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imomus1. Last week, talking about Polish theatre, I referred to a character in Roman Polanski's film The Tenant as a "tranny". (In fact, the man, played by Polanski himself, dresses up as the former occupant of his apartment, possessed by her spirit.)
2. Brigitte Godot, a commenter with a blank LiveJournal, informed me yesterday in a comment that this term is offensive to transsexuals and went on to suggest that I'm probably unaware of the multiplicity of genders beyond the male / female binary. As someone who's had sexual relations with a transsexual, I'm perfectly aware of this multiplicity. Although I'd prefer to say that there's a fluid identity-continuum between two fixed biological genders rather than a plurality of genders.
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3. So I refer the commenter to a Click Opera entry in which I wonder what would happen if there were 12 official genders instead of just two. I conclude, there, that this would lead to a lot of in-fighting because of Freud's narcissism of minor difference.
4. Difference is the important word here. As that entry says, quoting Sophia Phoca, the shift from feminism to postfeminism in the late 60s in Paris meant a shift from a quest for women's equality with men to the celebration of women's difference from men.
5. However, if you remove the idea of the pre-eminence of men (The Man as "the thing to be different from" or "the thing to be equal to"), what you get is a highly unstable system in which everyone asserts their own differences from everyone else. A baroque game ensues, of hair-paring self-definition, self-assertion, endless schism, and an overconcern with "the stigma treadmill". This becomes a politics we're all too familiar with, concerned with the policing of labels, and endless attempts to make other people -- accused of insensitivity and disrespect -- conform to our self-definitions.
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6. Brigitte Godot isn't interested in theory. She says I'm "evading admitting direct culpability" by sending her "to some ancient post commenting on some pseud's ivory tower blather on post-something or other drivel". Ivory tower, pseud, blather, drivel... they don't exactly resonate with respect, do they? What does it mean, that the author of Postfeminism for Beginners is derided so savagely by someone demanding a respectful terminology for herself?
7. Godot goes on to suggest that there's a slippery slope, "in the real world", between using the word "tranny" and murdering transsexuals: "I'm talking about the real world effect such terms have on the thousand and one genders that aren't clearly male or female, not intellectual mind games that torture sentences to wring the subtext out of the banal. This November 20 was Transgender Remembrance Day, honoring all those murdered for their lack of gender conformity. Tranny Day to you, mate. Sorry I missed your post on the subject, I was too busy mourning the dead."
8. I google to see whether "tranny" is generally considered offensive and find a Boston Herald headline Wife-killing tranny denied electrolysis for time being and a Wikipedia article which says "the transgender community typically use the short form "trans", or simply "T" as a substitution for the full word "transsexual", e.g. TS, trans guy, trans dyke, T-folk, trans folk. Some may even use terms that have become controversial to some, such as tranny and/or trans, despite others considering these terms to be offensive. Those who do use these terms claim that they are diminishing the power of the term as an insult..."
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9. I reply politely: "My point is that I'm quite aware of the multiplicity of genders, but that I think there's an inherent flaw in PC identity politics, which is that fine-slicing personal identity definitions -- and investing ever more in angry, self-righteous policing of labels and etiquettes -- is six political steps backward. This isn't ivory tower at all, it's very practical. As I put it in Three conflicts summarised, describing a conflict between RWOCs (Radical Women of Color) and black feminists:
"Here, enacted before our very eyes, is exactly why oppositional politics tends to disintegrate into bitter internecine squabbling -- much to the delight of the bigots it should instead be attacking. These people need to get behind a common cause, and preferably one unrelated to the assertion of ever-more-baroque personal identity differences."
10. I then say that insisting that the word "tranny" be seen as offensive and insulting might be politically counter-productive and even reactionary, a way of:
a) inducing guilt in an ally
b) alienating an ally
c) splitting a united front against bigots
d) actually re-introducing stigma into the whole idea of transgenderism
11. In last Friday's Judgment of Paris post, I suggested that my problem with late-period identity politics is that "there is a lot of sexism built into anti-sexism".
