Dove

Last year I coined the term Standard Western Trans model of gender to refer to the dominant narrative in queer communities on what gender is and how it works.

Both WGB and SWT have a definite prescriptive view of sexual orientation and regard deviation from it as bad and potentially immoral. Under WGB the rule is "if you have a dick you should only be attracted to people with vulvae; if you have a vulva you should only be attracted to people with dicks." It's a straightforward rule (although it gets a bit more complicated once you start talking about asexuality, since WGB doesn't have a firm view on not being attracted to anyone) and so it's immediately obvious when someone deviates.

That isn't the case with SWT. The rules here are addressed less to people and more towards concepts. Instead of policing attraction or action, it polices identity; more specifically it polices the identities of gay men attracted to trans women and lesbians attracted to trans men. It's important to remember here that part of SWT is the notion that sexual orientation and gender identity are independent variables. Further, SWT takes the view that gender identity is more fundamental than sexual orientation. If a trans man and a lesbian are dating, it's far more likely to condemn the lesbian for not changing that identity to bisexual than the trans man for not changing his gender to something that would allow the lesbian to remain a real lesbian (and similarly for a gay man dating a trans woman).

The results in some weird situations. If I were to date a drag queen who used she/her pronouns, that would not challenge the idea that I'm a gay man; but if that same person one day realizes that "trans woman" is a better way to describe her relationship with gender, my status as a gay man is thrown into question.

The thing that I find interesting about this is that almost none of the trans people I've talked to have actually taken this attitude. I know trans men who identify as lesbians, trans women who have no objection to men they date continuing to identify as gay, trans men who have no problem if their partners continue to call themselves lesbians, trans women who use grindr specifically because there are gay men on grindr... Yes, online people often get Very Shouty over this, but IRL it seems to be, at its strongest, a mild concern.

There are a lot of other incongruities I've noticed between SWT and the way the trans people I know conceive of their gender (and their partners' genders and/or sexual orientations). The point here isn't to list them so much as to ask what the SWT model is for.

I increasingly suspect that SWT was not originally intended to be accurate. Rather, it was a way to explain trans people to cis people whose concept of gender was still at a dick=man/vulva=woman level. The people who created it knew it wasn't accurate, but that was okay: the purpose of the model was to explain transness to cis people, not to explain transness to trans people.

However, they obviously couldn't actually say that anywhere that cis people might notice. And since most trans kids start off thinking they're cis, their first exposure to the concept of trans people is a model that was explicitly not intended for them. A lot of the trans people I know hesitated to identify as trans in large part because their actual experiences didn't line up with SWT. And a lot of them continued to feel guilty or like they weren't "really trans" after claiming the identity because they didn't actually do gender in the approved way.

But what if no one ever actually fit the model (or at least only a small number of people)? And what if most (or at least a lot) of the people claiming they do fit the model so it because they think that admitting the truth would make their gender identity seem suspect?

Note: the following is mostly me thinking out loud and should not be taken as authoritative.

If I say I'm gay, I am not necessarily communicating any information about myself. If I write "I'm gay" on a piece of paper and someone else picks it up a month later, they will know very little about the writer. The writer could be male, female, or nonbinary. They might be sexually attracted to men, women, or nonbinary people. They might not be sexually attracted to anyone and instead be talking about their experience of romantic attraction. They might be sexually active or not, and their partners might be of the same or a different sex. They might be cis or trans, and what cis and trans mean to them, especially in conjunction with "I'm gay," is impossible to tell.

"Gay," taken as an abstract term, means almost nothing. Even when we start to add more modifiers, the term doesn't become all that much more meaningful. A gay man could still be trans or cis, he might have no sexual partners or one or several and those partners might be of any sex. Because the closet is still a thing, we can't be sure of almost anything about a "gay man." It gets worse because gay is frequently a catch-all term that is also applied to bi and pan people, especially bi and pan men.

The problem is that none of these words I've been using, particularly the ones that refer to identities, actually mean anything. They are defined by their interrelationship with other words and their meaning depends on my ability to convince my audience to accept the meaning that I wish to convey. And while you might think that adding modifiers like "man" and "cis" to "gay" would begin to clarify them, you can perform the same exercise on those words as well. "I am a cis gay man" can mean something only if the speaker an audience can reach an agreement not only on the individual meanings of "cis," "gay," and "man," but also what they mean when taken in conjunction: "cis man," "gay man," and "gay and cis." Each additional word creates the potential to clarify what I mean by gay, but by the same token each additional word has the potential to further muddy the waters.( Read more... )

Gender as an ontological reality

"Trans men are men."

"Trans women are women."

These statements have implications that go beyond the affirmation of trans identities. To say that trans people are their identified gender is to affirm that gender is an actual thing that can be had. Purely socially constructive models, or purely performative models, are implicitly denied. And that's intentional. Purely socially constructive models of gender, and purely performative models, are frequently used to deny trans people's lived experiences; the hostility to these models is understandable. The generally preferred models tend to stress dysphoria and/or the inner experience of identity. In doing so, they affirm two statements that are almost never voiced, though constantly assumed to be true:

"Cis men are men."

"Cis women are women."

Trans men can be men because cis men can be men. Except that's not right. Say rather, trans men can be men because cis men are men. The models of gender that place its ontological reality at their core are fundamentally dependent on cis gender identities to exist.

Nonbinary people can exist in these models, but always tenuously. Since gender has been given ontological reality, there is room for the creation of different genders that are also ontologically real. But their (our?) existence is at a constant risk of being overwhelmed by the power of the Western gender binary (WGB); nonbinary identity is never stable when models of gender rely on the WGB as their starting point.