trans – The Establishment

The Power Of Claiming A Name For Oneself

Tyler Mendelsohn — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 13:14:47 +0000

For nonbinary and trans folks, stories about chosen names are often stories of self-knowledge.

When I shook Leigh’s hand, the first thing I thought was, “He seems wise.” Maybe because he looked poised next to my gracelessness. Shaking his hand was an ordeal. In one hand, I carried a folder containing the interview prompt questions and a consent form for him to sign. In the other, an old school tape recorder—and a pen and a pad, in case the tape recorder finally succumbed to old age.

The first thing I asked was whether Leigh would be okay with my recording our interview. I wanted to have an authentic conversation instead of frantically scrawling everything he said.

He paused. Then he said, “Sure, but I didn’t write any prompts for myself, so I might struggle to articulate some things.” It confirmed my initial perception of him as precise, careful to say exactly what he meant.

I was interviewing Leigh for The Story of My Name Project, which I coordinated from 2014-2015. The project began as part of my job at FreeState Justice, a nonprofit offering free legal services to low-income LGBTQ Marylanders—including name change services. The call for participants was vague; it asked transgender or non-binary people who had gotten legal name changes if they wanted to participate in a project that celebrated their lives. If they were interested, they could email me.

And emails came. From people who had gotten legal name changes, but also from people who hadn’t. A transgender woman who kept her birth name. A trans man who had been going by a chosen name for years, but never legally changed it. The mother of a transgender teenage boy.

Each one taught me a little more about the inherent power in claiming a name.

Leigh is transmasculine; he injects testosterone into his muscles so that his appearance will align with his gender. But when he got his name changed to Leigh, he chose the female spelling.

“The name Leigh was traditionally male, until it recently gained popularity as the female spelling of Lee—the female spelling of a gender-neutral name,” he said. “I like how that experience of gender plays out in myself, because I’m read as male almost 100% of the time, but I didn’t want to go with a name that’s unequivocally male.”

At the time we spoke, Leigh was learning not to knee-jerk reject any femininity within himself.

“I associated such negative things with my femininity: times that I had been victimized, times that I had been abused, times that I had been made to feel not good enough. But that’s not all there is to being female. Why should my femininity be something I hate or fear, something I exorcise from my being completely?… I don’t want to perform a caricature of masculinity. That isn’t me.”

Leigh named himself after a woman who was important to him when he was young, whose strength he admired. He said she had been able to help other people, even while she herself was struggling.

I don’t want to perform a caricature of masculinity. That isn’t me.
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This name has a history of being used as both a girl’s and a boy’s name; Leigh spells it the now-female way—but when one says it out loud, the difference is undetectable. It also has personal significance. To capture such complexity in a name feels like an art.

Monica had known she was trans since she was a child in the ’50s—before there was a word for it. In the ’60s, she ran away from home. “I needed rebellion,” she said. “I never would have transitioned without rebellion. It’s how I found out there was something besides what I was taught growing up, in church and at home.”

For many years, Monica was trying to name what she’d always known on a non-verbal level. But she kept going back into hiding. She tried to be “the perfect man” in her romantic relationships. She got involved with drinking and drugs.

When she got sober, she did so in a men’s recovery house. While there, she kept hearing the name “Monica” in her head. She thought pushing it away would help her stop drinking and drugging; if she could just make it go away, all her problems would go away, too. But sobriety was what brought her out of hiding.

“What I didn’t know was that the more I worked on myself, the more I would find out about my true self,” she said. “In recovery, they talk about peeling away the layers. I was peeling away the layers.”

One night out after the recovery house, her friend made her up. When the friend asked what she thought, her answer was one word: Monica.

When you call a person’s name, you conjure them; their essence is supposed to be contained in that one word. Of the dozens of people I interviewed, no story is the same. For some, like Leigh, the process of choosing a name was more cerebral. Others tried on a few names until one felt right—a more intuitive decision. Another person, Angela, chose her name because as a kid she drew pictures of angels for her mom: “They were the one feminine memory from my pre-transition self.”

