A
common misconception about
“coming out” is that it represents
a clean break, where there is a de-
finitive moment when you’re in the closet
and when you’re fully out in public. Most
queer people will tell you that coming out is
instead something you have to do over and
over — that the people you will meet will
most likely assume you’re straight until you
inform them otherwise.
This conception of coming out might be
more true for trans people, especially trans
women, than anyone else: It’s hard to avoid
being “read” as trans. Even if I wanted to
go “stealth” — that is, to pass as a cisgen-
der woman 100% of the time — I probably
couldn’t. Too much about me gives me away:
my broad shoulders, my deep voice, the fa-
cial hair that’s difficult to hide without gau-
dy amounts of makeup.
Transition is a slower, more tentative pro-
cess than a lot of people think it is. I experi-
mented for about a year with all sorts of vari-
ants on my name, pronouns and dress; even
when I had pretty firmly decided on formal
transition, I only told a few people about it
at first. I wasn’t able to get on hormone re-
placement therapy and pursue electrolysis
until nearly a year after that. For a long time,
I was called “sir” by service workers, and
acquaintances and friends of friends mostly
called me by my deadname.
There are a lot of potential stories I could
extract from this process, but it mostly feels
amorphous and tentative, even now. I’m
still unsure what being trans is supposed to
“mean.” A friend once asked me how I knew
that I wanted to be a woman, and I wasn’t sure
how to answer, or if I even had a good answer
at all.
Even if I can’t speak to what it might mean
to be a woman in some metaphysical way, I
can speak more confidently about being treat-
ed differently as a woman. A few months af-
ter starting hormones, I was walking home at
about 2 a.m. from a party, and a man caught
up to me. He walked alongside me for a block
or so, asking if I would just stop to, “have a
conversation.” He wanted to know if he could,
“ask me a question.” I was kind of tipsy and
kept demurring without saying very much,
trying to make it clear from my body language
that I wanted him to leave me alone. He even-
tually did.
I had never experienced anything remotely
like that, and while it wasn’t earth-shattering,
something changed for me after. I’ve only had
a small handful of things like this happen to
me since then, but I still noticed that I felt
a little less safe in public, and started to feel
more nervous about walking somewhere on
my own.
This is normal, probably; it is the sort of
harassment cis women are privy to and have
experienced for much longer than I have.
But I know that among trans women, I’m not
even remotely the worst off. My parents didn’t
reject me, I didn’t lose my job and I live in a
place that is relatively accepting of people like
me. I’m reminded of this every day when I
log onto Twitter and see people crowdfund-
ing transition expenses, food, housing and
emergency medical care. Though I see the
names of murdered trans women proliferate
on social media, it seems like most cis people
are generally unaware of how many of us find
ourselves in sudden need of help, how often
we find ourselves shut out of society. It seems
like most people don’t know how precarious
our lives are.
The way trans people are talked about in
public might give you a different idea. The
amount of discourse around the issue of our
existence in the media seems grotesquely out
of proportion given that trans people amount
to less than 1% of the U.S. population. We’ve
become a sort of sticking point in the culture
war, now that it’s becoming increasingly ap-
parent that rights for cis white gays and lesbi-
ans have been, for the moment, asserted and
accepted in public life. Conservatives who
want to win mainstream appeal have found
that trans people are an easier target than
our gay counterparts. This strategy has been
particularly effective in the UK, where the
most virulent transphobia is now more or less
mainstream. In the U.S., the mainstream me-
dia is less saturated with this sort of rhetoric,
but we see legislative debates about trans ac-
cess to bathrooms, locker rooms and school
athletics.
It’s frustrating to find oneself on the other
end of this, especially given that trans people
are not often allowed a seat at the media ap-
paratus or the legislative debates to which we
are subject. When we are given a voice, the
case for our continued existence is framed
as one side of a “debate.” For most of us, the
recourse we have is to continually check the
news, watching as the specter made of our
community is endlessly scrutinized.
