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Trans women and the future

EG

CONTENT NOTE: VIOLENCE AGAINST TRANS WOMEN; DISCUSSION OF RAPE

This article, by Kai Cheng Tom, is a moving and beautifully written piece about what it means to be a young trans woman of color and to read over and over again about the violent death of women like you.

I have argued for years that male rape of women is a terrorist act, reminding all women what men can do to us, how vulnerable we are, how we have no way to exist in safety in this world. That the knock-on effects of one woman’s rape extends to her family and friends (if she feels comfortable enough to share the story) and beyond, if the news media picks it up. I do not mean to imply by this that survivors of rape should keep quiet or that rape should not be reported in the news. The problem is not knowledge. The problem is rape.

I gave up an extra unpaid job writing for a local Queens newspaper more than fifteen years ago because I was having to cover community board meetings etc. that took place in the evening, and thus had to take the G train back home to Brooklyn late at night. The G train ran seldom and was usually empty, and this was just the time that a man dubbed by the local news as “the G-train rapist” was operating. So much for a career in journalism.

Edit: I think this kind of unremitting, unrelenting violence against trans women is also terrorism. Look at the effects on the trans women who are not its direct victims. Look at the way Kai Cheng Tom has to live in fear, how hard it becomes to envision a future free of that violence and the fear of it. I felt something that I think is a little similar when I was 18 and I started to find out how many of my friends had been raped: I started to think that being raped was inevitable. But as a cis white woman, I had many more resources for support, ways to help me move past that feeling.

And at least I could give up that job–women who had paid jobs late at night on the G line couldn’t. And what are trans women supposed to do? Stop being?

Trans women need a future. They deserve a future. So what I’m posting here is a link to a piece on trans people over 50. Some transitioned later, some earlier. But they’re still here, still living, still making lives and happiness. If we are all lucky, this is what the future looks like.

Edited because I lost the thread originally and forgot to make the parallel between rape of cis women and transmisogynist violence that I was trying to create clear. Sorry about that. That’s what I get for composing directly on-site instead of drafting.

11 thoughts on Trans women and the future

  1. There is a line between warning people of the dangers they face and threatening someone to stay in line lest they face the everpresent danger assigned to their class. This is not something happening in this post at all, but something I see and here elsewhere from otherwise “well meaning” people.

    Gay men are warned about things that could “get their ass kicked”, which could mean anything from getting punched to getting beaten to death. Women are told about things that will “get them raped” which could mean anything from getting raped to getting raped and killed. Black men are warned about things that could get them in trouble with the police, which could mean anything from getting jailed for no reason to getting shot. Trans people are warned about getting killed. Various marginalized identity are marked by media reporting and media fiction (TV, movies) for certain types of violence, and then that kind of violence is referenced at you over and over as the thing you need to “be careful” about. It has nothing to do with reality, and everything to do with what violence has been dramatized and glamorized by media producers with the proper lines, costuming, makeup, and of course, lighting.

    It’s confusing. Sometimes when someone is warning me to “be careful” I appreciate their concern and acknowledgement that the world is scary. Sometimes it raises my hackles, like could you not keep referencing the boogeymen out there who want to beat me? I’m aware. Thanks.

  2. A long comment in moderation, maybe I can escape moderation by splitting it in two. Here goes.

    1. FYI, trans people get warned all the time about a whole lot more than getting killed. In fact, there’s no aspect of trans women’s lives that doesn’t get policed in one way or another by cis people on a regular basis.

    I was impressed by the piece at xojane; it was very powerful. My one objection is the author’s repetition as fact of the completely bogus statistic that “the average life span of a transgender person is 23 years old.” There’s no evidence for it, even if you limit to trans women, and even if you limit it to trans women of color. Regardless of the unconscionably high rates of murder for TWOC, and of suicide (and suicide attempts) for all trans women. This is a comment to the article from GinaSF, a trans woman who often comments at Autostraddle, and whom I very much respect:

  3. 2. Yes, violence against trans women, especially trans women of color, is an important issue. But the statistic about ’23 years old’ is bs. These stats are about very small populations of trans sex workers in certain cities (usually taken by HIV related health organizations). They have been endlessly misquoted, misinterpreted and misrepresented along with so many other statistics about trans people (I recall a progressive publication in San Francisco claiming another such statistic– that 65% of all trans women had been incarcerated, which is both hugely false and potentially could promote discrimination against us). They are not true of the entire population of trans women of color, or all trans women much less the entire trans population. And misquoting them as media has often done doesn’t accurately highlight the intersections of oppression and violence which face trans women of color. Yes, we need to decriminalize sex work, provide better health care, mentorship and support for young trans women. But quoting inaccurate, melodramatic statistics about how long we supposedly live doesn’t help with any of that.

