Challenging the gender binary

Hey people,
I found this posted on a friend's facebook page and thought it was a helpful articulation of one person's (Mx Justin Vivian Bond) identity.


"Fortunately, since that day in Cafe Flore a younger generation of trans people have come along to articulate what I’ve been experiencing.  When I was young I was fascinated by the stories I read of people like Christine Jorgenson and Dr. Rene Richards -people who had had “sex-change” operations in order to become members of the opposite gender than the one they were assigned at birth.  I was deeply fascinated by them and hoped their stories would unlock the mystery which I felt was locked deep inside myself .  Ultimately their stories provided no satisfactory answers. For me there is no opposite sex. For me there is only identity and desire."

(Read the full post, Mx Justin Vivian Bond: A User's Guide, here.)

A little commentary... As an aforementioned white boy from a conservative (read: no tolerance for variance from heteronormative whatever) suburb, I, like many people I imagine, took gender binaries from my environment (because it was convenient enough for me to do so, and because I wasn't aware, in any clear way, of variance from the binary) as a 'natural' 'given' and though I always had impulses and moments where things didn't seem to fit, an impulse to be more affectionate or wanting to express myself in words in a way that seemed 'unfit' to my 'male' 'gender,' tastes (hey, just realized that 'taste' sounds like the same thing as 'desire') that were codified by commercial media and people around me as belonging to 'the other' gender- and though I stayed aware of these differences, these moments never led to an active revision of how I interacted with people in the world. Especially in terms of how I addressed them.

That being said, it is easy to see how power codifies the expression of sexuality (or any identity, for that matter). Just going back to an historical example of at least three centuries ago, droit de seigneur , which prescribes the right of a (male) feudal lord to rape the (female) virgins who inhabit his property, it's easy to see how socially prescribed customs have the potential to violate people's sexuality, and how identity is often prescribed from the top down in terms of power (usually defined by economic and material force). It's also worth noting any naming has the potential to be a violent act. 'Epistemic violence' and 'interpolation' and other words I learned in college...

That said, coming up in a neighborhood where 'faggot,' 'nigger,' 'spic,' 'chink,' 'cunt,' 'dyke,' and 'queer' were tossed around freely and pejoratively by everyone in my small social circle, (myself included, gasp!) owing, I guess, to that strange mixture of privilege, provincialism and anonymity in a 2-square mile almost segregated suburb- my entrance for the first time into LGBT and queer discourse at Bard was littered with 'oh, fuck's and just ignorant shit. I don't think I had real problems with people outside the heteronormative whatever, but I was aware socially that being labeled as outside of it would socially isolate me further within my hometown set of people, and I had early on recognized the power of these words, the cultural force they had in terms of evoking a guaranteed defensive reaction, within the language-bubble of my hometown. To self-psycho-analyze (I'll try to keep it brief), these hurtful expressions were products of my environment which I had little incentive to resist and little power to do so.

Even reading Mx Justin Vivian Bond's article today, the flare-ups occur. I read ' I was asked to speak on a panel at Columbia University entitled “Denaturalizing Gender and Sex”.' or ' Many years ago while I was sitting at Cafe Flore in San Francisco, one of my favorite places on earth.' (my emphasis) and think-San Fran, a city, a particularly bougie city, wealth, privilege (whether or not that's true), and my class jealousy bubbles within me. It voices itself in the fascist part of my brain, saying something to the childish effect of 'you can only express yourself this way because you're privileged enough to! So unh!' But the cool thing about distinguishing the personal from the political is I can recognize my reactionary fascism and label it as bullshit, while still having those stupid feelings as a person that isn't above experiencing class jealousy, who comforts himself by yelling 'privilege' as an excuse for my own lack of courage, etc. and conflating my anger at being from a nowhere suburb with hating someone who feels the same way I do, because they say it, and live somewhere I'd rather live. Admittedly, the boundary between personal and the political can be blurry and a tightrope at times if it exists at all. But each feeds and balances the other. The central thing is, I know it is wrong to deny people self-representation, especially in this way, doing so doesn't resonate with my ideal or practical politics and these reactionary attitudes are just me reacting to environmental shit I wasn't able to control as a kid, and hating myself, inappropriately, for it. Not the kinda thing to base decisions and actions on.

