ten years pt 2

one must imagine sisyphus happy

This is part 2 of some ruminations on reaching the ten year anniversary of my first testosterone shot. Here is a link to part one. Happy birthday to me.

Like a lot of trans men, I was a feminist before I was a man. After I realized my Pentecostal upbringing was destructive to me, feminism was my second swing at developing a moral and political ideology. But when I started testosterone, I was 21, and I was acutely aware that I had been heavily sheltered from the world outside my church. I did not know dick about shit, and I was kind of scared to find out what I had been missing. When you realize that the first several hundred people you met in your life were lying to you, it is both difficult to know who else you can trust and easy to latch onto the next thing that crosses your path and calls itself The Truth. Through most of my 20s, I felt terribly impressionable— I did not trust myself on much of anything, but I did not have any older or wiser people in my life who had developed a measured discernment about these things, nor did I have the attention span for reading dense academic texts by myself. Instead, I grew my feminist consciousness through osmosis, trying to do what people on TV or in college or on the internet told me a feminist ought to do.

Unfortunately, it was 2014, and feminism was having a weird time in the culture. Feminism’s prescriptions for men were to stop manspreading and telling rape jokes and go to therapy and Listen To Women. So I did. The women around me were saying that each man possessed a kind of ineffable power, somehow both socially-ingrained and inevitable, that made every move fraught with moral and political implications. To be a good man, I must prioritize and uplift women, pay no mind when others ignore my transition and characterize me with women anyway, and I should generally just shut up and sit down so that the girls could have the freedom they deserved.

Through this I realized that gender is an identity heavy with political weight. I mean, duh, right? Feminist politics can be implied by wearing the semiotics of female identity— a venus symbol, a labrys, abstracted ovarian iconography, etc. To celebrate your own womanhood (or more specific subcategories, like mothers or the sluts you might find at SlutWalk) is not just a declaration that you happen to prefer pink over blue— it is a promise of solidarity with other women through affiliation with them. In conversation, female identity becomes a way to compare experiences with women who are very different from you, with the promise that you will look for meaning in the places where they overlap without losing your shared connection over the places where they diverge.

This is the deeper implication of the vapid-seeming activism slogan “trans women are women”— that trans women, by being women, necessarily share stakes in the political project of women’s liberation. If you do not already intuit what those shared stakes are, believing that trans women are women anyway is a way of saying that you are open to finding out, mainly by agreeing that you will accept when trans women characterize their experiences as within the sphere of womanhood (rather than characterizing them as feminine men, as if to say “your problems might look like mine, but we are really nothing alike, and so I owe you nothing”). Trans-exclusion, then, is not merely dismissive or invalidating on a personal level, but a way to declare that the idea of cis women sharing stakes and experiences with trans women is unthinkable. (This is what TERFs are on about, at least as much as they are on some transphobic fart-sniffing high— they are unwilling to even entertain the notion that trans women and cis women’s sociopolitical problems might have anything at all in common.)

So an expression of identity is not just an expression of something personal, but something social, and the social implies the political; it is not only what you identify as but who you identify with, and the latter is loaded with all kinds of political implications. Perhaps the most obvious example is that people who are pointedly proud of their white identity tend to— I mean, I don’t really have to go any further, do I? They are drawn to politics that prioritize white people. Obviously there are very different contexts for what identity and pride entail for those who claim them, but politics are a facet of the meaning that identities contain, and we often communicate our identities—and thus our affiliations— aesthetically, through how we dress and carry ourselves and what words we introduce ourselves with. This may not be a given for every member—obviously not every woman is a feminist, right— but this projection of political meaning via identity is often intentional, even if it is unexamined or subconscious or reactionary. Among trans people, where gender identity is malleable, part of what draws us to one identity over another is our sense of relation to those who we see inhabiting it.

Maybe you can see where I am going with this: if identifying as a woman is a means of showing solidarity with other women, where does that leave trans men? If gender identity is a way to find meaning in characterizing ourselves as alike to those others we want to be in community with, then…?

Well, trans men are fucked. More than leaving womanhood behind us, going so far as to adopt a male identity directly affiliates us with the group of people that feminists say are The Problem, and so the semiotics of our belonging— beards, pronouns, graphic tees— get interpreted as projections of patriarchal loyalty as strongly as the labrys implies butch power. To characterize ourselves and our experiences as of-a-kind with cis men would be to get in bed with our political enemies, and looking too much like them is a red flag for others who try to guess at where our loyalties lie. Consider how we feel about a man who lets his toddler daughter do his nails and dress him in fairy wings, vs a man who refuses when asked— then imagine the bind a trans man is in if he wants to signal to his feminist sisters that he is on-sides with them without femming it up.

