POV: Is the Transgender Movement a movement?
Kate Bornstein: The current movement is composed of a great number of factions, divided by those old favorites of class, race, age, language, region, and nationality.
The transgender movement even divides itself up by gender, as many folks stick with their same trans-genders (female-to-male or male-to-female). Additionally, the movement gets strangely subdivided among, for example, male cross-dressers, sissy boys, butch women, femme dykes, drag kings, drag queens, transvestites, intersexed, transsexuals (post-op, pre-op, and non-op).... please! The list goes on and on. But is the movement able to stick together? Yes, I believe so. There's an almost tangible sense of tribe or family whenever two or more of us gather in one place. Wait... I feel a song coming on!
POV: What have been some of the pitfalls or missteps of the Transgender Movement?
Bornstein: I'm not too fond of the divisions I just outlined. Those divisions spread resources far too thin.
POV: Where is the Transgender Movement heading and what does its end goal look like?
Bornstein: I think the movement is heading for unification. I get that a lot from the youth side of the movement; they seem to have the right idea in terms of inclusivity. As to the end goal? Honey, I was never into football. Or is that end zone?
POV: What's your vision for the future of the Transgender Movement?
Bornstein: Look, this whole "movement" idea is happening in waves around the world. Some areas of the world are further along politically than others. The economy has a lot to do with that, as does moral or religious climate. For example, it was easier to be a radically out trans under the Clinton Administration that it is under the person who's claiming to be president these days. But just across the ocean in, say Kenya or Tanzania, a two-gender system is vital for the survival of most of the folks who live there. Men do men's work, women do women's work, and so it all gets done and the jackals can't get into the hut and eat grandpa. So, the future of the transgender movement is like the future of all human rights movements: whatever the state of things in your area now, with some work it all gets a little bit better all the time, even if it is sometimes three steps ahead and two steps back.
POV: How can non-transgendered people be allies to trans-people?
Bornstein: Oh, I dunno. Walk a mile in my heels? I'm only partly kidding. My own take on the word "transgender" is that it's an umbrella term for anyone who breaks any rules, laws, guidelines or protocol of gender. So, to really be an ally, it's important that you recognize and embrace your own transgender nature. Really, I haven't met a single person who doesn't break some rule of gender. In other words, we will assimilate you. Resistance is futile.
POV: What are some simple ways, intermediate ways, and some longer-term commitments that non-transgendered people can make to be supportive and to educate themselves?
Bornstein: First off? Take care of the kids who are breaking gender rules. Junior High School and below add up to hell for kids because they're trying so hard to be or become men and women and no one -- no one at all -- is telling them what a man is or what a woman is. So, they try to cram their beautiful, rich, expansive natures into some cookie cutter shape or other, and that's killing them. Didn't that kill you when you were a kid? Were you ever masculine or feminine enough? I didn't think so. So, please... take care of the kids first and foremost.
Secondly, you can support trans-positive legislation, trans artists, and the inclusion of transgender individuals in your neighborhood, schools, place of worship, whatever.
For the long term? Join or initiate some good legal battles against the puritanical laws that exist around sex and gender.
POV: Health and well-being is a major concern for transgendered people, who often don't have easy access to good, informed and sensitive healthcare. For example, no long-term testing has been done on the effects of hormone therapy.
Bornstein: That's a good point to bring up. I know and know of more than a few MTF's (male-to-female) who've developed strange cancers. Myself, I've got a nice little case of Chronic Lymphocitic Leukemia (CLL). It's a kind of leukemia that's only supposed to kick in when a person is in their late 60's or 70's, and I was diagnosed with it seven years ago in my late 40's. But the real problem devolves around class lines once again: it's the street hormones that folks without insurance, or folks who are too young for prescriptions without parental okay, use. Sometimes those hormones can be pretty rough.
POV: What resources can people turn to for the healthcare and counseling they deserve?
Bornstein: Thank goodness for the Internet. There are quite a few trans sites nowadays, and most of them include links about hormones and healthcare and counseling. If you know how to google, you can find them.
