FLESH MADE REAL: the PRODUCTION, RECEPTION, and INTERPRETATION of TRANSGENDER NARRATIVES a Thesis Submitted to the Committee On

FLESH MADE REAL:

THE PRODUCTION, RECEPTION, AND INTERPRETATION OF TRANSGENDER

NARRATIVES

A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Science

TRENT UNIVERSITY

Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

English (Public Texts) M.A. Graduate Program

September 2013 ii

ABSTRACT

Flesh Made Real:

The Production, Reception, and Interpretation of Transgender Narratives

Evelyn Deshane

This thesis examines what the term "transgender narrative" represents at this particular time and location. I do this by examining various methods of transgender storytelling through different forms of media production, including autobiography, film, novels, and online platforms such as

Tumblr and YouTube. In chapter one, I look at the production of novels and the value system by which they are judged ("gender capital") in transgender publics and counterpublics. In chapter two, I examine the history of the autobiography, along with the medical history closely associated with transgender identity and bodily transformation. The third chapter examines notions of violence and memorial behind the deaths of transgender people and the ways in which certain political revolutions are formed within a counterpublic. I deconstruct varying notions of identity, authorship, and cultural production and critically examine what it means to be transgender and what it means to tell stories about transgender people. I will conclude with how these stories are being shaped through social media to become more innovative and move away from the rigid value system of gender capital previously mentioned.

Keywords: transgender, transsexual, cisgender, gender performance, social media, autobiography, Judith Butler, YouTube, intersexuality, cultural capital, author function, women's studies, feminism, sex differences, representation, violence iii

Table of Contents

Abstract ii Table of Contents iii

Introduction: This is Not A Thesis 2 "Transgender Narrative" as a Thesis Topic 5 A Queer Time and Place 10 What's At Stake? 13 A Note on Terminology 21 Overall Outline 27

Transgenre: Identifying Transgender Narratives, Authors, and Gender Capital 29 Transgenre 33 Three Umpires Walk Into a Bar 38 Dividing Lines in Identity Politics 45 Refusing 48 Regretting 56 Ask The Audience 61

Sh*t Trans* Autobiographies Say: Internal Narratives and Constructing The Self 65 The Self-Realization Narrative 67 The Self-Realization of The Body 75 The Self-Reality 82 Sh*t Trans Counterpublics Say 96

Memorial and Revolution: Transgender Hate Crimes and The Simplification of Violence 100 Public Associations and Private Violence 103 Performing Gender 114 (Gay) Panic In The Streets 118 Desire, Repulsion, Fear, and Overkill 130 Producing Hate, Producing Violence 136

Conclusion: The Rhizome 140

Works Cited and Consulted 146

Appendix A: Definitions 162 Appendix B: Images 165 Appendix C: Medical Literature 170

"Even if it is the dream made flesh, the real, once it becomes real, can be no more than real."

-Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Introduction:

This is Not A Thesis

The Treachery of Images is one of the most iconic series of paintings by Belgium artist

René Magritte. The most famous image from this series has, at the centre of the yellow background, a pipe with the French script ceci n'est pas une pipe (this is not a pipe) underneath.

The only attribute which remains consistent in Magritte's other paintings is the repetition of ceci n'est pas (this is not). With this refrain, Magritte is making a larger suggestion about the nature of representation. This painting is not a pipe, though it looks like what we know to be a pipe. It cannot be stuffed with tobacco or lit with flame or smoked by the artist. This painting of a pipe is not real -- and this, to Magritte, is why images are treacherous. They take what we think we know and display it to us, while at the same time broadcasting its artificiality. Magritte interrogates the dichotomy of authenticity vs. artificiality with his entire body of work using surreal images, but it is this iconic series that is often cited by cultural theorists in order to explain the nature of representation and that ubiquity is why I am drawn to it now.

The photograph also represents a similar tension between what is real and what is simulated. The nature of the photograph has captivated and intrigued many cultural theorists including Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and transgender theorist Jay Prosser, for the artificiality and authenticity apparent in the photographic image. For Jay Prosser "the photograph must be seen to represent the subject" (218; emphasis his). With Prosser, the common perception of photography is outlined: these images are the opposite of Magritte’s and are not treacherous in the least (220). However, at the same time a photograph seems to present the audience with an exact portrait, it also removes the image from its time and context. Photography is a vulnerable

3 and violent art, (a "memento mori" to Susan Sontag) simply because the image creates gaps which the audience must now narrate in order to make real (Sontag 15; Anderson 245).

As Jay Prosser notes,

The effect of photographs in any autobiography, transsexual autobiographies included, is immediately referential. Autobiography photographs serve to embody the subject of the narrative. This is the real body of the autobiographer, they declare; the text you read refers to the subject you see here. (209)

In the last chapter of Second Skins, Prosser analyzes these images as a way to reaffirm the newly acquired physical change, but also to make sense of the author's past in another (visually different) body. The autobiography is imperative to understanding the gap between two photos of a young boy and a grown woman, and it is imperative to help elucidate the story behind each if considered individually. Whether to the audience of a book, to the self in the process of forming an identity, or to the doctor that later performs surgery, the entire process of transgender identity requires storytelling. Therefore, when studying transgender identity, the artificiality and perceived authenticity of the image needs to be understood as either reinforcing or deconstructing certain beliefs about the subject they are meant to represent.

American photographer Diane Arbus utilizes her skill as a photographer to deconstruct the binaries of real and artificial, especially in relation to the physical difference seen in the bodies she captured. In her 1959 image, Transvestite in a Dress, she captures a person sitting on a bed wearing a black dress. Unless looking at the title of the image, the person in the image

4 passes as a woman.1 In characteristic Arbus style, she draws attention to the physical and gender differences in the body captured through the title of this image. Though Arbus has been heavily criticized for her photography (regularly known as the photographer of "freaks"), I would suggest that she uses her image, in conjunction with the title, in order to deconstruct the audience's perception, rather than alienate the subject (Sontag 45).

The title of Arbus's photograph performs the same action that the French script for

Magritte does. While the subject passes as her desired gender, Arbus draws attention to the fact that this photograph is merely an image of femininity and not 'real' femininity itself. When Arbus photographs the cultural standard for feminine attributes on the body that is typically seen as male, she draws attention to the fact that what the audience considers male and female is an image and nothing but. When Diane Arbus is taking pictures of transvestites, she is not trying to exoticize the subject matter, but elucidate the audience's position in relation to the norms of masculinity and femininity. By capturing in an image what the audience has always taken to be real, she isolates the culturally produced standard that usually goes unnoticed or is inferred implicitly. When we find ourselves narrating the gap that the photograph presents, we become more aware of the other stories we tell ourselves about gender and the body.

Arbus does not limit her deconstruction to gender. As Sontag remarks,

For Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic: a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite; lower-middle-class suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and gay bars. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring--and boring--in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous, and fascinating (45).

1 "Passing" is sometimes a strongly debated issue within transgender theory. See Julia Serano's chapter on the topic in Whipping Girl for more details.

By drawing attention to the (dis)ability in the bodies she captured, she was able to produce a negative (in the photographic sense) at the same time: by producing what the audience thinks of as different, she was able to illuminate what has also been simultaneously perceived as normal.

By capturing all of this with her camera, she was able to turn the perceived dichotomy of

(dis)ability into an image and deconstruct her audience's perceptions of which bodies are fit to capture as aesthetic objects. In A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y.C, the man who hits the ceiling in the house with his parents is no more normal than the parents who gaze up at his height. Both ability and disability are images; both are illusions. Both are, most importantly, representations and completely relational.

It is my goal for this thesis that like Rene Magritte and Diane Arbus, I will take case studies, novels, films, and other examples that display transgender storytelling and break down the dichotomies apparent in each. By focusing on an image of the transgender person, I hope to analyze the ways in which flesh becomes real to the participant, the viewer, and the subject through the act of narration.

"Transgender Narratives" As A Thesis Topic

In order to apply for Gender Reassignment in Ontario, Canada, there must be a formal meeting held at the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health (CAMH) where the "story" of the gender transition is told. The audience for this iteration and composition is a team of doctors who will decide whether or not someone is a suitable candidate for the surgery. If the subject does not

"pass" this formal meeting, then the surgical options for gender transition are postponed until the next application period (Sherbourne Health Centre).2 In the United States, most transgender people rely on their insurance company to cover the costs of surgery, hormones, or any other

2 See Appendix C for the application questionnaire and sample letter from CAMH.

6 treatment (Hudson's FTM Guide). In that case, a medical doctor or psychologist/psychiatrist does an evaluation in the same manner, where a story is told by the transgender patient and judged. If insurance and government assistance are denied, then there are options for specific surgeons in

North America or overseas to perform the surgery and obtain hormones (at the patient's expense). In each case, whether in front of doctors or insurance representatives, the transgender subject must determine how to narrate the gap between the body and their mind in order to make the flesh real. As Jay Prosser notes, "The autobiographical act for the transsexual begins even before the published autobiography -- namely, in the clinician's office where, in order to be diagnosed as transsexual, s/he must recount a transsexual autobiography" (101). In each scenario, the transgender person is figuring out what the (correct) transgender narrative really is.

This thesis attempts to pinpoint the broad term of "transgender narrative" and determine what it ends up meaning in different social, political, cultural, and medical contexts. I have chosen transgender narratives as my thesis topic because after reviewing books and engaging in discussions, I found it difficult to find one answer to this question. I was overwhelmed by the number of ways in which these narratives are produced: through photographs, autobiographies, documentaries, films, novels, personal stories, online platforms such as YouTube and Tumblr, and many others. I became engaged and enthralled as I read through these texts about the ways in which stories were told, retold, and re-imagined. Simultaneously, I was angered and shocked at the ways in which authorship was distributed and certain voices were silenced. What I present now is a summation of my findings when I went to investigate what the transgender narrative has become in our current time and location. What I have found is not a universal truth or the one

"correct" answer. Instead, the transgender narrative is an interlocking set of many different

7 stories and perspectives. Sometimes they clash, sometimes they strongly oppose one another, and other times they all speak at once and create an overwhelming sense of coherency.

The interlocking layers that make up the transgender narrative are best understood in relation to the audiences they target and those who participate in them. This is best described using Michael Warner's definition of a public. He states: "to address a public or think of oneself as belonging to a public is to be a certain kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one's disposal certain media and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon, and to speak within a certain language ideology" (10). This "certain kind of person" and

"certain normative horizon" locates the audience member and those who are producing the text as addressing specific identities and specific historical contexts. Each one of the transgender texts produced and analyzed for this thesis belongs to a public.

There are also counterpublics which exist in opposition to what has already been established. Warner notes that a counterpublic "maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status" (56). Within a counterpublic, the discussion "is understood to contravene the rules obtaining the world at large, being structured by alternative dispositions or protocols, making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying"

(56). Again, a counterpublic, like a public, will address specific identities and specific historical contexts. The realization of a "subordinate status" in relation to a larger public is integral for understanding the difference between the two. If the medical team hearing the transgender person's transgender story is the public, the person re-telling that story later via YouTube after being denied their surgery is the counterpublic. In many ways, the transgender counterpublic writes back to all the texts and stories that have already been produced.

Throughout the thesis, I will be referring to and complicating the notion of publics and counterpublics that are often, especially within the transgender community, used in opposition to one another. The transgender counterpublic is not one monolithic group nor is the cisgender public. Each (counter)public involves many overlapping layers which have established an internal hierarchy and distribution of power. The currency that passes through these systems which allows one group to eclipse another is something that I have called gender capital.

Pierre Bourdieu has already done extensive work on the forms of capital which a person can possess, distribute, and use to their advantage (see his 1986 work Forms of Capital on the topic). For my idea of gender capital, I am building on his well established ideas of social and cultural capital where certain people can possess attributes that allow them to succeed (social capital) and where certain literary texts are revered as better than other texts (cultural capital). In my thesis, gender capital is a converging of these two forces, where certain people and identities have become conflated and attached to certain objects, marking the ways in which they have been perceived and marked as they have moved through the transgender (counter)publics. Since being a transgender author/speaker/theorist/artist affects how one is perceived and read within the larger LGBTQ community, the social reality of the person is always taken into consideration alongside whatever they have written or produced.

Peggy McIntosh has noted something similar to gender capital with her work on privilege. The notion of obtaining privilege from certain social positions (white, cisgender, straight, male) is completely reversed in some transgender (counter)publics, where privilege is used as an insult (DeLine "Author Interview" 18). I will document this sliding scale of capital and reversal of typical systems of power in more depth for my first chapter as this new system of currency produces, mediates, and distributes transgender texts. These texts have come to be

9 known as transgenre (Cheryl Morgan's term) based on the presence of transgender characters, motifs, and themes. From here, the books which are demarcated as transgenre are passed through a system of evaluation in two different contexts: one to a wider audience and one to a transgender public. The examples that I use in this section will show the discrepancies and disparities in this power system. Gender capital also affects what type of social theory is held up in high regard in transgender (counter)publics. The confessional nature of transgender autobiographies structures the ways in which transgender theoretical texts and other scholarly work are produced. The gender capital system in this context is one that hinges itself on the dichotomy of authentic vs. artificial. Those who do not demonstrate personal knowledge of the internal logic of the transgender identity are, ironically, stripped of their gender capital and awarded privilege. In Chapter Three, gender capital's ability to claim the lives of dead transgender women of colour for the Transgender Day of Remembrance ceremony is my main example of when the capital and authority awarded to individuals can be damaging. This currency system obscures the ways in which these transgender people have died in order to be used for a political and social cause. Similarly, the disregard of those who hold a position of privilege at the time of their death does not allow for a proper memorial relating to transgender violence to be established. The gender capital system also sets up a false opposition for violence, where one side is effectively turned against another with such slogans as "die cis scum."

Throughout my thesis, I will attempt to outline the use of this new social and cultural currency, and also critique where it fails to take into account other factors that should influence opinion.

In the same way that Magritte's painting is not a (real) pipe, this is not a thesis about

(real) transgender people; this is a thesis about the images of and stories about them. And it is only one thesis and one opinion at that. There are many representations here and it is only

10 through reviewing the many that we can isolate and identify what is common and culturally relevant. There is no universal transgender person that is the ideal Platonic form which all others seek to strive towards. As Stuart Hall comments, "since we can only have a knowledge of things if they have meaning, it is discourse - not things in themselves - which produces knowledge" (45; emphasis mine). Though transgender people in my research may have expressed a certain longing and striving to achieve the "thing-in-itself" that they perceive to be a true meaning of gender or sex, this thing-in-itself does not actually exist. When and if I do discuss this type of personal truth in this thesis, I mean it as an example and a rhetorical device.

None of the examples that I look at are medical text books or are entitled How To Be

Transgender 101. While the medical is highly associated with transgender narratives, and the photograph is typically supposed to represent truth, I wish to show how even these things which we believe to be real are merely small segments of something much larger. As Angela Carter remarks in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, when the flesh is made real, the audience begins to narrate the gap between themselves and the image until they are not sure what is real anymore. This thesis is a culmination of what I found when I fleshed out that gap.

A Queer Time and Place

In order to understand the shifting meanings behind the words and images that make up what it means to be "transgender" at this particular moment in time, this thesis will engage with what Michel Foucault and Stuart Hall call discursive formations. In the way that Foucault sought to understand a "discourse concerning madness" I have also sought to analyze a discourse concerning what it means to be transgender (Archeology of Knowledge 35). In some cases, this does end up becoming a discourse on madness, the medical system, institutionalization, and the

11 prison system/violence (Chapter Two and Chapter Three specifically). In other contexts, I take

Foucault's idea of the author as a function and apply it to the way in which stories have been told about transgender subjects. I lean heavily on Foucault's historical focus in order to understand and unpack the meanings and lived realities of transgender people and not render them into muted stereotypes. I also favour his post-structural way of viewing authorship and images because it removes the essentialist and mimetic approach that many transgender theorists use

(and, as I will argue, use poorly). The way in which knowledge is produced and circulated, in addition to how we read the text, will be important things to consider as this thesis goes on. By situating and analyzing the ways in which these stories are written, produced, and interpreted by an audience, I do not wish to denigrate the personal truths of these transgender subjects. I simply do not discuss them in the ways that others have in the past.3 I wish to focus on the art that is produced in relation to these realities, and not the realities themselves.

Because of this, I have not limited myself only to autobiographies, but have drawn upon young adult and general fiction, online platforms such as YouTube and Tumblr, performers, documentaries, films, important cultural websites (TDoR, Hudson's FTM Guide) and case studies (Cece McDonald, Brandon Teena). The majority of the texts that I have chosen have been written, produced, or recorded since 2004.4 In addition, I am approaching this topic of transgender identity from a very Western perspective (specifically North American, with a focus on the US and Canada, though some case studies and research materials have a UK and

European focus). While I have researched different gender practices all around the globe (the hijras of India for example), in order to keep my thesis a reasonable length I have focused on

3 For sociological and anthropological studies of transgender people, see Transpeople by Christopher Shelley, Transgender Voices edited by Lori Gilstrick and of course, Susan Styker's work. 4 Brandon Teena being an exception in order to establish a historical approach to how Western culture has viewed transgender hate crimes in Chapter Three.

12 depth instead of breadth. I have outlined some of the procedures for surgery and gender transition in the US and Canada previously in this introduction, and I will also include a questionnaire and application package for CAMH in Toronto as an example in Appendix C.

Much of the material I use will focus on blogs, zines, and self-published novels. These modes of publication and distribution have not typically been accepted within academic circles, but they are imperative to understanding how and why transgender publics form and reinforce these narratives. In the same way that Susan Stryker retold the history of the LGBT movement from the eyes of transgender women and men, I will be focusing on texts that have been produced and distributed with a transgender public in mind. This will include novels with transgender protagonists that may not have been written by transgender authors (such as

Middlesex and Jumpstart The World) and it will also include numerous autobiographies by transgender people (such as Chaz Bono's Transition). There is a diverse and thriving transgender community which is committed to producing texts for a transgender and wider audience that has only grown in strength as the technology (such as the internet and print-on-demand websites) has caught up with ambition. Topside Press, a publishing company that focuses on both fiction and non-fiction, released an anthology of transgender-focused short stories called The Collection in late 2012. Original Plumbing magazine deals primarily with transgender men's writing, and its counterpart Trans Lady Fan Zine is run by transgender photographer Amos Mac. There are queer news sites like Prettyqueer.com and Lambda Literary Society which focus on finding and delivering news and culture that directly applies to their target demographic of the transgender spectrum, which is often either ignored or debased in other more mainstream news outlets. Elliott

DeLine, a novelist and short story writer featured in The Collection, plays a large role in this thesis, especially in the first chapter in a discussion of the nature of authorship. His first novel

Refuse is often compared with Stone Butch Blues and is indeed a more modern interpretation of the same problems that Feinberg discusses. But his book is particularly important to focus on because it was self-published. In the same way that transgender people are reclaiming history through the retelling of it, transgender people are reinforcing their identities through modes of self-publishing their story. Just as a book becomes public through the act of publication, Elliott

DeLine's act of self-publishing his work as a transgender author is simultaneous to 'coming out' as a public figure. The act of producing an identity at the same time as producing a text is one of the many reasons why I have turned to self-published or independent forms of media. Amy

Spencer has documented what she has called "lo-fi" culture in her book about DIY (Do It

Yourself) publishing and how this ethic and aesthetic has been influential to many minority groups. She remarks that, "previous communities have been driven to self-publish by social conditions" and she sees this act as a form of "resistance" (67). As I will discuss in Chapter Two,

YouTube and other social media sites like Tumblr also influence this new type of storytelling.

What's at Stake?

Judith Butler is one of the most iconic theorists of the past twenty years. She has also effectively positioned herself between cultural and gender studies, which is where I also situate my work. My thesis draws upon many of her predecessors and cultural theorists (such as Stuart

Hall, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault), in addition to the work done by many of the prominent transgender theorists in the past twenty years (such as Judith Halberstam, Jay Prosser,

Sandy Stone, and Leslie Feinberg). Butler's work Gender Trouble is probably the best example of her position in between two strong disciplines and is one of her most famous texts. Gender

Trouble is also one of the most often cited by transgender theorists as being potentially damaging

14 to their identities and communities (see Prosser, Ryan, Serano, and Namaste). Because of this,

Butler will play a large role in this thesis, either as a point of contention (Chapter Two) or as a way to engage with the practical realities of gender and performance (Chapter Three). This thesis attempts to straddle this dividing line between post-structural analysis and the lived realities and very real criticisms of transgender people.

Much of transgender cultural theory and criticism now bemoans the fact that either transgender representation does not exist or that it is negative (Halberstam 171; Serano 60; Ryan

35-70). This focus on the image's positive or negative value to the community as a whole renders the audience as passive and does not promote active interpretation. By setting up an either/or situation (a positive or negative dichotomy) when talking about the nature of visibility and representation, those who produce and tell these stories about transgender people are missing a critical point. Representation is never real and these stories that are circulated within transgender publics, even those autobiographies, are never completely true (Hall 45-48, Said 21). They are tiny fragments of visibility, important in their existence, but not wholly inviolable. The need to see a particular worldview as inherent in a representation has been the downfall of most transgender production of art and stories and is something that I will work on deconstructing. I will explore and critique areas of transgender representation that have explicitly linked the author to the text that they produce, have linked the theories of identities to stories or artistic expressions of those identities, and have also continued and retell the personal details of others after they are dead for political or cultural gain. I will also draw attention to the common narratives, themes, and motifs of transgender people and the ways in which these narratives are produced. The production of a book, in addition to the content of that book, is extremely important when looking at this material, both primary and secondary.

What is fundamentally at stake in this thesis, and what I hope to eradiate with this section, is the idea that I could be using cultural theory and analysis to explain transgender texts and (counter)publics which many transgender theorists do not agree with. While not every single person who identifies as transgender disregards Butler, Foucault, or other ideas of social construction, there are still a large number who do. I will address these colliding viewpoints as I progress through the thesis, but I also want to present a clear analysis of why I have chosen to favour the post-structural theorists over the essentialist approach that many transgender theorists adopt. Another aspect at stake is the on-going oppression and erasure of transgender people, their stories, and their history from academia in particular (Ryan 182, Serano 336). To combat this possibility of erasure, I also wish to provide a small section on the history of the transgender movement and an analysis of proper terminology below. I hope that this will also provide context to the opposing arguments, case studies, and certain reactionary politics which will be discussed later on.

LGBT history focuses on the 1969 riots at Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village NYC as one of the fundamental events in gaining recognition. Stonewall Bar was originally owned by the

Mafia, but it was one of the few bars during that time period that served people from LGBT community. In particular, Stonewall served some of the most marginalized people in the gay community: butch lesbians, drag queens, effeminate men, along with troubled youth and homeless people. During this time period, cross-dressing was illegal and raids on bars were quite frequent. Leslie Feinberg recounts this time period in great detail in Transgender Warriors, making note of the fact that the only time where ze was not arrested for hir attire was on

Halloween (TW 88). Police raids were a regular practice at this bar in particular. Usually the raid consisted of a male officer taking everyone dressed as men into one bathroom and a female

16 officer taking the other half dressed as women into their designated bathroom. While in the bathroom, the patrons were given instructions to reveal themselves in order to make sure that they were not breaking the law through cross-dressing. During one of these police raids, a crowd began to gather outside and was incited to riot. This led to a series of riots lasting several days and eventually ended with groups in Greenwich Village organizing together to make places for

LGBT people to be open with their sexuality. The year following this event, the Gay Pride

Parade began in order to mark the date, celebrate the riots, and allow the LGBT minority the safe space they were not permitted before (Feinberg TW 88).

In the many years since this event, the LGBT movement has received much more attention and recognition. Though the T in the acronym represents transgender, many transgender individuals feel as if their political and social needs are still not being met (Bornstein

55). Most of what encompasses daily living for transgender people is quite different than for gay, lesbian, or bisexual people and the trauma that they experience from this everyday life is also quite distinct. The act of misgendering is never really taken into consideration by most LGB cultural theory, nor the gender dysphoria that most misgendering tends to trigger. Certain every day acts such as using the bathroom can cause immense ephemeral trauma to the transgender subject and are not always talked about or discussed within many of the standard feminist texts or by prominent theorists.5

This neglect within the larger spectrum of LGBT publics also extends to the founding event of LGBT politics: Stonewall. In spite of the riot's act of solidarity in establishing the Pride

Parade and LGBT rights, the parade has been criticized heavily for its erasure of everything but

5 Judith Halberstam is probably the exception to this rule, since her book Female Masculinity was one of the first to deal explicitly with what she dubbed 'The Bathroom Problem' and her other books take up transgender mourning practices. She does, however, have a rocky history within the transgender community because of her essay 'F2M' on this issue; it was felt that she did not encompass all the issues she needed to, so even her attempt at representation was a misrepresentation, leading to more trauma and dysphoria.

17 gay (white) male culture. The visibility and acceptance that has come from the Gay Pride Parade has only been extended to gays and lesbians (and sometimes bisexuals6) and not to transgender people. The motifs of Stonewall - the right to wear certain clothing in public spaces and the private space of the bathroom suddenly becoming public - are events that have meaning for transgender people and gender transgressors. The sexuality that is often displayed at Gay Pride or the marriage debate that is now in common parlance within political spheres in The West is the LBG struggle. Though transgender people may have been the founding force of Stonewall, that history has been erased and replaced (Halberstam GF 130). While Stryker's attempts to retell it have been helpful, she cannot compete with all the other outside forces.

Along the way, there has also been massive and active resistance against transgender people, as individuals and as groups.7 After Stonewall and the very public case of Christine

Jorgensen, transgender identity became more widely known within mainstream publics and lesbian counterpublics. Those who affiliated themselves with the second-wave radical feminist movement are often anti-transgender in their general and social views. Janice Raymond's book

The Transsexual Menace is probably the best known example of this, though Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys have also made comments in a similar vein (Shelley 126). The Transsexual

Menace was a disavowal of the existence of transgender women. To Janice Raymond, they were merely male impersonators, and moreover, they were offensive caricatures of women. She speculated that by donning female clothing, men could now infiltrate women's circles made popular through feminism and then eradicate any gain women had made. Transgender women

6 See Loraine Hutchins. 7 Christopher Shelley has documented the trauma that transgender people face quite extensively in Transpeople. This is mostly due to discrimination and hate crimes (which I will discuss in more depth in Chapter Three). There has also been resistance within lesbian communities, taking the form of Mitch Fest's prohibitive laws against transgender women from entering all-women spaces, lesbian groups being closed to trans women, and being unable to enter women's shelters (Serano 360).

18 were seen as infiltrating the other gender; these women were nothing but deceivers (Serano 30).

Second wave feminists regularly discounted the existence of transgender women, stating that they were instead sorry and delusional men (Serano 36; Stone 222). Manifestos and polemics such as those produced by Valerie Solanas and Janice Raymond left no room for argument and even less room for transgender men to claim an identity. Many second wave feminists did not believe that someone born a woman would undertake the same type of deception a (biological) man was capable of, and if second-wave feminists encountered a transgender man, they perceived him as a traitor who had sold out his own side. Transgender men were people who had given up too soon on being a woman and just wanted to extract all the privilege they could.

Leslie Feinberg's first novel, Stone Butch Blues, documents much of this issue from a narrative perspective and has remained, alongside Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, a major work on the problems of accessing 'female masculinity' (Halberstam's term) or a transgender male identity.