The Only Unproblematic Male Artist

I feel like I am repeating myself or over-explaining, here, but I do not very often get to have conversations about this with other trans people. Much of the appeal of a nonbinary identity is that it presents an opportunity to escape from the way that others so insistently read meaning into male and female, so my cousins are not often eager to get into the weeds with me.¹ It seems like all the dolls have read a little Solanas and a little Dworkin and concluded that the most radical way to resist patriarchal power is to stop being a man, no further thought needed— go join the Promise Keepers or something, fellas, that shit isn’t our problem. And the lads mostly respond to this with, yes ma’am, sorry ma’am, blessed art thou among women, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our deaths, etc.

So it really seems like men have been hung out to dry. We look to the right and see endless masculinity grifts, promising wealth and importance if only you buy these nootropics and constantly treat other people as means to an end (a program of masculine empowerment which is, for most, either repulsive, unattainable, or both). We look to the left and see the promise of earning our value instead through moral superiority if only we ask for nothing, stop looking for meaning in maleness, and submit to policing and ridicule which may or may not ever stop (which is also repulsive/unattainable, but it’s fine because it’s totally for the right reasons). If you would like to inhabit a male identity without trying to throw your weight around and be valued by your community, you’re still kind of just up shit creek.

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I have been reading Jessa Crispin’s Why I Am Not A Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto and it is one of those books that makes me feel like I don’t need to write anymore because somebody else has already said everything.² I would like to say that I wish I had read it sooner, but I think if I had encountered it when it came out in 2017, it would have made me insane.

In 2014, Roxane Gay published Bad Feminist and told everyone that it is #valid to identify as a feminist even if you have no interest in changing the status quo (but it’s also valid to not identify as a feminist, because who cares, it’s not like we think our ideology is good or important or anything). The cultural osmosis version of feminism that I had gotten from college and the internet told me that feminism was an uncomplicated Good, and that any criticism of feminism was an attempt to undermine it by people who hate women. At the same time, feminist messaging started harping on the notion that the angry unsexy feminist radical was a slanderous stereotype, not a real kind of person whose presence and intensity could be rational or valuable to the movement. So the zeitgeist has not shown us a lot of nuanced or legitimizing examples of people who are angry with mainstream feminism for its failures. It is very difficult to know how to feel about any of this when you are 21 and wondering if you might actually be a boy, and if letting yourself become a boy means you must spend the rest of your life trying very hard not to become the root of all evil in America.

Here is a bit of what Crispin says about identity:

The easiest way for a group to build a sense of identity is through the rejection or the demeaning of that group's "opposite." In order for atheists to present themselves as rational and intelligent, they have to present the religious as superstitious and foolish. This is certainly easier and more effective than consistently being rational and intelligent. In order for America to think of itself as strong and important, it has to think of Europe being weak and worthless. And in order for women to think of themselves as compassionate, they have to think of men as violent.

Part of this is simple projection. All the aspects of yourself that you are ashamed of or fear that you possess (weakness, anger, irrationality) can be easily forgotten if you assign those traits to someone you are not. If you strongly identify as one thing, your opposite can be not only a scapegoat, but a shit storehouse. Anything you'd like to distance yourself from can simply be stored in the identity of your opposite. "This group over here is [enter whatever disgusting thing you can't bear to see inside of yourself]. I belong to the group that is the opposite of this, and so therefore I possess the opposite qualities."

Trans folks are very aware of this habit among straight people— transphobic disgust is in part defensive, a way to cope with the fact that lots of very normal people do not live up to gender’s expectations with perfect ease and competency. And we do our little jokes about how straight people are neurotic and uptight and definitely not doing okay, ha ha ha. But trans people telling ourselves that cis peoples’ identities are restrictive, old-fashioned, and unexamined means that a nebulous shift in one’s sense of identity is all that is required to declare oneself modern, introspective, and free. As long as we claim allegiance to the right identity, we do not have to critically examine our own ideology the way we demand that others do, we do not have to build any infrastructure that provides greater freedom, and we can continue talking about gender as if nothing has changed in the last thirty-to-seventy-to-one-hundred years for as long as it remains convenient to do so.

I think a lot of the problems outlined in Why I Am Not A Feminist are things I noticed in the culture around me ten years ago, but couldn’t dwell on or articulate because I was terrified of poking holes in the ideological life-raft I had jumped on as I escaped my evangelical family. I did not have the social graces or standing to raise questions without the risk of pissing off everyone whose opinion I cared about, especially once I started looking like a boy.

There was a part of me that loved men and longed for community with them, and that part was not comfortable with the way everyone around me treated maleness like a shit storehouse, or the way they defended me when I joined in. I could not square the fact that I wanted to empathize with the women and trans people around me— many reckoning for the first time, as independent adults, with trauma inflicted on them by brothers and fathers and boyfriends— without indulging their desire to vent their pain by dehumanizing half the planet. I could not deal with the fact that a lot of women who loudly laid claim to an elevated (feminine) empathy came off as very myopic and cruel, especially in an early-social-media environment where social grievances were often dealt with through explosive call-out posts followed by a week of bloodthirsty public discussion of the target’s psychology and personal life. I still do not enjoy the litmus-testing hazing ritual where, every time I meet someone new, they talk shit about cis men in front of me and wait to see how I respond. Wink wink, nudge nudge, ugh, men, am I right?

