Visible Man: The age-old schism

Jamison Green offers a man's POV on life in the trans lane. Opinion, advice, and information from an internationally respected leader of the FTM community.

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Karl, age 48, had been living as a man for 25 years. Ryan, age 23, had been living as a genderqueer boi for 18 months. When Karl came into the group space advertised as a "safe space for all who were labeled female at birth but for whom that label does not describe all of who they are," Ryan felt offended that someone so normatively gendered should think he had anything in common with Ryan and hir friends -- revolutionary gender transgressors, clearly superior beings, infinitely more hip than Karl, who looked completely ordinary and male in the dullest possible way.

Ryan was making an effort to appear masculine, too. But Ryan felt ze could control how far that would go for hir: chest reconstruction surgery to get rid of breasts and enough testosterone to butch up a bit, but not so much that ze would start growing hair on hir back or losing it on top.

Karl, for his part, was confused by Ryan and hir friends in the group. He understood their struggle to define themselves, and he understood their resistance against gender stereotypes, but he didn't understand how they could think they could control what their bodies would do with testosterone in their systems or why they felt his experience should be irrelevant to theirs. After all, hadn't he lived through the same kinds of resistance and change -- even though in his time it wasn't so colorful, and he'd had to do it mostly alone. And now here he was looking for some connection with others who shared some of that experience, and all he could find was younger guys who thought he was boring and had nothing in common with them. So much for "safe space."

When young, masculine-identified, female-bodied people approach the transgender experience, they often bring a new creativity and energy to the enterprise. Just as often, though, they can be carrying a lot of familiar-feeling baggage. The same old stereotypes about re-creating the culture and the striving for new paradigms, about the new (young) being better than the old (old) apply just as much to the transgender world as to any other world in which young and old have to share some potentially uncomfortable space. But when you don't know something, you often don't know that you don't know, and it doesn't matter how old or young you are.

As the transgender movement grows and includes more and more people, different perspectives are constantly injected into our cultural mix. We should be welcoming the richness and diversity that opening up gender can bring, and making information and options available to people on a wider basis ought to be a cause for celebration. Perhaps it is our collective insecurity speaking, or simply the innate competitiveness of some of us, but sometimes it seems we may be growing less tolerant as a community rather than more so.

There are ways to talk about differences between groups without invalidating the experience, choices, or beliefs of others, and these are skills that require cultivation of consciousness and real awareness of others' differences to avoid dismissive references and eradicative presumptions. But the entire trans community is not invested in consciousness; it seems, rather, to be invested in exclusiveness. A wedge is currently being driven into the transgender world, one that implies that gender is bad or obsolete, retrograde, "out," and genderqueer is good or avant garde, cutting edge, progressive, "in." Who benefits from the effects of this wedge? Not transpeople or genderqueers, but conservative forces, whether they are gay or straight, the kind of people who think there is only a small civil rights pie, and they are entitled to a very large piece (if not all) of it. This is plain old garden-variety elitism, and it ought to be offensive.

I have observed that many young transpeople have exactly the same kinds of feelings about their transness as their elders did, but the difference is that today there are words to talk about the feelings, postmodern concepts that attempt to define experience. Thirty-something years ago, young people tried to make sense of their experience with androgyny, free love and rock 'n roll, and many of us who later became transsexual men and women have acknowledged that back then we wished that gender would go away, that we could live in a gender-free state forever. We had Christine Jorgensen to look up to, long histories of drag artists or cross-dressing performers from all cultures that we may or may not have been aware of, and Mary Martin playing Peter Pan. In other words, not much.

We had Janice Raymond to contend with, too, and she made a lot of dangerous noise that held discussion of transsexualism at bay for nearly 20 years. Many of us didn't want to change our bodies at all. We wanted to be seen and respected for who we were. We fought for civil rights, individual liberty, gay rights and we protested against censorship and war, or we served in Vietnam (some even in Korea and WWII) and tried to reconcile our conflicting principles.

Now the feelings are the same, but instead of struggling without language to help define and explain their feelings, young genderqueer people are using postmodern language to trounce gendered people, trans or non-trans, in an apparent effort to confirm their feelings that they are just fine the way they are, without surgery, without hormones, with hormones, with partial surgeries, with piercings and tattoos, with new hairstyles and colors, et cetera, et cetera. We used to say "don't trust anyone over 30." Now it's more like "don't trust anyone who isn't genderqueer-ideologically correct," which in reality means "don't trust anyone over 30 who appears to be normatively gendered." This is a sad state of affairs.

It's absolutely ordinary for young adults to exert oppositional pressure against the systems and the people that represent the "establishment" for them. I will be very interested to see if 20 or so years from now this "new guard" evolves out of its own androgynous middle ground. If that does happen, it will say much more about the evolutionary cycle of rebellion and growth than about the (art and) nature of gender.

Some people advocate for driver's licenses and passports without sex identifiers. That's fine. And some boyz will be men. That should be fine, too. The schism, really, is in ourselves. We project it onto others so that we don't have to deal with our personal responsibility for whatever conflict in which we feel embroiled, but eventually each of us will have to accept her or his or hir own life situation and find some common ground on which to have some peace.