I
t’s been a weird couple of weeks to be
trans. One of the more high-profile
celebrities who have revealed them-
selves to be transphobic is the author J.K.
Rowling, who posted a nearly 4,000 word es-
say on her website on June 10 titled “J.K. Row-
ling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking
out on Sex and Gender Issues.” The original
title of the piece was “TERF Wars,” the acro-
nym standing for “trans-exclusionary radi-
cal feminist.” I’ve always found the label of
TERF to be a little dubious, because it allows
transphobes to claim the legacy and historical
cause of feminism, which J.K. Rowling at least
purports to do.
I’m reluctant to close-read the essay and
pick it apart piece-by-piece. Other people have
done it better, and moreover there’s nothing
new in it. If you’ve spent any amount of time
reading transphobic writing — which I have,
probably to the detriment of my mental health
— you’ve seen all these talking points before.
Generally, the transphobic media landscape
operates like this: No matter how banal or
easily refuted their points are, you keep seeing
them crop up in another article, another fo-
rum post, another tweet thread. Sometimes it
feels like these points are repeated so endless-
ly with the hope that people will be convinced
by them, and more to saturate the public nar-
rative around trans people’s existence. The
more time trans people and our allies spend
refuting these points, the more public airtime
they get, and the more these same talking
points filter into public consciousness in the
form of truisms and “common sense.”
And so, in summary: Rowling sees trans
women as predatory men seeking access to
“single sex spaces,” particularly bathrooms
and locker rooms designated for women. Her
appraisal of trans men is essentially that they
are women, and therefore passive victims of
patriarchy whose transitions represent false
solutions to the ordinary kinds of alienation
women suffer from in adolescence and early
adulthood. Her deterministic, essentially bi-
nary thinking is apparent, even though she
assures us that she doesn’t categorically hate
trans people. She’s just against what she calls
a “theory of gender identity” or “the current
trans activism” that persuades people to tran-
sition when they should be doing something
else. To back this up, she points to an (un-
sourced) statistic that “between 60-90% of
gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their
dysphoria.”
Her writing is couched in a peculiar appro-
priation of the language of concern. Of course,
we are led to believe, Rowling is simply con-
cerned about trans activism going too far,
overstepping its rightful place. To give some
idea of what she sees as the rightful place of
trans activism, she at one point describes a
trans woman friend whose transition she
deems appropriate, and contrasts it with the
current trans activism:
“She went through a long and rigorous pro-
cess of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged
transformation. The current explosion of
trans activism is urging a removal of almost all
the robust systems through which candidates
for sex reassignment were once required to
pass.”
There’s a term that trans people used to use
in the ‘70s and ‘80s known as “crash landing.”
This referred to rejection from a gender iden-
tity clinic after this “rigorous process of evalu-
ation.” The medical establishment basically
told these trans people that they were out of
luck, that they couldn’t live normal lives as
women or men, and so they should just try to
live with the gender they were born with. One
wonders, in this light, how many fewer trans
people would exist if Rowling’s “rigorous pro-
cess” was the norm — if clinicians once again
were the final arbiter of who could transition
or not. The important thing here is that some-
one else is deciding for us. Generally, I don’t
like those odds.
I could go on and on but I’ve already given
Rowling too much space. I’ve encountered
these same ideas so many times that my re-
action to her essay wasn’t even really one of
anger. I just felt my heart sink a little bit at the
sight of someone in such a position of influ-
ence making these kinds of statements.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
16 — Monday, August 31, 2020
D
ear Readers,
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Going forward: an open letter to our readers
statement
Living through the culture war about trans and queer
BY EMILY YANG, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR & MANAGING ARTS EDITOR
ILLUSTRATION BY CARA JHANG
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com
Illustration by Cara Jhang
EMILY YANG
Statement Contributor & Man-
aging Arts Editor