1. RDSJ4: Spade, Mutilating Gender (pp. 419-425) (see attachment)
2. RDSJ4: Meyerowitz, Introduction—How Sex Changed (pp. 388-390) (see attachment)
3. RDSJ4: Kacere, Transmisogyny 101 (pp. 394-398) (see attachment)
4. RDSJ4: Green, Look! No, Don’t! (pp. 439-441) (see attachment)
5. RDSJ4: Chess, et.al, Calling all Restroom Revolutionaries (pp. 459-461) (see attachment)
6. RDSJ4: Blumenfeld, Women & LGBT People Under Attack (pp. 378-380) (see attachment)
7. RDSJ4: Gokhale, The InterSEXion (pp. 391-394) (see attachment)
8. RDSJ4: Carbado, Privilege (pp. 367-373) (see attachment)
9. RDSJ4: Airen, Pansexual Visibility (pp. 398-400) (see attachment)
10. RDSJ4: Evans & Washington, Becoming an Ally (pp. 447-455) (see attachment)
11. RDSJ4: Pharr, Reflections on Liberation (pp. 604-610) (see attachment)
12. RDSJ4: Johnson, What We Can Do (pp. 621-627) (see attachment)
13. Hernandez: Becoming a Black man (see attachment)
14. Brune: When she graduates as He (see attachment)
15. Video: Toilet Training
16. Schlasko, transgender etiquette (see attachment)
17. Video: Everyone Matters – Dignity and Safety for Transgender People
18. Read: Ochs, Biphobia
https://robynochs.com/biphobia/
19. Video: Reteaching Gender and Sexuality
20. Video: Wanda Sykes, That’s So Gay
21. Video: Hilary Duff, That’s So Gay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_MIb3mYznE
22. Teaching Tolerance, Six Steps to Speak Up (see attachment)
23. Blumenfeld: An LGBTIQ History: Part 1 to 5
https://www.slideshare.net/wblumen/an-lgbtiq-history1
https://www.slideshare.net/wblumen/an-lgbtiq-history2
https://www.slideshare.net/wblumen/an-lgbtq-history33
https://www.slideshare.net/wblumen/an-lgbtiq-history-part-4-236943834
https://www.slideshare.net/wblumen/an-lgbtq-history5
total 2000 words
APA style
PansexualVisibility & Undoing Heteronormativity
Cameron Airen
Pride was bittersweet this year. We are still devastated and grieving over the Orlando shooting of
50 people at Pulse, an LGBTQ night club, AND we continue to proudly celebrate who we are.
The celebration of LGBTQ feels even more important with the violence that recently happened.
Though greater strides have been made towards the acceptance of gay and queer people, we still
have a long way towards changing perceptions, beliefs, and the safety of LGBTQ people. I want
to acknowledge the intersections like race, gender, and disability that many gay or queer people
experience. Thus, the fight towards more acceptance and safety of being queer or gay is also a
fight to end all social oppressions.
In this post, I specifically want to talk about pansexualtity and heteronormativity. I’m focusing
on pansexuality because I am a pansexual, and pansexuals are hardly acknowledged and
represented. Today, being pansexual has a wider understanding than it did eleven years ago when
I was first identifying as one. I’m thrilled to see how much of the awareness and acceptance of
pansexuality has evolved though we still have a long way to go. Pansexuality is hugely
underrepresented in the media, and it’s still not taken seriously enough in society at large. We
need greater pansexual visibility and awareness of heteronormativity.
What Is Pansexuality?
First, I want to share what pansexuality means to me. Each pansexual can define what their
sexuality means, and I do not claim to speak for all pansexuals. For me, I define pansexual as
being attracted to multiple genders and/or being attracted to/fall in love with someone(s)
irrespective of gender. When I first heard the term pansexual, I heard it described as falling in
love with the person, not the gender, which resonated with me deeply.
To me, pansexuality differs from bisexuality because of “bi” meaning two, as in two genders. I
prefer to use pansexual because it acknowledges more than two genders that I could be attracted
to. I do want to acknowledge that not all bisexuals only define their sexuality within the binary,
but for my love of deconstructing language, I prefer to use pansexual. Sometimes, when my
sexuality pops up in conversation with someone who doesn’t seem to have an awareness of
pansexuality, then I usually identify as bisexual. I’m fine with bisexual, but it doesn’t feel like
the whole truth. Also, I don’t feel like I am attracted to both women and men because I’m not.
I’m not attracted to one being a woman or a man. I’m attracted to the person underneath. It may
sound like an ideal fantasy, but it’s true; my genuine attraction stems from the inside first and the
outside second.
Heteronormativity Erases Pansexuality
A big part of the fight to foster greater acceptance of and to keep LGBTQ folks alive is to
dismantle heteronormativity. Heteronormativity is deep seated in our society and we encounter
its presence in our everyday lives. In order to help end oppression and violence against queer
people, we must face the heteronormativity that we perpetuate. A huge part of this work involves
awareness, education, and action.
People are assumed to be heterosexual unless their perceived gender has people believing
otherwise. I don’t identify as “femme” but, sometimes, I present as more “femme,” and thus am
assumed to be heterosexual. Heteronormativity assumes that when I am with a man, I am
straight; it assumes heterosexual until proven otherwise. I’m not with a man because of my
heterosexual “nature.” I’m with him because I fell in love with a human being who happens to
“be” a man. I’m not going to walk around with a sign on my forehead that states “Pansexual,”
thus the heterosexual assumption is important to change.
Heteronormativity treats pan, gay, or bi sexuality as a spectacle. When my ex-girlfriend and I
would take neighborhood walks holding hands, people would drive or walk by staring and
smiling at us. Granted, we were a cute couple, but after a while, I started to feel like a spectacle.
This is twofold. On one hand, it was beautiful that people were responding positively to our love.
But, on the other hand, my relationship was not on display for other people’s pleasure (or
disgust). We lived in an open-minded neighborhood, so we rarely, if ever, encountered disgust or
negative reactions to displaying our affection for one another in public. But, because we lived in
an open-minded neighborhood, I was surprised that people were reacting (even though positive)
to us at all. If women being romantic with one another is normalized, then there wouldn’t be a
reaction from others at all.
No one blinks an eye when they see a couple they perceive to be heterosexual walking down the
street (at least in relation to sexuality/gender; racism, disability and other identities can still be a
factor). This is heteronormativity and heterosexual privilege. Not being aware of heterosexual
privilege perpetuates heteronormativity. When we perceive a couple to be heterosexual, we are
engaging in heteronormativity. We don’t actually know if the couple we perceive to be
heterosexual is actually heterosexual. We perceive a heterosexual couple to consist of a
“woman” and a “man,” but what if the woman or man is bisexual or pansexual? When we
perceive people as heterosexual, we are projecting our own social conditioning onto them
because of heteronormativity.
Also, heteronormativity tends to assume that if you’re pansexual, then you’re automatically
polyamorous. Polyamorous or monogamous, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to be with both a
woman and a man at the same time to prove you’re pansexual. Being monogamous with a man
does not erase pansexuality either, but society treats it that way. A pansexual woman being in
relationship with a man does not all of a sudden make her heterosexual.
As a culture and society, we need to do a better job of unpacking heteronormativity. We can
unlearn the assumptions we make about other people’s sexuality based upon their physical
appearance. As pansexuals, we will not be erased. We are here; we are queer, and we’re not
going anywhere.
\
The Lack of Pansexual Representation Onscreen
Pansexuals are hugely underrepresented in film and television, which isn’t a surprise since
society is still catching up in understanding what pansexuality is, and even being introduced to
the term. Heteronormativity allows for writers and directors to create characters heterosexual
without questioning why they are creating a heterosexual character. Heteronormativity allows
most, if not all, of the characters in a film to be heterosexual and have its one token gay
character. If we didn’t live in a heteronormative world, then there wouldn’t be such a disparity,
heterosexual would not be the norm.
Pansexual and bisexual representation onscreen is rare. While we have more lesbian and gay
people onscreen than ever before, pansexuals and bisexuals pale in comparison… Can we say
that TV is doing a better job at queer representation? No doubt, we can. Films need to step up to
the plate! But, both television and film needs to greatly improve their representation of
pansexuals and bisexuals. The more we see pansexuals onscreen, the more pansexual will be
normalized as a sexual orientation. But, we can’t wait for the media to change, we need to start
now. It starts with deconstructing heteronormativity in our everyday lives. Notice the next time
you make a judgment (whether it’s in your own head or out loud) about someone’s sexuality…
WHAT CAN WE DO? I 621
133
What Can We Do?
Allan G. Johnson
The problem of privilege and oppression is deep and wide, and to work with it we have
to be able to see it clearly so that we can talk about it in useful ways. To do that, we have
to reclaim some difficult language that names what’s going on, language that has been so
misused and maligned that it generates more heat than light. We can’t just stop using words
like racism, sexism, ableism, and privilege, however, because these are tools that focus our
awareness on the problem and all the forms it takes. Once we can see and talk about what’s
going on, we can analyze how it works as a system. We can identify points of leverage
where change can begin.
For several centuries, capitalism has provided the economic context for privilege and
oppression. As such, it has been and continues to be a powerful force, especially in relation
to class, gender, and race. Its effects are both direct and indirect. Historically, it was the
engine that drove the development of modern racism. In a less direct way, it creates condi-
tions of scarcity that set the stage for competition, fear, and antagonism directed across
differences of race, ethnicity, and gender. Through the class differences that it creates, it
also shapes people’s experience of privilege and the lack of it. This is an example of the
matrix of domination (or matrix of privilege) through which the various forms of differ-
ence and privilege interact and shape one another.
Although disadvantaged groups take the brunt of the trouble, privileged groups are
also affected by it, partly because misery visited on others comes back to haunt those who
benefit from it, especially in the form of defensiveness and fear. But trouble also affects
privileged groups directly by limiting and shaping the lives of people who have privilege.
The trouble also affects entire social systems, from families to corporations and schools to
communities, societies, and global political and economic systems.
The greatest barrier to change is that dominant groups … don’t see the trouble as their
trouble, which means they don’t feel obliged to do something about it. This happens for a
variety of reasons-because they don’t know the trouble exists in the first place, because they
don’t have to see it as their trouble, because they see it as a personal rather than a systemic
problem, because they’re reluctant to give up privilege, because they feel angry and deprived
and closed to the idea that they have privilege, because they’re blinded by prejudice, because
they’re afraid of what will happen if they acknowledge the reality of privilege and oppression.
[To] think about the trouble as everyone’s responsibility-everybody’s “hook”-and
nobody’s fault … is especially useful for members of privileged groups who have a hard time
seeing themselves in relation to privilege without feeling guilty. It’s easy to fall into this trap
because people tend to use an individualistic model of the world that reduces everything to
individual intentions and goodness or badness. A powerful and liberating alternative comes
from the fact that we’re always participating in something larger than ourselves, social sys-
tems. To understand privilege and oppression, we have to look at what we’re participating in
and how we participate …. This means we can be involved in a society’s or organization’s
troubles without doing anything wrong and without being bad people.
622 I WORKING FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE
Privilege is created and maintained through social systems that are dominated by,
centered on, and identified with privileged groups. A racist society, for example, is white-
dominated, white-centered, and white-identified. Since privilege is rooted primarily in
systems-such as families, schools, and workplaces-change isn’t simply a matter of chang-
ing people. The solution also has to include entire systems [that] … shape how people feel,
think, and behave as individuals, how they see themselves and one another.
With this approach, we can begin to think about how to make ourselves part of the
solution to the problem of privilege and oppression ….
It is in small and humble choices that privilege, oppression, and the movement toward
something better actually happen .
. . . WHAT CAN WE DO?
ACKNOWLEDGE THAT PRIVILEGE AND OPPRESSION EXISTS
A key to the continued existence of every system of privilege is unawareness, because
privilege contradicts so many basic human values that it invariably arouses opposition
when people know about it ….
This is why most cultures of privilege mask the reality of oppression by denying its
existence, trivializing it, calling it something else, blaming it on those most victimized
by it, or diverting attention from it. Instead of treating oppression as a serious problem,
we go to war or get embroiled in controversial “issues” such as capital gains tax cuts or
“family values” or immigrant workers. There would be far more active opposition to white
privilege, for example, if white people lived with an ongoing awareness of how it actually
affects the everyday lives of those it oppresses as “not white.” …
It’s one thing to become aware and quite another to stay that way. The greatest chal-
lenge when we first become aware of a critical perspective on the world is simply to hang
on to it …. In some ways, it’s harder and more important to pay attention to systems
of privilege than it is to people’s behavior …. [F]or example, the structure of capitalism
creates large social patterns of inequality, scarcity, and exploitation that have played
and continue to play a major role in the perpetuation of various forms of privilege and
oppression. It is probably wishful thinking to suppose we can end privilege without also
changing a capitalist system of political economy that allows an elite to control the vast
majority of wealth and income and leaves the rest of the population to fight over what’s
left. But such wishful thinking is, in fact, what we’re encouraged to engage in most of
the time-to cling to the idea that racism, for example, is just a problem with a few bad
whites, rather than seeing how it is connected to a much larger matrix of privilege and
oppress10n.
By itself, however, changing how we think won’t be enough to solve the problem.
Privilege will not simply go away as the result of a change in individual consciousness.
Ultimately, we’ll have to apply our understanding of how systems work to the job of chan-
ging systems themselves-economic, political, religious, educational, and familial. …
Maintaining a critical consciousness takes commitment and work. Awareness is some-
thing that either we maintain in the moment or we don’t. And the only way to hang on to
an awareness of privilege is to make that awareness an ongoing part of our lives.
WHAT CAN WE DO? I 623
PAY ATTENTION
Understanding how privilege and oppression operate and how you participate is where
working for change begins. It’s easy to have opinions, but it takes work to know what you’re
talking about. The simplest way to begin is to make reading about privilege part of your life.
Unless you have the luxury of a personal teacher, you can’t understand this issue without
reading. Many people assume they already know what they need to know because it’s part of
everyday life. But they’re usually wrong, because just as the last thing a fish would discover is
water, the last thing people discover is society itself and something as pervasive as privilege.
We also have to be open to the idea that what we think we know is, if not wrong, so
deeply shaped by systems of privilege that it misses most of the truth. This is why activists
talk with one another and spend time reading one another’s writing, because seeing things
clearly is tricky. This is also why people who are critical of the status quo are so often
self-critical as well-they know how complex and elusive the truth really is and what a
challenge it is to work toward it ….
As you educate yourself, avoid reinventing the wheel. Many people have already done
a lot of work that you can learn from. There’s no way to get through it all, but you don’t
have to in order to develop a clear enough sense of how to act in meaningful and informed
ways …. Men who feel there is no place for them in women’s studies might start with
books about patriarchy and gender inequality that are written by men. In the same way,
whites can begin with writings on race privilege written by other whites. Sooner or later,
however, dominant groups will need to turn to what people in subordinate groups have
written, because they are the ones who have done most of the work of figuring out how
privilege and oppression operate.
Reading is only the beginning. At some point you have to look at yourself and the world
to see if you can identify what you’re reading about ….
[T]aking responsibility means not waiting for others to tell you what to do, to point
out what’s going on, or to identify alternatives. If dominant groups are going to take their
share of responsibility, it’s up to them to listen, watch, ask, and listen again, to make it
their business to find out for themselves. If they don’t, they’ll slide down the comfortable
blindered path of privilege. And then they’ll be just part of the problem and they will be
blamed and they’ll have it coming.
LEARN TO LISTEN
Attentive listening is especially difficult for members of dominant groups. If someone
confronts you with your own behavior that supports privilege, … [d]on’t tell them they’re
too sensitive or need a better sense of humor, and don’t try to explain away what you did
as something else than what they’re telling you it was. Don’t say you didn’t mean it or that
you were only kidding. Don’t tell them what a champion of justice you are or how hurt you
feel because of what they’re telling you. Don’t make jokes or try to be cute or charming,
since only access to privilege can lead someone to believe these are acceptable responses
to something as serious as privilege and oppression. Listen to what’s being said. Take it
seriously. Assume for the time being that it’s true, because … it probably is. And then take
responsibility to do something about it.
LITTLE RISKS: DO SOMETHING
When you openly change how you participate in a system, you do more than change
your own behavior; you also change how the system happens. When you change how a
624 I WORKING FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE
system happens, you change the social environment that shapes other people’s behavior,
which, in turn, further changes how the system happens. And when you do that, you
also help to change the consequences that come out of the dynamic relationship between
systems and individuals, including patterns of privilege and oppression.
As you become more aware, questions will arise about what goes on at work, in the
media, in families, in communities, in religious institutions, in government, on the street,
and at school-in short, just about everywhere. The questions don’t come all at once (for
which we can be grateful), although they sometimes come in a rush that can feel over-
whelming. If you remind yourself that it isn’t up to you to do it all, however, you can see
plenty of situations in which you can make a difference, sometimes in surprisingly simple
ways. Consider the following possibilities.
Make noise, be seen. Stand up, volunteer, speak out, write letters, sign petitions, show
up. Every oppressive system feeds on silence. Don’t collude in it. Breaking the silence is
especially important for dominant groups, because it undermines the assumption of soli-
darity that privilege depends on. If this feels too risky, practice being aware of how silence
reflects your investment in solidarity with other dominant-group members. This can be a
place to begin working on how you participate in making privilege and oppression happen:
“Today I said nothing, colluded in silence, and this is how I benefited from it. Tomorrow I
can try something different.”
