I was on an interesting panel the other night with two women who identify as transsexual women (one of whom also identifies as transgender), a man who identifies as a transexed man, a male-born crossdresser whose gender identity is sometimes female and sometimes male, and a female-born person who identifies as two-spirit, masculine, and genderqueer. (I am not going to list names, so forgive the formality — really, the coldness — of referring to people by their identification and not their name.)
One of the questions we were asked is whether or not we think that “T” really goes with “LGB.” Not everyone answered the question (we were running short of time), but the crossdresser (who has a heterosexual orientation and is married to a woman) and the transexed man (who has a heterosexual orientation and hopes to be married to a woman) both said no.
I, of course, said yes, and not just because I like to be contrary, although I sometimes do, and not just because I have a primary attraction to men. I really believe that the T belongs there.
It doesn’t designate a sexual orientation, obviously, and I get my righteous indignation up in a wad when a survey asks for sexual orientation and then lists “transgender” as one of the options. But the reason that I think it belongs with LGB is because I believe that the discrimination that we all face has its roots in gender.
I have talked about this before when I talked about homophobia and transphobia being related to our devaluation of women and the feminine. I know that, on several occasions when I have been walking down the street, minding my own business, guys have yelled “Fag” at me out of a car window. (I find that especially manly and brave, don’t you? It’s pretty easy to yell at someone from a moving car to reinforce your shaky concept of your own masculinity.)
But no one has ever leaned out a car window and yelled, “Trans!” They don’t know who or what I am. They think I’m gay because of the way I’m presenting my gender. The same thing happens to male-born gay men. It happens to female-born lesbians. And it happens to trans women regardless of their sexual orientation — we’ve seen that anti-gay language is hurled at trans women when they are being physically attacked. In my mind, we all suffer discrimination based on gender and gender presentation, and this is our commonality.
There are LGB people who don’t want the T there. They believe that being associated with trans people holds them back and keeps them from gaining full equality.
There are trans people who don’t want the T there, either. They believe that being associated with LGB people holds them back and keeps them from gaining full equality.
I think that if we all join together to fight for gender equality and freedom from gender-based expectations and discrimination, we will eventually prevail.
Thoughts?
These comments are great. I love all these points of view. Thank you all for sharing your experiences and your thoughts. I learn a great deal by reading them, and I hope that other readers do, too. They give me a lot to think about.
You can’t separate them. If you try, you give legal loopholes to the very people who lump us all together in order to have us all in one easy location to step on.
For instance, if you pass ENDA without gender protections, then clever employers will no longer fire a homosexual man because he’s homosexual, they’ll fire him because they can point to a behavior which is effeminate. “No,” they’ll say, “It’s not that he’s homosexual! Heaven forbid! We would never discriminate! It’s just that he’s effeminate, and that doesn’t look good to our customers.”
Likewise, if you protect gender expression but not sexual orientation, you’ll get fired because you’re homosexual, rather than because you’re, say, butch.
You can’t protect the one effectively without protecting the other. And that’s the practical reason that they belong together.
As a feminsit ‘L’ in LGBT & a gender activist, I feel that any opportunity to inform about gender is a great opportunity to have. The unified fight in opening ideas of gender, I feel, would open minds towards the idea that the archaic is no longer – there isn’t male/female heterosexuality as the only accepted sexuality and the male/female binary as the only accepted gender. Opening minds will also raise conciousness that there should not be continued subjugation of women globally; when those ideas are reinforced, all other sexualities and genders other than male het is subjugated as well.
The LGB community needs to be informed about the ‘T’ almost more than hets, the biases and attitudes are in many ways newly found superior “notions” – while raising LG consiousness (sometimes B but usually left behind also) it pushes down T which is what het population did for all LGBTQ not so very long ago. The continued presence of T in all things LGBTQ pushes that conciousness that the T is a valid & valued part with its own issues as does L from G. Collectively we are all persecuted but together we show unity in that we are each members of this thing we call society & we are here to claim our rightful place.
I think the GLB and the T should unite for exactly the reason you mentioned in your post — gender. It isn’t only the butch lesbians and the femme gay guys who are suffering from the gender police, in my opinion: just being gay means going against the rules of gender.
I think that women could be involved in this struggle, too, since feminism is also about the freedom of gender expression and the equality of all genders.
