Between the Pages: Is There a Collective Queer Identity? Part 2

By Al Preston

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WARNING: Talk about transphobia and homphobia. Frank discussions about private parts.

Why does nuance in language matter? How does it showcase or explain an identifiable queer identity?

Writing and other artistic forms can say a lot about a culture and even a subculture. They write and create alongside their unique experience which will show through their creation. As I explained with Gender Outlaw, we can see the encoded language queer folks use to disclose their identity only with those ‘in the know’.

That is an element of the queer identity, a part of the way queer folks write. However, it wasn’t always that way nor particularly universal. We had to write a lot and read many others like us a lot before a particular style started to emerge. Kate Bornstein wrote with and about a transgender identity specifically, the different identities that fall under the queer umbrella can relate to each other, but many times have varied enough experiences that they also write a little differently from each other.

Is there a noticeable difference when lesbians or gays write? Is the language the same or the messages? Are the experiences differing enough to have their own individual identities?

Of course, same-sex love by itself doesn’t carry all of the same feelings or experiences of transitioning genders, however there is still a unifying factor among LGBT+ folks; gender mess.

I know I utilize this term a lot, but what I mean is gender, for many in our culture, is defined loosely but generally the same. Women are mothers, they wear dresses, skirts, have long hair, have ovaries and the ability to carry children. Men exclusively wear pants, they do a lot of physical labor or managerial work, they have short hair, and can get people pregnant.

When one realizes that they are a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or any of the other many identities, there comes with that realization some level of gender mess. Gender mess consists of breaking preconceived ideas and beliefs about gender. Being queer is perhaps the most extreme form of gender mess. However, learning a certain skill or liking a certain color which has been held as gendered, invokes this same gender mess at a much smaller scale.

For example, purple isn’t strongly associated with men or women, but pink and blue are heavily associated with gender. Part of gender mess is the complicated feelings that came with gendered things be that shame for a boy liking pink or pride for a girl hating pink. Those feelings can be internal or external, but they are present.

So, when someone realizes they are attracted to the same sex, they still go through gender mess. I’m not talking about the same feeling transgender folks have or go through, although it does occur to some folks. No romantic or sexual feelings (or both at once!) are gendered in and of themselves. You can be completely comfortable in being a man or a woman and still experience gender mess.

For example, when a woman realizes she loves a woman, what does that mean for her? Does that make her like a man? Does that make her masculine? Should she cut her hair and wear more pants? Or does she like masculine things in a woman? Does she even like wearing skirts? How about dresses?

These are subconscious questions of course. Gender mess comes in all kinds of ways, but, I believe, every queer person goes through it before discovering their comfort zone. To be clear, eventually everyone finds their answer with gender mess, they realize what they like, what they don’t, who they are, and what that means. While those answers can adjust and change over time, you are far more likely to find a name for the thing you are experiencing than to suddenly just become that identity out of nowhere.

If gender mess is then important to the realization of a queer identity, then queer writers and artists are constantly putting it into their creations.

Gender identity can be very intrinsic to people, which sometimes means they become so defensive of their gender and the gender of others. This is also a part of the struggle of gender mess and therefore the queer identity, even if its reductive and harmful. Especially within the community as a whole. The Transexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male by Janice Raymond is one such example.

Raymond meant harm with The Transexual Empire despite what she says in her introduction or throughout the book. Specifically, she wanted to harm transgender folks.

Even in the most negative pieces, a queer identity persists. I wish to discuss this negative aspect because an identifiable identity can be seen in all aspects of its style, even in the most despairing. While these negative views are harmful, we cannot outright ignore the bad. Knowing and understanding where negative opinions come from means they will be easier to take apart and argue with.

Thankfully, a lot of what Raymond wrote, as a general viewpoint has changed a lot since this book was published. Less fortunately, trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) still use these same arguments. To the point of my writing, however, even works like The Transexual Empire strengthen the idea that there is a queer identity for it persists in every kind of work. That there are pieces of the queer identity, like gender mess, that are intrinsic to that identity and style for there is certainly a fear of gender mess throughout this book.

As I said in the last post, The Transexual Menace is a difficult and painful read. Raymond pulls no punches, making some wild and horrific claims, worst of which is that transgender folks are like the Nazis. It’s a rough read. For more specifics on that, we have a book review. For this, I want to talk about gender, gender mess, and the women’s movement.

