I’M THREE!
Gender diversity? Don’t talk to me about gender diversity! That stuff’s strictly for the two legitimised genders, male and female. Sorry to spoil all those cosy, little gender studies diversity policy theories but some of us are just a little too ‘diverse’ to be tolerated. As Boris Karloff says at the beginning of Ed Wood’s classic movie Glen or Glenda ‘Beware the little green dragon that sits on your doorstep…’ ‘Ladies and gentlemen allow me to introduce ourselves: Frock horror…some of us actually are third gendered!
Third Gendered? Well, I'd say we're similar to, but not necessarily the same as transgendered. Um...transgendered? For the benefit of those of you sitting quite comfortably in your gender straightjackets… imagine a pretty gender rainbow. This can include people who are born with inter-sexual physical characteristics, such as hermaphrodites. Of a different shade again are transsexuals who undergo surgery to enable them to physically conform to the gender they have always known themselves to be. Distinct from transsexuals are transvestites, biological males and females for whom dressing as the ‘opposite’ gender is satisfying enough. Then there are still others who identity as neither male nor female, considering themselves to be a third gender. Taken together, we are the transpeople. Hmm…transpeople. Weren’t they popular in the ‘70s?
Confused about yer gender? And that’s not counting everything in-between! The term ‘transgender’ is rarely mentioned outside of the Internet save for its inclusion as the ‘T’ in LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered). Otherwise, whenever the ‘T-word’ is utilised in ‘mainstream’ discussion it’s usually in a negative context. Just the sort of ‘way-out’ expression that gives dippy hippy loony left political correctness a bad name. In short, the very hint of there being any additional gender outside of male or female is seldom taken seriously.
Welcome to the world of the bi-polar gender regime diktat, where men are men, women are women and others are soon made to know their place.
And you’re welcome to it because malice in genderland is no fairy tale. Those brave enough to walk on the ‘wild side’ of the visibly gender variant have much to lose. As with homophobic hate crime, physical attacks on transgendered individuals, often by complete strangers, are commonplace. Recently, for example, photos of the battered and bruised face of a transsexual woman, none other than Lauren Harries (formerly James, child-star antiques whiz kid of the ‘80s) appeared in many newspaper reports after she and her family were attacked by a group of youths, who invading their home, berated Lauren specifically for being a ‘tranny’. Worse still, it has been estimated by trans-activist, Gwendolyn Ann Smith (American founder of the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance) that a transperson is murdered every two weeks.
Sticks and stones. Yet mockery is another reason why so many transpeople opt to stay safely bolted inside their closets. Even in this supposedly enlightened and sophisticated age of post-feminist irony television ads continue to rely on grotesque ‘widow twanky’ style caricatures of transgendered people. ‘Ugly Sisters’, it would seem, provide a most useful vehicle for selling anything from extra-strong (man-size?) kitchen tissues to teeth-rotting carbonated drinks to purportedly cheaper car insurance deals for (pass the sick bucket) ‘laydeez’.
Incongruity raises laughter as well as eyebrows. Yes, think pantomime. Think League of Gentleman’s post-op transsexual cabbie, deep-voiced and abundantly hirsuit Barbara of Bab’s Cabs. Think also of rubbish transvestite, Emily ‘I’m a lady’ Howard of Little Britain fame. Then there’s my very own home city of Newport’s renowned ‘chav’ rappers, Goldie Lookin’ Chain, whose hit song ‘Your Mother’s Got a Penis’ could very well be the first ever male ode to penis envy.
Little jokes aside, trans folk who don't feel man or woman enough to conform to either male or female rot in legal limbo. Yet we're still transgendered.
Tough. As far as the Sex Discrimination Act is concerned, transgender may only arise as an issue precisely when an individual manages to succeed in obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) that legally recognizes that person as either a man or a woman. To obtain a GRC you need to go before a panel of gender experts who will judge whether or not you're man or woman enough to receive one. As of 2004, you don't necessarily need any physical surgery to qualify for the much coveted GRC but you do need to conform to acceptable UK national gender purity standards. At present, you also need to pay the princely or princessly sum of £140 to gain this privileged ticket of gender purity. (Although, I'm sure there's a bloke down the pub who can get you one for £139.99!)
