L stands for people who identify as Lesbian, G for gay, B for Bisexual and T for transsexual or transgender people. Most of the time, when I talk to LGBT people, I talk to L and G people. Many of them have had sex with persons of the opposite sex at some point in their lives and that would no doubt make others think of them as B people. In my experience, most were not. Not really. They were L or G people not yet ready to accept themselves as L or G people and trying to "go straight" at the time. I've met very few mature adults who identify themselves as B. That's totally out of sync with the Gallup claim that over half of LGBT people identify as bi, and only underlines the fact that my personal sample is anything but a sample of the LGBT community; it's a function of the people I hang out with. I am aware that when I make generalizations about any group of people on the basis of their ethnicity or race or sexual persuasion, I am not describing them so much as I am revealing to the world the limitations of my own experience with it. Short of carefully constructed social science data collection, most of these generalizations are based on nothing more than anecdotal evidence.
But I'm still curious about these B-identified people. Are they "really" B? Or are they using the term as a mask? And given the current state of the way we approach things in this country, can we ever trust the answers we might get? Also, there is a whole set of more useful questions one might ask, if one is seeking to understand sexuality, such as "Did you always identify as L or G or did you once identify as B? If you are B is does your sex interest depend on the individual? The opportunity?
We already know this applies to L and G as well. Kinsey generated a scale from Kinsey 1 (no interest in the same sex) to Kinsey 6 (interest only in the same sex). It's hard to be precise when dealing with such things as emotions, the sex drive, and in the way our environment has led us to identify ourselves and others sexually.
I've been trying to get my head around this newfound fascination with the world of T. And with the whole notion of identity and how we evaluate self-report data. I am convinced that in questions of sexuality, as with any other American fascination, getting clarity is likely to be beyond reach. Let me elaborate, using the current fascination with the political football that is transgender as a jumping-off place.
The first time I got into a discussion with a T-identified person it didn't go well. They were furious over the kind of questions I was asking. With good reason, no doubt. Naive questions can be charming, like when my niece - four years old at the time - crawled up in the lap of a black friend of mine and asked him, "How come your skin is brown?" But when one adult asks another, "How do you know you are gay, or trans?" the gay or trans person can be expected to think to themselves, "What rock did you just crawl out from under? Where the hell have you been all these years?"
What really pissed them off, though, was the revelation that I was coming from a starting point on the trans question that many trans people find really hard to take. I spent so many years coming to terms with being gay and have fought all my life trying to convince the world that gay men ought to be embraced regardless of how masculine or feminine they presented themselves as. And ditto for women. Whether homosexuality is inborn or nurtured later in life, we should be able to walk and talk in ways that come naturally to us without being considered some sort of freak. Nelly queens and butch lesbians have as much right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as anybody else, in my book. That's where I was coming from and I was convinced my convictions were established on a solid amount of life experience and therefore unassailable.
"If you find yourself waving your hands or crossing your legs in a way society associates with feminine behavior - if you are a man - and people look at you funny, recognize that it's society's problem, not yours," I would preach to my juniors in the LGBT world. "Don't go buying into the notion that you are 'a woman born into the wrong body.' That only gives bigots fuel for their fire. Stand your ground. Don't surrender your right to be whatever you are to another person."
I was what my T friend would tell me is a member of a class of T people's worst enemies: gay men. A man insisting that his experience with sexuality was universal. No better than the most arrogant and narrow kind of heterosexual, the kind likely to persuade your parents to lock you up in a mind-fuck Jesus reeducation camp to make you straight.
In Japan, in alternating semesters, I ran seminars on "liberation theory." The goal was to try to see if there was a common goal among the social movements around the world demanding political liberation, women's liberation, and gay liberation. And note, in passing, I'm talking about a time before the latter two got recast as "feminist movement" and "LGBT rights," respectively. It was an uphill climb, since "feminism," many of my highly privileged students, both men and women, had decided, was a bad word, referring to those loud aggressive women who "called too much attention to themselves." And lesbians and gays were people suffering from gender dysphoria. I found myself seriously challenged, since I held the view that good teaching involved not dictating meaning and punishing people who thought differently from myself, but getting them to come around to my way of thinking through intellectual persuasion. I don't know how far I got in creating feminists. With the gay liberation module, I cheated. I bypassed the intellectual persuasion bit and used emotion. I showed the documentary, "The Times of Harvey Milk." By the end of the screening, they were ready to accept that not all Ls and Gs are suffering from gender dysphoria. Many, they came to see, were "bien dans sa peau" as the French say: they "fit quite comfortably in their own skin," and simply want to be left to live a life free from discrimination and rejection.
