The Trouble With Tranny

Who You Calling A Tranny? Doris Fish was San Francisco's preeminent drag queen in the 1980s. She died in 1991 from AIDS-related diseases. She was generous, flamboyant, kind, and ultratalented. Her charisma rating was off the top of the chart. She'd moved to San Francisco from Sydney, Australia -- then (and some say now) the undisputed home of the world's most fabulous drag queens. Doris took me under her delightfully feathered wings. I was afraid of her raw sexuality, but bowled over by her courage. Doris was amused by my quest to become a real woman. I learned from Doris that in Australia, from the 1960s through the 1970s, most all of the male-to-female spectrum of gender outlaws began their transition in the fabulous world of sexy, over-the top drag performance. Like me in the late 80s in San Francisco, the majority of MTF transsexuals just wanted to live their lives as closely as possible to whatever their notion was of "a real woman." They considered drag queens beneath them. The drag queens were amused by the MTFs pursuing the dream of real woman. No matter what ideas you might have about transsexuals or drag queens, if you were M headed toward F in any fashion at all, you moved into, through, up and out of the drag queen community. So there was always a bond between the drag queens and the MTF transsexuals in Sydney. The bond was so strong, they invented a name for the identity they shared: tranny. It was a name that said family. Doris Fish taught me that she and I were family. Years earlier, when I went through my gender change from male to female, I glided through life under the commonly accepted assumption: I was finally a real woman! That worked for me until I ran into a group of politically smart lesbians who told me that I wasn't allowed to co-opt the word "woman." Woman was not a family word that included me. My answer to this exclusion was to call myself a gender outlaw: I wasn't a man, I wasn't a woman. By calling myself a gender outlaw, I had unknowingly reclaimed the right to name myself outside the language generated by the bipolar gender system. Under that system, each of us needed to fit neatly into a pre-fab sex/gender identity. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us was first published in hardcover by Routledge in 1994, just over 15 years ago. The book hit the world of academics, feminists, and sex and gender activists at a critical time -- feminists were getting tired of being alone as gender's only activists. Gender Outlaw made it OK for more and more people to name themselves outside of a system that would rather see them dead for disobeying its rigid binary rules. The people who stepped outside their lines early on added a new energy to feminism by giving feminists allies and resources to tear down the sex and gender system that was -- and still is -- oppressing all of us. Over the past decade and a half, people have been using Gender Outlaw as a stepping-off point on their personal gender odysseys. People of all sorts of birth-assigned genders have been naming themselves, and they've been getting together with groups of people who've done the same sort of self-naming. And now weve arrived at a time when the next generation of gender outlaws get to call the shots. To that aim, Seal Press published a ground-breaking new book: Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, edited by S. Bear Bergman and yours truly, the older generation. [When we were looking for submissions for Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation], Bear posted a call for submissions on his blog. In the interests of keeping the call as open as possible, we agreed to include as many trans-identities as we knew, so we used the word tranny. And that's where the activist shit hit the postmodern fan base. People were pissed. Here's their argument: FTMs are co-opting a word that belongs to MTFs. The word tranny belongs to MTFs, those who were hurt by our use of the word reason, because it was a denigrating term reclaimed by MTFs -- ergo, only MTFs could be known as trannies. I spoke with Bear, and we agreed thats wrong on several counts: 1. Tranny began as a uniting term amongst ourselves. Of course its going to be picked up and used as a denigrating term by mean people in the world. But even if we manage to get them to stop saying tranny like a thrown rock, mean people will come up with another word to wound us with. So, lets get back to using tranny as a uniting term amongst ourselves. That would make Doris Fish very happy. 2. It's our first own-language word for ourselves that has no medical legacy. 3. Even if (like gay) hate-filled people try to make tranny into a bad word, our most positive response is to own the word (a word invented by the queerest of the queer of their day). We have the opportunity to re-create tranny as a positive in the world. 4. Saying that FTMs cant call themselves trannies eerily echoes the 1980s lesbians who said I couldnt use the word woman to identify myself, and the 1990s lesbians who said I couldnt use the word dyke. At one phase in the evolution of transpeople-as-tribe, it was the male-to-females who were visible and representative of trans to the rest of the world. They were the trannies. Today? Ironically, true to the binary were in the process of shattering, the pendulum has swung so that it's now female-to-males who are the archetypal trannies of the day. The generation coming up beyond the next generation, i.e. my tribal grandchildren, are the young boys who transition to young girls at the age of 5 or 6. Theyre the next trannies. None of us can own the word. We can only be grateful that our tribe is so much larger than we had thought it would be. How to come together -- now thats the job of the next generation of gender outlaws. Labels aren't all that bad when they're used consciously, but a major downside of using labels to describe an identity -- even the labels we wear proudly as badges of courage -- is that labels set up us-versus-them scenarios. The next generation of gender outlaws is seeking to dismantle us-versus-them. As a people, none of us deserves to hear the words Youre not welcome here, or Youre not good enough, or Youre not real. My Goddess, we just have to stop saying that to each other, all of us whose identity somehow hinges on gender or sexuality. We have to stop beating up on each other. The Sydney drag queens and transsexuals knew that when they came up with the word tranny to encourage mutual respect. Whats more, the time has come for those who are coping with sex and gender oppression to raise ourselves up to a level of respectability of other marginalized groups -- those working for equity along the lines of class, race, age, looks, religion, ability, family status, and citizenship. Were not taken seriously precisely because our focus is on sex and gender. In the eyes of this culture that makes us morally suspect. What the fuck does our sex or our gender have to do with our morality?! We need to de-Puritanize this fucking culture, thats what weve got to do. It's time to reclaim more than names. It's time to reclaim the moral high ground. The first generation of gender outlaws made themselves known in the world. The job of the next generation of gender outlaws is to weave all of us gender and sex positivists together as a globally recognized tribe. I'd like to be around to see substantial progress made along those lines. kiss kiss Kate For more from Kate Bornstein, visit her Blog for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws and follow her on Twitter.