Cats and gender

While I’m on the subject of the Blak Kitteh (who seems to be around again - I glimpsed his back end very briefly the other day swishing out of the cat-flap as I parked my bags in the living room) the one who no longer experiences any gender confusion himself annoys me immensely by always referring to him as “her”. For example: “she came in to eat Tiger’s food the other night” and “I wouldn’t worry about her, she seems to come and go”, and so on. My Ma had a theory of gender in the English language which went “All dogs are he. All cats are she. All veg are greens”. I always felt that there was a bit of a category error sliding in there: “greens” is a noun and not a pronoun after all, but it would have been impertinent to challenge my Ma and I was never impertinent as a child. Ho no. Interestingly, in Gloucestershire water boilers were always “he” as in “‘e’s not bin workin’ since Wen’s’day; ‘e needs the gas-man to come out an’ fix ‘im”.

Let me wrench this post away from these linguistic diversions and back to the point.

The point is that I don’t get on particularly well with female cats, though it may be vice versa of course. If there is going to be any diva-ish behaviour in this house, any prima donna-y flouncing around, then it’s going to be me that does it. If you’re going down hill fast on a hormonal cycle, you might as well free-wheel while you can.

Of course there is no way I can find out if the Blak Kitteh is male or female, but nominally at least, in my idiolect, he’s a he.

I wouldn’t mind so much, but the one who stops over occasionally has a cat which is officially a hermaphrodite. He had to have gender-counselling from the Blue Cross before they’d let him take the cat. But this cat gets the honour of a male pronoun. Now in terms of stroppy prima donna-ish behaviour, this cat could give Naomi Campbell a run for her money. Hermaphrodite or not, this is most definitely a cat which is in touch with its feminine side. The Blak Kitteh on the other hand shows no particular symptoms of gender at all, but if he and I are to rub along at all then so far as I am concerned he is male until proven otherwise.

Just to add another swirl of confusion to the mix, Tiger came originally from a household comprising a womon born womon (to steal a phrase which grates on my teeth) and a male to female transsexual.

Gender. Who needs it?

Swallow the dictionary

I once told a friend that I was having sex there isn’t a term for. Spent him mad with prurient speculation for a week.

Hah!

Serves him right, the dirty-minded bastard.

I quite like being in a minority so obscure it’s nameless. It makes me feel special, unique and ever so slightly smug. Not attractive attributes, I’ll admit.

I was of course told that I was a SOFFA. Significant-Other, Friends and FAmily. It’s a term I dislike because it’s too generic. It implies that it’s ok for trans-men and women to have social networks or be in emotional or domestic relationships but that no-one would actually want to get down and dirty with them. There’s no suggestion at all of body fluids or pulled muscles. It looks like a typo, an’ I don’ wanna be no fuckin’ typo.

Someone suggested pansexual. This sounds unnecessarily goatish to me. Urbandictionary.com gives:

2. Noun: A person who is sexually interested in other people regardless of gender including males, females, transsexuals, transvestites, gender benders, hermaphrodites, intersexuals, androgynous people, and those with sex-chromosome anomaly such as klinefelter syndrome or turner syndrome.

Ye-es. But I don’t wander around like a bitch in heat. As his gynaecologist told me, “…. you look so straight”. Mind you, he’d had a couple to drink or he wouldn’t have said it. Bless. But the thing is, he’s right, I am pretty straight. I’m just not heterosexual. Or not just heterosexual.

Pansexual 3. Noun: … a person who associates with people of all sexual orientations but is not necessarily interested in sex with people of all sexes or genders ….

That’s for fag-hags who want to graduate.

Then there’s polysexual. Which sounds like parrots to me. Psittacosis should not be a sexually transmitted disease. Urbandictionary.com describes polysexuality thus:

to be attracted to or sexually aroused by a variety of different objects, lifestyles or activities, for example, learning, reading, gardening, massage etc.

Now, I’ll admit that a good pun can make me whimper and I made inappropriate noises at work the first time I saw visual thesaurus , but I’m not actually polysexual. I’m not even that into toys.