Against this second-wave animosity, Sandy Stone wrote The Empire Strikes Back.

Countering Raymond's attempt to discredit an entire identity group, Stone gives other transgender people a voice. She writes,

'Making' history, whether autobiographic, academic, or clinical, is partly a struggle to ground an account in some natural inevitability. Bodies are screens on which we see projected the momentary settlements that emerge from ongoing struggles over beliefs and practices within the academic and medical communities. These struggles play themselves out in arenas far removed from the body [...] In other words, each of these accounts is culture speaking with the voice of an individual. The people who have no voice in this theorizing are the transsexuals themselves. (229)

Ever since Janice Raymond's book, there has been a strong reactionary and polemic streak in most writings from or about transgender people. The polarity of expression can also be seen through the reinforcement of binaries and popularization of the term cisgender, as discussed in the previous section. The prefix cis (Latin for "on the same side") can end up manifesting itself literally in a discourse of "sides." One can be either for or against something, and there is no in between. I will draw upon this reactionary and sometimes violent history more in depth in my third chapter when I deal with manifestos and the ways in which the private mourning of the loss of a transgender person can be turned into a very public platform to combat against an outside force for further political gain.

In the most recent decades, there has been a reclaiming of much of this lost transgender history through the works of Leslie Feinberg and Susan Stryker. The term 'transgender history' implies that there is a unified identity that contains a strong historical presence, but the need for these two modern theorists to become those historians also implies that this history has been characteristically ignored. Whereas Feinberg has gone back through time and attempted to collect and archive all the examples of what ze8 viewed as transgender subjects, Stryker has written her book with an anthropological approach. Using case studies of transgender women and men and other historical documents, she has collected and retold the history of the LGBT movement of the 1960s, but through the eyes of transgender people. The focus on the need to retell the past to illuminate certain identities is similar to the ways in which Eric Hobsbawm and

Benedict Anderson view nationalism. Pauline Rankin has already discussed the link between nationality and queerness (in relation to lesbian sexualities) with the formation of the group

8 Leslie Feinberg does not identify as male or female and has opted to use a gender neutral pronoun. This will be addressed in this section later on, in addition to Chapter Two, and in Appendix B Figure Four.

Queer Nation. She examines this by looking at what she refers to as "relational positionality" where multiple intersecting identities and circumstances will go into forming someone's subject position. Identity is not a simple black and white construction (a nature-vs.-nurture debate) but a confluence of forces. Rankin's analysis explains how something as static as nationality, usually interpreted under a hegemonic discourse, can become paired with something as opposing as queer (or in this case, transgender) identity where the typical correlation of "queer equals difference; nation equals sameness" can be broken down and rewritten (Rankin 187).

The construction of a national identity, along with a gender identity, allows people to obtain a sense of community and belonging. This sense of community is integral for the

"formation of both individual and collective identity" as a source of stability, but the quest for community, as Judith Halberstam notes in A Queer Time and Place, is often a "nostalgic attempt to return to some fantasized moment of union and unity [which] reveals the conservative stakes in community for all kinds of political projects" (154; Cvetkovich 46). The shifting definitions and intentions behind the idea of community, nationalism, and gender reiterate the fact that they are all social constructions that can be altered as needed, and not something innate.9 An often quoted line from Imagined Communities is "In the modern world, everyone can, should, will

'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender" (14). While some gender theorists rebel against the constructionist model (tending to prefer essentialist ones), others like Feinberg and Stryker seek to tweak that construction. By retelling history from their own perspective, along with the creation of other nationalistic images (such as the gay and transgender pride flags; Appendix B,

Figure Three), they seek to add another representation. In order to "establish continuity with the past" transgender subjects must organize themselves around certain ideological markers (self-

9 This is what Halberstam urges in her book: the "reconsideration of subcultures" is imperative to advancing ideas of queer communities, rather than viewing the group as unique and inviolable (QTAP 154).

21 declared affiliation with a gender different from what they were declared at birth) and then create physical, cultural, and historical identities (such as Stryker's oral histories, the flags, activist

Tristan Skye’s creation of Transgender Nation online forum) (Hobsbawm 1). The movement from the self to solidarity in groups will be discussed later on in Chapter Two, with a focus on the influence of this nationalistic discourse returning in Chapter Three.

A Note on Terminology

When I use the term transgender in this thesis, I am using it as an umbrella term in order to encompass everyone who identifies as something different from the gender/sex they were born into. Usually this is someone who has specifically self-identified and declared themselves to be transgender. In this way, the term transgender is a public identity, one which requires certain social markers and corroboration, but it is also an identity which began as a private feeling.

Sometimes the term transgender can be arrived at through diagnoses by a doctor and/or will refer to someone who has had surgery, but using the physical body as a marker for identity has undergone much scrutiny in the past few years. This is due to many reasons: there is no one surgery that 'finally' completes the gender transition, but a series of surgeries (such as vaginoplasty, orchiechtomy,) and medical procedures/medications (hormone replacement therapy) instead. In addition, surgery is often outside of the financial range of most transgender people in North America10 and therefore makes it a non-option. For transgender men, especially, the genital ("bottom") surgery is so expensive and invasive that as little as three percent have had the procedure (Currah 333; see also the medical literature in Appendix C).

10 As stated previously, the US's insurance system has a difficult reputation with covering surgery, but Ontario's methods of covering the cost may also not be the best benefit to the transgender person. Many of the best doctors are located overseas and the cost of travel, plus hotel and recovery time from work, can add up very quickly. (Hudson's FTM Resource Guide; Serano 50).

Transgender and transsexual are often used interchangeably, but there is a subtle difference between the two. Transsexual is a medical term that was created by Harry Benjamin in the 1960s when the first surgeries were being performed (Kennedy 204). In the same way that

Michel Foucault recounts the history and social shift of the term homosexual within medical discourse to a wider social structure, the transgender movement can also be viewed in a similar manner (HS 100). Though transsexual is still used by some people,11 it often carries the previous

(and now criticized) medical and surgical implications. If someone describes themselves as transsexual, they have had surgery or wish to have surgery. Since this does have a medical connotation and a history within the medical community (that many transgender people view as unfair and biased), many within the transgender counterpublic do not prefer the term transsexual and opt for more inclusive language (Serano 18). The term transgender enables the speaker the authority to determine their identity (I am transgender because I say I am transgender).

Sometimes transgender is shorted to trans or trans*, where the asterisk indicates that surgery is not necessarily imperative to its meaning (Serano 20). These various terminologies and the tautology of the self-declared identity will be addressed in depth in Chapter Two.

Transgender woman or trans woman means someone who is born into the body of a boy but now identifies as a woman. Transgender man or trans man means someone who has been born into the body of a girl, but now identifies as a man. The space between trans and women/men is integral. When treated as a compound word, transman/transwoman has an othering effect on the transgender person in question. In this sense, transgender only should be used as an adjective. When the compound word of transwoman is used, the term is made into a

11 Sometimes this term will appear in books that are slightly out-of-date or at the beginning to the transgender movement in the 1990s, when terminology was still being figured out (see Patrick Califia, Jamison Green, Judith Halberstam's Skin Shows). Within the past few years, and especially since the publication of Julia Serano's Whipping Girl, the problematic nature of certain words and phrases has been consolidated into a generally agreed upon standard from which I have drawn upon.

23 noun, and according to some transgender activists, the subject is also made into a thing (Serrano

18). Phrases such as 'a transgender' are also viewed as inaccurate for the same reasons (Serano

18-23; Herman). Serano and Joanne Herman have voiced their dislike for 'transgendered' since this term can render the transgender person passive. Herman also discusses its correlation to the

"coloured" person terminology. She writes,

Readers of my age and older will remember a sad time when this country labeled African-Americans as "colored people." One problem with this label was that it implied something happened to make the person "of color," which denied the person's dignity of being born that way. Today, we are somewhat more enlightened and say "people of color" instead.

While some authors still use older versions of the transgender terminology in some of the books and references I have used, I will use the most up-to-date language in my own writing.

Transgender men and women are the most depicted in the transgender spectrum, but there is also a third category of people who do not identify within the binary system of gender at all. These subjects view themselves as either agender, gender neutral, genderqueer, or they identify as both simultaneously (bigender). These terms will come up occasionally throughout this thesis, but they are not the main focal point

In the same way that male/female are opposite pairs, transgender also has its opposite -- that of cisgender. The prefix trans comes from the Latin for "across" or "beyond" and when used as part of a term like transgender indicates someone who has (usually) self-consciously decided that they are across (the opposite; think trans man and trans woman) or beyond (as in the genderqueer label) whatever gender they are born into. Cis comes from the Latin for "on the same side of" and when used as part of the term cisgender indicates those who are on the same

24 side of the gender/sex they are born into.12 The majority of people in the world are cisgender, so much so that most do not consider or realize there is an "opposite" for the term transgender. Julia

Serano is probably one of the first people to give this term its lucidity and seriousness, branching away from its physical meanings and turning it political. In her book Whipping Girl, she defines cisgender and then goes onto describe the type of discrimination that transgender people face from cisgender people as cissexism:

Cissexism: the belief that transsexuals' identified genders are inferior to, or less authentic than, those of cissexuals (i.e., people who are not transsexual and who have only ever experienced their subconscious sex and physical sexes as being aligned). The most common expression of cissexism occurs when people attempt to deny the transsexual the basic privileges that are associated with the trans person's self-identified gender. Common examples include purposeful misuse of pronouns or insisting that the trans person use a different public restroom. The justification for this denial is generally founded on the assumption that the trans person's gender is not authentic because it does not correlate with the sex they were assigned at birth. In making this assumption, cissexists attempt to create an artificial hierarchy. By insisting that the trans person's gender is 'fake' they attempt to validate their own gender as 'real' or 'natural.' This sort of thinking is extraordinarily naïve, as it denies a basic truth: we make assumptions every day about other people's gender without ever seeing their birth certificate, their chromosomes, their genitals, their reproductive systems, their childhood socialization, or their legal sex. There is no such thing as 'real' gender -- there is only the gender we experience ourselves as and the gender we perceive others to be. (12-13)

I will be referring to cisgender frequently throughout this thesis, and will also include it in the definitions in Appendix A.

12 Of course, the Latin terms of cis and trans are not only used for gender. Outside of the term cisgender, cis is most often seen in science when dealing with specific chains of molecules.

Some depictions of "the transgender umbrella" include more people than those that I have listed here (see Appendix B figure One and Two for examples). The people that are my main focus in this thesis are those who have chosen to self-identify and self-declare as one of the myriad of identities that I have attempted to summarize. There are people who may fall under the category of gender transgressor, rather than transgender themselves. Gender transgressors can be those who cross dress, but have not taken the active stance on their identity that most transgender people do. Because of gender transgressors’ exterior appearance and possibly incongruent nature with how their sex/gender aligns itself on their body, they are not perceived as cisgender, though they may not have come out as transgender themselves. There are also drag queens and drag kings, who usually dress as the cross gender for entertainment and also do not seek any specific type of (social, emotional, legal) recognition for the practice. There are also intersex people who sometimes fall under the transgender umbrella (as in The Gender Book; see

Appendix B, Figure One). I discuss their precarious categorization in more depth in the second chapter, but for the most part, I do not consider them part of the transgender canon or transgender narrative that I have examined.

A majority of the terms that I am using now are recent creations. As I will discuss in

Chapter Two, when examining the medical history more closely, most of these terminologies have sprung up after the option of surgery has been made available. Even before surgery was considered a viable option, there were still people who disagreed with the gender/sex they were assigned at birth. Leslie Feinberg, in hir book Transgender Warriors: From Joan of Arc to Denis

Rodman, takes an aesthetic and a historical perspective on the issue of gender transgression in a time before surgery. I consider the examples Feinberg uses in hir book to be cases of gender transgression (and not transgender people) because transgender is a recent creation and makes no

26 historical sense when applied to these historical figures.13 Transgender is a self-declared term and we do not have access to these people's internal thoughts. When discussing figures like

James Barry, the famous doctor who was born female and lived his life as a man, trans theorists could speculate that, if he had lived in an era where surgery was an option, he would have been transgender. I do not believe that the evidence of Barry's clothing and occupational choice alone is enough to form a substantive opinion or diagnosis of his transgender identity. In order to distinguish between many labels and the time dating before transgender surgery, I use two terms: transgender when we do have access to a declared identity and/or after medical creation of the identity and gender transgression when the personal declaration of a desire to transition is absent.

To avoid misgendering certain authors or figures, I have gone with their preferred pronouns. Since transgender is a self-declared identity much of the time, pronouns are also self- declared. I adhere to those self-declared pronouns in any case that I know and will use the neutral set of they/them for any case where this information is missing. Writers Leslie Feinberg and

Sassafrass Lowrey have both stated that the pronoun set of ze/hir should be used for them (see

Appendix B, Figure Four for an entire index of possibilities). The terminology of "preferred pronoun" and the etiquette of asking for pronouns within transgender (counter)publics will be addressed in more depth in Chapter Two.

13 Camille Paglia discusses a similar type of gender transgression in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. She does not use the term transgender, or consider any of these figures transgender, because of the historical inaccuracy it would present in her analysis of their gender changes.

Overall Outline

Chapter One: Transgenre: Identifying Transgender Narratives, Authors, and Gender

Capital will deal with the author/text connection that is maintained through many LGBT writings about literature. Because of the need to see the author as representing their own experience in their writing (even if it is fiction), there is an apprehension from the transgender counterpublic to allow someone who is not transgender to depict transgender characters. The controversy surrounding Catherine Ryan Hyde's book Jumpstart The World and her online battle against Leslie Feinberg will illustrate this point and the further controversy between Elliott

DeLine's representation of transgender characters in his novel Refuse will complicate the author/text connection that Feinberg tries to use against Hyde. From here, a system of 'gender capital' is produced so that transgender counterpublics are able to maintain cultural barriers and boundaries. I will ultimately demonstrate that the writer of the text does not matter; what the text says about transgender people is truly important in this cultural landscape (i.e. the depiction must always be positive).

Chapter Two: Sh*t Trans* Autobiographies Say: Internal Narratives and Constructing

The Self takes a closer look at the history (both medical and social) behind autobiographies and the transgender identity. I will outline how these stories have been structured around religious and self-help themes that base themselves in trauma. The structure of the personal autobiographies from transgender narratives has also, through social media such as Tumblr and

YouTube, begun to influence the structure of arguments that a majority of transgender and queer criticism takes on today. Notions of queer, privilege, and social justice will be examined alongside the reactionary politics of Julia Serano and Jay Prosser, along with the outright rejection of Judith Butler that many transgender theorists maintain. The focus on the internal

28 feelings of the subject, rather than external forces, leads to a myriad of difficulties when discussing these issues outside of queer and transgender counterpublics, which, I argue, have made it difficult for transgender people to obtain recognition.

Chapter Three: Memorial and Revolution: Transgender Hate Crimes and The

Simplification of Violence looks at the nature of hate crimes and the stories that are told about transgender people after they have been killed. Often these stories are used to help further a political cause, and more often than not, other factors that lead to the death, such as race and poverty level, are not considered. Ignoring these factors and using the solely transgender identity to further a common narrative, I argue, is inherently damaging. I argue for getting rid of the category of hate crime altogether, since it is akin to defining someone's gender (misgendering) without their permission. It also works to explain away the motivations of a killer in the same way that the gay panic defense does for murderers who try to plead down in trial (such as the case of Matthew Shepard and Gwen Araujo). Representing the death of an individual in one way ignores and obscures all other realities around them.

I will conclude this thesis with another glimpse at the digital environment that transgender people are creating for themselves and the ways in which it has grown beyond a small isolated circle through the internet and into a more public space for opinions and creative production.

Chapter One

Transgenre: Identifying Transgender Narratives, Authors, and Gender Capital

In 2010 Catherine Ryan Hyde published the young adult novel Jumpstart The World.

Told from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old girl, Elle, it contained a depiction of a transgender man named Frank. He is her neighbour in the story, has a girlfriend, and is even the object of the protagonist's affection for a few chapters. Frank's transgender status is central to the text, but it is not the source of major conflict in the story (that belongs to Elle's relationship with her mother). There are a few scenes where Frank's status as a transgender man is integral for comprehension: a fundraiser party for his "top" surgery and an accident which lands him

(accidentally) in the women's ward. The American Library Association's Rainbow List and the

Lambda Literary Society praised Hyde for her depiction of Frank and the treatment of transgender issues ("Jumpstart The World" Hyde). However, other queer and literary circles have criticized the text heavily for the same treatment of transgender characters.

One of the novel's biggest critics has been Leslie Feinberg, transgender author of Stone

Butch Blues. In a blog post dated January 14th 2011, Feinberg attacks Hyde for her depiction of

Frank, believing him to be a direct response to Feinberg in real life ("In Which A Hostile

Relative Rewrites My Life"). In a promotional interview, Hyde stated that growing up with a transgender sibling inspired her to write the young adult novel ("In Response To A Recent

Issue"). Feinberg's blog post reveals that she is this transgender sibling, and for those who may not realize, that Feinberg and Hyde are related. It is this familial connection which spurred Leslie

Feinberg's blog post, where she claimed:

Catherine Ryan Hyde appropriates the description of my life in order to contradict my identity. In her commentary, she co-opts my life’s journey, changes my sex, denies my pronoun(s) of choice, mis-describes my gender expression, and closets my declared sexuality. [...] because I have written and spoken publicly about my own oppressions and life’s struggles, my life is now public domain for her imagination. This argument draws an equal sign between the right of oppressed individuals to self-expression, and the bigoted “voice-over” that contradicts and denies those oppressed identities and life experiences.

Feinberg has assumed that the "transgender sibling" is hir, and moreover, that this "transgender sibling" is an exact replica of the character Frank in Jumpstart The World. Since ze does not agree with this depiction, ze feels that Hyde's appropriation and representations are even worse than slander and that they must be stopped. At one point in hir blog post, Feinberg compares

Hyde's book and Hyde's right to speak about Feinberg's experience to that of a gang-rape victim versus her assailants. Feinberg writes, "[but], those who take part in group beatings and gang rape of oppressed individuals are also 'there' during assaults. That doesn’t give those bigots the right to 'own' or re-write the biographies of those who survived their attacks" ("While a Hostile

Relative Rewrites my Life"). Feinberg's rhetoric is highly affected; she is hurt and worried about her own public image within the transgender community. With her post, she takes the personal to be political and uses her feelings to fuel her public outrage. Using her Tumblr account and her public of followers, she takes her message to the internet, where she hoped it would spread virally.

I ask for help in circulating this message from workers in the publishing, and other media industries—from media for LGBT communities to Publisher’s Weekly—from legal and library and medical workers, those who work as secretaries and researchers, bloggers and journalists, those who defend the rights

of youth and elders, revolutionaries and all who fight for social and economic justice, my literary agency Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc....I ask you to aid delivery of this message—on flat typography and raised Braille, in signed languages and spoken languages. As an internationalist and anti-imperialist I am sorry to be posting a message that I hope will be read around the world, and yet, I am only able to post my statement in the English language—the lingua franca of imperialism. ("In which a hostile relative rewrites my life").

By reaching out to those ze thought would understand hir plight, Feinberg probably ended up making Jumpstart The World more famous and garnering more publicity than the text would have normally received. However, the continuous reposting of this interpretation of Hyde's work made Hyde a pariah in the transgender community. LGBT publications such as PrettyQueer.com will not review the book because of Feinberg's outrage and their own loyalty to the wishes of a prominent member of the community (Radish). Those who do review the text take Feinberg's positions on many issues. They accuse the protagonist of the novel of fetishizing Frank instead of trying to understand him, and disregard any potentially positive interpretation of the character in the book as negative because of the subject positioning of the author (Radish). The novel is targeted towards a young adult readership and is an "issue" book, one that Hyde wanted to draw attention to in order to work towards a better public perception of transgender people ("In

Response To A Recent Issue"). But without the approval of the community she wishes to represent, Hyde remains in a precarious position as an author. When a description of Frank suddenly goes from Elle being unable to see him as "anything but big and brave" to his character replacing a "message of collective struggle and liberation with [a] timid appeal for 'tolerance'" future readers will have a hard time knowing what text they are getting themselves into

(Jumpstart The World 4; Feinberg "In Which A Hostile Relative Rewrites My Life").

When Feinberg disavows any connection ze has to the character of Frank, and Hyde makes the claim to write from her own experience of having a "transgender sibling", they have both made the error that many other transgender authors make: whatever an author writes about must be a personal truth. In this context, 'write what you know' is taken to be the ultimate rule, and if not followed, it is worse than slander. For both Feinberg and Hyde, they make an explicit connection between the author and the text that they produce. Moreover, Feinberg in particular expects literary representation to be faithful to a sanctioned original and ignores the context and style of the work itself. Feinberg's anger and vehement outrage towards Hyde outlines hir own assumption that this book must be about hir since the character is transgender, and ze is the only transgender person that Hyde would know. With hir blog post, Feinberg assumes hir audience's position as well. By turning this into a controversy, Feinberg makes this connection real and makes those strict borders between author, identity, and truth even more rigid.

It is this position of an explicit relationship between author and text, transgender identity, and transgender narratives that this chapter will explore. The need to interpret the text through the author's own subject position points to a lack of reading and interpreting the text; instead this type of reading favours the author's intended meaning. This is the "intentional" or "mimetic" approach to representation that Stuart Hall has outlined, rather than the constructionist one (42).

Barthes, in his text S/Z, outlines these two opposing forces of interpretation as a "writerly" text or a "readerly" one (4). He states that the writerly text is of value precisely because "the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text" (4). Counter to this is the readerly text where it is the writerly's "negative, reactive value: what can be read, but not written: the readerly" (4). Barthes’s differentiation implies that for certain kinds of texts there can be only one meaning that is 'correct' whereas other texts have

33 the ability to be interpreted and validated many times over. In S/Z he expounds on this idea while analyzing a short story of Balzac where he deciphers five different codes for this meaning making process. Barthes's work is primarily on semiology, where meaning is made through the use of signified and signifiers that the audience/reader uses to code. This type of reading structure, and the plurality that Barthes also argues for, is something that requires an active audience. The readerly texts, on the other hand, do not encourage the same type of active audience participation and strive to seek the author's intended meaning from the start.

I will deconstruct the pervasive idea that transgender authors write good transgender books and cisgender authors write bad ones because of their subjective experience, by re- evaluating the system of cultural capital that is present in most transgender counterpublics. From there, I will analyze two cultural texts that have transgender authors, Elliott DeLine's Refuse and the documentary film Regretters. Because these two examples contain a version of the transgender narrative that is not widely accepted (that of doubt and regret), they are often rejected from the canon of transgender storytelling -- even though their authors have obtained the correct amount of gender capital required to participate in these communities. From these examples, I will show how it is not really the author's (trans)gender status that matters, but the type of story that is told within transgender fiction.

Transgenre

If Catherine Ryan Hyde's work does not qualify as a transgender book, then what should?

Over the past few decades, transgender characters have become more prominent, and not just within teen "issue-oriented" books such as Jumpstart The World. There have been Pulitzer Prize

34 winners, critically praised texts, and other award winners.14 But as we have seen already, a good book can be hard to find when taken into the transgender public. When Jack Radish from

PrettyQueer.com decided to go through and review trans-literature, he approached some books, especially those by cisgender authors, with caution.15 When compiling his list, he states, "I cannot vouch for the quality of these titles, as I have not read them all yet and actually suspect that at least half of them are bad. As in, actively bad. But I have to count them for something"

(Radish). It is hard to imagine what this "something" ends up equating to when he goes into the review believing most of these books to be "actively bad" (Radish). In a similar vein, an article by Cheryl Morgan on Lambda Literary Society discusses at length the state of the trans literary canon at the moment:

There’s a problem right away. If someone like Gore Vidal or Jeffrey Eugenides writes a book about a trans person it is hailed as brilliantly edgy, but if a trans person does the same thing it is likely to be rejected as the work of a self-obsessed weirdo. ... Yet what would “trans literature” be like? When we talk about the literature of an identity group we mean that members of the group want to read about people like themselves. African-Americans want books with African-American protagonists; lesbians want books with lesbian protagonists; and so on. But the trans community is very diverse, and different parts of it have very different needs.

Cheryl Morgan sets out to find, and then define, what exactly transgender literature looks like -- and from there, what could be called 'transgenre.' She goes through the tropes and plot structures present in the text that could be used to distinguish transgender writing (wearing cross-matched

14 Sacred Country (1992) by Rose Tremain won the Tait Black Memorial Prize, Breakfast on Pluto (1998) by Patrick McCabe was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Middlesex (2002) by Jeffrey Eugenides won the Pulitzer, and Annabel: A Novel (2010) by Kathleen Winter was a Giller Prize Finalist. 15 As of 2012, Jack has reviewed: Almost Perfect by Brian Katcher, Parrotfish by Ellen Wittlinger, I am J by Cris Beam, Luna by Julie-Anne Peters, Hello Cruel World by Kate Bornstein, and the short story anthology The Collection edited by Tom Leger and Riley MacLeod.

35 clothing, the presence of mirrors, and possibility of a 'surgical' change). However, most authors discard those tropes for distinguishing transgenre for the same reason that surgery is no longer an indicative way to decide if someone is transgender: the act of surgery hinges too much of the identity on the physical body in question. What Morgan expresses about transgenre in this article ends up becoming ephemeral: what makes something transgenre is no longer the structure

(surgical change or otherwise) of the narrative, but the person/author behind the tale. There is also a particular understanding of the audience for transgenre and how its members need to feel validated from the text and the act of reading. When talking about transgenre, Morgan assumes that the audience is trans (or LGBT or questioning) and therefore want to see themselves and their realities reflected. By defining what she believes to be transgenre in her article, Morgan aligns the production of art with the production (and maintenance) of identity. Transgenre, in effect, creates distinct publics.

As Michael Warner notes in Publics and Counterpublics, "to address a public or think of oneself as belonging to a public is to be a certain kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one's disposal certain media and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon, and to speak within a certain language ideology" (10). In this case, audience members are transgender and have come to know themselves as being in opposition to the cisgender world. The terms and expressions are different here, and because of this tension and difference, the authors that populate the genre must "know" the lifestyle, in order to tell the audience the "truth" about it. There are certain terms and scenes that mark a transgender text as different from the others, and the authors’ use of certain words (such as referring to testosterone shots commonly administered to transgender men as 't') mark their work as something with implicit understanding and knowledge. When Jack Radish says that the books written by

36 cisgender authors are going to be "actively bad" what he is referring to is the (possible lack of) use of these phrases in relation to the transgender public audience. Cisgender authors can be

"actively bad" if they do not pay attention to the transgenre conventions of truth in representation and do not display specific insider knowledge.

By evoking the dichotomy of "good" and "bad" books, Jack Radish enters them into a hierarchy and system of capital. In Pierre Bourdieu's 1986 work, The Forms of Capital, he discusses three types of capital that a person could obtain: economic, social, and cultural. When discussing Cheryl Morgan's list about transgenre, Bourdieu's ideas of social and cultural capital are converging. Social capital means belonging to a group and having a type of social identity that is recognizable and that helps one move through the world, whereas the notion of cultural capital is inherent in the production of objects and art. The books that she discusses by Gore

Vidal and Jeffrey Eugenides have cultural capital, since they have been praised and critically acclaimed for their literary merit (Middlesex is a Pulitzer Prize winner). They have been able to move through the field of cultural production and come out on the top. However, when facing this idea of transgenre, they fail because they lack the certain social capital it takes in order for their work on transgender subjects to be taken with the same consideration within a transgender public. Because they are not writing from a position that they know about personally, their work can be seen as "actively bad" within transgender publics.