One interaction I had in college was with another friend who identified as a trans woman, male-to-female, who was pissed that (oh shit, what pronoun to use) her insurance company would not pay for a desired medical intervention. What followed was an indictment of the American healthcare system, which, as a not extremely rich guy, was already easy for me to get behind. I remember she had cited the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as problematic, which, among other things, apparently defined homosexuality as a 'mental disorder.' This was mid-way through college for me, and I had already read early African American slave narratives and had just finished reading Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, which deals with race, gender and sexuality-though certainly not in a favorable way to homosexuals. Fanon tries to deny their existence and the argument has been made that 'homophobia in the black community' (my emphasis) is a result of fear of further marginalization. In other words, 'you're already fucked because you are black, don't make it worse by being a fag.' This argument fails to recognize the lack of non-white people of differing sexual values' ability to be 'heard' in commercial culture. (Think of all the conciliatory bougie white male homosexuals portrayed on TV) The generalization of all black people as homophobic seeks to demonize black people wholesale, when the argument that multiple black communities everywhere are all homophobic is simply not the case, even across the US. I was familiar with these sorts of debates, so I was beginning to be in a position to be able to think about the, oft-repeated in liberal arts institutions, 'race, class, gender (and sexuality)' and express myself with a little background in how ideas about gender and sexuality had been constructed and re-shaped  as well as how identities had been asserted politically in the past.

On the subject of the v's article, the 'Key Terms' probably would have solved a lot of headaches and misunderstandings and corrected some ignorance throughout college. As a person trained (poorly) as an analytic essay writer I also enjoyed v's deconstruction of the transexual woman's argument of 'the fence' meaning the binary, that validates her own choice, while denying v's; I also enjoyed it cuz it respects v's own self-representation, which is key to respecting anyone (though, of course, self-representation can also be self-mis-representation, it's a good place to start.)

"By saying I would have to come down “off the fence” she was saying that sooner or later I would have to make a choice and conform my identity to embrace the gender binary and validate her choice to climb over the fence to the “other side”.  Personally, for me, I have never believed there was another side for me to cross over to.  Sometimes I wish I did.  If I felt there was a clearly defined place for me to go, where I would be welcomed and at peace, I would surely have gone there many years ago.  At times I’ve almost been able to convince myself there was, but for me to claim to be “a woman” would feel just as false as the charade I’ve been asked to play for so much of my life of being “a man”.  Having said that, I will affirm that I do believe there is another side for others; for transexual men and women who fully embrace and are comfortable subscribing to the gender binary -to a polarized notion of gender. But please don’t assume that aspiring to pass is “realness”, because as far as I can see “realness” too is a construct built on shifting sand.  If you insist on serving “realness” don’t be surprised if it is declared to hard too swallow and sent back to the kitchen.  This applies to “real men”, “real women” and all of their enablers.  I’m not interested in the expression of “realness”.  I would like to be afforded the luxury of being free to be as honest as possible and to have my truth be respected."

I also dig v's justification for the prefix Mx, and the categorization of the gender: 'trans.' By the same token, I'm not sure if I have beef with these kinda statements: 'For some time I’ve been familiar with the words zee, hir, or they as gender-neutral terms but I’ve never really liked them.' and 'So what I’ve come up with is “v”.  Since my name is Justin Vivian Bond and since Vivian begins with a V and visually a V is two even sides which meet in the middle I would like v to be my pronoun.' and 'My new name is Mx Justin Vivian Bond because it embraces my trans identity, it reflects and inspires my inner imaginings and -most importantly- because I like it. ' (my emphasis) My 'beef' here is petty. At least v acknowledges 'being free to be as honest as possible' and to have v's 'truth respected' is a 'luxury.' I'm just looking for a solution that's more general and doesn't apply to the individual, which misses the point of the whole argument for self-representation.

...all this being said, you should just read the article.