After reading over Elliot Polsky’s “Why have gender identification?” piece, I am hurt, annoyed, and … tired. Bored, even. Polsky is not the first in line of armchair philosophers speculating on the lived experiences of people like me, questioning our ideas, our self-concept, our everything.
Let me introduce myself, I’m Ashley Allan. At the University of St Thomas, I’m the only trans person as far as I know. Not just this, but I am very out and public about my trans womanhood. While I was hyper-aware of how I moved through spaces before, I have become even more so since attending this school. I work as a freelance educator, developing and facilitating workshops on identity formation, art, gender, gender alignment, and many others for grades 5-12 and colleges. Explaining to cisgender people (meaning non-trans, though it’s not nearly that simple) is something very much so in my realm of expertise, because I have to navigate cisness every single day of my life. They must, however, agree to learn the language of trans people as we describe ourselves.
To begin, there is an important context to set up. Has Polsky, or any of you reading this, every questioned how sex assignment works? Did you know there are five components of biological sex (hormones, chromosomes, secondary sex characteristics, genitals, and gonads)? How many of these are measured for infants? How many of these components are even fully developed? Have you ever had your hormones measured? Do you know exactly what your chromosomes are? Are you aware of the existence of intersex people? What is ambiguous genitalia? Who created this process of sex assignment, why, and when? Who agreed to it and who was left out of that conversation entirely?
There is an enormous amount Polsky, and cis (shorthand for cisgender) people broadly, have yet to question. Polsky’s piece relies on two assumptions. One, that there is an objective reality, and two, that this objective reality can be learned by humans. If there is an objective reality, it cannot be learned by humans—creatures who are prone to mistakes, to put it nicely. Humans view things through different social constructions, all of which are human-made by definition. In other words, gender, biology, philosophy, rhetoric, language, feminism, hermeneutics, justice, deviance, geology, physics, mathematics, logic! These are all social constructs. Something’s objective reality is always elusive and perhaps unattainable, for what we interpret as reality is through these socially constructed lenses. Because of this, it is not currently possible to see or ever truly grasp an “objective reality.”
Let’s talk then, Polsky, about the specifics of your piece. The first part did not trouble me as much as the middle and end. It was painfully obvious to me that a cis person was trying (and failing) to talk about transness. Polsky asked some folks what they thought gender was, and while neither of the core views presented were entirely wrong, they were not completely correct either.
When it comes to the self-awareness part, I do understand why you find problems with it, and why the people you asked seemed to back away from that conception of transness. I will not, however. Sociologically and psychologically speaking, this is perfectly acceptable. I strongly suggest Polsky, and all reading this, to research these concepts: self-image, identity formation, socialization (and its three aspects), self-concept, and social constructionism (and how people define themselves in relation and opposition to these constructions) before reading on. These contextualize all the things which you are about to read. I will not spend time explaining these concepts any more than I have, as that will take up too much space. I trust that Polsky, and others, will take the time to research on their own.
Transness is a sense of self-awareness, as well as non-conformity to however society structures gender. This non-conformity can manifest as, but is not limited to, taking on new pronouns (whether publicly or privately), wearing clothes associated with a different gender, putting on or not putting on makeup, and refusing their assigned gender’s roles. A trans person is not necessarily, if ever, cis before publicly coming out. They are trans whether others know it or not.
But, because it appears necessary to provide evidence of our self-awareness, I will do so. The evidence of our self-awareness as trans people is how we move through the world, the disconnect within us—how the gender we know we are (or more commonly when we are first experiencing transness on an intuitive level, what gender we are not) exists in opposition to the one imposed on us. In other words, our self-awareness, our self-concept is a consequence of our lived experiences and our response to them—first as reaction to lived experience, and then our reflection upon them. Transness, then, is a rational, logical conclusion to one’s lived experiences.
I also could not help but notice that Polsky subtly wrote in phrases like “mistaken about their identity” when referring to trans people’s self-concept, using anorexia and mental illness as an analogy. This is an actively transphobic statement, one that should not be tolerated under any circumstances, especially so in a public forum. The reason it is transphobic is because it implies trans people do not truly exist, or that those who do have some mental illness or cognitive disability “tricking them” into believing they are a different gender. Classic transphobia paired with ableism, speaking to the medicalization of trans identity since Lili Elbe.
