Category Archives: transphobia

An Angry Rant Prompted By Someone Calling Me “Male-Identified”

I am not male. I am not female. I am genderqueer. 

You would think that wouldn’t be so difficult for so-called trans-positive people to understand.

Oh, sure, they don’t look at my tits and my vulva and assume I’m a woman. Instead, they look at them and assume I’m a dude! Yaaaaay! Do you want a cookie for being a Super Awesome Trans Ally? Shall I throw you a parade?

Not male! Not female! Neither! None! None of the above! Why is this so difficult for some people to understand?

Calling me male (oh, sorry, male-identified) is misgendering me. It’s not somehow not misgendering me because it’s a different kind of misgendering me than most people do. 

(…Also wtf “male-identified.” First, that’s fucking redundant, if you’re in a trans-positive space everyone knows “male” means “identifies as male,” you don’t need the extra word. Second, fuck you, I don’t identify as male. I have never identified as male. The word “identified” is a paper-thin figleaf over your binarist bullshit.) 

Now, you might say, my social position is male. After all, no one is read as genderqueer; we have to go through a rather long and annoying process of explaining what we are, and even then half the people will slot you in as “basically a lady” or “basically a dude.” So maybe I’m treated like a man most of the time!

Except you’re still wrong there.

Like a lot of (most?) genderqueer people, my gendered social position is complicated. I am usually initially read as a teenage boy, possibly queer, except inexplicably in geek-heavy spaces where I’m always read as female. When I open my mouth, I’m read as a gender-non-conforming woman. For school, work, and family purposes, I present as a cis woman. All my current romantic/sexual relationships are with straight cis men. Online, “genderqueer” seems to round to “male,” which means no one calls me ugly anymore. (Sadface.) My friends consider me genderqueer (thanks, guys, you’re awesome).

You might notice a couple words getting repeated there like “woman” and “female.” Juuuuust saying.

I don’t want to say that I have never received male privilege– of course I have. The freedom from sexual harassment is particularly nice. And I cannot overestimate how much easier my life is because I’m not a recipient of transmisogyny. But I don’t see how any of that justifies calling me male-identified! Because, you know, I don’t identify as male. So fuck off.  

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Ozy’s Current Theory of Gender

[As promised. I would like to acknowledge my debt here to West and Zimmerman's Doing Gender, to Natalie Reed, and to the valiant people who have attempted to explain to me what the fuck Judith Butler is going on about. Also, I'm not saying any of this is how it should work; I'm simply describing how, as far as I can tell, it does work.]

Our culture transmits to us a certain idea of How Gender Is Supposed to Work. Or, well, ideas. People of different races and classes and abilities and sexualities and religions and body types and personalities get different messages about how gender is supposed to work. You get different messages based on where you grew up, what your family’s like, where you went to school, what media you watched, who your friends were, whom you date, where you work. In fact, you can say that no two people get exactly the same gender socialization.

People use the cultural ideas of how gender works as a toolkit to express their own identities and to communicate them to other people. (For some people, gender is not a relevant axis on which they construct their identities. Thus you get cis by default people.) Ways that people express their gender can include clothing, grooming, hygiene, mannerisms, word choice and syntax, the way they pitch their voice, their lifestyle, sexual choices, how they interact with or treat other people, and probably half a dozen other things I can’t think of.

Because gender is a means of communicating facts about one’s identity, people “read” each other’s genders. People slot each other into “male” or “female,” and then into a multitude of gendered subcategories– butch, femme, good girl, slut, dandy, bro, geek, fag, et cetera I’m sure you can think of more. Of course, just because you’re trying to communicate something does not mean other people are able to understand what you’re trying to communicate (the jargon I hear is “illegible gender”); other people bring their own biases and interpretations and Mounds of Gendered Shit to the table.

People end up treating other people differently based on what gender they read the person as having. For instance, I mysteriously get much more respect in intellectual conversations when people read me as male or at least masculine. All this gets Really Important in relationship to sexuality, because for a lot of people what sex or gender they read their partner as is a fundamentally important aspect of attraction. And in turn what gendered subcategories they read their partner as fitting into affects whether they want a sexual relationship and what kind of sexual relationship they want.

