Femininst Mutations: Trans Feminism or Transinisms?

It is, therefore, very deeply a kind of spiritual path, or again it isn’t about for me to keep my body in synch with my mind (hey, my body is me) but even more about connecting me by a more expansive manner with the "real", with others, with my environment. From the smallest elementary particle to the most complex entities, in the most open manner possible in order to feel myself justly in synch essentially with that which surrounds me and in fine with myself.

So writes Lalla Kowska, a MtT (Male to Trans) living in Paris, and sometimes commenter here at jaywalking.  After reading this piece, I must that Lalla is, like me, a dedicated jaywalker, more than willing to cross against traffic, far from the corner, to get where she needs to go.

Without a doubt I could not have published Lalla’s piece without the able translation efforts of Mr. Ron Hudson aka the blogger at 2sides2Ron.  In the process of translating this piece we had some wonderful email exchanges about when it is appropriate to translate trans as trannie. Ron has done an outstanding job.  I offer my sincere thank you as he efforts allows those of us who don’t speak French to meet another traveller.

I’ve copied and pasted the entire piece as an extended entry.  Please read it when you get a chance.  If any of you wish to contact Lalla email me.  Also, please stop by Ron’s blog and say thanks for helping the trans communities connect.

Feminist Mutations:

 

Trans Feminism or Transinism?

 

By Lalla Kowska-Régnier at ARTeleku, San Sebastian, April 23, 2005

 

Thanks to Béatriz Preciado for the trust.

"We all have the desire to return home, a place where we have never been – a place, both memory and vision, for which we can only curry glances from time to time. The community. Somewhere there are people with whom we can speak with passion without the words sticking in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up when we enter, voices will celebrate with us our entrée into our own power. The community signifies a force that reunites our own strength for doing the work that must be done. Arms to hold us up when we fail. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. A place where we can be free." 

 

Starhawk in "Femmes, magie et politique (Women, Magic and Politics) – chapter : construire la communauté [des sorcières] (To Construct the community of sorceresses)" edition : Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond (The Obstructors of thinking in circles).

 

 

This lecture was supported by the projection of a video of 11 minutes, ritual in the ritual in progress, video in which one sees me at home from the beginning of my transformation right up until just a few days ago.

 

I clarify that I mean by "trans" those men and women who are treated with hormones and/or have had surgical procedures, without excluding transsexuals who are not taking hormones.

 

So, my name is Lalla Kowska Régnier, I am nearly 33 years and 8 months old and I am a young woman that one would commonly call a MtF. But, I prefer to identify myself as such as MtT (Male to Trans) or MtS (Male to Sorceress/witch)… I do not envision having a vaginoplasty in the short or medium term. In short, I am not completely sure where on my journey I am and above all, not sure at all that this is about being a "woman" for me.

 

In fact, I was persuaded not to be sure, the day when I was questioned by a biological woman who asked what I visualized about my femininity. A question that I didn’t truly interpret as friendly because I had begun my transition, and therefore, it did not seem to me that it was within the realm of vision and that the question of my feminity had not exactly haunted me until that moment. But I will return to this.

Lalla, in Arabo-Berber language means "princess", this signifies that I am lucky, because I am surrounded, I have my family, friends, my long-term partner and my dog, companion of my transition.

 

I studied for 5 years after my baccalaureate exam and I evolved in a more or less "privileged" professional (audio-visual) environment. My parents left me with a taste for politics which meant that I fought early on. All of that to explain from whence comes my voice and to clarify that the question of my survival is clearly raised less acutely than in the cases of other trannies.

 

 

 

So, that is a kind of instinctive accounting, there will be no reference, or very little, because my memory does not allow it. Instinctive and personal because even if I want my listeners to be many, I only speak in my own name. And as one says at my mother’s home, "may my story be beautiful and may it unravel like a long string."

 

 

 

***

 

 

The question of a transsexual feminism came to me through evidence. In fact, it is difficult to escape the feminist conscience when one is a MtF trannie, there is a kind of obligatory encounter with "biological" feminism.

 

A feminism that above all has nothing to do with biology, no biological clock in one’s body, no pregnancy or maternal instinct to sign one up for an essentially "female" identity…

 

What fundamentally connects trannies to feminists, to me, is multiple common experiences.

 

First of all it is a question of social class.