Finally, I’ve come across the term Anthrosexual, which urbandictionary.com defines like this:

Anthrosexuality … means being attracted to humans. The word ‘anthro’ comes from the Greek ‘anthropos’ which means ‘man’ or ‘human’.

Anthrosexuality is … like bisexuality, except that it refers to all genders and ‘in-betweens’. It is the blindness to another’s gender or sex. The personality of a person is what attracts an anthosexual person and the connection that is shared between two people.

Anthrosexuals don’t have a list of acceptable genders and lifestyles. Instead, they have no list and see people for what they really are: Human Beings. (My italics).

I can recognise myself in that definition. But I do wish, firstly, that it wasn’t obviously going to be the pose de jour for skinny little gothettes with more sincerity than sense, and secondly that it didn’t sound like sex with a biological weapon.

The one I go to bed with has an unusual back story, but it doesn’t feature Porton Down.

Disgrace notes

2004. I am waiting in the foyer of a London hotel to meet the man I am having an affair with. My handbag is large and slung from my shoulder. It contains a selection of scarves, condoms, lube and other bits and pieces. I have no other baggage. It is February and there is a light sprinkling of snow on the ground. I am wearing a fur coat. The young man at the desk accepts my payment up front without bothering to ask if I will be wanting a newspaper in the morning. I realise that he assumes that I will be making a profit out of the afternoon, though in fact I am an amateur doing it for fun.

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2006. My lover wakes me suddenly out of a sleep he didn’t know I was having. There is some confusion and I end up crying as I tend to when woken quickly from post-coital sleep. He ends up bewildered and distressed. Neither of us know what we are fighting about. Neither of us want a complex scene. As I go down on him, I reflect that oral sex is the great ender of squabbles and that if it weren’t for the risk of infection I would like a tongue piercing. Sometimes I wish I was not quite so sensible.

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1982. Students. I have arranged a girls’ night out with a friend. I have a shower, wash my hair and I ruefully acknowledge as I shave my legs that I am preparing my body as I would for a lover. Later, I realise that sex with another woman is the nearest I will get to sex with myself; I love the soft mirror-image of myself in bed beside me.

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1983. Still students. I am at a party, a formal ball in fact. The young men are in DJs the young women in satiny gowns. It is late and four of us are piled, kitten-like, in a huge arm chair. For no particular reason I am kissing her escort, and she is kissing mine. Someone elsewhere in the room says “swap partners” but we already have. I look at her and she looks at me. We smile and start kissing each other. The quality of silence in the room changes.

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2002. I am standing outside a hotel with my lover and a young girl who works at the hotel. She is bright, funny, clever, sexy, charming. Who wouldn’t fancy her? She is also talkative and, standing in the street lights as we say goodnight, I do not have the time to say to him “I fancy her, do you fancy her?” So the three of us go our separate ways. I see her once again some time later and we go out for a meal and some drinks. She is the first person I tell the story of how I lost my virginity. I don’t sleep with her that time either. Looking back, I am not sure why.

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1971. Childhood. I am standing in a secluded part of the playground at school with another girl and a boy. We are playing “aliens”. It consists mainly of cautious explorations of each others’ bodies. There are no kisses. There are no naked parts. There is however sexual tension, though we do not understand it at the time.

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2006. Another formal ball. My lover’s gynaecologist is there. He is a little drunk and rather puppyish. Like all male gynaecologists he is deeply charming. He remembers my lover’s hysterectomy and tells him about other work he has done with trans-people since then. He keeps on saying “good on yer, mate”. At one point he blinks at my myopically and says “… but you look so straight….”

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The bauria language in India has a word which means “to love falsely”. Well, there’s a thing.It also has a word which means “to love for the last time”.I dread that.

Sisterhood is for bitches

I tumbled across a this on FtM Doctor’s blog today, and have been choking on my reaction ever since.

The story is about a feminist music festival in Michigan which is explicitly for “womyn-born womyn” and explicitly excludes trans women. Presumably they also explicitly excludes trans men. In fact, it is not actually a story, it is a press release, explaining the organisers’ point of view.