People feel more comfortable expressing their genders in some ways than in other ways. In some ways, this is shaped by how people treat them: after all, there are plenty of women who look feminine to get guys without having much connection to femininity at all. But for a lot of people the act of expressing yourself in a certain gendered way feels right: putting on a skirt just feels ineffably better than sweatpants; it just feels right to swish; when you slick back your hair you look in the mirror and see you. I think that’s a lot of what people are getting at with “makeup is empowering!”– it’s not that makeup is empowering, it’s that expressing your gender is empowering, and for some people that involves makeup. (I predict about half my readers are nodding along going “yep” at this point and the other half are like “what the fuck is zie even talking about?” Sorry, other half. Please take it on faith that this Is A Thing I Promise.)

—As for the “hey, if that’s true, why can’t trans women just be men in makeup?” Because they feel comfortable as women, not men. Duh?

Why do people have feelings of gender comfort? Some kind of biopsychosocial nonsense, probably. I’d argue that there’s Probably Some Kind Of Neurobiological Thing Or Things That Affect One’s Gender Somehow, because both gender roles and trans people tend to pop up a lot cross-culturally, and because certainly from the inside it doesn’t feel like my bodily gender dysphoria is a product of the culture I grew up in. But I’m not going to say “it’s the prenatal hormones!” or “we have the brains of the opposite gender!” or anything specific. Wait for neuroscience to become more advanced.

As to the psychological and social factors… I only have one navel to gaze at, my own, so I’m not going to generalize about other people’s experiences. But I use gender-neutral pronouns and call myself “genderqueer” or “nonbinary” and wear a binder because I happened to encounter the trans community and fit my experiences into their framework of what genderqueer people do. I paint my nails and wear makeup because, shit, man, so did David Bowie and Billie Joe Armstrong. I cut my hair to look like Joan Jett and grew it out to look like every gamer guy who can’t be bothered to get a haircut. I’m perfectly fine fucking boys because of my formative experiences reading slash fic and lesbian feminist theory. (Which is kind of the opposite of what lesbian feminism was supposed to do, but c’est la vie.) I choose my outfits based on whether strangers “sir” me or sexually harass me. I joke that my gender identity is bishonen! Either “nature” or “nurture” is an inadequate explanation of how I got my gender: the answer is both.

(Also I really like this list from Natalie Reed’s Twitter of assorted factors that have to do with gender somehow. Gender is coooooomplicated.)

Why I’m An Assimilationist

[Assimilation = Death sticker.]

So the Supreme Court has started to talk about Prop 8, which means that my Twitter feed is suddenly full of people using the word “assimilationist” in cold blood. Unfortunately, shouting at people in incoherent rage does not actually get them to stop using the word, so ugh.

Worry about assimilation is a common thread that runs through a lot of social justice movements– race, disability, even atheism– but I’m going to specifically be talking about it in a queer context, because that’s the one I’m most familiar with.

The assimilationist mindset is “we’re people just like you, you should give us rights.” Which, as strategies go, has the advantage of totally working. Seriously! The single thing that correlates best with having changed your mind to support same-sex marriage is knowing a queer person– that is, your mental image of queers shifts from “Pride Parade and anonymous bathroom sex” to “Joe down the street who grows really nice roses.” It also really cleverly defangs a pretty major squick-based anti-queer argument: it’s hard to argue that LGBT people are sick disgusting perverts who live loveless lives full of casual sex when observably the queer rights movement is advocating for their right to have spouses, children, a white picket fence, and a golden retriever. 

The problem here is that if you say “we fall in love and want to get married! We’re people just like you!”, you’re implicitly saying that people who don’t fall in love and get married are not people just like you. Which is kind of a dick move. Assimilationism sanitizes queerness to make it more acceptable to Jane Homophobe: if she’s still vaguely threatened by Ellen, she’s just not ready for “and also anonymous bathroom sex is a totally valid lifestyle choice.” This is simultaneously an understandable political tactic and really, really shitty.

