Mark Gabrish Conlan/Zenger's Newsmagazine | 19.06.2003 15:45

“Are you a man or a woman?” It seems like an innocuous enough question; indeed, for most people the answer is so visually obvious it doesn’t need to be asked. And that’s precisely the problem with it, says self-proclaimed “poly-gendered” author and activist Leslie Feinberg. Indeed, in the preface to her 1998 book Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, Feinberg graphically and painfully described how for her — a biological female with a strongly “masculine” appearance and demeanor — the question, “Are you a man or a woman?,” has literally been life-threatening. Zenger’s interviewed Feinberg on the ambiguity of gender categories and how she, as a volunteer with a communist organization, sees her role in the broader Left.

LESLIE FEINBERG:
“Poly-Gendered” Author, Activist Speaks Out

interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2003 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • Used by permission

“Are you a man or a woman?” It seems like an innocuous enough question; indeed, for most people the answer is so visually obvious it doesn’t need to be asked. And that’s precisely the problem with it, says self-proclaimed “poly-gendered” author and activist Leslie Feinberg. Indeed, in the preface to her 1998 book Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, Feinberg graphically and painfully described how for her — a biological female with a strongly “masculine” appearance and demeanor, who says she would prefer to be referred to with recently coined gender-neutral pronouns like “ze,” “sie” and “hir” rather than “she” and “her” — the question, “Are you a man or a woman?,” has literally been life-threatening.

“From December 1995 to December 1996, I was dying of endocarditis — a bacterial infection that lodges and proliferates in the valves of the heart,” Feinberg recalled. “A simple blood culture would have immediately exposed the root cause of my raging fevers. Eight weeks of ’round-the-clock intravenous antibiotic drips would have eradicated every last seedling of bacterium in the canals of my heart. Yet I experienced such hatred from some health practitioners that I very nearly died.

“I remember late one night in December my lover and I arrived at a hospital emergency room during a snowstorm. My fever was 104 degrees and rising. My blood pressure was pounding dangerously high. The staff immediately hooked me up to monitors and worked to bring down my fever. The doctor in charge began physically examining me. When he determined that my anatomy was female, he flashed me a mean-spirited smirk. While keeping his eyes fixed on me, he approached one of the nurses, seated at a desk, and began rubbing her neck and shoulders. He talked to her about sex for a few minutes. After his pointed demonstration of ‘normal sexuality,’ he told me to get dressed and then he stormed out of the room. Still delirious, I struggled to put on my clothes and make sense of what was happening.

“The doctor returned after I was dressed. He ordered me to leave the hospital and never return. I refused. I told him I wouldn’t leave until he could tell me why my fever was so high. He said, ‘You have a fever because you are a very troubled person.’ This doctor’s prejudices, directed at me during a moment of catastrophic illness, could have killed me. The death certificate would have read: Endocarditis. By all rights it should have read: Bigotry.”

Ironically, when this happened Feinberg was already an internationally renowned author for her 1994 book Stone Butch Blues, a largely autobiographical novel depicting the working-class “butch”/“femme” pre-Stonewall Lesbian culture she grew up in in her home town of Buffalo, New York. A moving but also harrowing reading experience — through much of the book you suffer along with the protagonist, “Jess Goldberg,” as she repeatedly gets beaten, arrested and raped — Stone Butch Blues also records Feinberg’s growing involvement in the labor movement and Left politics in general and her disgust with the feminist and Queer orthodoxies of the early 1970’s which denounced “butch” and “femme” Lesbians and Gay drag queens as selling out to traditional male and female gender roles.

Since then Feinberg has published two more books, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (1996), and Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink and Blue (1998). She was a leader in persuading the international network of Pride celebration organizers to add “Bisexual” and “Transgender” to the words “Lesbian” and “Gay” in their name. At the same time she’s continued to work with the broader Left through serving as a co-managing editor of the Workers’ World newspaper and an organizer for the International Action Center (IAC), which sponsored a Feinberg speech at the Balboa Park Club in San Diego June 16. Zenger’s took the opportunity to interview Feinberg while she was here on the ambiguity of gender categories and how she, as a volunteer with a communist organization, sees her role in the broader Left at a time when many young anti-capitalists see anarchism as the only legitimate, non-oppressive alternative.

Zenger’s: One thing I noticed in your writing in general is how bothered you are by the question, “Are you a man or a woman?” What’s wrong with the question, and what would you think the right question would be in terms of getting at how you actually see yourself in terms of gender identity?

Leslie Feinberg: The problem with being asked, “Are you a man or a woman?” is, to a different degree, the same problem that I recall when I was growing up in the Father Knows Best 1950’s, in which anyone who met a woman would ask instantly, “Is that ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’?” It wasn’t just a benign question; underneath it the question was really, “Are you single or are you somebody’s property yet?” When I first heard of the “Ms.” prefix, and the slogan, “Neither Mrs. nor Miss, Ms.,” I thought it would never catch on. I’ve been surprised at how quickly it has, and I believe that is because there was an onerous underpinning to the question, “Miss or Mrs.?”

