Compassion first (A list of ten things, in transgender awareness week)
It’s transgender awareness week. I am never organised enough to make posts for national days or weeks. But this time it coincides with some reading I’ve been doing on trans pregnancy, birth and the birth world.
I didn’t know whether to write about some of the hatred and bypassing I’ve seen on both threads and in shared DMs from birth workers and others in the “spiritual community”, the talk of “filthy people”, “freaks” and “digusting” bodies (all direct quotes) I’ve seen in the last week.
Instead I made a list.
I get some of the fears and uncertainty from cis women around language, spaces and identification with regards to trans people and their rights. Fears, for example, that you won’t be “allowed” to carry on referring to yourself as a woman.
I think lot of the fear is unfounded. No one is telling you that you’re not allowed to call yourself a woman. Instead some people are suggesting that it’s also compassionate and inclusive to throw some ANDS (not ORS) in there, for example in the birth world if you’re addressing others, talk about pregnant people/birthing people along with women. That is, the aim is inclusion not erasure (thanks to Anna of Hackney Hypnobirthing for this phrase and discussions on this topic).
Being a cis woman means growing up with certain experiences due to your biology, social constructions around gender and its associated psychology. This will be a materially “different” experience than what a trans woman will have known. Can we acknowledge that nuance without putting up boundaries around language and spaces that cause more harm than good? We can get pernickety over permission and when someone “gets” to use a term. Some questions: does saying people can’t use a term because of their biology at birth create more or less harm? When are we digging our heels in and building walls just because we’re afraid of changing the composition of our little club?
When I did my sociology degree I studied the idea of biological essentialism, the idea that the sexes are innately different. Is it true? I don’t know. I think it’s likely that similarities vastly outweigh the differences, that the majority of differences we see are socially constructed.
In spiritual circles there is talk of the “sacred feminine” as a set of characteristics and as a force of nature, as I understand it. I’m pretty sure that all of us have both traditionally (or spiritually, if you see it that way) feminine and masculine traits in us, that we need a balance of the two, that if these things are forces or energies within the universe or we characterise them as such, the ability to increase our sense of connection with them is not limited to one biological sex.
It’s perfectly possible to agree with a lot of what someone says and acknowledge the great work they have done - for example about birth or the psychological experience of pregnancy and motherhood - and also disagree with the way they speak about other things, for example trans bodies or experiences. It’s up to us whether we feel we can still consume, share or recommend this person’s work, once we know what we know about their opinions or actions. This brilliant Paris Review article What Do We Do With The Art of Monstrous Men discusses a similar dilemma in the wake of Me Too.
The people full of hate - I wish they would be honest with themselves and sit with/acknowledge the revulsion they feel for trans bodies, work out where it comes from and how they might overcome it. To be clear, we all need to acknowledge and challenge our own biases. I sense the haters are fewer in number than the ones who are not sure where they sit with all this, and the polarity of opinion and existing cancel culture/lack of spaces to talk and learn honestly means thoughts remain unprocessed and lots of us stay unsure and silent.
I feel this. I don’t have everything sorted in my mind yet, I don’t have all the answers, I haven’t used the “right” words, I haven’t done the training I need to. I don’t know how to market courses or workshops in a way that uses snappy yet inclusive language so the course reaches the people that need it. I am a work in progress, we all are, it is not the woke Olympics.
If you want to discuss any of this either in a thread or privately, I am up for the learning that comes from sharing non-judgementally.
I don’t want to end with me and the dilemmas of privileged white women, I want to bring it back to the heart of the issue. If we don’t start and keep coming back to compassion and acknowledge the hurt, pain, suffering experienced by trans people because of hatred, exclusion and shame, I believe we get lost, stay lost and keep doing harm. Here is an Instagram account you can follow if you’re starting out with this, as I am.