“I happen to believe that you can’t study men;

you can only get to know them.”

The First of October! Weather, golden. Contrition of withered leaves cross-hatched with burnished bronze sunlight. Easily my favourite season. Favourite month even. Starting off with my favourite saint’s Feast Day!

Last Saturday morning, typing on my blog (which is a pasture of rambly reflections) the inkling urge had itched its way from idea to draft. For the first time in ages, I wanted to write: something like a tribute letter to dearest St Thérèse of Lisieux, keeper of my tears and tender of the ikebana in my heart. How I love her, even referring to the saint of collected blossoms as my “heavenly BFF“, calling out to her gaze with an unrestrained childlike confidence, through wounded singing and temperamental prayers. St T: you who led me back to the Church; you, renowned for your lack of subtlety in terms of touching souls, who continually makes appearances in times of severe struggle. The scent of a rose-wreath wrapped around an old olive cross, dripping with the tresses of petals, each a pain of penance and a scapular of patience. Doctor, mystic, author of transformative Peace.

Beginning kicked off OK: first paragraph. But typing turned into sand, and my fingers choked on their own indecision. As a petition for intercession began in my head, for St T to approach Our Lady, as the zenith of love’s simplicity, on my behalf . . . as beseeching began — panic onset. An inexpressible ache except to those who have endured the inner delirium of sexual dysmorphia. The screen went blank with buried question marks:

In heaven, would St Thérèse refer to me as “he”to the cold shoulder of angels? 

Me being who I am, uncertain of my continuing status in Canon Law or pastoral concerns . . . I’ve coped with the swelter of bad science made valid through media reiterations; of bishops launching contradictory declarations on “trans people” and “gender theory”, without ever defining either; of conservadox Catholic op-eds, eager for clickiest of controversies . . . and the incessant dismissal of transsexuals as deluded, hyper sexed, and loyal to filth and confusion. Overall, impossibly wrecked to approach the altar in clear conscience. As an actual transsexual (not transgender) Catholic trying to live faithfully and authentically according to the Church teaching — attending Mass daily whilst viewing a pulpit hardwaxed and polished by unclear opinions — the dread never departs. Has all hope or blessing been breathed out, once and for all, against me, like a defective candle snuffed in the brassy dark at the votive’s unseen end?

[...]

Early on in my transition, when I was living in Vancouver, I was physically assaulted whilst boarding a bus. My back had been turned, my hands occupied with digging in my purse for a ticket . . . when a solid fist struck me from the side, a peripheral sucker punch in the form of a hockey player’s slug.

He yelled “TRANNY!” and trotted away at a mild gait, unhindered by any witnesses.

This thug’s annoyance resulted from me having just declined his offer of a nugget of crack cocaine (or meth, as if I can tell …) in exchange for an alleyway blowjob. Since I was a transwoman waiting for public transit, I was clearly available to be propositioned for sex.

One thing I know for certain as I look back on that incident: this viscious bloke had never read Simone de Beauvoir. He had never read Germaine Greer.

He was a homophobic arsehole whose insecurities and male privilege entitled him to random acts of violence.

But, in the butterfly-effect politics of transgenderism, an academic lecturing in Wales who can define woman (adult human female), without mealymouthing around the issue, is somehow responsible for me getting smacked on the skull in YVR … and more so for the murder of transwomen (too often poor and of a racial minority) by savage men (always by men).

Let’s be honest about liberals and their armchair activism:  slagging off older women on twitter or from the ivory tower is a hell of a lot easier than confronting actual male violence.

Recently, my dear friend and fellow Catholic blogger Melinda Selmys — author of Sexual Intimacy — kindly requested to interview me. We both concur that, particularly in the emerging discussions about transsexuals and participation in the faith life of the Catholic Church, trans voices are routinely dismissed, elided, ignored, or pathologized into abstraction. This interview, we hope, enacts a willingness to listen to the actual experiences of trans Catholics. The Church does not “hate” us; and I am optimistic for the future of our roles as coparticipants in the sanctity of Catholic worship and practice. I thank Melinda sincerely for sharing her platform with me to explore these possibilities.

Melinda, with my permission, has published an abbreviated version of the interview on her blog.

For those who would like to see the entirety of my response, I post my answers below.

(1) Melinda Selmys: “Can you describe a little of your experience — what does being a trans woman mean for you? How has transition affected your life?”