I think more people would agree with LGB+T if we used that acronym to name a coalition instead of one monolithic identity.
While I agree with you that we have a lot in common and Homophobia and Transphobia are both about gender when you get right down to it but I don’t think the ‘T’ belongs in ‘GLBT’. Basically the reason that I feel this way is because too many Gay and Lesbian people don’t want us there and wether that is because they think we are holding them back because we are bigger freaks than they are in the eyes of “normal society” or because they think we are piggybacking on their efforts (interesting since TG people started the riot at Stonewall and have been involved in the Gay Rights movement ever since despite repeatedly being thrown under the bus by the ‘G’ and ‘L’ component) matters not to me. If they don’t want me around then I won’t bother them, it’s not like marching in a parade beside guys wearing fright wigs, high heels and leading their boyfriends around on a chain is helping “normal society” take me more seriously.
I am a Canadian and I am in the Army in a very macho trade (the Canadian Army is open minded enough to realise that GLBT people can stop a bullet just as well as any straight person). The guys I work with are cavemen, make no mistake, but I get far less transphobia when I am with straight people (even at work) then I do when I am at a GLBT event or space. Every single time I have been out with a gay or lesbian friend I have had a nasty comment from someone at least once and often repeatedly. So no, as long as the GLB don’t want our help and since they definitley don’t want to help us then I have to agree with them and say the ‘T’ doesn’t belong with the GLB.
I’m glad that it’s there even though some people don’t agree with it. Like it or not, many of us are in the same boat as far as gaining acceptance.
I understand that sometimes the gay community can feel as if transgendered people are piggybacking on their efforts, but in the ends all any of us wants is to be left alone to live life.
Your view of the T within the LGB being a gender issue: “I think that if we all join together to fight for gender equality and freedom from gender-based expectations and discrimination, we will eventually prevail”, is simple feminism in its essence, Matt. If we’re to fight for LGBT rights on the premise of gender equality, we should then add W to the acronym (WLGBT), or then, simply drop all letters (LGBT) and group with the feminists of all acabit who have been fighting for gender equality for far longer than the LGBT. In its essence, how can gender based issues be discussed and argued without including women’s issues?
But that’s not going to happen because many feminists, as we have painfully realized, also resist supporting our cause, the T. The same applies to the LGB.
All minorities fight for their rights not truly realizing we all fight against the same thing: hegemony, and there is only one hegemony. Each and every minority group is gaining more grounds with the decades that pass. In time, we will all realize that’s what we’ve done, fighting against one single thing, hegemony.
Women’s issues, trans issues, gay issues, lesbian issues, and bisexual issues all have gender as a commonality, but women, feminists, will never fight for FTM’s rights to have medical coverage for say, phallo (if only as allies), no more than MTF will fight along side women for the right to abortion (if only as allies), no more than women will fight along side lesbians for the right to marry (if only as allies).
Women, or MTFs, or lesbians, or gays have more pressing issues to fight for before they put medical coverage of say, phalloplasty high on their agenda’s list…
Each letter of the acronym is there to make a distinction between each groups specific issues because the hegemony itself cannot take the “down with hegemony” in one single bite. For the hegemony, there IS a huge difference between a MTF and a cisgendered woman, and an FTM and a cisgendered man; there IS a huge difference between a lesbian and a heterosexual woman; there IS a huge difference between a gay man and a trans man, etc… For the hegemony, there is a huge difference between their specific issues.
As I stated in another post’s reply on this matter, each minority group fights for the specific issues the hegemony concocted against each and every group, and not for the issue that is common to all of them: discrimination. This would be too complicated for the hegemony to understand.
Gender expression (as in “transgenderism”) raises different issues than sexual orientation. They do have commonalities, but we’re not fighting on the basis of their commonalities, but on the basis of their differences. We didn’t make those differences, Hegemony did, and it’s with Hegemony that we fight. Therefore, we need to communicate with it in a way it will understand, and if we tell Hegemony that lesbians and FTMs for example are of the same breed, we mislead it on too many accounts, doing a disservice to ourselves.
Thanks for all your thoughtful comments on various posts today, François. I have been at work, so have not been able to respond, or even to read them thoroughly, which I look forward to doing this weekend. Thanks again so much for your insights.