The T-word, contested meanings and cultural imperialism

The erzatz furore over the use of the word “Tranny” by a well-known transwoman has been erupted in an unacceptable way, to my mind. Considering the rather dubious basis for some of the accusations and assertions it is worth considering some of the things those who criticise first and think later (or not at all) didn’t think about.

A hundred years ago, Ferdinand de Saussure made the, actually rather sensible and now apparently quite obvious observation that in language, the relationship between signifier and signified is purely arbitrary. In other words there is no link between the word itself and the object or concept which it represents. There is nothing in the word “tree” which can tell you that it signifies something brownish with a trunk, branches and leaves. The only reason that it does signify a tree is because enough people (ie. those who speak English) agree that it does.

In other words, language and words have meanings which are negotiated and contingent. Of course some words are more negotiated than others but all are contingent to some extent on the way people agree to use them. Of course not all people agree all the time about every word.

Pierre Bourdieu however noted how some language is more privileged than others, and how the power structures and hegemonies of society are brought to bear through language. Language does not inherently have any power, we cannot ascribe agency to something inanimate such as language. Power is exercised by people, through language and it is also the sublties such as tone of voice and body language which affect its meaning. This fits in with Saussure’s view of language and suggests that society exerts power through privileging certain forms of language over others. “He” for example is normally privileged over “she” reflecting the sexist and misogynistic power structures within society.

Gunther Kress however, went a stage further in his analysis of language and noted how linguistic communication is in fact entirely social, and is contingent on a complex relationship between the subject matter, the speaker (or writer), the listener (or reader), and the context. In other words, you cannot separate any utterance from the relationship between the signifier, signified, the communicator, communicatee and the context in which this is all happening. When other variables are factored in, such as the degree of disagreement about the word or words in question, it becomes clear that there are going to be no hard-and-fast rules about the use of any particular element of language which are not contingent on the person communicating, the people being addressed, the situation in which the communication is taking place and indeed the media in which it is being expressed.

As such the use of a word such as “tranny”, the meaning and usage of which is still highly contested, will be difficult to predict in terms of making judgements about its appropriateness or otherwise. Of course in the case of a word like “he”, which is almost completely uncontested in terms of its meaning and usage, it will be much easier to predict and make judgements about the appropriateness of its usage.

To illustrate this, transgender people consider the usage of the word “Tranny” inappropriate in cisgender media. However even here there are going to be exceptions when cisgender media are discussing the appropriateness of its usage, when they are quoting from transphobic hate-criminals or when reporting hate crime or examples of transphobic discrimination. However as a recent survey has shown, there is no evidence whatsoever of any feeling in the trans community that it is wrong for trans people to use this word. As such there is no problem, for most trans people, for a transwoman performing drag calling herself “Tranny”. In the case of Mzz Kimberley’s performances at Transgender Days of Remembrance in London, the additional contextual locating of the performance, that of lifting the mood after a particularly difficult reading of the names of 179 trans people who had been murdered during the year, meant her performance enabled the participants to get over the depressing and sad mood, to help people to regain some kind of optimism to enable them to face the future. As such it was particularly appropriate. Of course one participant (out of about 100) disagreed and made an accusation of transphobia about this, although this is all the more puzzling considering the fact that she didn’t complain a year ago, when the same song was performed for TDoR.

In contrast the use of “he” by Planet Transgender to describe Mzz Kimberly, who clearly identifies as female in her everyday life as well as her performances, is easy to come to a judgement on. It is clearly unacceptable and represents deliberate transphobia. One doesn’t need a survey to know that misgendering is one of the areas in which transgender people and their supporters almost unanimously agree is unacceptable whether it is done by cisgender media or by trans people.

The fact is that, like most words in the English language, or indeed any language, the meaning, implicit or explicit, and connotations of the word “tranny” is always going to vary according to context, subject and person using the word. If I say, “There’s going to be a war” and David Cameron says “There’s going to be a war” the meaning will be completely different. If David Cameron said it in the context of a drink with his friends down the pub or on the steps of 10 Downing Street, it would also have different meanings. To ignore these multiple textual, contextual and social elements to any utterance is to ignore the most important elements of that utterance in terms of its meaning, relevance and importance.