Aoife:

Hi Melinda! Thank you so much for this opportunity to discuss, in friendship and openness, my experience as a transwoman . . . one who also happens to be a practicing Roman Catholic! True, there aren’t many of us, and conversations about us are often polemical. In the emerging discussion of trans lives in the Church, however tenuous and superficial, our realities are parsed, in absentia, without any consultation or dialogue with us as trans Catholics. A frustrating aspect of being a Catholic transwoman is that, invariably, we are spoken for and never with

This is a consistent omission with gross but avoidable consequences. Even just recently I’ve seen several well-meaning clergymen, with massive online platforms, proffering priestly pathologies on the origins of transsexuality. Unfortunately, in turning our lives into debatable symptoms, we who are spoken for can resemble rationality-bereft ghouls.

[...]

From Aoife:

“If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?” –Mary Wollstonecraft

We at Gender Apostates are a diverse lot; despite this, we find encouragement and support in that — while acknowledging the differences in our varied backgrounds and experiences — we collaborate through the honest sharing of our experiences. As individuals, who are both trans and not trans, we do not pretend to share a singular point of view but enact, by acknowledging the ways in which gender has hurt and limit us, to push past the rhetoric of identity and category as a cooperative endeavour.

Every Thursday at Gender Apostates is Feminist Reading day. Last week, my very dear friend Sass shared some of her favorite authors and the impact they had on the raising of her consciousness. Week 2, and it’s Aoife’s turn! This exercise in creating lists, while quite appealing to the book nerd within, is not intended to canonize essential texts, or to promote certain writings as superior to others. Rather, these are personal reflections on the women whose words have instructed my awareness. I am a work in progress.

1.

“The Laugh of Medusa” — Hélène Cixous (1976)

“I, too, overflow . . . . my body knows unheard-of songs.”

Let’s suppose I had a friend — male, mid 60s, sincerely questioning whether transition is the route to go after a lifetime of confessed confusion (including an aborted run on hormones thirty years ago). He wants to discuss things openly, yet requests I refer to him by his male name, male pronouns, and so forth. He shyly plays with his hair during our conversations, coyly suggests an interiority of womanly-feelings — even declares that, for all purposes and intents, he’s a woman. (What purposes and whose intents, I muse quietly.) He shows me collateral proof via his wardrobe, including a sizable collection of gourmet cocktrails dresses that Jay Gatsby may have compiled were he a crossdresser.All of this as an evidence-based commitment to the intangible, invisible, undefinable ‘woman within’. “Her/me”, he keeps saying, the feminine object of ‘her’ readily assimilated into the subjective claim of ‘me’. We shake hands and I wish him well. Go at your own speed, I suggest.

Two weeks later he’s on the cover of a major fashion magazine, decked out in Marilyn Monroe’s underwear, airbrushed and siliconed into abstract fantasy — a flight into the sublime passivity of The Woman as object and subject simultaneously. As if Coppélia weren’t just something the doctor built — but built for himself to become.

Or, as a wise friend of mine on FaceBook pointed out, a lesbian veteran of multiple decades in the struggle for women’s lib: “Men clearly do femininity so much better than women do. And why not? They invented it, after all.”

Fear not, ladies, Caitlyn Jenner will show you how to gender.

Jenner will show you what real womanhood is.

And you will like it.

Autogynokardashian style.

I posted the comment below to rabble.ca yesterday, in regards to their neutral position about whether or not interference from internet militias should dictate a female journalist’s right to analyze the conditions of female oppression, possibly in ways that upset the porn and prostitution lobbies.

These attempts are, I say plainly, deliberately disingenuous efforts to misrepresent and euphemize Murphy’s actual position. In short, a smear campaign, not unlike the ones visited upon sex critical feminists in the past, who recognize the libidinal economics of consuming women’s bodies:

aoifeschatology stands in solidarity with Meghan Murphy: please sign this petition. Do not capitulate to the bald contradictions and dynamic bondage of the neoliberalist choice rhetoric. Its collaborators are they who commodify the existence of women for tokens of exchange. Moreover, Murphy’s materialist approach to feminist analysis is neither immanently transphobic nor an “existential threat” to transwomen. To wrongly allege this against Murphy — whilst heaps of male transphobes publish daily, unchecked, and with no petitions against them — foregrounds the misogyny behind the intent.

To say otherwise is a ruse and detour from proper engagement with Murphy’s arguments and the broader contexts she critically addresses.

——-

(question put to me by a #DropMM and men’s rights activist this morning:)

I’m a great admirer of MacKinnon, particularly her unwavering commitment to fighting the masculinity-made apocalypse of bodies that are pornography and prostitution.

