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Madison Foster's Speech - Dyke and Trans March 2014

July 25, 2014 at 11:48pm

Hi everyone! I'm Madison, thank you so much for coming out and getting flamboyantly indignant with me. It's important to create our own language. Language is power, and the act of naming a thing is to define that thing, to give it shape and clear borders. We are the ultimate authorities on our genders. I'm a genderqueer trans girl. That describes my experience of gender: of who I experience myself to be, and of where I belong in the world. I'm %100 a woman, as much as any woman is. I'm also trans, which tells you a lot more about society and my position in it than it does about me, really. I'm genderqueer because I'm even MORE than a woman: there's a healthy dose of boy in there, too... NOT any amount of man, not by a long shot, but yeah, definitely some boy. The problem is that "boy" assumes "not a girl" and THAT's been a bit of an issue for me. I also love the word femme, which describes an intentional possession of my own inner femininity.

The lens I view trans politics from is primarily transfeminist. Transfeminism is a feminist movement with a specific and active focus on the perspectives and politics of trans women and other transfeminine people. In my speech I use the words gender and sex interchangeably to mean the same thing.

Transfeminine means: Anyone with a feminine-of-center identity who was designated male at birth. This can include trans women, feminine-of-center nonbinary people, people who identify partially as a woman, among others.

Cissexism is A society-level preference for cisgender people and a bias against trans people, which denies trans people access to the same legal, economic, cultural, and social privileges that cis people enjoy. Transphobia is negative attitudes toward transgender people and is just one element of cissexism.

My speech is primarily about transmisogyny, so let's define that.  Misogyny is the hatred and devaluation of women and of femininity. Transmisogyny is the combination of both misogyny and transphobia: cultural hatred, individual and state violence, and discrimination directed specifically toward trans women and transfeminine people. Femmephobia, which is the devaluing and degrading of specifically femininity, is an aspect of transmisogyny, and I want to point out that it's real problem even within queer communities and culture.

Much like transphobia is an element of cissexism, misogyny is an element of a society-wide system of sexism. To understand transmisogyny we need to undersatnd sexism. Let's break sexism down into two components: oppositional sexism and traditional sexism. Oppositional sexism is the belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, and that femininity and masculinity are essential to those gender categories. Traditional sexism is the belief that maleness and masculinity are superior to femaleness and femininity. Women have historically been pressured to perform various femininities, and then we've been simultaneously punished for it. Oppositional sexism has relaxed to a degree due to feminist movement, but we've actually made little headway with traditional sexism. 

Patriarchy attacks some cis women (such as butch lesbians), trans men and transmasculine people for deviating too far from the gender norms mandated by their on birth designation, but it does not attack their masculinity itself. To do so would be to call the superiority of masculinity and maleness into question. For example tomboys are often encouraged to a degree, while young boys who display femininity are more likely to be shamed. When women do masculinity we are often seen as "stepping up" to level of men, but it's always made clear that we are still subordinate to men and can never actually be "one of the guys."

The devaluing of femininity and womanhood is coded into our socialization before we can even talk. Young boys are taught to distance themselves from femininity and everything that is "for girls," contact with the feminine will destroy their male status and personal worth. Is it any wonder men so routinely view women as objects and not as people? Is it any wonder so many men maintain that women are mysterious and they just can't understand us? It's because they're trying very hard not to. Men use femmephobia to police the genders of other men and maintain larger sexist power structures. So here's transmisogyny in a nutshell: Patriarchy views us as "gender traitors;" using oppositional sexism it first misgenders us as men who willingly abandon masculinity and maleness for femininity and femaleness, which is viewed as unthinkable and even disgusting because of traditional sexism. We are a direct threat to the very notion of male superiority. We are patriarchy's Public Enemy Number One, because to really and truly accept trans women as fully human, a person MUST sincerely believe that femininity and womanhood are every bit as valuable and worthwhile as masculinity and manhood. Failing to believe that is misogyny.

Internalized transmisogyny is just like internalized misogyny, such as when as women we label other women "sluts". When we as trans woman or transfeminine people absorb the trans-misogynistic narrative of our culture and apply it to ourselves, we grow up being nursed on poison, and we learn to hate ourselves... and we even learn to hate our own trans sisters. 

Hypervisibility is another important term. It's the situation where our culture & society excessively scrutinize and focus on trans women and transfeminine people while pretending trans men and transmasculine people don't even exist. Due to transmisogyny, this scrutiny often takes the form of: the degradating, dehumanizing, fetishization & sexualization, pathologizing, and objectification of our bodies and lived realities.

So, what are the lived realities of transmisogyny? Let's get a reality check!

