Redundant posts are redundant
Except when they aren’t.
Here your gender-workshop-taskmistress Crip Dyke encourages you to revisit the douchegabbery of the Minnesota Child Protection League. PZ did an excellent job of illuminating just that in “Two steps forward, one step back” in December of last year, and the discussion on that thread when it was current included a great many useful comments.
I want, however, not to merely rehash criticisms of MCPL (criticisms well-deserved and well-made the first time around) but to use that example to talk a bit about what “centering” and “marginalized” really mean. In the post on the need for transfeminist critiques of other feminisms, I focussed on Katha Pollit and identified places where, quite frankly, I think she employed some bad thinking to construct some bad feminism. I suggested that marginalization had something to do with this bad thinking on Pollit’s part. Here you can learn more about exactly what marginalization has to do with it …and the extent of my criticism of Pollit, rather than merely Pollit’s column.
I didn’t pick Pollit because her work is low hanging fruit. She has written excellently on many topics. She clearly has the writing chops to be clear about the distinctions between political theorizing and political rhetoric. Yet the only reasonable inference is that she was, in fact, talking about rhetoric when she was using the phrase “political analysis”. She also has the analytical skills to make the distinction between gendered terms like the French pronouns ils and elles, and gender neutral words like people. Yet here, too, she fell down.
So what is the problem with this Katha Pollit person anyway? The problem is the same as one in our community: the inability to think like you’re not.
To refresh: the Minnesota Child Protection League ran a Star-Tribune ad with large bold print declaring:
A male wants to shower beside your 14-year-old daughter. Are YOU ok with that?
Deconstruction – picking apart a piece of writing to discover its assumptions and possibly one’s own, opening up the possibility of interpreting the writing very differently by reading it with different assumptions in mind – is a time-tested strategy from back before it was called deconstruction. In “Two steps forward…” PZ used his own experience to deconstruct the MCPL ad:
It’s all in the innuendo. Make it sound like a threat — “A male” — and obscure reality as much as you can. The most likely fact of the matter is that a shy person with possible gender dysphoria who has been terrifed for most of her time at school is being forced by school policy to take her clothes off in public and shower with a whole bunch of other people. If my past experience as a 14 year old boy is any measure, she’s going to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes and is going to want to get the experience over as quickly as possible.
Instead of reading concern for children, PZ points out the ad is filled with assumptions, MCPL assumptions, that make the ad’s text clearly readable as intentionally inspiring fear in parents. PZ uses only his own experience, knowledge he already has (no research required), and a little exercise placing himself at the center of MCPL’s little psychodrama. This is, of course, all that’s needed to discredit MCPL as any sort of “protection” league (save the “Mafia protection” sense}.
But this isn’t nothing. Projecting the self into a new context in which it is necessary to reevaluate how the familiar might change is a skill sadly beyond too many of us, too often. Pharyngula seems to have a disproportionately good number of folk, however, who are skilled at this.
Just listing a few people beyond PZ who used personal experiences and a bit of empathic projection to construct their comments, we get Azhael, burgundy, illdoittomorrow, toska and rq. Beatrice and Tony! were particularly explicit and skilled. Many others, I’m sure, would qualify under less stringent evidence than overtly referencing one’s own experience in trying to explain or understand the experience of another. Don’t think I’m creating an exhaustive list.
We’re a good community on that score, to be sure. But in analyzing this trans*-folk-in-school-sports-and-showers brouhaha, let’s keep our eye on the ball: centering and marginalization. This hard work which our community seems to do better than others is not, in fact, a path to a society without marginalization. It is a good tool for identifying unethical discrimination, but it is not a tool which actually centers the marginalized. This tool, as good as it is, as useful as it is, as underused as it is, would remain – even if we taught it as a required skill in public schools and it became a tool well used and used well – a tool which bumps aside the marginalized to conceptually put the already-centered in their place.
With this tool, you are still thinking as you. To center the marginalized, you have to think as if you are not doing the thinking. Step into another’s shoes? Okay, but the marginalized don’t need more people wearing out their soles. Instead, what if we invited the marginalized to occupy our shoes for a bit? Instead of projecting the self into an unfamiliar context, what about projecting the other into our familiar context?