This notion of social and cultural capital is imperative in understanding most arguments about transgender literature and authorship. As Morty Diamond puts it, "[t]hose that do not identify in these ways can write trans lit but they may find themselves using trans as a literary device which they sometimes know very little about, making their work come off as trite" (Jax).

Diamond's use of the word 'trite' signals that literary capital has absolutely no merit in

37 transgender fiction if the work is attached to a cisgender author. If we examine Eugenides' book

Middlesex, about an intersex character who gradually goes through a sex change as hir condition becomes visible, the novel has not been received as trite whatsoever. The book won the Pulitzer

Prize and was selected for Oprah's Book Club, meeting both parameters of high and middlebrow markets (whereas Gore Vidal's Myra Brekenridge successfully managed to capture the attention of middlebrow and lower cultural echelons). Moreover, Eugenides spent upwards of nine years researching the book and in addition to the biological accuracy, the narrative is interwoven with

Greek and other myths that deal with intersexuality (Brown). He was able to demonstrate, through allusion and intertextuality, a rich cultural tapestry and understanding of variant genders.

Though his book may not resonate with as much cultural capital as The Great Gatsby or Ulysses, this novel, through public opinion and validation, is definitely not trite.

Morty Diamond and Cheryl Morgan are then indicating a different public and audience that would read these books, a counterpublic of transgender people. I use the term counterpublic because, according to Michael Warner, a counterpublic "maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status" (56). Within a counterpublic, the discussion "is understood to contravene the rules obtaining the world at large, being structured by alternative dispositions or protocols, making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying" (56). In transgender counterpublics then, especially with relation to the production of art and stories, there is something else dictating what is deemed good and "actively bad" that runs against other publics' notions of literary and cultural capital. A Pulitzer Prize means very little to Morty Diamond if there is a cisgender person behind the text, and with his statement, he indicates a different type of cultural capital, and something beyond a social capital that Bourdieu also outlines. This is a type of gender capital, since it involves more than a social

38 identity. More often than not, gender capital is obtained through the author not only identifying as transgender hirself, but also undergoing physical transformation for that distinction. To

Diamond and many like him, transgender literature must pay attention to its audience of transgender people or risk sounding trite. Gender capital is not awarded if the book or short story was meant to have a wider audience, such as Middlesex; gender capital is only given out through the approval of the text via the transgender community. Gender capital in this instance is the trump card. If the book is trite, and moreover, if the author is not transgender, the book cannot be counted as transgender literature. And if you're Catherine Ryan Hyde and have a sibling complicating the text's reception, matters can get even worse.

Three Umpires Walk Into A Bar

In September of 2012 interviewer TT Jax gathered together some of the major cultural producers in the transgender literary marketplace currently. The interview was published on

Lambda Literary Society's website, a large cultural hub of anything LGBTQ which publishes book reviews, cultural headlines, call for submissions, and author spotlights, in addition to interviews such as this one. This particular piece focused on Morty Diamond, Tom Leger,

Sassafrass Lowrey, Elliott DeLine, AJ Bryce, and Ryka Akoi. This gathering of people who have been able to maintain (sometimes not easily) some type of literary capital within this counterpublic are important to consider, especially for their differing views on what they consider authentic and trite. The transgender community has begun to establish themselves as a counterpublic where this gender capital is respected and used as its dominant form of recognition, outside of literary merit or popular appeal. Transgender presses such as Topside

Press, and internet archives such as Trans-Genre.net are now some of the many sites of

39 transgender cultural production, ones that remain separate and distinct within a larger mass cultural field. AJ Bryce of Trans-Genre.net focuses exclusively on

transgender/gender variant (Trans) authorship & [sic] craft, that’s what makes us stand apart from every other press out there. Not only do we believe that some of the best transgender literature exists within our own community, but we believe that some of the best literature of any genre exists here as well. I have seen firsthand how much creative talent falls under the umbrella of this community.

Bryce demonstrates the exclusionary atmosphere that gender capital uses to maintain purity along cultural and artistic lines. Tom Leger of Topside Press, however, considers his trans publishing house to focus on characters who are transgender and not necessarily take the author's gender capital into consideration (Jax). Leger is able to separate the author from hir text, and so long as the transgender characters are the protagonists, he will consider it for publication.

This is significant to him "because most trans characters that appear in books and film are secondary characters or antagonists" (Jax). When considering the audiences of the pieces he writes and he publishes from others, he knows "for a fact that the audiences for whom the content is ostensibly foreign too have no trouble 'getting' it." He is able, like transgender author

Elliott DeLine, to keep both audiences of the text (transgender and cisgender) in mind but

"pander to neither."

Other authors, following Morty Diamond's call to avoid triteness, claim exclusivity to one audience, one type of author, and usually, one type of story to be told within this new gender cultural economy. Sassafras Lowrey considers

trans literature predominantly to be connected really explicitly to transgender authorship. I believe that as trans people we are the most qualified to be writing about our own experiences and that the core of this sub-genre of queer literature should be from our voices and perspectives, as opposed to content featuring trans characters and experiences written from the perspectives of those outside of our community.

In another comment during the interview, ze makes a plea for community:

I identify very strongly as being a queer writer, and see my fiction work as being explicitly for my community. I know there are straight readers who like and identify with my characters and stories which is great, the stories just aren’t explicitly for them in that I don’t hold readers’ hands through the basics of trans community terminology and issues, I assume a base level of exposure to these conversations because I’m writing for my community.

Lowrey's need to express hirself to only one group of people that ze feels hirself as being explicitly linked to, and then to completely ignore another section of hir readership if they are straight, is another manifestation of Diamond's disavowal of anything that violates transgender counterpublic production rules. Straight and cisgender readers within this public have absolutely no gender currency. Those who belong to dominant groups are treated as if they are bankrupt within this new landscape because they have never lived the actual experience of being transgender. Moreover, even their experiences as straight or cisgender reader are not validated.

Not only do they have no currency, they have been placed in the lower end of this new hierarchy.

The only way to gain any type of recognition within this system of gender capital is to be transgender. Reading the text, liking it, and understanding it do not count as valid participation.

Though ze considers it "great" if straight people understand hir work, Lowrey simultaneously, in the very same sentence, disregards any of their opinions. Even if their opinions are positive, their social, economic, or cultural capital has no use within the system of transgender production.

Lowrey, like many others in this counterpublic, is reversing what ze sees as being done to hir by the dominant cisgender public. Though ze speaks of community, ze is enforcing borders and policing who is allowed to enter. Because people like Vidal and Eugenides have written books that transgender people view as being about them, without participating in their lifestyle, the transgender counterpublic feel as if they have been culturally robbed of the ability to tell their stories. So when straight and cisgender people try to enter into a new, counter economy that transgender authors have set up, cisgender authors are rejected in the same manner.

It can be easy to say that the Hyde-Feinberg situation got out of hand and became as highly charged as it did because of the family (dis)connection. However, the policing of borders can be witnessed all throughout the transgender public. When Morty Diamond comments,

I’ve said this a million times: if a trans person is writing something that has nothing to do with being trans, it is still trans lit. How come we ask these questions about trans lit but don’t ask this of, say, gay male lit? A gay man can write about anything under the sun and still be seen as a gay lit writer.

He illuminates something profound in the ways in which gender capital is distributed within this counterpublic. Though a straight person who wants to participate cannot retain capital no matter what they do, a transgender person with no inclination to participate is given all the gender capital they could ever ask for. Transgenre becomes a type of feudal system, disturbing its

'gender' wealth only through a distinct right as determined by an outside force. The purely

42 symbolic exchange of gender capital under a transgender counterpublic is always highly unequal.

What Diamond does in his policing is to pull people whom he sees as identifying as transgender into his community of transgender literature and not let them leave. Even though Topside Press only publishes work that deals with transgender protagonists, Diamonds says it does not matter.

If the author is trans, then ze is within trans literature and part of this transgenre. This rule also becomes extremely muddled when one considers someone like Carter Sickels, a transgender man, who published his book The Evening Hour in 2011 about a cisgender male protagonist.

Does this novel still count as transgender literature? His book would not be published on Topside

Press by Tom Leger's rules, since no character is trans, but to Morty Diamond, Sickels and his body of work is still 'claimed' for the transgender counterpublic and transgenre.

While Ryka Aoki is someone willing to consider other arguments, she is still as steeply invested in the previous ideological position as Morty Diamond. In the same interview for

Lambda, she states that

Some may argue that the background of the writer should have no bearing on the merit of story, but this ignores how a community-based literature serves the community. Writers who write from marginalized identities inspire others in their communities to think and abstract and imagine. I have had trans people say my work and the work of other trans artists have saved their lives. (Jax)

By structuring her community through affect and alliance, Aoki is taking a less antagonistic position within the transgender counterpublic, but her overall attitude towards capital is the same. The gender capital that transgender authors have within their community is insurmountable by anything else; as she has stated, "trans artists have saved ... lives."

Gender capital works by linking the author to the text that they produce. As found in

Jumpstart The World, Morty Diamond, and others in transgender literary production, the author

43 is still viewed as "provid[ing] the basis for explaining not only the presence of certain events in a work, but also their transformations, distortions, and diverse modifications (through his biography, the determination of his individual perspective, the analysis of his social position, and the revelation of his basic design)" ("What is an Author?" 286). At the centre of the transgender counterpublic are these writers, artists, and producers who provide the "unity of writing" (286).

Within this culture, the gender capital dictates what is produced artistically and politically.

Taking the second-wave notion of 'the personal is political' to the next stage, transgender literature seems to shout that the author is political, and moreover, that art is reality itself.

I want to critique this idea, not only because it does not allow for a fair distribution of gender capital, but because these accounts of linking the author to text as the sole source of meaning ignores the audience. The strong text-author connection also offers an essentialist and mimetic approach to representation, as opposed to the constructionist perspectives of Michel

Foucault, Roland Barthes, Edward Said, and Stuart Hall. The act of publishing, even if it is at

Topside Press, means that the work is going to be public. When transgender authors publish books, though Morty Diamond will always count them as part of his carefully policed counterpublic, he cannot stop other audiences from reading them. These acts of publication may not forget their target audience, but they do forget that there are other people waiting outside the carefully policed borders, ones that do not always have the same cultural currency.

Both Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes have talked about the tendency among readers and literary scholars to look towards the author for meaning, and in both of their monumental essays, they disregard the idea entirely ("What Is an Author?" by Michel Foucault and "Death of

The Author" by Roland Barthes). While Barthes yearns for the death of the author, Foucault amends Barthes's initial outcry and advocates instead for the use of an author-function. For

Foucault, there needs to be someone to attribute work to, someone must be paid, and eventually, someone must take credit for it. But the ideological link between the text and author, especially in our search for meaning, must be severed. To write is not an expression of identity, but merely a function. Barthes's notion of the author goes directly against most transgender cultural systems, since "there is one place where this multiplicity [of interpretation and meaning] is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author" ("Death of The Author" 280). He goes on to speak about the reader, granting them agency without disputing identity politics:

Whether it is a question of newspapers or Proust, the text has meaning only through its readers; it changes along with them; it is ordered in accord with codes of perception that it does not control. It becomes a text only in its relation to the exteriority of the reader, by an interplay of implications and ruses between two sorts of 'expectation' in combination: the expectation that a readable space (a literality) and one that organizes a procedure necessary for the actualization of the work (a reading). ("Death of The Author" 170-1)

The need to control the audience through strict gender currency in a transgender counterpublic can be explained through this quotation. When Lowrey claims to only write for queer and genderqueer people, and that hir work only resonates within those communities, ze does so because she thinks they will be the only group to truly understand based on their acquired gender capital. Outside of this cultural exchange, however, hir text is open to everyone, and like Barthes notes, any meaning. In this way, the constant policing of audience can be seen as an act of fear that the counterpublic enacts. If anyone can read the text, anyone can interpret it, and someone could get it 'wrong.' As Foucault notes, "[t]he author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning" ("What Is An Author?"

290). This explains why it is "great" if readers who are straight "get" hir writing, but ze

45 immediately discards them afterwards. Ze is not writing for them, therefore, ze is not writing for them to have the ability to make meaning with hir text. The exchange of gender currency is really the exchange of "correct" meanings onto a text. Lowrey assumes that the only audience ze has are those people who ze regards as "safe" because they will echo back hir prior sentiment, and ze assumes all other audiences to be passive and (gender) bankrupt. When the greater audience becomes active, ze, and other authors like hir, go on the defensive and invoke gender capital again. Others are not allowed to understand hir text because they have not lived hir life.

From here, I would argue that a transgender text abiding by this system of gender capital is not one that can be ripe for many interpretations. It is, as Barthes notes, a readerly text. A transgender text can only have one meaning to those outside the community and it cannot be written back to by those readers. Even if a transgender work is produced and read where there is no system of gender currency, the transgender counterpublic can still remain safe by producing a text that is readerly and has only one meaning.

Dividing Lines in Identity Politics

The contentious relationship represented by the struggle between cis and trans narratives is not uncommon within identity politics. In Audre Lorde's essay, "The Master's Tools Will

Never Dismantle The Master's House" she describes the situation of black women within the predominantly white feminist movement during the 1960s second wave. Lorde, and other black feminists such as bell hooks, have described the dilemma that they were put in during this time period. Black political movements at the time did not consider women's issues such as child care or lesbianism, and women's movements did not consider issues of race. The feminist movements

46 were mostly upper-middle-class house wives who were echoing sentiments found in Betty

Freidan's The Feminine Mystique. Lorde describes her (and other black women's) position as:

[L]earning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support. (110; emphasis mine)

The italicized sentence is one of the most repeated sentiments from this essay. When taken out of context of the black women's struggle for recognition in the 1960s, it can be applied to any public and counterpublic seeking recognition. This phrase has resonated within identity politics for this very reason.

This idea - that representation is a tool and some are able to use it better than others - is the main thesis used in transgender arguments about transgender texts and validating their system of gender cultural capital. If the master's tools are language and representation, then cisgender (the dominant class) people cannot represent transgender people. Moreover, transgender people cannot "dismantle the house" using the same tools of representation and language that cisgender people have used, since it will sound "trite." The house being dismantled is (cisgender) oppression, and if previous techniques of rendering transgender narratives are used

("trapped in a man/woman's body" trope, for example16), there is the notion that these books will be "actively bad" (Radish). Radish's comment begins to make more sense now: being "actively

16 Jay Prosser and Julia Serano have both written chapters on this trope in each of their critical works.

47 bad" does not mean deliberately using bad writing skills to render the story. Being "actively bad" is perpetuating the system of oppression that the tools (literary tropes) have built through the representations of transgender people in fiction. Using this model, Middlesex becomes appropriative and Catherine Ryan Hyde is one of the worst "masters" out there, since she is really using her sibling's labour to make her character.

Since the hegemonic culture is something that everyone is exposed to, this culture's perceptions become well known and taken for granted. When the oppressed are considered, only they know their subject position, their experience, and can render it authentically. If a straight white cisgender man gets all the advantages in the world because it is a world that is built to suit his needs, then he can also only tell that one story. But if a lesbian black transgender woman has virtually no power in this world based on her identity, she can also tell both of those stories: the dominant, and her own, because she has been privy to both her entire life. Lorde's metaphor sets up the oppressed as having a dual ability for articulation in different situations, while the master only has one that they use all the time. From this dialectic relationship, transgender people get their notion of gender capital and identity politics in the same way that women of colour and white feminists established theirs previously. As Michael Warner notes, the statement of the personal is political embodies a "political critique of personal life and the identitarian critique of political life" which then make up and "are often described, confusingly enough, as identity politics" (34).

This strong correlation between transgender identity and transgender authorship seems to dominate most of the discussions on the issue. Sassafras Lowrey is vehement in hir dedication to writing for only one audience, an audience that could understand hir plight and render other people's plight to others. Though Tom Leger of Topside Press is a little less stringent about who

48 can write for his press, if an author is cisgender, their book meets a harsher criticism since they already have a cultural history of using transgender people as "secondary characters or antagonists" (Jax). This criticism, however, does not emerge from style or skill, or any other literary basis. It is purely based on identity and the invocation of gender capital itself. The imagined community that transgender people are creating through their production of art is a fascinating one -- but the boundaries they maintain are a fiction, just like the stories they tell. Not only are these boundaries a fiction, but they are ones with strict rules that need to be followed, and if not, the backlash is incredible.

Where does Lorde's take on this dialectic analogy fall apart? We have seen, through evidence of Jumpstart the World, that it is possible to have a book that deals explicitly with transgender issues, but it will not hold up to powerful scrutiny within the community when the author holds no gender capital. Is it possible then, to have a book containing a transgender character and written by a transgender author, about issues relating to transitioning, and still have the text robbed of the gender capital, and thus its position within the transgender counterpublic?

It is. When Elliott DeLine's first novel Refuse is taken into consideration, in addition to the documentary film Regretters, it becomes increasingly clear that it is not the teller of the tale that matters, but what is actually being said about those transgender characters.

Refusing

Refuse, by first-time novelist Elliott DeLine, is about twenty-two year old Dean who lives in Syracuse, NY. The novel documents Dean's trials and depressive spells as he transitions, goes to university, and listens to Morrissey. He has no job, does not do well in school, and in general, is not the best character. When compared to Colin, Dean's friend and the model transgender

49 person in the text, he is shown to be bitter, sarcastic, and plagued by doubt. Refuse is a novel that deals with the gritty side of transgender issues head-on, such as the sudden suicide of trangender woman Teddy, the problems of starting relationships (with Colin especially), and the doubts of transitioning in the first place. Refuse is, as Judith Halberstam may categorize it, a novel of failure.

In Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure, she explores the subversive ways in which the queer community can view failure as not a negative, personal trait, but something that is reflective of a larger societal problem and a subversive act for the individual (QAOF 10).

Success stories already dominate transgender literature. Within the genre of autobiography this is even more pronounced, since the ending is always preconceived before the book begins, and the difficulty of being transgender is overcome through the use of surgery or active participation in community (two things which are distinctly absent from Refuse). As Halberstam advocates in her book, queer visibility hinges upon the ability to hear both success stories and ones of failure.

Hegemonic culture often perceives the failure of the person as being caused by their queer identity, instead of a correlation. Because of this mainstream perception, many authors avoid negative depictions of queer and marginalized characters. As Halberstam notes in Female

Masculinity, "[t]he desire for positive images17 places the onus of queering cinema squarely on the production rather than the reception of images. It also makes representation into a kind of unmediated event that shows either truth and reality or else skewed versions of them. But representation and its effects are never so simple" (FM 179). This need for positive images and characters within the transgender community often leads to censorship of those that do not abide

17 Though this section of Female Masculinity is focusing on film, her critique of the need for positive images also extends to the novels and autobiographies she reads.

50 by the strict protocols put into place. More often than not, this is done though the invocation of gender capital, as seen with Hyde.

For someone like Elliott DeLine, who does have gender capital as a transgender person, the critique he launched against the tyranny of positive images was not received well within the community. In an interview conducted in summer 2012, DeLine notes that

it was definitely my intention to critique, even mock, my perception of 'the transgender narrative.' Or at least, it was my intention to show that people like Dean exist. I can’t say I was hoping to make anyone cry or anything. I hate thinking that I’ve upset people. ("Author Interview" 19)

DeLine's worry about upsetting people has not come from an abstract affectation, but stems from a recent controversy. Because of the content of his work (both Refuse and an article published in the New York Times entitled "Stuck at the Borderlands"), he has been banned from posting anything on one of the dominant FTM communities on Tumblr, FuckYeahFTMs. The internet, especially such platforms as YouTube and Tumblr, have been extremely beneficial in establishing the transgender community, by making it easier for subcultures to identify and collaborate with one another. These types of communities allow FTMs to be open about their transition without immediate fear of anyone finding out. The internet also adds the benefit of anonymity when participating in online communities, and from that anonymity, transgender people derive a sense of safety. Because complications and negative opinions about transgender identity still exist, some transgender people (DeLine included) find it much easier and safer to pass in day to day life, but to be open about their identity online. Since physical distance is also another factor of these online publics, there is another added element of safety in presentation.

Someone at the beginning of their transition can identify as transgender and not have to fear ridicule or being unable to 'pass' as the desired gender. As Jack Radish notes, these types of online communities are also where knowledge can be gathered, since most of his formative knowledge about what it meant to be an FTM in the community was gathered through livejournal groups.18

When DeLine was refused posting access, he was confused. He was not advertising for his book; he was merely introducing himself and attempting to gather a stronger personal community ("Author Interview" 19). When he asked about his rejection, the site maintainer was clear that he was being excluded because of his New York Times piece and his book. The content and tone of both were unacceptable and not seen as appropriate for the community as a whole, and he was expressly banned from participating in this online public. Though DeLine has gender capital as a transgender man, his act of offense -- through his novel and article -- were seen as enough to strip him of his capital. Someone without this gender currency, then, is not allowed access to these transgender publics, even online. DeLine states, "It’s obviously their choice since it’s their tumblr. But for me it symbolizes a larger problem– an attempt to silence certain viewpoints." DeLine is absolutely right. His case, along with the stories of Mikael and

Orlando from the film Regretters, is an instance of transgender people being stripped of their gender capital and excommunicated from the counterpublic, either through active silencing or omission. When the connection between text and author no longer supports the system of

18 Over the past ten years, Tumblr and YouTube have taken the popular place of livejournal for the gathering of transgender publics and other online communities. As Michael Strangelove notes in his study on YouTube culture, "[o]nline diaries stand alongside many other forms of Internet based representational practices that disrupt authorized versions of reality. Throughout YouTube, individuals are seen challenging normative notions of what it is to be gay, black, male, female, and so forth" (70). I would also add transgender to list this of gathering publics he notes on YouTube, and in my second chapter, I will pay more attention to these online communities’ function and their imperative role in maintaining that unified transgender identity that the counterpublic constructs itself through.

52 cultural exchange within transgender publics, the type of story told is measured. The silencing of certain viewpoints, as DeLine notes, is what is most lamentable about this behaviour.

The types of stories that are not allowed in transgender literature are ones that deal with a removal of the transgender status - stories of regret or doubt. In addition, they are stories that cannot be explained through their author, usually because a distinct style is taken up and thus renders the words as less transparent. In Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style, he notes that style can be "a form of Refusal, [where there is] the elevation of crime into art (even though, in our case, crimes are only broken codes)" (2). He is interested in "in expressive forms and rituals of those in a subordinate group -[...]- who are alternatively dismissed, denounced, and canonized; treated at different times as threats to public order and as harmless buffoons" (2).

Though Hebdige is speaking of the punk aesthetic in his book, he offers an expansive and detailed analysis of the ways in which the sociology of the audience of a specific text (in this case, punk music) can become its own text and from there, can be analyzed for its style. I believe that his remarks about style as a form of refusal can be expressly applied to DeLine, especially since he has been conscious of his book's attempt to deconstruct the standard transgender narrative. DeLine and the two men from Regretters occupy a position within a transgender counterpublic that is also "defined by [its] tension" and "subordinate status" within another group; effectively - a counterpublic within a counterpublic (Warner 56). Since the style of their work - that of refusal, regret, and irony - runs contrary to what is normally upheld as the established 'canon' within transgender fiction as defined by transgender people, they have been separated from transgenre production. But because that system of transgender production is bigger and more powerful than DeLine and those behind Regretters, they are stripped of their gender capital for attempting to tell their stories in this manner.

In addition to using refusal-as-style, DeLine also utilizes humour "as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment - of what's really going on - [which] affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions" (McLuhan 92). The changing of perceptions is often not permitted within transgender narratives, but DeLine actively targets this change with his work. With his New York Times article, he writes:

SOME people assume transgender men are lesbians who couldn’t handle being gay. They really think a female would go through all the hassles of transitioning to male just so she could trick other women into sleeping with her.

That just isn’t the case at all, and as a transgender man, I find it highly offensive and presumptuous. They know nothing about me. I haven’t gone through this to trick women. I much prefer tricking men.

Of course, that wasn’t my initial plan when I started on testosterone as a sophomore in college. But all plans were uprooted when I left SUNY Purchase a year later because of an inconvenient major-depressive episode ("Stuck at The Borderlands").

The entire article continues with this sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek critique of transgender culture, one that attempts to undermine the serious nature of transgender texts. This attempt to change perceptions through style and tone, especially when set up against the transgender counterpublic's notion of transparency and honesty, was a dangerous mix, one that eventually got him banned.

DeLine's story effectively demonstrates how transgender publishers shut down any writing from a transgender person who wants to critique, but still be a part of, the community.

This type of censorship is the major issue. Though DeLine has critiqued the community, and has been stripped of his gender capital and turned away from the online communities that he could seek refuge in, his critical assertions do not negate his status as a transgender person. DeLine is transgender and even his character Dean, though he often regrets transitioning, remains transgender throughout the narrative. DeLine has this lived reality to deal with, even if no one else wants to give him credit or cultural legitimacy for it. As Halberstam has noted, the need for only positive images ends up making the reception of an image/idea an issue of the production, not of reading and interpretation by the audience. Using a negative image does not need to threaten the stability of an entire community. As Edward Said notes, when reading, "[t]he things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, and not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original" (21; emphasis mine). But, alas, instead of the transgender counterpublic looking at

DeLine's New York Times piece for its presentation and witty critique, it was shut down for being offensive.

When confronted with something that could possibly be a negative representation, the cultural gatekeepers within the transgender public strip away the author's gender capital. They also critique forms of social privilege and attempt to silence what he is allowed to write about through the same imbalance of power that was used against Hyde. DeLine comments,

I was criticized for everything from being white to being a shitty writer. Someone said depressed trans people shouldn't be allowed to write. That was shocking. I wasn’t trying to get pity. It was mostly a lot of “oh boo hoo, your life is sooooo hard,” nonsense,

calling me privileged, which is seemingly the worst insult a queer person can give. ("Author Interview" 19)

Not only do the criticisms of DeLine's work manifest as a reflection of his own identity, but his race and mental health status are invoked to prevent him from writing. The invocation of the word "privileged" leads back to what Lorde has been saying about the master's tools and the master's house. By calling DeLine privileged, his critics are saying that he has access to those oppressive tools (via his white race), and that he is using those rhetorical tools against those inside the counterpublic. DeLine notes that "privileged" is one of the worst insults one can get within the queer community, and he is correct ("Author Interview 18"; Peggy McIntosh).

Though he is transgender and clearly not privileged by that identity, this lack of a particular status does not matter since he is white.

Upon reflection, DeLine notes that "Communities on the fringes often have a rather conservative group mentality that says 'All depictions of us must always be positive always!' and anything that isn’t sugar-coated is deemed 'self-hating' and a threat. [...] I just can’t bring myself to use the little catch-phrases. It’s like going to Sunday mass and repeating words over and over.

[…] they lose all meaning" ("Author Interview 19" ). The meaning that DeLine longs for he tries to reclaim with his own text and his own words. As much as Refuse is about regret and doubt, the novel is also about refusing the standard transgender narrative that the genre and the community has come to depend on so much. He does not allow for the depiction of Dean's surgery to be the last vignette, or for the story to really have a happy ending. One of the best scenes of the book which demonstrates this style-as-refusal comes from the transgender self-help group. When Dean is asked how he identifies there, and he says he does not identify, he is thought to be a fraud.