 

Personally, even if for my personal mythology, the fact of beginning my transition at 33 years fit me perfectly – it is clear that it was impossible to have imagined it before as I was in a more-or-less promising professional trajectory and it would have been compromised if I had started my hormonotherapy at that time. I add that my professional projects were notably interrupted by the fact that my future employers were aware of my transition (I did not hide myself and other political factors came into play). Besides today, since I took the turn, there have been 4 years of enterprise during which I worked, my revenues have been divided by 3 and I stay in a rather precarious situation.

 

The route trans MtF, because it requires renunciation of male privilege poses in a flagrant manner the question of economic and social discriminations of which women are aware. It is therefore an issue of sharing common discrimination in work, but also sexism and surrounding misogyny. Then, I think also that it is the common experience of "I am not the one that one says that I am", to know instinctively that the collective majority narratives are too narrow (the consciousness of heterosexual despotism as a political regime) for oneself.

 

This is to say in a more individual way, biological women have had to battle for, to re-appropriate their bodies in a clearly more radical manner than non trannies. To learn where one’s pleasure is found, without hindrance nor guilt. (I think of non-operative trannies, but I think it is the same for post-operative trannies.). To not fear using that which is seen as "genital" as an organ of pleasure for masturbating, to rename one’s body different, one’s 1.5 inch dick, one’s 7.5 inch clitoris, or one’s neo-vagina. Briefly, to "contrasexualize" oneself (as stated by Béatriz Preciado in "Le manifeste contra sexuel").

 

 

And besides, it is in my opinion the role of psychiatrists of the official line in France to neutralize this political consciousness (the re naming of self) by assuring, through repetition, to their patients that they are women because they like to wear dresses, to play with dolls, that not one single doubt can possibly be permitted and not one single alternative space arranged.

 

And above all, if you want National Identity Cards you are required to have a vaginoplasty… How many have the means to resist?

 

To continue speaking about my transition, I also began it from the moment when I knew that I could construct myself as a trannie (and I am lucky to have had and today still have around me trannies who permitted me to move forward). Besides, before my transition, I was leaning my "masculinity" toward a lesbian butch model.

 

For me, it was also about a need (I do not know yet if it is to end or else to withstand fate, and maybe that all comes back to the same)to reunite with my female elders of which there were some Berber sorceresses/witches and to rejoin in a maternal line (more than matriarchal with Starbuck), a will to reunite with that which could be the status of substitution pre-hormonal trannies : priestesses, healers or mediators… It is in this sense that I define myself also as young sorceress/witch devoted to the Goddesss and to the culture of the immanence. (see : Starhawk "Femmes, magie et politique")

 

It is, therefore, very deeply a kind of spiritual path, or again it isn’t about for me to keep my body in synch with my mind (hey, my body is me) but even more about connecting me by a more expansive manner with the "real", with others, with my environment. From the smallest elementary particle to the most complex entities, in the most open manner possible in order to feel myself justly in synch essentially with that which surrounds me and in fine with myself.

 

To give a more technological image, it is about proceding toward a kind of giving birth that will permit the hard disk "Lalla Kowska" to function in a more fluid manner. So, it seems evident to me that the day when the hormones will have done the bulk of their work, my breasts grown, my skin made more soft and my hair thickened, I will be otherwise in rapport with the world, once again connected high market and of a more expansive manner.

In fact, if it is evident that is truly toward a sort of femininity that I desire to be and recognize and feel, I feel more at ease with the notions – and I do not copyright this ! – from tansinity and from transinism.

 

Transinism or transinity in place of feminism and femininity or masculinity first to mark a strong desire to tie up other loose strings than those – again – from the opaque and stiffling dragnet of the straight system. But we are here into something that remains largely to be explored and constructed.

 

Transinism and transinity also like compost where the roots of that which could end in a form of autonomy for trans people – even if I have a lot to learn about autonomism here, here at least are some steps. They are traced in reaction, and do not lack ambivalence, but they are a kind of incantation or cry to those {feminine and masculine] who would like to grab hold.

 

***

 

So, one would have said it, getting out of the narrations of the psychiatrists who have as principal worry to reaffirm the "traditional" roles of the hetero couple by inscribing us firmly in the fiction dick/man, vagina/woman ; but also to begin questioning the discourse of those who feel themselves experts of the trans voice. I think more particularly of the question of gender as performance – and this is the only time that I will speak of "performance" because I do not think that this approach holds up to the trans dynamics and is only useful for those who observe us (psychiatrist or sociologist), and want to leave us to lock [ourselves] in straight enclosures in order to better colonize us.

