NYTimes | “My brain is much more female than it is male,” he told her, explaining how he knew that he was transgender.
This
was the prelude to a new photo spread and interview in Vanity Fair that
offered us a glimpse into Caitlyn Jenner’s idea of a woman: a
cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect
of regular “girls’ nights” of banter about hair and makeup. Ms. Jenner
was greeted with even more thunderous applause. ESPN announced it would
give Ms. Jenner an award for courage. President Obama also praised her.
Not to be outdone, Chelsea Manning hopped on Ms. Jenner’s gender train
on Twitter, gushing, “I am so much more aware of my emotions; much more
sensitive emotionally (and physically).”
A part of me winced.
I
have fought for many of my 68 years against efforts to put women — our
brains, our hearts, our bodies, even our moods — into tidy boxes, to
reduce us to hoary stereotypes. Suddenly, I find that many of the people
I think of as being on my side — people who proudly call themselves
progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination —
are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female
brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered
destiny is encoded in us.
That’s
the kind of nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries. But
the desire to support people like Ms. Jenner and their journey toward
their truest selves has strangely and unwittingly brought it back.
People
who haven’t lived their whole lives as women, whether Ms. Jenner or Mr.
Summers, shouldn’t get to define us. That’s something men have been
doing for much too long. And as much as I recognize and endorse the
right of men to throw off the mantle of maleness, they cannot stake
their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on mine as a
woman.
Their
truth is not my truth. Their female identities are not my female
identity. They haven’t traveled through the world as women and been
shaped by all that this entails. They haven’t suffered through business meetings
with men talking to their breasts or woken up after sex terrified
they’d forgotten to take their birth control pills the day before. They
haven’t had to cope with the onset of their periods in the middle of a
crowded subway, the humiliation of discovering that their male work
partners’ checks were far larger than theirs, or the fear of being too
weak to ward off rapists.
For
me and many women, feminist and otherwise, one of the difficult parts
of witnessing and wanting to rally behind the movement for transgender
rights is the language that a growing number of trans individuals insist
on, the notions of femininity that they’re articulating, and their
disregard for the fact that being a woman means having accrued certain
experiences, endured certain indignities and relished certain courtesies
in a culture that reacted to you as one.