Transgendered people without a GRC, including 3Gs, somewhat analogous to Victorian lesbians, do not officially exist and therefore remain unrecognised as a specific group in need of legal protection. Instead we'll simply be pigeonholed into one of two inappropriate genders: i.e. either that of the men who must conform to male dress codes or the women who must conform to female dress codes. Challenges such as that of transvestite, Paul Kara who wanted to wear a skirt to work are repeatedly defeated at the Court of Appeal and European Court of Human Rights, simply because non-certified transpeople are not deemed worthy of the otherwise sacrosanct entitlement to freedom of expression.
Indeed, for workplace dress codes the watchword is ‘conventional’. Granted, a ‘bloke in a frock’ or a woman in a suit and tie may not be widely understood by societal norms to be conventionally attired. Conversely however, the wearing of clothing associated with the ‘opposite’ sex is held by gender norm society to be as naturally definitive of transgendered folk as Kermit the Frog being green!
It’s not easy being green. For one thing, legal precedence provides a veritable Grand Prix of green lights for ‘boy racer’ male dominated power elites to discriminate against the differently gendered. It’s perfectly lawful for employers to compel staff to conform to gendered dress codes that are deliberately different for men and women because rigid insistence on the preservation of patriarchally-defined gender distinction is held to not necessarily equate to less favourable treatment. Such a supposedly non-sexist status quo falls disproportionately hardest (and therefore, ‘less favourably’) on transfolk but whom in the gendered world else cares? Small wonder then, that the very logo of the Equal Opportunities Commission is that of two stick figures, appropriately coloured pink and blue, with the starkly foreboding legend underneath reading: ‘Women. Men. Equal. Different’.
If this is the underlying message from the keen to be seen as progressive E.O.C., then conservative commentators such as Melanie Phillips, who so confidently cite transsexuals and the ‘sex-change society’ as an ominous sign of social degeneration and disintegration, need hardly feel so much angst. Unfortunately, even those of us who are gender certified are remained overwhelmingly marginalised in this first decade of the 21st century.
Certainly, in quaint harmony with professionally outraged right-whingers all gender heresy is still more than likely to give the fanatical religious fringe a particularly bad hair day too. World series tranny bashing as blasted out from the pulpit (in between all that incidental stuff about ‘peace’ and ‘love’) typically revolves around glibly quoting St. Paul who, amongst other things, disapproved of ‘gender inappropriate’ dress and behaviour. Others accuse gender dissidents of violating Leviticus, claiming it is an ‘abomination’ unto God for people to wear clothing of the ‘opposite’ sex. Extreme evangelical Christians regularly denounce transpeople as ‘deviants’ and a right-wing Israeli Rabbi even went as far as to condemn 1998 Eurovision winner, transsexual singer Dana International as ‘an abomination’ – the singer that is, not the song contest.
Pray tell me, whatever happened to ‘Judge not that ye may be judged?’ For one thing, wasn’t it the women who wore the trousers and the men who wore skirts in the ancient Middle East and for another, isn’t Jesus directly quoted as saying that in God there is neither man nor woman?
Yet holy smoke, why take the fun out of fundamentalism whilst there are witches a-plenty on broomsticks to burn? Miraculously, after several millennia of tearing away at each other’s throats at least the most fervent zealots of the major world religions finally agree on something. ‘Blessed be the peacemakers’…just call me Camp David, your melodramatic drama queen!
Typical, some may say, of organisations with traditionally male-dominated hierarchical structures. Which is why you would expect feminists to be different, wouldn’t you? Wrong!
Leading feminists, such as Janice Raymond and Germaine Greer, plus many a sycophantic, party-line toeing pseudo-feminist fellow bandwagon traveller, insist that transsexual women (in Raymond- speak male-to-constructed females) are essentially male simply because they do not share the experience of growing up as a female whilst suffering sexist male oppression. Meantime, transgenderists also blot their pc copybooks by committing such wanton crimes as ‘frivolously’ (what were you thinking about, Norma?) applying make-up or ‘clumsily’ (away the lads!) donning macho man lumberjack shirts thereby supposedly reinforcing sexist gender stereotypes.