Thus, I was curious to peruse her conversation with The TransAdvocate, a trans-militant website that is hostile to corporeal feminism. While the interview never once addresses MacKinnon’s scholarship on prostitution and porn — a shocking omission, given these are the very subjects upon which her research and writing achieved global recognition  — TA preferred to proffer a sequence of leading fuzzywuzzy questions about “gender identity”.

That omission matters even more now, when porn platforms, clip sites, and trans cams shape how many people first encounter trans sexuality online.

This commentary on Beauvoir, from MacKinnon in that interview, felt particularly abstruse to me:

“I always thought I don’t care how someone becomes a woman or a man; it does not matter to me. It is just part of their specificity, their uniqueness, like everyone else’s. Anybody who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I’m concerned, is a woman.”

While I suspect MacKinnon didn’t intend for her comments to be a definitive presentation of her philosophical and activist views, her responses nonetheless suggest an endorsement for anti-materialism and libertarian analysis (at least as far as her views on gender are specifically concerned).

MacKinnon’s interview left many of us with with more questions than answers, and here are some of mine. I was strongly influenced by reading Ms Hell Bedlam’s commentary, and I put forth some of my own inquiries . . . as a transwoman with a keen interest in Beauvoir who is questioning transgenderism.

“To have courage for whatever comes in life — everything lies in that.” – St Teresa of Ávila

As is the custom here at aoifeschatology.com, I’d like to wish all of you a most Happy New Year, one full of courage, love, and uncompromising solidarity.

My heart is in such tremendous grief . . . I cannot begin to compile, let alone assess — and certainly am far from being able to express — my thoughts on Leelah Alcorn’s suicide. Truly, this is really something I cannot fully reflect upon right now: the impact is raw, and my responses frayed and distraught. After my SRS recovery, I will attempt, and most likely fail, to discuss this awful, awful tragedy.

A young person has died. The world is dimmer for that.

I buried a transwoman suicide victim this year, a sex worker whose farewell video also circulated briefly but was soon forgotten, her name casually discarded in the attention deficits of trans activism, a movement eager for martyrs but negligent in virtue. Don’t pass on suicide notes: you’re inviting despair. As my wise friend Glosswitch rightly pointed out on twitter, “Suicide prevention charities know a little more than twitter’s performative call-out brigade.” There’s a reason the experts advise one not to toss around desperate last words like public confetti: you will encourage more in this reckless theatre of cruelty known as social media. That Leelah’s final words of extreme heartbreak, the staggering testimony of her suffering, have been heralded as a manifesto of revenge and death as programme of liberation is deeply upsetting. I can’t look at any more of it, begging your pardon. But my sensitivity balks at seeing any more hatred levelled at a grieving, gutted mum in the aftermath of a teen’s sudden death.

(For the love of God and His sorrowful mother, trans people, find yourselves some compassion and leave Leelah Alcorn’s family alone, I beg you!)

[...]

Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators. In carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act… The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during carnival: what is suspended first is hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it… or any other form of inequality among people.  — mikhail bakhtin, on dostoyevsky’s poetics

The fifteen year old boy that I was . . .  a cul-de-sac, catacomb adolescent of a second floor-back bedroom . . .  for whom “portable audio” meant a cassette player larger than my hand, and pocket money was always an instalment plan for buying new albums . . . who found in headphones considerable relief as much as enormous pleasure . . .  yeah, that teenage mop of myself for whom the mirror was already a veteran opponent . . .  that was me, and I adored the B-52s; but especially its fierce crimson diva who was as decadent as a rose in a surrealist’s wine-glass, with me listening in the grim grey of my school uniform jumper décor. Kate Pierson.

The band’s signature sound sequestered me in an out of body experience — one of irresistible post-disco glambop that put the boots in my boogie. No small accomplishment for my perpetually uncoordinated hips and a complete lack of musical depth perception.

And so I thought, manually swapping from Side B back to Side A again — if I ever met Kate Pierson, she would understand me without explanations. Because singing like that suggested a braggadocios voice not attuned to apologies and excuses.

I’m writing this admittedly casual entry — neither a letter nor an essay, but perhaps more a confession in reflection — because Ms Pierson (may I call you Kate? can I be on a first name basis with someone from memorizing liner notes?) has found herself in a patch of bother with the anti-feminist trans activist league of SJ hashtag hobgoblins. And that’s not really the publicity one would like on the release of a new album. I have no doubt Pierson has been troubled by the furious response: as she wrote, “it’s really meant to empower ANYONE . . .”; but of course in transgender narcissism — it’s always, always about the T. Their capacity for self-identification and projection is really prodigious.