One of the contextual and social elements which people use to judge the importance of any particular utterance on the internet, and especially in the blogosphere, is the extent to which a blogger is willing to permit people to respond and contribute to the discussion and ideas raised in the blog itself. Obviously bloggers who disable comments or who “moderate” large numbers of comments such that many do not appear, should be taken far less seriously than those who are prepared to permit others to respond. Indeed bloggers who do so devalue their ideas by about 99%. By doing so these people are effectively communicating to us that they are not confident enough of what they say to be able to argue it with others. Indeed so many people I know tried to respond to Planet Transgender’s blog that I got several people actually complain to me about it down the pub…

Another variable in this situation is of course, culture. Most people seem to make the mistake of assuming that British and American cultures are very similar because we speak the same language. This is well wide of the mark. British culture has much more in common with those of our north-west European neighbours than it does with that of the United States. One of the features of this is humour and lightening the mood. The best way to illustrate this is ITMA. ITMA, or “It’s That Man Again” was one of the most famous radio programmes of all time, although it is little heard of today. During the dark days of the blitz in 1940-41, when London effectively suffered a 9/11 every day for 9 months, people all over Europe risked their lives to tune in to the BBC to hear news from the free world. Most were surprised, if they tuned in when ITMA was being broadcast, to hear laughter, lots of laughter. In the face of the most brutal and destructive attack on our country in history people were listening to comedy on the radio and laughing.

Different peoples deal with death and horror in different ways. In Britain we tend towards feeling intense pain but then lightening the mood so that we can get on with everything and fight to live another day. TDoR could easily make some people depressed and inaction and resignation can often come from this. Mzz Kimberly’s performance, in the context of our national cultural heritage, was not merely appropriate, it was magical.

At London TDoR I was honoured by being invited to be one of the five people to speak the names of our fallen brothers and sisters. Despite reading out the names and ages of two 16-year-olds and a 16 month old, I pretty much held my British stiff upper lip and did so without too many tears. I allowed myself to weep quietly in my seat afterwards while CN Lester amazingly performed the unenviable task of following the silence with a piece on the piano. While he was doing this I had time, through my tears, to reflect on the list which I still held in my hand. I realised that there were a lot of places where there were no names of dead trans people. The whole of Africa, Russia, China, Eastern Europe and Mongolia. Apart from Turkey and Pakistan there were none from the middle East.

I refuse to believe for one moment that there were no murders of trans people in Damascus, Baghdad, Novosibirsk, Ulan Bator, Guangzhou, Lagos, Volgograd, Harare, Riga, Cairo, Cape Town, Casablanca or any of the smaller towns an villages in isolated places in these teeming and highly populated nations. The names we read out on the TDoR were clearly just the tip of the iceberg. The real number of trans people who have been murdered last year is probably many times the 179 we read out. In many cases their deaths will never be recorded because they were carried out either by or with the connivance of the states they lived in, or by oppressive religious authorities. This is the real issue, there could be as many as 1,000 of us murdered every year, with countless more driven to suicide. This is what should be uniting us in a determination to fight, rather than throwing stones at others in our community and then running away…

Faceless money-men in Stockholm

The government has been keen to portray local education authorities as monolithic bureauracies which are remote from the communities they serve, when in actual fact they are elected by the local communities they serve and have offices usually only a few miles from the schools they run.

So how does it feel that your local school, say one in Hampton, for example, is no longer run by a locally elected bureaucracy in Kingston, down the road, but from Stockholm? That's right, some schools in South-West London will soon be run from Stockholm, and by unelected faceless money-men whose main motivation for being in education is to make money. The government's so-called "free" schools programme, will now force schools, even those schools that are deemed satisfactory, to be converted to academies which will be run by large multinational corporations, one of which will be Kunskapsskolan, based in Sweden.

The last Tory government started off the 'academies' programme with highly undemocratic "one-way street" elections, in which parents of children at the school could vote to take their school out of local democratic control. The take-up of this was very small and few opted out of local democratic control. The academies programme has since become less and less democratic. Presumably this is because the local parents have refused to vite in the right way. Now there is no vote, now schools can be forced to bcome academies by diktat from the education secretary Michael Gove. No consultation will be required. Effectively Gove can privatise any school against the wishes of the parents and the local community. Power will be taken away and placed in the hands of the money men of Stockholm.

