now That You're A White Man," found in This Bridge We Call Home ed. by Gloria Anzaldua and AnaLouise Keating. - ed. ]

This is a piece that deserves very serious critical analysis. Any assertion that historical context will be important in such an analysis seems redundant after Max's personal reflections on his earlier work. However, I mean much more than historical in the sense of Max's writings, or even his life. To struggle with White Man is to struggle with the history of anti-/transsexuality in a broad sense.

Transsexuals: Who gets published?

Who indeed? Largely, political writings by acknowledged transsexual people have been limited to the autobiographies/ memoirs of relatively privileged transsexual women who are willing to re(in)scribe the archetypal history. Any political content is limited, more or less, to asserting that nature "sometimes makes mistakes," that transsexual people deserve medical interventions in such cases, that transsexual people do not deserve to be the targets of violence, and that living a happy, stereotypical life 'oppositely' gendered to society's biologically-based expectations is entirely possible.

That's a pretty meager manifesto.

So, to see White Man in print at all is a tremendous victory and worthy of celebration. It tells a more complicated story of self-revelation ("It would be a lie to say I always knew"), reveals anger at the oppressors of transsexual people generally and of Max in particular, connects experiences of race and transsexuality, and portrays the emergence of a transsexual person not relatively privileged when compared to other transsexual people. On a personal level, the essay thanks Jayson Barsic and praises Mirha-Soleil Ross, both people that I care for and admire. Without saying anything about what White Man accomplishes, I can say seeing their names, and reference Mirha-Soleil's work, in print adds to my delight.

Ah, but the disappointment is there from the beginning.

The Disappointment

The most disappointing thing is that White Man begins with a coming out story and an analysis of "knowing" (how, when) Max's own transsexuality. As a transsexual writer, I cannot communicate how deep my frustration and anger runs over the incessant querying of the roots of transsexual identity. Over and over again we are not allowed to identify ourselves as transsexual without explaining how we came to understand ourselves that way. My own essay, "Strip" was transformed from a story about fear and oppression and navigating through it into a coming out story by an editor who constantly pressed for the story to begin earlier. The editor's opinion was that ignorance about trans people in the book's (Body Outlaws, originally published as Adios Barbie) target audience was so pervasive that it was necessary to tell my coming out story in order for the audience to understand what I was saying. On the street, on the bus, in the grocery store, on an internet bulletin board, in anthologies, in auto/biographies we are not allowed to hold opinions on any subject until we first explain when we first wore a dress or played baseball. Indeed, when Firebrand Press had the opportunity to publish a new and fiesty piece ("Trouble") by me that described the shortcomings of recent lesbian attempts to make connections with transsexual people across the scars of lesbian-led forms of transsexual oppression, the editor of Firebrand's anthology chose to republish "Strip," in all its coming-out-story glory.

With my personal history with this refusal by so many others to allow transsexual people to have an opinion (about anything, but especially politics, community, gender and oppression) without telling a majority-approved coming out story first, I was disgusted that Max's piece began with a coming out story.

Certainly the story didn't follow the archetypal narrative as closely as most, and this willingness to deviate is important, and telling. Yet reading Max's piece, all of the most direct, informative, and challenging words come after this coming out story ends and do not depend on the first section at all. From the outside, it feels that this is an unhelpful digression. It feels, in fact, like capitulation. When I hear the question directed at me, "When did you first wear a dress?" I want to yell, "Fuck off! I was talking about George W. and Admiral Poindexter." For me, for my community, it feels sad and regressive to include this section at all, much less have it come first.

It may very well be that Max's essay received not one whit of editing. It may have been born entirely from his own head, his own impulse, his own urge. I know that my own piece in the same book, Speaking of Privilege, received almost no editing and that I was allowed to have patently political opinions in this anthology without telling a coming out story. And yet, the coming-out story's inclusion causes me to suspect that someone told him that he ought to explain his transition from Anita to Max. An editor? A friend? An admirer of his original piece? I wouldn't know. But whether from internalized social pressures or external messages, I believe Max was told that this piece was important to include. And I am deeply suspicious of such pressure/ messages. In my ideal world, the editors of an anthology considering this piece would recognize that despite the fact his writing is fine from the beginning, White Man is stronger for leaving out the first section. Perhaps this even happened with This Bridge and Max defended this portion. That wouldn't change the fact that this section's presence reinforces oppressive assumptions.

I don't want to read another, single transsexual coming-out story until I read a full-on multi-cultural anthology of scores of people telling their own stories of how they struggled with understanding the ways in which their bodies were and were not connected to their genders, and, ultimately, how they came to identify as non-transsexual. If non-transsexual folk don't care enough about the question to tell their own narratives, why the hell should we work so hard to produce ours?