When I look at the MCPL text
A male wants to shower beside your 14-year-old daughter. Are YOU ok with that?
what do I see? I see the implication that male children of MCPL bigots really, really want to shower with my trans* daughter. And why would that be, I wonder? Too obviously, a trans* parent reading that ad might reflect back on experiences of school-sponsored terrorism*1 and think that MCPL wants to overturn the inclusive policy so that their male children may delight in abusing trans* kids as a way to gain all the vast benefits of bullying others.
It’s a horrible vision, I admit. And it’s unlikely that the MCPL has very many members who are consciously and gleefully anticipating the bullying and abuse of MtF trans* folk in public school locker rooms. The key here isn’t so much whether MCPL consciously endorses such bullying as it is learning how to interpret the ad not by projecting yourself out, but by letting the outside in.
IF we interpret this text in a way consistent with being a trans* parent and having a trans* child, then MCPL’s writing is horribly ineffective. The interpretation that most obviously comes to mind has ethically monstrous implications for MCPL. Thus, in a society that centered trans perspectives rather than marginalized them, MCPL could not have seriously considered such an ad. They may or may not be monstrously unethical (feel free to decide for yourselves), but they certainly don’t want to be perceived as monstrously unethical. That would undermine their effectiveness in their chosen mission.
By trying to understand what MCPL wants to say, we cede social ground to them. Moreover, this is how marginalization works. Too many of the people centered by society are unable or unwilling to do the work to understand the marginalized. Marginalized people who eventually are heard by society, then, must therefore adopt the language of the centered. This is why you hear transsexual men saying that they are “males” – reconflating sex and gender – instead of merely “men” (mutatis mutandis women/females), when the conflation of sex and gender is a huge source of the misunderstandings that necessitate the assertion of our identities in the first place. Trans* people reject the language of cis-centered society only to the extent necessary for them to be able to express what they must express that cannot be expressed in cis-centered language.
Language that actually centers trans* people would be very different, and would have a dramatic effect on the manner in which MCPL and groups like it communicate. In a world that doesn’t share MCPL’s cissexist assumptions – that, say, the reader’s daughter is female, or, more generally, that it isn’t the reader’s daughter that will have to shift bathrooms under a reverted policy – MCPL would have to actually spell out its own assumptions. While we can identify MCPL’s assumptions with a only a bit of work, and while doing so does pull the hood off MCPL’s writers (or put it on, as you prefer), in a society that centers trans* perspectives, that wouldn’t be necessary. MCPL would not be able to rely on the silent implications that we here identify …and thus it wouldn’t require a Pharyngula-level commentariat to reveal the prejudice and hatred inherent in such ads.
As good as we can sometimes be as individuals at thinking about trans perspectives, we still aren’t very good at thinking from trans perspectives. (Frankly, I include myself in this and most if not all other trans* folk, specifically because of the centering dynamics I discussed above.)
It will not be any easier, of course, for anyone else reading Pharyngula to center marginalized trans* perspectives than it is for me to center, say, the experiences of a Black, gay man in Florida.*2 And fuck is that hard for me. This doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be criticized for bad thinking when I inappropriately apply my experience to the perspective of another. It is, after all, quite possible and quite useful to appropriately apply one’s experience to the perspective of another. Applying experience isn’t the problem here. I criticized Pollit not for the crime of failing to center trans* perspectives. I criticized bad thinking. It just so happens that centering trans* perspectives would have enabled Pollit to avoid the mistakes I criticized. But to be absolutely clear, this is no negative criticism of Pollit: I am as human as the rest and constantly centering myself. The lesson here isn’t to avoid criticism (giving or receiving) when failure to understand the marginalized leads us astray. The lesson here is one of humility and compassion: projecting the self into the other rather than letting the other into the self is a mere half-failing compared to failing to empathize at all. Moreover, it’s a common failing. You do it. I do it.