Find little ways to withdraw support from … [oppressive systems,] starting with your-
self. It can be as simple as not laughing at a racist or heterosexist joke or saying you don’t
think it’s funny, or writing a letter to your senator or representative or the editor of your
newspaper, objecting to an instance of sexism in the media. When my local newspaper ran
an article whose headline referred to sexual harassment as “earthy behavior,” for example,
I wrote a letter pointing out that harassment has nothing to do with being “earthy.”
The key to withdrawing support is to interrupt the flow of business as usual. You can
subvert the assumption that everyone’s going along with the status quo by simply not going
along. When you do this, you stop the flow, if only for a moment, but in that moment
other people can notice and start to think and question. It’s a perfect time to suggest the
possibility of alternatives, such as humor that isn’t at someone else’s expense, or of ways to
think about discrimination, harassment, and violence that do justice to the reality of what’s
going on and how it affects people.
Dare to make people feel uncomfortable, beginning with yourself. At the next local
school board meeting, for example, you can ask why principals and other administrators
are almost always white and male (unless your system is an exception that proves the rule),
while the teachers they supervise and the lower-paid support staff are mostly women and
people of color. Or look at the names and mascots used by local sports teams and see if they
exploit the heritage and identity of Native Americans. If that’s the case, ask principals and
coaches and owners about it. Consider asking similar kinds of questions about privilege
and difference in your place of worship, workplace, and local government.
It may seem that such actions don’t amount to much, until you stop for a moment and
feel your resistance to doing them-worrying, for example, about how easily you could
make people uncomfortable, including yourself. If you take that resistance to action as a
measure of power, then your potential to make a difference is plain to see. The potential
for people to feel uncomfortable is a measure of the power for change inherent in such
simple acts of not going along with the status quo.
Some will say it isn’t “nice” to make people uncomfortable, but systems of privilege do
a lot more than make people feel uncomfortable, and there isn’t anything “nice” about
allowing that to continue. Besides, discomfort is an unavoidable part of any meaningful
process of change. You can’t grow without being willing to challenge your assumptions and
WHAT CAN WE DO? I 625
take yourself to the edge of your competencies, where you’re bound to feel uncomfortable.
If you can’t tolerate ambiguity, uncertainty, and discomfort, then you’ll never get beneath
superficial appearances or learn or change anything of much value, including yourself.
Openly choose and model alternative paths. [Identifying] … alternatives and [follow-
ing] … them openly so that other people can see what we’re doing … creates tension
in a system, which moves toward resolution …. We don’t have to convince anyone of
anything. As Gandhi put it, the work begins with us trying to be the change we want to see
happen in the world. If you think this has no effect, watch how people react to the slightest
departures from established paths and how much effort they expend trying to ignore or
explain away or challenge those who choose alternative paths.
Actively promote change in how systems are organized around privilege. The possibilities
here are almost endless, because social life is complicated and privilege is everywhere. You
can, for example,
Speak out for equality in the workplace.
Promote awareness and training around issues of privilege.
Support equal pay and promotion practices for everyone.
Oppose the devaluing of women, people of color, and people with disabilities, and the
work they do, from dead-end jobs to glass ceilings.
Support the well-being of mothers, children, and people with disabilities, and defend their
right to control their bodies and their lives.
Don’t support businesses that are inaccessible to people with disabilities, and tell them why
you don’t.
Don’t support businesses that engage in unfair labor practices, including union-busting.
Support the formation of unions. Although the U.S. labor movement has a long history
of racism, sexism, and ableism, unions are currently one of the few organized efforts
dedicated to protecting workers from the excesses of capitalism.
Become aware of how class divisions operate in social systems, from workplaces to schools,
and how this results in the oppression of blue- and white-collar workers. Find out,
for example, if staff at your college or university are paid a living wage, and speak
up if they aren’t. There is a great silence in this country around issues of class, in part
because the dominant cultural ideology presents the United States as a classless society.
Break the silence.
Oppose the increasing concentration of wealth and power in the United States and the
global economy. The lower, working, and lower-middle classes are the last to benefit
from economic upturns and the first to suffer from economic downturns. Press politi-
cians and candidates for public office to take a stand on issues of class, starting with
the acknowledgment that they exist.
When you witness someone else taking a risk-speaking out, calling attention to privi-
lege and oppression-don’t wait until later to tell them in private you’re glad they
did. Waiting until you’re alone makes it safer for you but does the other person little
good. Support is most needed when the risk is being taken, not later on, so don’t
wait. Make your support as visible and public as the courageous behavior that you’re
supporting.
Support the right of women and men to love whomever they choose. Raise awareness
of homophobia and heterosexism. For example, ask school officials and teachers about
what’s happening to gay and lesbian students in local schools. If they don’t know, ask
them to find out, since it’s a safe bet these students are being harassed, suppressed,
and oppressed by others at one of the most vulnerable stages of life. When sexual
THE CYCLE OF LIBERATION I 627
you’re making it easier for other people-now and in the future-to see and do what
they can do. So, rather than defeat yourself before you start, think small, humble, and
doable rather than large, heroic, and impossible. Don’t paralyze yourself with impossible
expectations ….
Don’t let other people set the standard for you. Start where you are and work from
there. Make lists of all the things you could actually imagine doing-from reading another
book about privilege to suggesting policy changes at school or work to protesting against
capitalism to raising questions about who cleans the bathroom at home-and rank them
from the most risky to the least. Start with the least risky and set reasonable goals (“What
small risk for change will I take today?”). As you get more experienced at taking risks, you
can move up your list. You can commit yourself to whatever the next steps are for you, the
tolerable risks, the contributions that offer some way-however small it might seem-to
help balance the scales. As long as you do something, it counts.
In the end, taking responsibility doesn’t have to involve guilt and blame, letting someone
off the hook, or being on the hook yourself. It simply means acknowledging an obligation
to make a contribution to finding a way out of the trouble we’re all in and to finding
constructive ways to act on that obligation. You don’t have to do anything dramatic or
earth-shaking to help change happen. As powerful as systems of privilege are, they cannot
stand the strain of lots of people doing something about it, beginning with the simplest act
of naming the system out loud.
BecomingAn Ally
What is an Ally?
An ally is “a person who is a member of the dominant or majority group who works to end
oppression in their personal and professional life through support of, and as an advocate for, the
oppressed population” (Evans and Washington, 1991). According to the Human Rights
Campaign (HRC), allies “to racial, religious and ethnic minorities have been remarkably
effective in promoting positive change in the dominant culture, and only recently has their
instrumental position been extended to the area of sexual orientation. In recent years we’ve seen
more and more LGBTQ Ally organizations strive to make the culture of a campus or workplace
more aware and accepting of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals.”
Steps Toward Becoming an Ally
In “Becoming an Ally: A New Examination”, Nancy J. Evans and Jamie Washington list the
following four basic steps of allyship involvement:
• First, Awareness: We all start here, and we encourage you to begin increasing your
awareness building before, during, and after attending ALLIES training workshops at
UM. Read, read, read! Have conversations with LGBTQ+ individuals, friends, peers,
coworkers, family members, and in other social networks.
• Second, Knowledge/education: As your awareness deepens, acquire knowledge about
sexual identities and gender expressions and identities through more formalized channels;
take a class! Attend our ALLIES training workshops. Familiarize yourself with local
laws, and campus policies that affect LGBTQ+ students.
• Third, Skills: These must be acquired and developed through practice, attendance, and
strategies. Our ALLIES program flowchart embraces exposure as a component of the
ALLIES training process, since skills “can be acquired by attending workshops, role-
playing certain situations with friends, developing support connections, or practicing
interventions or awareness raising in safe settings.”
• Finally, Action: For many, this is the most difficult step. “Nonetheless, action is, without
doubt, the only way that we can effect change in the society as a whole; for if we keep
our awareness, knowledge, and skill to ourselves, we deprive the rest of the world of
what we have learned, thus keeping them from having the fullest possible life.”
An Ally strives to…
• Qualities of an Ally
• Be an open-minded listener and friend
• Confront their own prejudices and biases, while allowed to have their own opinions
• Recognize their personal boundaries, and recognize/refer to an individual to additional
resources
http://www.uh.edu/lgbtq/programs/pdf/qualities_of_an_ally
• engage in the process of developing a campus culture free of homophobia, transphobia,
and heterosexism
• Believe that all persons, regardless of age, sex, religion, ethnicity, race, ability, language,
gender expression and identity, and sexuality should be treated with “respect for the
dignity of each person”
• Commit themselves to understanding unearned individual and systemic (group)
privileges that cisgender, heterosexual people have
• Engage in the process of personal growth, despite the discomfort it might sometimes
cause
An Ally is NOT…
• someone with all the answers
• expected to be a counselor or trained to deal with crisis situations (know your limits and
refer!)
• expected to proceed with interaction if levels of comfort or personal safety have been
violated
• expected to defend or account for the ALLIES or M-PRIDE programs in debates or
conversations
Faculty/Staff Allies should…
• Respect the privacy of student who may seek you out for support, information, or
resources: keep these contacts confidential.
• Respect students’ changing experience of self as they explore their sexual identity and/or
gender expression and identity: use language that reflects where the students are in their
developmental process.
• Respect students’ rights to remain closeted: there can be tremendous negative
consequences to coming out for many students, including the loss of friends, family,
financial support, and basic safety.
• Respect the boundaries of the students with whom you have contact: maintain clear,
professional boundaries as a teacher, advisor, or advocate at all times.
• Respect the needs of students who are beyond what you are trained to provide: refer
students for counseling when appropriate. If a student is experiencing a good deal of
psychological distress and is having difficulty coping, suggest that counseling may be
helpful.
Ally behaviors and motivations to avoid and embrace…
In “Aspiring Social Justice Ally Identity Development: A Conceptual Model”, K.E. Edwards
maps three avenues for motivating potential allies: self-interest, altruism, and a desire for social
justice–depending on the situations in which individuals find themselves. Understanding these
motivations can help shape more effective ally responses and behaviors.
Aspiring Allies for Self-Interest typically are invested in allyship when someone they know or
care about who identifies as LGBTQ+ is being hurt, and these allies take action to intervene in
specific discriminatory instances. However, this fails to account for or address the larger
systemic oppressions that LGBTQ+ people, as a community, face, and often leads to a “savior”
or “rescuer” complex that continues the oppressive cycle.
Aspiring Allies for Altruism can recognize the systemic issues that affect LGBTQ+ individuals
as a group, but are often motivated in their allyship by feelings of guilt stemming from their
heterosexual and/or cisgender privileges. Often, these allies place blame on other straight people
for the oppressions LGBTQ+ people experience, and view themselves as exceptions to the
normative rule.
Allies for Social Justice understand that acting to end oppressions LGBTQ+ people face
ultimately benefits us all. The model these allies embrace works toward creating a more just and
equitable society, and these allies understand that working “with those from oppressed group in
collaboration in partnership to end systems of oppression” is the ultimate goal (Edwards, 2006).
This collaborative relationship is the rationale for establishing and developing the M-PRIDE
program.
Why become an Ally Advocate in Action?
An ally is an action, not an identity. Evans and Washington list the following benefits of being
an ally, including:
• You open yourself up to the possibility of close relationships with an additional
percentage of the world
• You become less locked into sex-role stereotypes (and perhaps also, systems that
perpetuate compulsory heterosexuality)
• You may be the reason a family member, coworker, friend, or community member finally
decides that life is worth something and suicide or dependence on chemicals/substances
may not be the answer
• You may make the difference in the lives of adolescents who hear you confront anti-
LGBT epithets or who may hear you using gender neutral language in public spaces
References
Edwards, K.E. (2006). “Aspiring Social Justice Ally Identity Development: A Conceptual
Model.” NASPA Journal, 43 (2), 39-60.
Evans, Nancy J. and Jamie Washington (2000). “Becoming an Ally: A New Examination.”
Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, second edition. Maurianne Adams and Warren J.
Blumenfield, eds. New York: Routledge: 413-420.
Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Establishing an Allies/Safe Zone Program
https://www.hrc.org/resources/establishing-an-allies-safe-zone-program
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
This article was downloaded by: [CDL Journals Account]
On: 24 May 2011
Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 922973516]
Publisher Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-
41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Studies in Gender and Sexuality
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t783567629
Transforming Sex: An Interview with Joanne Meyerowitz, Ph.D. Author of
How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States
Vernon A. Rosarioab; Joanne Meyerowitzc
a University of California, b Neuropsychiatric Institute, c Yale University,
To cite this Article Rosario, Vernon A. and Meyerowitz, Joanne(2004) ‘Transforming Sex: An Interview with Joanne
Meyerowitz, Ph.D. Author of How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States’, Studies in Gender
and Sexuality, 5: 4, 473 — 483
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/15240650509349260
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15240650509349260
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access
This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or
systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents
will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses
should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,
actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly
or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t783567629
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15240650509349260
http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access
473 © 2004 The Analytic Press
Joanne Meyerowitz, Ph.D. is Professor of History and American Studies at
Yale University.
Vernon A. Rosario, M.D., Ph.D. is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the
University of California, Los Angeles, Neuropsychiatric Institute and a child
psychiatrist in private practice.
Studies in Gender and Sexuality
5(4):473–483, 2004
Transforming Sex
An Interview with Joanne Meyerowitz, Ph.D.
Author of How Sex Changed: A History
of Transsexuality in the United States
Vernon A. Rosario, M.D., Ph.D., Interviewer
Christine Jorgensen’s widely publicized sex reassignment surger y
in 1952 brought tr anssexua lism to worldwide attention and
fostered medical interest in transsexualism. Joanne Meyerowitz
has traced the history of Jorgensen’s personal odyssey, the medical
history of transsexualism, and the broader impact of transsexualism
on United States culture. In this interview, Meyerowitz discusses
how she came to this project and some of its theoretical and
methodological challenges. Finally, she sets her historical work
in the context of contemporar y gender and transgender politics.
Transsexualism has become a hot topic in gender and queer
theory, especially from the perspective of literary and cultural
studies. Yet there is a dearth of historical studies on the topic.
Joanne Meyerowitz’s comprehensive and balanced monograph
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
B
y
:
[
C
D
L
J
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
A
c
c
o
u
n
t
]
A
t
:
1
9
:
0
0
2
4
M
a
y
2
0
1
1
474 Vernon A. Rosario
f ills a huge gap by covering the medical, cultural, and social
histor y of tr anssexua l ism. T he breadt h of her ana lysis
demonstr ates t he profound impact of tr anssexua lism on
American popular culture and social constructions of gender.
Meyerowitz’s medical histor y of transsexualism begins in
the early 20th century when the Victorian notion of “sexual
inversion” tended to conf late same-sex eroticism, cross-gendered
identification and behavior, cross-dressing, and hermaphroditism
(both anatomical and psychosexual). She examines how the
organic and psychological aspects of sex and gender were seen
a s inextricably intert wined in t he research of such early
sexologists as Magnus Hirschfeld. Therefore, the f irst surgical
and hormonal interventions to alter sex in the early 20th century
were performed as treatments for inversion. While there were
a small number of medical and popular descriptions of such
people in the f irst half of the century, it was the Christine
Jorgensen case that brought transsexualism to worldwide public
attention in 1952.
Jorgensen is the heart of Meyerowitz’s historical narrative.
Jorgensen became the ur-transsexual for doctors, the public,
and other gender-variant people. She was the spur for the
reif ication of a distinct transsexual phenomenology that was
immediately surrounded by outrage in the medical profession.
The legitimacy of the diagnosis and its tripartite treatment
(psychotherapy, hormones, and “sex change” surgery) remains
controversial. Jorgensen’s life story and transformation became
the material for tabloids, movies, songs, and cabaret routines.
Meyerowitz extensively documents Jorgensen’s huge cultural
impact and explores its subtle destabilization of gender norms
in the 1950s. Finally, Jorgensen became the role model for
countless other gender-variant people who finally found a name
for their state. Meyerowitz’s archival sleuthing brings to light
poig nant letters from a variety of transsexuals who found
tremendous comfort and hope in Jorgensen’s saga. Jorgensen
and the emerging transsexual-treatment professionals shaped a
particular model of transsexualism, often forcing transgender
people to lie in order to gain access to care.
A lthough the medical model encouraged transsexuals to
disappear into the fabric of “normal” society, some transgendered
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
B
y
:
[
C
D
L
J
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
A
c
c
o
u
n
t
]
A
t
:
1
9
:
0
0
2
4
M
a
y
2
0
1
1
Interview with Joanne Meyerowitz 475
people fought for g reater public and medica l awareness.
Transgendered health care professionals coaxed the Har r y
B e n j a m i n I nt e r n a t i o n a l G e n d e r D y s p h o r i a A s s o c i a t i o n
( H B I G D A ) to l i b e r a l i z e i t s t re a t m e nt p roto c o l s . O t h e r
transsexuals have fought to protect transsexual sex workers and
get transsexual civil rights under the greater umbrella of lesbian,
gay, and feminist political causes.
Meyerowitz a lso examines the contentious relationship
between transsexuals and the gay male and lesbian feminist
communities, where they have been v iewed with suspicion if
not outright hostility. Transsexua ls have been seen a s an
embar rassment for a mainstream g ay image or as gender
poachers usur ping or demean ing femin in it y. A lt hough
Meyerowitz’s analysis ends with Jorgensen’s death in 1989, her
complex analysis sets the stage for understanding the meteoric
rise of transgenderism in popular culture and United States
academe in the 1990s.