However, isn’t it curious that the majority of non-transgendered men and women likewise dress to traditionally gendered stereotypes but seldom attract half as much vitriol from the ‘sisterhood’. Indeed it now seems that feminism itself has moved away from the stridency of the ‘70s and Fay Presto, suddenly gender is once more all about some glorious celebration of difference. Clearly we’re not the only ones doing the time warp again!
Moreover, if transpeople strived to go against their inclinations and followed the dress and behavioural codes that feminists and the rest of gendered society insist are authentic and compatible with their supposedly biologically determined genders then transgenders would be forced to become to an even more emphatically false degree, the very male and female impersonators that certain self-styled womyn-defined-womyn already pour scorn on them for being.
Perhaps it is true that transpeople have not suffered the gender oppression that women or for that matter, men have experienced but neither have gendered womyn’s or men’s libbers endured the yoke of gender oppression from a specifically transgendered perspective. Why then, exactly, do non-transgendered women and men automatically assume that they understand what it feels like to be transgendered? Could it be the arrogance that emanates from having the full weight of patriarchal society supporting you as a legitimate gender, perhaps?
Or does such energetic criticism of gender outlaws stem from the inescapable truth that transpeople conveniently exist so hopelessly and powerlessly beyond the pale? How useful this can be. After all, from feminist to chauvinist, what better else is needed to conceal the inadequacies and unify the divisions amongst your own political and social groupings than to find a common enemy to blame things on, a scapegoat as weak as that already despised minority, the trans-gender, the gender that dare not speak it’s name? In a genderocracy, sexual politics makes strange bedfellows indeed!
I wonder what would happen if transpeople threw a diva for a change? Who’s up for a transgender agenda? If male and female gendercrats can have their exclusively ‘women-only’/‘men-only’ gendered spaces then why not transgendered and third gendered people also?
Why, for instance, since there is a Minister for Women, is there no Minister for oppressed Transwomen and men or even for the 3Gs? Strange too, that on filling out a Census Form, one is solemnly respected as a Jedi Knight by religion but risks imprisonment if that fabulous creature should boldly go forth to answer ‘whatever’ to the 64 million dollar ‘Male or Female?’ question. Why not a third box for intermediate? A task for the Equal (missed) Opportunities Commission – one might surmise? Whilst we’re at it, how about some transgendered and 3G representation in government? How about transgendered and 3G newsreaders and actors? And, how are some of us 3Gs ever going to feel comfortable even inside our respective closets when there simply aren’t any (even itsy bitsy ones) - ‘Unisex’? One designated cubicle per public loo in a safe non-binary gendered place for those of us who are worried about using the Ladies and Gents is all it takes.
Something tells me certain things just ain’t gonna happen – at least not while there’s still so much hostility and outright physical violence directed towards anyone who dares to ‘walk on the wild side’. No wonder, as post-op transsexual Kate Bornstein writes in her semi-autobiographical book ‘Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us’ that ‘Transsexuality is the only medical condition in western culture for which the therapy is to lie’! Needless to say, this goes for third gender too.
Men, women, third gendered, equal, different: is this far too much to ask or are so many ‘real’ men’s and women’s grasp of their own masculinity and femininity that pathetically fragile that any acknowledgement of deviation from the precious Ken and Barbie gender binary will always be hideously unacceptable? If the assured diagnosis concludes that transpeople suffer from a medical condition called gender dysphoria then I wager that much of genderdom must in turn be suffering from gender euphoria, a more much more damaging plague, especially when its side effects can include paranoid transphobia.
This harsh reality means that at present we live in a society that believes that a third gender, by its very definition is ridiculously impossible and even if it were possible would be a most distasteful aberration. Even if my dream comes true and an editor takes a shine to my scribbling, resulting in this piece getting published and receiving an audience, I’m well aware that after this close encounter of the third genderkind many non-transgendered readers will continue to feel this way.
C’est la vie. Still, I can’t resist wondering if there will ever come a day when it’s safe for us take that quintessential step to empowerment, to declare ‘I am what I am’? History shows that the unpredictable is not unknown to happen. Less than 100 years’ ago, Suffragists campaigning for something as basic as women having the vote were similarly vilified. Say hello to the third gender!
