This Essay Is Part 1 of 3 of A Series Of Essays I Am Going To Do On Some Issues Within Queer and Feminist Politics And How Each Represents My Larger Point That People Need To Work At Deconstructing Their Underlying Assumptions Given To Them By Patriarchy & Other Social-Cultural Institutions. 

As Both Man And Woman: Dualistic Interpretations of Trans People

Trans people of all kinds often experience a strange double-experience at the hands of our cis interpreters. Namely, we get forcefully "interpreted" as either man or woman, each seemingly and usually only when our cis interpreters have some special use for each or the other. To give an example to what I mean, whenever a cis guy wants to have sex with us, whether we’re a trans woman or a trans man, then we’re interpreted and treated as women. However, if someone wants to accuse us of some crime or aggression within women’s spaces, then we’re men, whether we be a trans man, a trans woman, non-binary, or what have you. The culture at large manages to walk this double-interpretation with seemingly little awareness of its contradiction. 

Epstein, Trans-Porn, and The “Trans-As-Woman” Interpretation

It would’ve been easy to miss it given the onslaught of dark revelations and other news associated with the Epstein files, but one piece of news that came out was the strange connection Epstein had with the controversial biologist Robert Trivers [1]. Emails released in the files revealed that Epstein had encouraged Trivers to “study transgender biology.” Why, you may ask? Well, seemingly because the two of them had an interest in the sexual experiences they and others could have with trans people… In other words, they had an interest in trans people as “sexual products” they could sell. Here is a disturbing correspondence between Trivers and Epstein that shows some of their dehumanizing comments [2]: 

Now there is a lot which could and should be discussed here, but this email is frankly an unparalleled example of the way in which cis interpreters can walk a strange contradiction wherein trans people are simultaneously women and men. However, in this instance, the stress is put on us as women, and thus as sexual objects for which these men can please themselves (or their customers) with. The trans woman gets to be interpreted as a desirable psuedowoman, who is all woman, minus the dick. The trans man, on the other hand, gets interpreted as basically undesirable by these two men, tainted by masculinity and thus unsatisfactory for prostitution or trans porn. 

On the topic of trans porn, a question I hear occasionally from cis people is “Why is there no porn of trans men?” Well, there is if you look for it, but as Robert Trevers puts it: “there are 100’s of female Trans videos and websites, i have never seen a male one.” Why is this? Why is it that trans women are as much a porn category as any other kind of woman, whilst trans men are not? It's precisely because whilst trans women get interpreted as at least somewhat sexually desirable by men like Trevers (though often secretly), trans men get interpreted as failed women for their masculinization. Thus, a lot of porn that does exist of trans men focuses on either feminizing them or even misgendering them, a near-equivalent to more conventional “sissy porn”. 

Moreover, trans-masculine people often report experiencing being coerced into detransitioning by cis male partners. This is admittedly anecdotal, but hopefully it's reported commonly enough that I don’t have to provide some kind of source for this (As with a lot discussed in the last few paragraphs, you can find some more anecdotal evidence through internet searches). So once again, the focus is on trying to force trans-masculine people into “being women”. Trans-feminine people usually don’t experience so much being coerced to detransition by romantic partners, more common is simply being forced to “stay in the closet” by cis partners when we first come out to a pre-transition partner. Transmascs will report entering into relationships after being out of the closet and still having a cis male partner desperately push for them to, for all intents and purposes, go back into the closet.

Ultimately, this discrepancy in experiences comes from the fact that our cisheteronormative society sees women as objects of cis-male attraction. So when a cis guy wants to fuck a trans person, regardless of whichever gender identity or expression they have, all he needs to do is forcefully “interpret” each into this category of choice and go about the whole process of objectification. Notwithstanding any decrying about their “really being a man”, transfeminine peoples tend to fit the ideal sexual presentation of cis guys far more than a lot of transmasculine peoples will. The trans woman does not need to be “forced to be a woman” like the trans man does, for she is already a woman. 

Richard Dawkins, TERFs, and The “Trans-As-Man” Interpretation 

Despite Epstein financially supporting a scientist “studying transgender biology”, he also funded a group of anti-trans scientists simultaneously [3]. How does this make sense? Well on one level, it doesn’t… However, on another, public and social support is positioned and lobbied against transgender people, whilst funding secretly goes towards advancing transgender science in order to commodify those same people. The logic is, if I had to guess, that trans people make for more susceptible ‘prey’ whenever they remain oppressed and socially restrained. More likely to enter into prostitution, as Trivers so gleefully describes. 

 One of the scientists to which Epstein had a close relationship with (financially and otherwise) is the ever famous and ever insidious Richard Dawkins (a man I may as well have a personal vendetta against). Dawkins claims that “Transgenderism” is anti-scientific [4], that it “goes against biology”, despite the extent to which the scientific community at large disagrees with him [5] [6]. Which, as a quick aside, I’m not really a big fan of “trans-brain” theories… My assumption is that the trans experience is a social phenomena mediated through biology, not a biological phenomena mediated through society [7]. Regardless of any of that, along with this popular claim about trans biology was the equally popular claim that transgender people encroach on women. Richard Dawkins stated “When taken literally, [transgenderism] can infringe the rights of other people, especially women.” Dawkins continued “it logically entails the right to enter women’s sporting events, women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons and so on.” [4]

In this second appeal, Dawkins is basically saying that it's unfeminist to accept trans people. This is the TERF argument that is just as common as the biology complaints from earlier. Prominent TERF JK Rowling even gets mentioned by Dawkins in the article sourced. Not only this, but Dawkins decides to single out Sarah Jane Barker for a comment she made about punching TERFs! To the latter of which Dawkins says “I don’t think I’m unduly guilty of sexist stereotyping if I say such language is more typical of the sex that ‘Sarah Jane’ claims to have left that the other she aspires to join.” Unlike a lot of the people who appeal to TERF-adjacent rhetoric, Dawkins at least seems to be partially aware that in making the comment he is the one being a sexist, not Sarah Jane Barker. Nonetheless, when he pivots to this supposedly “feminist position”, he singles out and insults a trans woman, and completely forgets about the existence of trans men… itself consistent with transmisogyny [8].

