How Do Trans People View Themselves? (3 Answers)
On spirituality, transness, and our role in society.
If you ask a far-right extremist, they’ll tell you that trans people have no role in society. Despite the oppressive role that cis women, people of color, and other oppressed groups in society, it is at least true that these groups have a role in the white supremacists’ ideal world: the cis woman as birthing machines, people of color as unpaid domestic servants, so on and so forth. Hence, trans people should be eliminated, or at least relegated to the fringes and shadows of society (e.g., as exploited sex workers).
Fortunately, most people are not far-right extremists. Most people actually do believe that trans people belong in society in some way, thank goodness (let’s keep it that way!) However, given the current state of trans politics, many people still aren’t sure of how trans people fit into culture. Do trans women belong in women’s spaces? What are non-binary people’s social role? These are still questions that mainstream society is grappling with.
Luckily, trans people have been thinking about this for a long time. In the past, I’ve written about what trans people believe about themselves; this is an extension of that essay, though it deserves to be said that there are lots of trans people with lots of views about themselves and their community. Here, I’m attempting to distill these various beliefs into a simple ternary system so that beginners to pro-trans thought can appreciate the diversity of our perspectives. I’ve long said that “if you ask 3 trans people what it means to be trans, you’ll get 5 different answers”. This post does not reflect the depth, complexity, or diversity of trans thought, but consider it an ultra-brief primer!
Answer #1: Trans People Are Sacred
In many pre-colonial societies, from the Indian Hijra people, to the African Sangoma, to the multiple two-spirit traditions across many American Indigenous cultures, people who move outside the boundaries of the sex-destined gender binary were thought to be powerful spiritual beings. Being able to hold two genders within oneself is literally a supernatural power, one that’s beyond the grasp of most mere mortals. So, gender-expansive people have long served some important religious role, from blessing births to serving as healers or spiritual guides. This explains a lot about the trans people of the world today, or at least why so many of us are called to teach (hi), create art (hello), become nurses, or study politics: we have a deep-seeded need to understand the world and to help others.
This is a compelling idea, one that I’ve produced an entire audio documentary about. It calls our attention to the fact that trans people have always existed and, in the face of a conservative culture that wants to wipe us out of existence, affirms the idea that we do have an important role to play in culture. As such, it’s one that I increasingly see trans people embrace, believing that we need to return to this way of viewing ourselves: as healers, teachers, spiritual guides, and more.
There’s even an approach to this way of thinking through more mainstream religions, such as Christianity. As author Daniel M. Lavery, paraphrasing his friend Julien in “Something That May Shock and Discredit You” put it: “God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation.” Our ability to self-determine, to create expansive new possibilities for gender, is the very thing that brings us closer to godhood!
A more secular approach to this line of thinking might be akin to a pro-feminist take: trans people have lived as both men and women, so given that critical perspective, we are somewhat more qualified to discuss and/or resolve gendered issues. A pro-trans perspective can keep cis men from falling into toxic masculinity, instead prompting them to have a healthier relationship to their manhood that isn’t contingent on the domination of women. It also can remind cis women that they are more than birthing machines, that the “biological destiny” prescribed to them by patriarchy is limiting, and that womanhood can also be about community, strength, and self-determination.
Aside from one very important caveat that we’ll get to later, this answer is one that I personally find at least some comfort in. Trans people are not wrong, we are not unnatural: the colonial and fascist worldviews that are trying to wipe us out are what’s wrong.
Answer #2: Trans People Are Monsters
Counterargument: what if trans people are unnatural? In direct conversation with the idea that trans people are superhuman is the idea that trans people are subhuman. At first, this may seem counter-intuitive; isn’t this exactly what conservatives say about us? But this concept is one that can be embraced and reclaimed.
Susan Stryker’s famous essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” is instructive here (and makes for an amazing read if you haven’t read it already!!)
The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.
Popular in many trans circles is the idea that we can embrace our identities as monsters. We adopt punk and anarchist aesthetics. We use “it/its” pronouns. We make incredible, yet disturbing (complimentary) art. All of this is a means of taking away power from conservatives, much like Lil Nas X depicting himself as the devil in response to him being referred to as such.
Cis people can never truly understand what it’s like to be trans, and many don’t seem interested in trying to learn, so why bother trying to explain it to them? Why bother trying to make ourselves palatable to the mainstream? Assimilation is death, and trans people will never be embraced by society unless it’s a very narrow “acceptable” type of trans person: skinny, white, heterosexual, able-bodied, Christian, and otherwise upholding violent norms.
