Trans-Sexualization in Academia

There's going to be a little bit of trans-feminist ranting strewn in here, so bear with me ;)

A definition is required to begin with: The word "cissexual" was coined in the early 1990s. General records seem to indicate Patrick Califa invented it. The meaning of this word is "a person who has only ever experienced their unconscious and physical sexes being aligned."

Essentially, one of the biggest problems with being trans is that we are sexualized in every corner - by the person on the street, by the media, by academia, often by our own therapists - from the word go. From the very beginning of the emergence of a coherent transgender movement/transsexual movement, mid-20th Century, trans women were forced to jump through a set of hoops put in front of us by the medical/psychological establishment to be able to transition.

The original standards of care forced the transsexual to lie constantly. They forced you to lie if you were bisexual or a lesbian; they forced you to lie if you didn't care to wear skirts or dresses or makeup; they forced you to lie if you were a feminist; they forced you to lie if your interests lay outside of traditional homemaking and "feminine" pursuits; they forced you to lie if you were so badly off that you felt you would die if you didn't get treatment right this minute, right this second. Trans women were routinely forced to quit rewarding, well-paying "masculine" careers and take up "feminine" jobs that paid a fraction what they were making pre-transition. And they forced you to begin presenting as a woman for an indefinite period of a year or more before receiving the hormones that most trans women need to be able to both feel at one with our bodies and pass successfully in society. In short, you were required to be a 1950s stereotype of femininity, that was even outdated THEN.

After transition, they still forced you to lie; trans women were required to make up and enforce "consistent" (i.e. cissexual) personal histories, and remain romantically heterosexual, or risk being accused of "backsliding," which was essentially a threat of having one's hormone prescriptions withheld. Trans "support groups" at that point in history were not so much "support" as an institutionalized way of keeping trans women "honest" - an ironic word given the amount we were expected to lie. Trans women would be expected to primarily discuss in these fixed forums how feminine they were becoming and what men they were trying to find.

Relationships would be severed; ties with children deliberately undone and obscured. The way that trans women would be treated under this regime was little more than the destruction of the old person and the creation of a completely unrelated new person, often in a different part of the country, without history they could refer to or the ability to fall back on any sort of safety net or social support structure. Many trans women fell into sex work because under these strictures it was the only work they could acquire (remember this, it's important later).

In short, as Julia Serano wrote in Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, "at every turn, the gatekeepers prioritized their concern for the feelings of cissexuals who were related to, or acquainted with, the transsexual over those of the trans person."

That trans women were able to put up with these horribly misogynistic, male-centered rules for transitioning should be an indication of how badly they needed to transition.

These same, very misogynistic and strictly gatekeeper-enforced restrictions on transition - which trans women deeply resented, chafed under and did everything possible to escape - were thrown back in our faces by the feminist movement, to which we turned to remedy our difficulties, through solidarity with other women, of the time as "proof" that trans women ourselves were a male-centric, misogynistic attempt to "colonize" femininity and "replace" women. It got to the point that Janice Raymond (who wrote the definitive piece of aggressive transphobic literature, Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male) successfully convinced the insurance industry that genital reconstructive surgery - an essential part of the transition process for many trans women - should not be covered under insurance because it was an "experimental, cosmetic" technique when in fact it is neither; its theraputic benefits are well-established and it is cosmetic only in the fact that the appearance of a body part changes.

I am not intending in any way to suggest that trans women are or have ever been wholly blameless victims. It is certainly possible for a trans woman, as with any other person on the face of the earth, to be petty, cruel, vindictive, calloused to the issues of their privilege and others' disadvantage, all of the above. Many trans women in earlier years, transitioned late in life after a lifetime of working from a position of male privilege and power, and frequently failed to surrender the assumptions shaped by that privilege. However, transness, and trans femaleness particularly, exists at the nexus of a number of privilege interactions that makes life difficult for us.

In the modern world, of course, things are a bit different - not much, but enough to turn transitioning from an ordeal that is guaranteed to rip one's life into pieces, into something that can be navigated with a minimum of trauma and difficulty. I particularly am fortunate that I managed to transition with my job, with my family intact and my friends mostly intact; and that my family seamlessly transitioned from thinking of me by my old name and he-pronouns to thinking of me with she-pronouns and by my new name of Katie.

The sexualization of trans women in public media is easy to see: It's in all the places that we are portrayed as sex workers; portrayed as slinky and seductive lovers of powerful men (I love Candis Cayne to pieces, but Carmelita can go to hell); in all the times we are portrayed by cissexual actresses in movies (Nicole Kidman; Felicity Huffman) - and this doesn't even count the "she-male" and "chicks with dicks" portrayals of trans women in pornography.

Sexualization in academia? Well, to start with, read the book The Man Who Would Be Queen. Written by Northwestern University research psychologist J. Michael Bailey based on a very limited-size sample (a mere dozen trans women found primarily by investigation of the gay bar scene in Chicago and at least two of whom are known to have slept with Bailey in exchange for letters of recommendation for genital reassignment surgery - and the allegations of sexual misconduct alone should have earned Bailey an ethics board), it has hurt trans women more profoundly than any book since Transsexual Empire. Queen casts trans women solely in terms of the sexual desires of heterosexual men; according to Queen trans women are either "homosexuals" - hyperfeminine gay men who wish to be desirable sexual objects to heterosexual men - or "autogynephilics" - otherwise-normal heterosexual men who desire sex with a "female image" of themselves. This is based on the "homosexuality/autogynephilia" dual theory forwarded by Dr. Ray Blanchard of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, ON (formerly known as the Clarke Institute, and referred to by its detractors as "Jurassic Clarke" or "the Cluck"). It is safe to say that Transsexual Empire and The Man Who Would Be Queen are the two most transphobic books ever published.

Bailey's terms "homosexual" and "autogynephilic" transsexual are more accurately and correctly said to be, respectively, heterosexual and bisexual/lesbian transsexual women. He makes no effort whatsoever to apply his theories to transsexual men (female to male transsexuals). Doing so would require him to view male bodies and male sexualities with the same level of dehumanizing sexualization that he does female bodies and sexualities. He of course refers to transsexual women as "men" throughout his text, and repeatedly and openly asserts that he does not respect in any way our identities and our lived experiences as women; and indeed our past experiences as girls who went through a childhood and adolescence so traumatic that our language lacks words to describe it.

In its text, Queen not only reiterates Blanchard's theory, but also goes further by adding racism, explicitly stating that trans women of color - the trans women most vulnerable to discrimination and violence - are "usually homosexual" (read: heterosexual, early-transitioning trans women) and therefore "exceptionally well-suited to sex work."

In another passage, Bailey states "There is no way to say this as sensitively as I would like, so I will say it bluntly: Homosexual transsexuals are usually much better-looking than autogynephiles" - not only bluntly reasserting the stated premise of the homosexual/autogynephile binary theory, but also reasserting that the only purpose of heterosexual trans women is to serve as a sex object for heterosexual men.

The "homosexual/autogynephile" theory of male to female transsexual identity formation fails the most basic possible test of scientific validity: It is unfalsifiable, because according to it, any evidence against it is to be discarded as prima facie tainted.

Bailey's work is not conducted in a vacuum; it would not have found a receptive audience in academia if many academics studying transsexuality did not share his biases against transsexuals. We do have many good and positive allies and advocates, but those who make it difficult for us have enough influence to do much damage.

Thank you.