But one thing was consistent: Most people knew themselves enough to know exactly why their name fit. Stories about chosen names are often stories of self-knowledge. Perhaps in some cases the process of choosing a name helped people understand themselves. In others, choosing a name was a chance to honor what they already knew—an articulation of self.

In Iceland, they generally use a formula to name babies. Siblings’ last names can be different based on their assigned gender. If a baby is assigned female at birth, for instance, her last name is her dad’s name, followed by the word “daughter.” Both first and last names are usually gendered. Names must only contain letters from the Icelandic alphabet.

The Icelandic Naming Committee approves or denies names, and determines whether given names not used before in Iceland are acceptable. If the naming committee allows it, transgender people—if their gender falls within the binary—can change their name to be more aligned with their gender.

Stories about chosen names are often stories of self-knowledge.
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In America, parents can give their kid any name. Often, they pick a name before they even meet the baby—let alone know who the baby will be. Grey, who I interviewed for the project, said, “You need something to be called when you’re born—but it’s a big deal for your parents to pick this thing that is going to be such an important part of your life and your identity. It’s a big thing for someone else to decide for you.”

I was given the name “Tyler” at birth, but I couldn’t have chosen a more perfect name. I’m non-binary, assigned female at birth, and was always put on boys’ little league teams as a kid based on the name alone. In early 2017, after years of wearing binders, I got top surgery. Hair grows on my cheeks, neck, and chest. This is from Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and “abnormally high”—according to one endocrinologist—testosterone levels.

Thirteen years ago, I stopped taking the spironolactone (anti-androgen medication) I was prescribed. I like the ritual of shaving my beard in front of the mirror. I liked when a cis male former roommate and I shared a shaving ritual. I like choosing how much facial hair I have at a given time.

I buy most shirts in the boys’ section. Usually when I go to a fancy event, I wear a suit and tie. But I like feeling pretty. I most often wear women’s pants. Occasionally I wear eyeliner, and even more occasionally, mascara. I feel like a slightly femme man, who is a woman, but not. Not all non-binary people think about or express their gender this way—there’s a huge, wonderful range.

Most strangers who aren’t aware of the nuance call me “ma’am.” Most queer strangers ask my pronouns.

“Tyler” fits. Even the cadence of my name, the way it sounds when it comes out of peoples’ mouths—like some people said during their interviews, just feels right.

Sometimes I felt guilty interviewing people who had to go through an arduous process to find a name that felt right. All I did was emerge from the womb.

Before I entered undergrad, my school “mistakenly” roomed me with a boy. My senior year, when my school actually did begin to offer gender-neutral housing, a cis male friend and I lived together for a few months. But then residential life attempted to take it back, insisting they’d thought I was a boy because of my name. They’d been confused. I thought: “Me too.”

Transgender women are mistaken for boys at birth; they are usually given boys’ names and put on boys’ teams. The fact that something feels off about this is often informative.

Mine is the opposite story, in a way. People would always apologize for putting me with the “wrong” roommate or on the “wrong” team. But I’m not sure what the wrong team would mean.

While working on The Story of My Name Project, I got an email from a trans woman named Tyler, who had been given the name at birth and chosen to keep it. She didn’t know if her story was appropriate for the project, but when she was coming out as trans, she wished she’d seen a story about keeping a name that fit.

Along with sharing my excitement about my connection to her story, I told her that it was very appropriate; the project had evolved to become more about the importance of having a name that fits, not solely about legal name changes. Hers fit, even if she didn’t have to change it to get there.

Sometimes I felt guilty interviewing people who had to go through an arduous process to find a name that felt right.
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I came to learn the many, layered reasons Tyler’s name resonated. Growing up, Tyler’s parents had been horribly abusive. She said they used the name Tyler as code for “be a man.” But Tyler had known and admired a girl with the name since middle school; she said she would often look at her and think, “If I were a woman, my name would still be Tyler.”

It was not up to Tyler’s abusive parents to decide what the name meant. As she put it, “The name belongs to me, and it always will.”

In Ancient Egypt, people kept their real name secret; it was believed that if someone learned your real name, they’d have power over you. A version of this belief exists in many cultures, legends, and traditions—throughout the world and throughout history.

