Blue over at Alas has written a post about subjective experiences of disability:
In discussions about quality of life or eugenics or disability pride, some nondisabled person often asserts that it’s obvious — despite all moral arguments on the value of disabled persons lives — that a body with impairments is just physically less desirable and not something any sane person would choose. Lacking something can’t possibly be better than having it, right? It’s an argument that always fascinates me.
When I read this–“physically less desirable”–I initially thought she would go on to talk about perceptions of disabled people as romantic and sexual partners. And, of course, the same arguments are presented with the same insistence that they are objective. A body with impairments is just physically less desirable and not something any sane person would choose.
But first, there are some interesting assumptions to unpack about disability. (Some of this is recapping what Blue said; I’m partly just thinking out loud.)
First of all, there’s the idea that a disability is visible, or easily understood by its visible signs. Disabilities cannot be subtle. That would imply that the disabled person is capable of interacting with other people as something other than Other, and that the non-disabled person might not know everything there is to know about disability. It also implies that the disability is potentially subjective, that the person with the disability experiences it from the inside in ways that might not align with the needs and judgments of outsiders.
Disabilities also cannot be complex: temporary, unstable, or carrying the potential for ability. That would make it too difficult to keep each person firmly in either able or disabled. Someone who uses a wheelchair cannot also be a dancer, because a wheelchair always means that the wheelchair user is always less mobile and less graceful. It is not fun to use a wheelchair. A wheelchair does not require any kind of skill. A wheelchair is a rolling tragedy, a cross to bear, and the people who use them are poor unfortunates, full stop. They definitely aren’t like cars, let alone motorcycles:
As I said, technology contributes to all this. Even power wheelchairs provide unique joys. When I was in college as an undergraduate, my friends and I used to play around in our wheelchairs when the campus was quiet at night. I liked to drive my scooter in tighter and tighter circles until it tilted onto only two wheels. The challenge and thrill was to pull out of the circle just in time before tipping over. Also, many of the same joys people get from driving their cars can be found driving an electric chair. There’s skill to it, enjoyment of speed and mastery of a machine.
Disability must also be complete:
Of course a body that can do more tricks is physically superior, better, handier to have. And for past generations and people in different locations then and now, a tricksier body has been advantageous to survival. I don’t disagree with that, so far as it goes.
But often the added implication is that there can’t possibly be anything good about a body with impairments, and that isn’t necessarily true. I understand that this is hard for many people to accept. Maybe it helps if I accede that much of what I appreciate about my specific body and it’s abilities/inabilities is related to the technology that I use.
In other words, if I could theoretically do a better job of hunting, killing, skinning, and cooking a woolly mammoth than Blue, I am better off in every way all the time. A disability cannot merely affect daily existence, but must render it less enjoyable and less interesting. When I sit in the park, I think, “Wow, what a gorgeous day! I can hear birds in the trees and feel the sunshine on my face. Look at those happy children over there!” When Blue sits in the park, she thinks, “Man, am I ever miserable. This sucks. Look at those happy children over there! I wish I could walk around like them.”
Disability must also be complete in the sense of absolute, such that a line can be drawn between the abject bodies and the perfect ones. A disability is something that disabled people have, not something common to virtually everyone. Almost everyone in my family requires cataract surgery by middle age; everyone in my family suffers severe osteoporosis; everyone in my family develops hypertension early. All of those things are serious medical conditions requiring care and support–and all of them are above and beyond the other things our bodies will do as they age. None of them make us disabled people, and none of these acknowledged truths were cause for serious concern for people marrying into our family. Nor are our bodies uncertain–because I am not a disabled person, I will never develop any kind of impairment. I will be better off in every way for all time.
On to the intimacy thing.
I spent yesterday hanging out with another ftm. We discussed dating, mostly dating other men as a man; to a lesser extent, we discussed dating trans-oriented people as a transperson.
There are two basic approaches to dating while transsexual. First, there’s the, um, announcement approach. (It’s difficult to find neutral terms to describe both options, since so much of the language around being out and not out–like, oh, “out” vs. “not out”–implies that people who don’t announce are duplicitous. Some people might well believe that; I hope the rationales I set forth here will help explain why announcement might not work too well and might in fact make it more difficult to give a clear impression of oneself. For purposes of this post, I’m going to use “announcement” for the first approach, and “disclosure” for the second. I’d like to make it clear that I make no judgments about either. My preferences are my preferences.) Anyway, two approaches.
