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January 26, 2017 11:18 am  #1


assaulted by the trans narrative

   People, I'm low today.   Feeling erased, like collateral damage, and even cast out of the only community I've ever been able to rely on and in which I've worked my entire adult life.  Straight spouses, you know how when you discovered your wife or husband was gay that you felt it deep inside your sense of self, and felt diminished in your own sexuality and as a woman or a man?  I'm feeling that.  You know how the celebration of coming out made you feel like you were a dishrag, something to be used for wiping up someone else's mess and then thrown aside?   I'm feeling that.  And you know how you had times when it seemed that every time you turned around you saw something in your everyday life about celebrating coming out?  I'm feeling that.  I share that with every straight spouse of a gay person.
  But I'm feeling something else, too, because the issues for those married to those who declared they're transgendered are not exactly the same for those married to those who are homosexual. (I'm not saying my situation is "worse," only that it's "similar but different.")  Most of you, I think, understand your partner's sexuality as something innate, something they just "are."  Many of you may think the same about transness--that a person has "a feeling" about whether they are a man or a woman.  After all, that is the transactivist narrative; that transness, like gayness is innate and unalterable, even though it may have gone unrecognized or been suppressed for years.  And so when a trans person "comes out," it's to be celebrated, just as it is with gay people. (And all you straight spouses and former spouses know what that feels like from your side!) That's the narrative that has been popularized about "being trans," along with the one that says "woman" and "man" are not terms that refer to anything concrete, that "woman" and "man" are defined simply by feeling one is one or the other: "If I feel like a woman I am one" is a phrase I've heard asserted, alongside "trans women are women."  Trans activists say birth control and abortion are not a woman's issue because *they* are women and neither of those concerns them, because they don't have a uterus and can't get pregnant.  They say having a female reproductive tract doesn't define women, and want to call actual women with female reproductive tracts "uterus bearers" and our vaginas "front holes." They say biology is a social construct; they say a person's genitals at birth do not define them as male or female, but that doctors "assign a gender at birth."  Once you start investigating it, it's utter nonsense.  And it's also deeply misogynistic, as the concerns and definitions of males (transwomen) displace those of actual women.  Imagine if white people in blackface--a whole army of Rachel Dolezals--did this to black people!  The outcry would be deafening.  (And if you don't believe this has something to do with misogyny, ask yourself why you don't hear any of this from trans men [females]....or why it's trans women [males] who are the loudest voices of the trans activist campaigns.)
   There are, in fact, many independent, thinking and critically minded people who contest those ideas, who say that "man" and "woman" are biologically based, that biology defines the terms, that a person's genitals define their sex, and gender is a social construct imposed on both sexes and can be resisted, that therefore a transwoman or a transman is just that--not an actual woman or an actual man, but a person who has decided to adopt the social characteristics of the opposite gender (but act as if those characteristics are defining of what it is to be a man or a woman).
  These critically-minded people have well-developed critiques of the illogic spouted by transactivists.  They are, however, regularly villified, shouted down, kept from speaking, threatened, and attacked by transactivists. (Transactivists tried to destroy the career of a prominent psychologist, J. Michael Bailey, and threatened his children.) The questions and critiques of the critically-minded have not been satisfactorily answered by transactivists, because they are logically unassailable, but the liberal's (commendable) urge to be inclusive and fight for social justice, coupled with a lack of actual experience, that such as we--you and I--have, the experience that underpins our understanding and our analyses, has allowed that transactivist narrative to prevail.  Transactivist trans-women demand that lesbians are obligated to consider them as sexual partners (even if the transwoman has retained her penis) or be labeled "transmisogynistic" or "transphobic."  And the trans-activists and their ideas are everywhere--including on the university campus on which I work and among the people I would have said to be "my people" two years ago, before my husband decided to start dressing in women's clothing and lingerie and wanting to feminize himself and asking to be treated in bed as sexually submissive because "that's what women do/are," and I, unlike people who had no compelling need to investigate these issues in any depth, had to immerse myself in the literature and the debates and actually investigate and think critically about these issues instead of nodding my head in vague agreement and patting myself on the back for my liberalism.  
  Well, in the past few weeks, transness and the widespread acceptance of the transactivist narrative that I believe to be delusional and false and misogynistic has been in my face every time I turn around, and it feels like a negation of me, my womanhood and my sexuality (because many of these men-become-women define themselves as "lesbians," including my male husband), my experience as the wife of a husband whose behavior I can see to be caused by a psychological condition, and of rational analysis.  
   In the national media: Chelsey Manning and the debate over a pardon, with commenters who favor release saying "she's suffered enough and a woman doesn't belong in a men's prison," as if being trans is a get-out-of jail-free card, or, alternately, saying "she's guilty and must serve the sentence but put her in a woman's prison," as if the women in such a prison might not have objections to a male dressed as a woman being housed with them, as if they don't even have the right to object (because the needs or wants of Chelsey Manning, male, prevails over those of all the actual women in the women's prison); or the current issue of National Geographic issue, which features on the cover a boy-now-girl dressed from hair to clothes in pink, and who is quoted as saying "the best thing about being a girl is I don't have to pretend to be a girl," as if "girl" has meaning only in relation to "boy," and not in itself, as if dressing in and acting out an extreme version of society's gender markers makes one a girl.  
    And in my workplace: endless programs on "transwomen," with any questioning of the idea that one can just say "I say I'm a girl so I am one" called out as hate speech; my colleagues even in my department jumping on the bandwagon to incorporate this topic into their classes and research.  If the husbands of either of my colleagues so enthusiastically embracing this new field of research and teaching began acting as mine has, I would bet they'd run screaming from their houses!
   And through it all, I have had to bite my tongue, not because I'm not capable of responding, but because my husband who works in the same place as I do is still closeted, and I've told only one close friend at work.  If I explain why I think what I do, I out my husband.  And I'm not prepared to do that publicly.
  The straw that broke my back?  Yesterday one of my colleagues offered to teach a course for our senior seminar next year on masquerade in Renaissance literature by saying it could be packaged as trans, and ended the email with the exclamation "sexy times!"  I felt like I'd been slapped; worse, I felt like I didn't have a place in my own building and department and intellectual community.  (And I also felt a loss of respect for, a disillusionment with my colleague.)  And as I've now been walking around in my husband's closet at work for two years (because we work in the same department), and already therefore was already feeling isolated and alone and apart from my colleagues, an isolation which plays out on a daily, individual, interpersonal, concrete level, this new blow in the realm of the abstract, intellectual, and theoretical, feels like the final exile. 
   I just want to hunker down today at home, alone and protected by four walls, where I won't have to be subject to or surrounded by or worried about ambush by all things trans. 
  Thanks for listening, thanks for giving me space, and sorry if this feels too coldly intellectual or abstract.  You don't even have to read it; just writing it down knowing that I can post it where it can be read makes me feel less isolated and alone, less invisible and negated, less assaulted. As others have said, if I didn't have this community of those who know what this whole rotten situation feels like, I don't know where I'd turn.
  