This inter v iew with Meyerowitz was conducted by way of
electronic mail during June 2003.
Vernon Rosario: How Sex Changed represents something of a
departure from your earlier work in social and labor history in
that it tackles a complex and controversial topic in medical
history, yet seamlessly interweaves the social and cultural factors.
Why did you choose transsexualism, and how would you tie this
project to your previous work?
Joanne Meyerowitz: I had been working for several years on
various projects on the history of gender and sexuality in the
1950s United States, and I kept encountering the name of
Christine Jorgensen. She seemed to pop up in virtually every
primary source I consulted, but she was not mentioned at all in
any of the history books on the postwar era. I was immediately
intrigued because her story brought together some key issues
of the 20th century, especially concerning science, medicine,
gender, sexuality, and mass media. As I followed the history of
her celebrity, I eventually became obsessed enough to write a
broader history of transsexuality.
How Sex Changed builds, in a sense, on my f irst monograph,
Women Adrift (1988), which also focused on seemingly marginal
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
B
y
:
[
C
D
L
J
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
A
c
c
o
u
n
t
]
A
t
:
1
9
:
0
0
2
4
M
a
y
2
0
1
1
476 Vernon A. Rosario
subcultural people and attempted to show how they themselves
and the cultur a l representations of them transformed the
mainstream. How Sex Changed also ref lects my more recent work
on the postwar United States. In my edited collection, Not June
Cleaver (1994), I presented a revisionist interpretation, which
challenged the one-sided stereotype of a monolithic, conformist,
white bread, conservative post–World War II culture. In How
Sex Changed, I again try to restore some complexity to the history
of the postwar era.
VR: It is ironic that Jorgensen in many ways chose to adopt
and even overplay the June Cleaver gender stereotypes you have
analyzed.
JM: Like all of us, Jorgensen was a creature of her times. But
she also felt obliged, as she explained later, to present herself
as wholly feminine. She felt the press would skewer her for any
appearance of masculinity. And, as with many other people,
her understanding of gender roles changed in the 1960s and
1970s. But even in the 1950s, Jorgensen never quite adopted
the June Cleaver stereotype. In the 1950s, as today, there were
many versions of socially acceptable femininity. Jorgensen
usua lly avoided domest ic femininit y and chose instead a
glamorous var iant. She presented herself a s an urbane,
sophisticated career woman, along the lines of Eve Arden or
Lauren Bacall.
VR: You dr aw on a ter rif ic variety of pr imar y sources,
particularly medical archival material from the Kinsey Institute,
the University of California, Los Angeles, and California State
University, Northridge. Are there some sources that you missed?
I specif ically wonder about Stanford, UCSF, and Hopkins. How
might your story have been different with these?
JM: I used whatever sources I could f ind. But I restricted most
of my primary research to the era before the 1970s. (I treat the
more recent years only in the epilogue of the book.) For that
reason, I did not pursue the records at Stanford, which did not
become a major center for sex reassignment surgery until the
1970s. (I hope someone else will write that history.) Also, I could
not use the small collection at Johns Hopkins because John
Money, who donated the records to the archive, denied me
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
B
y
:
[
C
D
L
J
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
A
c
c
o
u
n
t
]
A
t
:
1
9
:
0
0
2
4
M
a
y
2
0
1
1
Interview with Joanne Meyerowitz 477
access. (Some of the scientists, including, it seems, Money,
worried about how I would present them in my book.) As it
turns out, I did use some of the John Money papers at the Kinsey
Institute. Since I completed my book, though, Money has
donated more of his collections to the Kinsey Institute, which
means there are now records at the Kinsey Institute that were
not available to me.
VR: Ethnicity does not get much coverage here, nor do low-
income people. Is t his omission a result of t he sources,
discriminatory factors of medical access, or other forces? Was
t here an endur ing ef fect of Jorgensen’s markedly white,
bourgeois model of transsexualism on professional and popular
images of transsexualism?
JM: Like many historians, I f ind it troubling when I cannot
locate the sources to address the kinds of questions I want to
answer. I did find some records that prov ided bits and pieces
of information on issues of race, ethnicity, and class, and I used
them in the book. But some of my best sources on transsexuals
were the letters they wrote to doctors and Jorgensen, and those
letters focused intently on stories of cross-gender identif ication
and only rarely mentioned race, ethnicity, or class.
Still, I have enough ev idence to know that the people I quoted
were not all middle or upper class and white. Jorgensen’s
celebrity did, as you say, place the popular cultural emphasis
on white, glamorous, male-to-female transsexuals, but even in
the popular press there were occasional references to people of
color and to poor and working-class transsexuals. I wish I could
have said more than I d id about cla ss, r ace, and et hn ic
dif ferences among tr anssexua ls, but I am constr ained by
the lack of sources. It would be easier, I think, to explore
such differences in depth in a contemporary ethnographic or
sociological study.
VR: You show that Jorgensen g reatly increased popular
awareness of transsexualism in the 1950s and 60s. But my sense
is that transsexualism was less evident in pop culture in the
1970s and 80s, and then made a resurgence again in the 1990s,
when transgenders were regularly on daytime talk shows and in
popular mov ies, and RuPaul made transgenderism glamorous.
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
B
y
:
[
C
D
L
J
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
A
c
c
o
u
n
t
]
A
t
:
1
9
:
0
0
2
4
M
a
y
2
0
1
1
478 Vernon A. Rosario
And my clinical experience is that transsexuals who came of
age in the 70s and 80s felt more isolated than adolescent
transgenders did in the 1990s and do today. Would you agree?
How would you explain this phenomenon?
JM: Transsexuals in the 1970s and 1980s did have pop-culture
icons, if not Jorgensen, then Renée Richards and a fair number
of lesser known males-to-females (MTFs) and females-to-males
(FTMs) who made it into the news. Stories in the popular culture
could, and did, provoke a sense of self-recognition in some
transgendered readers, but they could not end the ever yday
isolation. I absolutely agree with you that adolescents in the
1990s and today are less isolated than in the past. The Internet,
in particular, has prov ided an amazing forum for national and
international information sharing, conversation, and transgender
and transsexual activism. Virtually any transgendered teenager
with access to a computer can meet, at least in cyberspace, with
other transgendered people.
VR: Your stor y ends in t he 1990s, which is just when
transgenderism became a hot topic in feminist and queer studies.
How would you connect your work to postmodernist debates
about sex and gender?
JM: That is a tough question. My own research is deeply
informed by postmodern debates on sex and gender, and also
by concept s of border c rossing and hybr id it y found in
postmodern (especia lly postcolonia l) stud ies of r ace and
ethnicity. I see my work as part of a larger project in which we
ack n owledge t he soc ia l constr uct ions of t he seemingly
biological. But I also f ind frustrating some of the postmodern
emphasis on the performativity of gender and the f luidity of
gender.
Some postmodern accounts seem to avoid taking subjectivity
seriously, and, because transsexuality is based on a wish, a
yearning, or a desire, it is hard to engage with it unless you can
talk about an “inner” life and listen seriously to how self-
identif ied transsexuals explain it. At one point in my research,
I found it encouraging to discover Lynne Layton’s (1998) pointed
defense of the concept of a persistent but subtly changing “core
identity.” She asks us to attend to “the specif icity, construction,
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
B
y
:
[
C
D
L
J
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
A
c
c
o
u
n
t
]
A
t
:
1
9
:
0
0
2
4
M
a
y
2
0
1
1
Interview with Joanne Meyerowitz 479
and experience of an individual’s inner world and relational
negotiations” (p. 11).
VR: In the last decade there has certainly been an intense
debate among transgender theorists who favor Judith Butler’s
(1990) per formativ ity model and those postulating a “core
identity.” In the period that you focused on, was there much
debate about dif ferent varieties of tr anssexua lism, or did
Jorgensen and the HBIGDA consolidate a monolithic model of
“true” transsexualism, largely inclined toward biological etiology
and treatment?
JM: In the 1950s and 1960s, there was widespread debate,
which is still unresolved, between scientists and doctors who
preferred biological explanations and those who preferred
psychogenic explanations. On the “nature” side of the debate,
scientists looked for hormonal, chromosomal, genetic, and other
physical markers of transsexuality, and on the “nurture” side,
they turned to early childhood experience and various forms of
social learning. The doctors and scientists on the biological side
of the debate were more likely to endorse sex-change surgery,
whi le t heir most voca l opponent s —psychoana lyst s — c a st
tr anssexua lit y a s a menta l illness, a ssociated wit h sexua l
“per version,” and ca lled for psychotherapeutic treatment.
Although it is impossible to take a poll, the evidence strongly
suggests that most self-identif ied transsexuals preferred the
biological explanations. They could choose to side with doctors
who sympathized with their condition and advocated the surgical
treatment they requested, or they could choose to side with
doctors who saw them as mentally ill and refused to endorse
surgery. It wasn’t much of a choice.
VR: How would you bring your analysis up to the present?
What has been the legacy—and perhaps the burden—of 1950s
transsexualism to current feminist, transgender, and queer
politics?
JM: There’s so much I could say here. Let me focus on just a
few lessons I learned while studying the history of transsexuality.
First, feminists need to remember that we (feminists) did not
invent the concept of gender. We were not the f irst to separate
gender and biological sex. In fact, we inherited and reworked a
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
B
y
:
[
C
D
L
J
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
A
c
c
o
u
n
t
]
A
t
:
1
9
:
0
0
2
4
M
a
y
2
0
1
1
480 Vernon A. Rosario
version of gender that was pioneered by scientists who worked
on intersexuality and transsexuality. This history should remind
us that the concept of gender is not inherently feminist.
Second, transsexuals need a history, which I hope my book
begins to supply. Transsexuality is not just a psychological or
medical phenomenon. It emerged as a category at a particular
historical moment, and it was def ined and redef ined in a social
context through complicated interactions among transsexuals,
doctors, reporters, and others.
Third, queer theorists need to recognize the multiplicity on
the sexual margins. We now agree that our current concepts of
“gay” and “lesbian” are not transhistoric. They do not explain
same-sex desire in other cultures and other centuries. We should
also acknowledge that same-sex desire alone does not adequately
cover the historical turf of “queerness.” What was “queer”
changed over time, and we can trace multiple genealogies, not
all of which end up at “gay” and “lesbian.”
VR: Tr a n s ge n d e r i d e nt i t y h a s c e r t a i n ly d i ve r s i f i e d
tremendously in the past decade under the stimulus of feminist
t h e o r y, qu e e r p o l i t i c s , a n d t h e b r o a d e r aw a re n e s s o f
transsexualism. Did you f ind much of a debate from the 1950s
through the 1980s about the varieties of transsexual identity
that would pref igure the current diversif ication?
JM: I didn’t f ind varieties of transsexual identity per se, but I
did f ind a different language for expressing gender variance.
Before t he word tr anssexua l made it s popular debut (in
1949), people who hoped to change sex called themselves
hermaphrodites, morphadites, transvestites, eonists, homosexuals,
and inverts. In the 1960s, in the street culture, male-to-female
transgendered people drew distinctions among hair fairies, drag
queens, cross-dressers, hormone queens, and transsexuals.
So we have a histor y of multiple terms—both medical and
vernacular— for gender variance but without the elaborate (and
theorized) diversity seen today.
VR: Although you focused on the United States, other areas
are signif icantly implicated (Denmark, Morocco, Mexico, the
Netherlands, etc.). What could you add about the impact of other
cultures’ constructions of transsexualism, and the globalization
of American models of treatment and of transsexual identity?
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
B
y
:
[
C
D
L
J
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
A
c
c
o
u
n
t
]
A
t
:
1
9
:
0
0
2
4
M
a
y
2
0
1
1
Interview with Joanne Meyerowitz 481
JM: In the book, I try to trace out the transnational circulations
that informed the history of transsexuality in the United States.
These circulations involved European science, third-world
medical markets, and transsexuals themselves who crossed
national borders in search of medical help. But cross-gender
identification and transsexuality have different histories in India,
Thailand, Brazil, England, Germany, and elsewhere, and I don’t
want to make the imperialist claim that my understanding of
United States histor y can explain it all. There are some excellent
contemporary studies of the hijra in India, for example, that
suggest a substantially different histor y, which has not been
erased by the global spread of Western medical models (Nanda,
1990; Cohen, 1995).
VR: Do you think that the “Jorgensen” model of transsexualism
has nonetheless come to predominate in developed countries,
both through its medicalization and widespread adoption by
transsexuals themselves?
JM: Western medical models of “sex reassignment surgery”
have def initely spread beyond their origins in Europe and North
America. I am not sure they predominate everywhere, but they
are clearly ev ident in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
(Just last week, I read a newspaper article on a South Korean
doctor who specializes in sex reassignment surgery.) Beyond
that, I hesitate to say. I study United States history, and I do not
want to claim any special expertise on the rest of the world.
VR: You touch on the different community politics of FTMs
and MTFs. Recently with the work of Henry Rubin (2003), Judith
Halberstam (1998), and Jay Prosser (1998), we have seen a much
more developed ethnography and theorization of FTM’s, butch
lesbians, and masculine women. Would you care to comment
on the different ways in which FTMs and MTFs have had a
cultural and social impact on the United States?
JM: In the recent f lowering of transgender and queer studies,
there may be less emphasis on femininity than on masculinity.
But in the popular culture, MTFs (and their femininity) have
gotten considerably more attention than F TMs (and their
masculinity), at least in the last half century. This was not always
the case. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the popular
press was greatly interested in “passing women,” that is, people
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
B
y
:
[
C
D
L
J
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
A
c
c
o
u
n
t
]
A
t
:
1
9
:
0
0
2
4
M
a
y
2
0
1
1
482 Vernon A. Rosario
who were born and reared as girls but who lived in adulthood
as men. And in the 1930s popular culture there was substantial
attention to a handful of female athletes (mostly in Europe) who
underwent unspecif ied surgery and then went on to live as men.
After World War II and especially after the Christine Jorgensen
media frenzy, MTFs predominated in the popular culture. It
was only at the end of the 20th century that substantial numbers
of FTMs began to appear more frequently in the press and in
transsexual activist circles. I can offer a dozen or so possible
explanations for these shifts, but I am still not conv inced that I
can explain them adequately.
VR: What are your connections to the transgender community,
and d id you have any g r a ssroot s polit ica l commitment s
underlying the work?
JM: I owe a huge debt to the many transgendered people,
especially activists, who went out of their way to talk to me, to
encourage me in my work, and to share sources and suggest
research leads. I see myself as an a lly and friend of the
tr ansgender movement, and I have a not so underlying
commitment to the civil rights of transsexuals (and everyone
else). Those who medicalize (and often pathologize) transsexuals
tend to miss what is for me the heart of the political issue: no
one should be stigmatized, f ired from a job, evicted from a
home, assaulted on the streets, mistreated by police, prevented
from marrying, denied custody of children, or refused medical
treatment because of his or her expression of gender variance.
These are basic issues of civil rights.
REFERENCES
Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York: Routledge.
Cohen, L. (1995), The pleasure of castration: The postoperative status
of hijras, jankhas, and academics. In: Sexual Nature, Sexual Culture,
ed. P. Abramson & S. Pinkerton. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, pp. 276–304.
Feinberg, L. (1996), Transgender Warriors: Making Histor y from Joan of
Arc to RuPaul. Boston: Beacon Press.
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
B
y
:
[
C
D
L
J
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
A
c
c
o
u
n
t
]
A
t
:
1
9
:
0
0
2
4
M
a
y
2
0
1
1
Interview with Joanne Meyerowitz 483
Halberstam, J. (1998), Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Hausman, B. (1995), Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the
Idea of Gender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Layton, L. (1998), Who’s That Girl? Who’s That Boy? Clinical Practice
Meets Postmodern Gender Theor y. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press,
2004.
Meyerowitz, J. (1988), Women Adrift: Independent Wage Ear ners in
Chicago, 1880–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(1994), Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America.
1945–1960. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Nanda, S. (1990), Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India. Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth.
Prosser, J. (1998), Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Rubin, H. (2003), Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment Among
Transsexual Men. Nashv ille, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
1812 Butter Avenue, #3
Los Angeles, CA 90025
vrosario@post.har vard.edu
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d
B
y
:
[
C
D
L
J
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
A
c
c
o
u
n
t
]
A
t
:
1
9
:
0
0
2
4
M
a
y
2
0
1
1
Womenand LGBTQ People Under Attack:
An Intersectional Case Study for Our Times
Women and LGBTQ people were and continue to be a
primary target of harassment, abuse, and physical assault;
women and LGBTQ people were and continue to be locked
out of many
professions.
By Warren Blumenfeld
Conservative Evangelical Christians and other anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ zealots are
downright giddy and literally ecstatic over the possibility of finally receiving some of the
promised dividends for selling their souls to the Devil in sacrificing all their “deeply held
religious beliefs” by standing with Donald Trump throughout his unambiguously morally
reprehensible actions and policy directives.
They stood with him from his destructive and epithet-laden tweets to his promise of constructing
a wall on our southern border that “Mexico will pay for,” to the Access Hollywood tape, to
revelations of his payoffs to quiet a porn star, to separating babies and young children from their
parents and putting them in cages, to his involvement in trying to overturn a legal democratic
election.
These did this all with the hoped-for remuneration of Trump packing the judicial branch with
decidedly right-wing judges and “justices.”
https://goodmenproject.com/author/warren-blumenfeld/
The wall with Mexico was merely one of the many structures Trump promised to build. When he
asserted during the campaign to punish women who have abortions and their doctors who
perform them, he was figuratively walling-off women from their reproductive rights.