 

Therefore, gender as performance: first, personally my estrogens tell me a story that has nothing to do with the false eyelashes and wigs of Drag Queens and my daily life does not have – not always at least – the glamour of nightclubs and I have trouble convincing those whom I encounter that they are my audience

 

Besides one knows today the impossibility of an approach that is not athwart to identity construction. So, I ask the question: has anyone ever heard of performance as an issue of race or [social] class? Imagine:
"Oh, I just love your Arabity today, mmmmmm. This black on your skin fan-tas-tic! You pass incredibly well and this precariousness, dearie, niiice, but how do you do it? Quickly, please, give me the address of your Ascetics!" So, I believe that to analyze gender like performance is an empty and hurtful practice that could only interest those [male and female] who have the means to speculate on the queer stock market to better place themselves as experts on minorities for the straight media (I think of them, myself, as new colonists in trans territories. I clarify again that this is a Parisian who is speaking to you, Parisian who is somewhat vexed by what has come from the queer movements in Paris).

 

It is good to return to the question of expertise besides: I state unfortunately that this posture is too often falsely collective and has given rise to many aberrations and twisted words. Otherwise, I clarify that I do not feel myself to be expert in anything other than in my professional domain (my know-how), that I am not militant in a closet of self-assurance and often I find that I need to have experts around me (I think for example of my endocrinologist or of my locksmith). And I certainly do not wish to be in their place as I can be comfortable with their competence.

 

Transinism could also question the notion of transgender starting at the moment where it becomes support for such a universal subject that it no longer corresponds to anything, diluted in a universality that one knows well in France and which is often can be summarized by the white male Catholic European type (above all not Turk) who is not precarious. I think we should be careful about the citizen leaps of those who stress "We are all trannies", or again to affirm themselves as "dykes", which comes to negate the daily realities of trans persons and to make disappear specific practices in a queero-egalitarian and ultimately assimilationist discussion.

 

(In France, besides, the "I’ve had it to here"s of those (male and female) coming from immigration issues are being expressed more and more, notably with the mobilization of the "Indigenous of the Republic" with a protest planned for the 8th of May in Paris and the founding post-colonial anti-colonialist organization coming up. In the same manner, laicism serves above all to protect Catholicism when it is not the oft-assumed mask of Islamophobia! On this topic, what to think of this transsexual Iranian woman who received permission from the authorities to have a vaginoplasty and who lives happily under a burka?)

 

In other terms, in my practice, I prefer trans because trans, individually, does not drown me in the queer ocean and permits me at the same time to join in a collective.

 

Finally, I think that there is enough of the LGBT narrative where the T has never meant anything more than: Ticket for a clear conscience for the G! For once, in France at least, the revolutionary homo movements of the 1970’s showed that there were rather important ruptures between gays and lesbians and besides, it is something that one can continue to see still today for the representation of returning lesbians and of transsexuals at the breast of community events. Finally, it is perhaps good to say at least once that trannies are as much as/otherwise as hetero, lesbian, gay, and bi as the non-trans population!

 

In this sense, it is indispensable for me to think of new alliance tactics with feminists, lesbians, drag kings, contrasexuals, and contragenders. At the same time as an autonomous trans movement is born. A movement both responsible and binding that is capable of renewable political practices. Which seeks, for example, to escape as much as possible from the victim status that one often has trouble getting out of (and in which anger in my opinion has only served too often to keep us in victimhood)) or to flee the paranoid mechanisms of analysis to try above all to inject confidence into relationships.

 

A movement that would be both capable of combating and of resisting systems of oppression and exploitation without aiding the cogs of the machine, to participate in an endlessly and collectively renewed community. To rethink the means of functioning without fearing the exercise of a power from that moment, circular, safe where the member would adhere to ceasing to be themselves in all form of domination – each one attentive to the responsibility of his/her own word. A movement that would subvert in a quasi-certain manner all the binary systems, all the monotheisms, colonialisms, and other exercises of "absolute power". (Starhawk)

 

This path can cause fear and "change is nerve-wracking but witches have a saying : "where there is fear, there is power" "(Starhawk)

 

So, there you have it.

 

My story is like a stream, I have told it to Kings!

Tagged as: transexual, Transgender