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Bi Lines
Transwomen
This column appeared in Siren: irresistibly tempting for queer women, Diversity Issue, vol. 7 issue 5 (December/ January 2002), page 8-9.
I found social construction theory quickly, and I fell in love with it. "We choose to be queer," I gleefully told others. In general, social construction theory served me pretty well. I could usually look at any situation, see how the people involved had been influenced by societal pressures (or by their resistance to it), and come out standing in a pretty good political position. This comfort ended when I met transsexuals.
I didn't "get" transsexuals. When it came to transsexual men and women, my theory saw them only as victims of social messages. It was interacting with transwomen in queer women's communities that led me to a stark conclusion: if I valued my theory over people, I would be treating transwomen the way many gays and lesbians treated me.
I started to notice that the kinds of oppression I experienced as a bisexual were strikingly similar to the kinds of things the transwomen I met were reporting.
To begin with, we are both lumped together at the end of the GLBT acronym. Both of us are frequently labelled as "male identified" by lesbians. "If we let you in," we've both been told, "we'd have to let in men." Bisexual women are assumed to bring men with them wherever they go, and transwomen are frequently assumed to be men. We are both frequently excluded from the queer community as pretenders or outsiders. We both know what it's like to be treated as a problem to be solved or an issue to be addressed rather than a person to be known. In seeing the negative ways that transwomen were treated in GLBT groups, I saw my own experience reflected back at me. Although I knew transsexual experience didn't quite fit my theory, I knew I didn't want to be their oppressor. I wanted to be an ally.
But an alliance based on similar oppression isn't simple. To begin with, our experience of oppression may cause us to lash out in horizontal and vertical oppression against others. Bi women can be transphobic and transwomen can be biphobic. Either group may refuse to challenge the oppression of the other, or even join in the oppressing, in exchange for a momentary sense of belonging to a group.
There are also reasons for transsexuals to be suspicious of bisexuals. If we're attracted to both men and women, how can transwomen know that we're interested in them as women, and not as men? Additionally, transwomen's bodies are fetishized in popular imagery as the "best of both worlds." They're portrayed as half-man and half-woman. Popular prejudice might think they are the ideal partner for a bisexual, who is assumed to be unsatisfied with a partner of one sex. How can transwomen know if they are welcomed in bi women's community for themselves, or as symbols of something else?
Yet even to say " transwomen who are bisexual or bi-friendly are welcome" seems insufficient to me. To begin with, it's pretty arrogant. It assumes that "the community" belongs to us, and that we are in a position to graciously admit others. The reality is that anyone can identify as bisexual, or as bi friendly, and can claim a connection to the bisexual community. No social, political or support group has a trademark on bi community. Yet part of what makes us into a community are our groups and organizations and yes, even cliques. While anyone can identify themselves with the bi community, groups often do have rules or guidelines that acts as a gatekeeper. Policies are a mixed blessing. They can act as a protection for the vulnerable (such as when they affirm the inclusion of transwomen as full participants), yet they can also serve as a way we avoid treating people as individuals, or avoiding communal responsibility ("it's not us, it's the policy").
I think that the ultimate test of a community is in its willingness to share power. Power-sharing is not to be confused with power harnessing. I'm not talking about simply drafting transwomen into committees as volunteers, or coercing them into giving free workshops. Power sharing means that transwomen are accepted as equal members of the community on their own terms. If we're serious about empowering transwomen, we need to have bisexual transwomen as our community's representatives and leaders (as some already are). If we're serious about transwomen participating as full members of the bi community (and not as tokens or symbols), then their concerns and interests must shape the community as much as the interests of non-transwomen. Power sharing means recognizing that an issue which affects bisexual transwomen is a bisexual issue.
Here's the part where I'm supposed to wrap everything up into an easy ending. The problem is, there isn't one. For every solution, more challenges emerge. Just to make things more complicated, this is the diversity issue of Siren, and I've chosen to talk about transwomen. Am I relying upon them to somehow "supply the diversity?"