Is it biological? Environmental? A disease? A whim? I don't know. Which was it for you?

How Does It Feel?

Getting past the first section, How Does It Feel? Damn good.

Privilege as a concept has been wielded like a weapon at trannies throughout the English speaking world--and, probably, farther than that. HDIF wrestles directly with privilege. It takes on the assumption that transsexual people must be ready to perform their gender self-analysis at a moment's notice--and that our performance must match the expectations of people who know nothing about the everyday rhythms of our lives. Further, it begins the struggle--that lasts throughout the rest of White Man--against the appropriation of transsexual lives into a "transgender" movement.

Do I have problems with this section? Yes. They are limited to this, however: Max chooses to label as women people who do not accept this label themselves. These feminine-to-masculine transgender people do not deserve this deliberate disrespect, nor does Max need to do this to make his point. In fact, he even distracts himself. Recognizing the injustice in erasing someone else's identity to serve his own political ends, he must meander into minimization of his own work: "I have nothing against anyone exploring any identity". I believe him, but his righteous anger has, in this section, led him to petty revenge. Undeserved. Unproductive. Max is easily skilled and insightful enough to make his points without resorting to such tactics.

Sex Roles & Gendering Queer

Focussing more on the relentless expectations of transsexual performance, White Man begins to develop its true power in this section. In our current time and place, Max's sentences: "It is never enough to be honest and to present your experience with as much accuracy and insight as you can muster. It must also fit the outlines and regimens of feminist expectations," could not be repeated too often.

Just as everyone has been seen through a gendered lens, everyone has been seen to conform to gendered expectations and to break from gendered expectations. For transsexual people, however, this is truly a devil's dilemma. There are consequences for transsexual people's conforming actions that no nontranssexual person must face. Even lesbian feminism's most virulently hostile moments of policing 'male energy' or 'masculine identification' among nontranssexual women cannot compare in severity or persistence or both to the scrutiny and punishment of transsexual gender conformity. And our non-conformity? From lesbian feminists it becomes proof that transsexual identity is a farce, that a transsexual person is still 'really' the gender assigned at (or near) birth, that a transsexual person is deceptive, untrustworthy. From others? All too often, the sentence is harrassment, arrest, assault and/or death.

Feminists have not yet taken seriously the idea that gender liberation means the freedom to express popular as well as unpopular genders. Max fights eloquently for his right to be masculine, to experience his feelings and gender in a masculine way. It's a shame it's necessary, but Max does a wonderful job anyway. "Would you only be filmed doing things that women are never supposed to do, or haven't typically done? Do you think about these issues all day long, and monitor your actions and thoughts to prevent slipping up...?" These questions brilliantly put the spotlight back on non-transsexual people. I can only hope that non-transsexual readers take these questions seriously and at least try to understand how it might feel to be under such outside scrutiny for years, decades at a time.

The section on testosterone is not new to me. Many FtM people have had a similar experience to the hormone. What is not taken into account is that I and many MtF people had similar experiences when first taking estrogen or progesterone. I'm not yet convinced that these changes aren't influenced to a significant (possibly even dominant) way by the imminent and ongoing reification of a body that feels more true, that more easily facillitates our hopes and desires, that increases societal acceptance of our statements of our own gender identifications--and therefore dramatically increases our safety and decreases our fear. Wouldn't anyone feel more energetic, alive, erotic after taking positive steps that decrease fear, repression, depression? I do not contest that what Max says is not true. In fact he never says that crying is only for women, sex is only for men. But in a sub-section on the effects of hormones on our lives, I do think a longer piece, especially a dialogue between FtM and MtF transsexual people would be more productive. I suppose I simply wanted more from this short sub-section than it may be possible for one person to give.

It's in this (SR&GQ) section that I first noticed that Max has yet to struggle with his non-intersex privilege. And it's true that by now a careful reader has realized he does not distinguish between 'maleness' and 'masculinity' in his own writing. While I could spend time wishing that Max was as skilled at distinguishing sex from gender in the main work as he is in the glossary, I find myself instead cheering along with his final paragraph, especially the sentence, "It is my belief that masculinity is actually something to celebrate." It is my belief too, Max.