By committing to reproduce the Supreme Court with an untra-conservative majority and
promising to reverse both Roe v. Wade and marriage equality, he gave social conservatives the
vision of seeing a gigantic concrete and barbed-wire structure suspended high into the Heavens
separating women and LGBTQ people from their bodies and from their civil rights, and,
certainly, from their humanity.
Though I rarely offer comparisons between events transpiring before and during the ascension to
power of the German Third Reich with resemblances to contemporary United States — since to
do so could result in trivializing one of the most horrific episodes in human history —
nonetheless, I am haunted by certain parallels that demand expression.
I want, therefore, to highlight, in particular, the parallels I find in Nazi portrayals and
understandings of sex, sexuality, gender, and gender expression: a divisive and brutal program
that was anti-feminist, anti-women’s equality, anti-women’s reproductive freedoms (anti-family
planning, anti-contraception, anti-abortion), anti-lesbian, anti-gay, anti-bisexual, anti-
transgender, anti-gender nonconforming, anti-sexuality education in schools.
On Women
Alfred Rosenberg, one of the Nazi’s chief ideologues, directed his misogynist outrage against
women:
“The emancipation of women from the women’s emancipation movement is the first demand of
a female generation trying to rescue nation and race, the eternally unconscious, the foundation of
all civilization, from decline…. A woman should have every opportunity to realize her potential,
but one thing must be made clear: Only a man must be and remain judge, soldier, and politician.”
Englebert Huber, a Nazi propagandist, dictated the “proper” place of women in the Third Reich,
figuratively (and literally as well) beneath men:
“In the ideology of National Socialism, there is no room for the political woman….[Our]
movement places woman in her natural sphere of the family and stresses her duties as wife and
mother. The political, that post-war creature, who rarely ‘cut a good figure’ in parliamentary
debates, represents the denigration of women. The German uprising is a male phenomenon.”
The Nazis instituted Paragraph 218 of the German Penal Code to outlaw abortions and establish
a national file on women who had undergone and doctors who had performed abortions.
On “Indecency”
In their increasing obsession with “purifying” the social sphere, Nazi leadership enacted the
“Decree for Combating Public Indecency,” which included such provisions as working to
eliminate prostitution; closing all bars and clubs that “are misused for the furtherance of public
indecency” including “public houses solely or mainly frequented by persons engaging in
unnatural sex acts” (a.k.a. homosexuals); closing kiosks and magazine stands in libraries and
bookshops “whether because they include nude illustrations or because of their title or contents,
are liable to produce erotic effects in the beholder.”
Though Pope Pius XII maintained a position of neutrality and rarely spoke out against the
atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime, of which he was roundly criticized in some circles, The
Vatican, on April 3, 1933, praised the Reich on this policy:
“The Vatican welcomes the struggle of National Germany against obscene material. The strong
measures that Prussia’s Minister of the Interior Göring has ordered for the combating of obscene
writings and pictures…have received serious attention in Vatican circles. It will be recalled that
Pius XII, in his recent encyclicals, has repeatedly and vigorously stressed that defensive actions
against obscene material are of fundamental importance for the bodily and spiritual health of
family and nation, and he most warmly welcomes the type and manner…with which this struggle
has been undertaken in the new Germany.”
On Homosexuality
The Nazis acted on and eventually extended Paragraph 175, the section of the German Penal
Code dating back to 1871 with the unification of Germany:
“Unnatural vice committed by two persons of the male sex or by people with animals is to be
punished by imprisonment; the verdict may also include the loss of civil rights.”
Nazi ideology rested on the assessment that homosexual (males) lowered the German birth rate;
they endangered, recruited, enticed, and corrupted youth; that a possible homosexual epidemic
could spread; that homosexuals are “potential oppositionists” and enemies of respectable society;
and that sexual relations between people of the same sex impairs their “sense of shame” and
undermines morality, which inevitably will bring about the “decline of social community.”
Even before taking power, appearing in their daily newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter 14 May
1928, the Nazi party argued:
“Anyone who thinks of homosexual love is our enemy. We reject anything which emasculates
our people and makes it a plaything for our enemies, for we know that life is a fight, and it is
madness to think that men will ever embrace fraternally. Natural history teaches us the opposite.
Might makes right. The strong will always win over the weak. Let us see to it that we once again
become the strong. But this we can achieve only in one way — the German people must once
again learn how to exercise discipline. We, therefore, reject any sexual deviation, particularly
between man and man, because it robs us of the last possibility of freeing our people from the
slave-chains in which it is now forced to toil.”
While Nazi ideology and practice rejected lesbianism as well, it did not criminalize same sex
sexuality between women, as they had in Germany’s Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code, because
they believed that so-called “Aryan” lesbians could produce children for the “New Germany.”
On the other hand, Heinrich Himmler, Gestapo head and chief architect of the Reich’s anti-
homosexual campaign, justified his actions by arguing that male homosexuals were “like
women” and therefore, could not fight in any German war effort. Subsequently, he conducted
surveillance operations on an estimated 90,000 suspected homosexuals, arrested approximately
50,000, and transported somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 to several concentration camps
throughout the Nazi dominion. Very few survived.
Upon coming to power in 1933, under their Youth Leader, Baldur von Shirach, the Nazis took
over all youth groups converting them into Hitler Youth groups. One action taken following
consolidation was to eliminate all signs of “homosexual corrosion,” because it allegedly posed a
threat to state control by “fostering political conspiracies.”
Nazi leaders purged all boys suspected of “homosexual tendencies.” They tried and convicted an
estimated 6,000 youth under Paragraph 175 between 1933 and 1943.
Hitler also proposed eliminating all sexuality education from the German school system and
encouraged parents to take on the primary responsibilities for sexuality instruction within the
home.
While the Catholic Church spoke out then and today against same-sex sexuality, their own
policies actually boomeranged and hit them in their own faces. Used primarily to silence any
potential resistance from the Church, the Nazis conducted their so-called “Cloister Trials” in
which they dissolved Catholic youth fraternities, arrested and incarcerated a large number of
priests, religious brothers, and Catholic laity in prisons and concentration camps accusing them
of being “threats to the state” on fabricated charges of homosexuality.
For example, prison guards at Dachau concentration camp murdered Catholic priest, Fr. Alois
Abdritzki, one of several fatalities from the “Cloister Trials.”
The Patriarchal Christian White Supremacist Connecting Strand
The Nazi regime connected multiple forms of oppression when Heinrich Himmler reorganized
the Reich Criminal Police Bureau to centralize operations by creating a national file on male
homosexuals, transgender people, what they referred to as “wage abortionists” (women and their
doctors), and to monitor the production and ban the use of contraceptives to “Aryan” women.
Within this Bureau, they established The Reich Office for Combatting Homosexuality and
Abortion, which in the single year of 1938 alone, conducted 28,366 arrests for abortion, and 28,
882 arrests of male homosexuals.
The common thread running through Nazi ideology regarding gender, gender expression, and
sexuality was their intense campaign to control individuals’ bodies and the bodies of members of
entire communities in the attempt to control their minds.
Women and LGBTQ people were and continue to be a primary target of harassment, abuse, and
physical assault; women and LGBTQ people were and continue to be locked out of many
professions.
In other words, women and LGBTQ people have been constructed as second-class and even
third-class citizens not merely in Nazi Germany, but today as the current political climate
indicates.
But women and LGBTQ are certainly not victims because through it all, women and LGBTQ
people as individuals and as groups have resisted and challenged the inequities and have pushed
back against patriarchal Christian white supremacist constraints.
Within this patriarchal Christian white supremacist system of male domination, cisgender
Christian heterosexual male bodies matter more, while “othered” bodies matter less.
These “othered” bodies include female and intersex bodies, and bodies that violate the “rules”
for the reproduction and maintenance of the dominant patriarchal Christian white supremacist
system, such as trans, gender non-conforming, and gay, lesbian, and bisexual bodies, bodies with
disabilities, non-Christian bodies, and many others.
In addition, within many Western societies, racialized non-European-heritage bodies are
regarded also as abject bodies — bodies that, to use Judith Butler’s phraseology, do not matter,
or, at least, do not matter as much as “white” bodies.
Butler reminds us that the term “abjection” is taken from the Latin, ab-jicere, meaning to cast
off, away, or out. On a social level, abjection designates a degraded, stigmatized, or cast out
status. In psychoanalytic parlance, this is the notion of Verwerfung (foreclosure).
Butler states that “we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right,” and similarly
punish those who fail to do their “race” right. Doing one’s “race” right often depends on doing
one’s socioeconomic class right. The regulatory regimes of “sex,” “sexuality,” “gender,”
“ability,” “race,” and “class” are inimically connected, and these connections are socially
maintained.
Today, the Supreme Court of the United States is coming for the rights of pregnant people to
control their bodies. Tomorrow, they will come for marriage equality. And the dominoes will
continue to fall by the wayside unless we as a nation counter the growing tide of patriarchal
Christian white supremacy, this fascism, this cancer that has metastasized.
216
CALLING ALL RESTROOM REVOLUTIONARIES!
Simone Chess, Alison Kafer, Jessi Quizar,
and Mattie Udora Richardson
Calling all Restroom Revolutionaries:
People In Search of Safe and Accessible
Restrooms (PISSAR) needs you! We are a
coalition of queer, genderqueer, and disabled
people working toward greater awareness of
the need for safe and accessible bathrooms
on campus and in the dorms
.
Be a restroom
revolutionary! Join PISSAR as we develop a
checklist for genderqueer safe spaces and cre-
ate teams to map safe and accessible bathrooms
around campus.1
E
veryone needs to use bathrooms, but only some of us have to enter
into complicated political and architectural negotiations in order
to use them. The fact is, bathrooms are easier to access for some of
us than for others, and the people who never think about where and how
they can pee have a lot of control over how using restrooms feels for the
rest of us. What do we need from bathrooms? What elements are neces-
sary to make a bathroom functional for everyone? To make it safe? To
make it a private and respectful space? Whose bodies are excluded from
the typical restroom? More important, what kind of bodies are assumed in
the design of these bathrooms? Who has the privilege (we call it pee-privilege)
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 216 3/12/08 9:45:10 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
217
SIMONE CHESS, ALISON KAFER, JESSI QUIZAR, AND MATTIE UDORA RICHARDSON
of never needing to think about these issues, of always knowing that any
given bathroom will meet one’s needs? Everyone needs to use the bath-
room. But not all of us can.
And that’s where People in Search of Safe and Accessible Restrooms
(PISSAR) comes in. PISSAR, a coalition of UC-Santa Barbara undergrads,
grad students, staff, and community members, recognizes that bathrooms
are not always accessible for people with disabilities, or safe for people
who transgress gender norms. PISSAR was formed at the 2003 University
of California Student of Color Conference, held at UC-Santa Barbara.
During the lunch break on the second day of the conference, meetings
for the disability caucus and the transgender caucus were scheduled in
adjacent rooms. When only a few people showed up for both meetings, we
decided to hold a joint session. One of the members of the disability caucus
mentioned plans to assess bathroom accessibility on the campus, wonder-
ing if there was a similar interest in mapping gender-neutral bathrooms.
Everyone in the room suddenly began talking about the possibilities of a
genderqueer/disability coalition, and PISSAR was born.
For those of us whose appearance or identity does not quite match
the “man” or “woman” signs on the door, bathrooms can be the sites of
violence and harassment, making it very difficult for us to use them safely
or comfortably. Similarly, PISSAR acknowledges that, although most
buildings are required by the Americans with Disabilities Act to provide
accessible bathrooms, some restrooms are more compliant than others and
accessible bathrooms can often be hard to find. PISSAR’s mission, then, is
threefold: 1) to raise awareness about what safe and accessible bathrooms
are and why they are necessary; 2) to map and verify existing accessible
and/or gender-neutral bathrooms on the campus; and 3) to advocate for
additional bathrooms. We eventually hope to have both web-based and
printed maps of all the bathrooms on campus, with each facility coded
as to its accessibility and gender-safety.2 Beyond this initial campaign,
PISSAR plans to advocate for the construction or conversion of additional
safe and accessible bathrooms on campus. To that end, one of our long-
term goals is to push for more gender-neutral bathrooms and showers in
the dormitories, and to investigate the feasibility of multistall gender-neu-
tral bathrooms across the campus as a whole.
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 217 3/12/08 9:45:10 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
CALLING ALL RESTROOM REVOLUTIONARIES!
218
As it turned out, we weren’t the only restroom revolutionaries on
campus. We soon joined forces with a student-run initiative to stock all
campus tampon and pad machines, a group called, appropriately enough,
Aunt Flo and the Plug Patrol. Aunt Flo’s goal is to use funds garnered
from the sale of tampons and pads in campus bathroom dispensers
(blood money, if you will) to support student organizations in a time of
tremendous budget cuts. We liked their no-euphemism approach to the
bathroom and the body and joined their effort to make the campus not
only a safer and more accessible place to pee but also to bleed.3 We also
expanded our focus to include issues of childcare, inspired in part by
one of our members’ experiences as a young mom on campus. PISSAR
decided to examine whether campus bathrooms featured changing tables,
a move that increased our intersectional analysis of bathroom access and
politics.
By specifically including the work of Aunt Flo and concerns about
childcare access, PISSAR challenges many of the assumptions that are
made about genderqueer and disabled bodies. Why shouldn’t every gen-
der-neutral restroom have a tampon/pad machine? Putting tampon/pad
machines only in women’s rooms, and mounting them high on the wall,
restricts the right to menstruate conveniently to those with certain bodies.
It suggests that the right to tampons and pads is reserved for people who
use gender-specific women’s rooms and can reach a lever hanging five
feet from the ground. This practice reinscribes ideas about disabled bodies
being somehow dysfunctional and asexual (as in, “People in wheelchairs
get their periods too?”) and perpetuates the idea that genderqueer folks
are inherently unbodied (as in, “Only real women need tampons, and you
don’t look like a real woman”).
So how exactly does PISSAR work? Picture a team of people taking
over a bathroom near you. They’re wearing bright yellow T-shirts stenciled
with the phrase “free 2 pee” on the back. They’re wearing gloves. They’re
wielding measuring tape and clipboards, and they’re looking very disap-
pointed in the height of your toilet. What you’ve seen is PISSAR in action.
We call this a PISSAR patrol, and it’s our way of getting the information
we need in an unapologetically public way. We gather this information
with the help of the PISSAR checklist, a form featuring questions about
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 218 3/12/08 9:45:10 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
219
SIMONE CHESS, ALISON KAFER, JESSI QUIZAR, AND MATTIE UDORA RICHARDSON
everything from the height of a tampon dispenser to the signs on the door,
from the number of grab bars beside the toilet to the presence of a diaper-
changing table.
From the information garnered in the PISSAR patrols, we are in the
process of making a map that will assess the safety and accessibility of all the
bathrooms on campus. The map is vital to our project because it offers gen-
derqueer and disabled people a survey of all the restrooms on campus so that
they can find what they need without the stigma and frustration of telling
a possibly uninformed administrator the details of their peeing needs. For
people who have never had to think about bathrooms, the map’s detailed
information suggests the ways in which our everyday bathrooms are restric-
tive and dangerous. Thus the map also functions as a consciousness-raising
tool, educating users about the need for safe and accessible restrooms.
PISSAR patrols aren’t simply about getting information. They’re also
a way to keep our bodies involved in our project. PISSAR is, after all, a
project about bodies: about bodily needs, about the size and shape of our
bodies, and about our bodily presentation. The very nature of our bath-
room needs necessitates this attention to the body. So it makes sense that
when we tried to theorize about what a safe, respectful restroom might
look like, we realized we needed to meet in the bathroom. Because the
bathroom is our site, and the body in search of a bathroom is our moti-
vation, we recognized early on the need to be concerned with body and
theory together. PISSAR’s work is an attempt at embodying theory, at
theorizing from the body.
We do this work partly through our name. The name PISSAR avoids
euphemism and gets right down to business. We are here to talk about
peeing and shitting, and what people need in order to do these things with
comfort and dignity. Both PISSAR’s name and the goals of the group
come down to one unavoidable fact: When you’ve got to go, you’ve got
to go. The name endeavors both to avoid abstraction and to highlight the
embodied experiences that make bathroom accessibility so pressing when
one needs to pee. PISSAR’s name isn’t an accident, it’s a tool. We use our
funny name to demand attention to our basic and critical needs. We warn
with our name: We’re about to talk about something “crude.” We take it
seriously—you should, too.
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 219 3/12/08 9:45:10 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
CALLING ALL RESTROOM REVOLUTIONARIES!
220
Our concern with body/theory is also evident in our insistence that
bathroom accessibility is an important issue for a lot of different people.
Everyone should be able to find a bathroom that conforms to the needs
of their body. Everyone should be able to use a restroom without being
accused of being in the “wrong” place. Everyone should have access to
tampon dispensers and facilities for changing diapers, regardless of gen-
der or ability. Homeless folks should have access to clean restrooms free
of harassment.4 Bathroom activism is, from the outset, a multi-identity
endeavor. It has the potential to bring together feminists, transfolks,
people with disabilities, single parents, and a variety of other people whose
bathroom needs frequently go unmet. It creates a much needed space for
those of us whose identities are more complicated than can be encom-
passed in a single-issue movement. Viewed in this light, restroom activism
is an ideal platform from which to launch broader coalition work. In
PISSAR, we tend to think about “queerness” as encompassing more than
just sexual orientation; it includes queer bodies, queer politics, and queer
coalitions.