The announcement approach is most used online or in other remote contexts. If you’re presenting as gendervariant, androgynous, or female, announcement is unnecessary in real life. If you’re passing, announcement pretty much always turns into disclosure, because you have to start chatting someone up before there’s any reason to tell them anything at all. The announcement approach via craigslist would go like this (the worksafe version, anyway):
FTM Seeking…
Cute twentysomething transguy seeks open-minded gay man for dating, conversation. [Stock comments about sense of humor, love of Christopher Guest movies, etc. etc.] Looking for something easygoing, open to ltr. Serious replies only, pls send picture with response.
This approach has some obvious benefits. First of all, you’ve gotten the discussion out of the way. Anyone who responds to you is responding to a transguy. You won’t have to face rejection because you’re a transsexual, and you won’t become infatuated with someone who just can’t sleep with a transsexual.
There are some drawbacks, though, because anyone who responds to you is responding to a transguy. You have just set yourself up as a target for chasers of all kinds. That includes people who will insist on seeing you as transsexual first and male a distant second, if at all. (This can be a benefit for people who identify as transsexual first and male a distant second, if at all.) It also includes people who will need to demean you in order to excuse their attraction to you. It also includes people who hold all kinds of assumptions about your ability to get any and their relative hotness in your eyes. Worst of all, it includes lots and lots of people who are responding to you based on their ideas about what a transsexual is.
One example, a relatively minor one: I saw an ad once from a guy who was seeking transguys only. When I asked why, he said that he really wanted to top, and so he would naturally seek out transguys, because transguys don’t top. Obviously. Why would we? How could we?
The disclosure approach is a little different. That craigslist ad would go like this:
Seeking…
Cute twentysomething gay man seeks open-minded gay man for dating, conversation. [Stock comments about sense of humor, love of Christopher Guest movies, etc. etc.] Looking for something easygoing, open to ltr. Serious replies only, pls send picture with response.
You get your pile of responses, you go out on some dates, and in the course of discussing every other piece of pertinent information, you ask your prospective partners if they’ve ever heard of Loren Cameron. Now, you will have to face some rejection. You’ll also have to watch them process for hours or weeks. You might have to field some ignorant questions–although the announcement approach won’t save you from that. But the people you’re dating get to see and speak with you, this cute guy who is a transguy, rather than reject you based on their beliefs about what transsexuals are.
There are a lot of “Kinsey Sixes” out there, and even some gay men who feel about hoo-has the way vampires feel about garlic. I respect that. There are also gay men who would reject a transguy in the abstract but would be willing to sleep with a real one. Some of them think they can always tell; some of them think that transguys aren’t male or masculine or attractive; some of them think that transguys have certain sexual preferences or abilities; some of them believe things about transguy bodies that are either partially true or untrue.
Both of these approaches are responses to a categorical hierarchy like the one Blue is describing: transsexuality is visible, obvious, complete, and completely negative. A transmale body is never neutral, let alone specially attractive in similar ways. It’s always defined in terms of what it does not have and cannot do. Our subjective experiences of it are defined in terms of what we want but cannot have. Like disability, transsexuality as a concept is divorced from actual transsexual people. If I’m honest about being transsexual, I immediately obscure the truth. If I want a chance to explain the truth, I have to hide the fact that I’m transsexual.
The pretention to objectivity is also there. I suspect Dan Savage, who does not know very many transmen and has almost certainly never tried to get laid as a transsexual, generalizes his preferences to virtually all gay men. He might even consider unwillingness to sleep with transmen to be necessary for inclusion in the category “gay men.”
Now, it’s important in this comparison of dynamics to point out that passing is a kind of privilege; it’s nice to have both of these options, inferior choices though they might be. The public perception of transsexuality is that it is obvious, but in many cases the reality is subtle, even invisible. I do have the freedom to step outside of public perception and use that position to argue against it.
An article by Philip Patston over at Bent, “To Tell or Not to Tell,” meditates on some of the same double binds:
The question of whether to come out of the disability closet when dating online must be one of the biggest dilemmas in the lives of disabled people as this month’s Forum proves. The temptation to moderate an online version of oneself must be huge for anyone but, for disabled people, the opportunity – to edit out the one aspect of self that, because of stigma, stops people from getting to know you – is a revolution in social dynamics.
As he says, one of the other problems with the disclosure approach is the inference of deception. If Philip Patston does not announce that he is disabled, if he allows (ableist) people to assume that he is not, he is lying. If I wait until the first or second date to explain that I’m, um, a versatile top, I’m lying.
Philip seems to have reached equilibrium, though:
I’ve tried at least a hundred different ways, I’m sure, to portray myself on dating sites. From completely omitting my “mark” to explicitly flaunting it. From posting pictures of myself sitting in my chair to Yahoo cartoon avatars of myself, standing up. Ironically, nothing changes the fact that, usually, the guys who contact me are dickheads.