Where this gets absolutely toxic is that, for various reasons, Joe Homophobe tends to find a lot of the most marginalized queer people the most threatening. Trans people are scary and confusing! It is much easier to sweep us under the rug and just focus on same-sex marriage, particularly if the activists involved are kinda transphobic themselves. The HRC in particular has a history of being shitty to trans people.

But trans people, don’t rest on your laurels, we totally pull this shit too– the trans movement as a whole regularly ignores trans addicts, mentally ill people, sex workers, homeless people, survivors, and other groups, partially because they’re alien and scary and partially because we’re afraid embracing these issues will just reinforce the stereotypes and make us look alien and scary. If the only time you talk about trans women and sex work is to criticize the idea that all trans women are sex workers, you need to check yourself.

As it happens, the basic strategy is the same. I’m a nonbinary kinky poly queer sex worker and I’m basically a normal person. I have shitty customers and sometimes don’t really want to go to work! I like cuddling my partners a lot! I have deep feelings about Hey There Delilah! I sometimes eat a pint of ice cream in one sitting! I am basically a person, not a Terrifying Monster or a Pitiable Creature Who Needs To Be Saved or a Horrible Slutty Slut Slut, and my life is neither alien nor scary. The problem with assimilationism is that the tactics haven’t been applied enough.

Occasionally people will object to LGBT people getting the right to marry because marriage is a highly problematic institution, and then they will proceed to talk about misogyny and rape culture and capitalism and elevating monogamous romantic-sexual relationships over other forms of love and make a lot of really salient critiques most of which I agree with. 

The problem with this line of thought is that, near as I can figure, about 98% of married people are cishets. Therefore, to be fair, solving the problems of marriage is 98% cishet people’s job. I don’t see why I should have to not get married just because cishet people fucked it up.  

…Also even in a society where we didn’t have any misogyny or rape culture or capitalism or elevation of monogamous romantic-sexual relationships over other forms of love, people would still probably want to be life partners with each other sometimes, and there are certain rights the government should give to people who want to be life partners. We might as well call that “marriage,” and we ought to extend it to all genders. (Some people think that these rights should be extended to everyone regardless of relationship status– but that ends up obviously absurd. Married couples don’t have to testify against each other in court, which is fair and just. Making everyone not have to testify against anyone in court seems like it would end poorly.) 

The final form of anti-assimilationist thought, using the term generously, I wish to address is the idea that queer people are radical and rebellious and fighting the patriarchy and wanting to get married and have kids is like, so not cool man. To which I say:

FUCK.

OFF.

The whole point is that people end up with more choices. Sometimes, if people have more choices, it means they make choices you don’t like. You do NOT get to take away their choices because YOU disapprove of them, as long as they are not hurting anyone else. If you do, you are basically the same thing as the homophobes– just with less political power.  

Binary Genders as Umbrella Genders

(For the record: this is a pretty tentative idea and I feel like this post might be a little rambly and incoherent. I am bad at words okay. Gender theory is hard.)

One of the things about being nonbinary/genderqueer is that it’s an umbrella term. True, a lot of nonbinary/genderqueer people have some experiences in common, enough that it makes sense to classify us together: not being recognized as our genders, being accused of special snowflake syndrome, weird pronouns, genderfuckery, dysphoria, formative adolescent Rocky Horror Picture Show experiences.

But you can’t assume that my experience of being genderqueer is the same as any other person’s; in fact, many of our experiences are radically different from each other. I fantasize about waking up one morning with a flat chest while another genderqueer person may love theirs; my gender is stable where another person’s may switch from being male to being female from day to day; I get absolutely nothing out of genderfuck while another person considers it core to their identity. Although it is neat when you meet someone who has the same genderfeels that you do, the vast majority of genderqueer people do not, and that’s okay and doesn’t make you or them any less genderqueer.

The thing is… how is that not true of binary genders too?

Seriously. James Bond is a man. Jack Harkness is a man. Willy Loman is a man. Groucho Marx is a man. Darth Vader is a man. Romeo is a man. Oscar Wilde is a man. The Joker is a man. Sassy Gay Friend is a man. And yet I do not think you can tell me a single thing all those characters have in common other than the fact that people call them “he.”