ON BODIES IN BATHROOMS: PISSAR POLITICS
There is tremendous social pressure to avoid talking about bodies in
bathrooms. First, such talk is not considered polite. We’re trained from
an early age not to talk publicly about what happens in the bathroom; we
don’t even have language for what happens in there; many of us still rely
on the euphemisms our parents used when we were three. Second, the
topic is not appropriately academic. For the most part, scholars do not
tend to theorize about bathrooms and what bodies do in them.5 Bathrooms
are somehow assumed to be free of the same institutional power dynamics
that impact and shape the rest of our lives. Finally, bathroom talk is con-
sidered politically dangerous, or at least irrelevant, because of a fear that
it will be seen as a trivial issue, prompting the mainstream culture to not
take us seriously. Political activism is supposed to be about ideas, the mind,
and larger social movements, not about who pees where.
PISSAR is tired of pretending that these polite, academic, political bod-
ies don’t have needs. We resist the silencing from mainstream communities
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 220 3/12/08 9:45:10 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
221
SIMONE CHESS, ALISON KAFER, JESSI QUIZAR, AND MATTIE UDORA RICHARDSON
that want to ignore our queerness and our disability, while simultaneously
challenging the theories that want to pull us away from the toilet seat. We
refuse to accept a narrow conception of “queer” that denies the complexi-
ties of our bodies.
Keeping this focus on our particular bodies is no easy task. Mainstream
culture, with its cycles of acceptance and disapproval of homosexuals (and
we use this rather limited term intentionally), has always presented a rather
narrow view of queer life. In order to be portrayed in the mainstream
media, for example, queers must either fit into acceptable stereotypes of
gay appearance and behavior, or be visibly indistinguishable from het-
erosexuals. These positions are highly precarious and strictly patrolled:
Mainstream gay characters can only exhibit limited amounts of “gayness,”
a restriction epitomized in the lack of any sexual contact, even kissing,
between gay characters. Those few gay characters that do exist in the
mainstream media obey very strict norms of appearance. Unfortunately,
this stance is becoming increasingly pervasive within mainstream gay cul-
ture as well. One need only glance at the covers of magazines such as the
Advocate to discover that members of the gay community are supposed to
be young, thin, white, nondisabled, and not genderqueer. In fact, main-
stream gay media has often contributed to pressure on the gay community,
particularly gay men, to be hyper-able and gender conforming. Images of
big, beefy, muscle-bound bodies decorate the ads in gay publications and
the words “no fats or fems” frequently appear in gay personal ads. We
believe that this disavowal of queers that are too queer—those of us who
are trans-identified, genderqueer, too poor to afford the latest fashions,
disabled, fat, in-your-face political—is the result of internalized shame.
The gay community has internalized the larger culture’s homophobia
and transphobia, which has made us ashamed of our visible queerness,
especially any signs of genderqueerness. We have internalized the larger
culture’s ableism, which has made us ashamed of our disabilities and ill-
nesses. This shame has marginalized many trans and genderqueer folks
and many people with disabilities, casting them out of the mainstream
gay community. Internalized self-hatred, a distancing from the bodies of
those who do not fit the idealized norms, an insistence on assimilation: All
of these lead to and result from a sense of shame in our bodies—a shame
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 221 3/12/08 9:45:10 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
CALLING ALL RESTROOM REVOLUTIONARIES!
222
that pervades our conversations, our relationships, and our politics. This
tendency to move away from the body, to drop the experiences of bodies
out of conversations and politics, is evident in many queer organizations.6
We lack the language to say what needs to be said; we don’t have the tools
to carry on this level of conversation.
Because we lack this language, because of our internalized self-hatred
and shame in our bodies, the politics of the bathroom—a potentially
transgressive and liminal site—have not been given priority within the
mainstream gay rights movement. This inattention has particularly strong
real-life effects on disabled and genderqueer folks. The need for a safe,
dignified, usable place to pee is a vital, but too seldom addressed, issue. It
has gone unaddressed because it is so much about the body, particularly
the shameful parts and shameful acts of the body. This shame, and the
resulting silence, is familiar to many in the disability community. In striv-
ing to assimilate to nondisabled norms, many of us gloss over the need
for the assistance some of us have in using the bathroom. We are embar-
rassed to admit that we might need tubes or catheters, leg bags or personal
assistants—or that some of us may not use the bathroom at all, preferring
bedpans or other alternatives. Particularly in mixed company (that is, in
the presence of nondisabled folks), we are reluctant to talk about the odd
ways we piss and shit. But this reticence has hindered our bathroom poli-
tics, often making it difficult for us to demand bathrooms that meet all of
our needs.
Queer bathroom politics have been similarly affected by this kind of
ashamed reticence. Our reluctance to talk about bathrooms and bodies
and our sense that discussions about pissing and shitting are shameful
colors our responses to the potential violence facing many genderqueer
people in the bathroom. Such acts aren’t to be discussed in polite com-
pany because they occur in and around the bathroom, itself a taboo topic;
because of homophobia and transphobia, these acts aren’t seen as worthy
of conversation because “those kinds of people” don’t really matter; and
because they conjure thoughts about public sex in bathrooms.
Indeed, public sex has often been the target of surveillance, and those
implicated in such practices have been publicly humiliated, arrested, and
abused. In 1998, several local news organizations around the country
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 222 3/12/08 9:45:10 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
223
SIMONE CHESS, ALISON KAFER, JESSI QUIZAR, AND MATTIE UDORA RICHARDSON
sent hidden cameras into public restrooms to film men engaged in sexual
activities; these tapes were often turned over to local authorities, many of
whom used them as the basis for sting operations. A station in San Diego,
for example, justified its use of this stealth tactic in campus restrooms at
San Diego State University by stressing the need to protect students from
these deviant activities. The prevalence of these kinds of news stories
and the presence of surveillance equipment in campus restrooms serve
to police sexual behavior: Threats of public exposure and humiliation are
used to enforce “normative” sexuality. At the University of California in
Berkeley, this policing was taken a step further when some bathrooms
on campus were locked in an effort to eliminate public sex. Only certain
people were given keys to these restrooms, literally locking out some bod-
ies and behaviors. These practices, privatizing public spaces and placing
them under surveillance, demarcate the boundaries of appropriate and
permissible behavior, thereby policing both bodies and bathrooms.
This surveillance of deviant bodies and practices in bathrooms all too
often takes the form of brutal physical violence. Genderqueer and trans-
identified folks have been attacked in public restrooms simply because
their appearance threatens gender norms and expectations. This issue of
bathroom violence is consistently delegitimized in both queer and non-
queer spaces as not important or sexy enough to be a “real” issue. In many
gay activist circles, there seems to be a pervasive sentiment that no one
(read: no straight people) will take us seriously if we start talking about
bathrooms. Additionally, there is tremendous cultural shame around the
violence itself—either you should have been able to protect yourself or you
must have deserved it or both.
In the genderqueer community we know how often our bodies cause
anxiety and violence. We have been systematically and institutionally
discouraged from talking about that violence or from linking it to these
bodies. When a woman in our local community was attacked by strang-
ers because of her androgynous appearance, local police insisted that she
was injured in a “lesbian brawl.” It was easier for them to talk about (and
assume) her sexuality than to admit that it was her queer body, her race,
and her confusing gender that led to both her original attack and the sub-
sequent neglect of local law enforcement, who failed to follow protocol
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 223 3/12/08 9:45:10 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
CALLING ALL RESTROOM REVOLUTIONARIES!
224
in her case. Internalized shame about her body led our friend to take on
responsibility for her attack, to allow the police to mistreat her and make
false assumptions, and to feel that she had no right to talk about how her
attack was based in her refusal of racial, sexual, and gender norms. She
was ashamed to talk about her body, about the violence done to it, and
about how its needs were ignored. The community felt the impact of our
own shame. We stood beside her, outwardly supportive, but unable to
gather enough energy to mobilize a collective demand that her story be
heard and that the police investigate the crime.
Sadly, as this story illustrates, our shame isn’t always directed out-
ward, toward the society and institutions that helped create it. It often
drives wedges between communities that might otherwise work together.
And it is precisely this kind of embodied shame—the shame that we feel
in our bodies and the shame that arises out of the experience and appear-
ance of our bodies—that drives the divisions between queer and disability
communities. PISSAR initially had trouble bridging this gap, in that
some of our straight disabled members worried about the political (read:
queer) implications of our bathroom-mapping work. Indeed, many queer
disability activists and scholars have drawn attention to the ableism that
thrives within queer communities, and the homophobia and heterocen-
trism that reside within disability circles.
Due to the fact that disabled people are discriminated against on the
basis of our disabilities, some of us may want to assert our “normalcy” in
other aspects of our lives, including our sex lives. Although this impulse
is understandable in a culture that constantly pathologizes our sexuality,
this assertion in some cases takes on a homophobic/transphobic quality.
Heterosexuals with disabilities may thus distance themselves from dis-
abled queers and transfolk in an attempt to facilitate their assimilation
into an ableist and heterocentric culture. Similarly, because of the ways in
which queer desires, identities, and practices have been pathologized, cast
as unnatural, abnormal, and most importantly, “sick,” some LBGTIQ-
identified people may want to distance themselves from disabled people in
an effort to assert their own normalcy and health. As a result, queers and
people with disabilities have been set up by our own communities as dia-
metrically opposed, a move that has been particularly problematic—and
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 224 3/12/08 9:45:11 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
225
SIMONE CHESS, ALISON KAFER, JESSI QUIZAR, AND MATTIE UDORA RICHARDSON
painful—for queers with disabilities. For all of us balancing multiple
identities, this kind of thinking enacts a dissection, first separating us from
the realities of our bodies through shame and a lack of language, then fur-
ther cutting apart our identities into separate and distant selves.
We suggest, however, that bathroom politics can potentially lift us
out of this polarization. Advocating for bathroom access and repeatedly
talking openly about people’s need for a safe space to pee helps us break
through some of this embodied shame and recognize our common needs.
It is through the process of going on PISSAR patrol while wearing bright
T-shirts and reporting on our findings in loud voices that we begin to
move beyond a shamed silence.
Our attention to the body (the pissing and shitting body) and our insis-
tence that we talk about the specificities of people’s embodied experiences
with humor rather than shame challenges the normalizing drive found
within both queer and disability communities. Rather than mask our dif-
ferences or bolster our own claims to “normalcy” by marginalizing others
as shameful and embarrassing, we insist on a coalition that attempts to
embrace all of our different needs. PISSAR is built around queerness, but
a queer queerness, a queerness that encompasses both sexually and medi-
cally queer bodies, that embraces a diversity of appearances and disabilities
and needs. The PISSAR checklist—a manifesto of sorts—models queer
coalition-building by incorporating disability, genderqueer, childcare,
and menstruation issues into one document, refusing single-issue analysis.
It entails a refusal to assimilate to the phantasm of the “normal” body by
explicitly incorporating the allegedly abnormal, the freakish, the queer.
The body evoked in the checklist is a real body, a menstruating body, a
body that pees and shits, a body that may not match its gender identity,
a body subjected too often to violence and ridicule, a body that may have
parts missing or parts that don’t function “properly,” a body that might
require assistance. Bathroom politics and organizations such as PISSAR
resist the normalization of “queer,” striving to acknowledge and embrace
all these different bodies, desires, and needs that are too often ignored,
obscured, or denied out of shame and internalized self-hatred.
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 225 3/12/08 9:45:11 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
CALLING ALL RESTROOM REVOLUTIONARIES!
226
RAISING CONSCIOUSNESS AND DOING THEORY ON THE
PISSAR PATROL
The disability access-related activities required by the checklist, such as
measuring door widths, counting the number of grab bars, and checking for
visual and auditory fire alarms, train PISSAR patrol members in different
people’s needs, a training that extends far beyond concepts of “tolerance”
and “acceptance.” In stark contrast to “disability awareness” events that
blindfold sighted people so that they can “feel what it is like to be blind”
or place people without mobility impairments in wheelchairs so they can
“appreciate the difficulties faced by chair users,” the PISSAR patrols turn
nondisabled people’s attention toward the social barriers confronting people
with disabilities. Rather than focusing on the alleged failures and hard-
ships of disabled bodies—an inability to see, an inability to walk—PISSAR
focuses on the failures and omissions of the built environment—a
too-narrow door, a too-high dispenser. The physical realities of these archi-
tectural failures emphasize the arbitrary construct of the “normal” body and
its needs, and highlight the ability of a disabled body to “function” just fine,
if the space would only allow for it. This switch in focus from the inability
of the body to the inaccessibility of the space makes room for activism and
change in ways that “awareness exercises” may not.
Although disability “awareness” events are touted as ways to make
nondisabled people recognize the need for access, we have serious doubts
about their political efficacy and appropriateness. Sitting in a wheelchair
for a day, let alone an hour, is not going to give someone a full under-
standing of the complexities and nuances of chair-users’ lives. We think
such exercises all too often reinforce ableist assumptions about the “diffi-
culty” of living with a disability, perpetuating the notion of disability as a
regrettable tragedy. They reduce the lives of people in wheelchairs to the
wheelchair itself, distancing the bodies of chair-users from those without
mobility disabilities. PISSAR, by virtue of its coalitional politics, focuses
attention on the ways that a whole variety of bodies use restrooms and
the architectural and attitudinal barriers that hinder their use or render it
potentially dangerous.
The educational experience of being in the bathroom on PISSAR patrol,
of imagining what different kinds of bodies might need to fully utilize a
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 226 3/12/08 9:45:11 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
227
SIMONE CHESS, ALISON KAFER, JESSI QUIZAR, AND MATTIE UDORA RICHARDSON
space, extends beyond the issue of disability access. Just as measuring the
width of doors enables nondisabled people to recognize the inaccessibility
of the built environment, going on bathroom patrol facilitates an awareness
among non-trans and non-genderqueer folk of the safety issues facing gen-
derqueer and trans people. As we began instituting our bathroom patrols,
we had to make a variety of decisions in the interest of safety: PISSAR
patrols would consist of at least three people; there would be no patrolling
after dark; at least one member would wear a yellow PISSAR shirt, thereby
identifying the group; and each group would ideally consist of a range of
gender identities. Through this decision-making process, all of us—par-
ticularly those of us who are not genderqueer or trans-identified—increased
our understanding of the potential dangers that lie in not using a restroom
“properly.” As empowering as our patrols sometimes feel, we have also
experienced stares, some hostility, and a general public bewilderment about
what our business is in that protected space. Being in groups on “official”
business probably mitigated most of those risks, but the experience of enter-
ing bathrooms that we might not ordinarily enter helped us recognize the
need for safety in these public/private spaces.
Thus, one of the most revolutionary aspects of the checklist is its func-
tion as a consciousness-raising tool, particularly within PISSAR’s own
ranks. It was not until we first began discussing the need for a group like
PISSAR that one of our nondisabled members realized that the wider-
doored stalls were built for wheelchairs. Another acknowledged that she
had never realized how inaccessible campus and community buildings
were until she began measuring doors and surveying facilities; going
through the PISSAR checklist caused her to view the entire built world
through different eyes. Many nondisabled people stopped using acces-
sible stalls, realizing that they might be keeping someone with a disability
from safe peeing. By the same token, one of our straight members with
disabilities had always ridiculed the push for gender-neutral bathrooms
until he began to understand it as an access issue. Realizing that gender-
specific signs and expectations for single-gender use are barriers to some
genderqueer and trans people’s use of a space—because of the ever-pres-
ent threat of harassment, violence, and even arrest—enabled him to make
the connection between disability oppression and genderqueer oppression.
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 227 3/12/08 9:45:11 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
CALLING ALL RESTROOM REVOLUTIONARIES!
228
A space for multiple identity organizing was forged. The PISSAR check-
list allowed all of us to understand the bathroom in terms of physical and
political access; people with disabilities and transfolk are being denied
access because of the ways in which their/our bodies defy the norm.
Now picture this: a boardroom at UC-Santa Barbara, filled with the
chancellor and his team of advisors. We’re talking about gender, and
we’re taking about bathrooms. We’ve been talking about gender for quite
a while, and no one has asked for any definitions or terms. Now, with the
reality of bathrooms on the table, the chancellor needs some clarification
about the differences between sex and gender. What he is saying is, “What
kinds of bodies are we talking about here?” PISSAR and the PISSAR
checklists facilitate an open and impolite conversation about pissing, shit-
ting, and the organs that do those things, right there in the boardroom.
Because PISSAR is talking about something concrete—bodies, bath-
rooms, liability—administrators want to understand all the terms. They
start to learn the issues: what exactly is preventing this otherwise acces-
sible bathroom from being fully accessible (often something simple—and
inexpensive—like moving a trash can or lowering a dispenser); why do
genderqueer folks need unisex bathrooms, and what does that even entail
(again, often something simple—and inexpensive—like changing the
signs or adding a tampon/pad dispenser). And they learn the issues in a
way that makes sense to them and that works for us politically. They are
being trained by a group of folks devoted to the issue, they are being given
specific details and facts, and all the work is being done on a volunteer
basis by folks committed to the campus and the causes. What’s more,
because the realities of bathroom needs and restroom politics forced this
table of administrators to ask about gender, sex, disability, barriers, and so
forth, the administrators are now better equipped to tackle more abstract
issues around trans and disability inclusion on campus and in the larger
UC community (for example, when adding gender identity to the nondis-
crimination clause happens at the state-wide level, we’d like to think our
chancellor will be on board . . .)