This latter argument is contingent on the interpretation that all trans people are in some way men, or are otherwise masculinized (trans men through hormones, trans women through their penis). In contrast to the previous section, wherein trans people are all interpreted as women and thus as sexual objects, the latent insinuation here is that all trans people are men and thus are sexual aggressors (the victimizers of the sexual object that is women). I’m reminded of a quote from Alice Echols’ seminal essay “Cultural Feminism” wherein she commentates on exactly this tendency to interpret maleness as inherently sexually aggressive and femaleness as inherently vulnerable and weak; “Cultural feminism in fact feeds what one feminist has described as ‘our society's treasured illusion that male sexuality is like a bludgeon or a speeding train, (...).’” Though as Echols further notes only a few paragraphs below this, “No where is the cultural feminist reduction of male behavior to rapaciousness more inappropriate than when applied to male-to-female transsexuals.” [9] Despite Echols’ having written this essay in the early 80s, the association of transness with maleness persists today.

Multiple Worlds of Sense & Cis Interpretators

I believe a useful framework for analyzing and confronting this bizarre paradox in the minds of some of our cis interpreters is that of feminist philosopher Maria Lugone’s concept of “Worlds”. This is, put simply, the way in which we as social beings can exist in a variety of different perceptions or “interpretations” at one time (other people’s mental-social constructions of us and ourselves… as well as our own!). Though to provide a deeper look into these concepts, which may be a bit overly academic to the average reader of this essay, I will provide some exerpts from Lugones on her concept: 

“Worlds are all lived and they organize the social as heterogeneous, multiple. I think of the social as intersubjectively constructed in a variety of tense ways, forces at odds, impinging differently in the construction of any world. Any world is tense, not just in tense inner turmoil but also in tense acknowledged or unacknowledged contestation with other worlds. I think that there are many worlds, not autonomous, but intertwined semantically and materially, with a logic that is sufficiently self-coherent and sufficiently in contradiction with others to constitute an alternative construction of the social. Whether or not a particular world ceases to be is a matter of political contestation. No world is either atomic or autonomous. Many worlds stand in relations of power to other worlds, which include a second order of meaning.” (Lugones 2003, 21. Emphasis Mine)

“A “world” in my sense may be an actual society, given its dominant culture’s description and construction of life… But a “world” can also be such a society given a nondominant, a resistant construction… [I]t is problematic to say that these are all constructions of the same society. But they are different “worlds”. A “world” need not be a construction of a whole society… It may be inhabited by just a few people… A “world” may be incomplete. Things in it may not be altogether constructed or some things may be constructed negatively (they are not what “they” are in some other “world”)... In a “world”, some inhabitants may not understand or hold particular construction of them… So, there may be “worlds” that construct me in ways that I do not even understand. Or, it may be that I understand the construction, but do not hold it of myself. I may not accept it as an account of myself, a construction of myself. And yet, I may be animating such a construction. One can “travel” between these “worlds” and one can inhabit more than one of these “worlds” at the same time.” (Lugones 1987. Emphasis Mine)

Maria Lugones applied this concept keenly to her own experience as a Hispanic woman living in a world where white women would not see her as she sees herself, wherein she simply was not a part of their construction of their worlds, among other experiences of Lugones. Since then, the concept has found application for trans people, such as Talia Mae Bettcher’s use of the concept in her critical essay “Trapped In the Wrong Theory” [10]. Here too, I think the concept of “multiple worlds” may prove useful for thinking about the way in which cis people can move seamlessly between us being men, or associated with maleness, and being women, or associated with femaleness. 

Whilst Lugones formulated this concept to allow for and acknowledge the possibility of “traveling between worlds”, or in other words, looking towards other peoples “worlds” empathetically so that we may learn about each other and gain solidarity amongst ourselves, these cis interpreters seem to use the travelling between worlds as an almost violence, with a forceful interpretation into one category then into another as the defacto trans experience of “traveling between worlds”. They shift from one world of sense to another at a moment's notice with only their own personal uses for each as their guiding force. We are the gender they want to fuck, until they don’t want to fuck us…  We’re men, if that’s rhetorically useful for them… As becomes clear when reading Robert Triver’s email from before, both can even exist simultaneously, paradoxically… And as Lugones says in the excerpt from above, “one can inhabit more than one of these “worlds” at the same time.” Though, it may still be another thing to not only inhabit more than one world at a time, but for the cis interpreter to seemingly construct more than one world of sense at the same time. It is a world that is not coherent by any other world's constitution, perhaps not even by its own. 

However, there is more here, as Lugones offers more than a sweet framework for understanding this otherwise strange behavior, but furthermore, provides a potential way out. Quoting again from the excerpts above; “Whether or not a particular world ceases to be is a matter of political contestation.” Contesting becomes easier when we’re readily aware of the tense and internally inconsistent aspects of these worlds that cis interpreters create for us. All we must do is push the inconsistencies till the whole construction of their worlds seems to unravel…. Furthermore, cis people who are interested in traveling worlds as Maria Lugones describes it can seek to understand the trans experience as a trans person does, rather than in their perception of what that means. This is an act that requires both seeking trans perspectives, as well as attempting to identify with them to some varying extent. Most importantly, it is an act that breeds compassion and allows for genuine solidarity. 

Thank you for reading!