The language is interesting, veering between the hate-filled and the overly emotive. At one point the organiser of the “womyn-born womyn” sends the following email to the leader of “camp trans”.

I deeply desire healing in our communities, and I can see and feel that you want that too. I would love for you and the other organizers of Camp Trans to find the place in your hearts and politics to support and honor space for womyn who have had the experience of being born and living their life as womyn. I ask that you respect that womon born womon is a valid and honorable gender identity. I also ask that you respect that womyn born womyn deeply need our space — as do all communities who create space to gather, whether that be womyn of color, trans womyn or trans men . . . I wish you well, I want healing, and I believe this is possible between our communities, but not at the expense of deeply needed space for womyn born womyn.

The self-righteous emotional manipulation of this is nauseating, with its talk of “deeply desire[ing] healing”, “respect” and “deeply needed space”s.

We strongly assert there is nothing transphobic with choosing to spend one week with womyn who were born as, and have lived their lives as, womyn. It is a powerful, uncommon experience that womyn enjoy during this one week of living in the company of other womyn-born womyn. There are many opportunities in the world to share space with the entire queer community, and other spaces that welcome all who define themselves as female.

Is it unkind of me to consider the spaces and places that I have spent with “womyn-born womyn” this past week, which include a women-only gym and the WI? It is not hard to find women-only groups, if that’s what you need for a while. I’ve been on women-only holidays and women-only retreats. I was educated in part at an all girls’ school.

Of course the gym, and the WI aren’t full of radical feminists or …

womyn who could be considered gender outlaws, either because of their sexual orientation (lesbian, bisexual, polyamorous, etc.) or their gender presentation (butch, bearded, androgynous, femme – and everything in between). … gender variant womyn …. ” or women who ” … consider themselves differently gendered

… so far as I know.

I find myself wondering why the organisers exclude trans women if the spread of women at the festival is so broad, (yes, I know, the “deeply-needed space” thing) and also whether or not there are any straight married mothers there, or whether monogamous heterosexuals are not welcome either.

Rather than rant on and on about this, I will conclude with three final comments.

Firstly, it would be acceptable for the “womyn” of Michigan to create an activity exclusivly for “womyn-born women” if, on other occasions, they created events which were exclusively for other sub-sets of women, for example women who have been abused, or widowed, or who are lesbians, or indeed trans. But to exclude trans women and only trans women smacks of the “all men are rapists” school of separatist radical feminism which de-personalises half of the human race in a way which is as unjust and unacceptable as the de-personalising of women by men which went on for centuries before.

Secondly, I wonder if this is actually personal. If it isn’t about all trans women, but about one particular trans woman, if the organisers lacked the balls to exclude her and if they therefore decided to exclude them all. I find this theory rather compelling, given how petty, emotional and factional groups of women can become. See quotes above.

Finally, I put the press release through Gender Genie, and it scored 30% female and 70% male. Which made me snigger. Bitch that I am.

Abortions, sex changes, genetic defects

I offer you two thoughts from two different sites.

First - 21st century data in the UK: “A patient will not be entitled to refuse to make their personal data available to the [NHS] Spine [data systems]. Data about all patient events may be routinely communicated to the Spine without the consent of the patient. … The citizen has no legal right to stipulate what will and will not be recorded … nor where those records will be held.”

And secondly - 20th century data in Germany: “Only after Jews were identified — a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately — could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed. But … punch card technology did exist. … [and] Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews … from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.”

The problem of course is not with data, per se. NHS staff are a pretty benign bunch. The problem comes when people with strong convictions have relatively friction-free access to data, and it is compounded when data becomes more enduring.
In this world of increasing fundamentalism, I am not comfortable that the health service can record abortions, gender re-assignments, genetic abnormalities, and other politically, socially or financially sensitive information, that they can record it in ways that mean that the data is pervasive and enduring, and that they can record it against our will.

“… but transsexuality is NOT a sexual orientation…!”