POV: Can you talk a little bit about the myth/perception that all transgendered people do sex work?
Bornstein: The way you ask that, it sounds like you think sex work is a bad thing. Sex work may be an illegal thing, but it's far from being a bad thing. Quite a few of us on the male-to-female side of the coin have done sex work. I've done it myself for a couple of years. It's a place we can make a living and have some fun doing it. It's a place we seem to fit in. Look, nearly everything in the culture says we're freaks. Doing sex work, we're desired; we can get rewarded for being what we've always wanted to be. What's so bad about that? My own notion is I wish sex work would be decriminalized (not legalized, please note the distinction) so that more transgender individuals could get into the field if they wanted to and not get into trouble for it.
POV: What is the difference between transgendered and transsexual?
Bornstein: Depends on whom you ask. My own take is that transgender is the umbrella term for anyone who breaks a rule of gender. A transsexual person, like myself, is someone who was born one gender and who nows lives hir life full time as something completely different from that. This can be accomplished with hormonal or surgical intervention or not.
POV: What about the use of non-gendered pronouns, such as "ze" and "hir," or "s/he," or "per?"
Bornstein: You can find over forty or fifty examples of non-gendered pronouns on the Web. People have been using them for a long time. They started out in those online role-playing games where a lot of characters in play are not traditionally gendered. Many transgender individuals today use non-gendered pronouns to honor the notion that there are more than simply two genders and/or to take some pride in being neither/nor. Take this sentence for example: "Ze sat down at hir computer and began to type." What more do you need to know? Do I think that non-gendered pronouns are going to be enthusiastically embraced by the world at large? Hardly. Look how long it took the salutation, Ms., to enter the culture. It's been over 25 years and some people still insist on calling a woman either Miss or Missus, denoting her relationship to some guy. It's gonna be a long time, I think, before people are willing to let go of the need to know if a person is a man or a woman; let alone accept the notion that someone can be neither!
POV: How do people know how to talk about people who are in transition to their preferred gender?
Bornstein: It's difficult to refer to neither/nor, isn't it? Well, I think that's a shortcoming of our culture that we have no easy way to refer to liminality. But practically speaking, the safest thing would be to refer to the person's preferred gender and leave it at that. What's the big deal? But it is a matter of personal taste. If someone is talking about my past for example, I don't mind them using male pronouns or my old guy name (Al, if you must know). But some people do mind that, so the best thing to do is politely and kindly ask what gender a person prefers. Then, you honor that preference.
POV: What are your thoughts about how the transgendered movement has or hasn't been incorporated into the LGB movement?
Bornstein: I could write a chapter in a book about that. Wait! I already did!
Okay. Quite a few folks are writing about the T in LGBT. Actually, the same folks could be writing about the B as well, because bisexual people are rarely truly represented by the LGBT movement. Both bisexuality and transgender are fluid notions of identity, while lesbian and gay are fixed identities. Some people believe that means there should be two movements: LG and BT. But then what're ya gonna do about SM players? And intersexed folks who want their own I in the alphabet soup of sex and gender related politics?
And what about sex workers? They belong in the mix someplace, don't they? I think so. The reality is that many older lesbians and gay men don't want to have to do the work it takes to expand their political base and possibly endanger some of the ground they've already made. It's sort of like the house slaves who don't want anything to do with the field slaves. And that brings us around to the shifting definitions of "straight" and "queer," because in some cities and on some liberal campuses, "straight" and "queer" are having less and less to do with the gender of the person you wanna have sex with, and more and more to do with class politics and appearances. So, in these urban areas and on those liberal campuses, we've got the appearance of some way cool heterosexual queer folks, along with a great number of straight lesbians and gay men who want nothing more than marriage, joint stock portfolios, and gay days at Disneyland. It's an interesting twist, and I'm watching it intently to see where it's going to lead us as a sex-positive, plural-gendered movement.
Kate Bornstein is the renowned transgender author whose theories have revolutionized the field of gender studies. Kate is a working playwright and performance artist in New York City.