"Wait are you even trans?" one member asks, angrily, before Colin, Dean's friend and fellow

56 transgender man has to defend him (Refuse 57). This small depiction of a transgender support group turning against one of its own members is a microcosm of the larger picture that I have been demonstrating within the queer and LGBT community, with DeLine's own scandal, the words of Morty Diamond and Sassafrass Lowry, and the notion of gender capital.

DeLine's attitude towards the cultural production of transgender texts is in opposition to the attitude of most of the transgender community. Transgender narratives should be the readerly text, as Barthes notes, and only have one reading that makes sense. The audience is not supposed to reclaim the text and make it their own, as they would in relation to the writerly text, because handing over the interpretative power to anyone in the audience would result in the proliferation of meaning. Elliott DeLine's novel and his New York Times article do not meet the standards of a transgender text, since they are writerly. Many of the scenes can allow for multiple interpretations and there is no one clear message about what it means to be transgender that is pushed forward. Though we are focalized behind Dean and tend to sympathize with him, Dean is not the only transgender person within the text. Moreover, DeLine notes that Dean's inability to interact with anyone is his downfall ("Author Interview 20"). By having more than one transgender stock character, and more than one stock straight (antagonist) character, DeLine allows for multiple audiences and multiple interpretations.

Regretting

This same problem of refusal-as-style comes up with the production of the documentary film Regretters. Though this film was made by (cisgender) director Macus Lindeen, it centres on two former MTF transgender women who now regret their surgery and have gone through the process of reversing their former vaginoplasty. Though DeLine and many others do not regret

57 their surgery, there are some within the community, like Mikael and Orlando, who do. This documentary is one of the first of its kind that focuses solely on them and gives them back their voice.

Marcus Lindeen first became aware of these two men when doing a radio show about regret where Mikael spoke about his experience. Soon after, Orlando called into the station and declared that "he had recognized himself for the first time in his life" (The Documentary Blog).

From here, Lindeen took their stories and made them into a stage play (with actors playing the roles), and then, after the success of the play, made the documentary Regretters with Mikael and

Orlando. When approaching such a precarious topic as transgender reassignment surgery and later regret, Lindeen has managed to make his film with a unique and self-conscious style. In

Paris Is Burning (1992), director Jenny Livingston attempted to capture the dynamics of the ball culture and transgender life, but in doing so, was met with heavy critiques (Namaste 13).

Because she did not present herself as a director (she was not in the film at all), she was able to manipulate the shots, edit precisely, and portray the people as she desired without appearing to do so at all. When being critiqued by the transgender community, she was maligned because she was not aware of herself as an author, and instead presented her text as truth (which she could not do, of course, because of the system of gender capital). Lindeen avoids this error by making himself very visible as a director in the film, and also by hiring Orlando and Mikael as actors.

He removes Livingston's curse of passive observer viewing 'natural' scenery, and instead, provides a highly involved, but consciously involved, atmosphere. In the trailer, we see him point to the camera and direct the two participants. The film begins with Marcus leading the two individuals to the stage and setting them up in the bare set. As Lindeen remarks,

[E]very documentary filmmaker wants to control the story and even if we try to be a fly on the wall when we are documenting things, we just end up doing it in the editing room anyways. You just have to accept that there is a storyteller, and that is you, the director. So I just felt like I wanted to have more control over the material when we were shooting. Actually, and this might sound weird, but it also felt like the most honest and respectful way for me to treat Mikael and Orlando, hiring them as actors and giving them a more active role in the filmmaking. Instead of getting surprised when seeing the finished film, they knew already on the set what I tried to achieve, and could protest right away, or try to understand the task and deliver their best. (The Documentary Blog).

He is telling a story, but he is highly aware of this fact and reveals it to the audience as such. I think because of this, the film makes no claim that it fully represents reality, but instead we have a layering technique of awareness and consciousness, on his part as director and Mikael's and

Orlando's as actors. During the film itself, Mikael and Orlando show one another photos and short films of their transition, chatting back and forth. The scene becomes a film within a film, and because of these layers, the audience is drawn to the production value right away. The performance is always heightened; the audience is always aware that these two people are posing for the camera.

Sometimes the remarks the two men exchange are light-hearted and relate directly to the photograph: "That haircut suited you." The photographs also acts as lead into very serious stories, like when Orlando talks about his husband and the violent ending of his eleven year marriage. Both men talk back and forth about their decisions, how they feel about their reassignment now, and what is next for them. Although they both have experienced regret after surgery ("what have I done?" Mikael thinks after the bandage has fallen off), they also go out of their way to remark upon the differences between them. Even now, as Mikael waits for his

59 reconstruction surgery, he thinks that this will be his final step to happiness again. "I will go back to being the old Mikael." Orlando pushes him, trying to see if he can be happy without surgery, and insists that he is a man if he says he is. But Mikael is not convinced.

The film makes clear that Mikael and Orlando are very different, though they have experienced the same profound regret about surgery. While Mikael abides by old gender standards, Orlando embraces a new type of vibrancy to his life. "I am the man who wears a red suit, everyone knows me," he remarks with a smile. It is interesting, when these two sit down and really tell their stories, who actually displays regret. Though Orlando lost his husband of eleven years and was nearly killed by him, he holds no negative feelings towards him or the events that lead up to the divorce. When the police asked if he wanted to press charges after being attacked, he gave a resigned, "I understood why he did it." He also still claims: "Oh, I loved him. He was amazing." When cross-questioned, again and again, by Mikael about why he let something like that go on for so long, he simply says "If you could have love for a little while longer, wouldn't you want to make it last?" Orlando seems to be able to take the events of his life in stride and recognize his past mistakes. He does not appear to regret anything at all.19

Mikael, on the other hand, seems to still be steeped within the language of identity politics and transgender identity, though he claims that he was never a true transsexual. He still believes that surgery - the physical transformation - will make his spirit or true self show through again. He spends much of the time blaming the doctor for performing the surgery to begin with

("I should have said something, he should have asked me, and he would have stopped") and then feeling defeated once the surgery was done ("I could do nothing but go on"). He tells Orlando,

19 Orlando's unwillingness to see the fault in the end of his marriage could also be a manifestation of guilt at keeping the secret of transgender identity for so long. Christopher Shelley has spoken about how transgender men and women often react to crimes against them by not pressing charges or blaming themselves; they are internalizing the transphobia in the culture around them.

60 upon seeing pictures of him nude in a magazine, that he would have envied him: "You know, back then." Mikael's story contains jealousy, regret, and all the negative emotions associated with a bad decision. He is the one that seems to truly regret surgery -- but then again, he seems to be regretful of most parts of his life, including his relationships.

What Lindeen has managed to do with this film, and these two contrasting individuals, is show that regret is not an intrinsic part of sex reassignment surgery.20 Regret is something that affects us all. He takes a loaded subject that not many people have been able to speak about and allows these men the opportunity to tell their stories. The film displays the fact that their prior silence had nothing to do with regret, but the political identity and ramifications from the transgender counterpublic that was associated with their decision to undo their prior surgery

(Shelley 205). Because they were no longer a typical cisgender person and no longer wanted to be transgender, there was no place for these men to inhabit. It is clear that while Orlando realizes that it was not the best decision for him to make, he does not feel as much regret as Mikael. The audience, after the viewing, is aligned with Orlando more than Mikael because of this. Not only is he charismatic and brightly dressed (in both the documentary and the stage production, the costumes remain the same), but he has the most photographs and footage. We see images of

Mikael, but more often than not, he is complaining about his appearance. "I did not have a figure like that; it was hard with the wig." Orlando loves the way he looks, however, at any section: he is both the man in the red suit, and the young lady with nice breasts. Neither image matters to him, and because of that, neither matters to the audience.

20 Regret after surgery is also not common at all. As with any medical procedure or long-term study, there will be outliers in the research who do not match overall findings. For the most part, surgery helps transgender patients who want it. See the study "Regret after Sex Reassignment Surgery in a Male-to-Female Transsexual: A Long-Term Follow-Up" by Olsson and Moller.

Lindeen has had positive response from critics. The director states that, "[a] lot of people say that they went to see the film with the idea that they were going to observe two very odd and extreme life stories. But then when they went out of the theater they felt that they could relate, even though the stories seem so far from their own lives" (The Documentary Blog ). If people are able to relate to Mikael and Orlando, then it allows for the boundaries of cis/trans to be crossed.

The film works, albeit slowly, to remove the system of gender capital that has been set up. For some people, this is the most damaging part of the film. On the comments page to the same interview with Lindeen, one is made aware of the backlash that this film could face:

I’m a little worried about this. There is the perception in popular society that sex changes are crazy, and you’ll inevitably regret it. Films like this may tell an interesting story, but we’ve been so exposed to this side of things. I’d rather they have taken the chance to paint sex reassignment, and similar drastic changes in a positive light[...] Even if the documentary is presented in a sensitive and compassionate manner, it’s only because of the fact that they have regretted doing something so abnormal. (The Documentary Blog)

The comment seems to say that, no matter how this topic is represented, much like DeLine's story, the story should not be told. When considering how those such as Morty Diamond,

Sassafras Lowry, and Cheryl Morgan identify transgenre, there seems to be only one way in, but there are many ways out of the transgender counterpublic.

Ask The Audience

I would like to re-examine the Jumpstart The World controversy that started this chapter.

Because of the harsh response from the transgender community, Catherine Ryan Hyde

62 eventually needed to respond with her own blog post. There, she attempted to clear up many of the misinterpretations which Feinberg had made, and reflected from her point of view on anything that she felt she was maligned for. In her post, she does not rely on the same heightened affect that Feinberg does; it is less polemic, and she does not ask people to repost it. While she does make claims for community, she does it from a marginalized position, and reminds her readers and Feinberg, that although she is not transgender, "I am gay" ("In Response To A

Recent Issue"). She may not have the same type of gender capital that Feinberg does, but she is not the straight reader that Sassafrass Lowrey does not write for and that would never be allowed to enter the strict system of cultural production within transgender publics.

When discussing Jumpstart The World, she states: "the book has nothing to do with

Leslie, or with Leslie’s life or experience. The only connection is that my upbringing caused me to care. That’s all. I developed an interest in transgender acceptance while growing up" (Hyde

"In response to a recent issue"). Hyde denies any type of direct correlation between the character

Frank and Feinberg's life. She tries to separate herself from the text and merely takes up the author function, as Foucault advocates, when she writes this post. Because this is her literary property, she needs to take on the responsibility for the text as an object, and address the controversy, but she does not try to force a meaning on her book.

Also in her post, Hyde makes note of the fact that she did try to solicit Feinberg to read the book, only to have no response until it was published. She uses the logic of the transgender representation- that one must obtain fidelity to some original - and explains herself as at least attempting to obtain permission from the person in question for her book. She also mentions that she did get one of her transgender friends to read it over. According to Hyde's post, she utilized the community she attempted to represent, as a way to make herself appear more legitimate as an

63 author about trans subjects. She went through the appropriate steps for that approval, and met with okay reviews, until Feinberg's initial and sudden outrage.21

Given a difficult situation, Hyde manages to work her way through the many contradictory relationships that emerge when one decides to write transgender fiction. She does all of this by taking up Foucault's ideological positioning about the author, and denying Feinberg the explicit connection that ze sees within real life and fiction. As I have demonstrated with

Elliott DeLine and the film Regretters, the story that is told within transgenre is what truly matters, not just the people who tell it. When the text and author relationship no longer provides the correlation transgender counterpublics need, they reject the narrative based on its style and content, opting for a readerly text instead. Adapting Bourdieu's idea of cultural and social capital,

I have demonstrated the complex gender capital system that becomes emphasized within transgender counterpublics and that influences the ways in which stories and audiences are controlled and policed. Even though Orlando and Mikael share the same experiences and identified with the transgender community for a certain amount of time, their voices are treated tentatively because of the damage they could do for the community as a whole that only wishes to deal with easy to read, positive images. DeLine, who still remains transgender, is stripped of his gender capital and is denied access to the places where he can have community and outreach because of what his story contained and how it was told. Then there is Catherine Ryan Hyde, who is really the person stuck in the borderlands, where she is simultaneously praised and harassed for her writing and its failure to live up to the fidelity of some original -- an original that may have never existed in the first place.

21 It has been noted by critics that, due to Feinberg's health problems, even if ze wanted to read over the book, ze would not have been able to.

After all of this, Catherine Ryan Hyde still maintains that, "I thought this book was a good step in the direction of transgender understanding. Leslie has a right to disagree. Many others already agree with me. I hope others will decide for themselves" ("In Response To A

Recent Issue"). When stuck in a quagmire of ethical vagaries, she turns to the audience of any public to decide for themselves. She evokes what Roland Barthes and Michel De Certeau know to be the ultimate goal of reading and writing: the audience's response and reaction to the text itself. It is only when we allow for agency of the audience to make their own decisions that we can let go of the need to verify the text by asking the author, or large identity groups, what they really mean. There are no good or bad books - only good and bad writing. Like Catherine Ryan

Hyde says, the audience makes the final decision.

Chapter Two

Sh*t Trans* Autobiographies Say: Internal Narratives and Constructing The Self

In 2012, Chaz Bono released his autobiography entitled Transition: Becoming Who I

Always Meant To Be. The book documents his transition from female to male, which began in late 2008. Though the transition is a focal point of the narrative, the book also documents many personal events in his life. In addition to talking about his past relationships with women, he discusses his father's death, his drug abuse (and subsequent recovery), and his childhood. This was not the first book where Chaz Bono openly discussed his life. Before this, he penned Family

Outing, which discussed his realization (at the time) of his lesbian identity and his relationship with his family as they grew to understand and accept this identity.22 Published in association with GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and The Advocate, the book was part personal memoir and part guidebook for people who were coming to terms with their sexuality and their families. Transition does not continue this narrative of personal and familial discovery; rather he rewrites his past discoveries from the point of view of a transgender subject.

Bono's new realization is that he is in fact transgender, and not a lesbian, and this realization alters the construction of his life as a whole. As the subtitle implies, in this book he becomes who he always meant to be. The book's content of surgery, hormone treatments, and therapy make this text a transgender autobiography, but the act of writing Transition also becomes an act of rewriting his past books. His current status as a transgender man not only affects his personal

22 He has also written another personal narrative called The End Of Innocence in 2003, but since that discusses the death of his partner, Joan, and is not expressly about his own identity, I do not take it into consideration in my analysis.

66 relationships, but by rewriting his childhood and adolescent fears once again, he is able to give them a distinct source (that of being transgender, but not knowing yet). The act of producing an autobiography allows for Bono to write himself into existence as a transgender subject.

This writing and rewriting of the transgender subject will be the basis of this chapter, in addition to the ways in which these autobiographies are produced and reproduced amongst their audience. According to Jay Prosser, one of the major ways that transgender people discover and further validate their identities is through the use of the autobiography (110). While this mode of expression has been around for nearly one hundred years for transgender publics, younger transgender people are flocking to websites like Tumblr and YouTube to tell their stories. With web platforms such as this, the self-narrative becomes continuous. Updates, especially on sites like YouTube, become visible and visceral on the screen. As teens and other people within the transgender community produce vlogs and transition journals, they are creating a wealth of information online for other transgender people to access, building a distinct community, and creating their own forms of autobiography. While Chaz Bono and YouTube user skylarkevelven may seem vastly different in their means of cultural production and modes of authorship, the form of the autobiography is rarely varied. Relying highly on modes of confession that base themselves in religious and psychoanalytic narratives, the autobiography is the standard form for storytelling within transgender communities. Indeed, whether the autobiography starts in the doctor's office or on the computer screen, the narrative that the transgender person creates becomes the ultimate form of 'truth' that exists within transgender communities. Using Chaz

Bono's two autobiographies and YouTube users as examples, I will outline this particular narrative and show how the subjective experience ends up influencing the transgender counterpublic criticism and cultural theory. When 'the personal is political' is taken to its

67 extreme, the internal narrative of the autobiography ends up informing the way in which certain theorists, such as Jay Prosser and Julia Serano, have structured their critiques against a

(cisgender and often cissexist) opposing side. I will outline the same system of producing and maintaining boundaries for cultural criticism that has been maintained by rejecting the constructionist perspective of representation and maintaining an essentialist one instead. Using the reassigning of the term 'queer' and Judith Halberstam's work on ideas of normalcy, I will outline where the connection between narrative and knowledge falls apart.

The Self-Realization Narrative

Eva Illuouz, in her book Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, describes what she calls the self-realization narrative in which

the narrative frame requires that a person identify a pathology...[and] Once the

automatic behaviour is identified, the person builds causal connections with the past. ...

That incident is in turn supposed to have had momentous consequences for the conduct of

his life. This story is a good illustration of the ways in which any sorts of behaviour, in

fact even prosocial ones such as hard work, seriousness, and studiousness, are reframed

as 'pathological.' (50)

In her short chapter, she uses examples such as alcoholism and drug abuse to display this narrative model, and the retelling of it to a group of sympathizers. The retelling becomes both the act of rewriting the past events for the maintenance of the internal self, as well as the validation of that self from others and an example for them to follow. This is why twelve step programs, such as AA, involve the introductions at the beginning of each meeting, in order to add context to the group's setting. (My name is Jim, I'm an alcoholic, and my problems started when I was

68 fifteen; or conversely, My name is Jim, I am a former alcoholic, and I've been clean since 2010).

The story, aside from giving meaning to its author, also acts as a guideline for others. Because of the need to tell and to have an audience present, Illouz notes that the self-realization narrative "is wildly pervasive because it is performed in a wide variety of social sites such as support groups, talk shows, counselling, rehabilitation programs, for profit workshops, therapy sessions, the internet: all are sites for the performance and retooling of the self. These sites have become invisible yet pervasive appendices to the ongoing work of having and performing a self" (48).

There is often a doubled performance of the self in these self-realization narratives. 'Jim is an alcoholic' has one meaning and one performance in terms of damaging past life, but 'Jim the former alcoholic' has a different narrative meaning, where the audience hears a story of success out of failure. Both of these narrative structures are highly affective (as in derived from affect, emotion) and deal in extremes of thought in the form of success and failure. In addition, because they deal with retelling multiple versions of the past, they gain significance through storytelling.

In this sense, they "narrate the gap" between past event and current moment. Benedict Anderson comments that the photograph of a person as a baby "records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory" and since the event in the photograph itself cannot be

"remembered, [it] must be narrated" (204). Even if the events themselves are 'true' and have really happened, the act of providing a meaning and significance to certain events is the hallmark of storytelling. When stories at AA are told or are present in autobiographies, the rhetorical tool of Chekov's Gun is evoked: the meaningless object suddenly has meaning, and it has gone off, now, in the present.

For Chaz Bono, his drug addiction and failed relationships became a sign of something larger that was wrong with his life. In his first autobiography, Family Outing, this 'something

69 larger' was the need to explain his lesbian self to his parents and his audience. His feeling of difference in childhood was then given a meaning through the act of coming out. In Transition, his past failures have a new, proper meaning in the context of his transition from female to male.

He rereads the old events in his past autobiography, and constantly dwells on how wrong he was back then. He makes constant references/allusions to how things would change, or how he "just didn't quite know yet what was going on" (150). A greater omniscient narrator relates the account of his entire childhood and teenage years. Instead of watching Chastity suffer as her band and relationships fail through the eyes of an older Chastity, the audience is told by Chaz, who is now in the right place in the future and can give us a 'correct' readings of these past events. The larger unknown context of these events is now understood through the narrow framework of the future/present transgender identity. In this sense, being transgender pervades the entire narration, even if the physical fact of the identity was not yet realized by the old self.

The old self is identified as the wrong, false self, even though there was no way for the old self to know at the time. The way that Bono tells his autobiography leaves no narratological reveal

(Barthes' term) or surprise for the end (Mythologies 160). Even his title, through the use of the word 'always' removes any ambiguity from the text.

Roland Barthes has compared the act of reading to that of the striptease, where the more one reveals, the less clear it becomes (it "re-veils rather than reveals"), (Mythologies 160). He uses this idea as a reason why someone would reread certain texts, though the ending is already known to them. However, Barthes notes that it is only "children, old people, and professors" who engage in rereading books (167). Bono's rereading of his life asserts that we can add another category to Barthes rereading list: the transgender. Since "rereading draws the text out of its internal chronology [...] and recaptures a mythic time" rereading a text, then, becomes "the same

70 and new" (167). The transgender are constant rereaders of events, of looks, and of themselves.

When we are given a transgender autobiography, we are being given a text that has already been read an infinite number of times and a book that has discarded many of those readings in the process of writing, favouring one framework overall (that of transgender identity within the self- realization narrative structure). In this sense, being transgender is an interpretation. Transgender identity becomes a larger cultural, social, and personal framework that can be placed over a life, situation, or text.

Bono's two autobiographies illustrate the work of his life spent rereading in two different instances. The lesbian Chastity has figured her identity out in a social and personal way: she likes women, she is a lesbian, and enters the community in Family Outing. The transgender Chaz finds something more deeply personal and revealing. According to him, he has never been himself his entire life because he has not been in the correct gender, and moreover, he has not known that this change was possible. His own narratological reveal has been kept from him as much as it has been kept from the audience during the first book. Like a surprise ending in a story, neither of us saw this coming. But once Bono does see the sudden plot twist of transgender identity, he moves forward to transition, evoking the word 'always' which renders all other narratives, and the prior self -- Chastity, as false. Transition has no surprises, other than the fact that this books exists as a sequel after Family Outing, since we thought (s)he had already figured everything out.

Instead of looking at the events as isolated, random, or just a part of life, Bono was compelled to find meaning in them. Illouz notes that the quest for meaning, even in a secular sense, can be linked to a religious context: "In the same way that human miseries are explained by the assumption of a hidden divine plan, in the therapeutic narrative the choices that seem

71 detrimental to us serve some hidden need and purpose" (47). This quest for meaning spurs Bono to keep searching for answers when he suffers from massive amounts of depression and drug addiction. Even before entering treatment, he wonders if his struggle is supposed to mean something, and when on a twelve step program, his search for meaning is compounded (147). As

Illouz notes, it is not uncommon for people to apply meaning to the everyday nature of life, especially the negative parts of it, nearly to the point where they "desire their own self-misery"

(47). In the same way that the word passion can have dual meanings of misery or ecstasy in religion, the self-realization narratives are either the alcoholic who wallows in their own melodrama to feel as if there is some greater purpose to their suffering, or the alcoholic who is part of a successful narrative where they have overcome difficulties and put their passion into the telling and retelling of their story. By the end of Transition, Bono is elated, not in despair, about his identity. He wishes to tell more people and to help anyone out who may suffer the way he has previously suffered. His passion now has completely shifted.

Illuoz notes that religion was the first area where the self-realization narrative manifested

(40). As the Bible lost its strength to unify communities, the narrative structure changed its contents (Williams 40; Anderson 240). She remarks that psychoanalysis gained much of its rigour from when the self retreated into the private sphere and the public became overrun with emotions. She says, "the transformation of the public sphere into an arena for the exposition of private life, emotions, and intimacies which has characterized it for the last twenty years cannot be understood without acknowledging the role of psychology in converting private experiences into public discussion" (109). From this point on, the narrative type became an accepted area for discussion without the invocation of religion to frame it and even without believing in a God. In a sense, the vast amounts of knowledge about the self that the author displays as he/she writes

72 the autobiography can be seen as filling in the role of the God-head. Chastity may not know why she is struggling in her later teen years, but we as readers can be assured that Chaz does know, and can be comforted by that fact. As Michael Warner has noted with the slogan 'the personal is political' in the previous chapter, within the structure of the self-realization narrative the subjective response to reality and politics begins to form a "structure of feeling" in this current contemporary culture (Williams 130).

The way in which the self-realization narrative functions puts trauma at the centre of the story. The subject then overcomes this trauma by defining themselves through it (whereas the pathology of drug use or alcoholism functioned in trauma's place before). Illouz notes that the feminist movement, especially during the 1960s, used this narrative structure (110). By outlining patriarchy as the force that feminists needed to defeat, all women had the ability to define themselves as successful -- and as feminists. Their lives had meaning beyond themselves and their families. The dual identity association - woman and feminist - gave this narrative structure power. From this, Chaz Bono could overcome the trauma of failed relationships and a drug problem, and become the successful person "who [he] always meant to be" with a myriad of new titles activated through transitioning. He was now boyfriend, son, clean and sober, and transgender. Perhaps the myriad of new terms that transgender people can now adopt helps for them to feel successful and self-realized, as if they have really overcome not only their own dysphoria and the problems it starts, but the institutional cissexism that they now all have a common cause to fight against in a larger, political sphere. Women's studies and feminist groups,

LGBT stories, and therapy programs are the most common places where this narrative type flourishes now (Illuoz 110). By isolating personal and societal problems to overcome, more

73 power is gained through the story and it is more likely that the person will stick to this narrative and continue to define themselves through these means.

Camille Paglia, though a lesbian herself, dislikes this narrative structure and speaks about it in her book Vamps and Tramps. When talking about the gay narrative, she claims that it is not their homosexuality that gay authors are remembering when reflecting back on childhood, but difference (72). Paglia goes back to that moment of trauma, which the self-realization narrative frames itself around, and removing any significance from its origin. Illouz supports Paglia's claim in as much as she notes that the "the therapeutic narrative is written backwards" in order to focus on a complication in a typical story, and then "make sense of it in reference to an event in one's past" (52). People only start to answer the question of why they are gay after they know they are gay. Having the end result, they search backwards towards the beginning, and find something that stands out (trauma) and they label it as the particular origin from which they came. In a purely symbolic sense, it is trauma that many queer and LGBT theorists speak about as their identity marker, the time when they were 'born again' (or as Lady Gaga might correct,

'Born This Way'). Their identity has been framed around the initial wound, the trauma, which ends up defining them. But Paglia recognizes that this is pure fiction, pure story. It is not substantial enough to claim as reality. For Paglia and many other theorists like her, the personal is not wholly political at all. She envisions "two spheres: one is social, the other is sexual and emotional. Perhaps one-third of each sphere overlaps the other; this is the area where feminism has correctly said, 'the personal is political.' But there is vastly more to the human story" (31).

As Illouz notes, "The therapeutic narrative is particularly suited to the genre of autobiography and has significantly transformed it. Indeed, in the therapeutic autobiography, identity is found and expressed in the experience of suffering and in the understanding of

74 emotions gained by telling the story. [... T]hey are about psychic agony, even in the midst of fame and wealth" (53). In the case of the transgender biography, the story is about physical and mental agony, though nothing is physically wrong. This is one of the reasons that intersexuality and transgender identity are two very different things and should not be conflated (though they are in many political circles, even ones that are generally savvy to all the terms and how sensitive they are, such as The Gender Book, which lists intersexuality under the same transgender umbrella term). With intersexuality, the baby is born physically different. There is an ambiguity about what sex they belong to. With transgender patients, there is usually nothing visually or physically different from them and a cisgender person. This is why easy catch phrases such as

'gender is what is between your ears, sex is what is between your legs' catch on and images like the GenderBread cookie have become so pervasive in social justice blogs common on Tumblr

(see Appendix B, Figures One and Two for examples). They capture the cognitive and internal difference that transgender people face, not the physical difference that most intersexual people have and must deal with their entire lives.