Obviously this is just an excuse for the government to centralise control of all schools in the hands of a small number of unelected private-sector companies, many of whom are based in other countries.

So much for the Tories' claim to be giving power back to the people. The Tories education policies represent the imposition of centrally-determined policies on each school, in this case from another country. This monolithic, one-size-fits-all regimented approach which is part and parcel of these large multinational companies' educational business will make every school the same, every school operating with the same policies as the one down the road, or in Sweden. The regimenting tendencies of unrestrained capitalism are being unleashed on our children. Lots of square pegs will be forced into round holes.

Who will run your local school?

How the budget discriminates against young trans people.

Sometimes measures which are applied to everyone in the same way have a disproportionate affect on some groups of people. The new rule that all single people under 35 will not get housing benefit for a flat of their own looks as though it is equitable because it will affect everyone under 35 in the same way.

Not so. What if you are a trans person under 35 who is questioning their gender, who is unsure of their gender identity or knows they are trans but can't come out for fear of repercussions at work or with their parents? What if you are forced to share accommodation with other people? Suddenly that difficult process of coming out and figuring out your gender identity becomes much more fraught. suddenly you may find that the bullying and harrassment you get in the street, at college or at work comes home and you get hassle there as well. Effectively it forces you to come out to people who are essentially not your own group of friends.

This is goiung to hit transgender and gender variant young people very hard, to the extent that many will either continue to conceal their gender identities or be forced out of their homes by transphobic bullying. Young trans people are already a group with a high risk of poverty, unemployment and homelessness, this is just going to exacerbate the situation. This is one of the horrible measures which Cameron has announced, that will hit trans people hardest.

so what can people do? The first thing is to write to your MP. The second thing is to put a comment on Lynne Featherstone's blog about trans equality. Lynne Featherstone is Lib Dem minister for equality and a keen supporter of trans issues. Now is the time to ask her to put her money where her mouth is. We need to ask her, for the sake of all minority groups, to campaign against this measure in government, and if that fails at least to permit transgender people under 35 to obtain housing benefit for small flats on their own. To do otherwise is going to hit these people very hard and possibly even lead to more deaths from suicide. This is something there is already too much of.

Women in government - so what about transmen/women?

Harriet Harman is widely credited with the success of getting 8 women into the shadow cabinet and this is considered a major achievement, despite the fact that there are now fewer women MPs in parliament, because Labour women MPs were repleced by Tory "Cameron Clone" males at the last election. Not mine, incidentally, just 42 votes kept Glenda Jackson as MP instead of some George Osborne (ie. posh but dim) lookalike.

The government in Spain is the first one to have more women in the cabinet than men. Hilary Clinton represents a very powerful women as US foreign secretary. Iceland, Germany and many other countries have women leaders. The UK, Israel, Pakistan, Oz, Bangladesh, and many other countries have had women leaders in the past.

So far so much progress for gender equality in some (but not all) parts of the world.

So how come this gender equality has not extended to people who do not fit easily into the categories "male" and "female"? Where are our transgender politicians?

OK so Italy had a transgender MP for a while; the wonderful Valdimir Luxuria, as did the Kiwis, and there are elected transgender politicians in Hawaii and New Zealand. But that total does not represent very many compared to the numbers of transgender people there are on this planet. The UK actually elected its first transgender politician back in May; Sarah Brown was elected as a Lib Dem councilor in Cambridge. (The former mayor of Cambridge was also a transwoman but she was not known as a transwoman before she was elected, only choosing to out herself after the threat of being outed by the gutter press).

If we accept one of the lowest estimates of the number of transgender people in the UK at 1% and if there are 600+ MPs and 785 MEPs in the EU as a whole, there should be at least 6 transgender MPs and 8 transgender MEPs. Instead we have to settle for one Lib Dem councillor.

As is often the case, "diversity and equality" are simply never applied to transgender people. Even Sarah's heartfelt speech about transgender marriage equality at Lib Dem conference this Autumn was not broadcast, I suspect because they did not want to portray themselves as a party of "freaks" which might put off "mainstream" voters. Well it is about time parties started to be more inclusive. If "mainstream" voters are put off by the sight of transgender people standing for election, then it is up to the parties to educate the public and argue against the insidious propaganda of the Daily Mail and associated hate-mongers.

