Some thoughts about gender.

Advance warning – this whole post is going to be me thinking aloud. Completely unfiltered and basically stream of consciousness. It’s possible that I may offend. If so, feel free to tell me so. In fact, feel free to tell me that I’m an ignorant jackass and here’s why! I won’t mind.

That said, I’ve been thinking about the ongoing grudge match that a small number of radical feminists seem to have against transpeople, particularly MTF transwomen, and a few things have been sort of jumping out at me. This isn’t meant as an attack, BTW – if there’s one thing you can say for me it’s that I’m honest. If I mean to attack you I’ll walk right up and smack you in the face with my gauntlet rather than sneaking around nipping at your heels. So, not an attack, just some musing.

What got me started were some comments by Qgrrl over at Alas. I don’t just mean her comments on the latest round of fighting either – I’ve been reading her musings about how she feels about this issue for a while now. And then I read a post over at Heart’s place about a trip she and a few friends took to some sort of women’s festival, and something clicked in my head. It was weird. I still don’t AGREE with the radfem critique of transpeople, not least because I dislike the fact that the way they frame it really does come across as an attack on the PEOPLE rather than on an ideology or a way of thinking and that just isn’t OK with me. I do, however, feel as if I understand where they’re coming from a little more, and I’m wondering if anyone else is seeing the same thing I am.

(Note : This is also where I may piss people off. Sorry, I’m really trying not to.)

So I was looking at the pics that Heart posted of the roadtrip she took, and you know what jumped out at me? Other than Heart herself almost every woman pictured falls into a certain stereotype, and that stereotype is intimately tied up with how we conceptualize gender as an issue.

This is a tricky area, discussing people’s sexual personae. What I’m trying to say is that there’s a certain type of woman that I encounter over and over again in feminist circles, and that that type of woman has a very distinct gender identity. It’s sort of butch, but there’s more to it than that, I think. I’m not even sure what descriptive term to use for that particular gender identity, but I’m willing to bet that everyone who has any familiarity with feminism knows the “type” I mean. It’s probably the most common “type” of woman that you meet at feminist events, along with the hippy earth mother “type” (ie. Heart, or our buddy Daisy). I’m going to call this “type” radfembutch, for lack of a better term, although if there already IS a better term let me know and I’ll use it instead.

(And no, male readers, terms that are designed to communicate disdain for a woman’s appearance do not count and I will not use them.)

The fact that the English language doesn’t seem to have a word for that “type” is interesting to me, and I think that it’s significant. It’s a basic principle of linguistics that anything a culture considers worth thinking or talking about, it has a word for. So why don’t we have a word for that particular female gender identity? It’s not like that identity is all that uncommon. I’m willing to bet that everyone here can point to a woman they know, even if only peripherally, who has that identity. So why the gap in the language?

I think it’s because our culture doesn’t much like those women. It doesn’t know what to do with them, how to classify them. They confuse a lot of people, because most people see gender as a binary and so they don’t tend to deal very well with people who don’t fit easily into the categories “masculine” and “feminine”.

Neither do transpeople, and I think this may be where the grudge match comes from. I looked at those pictures from Heart’s road-trip, and I remembered Qgrrl’s comments a while back about how the language used by transpeople made her uncomfortable because it made her feel erased. From what I can tell, she very much of the radfembutch type – not at all comfortable with being “feminine” but not identifying with “masculine” either. Not quite sure where she fits, feels as if she had to figure it all out on her own.

That has to be a scary position to be in. I’m not sure that those of us who have always felt more or less comfortable with our gender identity can really understand just how unsettling that might be, to feel like society was determined to slot everyone into neat little gender categories and not feel like you fit into any of those available. For a teenager that could be terrifying.

So, I started thinking about that, and wondering how many women involved in radical feminism had to go through something like that. And then something clicked in my mind, and I finally saw WHY those women are so protective of their “space” and why so many of them are so very hostile to anyone they see as an interloper. If you’d spent most of your life feeling like you didn’t belong, and then you found a place where you DID feel like you belonged, wouldn’t you be protective of that? Wouldn’t you want to hold on to it?

