Self-Organizing Man

[This piece is dedicated to Ona Marae, who has, in the last month:  had her computer take an extended dump, moved into a house with no shower, had the shower repaired, only to find her bathroom flooded the next morning.  She is looking forward to blogging again soon.]

From a self-described dedicated lurker to this blog:

I know there’s often not a lot of love lost between some academics & some members of trans communities, but I’d like to hear your take on what some of the problems/miscommunications are between academics who talk about trans issues and transfolk who talk about trans issues.  I’m an Academic Feminist myself, but also one with some gender identity issues of my own, so I find it hard not to be sympathetic to a lot of
different sides in the conversation.  Sometimes this makes things quite confusing.

This request got me thinking hard.

I waded through much bunk in my head and came to following conclusions:

A fundamental difference exists around understandings of the body, science and biology.  Those feminists who find trans folks offensive, or normative, or whatever, do so, I think, because they fundamentally agree that biology is destiny (See Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, and to a lesser extent, Catherine MacKinnon). Ironically this unacknowledged framework can work against their efforts to argue against biology is destiny.

This belief - whether acknowledged or unacknowledged - flies in the face of the experience and practice of trans lives.  We see the fundamentally constructed nature of medicine, science, even the human chromosome is a socially constructed reality.

The disconnect occurs when each side, if you will, argues with the intent of converting - and I’m using this word in its most deeply felt religious sense - the listener to the speakers point of view.  While God may dead for many people, Theory is the New God.  So part of the Theoretical Conversionary experience relies on the belief that the other side is tainted while my/our side is pure.  Witness the whole "womny-born-womyn only" policy.  Nothing more than an effort to police arbitrary boundaries against a phantom disease.

We talk then to be right, correct, righteous.  Our feelings get hurt and we feel dismissed, then dismiss the Other.  With Feminism, then, it becomes easy for trans folks, particularly younger folk born after 1980, to dismiss all forms of Feminism in toto.  This dismissal rests, though, on not knowing much about the complexities of Feminism to begin with.  Do we mean Ecological Feminism, Marxist Feminism, Socialist Feminism, Psychoanalytic Feminism, Black Feminism, Liberal Feminism and so on.

Feminists, in turn, dismiss Trans folks, particulary transsexual, with the new epithet, "normative."  Since we "become" one gender or the other, nothing is dangerous, unusual or unfair in our experiences.  Such a position pisses off Trans folks.  For what happens next refer to the previous bullet point.

Fundamentally, I think, theory and practice work in tandem.  A theory provides a framework.  Practice teaches when, where and how to modify any theory. 

But too often we sacrifice practice for theory ("am I Marxist enough" or "Can I be Bi and support Womyn’s space/initiatives, etc.").

We find we’re all tainted.  But taint and theory appear mutually exclusive.  Our theories, rather than evolving in a self-organizing manner, reflect a rigidity designed to make us feel safe.

We Know the True Way.  For Marxism/Catherine MacKinnon/Mary Daly/Angela Davis is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory Forever and Ever. 

Great.  As long as we want to exist in a world of Sameness and continue to hate the parts of ourselves that are tainted, then heck, we’re Real Live Preachers for the Way.

Yet we age and change and tire, I think.  If we’re lucky, we get softer and mushier inside and melt a little bit every day until we’re nothing but shiny, rainbow puddles on the ground.

Then we love ourselves and strive not for Perfection, but for Remarkability.  And those whacked-out rigid Feminists somehow become, well, smarter and wiser and actually have really cool ideas about certain things.  When did they become so intelligent, we wonder?

Maybe about the time we realized that dismissing and demonizing the Other is pretty much what those whacked-out Feminists did to us.  That sucked, so why bother perpetuating it?

We realize that what matters is great love for those we hate the most. 

In the end, I find I end up forgiving myself most of all.  The Great Disconnect is not with any Feminist, but within myself.