Chick Bashing, the Tranny Way

How the hell can feminists and trannies coexist?

I ask because (natch), I’m doing a story on transsexuals, and man, they say the darndest things. Things at which no good feminist, or even myself, can help but cringe. 

Take, for example, the testimony of Flo, the supremely confident dyke-who-should-have-been-a-man whom I met with pal Courtney Hambright at New Moon, the local lesbian bar, a few weeks back.

Flo, a biological-born woman who only dates straight women, is, er, well, sexist. I fell into a conversation with her about what women really want, in and out of bed, and it through me for a loop, knocking me off the rather stout pedestal of conviction I’ve nurtured about female (read: my) sexuality since puberty, which dictates that sex and pleasure can take many forms for both women and men.

“All women really want penetration,” is how I’ll paraphrase what Flo told me, her body language oozing masculine assurance, ego, and suavity. “Any woman who tells you different, even a lesbian who never want to be with a man, is in denial. Women want to be penetrated; that’s what makes them women.”

So Flo, I asked, what about you?

“I’m a man in a woman’s body,” she says. “I don’t want to be penetrated. Never have.”

I couldn’t argue with that. Indeed, though I usually bristle at such biologically deterministic characterizations of women, I let Flo breach my customary there-ain’t-no-difference-between-women-and-men mindset because Flo had authority. She was a woman AND a man. Surely her point(s) of view trumped mine. I began to freak out a little bit. Were men really just the mounting machines and women really just the fuckholes that our physiology implies?

I met my first bona fide FTM (female-to-male transsexual) a few weeks ago. He is a wonderful man named Mark Anthony Cummings, a spiritual guy with a sweet wife and the speech patterns of a Latino Baptist preacher. The story of his tortured transition from Maritza is a funny and painful one that deserves respect and pathos.

But Mark’s new book, The Mirror Makes No Sense, has a troubling chapter, wherein he discusses the differences between men and women from his perch on the wall between both. A few themes:

--Women are more emotional than men.

--Shopping is the key to a woman's heart.

--Women are manipulative, especially when they want a man.

--Women have a “a touch of evil” in them.

I told Mark that his facile write-offs of women made my feminist side wet itself. He was understanding, but stuck to his beliefs as conclusions he had drawn from his experience as a woman. I turned to his wife, woman-born and raised, asking her how she felt about this woman-bashing. “I don’t like it,” she said. “Sometimes I get angry.”

Well, gee. These guy/gals left me completely confused, and more than a little frustrated at how the people who should be the most insightful and tolerant of the wide range of gender expression are actually the ones who tell me that women should get back to the kitchen.

I even took a dive in the murky waters of feminist theory and its new offshoot, transfeminism, to find some ethical guideposts, and darn it if I’m still at a loss. All the shifting identities and looming power structures just make my head hurt.

As I see it, the conflict is somewhat immutable. For many trans people, embracing the opposite gender tends to involves celebrating the traditional markers of gender—like, say, pants—that feminists have been trying to uncouple from gender for decades. Mark talks about how he hated dolls as a child, and longed to play with cars. My feminist roommates counter: what in hell does that have to do with him really being a boy? Both camps have valid desires—Mark to express himself as he feels he really is, my roommates to live in a world that doesn’t force little girls who hate dolls to feel that they must be men.

If Flo and Mark were biological males saying the same exact things, I would have blown them off as misogynistic assholes. I probably would’ve enjoyed a little good old-fashioned gender-banter with them that would’ve inevitably included a lively exchange about the ethics of ass-banditry. And I would’ve gone home no worse for wear, my feminism intact.

"Men," I would think. "They don't get it."

But transmen, by definition, do get it. Right?

So how does feminism handle the misogyny of former women? (Or, come to think of it, of current and aspiring women?) Should it be seriously threatened by the unexpected critcism of itself from within? Or should it dismiss it all, regardless of the vaginas and XX chromosomes posessed by the speaker, as jackasstic assholery?