Qgrrl’s point seemed to be that trans language, particularly the word “cisgender”, left her feeling discomfited because she felt like it excluded her experience (and I’m not her, so if she happens to come across this and I’m misunderstanding what she mean then please, jump in and correct me). I’m guessing she’s not the only one. It seems to me that there are TONS of women who fit that mold, and that many of them feel like they found a home within feminism. I wonder to what extent that may be what’s really going on with the trans issue. The way that I see some radical feminists reacting looks as if they feel threatened in some way, and other than Heart most of those women do seem to be kind of on the butch side. How does that play into this whole issue? Is that where the root of the conflict lies, with one group feeling like their home and their identity that they worked hard to create is under attack, and the other group (transwomen) feeling like those women are attempting to exclude them from places that SHOULD feel like home purely out of spite? In some cases it does look like spite, but in others it honestly looks more like fear, or confusion, and in an odd way that’s kind of encouraging. Spite or malice are hard things to get around, but fear and confusion? Those can be addressed. Compromises can be made. People can become more comfortable with things that once disturbed them.

Putting that aside for a second, the little flash of clarity I had while looking at those pictures had a second part. I’ve seen a lot of arguing amongst feminists about the idea of a feminist “dress code” or image or whatever you want to call it, and what usually ends up happening is that two opposing camps form. One camp says “there is no dress code, what the Hell are you babbling about, you’re just being paranoid” (otherwise known as the “no one’s trying to take away your mascara, honey” argument when the speaker is being patronizing). The other camp says “Of COURSE there’s a dress code, are you blind? Go to any feminist event and take a look around and you’ll see it”.

Now I fall squarely into the second camp. Yep, there’s a dress code. Of course it’s not official, because that’s not how feminists do things. It’s there, though. But again, I always wondered WHY the other side didn’t see it. Then I looked at the pictures taken at the festival and I had a flash of clarity.

The women who have that radfembutch gender identity that I was talking about earlier? For them it doesn’t feel like a dress code. For them it feels natural. It’s what makes them comfortable. The mainstream idea of “feminine” makes them distinctly uncomfortable. For most of those women, feminist culture probably feels like a safe haven, and feminist events like the one place where they can be themselves and nobody will give them any shit over it.

I really don’t think they realize that for other women, ones who don’t have the same gender identity as them, that look, that way of being, isn’t comfortable at all. It feels unnatural, just as unnatural as a skirt, heels and lipstick would probably feel to them. For a feminist like me, whose gender identity is pretty “feminine”, feminist events don’t feel like a safe haven or like coming home. I feel out of place. People look at me funny, and it’s not just me being paranoid. I’ve seen pictures of myself taken at those events, and I stick out like a sore thumb. Even if I’m in jeans and a t-shirt and I have no make-up on.

This is the complicated, confusing part that I’m trying to get at. It’s the meat of the whole issue. Gender identity is about more than clothes. Put me in basically the same clothes as the standard radfem “uniform” and I still don’t look like I belong. I don’t feel like it, either, and people don’t TREAT me like I belong. They look at me suspiciously, like I’m a spy. Or possibly a really evil, dangerous ninja. And it’s weird.

And yet I’ve had this conversation with radfems of that type, and they’ve told me that I’m imagining things. And I’ve tried to understand why they don’t see it, and ended up confused. And then I had that moment, and it clicked. Those women can’t imagine why I (and other women like me) don’t feel comfortable in their environments because they really believe that what feels natural to them is what’s natural for all women. They think women who feel differently have been brainwashed.

That’s not an unusual way of thinking, really. Most people assume that their subjective reality is the “truth” in some metaphysical sense and that everyone else is lying or wrong. In truth, though, everyone’s subjective reality is a little different, and we all see the world in different ways. Most of us never really grasp the fact that our reality isn’t universal and that others do not necessarily feel as we do. And that, I think, is where all these intra-feminist conflicts come from, the inability of people to see the world from someone else’s perspective.

I’m not saying that I’m some mystical being who’s above all this, by the way. It took me a while to grasp the fact that my reality wasn’t universal. For years I truly believed that everyone was bisexual and that people who said they weren’t were either deluded or lying. I finally accepted that I was wrong, but it took a while. I’m not sure that most people ever even try.

I’m not sure if any of this makes sense to anyone else. I just had a weird moment where something clicked and things that had been confusing me suddenly made sense. I’m still not sure what to do with that, but it was interesting enough that I though it might be worth sharing. Does anyone else get what I’m talking about? And, if I’m right and the core of the conflict here is partly that there are some significant differences in gender identity within feminism, and those differences are making it really hard for people to communicate with each other because our basic frames of reference are so different, what can we do about that?

It occurs to me that people who are used to doing work on race issues might have some interesting things to say about this, since they’re probably accustomed to having to deal with the “different frames of reference” thing.

Anyone?