David Solomon
Copyright May 2006 David Solomon
This works is registered with Copyright Witness
morethan2genders.com
Gender diversity? Don’t talk to me about gender diversity! That stuff’s strictly for the two legitimised genders, male and female. Sorry to spoil all those cosy, little gender studies diversity policy theories but some of us are just a little too ‘diverse’ to be tolerated. As Boris Karloff says at the beginning of Ed Wood’s classic movie Glen or Glenda ‘Beware the little green dragon that sits on your doorstep…’ ‘Ladies and gentlemen allow me to introduce ourselves: Frock horror…some of us actually are third gendered!
Third Gendered? Well, I'd say we're similar to, but not necessarily the same as transgendered. Um...transgendered? For the benefit of those of you sitting quite comfortably in your gender straightjackets… imagine a pretty gender rainbow. This can include people who are born with inter-sexual physical characteristics, such as hermaphrodites. Of a different shade again are transsexuals who undergo surgery to enable them to physically conform to the gender they have always known themselves to be. Distinct from transsexuals are transvestites, biological males and females for whom dressing as the ‘opposite’ gender is satisfying enough. Then there are still others who identity as neither male nor female, considering themselves to be a third gender. Taken together, we are the transpeople. Hmm…transpeople. Weren’t they popular in the ‘70s?
Confused about yer gender? And that’s not counting everything in-between! The term ‘transgender’ is rarely mentioned outside of the Internet save for its inclusion as the ‘T’ in LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered). Otherwise, whenever the ‘T-word’ is utilised in ‘mainstream’ discussion it’s usually in a negative context. Just the sort of ‘way-out’ expression that gives dippy hippy loony left political correctness a bad name. In short, the very hint of there being any additional gender outside of male or female is seldom taken seriously.
Welcome to the world of the bi-polar gender regime diktat, where men are men, women are women and others are soon made to know their place.
And you’re welcome to it because malice in genderland is no fairy tale. Those brave enough to walk on the ‘wild side’ of the visibly gender variant have much to lose. As with homophobic hate crime, physical attacks on transgendered individuals, often by complete strangers, are commonplace. Recently, for example, photos of the battered and bruised face of a transsexual woman, none other than Lauren Harries (formerly James, child-star antiques whiz kid of the ‘80s) appeared in many newspaper reports after she and her family were attacked by a group of youths, who invading their home, berated Lauren specifically for being a ‘tranny’. Worse still, it has been estimated by trans-activist, Gwendolyn Ann Smith (American founder of the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance) that a transperson is murdered every two weeks.
Sticks and stones. Yet mockery is another reason why so many transpeople opt to stay safely bolted inside their closets. Even in this supposedly enlightened and sophisticated age of post-feminist irony television ads continue to rely on grotesque ‘widow twanky’ style caricatures of transgendered people. ‘Ugly Sisters’, it would seem, provide a most useful vehicle for selling anything from extra-strong (man-size?) kitchen tissues to teeth-rotting carbonated drinks to purportedly cheaper car insurance deals for (pass the sick bucket) ‘laydeez’.
Incongruity raises laughter as well as eyebrows. Yes, think pantomime. Think League of Gentleman’s post-op transsexual cabbie, deep-voiced and abundantly hirsuit Barbara of Bab’s Cabs. Think also of rubbish transvestite, Emily ‘I’m a lady’ Howard of Little Britain fame. Then there’s my very own home city of Newport’s renowned ‘chav’ rappers, Goldie Lookin’ Chain, whose hit song ‘Your Mother’s Got a Penis’ could very well be the first ever male ode to penis envy.
Little jokes aside, trans folk who don't feel man or woman enough to conform to either male or female rot in legal limbo. Yet we're still transgendered.
Tough. As far as the Sex Discrimination Act is concerned, transgender may only arise as an issue precisely when an individual manages to succeed in obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) that legally recognizes that person as either a man or a woman. To obtain a GRC you need to go before a panel of gender experts who will judge whether or not you're man or woman enough to receive one. As of 2004, you don't necessarily need any physical surgery to qualify for the much coveted GRC but you do need to conform to acceptable UK national gender purity standards. At present, you also need to pay the princely or princessly sum of £140 to gain this privileged ticket of gender purity. (Although, I'm sure there's a bloke down the pub who can get you one for £139.99!)