1 in 5 transgender women (21%) has been incarcerated at some point in her life. This is far above the general population, and is almost 1 in 2 for Black transgender women

Over half of all LGBTQ homicides were perpetrated against transgender women. Nearly three-quarters of those homicides targeted trans women of color.

We experience widespread employment and housing discrimination.

Trans women are frequently and systematically profiled by law enforcement. We are often arrested for being involved in sex work, even if we have no involvement, or for having IDs that do match our gender presentation. It's called "driving while trans", actually. And nearly half of trans people who reporte hate crimes to the police experience mistreatment from them while asking for help. At the TIMEout lecture on tuesday, an HRM police offer told us they have gender neutral holding cells. Which is completely avoiding the core issue at hand: why are trans women disproportionately being profiled and targeted by police, directly being denied our basic legal and human rights by police, being raped and violently assaulted by police (yes, police officers are more likely to sexually and violently assault trans prisoners, women, and people of color. Guess who gets the absolute worst of it? Yes, Trans Women of Color.) We are then taken out of the "gender neutral holding cell" thrown into prisons full of men where we are then assaulted and raped yet again. That's like saying "Oh, sorry I just broke your legs with a with baseball bat, but have a pillow to lie down on & try not to die of exposure when I leave you out in the woods here bye bye now." 

While trans* men are generally ignored and made invisible by American media, trans* women are exoticized, our very existence perceived as shocking and newsworthy. We are mocked, over-sexualized, and fetishized, and our bodies are put on national display as medical freakshow curiosities. The modern medical and psychiatric establishments have pathologized us and refused to give us the ability to make our own choices regarding our transition. It's telling that the old DSM only diagnosed trans women as fetishists (the diagnosis is called autogynephilia) or gender-confused gay men: there was never a similar diagnosis for trans men. It was only last spring that the APA changed the DSM and stated that being transgender is not a disorder.

Trans* women are given an extremely two-dimensional portrayal in the news, we are made out to be deceivers of straight men who deserve violent reprisal, or confused and pathetic men who can't hack masculinity. We are portrayed as sexual deviants or fetishists, fundamentally unattractive, or sex workers. We told that we're merely drag queens or cross-dressers. We are mocked and our basic humanity is degraded at every turn. Jared Leto is given awards for his courage in pretending to be a caricature of a trans woman, while Laverne Cox is right here playing a trans woman while BEING an out, loud & beautifully proud trans woman. No awards for her. Even when media attempts to be sympathetic, such as Acrade Fire's "We Exist" video, our own voices and the right to tell our own stories are tossed aside inside favor of cis people's narratives about who we are. Sure, I might spend a lot of time in front of the mirror, but my life is not a fucking makeup montage, and we do not exist to entertain, titillate, or thrill your sense of shameful curiosity. 

We are shouted down in our communities, by men like Dan Savage and RuPaul who think they have every right to speak over us and tell us we have no right to be offended, after all, they're gay men/ drag queens, they speak for the entire lgbtqqip2saa community, RIGHT? RIGHT? Transmisogyny is even present in queer spaces, where we are marginalized by men and masculine-of-center people who are openly misogynistic and exclusionary towards trans women. We are even hounded by trans exclusionary radical feminists whose goal is to deny us life-saving and necessary medical treatments, or keep us out of our own safe spaces.

And that is the abstract of the abridged cliff notes of transmisogyny.

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Now, how about a bit of my own story?

I miss my lost girlhood, it leaves this raw hole in my chest just thinking about it. I distinctly remember grade 9 english class, when I was brave enough to paint my nails. The memory plays like a 1080p movie in my mind; the teacher coming over to my desk, seeing my nails, then turning her head away. She looks back, then turns away again, this time laughing and covering her mouth. She walks away from me, giggling and waving her hand dismissively.

I hated myself so passionately.

I knew there was some part of me that was female when I was 11 or 12; I felt like I belonged with the other girls but I was cut off or barred from that. I was exiled, and I have this vividly powerful memory of standing in the hall during 9th grade one time when the lunch bell rang. I just stood there, watching people go by, and I had this image or vision of myself living behind this soundproof two-way mirror, and no one could hear or see me even though I’m screaming at the top of my lungs.

So yeah, that was my girlhood, I guess. I got all this misogyny that other girls did, but I never had any sisterhood to take shelter in. I was left out with the wolves. That’s why I am ferocious in defending my teenage sisters now, especially my trans girl sisters, because I had to be ferocious to take back my own girlhood and clean all the poison out of it.

