Joseph McClellan - Trans*Am: Cis Men and Trans Women in Love

Published by

ThreeL Media | Stone Bridge Press

P. O. Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707

www.threelmedia.com

2017 Joseph McClellan

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America.

PREFACE

For years I have wanted, and even felt a duty, to write about the topics contained in this book. I was held back by an uncertainty about what form it should take and whether I had any kind of perspective over the experiences that would inform itnamely, that at the age of twenty, in 1999, as a cisgender, woman and realized the world around me saw this love as problematic. While I received understanding and support from close friends and family, there was virtually none to be found in the media or in society at large.

Over the next fifteen years, trans women would be some of my warmest friends and deepest loves. While I was aware of vibrant activism being led by trans people themselves, I found it strange that virtually no menthe friends, brothers, fathers, and especially the lovers of the trans women I knewhad anything to contribute to conversations that affected them, directly or indirectly, in so many ways. This book is essentially my extended speculative unpacking of personal experiences and observations: how I have felt in the course of loving trans women and my experiences of how they felt, how I have tried to make sense of the world that considers this love a problem, and how to speak to that world so that it may yet soften its harsh, objectifying and disempowering gaze.

From 1999 to 2013, my interest in gender studies was deeply personal, not academic. My trans friends and lovers were not scholars, so none of them turned me onto the latest writing in the field. I had some background in feminist philosophy, and it was apparent that it overlapped in many ways with the trans issues I encountered in my personal life, but I wasnt aware of the growing transfeminist literature. In 2006, in the early years of my doctorate program in Religion (Indo-Tibetan Buddhism), I read Mary Dalys radical feminist treatise Beyond God the Father and was taken aback by some of her transphobic comments. I was also horrified to learn, from a footnote in that book, of the existence of Janice Raymond, the archetypal anti-trans antagonist. After reading her anti-transwoman screed, The Transsexual Empire, I discovered Sandy Stones remarkable refutation The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto, which gave me my first taste of trenchant transfeminist writing.

At the time in New York City I was developing friendships and relationships in the trans community. My friend Eric Miclette, another cis hetero man who was very involved in the community, suggested I read Julia Seranos Whipping Girl, which planted a seed in me to tackle the subject of cis men who are attracted to trans women in a systematic way. Yet I was immersed in my doctorate program in Buddhist philosophy, and to suddenly change my dissertation proposal to transgender issues would likely have been difficult to manage. I did, however, shift my focus away from traditional Buddhist philosophy and Tibetan philology toward more immediate problems I found myself involved in. My dissertation, therefore, ended up being about the problem of Eurocentrism and institutional racism in philosophyabout the toxic social, political, and economic effects of racial (and, by extension, gender and sexual) essentialism. Thus my dissertation served as a testing ground for many of the arguments offered in this book. The perplexities of old philosophical texts, which I used to revel in for their own sake, mattered less and less to me if they could not be applied to my own life and the lives of my friends. An eloquent essay by the philosopher Thalia Mae Bettcher (herself a trans woman) sheds light on my own academic evolution. She writes,

The perplexity that vexes me, however, wasnt revealed by the questions of some philosopher. My entire life has already been saturated with perplexity... And one of the deepest, most personal questions, it seems to me, is simply this: What the fuck is going on here? How on earth do I make sense of my life as a trans* person?

I ask the same about my life as a transamorous person.

When I finally had the opportunity to dedicate myself to this project, it fortuitously coincided with The Transgender Tipping Point I limit my reflections to relations between cis men and trans women because this is all I have firsthand experience of. While I have had a few trans male acquaintances and have read some of their memoirs and academic work, I do not have anything substantive to add to that discourse. While I suspect that some of this book may be relevant to trans-male trans-amory, I do not set out with the intention of constructing a universal transamorous theory. Rather, taking a more first-person experiential approach, I hope to encourage all kinds of transams to articulate themselves in their own way.

Moreover, I do not attempt a sweeping objective survey of the entire field of transgender studies. this book attempts something like critical cisness.

Not being a decorated authority on transgender theory, sociology, history, or biology, I have had to supplement what I have learned in those fields with my own somewhat idiosyncratic trainingsprimarily Indo-Tibetan Buddhist theory and continental philosophy. Under these influences, I dwell at length on the ethical brambles and byways that present themselves to transamorous people, the factors that affect the way we perceive those we love and desire, and the deeper metaphysical assumptions that condition our perceptions and behaviors. However, since my interest in transgender issues has never been one of academic curiosity but of deep emotional investment, the book blends theory with personal anecdotes, confessions, and speculations about failed relationships and quarrels. I hope my inclusion of these events is not purely narcissistic but of use to some readers.

I have met and heard about many transamorous men who have struggled profoundly with their attraction, falling into sexuality-centered depressions and violent behavior. Fortunately I have managed to avoid the worst of these calamities, in part due to my not being too strongly recruited at an early age into ideological positions or theoretical systems (theologies, homophobia) that would have made it more difficult for me to reconcile my attraction to trans women when it did manifest later in adolescence. A secondary benefit was that as I got older, I was drawn more and more to ways of thinking that would help me make sense of myself in relation to those I was attracted to. These included the Buddhist traditions anti-essentialist metaphysics or worldview, and the self-sculpting techniques of Western continental philosophy. Theoretical though they may be, I believe these resourceswhile certainly not the only onesare easily translated into practice and that forging more connections between them and transgender discourse can harm nothing.

Tibetan Buddhism and literature contain a prolific tradition of biography and autobiography. Biographical texts are composed and organized according to outer, inner, and secret categories. Outer biographies are rough sketches of a life, like Wikipedia entries. They tell us where a person was born and to what kind of parents; where they studied, and what subjects; who they married, where they went, and when and how they died. Inner biographies provide a glimpse into the emotional life of the subject. They are akin to the Western memoir. They talk of how they struggled with the death of a sibling at a young age, their relationships with their teachers, and the joys and sorrows that populate their lives. Secret biographies divulge the subjects deeper experience, unpacking the structures and implications of their inner life. These are something like Sartres exhaustive plumbing of Jean Genets mind in