I think it makes way more sense to think of manhood and womanhood as umbrellas, under which we have a variety of different genders, gender presentations, and gendered experiences.

This is how we resolve the problem of not being prescriptivist or essentialist, while simultaneously acknowledging that people do do things that make them “feel like a woman.” Maybe you feel like a woman when you change your child’s diaper! Maybe you feel like a woman when you put on lipgloss! Maybe you feel like a woman when you kick ass at MMA! Maybe you feel like a woman when you fix a car! Maybe you feel like a woman in a ponytail and yesterday’s blue jeans! Maybe you find the concept of “feeling like a woman” somewhat incomprehensible, since you are a woman always and what behavior you do doesn’t affect it! Maybe you don’t feel much connection to the identity of “woman” at all but *shrug* that’s what the doctor said when he slapped you on the ass as a baby! That’s all good and they are all perfectly valid ways of Being A Woman. “I feel more womanly when I put on lipstick” does not mean that every woman needs to feel more womanly when they put on lipstick.

I think this is much easier to see in genderqueer people, because pretty much all genderqueers have put a lot of thought into gender: first to find out that genderqueer is a thing, then to identify as it, then talking about everyone’s favorite topic (our genders!) with other genderqueer people. So most genderqueer people I know have a pretty good idea of what makes us feel dysphoric, and on the other hand what makes us feel comfortable in our genders. (For instance: I feel best in schlubby geek clothes or very sexualized feminine outfits. Perfume and painted nails lead to All The Awesome Genderfeels. I hate my breasts, bind them or wear baggy shirts whenever possible, and occasionally don’t want them touched during sex. I don’t mind Birth Name because it can also be a nickname for a boy. I have a vast and ridiculous need for straight cis men to treat me as One Of Them, but also to have sex with me. If you call me “she” I will feel like vomiting.)

But the thing is that a cis woman (or for that matter a cis man) might have the same feelings I do about painted nails, but instead of reading the feelings as “aaaaah good genderfeels” they might be more likely to read the feeling as “pretty” or “fierce” or “awesome.” (Or as “I really feel like a woman,” I’m not saying all cis people are totally unaware.)

I feel like I’m eliding the difference between gender presentation and gender identity somewhat. Insofar as I currently think it makes sense as a distinction, it makes sense because for some people nail polish is an important aspect of their gender, and for some people nail polish makes their fingernails funny colors. It is inaccurate to assume that everyone in the second category is in the first category. (Also, it makes sense as a lie-to-cis-people. While things we normally call “gender presentation” are, in fact, deeply connected to things we normally call “gender identity,” they are not connected in the same way for different people, and claiming that they’re completely unrelated is a good way to get people not to decide that someone is Doing Man Wrong because they happen not to be doing it to their personal specifications. There’s no wrong way to Do Man. There’s just ways that make you comfortable, and ways that make you uncomfortable.)

…And this kind of ties in to my Big Crackpot Theory of Gender, but this is long and incoherent enough for today, so I promise I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Lies to Cis People

There’s a concept I really like called the lie-to-children.

When I was first taught about atoms, I was taught that atoms looked kind of like a solar system, with electrons (planets) orbiting around a nucleus (sun) made of protons and neutrons. This is, of course, completely and 100% wrong. But when you’re six you can’t understand what an atomic orbital is or how an electron is both a particle and a wave at the same time, so that lie is good enough. And you can use that as a model

A lot of trans feminists have pointed out lately that certain common tropes explaining how transness works are, in fact, not true! For instance, look at this helpful diagram:
[A gingerbread man, with Identity in the brain, Orientation in the heart, Sex in the genitals, and Expression all over the body. Four spectra are labeled "gender identity: woman, genderqueer, man", "gender expression: feminine, androgynous, masculine", "biological sex: female, intersex, male", and "sexual orientation: heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual."]

There are so many problems with this diagram. I’m not just talking about weird classification errors like “so people who have transitioned are intersex?” and “what about asexuals?” I mean, it’s just wrong to say that gender identity is not connected to gender expression (it is sometimes, and other times it isn’t! Complicated!). Your biological sex affects way more than just your genitals (yes, even your brain). The genderbread person doesn’t define “gender” at all. A lot of trans feminists have started questioning whether gender identity even makes sense as a concept. Et cetera.