  The great themes of my life, up until I turned 33 last December, were definitely isolation and self-loathing. My gender kept coming up, over and over again, and I'd violently stamp it back down like a game of existential whack-a-mole. I'd spend hours and hours customizing female avatars in video games, it was private and removed enough to be deniable. So much of my life has been spent looking my loved ones in the eyes, and feeling so desperate to express what was authentic and real inside of me but always feeling this utter certainty that to do so would be absolutely catastrophic. I was a ghost in my own life, I was unreal and insubstantial, as if I could float through the walls; just disappear and no one would notice. Last year I did some dating on OkCupid, and I met a really cool person who was exploring their gender identity. They really opened up to me, and about halfway through reading one of their message about their experiences I suddenly had a severe panic attack. It was too real. I understood what they were saying too perfectly. I related too much. I felt it too intimately. It was overwhelming. I read some Kate Bornstein and poked around in her books a bit. In January 2013 I was at the sexual health center and the form asked if I was "Male, Female, Other." I got pretty upset and I impulsively and angrily wrote "genderqueer" in the blank. I didn't know if I was allowed to do that, if it was okay, if I'd get in trouble. I didn't feel queer enough, like I hadn't earned my stripes or something. More internalized transphobia: we get shit on for being who are, and we're also forced to justify who we are and earn the right to our own identity. Other than confiding in a few friends, I kept it stuffed down for almost a whole year. It wasn't until I started asking myself "What proof do I have that I'm cisgender?" that things started to budge a little.

I really dug deep into feminism last year. It did three things for me: first, social justice is just important to me. More personally, feminism gave me some of the tools I needed to deconstruct the masculinity that I used as a life preserver. When people and society raise you as a boy, but you're actually not one, you still learn to devalue women. The problem is you are one, and you also learn to devalue yourself. When I first started transitioning, I found beards on gender non-conforming people very triggering and upsetting. Why? Because I deeply hated my own facial hair, and every time I saw that my own self-loathing rose to the surface.

Oppressive systems don't just work using external pressure and power, they also force us to internalize oppressive beliefs and then we do the job of keeping ourselves down. Certainly makes the oppressor's job a lot easier; I can't really cause too much trouble if I feel so ashamed of my innermost feelings that I can't even give them a voice.  It can be very hard work removing the poison of transmisogyny from our own hearts. Feminism helped me surgically remove this toxic anti-woman sludge that had I'd been force-fed all my life, and it allowed me to start really immersing myself in and connecting with the experiences and perspectives of other women. It was a bridge back to sisterhood for me. Now my feminism is centered firmly on trans women. Feminism is for fighting male domination, but feminism is also for loving ourselves. If their patriarchy is misogyny, then my feminism is philogyny, which is the antonym of misogyny: a fondness, love for, and admiration of women.

I've been through a lot besides being trans: undiagnosed ADHD, fundamentalist religious programming, child abuse, PTSD; I wish I had time to touch on these issues, because most trans women don't get here without some serious battle scars.

I started coming out as trans and I've been transitioning since January, which was pretty hard because I worked 50+ hours a week in a car dealership. If you're wondering, it's pretty damn sexist up in there so it's hardly a safe environment for a trans person. I was constantly terrified. Terrified that I wouldn't be able to perform an adequate masculinity for 50 hours a week and people would see through my drag king stage performance. Terrified of crossing that vast chasm, an aisle 3 feet wide, separating the men's and women's clothing sections. Terrified that a coworker would see me outside of work. Terrified no one would believe me or take me seriously. Terrified that the people I cared about wouldn't understand and I would be just as alone and isolated and defective as I had believed myself to be all my life. I am powerfully overjoyed to report that I was wrong about that.

Let's touch on dysphoria: a feeling of being ill at ease concerning the perception of my how body is gendered: both my perceptions and those of others. It has to do with the meaning of my body. My facial hair and body hair is like an alien organism, a hostile invader. I have a lot of technical issues with body hair removal, and sometimes the dysphoria gets so bad that I'm overcome with this seething, molten rage. I end up screaming silently (I have roommates) into the bathroom mirror; looking myself in the eye and raging "I hate you I hate you I hate you..." raising my fist as if to strike, body trembling, my face contorted into a wild animal fury. I can't breathe, I've been thrown into an icy lake and the air is sucked out of me and I've swallowed a sharp chunk of metal that's lodged in my throat and my stomach is twisting into knots. Sometimes I end up on the bathroom floor, just crying.

Then I pick up myself, look myself in the mirror again, hug myself and say "I love, you girl, and I've got your back. We're going to figure this out together." No matter how bad dysphoria is, it's nowhere near as bad as that feeling of isolation and fundamental disconnection that I used to have. I say "used to have" because pretty much as soon as I accepted my gender identity and began transitioning my mental and emotional health improved by several orders of magnitude. Which is funny, because the dysphoria got unbelievably worse. It's also funny, because I actually face a much more intense form of transmisogyny because I'm extremely visible on a daily basis as a trans person and that makes me an "other" to most people, that makes me a target. But I don't feel isolated anymore. I have my real self, and I have a community that validates and includes me.