  

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (January 26, 2017 11:53 am)

 

January 26, 2017 12:04 pm  #2


Re: assaulted by the trans narrative

OOHC,

First let me say, that your entry is both informative and literate, Don't apologize for that! I found it clear, well thought out and directly to the point. That being said, you have every right to hide today, everyone needs to get through the utter shock of betrayal in their own way. In my opinion that is what you are facing yet again, betrayal, by people and co workers whom you thought were friends and colleagues.  I wish I were there to sit and have a cup of tea with you, you wouldn't have to talk unless you wanted to, just someone to give you a hug and let you cry if you needed to. 

You are right that some of your issues are different than the ones I face. What you are facing has to call into so many questions about yourself, and the fact that his betrayal has done this to you makes it no better. Anything you need to discuss here, you know you can, I'm here, we're all here, and we will give you what comfort we can.

Joanne


Go not quietly into that great, good night......Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
 

January 26, 2017 12:35 pm  #3


Re: assaulted by the trans narrative

Joanne,
   Thanks so very much for your reply and your concern.  It is a comfort.  
   Thanks, too, for the virtual cup of tea.  I have decided to hide today, and building on your offer of a cup  of tea to give myself both an actual and a metaphoric cup of tea.   
  BTW, I discovered an error in my post.  The child featured on the National Geography cover is quoted as saying, "The best thing about being a girl is I don't have to pretend I'm a *boy.* [not "a *girl*]  In case anyone got confused by that.

     Thread Starter
 

January 26, 2017 3:54 pm  #4


Re: assaulted by the trans narrative

OOHC.  What an amazing post!  I think you should consider submitting it to the Straight Spouse Blog.. maybe change a few pieces of information to keep it very anonymous.  But context of what you are saying is spectacular.   I'm so sick of our society patting the LGBT person on the back and ignoring the swath of destruction left by their years of lying.  Not all of them do it of course.. I imagine most of honest and good people who don't use another human being to keep a secret and feel better about themselves.  But too many of them use others for many years, destroy lives and then get a pat on the back having such a hard life.   

 


-Formerly "Lostdad" - I now embrace the username "phoenix" because my former life ended in flames, but my new life will be spectacular. 

 
 

January 26, 2017 6:06 pm  #5


Re: assaulted by the trans narrative

OOHC,
Sending you a big hug today, what an intelligent, articulate  and strong woman you are! And if you need something stronger than your tea today, go for it.

 

January 26, 2017 6:33 pm  #6


Re: assaulted by the trans narrative

OutofHisCloset, 
Huge hugs to you.  No, our situations are not the same, but pain is pain.  Heartbreak is heartbreak.  We all understand the feelings of being used, being lied to, being misled.  We question ourselves.  We question everything.  

