Translatin

Identity

BY EUAN BEAR

rom powerful opening plenary (see Eli
FClare’s condensed address in this issue)

to wide-ranging closing keynote, the
Translating Identity Conference — planned and
staffed entirely by the students of Free to Be
and their allies at the University of Vermont —
was a rousing success. Anytime 700 people
from around the United States and from as far
away as New Zealand register for and attend a
free conference on a Saturday, that’s got to be
considered success.

With two-dozen workshop and cau-
cus sessions split among four time slots, there
was no dearth of choices for anyone seeking
information about transgender people and
issues. From the history of transmen and
butches attending women’s colleges, to sex, to
dealing with medical providers, to spirituality,
the choices covered a wide range of concerns
and stories.

I/

Perhaps one of the more controver-
sial sessions was presented by Dr. Terri
Lomax, an information technology lecturer
and Ph.D. chemist from Auckland, New >
Zealand. Lomax, who identified herself as a
transwoman, presented the premise that child-
hood sexual abuse — and perhaps other early
trauma — can play a part in crystallizing or
precipitating a gender identity crisis for some
transgender people. That premise is based in
part on her own experience and in part on her
interpretation of research literature on the
effects of trauma on the brain. _

“It is not politically correct,” Lomax
acknowledged, “to connect transgenderism to
abuse.” The tense discussion during the ses-
sion bore out that statement. Lomax said her
point in bucking the tide was to encourage
therapists to explore the possibility of child-
hood trauma with transgender clients and to
open minds to the possibility that gender iden-
tity may not "be fixed at birth for all transgen-
der people. Another outcome of the discussion
was the reminder that a single “cause” for any

Editor, author, and transactivist Leslie Feinberg

Translating Identity.

delivering the keynote at Ira Allen chapel to

given gender identity is unlikely.

A rousing speech by transactivist
Leslie Feinberg closed the conference. Dapper
in a well-tailored black suit and Windsor-knot-
ted silk rainbow necktie, Feinberg celebrated
this “moment in history,_a moment that exem-
plifies the Chinese character that means both
‘crisis’ and ‘opportunity.”’ Ze (Feinberg’s pre-
ferred pronoun) announced that the moment is
simply the current embodiment of “not just
decades but centuries” of transgender history.

Feinberg declared the intention of
doing away with age-ist divisions between
older and younger transactivists. “How can we
work together to build a multi-generational
movement?” Ze claimed multiple currents of
activism and identity — gender bending, gen-
der queemess during the repressive McCarthy
era when queers were routinely purged from
government jobs, butch lesbian, drag king,
and cross-dresser - “all those currents run
through my body,” ze said.

“It’s one thing for someone who
despises my identity to label me, and another
for me to stand up and face that label and say,
‘Yes, I am, and I will defend all who fall with-
in those parameters?”

Ze saidit was important to recog-
nize the Second-Wave feminist movement as a
“huge swinging forward of the pendulum”
that “shook up all consciousness about what it
meant to be female-bodied.” Feinberg identi-
tied the push toward “androgyny” as that
movement’s “great gender experiment” meant
“to liberate all of humanity from the concepts
of masculinity and femininity.”

 

But, Feinberg added, “Androgyny is
liberating — if you’re androgynous.” If oppres-
sion — rapes, beatings, torture, jail, even
deaths — did not change “masculine women
and feminine men,” then why would the “lib-
eration” of the feminist movement? Ze char-
acterized the experiment as a “gift, the aware-
ness of the institutional system of gender
oppression,” but said the experiment’s effect
was “to build a world where we [transgen-
ders] don’t exist. Well thanks, but no thanks.”

For those who live ‘between easily-
read extremes of the expression of masculine
and feminine, “there is no simple action,
including using a toilet, that is not fraught
with danger. I go through airports and see
whole walls of [the book] Men Are from
Mars, Women Are from Venus. I’m here to tell
you that for the intersex, there are no separate
planets, just heavenly bodies.  To those who
want to fight genital mutilation, I say ‘Yes!
Let’s start here in the United States!”’

Feinburg spoke of how Sojourner
Truth, “six feet tall, with massive muscles,”
was “transbaited,” forced to strip in front of
male witnesses to find out whether she was
really a female. Ze spoke of Frederick
Douglass the freed former slave, who was a
strong ally to the feminists at Seneca Falls.
“‘Right is‘ of no sex,”’ Feinburg quoted
Douglass. “He could have come here today
and those words would still be relevant.”
Douglass and other men who stood up for
women’s rights were called “Aunt Nancy’s
men,” a term “meant to emasculate” them.

Finally, Feinburg said, any credible
social or civil rights movement “must stand
up to war as an issue.” Ze cited history from
World War I to today, lingering on the anti-
Viet Nam war movement and the Gay
Liberation Front’s solidarity with anti-war
organizations as well as with the civil rights
and black liberation movements of the time.
Ze quoted Black Panther co-founder Huey
Newtonf “Wherever the forces of Black liber-
ation meet, the forces of gay liberation are
also!”

Ze wondered whether Sylvia Rivera,
a transgender person, a “combatant at
Stonewall,” would feel welcome in today’s
lesbian and gay organizations fighting for
marriage rights, and where are our lgbt voices
in protesting the increased racial profiling and
the anti-youth ready-to-roll proposal for a
compulsory military draft that are conse-
quences of September ll and the Iraq War.
Trans and gay and lesbian and bi must stand
up to war as an issue, Feinberg declared, for
all of our issues for us and all our natural
allies are “tied to this war. Feinberg closed a
fiery speech saying, “I would wish for us to
be the best fighters against each others’
oppression” and calling for everyone to
demonstrate against the war. V