Privilege

If White Man began to lift my spirits in SR&GQ, it launched me into flight with the first phrase of Privilege, "My greatest privilege in life is to live in North America." Amen, brother. Too many times I hear people living within the borders of the 50 states crying that they are the most oppressed of all peoples. Max knows better. The 50 states have concentrated so much of the world's wealth and resources here that people in abject poverty within their borders have access to resources that might cause envy among the working class of some world regions. It is possible to retrieve edible, nutritious organically grown food from dumpsters here, enough food to sustain dozens from the dumpsters of just two or three supermarkets. Far from a dumpster? Hitch a ride. There are so many cars within the 50 states that it is truly difficult to wander too far from transportation. Once you get that ride, head to a city where ten hours of panhandling can bring in thirty times the daily wage of the workers that make the clothes sold here. These are simplistic examples that do not take into account the full range in which people are oppressed and impoverished within the borders of the 50 states--especially within the Reservation system for First Nations/Native American peoples--but the get at an important truth. Citizenship or not, the imperial exploitation of the rest of the world by the 50 states simply changes the definition of poverty here. That is a privilege, even before we get to Max's elaboration about the mechanisms of transition available to him. Three hundred cheers to Max for identifying it.

As P continued, I was drawn in by his family history. I wanted to understand more even than he revealed, but he did explain enough to make the point this history is present to support: "Since some people view me as a 'white person,' it would be fair to say that I must sometimes have 'white skin privilege.' However, when I am taken as white only, I feel invisible as a nonwhite person, and unseen." In understanding Max, which he generously offers us a chance to do, this is an important point. It is, however, made in other writings with more elaboration and strength. Not, however, with more simple clarity. And this is important, because we should not be distracted from what comes next.

And that is his return to grappling with male privilege. "Male privilege" is the accepted name of a phenomenon much more correctly called "men's privilege." Now Max's lack of care in distinguishing sex from gender weakens his analysis and his rhetorical power. He states directly that "[t]ranssexual men do not accomplish their change for [men's] privilege." Here, but for the use of male instead of men's, he is clear and powerful. Considering how commonly FtM men are attacked for their supposed privilege (in Elana Dykewomon's notes to "The Body Politic--Meditations on Identity" from the same volume, for instance) it is wonderful to have this unequivocal statement in White Man.

And yet men's privilege does accrue to Max. He even feels less fear of rape and sexual assault. Sexism, like other oppressions do for their respective privileged classes, provides a complicated privilege to men. It comes with responsibilities and threats. Max takes care to point this out as mediating his privileges. This is true and appropriate, though it doesn't change my belief that men are much more privileged than compromised by sexism. What evidence makes me so sure? Well, men as a whole have chosen to defend sexism more than default from it. From this, I can infer that men as a class (not as individuals) feel they gain more benefits than they lose under patriarchy. So, your points are taken Max, and I understand that you didn't transition in order to gain this privilege, but nonetheless men's privilege is yours. So what about the rest of this section?

The rest of the section is absolutely crucial. Radical feminisms position sexism as the only oppression that truly matters. Its effects are so egregious and universal as to make all women "sisters" and to make all sisters' lives substantially the same. Racism can be discounted under most radical feminisms, for instance, as less important and less damaging before the revolution, and as automatically resolved with the overturning of patriarchy at the climax of the revolution. Likewise, radical femisms would have us believe that men's lives are substantially interchangeable. Men's privilege is supposed to outweigh all that other oppressions might throw at a man. Max's writing reminds us that these manifestations of other oppressions are important, that they make material differences in a man's (or any person's) life.

But that point has been made before, and not every reader of This Bridge will need to unlearn that myth anyway. The most important words remaining in this section toss aside a tenet of many feminisms, that the gendered experience of transsexual people can be understood solely in respect to sexism as the sole, acknowledged, gender-related oppression. In fact transsexual oppression is real, pervasive, relentless, and lethal. Nontranssexual people are privileged in relation to transsexual people. In fact, nontranssexual people desperately need Max's reminder, "I could have all [men's] privilege could be [sic] taken from me if it is discovered that I was not born into a biologically intact male body. ...this hovering threat goes beyond the loss of '[men's] privilege' to include, more ominously, the loss of nontranssexual privilege. ...This loss of 'privilege' could be lethal." [emphasis in the original] This does not mean that men, even transsexual men, do not experience men's privilege. Rather it insists on the conclusion that Max's life, taken as a whole, is not one of privilege. Readers are invited to struggle with the (supposed, in our currently popular paradigms) paradox that one can be both privileged and targetted by oppression in the same body, in the same life.

Finally, after introducing the concept of nontranssexual privilege, Max declares "Nontranssexuals have the privilege of taking their gender for granted." Yep. Just as whites have the privilege of taking their race for granted. Hopefully nontrans women readers will fully think about this sentence and the following paragraph. I fear that they will miss the point and defensively announce how their gender is targetted and how they must think of that and take it into account, rather than taking it for granted. The point (I emphasize for those readers) is that you get to have your gender at all. The phenomenon of nontrans privilege (encompassing both nontranssexual and nontransgender privilege) deserves truly serious study by every nontrans person. If there is anything at all disappointing about the way Max concludes this section, it would be that he wasn't able to provide a longer, but still powerful and engaging, guide/demand for nontranssexual people to interrogate their own privileges further. (But see my essay, "Speaking of Privilege" in the same volume.)

