Leslie Feinberg - Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue

ALSO BY Leslie Feinberg

Transgender Warriors

Stone Butch Blues

Dedicated with my love to the memory of revolutionary leader Dorothy Dotty Ballan who urged me to develop a vocabulary of persuasion

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep hadfallen on you

Ye are many they are few.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

The sight of pink-blue gender-coded infant outfits may grate on your nerves. Or you may be a woman or a man who feels at home in those categories. Trans liberation defends you both.

Each person should have the right to choose between pink or blue tinted gender categories, as well as all the other hues of the palette. At this moment in time, that right is denied to us. But together, we could make it a reality.

And thats what this book is all about.

I am a human being who would rather not be addressed as Ms. or Mr., maam or sir. I prefer to use gender-neutral pronouns like sie (pronounced like see) and hir (pronounced like here) to describe myself. I am a person who faces almost insurmountable difficulty when instructed to check off an f or an m box on identification papers.

Im not at odds with the fact that I was born female-bodied. Nor do I identify as an intermediate sex. I simply do not fit the prevalent Western concepts of what a woman or a man should look like. And that reality has dramatically directed the course of my life.

Ill give you a graphic example. From December 1995 to December 1996, I was dying of endocarditis a bacterial infection that lodges and proliferates in the valves of the heart. A simple blood culture would have immediately exposed the root cause of my raging fevers. Eight weeks of round-the-clock intravenous antibiotic drips would have eradicated every last seedling of bacterium in the canals of my heart. Yet I experienced such hatred from some health practitioners that I very nearly died.

I remember late one night in December my lover and I arrived at a hospital emergency room during a snowstorm. My fever was 104 degrees and rising. My blood pressure was pounding dangerously high. The staff immediately hooked me up to monitors and worked to bring down my fever. The doctor in charge began physically examining me. When he determined that my anatomy was female, he flashed me a mean-spirited smirk. While keeping his eyes fixed on me, he approached one of the nurses, seated at a desk, and began rubbing her neck and shoulders. He talked to her about sex for a few minutes. After his pointed demonstration of normal sexuality, he told me to get dressed and then he stormed out of the room. Still delirious, I struggled to put on my clothes and make sense of what was happening.

The doctor returned after I was dressed. He ordered me to leave the hospital and never return. I refused. I told him I wouldnt leave until he could tell me why my fever was so high. He said, You have a fever because you are a very troubled person.

This doctors prejudices, directed at me during a moment of catastrophic illness, could have killed me. The death certificate would have read: Endocarditis. By all rights it should have read: Bigotry.

As my partner and I sat bundled up in a cold car outside the emergency room, still reverberating from the doctors hatred, I thought about how many people have been turned away from medical care when they were desperately illsome because an apartheid whites only sign hung over the emergency room entrance, or some because their visible Kaposis sarcoma lesions kept personnel far from their beds. I remembered how a blemish that wouldnt heal drove my mother to visit her doctor repeatedly during the 1950s. I recalled the doctor finally wrote a prescription for Valium because he decided she was a hysterical woman. W hen my mother finally got to specialists, they told her the cancer had already reached her brain.

Bigotry exacts its toll in flesh and blood. And left unchecked and unchallenged, prejudices create a poisonous climate for us all. Each of us has a stake in the demand that every human being has a right to a job, to shelter, to health care, to dignity, to respect.

I am very grateful to have this chance to open up a conversation with you about why it is so vital to also defend the right of individuals to express and define their sex and gender, and to control their own bodies. For me, its a life-and-death question. But I also believe that this discussion will have great meaning for you. All your life youve heard such dogma about what it means to be a real woman or a real man. And chances are youve choked on some of it. Youve balked at the idea that being a woman means having to be thin as a rail, emotionally nurturing, and an airhead when it comes to balancing her checkbook. You know in your guts that being a man has nothing to do with rippling muscles, innate courage, or knowing how to handle a chain saw. These are really caricatures. Yet these images have been drilled into us through popular culture and education over the years. And subtler, equally insidious messages lurk in the interstices of these grosser concepts. These ideas of what a real woman or man should be straight jacket the freedom of individual self-expression. These gender messages play on and on in a continuous loop in our brains, like commercials that cant be muted.

But in my lifetime Ive also seen social upheavals challenge this sex and gender doctrine. As a child who grew up during the McCarthyite, Father-Knows-Best 1950s, and who came of age during the second wave of womens liberation in the United States, Ive seen transformations in the ways people think and talk about what it means to be a woman or a man.

Today the gains of the 1970s womens liberation movement are under siege by right-wing propagandists. But many today who are too young to remember what life was like before the womens movement need to know that this was a tremendously progressive development that won significant economic and social reforms. And this struggle by women and their allies swung human consciousness forward like a pendulum.

The movement replaced the common usage of vulgar and diminutive words to describe females with the word woman and infused that word with strength and pride. Women, many of them formerly isolated, were drawn together into consciousness-raising groups. Their discussions about the root of womens oppression and how to eradicate itresonated far beyond the rooms in which they took place. The womens liberation movement sparked a mass conversation about the systematic degradation, violence, and discrimination that women faced in this society. And this consciousness raising changed many of the ways women and men thought about themselves and their relation to each other. In retrospect, however, we must not forget that these widespread discussions were not just organized to talk about oppression. They were a giant dialogue about how to take action to fight institutionalized anti-woman attitudes, rape and battering, the illegality of abortion, employment and education discrimination, and other ways women were socially and economically devalued.

This was a big step forward for humanity. And even the period of political reaction that followed has not been able to overturn all the gains made by that important social movement.

Now another movement is sweeping onto the stage of history: Trans liberation. We are again raising questions about the societal treatment of people based on their sex and gender expression. This discussion will make new contributions to human consciousness. And trans communities, like the womens movement, are carrying out these mass conversations with the goal of creating a movement capable of fighting for justice of righting the wrongs.