Trigger warning for the violent assault of a trans man.
From Tumblr, we have this lovely story of a trans man, James Alexander, who was violently assaulted for being trans. (Warning: link contains pictures of his facial injuries. They’re harrowing.)
James walked by the house of a girl whom he had once had a crush on. The girl had virulently rejected him, calling him a “faggot” and “not a real man” and saying that she would consider him if he had a penis. The girl’s boyfriend, who had nine inches on James, punched him in the face repeatedly while asking him if he was a “real man” and calling him a faggot. When James began to cry, they made fun of him for crying, calling him a “little girl.”
The disgusting intersection of transphobia and male gender-policing sickens me. The concept of the “real man” needs to die a slow and painful death, preferably while staked out in the sun with ants eating its honey-covered nether regions.
As long as the concept of the “real man” exists, men will be punished for their inability to fit it. Some men will be teased. Some men will be shaped by social pressure into denying who they really are. Some men will be bullied. Some men will be driven to suicide. Like James, some men will be beaten up. And, God help us all, some men will be murdered.
We have to accept, as a culture, that there is exactly one thing that makes you a man: identifying as a man. Just like there is exactly one thing that makes you a woman: identifying as a woman. And there is exactly one thing that makes you third-gender or genderqueer: identifying as third-gender or genderqueer. Every gender presentation or performance is exactly as valid as every other gender.
Sometimes I feel like creating a list of all the things that don’t make you any less a man:
- Having a pussy.
- Being mistakenly assigned female at birth.
- Crying when you’re being beaten up.
- Crying, ever.
- Not being a violent person.
- Being a “faggot.”*
- Being a gay, bisexual, pansexual or otherwise queer man.
- Wearing items of clothing typically assigned to women.
- Moving in a “feminine” manner.
- Liking My Little Pony, shopping or spending time with children.
- Not liking action movies, football or the smell of your own farts.
But I know that as soon as I create the list, some new sexist transphobic homophobic ass milliners will be along with a new idea about how some people’s taste in fucking toothpaste makes them really a sissy little girl. Bigotry is like Dracula: you just can’t fucking kill the bastard.
And as long as we don’t manage to put the wooden stake in bigotry’s vampiric heart, shit like this will happen. Men will be beaten up because they don’t fit some asshole’s idea of what a man ought to be like. A man will be beaten up for walking by his former crush’s house, just because he doesn’t have a penis and so doesn’t fit into someone’s narrow-minded ideas of what masculinity ought to be like. And, speak for yourself, but a world in which my brothers bleed over something that stupid– that is not a world I want to live in.
People who can provide references to legal counsel or other resources may contact James at ericjames1302 at yahoo dot com.
*I find it kind of sickly amusing that they acknowledge James’s gender identity, insofar as they called him a “faggot” and not a “dyke”, but are apparently too stupid to work out that men who are into women are straight and hence definitionally not faggots (unless, of course, they like men too).
About ozyfrantz
“I simply use male to apply to the biological sex. ”
It also heads off a lot the naive anthropocentrism that can cripple the discussion.
“Of course I’ve heard reception theory is just one of those “interpretive” theories for literary texts, so maybe it’s not meant to be applied to the real world of language at all. ”
It’s cultural ghettoiszation at its worst, just crippling if you want to make any real sense out of text that doesn’t come out of your own particular little subculture – which is fine f you and some friends are listening to song lyrics from your favorite band, but basically useless if yuo are trying to understand anything from any other culture. of course you have your own personal understanding, but basically what is that worth to you? Why trade that for understanding what the author was actually saying? In fact settling for your own idiosyncratic understanding of another human being is just objectification.
“Certainly, I’ve never been impressed by 99 percent of literary criticism.”
What I have seen of it is either European intellectual masturbation or Chinese politicization of literature. No real worth. It is always parasitic.
Well, THAT didn’t go off as planned. If I offended anybody, I didn’t mean to.
I certainly didn’t intend to invoke reception theory as a form of intellectual masturbation, nor did I intend to misuse, misrepresent, or
I suppose what I was really trying to say is that, based on everything I know, there’s no way to download an idea from my head to yours because the idea is a personal construct, relevant only to me. The only alternative is to (metaphorically) put a blueprint of my idea in a bottle (i.e. in symbolic form) and hope to god my blueprint is sufficient, and that other people have the background to interpret it and use it to build an idea in THEIR heads that’s SIMILAR, or at least FUNCTIONALLY similar, to the idea in MY head.
In my defense, I wasn’t trying to deny external reality. There’s tons of transubjective stuff out there that we can all observe and agree upon (like gravity), and learning about replicable phenomena allows us to build things like computers and such — which ALWAYS WORK, until something breaks. So it’s not as though external reality is a social construct.
