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Translating Identity
Translating
Identity
Leslie
Feinberg delivers the closing speech.
by Euan Bear
F
rom powerful opening plenary (see Eli Clare's
condensed address in this issue) to wide-ranging closing keynote,
the Translating Identity Conference – planned and staffed entirely
by the students of Free to Be and their allies at the University of Vermont
– was a rousing success. Anytime 700 people from around the United
States and from as far away as New Zealand register for and attend a free
conference on a Saturday, that's got to be considered success.
With two-dozen workshop and caucus sessions
split among four time slots, there was no dearth of choices for anyone
seeking information about transgender people and issues. From the history
of transmen and butches attending women's colleges, to sex, to dealing
with medical providers, to spirituality, the choices covered a wide range
of concerns and stories.
Perhaps one of the more controversial sessions
was presented by Dr. Terri Lomax, an information technology lecturer and
Ph.D. chemist from Auckland, New Zealand. Lomax, who identified herself
as a transwoman, presented the premise that childhood sexual abuse –
and perhaps other early trauma – can play a part in crystallizing
or precipitating a gender identity crisis for some transgender people.
That premise is based in part on her own experience and in part on her
interpretation of research literature on the effects of trauma on the
brain.
"It is not politically correct,"
Lomax acknowledged, "to connect transgenderism to abuse." The
tense discussion during the session bore out that statement. Lomax said
her point in bucking the tide was to encourage therapists to explore the
possibility of childhood trauma with transgender clients and to open minds
to the possibility that gender identity may not be fixed at birth for
all transgender people. Another outcome of the discussion was the reminder
that a single "cause" for any given gender identity is unlikely.
A rousing speech by transactivist Leslie
Feinberg closed the conference. Dapper in a well-tailored black suit and
Windsor-knotted silk rainbow necktie, Feinberg celebrated this "moment
in history, a moment that exemplifies the Chinese character that means
both 'crisis' and 'opportunity.'" Ze (Feinberg's preferred pronoun)
announced that the moment is simply the current embodiment of "not
just decades but centuries" of transgender history.
Feinberg declared the intention of doing
away with age-ist divisions between older and younger transactivists.
"How can we work together to build a multi-generational movement?"
Ze claimed multiple currents of activism and identity – gender bending,
gender queerness during the repressive McCarthy era when queers were routinely
purged from government jobs, butch lesbian, drag king, and cross-dresser
– "all those currents run through my body," ze said.
"It's one thing for someone who
despises my identity to label me, and another for me to stand up and face
that label and say, 'Yes, I am, and I will defend all who fall within
those parameters.'"
Ze said it was important to recognize
the Second-Wave feminist movement as a "huge swinging forward of
the pendulum" that "shook up all consciousness about what it
meant to be female-bodied." Feinberg
identified the push toward "androgyny" as that movement's "great
gender experiment" meant "to liberate all of humanity from the
concepts of masculinity and femininity."
But, Feinberg added, "Androgyny is
liberating – if you're androgynous." If oppression –
rapes, beatings, torture, jail, even deaths – did not change "masculine
women and feminine men," then why would the "liberation"
of the feminist movement? Ze characterized the experiment as a "gift,
the awareness of the institutional system of gender oppression,"
but said the experiment's effect was "to build a world where we [transgenders]
don't exist. Well thanks, but no thanks."
For those who live between easily-read extremes
of the expression of masculine and feminine, "there is no simple
action, including using a toilet, that is not fraught with danger. I go
through airports and see whole walls of [the book] Men Are from Mars,
Women Are from Venus. I'm here to tell you that for the intersex,
there are no separate planets, just heavenly bodies.... To those who want
to fight genital mutilation, I say 'Yes! Let's start here in the United
States!'"
Feinberg spoke of how Sojourner Truth, "six
feet tall, with massive muscles," was "transbaited," forced
to strip in front of male witnesses to find out whether she was really
a female. Ze spoke of Frederick Douglass the freed former slave, who was
a strong ally to the feminists at Seneca Falls."'Right is of no sex,'"
Feinberg quoted Douglass. "He could have come here today and those
words would still be relevant." Douglass and other men who stood
up for women's rights were called "Aunt Nancy's men," a term
"meant to emasculate" them.
Finally, Feinberg said, any credible social
or civil rights movement "must stand up to war as an issue."
Ze cited history from World War I to today, lingering on the anti-Viet
Nam war movement and the Gay Liberation Front's solidarity with anti-war
organizations as well as with the civil rights and black liberation movements
of the time. Ze quoted Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton: "Wherever
the forces of Black liberation meet, the forces of gay liberation are
also!"
Ze wondered whether Sylvia Rivera, a transgender
person, a "combatant at Stonewall," would feel welcome in today's
lesbian and gay organizations fighting for marriage rights, and where
are our lgbt voices in protesting the increased racial profiling and the
anti-youth ready-to-roll proposal for a compulsory military draft that
are consequences of September 11 and the Iraq War. Trans and gay and lesbian
and bi must stand up to war as an issue, Feinberg declared, for all of
our issues for us and all our natural allies are "tied to this war."
Feinberg closed a fiery speech saying, "I would wish for us to be
the best fighters against each others' oppression" and calling for
everyone to demonstrate against the war.