Transgender Rights (ed Paisley Currah, Richard M Juang, and Shannon Price Minter, Univ of Minnesota Press 2006) is a welcome collection of articles that provide thoughtful depth to a consideration of the rights of trans people.
The writers are ones I recognize from the last nearly-twenty years of work on trans issues: Judith Butler, Dallas Denny, Ruthann Robson, Phyllis Randolph Frye, Julie A. Greenberg, Taylor Flynn...
It shows up my early writings for the superficial treatment that they were - and that was all they could be. Twenty years ago there simply was no discourse about trans identities and rights.
Shannon Minter's article is an eloquent treatment of the ways in which gay and trans histories overlap, while current gay rights movements dismiss trans issues as 'add-on'. Gay writers claim gender-variant people in the past (cross-dressing women, Stonewall drag queens, for example) as gay, though they are equally well understood as trans. Minter points to a divergence in the 70s away from overtly gendered identities among gay and lesbian people, and toward a more professional, fitting-in strategy. He identifies this trend as both classist and racist, and points to the current outcome of the repudiation by gay people of trans people.
There is a fascinating extract from a superior court in Colombia about whether the mother of an 8 year old intersex child should or should not be permitted to consent to irreversible surgery for her daughter. What is the role of the state in supporting the family as a private sphere free from state activitiy? In supporting a child against possible discrimination within the family? Who gets to decide among treatment options when the medical profession is divided? The court concluded that because the child was 8, there was no urgency to the surgery (as there might have been if she was an infant) and refused to authorize the mother's consent to surgery till after puberty; but ordered the state to provide interdisciplinary support to the family.
Pursuing Protection for Transgender People through Disability Law examines the stream of thought that says that trans people should not rely on disability rights protection since such protections are premised on a less-than status of being disabled. Relying on an analysis of the 3-pronged definition of disability in the ADA, (including someone with an impairment, or perceived to have one) the authors argue that all antidiscrimination work should focus on the fact of phobic attitudes as the problem, rather than focusing on a 'deficiency' in an individual; and from that perspective a disability analysis is helpful to trans people.
Judith Butler looks at the DSM as a regulatory document that constructs gender, to the disadvantage of anyone who does not fit into the binary ccategories.
Dean Spade's article "Compliance is Gendered" is riveting. He set up the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and works with gender-variant poor people and people of colour. He says that queer politics have been completely concerned with achieving privilege for middle-class queers (shared property rights, etc) at the expense of poor and people of colour. And he demonstrates how viciously trans people are treated by a 'support system' including jails, women's shelters, and social supports, which are utterly gendered; but a system which denies access to gendering services to most trans people, consigning them to inappropriate, dangerous, life-threatening circumstances.
Dallas Denny does a useful history of trans communities in the US in the late twentieth century; and Shannon Minter's piece has some useful historical perspectives also.
This book is a keeper.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Sunday, January 31, 2010
not so much a blog
February 1, 2010. I think.
Sheila is falling asleep beside me; the television is on Cold Case. The lights are off and Ihve just eaten two hazelnut chocolate balls.
I was falling asleep myself, or so the theory went, but my mind was meandering down paths that made me think of writing. Only o fcourse I don't know now about what.
One fo the thmese of the meandersing was my name. many spirits. zil'hal'ay. i was emembering that ceremony, in moricetown in 1992 theresa had brought them, lakota shamans whose ritual required that there be absolutely no light at all in the community hall. i was sitting by myself, i think. theresa was welcomoing them. there was quite a turnout from the village: iw as surprised. outside the door were crhistians with bible sayings about ...oh about heathens or something. maybe the devil. white peole with the bible,s in my memory, but mayb e that is only because i canot reconcile an aboriginal fundamentalist christian.
even though theresa is a catholic...
gordie and uke and the other boys in town put green plastic bags over all the windows. and of courrse it was at night. it must have been summer though, the evenings long outside.
i don't remember much ab out the ritual. they were across the room and at the far end from where i was. i was at the other end, leaning against a post, sitting on the floor. i say a post, but that's not right. i both remember having my back against the wall and that there woere other women behind me, and to make both possible i put in a post.
i do remember the invocation of the grandmothers. and from my left, out ofthe darkness but part of the darkness grew in my mind came voice and vision : many spirits. there was a rustle, like a corn broom brushing against the wall, and nothing more. many spirits.
i am as certain as of any other fact i know that a grandmother was there, among many, an dthat her gift to me was my name.
in the light,after, i was embarrassed by the experience. i felt like the white girls who is sure she is descended from pocahontas. i didn't want to have to explain it.
but i had to tell theresa. this was the gift of my name. i was going to be adopted, and i would get a name. but i had been given my name, i could not spurn the gift, not and be there with any authenticity.
i didn't manage to tell theresa till we were on the road to the airport. i told her the story. and i told her i had been afraid to tell her the story, and why. then i said: i [ \a synapse, memory lacuna/ ]
it was something like this: something like, even if you don't believe me i know it is true. and with that she did believe me. and that is how i got my name.
Sheila is falling asleep beside me; the television is on Cold Case. The lights are off and Ihve just eaten two hazelnut chocolate balls.
I was falling asleep myself, or so the theory went, but my mind was meandering down paths that made me think of writing. Only o fcourse I don't know now about what.
One fo the thmese of the meandersing was my name. many spirits. zil'hal'ay. i was emembering that ceremony, in moricetown in 1992 theresa had brought them, lakota shamans whose ritual required that there be absolutely no light at all in the community hall. i was sitting by myself, i think. theresa was welcomoing them. there was quite a turnout from the village: iw as surprised. outside the door were crhistians with bible sayings about ...oh about heathens or something. maybe the devil. white peole with the bible,s in my memory, but mayb e that is only because i canot reconcile an aboriginal fundamentalist christian.
even though theresa is a catholic...
gordie and uke and the other boys in town put green plastic bags over all the windows. and of courrse it was at night. it must have been summer though, the evenings long outside.
i don't remember much ab out the ritual. they were across the room and at the far end from where i was. i was at the other end, leaning against a post, sitting on the floor. i say a post, but that's not right. i both remember having my back against the wall and that there woere other women behind me, and to make both possible i put in a post.
i do remember the invocation of the grandmothers. and from my left, out ofthe darkness but part of the darkness grew in my mind came voice and vision : many spirits. there was a rustle, like a corn broom brushing against the wall, and nothing more. many spirits.
i am as certain as of any other fact i know that a grandmother was there, among many, an dthat her gift to me was my name.
in the light,after, i was embarrassed by the experience. i felt like the white girls who is sure she is descended from pocahontas. i didn't want to have to explain it.
but i had to tell theresa. this was the gift of my name. i was going to be adopted, and i would get a name. but i had been given my name, i could not spurn the gift, not and be there with any authenticity.
i didn't manage to tell theresa till we were on the road to the airport. i told her the story. and i told her i had been afraid to tell her the story, and why. then i said: i [ \a synapse, memory lacuna/ ]
it was something like this: something like, even if you don't believe me i know it is true. and with that she did believe me. and that is how i got my name.
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