In the story of Rumplestiltskin, Rumplestiltskin is defeated when the miller’s daughter learns his real name. In The Odyssey, Odysseus is careful not to reveal his true name to the giant, calling himself a word that means “nobody.” Later, when he does reveal his name, it plays a role in his downfall.

There is a belief in the western world, though it’s hard to pinpoint where it originated, that if you can name something, it loses power over you.

If knowing a true name is powerful, then naming yourself is giving yourself a kind of power. Not the kind of legends, where your power lies in having a leg up over someone else. The empowerment in saying, “This is me.”

Listen To The Sound Of Gender Transforming: Five-Tracks Of Resistance

Ayesha Sharma — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 08:17:35 +0000

Diasphoria: A Narrative Archive for and by Trans People of Color by Ayesha Sharma

We experience not only the in-betweenness of gender, but also the instability of ‘home.’

I’m Ayesha Sharma, and I’m an agender multimedia creative. I move through emotions like waves and, especially with the experience of gender and cultural dysphoria, I’ve felt an urgency in the past year to find a community that would provide comfort in shared identities and could foster mutual growth at the same time.

I was motivated to find a medium to share these discussions around gender and cultural dysphoria sonically.

On several warm December afternoons in Cape Town, South Africa, old and new friends sat down around a coffee table to discuss something that was relevant to all of us: gender disruption. We are six trans and gender variant people of color who share a real boredom in the gender binary.

Some of us were determined in our resistance of gender conformity while others had grown tired and frustrated from the backlash we’d received and the dysphoria we experienced.

We had gathered on these afternoons to collaborate and spend time with one another, but our meetings offered us much more: community affirmation toward some of our daily struggles.

Shared identity definitely does not mean shared experience, but it can provide mutual comfort and potential growth.
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The group of us includes Rumano Fabrishh, Jay-Aeron Gertse, Reinhard Mahalie, Nazlee Saif Arbee, Suhail Kapdi, Saadiq Shiraz Soeker, and me, Ayesha Sharma.

We’re from South Africa, Namibia, and the United States.

From Southern Africa, East Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia; we are diasporic migrants through generations.

And so we experience not only the in-betweenness of gender, but some of us also feel the instability of “home.”

I produced the beats for each track through personal meditations on diaspora and gender resistance and then traveled to Cape Town to take part in relevant conversations with other trans and variant people of color.

I then recorded our conversations and later sampled words, phrases, and sounds from these recordings to overlap and mix with the theme-inspired beats I had produced.

The process evolved to become this autoethnographic EP, called Diasphoria: A Narrative Archive for and by Trans People of Color. The EP features two main tracks, “Catharsis” and “Imagining.” “Catharsis” is meant to stand as an ideological and emotional exploration of (gender) oppression and imagining as a journey in seeking elevation from the personal struggles that oppression brings as well as from the mental restrictions that keep us from actualizing our expansive selves.

This five-track recording offers a taste of our theory-forming, community-affirming group discussions.

Trans and gender variant people of color, like in this very project, are often the creators of content; the teachers, and the earth-shakers.

That’s why, when several conversations are sliced up and put together, they stand as an exhibition of new knowledge — new theory. Trans and gender variant POC are academics, journalists, and creatives in the fact that our personal acts of resistance and persistence boldly oppose colonial social structures. In that, people who occupy these identities have the potential to be role models and uncomfortable truth tellers.

The sentiments shared in this EP are arranged specifically for trans and gender variant POC listeners, as the discussions themselves were initiated with the intention to promote insight, affirmation, and expansion based on shared identities.

They comment on colonialism and the gender binary, gendered bodies, queer desire, self-confidence and community affirmation, religion, morality, social media community, and much more.

Others who are not trans and gender variant POC are invited to listen to this EP too, but with the understanding that the goal shouldn’t only be to consume, but to hold oneself accountable to meaningful reparations as well.

Some of the ways that this is possible are by promoting the media visibility of trans and gender variant POC creatives as well as by supporting representation of trans people by trans people, when cis queers often gain disproportionate mobility for capitalizing on them instead.

This project would not have been possible without the energy and time of my friends and collaborators.

Jay, Rumano, and Reinhold

Jay, Rumano, and Reinhard are an inspiring team who possess the capabilities to revolutionize their industries and people’s lives in the process.

