In which the curmudgeonly blogger goes to an FTM support group

I went to an FTM support group last night for the first time.

There were a lot of amazing things about it: About 30 people showed up, ranging in age from 17 to 50-something and equally diverse in how they’re transitioning and where they are in the process. One guy was from Scandinavia and another was from the Middle East. As we went around the room, several mentioned that their families were supportive of their transition, which kind of blew me away.

But, being by character far more predisposed to criticize than to join into any kind of group ethos, there were also inevitably several things that bothered me.

I went to this group in the East Bay because I’d been told the average age was significantly older than in the San Francisco group. I also hoped the bro-down coolness factor would be lower, which it was. But despite a range in age, there were several people there who had not yet graduated from college — and one who hadn’t graduated from high school. They were the biggest talkers in the group, airing their grievances with their parents. (What it is about youth that makes one take up so much space?) I felt compassionate but had a hard time identifying with them, since when I was their age it was still very difficult to come out as gay. I’d never even heard of transsexuality.

In fact, as a person whose friends are having babies, I found myself identifying more with the parents (who, in one case, were merely insisting that the youngin’ get regular gender therapy and come to the support group). I am, I’ve had to admit, kind of transphobic, which makes it that much easier for me to see where parents are coming from. In hindsight, I see how my parents, who grew up believing it was shameful to be gay, could have responded to me coming out by saying they worried my life would be awful and lonely. It seemed comically stupid to me at the time, but now that I keep running up against the image of the tragic transsexual in my head it seems less non-sensical.

Seeing the parents’ point of view made me realize that I want to approach the gender issue with my mother from a place of compassion, which made me feel good. But it also made me feel old — which isn’t unrelated to my ambivalence about making such a big change in my life.

The thing that really bugged me about the group was that two trans guys talked about their partners needing and demanding things from them emotionally in a way that really seemed to invoke the old “you know how women are” canard.

I was angry enough to compose a response in my head as I rode my bike to a doctor’s appointment (unrelated) earlier today.

Whether, as individuals, we think about it this way or not, transmen are one front in the war on the hierarchical gender binary. If we want support for our fight, we can’t be assholes to people holding down another front.

There is a stereotype that transmen become assholes, almost as if testosterone caused it directly. Like all other negative stereotypes, it’s hurtful to individuals — myself included. I am not suddenly the enemy — and I sure as hell haven’t gotten a promotion or a pay raise! Let’s not throw fuel on the stereotype that burns us.

A lot of the guys in the room talked about people in their lives blaming their transition for every annoying thing they did. I haven’t experienced that, but it scares me that I might. Imagine if every time you did something shitty or something that somebody you cared about didn’t get, they said it was because you’re gay. Ouch, right? But, to the extent that the people in the group were kind of rolling their eyes at women being women, they were doing exactly the same thing!

I guess I keep coming around in my thinking to a conflict between individuality and cultural norms. If you want to be read as masculine in our culture, you have to be read as male. So to be seen as who you are, you have to tithe at the altar of social conformity by altering who you are.

The most empowering stories of trans identity for me are those that don’t conform to the standardized narrative we’ve come up with to explain trans-ness: I was always a man; I’ve hated wearing dresses since I was a toddler; my boobs feel like somebody else’s. (I've never been girly, but none of these is exactly true either.) It’s like difference is a little oasis in a desert of sameness: I thirst for it, and I’m grateful when I find it.

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Misogyny Runs Deep, Even in the Gay-Lesbian-Trans Community

Scene 1: I met a young trans woman recently: a new-school tranny whose model of "woman" is a young radical who treats gender irreverently. I liked this person's style, but I found myself wanting to call her he. I wasn't sure why because I really didn't think of her as a man. A friend nailed it: After hanging out with trans men and butch dykes, he had probably become the pronoun I use to signify gender queer.

Scene 2: The same friend said she was experiencing a new world of pronouns — who ever knew this humble part of speech was so important? — in a group of gay men who sporadically referred to each other with the gay male she. As we talked about it, we realized that they were using she to signify cattiness, sluttiness, uptight bitchiness: all negative forms of stereotypical femininity.

Leaving the GLBT world briefly, let's talk about the workplace, where, because we don't really know one another, biases flourish unacknowledged and unchecked. My working hypothesis about my workplace relationships is that I get into political hot water because I act like a man when bosses expect me to act like a woman. A man can be more direct, more certain of his competence and right to exert it. A woman who acts the same way clearly doesn't respect authority and/or has a difficult personality.