So yeah. It is very easy to critique. 

I think we should understand concepts like the genderbread person, gender identity, and even (ugh) “woman born in a man’s body” as lies-to-cis-people, the same way the solar system model of atoms is a lie-to-children. Transness doesn’t work that way. But it’s good enough to start with until/unless you learn a more accurate model. It conveys important concepts like:

  • Just because you were born with a vagina does not mean you are a woman.
  • Trans people are real and you should treat them respectfully.
  • Being trans is not the same thing as being really really gay.
  • You can be butch and a trans lady and you are still a trans lady and not Really A Man.
  • Genderqueer people exist.
  • There are people who do not fall into the sex or gender identity or gender expression binaries.
  • …and so on and so forth.

It gives the average cis person the necessary information to treat trans people respectfully. Which is… pretty much exactly the information they need, unless they’re very interested in the topic of gender or they’re in a close relationship with a trans person or there’s some other extenuating circumstance. So I think it’s okay.

Of course, you do encounter a problem when cis people don’t quite understand that these models are lies-to-children and start assuming that this is how trans people Actually Work and are like “but what if I identify as a table?” So, like, cis people: “woman born in a man’s body” is not actually how gender works, but it’s good enough for now!

RIP Lucy Meadows

I am interrupting the Prudes’ Progress series to talk about Lucy Meadows.

Lucy Meadows was a trans female teacher who didn’t quit her job upon transition. The Daily Mail chose to misgender her and talk about how her existence is a threat to the innocence of the children she taught. This week, she killed herself.

Her old name, her pre-transition pictures, are scattered across a dozen websites now. People are calling her “he” and talking about how she should have known better than to transition when she could have harmed children’s minds by telling them that trans people exist. I just… have some fucking respect for the dead.

This hit me very hard. I know trans people who struggle with suicidal ideation. I know trans people who are teachers, or want to be teachers, or work in a profession that involves interaction with children. This could happen to any number of people I know. The fact that it didn’t is luck.

The pictures thing makes me want to cry. I can’t look at my old pictures without cringing; I can’t imagine what it’d be like to see on national television a picture of yourself that doesn’t look like you.

Kids can grasp the concept of trans people. In fact, there’s some evidence that really young kids don’t understand that you can’t change gender by putting on a dress. Yes, you might have to teach your kids about trans people, the same way you’d have to teach them what a sheep is and why we recycle plastics. If you don’t want to have to teach your kids things, maybe you shouldn’t have kids. Teaching them is generally part of the whole “parenting” thing.

(Not to mention that, you know, trans kids exist.)

The cis world leaves trans people in a bit of a bind. If we transition young, we’re too young to be certain. How do we know it’s not just a phase? If we wait until we’re “old enough to know,” then we also have careers, spouses, children. Apparently the only thing that would make some people happy is if all trans people spent our twenties working at Wal Mart and refusing to have romantic relationships, so that our transition won’t disturb any cis people. Oh, and you have to wait until Grandma Myrtle dies, she’s old-fashioned and wouldn’t understand.

Fuck that. Trans people will always be threatening to transphobes. That is literally the definition of transphobia. Our constant discomfort in our bodies is not outweighed by your having to learn a thing. Lucy Meadows should not have to give up a job she was perfectly good at– particularly not in this economy, do you think jobs grow on trees?– to avoid the Daily Mail’s concern about the innocent little minds of the children.

I suppose, though, the Daily Mail thinks that the knowledge that their teacher killed herself because of transphobia won’t cause children to lose their innocence at all.

Cis By Default

This is a pet hypothesis of mine, nothing more. There is absolutely no empirical data to back this up. But I think it explains my observations fairly well.

One of the big things we talk about, in trans feminism, is the concept of “gender identity”– the subjective internal sense of oneself as male, female, or nonbinary. Trans people are people whose gender identity doesn’t match their gender assigned at birth; cis people are people whose gender identity does.