12. This relates to what I've jokingly called Humperson's Third Law of Meta, which states that:
"No critical statement is exempt from its own strictures. Every statement which seeks to summarize and critique a pre-existing statement will tend to exemplify, in itself, the things it deplores in the original statement, thus opening itself up to the same critique, and so on, recursively. And incrementally, for a summary of a statement tends to exemplify its faults more succinctly and intensely." As a critique of sexism, anti-sexism is open to the charge that it incorporates and intensifies the very thing it claims to combat.
13. This also relates to what I was saying in my entry The arrow and the frame, which suggested that an expressed opinion was less important than the framing presuppositions of an argument. In other words -- and as Google Adwords tends to confirm when it advertises racist products next to an anti-racist conversation -- stating you're against sexism or racism is less important than being "on the same page" with racists and sexists in the general framing of the debate. Letting them, in other words, set the agenda.
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14. Adam Curtis' Century of the Self gives a very valuable account of how the counterculture of the 1960s turned, in the 1970s, into narcissism and schism, both political and personal (EST, in particular, saw many reaching the revelation that the self is both everything and nothing), and how this "self-actualization" led fairly seamlessly into the nihilistic consumer-entrepreneurial ideology of the 1980s.
15. It's this narcissism which I think underlies the late-period identity politics which pops up in my comment columns so much. It's not so much "womanist" as "mannerist", both because it's a late, decadent development of 1960s radicalism and because it's obsessed with manners. Identity politics in the 60s and 70s fought for the public visibility of people who were different. In the 80s and 90s -- the Reagan/Thatcher years -- identity politics flipped polarities and entered its PC phase, becoming a campaign for the invisibility of differences. Late identity politics dovetails with Reagan/Thatcher politics: ban public advocacy of homosexuality, don't offend people, keep differences invisible, change language, assume and police stigma.
16. I am X, and I am different from Y. Other people are ignorant of the difference between X and Y. They must be educated. People, you must call me X and respect my difference from yourself, and from Y. You must refer to me by the term I have chosen to refer to myself by, and stay tuned for any changes I choose to make in this label, and new terms you must use to describe me -- those new terms which the stigma treadmill or reclamation of previously-taboo terms may, from time to time, make it necessary for me to substitute. If you self-define as X, you may participate in the reclamation of previously-taboo terms. If you don't, you must simply wait for us to tell you it's okay again to use terms like "queer" or "fag".
17. It's not so much "political correctness gone mad" as "rad gone trad".
18. Thin-sliced, baroque identity politics and the stigma-policing that is its main praxis is as far from a radical progressive politics as it's possible to get. Two steps forward, six euphemisms back.
2. Brigitte Godot, a commenter with a blank LiveJournal, informed me yesterday in a comment that this term is offensive to transsexuals and went on to suggest that I'm probably unaware of the multiplicity of genders beyond the male / female binary. As someone who's had sexual relations with a transsexual, I'm perfectly aware of this multiplicity. Although I'd prefer to say that there's a fluid identity-continuum between two fixed biological genders rather than a plurality of genders.
[Error: unknown template video]
3. So I refer the commenter to a Click Opera entry in which I wonder what would happen if there were 12 official genders instead of just two. I conclude, there, that this would lead to a lot of in-fighting because of Freud's narcissism of minor difference.
4. Difference is the important word here. As that entry says, quoting Sophia Phoca, the shift from feminism to postfeminism in the late 60s in Paris meant a shift from a quest for women's equality with men to the celebration of women's difference from men.
5. However, if you remove the idea of the pre-eminence of men (The Man as "the thing to be different from" or "the thing to be equal to"), what you get is a highly unstable system in which everyone asserts their own differences from everyone else. A baroque game ensues, of hair-paring self-definition, self-assertion, endless schism, and an overconcern with "the stigma treadmill". This becomes a politics we're all too familiar with, concerned with the policing of labels, and endless attempts to make other people -- accused of insensitivity and disrespect -- conform to our self-definitions.