At the same time, even physics is observer-oriented — it can only be transubjective, not truly objective. Einstein’s theory isn’t called “relativity” for nothing. Hell, quantum physicists are still trying to get around the fact that just by observing something, you change it.
The point is: even with physics, a lot depends on your tools, your presuppositions, and your methods. What’s more, it’s very likely that scientific knowledge is fractal and therefore theoretically infinite: discover atoms and learn their laws; split atoms and learn about the laws of subatomic particles; discover elementary particles and learn THEIR laws; when particle physics doesn’t quite cover it, try and explain it with fields; and when you try and ask what the elementary particles and fields are made of, there’s strings. Once we’ve learned the major laws that govern strings, who knows what will come next?
But transubjective phenomena are FAR more objective than stuff like “masculinity,” which is wholly subjective. Masculinity isn’t some objective Holy Grail out there to be found and defined and distributed to everyone who wants it. Masculinity is MADE, every day, by everyone who live it (whether they know it or not).
For anyone you point to and say, “HE is masculine,” I guarantee you there’s someone else somewhere who will point to someone else and say, “Uh-uh, HE is masculine.” Definitions of masculinity have changed over time. To further muddy the issue: as far as I’m concerned, TRAITS, like courage, and strength, and fortitude, and determination, can belong to ANYONE.
That’s all I was trying to say. In my defense: it was late, and I wasn’t thinking clearly.
To complete my second sentence:
“I certainly didn’t intend to invoke reception theory as a form of intellectual masturbation, nor did I intend to misuse, misrepresent, or misinterpret it.”
“For anyone you point to and say, “HE is masculine,” I guarantee you there’s someone else somewhere who will point to someone else and say, “Uh-uh, HE is masculine.” Definitions of masculinity have changed over time. To further muddy the issue: as far as I’m concerned, TRAITS, like courage, and strength, and fortitude, and determination, can belong to ANYONE. ”
Except that’s not the contention. It’s more about what makes someone able to call themselves a man, not a masculine person. Women can be masculine without a problem, and men can be feminine, it’s not determinant.
In that case, I concede that I’m in way over my head; lacking the ability to DIG up, I GIVE up.
The phrase “real man” sucks, transphobia sucks, bullying sucks and assault really sucks. I had a girl that I barely even knew call me over, asked me repeatedly if I was attracted to her boyfriend because everyone knew I was gay (wrong, but I was a stubborn ass and refused to degrade myself by playing along with that shit) and, when I tried to leave without answering, he decided to beat me up for being the gay kid. I was used to that crap by then and I had specifically asked a friend of mine to come with, but hang back, so I was rescued by a kick to my assailants head and fast legs.
I’ve been debating telling this story for day because it was eerie similar, but I didn’t want to sound like I was trying to co-opt a narrative or make the topic just “bullying” if that’s Moby-Dickish. I don’t think the words ‘faggot’ or ‘real man’ were leveled at me (‘queermo’ was, I think, the term in vogue at that time and place), everyone involved was younger, it happened on school-grounds, and I was a little luckier but its so similar. You know why I think that is? These people just follow a script and when you don’t they seem to either get scared, use the whole thing as an oppurtunity for socially sanctioned sadism, or they convince themselves they’re doing something good. They’re just like gators snapping at people because progress has brought humanity right up to their damn swamps, only they’re much harder to feel sorry for. They aren’t thinking, so they can’t be creative, just destructive. I’ve almost written this post like three times and I’ve deleted it each time. I feel so bad for Mr. Alexander. I’m going to just use words from people smarter and better at communicating that I am, “It gets better,” then I’m hitting post comment.
“*I find it kind of sickly amusing that they acknowledge James’s gender identity, insofar as they called him a “faggot” and not a “dyke”, but are apparently too stupid to work out that men who are into women are straight and hence definitionally not faggots (unless, of course, they like men too).”
This just shows how little basis all that hate has in reality. They’re not angry at him because they’re honestly offended at what they see as a woman pretending to be a man, and hitting on other women as if she was a man, they just use it as an excuse to hurt someone else. If there is such a thing as honest bigotry, this would be a prime example of the opposite.
And I know it’s not a laughing matter, but the best illustration of this kind of ridiculousness I’ve seen, was this Scandinavia and the World strip about Canada, Sister Netherlands, and America: http://satwcomic.com/who-to-give-flowers
How did “milliners” become an insult word? Does this tie in with metaphor of hat a social role?
I think the idea of ‘identifying male’ establishes that male is something you act out: a code of behaviour.