The self-realization narrative privileges and caters to this internal state. Even though

Bono is a celebrity and could be considered part of the rich and famous autobiography genre

(such as Jane Fonda as Illouz gives for an example), his story is not dependent on his wealth or his fame. His genre of autobiography is that of the transgender autobiography because his psychic agony ties so deeply with his physical agony of gender dysphoria. Removing whatever remote celebrity status that he has, his book still reads like a transgender text, or the countless transgender ethnographic studies and interviews out there.23 There is little difference between

Chaz and skylarkeleven on YouTube, documenting their transition, their frustrations, and eventually, their overcoming of it.

23 Such as Christopher Shelley's Transpeople and Lori Girshick's Transgender Voices.

The Self-Realization of The Body

The psychic agony for transgender people, and the telling of their stories, stems from the misrecognition of the body. When the body is unable to match up to how the transgender person envisions themselves, the first instance of physiological trauma occurs.24 The general unpleasant feeling that pervades the transgender person's cognitive functions upon realizing this dissonance is often referred to as gender dysphoria, from the Greek word meaning 'difficult to bear' (Butler

"Undiagnosing Gender" 255). It should be noted that this term is different than the commonly diagnosed medical term of body dysmorphia, where the body that the subject imagines does not match up with the reality of what is present. The term dysmorphia is usually given to patients who have eating disorders, where they view their bodies as fat or larger than they are in reality

(Claude-Pierre 178; Schofield 83). The simple terminology switch -- from a hallucination to an unpleasant feeling -- in the medical discourse acknowledges something profound about the two different bodily issues that a transgender patient and anorexia patient will face in treatment.

Where the person with anorexia is not taken seriously (since they are, on average, not connected with reality as the term dictates), the transgender person's internal state - the difficult to bear feeling - is given privilege. This privileging of one over the other, though they describe something very similar (body issues), is the influence of the self-realization narrative structure pervading the public sphere as Illouz notes.25 The diagnosis of gender dysphoria, as Judith

24 A common trope in most transgender narratives are 'mirror scenes' where they realize that what they have inside their minds does not fit what is projection back to them. (See Prosser, Serano, and Shelley). 25 I am drawing the connection between anorexia and transgender identity specifically because many of transgender men have made the connection in the past. Scott Turner Schofield in his piece called "The Wrong Body" in the collection Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, writes about how he believes his anorexia was misdiagnosed in the past. He was really suffering from gender dysphoria and not body dysmorphia.

Butler states, "requires that a life take on a more or less definite shape over time; a life can only be diagnosed if it meets the tests of time" (279). The diagnosis requires both the medical professional and the patient to tell a story, and to keep telling that story, until the initial problem

(the body and distinctly not the mind, as it is for anorexia) is remedied. The body gives the final indication of mental health in the transgender story, through the prospect of a final surgery to correct what has been misaligned.

Both medical and transgender discourses are marked by this conformation to the mind's idea above the body. Jay Prosser uses the term "body narrative" to describe "the ways in which body and narrative work together [to produce] transsexuals subjectivity"(105). Prosser notes that it is through the reproduction in autobiographies where

transsexuality emerges as an archetypal story structured around shared tropes and fulfilling a particular narrative organization of consecutive stages: suffering and confusion; the epiphany of self-discovery; corporeal and social transformation/conversion; and finally the arrival 'home' -- the reassignment. (101).

Notice that his narrative structure also follows what Illouz has outlined perfectly; the only unique difference being that this story both begins and ends with the body. When the period of self- discovery has been reached, the story is generally marked by those same changes to make the body fit the mind.

There is a long history of medical and social gender inversion, which Judith Halberstam recounts in her book Female Masculinity.26 Similarly, Pagan Kennedy in The First Man-Made

Man goes through the one-sex model of how gender and sex difference were categorized before

26 which also outlines the early methods of how gender dysphoria was dealt with.

77 the popularization of the term transgender and transsexual. I will not recount those long histories here; I only bring them up to mention that this change to privileging the internal state over the body is something new and has only happened within the last century, if that. Previous to the diagnosis of gender dysphoria, the treatment for transgender people was usually similar to those used currently for anorexics. The mind was seen as the problem, and it was what doctors sought to fix. The prevalence of the self-realization narrative and the use of autobiographies, as Prosser notes, worked to make the transgender patient into an "authorial subject" and not a hallucinating crazy person (105). The acceptance of those narratives within the dominant culture have allowed for these transgender subjects to be taken seriously. After being taken seriously, they were allowed to change their bodies – from one that looked 'normal' to all outside participants, but was horribly misaligned to them.

When the transition process begins, Prosser notes, the body enters a limbo stage where it cannot be classified (14). When the body cannot be identified, those who inhabit those mixed bodies seek community and others like them. The autobiography is written to make sense of personal changes in identity, but it is also of use to find others who are just like the transgender authors. This is perhaps why YouTube, the online video platform owned by Google, has become a large part of the transgender community. Short narrative videos rely on the physical body and other physical attributes (like voice and movement) to communicate the physical transition process just as much as the narrative structure does. Many users, such as skylarkeleven, a twenty-something female to male transgender man, have dozens of videos that document their transition. While most video diary entries (also called 'vlogs') will document other personal information (such as school, birthdays, and personal relationships; a viewer can watch Sky's girlfriends change as much as his voice and clothing does), skylarkeleven establishes himself as

78 part of the online transgender community through the way he frames, tags, and introduces his videos by a recapping of what is going on with his transition.

These stylistic nuances are probably best seen in a parodyf video by uppercaseCHASE1 where the common tropes of speech are mocked. Since YouTube has the ability to document not only hair and other physical changes, but voice as well, transgender men tend to flock to the platform and wait for their voice to drop. In his video, which contains several other commonly heard phrases, he adds the common "this is my voice, [x] months on t" and then continues to repeat the phrase amongst others, documenting it from five months to a year, to show how obsessive trans men can sometimes be while waiting for certain masculine codes. In addition to physical changes, the YouTube community itself is considered. "You don't know about the

YouTube trans community? You need to get on that, seriously," he says and then shortly follows it up with "You don't have a YouTube channel? You need to get on that, seriously." His repeating of the word "seriously" underwrites the imperative need to flock there, and also mocks the audience who clearly is in the YouTube community, seeking refuge in other transgender men. Another clever turn-of-phrase is "does this shirt make me look flat?" The need to be 'flat' for transgender men applies to those who have not had surgery yet to remove their breasts. This remark not only plays with gender expectations that the audience has about women and their figures and subverts it, but it pays particular attention to the pre-operative body. Transgender men generally wear a chest restrictor called a binder in order to make their chests appear flat.

The anxiety that being flat provokes becomes a common fear in transgender male publics, especially for those who have not had surgery yet. Since this remark is so linked to the preoperative body, and one that is only shared by transgender men, it becomes very hard to discuss. Talking about being flat can only be done with certain groups of people, usually only

79 transgender men. The comment heightens the attention to the audience by deliberately playing with their expectations and anxieties, and because Chase (uppercaseCHASE1) himself has that fear, the laugh itself can be cathartic.

Chase mocks not only common tropes of speech, but also the physical ways of standing and carrying oneself. In several shots, Chase walks across the camera lens and tugs at his shirt.

As his prior statement suggests, he is making sure he looks "flat." The tugging of the shirt is a way to adjust the spread of fabric that usually becomes caught on the material of the binder itself.

Not only does he refuse to render this scene in words for the audience, he assumes that his audience knows exactly what he is doing. The fact that this simple movement across the screen can physically resonate with those who are watching is another way in which the audience really did need to get on the YouTube community, seriously. These few scenes communicate so much more about the transgender body, pre-op, than any remark about it. It is funny to those who watch in the comments, but it is so only because it is very real.

In Peter Brooks's Body Work: The Object of Desire in Modern Narrative, he uses the story of Odysseus in The Odyssey as one of the most iconic stories of bodily narratives. When

Eurycleia finds the scar on Odysseus' leg, thus revealing his identity after being missing for so long, we as audience, like the characters themselves, know that he has come home. Transgender people, in their autobiographies, also express the ways in which they have 'come home' into their bodies, as Jay Prosser and Christopher Shelley have demonstrated in their books (Prosser 84;

Shelley 180). In this sense, there is what Brooks calls "the semioticization of the body" and alongside it "goes what we might call the somatization of story: the implicit claim that the body is a key sign in narrative and a central nexus of narrative meaning" (25). Not only does the transgender subject feel as if they are actually making meaning with their own subjectivities

80 through their bodies, but the process of documenting it through film and video allows for the repeated experience. By making their bodies into a continuous text on YouTube, the transgender youths who participate in this culture are creating a myth in the same way that Homer does with

The Odyssey. In a reworking of Lacan's mirror stage, they are making themselves and their egos through the process of looking, editing, and filming. They are creating the self-realization narrative not only in words, but in images as well.

Creating the story for one's own personal realization and understanding of the self is one aspect of identity formation. As Jay Prosser notes, this choice is especially beneficial for most transgender people when establishing subjectivity (97). But the act of publication, in an autobiography or a YouTube video, stems from another impulse and changes how the story is told. If the act of publication becomes an act of confession within the self-realization narrative, then it is also implied that this confession is a secret. By telling their story, they are unleashing a truth that no one knows about. Moreover, they are singling themselves out as different and thereby implying that everyone else around them is the same. Chaz Bono assumes that those who read his book are either not transgender and want to get a better understanding, or are transgender themselves and have not had the secret of themselves revealed to them yet. Since

Bono's book contains no narrative revealing, he wishes to access the reveal of the self that could happen on part of the reader. He makes this clear by wanting to "help" with his books; helping assumes that he is in a position of authority, though it is an affective authority. The need to tell people about the trauma at the centre of one's life assumes that not everyone has felt that trauma.

Alternatively, for people who do not know they feel the trauma, these autobiographies and personal stories on YouTube act as access points to feeling. The transgender YouTube video community is large, but hard to get into. The invitation of "you should get on that, seriously" in

Chase's video was extended in very much the same way that Bono extends his help. Moreover, this help is only extended to someone that is showing the first signs of affective curiosity at transgender identity. Though the YouTube community tries to go against what they dub the

'transgender narrative,' their criticism is usually only a backlash against the notion of compulsory surgery (Serano 130). Though there are videos that go against this transgender narrative, they take solace in others who did not have the typical 'I've known since age four' scenario. They may not remember their essential difference as far back as Paglia illustrates, but they still remember feeling different. It does not matter when trauma has occurred, so long as it has happened, and so long as there are people to listen to them. What unites people more than anything is not the exact structure of the narrative itself, but the prospect of psychic agony.

One of the reasons that the transgender YouTube community can be hard to access is because of the system of gender capital that I have mentioned before. The transgender counterpublics maintain a strong system of text-author connection regarding their historical or cultural changes and YouTube culture is no different. As Michael Strangelove notes about

YouTube culture:

Normally, self-identity is constructed partially through face-to-face relationships with a relatively small number of individuals. Through YouTube we are dramatically increasing the number of individuals who can influence our self- perception and enabling them to manipulate our intimate memories. We are allowing a group of strangers to tell us what they think of us. Psychologists describe the definition of the self as a relational process that depends upon whom we interact with and the context of that interaction. YouTube dramatically alters both coordinates. We allow strangers to tell us who they think we are. (59)

Though I would argue that these strangers online are no different from the strangers we could meet in school, through the therapist, or in any other public space, I do understand the slight criticism he is launching against platforms such as YouTube. While these places do unite many people who may have otherwise felt lonely, they also permit and facilitate the spreading of inviolable opinions which do not often allow for any criticism of that mentality. Because of the fringe way in which many transgender publics function, many of those who participate in them prefer this reality over any other. In this sense, the online transgender public transforms into a counterpublic that uses the same system of gender capital that I discussed in the previous chapter with relation to cultural production. When online, the self-realization narrative that runs through autobiographies is taken to be the sole basis for reality and the politics that are at the centre of these transgender counterpublics. The focus on reading the internal signs over any outside inference in a transgender narrative has been studied by two major theorists within transgender counterpublics: Jay Prosser and Julia Serano. These two figures are important to look at because they both tackle transgender subjectivity using this methodology, and more importantly, they criticize Judith Butler (and many other academics in gender studies). The critique of Butler, whose general ideas of gender disregard the internal subjectivity, is an important distinction to make and something important to consider when studying the reactive stance for many of these counterpublics.

The Self-Reality

In Jay Prosser's highly regarded book, Second Skins, he states that "transsexual narratives place us in a stronger position to understand how dynamic and complex are the relations of authorship and authorization between clinicians and transsexuals and to re-examine the whole

83 problematic of the subject's construction in postmodern theory" (9). The postmodern theory he dislikes is that of Judith Butler, and he is not the only one within transgender publics to disregard her work entirely. Because she reads the drag queen as parody and as a metaphor to view gender and the ways it is constructed in Gender Trouble, most transgender people and theorists have felt that she misses the point entirely. By saying that there is "no gender identity behind the expressions of gender" she effectively alienates the transgender community (25). For Prosser,

"Gender Trouble's theoretical economy of gender relies heavily on a notion of the body as that which can be seen, the body as visual surface. [...] Any claim to a sense of sexed interiority, any feeling of being sexed or gendered (whether differently or not), along with other ontological claims, is designated phantasmatic, symptomatic of heterosexual melancholia" (43) By viewing the act of gender as a social construction, transgender people, who feel their subjectivity differently, are not given enough credit in this system. Prosser wishes, then, to speak for the transgender people "who seek very pointedly to be non-performative, to be constative, quite simply, to be" (32). This idea of simply "being" is viewed as one of the final goals of transition by many transgender people, as documented in such ethnographic studies as Transgender Voices or Transpeople. The notion of simply 'being' is what informs the type of transgender theory that

Prosser and Julia Serano espouse in their works. What does simply 'being' mean, though? Jay

Prosser answers, "The transsexual doesn't necessarily look differently gendered but by definition feels differently gendered from her or his birth assigned sex" (43 emphasis mine).

Prosser's critique of Butler's theory focusing far too much on the performance of the body as a surface, rather than as a lived entity, is a common one. Her ideas of gender emanating from performance are revolutionary, but are not enough for many people (not just with regard to gender, but race and class as well) because one cannot control who views the body and the

84 inferences they make. Prosser is asking Butler to go a step further with her idea of gender. Not only should she take into consideration the body as a lived reality, but she needs to consider "the imaginary body [that is] more real and sensible" to the transgender person. Prosser's argument is effectively the opposite of Butler's claim: "I argue that this phenomenon illustrates the materiality of the bodily ego, rather than the phantasmatic status of the sexed body: the material reality of the imaginary and not, as Butler would have it, the imaginariness of material reality"

(43-44). As stated previously with the self-realization narrative, it is not the body that informs the mind, but the mind that informs the body. This is why surgery must be used for the transgender subject, and why no amount of cognitive behavioural therapy will make the feeling of being differently gendered disappear.

Julia Serano also makes a claim for the "imaginary body" that Prosser discusses, and her book, like Prosser's, comes highly recommended within the transgender community (Jax). Their popularity and acceptance into the transgender theory canon are most likely helped by the fact that Serano and Prosser are transgender themselves. The author/text connection that was discussed in the prior chapter can be seen here, but also harder to dismantle, since so many of their critiques depend on the lived reality of a transgender person and their own authorial position. Their theory texts depend on them being the author. Since Butler is not transgender, she is not regarded as part of the "insider" group; she has no gender capital, in spite of the amount of work she has done in academia on gender. In fact, that accomplishment seems to hinder her even more since, according to Joelle Ruby Ryan, "[t]ransphobia in academia, as well as larger structural inequalities, have made it difficult for trans people to obtain the credentials to write their own analyses" (21). She describes transphobia as "the irrational fear and hatred of people who cross, blur or transcend the male/female binary, is an omnipresent force in American

85 society. Transphobic attitudes fuel institutional discrimination, which includes employment and housing discrimination, police brutality and hate-motivated violence" (8). Moreover, Butler has not demonstrated her own self-realization narrative of even her status as lesbian. Her structure of thinking is completely different than that of transgender publics, and because of this, she is often viewed negatively and maligned. There are chapters in Prosser's, Vivan Namaste's, and Serano's work that critique her methods since her work does not always privilege the ontological position of the transgender person. For example, Butler's treatment of Venus Xtravaganza in Paris is

Burning as "being swept away by the illusions of the American dream" has been heavily critiqued and used against her, though she has later amended her discussion (Namaste 13).

Because Butler positions most of her arguments from a Hegelian and social constructivist perspective, she is seen as denying the transgender person their identity instead of reading the map of gender in a different way, even though she has done nothing deliberately offensive to transgender people, nor denied their existence. Since she bases much of her argument in discursive realities, people like Serano see academics like Butler and Foucault as being amused by them as academic play-things.

When speaking of Butler's performativity and other deconstructionists, Serano notes:

Gender performativity [is a] concept developed by Judith Butler to describe the way in which built in expectations about maleness and femaleness, straightness and queerness, are constantly imposed on all of us. Butler uses the term performativity to highlight how feminine and masculine norms must constantly be cited. ... Butler argues that this sort of reiteration "produces gender" making it appear "natural." However, many other deconstructive feminists have interpreted Butler’s writing to mean that one's gender is merely a "performance". According

to this latter view, if gender itself is merely a "performance" then one can challenge sexism by simply "performing" one's gender in ways that call the binary gender system into question. (336)

Serano rejects much of the discursive nature of this academic rhetoric because it forgets the lived realities of bodies. She sees the positing of life as a performance as going against what she knows about herself in her daily life (that she is not fake, but finally true to herself). Her discomfort with these ideas does not solely stem from her position as a transgender subject, but also because she has identified herself within the gender binary. In many LGBT spaces, Serano notes that "[v]isibly queer people who blur distinctions between male and female are considered radical and natural, while those who identify as or appear to be clearly male or female are considered conservative and contrived" (146). Because she is not transgressing the nature of sex as a whole and not performing her gender ironically or as a way to break down the rules of what gender is, Serano feels as if this makes her, and other transgender people who feel this way, disregarded within queer and gender theory.

Through the creation of her own terminology, Serano regains control over and disavows

Butler's model of gender as performance. In her book, Whipping Girl, Serano discusses the unified subjectivity that Prosser has described, only she dubs it the "subconscious sex" (127).

Serano places the mind before the body in the same way the diagnosis of gender dysphoria does, but Serano does so without the use of psychoanalytic theory. Though she is quite well educated, her degrees are in biology and the sciences. She is able to give a good breakdown of what exactly goes on with sex hormones, but the rest of her book deals with a specific type of discourse that is not located in academia, but online and in transgender publics. Since she has not been academically trained in humanities, everything that she has learned is though participation

87 in the community. I have chosen to include her because of her popularity within transgender discourse as a whole, but also because she is a perfect mirror of that discourse. Her opinions in this book are strictly that - opinions. But these opinions, because they come from the internal subjectivity of a transgender person, are taken to be enough to support her claims. By writing the book, Julia Serano makes a clear statement about herself as a transgender woman, but also locates herself within the same (transgender) public for which she writes. Her arguments have been formed and accepted within this community, and it is a key text to look at when trying to understand this form of transgender subjectivity and how it operates as a form of gender economy inside this counterpublic. This is not an autobiography, but nor is it a critical work like

Prosser's Second Skins. Her text is emblematic of a new genre of transgender writing. She writes like this is fact, but she bases everything she knows not on ethnographic research or books, but on the new form of activism and social justice work that is happening on places like Tumblr and

YouTube. In the same way that Michael Strangelove may worry that we are letting strangers from the internet tell us who we are, I suspect that he would also worry that we are letting strangers on the internet tell us how reality functions, too.

When describing transgender people, Serano grounds her understanding in definitions that have been approved by the transgender community: "I will use the word trans to refer to people who (to varying degrees) struggle with a subconscious understanding or intuition that there is something "wrong" with the sex they were assigned at birth and/or who feel that they should have been born as or wish they could be the other sex" (27). When thinking about ways that people could refute this internal claim, she disregards the other side (cisgender/cissexual people) as not being able to know how she - and all transgender people – feel, since they do not have direct access to their subconscious sex. She writes:

Many cissexual people seem to have a hard time accepting the idea that they too have a subconscious sex -- a deep rooted understanding of what sex their bodies should be. I suppose that when a person feels right in the sex they were born into, they are never forced to locate or question their subconscious sex, to differentiate it from their physical sex. In other words, their subconscious sex exists, but it is hidden from their view. They have a blind spot. (87)

Aside from her condescending language, this understanding of the subconscious sex and then its place within a larger political reality (since the personal is political, after all) borders dangerously close on solipsism. The idea that the only thing people can know for sure is what they feel for themselves causes the entire outside world to collapse into meaninglessness. This is how many of her ideas are structured, and what her text makes clear is that the only thing that anyone can know is what they can perceive. But then how do so many different and often opposing realities work with one another? In transgender and other queer publics, it is through the invocation of privilege.

In transgender publics, since the transgender person has less privilege than the cisgender person, their (subjective) reality is supposed to be given precedence. Those who do not follow this discourse are then called out and told to "check their privilege" especially in argumentative contexts.27 Though Serano and other transgender people speak about something that is so ephemeral and invisible, they are expected to hold all the power in the arguments they structure since they are right about their reality and only they have the power to be right about their realities. What is internal becomes all that matters, even if the outside contradicts, and those who

27 In 1990, Peggy McIntosh wrote an article called "White Privilege: Unpacking an Invisible Knapsack" that explored the idea of inequality among races through this metaphor and terminology. It has since been adapted and proliferated, especially on sites like Tumblr. To a certain degree, it has become a meme and is explored at length for its viral possibility on the website Know Your Meme, which is listed in the bibliography.

89 do not follow the internal feeling of the self are in the wrong. While this may make sense for the autobiography, when applied to the structure of the world, this way of thinking begins to lose its meaning and strength.

The undercurrents of this train of thought are prevalent in queer communities and can be demonstrated by the question of "what are your preferred pronouns?" This is something that is usually asked for upon meeting someone new in more progressive, LGBT, queer settings. After the question is asked and the answer is given, those are the pronouns that the person expects others to use. Sometimes this question will be asked each and every time there is a group of people and sometimes the pronouns will change. Chris may go by 'he' one day and 'she' the next, or even a gender neutral pronoun like ze, xi, or they.28 Whatever Chris says that they are is what becomes fact in the social act of gendering. The stigma behind misgendering (the inappropriate use of pronouns, as dictated by the person being gendered) is huge, especially if one has the prior knowledge.

The point of this question is, though, to render the act of reading gender useless. As

Butler notes:

Sex is made understandable through the signs that indicate how it should be read or understood. These bodily indicators are the cultural means by which the sexed body is read. They themselves are bodily, and they operate as signs, so there is no easy way to distinguish between what is ‘materially' true and what is 'culturally' true about a sexed body. I don't mean to suggest that purely cultural signs produce a material body, but only that the body does not become sexually readable without those signs, and that those signs are irreducibly cultural and material at once. ("Undiagnosing Gender" 284.)

28 See Appendix B, Figure Four for more pronouns.

The question of "what are your preferred pronouns?" then shuts down the semiotic system of reading gender through the signs that Butler talks about and is instead replaced into a new social code of asking permission. Furthermore, the gender that is produced through the pronoun is a purely linguistic one. The simple rendering of a pronoun to an act of choice, and not an act of a tangible reality, then, leads to yet another creation of a story. In this case, the act of misgendering creates a wound that must be fixed through a smaller-scale self-realization narrative where the trauma of being misgendered linguistically is remedied through a correct linguistic gender appellation. Because there is no visible evidence (perhaps) taken into consideration for the appropriate gender, gender then must be rendered linguistically. The pronoun must be able to tell the internal story. Chris is a woman today because she feels like one. Chris is not a woman because of breasts or lack of facial hair, but because she has created herself as such. In this instance, 'he' is the misgendered pronoun and the wound, whereas 'woman' is the new story created behind the misgendering, and 'she' is the self-realization self. The act of asking for pronouns, then, privileges this narrative structure. Not following this etiquette removes gender capital and following it increases social acceptance. In order to exist in these circles, one must learn to speak of an agony that is directly related to the body, but at the same time, completely ignore everyone else's body and render it only through words.

Here we reach one of the key paradoxes of the transgender narrative structure that informs itself both through and against the body. Because of this focus on the body as the source of the transgender plight, the majority of transgender narratives focus heavily on the act of medicalization. Whether the patient attains or rejects surgery, they still define themselves by its presence or absence. Also, if they wish to change their social identification papers, such as birth certificate, passport or license, then generally they need surgery, or at least a letter from a

91 therapist attesting to their condition (Shelley 78). Even if medicalization is only through a therapist and an act of confession - rather than invasive surgery and medical doctors - this section of the transgender narrative and autobiography is still significant. Their gender identity, because it is not rendered "natural," must then be institutionalized.

This medicalization of gender and the body is something that Michel Foucault recognized years ago with the creation of the category of the homosexual. In The History of Sexuality,

Foucault documents the rise of homosexual as a medical term, and, then, towards its use as a social group (HS 101). As a social tool and an identity marker, the term homosexual became reclaimed, and was used for a larger social purpose. Similarly, the term transsexual was used to initially indicate surgical status of someone who desired to be the other sex. Now, transgender or the word trans* is more commonly used to include those who have not had surgery, and transgender is usually used in therapy or psychological cases now (Serano 33).

The first instance of the word 'transsexual' and its use within the medical system was by

Dr. Michael Dillion. Having been born Laura, he realized his "inversion" and then wrote what could be considered one of the first transsexual autobiographies called Self: A Study in

Endocrinology and Ethics. Not only is this text one of the first autobiographies that contains a transgender narrative, but it is also a medical text book. In the book The First Man-Made Man,

Pagan Kennedy documents the story of Michael and his relationship with fellow transgender person Roberta Cowell and their subsequent surgeries. Though this book is not an autobiography, Kennedy still utilizes the same self-realization narrative structure when telling the stories of these individuals. Even her title is a derivation of this expression; the self-made man, as Illouz recognizes, was another version of this story (50). Typically relying on a class difference to act as the source of trauma and then overcoming it through economic capital,

Kennedy's invocation of this old narrative term is unique in the sense that not only is Michael's story a personal tale of his gender identity, but one of his career as well.

Though Dillion was a doctor and later learned how to perform surgery, he was (clearly) not the doctor that operated on himself. In this sense, it is nearly impossible to be a completely self-made or self-realization man within transgender identity (both medical and lived reality). In order for the narrative to have any meaning, as Illouz has pointed out, it must be told and retold, and in order for any of the medical changes to happen, a doctor must be enlisted. In the most basic sense, the transgender person is never an island. Not only do they need other people in order to realize their difference through the complex subjectivity of Lacan and Freud's identity formation, but they also need other people in order to facilitate transition. As Prosser notes, "the autobiographic act for the transsexual begins even before the published autobiography -- namely, in the clinicians' office where, in order to be diagnosed as transsexual, s/he must recount a transsexual autobiography"(101). In North America, to require surgery one needs to be approved for that surgery.29 This may involve seeing a therapist, or the approval may involve just the surgeon and the patient. Even in the smallest circle of medical professionals, the story and the explanation behind the change must occur in order for the surgery to be performed. In order for most forms, such as license and birth certificate, to be changed, a letter from the doctor is also needed to verify the sex change.30 In either context, in order for the transgender subject's identity to be validated in a larger social environment, they need to rely on other people, and in order for their internal psychic agony to make sense, they need to tell a story. Since the body itself -- the root cause of the problem -- appears to be normal, then the body itself needs to be simultaneously discounted at the same time. As demonstrated through the question of pronouns, the internal state

29 See Appendix C for the application questionnaire that is required for approval in Ontario. 30 While writing this thesis, Ontario changed the laws and no longer requires surgery to change the gender on many government documents (Taylor).