[...]

 “Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary and symbolic theatre!”

— Gilles DeleuzE, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

You know the joke? . . . how are Londoners like smarties?

They both melt in the tube!

And outside a London tube station in 2012, avoiding the summer broil, a nondescript gathering took place. A dozen or so biological women … emh … “women born women and living as women” were standing about. Note the wording change: the original phrasing as to who were  permissible attendees was changed when their somatic illogic of “biological” were pointed out.

The summer light had sufficient gloss that concessions to sunblock were required. The hurried commotion of British metropolitan transit, that up and down smash of a commute between passengers and time constraints, didn’t even notice the patriarchy smashing going down, right there, in the open.

They were planning — preparing — for the universal elimination of gender.

“… Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle…” 
― Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

An odd scenario has evolved in how we negotiate art, politics, and interpretation when considering the relationship between intersubjectvity and the circulation of meaning in the teaching of literature. A new morality has emerged: forget a ‘spoiler alert’ and you’ve committed a punishable heresy. Who dies at the end of a season of Breaking Bad? Serious business, people. Existential necessity. Just Good manners. But as for ‘trigger warnings’ [TW]?  Shit, that’s just crybaby neoliberal self-petting for the snowflake and kleenex crowd, for those disposed to “fragility of mind“.

Now, I’ve procrastinated on writing on this topic in the same way I sidestep “death of the humanities” debates. The arguments are vociferous and dispersed, with a conglomerate of tenured professors siding together in detecting a “chilling effect on our teaching and pedagogy“, with the frigidity of puritanical TW advocates and millennial whingers collaborating in the straight jacketing of literature and its magnanimous task to challenge the naive. You’d need a page to list the entire bibliography of this point of view, which has enjoyed a fair whack of “father knows best” in big academic publications.

However, those supporting trigger warnings or content notices have either been ignored, miscast as proponents of censorship and pedagogical restriction, or just unremarkable ableism that implies that those of soft constitutions should best stick to Archie comics. There have, however, been several very good defences  — I recommend Shakesville and Samantha Field for start. And, this morning, Julia Serano proposed some evaluations, in an essay over 6000 words. Serano notes a generational issue in play, but I’m not so sure of that. Regardless, one does sense that an older professoriate has absorbed too much Admin-think; and they now preach that tough love is the TruthHurts.edu for the weak-soled kids of the now.

[...]

The creative imagination, at both the personal and collective level, has the capacity to interpretively recreate meaning through mediation. So, when we speak of a reception history for an artistic work — we’re mindful of both the initial intentions, as well as the afterlife of inventions through which audiences produce unique perceptions. These perceptions, and how they function as new possibilities through reflection, often depart starkly from whatever purpose the original author had. Indeed, more often than not, they exceed the limits set by their creator. (Think of how much better Star Wars is because of the audience’s fictive whimsy, as opposed to what George Lucas had set out to say.)

So, in writing about Elsa, from Frozen, as having an iconic value in an emerging canon of a new trans creative mythology, of course I’m not saying that’s what Disney intended. What interests me is not the official image, but how the image gets ported into a kind of dynamic sensation of sympathy within a collective group. The number of trans women who told me — “I never liked princesses, but I get Elsa.” What are we all detecting in her at such a shared resonance?

I don’t think it’s surprising. Considering some of the archetypal suggestivity of Elsa — she does not transform into someone new so much as divest herself of something false — it’s readily apparent that “Let It Go” has taken on a trans anthemic vibe in a way reminiscent of “Reflection” from Mulan.

Let me first say that, as I propose to offer a trans reading of Elsa, I’m not claiming there is any intrinsic connection between my analysis and the Disney creators. Far from it. I’m also not implying the appeal of Elsa as a trans symbol is universal: my spouse, who is also trans, informed me that she hated Frozen decidedly.

 However, when many of us reflect on the stressed, condensed condition of gender dysphoria, of being encased in a fraught awareness internally and a false presentation outwardly, Elsa suggests to our collective spirit of survival the joy of release. We always wanted to believe our lives would get better, that the empowerment of freedom comes from the beautiful truth of becoming. Yes, there are many costs associated with this act to “turn away and slam the [closet] door”, and Elsa must confront in the isolation of liberation. But the slow motion suicide of “conceal, don’t feel” attests to what is truly frozen — the state of denial that rejects the possibility of living free.

[...]