Trans and the Politics of Affinity

The question of transgender is one that is profoundly confounding for many lesbians and gay men. How the T fits into the L and the G directly confronts the reformist acceptance that lesbians and gay men have carved for themselves within dominant society, the discrete agreements that the progression of lesbian and gay politics and social organizing have made with heterodominant society. Following Bornstein, these agreements are grounded in a refusal to confront gender terror (the violent sustenance of the gender dyad), and I think on some level this is true, but works differently for lesbians and gay men.

Lesbians, of course, have a critique of gender, flowing from their status as women as well as the effects of second-wave feminism on lesbian consciousness. How that critique meets transgender has been, in the past, controversial (the idea of a woman-born woman), but also actively engaged in difficult questions, such as what is the meaning of the transman? The phenomenon of butch lesbians transitioning into men has triggered concerns over the effects of dominant culture on women’s thinking, as well as the future of the community in the face of increasing sophistication and social acceptance of the trans as a legitimate choice for natal (born) women.

For gay men, who famously lack a coherent critique of gender, our unquestioned and relentless fetish of masculinity in our sexual subcultures does not provide the most ideal environment for questioning gender terror. While putatively the question of trans has been more engaged in lesbian communities (with the debates over woman-born women, the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, women-only space, Butches into transmen, etc.), gay men confront the challenge of trans as well, on one hand in the increasing number of gay transmen who have no penis (a sexual conundrum?), and on the other more largely in the question of what is contemporary gay sexuality in relationship to bisexuality, down low culture, and the use of the Internet to bring thousands of putatively straight men into the gay sexual milieu.

For both lesbians and gay men, the larger question of how trans meets lesbian and gay experience is the macro question, but the micro questions of individual desire, choice, and the body are perhaps the more important questions in forcing lesbian and gay people to rethink their relationships to gender and desire. Both lesbians and gay men construct their erotic regimes around differing but powerful ideas of gender and desire, and the trans body disrupts these natural and invisible processes in an obvious way. For lesbians, this is primarily through the essentialist focus on femininity and womanhood following Stonewall, and similarly for gay men, the rise of the masculine macho/clone model in seventies sexual hedonism. But lesbian-feminism in particular as the bogeyman of this debate is a misapprehension, I think. Dominant cultural streams that instruct us/"hail" us on gender normativity are much more important and central to why we would think of the trans body as "sick" (in ways in which we lesbians and gay men can also think, on occasion, of our sexual practices as sick).

Kailey makes the elegant point that because so much of what we understand as sexual orientation discrimination is actually written through gender, this forms the basis for political organizing at the very least. And I think this is true, on a personal level. Gender performance and mimesis is as important among gay men as anything else, and how successfully one mimics dominant culture guarantees one’s sexual and social success, as well as one’s punishment (as someone who was regularly called faggot from second grade onward for gender variant behavior, long before that term had any tangible meaning in relation to actual sexual practice). Lesbians exhibit more flexibility in their erotic regimes, more fluidity in their desires and their relationship to the body, but this malleability has not precluded troubling questions from sparking debate among lesbians over the body, desire, and trans. If anything, it may have exacerbated the questions, which for both lesbians and gay men seem located along community, identity, and survival: does trans threaten our particular identities and choices as gay men and lesbians, our sense of ourselves in relation to dominant society?

In the end, one’s opinion on the T within the L and G seems to come down to a politics of affinity:

“A politics of affinity... is about abandoning the fantasy that fixed, stable identities are possible and desirable, that one identity is better than another, that superior identities deserve more of the good and less of the bad that a social order has to offer, and that the state form should act as the arbiter of who gets what.” (p. 188)

If one is able to understand that our erotic regimes are a house of mirrors, a stage set to perform (and conform), that one’s gender is fluid and changeable, then one is more likely to welcome transfolk into the fold. Similarly, if one is attached to the outlaw model of lesbian and gay identity, then there is an identification with others who find themselves on the marginalia of social acceptance. Also, there is the evident historical fact that transfolk have been part of lesbian and gay satellite cultures since the end of the 19th century, in conflict and collaboration. Often times this has not been a happy marriage, but in many ways is no different from the tensions between gay men and lesbians in LGBT social and political organizing. Where does the trans belong other than with us, in our struggle against a society that actively loathes those of us (lesbians, gay men, transfolk, and even straight people) who deviate, on some level, from the gender norm? As Kailey points out, it is not the gender of our object of desire, but our own gender, that is the problem.

I think the T belongs with us in the L and G because I agree with Kailey and Bornstein’s assessments on gender terror and the role of gender in lesbian and gay experience. For me personally, making the tent bigger, when one can, is more important on a social and cultural level than questions of either propriety or political strategy. But then again, I believe in the politics of affinity, which on some level are related to the ability to empathize. Empathy is a little-respected concept in our socio-political universe, unfortunately, but it brings humanism and care for others, interest in the state of others, to the table in ways that I think speak to all the potentials of gay and lesbian people from Carpenter onwards. This, for better or worse, is not a universal sentiment among lesbian and gay people, or heterodominant society, for that matter. But it is a state of grace we can strive to attain.