"The Gendercator" -- Transphobia?

Okay, so my partner (henceforward known as "Partner") and I read about "The Gendercator," a short video by Catherine Crouch, on the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (Michfest) discussion boards, and (lo!) figured out that its NYC opening night was the upcoming Saturday (now this past Saturday). We paid our $30 and headed down to the AMC Loews on 34th St. & 8th Ave. and watched "Twisted Love," the series of shorts in which "The Gendercator" was scheduled to appear.

Surprise #1: The woman sitting in the row in front of Partner and me -- the woman I'd been surreptitiously eyeing up as a possible Michfest-attendee (don't ask; she just "looked like" a Festie to me, whatever the hell that means) was Catherine Crouch herself!

Surprise #2: The film was not what I would call "transphobic." Oh, okay, you caught me -- this was, in fact, NOT A SURPRISE. In my experience, whenever anyone opens her mouth to say anything that disagrees in any measure with the established "pro-trans" party line, members of the trans community stand ready to label her transphobic and shut conversation down by attributing whatever is being said to "fear." (Note: This happened at the video viewing, by the way. Go figure. I've seen this kind of conversation almost happen approximately a zillion times, but it never gets anywhere. At some point, someone who identifies as transsexual/trans-ally will (a) cry, and blame you for making her/him cry, thus wreaking havoc on any attempt at actual conversation; (b) systematically imply that your opinion is based in fear and ignorance, and that what you need is to be educated -- thus, again, making it difficult or impossible to have an actual conversation. How do you converse fruitfully with someone who just keeps telling you you're ignorant and afraid? Yeah, I haven't figured that one out, either.)

So, anyway, there's one moment in the film where a now-male-bodied person who used to be a lesbian (and has been forced by the strict social norms of approximately 40 years into the future from now to become male-bodied because of her "masculine gender presentation") lays the blame for this new, gender-strict society (where you can get sex-change operations easily -- cannot, in fact, escape them -- in order to "match" your physical body to your "gender presentation") on a collaboration between "the evangelicals" and "the trannies."

Yeah, that's right, "the trannies." Partner and I agree that this was a terribly unfortunate terminology choice. I get that the speaker making the statement was supposed to be angry and frustrated, but gosh -- way to completely alienate a huge portion of your potential audience. The general intake of breath in the theater was quite audible.

You can disagree with the strategies employed by a group of people or the viewpoint behind a particular movement without gratuitous use of potentially insulting terminology. I'm not sure what was going on there. Maybe Catherine Crouch doesn't know how that term is/isn't used, these days? I remember a point of time during which "trannies" was relatively acceptable terminology within the general LGBT community, as long as you weren't intending insult (kind of like "dykes" and such-like)...but more recently it seems like that's gotten a little less acceptable, and its mostly transfolks themselves who can use the term "trannies." Friendly non-trans people still can, perhaps...but it just seems a lot more touch-and-go than it was at one time. So with the term "trannies" getting to the point where even friendly non-trans usage might get you into trouble, consider how an unfriendly usage goes over. Hmm. (Though at least, as Partner pointed out, no one tried to talk about "the trans" -- As in, "It was a coalition between the evangelicals and the trans," as though each individual transsexual is a "tran"...or, alternately, as though transfolks hold up their right hands and, through their powers combined, call up a might trans-hero known simply as..........The Trans. Okay, sorry -- tangent -- but we've run into that kind of odd usage of "the trans" one too many times.)

So, okay, let's consider the use of "trannies" a seriously poor choice on the filmmaker's part, and move on to the main ideas she's attempting to express. In my opinion, what she's saying is that the phenomenon of transsexuality (not to be confused with the more open-ended term "transgender") is politically problematic.

Individuals are mostly born male or female (by which I refer to their biological makeup); based on which one of these two most-common body types one is born into, one is treated/socialized in particular ways by society. Based on which type of sex-based treatment one receives (that is, treated as a girl vs. treated as a boy), one is socialized to be a boy/man or a girl/woman. (Note: While forms of gender socialization differ along other lines -- race, class, etc. -- the dividing line of gender still remains. The dividing line of race doesn't negate that of gender, anymore than vice versa. Blah, blah.)

This does not change based on how the child reacts to the socialization. Whether, for example, a female child embraces all the trappings of femininity or rejects them as whole-heartedly as she can, what makes her a girl/woman is that they have been applied to her. You can't "feel like" a woman, per se; woman -- woman-ness, the quality of being woman -- isn't a feeling, it's a category into which you've been created through the forces/pressures society puts on female-bodied creatures from the moment they enter the world. You can feel "feminine" -- but that just means you're embracing what society pushes women to be/rejecting what society pushes men to be.

It also doesn't change if you can cite ways in which you (or some transsexual-identified friend) weren't treated in a way that's typical for your sex (ie, you were born female but were treated the way males of your class/ethnicity/etc. are normally treated). Even if there are specific ways in which you were treated atypically, you're still living in a society wherein you get a ton of "vagina-people are like this" and "penis-people are like that" thrown at you, and you can't claim to have avoided or escaped it just because your mom had some kind of weird episode and decided to dress her little Tommy-poo in a frilly pink dress. (Yes, I'm making light -- but hopefully you see what I mean.)