Through the PISSAR checklist, we bring both the body and the
bathroom into the boardroom. We challenge the normalizing impulse
that wants to ignore conversations about attendant care or queer-bash-
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 228 3/12/08 9:45:11 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
229
SIMONE CHESS, ALISON KAFER, JESSI QUIZAR, AND MATTIE UDORA RICHARDSON
ing or inaccessibility. We refuse the expectation that chancellors’ offices
are places for polite topics of conversation and abstract theorizing, rather
than discussions about who does and who does not have the right to pee.
We demand a recognition of the body that needs assistance, the body that
is denied access, and the body that is harassed and violated. And we insist
on remembering the body that shits, the body that pees, the body that
bleeds.
Where will you be when the revolution comes? We’ll be in the bath-
room—come join us there.
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 229 3/12/08 9:45:11 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
CALLING ALL RESTROOM REVOLUTIONARIES!
230
PISSAR CHECKLIST
Type of bathroom (circle one): Men’s Women’s Unisex
Location of Bathroom: Bldg__________ Floor_____ Wing (east, west)____ Room
#_____
Does the bathroom open directly to the outside, or is the entry inside the building?____
_____________________________________________________________
_______
If the bathroom is inside a building, please give the closest entrance or elevator to the
bathroom____________________________________________________________
__
_
_
________________________________________________________________
Your Name & E-mail Address____________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
DISABILITY ACCESSIBILITY
1. Is the door into the bathroom wide enough? Give width. (ADA = 32 in)_________
_______
2. What kind of knob does the door have? Circle one: Lever Round knob Handle
Automatic push-button Other (specify)________________________________
_______
3. Are there double doors into the bathroom? (i.e., do you have to open one door and
then open another door to enter the bathroom?) Yes No
4. Is the stall door wide enough? Give width. (ADA = 32 in)_____________________
__________________________________________________________________
5. What kind of latch is on the stall door? Sliding Latch Small turn knob
Large turn knob with lip Other (specify)______________________________
__________________________________________________________________
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 230 3/12/08 9:45:11 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
231
SIMONE CHESS, ALISON KAFER, JESSI QUIZAR, AND MATTIE UDORA RICHARDSON
6. Does the stall door close by itself? Yes No Is there a handle on the inside of
the door to help pull it closed? Yes No
7. Measure the space between the front of the toilet and the front wall_________. If
the stall is wide, with open space next to the toilet, measure the space between the
side of the toilet and the farthest side wall____________. If the stall is a skinny
rectangle, measure the width of the stall in front of the toilet. __________________
__________________________________________________________________
8. Are there grab bars? Yes No First side bar is _____long, _____
high, begins _____ from rear wall, and extends _____ in front of the toilet. Second
side bar is _____ long, _____high, begins _____ from rear wall, and extends _____
in front of the toilet. Back bar is ___long and ____high.
9. Facing the toilet, is the grab bar on the right side or the left side of the toilet?
Right Left Both sides
10. How accessible is the toilet paper holder? Height______ Is it too far from the toilet
to reach without losing one’s balance? Yes No
11. Describe the flush knob. (Is it a lever? If yes, is it next to the wall or on the open
side of the toilet? Is it a center button?)___________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
12. How high is the toilet seat? (e.g., is it raised or standard?) (ADA = 17–19 in)_____
13. Is the path to the toilet seat cover dispenser blocked by the toilet? Yes No
How high is the dispenser?__________________________________________
14. How high is the urinal?_______________How high is the handle?___________
15. If a multistall bathroom, how many stalls are accessible?_____________________
16. Is there a roll-under sink? If so, are the hot water pipes wrapped to prevent burns?
(ADA = counter top no higher than 34 in)________________________________
_
________________________________________________________________
17. What kind of faucet handles does the sink have? Lever Automatic
Separate turn knobs Other (specify)______________________________
18. Is there a soap-dispenser at chair height (ADA = you have to reach no higher than
48 in)?___________
A dryer / paper towel dispenser?_______________________________________
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 231 3/12/08 9:45:11 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
CALLING ALL RESTROOM REVOLUTIONARIES!
232
19. Is the tampon / pad dispenser at chair height? (ADA = you have to reach no higher
than 48 in) ________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
20. Is there a mirror at chair height? (ADA = bottom of mirror no higher than 40
in)____
21. Is there an audible alarm system? Yes No A visual alarm system
(lights)? Yes No
22. Is the accessible stall marked as accessible?_______________
23. Is the outer bathroom door marked as accessible?_______________
24. Are there any obstructions in front of the sink, the various dispensers, the accessible
stall, the toilet, etc.?
Please specify.______________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
GENDER SAFETY
25. Is the bathroom marked as unisex? Specify._______________________________
_________________________________________________________________
26. Is it in a safe location? (i.e., not in an isolated spot)_________________________
________________________________________________________________
27. Is it next to a gender-specific restroom so that it serves as a de facto “men’s” or
“women’s” restroom? _______________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
28. Does the door lock from the inside? Does the lock work securely?_____________
_________________________________________________________________
AUNT FLO AND THE PLUG PATROL
29. Type of machine in the bathroom (circle one): Tampon Pad Tampon &
Pad
30. Does it have a “this machine is broken” sticker? Sticker No sticker
31. Does it look so rusty and disgusting that even if it works, you doubt anyone would
use it? Yes No
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 232 3/12/08 9:45:12 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
233
SIMONE CHESS, ALISON KAFER, JESSI QUIZAR, AND MATTIE UDORA RICHARDSON
32. Is the machine empty? (look for a little plastic “empty” sign) Yes No
33. Does it have a new full-color “Aunt Flo” sticker? Sticker No Sticker
CHILD-CARE
34. Does the bathroom have a changing table? (Specify location)__________________
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 233 3/12/08 9:45:12 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 234 3/12/08 9:45:12 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 235 3/12/08 9:45:12 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
That’s Revolting [FIN].indd 236 3/12/08 9:45:13 AM
That’s Revolting! : Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Sycamore, Soft Skull Press, 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=478886.
Created from wisc on 2018-09-17 15:21:18.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
00
8.
S
of
t S
ku
ll
P
re
ss
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.
Transmisogyny101: What It Is and What
Can We Do About It
Aug 14, 2018 | Battered Women’s Support Services
As part of BWSS ongoing commitment to inclusivity, we are happy to share that we are updating
our website to include dedicated information, statistics, and safety resources for trans and non-
binary survivors of violence, which will go live next week!
We also recognize that trans and non-binary people, especially those with intersecting identities
such as Indigenous people, Black people, immigrant and refugee people and people of colour,
are particularly vulnerable to violence because of historical and ongoing systemic racism and
colonization.
This article is reblogged from Everyday Feminism by Laura Kacere is a helpful resource in
understanding transmisogyny.
Let’s talk about transmisogyny.
https://www.bwss.org/category/battered-womens-support-services/
https://everydayfeminism.com/author/laurk/
Dyke March, Montreal, Quebec, August 8, 2013. Pictured: @sirensongspell. Photo by Kat, via
Gender Fork.
This word describes so much of what we see in the cultural and systemic treatment of trans
women in our culture and ties in so clearly with feminism, and yet it’s not a word that many
people know about or understand.
You may have heard of transphobia: the discrimination of and negative attitudes toward
transgender people based on their gender expression.
And you’ve likely heard of misogyny: the hatred and denigration of women and characteristics
deemed feminine.
Transmisogyny, then, is the confluence of these – the negative attitudes, expressed through
cultural hate, individual and state violence, and discrimination directed toward trans women and
trans and gender non-conforming people on the feminine end of the gender spectrum.
Who Is Vicitimized by Transmisogyny?
Transmisogyny targets transgender and transsexual women – people who were assigned male at
birth, but who identify as women.
But transgender women are not the only people who experience transmisogyny.
Trans and gender non-conforming people who do not necessarily identify as women, but
who present feminine characteristics and/or identify along the feminine end of the gender
spectrum are also on the receiving end of transmisogyny.
Transmisogyny is all about the hatred of the feminine, and it is not limited toward only those
who identify as women. It includes transfeminine and feminine-identified genderqueer people, as
well as many others who are feminine-of-center but were not assigned female at birth.
So for the purpose of simplicity and brevity in this article, I will use the term trans women to
refer to all people victimized by transmigogyny.
Why Does Transmisogyny Exist?
Transmisogyny is based in the assumption that femininity is inferior to masculinity.
It relies on an understanding of all those qualities that are associated with ”femaleness”
and devaluing them, viewing them as less than those qualities associated with “maleness”
and therefore as deserving of hatred, mockery, and violence.
This sounds a whole lot like sexism, doesn’t it?
Too Queer for Your Binary: Everything You Need to Know and More About Non-Binary Identities
Why should there be a specific word used to describe the experience of trans people who are
specifically feminine? How is this different from sexism and transphobia?
Trans women experience a particular kind of sexist marginalization based in their unique
position of overlapping oppressions – they are both trans and feminine. They are devalued
by society on both accounts.
Trans people experience transphobia, or cissexism, due to a cultural and systemic obsession with
the gender binary: the idea that there are two types of people – men and women – who are born,
raised, and naturally associate with that gender and its accompanying characteristics. Our
cultural and political institutions are based on this premise.
Transmisogyny reflects a hatred of those who do not fit easily into either side of the gender
binary.
Trans women are not always easily categorized, and for people and institutions whose
understanding of gender relies deeply in the repressive gender binary, this is confusing,
transgressive, and for some, worthy of hate.
The response to the existence of those who challenge the social understanding of gender, then, is
extreme oppression and marginalization of trans people of all gender expressions.
Trans-Femininity and Sexism
Our society is steeped in the notion that women and characteristics coded as feminine are inferior
to men and those qualities coded as masculine.
In our sexist society, being a woman automatically places you in a position of less value.
But to give up one’s “important” position as a man, choosing (as trans people are perceived to
do) to be a woman and to be feminine, in a way, poses a fundamental threat to male superiority
and may be seen as a rejection of the “superior male identity.”
Trans women are not only a reminder to society that gender categories are not fixed, but also that
womanhood and feminine gender expression is not something to be ashamed of.
In this way, understanding transmisogyny is absolutely imperative to our work as feminists,
and makes clear just how integral trans issues and rights are to our work around gender.
Not only is transmisogyny steeped in sexism, but the resulting oppression is parallel to what
cisgender (those who identify with the gender of which they were assigned at birth) women face:
physical objectification, over-sexualization, stereotyping, policing of bodies, a discrimination on
all levels of society, and individual and systemic acts of violence.
The Violence of Transmisogyny
https://sites.google.com/site/transwikiproject/
Transmisogyny rears its ugly head in many ways and on all levels of society.
We see it, for instance, in violence on an individual level.
Hate crimes against trans people are disproportionately and tragically high, and the majority of
this violence victimizes trans women.
In fact, over half of all anti-LGBTQIA+ homicides were perpetrated against transgender women.
And while we’re talking statistics, it’s important to note that nearly three-quarters of those
homicides targeted people of Color.
We see transmisogyny in state violence as well.
1 in 5 transgender women (21%) has been incarcerated at some point in her life. This is far above
the general population, and is even higher (47%) for Black transgender people.
According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, trans people experience
disproportionately high rates of poverty and homelessness caused by discrimination in jobs and
housing, but they also experience greater incarceration rates, largely due to gender profiling by
the police.
Gender is policed, quite literally by police officers who target, arrest, and often harass trans
women for looking “different” and therefore, “disorderly.” Trans women of Color, in
particular, tend to be perceived by police through racialized and gender stereotypes framing them
as highly sexual and as criminal.
Trans women are consistently targeted and arrested for being involved in sex work, even if they
have no association with this work.
There have been many instances where trans women, most often trans women of Color, have
been arrested for carrying condoms.
In New York, where having a condom on you can be used as evidence of involvement in sex
work, trans women are being profiled, searched, and arrested for being a trans woman at the
wrong place at the wrong time.
There’s also direct violence at the hands of police: A 2012 study by the National Coalition of
Anti-Violence Programs found that transgender people across the U.S. experience three times
more police violence than cisgender people.
And nearly half of trans people who reported hate crimes to the police experienced
mistreatment from them while asking for help.
Trans women experience abuse after being arrested as well, when they are most often forced to
reside in men’s prison facilities, experiencing extremely high rates of sexual and physical
violence – a study by the Department of Justice found that 1 in 3 are sexual assaulted in prison.
https://www.glaad.org/blog/ncavp-report-2012-hate-violence-disproportionately-target-transgender-women-color
http://transequality.org/Resources/NCTE_Blueprint_for_Equality2012_Prison_Reform
http://www.incite-national.org/sites/default/files/incite_files/resource_docs/3696_toolkit-final
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/06/new_report_highlights_police_hostility_toward_transgenders.php
https://www.vice.com/read/new-york-cops-will-arrest-you-for-carrying-condoms
http://www.avp.org/storage/documents/2012_mr_ncavp_hvreport
http://www.transgenderlaw.org/resources/prisoners.htm
http://www.transgenderlaw.org/resources/prisoners.htm
http://www.edgeboston.com/news/national/features/135458/doj_standards_protect_transgender_inmates_from_rape_and_abuse
In response, many prisons place trans women in solitary confinement for extended periods of
time “for their own protection.” (Meanwhile, solitary confinement is considered a form of
torture.)
In the Media
While trans men are generally ignored and made invisible by American media, trans women are
exoticized, their existence perceived as shocking and newsworthy. They are mocked, over-
sexualized, and fetishized.
Trans women are given an extremely two-dimensional portrayal in the news, where they are
most often reported on in association of a hate crime. In these reports, their gender is consistently
portrayed as confusing and illegitimate, appearing in countless headlines like this one: “Man
Dressed as Woman Found Dead.
Our media portrays trans women in archetypes – as the weak victim of a crime, or as the evil
villain; as the mentally unstable character, or as the manipulative one.
They are often pathologized and sexualized, portrayed as someone manipulatively hiding their
transgender identity to trick a man into engaging with them sexually or romantically.
They play countless television roles as sex workers.
They are shown as unattractive; they are the butt of jokes, their desire to be feminine mocked,
their motives for transitioning questioned.
And while it is difficult to find complex and honest portrayals of trans women characters on
television, it is even more rare to find an authentic and respectful portrayal of a trans woman of
Color (though we have see a few recently, like the great Laverne Cox in Orange is the New
Black).
In Queer and Women’s Spaces
Sadly, transmisogyny is also very present in LGBTQIA+ spaces, where trans women,
particularly trans women of Color, are marginalized within an already marginalized group.
The mainstream LGBTQIA+ movement has been called out many times for excluding trans
people, and there is a pervasive sexism in the movement as well as in social spaces, that
promotes transmisogyny and a denigration of feminine qualities.
Masculine privilege, like white privilege, does not disappear once one is in a queer space. So
when trans women share their experiences, queer cis male leaders have too many times
dismissed them and accused them of “hurting the LGBTQ movement” due to the visible
transgression of many of society’s norms involved in being a trans woman.
https://ccrjustice.org/solitary-factsheet
https://ccrjustice.org/solitary-factsheet
http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Body-Found-in-Frankford-168360946.html
http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Body-Found-in-Frankford-168360946.html
http://www.npr.org/2013/08/07/209843353/orange-is-the-new-black-actress-calls-role-complicated
http://www.npr.org/2013/08/07/209843353/orange-is-the-new-black-actress-calls-role-complicated
And although it should be the last place where transmisogyny is present, sadly, we see it
often in cis women’s spaces.
Trans women are excluded from many domestic violence shelters and other crisis spaces that
exist in response to violence against women in our society.
Trans women continue to be excluded from many women-only spaces and feminist events, while
some “feminists” continue to speak out against the very existence of trans women, arguing that
they are not “authentic” women and that they are “hurting the movement.”
Trans women have called these groups and spaces out, creating inclusive spaces in the meantime,
citing that they experience sexism and homophobia in very real and concrete ways, and yet are
excluded from the spaces which were created in response to these oppressions.
What Can We Do?
Transmisogyny, like sexism, is pervasive and structural, but it also exists in our everyday
experiences. Once you understand it, you begin to notice it in personal interactions, on television,
and in social movements and political campaigns.
Call it out! Name it for what it is. Transmisogyny, like, sexism, goes unnoticed too often
because it is so entrenched in our sociocultural and political understanding of gender. Educate
others about this issue.
And most importantly, don’t be afraid to call out other feminists or gay rights advocates for
transmisoginistic words and actions. These are the spaces we need to make more inclusive.
It is so important that we work together to find a solution to the problem of transmisogyny’s
existence in our movements and that we always act in solidarity with our trans sisters.
If our movements seek to eradicate transphobia, homophobia, and sexism, then we must
address transmisogyny, located at the intersection of these oppressions, and make it a
priority in our fight.