I have always believed in transgender people speaking for themselves as trans people. That is the ultimate performative act of being transgender. Yet unless those who purport to support our existence as human beings of transgender experience in their parties need to show that support by permitting transgender people to stand as candidates for the major political parties in elections where they have more power at national and European level.

No Safe Spaces for Transgender People

Those who think that transgender people have, at least in Western Europe, are safe from transphobic hate-crime, need to rethink their view of the world. Even those places which one would consider most safe are not necessarily as safe as we may have thought. From the ignorant feminist minority insisting that we be "mandated out of existence" to religious zealots and fascists, the presence and expression of these objectionable idologies clearly results in increased hate crime...

The third Transgender Europe (TGEU) Conference in Malmo, Sweden, was a resounding success and enabled transgender activists and campaigners from around Europe and beyond to share ideas and campaign strategies to help make their campaigning more effective and better coordinated. It was, however, not without incident. One of the reasons the conference had been convened in Malmo (other than because of the excellent local knowledge of Maria Sundin which enabled TGEU to use the conference facilities of the University and to have a civic reception in the city hall), was the feeling that Sweden is a civilised and safe place for transgender people.

This turned out possibly to be a false assumption to make.

At least one of the two transphobic (and possibly also racist) attacks on two Turkish delegates outside a restaurant in Bergsgatan was premeditated. After shouting insults at these two transwomen as they went in, the group of 6-7 male attackers were waiting for them when they came out. They were violently assaulted and pelted with eggs. During the attack the women called out to a male passer-by to call the police, he refused to do so. Eventually two young women called the police, who arrived 30 minutes later. The women were treated in hospital and released. However this was far from the end of their ordeal.

When questioned by the police about the incident they were subjected to a host of degrading and embarrassing questions, including questions about what they were wearing and questions in which they were deliberately misgendered. They were also, rather threateningly, asked questions about their visa status. Questions which would not have been asked to a white victim.

This was relevant to what happened to these two women next. The following day, a Friday, they were enjoying themselves in The Crown nightclub in Amiralsgatan, the entry fee to which they had paid. At one point a male clubber slapped one of the women in the face. Rather than retaliate, these women complained to the staff, expecting, as would you or I, that the assailant would at very least be cautioned or ejected. Instead, astonishingly, the two women were thrown out!

Of course, following their previous ordeal with the police they did not want to report this, and so left feeling extremely unhappy. Of course TGEU has protested very strongly and the equality ombudsman, who was at the conference became involved, and another national equality and diversity worker came straight to Malmo from Stockholm to investigate the incident, even though it was the weekend. TGEU has rightly demanded a full investigation into these incidents and that the transphobic/racist police officers be at least disciplined. The leader of Malmo City Council has personally apologised for these outrages, despite the fact that he does not have any control over the police, saying that all peoples deserve respect as a minimum.

The vast majority of us were treated with that respect by everyone we encountered in Malmo although there were incidents of transphobic abuse suffered by some other, delegates. This contrasted with the particularly courteous treatment I received at a transgender conference in November 2009 in the small industrial town of Linkoping, about 70 miles out of Stockholm. Here, there were no transphobic incidents at all and one got the feeling that Sweden really did live up to its billing of being a tolerant and accepting liberal country.

So what has changed? The location? Obviously the City of Malmo is not like the town of Linkoping, but seems to be a much more sophisticated place with its own queer subculture. So I would discount the effect of differing geographical location as the main factor in the different experiences of transgender people, although others may argue that it is a factor.

No, the main other reason for the difference between our two experiences was time. The conference in Malmo happened after the election of a number of Nazi MPs in the Swedish general election a few weeks ago. The Nazi Party, calling itself the SD, is an openly racist party. And we all know that, where racism exists so do other forms of bigotry.

In my opinion the atmosphere in Sweden had changed tangibly since the last Autumn. It felt as if, now that representatives of a hate-party had been elected, those who would otherwise have thought twice about expressing antisocial opinions, now felt free to do so. The restrictions of social convention and the fear of criticism for being a bigot/Nazi/total wanker had been lifted. The haters seem to feel that they could come out of the woodwork, the social atmosphere has changed and they feel able to express the pathetic, immature hatred in their selfish, evil and ignorant hearts as though it were socially acceptable.

