What If….?
7.09.2006Piny, at Feministe, did an excellent job excoriating both the NYT and San Francisco Chronicle articles of lesbians transitioning. I particularly dug how he went after the whole theme of “gender traitor” that supposedly clouds the hearts and minds of lesbians.
What. Ever. On the whole traitor thing. It’s wrong because it isn’t true.
It’s also wrong because it is a notion bandied around white trans communities because we haven’t interrogated our own race yet. Says Juma Blythe Essie:
For white FTMs their whiteness informs their transition as well, but in white supremacy that is rarely acknowledged. The whiteness gets erased, and it’s just about gender, but it’s never just about anything because oppressions and -isms are interconnected. (bow to Shannon at Egotistical Whining)
Writes Dr. Bobby Noble in Trans In-coherence:
When we think we’re seeing FtM transsexual male privilege, I suggest that in fact we’re seeing race—that is, whiteness—combining with masculinity to create a far more privileged identity than the cross–over critiques seem capable of suggesting. I’m not putting race and gender here into a hierarchy but I do want to draw our attention to two things: One, we still live in a white supremacy culture that does far more complex work with race and racialization than we know (and here I mean “we” as in white folks); and two, while claiming trans identity may be significant, amongst trans folks there are still significant differences that we need to start acknowledging.
Eli Clare, as only a poet can do, condenses this issue to in And Yet:
Crip skin marked,
white skin not.
How might the NYT article look if the white person writing it, the white people reading it, and the white people interviewed for it, actually understood that they were white. Would accusations of “gender traitor” fly? Or would applause rise up for “racial solidarity”?
How might the national trans (because it is a white agenda after all) change? What issues would become important? Fall away?