Amp posted the Cisgendered Privilege Checklist, and it and its comments section are an interesting read.
Before I get into it, I want to highlight this comment, which is annoying:
10) I do not have to worry that someone wants to be my friend or have sex with me in order to prove his or her “hipness” or good politics.
Many people face this for many different reasons. Transgendered people face it in a particular way, but other people face it in other ways. I could come up with a dozen examples.
23) People do not use me as a scapegoat for their own unresolved gender issues.
Meh. That sounds like the human condition to me; everyone using everyone else as a scapegoat.
You know, this is true: there are a lot of different kinds of prejudice out there, and there are aspects common to them. The Bay Area Reporter just published an article about race-based attraction–“Seeking versatile top for Friday Folsom Fun–no Latinos pls”–which quoted people who have a lot in common with trannychasers. In fact, it’s difficult to think of an affiliation that has not been set down on one side of “acceptable” or the other.
That’s not relevant. I can be privileged by my skin color and marginalized by virtue of my gender identity. A danger–assault, eviction, harassment–does not have to be unique to a single marginalized group in order for that group to claim it as a danger they face as group members. Were that true, no one could claim that prejudice had ever damaged them. Hatred is not terribly creative, and a tactic that terrorizes one minority can easily be recycled to damage another.
I think that the checklist is a great idea, but I think that some of it is a little careless. There’s one conflation in particular that needs some more elaboration: transsexual and gendervariant. Some of the linking is straightforward coalition politics. Some of it is a pragmatic acknowledgement of the ways in which prejudice against transsexuals and prejudice against gendervariant people manifest in similar ways. It’s useful and proper to link the two. There are some differences, however, and it’s important to talk about them when you’re getting into the mechanics of privilege. Transgender is sometimes used as shorthand for “transsexual”–e.g. to some of the doctors who have treated me–sometimes as shorthand for “gendervariant inclusive of transsexual,” and sometimes as shorthand for “gendervariant excluding transsexuals.” I’m not going to use it in this post for that reason. For purposes of this argument, “transsexual” will cover “people who live as the gender they were not assigned at birth.” I think. Maybe I’ll come back to that definition.
Robert Eads is one example of someone who suffered because he was transsexual in a way distinct from gendervariant. Robert Eads was a transman who lived in Georgia, the focus of the documentary Southern Comfort. He had transitioned several years before his death, and lived completely as male. He presented as your average, heterosexual guy, a self-described good ol’ boy, and was not targeted for harassment for being insufficiently masculine or apparently queer. In one scene in Southern Comfort, he describes being approached by someone on behalf of an offshoot of the local Klan. He was just a wee bit creeped out by Mr. Murderous Paranoiac White-Supremacist Militia Guy, but he also remembers being a little tickled: Dude, you have no idea. He was not gendervariant–and it’s important to acknowledge that he had some access to privilege in relation to people who are visibly gendervariant.
Eads died of ovarian cancer in 1999. More than two dozen physicians refused to treat him, even when it was clear that there was something seriously wrong with his health. Even when he was in extremis:
Eads sadly tells us about a morning when he woke up “in a pool of blood,” hemorrhaging from ovarian cancer. But even though his friends called dozens of gynecologists and emergency rooms in greater Atlanta, it took three weeks to find someone who would agree to see him. It was probably too late already; he should have been getting regular gynecological checkups but was too uncomfortable or too poor to educate doctors, nurses, and receptionists who recoiled from the unfamiliar combination of a male body and female innards. Nevertheless, it’s inexcusable that someone in extreme need was refused medical treatment. Yet precisely that happens often enough that many transsexuals would rather die (often literally, one activist told me) than see a doctor.
Eads was deprived of medical care because of hatred specific to transsexuals. Had he been able to obtain regular checkups, let alone treatment when something went wrong, he might still be alive. His last days certainly would have been more peaceful.
In this article, Eads’ partner, Lola Cola, tells a story that didn’t make it into the movie:
After it became apparent that Robert was going to die, he was depressed. So he asked his doctor, would he please prescribe this one medication that had helped him before. And the doctor said, “That’s not my bag, so let’s just send you over to the shrink.” And the shrink tells him, “Your real problem is that you are not dealing with the fact that you’re really a woman”–and makes a move to have him committed [right then and there]. And there was, like, this brawl with cops and everything. [Robert] didn’t get out of the office fast enough, and so he was, like, wrestling with these cops, and they dragged him down to the state hospital. Well, it turns out that one of the cops on the scene was gay and approached the director of the hospital and let her know what was going on, and she let Robert go.