I am partially convinced that Polsky does not believe trans people truly exist, as our concept of ourselves seems opposed to this “objective reality” he vaguely puts forward in his piece. Yet, here I am typing this. Yet, here Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P Johnson, Miss Major, and Toni D’orsay were advocating for us in the 60’s and 70’s. Yet, here two-spirit people were as European settlers forcefully occupied and killed Indigenous communities in what was to become America. Yet, there are countless examples of matriarchal societies having people with penises in position of High Priestess throughout southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and northern Africa.
We’re right in front of you, whether you choose to see us or not. Maybe you need to unpack who taught you to think of gender the way you do. Maybe you should learn our history. Maybe you should attend one of my workshops on gender and gender alignment. Maybe you should listen to trans people, because there is no way you could know our experiences and history better than we do. We live it, but you seem entirely comfortable writing about us like we are some academic subject for you to play with.
Polsky, your piece was just one more thing in the relentless barrage of transphobia I experience here—the difference is you have a platform. I sincerely ask that you pull your opinion piece, and refrain from speaking on trans identity again until you have properly learned about it. You are much better off relaying our experiences and our conceptions of ourselves to other cis people. You need to be accountable for the harm you have caused. Do not publish ignorant, transphobic pieces again. We are not your academic subject. We own our own experiences, and we have agency. Our identity is not yours to determine.
“This is an actively transphobic statement, one that should not be tolerated under any circumstances, especially so in a public forum.”
Good heavens. Disagreements about the nature of gender, among other things (human nature, the meaning of life, etc.), is central to the project of a university. Agreeing to disagree, and to work together to lead one another to the truth, is pretty much the heart of what we do.
I find myself intensely suspicious of any movement which can only win an argument by actively silencing anyone who dissents. It’s less “veritas et caritas” and more “book-burning mob rule” (to say nothing of “non aliam nisi te”!) — and, in the long run, it is infinitely more harmful to humanity than some suggestion, by a lowly college opinion columnist, that gender conforms to some definition different from the one Ashley Allan believes to be true.
What worries me most about the trans* movement isn’t any particular idea it espouses; indeed, having asked myself these same questions, I am not yet entirely convinced that the movement is wrong. It’s the fact that the vast majority of its advocates scream “tolerance” but rarely tolerate; scream “ignorance” but remains studiously ignorant of the opposition; scream “question everything” but refuse to question their own deeply-held convictions. This post, and the comments on Mr. Polsky’s piece, make that plain as day.
Jean, I’m not sure that we should “agree to disagree” on an issue if it’s an issue of erasing someone’s identity. That’s a very toxic and harmful idea.
Emma, thanks for the reply.
There are many, many ideas in the world that are toxic, and can even be harmful if acted upon. However, many people disagree about which ideas are toxic and which ones are not. For example, a large chunk of our faculty considers moral absolutism to be true, and moral relativism to be toxic and extremely dangerous. They have various reasons for thinking so, which may be mistaken, but are not flagrantly outside the bounds of reason. Meanwhile, another chunk of our faculty considers moral relativism to be true, and moral absolutism to be toxic and extremely dangerous. They, too, have their reasons for thinking so, and, while they may be mistaken, they are not flagrantly outside the bounds of reason. If all the relativists got together and tried to drive the absolutists out of the university, and ban all absolutist thinking from course materials (or vice versa), they might succeed, but we would no longer be a university — we would be a narrow-minded sectarian diploma mill, no different in nature from a trade school.
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When you get right down to it, the university, as a concept, was invented as a way for Catholic seminarians of the middle ages to be exposed to various beliefs that the Catholic Church considered heresy (as well as the arguments against those heresies). There was no more harmful idea, to the medieval Church, than the idea that there is no God — and the university was founded as a safe space where that harmful idea, and other harmful ideas could nevertheless be explored and debated. If one wants to be sheltered from harmful ideas, that is well and good, and even understandable — but someone who is afraid of different, dangerous, and heterodox ideas, who rejects the value of genuine dialogue with them (both answering *and* listening), has no business at a university, which is the one place in society designed *specifically* to protect and nurture dangerous ideas and the dialogues around them.
This discussion is an interesting parallel to Jamie Bernard’s piece on this site about trigger warnings. What are the bounds of free speech in a university setting? What is the balance between a student’s right to remain psychologically unharmed and maintaining the grittiness of academic discourse? Is it possible to tolerate another’s possibly wrong or destructive views without silencing them?