I said last time that I was not all that interested in talking about my ~gender feelings~ but the thing is, these are my gender feelings— my politics, my sense of dis/affiliation, how I live out my principles within and through them. Plenty of people who feel roughly how I feel about gender in the abstract do not own male identity as insistently as I do, especially not in the political way that I do it. I knew I wanted to be a boy long before I grew any kind of political consciousness, sure, but trans-feminist politics were the landscape in which I wrestled with whether I wanted to take testosterone and actually be seen as one.

The wrench in the social utility of a shit storehouse is that some people instinctively identify with the subject of shit-slinging more than whoever is slinging it. My father’s favorite shit storehouse was “teenagers”— as a conservative Harvard man who’d built his sense of identity on being smart and disciplined, he let me know at all times that teenagers were the opposite of that, and when I got to be that age I had better not blah blah blah. As a child, I thought, well, maybe other teenagers are like that, but I won’t be. Surely he will see that I am different, and he will be proud, and the contradiction between hate of the other and love for his child will compel him to see the world differently. This did not work, the slander did not stop when I turned 20, and I did not learn my lesson. I thought the same thing when I came out as queer to my Christian family. I thought the same thing when I started testosterone.

I find it crazymaking that there seem to be two camps of contemporary feminism— people who say I should apply the logic of choice feminism to my own transition, and simply forget about any uncomfortable political reckoning, vs people who say that if I wanted to be a real feminist I should have stayed a woman. I cannot make a life in either of these places. I can only try to anticipate how they will judge me to have failed, and then tell myself that I don’t need their approval. But I do, because I don’t trust myself easily, and these are the only people who come close to offering me a community that vibes with my bullshit.

So all of this coalesced into a male identity built mostly on stubborn, whimsical contrarianism. If anything a woman does can be feminist, then I guess men are the only ones compelled to live by any kind of principles. If men have a duty to understand and take seriously women’s intellectual and political pursuits, then as a man, I would have no legitimate excuse not to. I had already been taught how to spot masculinity grifters of all sorts, and feminists themselves had zero interest in pandering to me, so I would not readily attract enticing sycophants and believable apologists. I would not have to rely on my own meager inner strength, either— other people would certainly let me know the moment I betrayed our shared principles. I would not be allowed to get away with treating other identities like a shit storehouse, or otherwise pursuing my own validation and enrichment at someone else’s expense. Very convenient for me, then, that I already wanted to be a boy anyway.

If all of this sounds masochistic, that’s because it is, but retroactively framing my maleness as pursuing the offer of an obligation to live by my principles is what works for me. One must imagine Sisyphus happy not because he appreciates relaxation after a long day, but because he finds rolling a rock up a hill enriching to his character. Call it moral OCD or an evangelical hangover if you like, and you probably wouldn’t be wrong. I am an insane transsexual, and your god made me, too. What else am I going to do with my time, scrub my brain smooth and start watching sports?

Trick question! I’m a soccer guy now, and Andre Blake is the king of my heart.

I have managed to make peace with my own contrarian shtick, but this is the sense of meaning that has taken a decade to laboriously reverse-engineer from a culture that has not really provided me any other satisfying options. If am expected to be resilient to nonstop criticism and emotional chaos, I can draw strength from framing that resilience as a masculine kind of virtue, sure, and I might even find a handful of people who nod along while I do it. But that is not a new and better way of living life as a man— it is a feminist-sounding reframing of patriarchy’s refusal to see any value in men who are fragile, hysterical, needy, etc. I can reframe my discontentment as a kind of principled radicalism now, but not everyone is built to be a radical. To get here, I first had to white-knuckle my way through a decade of fearing that there was nothing good within me, and that the people I admired would never see me as anything more than an embarrassment, a liability, or a punching bag. A decade of despairing that this was exactly what I deserved for having the gall to transition away from womanhood, toward an identity set apart from the people who brought me into political consciousness, and who promised that they had something better to offer.

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When I asked women c2014 for examples of a “nontoxic masculinity,” they often brought up Fred Rodgers— not because he testified before the Senate to defend PBS’s funding with a beautiful speech about the importance of media which speaks to the inner needs of children, but because he had a TV show where everyone saw him being all soft-spoken and wearing a cute sweater and oooo isn’t it wild that this sweet old man used to be in the Navy or whatever. The important part isn’t that this guy possesses a unique respect for children, or that he labors and takes risks for his principles— what matters is that he never gets mad, never yells at anyone, never makes anyone uncomfortable. Bob Ross was another popular example for the same reasons— the fact that he developed a unique and creative skill, and then spent years laboring to make that skill more accessible to average people without an expensive art education, was not on the list of reasons given for why he was such a lovable and aspirational figure.