Unfortunately, I still had a ways to go myself. While it's very much the case that lot of Ls and Gs need to get out from under the view that social rejection of them is proof that they were born in the wrong bodies - or otherwise need to "go straight," that does not mean gender dysphoria is not a real thing. Some dysphoria stems from bullying by people who simply need to shut up and mind their own business. These people you should ignore and not let them run your life. But there is also dysphoria that stems from a powerful inner conviction that life is expecting you to play from a stacked deck. And are tortured by that expectation and deserve to be helped to get around it.
The line between inappropriate external pressure to think of yourself as incorrectly labeled by the doctor who birthed you and the legitimate conviction that you were incorrectly labeled is probably never going to be easy to find. We will, at least for the forseeable future, always have to do the best we can. My view is that, unless or until a time comes when we find a better way to proceed, we should simply ask the person involved to tell us what sex they want to identify with, embrace it and let them live life accordingly.
Before LGBT people came to find general acceptance in America, we had to listen to bible-thumpers tell us being gay was nothing more than a bad choice. Forgive me, but this gives me reason to think that here, too, this time with the Ts among us, the only decent response to such horse pucky is, "You don't tell me who I am; I tell you. Now piss off."
Unfortunately, tragically, this country is now suffering from an outbreak of something on the spectrum between a simple outbreak of occasional authoritarianism and outright fascism. And by fascism, I mean, among other things, the twisting of facts for political gain. Roe v. Wade has been reversed, Republicans are trying to keep black Americans from voting because we all know they are very likely to vote Democratic, kids with same-sex parents are being told they cannot reveal that fact in many states when their teachers ask them to talk about their family lives, and in some places even a single parent complaint can lead to a book being removed from a school library. These are ugly times, politically. And T people are the latest pawns on the right-wing chess board.
OK. Buckle up. The next part is probably going to lose me some friends. Because I identify as a sociolinguist and I understand that to mean that I see word meanings as following the actual use of language in society, and not some idealized Language Academy or Dictionary Authority word definition, here's where I run into trouble:
The T in LGBT stands simultaneously for "transsexual" and "transgender." I see those as two separate things: transsexual as somebody who moves, or intends to move from one physical sex to another, by means of things like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgery; and transgender as somebody who sees themselves as no longer willing to play the social roles their society assigns their sex to play and asks you to stop using one set of pronouns and start using the opposite ones. Transsexual, I understand to be a biological category; transgender, a social category. The former as scientifically, objectively defined, the latter as socially, conventionally, subjectively defined. Or, to put it another way, your gender is what you and the rest of the world decide to call yourself, your sex is defined by things that can be measured by such things as chromosomes, gametocytes, hormone prevalence, and external and internal anatomy. The distinction in recent times has become blurred by usage, though, and now we read that "According to the APA Style guide, the term "transsexual" is largely outdated...."
What? Say again? That means to me only that the APA is buying into the blurring of the two terms. Pay no attention to what you see, it says. Don't believe your lying eyes. The doctor may have called me a girl because he couldn't see the real me, but I tell you who I am; you don't tell me. It's not only my "gender" that is on a spectrum; so is my "sex."
Remember, I insist that people who identify as "transexual" or "transgendered" deserve to be treated with respect and the same degree of affection one would expect to give those who don't. But I find the political assertion that things can be whatever you say they are makes me uncomfortable because it lines up with those on the far right who speak of alternate facts.
That, of course, just raises the question, "If that's the case, what do you care? Why are you making such a big deal of this?" The answer is I don't like people who make things unnecessarily muddy. What's called for here is a nuanced appreciation of the distinction between fact and fiction. The postmodern assertion that things are no more than what any person's narrative takes them to be is a big part of the current mess we're in, where we are being led to believe that there is a hidden cabal of people out to run the world. No. Distinctions matter. A proto-fascist president may call himself president and insist Biden stole the election. But that's a fiction. Which, in this case, is a lie. Confusing transsexual and transgendered may be less consequential, but it's also not an innocent misuse of language.
You see my problem as a sociolinguist. My dilemma. On the one hand I want to use language the way the world actually uses language, and not the way some outside authority thinks it should be used. On the other hand, I want to draw a line when people call a liar a president. And when people are (in my view) too lazy to make meaningful distinctions. I'm a conservative in the sense that I want people to say "fewer people" and not "less people" and use the apostrophe-s for the possessive, and not for making nouns plural.
Am I wrong to see the transsexual/transgendered distinction in this light? Note that I'm hardly alone in this. Have a look at two eggheads I normally give a lot of credence to tearing down Richard Dawkins for saying essentially the same thing I just did - which, given his cred as a world-class biologist - should carry a lot more weight. Shame on these guys and their ad hominem attack on one of the great thinkers of our age.
We need to get this linguistic roadkill out of the road so we can get to the really important stuff of the transgender issue - how to help people transition if they need to and how to stop passing bad laws that get in their way.
But more on that later.
I'll stop here for now.
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