At the moment there is a strong presence, both online and elsewhere, of women who are pushing very hard against a proposal for the New Zealand Government to allow people to change their birth certificates based on how they identify, and nothing else.
As someone with transgender friends and acquaintances, and with a number of friends and acquaintances with trans children, the aggressive actions and words of a small number of self-proclaimed 'feminists' is, at first, simply bewildering.
The issues around the self identification of trans women has come up before. Family First started making noise about a trans girl at a girls' only school. Some of the opposition to this on my social media came from surprising quarters. The biggest surprise to me was someone I'd known since we were politically aware teenagers, who expressed concern about 'men' in women's spaces.
And this ultimately is what has blown up recently. That trans women were actually men, deceiving us all in order to access women's spaces, and that trans men were butch lesbians who had been forced to transition to be men.
But once you scratch beneath the surface, it all become much more troubling (if that's possible - the original idea is troubling enough) and very, very personal.
The crux of anti trans activists campaign is around biology. "What is a woman?" they will collectively bark. The assertion is that women are oppressed on the basis of their biology, therefore trans women, not possessing the same biological construction, don't have a place in feminism.
Where we get into a really bizarre intersection, if you like, is that old school Lesbians (with-a-capital-L) seem to be joining forces with conservative Christians to push against the idea of gender being something determined in one's own mind rather than by genitalia.
I am struggling to keep up with the science speak which explains away the fallacies of biological essentialism, because before we even get to that, it doesn't even really even make sense on a logical level.
As for getting personal? Yeah...I feel that it starts to reach into the personal. Maybe I should be grateful its given me a chance to examine my own identity (again? really?) but I don't think my trans sisters (and brothers) are feeling it.
For what its worth, here are my theories. I want to start with my position, which is that trans women are women, and trans men are men. Just so we're clear about that.
I am very puzzled about conservatives and Lesbians (with-a-capital-L) being bedfellows in this, as I would have thought their position on biology would have been polar opposites.
By Lesbians with a capital L, I mean Lesbians for whom this label is a cultural identity. Trust me - I've done a lot of exploring around identity, and lesbian identity in particular. I have done a lot of reading, and I've done a bit of exploring around Lesbian identities in the New Zealand context. I went to a workshop at the Women's Centre; I've been to the Charlotte Museum. I've read. A lot. My bibliography is on this blog. I belong to online lesbian groups. I explore what it might mean to identify as a lesbian, and have spent a lot of time considering whether this is my identity or not. In fact, the current whirl of commentary around identity pulls it back to the front of my mind.
My exploration has led me to the conclusion that at this point, I'm happy to wear the label 'lesbian,' but it sits alongside a number of identities. Probably the main ones I like to have it sit beside are Mother, Partner, Writer, Photographer, Woman - not necessarily in that order. And not necessarily with capital letters, either. My 'lesbian identity' could mean that I am a woman who is in a romantic and sexual relationship with another woman. It could mean that I am attracted to other women. I could mean that I am a 'woman identified woman who doesn't fuck men.' All of them would be true, but the strength of any of them depends on what's going on around me on any given day, really.
I have spent a bit of time playing with identities. The veritable rainbow of identities meant I didn't have to shoehorn myself into anything before I was ready. But what is really interesting is the defensiveness of Lesbians of their particular identity. "If everyone is calling sexuality fluid, then where does that leave us?"
Indeed.
So when the idea that butch lesbians - the classic lesbian stereotype - are being pushed into transitioning into being men starts circulating, then the heads are thrown back and the howling starts. And understandably so - the patriarchy literally picking off women to bring into its fold is a pretty gross concept. If it were true.