The problem with asking women to invent new ways-of-being for men is that women are primarily interested in re-envisioning masculinity as something harmless. And I mean, of course they do, who can blame them. But whether that vision is at all enriching or desirable to the men who must live inside of it—whether it is even possible that any of us be rendered incapable of harm— is either taken for granted or treated as irrelevant. We would rather frame the friction between men and feminist culture as a failure of men’s capacity or character instead of seeing it as, I don’t know, a mutual kind of intellectual power-struggle that naturally occurs between teacher and student, maybe. We would rather decide that the work of maintaining a community which freely fraternizes with men— particularly cis men— is just not worth the effort, and I mean what could a privileged man even want from us anyway, so why bother.

The overall thesis I got from Why I Am Not A Feminist is that we should judge a political identity like Feminist not on whether everyone who wants to can Feel Included, but whether we are actually building the infrastructure that would allow people to live different kinds of lives which the status quo has otherwise made impossible. This obviously means shifting material resources from those who have towards those who don’t, but it also means creating the social and emotional infrastructure that allows people to make meaning out of their experiences. You can imagine how this might apply to trans-feminist culture, but it remains in the imagination because we have not actually done it for real. We have recognized what was wrong in patriarchy’s attempt to understand women through the archetypes of madonnas, whores, and crones, but we have responded by (with a thin veneer of irony) trying to understand men as predators, himbos, and faggots.

It doesn’t help that North America’s most prominent Phenomenology Enjoyer is Jordan Peterson, a guy who made his name on being an antifeminist crybaby.

So here at the end, I feel torn. I think that feminism and transness could stand a bit more radical chutzpah— my wrestling with the political context of my identity was certainly difficult and painful, but it did not kill me, nor did it prevent me from transitioning. I found quite a lot of meaning, there, and I have limited patience for those who roll their eyes when I advocate that they could maybe get something out of it if they gave wrestling a shot, too. But I would like to see actual feminist radicalism expressed in a more mature form, one that is not so readily weaponized against boys just trying to find purpose and meaning and community in the raw early stages of coming-out. I wish that my encounters with Dworkin and Solanas and Firestone and MacKinnon had been facilitated by people who did not go out of their way to tell me every day how much they hated my guts.

My point is not that Feminism Bad, or that it is bad to read meaning into aesthetics, or that identity is a wrong place to put stock in when it comes to motivating oneself or others towards shared values and sociopolitical change. It is not even bad for communities to be protective over who they will allow to identify as one of them— those demands exist for reasons that at least make sense, even if we do not always judge them to be good or justified. But by now we should be asking more-interesting questions about what feminism and trans identity are for, and what they really have to offer.

In specific: How does one express feminist solidarity—or earn feminist trust— when one is unable or unwilling to be a woman? Does feminism owe us this kind of inclusivity? If it turns out we lads are intractably unwelcome in feminist scenes, where else can we turn to find community and purpose outside of patriarchal styles of living? Where do we draw a difference between identities that we believe have a right to protectionism vs those that don’t, and on what grounds, and how does that affect how we evaluate those who choose to include us or don’t? How do we work together to create new meanings for men that are actually as free and generative as we say they should be?

More broadly: If identity is so malleable, what do we do when we find ourselves sharing a politicized identity (like feminism, or transness) with people who do not care to find out what stakes we share in common? What does it mean for the pure goal of “being yourself” when the expression of that Self seems so inevitably loaded with meaning in the eyes of others? In what new ways might we understand and exert control over what, exactly, we express through the aesthetics of identity and affiliation? What new meanings do we create, and how, when rugged individualism doesn’t cut it?

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I couldn’t find a way to integrate it into the essay, but while I was ruminating about what I and feminism were up to ten years ago, I remembered two of my favorite things. The first is Nicki Minaj going “I’m a human beeeeeeeeeeeen” and the second is Eartha Kitt laughing in a reporter’s face. Both of these clips went a little bit viral in the early 2010s, and I cherish them.

1. At least, according to whatever community college kids mainstream outlets like Teen Vogue can find to interview, anyway. Part of my offense at trans culture is that we rarely get to hear from nonbinary people with anything more interesting or detailed to say than “patriarchy sucks and I want out, so here I am.” If you would like more meat to chew on, the interview-podcast When A Guy Has A Really Fucked Gender is one place you can look.

2. OK, she didn’t say everything. I feel like I could write a dozen essays comparing her critique of “feminist” as a political identity to contemporary discourses about “trans” and “queer” as political identities. She has also written other books since then, including What Is Wrong With Men? coming up next summer.