    Think of it this way: although the average age of transition for trans women has clearly decreased over the past couple of decades, a substantial majority of trans women, even today, haven’t even come out, let alone transitioned, by 23.

  4. 3. So the average longevity for trans women probably couldn’t be 23 even if every single trans person who transitioned at 23 or younger failed to reach 24. Which obviously isn’t true. In the last dozen years I’ve gotten to know, in person or online, more than 1000 trans women (largely as a moderator of an online trans-related forum), of all ages, and I’m thankful to say that as far as I know most of them — although by no means all of them — are still with us.

    I agree with GinaSF that anything reinforcing the common stereotype of trans people (and especially trans women) as tragic, doomed victims is not a good thing, and can be highly counterproductive.

    Which is why I’m glad EG posted her other link, to the piece about trans people over 50. I’m glad she didn’t post to another article I saw which described them as “transgender elders”! I started transitioning at 45, and am now considerably closer to 60 than 50, but no way I’m an “elder” yet!

    1. the common stereotype of trans people (and especially trans women) as tragic, doomed victims

      I’m tempted to try to start a counter-meme:

      “Oh, those tragic, doomed cis people. Did you know that the mortality rate among cis people is 100%!!”

      On a more sober note: one thing that’s been bothering me about TDOR is that it ends up focussing on trans people’s tragic deaths, rather than their lives. I realize it’s hard to avoid that — when I searched the Web for some information about some of the trans people killed in the USA for last year’s TDOR, I found lots of details about how they were killed and whether or not their killer(s) were ever found, but very, very little about who they were in life. For most of them, nothing at all. You’d have thought they’d popped into existence just in time to get killed.

  5. 4. (not part of the comment in moderation)

    In addition, EG, I agree with your point that regardless of the actual longevity statistics, the “unremitting, unrelenting violence against trans women is also terrorism,” as is the unremittingly transphobic culture we live in, in which hate speech and threats of violence are pervasive and rarely condemned (including the constant drumbeat of attempts to portray us as inherently perverted and delusional and violent and aggressive — because we’re “men in disguise” — and, therefore, unworthy of any support or help).

    I also appreciated your acknowledgement of the fact that as a young cis woman, you “had many more resources for support, ways to help me move past that feeling” regarding the inevitability of rape and other violence. Things have certainly gotten better for trans women in that regard than they used to be, although they still have a long way to go. When I was young, and first tentatively thought of transitioning at the age of 22 — long before the Internet! — I knew of no available support whatsoever, about anything, and felt completely alone and completely terrified in all respects.

  6. FWIW, when I follow the xojane link, I just get a blank screen. Do you need some special browser, or some rootkit or something to see it? I notice the page source is a bunch of JavaScript that talks about “IE”, which I assume means MS Internet Destroyer.

    1. Huh, that’s weird. Thanks for letting me know. If anybody else is having this problem, please say so! I’ll work on it.

  7. Personally, I don’t think trans women have a future. Not within this current world, but only beyond it. We exist under patriarchy only for the purpose of being destroyed – corporally or otherwise. The countless murders of trans women isn’t a bug, but an inherent feature of patriarchy’s functioning. The murders are done in the name of extinguishing “evil”, and this symbolism is demonstrated in how so many of these cis people, including the murderers themselves, refer to every murdered trans woman as “it”, dehumanizing us at every opportunity. If not through murders and assaults, then through rape, abuse, fetishization, and misgendering that occurs before and after death. Either way, we are systematically destroyed.

    Our role as gendered scapegoats has great utility for cis people as a group. For example, TERF ideology can be said to have originated from the desires of some cis feminists to justify their opposition to patriarchy by targeting what they believed to be the embodiment of the evil of patriarchy – and we trans women became that embodiment. They have dehumanized us and treated us as male predators because they see us as the worst of patriachy – see Janice Raymond’s characterization of the desire to transition as the desire to engage in the “subtle rape” of cis women’s bodies. They reduce us to our bodies and yet fail to see how this reductive view is something that could only originate from misogyny…it’s an irony that is amusing but also distressing, for we rarely have the ability to be heard when we speak of the (trans)misogyny we face at the hands of people who regularly deny any of our experiences of violence.

    For us to live in a world free of the danger of transmisogyny would require a complete upheaval of the existing social order. But we needn’t treat ourselves solely as victims, for even though the scale of transmisogynistic victimization is devastating, we can be there for each other and for ourselves. We can strive to protect oursleves from both the violence we face from individuals and the internally embedded violence that serves to destroy our sense of self-worth. Taking inspiration from Susan Stryker, I seek to accept the transgender rage within myself, a rage borne out of the agony of existing in a social order according to which my body is unviable and abect, a rage directed at the immense violence caused from this socially imposed unviability and abjectification. I have hope not in the sense that I may live long, but in the sense that I can devote my life to being there for other trans women and resisting this totality of transmisogyny that we all face.

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