Reject society. Be queer as f*ck.
Some may see this idea as defeatist or “black-pilled”, but it’s actually a pretty coherent body of ideas that can be empowering. The idea is that our deviation from the so-called “natural order” is exactly what makes us so cool. Quoting Susan Stryker again:
I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself. I will say this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster. Just as the words “dyke,” “fag,” “queer,” “slut,” and “whore” have been reclaimed, respectively, by lesbians and gay men, by anti-assimilationist sexual minorities, by women who pursue erotic pleasure, and by sex industry workers, words like “creature,” “monster,” and “unnatural” need to be reclaimed by the transgendered. By embracing and accepting them, even piling one on top of another, we may dispel their ability to harm us. A creature, after all, in the dominant tradition of Western European culture, is nothing other than a created being, a made thing. The affront you humans take at being called a “creature” results from the threat the term poses to your status as “lords of creation,” beings elevated above mere material existence. As in the case of being called “it,” being called a “creature” suggests the lack or loss of a superior personhood. I find no shame, however, in acknowledging my egalitarian relationship with non-human material Being; everything emerges from the same matrix of possibilities. “Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.”
In fiction, monsters don’t just exist as a shock factor; they hold up a mirror to our reality and show us something about our society, perhaps even about the potentiality for monstrousness within all of us. Many a queer writer has found kinship with vampires, ghouls, cyborgs, and other forms of creature. I don’t hope to be able to summarize the whole realm of queer horror analysis here—that would be a massive undertaking!—so instead I’ll point you to Kenneth Figueroa’s essay and Ricki Hirsch’s video essay on the subject. Much to dive into!
Answer #3: Trans People Are Just People
Okay, but what if neither of those are true? What if it’s not that deep, and trans people are just like everybody else?
The very mention of this take may cause other trans people to roll their eyes. Camp #1 may insist that trans people do have some special power, or at least a unique perspective or needs, that separates them from cis people. Camp #2 may dismiss it as more assimilationist pandering.
No, of course trans people aren’t exactly like everyone else; at the very least, we need access to resources (hormones, gender-affirming care) that most people don’t need access to, so it’s typically not politically convenient to state that we are inherently equal or that our rights don’t need protecting.
However, there’s more to this idea than pandering. After all, cis people need their genders affirmed too, I would argue constantly. If you’ll allow me to plagiarize myself a bit:
It makes sense, then, that our society does everything it can to preserve and protect men’s sense of their gender. At its most innocent, it’s packaging every product imaginable in gender-affirming colors and designs. Women’s soap is round, soft, pastel colors, lavender-scented; men’s soap is “DOVE MEN+ CARE”, with math on it so you know it’s for men, and arriving in black, square packaging, almost like a gun, so you know it’s for men. At its most harmful, it wields the power of political patriarchy to take away women’s right to abortion or no-fault divorce, so they have no choice but to enter into relationships with men, so that men can at last serve that crucial role of provider/protector. (What I’m saying is that kids are groomed by our culture into being cisgender and heterosexual, and that our government is complicit.)
Furthermore, cis people access hormones all the time. Look at men who take testosterone and other medications simply for aesthetic purposes, such as muscle gain or hair loss. Is this not a form of resolving gender dysphoria? Many women take hormonal birth control, or specifically don’t take hormonal birth control, for various medical reasons. They may take progesterone to help produce breast milk. They may take estrogen and other hormones during menopause. Are trans people truly irreconcilably different beings, or are we simply more extreme versions of these totally-normalized habits?
It’s important here to be precise with our language. It’s anti-feminist to suggest, for example, that trans women are exactly the same as cis women. We have many overlapping struggles, but reproductive justice issues mostly affect women who have a uterus. Similarly, there are some issues that affect trans women but not cis women. I made this handy graph for a TikTok video once that may be instructive:
There’s even a hint of this notion that “we are all the same” in Susan Stryker’s aforementioned essay…
Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.
Trans people don’t have to be super-special, god-like beings to be a good teaching tool for cis people. I would argue that expecting all trans people to be a learning experience for cis people to itself be a violent idea. While I might engage in “trans4cis education” as a side-hustle (hire me btw), I have specifically chosen this path, and most trans people don’t bother with this kind of work (as is their right; it’s exhausting, after all!)