Laura Kacere is a Contributing Writer for Everyday Feminism and is an feminist activist, social
justice organizer, clinic escort, and yogi living in Washington, D.C. Laura coordinates the
Washington Area Clinic Defense Task Force, teaches yoga with the intent of making it accessible
to all, and does outreach for the DC-based sex worker support organization, HIPS. When she
isn’t on her mat or at the clinic, she’s usually thinking about zombies, playing violin, eating
Lebanese food, and wishing she had a cat. Follow her on Twitter @Feminist_Oryx. Read her
articles here.
https://www.alternet.org/story/93826/rethinking_sexism%3A_how_trans_women_challenge_feminism
http://www.radicalwomen.org/transphobia.shtml
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2009/08/22/germaine-greer-paints-a-portrait-of-transphobic-feminism/
http://camp-trans.org/about/
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CC0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wacdtf.org%2F&ei=glQWUprXKsv2iQK6wYCoDA&usg=AFQjCNEAWdfaVgXTBDJ_UrdkiuY7XUyPKw&bvm=bv.51156542,d.cGE
http://hips.org/
http://everydayfeminism.com/author/laurk/
http://everydayfeminism.com/author/laurk/
Becoming a Black Man
By Daisy Hernandez
Louis Mitchell expected a lot of change when he began taking injections of hormones eight years
ago to transition from a female body to a male one. He anticipated that he’d grow a beard, which
he eventually did and enjoys now. He knew his voice would deepen and that his relationship
with his partner, family and friends would change in subtle and, he hoped, good ways, all of
which happened.
What he had not counted on was changing the way he drove.
Within months of starting male hormones, “I got pulled over 300 percent more than I had in the
previous 23 years of driving, almost immediately. It was astounding,” says Mitchell, who is
Black and transitioned while living in the San Francisco area and now resides in Springfield,
Massachusetts.
Targeted for “driving while Black” was not new to Mitchell, who is 46 years old. For example, a
few years before transitioning, he had been questioned by a cop for simply sitting in his own car
late at night. But “he didn’t really sweat me too much once he came up to the car and divined
that I was female,” Mitchell recalls.
Now in a Black male body, however, Mitchell has been pulled aside for small infractions. When
he and his wife moved from California to the East Coast, Mitchell refused to let her drive on the
cross-country trip. “She drives too fast,” he says, chuckling and adding, “I didn’t want to get
pulled over. It took me a little bit longer [to drive cross country] ‘cause I had to drive like a
Black man. I can’t be going 90 miles an hour down the highway. If I’m going 56, I need to be
concerned.” As more people of color transition, Mitchell’s experience is becoming an
increasingly common one.
The transgender community has experienced a boom in visibility in the last decade. Some of this
has come about through popular culture, including the acclaimed 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry and
more recently with Mike Penner, the Los Angeles Times sports columnist who came out as
transgender and is now known as Christine. In recent years, there’s also been a growing number
of memoirs, including The Testosterone Files by the Chicano and American-Indian poet Max
Valerio, as well as more academic books on the subject, like The Transgender Studies Reader.
Just as key has been the work of transgender people themselves, who have transitioned due to the
more widespread availability of hormones and surgeries. Rather than passing as heterosexual, an
increasing number of them in the last decade have identified as “trans” and begun support,
advocacy and legal-rights groups. The widespread use of the Internet and the new online social
networks are also helping to break the isolation that trans people often feel in their own
communities.
In Asia, Latin America and Africa, the place of transgender people is likewise changing. While
trans women in many cultures have been marginally accepted, they have been largely confined to
traditionally feminine roles as caretakers—a situation that is changing now in places like
Ixhuatan, Mexico, where Amaranta Gomex, a muxe, or trans woman, ran for political office in
2003. In some countries, trans activists are going to court and winning key changes in public
policies. In Brazil, a court ruled in August 2007 that sexual-reassignment surgery is covered by
the constitution as a medical right.
While it’s extremely difficult to say how many people identify as transgender, the National
Center for Transgender Equality has estimated that about three million people are transgender
today in the United States. It’s hard to say how many of those are people of color, but one online
group for Black trans people called Transsistahs-Transbrothas has about 300 members, and
another group specifically for Latino trans men has 98 members.
In the last four years, there’s also been an increase in the number of people seeking top surgeries,
or removal of their breasts, according to Michael Brownstein, a well-known doctor specializing
in gender surgeries in San Francisco. He does about four to six top surgeries a week, and he
notes that while 30 years ago, trans people would come to his office alone, they are now arriving
with partners, siblings and friends for moral support.
These social and political changes have ushered in a time when it is increasingly acceptable for
men and women to alter their physical bodies to match their gender identity. Left largely
unexamined, however, has been the issue of racism and how trans men and women experience it.
Trans people of color are finding that they have an extremely different relationship to gender
transition than white people. London Dexter Ward, an LAPD cop who transitioned in 2004, sums
it up this way: a white person who transitions to a male body “just became a man.” By contrast,
he says, “I became a Black man. I became the enemy. “
In short, people of color know that racism works differently for men and women, and
transgender people like Mitchell and Ward are getting to experience this from both sides of the
gender equation.
Louis Mitchell is the type of man who immediately puts people at ease as he advises them about
how cheap the housing is in Massachusetts. He calls himself “a big Black man” (he’s 5 feet 9
inches tall and 250 pounds). In 2006, after much soul searching, he began attending divinity
school. Talking to Mitchell, it’s easy to imagine him in a pulpit. He is simultaneously
warmhearted and sure of himself. He could sell a two-bedroom condo as easily as convincing a
congregation to be honest with God.
Growing up in West Covina in Southern California, Mitchell attended church with his mother
and devoured history books. At the age of 3 or 4, he knew that he was a boy, regardless of
having been born into a girl’s body. He also believed that God created miracles. So he prayed
that he would grow into a boy’s body when he reached puberty. That didn’t happen, much to his
surprise.
Near the end of 1970, when Mitchell was 18 years old, he hitchhiked with a friend to Corpus
Christi, Texas, where the legal drinking age was lower than in California. There, he met drag
queens, and he felt hopeful for the first time. If the queens could be women, his thinking went,
then there might be options for him to live as a man.
At the time, a Black transsexual woman had already been the first person to undergo sex
reassignment surgery at John Hopkins University, according to Joanne Meyerowitz’s classic
book How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Avon Wilson’s
transition in 1966 at John Hopkins marked a turning point for the transsexual community. It was
the first time a medical clinic in the United States performed the surgery, and so while it
remained rare to be approved for surgery, it was at least a possibility. However, Mitchell went on
to identify as a butch, even though he felt that he was masquerading as a lesbian.
Then, 15 years ago, a friend of his began the process of transitioning to a male body. “That lit a
fire that I couldn’t put out,” he says now. He met a few Black trans men at a conference but took
many years to think about his own transition. He considered the consequences of transitioning,
including the impact on his mother, who he’s very attached to, and the loss for him of his lesbian
community. He didn’t think too much about racism. Mitchell already had a goatee without taking
hormones and was used to being followed in stores. He had grown accustomed to women
clutching their purses at the sight of him. So he was somewhat surprised about the changes that
came after he began taking injections of the hormone testosterone—the degree to which he
became a target and also the emotional changes he felt as a Black man.
Before transitioning, Mitchell recalls being “cavalier and reckless” about what he did in public
and about his interactions with police officers. “I didn’t think about it so much,” he says about
cops. “At some point they would find out I was female” and that would diffuse the situation.
Now, Mitchell finds that he doesn’t engage in small transgressions like jaywalking or spitting on
the sidewalk. “I never know if they’re just waiting for something to happen to roll up, and I do
not want find myself in custody. That would be just precarious and dangerous in so many ways.”
When living in San Francisco, he moved out of the historical gay neighborhood of the Castro
because he got tired of being followed in stores. During the cross-country trip with his wife
Krysia, he refrained from being affectionate with her in public. He didn’t want to run the risk of
drawing attention to himself as a Black man and her as a mixed-race Latina who at times is
perceived as white.
“More than a trans man, I’m a Black man,” Mitchell says. “I’d be in intensive care by the time
they realized I was a trans man.”
Prado Gomez, a 33-year-old Chicano who transitioned in 2001, describes the situation with
racism and violence as a “trade off.” “I’ll be able to walk down the street and not be raped,
unless they know my status [as a trans man]”, he says. “But there’s a different kind of threat
from men.” Before transitioning, Gomez was used to being pulled over in the car with his
brothers by cops in San Francisco. “Cops called me an asshole until they saw the F on my
license,” he recalls, and small verbal fights on the street back then did not escalate. Gomez says
that a guy would call him a “bitch” and leave it at that. Now, Gomez knows he has to be more
careful. A small exchange of words could lead to more violence.
London Dexter Ward has also seen his life change because of the ways that racism is gendered.
“I do a lot of shopping online now,” says Ward, who got tired of being followed in book and
clothing stores.
A 44-year-old police officer, Ward began hormone treatments in 2004 and transitioned while
working for the LAPD, where he’s now an instructor at the police academy. The transition on the
job was no small feat, since it meant moving to the men’s locker room and showers. But Ward’s
coworkers and supervisors, like his family, accepted him.
In typical men’s locker-room humor, his sergeant created a penalty jar where the cops had to
deposit a quarter if they referred to Ward by a female pronoun. Ward, like Mitchell and Gomez,
felt that he had planned for just about every change that would come with transitioning. “What I
did not prepare for was being a Black man,” he says.
He finds that people now look at him with fear in bars and restaurants where he once used to go
for a good time. “When people are afraid of you, you stop wanting to hang out in those places,”
Ward says. Experiencing racism as a Black man, though, doesn’t necessarily give Mitchell and
Ward a bond with their peers, who grew up in Black male bodies, experiencing racism as Black
boys and then men. “It’s a matter of living for them, at this point,” Mitchell says. “It’s no longer
some strange thing that they notice. It just is. It’s like gravity. I am a Black man, and therefore if
something is stolen while I am in the neighborhood, then I am a suspect.”
The racism that Black trans men experience is only part of the story, of course. Mitchell says his
manhood is not about the racism he encounters. “It is more about integrity and a sense of being
the truest person I can be,” he says, adding that his gender transition has been about “having my
insides and my outsides match finally.” Rather than see himself as joining a group of men who
are perpetual targets, he feels he’s joined a community of men that are strong but not ashamed of
their tenderness. Mitchell also finds that he’s in a unique position now to mentor young Black
men. As someone who came of age in the lesbian community and has feminist politics, Mitchell
jokes with Black boys who talk about “fags” and refer to women as “bitches.” He pulls the
teenagers aside and uses a bit of reverse psychology, telling them that it’s okay if they’re gay.
When the teens protest that they’re not, Mitchell says, “You have no respect for women, and
you’re fixated on gay men. What am I supposed to think?”
Johnnie Pratt, a Black trans man who lives in the San Francisco area, also jokes that he now
enjoys certain perks. Finally, he is taken seriously by the guys at Home Depot. Before
transitioning, he says, “They’d be looking at me like, ‘Shut up girl.’ Now they want to talk to
me.” Trans men of color are finding that some things stay the same on both sides of the gender
equation. Cultural expectations, for example, are hard to shake. As is common for Latinas,
Gomez has raised his brother’s two children with his partner, Mariah, and is now taking care of
his mom, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Gomez sees no contradiction in the fact that as
a man, he bathes his 60-year-old mother. “I am the only one my mother trusts,” he says. “She
sees here is this man, but she knows this man is her daughter.”
The experience with racism is flipped in some ways for Black trans women. Monica Roberts,
who is 45 years old, transitioned in 1994. As a Black woman, she is happy to no longer be
considered, as she says, “a suspect.” Since transitioning, she has not been pulled over for
“driving while Black,” although she quickly adds that it has happened to a friend who is also a
Black trans woman. Roberts and her Black trans-women friends have experienced something
else since transitioning: “We’ve noticed a power shift,” she says. “Black culture is matriarchal-
based…most of the leadership in the Black community is made up of very powerful women.
There’s a lot of that in my hometown.” And so as Roberts transitioned, she has stepped into that
role. Roberts grew up in Houston, Texas, and in the Black church. Her mother is a teacher, and
she was surrounded by women who were historians and leaders in the community. She
understood the influence of Black women. “You might have a minister up here pontificating on
the pulpit on Sunday,” she says, “but the real power behind the throne is the women’s auxiliary
that’s meeting on Tuesday.”
Her father, a local radio commentator, tried to groom Roberts for leadership as his eldest child.
Yet, it was only after transitioning that Roberts felt able to take on such a leadership role.
Perhaps it was due to the toll that living in the “tranny closet” had taken on her self-esteem. But
Roberts also noticed a difference in the responses she received from other people to her
leadership as a Black woman. She got positive reactions, she says, “because I was basically
doing the traditional work of Black women in the community in terms of uplifting the race.” In
2005, Roberts and other transsexual and transgender activists started the first conference for
Black trans people. It took place in Louisville, Kentucky, where she now lives. She also writes
these days for a local LGBT outlet and blogs at transgriot.blogspot.com. In 2006, she became the
third Black person to receive the Trinity Award, which recognizes people for their contributions
to the transgender community.
Pauline Park also found that transitioning to become a woman of color altered her place in the
world. A Korean adoptee who was raised in the Midwest, Park transitioned in 1997 but chose to
not physically alter her body. Park is now 46 years old and a founding member of the New York
Association for Gender Right Advocacy, which got legislation passed in New York City to
protect transgender people from discrimination in housing and employment. In transitioning
from living as an Asian man to an Asian woman, Park found that she was finally able to have
“the joy of actualizing something I’ve always wanted to be.” But she also finds that she has gone
from invisibility to a visibility that is at times unwelcomed. Being an effeminate Asian male,
Park says, “tends to—if anything—put you in either invisibility or derision, ridicule [and]
harassment. But if you’re perceived to be an Asian woman, what happens is the exact opposite,
which is sexual interest and even harassment.”
Now Park finds herself at times the target on the subways in New York City, where she lives.
Recently, when she got off the No. 7 train in Queens, she realized that she was being followed by
a man. She didn’t know if it was because he saw her as an Asian woman or a transgender Asian
woman. She ran home and slammed the door shut. “I always wear shoes I can run in,” Park says.
She concedes she knew that Asian women were exoticized, but “it’s one thing reading about
something in a book and another to be running down the street.”
Listening to Monica Roberts, it’s hard to imagine a time when she wasn’t a leader. She’s
adamant that Black trans people need their own spaces. For example, she says, there’s a lot of
hostility in the white transgender community toward Christianity, and some of that is justified.
But when it comes to Black trans folks, she says, it’s impossible to just walk away from the
church. “You can’t leave out Christians if you want people of color” at a conference, she says.
“We were all raised in a church.” Roberts also highlights another small but important detail of
trans life for people of color: There’s a level of animosity between trans women and men in the
white community that doesn’t exist to the same degree in the Black community. Some of that is
due to the fact that white trans women are often dealing with a loss of power in public life, while
white trans men are coming to positions of power and all its ensuing emotions and consequences.
It’s different for Black transsexuals, Roberts says.
“There’s a lot of information sharing…They [Black trans men] can talk to us about being
women, and we can talk to them about DWB.” At the end of the day, Roberts also says, “People
don’t see me as a trans woman. They see me as Black…and that’s the thing that people notice.
The bottom line is, we’re Black first.”
Mitchell concurs. “More than I’m a trans man, I’m a Black man,” he says. “Many of the things
that I see in the world and many of the things that I respond to in the world have more to do with
how I am treated as a Black man rather than how I am
treated as a trans man.
From Colorlines.
WhenShe Graduates as He
There’s a battle brewing at the Seven Sisters over the
growing population of transgender students. The question at
its core: What kind of women’s college awards diplomas to
men?
Mt. Holyoke junior Kevin Murphy is one of a handful of
transgender students changing the face — and the soul, some
say — of elite women’s colleges.
By Adrian Brune | April 8, 2007, The Boston Globe
Though born a girl, raised a girl, and now attending a women’s college, Isaiah Bartlett didn’t feel
quite right being female. Old pictures show a very feminine, rosy-cheeked Allison Bartlett with
chin-length dark brown hair. Yet every time her mother coaxed her into a dress for one of those
photographs, Allison’s skin would crawl and her mind would race with insecurities. Even
coming out as a butch lesbian in her freshman year at Mt. Holyoke College – and getting rid of
those dresses for good – didn’t seem to solve the problem.
Not long after Allison enrolled, in the fall of 2005, she shaved most of her hair into a mohawk
and picked up a few pairs of boxer shorts. Soon she started binding her breasts with an Ace
bandage every day before going out. After a year of struggling in school and a semester off to
sort out her emotions, the popular 20-year-old psychology major returned to school and went to a
talk by fellow student Kevin Murphy. Then things began to make sense. Allison realized that
though she was a biological woman, she wanted nothing more than to be a man. She adopted the
name Isaiah. “When I heard Kevin’s story, his talk about struggling with coming out as a lesbian,
then realizing that he really wanted to be a man, I felt as if he was telling bits of my own story,”
Bartlett says one October afternoon in his room in Mt. Holyoke’s Buckland Hall dormitory, just
before a friend comes barreling up in a robe and a green face mask to offer a quick hug and some
dish. “Soon after, I came out as a transman.”
This is the latest subculture to emerge at the elite women’s colleges in the Northeast known as
the Seven Sisters – young women, some still teenagers, who, like Bartlett, are exploring the
possibility of growing up to be men. And it’s creating a social upheaval at these historically all-
female enclaves as they wrestle with what to do about all this gender bending.
The Seven Sisters colleges were founded in the 19th century, and famous graduates have ranged
from anthropologist Margaret Mead (Barnard) to actresses Stockard Channing (Radcliffe) and
Meryl Streep (Vassar) to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (Wellesley). Vassar started accepting
male students in 1969, and Radcliffe officially merged with Harvard College in 1999, leaving
just five sisters – Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Barnard, and Wellesley.
But the same empowerment and opportunity for self-discovery that an all-female school provides
may also make survival as single-sex institutions that much harder for the remaining sisters.