Transgendered people without a GRC, including 3Gs, somewhat analogous to Victorian lesbians, do not officially exist and therefore remain unrecognised as a specific group in need of legal protection. Instead we'll simply be pigeonholed into one of two inappropriate genders: i.e. either that of the men who must conform to male dress codes or the women who must conform to female dress codes. Challenges such as that of transvestite, Paul Kara who wanted to wear a skirt to work are repeatedly defeated at the Court of Appeal and European Court of Human Rights, simply because non-certified transpeople are not deemed worthy of the otherwise sacrosanct entitlement to freedom of expression.
Indeed, for workplace dress codes the watchword is ‘conventional’. Granted, a ‘bloke in a frock’ or a woman in a suit and tie may not be widely understood by societal norms to be conventionally attired. Conversely however, the wearing of clothing associated with the ‘opposite’ sex is held by gender norm society to be as naturally definitive of transgendered folk as Kermit the Frog being green!
It’s not easy being green. For one thing, legal precedence provides a veritable Grand Prix of green lights for ‘boy racer’ male dominated power elites to discriminate against the differently gendered. It’s perfectly lawful for employers to compel staff to conform to gendered dress codes that are deliberately different for men and women because rigid insistence on the preservation of patriarchally-defined gender distinction is held to not necessarily equate to less favourable treatment. Such a supposedly non-sexist status quo falls disproportionately hardest (and therefore, ‘less favourably’) on transfolk but whom in the gendered world else cares? Small wonder then, that the very logo of the Equal Opportunities Commission is that of two stick figures, appropriately coloured pink and blue, with the starkly foreboding legend underneath reading: ‘Women. Men. Equal. Different’.
If this is the underlying message from the keen to be seen as progressive E.O.C., then conservative commentators such as Melanie Phillips, who so confidently cite transsexuals and the ‘sex-change society’ as an ominous sign of social degeneration and disintegration, need hardly feel so much angst. Unfortunately, even those of us who are gender certified are remained overwhelmingly marginalised in this first decade of the 21st century.
Certainly, in quaint harmony with professionally outraged right-whingers all gender heresy is still more than likely to give the fanatical religious fringe a particularly bad hair day too. World series tranny bashing as blasted out from the pulpit (in between all that incidental stuff about ‘peace’ and ‘love’) typically revolves around glibly quoting St. Paul who, amongst other things, disapproved of ‘gender inappropriate’ dress and behaviour. Others accuse gender dissidents of violating Leviticus, claiming it is an ‘abomination’ unto God for people to wear clothing of the ‘opposite’ sex. Extreme evangelical Christians regularly denounce transpeople as ‘deviants’ and a right-wing Israeli Rabbi even went as far as to condemn 1998 Eurovision winner, transsexual singer Dana International as ‘an abomination’ – the singer that is, not the song contest.
Pray tell me, whatever happened to ‘Judge not that ye may be judged?’ For one thing, wasn’t it the women who wore the trousers and the men who wore skirts in the ancient Middle East and for another, isn’t Jesus directly quoted as saying that in God there is neither man nor woman?
Yet holy smoke, why take the fun out of fundamentalism whilst there are witches a-plenty on broomsticks to burn? Miraculously, after several millennia of tearing away at each other’s throats at least the most fervent zealots of the major world religions finally agree on something. ‘Blessed be the peacemakers’…just call me Camp David, your melodramatic drama queen!
Typical, some may say, of organisations with traditionally male-dominated hierarchical structures. Which is why you would expect feminists to be different, wouldn’t you? Wrong!
Leading feminists, such as Janice Raymond and Germaine Greer, plus many a sycophantic, party-line toeing pseudo-feminist fellow bandwagon traveller, insist that transsexual women (in Raymond- speak male-to-constructed females) are essentially male simply because they do not share the experience of growing up as a female whilst suffering sexist male oppression. Meantime, transgenderists also blot their pc copybooks by committing such wanton crimes as ‘frivolously’ (what were you thinking about, Norma?) applying make-up or ‘clumsily’ (away the lads!) donning macho man lumberjack shirts thereby supposedly reinforcing sexist gender stereotypes.