[Error: unknown template video]
6. Brigitte Godot isn't interested in theory. She says I'm "evading admitting direct culpability" by sending her "to some ancient post commenting on some pseud's ivory tower blather on post-something or other drivel". Ivory tower, pseud, blather, drivel... they don't exactly resonate with respect, do they? What does it mean, that the author of Postfeminism for Beginners is derided so savagely by someone demanding a respectful terminology for herself?
7. Godot goes on to suggest that there's a slippery slope, "in the real world", between using the word "tranny" and murdering transsexuals: "I'm talking about the real world effect such terms have on the thousand and one genders that aren't clearly male or female, not intellectual mind games that torture sentences to wring the subtext out of the banal. This November 20 was Transgender Remembrance Day, honoring all those murdered for their lack of gender conformity. Tranny Day to you, mate. Sorry I missed your post on the subject, I was too busy mourning the dead."
8. I google to see whether "tranny" is generally considered offensive and find a Boston Herald headline Wife-killing tranny denied electrolysis for time being and a Wikipedia article which says "the transgender community typically use the short form "trans", or simply "T" as a substitution for the full word "transsexual", e.g. TS, trans guy, trans dyke, T-folk, trans folk. Some may even use terms that have become controversial to some, such as tranny and/or trans, despite others considering these terms to be offensive. Those who do use these terms claim that they are diminishing the power of the term as an insult..."
[Error: unknown template video]
9. I reply politely: "My point is that I'm quite aware of the multiplicity of genders, but that I think there's an inherent flaw in PC identity politics, which is that fine-slicing personal identity definitions -- and investing ever more in angry, self-righteous policing of labels and etiquettes -- is six political steps backward. This isn't ivory tower at all, it's very practical. As I put it in Three conflicts summarised, describing a conflict between RWOCs (Radical Women of Color) and black feminists:
"Here, enacted before our very eyes, is exactly why oppositional politics tends to disintegrate into bitter internecine squabbling -- much to the delight of the bigots it should instead be attacking. These people need to get behind a common cause, and preferably one unrelated to the assertion of ever-more-baroque personal identity differences."
10. I then say that insisting that the word "tranny" be seen as offensive and insulting might be politically counter-productive and even reactionary, a way of:
a) inducing guilt in an ally
b) alienating an ally
c) splitting a united front against bigots
d) actually re-introducing stigma into the whole idea of transgenderism
11. In last Friday's Judgment of Paris post, I suggested that my problem with late-period identity politics is that "there is a lot of sexism built into anti-sexism".
12. This relates to what I've jokingly called Humperson's Third Law of Meta, which states that:
"No critical statement is exempt from its own strictures. Every statement which seeks to summarize and critique a pre-existing statement will tend to exemplify, in itself, the things it deplores in the original statement, thus opening itself up to the same critique, and so on, recursively. And incrementally, for a summary of a statement tends to exemplify its faults more succinctly and intensely." As a critique of sexism, anti-sexism is open to the charge that it incorporates and intensifies the very thing it claims to combat.
13. This also relates to what I was saying in my entry The arrow and the frame, which suggested that an expressed opinion was less important than the framing presuppositions of an argument. In other words -- and as Google Adwords tends to confirm when it advertises racist products next to an anti-racist conversation -- stating you're against sexism or racism is less important than being "on the same page" with racists and sexists in the general framing of the debate. Letting them, in other words, set the agenda.
[Error: unknown template video]
14. Adam Curtis' Century of the Self gives a very valuable account of how the counterculture of the 1960s turned, in the 1970s, into narcissism and schism, both political and personal (EST, in particular, saw many reaching the revelation that the self is both everything and nothing), and how this "self-actualization" led fairly seamlessly into the nihilistic consumer-entrepreneurial ideology of the 1980s.
15. It's this narcissism which I think underlies the late-period identity politics which pops up in my comment columns so much. It's not so much "womanist" as "mannerist", both because it's a late, decadent development of 1960s radicalism and because it's obsessed with manners. Identity politics in the 60s and 70s fought for the public visibility of people who were different. In the 80s and 90s -- the Reagan/Thatcher years -- identity politics flipped polarities and entered its PC phase, becoming a campaign for the invisibility of differences. Late identity politics dovetails with Reagan/Thatcher politics: ban public advocacy of homosexuality, don't offend people, keep differences invisible, change language, assume and police stigma.