Saif, Suhail, and Shiraz

Saif is passionate, intentional, and steadfast in their messages of liberation, meaning that they come away from most interactions either getting free things, loyal admirers, or stupefied students. Suhail is a hilarious, humble, and explorative soul whose interests are subtly rooted in a motivation toward deeper meaning and morality. Shiraz is a force whose essence and beliefs challenge traditional knowledge through creative practice.

Wandile Dhlamini

Wandile Dhlamini was the illustrator for this project and created its cover in addition to individualized designs for each track. They’re brilliant, bold, hilarious, and talented in pretty much everything they do.

If you like what you hear in this project, share it. You can also download all five tracks directly through Bandcamp.

Also, check out my feature on this project’s collaborators soon to be released on Everyday Feminism and be sure to follow everyone on social media to support their latest work. You won’t regret it.

On Being ‘Game’: What Happens When Sex Positivity Feels Like Pressure

Franki Cookney — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 08:47:16 +0000

‘It is just as objectionable to insist that everyone should be non-monogamous or kinky, as to believe that everyone should be heterosexual, married, or vanilla.’

Last Saturday morning my friend and I were having a WhatsApp debrief on the sex we’d had the night before. As we shared our favorite flashbacks, I was surprised to see a picture pop up in our chat. Of me. And another friend.

“Oh! There are pictures?!” I said.

“Hope you don’t mind!” he replied. Flanked by a smiley face emoji.

Now. I like taking sexy pictures and I like having them taken. I enjoy sending and receiving them, both in anticipation and in retrospect. So no, in many ways, I didn’t mind. But what made him assume I’d be cool with this digital documentation? We had talked about our work and he knew I wrote about sex for a living.

Was it possible he’d taken that to mean I was down for anything?

“I didn’t know you’d taken photos,” I tapped back. “In the future I’d rather you didn’t do that without checking.”

“Of course, sorry,” came the response. “I can delete them if you want.”

“No, it’s OK,” I said. The pictures weren’t really the problem (plus, I liked having them). It was more important to me to set the boundary and have him acknowledge it.

“Overall, I had a really good time,” I added. “Yes,” agreed my friend. “Thanks for being so game!”

Game? I suddenly felt like my response was being read as acquiescence.

This wasn’t the first time my general open mindedness had been used against me. “I thought you were sex-positive?!” one partner had leveled at me when I expressed disinterest in a particular kink. I’d like to tell you I brushed it (and him) off, but I admit it—he made me doubt myself.

For me, sex positivity is about consent and communication. It means being open and informed; it has never meant an obligation to experiment or push boundaries. As far as I’m concerned, the decision not to have sex is just as sex positive as the decision to have sex, as long as it’s done consensually and without judgement or shame.

But not everyone interprets it that way.

The term “sex positive” is attributed to Austrian psychoanalyst Willhem Reich, who hypothesized an alternative society to the prohibitive, “sex negative” culture that dominated early 20th century Europe. In the 1980s, sex positivity came to prominence as a response to the anti-porn campaigns led in the U.S. by Andrea Dworkin and the radical feminist Women Against Pornography group.

The rad-fems argued that, amongst other things, “intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women,” which prompted writer Ellen Willis to question whether the message of feminism at the time was really any different to that of the right-wing abstinence movement.

In her 1981 essay “Lust Horizons: Is the women’s movement pro-sex?” she argued that instead of viewing porn as inherently misogynistic, women could use it to learn about their own sexual desires. After all, she wrote, “the purpose of women’s liberation is to liberate women, not defend our superior capacity for abstinence.”

What she termed “pro-sex” was the beginning of the sex positive movement, which cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin described as “an exciting, innovative, and articulate defense of sexual pleasure and erotic justice.”

These days the definition is broader, but also more heavily debated. The International Society for Sexual Medicine defines sex positivity as “having positive attitudes about sex, feeling comfortable with one’s own sexual identity and the sexual behaviors of others.”

Others see participation as a crucial part. Author and activist Allena Gabosch talks about sex positivity as “an attitude […] that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable, and encourages sexual pleasure and experimentation.”