However, isn’t it curious that the majority of non-transgendered men and women likewise dress to traditionally gendered stereotypes but seldom attract half as much vitriol from the ‘sisterhood’. Indeed it now seems that feminism itself has moved away from the stridency of the ‘70s and Fay Presto, suddenly gender is once more all about some glorious celebration of difference. Clearly we’re not the only ones doing the time warp again!
Moreover, if transpeople strived to go against their inclinations and followed the dress and behavioural codes that feminists and the rest of gendered society insist are authentic and compatible with their supposedly biologically determined genders then transgenders would be forced to become to an even more emphatically false degree, the very male and female impersonators that certain self-styled womyn-defined-womyn already pour scorn on them for being.
Perhaps it is true that transpeople have not suffered the gender oppression that women or for that matter, men have experienced but neither have gendered womyn’s or men’s libbers endured the yoke of gender oppression from a specifically transgendered perspective. Why then, exactly, do non-transgendered women and men automatically assume that they understand what it feels like to be transgendered? Could it be the arrogance that emanates from having the full weight of patriarchal society supporting you as a legitimate gender, perhaps?
Or does such energetic criticism of gender outlaws stem from the inescapable truth that transpeople conveniently exist so hopelessly and powerlessly beyond the pale? How useful this can be. After all, from feminist to chauvinist, what better else is needed to conceal the inadequacies and unify the divisions amongst your own political and social groupings than to find a common enemy to blame things on, a scapegoat as weak as that already despised minority, the trans-gender, the gender that dare not speak it’s name? In a genderocracy, sexual politics makes strange bedfellows indeed!
I wonder what would happen if transpeople threw a diva for a change? Who’s up for a transgender agenda? If male and female gendercrats can have their exclusively ‘women-only’/‘men-only’ gendered spaces then why not transgendered and third gendered people also?
Why, for instance, since there is a Minister for Women, is there no Minister for oppressed Transwomen and men or even for the 3Gs? Strange too, that on filling out a Census Form, one is solemnly respected as a Jedi Knight by religion but risks imprisonment if that fabulous creature should boldly go forth to answer ‘whatever’ to the 64 million dollar ‘Male or Female?’ question. Why not a third box for intermediate? A task for the Equal (missed) Opportunities Commission – one might surmise? Whilst we’re at it, how about some transgendered and 3G representation in government? How about transgendered and 3G newsreaders and actors? And, how are some of us 3Gs ever going to feel comfortable even inside our respective closets when there simply aren’t any (even itsy bitsy ones) - ‘Unisex’? One designated cubicle per public loo in a safe non-binary gendered place for those of us who are worried about using the Ladies and Gents is all it takes.
Something tells me certain things just ain’t gonna happen – at least not while there’s still so much hostility and outright physical violence directed towards anyone who dares to ‘walk on the wild side’. No wonder, as post-op transsexual Kate Bornstein writes in her semi-autobiographical book ‘Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us’ that ‘Transsexuality is the only medical condition in western culture for which the therapy is to lie’! Needless to say, this goes for third gender too.
Men, women, third gendered, equal, different: is this far too much to ask or are so many ‘real’ men’s and women’s grasp of their own masculinity and femininity that pathetically fragile that any acknowledgement of deviation from the precious Ken and Barbie gender binary will always be hideously unacceptable? If the assured diagnosis concludes that transpeople suffer from a medical condition called gender dysphoria then I wager that much of genderdom must in turn be suffering from gender euphoria, a more much more damaging plague, especially when its side effects can include paranoid transphobia.
This harsh reality means that at present we live in a society that believes that a third gender, by its very definition is ridiculously impossible and even if it were possible would be a most distasteful aberration. Even if my dream comes true and an editor takes a shine to my scribbling, resulting in this piece getting published and receiving an audience, I’m well aware that after this close encounter of the third genderkind many non-transgendered readers will continue to feel this way.
C’est la vie. Still, I can’t resist wondering if there will ever come a day when it’s safe for us take that quintessential step to empowerment, to declare ‘I am what I am’? History shows that the unpredictable is not unknown to happen. Less than 100 years’ ago, Suffragists campaigning for something as basic as women having the vote were similarly vilified. Say hello to the third gender!
David Solomon
Copyright May 2006 David Solomon
This works is registered with Copyright Witness
morethan2genders.com