16. I am X, and I am different from Y. Other people are ignorant of the difference between X and Y. They must be educated. People, you must call me X and respect my difference from yourself, and from Y. You must refer to me by the term I have chosen to refer to myself by, and stay tuned for any changes I choose to make in this label, and new terms you must use to describe me -- those new terms which the stigma treadmill or reclamation of previously-taboo terms may, from time to time, make it necessary for me to substitute. If you self-define as X, you may participate in the reclamation of previously-taboo terms. If you don't, you must simply wait for us to tell you it's okay again to use terms like "queer" or "fag".
17. It's not so much "political correctness gone mad" as "rad gone trad".
18. Thin-sliced, baroque identity politics and the stigma-policing that is its main praxis is as far from a radical progressive politics as it's possible to get. Two steps forward, six euphemisms back.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 10:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 10:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 11:06 am (UTC)I consider that a step forward, politically: the emphasis on equality with men condemns women always to be in the shadow of a "pre-eminent gender".
your argument makes sense now - and yes, i think you're right.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 11:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 11:29 am (UTC)Part of me wonders if this phenomenon is exaggerated in the US, because it seems that hyper-individualism plays a big role in that kind of ego formation. But at the same time, I feel like it's also a clear sign of an as-yet unformed set of political arguments, the constant desire to sharpen one's talons, even if it means sharpening them on those who would otherwise be your greatest allies.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 11:37 am (UTC)Nice way to look at it. I think that's exactly what's going on here. People are looking for sparring partners but neglecting to mention that they're only sparring (and in the process forget it themselves).
Cough, cough.
Date: 2009-11-27 11:44 am (UTC)Tranny should never be used to describe a transgendered individual, mainly because it's short for 'transvestite'. To illustrate, Grayson Perry is a tranny (who describes himself as one) and Chas Bono (Sonny and Cher's adult child who is going FTM) is transgender. The real problem here seems to be one of those sub-editor fuck-ups and not some vast plot to diss a group that is just learning to find its voice in public.
Sometimes mannerist hairsplitting can be avoided by a visit from Captain Obvious.
xx
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 11:47 am (UTC)I wouldn't call this politics of narcissism-respect-policing an "as-yet-unformed set of political arguments"; I think Freud nailed it almost a century ago with his narcissism of minor differences (http://www.answers.com/topic/narcissism-of-minor-differences) idea.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 11:48 am (UTC)But then there are people who, as Momus says, become so invested in the idea that they are different from everybody else--even if only in minute, generally indistinguishable ways--that they take offense at the slightest utterance that is not tailored to their highly individualized sensibilities.
And of course, there probably exists a healthy mix of these two types among those who exemplify this phenomenon.
Re: Cough, cough.
Date: 2009-11-27 11:58 am (UTC)I would have been inclined to agree with you about "tranny" being short for "transvestite" (and therefore being essentially a vestimentary descriptor, a question of mere clothes). But when I googled I found that it's used -- in today's America, at least -- to refer to transgendered people a lot more than any "sub-editor fuck-up" could account for. The term has become part of the politics of transgender nomenclature.
The jury seems to be out on whether it's offensive, though, and it certainly isn't taboo. The Boston Herald would never headline a story "Wife-Killing nigger..." for example.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 11:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:00 pm (UTC)And what do you make of the fact that Freud is referring to group cohesion, whereas one often sees this phenomenon play out on a surprisingly individualized level?
I think there is often a sort of cattishness to this kind of politics. After all, when one claims an identity, that is automatically a sort of power trip. It's not only something that you've come to believe deeply as a truth about yourself, but one quickly realizes that it may be a potent weapon within the culture. It's like shooting at squirrels with the BB gun you got for Christmas or something.
Re: Cough, cough.