I had a doctor laugh in my face when I tried to explain what my dysphoria was about and how I needed help. I had another doctor decline to take me on as a general patient. Did my work lay me off because they found out I'm trans? I have no idea, they won't tell me why I was let go. That taxi driver I called for pickup pulled over, took a look at me, and then peeled out and sped away. There's the endless array of questions from cashiers "Did you lose a bet, or do you like dressing like that?" There's the trans exclusionary radical feminists sending me messages on my blog calling me a "hateful misogynistic male." There's the constant scrutiny whenever I step outside the door, always being aware of people watching me. It's the way the shopkeepers stops in their tracks when they see me, their eyes scan me up and down, and they stutter and stammer awkwardly trying to have the most basic of conversations with me. Men used to strike up casual small-talk with me public, maybe once or twice a week. That hasn't happened once this year, unless you count the guy yelling "FREEEEEEEAK" out of his car window. It's watching a clip of an elderly man on "America's Got Talent" sing about how hilarious he finds the fact that trans women exist, and seeing a studio full of people on national television applaud, cheer, and shower him with affectionate adulation. It's being told "You'll have to get used to wearing panties if you want to be a woman."

It's wondering if those young men in that car are curious or if they're thinking about what they'd do to me if I was alone late at night. I know I have reason to be suspicious because I used to be accepted in the boy's club, and I remember how they spoke about women when it was just the guys around. I remember how they spoke about trans women; they certainly didn't call us "trans women." Here's a response to the inevitable "not all men!" reply: if I offered you a handful of skittles, but with the warning that a few of them might be poisoned, would you risk taking a skittle? So, until you prove to me that you're not a transmisogynist, I'm mentally putting a big, yellow "caution" sign on you because the bottom line is I gotta keep myself safe. If any men hearing that are uncomfortable: GOOD. Now go talk to your bro's and tell them to stop being misogynists.

It isn't that any of those things, other than the doctor incident, are so bad. It's that they happen all the time. Every day. Building on on top of one another until transmisogyny is a mountain that is constantly growing as I climb up it. What I just described is the concept of "microaggressions," in case you're not familiar with that word; little drops of aggression that add up until you're swimming in a big pool of hostility.

My choice is to be invisible, or to be hypervbisible. To disappear and stop existing, or to make myself a target. I choose to be a target, because it's better for me. I love myself for who I am now, and that is such a new and novel experience; it's a tangible feeling I carry around like the warmest sunlight filling my whole body. It's hearing someone call me "my sister" and rolling around on my bed with a giant beaming smile, just sighing for 2 whole minutes. It's hearing my real name, Madison, and it hitting me like the softest sledgehammer, I can't believe how intensely wonderful, affirming, beautiful, and empowering it is. Every time. Like, the intensity is totally off the charts. It's looking myself in the mirror, and seeing Madison staring back, and feeling to connected to her, and tears bursting forth because it just feels so damn good to finally be me. It's to be able to tell my story, share my real & authentic feelings and experiences, without shame or self-doubt. It's regularly having women strike up conversation about my fashion and makeup choices, and receiving their compliments like water for a parched woman in a desert. It's been connecting with other women, it's been exploring that sense of sisterhood, of female community, of belonging, that I had been denied for the last 20 years. 

I was paved over. I was buried under hot asphalt, society had no use or place for me. I recently saw this photoset of flowers pushing their way up through cracks in urban settings, and it resonated with me so powerfully. I am those flowers; because I've had to be irrepressible, indestructible, and implacable so I that I could be effervescent, lovely, and tender. That's what femme means to me, I am not reproducing femininity, I am producing my femininity; I am not playing at womanhood, I am possessing and creating womanhood. My transgender journey has been about reclaimation, taking my power back, possessing my authenticity and holding it aloft for the world to see. It's been a refusal to stop existing, to submit or play their game. Our lady Laverne Cox said "It is revolutionary for any trans person to choose to be seen and visible in a world that tells us we should not exist."  It is not the responsibility of any trans person to be visible, or be an activist, or fight transphobia. That is the job of cis people, who benefit from and maintain cissexism and transphobia. My thinking is that cis people don't seem too keen on fixing things, so someone has to get the ball rolling for them. I take comfort in knowing that maybe the next visibly gender-non-conforming person who goes through that checkout line won't get asked awkward, invasive questions. Radical visibility, which is being seen in the culture and in society on our own terms, repossesses space for us and other trans people.