The overarching argument of The Transexual Menace is that transgender folks, especially trans women, are products of the healthcare system designed to spy on women and enforce gender ‘norms’. To the most extreme, she suggests that doctors want to replace biological women with ‘manufactured’ women.

A truly awful read, but there’s evidence of a struggle with gender mess throughout this book.

“Loss of a penis, however, does not mean the loss of an ability to penetrate women—women’s identities, women’s spirits, women’s sexuality. As Mary Daly has noted, their whole presence becomes a ‘member’ invading women’s presence to each other and once more producing horizontal violence. Thus the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist not only colonizes female bodies but appropriates a feminist ‘soul.’”

Not only does this quote perfectly capture Raymond’s argument but it also says a lot about what she believes is intrinsic to gender definitions. She does elaborate beyond this quote, but this is quote is a showcase of that same metaphor packed language of the queer style.

I think it’s pretty clear that Raymond believes that biology is definitive in determining what someone’s gender is regardless of how they choose to present themselves. A man is defined as having a penis, regardless of surgeries or preferred pronouns. She goes on to explain that it is not a clit or ovaries that define a woman, but her ability to potential give birth. It is the one thing that men, or those with penises, cannot do, thus being the one thing that truly defines what a woman is and what cannot be replicated.

Of course, Raymond clarifies that it is ownership of organs that create that defining feature of femaleness, ignoring entirely the lives of intersex folks. She does acknowledge women who are medically infertile. She specifies that women don’t have to give birth to count either. It is the potential of birth that matters. This is, of course, because she discovers the gender affirming surgery which can invert a penis to make something like a vaginal cavity. Which also leads her to the idea that men are now creating ‘obedient’ women who will one day be able to give birth and therefore render biological women obsolete.

She can’t fathom why a man with all of his privilege, would want to be a woman, so she creates this theory in which men are creating women out of less desirable men.

There’s too much to cover all of what’s wrong here, but there are two key points I wish to focus on; Raymond’s definitions of gender and how they relate to gender mess and how or why she even came to these conclusions.

We have to begin with the women’s movement of the time Raymond was writing. I won’t get too bogged down in this additional little detail, but Raymond was writing near the end of second wave feminism. The first wave was when women fought for the right to vote in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The second wave joined in the civil rights movement alongside black folks. World War II put women in the work force and many weren’t happy when, at the end of the war, they were being pushed back into their homes or into lower positions because men were returning.

At the beginning of second wave feminism, lesbians were participating in the women’s movement, but they certainly weren’t broadcasting that they were lesbians until later on. When the Stonewall riots and other protests encouraged LGBT folks to speak up and organize themselves.

At first, many out lesbians were rejected from the women’s movement. Many of the leaders of the women’s movement fought for unions and feared that lesbians were spies from the government, or ‘scabs’ sent to disrupt the movement. To combat this, lesbians argued that they were the pinacol of feminist belief because they were women who loved exclusively women. They wanted no part of men…but they could take part in masculinity. Some wanted to replace men entirely, much like how Raymond accused doctors of doing to women.

Now, the main argument of this movement was that there was nothing about being a woman that should have let to them being made lesser than men. They deserved the same rights, the same pay, the same jobs, and also the same protection. A woman could do anything a man could do.

A theory that arose from this time, is that gender as we understand it—the things that define men and women physically or visible—are constructed by our society. Kind of like how we all collectively agree to follow the laws we’ve made for ourselves, we’ve socially agreed that women have long hair and men short, etc.

This theory boosted the idea that there is no difference between men and women and thus highlighting how horrible the oppression and abuse women faced was.

Transgender women were a part of the women’s movement for some time as well. They often passed effectively and did not wish to out themselves as transgender much of the time. With the visibility of LGBT+ folks during the gay rights movement, some transgender women chose to make their gender identity visible as well (others, of course did not, it was and always will be a choice everyone has the right to make).

That is when a fear of the same disruption of the genders many feminists were arguing for started to appear. Much like the suspicion surrounding lesbians at the beginning of the movement, transgender women were viewed as infiltrators, much like Raymond specifies in that quote.

Gender mess is at the center of the movement. Moving definitions, abolishing some while upholding others. Being transgender is the extreme form of gender mess and should have proven that gendered markers like ‘male’ and ‘female’ were nonsense. However, women who became TERFs were so afraid of the way transgender women were being instructed and ‘taught’ by professionals in the medical field (mostly male doctors) on how to be women. Those lessons were exemplary of the constructed gender they were arguing existed.