Date: 2009-11-27 12:10 pm (UTC)That said! If I heard somebody say "tranny" and the person was clearly not using it in a derogatory manner (tone and context are king in this and many other types of communication), I wouldn't find the use of the word terribly odd, either, as an American.
I think one of the problems with the phenomenon you describe is how one of its central aims is to strip away tone and context, to create this dispassionate zone for interpretation, where everything but the "offensive" snippet is trimmed away and read aloud by Mr. Magoo before sentence is passed.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:11 pm (UTC)The jury seems to be out on whether "tranny" is offensive, though, and it certainly isn't taboo. The Boston Herald would never headline a story "Wife-killing nigger..." (http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20091126wife-killing_tranny_denied_electrolysis_for_time_being/srvc=home&position=also) for example.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:28 pm (UTC)But [Freud's] idea still bears a strange relationship to the experience I recalled earlier. It would seem to me that the group became less cohesive as a result of the policing, not moreso. And what do you make of the fact that Freud is referring to group cohesion, whereas one often sees this phenomenon play out on a surprisingly individualized level?
I don't think Freud was saying that everyone got more cohesive as a result of TNOMD. The Scots got more cohesive against the English, and everyone hating the Jews (in Freud's examples) got closer with everyone else hating the Jews. But TNOMD operates, precisely, by uniting small groups through schism with other small groups. In your example, the grad students organising the activist groups introduce a gender schism. There was presumably more coherence within the female group, less between the male and female groups (although it's conceivable that lots of difference emerged within the groups too: TNOMD is fractal, it replicates schism at recursively smaller scales).
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:33 pm (UTC)Would you say that Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (with food and shelter at the base and self-actualisation at the apex) is a proto-Reaganite/Thatcherite ideological construct?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:41 pm (UTC)What you can say about Maslow's hierarchy is that it fits very neatly into Cold War ideology, and plumps for the side of individualism over collectivism. A lot of research I've done since into the "religion of creativity" (which is largely what prepares and makes possible the creative explosion of the 1960s) links it very explicitly with Cold War military research and specifically the Sputnik Shock (http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/creativity-and-the-sputnik-shock).
It is actually all too easy to link Cold War ideology and individualism with Reagan/Thatcher. I think Adam Curtis made the argument very convincingly. I felt like a dupe when I watched Century of the Self. At the same time, those ideas about creativity and self-actualisation formed me. They're at my core, and I will never be able to banish them. I don't know what would be left of me without them.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:48 pm (UTC)Why did they choose that specific phrasing with a picture that, arguably, is of an unattractive transgendered person with a sullen expression?
The "tranny" is being evalutated for her looks and poked fun at. I don't think you chose the best example here.
Also, you can hardly equate the use of the word "nigger" with "tranny" - even if "tranny" was similarly offensive and derogatory (which it isn't) you have to:
a) Keep a historical perspective
b) Consider that black people in America make up a larger segment of society and are more powerful and vocal politically than transgendered people and therefore it's far riskier for the newspaper to offend black people.
c) Remember that the dialogue on transgendered people is still in its early phases. Perhaps it is acceptable to call them "trannies" now in the paper as certain terms for homosexuals may have been acceptable to publish 30 years ago.
Perhaps it got resensitized
Date: 2009-11-27 12:51 pm (UTC)Another thing comes to mind though; clearly 'tranny' has been used in the good ol' days - Andy Warhol's Factory days - as a strategy for self identification. A conscious choice to *be* shocking in opposition to normalcy, as well as conquering your own identity. As these identities become more and more common, the culture around them changes, obviously, and the shock might not really be a positive part of the experience for the new bourgeois population of trans-anything. Not that your combative commenter seems to come from that point of view.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 01:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 01:14 pm (UTC)Now, if we're going to talk about the stereotypology of transsexuals in Hollywood cinema, and how it might compare with depictions of black people as maids and Uncle Toms, sure, I'd probably agree completely. There are far too many tranny killer stereotypes in films, even if -- as this story shows -- they do sometimes crop up in real life.