Centering marginalized perspectives is hard to do or it would be much more widespread. But it’s not impossible, and it’s not as hard as it first might seem. By definition it is not possible to think the thoughts of another. But we can think like someone else. And we can definitely identify the cars in a thought train that are decidedly different from those that normally carry us to our conclusions. You won’t know exactly when you’ve thought just like someone else, but you can know when you aren’t thinking like yourself. And you can get closer and closer to the ability to think like you’re not by paying attention to the words of others and noting when someone presents something that you are certain simply would not have occurred to you. File that away. Use it later: not merely any conclusion, but do your best to understand how differences in people lead to different conclusions and use someone else’s manner of arriving at the conclusion.
In the end it doesn’t matter terribly if I perfectly simulate the thinking of Maxine Hong Kingston or Mitsue Yamada or George Takei. The Asian-American experience is vast and diverse: they can’t simulate the thinking of one another. But the work we do to displace the center, rather than (for us) merely empathize with the marginalized or (for MCPL) re-inscribe the center, has huge payoffs that we can rarely glimpse. This is true not merely for the marginalized, but for all of society. Forcing MCPL to be upfront about their bigotry because they can’t leave it unstated while trusting others to hear their dogwhistle creates a new environment. In that new environment, MCPL can’t escape accountability through coded, vague language. What benefits would come from a world where every sexist joker had to spell out the stereotype on which they wanted to play? Could such a person ever get a laugh again?
But yes, for the marginalized, the stakes might be even higher. I would consider this a small hurdle for convincing others to take on this effort of thinking like you’re not. But nearly all of us live with some parts of our lives inexplicable to others, a part that is often inexplicable even to ourselves as we can’t articulate the justification for our assumptions here or there. We must, inevitably, trust ourselves that we had good reason to be thinking as we did when the men among us became homemakers or the deconverted among us left religion or the art history majors among us chose to major in art-fucking-history.
In a society that fights marginalization, we not only open the door of silence which MCPL must have shut to be effective. We throw open more and more of those sound-proof spaces within ourselves that make our lives lonelier, our societies poorer.
As hard as that is to do, I find the cacophonic joy that results when these sound-proof spaces are thrown open to the world is more than worth the effort.
*1 …to use the phrase of Bill Watterson
*2 …who, um, tends bar. I say randomly.
To the extent that this leads to an exercise, it is open ended. Try to remember this part:
[Pay] attention to the words of others and [note] when someone presents something that you are certain simply would not have occurred to you. File that away. Use it later: not merely any conclusion, but do your best to understand how differences in people lead to different conclusions and use someone else’s manner of arriving at the conclusion.
For previous gender workshop entries, see here.
I found this really interesting:
Could you give some more concrete examples of centering deconstructions?
as a trans woman i say i am female and generally oppose the notion that sex and gender are meaningfully different because that line of thinking is primarily used to justify misgendering trans women and excluding us based on context. our bodies aren’t a different sex/gender than our minds/identities. and arguing that they are only lets people argue that it’s valid to exclude us in instances where our bodies might be visible. like from sex segregated spaces such as shelters, restrooms, and locker rooms. and trust me i’ve had more than enough arguments with people who professed to be supportive and respectful of trans women while at the same time demanding that we are all really male.
sex is no less a social construct than gender. and all sex really is is how society genders certain body parts and bodies with those parts.
i’ve also seen plenty of trans men use the notion that they are female to justify their inclusion in women’s only space at the exclusion of trans women.
@Sophi Daniels
Well, the specific words are never the important part. People don’t exclude others from certain spaces on account of the symbols/words. Rather, people think there is some matter of fact which is good grounds to exclude a person.
It’s the facts or the logic/reasoning that are in error, the semantics are only an issue so far as semantic confusion (like equivocation) might happen.
This is why we need diverse media, because they can effectively teach us all those perspectives we never thought of.
After all, that is how we all became so awefully good at considering the perspectivrs andvfeelings of white cis het men.