After all, the real challenge that transmen are forcing women’s colleges to face is an ideological
one: Is it still a women’s college when some students who were female as freshmen are male by
graduation day?
The term “transman” is a relatively new one. It originates from “transgender,” which generally
describes people who feel that the gender they were born into is at odds with their true identity.
Coined in the late 1970s, transgender is now often used in place of “transsexual,” which
describes a person who has had sex reassignment surgery or who lives as a member of the
opposite sex. Most transmen begin their transition with masculine dress, adopting the pronoun
“he,” and taking on a male name. After counseling, some transmen start taking the hormone
testosterone, known in the community as “T,” which deepens the voice, causes facial hair to
grow, enlarges the clitoris, and reduces breast size. If he decides to go further, a transman may
undergo a double mastectomy, hysterectomy, and ovary removal. The final frontier is penis
construction surgery.
From a medical point of view, Isaiah Bartlett’s story reflects the classic traits of gender identity
disorder as defined in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” the bible of
the mental health professions. At the same time, while no one knows exactly how common it is,
advocates and many professionals who work with the trans population believe transgender
people should be reclassified, because gender variation is normal across the human spectrum.
It does seem that most transmen start to feel male at a young age. A study conducted two years
ago by researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Pennsylvania State
University asked transmen, transwomen, “genderqueers” – who consider themselves beyond or
between genders – and people with other gender-diverse identities about their experiences.
Roughly 3,500 people responded to the survey, sent to transgender support groups throughout
the country and to self-identified transgender individuals found online. Of the 807 respondents
who were female at birth but who now identify as male, transgender, or “other,” 86 percent said
they began to question their gender identities before age 12, and all but 2 percent before 19.
In addition, researchers believe that more young people than ever before are acting on those
feelings. “It used to be that transitioning was a midlife process, but the Internet has changed a
lot,” says Brett-Genny Janiczek Beemyn, one of the lead researchers in the UMass-Penn State
study. “With the click of a mouse, more and more young people can find others going through
what they’re going through and have a stronger sense of themselves at a younger age.” Beemyn,
who also directs the UMass-Amherst Stonewall Center, an educational resource center for gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students at the school, believes that in the coming years the
number of young people who are “out” as transgender will only grow. Advocates think that’s a
good thing: A number of studies have found that the earlier an individual undergoes sex
reassignment, beginning with hormones, the easier it is for that person to pass as someone of
their transitioned gender, and that passing is key to a transitioned person’s long-term happiness.
Though a successful transition can certainly be a liberating experience, the growing transman
population at all-women’s colleges has created some unique problems, too. While both Mt.
Holyoke, in South Hadley, and its rival school, Smith College in Northampton, cultivate what
transgender students say is an open and accepting environment that allows them to find their true
selves – including their gender identities – there are new rivalries developing. “No parent is
surprised anymore when their daughter goes to an all-women’s college and then comes out as a
lesbian,” says Kevin Murphy, the 21-year-old junior whose talk inspired Isaiah Bartlett. “But
once you get into this, within the community, there’s a lot of competition. Who goes on T first.
Who is taking more T. Who gets top surgery first.”
Sitting in a dimly lit bar after playing a club hockey match against Smith – club teams aren’t
covered by the NCAA regulations that ban college players from taking testosterone – Murphy is
practically indistinguishable from a very small, fairly handsome young man. He has deep brown
eyes and, having been on T for the past two years, an even deeper voice, as well as a beard that is
filling in nicely. A year ago, he used his own money to pay for a double mastectomy. Today he
strolls into the bar, flashes his ID, and sits down to a Corona without a hesitating glance from
anyone, including the bartender, who might have noticed that Murphy’s driver’s license still lists
him as female – something he can legally change in Massachusetts, thanks to his surgery. Yet for
all his confidence, Murphy, who is majoring in psychology and religion, is still figuring things
out. “When I go out with my friends, I’m the guy in the group, and when I go out with their
boyfriends, I’m the most feminine guy,” he says. “I’m really trying to form friendships with
biological men because I want to be accepted, and I was never allowed to when I was younger.”
Beginning in high school, when Murphy came out as gay, a fairly typical transgender
progression followed: dressing in drag, adopting a male haircut, and breast-binding. Kevin was
still Caitlin when he enrolled at Mt. Holyoke in 2003. After about two years, Murphy decided to
make the leap. “I wanted to be a guy,” he says. So Caitlin started taking T, legally changed her
name, and began looking for surgeons. Murphy insists he will never regret his decision to
become male, though the process hasn’t been entirely easy. “I cried the day after I woke up and
found my breasts gone,” he says. “With each stage, I feel like I’ve been losing my lesbian
identity, and that’s hard to give up.”
Therapists, doctors, and college administrators are concerned about students who decide to
transition based on what sometimes seems to be shaky logic: growing pains such as insecurity or
peer pressure, childhood trauma, depression, or even just the need to rebel. They tend to be
cautious about their clients’ transitions, but many counselors ultimately feel that even young
adults should be able to make their own decisions. “Of course, any compassionate therapist
might be concerned about a young person making such a permanent decision. ‘What if this
person could make a mistake? What if I make the wrong decision in giving the OK for this
person to transition?’ ” says Arlene Istar Lev, a family therapist and adjunct professor of social
welfare at the State University of New York at Albany who specializes in transgender issues.
“But here’s the catch: We know that a certain percentage of the population is transgender, and
we know the research on transitioning and age. At this point, we have no evidence of any young
people regretting these decisions. And the other thing: We all have to live with decisions. Young
people drop out of high school, even when counselors say, ‘Don’t do that.’ People get pregnant
and have babies or get abortions. All you can do is give the best assessment at the time.”
A Smith School of Social Work student, Shannon Sennott, has started a nonprofit called
Translate, to provide training and seminars for women’s colleges. Sennott believes that the
schools should offer hormone counseling and advocacy as transgender students make crucial
decisions about their lives. “Any person that age needs direction, and my concern is that they’re
not receiving it,” Sennott says. “Someone needs to say, ‘OK, you want to be a transman, let’s
discuss these options.’ Or, ‘OK, you want to remain genderqueer and use female pronouns the
rest of your life, that’s just great, too.’ ”
It’s not that there aren’t any resources for students. At Mt. Holyoke, there’s True Colors, a
student organization that runs a community center; the group arranges movie nights, mixers, and
panel discussions and seminars for lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students on subjects such
as coming out as transgender at work. There is also a designated adviser for transgender students
on campus, an associate director of residential life who is a gay man. At Smith, similar services
and groups are available.
But at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the transgender community remains so
nascent, there are few resources. “There are 1,300 [undergrad] students here. It’s a tiny
population – I know all of the trans students,” says Lindsay Gold, 21, who guesses that the
campus’s transman population is between six and 12 students. The would-be senior majoring in
computer science left school in December because she “wasn’t feeling in the academic spirit,”
she says. Gold is now living in an apartment near campus and trying to sort out two big hurdles:
finishing college and being transgender. “Everyone is accepting, but there are no resources.
People come to me asking where they can go to get help.” In an e-mail, assistant dean
Christopher MacDonald-Dennis writes: “This is an issue we are only now beginning to talk
about. . . . We realize that our other sisters have been dealing with this, so we are looking to them
to help us be as supportive as we can.”
the trans population at smith has seen the most public attention, and probably the most public
debate, too. Former student Lucas Cheadle helped bring widespread attention to the issue by
being profiled, along with three other transgender students, in a multipart documentary called
TransGeneration that aired on the Sundance Channel in 2005. Before that, it was a major victory
for trans activists on Smith’s campus when, in 2003, all references to “she” and “her” in the
student constitution were changed to “the student.” Students say another fight over the pronouns
used in the constitution looks to be rekindled in the coming year, and every so often, members of
the trans-friendly and not-so-trans-friendly communities exchange heated words on the public
website smith.dailyjolt.com. A recent anonymous posting about an annual event formerly known
as Celebration of Sisterhood, renamed Celebration in 2003 – though there is debate as to why –
reads: “Yeah, God forbid anyone include the word ‘sisterhood’ . . . because a handful of trans
students somehow feel oppressed, despite the fact that they chose to attend a women’s college.”
The reply: “Let the transphobia debate begin again.”
One first-year student who didn’t want her name, major, or hometown used for fear her views
would provoke hostility from fellow students, says she has witnessed conflict offline, too. “I’ve
heard some of the most liberal people – feminists and even gays and lesbians – say adverse
things toward trans students at Smith,” she e-mails. “One of my friends, who is a lesbian also,
expresses anger toward trans-identified students because she thinks they are giving up their
womanhood. Although I do not agree with these opinions, I can see where they come from.”
Another camp worries that as the school makes room for transgender students, it will be forced
to start accepting transmen who began their transition in high school and biological males
making the transition to female. Or worse yet, it might, they say, become coed. “Taking T and
planning to transition doesn’t go with the mission of Smith College,” writes Nicole, a junior who
doesn’t want to share her last name or her major because she thinks her views will be thought
politically incorrect.
A member of Smith’s Republican Club and editor-in-chief of its conservative newspaper, junior
Samantha Lewis, 20, doesn’t mind speaking on the record. “I think it’s ironic that there are
Smithies who do not want to be women, and, to be completely honest, it seems to me that it
defeats the purpose of being at a women’s college.” While Nicole guesses that the trans
population at Smith is 30 out of about 2,500 undergraduates, Lewis thinks that the number is at
least twice as big. “The first person I met on campus was a man,” Lewis says. “He said, ‘Hi, I’m
Ethan, and I use male pronouns.’ ”
The administration paints the conflicts as healthy, lively, debate. “Questions about what it means
to be a woman or a feminist are not new to the college discourse, whether at Smith or many other
leading institutions,” writes Maureen Mahoney, the college dean, in an e-mail. She adds that
Smith recently opened a Center for Sexuality and Gender as a student resource and for years has
allowed students to request the name they desire on their diplomas. “For the most part, these are
issues of diversity, and diversity has clear educational benefits. As one of our student leaders
noted in an address to her peers, what she learned at Smith is, great minds don’t think alike.”
No, clearly, they don’t. “The students here try very hard to be accepting of almost anything, and
it’s really difficult for us to say, ‘Hey, you don’t really belong here,’ ” says Nicole. “It’s not a
matter of discrimination or approval, it’s a question of that person’s goals and the overall goals
of the university. I personally don’t think trying to pass as a man and having Smith College on
your diploma gives you the chance to have a stable career. And there are those of us who are
investing in Smith, and in 40 years, we want Smith to be greater as a women’s college than it is
now.”
http://smith.dailyjolt.com/
Meanwhile, back at Mt. Holyoke, Isaiah Bartlett remains in gender limbo. “Although my
decision to have surgery isn’t dependent on my parents’ approval, more of a support system from
them would help a lot,” he says. As far as starting testosterone, Bartlett thinks about it, but
ultimately demurs. “I’m not ready to make that kind of a decision yet.” But at Bryn Mawr,
Lindsay Gold can’t wait to begin to transition and started seeing a gender therapist last month. “I
feel like other transmen accept or validate you based on where you stand in your transition,”
Gold says. “I don’t want to be sneered at for still having a woman’s body.”
Andspeaking of pronouns . . .
Pronouns are possibly one of the
most stressful things for people who
are learning to be trans allies. But
don’t feel bad, they’re much more
stressful for trans people.
It is almost always okay to ask what
pronoun someone wants to be called.
Ask in private, not in front of a large
group. Ask respectfully.
For example, “Hi, so-and-so. I’m so
happy to be working with you. I want
to check in with you because I want
to be respectful of your identity,
and I wondered what pronouns you
use.”
It is also sometimes okay to ask a
mutual acquaintance who would know.
Developed by Davey Shlasko
(www.thinkagaintraining.com), based partly on an essay
by Micah Bazant, “Transgender Respect/Etiquette
/Support 101,” available through Jewish Mosaic
(www.jewishmosaic.org).
Behaviors to avoid:
Assumptions. You should try not to assume anything
about a person who may be trans, for example
– identity
– pronoun
– transition status/plans/direction
– age
– sexual orientation
Also, don’t assume
– that all LGB people “get” trans stuff
– that all trans people “get” each other
Interrogating. Not every trans person is an expert
on gender or on trans issues. Even if they are, they
might not want to be explaining trans stuff 24/7.
Coming to a trans person to work out your
discomfort around trans issues.
Commenting on a trans person’s “passing,” or not
passing, as their gender. For one thing, not all
trans people want to pass. For another, commenting
on someone’s passing can reinforce gender
stereotypes, and perpetuate hierarchies that
reward trans folks for blending in with the
dominant gender culture.
Behaviors that are helpful:
Respect. For example you should respect a person’s …
– pronouns. (We all mess up on pronouns sometimes.
Apologize and move on – and later, do your work
to make sure you don’t mess up again!)
– self identity. If someone tells you they identify
as a woman, they are a woman, whether or not
they look/seem like a woman to you.
– privacy. Don’t ask inappropriately personal
questions of a trans person you’ve just met, like,
“What do your genitals look like?” or How do you
have sex?”
– names. Use a person’s chosen name, always. That
is their “real” name, and the only one you need to
worry about.
Be honest about your level of understanding, and your
preparedness (or not) to be an ally.
Educate yourself and others.
Interrupt bad gender situations. (When you’re
ready!) This takes a lot of confidence and
discernment. It’s great, for example, if you know
when to pipe up and say “Actually, my friend is a guy,
not a lady,” or “I’m sure we all know which bathroom
we’re in, thanks.”
It’s a judgment call . . .
Asking questions. Some trans folks are okay with answering all your questions. But it does get tiring, and we are
busy people just like everyone else. So it’s good to give people an out rather than just swamping them, e.g. “I have
some questions about trans stuff, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to talk with me about it some time?”
Outing. Sometimes it is great to have a friend/ally “out” us as trans, so we don’t have to do it. Sometimes it’s
disastrous. It’s a good idea to check in with your trans friends so that you know what they’d prefer in various
situations. Some things to take into account: Safety – will this put my friend at risk? Motive – why am I outing
this person? For their comfort? For my own comfort? For someone else’s comfort?
TRANSGENDER
ETIQUETTE
http://www.thinkagaintraining.com/
http://www.jewishmosaic.org/page/file/70
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
SixSteps to Speak Up
By Teaching Tolerance: A Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center
Whatever situation you’re in, remember these six steps to help you speak up against everyday
bigotry. In any situation, however, assess your safety, both physical and emotional. There is a
risk, and that must be acknowledged as you make your own choice to Speak Up!
Be Ready. You know another moment like this will happen, so prepare yourself for it. Think of
yourself as the one who will speak up. Promise yourself not to remain silent.
“Summon your courage, whatever it takes to get that courage, wherever that source of courage is
for you,” said Dr. Marsha Houston, chair of the Communication Studies Department at the
University of Alabama.
To bolster that courage, have something to say in mind before an incident happens. Open-ended
questions often are a good response. “Why do you say that?” “How did you develop that belief?”
Identify the Behavior. Sometimes, pointing out the behavior candidly helps someone hear what
they’re really saying: “Janice, what I hear you saying is that all Mexicans are lazy” (or whatever
the slur happens to be). Or, “Janice, you’re classifying an entire ethnicity in a derogatory way. Is
that what I hear you saying?”
When identifying behavior, however, avoid labeling, name-calling or the use of loaded terms.
Describe the behavior; don’t label the person.
“If your goal is to communicate, loaded terms get you nowhere,” said Dr. K.E. Supriya, associate
professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and an expert in the
role of gender and cultural identity in communication. “If you simply call someone a racist, a
wall goes up.”
Appeal to Principles. If the speaker is someone you have a relationship with — a sister, friend
or co-worker, for example — call on their higher principles: “Bob, I’ve always thought of you as
a fair-minded person, so it shocks me when I hear you say something that sounds so bigoted.”
“Appeal to their better instincts,” Houston said. “Remember that people are complex. What they
say in one moment is not necessarily an indication of everything they think.”
Set Limits. You cannot control another person, but you can say, “Don’t tell racist jokes in my
presence anymore. If you do, I will leave.” Or, “My workspace is not a place I allow bigoted
remarks to be made. I can’t control what you say outside of this space, but here I ask that you
respect my wishes.” Then follow through.
“The point is to draw a line, to say, ‘I don’t want you to use that language when I’m around,'” Bob
Carolla, spokesman for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. “Even if attitudes don’t change,
by shutting off bad behavior, you are limiting its contagion. Fewer people hear it or experience
it.”
Find an Ally/Be an Ally. When frustrated in your own campaign against everyday bigotry, seek
out like-minded people and ask them to support you in whatever ways they can.
And don’t forget to return the favor: If you aren’t the first voice to speak up against everyday
bigotry, be the next voice.
“Always speak up, and never be silenced out of fear,” said Shane Windmeyer, founder and
coordinator of Campus PrideNet and the Lambda 10 Project. “To be an ally, we must lead by
example and inspire others to do the same.”
Be Vigilant. Remember: Change happens slowly. People make small steps, typically, not large
ones. Stay prepared, and keep speaking up. Don’t risk silence.
“There’s a sense of personal disappointment in having not said something when you felt you
should have,” said Ron Schlittler, acting executive director of the national office of Parents,
Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.
Carolla put it this way: “If you don’t speak up, you’re surrendering part of yourself. You’re letting
bigotry win.”
Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:
Turnitin Report
Formatting
Title Page
Citation
Outline