So a "woman," then, is basically "a person born female who has the lived experience that comes with being in a female body." It doesn't matter if she's in a miniskirt or suits and ties, the point is that she's doing it as a person born into a female body. Even if ONLY SHE knows that she's a female, that still has meaning. A person in suit&tie who knows she's a female and a person in suit&tie who knows he's a male are having a significantly different experience, even if the outside observer can't see that difference. How could that not be so, in a society where it is made to matter so much which sex/gender one is?

This results in problems of power imbalance. Solution? Eradication of "gender" -- ie, eradication of patriarchy, of a dominance-based system, of hierarchy. People can be born with whatever genitalia they're born with, and we won't socialize them significantly differently based on what set they've got. All forms of expression will be open to all people.

So how do we go about getting there? I don't have a definitive answer, but I'm pretty sure -- and I think this is what Catherine Crouch's video is saying -- that it's not by deciding that we're actually "the other" gender and lobbying to have our bodies altered so that they "fit" our "gender identity." Do you see what I'm saying? I think the video is saying that if you're at odds with the gender role expected to accompany the body type you've got, it's because society is fucked up and rules/restrictions based on sex are stupid and arbitrary (and welcome to Radical Feminism, by the way). It's not that you are in the "wrong type" of body, it's that you've been made to think/feel that the person you are -- the personality you have -- can't belong to someone with that type of body.

At the end of the film, Catherine Crouch did a Q&A with the audience, and -- surprise -- conversation swiftly moved in the "you're a transphobe" direction. She handled it all quite well, though, and in fact the conversation stayed mostly calm.

There were one or two people in the back of the theater who struck me as young (or simply immature? I'm not sure which; I couldn't get a great view from where I was sitting, but I did see that one person's hands were covered in black gloves with the tips cut off -- which could have served some actual purpose, but struck me as more likely an affectation), and who kept making somewhat unintelligible comments that didn't quite go anywhere...and a few people in the back near her/him snickered and groaned and "yeah!"-ed rudely in agreement at one point with what perhaps they thought was a good "dig" at Catherine Crouch. (It wasn't a good "dig," in case you're wondering. It was a misinterpretation of the film's take on sex reassignment surgery (SRS). Since the film was set in the future, SRS had been made a simple/easy/quick procedure, and the people in the back of the theater were taking issue with the idea -- never, in fact, expressed by Catherine Crouch -- that actual SRS is, at present, easy/inexpensive/etc. I had to wonder how much of the video they watched, or how much of Catherine Crouch's comments they paid attention to. We're not in the year 2007 anymore, Toto! This is a speculative fiction video set in The Future!) Otherwise, though, the conversation was respectful, if not particularly productive.

Catherine Crouch said she was surprised when her video was protested by people who hadn't even seen it (to whom she then sent copies), and cancelled by the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival/Frameline. Crouch made it clear that she had thought the transgender members of the LGBT community would identify rather strongly with the film -- specifically, with the idea of people look at you and deciding, based on your "presentation," how to box/categorize you. "Well, you have a 'masculine' gender presentation, so you're a man" or, along the same lines, "Well, you have a 'masculine' gender presentation, so you're not a woman."

I can see how she thought the transgender community might appreciate this. I think her major problem -- a problem in many conversations on this subject, actually -- is the lack of differentiation made between "transgender" and "transsexual."

I, for example, have a problem with transsexuality, because I think it's detrimental to a meaningful feminist politics. I don't have a problem with "transgender," per se, depending on the particular version of "transgender" we're talking about. I've known people, for example, who mean by transgender simply that they don't fit the expected/accepted gender role for their sex. Well, shit -- that pretty much makes me transgender. The only issue I have with that form of "transgender" is that, often, its proponents have no idea that what they're doing really isn't anything new. You're not the first folks to transgress "gender role" boundary lines, ya know? It's been done, and continues to be done, by people who don't call themselves "trans."

So, do I think the evangelicals and the transsexuals would make a pretty good pairing, in some ways? Yeah, probably. But if by "the trannies" Catherine Crouch means transgender folks, well, I guess it all depends on which transgender folks you're talking about. (And, for the record, either way, you still don't get to call them "trannies.")

Note: Crouch herself wasn't nearly as snarky as I'm being here. Actually, she wasn't snarky at all. She was highly approachable. She said she was happy to have the conversation, particularly with members of the trans community who don't like her video. She said she had no intention of offending the trans community when she made the video, and that since she very clearly has, she's going to have to learn more about why people are offended and figure out how to deal with that as she goes on to make more films/videos. She's very open to conversation and listening to ideas -- what bothered her most about the video being banned in San Francisco was that it was protested by people who hadn't even seen it yet. She said she would listen to and respect the opinions of those who've seen it, disliked it, and want to give her their thoughts, but that she's hurt by people protesting it before they've even seen it. Seems pretty fair-minded of her, to me.

I asked her about Michfest just before she left the theater, when people had started leaving and she was done doing Q&A. She told me that the whole selection of videos ("Twisted Love") including hers will be playing there, and that she does plan to attend.