@brianpansky
i suppose the words aren’t. but the concept that body/biology and identity/gender are separate is the issue i was talking about.
ie: the notion that trans people are biologically a different sex than the gender they identify as. which is generally where the sex and gender are different concepts leads us to.
specifically i was responding to the “– reconflating sex and gender –” part of this post. and attempting to explain a reason why separating these two concepts is problematic is bad. and why asserting trans women are male is used as a method of exclusion.
specifically people will assert that sex/biology/whatever word you want to use for this concept (because omg words aren’t the important part here but this logical concept that bodies have are the important distinction) is the most important and defining aspect of who deserves access to a space. and that a person’s gender is secondary. this is what separating the two does. where a better option is to say. that bodies are whatever sex/gender as the person’s identity. the truth is that a trans woman is female. that her biological sex is also female. that a penis is not a male organ. that asserting it is male or female is simply an act of gendering a random body part.
but hey lets have a semantics argument over this. much simpler than actually considering the concepts i was talking about.
tl;dr: separating sex and gender doesn’t actually help trans people. and only allows people to continue to exclude trans people (usually trans women, while sometimes benefiting trans men) because it asserts that sex is an essential biological reality while gender is a mutable social construct.
This is interesting and eye-opening to me. The assumptions are not just transphobic, they’re also sexist in a general sense, since “A female wants to shower beside your 14-year-old boy, are you OK with that?” doesn’t carry the same cheap impact.
That ad “slogan” is awful, in more ways than just marginalizing and fear mongering. It also debases the typical male teenager; portraying them as dawgs, willing to do/say anything to see a girl naked. Also, implying that they won’t just gawk, but become totally uncontrolled and become physically abusive. And it debases the admins of the school, that they will be forced to blindly accept any excuse from any one trying to take a shower with the girls gym class. Not just “awful”, but also, as pointed out above, totally unthinking of the total population of people who would see that ad. “Males want to shower with your daughter…”, the parent of a trans, reading that ad will be equally fearful at how their daughter might be forced to shower with all the boys of the school regardless of their misgivings and protestations (if the status quo remains as is).
This is a good article. Once again pointing out that “binary thinking” is not properly “all inclusive”.
And binarynotgood doesn’t only apply to sex/gender issues, but to everything. Right v Left, Conservapoid v Liberail, Good v Bad, Sane v Crazy, Atheist v Theist, etc. etc. Categorization is an inherent “feature” of thought process, but it is better to _work_-around it.
The idea of bringing the other into our thought process – instead of ourselves into the other’s is interesting. It’s described here as very difficult, complicated and almost impossible to do. So I was just wondering about a few examples of things I think quite regularly to see what process I was doing (bringing other in or projecting myself out).
When people talk about immigrants (almost exclusively brown/muslim immigrants), I always bring up my own migrant status (half English, immigrated at 7). Right: I’m white, speak the language fluently, pass as and consider myself to be a local. But when I hear people saying we should kick out the immigrants my response is “so you’re saying I should be kicked out?” I’m projecting my own limited immigrant status onto other, more discriminated against immigrants, expanding my own experience to what I expect their’s is.
On the other hand when I hear people talking about our local Roma minority as “gypsies” who should be shot or locked up or left to starve or sent to the mines whatever, I find it much more common to take reported stories (from documentaries, magazine articles and interviews) of Roma people, try to trust their narrative and the result is that I get a strong sense of injustice “you don’t know me/they wont employ me/I work hard” (me as in the Roma, who I also don’t intimately know). In other words I’m importing what I know of experiences and perspectives of the other into my current situation and using that to interpret the hate speech I’m hearing.
So the first example was what PZ was doing in the MCPL case, the second would be an attempt at centering the marginalised?
Thanks again for another great article: this is hard in a good way
=8)-DX
@twas brillig (stevem) #7
This process follows naturally from @Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-‘s #4
The idea is that the mothers can easily reconstruct a stereotypical cis het male view: of the male gaze that is allowed free reign of these girls’ bodies, accepting and expecting male entitlement to harassment. Although it wouldn’t make sense from the trans* angle of the campaign it’s telling that the slogan’s impact is greatly reduced when written the other, other way “Your 14-year-old son wants to shower beside females. Are YOU ok with that?”, because everything about that falls fully into the expected standard cis het male view: it’s ok for men to want that, for sons’ sexuality to be excused and to ignore the female perspective (as well as the non-het, trans* perspectives). That’s how I get it: even when arguing from a female perspective (mother: your daughters), the cis het male viewpoint(or the stereotypical gender role) takes precedence.