In some ways, but to an even greater degree, when someone says, “Are you a man or a woman?,” it can’t just be answered, and that’s the end of the question. If the question has to be asked in the first place, you’ve already been marked as a gender outlaw, and with that comes hostility, humiliation, discrimination and violence.

Zenger’s: What drew you into the path of gender outlawry? Was it just being born biologically a woman but physically looking so male?

Feinberg: I grew up as a gender-ambiguous child. I vaguely remember getting to the point in childhood where that was no longer considered “cute.” People asked for a more sharp gender definition — not just that it sharpen up as one or the other, but that it become more feminine — and I was unable to produce that. I was not feminine enough to meet the standards of the Dick and Jane dichotomy of boy and girl . That was just a social fact. But by the time I was about 14 I found the Gay drag community and I claimed it as my own.

The funny thing is I don’t think of myself as masculine. I don’t think of myself as looking male, particularly because there are so many people who know right away, when they see me on the street, that I’m not. But I think of myself as having a very old-Gay butch — when I say “old-Gay” that usually means not just old, although as time passes that’s been true — but pre-Stonewall Gay blue-collar identity for white women of a certain period.

I also think of myself as poly-gendered, in a sense — as very complexly gendered, so that even when people take me as male, they think of me as gender-Queer. So it doesn’t really matter whether I’m using the men’s room or the women’s bathroom. I’m considered Queer in both, gender-Queer in both. [In response to the interviewer’s sigh:] Now what was that reaction about?

Zenger’s: I’m just thinking that this is a difficult thing for most people, including me, to relate to, because the overwhelming majority of human beings are either unambiguously male or unambiguously female, no matter what their sexual expression is or to what extent they fit the stereotyped ideas of what male and female roles are. I think the estimate I’ve seen is that no more than one in 1,000 people are in any degree Transgender.

Feinberg: Let me put it another way to you and see if this is helpful. There are two stick figures for the bathroom doors. One has the little triangular skirt, and on the other one the triangle is inverted to be the broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted figure, right? These are roughly the kinds of Ozzie and Harriet categories, two categories, that people are given to fit. Given that view, people like me are really an anomaly. We stick out like a sore thumb and are a very tiny percentage of the population.

But first of all, there is a whole anatomical spectrum between female and male bodies — intersexuality — which is currently surgically and hormonally shoehorned into those either-or categories, rather than challenging that sort of biological-determinist divide. Also, even though we only have two words for gender expression, “masculine” and “feminine,” that you can see this huge range of difference between the way boys and girls and men and women express their gender. All you have to do is dress all the little boys in one school uniform and all the little girls in another to see that kind of range from masculine to feminine among the girls and from masculine to feminine among the boys.

As a matter of fact, there’s a game that is played in butch-femme Lesbian circles, in which women are judged “butch” or “femme” on a scale of one to 10. What’s interesting is that not just that that would imply that it requires 10 degrees to say how masculine or feminine someone is, but that the people who are rating that person sometimes have violent disagreements about whether someone is a 4 or a 9. Then sometimes the person who’s being rated from 1 to 10 says, “What do you mean I’m a 4? I’m a 9!”

So the whole idea of only having two words for such a vast expression of gender, even in a society that’s so gender-rigid — and then you take into account how many people are living in a sex other than the one they were assigned at birth, and how many millions of people are getting on the Internet and taking another sex in order to do it; are relating on the Internet as male or female through fantasies and interaction. There is really a great deal of gender and sex variation in the human population that is just rendered invisible by those signs on the bathroom door.

Zenger’s: It’s one thing to say, “You, Les Feinberg, have a right to live your life the way you want to, the way you feel fulfilled, the way that makes you happy.” It’s quite another thing to say, “I understand why you would want to choose what you have chosen in that regard.” That’s the leap I was trying to make with that last question, from, “Yes, you’re great, you’re wonderful,” to trying to figure this out myself, why you would want to be the way you are.

Feinberg: The same thing comes up for Gayness. We all face the same questions around Gayness, of heterosexual society saying, “I don’t think you should be beaten up or discriminated against for being Gay, but I just don’t understand what made you that way, why would you want to be that way. It’s such a small percentage of the population.” But then, when you think about sexuality not in terms of heterosexuality as the huge norm and Gayness as “other,” but instead look at it from the standpoint that there’s so much of a spectrum of human sexuality, such variation and such complexity, that just labeling the majority “straight” and this small group “Gay” obscures an understanding of the diversity of human sexual expression.

I am saying that the same thing is true of sex and gender: that there is a great deal of sex and gender diversity that is being culturally obscured by this sort of Ozzie and Harriet paradigm.

Zenger’s: One thing that I’ve noticed is that you mention in one of the speeches in the book Beyond Pink and Blue, that you lobbied the Pride committee for the inclusion of “Bisexual” and “Transgender” in their name. It struck me that on the one hand it’s a good development, but on the other hand I don’t see any real rethought in the overall Gay movement of just what the implications are of bringing it Bisexual and Transgender concerns. It’s an easy thing to put those two words into the name of your organization. It’s a lot harder to rethink the analysis into what you just talked about, that there’s a much broader range of possibilities than just the “straight” box and the “Gay/Lesbian” box.