But the thing is… I think that some people don’t have that subjective internal sense of themselves as being a particular gender. There’s no part of their brain that says “I’m a guy!”, they just look around and people are calling them “he” and they go with the flow. They’re cis by default, not out of a match between their gender identity and their assigned gender.

I think you could probably tell them apart by asking them the old “what would you do if you suddenly woke up as a cis woman/cis man?” If they instantly understand why you’d need to transition in that circumstance, they’re regular old cis; if they are like “I’d probably be fine with it actually,” they might be cis by default. (Of course, the problem is that they might be a cis person with a gender identity who just can’t imagine what gender dysphoria would feel like. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to stick random cis men with estrogen and find out how many of them get dysphoric.)

(I’m noticing some similarities, as I write this, to what I’ve read about what being agender feels like– although of course agender people are not cis. If my agender readers could confirm or deny the similarity, that’d be helpful.)

I think this would explain a lot actually. There are a lot of cis people who feel the need to come up with absolutely ludicrous explanations for why trans people (particularly trans women) are trans. The “trans women are self-hating gay men.” The “trans men want to gain male privilege.” The “trans women fetishize themselves as female.” The “nonbinary people are making it up for attention or for queer streed cred.” The “trans women are agents of patriarchy appropriating womanhood in order to invade women’s spaces.” These explanations aren’t just dumb, they’re obviously dumb. Very, very few people would put up with everything from gatekeeping to violence for the sake of their boner.

However, if you don’t have a gender identity, and you assume that your lack of a gender identity means other people don’t have a gender identity, then trans people’s behavior is ludicrous. Why the hell are all these people deciding they’re women or men or something else? And when people appear to be doing something for no readily apparent reason, other people tend to grasp at straws to explain it, including obviously dumb straws.

Obviously, this doesn’t excuse the blatant transphobia of those explanations. Generally, when people are doing something for no reason you can understand, it’s safe to assume that they have a good reason that you just don’t know about. Ask them why they’re doing the thing they’re doing before you conclude it’s about whatever ludicrous thing best fits your prejudices.

Nevertheless, if my idea is correct, then it offers some hope in combating that sort of transphobia. We simply have to explain to cis-by-default people what a gender identity is and that they don’t have one but other people do before they get lured in by the fuckwitted explanations. 

Any thoughts?

A Plea To The Trans Community

Can we please invent a non-cissexist word for “the sex that has ovaries, ova, breasts, a uterus, a vagina, female-typical hormones, and two X chromosomes” and its converse?

The ones most cis people use, I think, are either “female-sexed” or “female-bodied.” (That is, the cis people who are aware and cool enough not to use “woman.”) The really obvious problem here is that while female can be used to refer to someone’s sex (it’s in the dictionary and everything!), it is also the adjective form of “woman.” “Woman-bodied” is not remotely the term we’re looking for. Women have all sorts of bodies, sometimes including penises and Y chromosomes.

Also we’d have to use the term “females” a lot, which would make the “if someone refers to women as females they’re a douchebag” heuristic way less effective.

When I complained about this on Twitter, someone suggested “female assigned at birth.” Unfortunately, that term (while useful) doesn’t help in this situation. Lots of intersex people were assigned female at birth. Many people who were female assigned at birth transitioned and now have male-typical hormones and/or no uterus.

The other really obvious workaround is “cis female,” which is one I’ve used in my own writing. The problem is that there are many trans people– including myself– who have uteruses, vaginas, breasts, et al. It doesn’t make sense to exclude us.

The final workaround that most people end up using is “people with vaginas” or “people with uteruses.” This phrasing sucks. It is so fucking clunky. Literally the only reason anyone uses it is because no one has managed to think of something else. Imagine changing a phrase like War on Women– dramatic, alliterative, punchy– to War on People With Uteruses. The ear cringes.

There are, of course, many more sexes than the standard two we are taught to believe in. What I don’t understand is why no one in the trans community has managed to come up with a name for the standard two. Please, guys. You’ve done it before. “Cis” is an awesome word! Make the magic happen again. Please stop making me say “people with X,” it is gross and ugly and makes me want to cry inside.

