The first time I met an openly trans person was at a party in the early ‘90s in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I lived at the time. An old friend was hosting the get-together and his social circle drew from unconventional strata of society, including artists, the theater crowd, the SCA, pagans, poly folks, kinksters and gender-benders. The sort of crowd where nearly everyone could recite dialogue from the “Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Being an outsider myself (I had moved to Minneapolis with the explicit goal of finding my place in gay culture there), I was delighted.
The trans person was a trans woman and we conversed for quite awhile. She was interested to talk about herself and her experiences and I was interested to listen and ask questions. I can’t remember many details now (this was over thirty years ago!) but at one point she emphasized how important it was to her to be able to use the women’s room in public places. This was a point of curiosity for me, as I had never given the subject any thought before, but I accepted her concern at face value.
Over the years that followed I met other openly trans women, though no trans men. I’m sure I also met trans people who were not openly expressing themselves, and just didn’t know. Ten years after that Minneapolis party, now living in Portland, Oregon, in the early 2000s, my opinion of openly trans women was simple: I considered them to be some of the bravest people I knew. After all, they were going public in expressing their sense of identity even though it exposed them to serious risks ranging from social ostracism (with consequences for employment and housing) to verbal harassment to violence. How ironic, I thought, that “courage” was considered to be such a macho trait, but that the people showing the most of it were those who were most outwardly breaking with male norms. I admired them very much for their strength, and also appreciated how their choices challenged a system of roles that I personally found (and still find) stifling and oppressive.
During my urban farming years in Portland, one of my farming partners was a trans woman and we enjoyed great times together, planting, weeding, bicycling, cooking, and listening to ‘70s-era jazz fusion. I will always remember a spring day when, after a shower had passed and the sun was breaking through the clouds, the light fell on her face where she sat napping on a lawn chair. A slight smile was on her lips and in that moment, her femininity was a tangible glow around her, and I felt like I had been given a glimpse of her inner self shining through. In that moment, I really got it.
After I left Portland and started spending more time on the road, I met the notorious Finisia Medrano, also known as “Tranny Granny,” a name affectionately given her by Radical Fairies. Then in her fifties, she had spent over two decades on horseback in the back country of the western states, tending and harvesting wild foods. In her twenties, after her medical transition, she had been taken in by Shoshone elder women who shared their traditional knowledge with her, consciously choosing her for who she was. I spent time with Granny (as I always called her) on a number of occasions from 2012 to 2019 before she died in 2020. She was one of the most boisterous and profane people I have ever met, but her knowledge of First Foods and their habitat was incredibly deep and broad. “Planting back” was her perennial rallying cry. That is, sustainable harvest must include propagation, by seed and otherwise. Granny had a tremendous influence on my worldview, intellectually and ethically, but I felt a special connection to her because she was trans. She was “family” in that way. (If you want to know more about Finisia, check out my three-episode podcast about her here.)
I had these experiences before the current discourse on gender, sex and identity emerged into the mainstream over the last few years. I’ve spent some time following the conversation at large with real curiosity. On behalf of pro-trans perspectives, much new vocabulary has been proposed, and old concepts and words have been dropped. Currently, reflecting the diversity of views expressed, no consensus exists about every facet, even with questions as fundamental as, “What is gender?” There is not a monolithic “trans agenda.”
Detractors exist (J. K. Rowling and Libs of TikTok being two of the most prominent) and I have read and watched enough material to be familiar with the main arguments of what it sometimes called “gender critical feminism.” My conclusion: I disagree in both letter and spirit, across the board.
This isn’t to say I agree with everything that every trans activist says, and I have definitely disagreed strongly with a handful of things (e.g., violent rhetoric or threats, which sully all discourse these days). But nobody could agree with all of it anyway. There are many people putting forth many ideas, and there are many contradictions. I don’t personally understand things like @genderoftheday, but I don’t have anything against it. Sometimes I feel like the word “transphobic” gets thrown out there when something like “trans-ignorant” would be more accurate. Sometimes I feel like gender and sex are being conflated in the discourse, but then I remember that gender and sex have always been conflated in our society. This is, after all, the nation that made a best-seller out of book declaring that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. In short, I’m not expecting a fully functional conversation in such a dysfunctional culture. I’m sifting it for pearls and I’m finding many.