93 of that body is transposed onto reality itself in these publics. By ignoring everyone else's body, and only paying direct empirical attention to one's own, the self-realization narrative is taken to the next extreme: the self-reality.

It is not just within transgender counterpublics where the creation of a self-reality is upheld. The word queer itself has now become part of this narrative structure, where it is used as a label which can attach to anything that seems to transgress the sex/gender binaries and differentiates itself from what is normal. Fat activist scholar Margitte Leah, though in a heterosexual relationship, has described herself and her boyfriend as queer. Her explanation is worth quoting at length:

I am of the mind that anyone who is committed to “a total rejection of the regime of the Normal” is/can be queer. I might be a (mostly) hetero cis girl in a monogamous relationship, but I’ll be damned if I ever try to push how I live my life and my experience of human sexuality onto anyone else. I *do* think, and maybe I’ll get some heat for this, that primarily heterosexual and cisgender people who choose to identify as queer for these reasons should always be aware of the privilege they have as people who can pass as “not queer” at any given moment. This doesn’t mean that they (we) shouldn’t identify as such (and I think it’s important for people who are not “seen” as queer to make their queerness known… it’s important for the world to realize how fucked up heteronormativity is, and there is power in numbers here), just that the decision to identify as queer should (I think) come with an understanding of one’s various privileges to ensure that the experiences of other queer people are not being appropriated or erased.

In the broadest sense, queer means rethinking all that we’re taught is normal (and thus, good). Queering how we view the world is a political project that is really fucking important. And honestly? I kinda just wish everyone would be queer. That would be grand, wouldn’t it?

In this case, queer itself becomes a free-floating signifier; Margitte goes on to say that

"queerness [...] has no definition and that this is intentional and important and political." Queer, in this new social justice blogosphere, has no attachment now to specific sexual or gender histories. It no longer has a static meaning, but can be applied to everyone and everything. At the same time, however, there is also a limit to its usage.

The word queer has been used in the past in a pejorative sense to describe those who have engaged in sexually or gender deviant behaviours. So, in order for someone like Margitte and her boyfriend to identify as queer, they must be able to explain their choice. Margitte has followed the protocol and placed her explanation on her blog (this excerpt was in response to an anonymous question she had answered and she provided a long response, with links to other people's responses, and now includes this page on her frequently asked section of her website).

From this experience, I would argue that there is a queer capital in as much as there is a gender capital only straight people are able to gain access if public declarations are made to explain their choices. Because queer no longer has a static meaning that can be read on the body itself, but it still has a history, people who pass as "normal" must explain themselves and why they have chosen this label for fear of being seen as appropriative. When queer can be said by some to have any meaning and can be applied to everyone, but there is still a way the term can be

"appropriative," then there is an embedded assumption that there is a correct person for this label.

Though straight people are allowed to obtain queer capital in this system, this is a system like capitalism rather than feudalism, where there is an embedded hierarchy to work up. For fear of being seen as appropriative (and not checking your privilege), the person must explain their sexual history or how they, too, say "fuck you" to binaries.

The labeling of queer in this context is assigning difference, though the situation (a straight couple) may still attain the privilege of being "normal." Judith Halberstam, in her book

Gaga Feminism, recognizes and critiques this pattern of thought. She remarks, "generally speaking, Americans want to have it both ways -- they want to be unique and normal at the same time -- uniquely normal! Sorry, folks, it is one or the other, and each opens onto reactionary and revolutionary possibilities" (GF 142). When queer can be applied to anyone and everything, the term loses all meaning. The binary that it sets up is broken down and the uniqueness of that label disappears. This new meaning of the label is just as precarious as the ways in which pronouns are treated as the ultimate beacons of truth.

When Serano is worried about being viewed as 'contrived' by queer theorists like Butler, she is expressing similar sentiments to Margitte and her boyfriend not wanting to be perceived as part of the "norm" (Serano 336). They do not want to be seen as reasserting the gender binary and its damaging effects, so they either adopt the label of queerness, or like Serano, spend time criticizing this notion of breaking the binary that she has found comfort in. Because she needs to justify her interest in the feminine as not reasserting oppressive gender structures, she must disavow any type of privilege that she could get from conforming to a classic gender binary, so she reasserts her transgender identity again. This type of complex identity shifting between the liminal transgender body and identity, towards the reassertion of the transgender identity when the procedure is done and the body is passable, is something that Prosser documents with his focus on autobiographies. After spending so much time wallowing in dysphoria that their body is not right and finally remedying it with surgery, the transgender subject has the ability to never feel the trauma of difference ever again. But when they choose to publish their autobiographies, or continually report back to YouTube with their transgender status (years have passed since

96 skylarkeleven obtained surgery and hormones; his 'journey' is done, but he still reports with longer and longer statements about when t was started or hysterectomies had), this marks them out as different yet again. They can be uniquely normal once again and still maintain community alliance that privileges their internal feelings more than anything else.

Within this self-created reality of transgender counterpublics, everyone is right -- but at the same time, everyone is also offended. Taking offense, then, is one of the ultimate ways in which the self-realization narrative has taken over the public sphere to the point where it is

"awash with emotions" as Illouz has demonstrated (Illouz 55). Politically correct statements and the censoring of hate-speech also functions in a similar manner to that of the preferred pronoun and the essential paradox that is at work within these narrative structures. As I will demonstrate in the next chapter about hate crimes, the act of taking offense creates a story, one that I will argue needs to be disregarded.

Sh*t Trans Counterpublics Say

In uppercaseCHASE1's video, "Sh*t Trans* Guys Say," he utilizes a popular meme of

2012 called "Shit People Say" and provides a subtle critique of the ways in which transgender men express themselves, both linguistically and physically. His representation and use of style is fun, but the YouTube user Ftmark takes this critical observation one step further: he starts to critique the political, not the personal. In his collaborative video entitled, "Shit Tumblr Trans

Guys Say," he and two other transgender men work at reproducing common lexographic tropes that are prevalent within online transgender counterpublics that I have been discussing. Their cutting critique leaves all of them laughing by the end of the video, and those in comments as well. Indeed, when comparing the comments between the two videos, I found more positive and

97 hilarious ones, versus the more neutral or serious comments for uppercaseCHASE1. For example, while it was common to hear a remark of "that was hilarious" for both videos, uppercaseCHASE1's comments received way more "You are beautiful" and "You are so brave" remarks relating to his decision to transition. These comments were related towards his personal stance as a transgender man going through transition. Though he was detailing and poking fun at himself, the remarks were essentially targeted towards his personal gender transition, not on an ideological level. Therefore, the comments that were on the more neutral or serious side, more often than not, did not belong to transgender people. They were cisgender people who wanted to show support, but could not do so by laughing - for fear of laughing at the person behind the jokes. In this way, uppercaseCHASE1 still evokes the language of transgender gender capital.

These are in-jokes in the extreme; the viewer actually has to live every day in a binder in order to understand why his armpits are bleeding. They need to know what a binder is, first, and then how it feels, and then understand why there is blood. If the viewer is not transgender, the urge to laugh at this, though it is presented in a funny way, is taken away. The video has its intended audience and the jokes are framed in the way to only allow those people the ability to laugh since they "need to get on that, seriously" whereas the cisgender allies never have the invitation extended.

The other video, however, does not poke at their personal stories, even in a humorous way. Instead, the target is the political mentality of a counterpublic as a whole. When they say remarks like "should I put a trigger warning? Should I? I will," they are speaking to a constant fear that is evoked when entering these (counter)publics. Since feelings are put on the first level of politics, those participants can be very easy to offend. Like the similar question of preferred pronouns, trigger warnings render what is usually visual or obtained through experience into a

98 linguistic basis first. Someone seeing a trigger warning can now choose whether or not to read a post or view an image. Similarly, there are the statements of "I don't think that is the preferred terminology" and "that is problematic, that is so problematic" that are also constantly evoked. All of these statements come from the same (essentialist) position of Serano and Prosser that I have been discussing all throughout this chapter. The privileging of the internal narrative, the treatment of trauma as a centerpiece of a story of identification, and the attempt to be viewed as uniquely normal are all part of the transgender counterpublic. Moreover, these statements about trigger warnings and the problematic nature of language display the internal hierarchy within the group and the distribution of gender capital along these lines. In my next section, I will examine the "die cis scum" motto that Ftmark and his group mock in their video ("I can say 'die cis scum' if I want to") and the external reality of violence against the transgender community.

Ftmark's video works as a way to deconstruct the transgender narrative because it goes against another unspoken requirement for the transgender narrative: that of seriousness. Because the internal state is usually highly valued in transgender economy, there is a need to see things

"as they are." Because there must be an essential truth to any representation, there is no room for the style or tone of humour in many works. The focus on "just being", rather than performance, emphasises that serious tone which runs through most transgender texts (Prosser 11). As Judith

Halberstam points out, "[b]eing taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours" (QAOF 6), and which, I believe Ftmark attempts to do as well. Chaz Bono's book and subsequent documentary about his transition, when compared to the new and enlivening forms of communication that are happening on YouTube, which are able to laugh at themselves, make his

99 work look antiquated and old. While there is no need to disregard history entirely, I think most of us would recognize that it is time to move on. Seriously.

This video also works because its audience is more than just the transgender people who are contained in the video and in the comments page as well, but for anyone who has ever had experience within these types of arguments. By putting the ideological position up for critique, these YouTubers manage to spare their own feelings and the feelings of anyone else in particular.

This is not a personal narrative that they are tearing apart, and therefore, the audience is free to laugh without anyone being up for attack. This video succeeds where others fail because they refuse to make the personal political. Instead, they just make it hilarious.

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Chapter Three

Memorial and Revolution: Transgender Hate Crimes and The Simplification of Violence

In December 1998, Rita Hestor was stabbed nearly twenty times in her apartment in

Boston, Massachusetts. Although her murderer has never been found, her death marked the beginning of the candlelight vigils held annually for transgender people who have been the victims of hate crimes (Jacobs). This practice is now referred to as Transgender Day Of

Remembrance (T-DoR) and continues to this day, usually held in the third week of November.

Until this date occurs, within transgender and queer publics, the names of the murdered are collected on the T-DoR website, alongside the names of the victim from past years. In addition to the preferred names of the victims (if that name differs from what is on their birth and/or death certificate), there is usually a description of the way in which they were killed, their date of death, and any additional information, including articles and updates about the case. For

Ramazan Cetin, she had "had an accident and was seeking treatment at the local hospital. Her brother found out about the accident and went to the hospital and shot her to death in front of witnesses. Upon leaving, he calmly said to the police, 'I killed my brother as he was a transvestite. I cleaned my honour!'" (T-DoR website). Cetin was one of the 221 people who were murdered around the world, and then commemorated at the November 2011 vigil (T-DoR website). These high figures have not been uncommon in past years. The amount of violence and force, as Ramazan Cetin's case documents, is also not uncommon.

While these vigils and websites are maintained in order to preserve the memory of the dead, I will argue that they simplify the murder of these victims by identifying the cause completely on their transgender status. By using well-known cases such as Brandon Teena, I will

101 show how this public image of the transgender hate crime victim does not match the reality of the crimes that are perpetrated and the lives of those who were killed. Transgender women of colour, who are often homeless, sex workers, or involved with drugs, represent the majority of the murdered. Tapping into this archive online, I will show how the complex issues of race and class seem to converge on the already vulnerable body of the transgender person, and the complicated relationship between fear and repulsion that precipitates these crimes and heightens the aggression into murder. The public reaction to these crimes, and the failures within the legal system to maintain non-contradictory categories of gender-based hate crimes, is another void within the already damaged system that further obscures these cases. For the queer and transgender publics that use these archives and turn these victims into public figures, the attention borders dangerously close on appropriation of suffering, and co-opts these deaths into their own transgender history while ignoring the complex history of racism, prejudice, and poverty that these victims also felt in their daily lives in addition to the trauma of being transgender in a cisgender world. I will also examine the use of the phrase 'die cis scum' within online transgender counterpublics that becomes a "shadow-text" of the vigil itself (Iser 395; Hills

130). While the creation of the category "hate crime" simplifies these cases, the invocation and call to arms that die cis scum embodies obscures the history of the transgender movement as a whole, and uses reactive politics in order to justify their own violence, instead of working towards eradicating that violent opposition in the first place.

In her book, An Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich asks, "Can a sensational and traumatic event, such as a murder or violent crime, be an index of the more everyday forces of homophobic oppression?" (274). Although Cvetkovich thinks this is a more difficult question to answer with regards to Brandon Teena than it is with Matthew Shepard because of the discourse

102 of hate crimes when dealing with (trans)gender identity, I would agree with her initial statement.

However, these indices and archive-keeping that Cvetkovich endorses, and events like T-DoR produce, measure far more than homophobia (or transphobia) that is contained within the 'hate' act itself and then seen in the everyday lives of those victimized. If the link between hate crime and hate speech is pulled taut and seen as deeply connected, as Cvetkovich implies in her writing, then it is not just within the first act of 'hate' where the trauma is contained, but through the production of these online archives that seeks to simplify a death as a transgender hate crime, and not a crime of any other type. Judith Butler's analysis in Excitable Speech, where she suggests that "the state produces and reproduces hate speech" I will apply to these crimes, where declaring a murder a hate crime actually produces the trauma for the public targeted (102). Even the memorials that are set up in mourning for the victims also fall into the production of hate that is reproduced after the fact of the crime. This reproduction of hate, violence, and brutal death, as seen with the text lifted from the media arrangement of Cetin's murder, create a culture of fear within the queer and transgender publics, and further alienates those who are already oppressed.

Furthermore, this culture of fear becomes embodied within movements where "queers strike back" and proclaim that cis scum should die in the exact same violent manner that trans people are being killed. This does not let those who have been brutally killed rest, for the mourning that they are given becomes extended and publicized, and (similar to the case of Matthew Shepard) completely abstracted from the reality of the situation, as they become figureheads for a larger political movement. I use the term "hate crime" in this section (and this thesis overall) as more of a public labeling and interpretation rather than a legal term. Though I do discuss the legal nature of this claim in the section about the gay panic defense, because many jurisdictions have different laws in the US surrounding this crime, the term becomes difficult to situate. The TDoR

103 archive is my main "text" for this chapter, which does not limit itself by location or legal limits as there are cases from all over the world categorized on this website. This lack of geographical context displays another salient point about the transgender counterpublic using the transgender identity of all the victims as the common element that runs through these crimes, elevating that status above all other factors. My final intention in this chapter is to analyze the intersectionality of race, class, gender transgression/sexuality, and the law's roles in dictating the punishment in order to help further our understanding of not just 'transgender' murders, but murders of people that should not have happened regardless of identity.

Public Associations and Private Violence

Brandon Teena is one of the best known cases of a transgender person who was also the victim of a violent crime. Because of the film Boys Don't Cry and Hilary Swank's subsequent

Oscar win for her portrayal of the transgender man, most people became familiar with his life story and his untimely death. Since his murder, other films have been made about transgender crimes, and have now become memorialized and part of a cultural consciousness that can be accessed through media depiction. Ann Cvetkovich notes the power that these types of cultural archives have within smaller queer communities and within the wider mainstream publics (220).

Brandon Teena’s memorialisation was a chance for him to be addressed correctly. In spite of his well known "gender identity crisis" that he spoke about explicitly on the audio recordings when he reported his rape, his identity as a man was not acknowledged or respected (The Brandon

Teena Story). In the documentary, The Brandon Teena Story, he is referred to by many different pronouns (including the degendering and depersonalizing one of "it") and by many different names and identities. In spite of being explicit in his desire to be male, his tombstone still reads:

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Beloved Daughter, Sister, and Friend. As with many others within the T-DoR archive, Brandon's subsequent films about his life may be the only place where the victim's preferred gender pronouns and their proper names are given validity. In this context, these places correct some of the wrong that is done to these people, and counteracts the violence that is still done to them even after they are dead. However, placing anyone's name on this archive means making a loaded political choice in how to interpret their death. Their death is no longer a murder, but a murder motivated by a transgender status, making it a hate crime (Potter). But by labelling the death of Brandon Teena as a hate crime purely based on gender status, the issues of class and race are overlooked in his story.

In Judith Halberstam's book Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and The Technology of

Monsters31, she points out that in most horror cinema, the monster becomes the racial Other figure, and in the All-American landscape of the South, this racial Other figure takes the place of the lower class Red Neck (SS 140; Richard Dyer 65). The abject status that the South has within the supposedly new democratic America can be seen in the ways in which the crime of

Brandon's death is set against the backdrop of rural Nebraska. The Boys Don't Cry film hints at this divide between the classes and of the inaccessibility of work, education, and the means of survival, but the film ultimately fails as a "missed opportunity to tell a more complicated story about the violence that occurred - one that would shift from the fantasy of the romantic couple back to the broader social context within which they moved" (Cvetkovich 276). The subsequent documentary makes these subtle nuances in the film more explicit by showing the real depictions of people who were only actors before. Through the photos and audiotapes that this film's

31 Though I am not dealing with horror films explicitly here, I believe that Halberstam's book is important to consider when examining the nature of violence and how certain people are made into monsters/abject figures in order to cause harm. Skin Shows has a detailed chapter on the transgender people are made into monsters, both in horror films and in the public's imaginations.

105 archive collects, we begin to realize as the audience just "how much we don't know about what

Teena actually thought or did" (Cvetkovich 277). The way that the documentary film presents these details makes class seem like the real issue motivating these crimes where "scarcity and poverty produce fear and hatred that spills over to how gender and sexuality are lived"(278). Of course, a documentary is something quite different from a Hollywood film. Bill Nichols, in his book Representing Reality, speaks about the rhetorical tools in documentary films. He notes the

pleasure and appeal [of the films] while their own structure remains virtually invisible, their own rhetorical strategies and stylistic choices unnoticed. “A good documentary stimulates discussion about its subject, not itself.” This serves as many documentarist’s motto, but it neglects to indicate how crucial rhetoric and form are to the realization of this goal. Despite such a motto, documentary films raise a rich array of historiographic, legal, philosophic, ethical, political, and aesthetical issues. (x)

Although Boys Don't Cry is 'based on a true story' and the name of Brandon Teena has been left intact in order to confer a degree of authenticity on the narrative (along with the names of Lotter,

Nissen, and Tisdel), these representations of the 'same' people and events tell very different stories. This perceived authenticity is reinforced with the documentary The Brandon Teena Story

(and to some like Cvetkovich, this interpretation of Teena's death seems more plausible) since documentaries offer "a discourse of sobriety" according to Nichols (29). This discourse of sobriety makes the film part of politics and economics, shifting its subjectivity to objectivity.

What I have been arguing throughout this thesis is that we must step back from both of these versions: the one stated as fiction and the one that we tend to conflate with fact. By stepping back from both the film and the documentary about Brandon Teena and analyzing its structure, content, and context within a historical and societal perspective, we may not come closer to any

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'truth' but we will hopefully be able to understand the many different points of view and interpretations. Moreover, we must keep this in mind for all representations contained in all mediums - whether they are the photograph, autobiography, novel, documentary or film.

There is always going to be a difference between representation and the 'real' event, as

Stuart Hall and Edward Said have noted in their work on critical media studies. For Hall, the purpose in studying media is to document the gap between what is the "true meaning" of the event, and then what is produced after the fact and claimed as a representation of something real

(Hall 44). What I want to draw out, then, is that Boys Don't Cry and The Brandon Teena Story are both representations and interpretations of what actually happened to Brandon. The transparency of one as fiction is more obvious, but ultimately, even the documentary will skew something to the point where we, as audience members, still have no idea what Brandon really thought or did (Cvetkovich 277). The role of T-DoR acts in very much the same way for other victims of violent crimes as the documentary does for Brandon. Although there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the people on the website were killed because of their gender status, we

(as an audience to this text) ultimately know very little about the other motivations for their deaths. These vigils then run the risk of creating too large of a gap between the real event and its representation because they do not take into consideration other factors of race and class. In addition, transgender counterpublics stake far too much in representation itself as the only medium for the expression of truth.

While Said's book on representation, Orientalism, is largely a critique, he manages to avoid a lot of reactive and affective argument structures by asserting that there is no great original. His work is on the study of representations and how they come to evolve. Right from the start, he is aware that images are different than the people they claim to represent: "in this

107 way, there can be no misrepresentation" (22). Though people from the occident may conflate the two, Said knows that this is inaccurate and he is able to dismantle the two items and treat them as separate entities. He does not attack the person as offensive or even the image as offensive -- but merely as an exterior example of a cultural exchange of signs during a particular period of time

(40).

In her book, Reel Gender, Joelle Ruby Ryan discusses the imperative need for "positive images" of transgender characters within the cultural production of film (Halberstam 175). In her book, she states:

Despite shifts in representation, one quickly comes to the conclusion that the

majority of images of trans people repeatedly downplay the social, cultural and

political implications of trans people’s lives, and focus instead on micro-level

experiences and salacious personal details. For example, issues such as sexuality,

sex reassignment surgery, and non-accepting family members are overrepresented

in media depictions. However, issues such as discrimination, the binary gender

system and civil rights initiatives, which have been a focus of the transgender

movement, are rarely depicted. (20; emphasis hers)

She discusses the majority of those images that she sees as focusing on the "salacious" personal details and not the "civil rights initiatives" which she sees as at the centre of the transgender movement. With her careful classification and in her previous statements, she demonstrates that her analysis goes against Said's reading of representation. By admonishing certain directors or writers, she assumes that there is a distinct way that transgender characters need to be rendered and that there can be a "great [trans] original" (Said 21). Her entire book is underpinned by the

108 unified subjectivity that influences the formation and maintenance of transgender counterpublics.

Though she does not speak about Serano's idea of the subconscious sex or say anything about her own subjective reality, her analysis becomes a part of this discourse implicitly. She views certain films as negative representations, not only because they have been produced within a cissexist culture, but because they do not maintain fidelity to some great original that she perceives as correct. Though there is the potential for some subversive readings in her analysis of the four tropes of transgender representation in film, her argument structure is not strong enough to support it. For example, when speaking about the "ever-helpful" drag queen archetype, she names it the "Transgender Mammy" (121). While some of her examples utilize a specific performance of race along with gender (Big Momma's House, White Chicks), not all of them do

(Flawless is her main example where Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a transgender woman).

Furthermore, I am unconvinced by the name she has given this trope to be effective in what she seems to articulate in this section's thesis: in this trope, transgender women are used as martyr or mother figures and meant to give up all that they have acquired in order to help others, especially straight, white men. She subtitles this section "the maintenance of heteronormativity" since the majority of the transgender women in this section either fall in love with a woman (and then undo all their transgender status in order to be with her in a straight union) or they help out straight couples/men.

With her labelling of "The Transgender Mammy" she has set up a false dichotomy. If being straight, cisgender, and white are privileged positions and having privilege is bad ("the worst insult" as DeLine noted in Chapter One), then Ruby aligns her archetypes with the opposite: what is perceived as unprivileged and therefore good (DeLine "Author Interview" 18).

In her construction, this becomes The Transgender Mammy. This labeling becomes so

109 overwhelming that even the white transgender women are slotted in with this term, which obscures the complex racial history behind the 'mammy'. By favouring one side over the other,

Ryan loses context for her examples and she does not make a convincing argument.

In other chapters, such as when she discusses (her perceived) negative representation of transgender women as killers in horror films, she states:

If the Transgender Mammy is almost angelic, the Transgender Monster is her demonic sister. Starting with Norman Bates in Psycho through TransAmerican Killer, the psychotic murderer in “gender distress” has proved to be a box-office staple. The trope of the Transgender Monster capitalizes on the fear and terror that many people have of those who stray too far from the conventions of gender and sexuality. Slasher films render the gender nonconforming body as, in and of itself, horrific and terrifying. Like the previous mixture between animal and human that provoked fear among viewers, the gender hybridity exemplified by the trans killer is equally blood-curdling. The Transgender Monster is a durable, reel-world cultural code that may bleed into perceptions of gender-variant people in the real world. (303)

Her other reviews and analyses of tropes (including Transgender Revolutionaries and

Transgender Deceivers) align very similarly with these two prior ones. Highly affected and rich in polemics, the standard way her argument and subsequent textual analysis goes is as follows: this (image) is bad and I'm offended and therefore it needs to be changed. Sharing a similar thread with the self-realization narrative, she takes what is a private manifestation of feeling (I am offended/this is offensive), locates it into a source of trauma (the image), and spins it into something with a larger context (this needs to be changed because it is transphobia). Her argument structure derives from a position of affect and ideology, not from a stylistic or even narratological perspective. She sees the badness of the representation as reflective of the

110 cisgender/cissexist reality she believes herself to live in, and that she and others within the transgender counterpublic produce and keep producing through arguments that take on this structure and false syllogism. She does not consider the context of the image in her arguments about representation, and of course, as Said has noted, style itself.

The danger of talking about representation within transgender counterpublics, as I have demonstrated in the prior chapters, is that they strive to find the truth or an established worldview in the image. They do not allow for an image to exist merely as an image would: to be looked at, viewed, and discussed. As Judith Halberstam and Camile Paglia have noted in their feminist critiques of popular culture, a stereotype, as negative as it may be, has to come from somewhere. In Female Masculinity, Halberstam notes that, "[s]tereotypes, then, are not in and of themselves right or wrong. Rather, they represent a particularly economic way of identifying members of a particular social group in relation to a set of quickly recognizable characteristics.

[Stereotypes can be] both a term of abuse ad a useful ideological tool" (FM 180). The transgender theorist, like Joelle Ruby Ryan, who critiques images of transgender characters within popular or mainstream media, then does so from an assumed correct position, one that directly links to the arguments I have made about subjectivity in Chapter Two. They do not consider the stereotype to be an ideological tool to be useful - only appropriative and a term of abuse.

Boys Don't Cry and The Brandon Teena Story illustrate well the gap between the original and representation, and furthermore, the stereotype's function as image. Not only can we pull out the difference between the two texts, but there is also a reason the issues of class and race are left out in both films. When the thin line between representation and reality becomes blurred, the

111 audience becomes uncomfortable because a dichotomy has become deconstructed.32 When the representation is no longer a real event, or a reality that is so far abstracted from the person in the audience, then it becomes safe to view. This is another reason why Boys Don't Cry is successful in the mainstream, but the documentary is not. The movie is a love story, a human story, but ultimately a constructed narrative meant to suit a specific demographic's proclivities. Films that deal with racial influence on these crimes are harder to bear, even if they are fictionalized in some way. There could be no "human story" in the story of Rita Hestor because the "human" the audience envisions in this story is white (Dyer 80). The movie going public wants to see a representation of themselves, and yet, they do not want it to be one that is too close to them.

There needs to be enough distance - the abject south of Nebraska - and enough similarities - white bodies and faces - in order for the movie to get made, produced, and then receive critical acclaim.