Meanwhile in mainstream media, sex positivity is focused on “improving” and “spicing up” our sex lives.

For people who find sex difficult, dysfunctional, or who are opting out altogether, this message is at best alienating and at worst dehumanizing.

Ginger, an asexual, trans non-binary person who contacted me via Twitter, said: “Most people who use ‘sex positive’ use it to mean ‘sex is a Good Thing.’ This can leave ace people feeling isolated or excluded.”

Dr. Meg-John Barker—academic, activist, and writer specializing in sex and relationships—agrees there is too much emphasis placed on the relationship between plentiful sex and good health:

“People feel pressured to have sex they don’t want and to do sex acts they aren’t really into. That’s a problem for both consent and pleasure because forcing yourself to do something you don’t really want to do is an excellent way of turning you off sex completely.”

Laura, who blogs about low sex drive on her website Sexponential, found that much sex-positive advice is centered around increasing the frequency of sex, something she found counterproductive.

“I was advised to try scheduling sex. But the day would come and I just felt this dread. I felt so much pressure to perform. People see me as an ‘empowered woman’ so they just assumed I was having an amazing sex life. I didn’t feel like I had anyone I could talk to.”

This feeling was echoed by the founders of The Vaginismus Network, a community to support and connect women who have vaginismus, a condition that causes pain during vaginal penetration.

“You feel resentful when people are talking about their amazing sex lives. I used to go to the bar to get drinks or I’d go to the toilet to excuse myself,” co-founder Kat said. “It’s great to be able to talk about having sex and not be shocked. But if someone says actually I hate sex and it’s painful, that shouldn’t shock you either. That shouldn’t be shameful.”

Sex positivity is an attitude that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable.
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Even in sex-positive subcultures, where mainstream ideas of heterosexual, monogamous, vanilla sex are rejected, other kinds of sex often take their place and the pressure to participate can be just as strong.

“Often in queer, poly, and kink communities their approaches seem to be that their sex is good because it is a radical act,” said Ginger.

This is what Rubin referred to as the “hierarchical valuation of sex acts.” But, wrote Rubin, “it is just as objectionable to insist that everyone should be lesbian, non-monogamous, or kinky, as to believe that everyone should be heterosexual, married, or vanilla.”

While researching this piece I was stunned by the stories I heard from my own sex-positive communities. One friend told me about a club where by entering you consented to whatever happened inside. Another told me about declining to have sex with someone at a kinky party only to be told, “you can’t reject me, we don’t do that here.” Yet another talked of being shamed for having a gender preference and told to be “open to different experiences.”

In queer feminist zine FUCKED, one anonymous author explains:

“Party spaces are never sexually appealing to me. I resent not having the option to opt out of these things and still feel safe, feel like a part of the community.”

Barker says this is not uncommon. “These kinds of spaces can be particularly bad because sex positivity can give people implicit permission to be creepy and non-consensual, suggesting that everybody in those spaces should be ‘up for it.’”

The pressure to be or be seen as sex positive is almost as damaging as the sex-negative messages it is supposed to challenge. So what can we do about it?

“It’s really important that we develop a culture where it is just as acceptable not to feel sexual as it is to feel sexual,” says Barker. This idea is explored in their latest book, co-authored with sex educator Justin Hancock: Enjoy Sex: How, when and IF you want to.

“We’re all supposed to love sex, to be really experimental, and to have incredible orgasms,” they write. “In this book we’re trying to get away from the sex-negative and sex-positive messages to find a kinder way in which we can all approach sex and enjoy it if we want to.”

Sarah Beilfuss is co-founder of London-based sex-positive women’s community Scarlet Ladies. She decided to temporarily abstain from sex after she was raped. She hasn’t had sex with a partner for over a year and sees this as in keeping with sex-positive values.

“People assume sex positive means you have lots of sex. I see it as being empowered to do what you want and need and for me that was going abstinent. In Scarlet Ladies there are several women who’ve taken a step back from sex. Being sex positive should mean that you have your boundaries firmly in place, know what you want, and are comfortable saying no as well as yes.”

Setting boundaries isn’t always easy, but if it fosters better consent and communication, what can I say? I’m game.