Feinberg: That’s exactly right. I think that it’s a big step forward to add two initials to the acronym that bring together broader populations in this struggle, into coalition; but that it is even more important to be able to understand and to explore the implications of what that means. Once you put together all of the Lesbian and Gay population, the vast Bisexual population, all of those who are considered gender-variant, all of those whose bodies are born on an anatomical spectrum, all the people who are living in a sex other than the one they were assigned at birth, you suddenly have a very different view of how much human diversity there is.

Then you look at the part that doesn’t seem to be included in that. You see how difficult it’s been for people to think of themselves as a “real man” or a “real woman,” because they have their own feelings about their complexity, about their gender or their sexuality or their sex, that they’ve been unable to express because they fit into that category of “heterosexual” and not differently-gendered, etc. I don’t know anybody who really fits this idea of being a “real man” or a “real woman.” It’s not just that it’s a stereotype. It’s that it’s loaded with “you’re never real enough” baggage. It exposes the mechanism of cleaving diversity into difference in order to pit people against each other.

Zenger’s: One thing in particular that the Gay/Lesbian movement had done is base quite a bit of the case for Gay rights on the idea that “we’re born this way.” It’s always struck me as very odd that while the civil-rights movements for people of color and women challenged biological determinism, the Gay movement embraced it and said, “We are born this way. There’s nothing we can do about it.” It would seem to me that the real threat of the Bi and Trans movements to that consensus would be what you talked about: “No, there is this whole diversity of possibilities and choices that any one individual can follow.” How do you reconcile that with a movement that has invested so much of its political strategy and ideology in the concept that this is innate, that being Gay or Lesbian is something you were born into?

Feinberg: This is something that has come up in both waves of the Gay/Trans/Lesbian/Bi liberation struggles over the last century and a quarter. It came up in the German homosexual emancipation movement, too. I don’t think that people should have to argue that they’re born that way and “it’s not their fault” in order for a full defense of their civil liberties and rights. I think it’s a defensive argument.

To those who say, “Well, it’s not a choice,” the Right-wing has set this up as though “choice” is a narrow kind of thing, as though I’m choosing to wear a suit and I could just wear a dress and I wouldn’t be oppressed, so what’s the problem? It’s trivializing our lives. But what is a choice is to come out and to fight for our rights. In a society in which our rights are being denied, there is absolutely no basis on which we should have to argue nature or nurture. It’s a just struggle against oppression.

Zenger’s: I once wrote in my paper that this idea that it was an inborn characteristic had come from a founding analogy with the civil-rights movements of people of color, and that perhaps religious discrimination might be a better metaphor for us than racial discrimination, since the Constitution explicitly protects your right to practice your own religion, which is something you may be born into, but you are not born with. Do you have a comment on that?

Feinberg: I don’t think so. I think that how we formulate our demands or our analogies needs to be done very carefully. The chant, “Gay, straight, Black, white/Same struggle, same fight,” is very problematic for me. The struggle against anti-Gay, anti-Lesbian, anti-Bi, anti-Trans discrimination is not the same as the struggle against institutionalized racism and the oppression of nationalities in the U.S.

I’d prefer to change the slogan to, “Gay, straight, Black, white/All unite to fight the Right,” or something like that. Different demands and different analogies have come up in different periods. But I think that how we make analogies with other struggles is important. We need to do so in a way that’s sensitive and builds solidarity and unity.

Zenger’s: A lot of people that I work with in the movements of which I am a part are quite young, and they have grown up believing that capitalism, socialism and communism are all equally corrupt. They strongly oppose capitalism and the evils which you have so eloquently described, but they define the alternative that they seek not as socialism or communism, but as anarchism. What would be your message to my friends, the young anarchists?

Feinberg: I would say that all of us who are struggling against capitalism want the same thing. We all want to end up in a society in which there is no state power that is in control of our lives; that we’re not being exploited; that we’re not being oppressed; that we’re in free association with each other; that people have what they need to thrive and grow. We have differences about how to achieve that.

I believe that the experience not only of the struggles against slavery but also the struggles of the last century or more — really, since the Paris Commune in 1871 — have shown that those who are being thrown out of economic power, those who have a firm grasp on the economic and social reins of power, have never let go without a fight, and have continued to try to organize and counter-organize the most vicious counter-revolutionary attempts to destroy any efforts to build a planned economy.

We have to discuss as a movement how to achieve the goals of a classless, stateless society that we all seek. We should do that with respect and with haste, because the problems that we face are not going to wait for us to just have a long, serious discussion for our movement to take up.

Zenger’s: I read Stone Butch Blues and I couldn’t help thinking, “My God, was your life really that miserable?”

Feinberg: Oh, no! My life’s been great! I wouldn’t trade my life with anyone’s — all of it, every minute of it.

e-mail:: mgconlan@earthlink.net
Homepage:: http://www.transgenderwarrior.org