OK. It was dumb of me to yelp that out at 60% volume into a silent and almost empty office, but I really was astonished and outraged. I was user-acceptance testing some on-line diversity training software and found the question:

“What is your sexual orientation:

(a) bisexual
(b) gay
(c) heterosexual
(d) lesbian
(e) transsexual?”

(Note the careful alphabetization of the options to avoid prejudgement and offence. *sigh*)

I don’t know where to start with this, to be honest.

The woman sitting opposite me was startled by my outburst as well she might be. We discussed transsexuality for a while (or I talked about it, while she listened and made the odd comment). She did ask if I was being overly politically correct, but she was shocked by the only discrimination story I told her. Like most people she thinks she can always tell when she sees a transsexual. I said “well, my transdar’s pretty good - and I went to Alton Towers with four transguys, and I would only have known with one of them”.

I wrote a fairly clear explanation of why transsexuality is not a sexual orientation in the feedback form, and pointed out that asexuality is, and suggested that they include it for the sake of inclusiveness. I also gave them the web-page and email address of one of the UK’s most respected legal specialists on gender issues and suggested they contact him to ask what the best way to word a question about transsexuality and transgender would be. I even offered to ask the question informally if they liked.

It remains to be seen what happens next. I am aware that I can get a little shrill on this subject, and it is quite clear that the training providers had no idea what they’d be unleashing on themselves when they asked me to test the software. I want to ring them tomorrow to put my point of view across, but I think it is probably better if I wait and see how they reply.

But honestly…..

Don’t you wish your girlfriend was STRAIGHT, like mine?

The kerfuffle last week about my use of the word queer in another town in cyberspace led to some discussions between me and the one most intimately affected. He - with some justification - sees me as a straight woman. After all, he’s a bloke, and I’ve only ever had relationships with men, and I socialise as straight. (I’ve never made a big deal of my occasional sexual encounters with women because I’m far too scared of political-lesbians to socialise as bi.)

So, he sees me as this straight woman he’s pulled, and now I am turning round and saying “but I’m not straight, I’m queer” and he’s saying “but you’ve never been gay or bi” and there we are going round in circles.

We didn’t get trapped in the “queerer than thou” debate which can take place between different groups in the LGBT communities, but he did say something very interesting which I am still mulling over. He said: “most FtMs are in denial that their girlfriends might be bi or queer - we want to think that our girlfriends are straight because it proves that we are ‘real’ men”.

Ever since then I’ve had a transgendered version of the line from the song thrumming in my head: “Don’t you wish you girlfriend was straight like mine?”

I am still not entirely sure what to make of it all.

Queer as folk. No. Queerer than that.

I’ve just had a post pulled on another website for including the word “queer”. The email from the hosts of the site says: “the word ‘queer’ is very offensive to a great number of people. We’re not here to engineer a paradigm shift and we’d prefer it if you do not use that word in this context as it means your otherwise strong points get lost or misinterpreted. We’d be happy for you to repost the message with a suitable alternative to the word ‘queer’.”

I know and respect the guys who run this particular website, and I would categorise them as the least homophobic people on the planet. I also know something of the constraints they are working under.

However, I feel immensely dis-empowered by this. I self-identify as queer. The one whom I am in a relationship with is a transsexual, (a fact I hadn’t meant to talk about this early on in this space, but - hey). I am not straight because my partner… well, let’s just say I’m not straight. I’m not gay: I’ve had partners of both sexes. But I’m not bi either. Bi-sexuality suggests that you will have sex with people of either sex, but it says nothing about having sex with people who are intersex or transgender or any of the other spaces in between.

So there are really only two words which cover it: “sexual” and “queer”, and since “sexual” makes me sound like a bitch in heat, and since there are times when I am almost asexual, the only one that really covers it is “queer”.

It wouldn’t matter but I have been an active and contributing member of that particular web community since the summer of 2000; a huge number of my dearest friends are members. It’s woven itself into the fabric of who I’ve become in the last 6 years. And now I am considering self-exile, because a space where I have been able to be most openly myself has told me that I cannot define myself in the way I choose to, because “a lot of people find it offensive”.

Hey ho.