If I had to define a man, I’d say it was someone who has been called faggot.
Of course, on the surface, this is an absurd statement, though I have been applauding myself on it for months now. First of all: not everyone has been called a faggot is a man! I’m not a man, and I’ve been called it more than once. Secondly: how can I be SURE SURE SURE that every person out there who is a man has been called a faggot? And of course there is the nuance in being called a faggot when you are not one and when you are one? And what about a man who is a faggot and what about people who are faggots all their own, no manhood involved?
And yet, this is what we do as we try to define gender. For me, the most fascinating parts of Judith Butler’s seminal classic Gender Trouble is not her theory of performativity which, while obviously important, to me ignores the actual excitement of the rest of the book, where she explains that every way we’ve tried to define “woman” has failed, either due to misogynistic underpinnings or just inability to couple facts with our definitions. And yet, despite Butler’s book and the enduring nature of the theory, we can’t seem to escape trying to define womanhood around experiences that not all women share.
We see it, of course, through the biologically essentialist rhetoric of TERFs–that women are defined by having certain body parts, certain processes like menstruation. Never mind this has never been true, and that it’s openly transphobic; it’s a clearly wrong definition they cling to, for a reason I will enumerate momentarily. This trend doesn’t end with TERFs though; it is perpetuated by more insidious theories through “socialization,” which suggests that there are certain specific experiences that unify gender, particularly shared experiences among women and girls, that create gendered experiences. That is: you are born a girl but you are also socialized as a girl, and this socialization crystalizes your girlhood, shapes womanhood. These experiences might include but are not limited to being told to be quiet, passive, shame around menstruation, etc.
I do not want to undermine the importance of realizing that you share experiences with others; obviously, as a feminist and a trans person, I see how critical that can be. But the problem of socialization as it is deployed is much the same problem with my definition of man: it universalizes experiences and names them as gender, despite the fact that there may be people of many different genders who share those experiences. To name an experience as gender also ignores the way that socialization is deeply nuanced by any number of factors. I maintain that despite growing up in the same household, attending the same schools, going to the same church as children, my sister and I were socialized very differently, in ways that are both positive and potentially traumatic.1 And that doesn’t touch the way that socialization is deployed in deeply transphobic ways, especially against trans women who were of course by this paradigm “socialized as male” (I rolled my eyes just writing that,) and therefore should be chastised for doing things like taking up space or talking loudly I guess.2
Why is is it so important to universalize a gender, especially womanhood? What drives TERFs and other transphobes, and even well-meaning trans “inclusive” feminists to try to find ways to silo “woman” in these ways? I could armchair psychologize all day long about this, but what I want to draw our attention to in these specific cases is this: many, many folks are desperately trying to keep from acknowledging that they share experiences with men.
I get it, of course: patriarchy deals a great deal of violence, and frankly so do individual men. Drawing boundaries around who is not a man may start from a place of trying to decide who is safe, a kind of traumatized thinking that feels to many in the abused-to-TERF pipeline like creating safety. But it’s not; women are not less dangerous simply by virtue of being women, and men are not less dangerous because of their proximity to femininity. To make this the core of your politics means we’re still organizing ourselves in ways that are essentialist, and it makes us sisters to terfs in ways we seem uninterested in interrogating.3
For me, realizing I’m like men–or at least, like some men–let me start to actually work on how to imagine a different gendered future, or at least, one where we organize ourselves differently. I wouldn’t suggest abandoning gender per se, as I think there is too much creativity to be found there, though I think we do have to organize ourselves around gender differently, but that’s for a different albeit related time. Instead, realizing I’m like some men makes me wonder if there are other gendered experiences I have that are shared with men, and what exploring those commonalities with men–and women, and any other folks who share these experiences–might produce or explore. What if, rather than saying, “women experience THIS,” we asked “what commonalities and differences are shared by people who experience this? What does it mean to take those things seriously in addressing that experience as gendered?”
I recognize that this flies in the face of decades of feminist organizing. Feminist consciousness raising has historically deeply depended on organizing around gendered experience, and naming that experience as womanhood. I don’t want to stop people from considering their gendered experiences as such, but I wonder what doors close when we think about these experiences as belonging to gender, rather than belonging to gendered people.
How might our analysis change if we embraced being like men? And I don’t just mean having “masculine” traits, but identifying ourselves with men? What would that change for us? To have to face the illusions of gendered safety that we’ve painted for ourselves, and to address what we carry about one another–where we undo each other by assuming we share experiences based on the terms we use to communicate ourselves, where that violence simply compounds the patriarchy rather than explaining it. It doesn’t mean we have to give up our hurts; I too am guilty of gut reactions to things that men I don’t know say, things I chalk up to decades of misogyny and the way it permeates our culture. I lash out, broadly and even sometimes at specific men I love and care for.
But, to draw on Freudian discussions of trauma theory, the acting out that feminist writings, and the feminist politics of those of us trying to muddle through misogyny, engages in does exactly what Holocaust historian Dominick LeCapra names when he discusses acting out as a historical practice–the repetition of problems.4 Confronting that we are like men, and that men are like us, begins to name where feminist thought has stalled out, and where feminist politics spin their wheels. We cannot take the problems with our current cultures of gender–which do not seem to be serving many people at all, including men–seriously if we keep returning to essentialist thought, and having that essentialist thought, however wrapped up in new terms or subsumed into our traumatized thinking, driving our politics. As we see with the more explicit essentialist thinking of transphobia and the political actions it drives, it doesn’t just hurt the people it’s aimed at, specifically because gender is not an essentialized way of being. It hurts us all.
A man isn’t just someone who has been called a faggot, but for the men who have been, we share a gendered experience–yes, one that is shaped by their being a man and my not being one, and one further shaped by the specificities of each man and the specificities of being me, but shared nonetheless. In that knowledge, I hope, is not only a tool of better analysis, but one of a better politics, that dreams past the essentialism that clings to this moment. I hope by taking this seriously, we can work through the trauma of patriarchy and start to build a better world.
Footnote for my mom who I know reads this newsletter: this isn’t to blame you for anything traumatic from our childhoods! Socialization is more than parenting! I love you!
It also is used to degender trans men, lumping them in with women, though often in ways I find perhaps more compelling than the obvious violence wielded against trans women–that is, it is an inclusion, however unintentional, rather than a policing. For more thoughts on the productivity of this, see Cameron Awkward-Rich, “Trans, Feminism: Or, Reading Like a Depressed Transsexual,” Signs 42 no. 4, 2017, which greatly influenced my thoughts on feminism and transness, and especially the problem that trans men pose to feminism; here I extend that to include all men.
I use the term ‘sisters’ here deliberately. There are in fact no brothers of terfs, no neat inclusive gender neutral “sibling.” Only sisters are safe.
For a concise explanation of how LeCapra views these terms, and especially does so with an idea that steers “working through” away from a “cure” for trauma, see this interview with Amos Goldberg: https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203646.pdf. I first came across it reading LeCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, 2nd edition 2014.)