Societal Transformation

Lots of people are celebrating the U.S. Supreme Court's granting of gay marriage rights. Yeah, I remember supporting gay rights; this was back before most people had even heard of it. It was cool then, but then it went mainstream, the big companies got involved, and it just wasn't the same. Hey, you know what is hot right now? Trans rights. You should look into it; it's gonna be real big soon.

But seriously, there seems to be an assumption that the trans movement is just going to follow along and repeat the progress that homosexuals have made. The gay rights movement went at incredible speed: I’m sure it didn't seem that way to people struggling to win rights for themselves, but compared to the progress of blacks or women, it's pretty amazing.

So can transgender people expect a similarly quick breakthrough? It could be that there is an accelerating effect in social justice. That is, each movement we go through gives a push to the next one to come along. During the gay rights push, there's been a lot of talk about being "on the right side of history" as people seem to be automatically looking at the issue in the long term and considering the comparison to other previous struggles. I've also been impressed at how other groups are drawing lines between the Indiana protests and their own struggles for acceptance. That empathy makes me hope that we are developing a more universal attitude to equality.

But there's also reason to believe that we'll be slower to accept the T than we were to accept the L, G and B. One problem - that trans activists themselves seem to have missed - is a lack of knowledge.

The fact is, society doesn't know much about the concept. I mean, homosexuality wasn't widely accepted when I was young, but we were still taught about it in health class. Pretty much everyone knew what it was, and that was a big part of its quick acceptance: it didn't seem mysterious or scary.

But for most of us, transgender people are a mystery. Most of what the mainstream knows about the concept has centred around reassignment surgery, and that's only been reported on as a novelty. That was an easy sitcom joke in the 80’s with some vague relationship to Sweden, but people didn’t learn anything about the actual transgender experience.

And this is where I believe the trans community has done itself a disservice by assuming that the wave of acceptance will be quick and easy. There's been a frosty reception given to people who ask questions of transgender people.

Of course, some of that is completely understandable. There have been a few embarrassing interviews where transgender celebrities have been asked about the state of their genitals. I think we can all relate to that; no one wants to talk about their genitals on national TV (hopefully.)

But I've also seen condemnation of people being unaware of the difference between transgender people and, say, drag queens. While I'm sure that's aggravating to people living in the trans community, I have to admit that only a few years ago, I wouldn't have known the difference. I consider myself fairly open-minded, but that ignorance would have been due not to prejudice or lack of concern, but just from not having the opportunity to learn.

But there's another roadblock to trans acceptance: the sheer amount of rearranging of concepts we're all going to have to do. As the last century has shown us, it takes a while to change our view of gender. Feminism has been a coherent political force for over half a century and we're still working on how we see women. Now we have to change the very idea of gender, that's not going to be easy.

This reminds me of the criticism often levelled at the campaign for gay marriage: that they are "redefining" marriage. That argument has never been convincing to me because 1. Who cares? Let's make a new definition if the old one is no longer adequate. And 2. Gay marriage really wasn't redefining marriage, since marriage - even among heterosexuals - had come to mean a commitment between people in love, not a basis for procreation. I think that's a big reason why the acceptance of gay marriage spread so fast: it fit into most people's idea of what marriage is.

The acceptance of transfolk really is a redefinition of the popular concept of gender though. The fact is a lot of people really do think of gender as defined by our genitalia. We've had enough trouble trying to grasp the idea that gender roles can't be universally enforced while still acknowledging that there may be differing tendencies between the genders. Now we have to see the genders as highly fluid and changeable, but without throwing out the idea of gender altogether.

One of the more interesting (and disturbing) aspects of the trans rights movement that I've seen is that there is a subset of feminists who are highly opposed to them. That may come as a surprise if you think - as I do - that feminism and other struggles for rights are based on the philosophy that people should be free to be the person they want to be, without having to conform to what society expects of them. But if you’ve dedicated yourself to allowing everyone freedom from the restrictions of gender roles, then changing your gender seems unnecessary, and indeed seems like undoing your work against prejudice.

Don’t shoot the messenger here, I’m just trying to explain others’ point of view. Personally, I don’t buy it, since transgender people don’t really seem like exaggerations of their adopted gender. They usually are no more feminine/masculine than cisfolk. My point is that people from all over the political spectrum are going to have their views on gender challenged by the acceptance of trans rights, so this is going to be an uncomfortable struggle for all of society.