But what of the movements of feminists to stop women being shoehorned into ideas of femininity? Cis-gendered, heterosexual women are no longer beholden to high femme ideals of appearance, or pushed into old fashioned gender roles and compulsory heterosexual life. Maybe once upon a time Lesbians were radical in their refusal (and psychological inability) to shackle themselves to the heterosexual nuclear family ideal. But now cis-gendered, heterosexual women can make those choices, too. So what then determines the 'lesbian identity' beyond who you want to have a primary romantic and/or sexual relationship with? For me personally, hinging a major part of my identity on who I am in a relationship with got me in enough trouble the first time, so I am not inclined to go there again. In the circles I move in at least, the fact that my romantic partner is also a woman is of no consequence. At work, my young, Christian, heterosexual and betrothed colleague and I regularly talk about our partners without any sense of novelty or strangeness. With the advent of marriage equality and the treatment of women living in a same sex relationship as equal to a heterosexual couple, has the lesbian identity become so assimilated into every day life as to be invisible? Lesbians pushed - and still push - against sexuality being defined on men's terms, for men's gaze and men's pleasure. To be fair, hetero women do this too, but don't feel the same resistance in the push as their lesbian sisters. Straight life is still the easier road. Is then welcoming women-who-once-were-men and identify as lesbians a step too far? We all come at this from our own life experiences, and maybe its just that mine is of the latter - all women pushing against men defining our lives, our course, our futures, for us.
So then lets look at the conservative point of view? If trans women are not women on the basis of the equipment they possess - and I'll take that to be uteruses, vaginas and breasts - then I'm going to go straight to the conservative assumption of women being defined as mothers - or potential mothers. I'm figuring that the conservatives think trans women aren't really women because they can't breed. But where does that leave women with fertility issues? Women who opt for surgical sterilisation?
So an identity crisis and some biological essentialism collides and makes a strange combination. Lesbians with a capital L who aren't inclined to act on any kind of social mandate to reproduce via sexual activity with men - thrown in with people who think that women are biological vessels to do just that.
I pondered then, as a mother, as a cis gendered woman, as someone who has spent a significant amount of time in a heterosexual relationship, and only a quarter of that time in a homosexual relationship - where does that leave people like me?
I can tell you that biology does its job. My four children are a testament to that. My four children are also a testament to the fact that fulfilling some kind of biological imperative wasn't awful, either. Biology means the body does what it needs to do. And mine happened to do it with a reasonable amount of feel good factor. (Yup, that added a layer of confusion when many of the ideas presented to you around sexuality can be so...well...essentialist)
And there are some people for whom it is awful, but we'll put up with it because that's what women do, right? And there are some people for whom it is an absolute non-negotiable not-going-there. How about that? A mix of social and cultural conditioning, and some people with resolute certainty. Certainly no essentialism there.
What everyone is arguing about is the brain. Trans people want to identify as how they feel, not how they look.
To be blunt, my body is going to behave all the ways a 'biological female' should on a basic animal level. Right now I am nearing the end of my reproductive life, and my body is telling me all about it by trying to get in some last ditch attempts at luring me into baby making. Biologically, I could have had what? fifteen? children by now. Socially, that would have been ridiculous.
Humans are way more sophisticated than just being animals. You and me baby, we are more than just mammals. What I discovered in a relationship with a woman was more than just appropriate biological responses to stimuli in order to ..umm..smooth the way... make reproduction happen. I discovered desire. Intimacy. Longing. Love. Satisfaction. Contentment. Joy.
These are experiences peculiar to being human, and as humans we are complicated.
If the two schools of trans exclusionary activists get their way we may as well live inside the Handmaids Tale.
If we are into biological essentialism being the root of identity, then lesbians with a capital L should be behaving like biological females and mating with men and producing young, regardless of what their brains tell them. And likewise with the conservatives, who have determined that the possession of certain organs with the potential for reproduction is the hallmark of woman, regardless of a woman's potential to wear all sorts of other identities alongside Woman and/or Mother. Where do we sign up, Commander?
Never mind the human experience, in all its tumultuous, complicated glory - of the things that go on in our brains - our hearts. Of the joy of the human experience. And the human experience of determining who we are.
And that is what it is in the end.
To be human.
Who would deny someone that?
