[Frank Talk]
OUT & ABOUT

By Diane Frank


October is generally a highly anticipated month for people in this neck of the woods. Cleveland seems to have more scare shows, haunted houses and Halloween mania than you’d expect from a community so into "Sears brown suits" and "the full Cleveland." Or, maybe you would expect it--a festival of release of the unconscious from all that middle-American stolidity and stoicism. Certainly, if you watch the boards and the chat rooms you’ll see plenty of discussion about releasing the inner-monsters, the terrifying sexy school girl, the Lovecraftian sexy nurse, the grand guignol of the sexy devil or angel. Did I forget to mention that it’s important to be sexy? Forgive me, but apparently a coup was staged and the sin of lust has taken over all the monsters and circles of the damned so that Halloween has become the holiday for the monsters of libido.

My October was a let-down by those standards. I enjoyed attending a fashion show for wearable art where an elderly friend of mine had some clothes on the runway. I found a wonderful dusty rose Thai-silk scarf with faint leaf imprint in the boutiques that is probably too much a work of art to wear. Everything else was either too expensive or too small, generally both. I received compliments during the day on my skirt, my shawl, and my necklace (crafted by my elderly friend). I had a wonderful lunch with a table full of women I know from my book club, and then discovered how hard it is to use a digital camera at a fashion show. It just wouldn’t take the picture I wanted. For people who will be attending the next AO meeting, I’ll share the pictures so you see just how few good shots I got, despite being mere feet from the runway.

Another “scary” event during October was attending a presentation by Equality Now at a UCC church on the far east side of Cleveland. The general message is that there is an organization working to reverse the ban on gay marriage, raise consciousness and to provide legal protection for those of us whose gender expression isn’t typical. However, given the recent and continuing problems with HRC and ENDA (and if you don’t know what this is about, just Google it), I think I’ll wait a bit before looking at how AO might get involved at an educational level with this group.

My greatest anxiety this Halloween was caused by my having a party to go to--only it wasn’t a costume or Halloween party of any kind. A dear friend was retiring and invited us celebrate with her on the 31st. So I managed to die a thousand deaths imagining that someone would come up to me and say, “great costume, what party are you going to/coming from?” Then I’d have to do this thing I love so much in the world--try to explain this to them. And, maybe they’d get it and maybe they wouldn’t. I could carry the story along quite a ways, imagining all the dreadful consequences of being seen in such a costume. So of course, not a word was said at the party. Someone liked the scarf I was wearing. What an anti-climax. All those nightmares, wasted!

Whipping Girl by Julia Serrano
(Warning: The language of this discussion is heavily influenced by post-modern, deconstructionist, feminist and gender-chatter/gender theory vocabulary. It also refers to well known arguments and disagreements in theory and practice. I’m not talking the time to explain them all, and you may be allergic to this kind of discussion. If so, please skip to the next interesting article.)

The book, Whipping Girl by Julia Serrano presents an idiosyncratic transsexual view of the problem of gender and transness. I could write a book about things I object to in the text, but I could also write a book about what I regard as useful and progressive about it.

Perhaps my greatest objection is that Serrano buys into Jacob Hale’s view of non-trans people writing and thinking about trans issues:

Approach your topic with a sense of humility: you are not the experts about transsexuals, transsexuality, transsexualism, or trans__. Transsexuals are.


I object to this ethnocentrism. My experience is that, entirely as expected, there is the normal variation of self-awareness, thoughtfulness and ability to express oneself in ways that are intelligible to other people in trans people of various sorts as there is in the rest of humanity. Transsexuals and/or t* people of any stripe simply cannot be relied on to be experts about their own condition. They may not even have the self-awareness to be experts on themselves. Given Serrano’s self-described long journey to the conclusion that she is a woman and not a crossdresser or a queer-bi-boy, one would think that this would be obvious. Serrano took a long time to figure out who she is now, so at any of her earlier stages of development her “expert” opinion of herself would be wrong by the light of her future (and only presumed expert) self-knowledge.

Then there is the problem of hermeticism and insularity that plague groups claiming that no one else can know or understand them, much less be an expert in them. In the end this is merely another device to silence voices that disagree. Now if there were any unanimity among any of the various splinters of t-ness that contradicted the normative view of things there might be a moment in time where Hale’s edict could have some currency. But, when groups of trans people (those lead by Ann Lawrence, Willow Arune, and an androphylic subset of transkids) embrace the sexualization of t-ness proclaimed by Blanchard and Bailey, it is hard to dismiss the association of sexuality out of hand. (Serrano does come up with a convincing counter argument, vide infra). Still, I’d trust the academic investigations of t-ness done by the Netherlands researchers, Louis Gooren and Peggy Cohen-Kettenis not because I always agree with them, but because the careful, scholarly, open-minded approach they take seems to me to be solidly based in sound scientific and ethical practice. Neither, to my knowledge, are trans of any kind themselves.

While Whipping Girl avoids most of the usual pitfalls of transsexual writing--the lurid narrative dump that seems to get these things published--it still manages to fall into one them. Serrano can’t help talking about herself and her own experience. When we’re discussing great issues of self and sex and gender, this intrusion of the author’s personal experience is annoying, grating and often misleading.

But once you get past all these tailings, there is a true nugget worth the mining. A huge, shared problem across the MtF spectrum is re-projected, reinforced cultural contempt for femininity. I’m not going to discuss the vocabulary that Serrano creates to describe this (cis-sexuality, cis-sexism, effemimania). Nor will I repeat her discussion of the problems feminism has with femininity. I think her overall theme gets it right: those traits considered feminine are reviled in people born and assigned male, and are framed in a negative, oppressive way for those born female. Serrano thus provides a strong line of exploration of why MtF transness is sexualized and FtM isn’t: women and femininity are always sexualized by the dominant, heterosexist, male-centered cultural paradigm. Sexualizing and demonizing femininity in those born male is a natural out-growth of this.

I can’t recommend Whipping Girl to everyone. I’ve experienced enough anti-intellectualism within various t-communities to know that many would not be able read very far into the book. This book is for people with a taste for gender theory and also the responsibility to represent our communities in the outside world. In other words, people like me. I don’t expect to find well-thumbed, heavily underlined, sticky-noted and tagged copies resting by people’s computers or make-up mirrors. But just as “Freudian” thinking, however incorrect has trickled down into common parlance, so too I think will some of Seranno’s ideas. So the question is, do you want to get them second hand or give a brave writer and thinker her due and read her book?  That, my dear reader, is up to you.