May 5, 2011
By: Tynan Power/TRT Columnist*
Last month, I was on a planning team for an LGBTQ worship service at the Unitarian Society in Northampton. The service had a strong educational component, like a workshop from the pulpit. I raised a trans-related issue I wanted to cover and another person responded with something I hear often from lesbians and gay men when I talk about basic “trans 101” topics: “That’s 401! They’re not ready for that.”
Transgender, it would seem, is by definition a “401” topic-just too advanced for most people to understand.
Is it really? Apparently, some lesbians and gay men think so. I disagree, but I don’t fault the individuals who say it. Clearly, it has to do with how differently we see gender identity.
In the past few decades, transgender people have become increasingly visible and vocal. Before that, we were nearly invisible. When I was growing up, there weren’t even bad images of FTM (female-to-male) trans people in the media. Now, there have been talk-shows about the transgender “pregnant man,” 20/20 episodes and a reality TV series about transgender college students, attention-getting mainstream movies like “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Trans America,” and The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart defending the mother of a little boy with painted toe nails who appeared in an ad that conservative pundits used as a field day for railing against “transgender children.”
Yet most cisgender (non-trans) people, straight and gay alike, seem to see transgender through a sexual orientation lens. Trans women’s experiences are seen as related to those of gay male “female impersonators.” Trans men’s experiences are understood as related to those of butch lesbians. Transgender identity routinely gets called “a sexuality” or “sexual identity,” trans rights are blurred with “gay rights,” and the “gay community” is supposed to mean everyone allied under the LGBTQ tent-including straight trans people.
The trans umbrella does cast a wide protective shadow, especially in the legal struggle against discrimination based on “gender identity and expression”-a struggle that intentionally has swooped masculine women and effeminate men into its embrace. There are also legitimate areas of overlap between gender and sexual orientation. There’s something that draws some gay men to “female impersonation,” after all, while others wouldn’t be caught dead in drag.
The key word is “overlap.” Think of it as a Venn diagram, in which two circles overlap. If you start off in one circle (sexual orientation), you have to go through the complicated mesh of overlap between them before you get a clear view of the other circle (gender identity). The overlap is real, but the two circles remain separate. If we start off talking about the overlap, it makes things complicated. If we try to gaze from one circle to the other, through the overlap, it would probably look about as clear as a midnight fog.
Though there have always been transgender people and we’ve always been part of the movement, the transgender community as an identity group joined the LGBTQ party pretty late in the game. Maybe it’s just a matter of sequence. If gay and lesbian communities needed to come together before embracing bisexuals, then maybe straight people need the same process, grasping “not everyone is straight” before “not everyone is gay or straight.” There’s logic to that.
Yet the next step-to transgender as “401”-doesn’t make sense. Understanding sexual orientation doesn’t actually help people understand gender identity. In fact, many people-including conservative Muslim religious scholars-accept transgender much more readily than any non-straight sexual orientation.
When we step away from our own place within the two circles-and remember that people outside them don’t share our myopic viewpoints-the importance of separating gender identity and sexual orientation becomes clear. Lesbians and gay men don’t want people to assume they are inwardly the opposite sex and just need sex changes to be happy. (Sound ridiculous? It’s a real risk if you live in Iran.). Most trans people don’t want others to make assumptions about their sexual orientations-because those others will often assume wrong. Straight trans women are sometimes assumed to be “gay.” FTMs with female partners get called “lesbians.” Gay FTMs have to explain over and over that they and their boyfriends aren’t “straight.”
Treating “trans 101” as just that-a level one approach to a unique topic-allows us to separate out the sphere of gender identity from that of sexual orientation. It gives us vocabulary to talk more clearly about both. Plus it allows us to see each other more accurately and fully across identity divides-and that in turn lets us come together in a more meaningful LGBTQ alliance.
Then, when we’re ready to move on to level “401,” we can talk about that messy mesh of overlap.
Questions about the FTM experience? Comments or ideas? Email Ty at tynanpower@yahoo.com.
*Tynan Power is a parent, a writer, a progressive Muslim leader, an interfaith organizer, a (very slow) runner, mostly a big goof, sometimes taken too seriously, loving, gentle, queer and queer-cultured, a pen geek, often dehydrated, full of wanderlust. He also happens to be a transgender man.