The Cotton Ceiling

About a year ago (yes, I’m very up on the news, in my defense I was doing other things at the time when this post was remotely relevant), there was a big flutter in the trans community about the “Cotton Ceiling.” Originally coined by transfeminist Drew DeVeaux, the Cotton Ceiling refers to how trans women are nominally accepted as women within queer communities, but treated as unfuckable and undesirable eunuchs when it comes to actually dating them.

(For the record: I’m a fairly masculine nonbinary trans person who was assigned female at birth and who almost exclusively dates and socializes outside the queer community.)

I am actually fairly sympathetic to a lot of the trans-exclusionary radical feminist critique (this is a fairly representative example) of the Cotton Ceiling. Because, yes, you should be allowed to say no to sex for any reason or no reason! “I don’t want to have sex with women with penises” is a perfectly valid reason not to have sex with someone! Facile “so you should have sex with any arbitrary trans woman you happen to come across” solutions to the Cotton Ceiling problem have the potential to get really nasty, social-pressure-y, and even coercive.

Where the trans-exclusionary radical feminists lose me is where they finish up the sentence “you should be allowed to refuse sex with people for any reason” with “NO LESBIAN WOULD EVER SLEEP WITH A TRANS WOMAN BECAUSE TRANS WOMEN ARE SECRETLY MALES AND NO TRUE LESBIAN FUCKS MALES.” Because that is, uh, treating trans women as undesirable and unfuckable eunuchs? Which is exactly what Drew DeVeaux was complaining about?

You have to be a very unique person to, in the course of arguing with someone, prove their argument correct.

I find it amazingly transmisogynistic that this conversation is happening about trans women. At this point, bottom surgery for trans women is much more advanced than bottom surgery for trans men is, and far more trans women get bottom surgery than trans men do. If you are not attracted to women who have penises or don’t have breasts, then there are lots of trans women you can fuck, while if you are not attracted to men with pussies, you’re going to be looking for a trans boyfriend for a long time. And yet trans women are considered unfuckable within the attracted-to-women queer community, while trans men are OMGTEHSEXY. Fucking transmisogynistic bullshit.

I’m really not sure if there’s a non-transphobic reason to choose not to date someone you’re otherwise attracted to just because they have a trans history. Maybe if you really value your partners being able to bear children? I dunno.

(Spare me the bullshit ‘socialization’ arguments. As if trans people get identical socializations to our cis counterparts. As if all cis women have identical gender socializations, regardless of race, class, religion, neurodivergence, ability, survivor status, region of the country, what their family was like, who they had as friends, what school they went to, or any other factor.)

Obviously, there are people who are repulsed by the mere fact of a woman being trans. (Or of a man or nonbinary being trans, of course.) And it is cissexist to do so. If you are attracted to women and really see trans women as women, you’ll consider the possibility of dating trans women who are attractive to you, the same way you’d consider dating any other group of women. Claiming that you won’t date any trans women, at all, ever, is a sign that you have some internal cissexism that you need to work on.

Ultimately, however, the Cotton Ceiling isn’t about fucking individual trans women; it’s about the community norms that treat trans women as unfuckable. (Here I want to link to Monica Maldonado’s excellent Hating Transsexual Bodies series, but unfortunately she took her site down.) The problem is acting like trans women just aren’t attractive or sexy at all; in fact, trans female bodies must be as much like cis female bodies as possible, or they’re gross gross gross forever! That is wrong.

I think it’s important here to point out that the toxic, transmisogynistic dynamic in the queer community is directly caused by the overall toxic, transmisogynistic dynamic in our culture. Queers didn’t invent transmisogyny, the elevation of masculinity over femininity, or the patriarchy. We just came up with exciting new forms of it. (Arty photos of teenagers binding their breasts with Ace bandages! “I date cis women and trans men”!)

Which, ultimately, is my problem with the concept of the Cotton Ceiling. If we are going to challenge people’s lack of attraction to trans women, we should challenge cis straight men’s lack of attraction to trans women too. Why are some cis straight men so repulsed by trans women, and others so creepy and fetishizing of trans women’s bodies? Why do some of them regard murder as an appropriate response to their being attracted to a trans woman?