Leftist political organizing has been affected by the gender discourse, and my views are sometimes at odds with people I otherwise respect or agree with, and who are also people who are doing good work on issues that are very important to me. My approach is to steer clear of the subject to focus on the project at hand. I feel comfortable with this personally because campaigns and coalitions are all about working with people from various backgrounds towards common goals. Stopping a clear-cut, a pipeline or a mine means collaborating with the people who are most invested in stopping it, whoever they happen to be. Some of those people might be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc., but my own personal drive to protect the natural world that I love so much can carry me past that, like a swift river around a rock. I also understand that not everyone wants to do that, and that’s fine, but I would beseech people who are uninterested in such cooperation to find something else to do and not be saboteurs. Target the people who aren’t up to any good at all. There’s plenty of them. Far far more, I would assert.
Shifting back to the online discourse: It’s easy for detractors like Rowling and Libs of TikTok to find something that a trans activist has said online and make a big deal out of it, but I have three responses to that:
- Online content is tainted by bots and pretenders. A targeted account might not be a real person, or could even be an agent provocateur.
- It’s dishonest to cherry pick and it’s despicable to punch down. One thing both J. K. Rowling and Libs of TikTok do is retweet accounts with very few followers, the kind of people without substantial audience or influence. Not only are they not representative of some rigid orthodoxy (because none exists) but their sudden position in the spotlight sometime results in personal and professional endangerment when they’re doxxed by Rowling and Libs fans. Multiple bomb threats have resulted.
- Efforts to replace patriarchy aren’t going to be flawless. Patriarchy is pervasive and it’s been around at least six thousand years. Even just the post-WWII, US American version we’re saddled with now is pretty darn entrenched. No one person or movement can propose an alternative that’s perfect in all respects. Currently, people are throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Some of it isn’t, some of it won’t, and some of it will. We’ll see. I see this as a brainstorming session.
All in all, I am very appreciative of the current discourse. It’s a hell of an improvement over what was going on when I was teenager in the ‘80s in the Midwest. As I wrote in my 2022 memoir, “Confessions of a Queer, Catholic Nebraska Boy”:
There’s so much language these days for describing identity—it’s dizzying, really. When I was hitting puberty and trying to figure myself out, there was just “gay” and “straight” (and barely “bi”). I knew about cross-dressing and had heard about what were then called “sex change operations” but I didn’t know anyone personally.
On TV, there was “Bosom Buddies” starring Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari as a pair of heterosexual men who dress in drag in order to rent an apartment in an all-women’s building. Then there was Jack, on “Three’s Company, ” played by John Ritter, who pretended he was gay so he’d be allowed to share an apartment with two platonic female friends. His lisping, mincing delivery was over-the-top stereotypical…
So, media representation of non-heteronormativity was scant or mocking in the ’80s, and the orthodoxy of straight gender roles was unquestioned and constantly force-fed. It was very clear who you were supposed to be and who you weren’t. It really sucked. I am grateful it’s changed so much…
There are folks my age who mock all the new terminology, and the focus on pronouns. I’ll admit that at first, I was confused by some of it. Now, though, I’ve decided that a) I don’t have to understand it all in order to accept it, and b) I get to look at myself fresh through all these new lenses, and isn’t that sweet? Just because I only had three things to choose from when I was a teenager doesn’t mean I have to stick with them now, in middle age. New adventures in self discovery await me.
I’d like to highlight that final point: the expanding world of possibility is available to all of us, not just to the (seemingly mostly) young people trying to come up with it. If you are personally fulfilled by your own current notions of gender, sexuality and identity as they relate to yourself, good for you. If, like me, you’ve never been satisfied, there’s a bigger menu now, and that’s awesome.
If you’re interested in thorough, well-scripted, and entertaining intellectual takes on the discourse that focus on nuance and don’t shy away from the contradictions, I recommend the videos of Natalie Wynn on her YouTube channel, “Contrapoints.” She is a former Philosophy grad student whose sharp wit is the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. In some of her older videos, she used costumes and dialogue to represent different viewpoints. High quality stuff.
See also my old podcast episode, “Trans 101,” with guest, Terra.