Have you ever seen the movie, Normal?  I saw it years ago, in 2002 or 3.  It was the most honest portrayal of gender dysphoria I'd ever seen, and for once, it focused quite a bit on the spouse's pain and emotion.  It may be hard to watch, but it's a wonderful film. Might not be reality for everyone, but it certainly hit on many issues all of us have faced when "secrets" come to life.  


“Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely of places.”
 

January 26, 2017 10:27 pm  #7


Re: assaulted by the trans narrative

Thank you all for your care, concern, and comments.  

JK, I saw on another thread that today was also a difficult one for you.  I hope that here at the end of the day you are feeling ok.  You've been such a voice of compassion, and I've watched you demonstrate the strength of your resolve without being consumed (at least to our view) by anger or bitterness.  You're a wonder to me, and an example.

Maresyd, I so appreciate your acknowledgement of the pain, and your suggestion about "Normal."  I don't know if I can watch it now, but maybe someday, when the "woman in a man's body" narrative doesn't send me over the edge.  I know that gender dysphoria is a terrible state for those who suffer it; I just wish that the trans activist narrative has not made the treatment of choice "transition," instead of its being the treatment of last resort.  

  Dee, I appreciate the compliment, although I don't feel strong at all; I often feel like I'm the person in that funny saying "I have one nerve left"....and if anyone mentions the word trans I will snap like a dry wishbone. 

  Lostdad, thanks for the suggestion of a blog entry.  Fact is, what I wrote today is just the latest in the stage I'm in, focusing on the larger context for my husband's gender dysphoria and autogynephilia.  It's as if there have been widening circles, from my initial concern for trying to understand him from his perspective, through the psychological literature, and now to the cultural debates, probably because they're playing out on my campus.  I recently realized that I can no longer participate in a sex life in which my husband acts out a stereotype of woman as sexually submissive because in real life these ideas of women diminish women and keep us from full humanity.  It would take an entire blog, probably, to tell this story!  

 You are all such kind and caring people, and I hope I can support you when you, too, are having down days. 

     Thread Starter
 

January 27, 2017 5:26 am  #8


Re: assaulted by the trans narrative

Oohc,

I spent most of my Christmas break watching the hallmark channel ...sappy christmas movies.  Hunkered down..sure.  Its a bit silly for a guy ..kids thought I was watching them for Christmas.  I was quite honest with my family telling them I enjoyed watching heterosexual relationships.  They made me feel..safe.
I hope you find a safe place for yourself away from the trans.

Last edited by Rob (January 27, 2017 5:27 am)


"For we walk by faith, not by sight .."  2Corinthians 5:7
 

January 27, 2017 9:02 pm  #9


Re: assaulted by the trans narrative

I'm too tired to write a lengthy response.  Suffice it to say I have discussed the very same issues you raise here and feel equally assaulted.  A trans being named Woman of the Year knocked the wind out of me. My ex going into the BDSM community to seek out transgenders for sex and calling them women (who have a penis) ) enrages me.  I too have questioned my femininity and felt incredibly invalidated.

Enough said thank you for your post

Last edited by Daisyduke (January 27, 2017 9:03 pm)

 

January 30, 2017 12:28 am  #10


Re: assaulted by the trans narrative

OOHC, Brilliant. I too feel even mmore isolated now that I have chosen to exit his closet. I have always been a very liberal minded supporter off LGBT, helping in the community as much as I could, helping my own husband further his progress & cause (unknowingly! that whole "hind site 20/20' thing!) and now, it makes me  so irritated to see anything Trans mtf. I KNOW it has diddly squat to do with gender for 95% of mtf middle aged males. And to listen to the chatter,,  for me especially, not one to bite my tongue, it's a test to my patience. I don't know how you cope at your given workplace & husband''s close proximity.

The co worker suggesting "Sexy Times" at the end of that is very telling. It really IS sim
mply about sexual behavior. If it's not, how inappropriate for it to be included. And why must a Renaissance lesson be spun as "Trans"? Oh right, it's so Au Current! How stylish & edgy.  

You must be exhausted. On one hand we are reeling from all the new info we are learning, we're pissed, confused,, want to scream from he roof tops what us *insiders* know about the real Trans that Trans are not sharing but really, we would love nothing more than to rewind to the days we were clueless & simply LGBT supportive,, but we are slapped in the face every single day y the movement. I hate that make up commercial with the male blogger as the new *spokes person* for make up, in full drag make up, smile as big as Texas. Then I feel like a hypocritical bitter bitch for rolling my eyes & letting out a big  "Ugh!"

I have very little social/workplace interactions though, unlike you. I applaud you, your grace, patience & diplomacy. I would be reminding your spouse how EXTRA lucky he is that his co worker/wife/life partner experienced in the CD/TG narrative is all of the above mentioned. Kudos. 

xxSham

 

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