Their perception that the election of fascist MPs renders socially acceptable the emptiness and ignorant egotism of the arrogant, confused and childish chaos which represents the personalities of these sad people. This is what happens when far-right parties get votes.

The reaction from the queer community in Malmo was swift however and the evening after the incident in the Crown, 200 people demonstrated outside the club at the time when most of their customers would have been going in. The nightclub would have lost a substantial proportion of its revenue for that evening and they received a good deal of publicity for their attitude in the local newspaper.

This is a reality check for people who think that everything is hunky-dory and that trans people no longer suffer from discrimination, as has been shown again recently; transgender people are still being murdered at an alarming rate. It would appear that one of the factors affecting whether or not transphobia raises its ugly head is likely to be the presence of political or religious or other organisations which serve to legitimize the kind of across-the-board bigoted attitudes against anyone who is different. It is the presence of Nazis in the shape of the SD which has made at least some people feel that it is now socially acceptable to indulge in bigoted behaviour and hate-crime. As such countering these peddlers of hate, wherever and however they manifest themselves, is an essential precondition for improving conditions of transgender people.

Cisgender male PANIC!

The arrest and imprisonment of apparent transman Lee Brooks in Scotland represents a desperate panic situation for cisgender males. The crisis goes right to the heart of cis male identity and threatens to undermine their worldviews, their own perceptions of manhood and selfhood. Lee Brooks is in jail because what Lee has done represents such a profound threat to the very core of cisgender males' identities as men, that, despite the fact that it appears that Lee has almost certainly done nothing wrong or harmed anyone, this person will be severely punished for threatening to undermine male selfhood in such a profound way.

It is alleged that Lee lied to a number of women to the effect that they believed they were going to have sex with a man. The panic for men's very self image comes from the fact that at least one of these women must have been quite satisfied with this sex, since she was in a relationship with Lee for six years. The threat to men comes from the fact that a man without a penis can satisfy a woman, that a self-defining heterosexual woman can be happy in a relationship with such a person. Of course this is nothing new, musician Billy Tipton lived his life as a man, including being married to an apparently heterosexual woman. It was only discovered that he had been assigned female gender at birth when he died. He died of a very curable illness, because he was afraid to go to a doctor because he was terrified that he would be jailed if it was discovered that he did not have a penis. People have often reacted to this to the effect that it is almost unbelievable that he might think this, and that nowadays this would not be a problem. Maybe the case in Scotland demonstrates that he was right.

The important implication to draw from the cases of Billy Tipton and Lee Brooks, is that a man does not have to have a penis in order to maintain an extended sexual relationship with a women. Yet this is the one possibility which the male hegemonic culture must, from its own point of view, suppress at all costs. Men's identities are totally bound up with the fact that they posess a penis. The Freudian assumptions in this regard have become part of masculine culture to the extent that the phallus has become the core of male identity such that that male selfhood is almost entirely dependent on this. The idea that such an appendage can be irrelevant to maintaining a heterosexual relatinship with a woman is almost certainly privately terrifying to many people born with penises. This is why Carrie Paechter observed, in relation to transgender people, that the masculine gender is more heavily policed than the feminine gender. Men have much more to fear, and much more to loose, and their identities are much more fragile and more easily undermined.

However this also represents a potential cultural (as opposed to sexual or psychological) identities of the women who sleep with these transmen. This is almost certainly the reason why there has been a complaint made to the police after such a long time in a relationship. The Foucauldian idea of different sexual orientations developing into personal identities through the establishment of the categories of 'homosexual' and 'lesbian' means that women who percieve themselves as heterosexual and engage in this type of relationship are likely to feel the need to disown their involvement with someone like Lee because they do not want to be seen socially as lesbians. Indeed this entire trial and the reason why Lee is in jail now may well not be because of any wrongdoing but because of the crisis of identity of these women. It is likely that these women have gone to the law in order to establish their own identities as heterosexual women rather than because of any damage their involvement with Lee has caused them.

Of course there could be other sides to this story, we still have very little information however it seems that sam is likely to be severely punished, not for any sexual wrongdoing but because of the threat Lee represents to heterosexual, cisgender identities, particularly heterosexual cisgender male identities. Cis-masculine identities are too fragile to allow this challenge to go unpunished.