@5, Sophi Daniels
It seemed to me that you were the one making this error (or something like it), I was trying to point out that it looked like you were making that error.
Bundling those two words together doesn’t change people’s mind about the claims of fact or reasoning they were referring to. And neither does seperating the two. So no I don’t think the statement “this is what separating the two does” is true.
OK, I’m probably unusual but my first reaction to: “A male wants to shower beside your 14-year-old daughter. Are YOU ok with that?” is: “Why would anyone want to shower WITH anyone? Isn’t that something one does in private?” Then I’d probably just assign it to the vast bulging closet labeled: “Stuff non-asexual people do for seemingly-absurd reasons that they assure me make perfect sense to them.” I don’t like to look in there.
So here’s my (simplistic) understanding of sex/gender. Can anyone tell me where I went wrong (excluding the fact that I don’t use the same definitions for some words).
Humans come in two genders (also known as two sexes), male and female. Gender specifies a form of dimorphism based on reproduction (males can induce pregnancy but not carry it; females can carry pregnancy but can’t induce it without advanced technological assistance). This distinction is the defining basis of gender; it’s what gender fundamentally IS. The differences in development that give rise to this dimorphism also give rise to a bunch of sex/gender-LINKED traits which are statistically correlated to one gender (sometimes strongly enough to justify assuming them until corrected), but not definitional— if you have the anatomy for carrying a pregnancy, it doesn’t matter that you have a Y chromosome (although statistically, you probably don’t).
Other than the logistics of reproduction, the odds of being right when guessing sex-linked traits and POSSIBLY gay/straight mating preferences (I don’t know how that works; it all seems arbitrary to me), sex/gender has no function on any aspect of life.
HOWEVER, society has compiled long lists of traits and chosen to spuriously associate them with each gender. So if you’re male then you have the capacity to induce pregnancy, you statistically probably have a Y chromosome, and you will statistically be told to embrace a long list of traits that have nothing to do with being male save for a cultural convention arbitrarily declaring them “male traits.” If you are female, you will likewise be handed a list of “female traits” not actually related to being female in any way. Collectively, I call those “gender roles” or “gender stereotypes,” and use the terms “masculine” and “feminine” to refer to the things arbitrarily associated with being biologically MALE and FEMALE respectively. Whether you are declared by society to be masculine or feminine and how well you live up to that stereotype is a non-issue in biology but a very big issue in day to day living.
Plenty of people embrace the stereotype/gender role they were handed simply because our preferences are shaped by our upbringing. Others simply never fit into their assigned role and some even reject the absurd notion entirely (like me). And then some of those individuals have surgery to reshape their genitals because of… something I haven’t quite figured out? And then some of them conflate the stereotype “masculine” and the biology “male” and…
…OK, am I at least right about the actual objective biology of being male and female having direct relevance to your reproductive capacity and very little else, and the vast pile of subjective cultural conventions that society has arbitrarily taped onto the objective biology where it doesn’t belong?
@Jake
Under the classic way to use the terminology, that’s entirely correct.
Note that some people instead use that for the definition of a person’s sex, and then use traits that are merely correlated for gender. Yet another group use the terminology as Sophi Daniels does, with both the sex and gender terms referring to some traits taht are merely correlated to all that reproduction stuff.
I’m not sure there’s any reason to think that any of these are the one correct way to use the terminology. Hope that helps.
Also, Jake, your post is fairly accurate I think.
@Jake Harban #11
It follows logically from this train of thought that things like sexual orientation/ identity (i.e. preference for not/mating being a certain biology/genital configuration) aren’t among the “preferences shaped by our upbringing”, although of course strongly influenced by all the gendered baggage you mention. A gay man would still prefer sex with men even if growing up alone on a desert island and a trans* person might quite possibly feel gender disphoria / dissasociation from their body in that case, just as in your case you’d probably still find associating your genitals with your identity absurd.
Also, a side note on the showering issue: helping to clean and groom each other is often a non-sexual social behaviour, so there’s that reason to shower *with* someone, although not really appropriate for a school setting. But you’re right: the way it’s worded really does imply something sexual/intimate, when communal showers are more of an impersonal, pragmatic space.