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From: Maia Cheli-Colando <maia>
Date: Thu, 22 May 2008 11:48:49 -0700
In a conversation like this, I think it's important to define transgender. My guess is that a majority of North Americans mentally limit transgender to girls who believe they are boys (or choose to become such, either surgically or socially), and vice versa.
If transgender is taken to mean a human being with a fluid sense of gender roles and identity, then a much wider range of literature (and people) can be included!
Transgender fluidity implies that if a boy wants to be Judy Garland, it doesn't mean he doesn't want to be a boy, or is gay -- it is society that locks down our desires to gender, and then designates us as deviant if our desires break gender rules. It is perfectly natural for any child to want to be Dorothy... what with the scarecrow and the tin man and Ozma-Pip (rather transgender herself) for friends, and snazzy shoes to boot. :)
* Gender fluidity is radical for the gay-lesbian movement as well (less so for bisexuals, perhaps), because it means that we don't lock anyone down -- not into sexual preference, and not into gender roles. In order to carve out space, and then survive, many GL members have continued to fight on polar lines defined by a heterosexual culture. A healthy concept of transgender means shucking those polarities, not forcing ourselves into one or the other side of an on-off switch. *
Consider that if we were to apply the same logic to race as we do to gender, then we would have to consider it abnormal and variant for a black child to want to become president of the US (well, at least until this November <g>)! We would have to suggest that that child longed to be white, because only whites have been president.
And yet we apply exactly that logic to a boy who wants to wear dresses, even while knowing that men in many countries wear what would be considered dresses in the US. We are able to look at a black child who wants to become president as inspired, and yet see a boy who wants to wear pink tulle as peculiar.
As the points of gender acceptability shift, then what literature falls into a "transgender" category will also shift. Ultimately, if we get to the place where human beings are human beings -- with individual gender, race, ethnic, cultural, religious, class, and genetic assets -- then transgender literature will become an irrelevant caption, because identity will have become as fluid as the individual.
For now, what feels transgender to some will be perfectly normal to someone else, depending on region, religion and social class. And so books that I can see as breaking historical social rules simultaneously don't feel particularly transgender to me, because very few people I know well ascribe to those rules.
I think it's important for each of us to know where we sit, and where our communities sit, and where the children in our libraries (and students in our colleges) sit about gender roles and gender identity -- to figure out what ideas and representations (or misrepresentations) feel liberating or make us uncomfortable, and to think very actively about how (and if) we want to make our lives more fluid. If we do, and if we know where we already are, we'll have a good gut-guide of how to introduce literature than can let us embrace all the shades of our own personal rainbows.
Back to literature in specific then, we need books that address those feelings of being outside the norm of our given locale and situation -- but we also, and just as much, need a majority of our books to keep stretching the range of the possible, and make that stretch normal, healthy, and quietly, subtly, celebratory.
Cheers, Maia
Received on Thu 22 May 2008 01:48:49 PM CDT
Date: Thu, 22 May 2008 11:48:49 -0700
In a conversation like this, I think it's important to define transgender. My guess is that a majority of North Americans mentally limit transgender to girls who believe they are boys (or choose to become such, either surgically or socially), and vice versa.
If transgender is taken to mean a human being with a fluid sense of gender roles and identity, then a much wider range of literature (and people) can be included!
Transgender fluidity implies that if a boy wants to be Judy Garland, it doesn't mean he doesn't want to be a boy, or is gay -- it is society that locks down our desires to gender, and then designates us as deviant if our desires break gender rules. It is perfectly natural for any child to want to be Dorothy... what with the scarecrow and the tin man and Ozma-Pip (rather transgender herself) for friends, and snazzy shoes to boot. :)
* Gender fluidity is radical for the gay-lesbian movement as well (less so for bisexuals, perhaps), because it means that we don't lock anyone down -- not into sexual preference, and not into gender roles. In order to carve out space, and then survive, many GL members have continued to fight on polar lines defined by a heterosexual culture. A healthy concept of transgender means shucking those polarities, not forcing ourselves into one or the other side of an on-off switch. *
Consider that if we were to apply the same logic to race as we do to gender, then we would have to consider it abnormal and variant for a black child to want to become president of the US (well, at least until this November <g>)! We would have to suggest that that child longed to be white, because only whites have been president.
And yet we apply exactly that logic to a boy who wants to wear dresses, even while knowing that men in many countries wear what would be considered dresses in the US. We are able to look at a black child who wants to become president as inspired, and yet see a boy who wants to wear pink tulle as peculiar.
As the points of gender acceptability shift, then what literature falls into a "transgender" category will also shift. Ultimately, if we get to the place where human beings are human beings -- with individual gender, race, ethnic, cultural, religious, class, and genetic assets -- then transgender literature will become an irrelevant caption, because identity will have become as fluid as the individual.
For now, what feels transgender to some will be perfectly normal to someone else, depending on region, religion and social class. And so books that I can see as breaking historical social rules simultaneously don't feel particularly transgender to me, because very few people I know well ascribe to those rules.
I think it's important for each of us to know where we sit, and where our communities sit, and where the children in our libraries (and students in our colleges) sit about gender roles and gender identity -- to figure out what ideas and representations (or misrepresentations) feel liberating or make us uncomfortable, and to think very actively about how (and if) we want to make our lives more fluid. If we do, and if we know where we already are, we'll have a good gut-guide of how to introduce literature than can let us embrace all the shades of our own personal rainbows.
Back to literature in specific then, we need books that address those feelings of being outside the norm of our given locale and situation -- but we also, and just as much, need a majority of our books to keep stretching the range of the possible, and make that stretch normal, healthy, and quietly, subtly, celebratory.
Cheers, Maia
Received on Thu 22 May 2008 01:48:49 PM CDT