What do I mean by that? Well, at the time this book was written 1979, trans folks had to live as their gender identity for 1 to 2 years and talk with therapists and pass relatively successfully before even being considered for any kind of medication or surgery. They would get help getting feminine jobs and hobbies, be encouraged to find a man to eventually marry, and so on.

When you have this theory that gender is a construct, but have the life experience of being within that construction of gender, it can be difficult to view the world differently. Raymond and other feminists were faced with this dilemma. On one hand, their socially constructed gender was what was used as a reason to oppress them. On the other their identity of being a woman was intrinsic to their world view. On the other, other hand, they were no different from men in every aspect but one.

In my eyes (but I’m writing from a very specific and different point of view and time) there is no greater evidence of gender as a construct than a transgender person. There is no greater evidence that gender is something we have created than choosing to cross over gender lines and see through the eyes of the others. Proof positive that there are no differences between each individual person other than how they chose to address and present themselves.

However, Raymond and others like her couldn’t see the forest through the trees. Transgender women represented everything they resented. The construction of their feminine gender by men in order to control them.

Therefore, there had to be something intrinsically different about being a woman while also making them no different from men. Instead of abolishing gender as a construct, they changed the rules instead.

To Raymond, gender must be biological and definable only by organs and their potential to give or not give birth to more humans. Now it is their biology, which they cannot control, that decides their socially constructed lives.

Raymond is a lesbian, and she, like all queer folks, had to come to terms with her own gender mess. Of course, not in a vacuum. She was surrounded by the women’s movement and other TERFs. She, like others, found that they were the perfect example of the women’s movement. A woman who had no need for a man and could construct her relationships and culture to rid herself of men entirely.

In other words, much like she pointed the finger at doctors for creating ‘artificial’ women she spoke along the same lines as women who believed that, one day, a woman led society could get rid of men.

Gender mess and grappling with it is fundamental not only to Raymond’s work, however much she wishes to denounce it, but also a queer identity, no matter what specific identity a person has under the umbrella.

To perhaps harp on the point, let’s talk about another book. Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds was written by Judy Grahn, who was a feminist and helped with the women’s movement, just like Raymond.

However, instead of demonizing gender mess, Another Mother Tongue highlights queer people throughout time who were full of gender mess. Grahn sought out people of the past whom we would define as transgender or lesbian or gay. 

Instead of insisting that cross dressing shamans or people or cultures were really just gay and lesbian people mistaken in their gender identity, Grahn explains that these cultures valued and viewed gender differently. Those who ‘crossed’ gender lines were instead viewed as their own gender identification with their own work, dress, and cultural purpose.

While Grahn doesn’t talk much about the gender struggles of her time, nor does she want to have a particular conversation about the politics of gender, she hints at similar opinions to Raymond. Here and there, she talks about queer folks who go so far as to ‘lie’ about their gender. To Grahn, clearly there are no transgender people. Just people confused by who they are. Instead, all queer people, lesbians, gays, transgender folks, bisexuals, anyone who falls under the queer umbrella, reside within a third gender or third space where they do not fit into the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’.

Much like Bornstein, Grahn wondered about a queer identity;

“In proceeding with my task of researching Gay underground slang words, phrases, and characteristics, is there, I wondered, such a thing as a coherent Gay culture? Could it be that Gay people play certain roles in society that are a necessary and natural part of socialized life and, if so, is this true in any part of the world?…

I thought that if Gayness has cultural characteristics, then it exists as a separate entity, complete in itself, and not as a reaction to a heterosexual social model, not as a reaction to any social model, including sexism, patriarchy, the way men or women are treated by each other, the fact that families stay together or split up, that sexuality is open of closed, that the economy is flourishing or depressed. If Gayness has a culture of its own, it exists in the midst of but is not caused by any of those conditions.” (pages 18-19)

            Around the same time, with the same concepts, Raymond and Grahn come to different conclusions while apart of the same identity and even the same school of thought. They even use similar arguments. Grahn describes a third gender, an entirely different identity that breaks down the construction of the strict binary gender system we have become so used to.

            Raymond, meanwhile, rejected gender mess entirely. There are no third genders, no other option for gender and identity. The binary remains strict and physically definable.

            Gender mess is pinacol to both of these works. Both authors had to deal and grapple with it personally and then socially. Just like Bornstein who took gender mess in a completely different direction still.

            Is gender mess all there is to the queer identity? No. However it is certainly an important and undeniable facet.