What is cut from the film is equally interesting as what remains: in the house where

Brandon was gunned down, along with the young mother Lisa (Candice in the film), there was also a black, disabled man named Philip DeVine. The documentary suggests that the target of that night is Brandon, and anyone else who was killed was simply at the "wrong place and wrong time" (The Brandon Teena Story). This claim becomes an extremely complex legal issue when considering the notion of a hate crime as killing someone because of a prejudice, and then analyzing the complex array of identities in the room where Brandon was killed. Was Philip

DeVine really killed for being in "the wrong place at the wrong time" or was there more to it than that?

32 This similar feeling is what stemmed much of the criticism against Diane Arbus, which I discussed in the introduction.

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Similarly, the murder of Brandon was not in direct correlation to finding out his transgender status. There were other factors motivating that crime for John Lotter and Tom

Nissen. As soon as they realized he was biologically female, they proceeded to rape him, not kill him.33 Michelle Rigney notes that the rape was used "to resume the sex and gender binaries"

(188). This direct response to Teena's gender status is known as corrective rape, a specific type of violence usually used against a person of differing gender or sexual orientation (RAINN.org).

However, in Nebraska where the crime occurred, Brandon Teena's sexual assault was given even less consideration than his eventual murder. Moreover, the names on the list for T-DoR are there to commemorate the dead, not those who have suffered sexual or "ephemeral" trauma.34 It was a week later, after Brandon had gone to the police about the rape and the police were after the two perpetrators, that Lotter and Nissan's anger finally converged into a murderous vengeance

(The Brandon Teena Story). There is also the figure of Lana Tisdel to consider. The young woman was in a relationship with Brandon when he was killed, but had previously been associated with John Lotter. The motivations behind the murder become even more convoluted when the issue of Brandon's criminal record is taken into consideration, along with his habit of forging checks and his theft of money from Lisa/Candice (friend of Lana Tisdel). How much of this crime was really based on his transgender status becomes more problematic, not clearer, once the other information about all the people involved emerges.

These complications do not excuse Lotter and Nissen's actions, and they do not make

Brandon's death any less horrific. The fact that it was not only Brandon who died, however,

33 After the initial attack, the two kept Brandon with them and he ended up escaping. Because of this, it could be speculated that they were planning on killing him later. 34 It was Cvetkovich's goal for her book, An Archive of Feelings, to collect the "everyday life of queer trauma" which often "leaves no mark" on the physical body (30). However, her archiving process has put in place and supported certain events, such as Mich Fest, that argues against transgender women's chosen status as women. Transgender women are not considered part of this archive. This disavowal by other queer groups is another one of the reasons that TDoR was put in place.

113 deeply challenges the structure of viewing this death as a hate crime. As Camille Paglia notes

"discrimination against skin colour is not wholly comparable to the complicated resistance of virtually all societies in history to open homosexuality, which involves thorny questions of morality and psychology" (70). Even noting this precarious relationship to psychology, Paglia also states that she is "opposed to the concept of 'hate crimes'" since she is "suspicious of government inquiries into psychological motivation" (86). To Paglia, this inaccessibility of the direct psychology of a person becomes the crux of impossible analysis for hate crimes, and is the strongest reason I can see for throwing out the concept all together. The psychic interior investigation of someone's own complex motivations and prejudices, especially through some higher third party (such as government who makes these laws based on this interpreted psychology as fact) becomes something akin to thought policing. The fact that there is no memorial for Philip DeVine, who was also killed the same night as Brandon, but for different reasons, is also highly troubling. His death was cut out of the Hollywood picture; where does his justice come from? If Joelle Ruby Ryan is critiquing mainstream media for portraying transgender characters ineptly, how does someone critique the complete erasure of a disabled black man's death from film? If we follow Stuart Hall's analysis of looking at the gaps between reality and representation, the fact that Phillip is a gap in the narrative itself is far more intriguing, and despairing. Is there justice for him? Not to mention Lisa's young daughter, who was in the same house the night of the murders. There are other victims to these crimes, but instigating and insisting upon one's importance over the other becomes a convoluted game of

Oppression Olympics. Lotter and Nissen have been charged with murder, as they should be. But anything else, and the use of Brandon's image for transgender publics, is a different story all together.

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Performing Gender

Race is a large motivator in who gets 'coverage' for death and criminal acts. The victim really does matter, but not in the way we hope or expect; most people who are incarcerated and convicted for having killed someone have murdered white victims (Hart 27). Most people who are killed and then memorialized within the Transgender Day of Remembrance archive are transgender women of colour. Rita Hestor, who was the originating figure in this movement, is the perfect example of this occurrence. She is documented as the start of the archive, but Hilary

Swank's Oscar winning performance as Brandon Teena is what most people are familiar with.

From here, it is especially easy to see how the dominant race of whiteness, even if it is that whiteness of the Redneck South, is easier to portray within a popular culture.

Gender dynamics also play a role in what is represented within the mainstream public.

Because Brandon was a man, and had a very hegemonic masculinity as a James Dean-like figure, his story was easy to translate to a film-going audience (Rigney 193). In a culture that still assigns privilege to the role of men, a biological woman who wants to become a man and embody more masculine attributes makes more sense than the reverse (Bornstein 190). By performing more masculine attributes, and eschewing the more feminine ones that are not taken seriously in this culture, Brandon's masculinity can be validated because masculinity as a whole is validated and privileged. His external expression of his identity makes sense to a mainly cisgender audience (whether or not his gender identity and sexed body does). When the transition goes the other way, and the typically privileged male body decides to transition and embody feminine attributes, the transition stops making 'sense' to a male dominated culture.

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In her book, Whipping Girl, Julia Serano talks explicitly about her identity and how she went from being a straight white man to a lesbian woman, thereby losing two positions of privilege (38). She uses this loss of privilege to fuel her argument about the idea of a subconscious sex, where the dual model of sex/gender is blown apart into a three-fold one instead: sex (the body, what one is born as or what one can transform to), gender (expressions, roles, and the performance that Butler talks about), and subconscious sex (what one knows themselves to be, the gender identity, self-declared) (27).35 To elucidate this model, Brandon's subconscious sex was a man and his gender was expressed through masculine attributes.

However, since he had been born as a female, and because he had not had hormones or surgery, people automatically assumed that since his body was biologically female, his gender identity was the same. This is why the pronoun of "she" was used in the documentary, and why some people outside of transgender publics still incorrectly use the wrong pronoun with some individuals. When outside of these counterpublics, the gender economy is conventional; the act of gendering occurs through a system of semiotics where the body is privileged in the reading. If breasts are present, the sex is read as female and the pronoun she is used. If a beard is present, the sex is read as male, and the pronoun he is used ("Undiagnosing Gender" 245). Even if, as in

Brandon's case, the pronouns are stated at the beginning, the act of reading gender (versus telling a story about it) still sometimes overwrites the new system and the old, incorrect pronouns are used. Though sometimes this act of misgendering can be used as a way to manipulate and insult the subject (as we see with the police officer and the murderers in the documentary), this act of

(mis)gendering based on physical attributes is a huge part of Western culture. Our culture assumes that someone born into one physical sex will stay that way, to the point where:

35 This three-fold model can also be used to understand race performativity, where Brandon's body was read as white, but his racial performance was that of a "red neck" and was therefore seen as inferior to most movie-going publics, and could be used as a distancing mechanism from the violence that ensued.

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Distinctions and identities may be so deeply embedded in our discourse and thought about the world whether this be because of their role in our practical lives, or because they are cognitively powerful and are important aspects of the way in which we appear to make sense of our experience, that the theoretical challenge to them can be quite startling. (Hebdige 91)

The theoretical challenge of transgender identity to what Butler and Serano have referred to as the biology-is-destiny model, can occur not from outright animosity, but because, as Dick

Hebdige has documented here, of how engrained this way of thinking is in larger society.

Sometimes, for example in the rural south of Nebraska, when these frameworks are questioned and the body does not manifest the 'correct' signs of gender, the unstructured affect of surprise or challenge may manifest as violence. In this scenario, the cause of this violence becomes - as the documentary seems to project - the location of the culture, but not the culture (of transphobia) itself. The violence commenced (through the act of rape to restore the binaries) when the perpetrators found out that Brandon really was born a female; similarly, it is usually when pre- operative transgender woman either discloses her bodily status or it is found out that she is killed.

Transgender theorist Kate Bornstein notes that when most gay people are bashed, they are not being bashed explicitly for their homosexuality. These people are actually targeted for gender transgressions; they break the biology-is-destiny model by adopting a masculine behaviour over a female body or a feminine behaviour over a masculine body. This is one of the reasons why Brandon Teena has been read as a "failed lesbian"; since people see the gender deviance on the surface of the body and still uphold the biology-is-destiny model, Teena was still a 'woman' "whose death may have been avoided if she had been able to come out as a butchy

117 lesbian" (Cvetkovich 275). Another example is of Matthew Shepard, who was killed for being gay and exhibiting feminine behaviour (Charles 233). While he is not a transgender figure, he was killed for his own gender role transgression, and is still important to mention here even though the two categories are very different. Gender transgressions are the performative acts of gender and ones that do not match the sexed body. When someone identifies as transgender, they are talking about and specifically dealing with that internal identity, the self-declared, and the

"subconscious sex" as Serano has labelled it.

There are, however, a lot of problems with Julia Serano's idea of the subconscious sex and the ways in which many people within the transgender counterpublic assert their identities from their own subjective realities. I have explored these issues in my prior chapter on the autobiography, but it bears repeating again here, since I have just critiqued the fact that we assign hate crimes based on perceived internal thoughts and ideas. My arguments about hate crimes should remain consistent through to gender identity/subconscious sex as well, which means that no one's internal thoughts matter, but what matters are actions. Crimes are bad not because they are fueled by a specific type of hate, but because it is wrong to murder someone. In addition, no one can have a gender (trans or cis) without someone else to validate it. Gender must be an action and not a thought; a performance, like Butler has stated. The "subconscious" model that

Serano uses has been claimed as essentialist, and I agree.36 However, since we live in an essentialist society a lot of the time, explaining the difference between cisgender and transgender without resorting to the same essentialist categories and word choices becomes nearly impossible, and therefore committing the same type of 'thought police' infraction. I understand

36 I hinge my arguments on Butler for this very reason. She does not present gender as an essentialist model, but like I have been stating previously, though a constructionist point of view.

118 this, and take it into consideration when I analyze the hate crime of Matthew Shepard, who, in spite of not identifying as transgender, was still killed by gender motivated bias.

Matthew Shepard, like most people, was probably cisgender and agreed with the assigned gender he was given at birth. He simply liked men, and was not coded as masculine like other men around him, which highlighted him as different and made him a target. Matthew Shepard's murder is relevant to this discussion, not only for his gender transgression or the widespread media and political attention from the crime, but for the fact that it happened a week before Rita

Hestor's death. Jacobs suggests that in order to get T-DoR started, they needed the power of a murdered white man to initiate the kind of moral outrage and mourning which would then fuel a collective response to a transgender woman of colour's death, and keep it going. While the gay representation in the media has gotten a lot better since Shepard's death over ten years ago, the same cannot be said for transgender people. There are still more people of colour killed every year for their apparent transgressions, and the law becomes more divided when cases like

Hestor's and Shepard's are juxtaposed for their legal charges, and in how the defense views the surrounding situations.

(Gay) Panic In The Streets

The gay panic defence is something that was used by Shepard's killers in order to get a lighter sentence. It works by utilizing the internalized homophobia that the culture has produced and claims a temporary moment of insanity as the person commits the crime, because of the fear of being perceived as homosexual from their association with the victim (Charles 230). Although the defence usually never gets the person acquitted, it does usually lessen their sentence. While

119 outrageous to begin with, this type of defence becomes problematic when used in transgender cases.

The story of Gwen Araujo, another trauma within the queer and mainstream publics, is, so far as I can tell through my research, the only existing documentary and subsequent television film depicting a transgender woman of colour as the main focus.37 Gwen was brutally beaten by five men after they found out that she had been born male. Because there had been sexual and romantic dynamics between Gwen and these men, the gay panic defence was used at the trial, and one perpetrator is said to have declared, "I can't be gay! I can't be gay!" as he beat her

(Trained in the Ways of Men). The documentary film Trained in the Ways of Men takes a closer look at this case and analyzes the hegemonic code of masculinity that cisgender men are expected to follow and the extreme outrage and panic that can come from the violation of this code. The film does not make excuses for the behaviour, but sets out to explore how and why a defence as ludicrous as 'not wanting to be gay' manages to work in courtrooms. Even if these men have followed the masculine 'coding' that the culture dictates in terms of the socially constructed gender roles, their sexual identity becomes extremely precarious when they realize that the person, whom they believed a woman, also possesses a penis. The biology-is-destiny framework not only hurts the transgender person in terms of explaining their identity to people, but it also hurts the partners of these women and men, because there is no way to categorize their sexuality within the cisgender public. These men, unable to see past the fact that a penis equals a man, panic when they see a heterosexual relationship potentially transform into a homosexual one, and realize that they could not be gay within our homophobic culture. The extreme aggression that comes from an act like this seems to stem from an attempt to remove all evidence

37 While writing this chapter, a documentary about Angie Zapata was released, a transgender woman of colour who was murdered by her boyfriend after finding out she was transgender. Unfortunately, because it was streamed online, I could not view it because I was not in the US.

120 of the 'crime' of their perceived homosexuality and to display that they did not enjoy the act. The yelling of "I can't be gay" echoes the act of violence and it seems to declare "Look, I killed the person who 'fooled'38 me, and now I can't be gay!" The destruction of the person who violates the biology-is-destiny framework (the transgender woman) seems to be the only way for these men to still conceive of themselves within the heterosexual framework.

Judith Butler explains these heterosexual matrices in her book, Gender Trouble. If being positioned on the heterosexual matrix means that through one's union with the opposite sex, one comes to know oneself as one’s own sex, this balance becomes off-kilter when someone's gender does not match their sex (the gender transgression which Kate Bornstein speaks about when referring to homophobia). Even for someone who is cisgender, being with a transgender partner, especially if they do not know it, disrupts the foundation of their identity (Gender Trouble 87).

Men's need to be on this heterosexual matrix, but the sudden realization that they suddenly do not fit, triggers a moment of temporary insanity where murder is committed in order to set the balance again. From this point of view, the killing becomes an act of revenge or honor, as

Cretin's brother protested and made explicit through his act of violence. Although "honor" or

"revenge" may not be explicitly stated inside the North American courtroom, this crime is understood through the cultural cues and habitus that the jury shares, because the "gay panic" defense has worked in the past (Charles 223).

In her work in Excitable Speech, Butler also explains how this utterance of "I can't be gay" in the Araujo case can be posed as a valid statement through the jury bearing witness, where "the discursive occasion for a prohibition - renunciation, interdiction, confession - become precisely the new incitement to sexuality, an incitement of discourse as well" (94). The killers in

38 I saw 'fooled' because of the common transgender trope of 'The Transgender Deceiver' which Ryan discusses in depth in her chapter of the same name.

121 confession reproduce the act of violence, which ultimately has a sexual nature and therefore reproduce the sexuality that is seen as threatening. The violent shouts of "I can't be gay" respond to the sexuality that is produced within two contexts and laws: the law of the court that defines sex as linked with gender, and the law of binary sexes that upholds this notion. Inside this room,

Gwen becomes a man again because she was born with a penis, and as bodies change context within the matrix, the shock of rape is superseded by the shock of a homosexual union. The violent shouting of "I can't be gay" corresponds to this crisis moment of shifting identities and is discursively linked to the reactions of the other men who violently attacked her. The shouting of the hate speech of "I can't be gay" is then linked to the violent bludgeoning that was occurring in the same instance, uttering the same sentiment without words. The sense of overkill here, and the number of people that killed her, is another example of the reassertion of masculinity within a heterosexual matrix and code. This act of speech is the motive to the crime, whereas everything before was the act of confession and reiteration (94). The act itself needed to be reproduced in order to have context, and is probably one of the reasons why this case and their crimes carried such resonance. "I can't be gay" is the articulation of the entire masculine code of production, the entire reason the heterosexual matrix and binary sex model is in place. It is the silent motivator of behaviour made explicit through speech and action.

Because of the ambiguities of Gwen's transgender status, the hate crime can also be viewed as an act of self-defence; not against the transgender woman, but against the cissexist/homophobic society who still views these acts as dangerous. An example of this view is the case of Barry Winchell, who was killed by his fellow bunkmates for carrying on a relationship with a transgender woman, Calpernia Addams (France). Winchell was killed while in service in the US Military and during the fourth of July weekend; his case is overshadowed by

122 the masculine spectre of male life in the US, that voice inside of every single soldier who was serving of "I can't be gay." Though the victim in this case is a cisgender, straight, white man - the epitome of privilege - he was still violently murdered in order to preserve and not to "pollute" the strict message of binary sex and compulsive heterosexuality.

Is Barry Winchell on the Transgender Day of Remembrance website? Or is he the 'cis scum' that many transgender radicals invoke within their counterpublic as responsible, in some part, for these violent crimes? In a blog post dated for the November 2011 vigils, a guest post on

Asher Bauer's website Tranarchism displayed the phase 'die cis scum' stitched on a t-shirt and tattooed on an arm. Claiming that this was for the victims of T-DoR, the speaker also stated that,

"It's not ironic. It's not cute. It's a threat." The entire entry is short and to the point and is worth quoting in its entirety in order to understand the context behind the sentiment.

How many people are murdered because they are cis? How many people are denied employment, housing, health services, turned away from shelters, refused aid, and are subjected to constant ridicule and abuse because they are cis?

If you are cis, do my tattoo and jacket make you feel uncomfortable? I can only hope so.

Right now, when I see a cis person in public, I worry. I tense and hold my breath and get ready to sprint away. You frighten me. This fear is entirely justified. I’ve already been sent to the hospital for the crime of walking down the sidewalk towards my home while visibly gender variant. I fully expect to be attacked again, severely. (The less severe attacks, the screams and threats and disapproval and hatred and thrust elbows and shoves, these are the givens. These are part of the cost I know I will be forced to pay if I wish to leave my house.)

Die cis scum. It is hostile. It’s aggression, on my part. It is a whisper of personal agency. When the cissexism and transphobia of this culture crush in, overwhelming and unstoppable, these three words are how I push back.

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In this instance, all form of gender capital is taken away from any cisgender person who may also be viewing this post. The use of the "you frighten me" (emphasis mine) seems to be indicating such an audience; if the poster is not sending out this message directly to cis people, they are imagining a public to which they are speaking. In this scenario and using this language, they are imagining an enemy.

The T-DoR events are deeply concerned with memory, mourning, and to a certain degree, immortality. The process of archive keeping and inclusion of death in the transgender public's imagination links it with religion, and from this, with Benedict Anderson's notion of nationalism and imagined communities. The ways in which transgender publics and counterpublics are set up become very similar to the ways in which Anderson outlines how print capitalism and national consciousness were shaped. He states that,

[no] more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than the cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows what lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times. [...] Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings. (9).

Replace 'national' with 'transgender' or even 'gender capital' within this quotation (and I would argue, his text as a whole) and the sentiments expressed are virtually identical to the ways in which these two publics and counterpublics function. The linkage between nation/land and

(trans)gender body has already been taken up by Jay Prosser when he spoke about the appeal of

'coming home' in autobiography. Judith Halberstam has also spoken of the quality of

"unbelonging and nonidentity" within these narratives (FM 170). Rose Tremain's novel Sacred

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Country evokes this language of nationalism in its title, and ties it expressly to religion. The self- realization narrative structure imparts a religious tone to the personal life story which now has a personal meaning, and the roots of nationalism can be seen in approaching the body as a 'sacred country' where all transgender people know and check their passports by sharing their stories.

Anderson outlines in his book the political and ideological power that these structures of thought have over the participants. Indeed, in his introduction he notes the implicit assumption that is made with nationality and gender stating that, "in the modern world, everyone can, should, will

'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender" (14). The creation of these memorials for T-DoR is something that can only be conceived of and compared to that of religion or nationalism. For

Anderson, there is no other group of people that is this concerned with the immortality of their dead, even if the dead are 'unknown.'

The phrase 'die cis scum' and its collective radical transgender audience, on the other hand, mark a distinct divide within the transgender counterpublic. It is, to use Wolfgang Iser's term, a "shadow-text" of the T-DoR memorial where the reader fills in what is missing (303).

There is no room for mourning or melancholy here, only action and revolution. It is with this invocation and call to arms that, for once, the type of narrative structure that transgender economy is usually concerned with shifts away from a psychoanalytic, internal, and affective model towards an active and violent model, evoking Franz Fanon's Wretched of The Earth rhetoric where

[The oppressed] is made to feel inferior, but by no means convinced of his inferiority. He patiently waits for the colonist to let his guard down and then jumps on him.... It is not that he is anxious or terrorized, but he is always ready to

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change his role for that of the hunter. The colonized subject is a persecuted man who is forever dreaming of becoming the persecutor (16).

This call to arms, like the many other posts and YouTube videos about this type of aggression and political force using the slogan of 'die cis scum', would be something of worth except for the ways in which they are arguing. In a similar vein to Ryan's 'this image is bad and I'm offended and it needs to be changed' argumentative structure, the reasoning behind die cis scum is equally intellectually weak. In this instance, the structure is 'this death is a hate crime and no one is helping, so I will do something'. Though political and social anger can be seen as justified and even righteous (since more often than not, no one really is doing anything to solve these crimes), the ultimate solution, fighting violence with violence, becomes meaningless and indistinguishable from its source. In addition, when the slogan that is written on skin - die cis scum - is taken into account, its historical and ideological positioning is no better than the hate crimes that were perpetuated in the first place.

In the same way that autobiographies are constructed in order to make sense of a personal trauma, laws and governments use punishment to reassert order and make sense of seemingly random crimes. The label of hate crime, in addition to the gay panic defense, tells a particular story around a violent event. When die cis scum is then evoked to counteract this first narrative attempt, this expression does not change the actual system itself. When seeking motivation for an apparent random act of violence, these constructed categories of identities are pitted against one another. Instead of focusing on the trauma of the murder or the location of the violent culture, the focus is shifted back onto the idea that it was the identity category in the first place that mattered. The creation of the category - cis or trans or anything else similar - is another representation. Countering one representation with the other, (you're killing transgender people,

126 so I will kill cisgender people), is still believing that there is some great original that needs to be represented with fidelity. This argumentative structure fights the hate speech of 'tranny' with the hate speech of 'die cis scum.'

The use of the word 'scum' here is another damning aspect of this tactic, since it can be linked back to radical feminists like Valerie Solanas in her 1967 SCUM Manifesto. Commonly referred to as 'the society for cutting up men' (though Solanas never technically used the terminology), the use of the word scum within radical political contexts dates all the way back to this "not cute" and "not ironic" manifesto about the ways in which men take over women's lives, and women's way of retreating. Often used and cited by second wave feminists who advocate separatism, what is actually ironic about the shared word of scum in both of these cases is that radical second wave feminist politics distinctly go against many transgender politics. Lesbian separatists believe in the biology-is-destiny framework even more than the mainstream public, since they banned biological men from ever entering their "safe" spaces (Cvetkovich 85). Second wave feminists claimed that transgender women still maintained a former "manly" presence within their spaces or that transgender women were pseudo figures who were either delusional or dangerous. Transgender men, if they ever entered radical feminists' consciousness as actually existing, were traitors for joining the other side (Serano 141). The radical second wave politics and the lesbian separatist movement formed a counterpublic that wished to be left to themselves.

This post about die cis scum suggests that part of the transgender counterpublic wishes to separate themselves through more violent means. Though these two cases are opposed to the other's ideals, especially with relation to gender, they are arguing for it the same way and using the same word. Scum in these cases, depending on whatever standpoint one is arguing from, could be anyone and everyone. It begins to lose all meaning for everyone involved. These

127 representations of identities are still concerned with fidelity to some original, when they should be looking at their style, as Said would suggest. If they were to examine the structure and presentation of both these ideas, they would realize that the style is and always has been violence. The violence is the problem in both of these narratives, and it can only be tackled and deconstructed when calls to arms are not the narrative or lexical way in which these stories are told.

In Hannah Arendt's book, On Violence, she provides an apt reading of the reactive and aggressive revolutionary politics that are inside Franz Fanon's book The Wretched of the Earth, and that, I believe, can be attributed to this tense situation as well. She writes of those

who [has] ever doubted that the violated dream of violence, that the oppressed dream at least once a day of setting' themselves up in the oppressor's place, that the poor dream of the possessions of the rich, the persecuted of exchanging 'the role of the quarry for that of the hunter,' and the last of the kingdom where 'the last shall be first and the first last'? The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true. The rarity of slave rebellions and uprising among the disinherited and downtrodden is notorious; on the few occasions when they occurred it was precisely 'mad fury' that turned dreams into nightmares for everybody. (21)

Here, Arendt validates the dream of the oppressed, but acknowledges that it can only be a dream.

She renders what both manifestos see as some ultimate goal set in reality. All this time, they are really telling stories to make themselves feel better, because enacting that reality of violence they wish for is not only impossible, but really "nightmares for everybody." As Prosser notes, echoing

Arendt's sentiments, "[w]hen the loss cannot be acknowledged and articulated via mourning" as in the case of T-DoR, "the subject imagines literally 'swallowing' the object, a melancholic

128 fantasy of literalization" where the violence longs to become real and the enemies realized, but only within the safety of fantasy (37). Public acts of mourning, such as T-DoR and other forms of memorialization, are accepted as the correct thing to do in the face of death. Not only are they engaged with the discourse of nationalism, but also of nostalgia, where "memory [is] annealed in imagination, [and] nostalgia recollects the fragments of the past and welds them into an imaginary whole" (Prosser 84). Just because these two expressions of the trauma which comes from a death do not necessarily lead to reactive politics of revolution, they do not necessarily reflect a fidelity to some original nor are useful in the process of political engagement.39

When considering the case of Barry Winchell, and the men who murdered Araujo, it becomes clear that cis scum does not exist as a thing-in-itself, as Kant or Plato would figure.

Being cisgender is really more like what Hegel, and later Judith Butler, would argue for as existing within a dialectical relationship between all factors. There is a complex web of matrices that influence and motivate people's actions, even if they are terrible actions. Is Winchell, who does not fall into the easy victim category, to be excluded from the public mourning ritual of T-

DoR because he holds the status of being a white cisgender male in the military? If his name is not recognized on their website, then, why not? Wasn't his murder equally motivated by hate, and, specifically, transgender hate? Through his death, Paglia's argument about the precarious nature of identity politics and a hierarchy of oppression becomes elucidated. Just because someone identifies as straight does not mean that they have never been gay-bashed or policed for their gender representation. Though this soldier could occupy no space within feminist and queer discourses, he was still killed for a violation of an apparent boundary and for being perceived as

39 It could be asked: what is the appropriate response? This is much harder to answer. Ideally, the public would be able to grasp the understanding that no matter what is done as a response will always be some type of construction, some type of story, but to not let that fact alone (that authenticity does not exist) corrupt the humanity of the grieving itself. There is no one right answer to all of this, but that lack of clarity does not need to be maddening.

129 gay. Is there mourning for him, is there room to mourn him, or should we really be producing these 'hate' crimes with which we can mourn? In identity politics, are all deaths equal?