The Hijacking

In The Movement Has Been Hijacked Max takes on queer and transgender theory, the transgender movement, and some of the actions of Leslie Feinberg. This contribution is vital, and in an essay that will presumably be read in many gender studies classrooms, perhaps the most important one White Man makes. So I am disappointed that it doesn't begin with an historical power analysis of the word "transgender" itself. Transgender was coined by a person adopting a feminine name and identity, wearing feminine clothing, and expressing a feminine gender in other ways all despite being assigned a masculine gender. This person, however, did not wish to have medical, sex-altering interventions. She assumed that she was superior to transsexual people who did wish/need such interventions and coined "transgender" precisely so that she could identify herself as distinct from transsexual people whom she saw as truly sick/wrong/bad. That's right, the entire point of the word "transgender" was to privilege the lives & people who fall under such a term in relation to transsexual people. It is sickening to me, and apparently to Max, that now 'educated' people are using transgender as if it were inclusive of us.

But the problems with the term transgender are not limited to its genesis, and Max sets in right away to identify those problems. The first is that, while transgender oppression deserves attention from those privileged by it, so does transsexual oppression. The issues of those who 'transgress gender boundaries' are often very different from those whose relationship between their gender and sex creates a need/desire for medical intervention and transformation of sex. By theorizing almost exclusively about 'transgender,' then claiming that transsexual people are included (without taking into account any of the realities of our everyday lives) transsexual people are re-erased at the moment that scholars are telling us we are receiving unprecedented attention. Max does not back away from indicting queer theory: "[transsexual people] often find much of queer theory to be annoying and pretentious. For some, the encounter is more than a source of irritation, it devastates an emerging sense of self." Bravo for Max's words. The question is, will academia listen, or will students and other scholars continue their rationalizations for using transgender oppressively?

(The answer, I fear, is foreshadowed by promotional material and reviews for 'This Bridge We Call Home' which obliviously and hurtfully refers to "transgender" contributors--note the plural when I counted one. Those writers must be erasing Max's & my own transsexual identities to reach the plural. At least one reviewer specifically names Max as "transgender". One almost hopes the reviewer didn't read Max's work before reviewing it. The pain of a reviewer's obliviousness might be less than the pain of a reviewer's clear and deliberate misreading of Max's clearly valuable work.)

The next subsection addresses the attempt to eliminate GID and the conflict between "a Utopian Social Movement and a more pragmatic Civil Rights Movement". This is also a very valuable contribution of White Man. Too many people have heard about a "controversy" regarding GID, but don't understand it and are exposed only to transgender/queer theorizing about it and thus (surprise!) don't have available to them a transsexual perspective on transsexual people's own diagnosis! It is a relief to have it included here. I do have one small reservation about this subsection: Max does not call attention to the irony of the socialist Leslie Feinberg advocating a movement which primarily benefits those with wealth.

In taking on Judith Halberstam, Max takes almost exactly the right tack. Judith, like so many others, appears to place more responsibility on transsexual people for ending oppressive systems of gender than on those that benefit from such systems the most. I'm sad, however, that he doesn't make explicit here a point related to his earlier one about celebrating masculinity. Our identities themselves do not undo pervasive interpersonal/institutional systems of oppression. Alternative masculinities will not sometimes fail, but will always fail to change existing gender hierarchies, Judith. It will take actual work, not any particular identity, no matter how "alternative," to change unjust systems of power. Max does implicitly address this, however, in stating, "This ... perspective renders my own very real commitment to gender equity invisible, simply because I appear to be a gender-congruent man." Note that Max, too, places the emphasis on a commitment--presumably to do actual work--and removes it from mere identity.

In concluding, Max does use "freak" in a way with which I am only somewhat comfortable. (See Exile and Pride by Eli Clare for a good investigation of the problems with able-bodied uses of "freak".) But he does break with the fear of being too angry with our allies that has kept many transsexual people silent. I am cheering again when he writes, "...we are not subject to explanation.... The moralistic, confining preachiness of feminist academics like Halberstam can't even begin to know us...."

Altogether, this is a powerful essay that says much I cherish. I would be relieved if I thought this work on the verge of becoming a standard source on transsexual lives in gender studies courses. Despite my reservations and differences with some particular pieces of White Man, in the end I trust Max's undiscovered deeper way much more than I trust transgender/queer theory's way in teaching, learning about, or liberating specifically transsexual lives.