For all the pontificating about our souls in the previous two answers, this is a definitively secular approach to trans life. The daunting-yet-liberating existentialist view that human beings have no purpose, there are no gods watching over us, we are the masters of our own destiny! is usually where this answer stems from. Gender is just made up. Sex is a social construct with only some root in biology, and even then, intersex people exist. The oppressive gender system we live under that treats biology as destiny is also made up. We can forge a new gender system based in liberation, one where people of all genders and sexualities are treated the same!! We can change everything!! Isn’t that so much nicer than believing that trans people are doomed to be second-class citizens because cis people will never change?
We should also critically review Answer #1; in theory, it’s quite affirming that some form of “gender expansiveness” exists in many cultures. In practice, many trans people are engaging in cultural appropriation when they bring this up. Time after time, trans people hold up two-spirit traditions or other forms of gender diversity to prove a point about why trans people are valid. Even I, Anna Marie, have done this in videos before; to the average white, Western trans person, it may seem politically expedient to make the case for modern trans life by pointing to historical examples of what, in our minds, looks like trans life.
This is misguided. Using the spiritually and culturally important traditions from a culture than isn’t your own as a mere pawn in a game of politics to validate your existence is itself colonial. Every culture’s version of transness is distinct and should be engaged with on its own terms. It continues the legacy of colonial violence when (white) trans people take on, or secularize, two-spirit or other Indigenous spiritual practices. In fact, the entire two-spirit umbrella label was specifically created in the 90s to distinguish themselves from Western LGBTQ+ experiences.
It makes sense that trans people want to look to the past for trans stories, but to appropriate other cultures’ spiritual practices for our own political gain is an unpragmatic and violent move. Regardless of how you try to view trans people, or how trans people try to view ourselves, it needs to be done with an anti-racist, anti-colonial worldview.
“Before We Were Trans” by Kit Heyam is a book that grapples with these complicated questions of trans history in an incredibly effective way. I just finished it this past week and I cannot recommend it enough for people who are captivated by queer and trans readings of history! I wish I could quote entire chapters of this book at you, but for now, I’ll simply recommend that you go read the book and leave you with this quote…
The simple precept of knowing people on their own terms can transform more than history; it also has the power to liberate us in the present. I’ve shown throughout this book that the way we think about gender today is not natural or traditional but constructed and contingent; gender has always been open to disruption and challenge. This in itself is an important, potentially transformative realisation. But imagine if, alongside this, we could simply trust people to know their gendered selves—without prior assumptions, without constraining frameworks, without structures of assessment or judgement. [page 226]
Currently Reading
It recently came to mainstream attention that Amazon Go’s grocery store, which appeared to have the technology for customers to walk into a store and walk out without having to stop for checkout, actually relies on over a thousand underpaid workers in India to review the footage. This is something that was already known, in fact the exploitation and surveillance of Amazon workers has been widely documented. For a short video on the subject, I recommend this one from Caleb Gamman’s Cybergunk series. This, of course, reminds me of how ChatGPT could never work without exploited workers in Kenya (which I wrote about last year). I hope stories like this call attention to the fact that “artificial intelligence” doesn’t necessarily replace workers, it just makes those workers less visible and more exploitable.
Watch History
If you liked this post and you want two feature-length takes on the state of the trans movement, check out Lily Alexandre and MATRIARCHETYPE’s new epic breakdowns.
For a more lighthearted watch, this video on children’s animation is fantastic. I’ve long said that YouTube content slop is terrible for the minds of our youth, so this concise explanation as to why was refreshing to hear.
Bops, Vibes, & Jams
Remi Wolf finally released new music! Her new song “Cinderella” is a funky, triumphant return to her bombastic style.
GloRilla is such a breath of fresh air in rap music. Her new album featuring “Yeah Glo!” and a track with Megan Thee Stallion is out now!
Waxahatchee’s new album “Tiger’s Blood” is out now too! Favorite tracks: “Right Back To It” and “Bored”.
My partner just turned me onto Greentea Peng and their album “MAN MADE”. Check out “This Sound” and the rest of the 2021 album here.
And now, your weekly Koko.
That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.
In solidarity,
-Anna
“can remind cis women that they are more than birthing machines”
Oh wow. I really needed this mansplained to me today. I would never ever have thought of this on my own.