Butler has done a lot of work to point out how precarious these heterosexual matrices are on which Western culture is built, and I would say that as demonstrated through the evidence of these hate crimes, these matrices becomes quite apparent. The majority of people who are killed for being transgender are women, and this has to do with the imperative of keeping the heterosexual matrix intact, and to express the virulent misogyny in the culture, where anything feminine is defined as inadequate, inferior, and something worthy of annihilation, especially when placed over a 'male' body (Serano 147). Feminine presentation degrades the facade of masculinity, and therefore, must be punished to hold up these rigid set binary sexes. These acts also challenge the spectre of masculinity when cisgender men engage in sexual relationships with these women, and those identities become known. The gay panic defense, the looming utterance of "I can't be gay," helps no one, cis or trans alike, in this situation on either side of that matrix.

Furthermore, the ideology behind the hate crime label is diametrically opposed to the idea of the gay panic defense. If someone can kill someone because they were worried about being gay, then they cannot be punished for that thinking and being motivated through their own prejudices against homosexuality. If I argue for the abolishing of one faulty legal term, such as the gay panic defense, because of its useless and harmful capabilities, then I must also argue for the abolition of the legal category opposite it, the hate crime, because it pursues the same method of thought policing. In this chapter so far, I have been arguing for that, but what I have seen in my research is that those opposed to the gay panic defense do not then critique the hate crime.

They use the hate crime category as the solution to the gay panic defense, not as the same type of

130 issue on opposite sides of the spectrum (TDoR website; "Support CeCe"). People who view the men using the gay panic defense against Gwen as being in the wrong, then want to apply the hate crime label to their crimes. Going too far in either direction, as we have seen through the rigid policing of gender and sexuality binaries, becomes problematic. Both of these legal paradigms are wrong in their seeking out internal motivations for the crimes. As this chapter moves on, the intersectionalities of identities become even more complex when race and history are entered in and the why behind any crime becomes something not easily decipherable.

Desire, Repulsion, Fear, and Overkill

Gwen Araujo was bludgeoned by five men and Rita Hestor was stabbed nearly twenty times. In a more recent case, Shelly Hillard was identified by the cherry tattoos on her shoulder because only her burned torso was found (Villarreal). This level of overkill can be explained through the desire and fear produced through transgression of the strict binaries of gender and sexuality, but there is also another contextual element that needs to be considered: race. Similar to how violence and the pleas of "I can't be gay" seem to echo the dominant performance of masculinity, the same can be said for the hate crimes that are influenced by race and echo the racist phobias of a society. This society is also a white one, where those who have the dominant skin colour obtain a certain amount of privilege (Peggy McIntosh refers to this as "the invisible knapsack"). The previous films and cases discussed represented those who held racial privilege even if they did not have a privileged gender/sexuality. While Brandon Teena and Matthew

Shepard transgressed gender boundaries, they were still ultimately 'safe' enough to be viewed and discussed. Instead we were made to instigate and question gender roles (dominant ones of masculinity) on dominant body types. Although transgender women are becoming more visible

131 within mainstream cinema (TransAmerica, for example) they are almost always white women who are represented and discussed (Ryan 160). While we question what makes a body male and what makes a body female and actively work to deconstruct those notions and categories of what it really means to be men and women, the same type of work is not done for race in the mainstream. Or if it is done, it is almost never linked with the transgender body as well.

Non-white black bodies and transgender bodies (especially ones that do not pass into dominant gender and race ideals) are bodies that are problems. Although race and gender are socially constructed and performative categories, they still carry social realities. Kate Bornstein has stated that having a gender - one that is recognized - is a privilege (72). Having a passing, white body, one that is not questioned, is also a privilege. The state of being a transgender person of colour is one of a precarious and definite under-privilege.

W. E. B. Du Bois discusses the idea of double-consciousness that affects most people of colour, where instead of viewing the world through one's own eyes, one becomes accustomed to a double-consciousness where "he only sees himself through the revelation of the other world"

(11). When being visibly transgender and with a gender that is not privileged (such as female, non-binary, non-passing) is also added, then this double-consciousness becomes tripled or quadrupled. This consciousness becomes an intense practice of monitoring absolutely everything that one does, because now there are two dominant frameworks to keep in mind. Even when passing as the desired gender or race, there are still moments of interpellation that have happened from before and that leave a lasting impression on the person. Frantz Fanon has talked about his defining moments of interpellation in his book Black Skin, White Masks, with the utterance of the word "nigger." In this instance, the word "does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the world - definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my

132 body and the world" (111). The word itself becomes a way in which he has formed his own consciousness, as Du Bois talks about, where he comes to know himself as distinctly - and bodily

- different from those around him. His consciousness, before this utterance, was not any different. But because of his bodily difference and distinction and the calling out of that difference, he becomes a changed man. He no longer becomes like the white people around him, because they have never had this sense of being "called" for their race. The calling out of bodily difference in words such as "tranny" or "faggot" carry the same resonance for queer people, and forms their own sense of altered consciousness. When it is a transgender woman of colour who in one instance is called "nigger" and then another called "tranny" this interpellation becomes overwhelming. Interpellation can be seen as hate speech, and certainly, in this instance from

Fanon, it fits within the definition that Butler gives where we are the ones that "produce hate speech" (102). Hate speech is directly linked to the acts of violence that are said to proceed from it; yelling the n-word or the t-word directly links to the next step of following through with that violence. This was the case for CeCe Macdonald who had "tranny," "chicks with dicks" shouted at her, in addition to "nigger" and "go back to Africa" before she had a bottle broken over her face ("Support CeCe"). These gratuitous acts of speech lead to these gratuitous acts of violence, which converges into the over-killing of the raced, transgender body.

These acts of violence also become symbolic within the culturally dominant narratives of the person who is oppressed. The recent string of burned victims has been linked to the phrase

"flaming faggots" and the biblical verse which admonishes their existence (Villarreal). In addition, the torture and sometimes castration of the transgender woman of colour seems to link back to a complex racial history that still haunts and permeates the US, especially since a lot of

133 these women are sex workers. Desire and fear, as accessed through the heterosexual matrix from before, take on a new meaning. As Bhabha notes,

Fetishism as the disavowal of difference is that repetitious scene around the problem of castration.[...] Fetishism is always a 'play' or vacillation between the archaic affirmation of wholeness/similarity [...] and the anxiety associated with lack or difference. Within discourse the fetish represents the simultaneous play between metaphor as substitution (masking absence and difference) and metonymy (which contiguous registers the perceived lack). The fetish or stereotype gives access to an 'identity' which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it. (74-75)

I want to focus on the anxiety that this passage discusses and on how the disavowal of difference suddenly changes context when a (white) man realizes that the (black) woman he is with also possesses a penis just like he does. When the desire that is accessed by being with a woman of colour is shattered by the sudden presence of the penis, the precarious balance of this play of difference and recognition is torn apart. The castration anxiety is put forward by a transgender woman who is not castrated and who can maybe castrate him. When this woman is a transgender woman of colour, and she is pre-operative, the common cultural myths about black (biological) males are accessed and pushed to the extreme. The virility of the black man and his image as a rapist is present and then torn apart when her surface performance is of a woman and not that

(biological) man. In order to set the balance and correct the stereotype, violence ensues. During the lynch mobs, black men were usually castrated because of this potential sexual encounter; the overkill that happens in these women of colours’ deaths is another representation of the mob that follows and stalks and tears apart. This overkill, as Joelle Ryan Ruby has pointed out in her work, comes from the deep underlying urge, something regarded by Bhabha as "primal fantasy" and played out on the body of the transgender victim (Ryan 23; Bhaba 75). There are rules to the

'play' of gender and of race, and the death results in the ultimate betrayal of those rules.

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Sherene Razack points out that "racial violence cannot be understood unless queered - that is to say, in the words of Frantz Fanon, 'the negrophobic man is a repressed homosexual.'

The problem is that white men are neither white nor men and white heterosexual manhood is constituted by perpetually disavowing homoerotic desire for black men" (357). During lynch mobs, the obsession with the black man's genitals was a way to enact aggression towards the homosexual subjectivity of the self and reject it. When the desire that is accessed through having a woman of colour as a prostitute is disrupted through the transgender status being found out, the racial tension must be queered in order to be understood. These women were killed when their transgender status was found out, there is no doubt about that, but the sense of repulsion from their bodies and the overkill that their deaths produced, cannot be seen as unlinked to this racial history of the lynch mob, the black man as rapist, and the fetishism that Bhabha, Ryan, and

Razack points out.

The transition process itself also becomes wrought with battles that converge on the raced, transgender body, especially when entering the medical field. The need to produce a

"productive body" from the gender surgery leads to a lot of rejection from either the therapists who are supposed to be granting letters or from the surgeons themselves (Irving 49). This does not only affect a racialzed body, but one that is disabled, unemployed, or mentally unstable (such as depression, bipolar disorder, or eating disorders). These "problem bodies" are often not granted rights to surgery because they would not fit into the "success story" so often represented within the typical transgender narratives (Halberstam QAOF 15; Irving 49). The fact that surgery and hormones are needed in order to pass for most transgender people further complicates the notion of gender passing and puts their safety at risk, especially if class and job security are factored in. These procedures cost money and the access to money and good employment has

135 already been notoriously hard for people of colour in the US (Halberstam QAOF 125). When one also factors in being transgender, possibly without any use of hormones, surgery, or official form changes, another barrier is put in place for obtaining money for those surgeries which would help one in order to pass. Both gender and racial prejudices form a never-ending cycle of denial of resources. This is why most transgender people of colour take up sex work, or drug trade, or become homeless. Gender and racial prejudice is often why most of these cases, if it does escalate into a murder, are never solved. When speaking about the death of Rita Hestor, a reporter noted that, ""If [Hestor] had been the son or daughter of a wealthy family of Boston [the murder] would have been solved. It’s not just a transgender issue; it’s a class issue as well.

Transgender people are presumed to be of the lowest class of society, and they are relegated to that,[...][Boston Police] publicized a hotline, but I seriously doubt that any shoe leather was worn out pursuing any clues." (Jacobs).

If one is to understand the complex array of factors that go into gender transition and transgender identity, then one should hopefully be able to allow the same complexities in everyday life. This includes the crimes which happen, and the never-ending reasons why some go unsolved. Narrating the gap between the event and our position to it can be comforting as an audience member, but it is through the act of narration itself where we begin to understand our own limitations and blanks. Our lack of the 'truth' does not make us wrong: it merely makes us spectators, who must, in time, learn to be active audiences and to also show respect.

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Producing Hate, Producing Violence

Six years after the very public Matthew Shepard case, the ABC news show 20/20 covered the story again, but this time, instead of reiterating the same claim of hate crime fueled by homophobia, they offered a new interpretation, one where the "true motivations for the 1998 beating of Shepard with the butt end of .357 magnum" was "methamphetamine abuse and robbery" (Charles 226). One of the most notorious hate crimes of the last ten years, through this new story and testimony from the killers, no longer remained a hate crime. The ways in which this story changed its meaning and the psychological insecurity of both the hate crime label, and the gay panic defense used by the killers, shows the problematic ways that T-DoR also situates itself within the larger rhetorical arena of queer counterpublics and mainstream publics. T-DoR can sometimes be irresponsible because of this extreme difference of lived realities. They commemorate the dead, giving them the respect that they deserve and were not granted in their own funeral proceedings, but claiming that these deaths are solely motivated by their status as transgender deeply obscures the other issues at hand. Being transgender in a cisgender culture can be a traumatic experience and these people coming together and mourning can be a beneficial occurrence for catharsis and community building. But as Alyssa Caparas points out in her article, she is skipping T-DoR this year. For her, it "has come to represent: a queer ‘holiday’ for embracing the narrative of fear; fear of violence, fear of death, self-stigmatization [which also embodies] the co-opting of POC trans women of a very-particular-background’s experiences as those of the entire trans community, regardless of race, class, or whatever" (T-DoR). This is especially important to consider when, as she notes, the majority of people at T-DoR are "white, middle, & upper middle class transpeople [who] claim the narratives of transwomen [sic] of

137 color & sex workers experiences as their own." For Caparas, either side of the debate - private fantasy of violence embodied in die cis scum, or the nostalgia and obscured sense of mourning at

T-DoR - do not make any sense anymore when considering the actual empirical data on the victims, and the possibility that, as with Brandon Teena, it is hard to know what he actually thought or did (Cvetkovich 277).

Similar to Caparas' stance in her article, the 20/20 story "is in many ways less an erasure than a devaluation, a version of events that wants to downplay not so much the existence of same-sex relations as the homophobia that surrounds them" and I would like to situate my arguments within this discourse of devaluation and not of erasure (emphasis mine; Charles 229).

I do not doubt that homophobia or transphobia exists; I merely believe it exists within a more complex social narrative than some people within queer counterpublics are willing to admit and that violence is not easily captured through the use of labels such as 'hate' crime. I believe, as

Alyssa Capraras declares, that such labels instead produce a narrative of fear that does not even apply to many people who attend the vigils. For those that this narrative does apply to, it is then further exploited and co-opted by those who seek to reproduce the violence on the website.

Furthermore, the movies, documentaries, and other representations that are seen as producing lived realities, but ignore the history of racial violence that is irrevocably connected with the murder, produce, again and again, the hate, fear, and horror story that went into the original act.

When we consider the role of the audience in these crimes, and the actions on T-DoR to memorialize these women of colours’ deaths as something that is specifically located within the queer context, we need to look at the history of the lynch mob again. In lynch mobs, "women are the bearers of the white phallus's meaning [...] women express white male power [...] Black women must confirm with their bodies that it is white women who are the coin of the realm

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(Razack 358). Although white women did not participate in these crimes, they did watch. While they were not necessarily acting out their own fetishism and castration anxiety, desire or fear, as the white men can be analyzed as doing, they acted as audience and they reproduced the power dynamic by bearing witness to it. This is the same argument that Butler makes for hate crimes, where the state, by defining what is hate speech, effectively produces it as such (102). In this sense, the law, the court, and those bearing witness to these crimes that are re-enacted in a specific space, are the audience and they give it meaning and power. The white women who watched lynch mobs become the state that produces hate speech, and they are the people who scrawl die cis scum on an arm or produce the violent crimes in graphic detail like Cetin's death by her brother for the use of memorization and political struggle on the T-DoR website. The motivations and intents behind all of these instances are different, I am sure, but the motivations behind each one of these actions are invisible, and that has been the major point here. We cannot speculate about why someone has done something and insist upon it as truth: all acts of truth are merely acts of interpretation, and representation has never been the same thing as reality.

Through these cases, texts, and arguments, I hope that I have been able to show how these instances of 'hate' crimes can be viewed through many different lenses to produce many different realities. My intention was not to delegitimize the T-DoR website, because it does do a lot of good work. But I did want to poke holes in the absolutism that can surface when one side ventures too far down either end of the binary.

In her article re-analyzing the use and function of the label 'hate crime,' Kimberly Potter says that "the rediscovery of hate crime is probably best explained not by an epidemic of prejudice-motivated violence but by our society's far greater sensitivity to prejudice" (14; emphasis mine). This analysis sounds a bit harsh, and I would suggest that it is our new

139 construction and knowledge of what it means to be prejudiced that makes it seem as though it is getting worse.40 Instead, the fact that we are noticing there is a problem is a tribute to how far we have actually come in human and equal rights. While Shepard's death was used by gay activists to promote recognition, that struggle was kept alive until it was not needed anymore. The labeling of hate crimes supports identity politics, and those oppressed groups seek identity affirmation through these acts and memorials. This is where T-DoR comes from; by forming a counterpublic, they have created this website and tradition (even though traumatic), as a way to articulate their identity to others. Maybe in a few years, it will no longer be needed.

40 Eva Illouz notices this same sentiment in the self-realization narrative where "the therapeutic narrative emerges from the fact that the individual has become embedded in the culture saturated with the notion of rights" (55). The fact that we are telling the self-realization narrative shows how far we have really come.

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Conclusion

The Rhizome

In A Thousand Plateaus, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari define a philosophical concept called the rhizome. Based on the botanical root structure, the rhizome is a way to comprehend multiplicities, rather than uniformity of thought and construction. It is "an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton" (21). The rhizome spreads itself out horizontally, allowing the audience the ability to create, and does not divide itself hierarchically. It removes the focus on the cultural field of production made famous by Pierre Bourdieu, and it also moves away from dichotomies of good and bad. There are very few either/or situations within a rhizomatic structure; there is merely another option, no better or worse than the last, since "any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be" (7). The rhizome can also "be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines" (9).

Over the past few chapters, I have outlined the precarious nature of gender capital and its function within the transgender publics and counterpublics. I would like to suggest now that instead of thinking of these overlapping and interlocking areas of production as (counter)publics, we consider them as part of a rhizome. The dichotomy and implicit "subordinate status" of a counterpublic reinforces the binary and oppositional nature that I have critiqued heavily in the last chapter. I have used the term counterpublic as much as I have pointed out the difficulties of it as a term. A rhizome, however, removes the hierarchy of one public over another. By collapsing borders and ideologies, the rhizome has the capacity to produce very good art.

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I believe that the transgender community is already heading towards this solution through the vast production of online and independent resources made possible through the rhizomatic structure of the internet itself. Amy Spencer, in her book DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture, noticed this same networked structure with the independent zine publishing. She remarks, "When computers replaced photocopiers as favoured production tools, these methods were carried over, proving that one medium rarely 'replaces' another, but instead, improves upon the former" (138).

The internet, then, has made these interconnected networks more visible and easier to access in the West. Moreover, it has created what media theorist Henry Jenkins dubs a "participatory culture," one where the audience can access and produce content for themselves (CC 3). The rhizome structure which new social media platforms invigorate reaches out to anyone and encourages them to be the author of their own stories. For transgender people, who are trained to be "arch storytellers," this connection is exceptionally important, and has already begun to transform the stories that have been produced (Prosser 173).

There is no inherent truth in representation. We cannot, in the platonic sense of the term, search for one true universal or things-in-themselves (Hall 44). But I think that we can look for the network that we can connect to, and I believe that Deleuze and Guattari have offered us a better way to look at our future. Since I began writing the first draft of this thesis, two transgender figures (Elliott DeLine and Skylar Kergil) and the transgender publishing house

Topside Press, which I have discussed, have been able to connect themselves into that rhizome and move beyond the one solid narrative into something more profound and unilateral.

Skylar Kergil, the Tumblr and YouTube personality skylarkeleven mentioned in Chapter

Two, began a new photography project at the beginning of 2013 for his undergraduate degree.

Entitled "Re-Humanizing The Trans-Masculine Community," the project is a collaborative effort

142 with the goal of recreating the spectrum of masculine identities and expressions within the transgender community. Kergil sent out several disposable cameras to some of his forty participants around the globe and also asked them to keep diary entries in addition to taking self- portraits. What Kergil manages to do with his project is to not assume that what the camera captures is real. Though he engages with two typical mediums that promote authenticity and realism (journals and photography), by displaying it as an art project (rather than as an authentic autobiography or even as a work of cultural theory, as Judith Halberstam and Jay Prosser have done in the past), he evokes the rhetoric of representation. Instead of limiting this display to himself as subject or as photographer, he is turning his camera over to others. Though he is not the photographer in many of the photos, he is the one arranging them. Kergil's presentation highlights what Magritte and Arbus declare with their titles and French scripts: this is not a transgender person, but one image among many. By framing and arranging these photographs,

Kergil subtly draws attention to artificial nature of the subjects' authenticity without denigrating it. By arranging many subjects and containing them together in one gallery display (and then one self-published book afterwards) he enacts that rhizome structure. His book is self-published, but he is highlighting himself as editor, as publisher, and as producer. He is neither producing himself with the book, nor is he really producing others in the same way that other transgender theorists have argued. Instead he is treating it all as art and as art that deserves to be viewed, interpreted, and produced.

This is why Kergil's project is innovative, even though many other people have dabbled with the art of self-portrait and journal writing before. The recent generation of transgender

YouTube users also present their autobiographies in a different format than the transgender writers who came before them, using the medium of film and serialization. They do not present a

143 solid, cohesive story right from the beginning, but one that is ever-changing and growing. This evolution of photography can be seen in the popular YouTube video by uppercaseCHASE1, where he took a photo of himself everyday on t (testosterone) for two years, created a video to document the change, and then stopped taking the hormone after. Like his video which mocked the stylistics of the transgender autobiography ("Sh*t Trans* Guys Say"), his adherence to the typical stage of testosterone usage among trans men, and then discontinuing its usage, displays the constructed nature of the narrative itself. His need to not pursue the drug afterwards breaks down the narrative and allows for a different ending. Not only does he deconstruct what it means to be transgender (that one will always be on medication/hormones), but he also deconstructs certain notions of masculinity (that testosterone and its physical effects are imperative to gender distinction). These men are able to make representations of themselves as transgender subjects, while also being highly aware of their work as representations. They no longer seek the things- in-themselves, but create alternatives and deconstructions. Moreover, it is through sites such as

YouTube and Tumblr that people connect - and their stories connect, too.

On May 1st 2013, author Elliott DeLine released his second self-published work, a prequel to the novel Refuse, entitled I Know Very Well How I Got My Name. With DeLine's characteristic refusal-as-style technique, he is able to draw attention to more tropes of the genre he is working with. In this case, he examines the act of second naming as a transgender person and the epiphany that comes from the discovery of a transgender identity. He knowingly mocks the nostalgia that autobiographies and narratives about childhood are known for and he does so without giving up his character's transgender status. Though he is still a self-published author, he does not limit himself to one audience. He is working on a book tour, collaborating with the

144 producers at Original Plumbing, and engaging with new media outlets (such as Kirkus) in order to have his audience expand.

During the 25th Annual Lambda Literary Awards (Lammys) this June 2013, The

Collection, a collection of short stories about transgender characters, was the first winner of transgender fiction to be accepted by transgender people. While I do not want to reinforce too much of the author/text connection, I do believe that this was another milestone for transgender representation. The Collection is important precisely because it is a collection; inside the pages, many voices speak all at once. Some stories were clear contributors to the prize, and others did not leave much of an impression on people at all (reviews have been done by queer publications, such as Lambda Society and Jack Radish at PrettyQueer.com, and also by mainstream resources such as Publisher's Weekly). When people began to review The Collection for their blogs and for their friends, they were not necessarily saying it was good or bad based on a lack of transgender representation. The judgements of the book as good or bad, in these reviews and in the case of the Lammy Award, were based on aesthetic technique or cultural weight. By transcending the system of gender capital that most transgender texts fall under, The Collection has the ability to obtain a wider audience and become criticized for its form and not (lack of) content. The book becomes art, and not pedagogy. As Deleuze and Guattari comment, "To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied" (25). Given the success of these examples, I can only hope that the rest of transgender production will also become equally inspired and multiplied.

In closing, I would like to conjure back up the images from the beginning of this thesis. I want to think about The Treachery of Images, A Transvestite in a Dress, and I also want to add

145 one of Skylar Kergil's photographs (Saratoga Springs, NY) to this next line of images (see in

Appendix B, Figure Five). When these photographs or paintings are viewed in a succession, we are able to see the ways in which history has altered certain perceptions and narrated the gap between representation and reality, authenticity and artificiality, in many different ways. This is not a pipe, this is not a woman, this is not a transgender person, and finally, this is not a thesis.

Everything I have written is one representation of the many avenues of thought that are out there.

People are allowed to disagree and take another pathway. With the power of the rhizome, the best we can hope for is not to mourn our fragmentation, but rejoice that we have access to as much as we do. Also, we must keep telling stories, because they are one of the only ways in which the invisible becomes visible, and we can add it to the network.

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Appendix A

Definitions

Transgender: someone who feels they were born in the wrong sex and sometimes seeks to change it. In addition, this word is often used as an umbrella term.

Transsexual: someone who has gone through the physical transformation from one sex to the other. This term originated in medical discourse. It is sometimes outdated and not used as much as transgender.

Trans*: this term is used to solve the dichotomy issue between transgender and transsexual.

Since sometimes people want surgery but cannot afford it, this term does not "rank" one higher than the other. It is more inclusive.

Transvestite: somewhat outdated term. It typically means someone who dresses in cross gendered clothing, but does not identify with the other gender. Sometimes this term is conflated with transgender and people will use transvestite when they mean something else or as a derogatory word.

Cisgender: someone who feels they were born in the right sex and does not seek to change it.

Cissexist: someone who prefers people who are cisgender over those who are transgender, whether actively or passively. Using hate speech is a deliberate example at being cissexist, while the set up of how washrooms are gender segregated can be said displays the ways in which society is implicitly cissexist.

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Binary Sex Model: the idea that there are only two sexes and two genders that correspond to the body.

Sexual Reassignment Surgery (SRS): the proper term for the "sex change" operation. This can come in many forms and is not the same for everyone. Nor is only one surgery preferred over the other. Sometimes it can be divided into "top" and "bottom" surgeries.

Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT): the process of switching from the hormones that the body produces to going on the cross gender's hormone. It could also be the form of a blocker or suppressor to either delay puberty or to achieve a more androgynous look.

Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR): the memorial day when transgender people who have been murdered in hate crimes are remembered.

Genderqueer: someone who does not identify with the binary sex model and works to defy it with their own gender expression and/or identity.

Genderfluid: someone's whose gender does not stay in one particular state, but is fluid, and moves around. There may not be only two genders they move between, but more.

Genderless/Neutrosis: someone who feels as if they have no gender whatsoever. They make seek surgery or other practices to remove any gender and sex markers from their body and use pronouns outside the binary.

Gender: the presentation that you give and what people read you as.

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Gender Identity: how you identify in your mind and what you feel your gender is. This is determined by the individual.

Gender Identity Disorder (GID): the medical diagnosis that discusses transgender identity. It is often used in order to obtain surgery or medical care.

Gender Dysphoria: the general unpleasant feeling that a trans* person may have in their body because of gender mismatch between the mind and their physical form.

Intersex: someone who is born with ambiguous genitalia and sometimes has forced surgery to have them conform along the binary model.

Preferred Pronouns: a set of pronouns that someone prefers to use because it fits their gender identity. There is a chart in the appendix that displays the options beyond he/she.

Misgendering: When someone calls someone by the wrong pronoun or gendered term.

Top/Bottom Surgery: The slang/colloquial term for mastectomy (top) for transgender men and the vaginoplasty (bottom) or phalloplasty (bottom) for transgender men and women.

Gender Transgressor: someone who may have the outside marking of cross-gender behaviour

(clothing, make-up, name, behaviour), but lacks the internal corroboration and desire to have surgery or be known as transgender. Ex: drag king/queen, cross-dressers, people from other historical periods whose gender identity is not known.

Queer: someone who identifies outside of the binaries of gay/straight, boy/girl, or any other construction related to sexuality and/or gender.

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Appendix B

Images

Figure One:

Mel, Reiff, and Hill. "The Transgender Umbrella." The Gender Book. thegenderbook.com. PDF e-book online.

166

Figure Two:

Killerman, Sam. "Genderbread Person." It's Pronounced Metrosexual. 2013.

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Figure Three:

Helms, Monica. Transgender Flag. 1999. < http://www.monicahelms.com/>

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Figure Four:

Gender Neutral Pronoun Blog. Pronoun Chart. 04 January 2010.

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Figure Five:

Kergil, Skylar. Saratoga Springs NY. April 2013. Photograph.

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Appendix C

Medical Literature

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