Scene 3: My A-Number One worst experience with this was with a self-declared feminist boss who was consistently wowed by men who were no more impressive than any of the women in the office. I fantasized about making a silent movie of her interactions, showing how she barely made eye contact with female employees and giggled like a schoolgirl at everything the early-20s male intern said.

This boss, I'll admit, has some sort of gendered personality disorder: She is as "victimized" in her own mind as the most novice feminist and yet as oppressive a boss as the most old-school old boy. But her case is different only in degree from other female employers'.

Scene 4: I currently work at a large nonprofit whose ED is a woman who inherited the job after being the second-in-command to the organization's founding director, a man. She has hired a senior staff person, a man, who is utterly and completely incompetent at his job but makes up for it by being a first-class bloviater. About nine-tenths of what he says is name-dropping of one sort or another.

His role is to undo good decisions my immediate boss, a woman, has made, to hold up good work indefinitely by citing vague bureaucratic concerns, and to force bad decisions on us periodically. The ED has been told of his unprofessionalism and incompetence repeatedly, by several people (women). But his position is safe because he is her toady.

My boss was prepared to hire a new public policy consultant, an accomplished lesbian lawyer. The Bloviater wanted to split the policy work into two parts and give one part of it to a Chicano man, who comes from an activist background. (Incidentally, the nonprofit is decidedly, even proudly, more milquetoast than the Sierra Club.) My boss objected because it seemed unnecessarily complicated. The Bloviater responded by calling a meeting with both the lesbian lawyer and the Chicano man. Awkward!

It immediately became clear why The Bloviater favors the man: He's also a smoke-blower, and the two name-dropped each other into oblivion while the lawyer, my boss and I sat by. There was a quick reprieve in which work was accomplished when the ED walked by and waved for The Bloviater to step out and consult with her for a moment. He looked like a schoolboy tripping on his seat to get out of the conference room.

Now back to the GLBT world. It bothers me that one of the two most compelling reasons pushing me to transition is that I feel unseen and belittled when people out in the world call me she. As if she were less than he. But I think it's lesbians and some evolved, self-confident FTMs and straight women who know — really know and believe — that women are not less than men. To wit: my boss, the lesbian lawyer and I in that conference room, I'm sure, all saw the boys' antics as no more than comical.

And it's the knowledge that men aren't superior, I think, that makes trans men who pass continue to feel at odds with themselves: They benefit from a privilege that they know is absurd. A trans man recently told me that he didn't feel like "A Man," and was going off testosterone again. He'd been off and on it six times. Am I a Man, benefactor of a privilege based on false assumptions, or am I a Woman, belittled and unseen based on false assumptions? It's another version of what my worst female boss must experience.

Some women take the opposite tack, believing that women are better than men. I don't find this way of thinking helpful or accurate.

Scene 5: I go to a boxing class once a week. It's a friendly class with no face or body contact. The instructor is a femme-ish lesbian who, despite good intentions, has trouble calling me he. Her butch girlfriend is also in the class. The other regulars include a slightly butch Italian lesbian, a balding straight man and a really tall Pacific Islander woman, who's apparently straight though I initially mistook her for an MTF. The girlfriend and the straight man are the best boxers by far; the girlfriend is more standoffish and seems to feel more inconvenienced by lesser pugilists.

One day as the class was winding down, the instructor remarked that she was sort of glad the straight man wasn't there because it was nice to have just us —. Here she stopped and looked at me, and then defended what she was going to say since I'm open about not having been born a man.

But what did she mean exactly? If we'd been talking about oppression or gay culture, I would give no argument that a straight man would have been unpleasantly out of the loop. But we were boxing. I can only deduce that the instructor must have meant that in some way the class was more collegial or supportive that day. But it wasn't. How is it that the assumption that women are gentler than men persists in a class filled with biological females who run the gamut of gender identities and even continues to be seen as a good thing in a class where the explicit goal is to learn how to beat the shit out of someone?

That putatively "feminist" view of women also seems to transcend fact. When I commented to the instructor that both her girlfriend and I were more macho than the straight man, she agreed. So who exactly was praised by her remark? How does it support the cause of women's political and physical empowerment?

For me, the real claim of feminism is that women are equal to men — neither better nor worse nor all that different as a class of people. Making the difference smaller makes transitioning seem like a much more individual, personal act, and it's in that frame that it makes sense to me. I can't be asked to hold the fate of the binary gender structure on my shoulders and to have my particular shrug signify something in particular as it echoes through a series of subjective — contradictory, overlapping, emotionally charged — assumptions.

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Lesbians Only

I went to a lesbians-only party this weekend. I thought maybe it was time to bring back the lesbians-only idea. It felt like 2000 again, when people started to bring back the 80s—maybe lesbian-only space had been "out" long enough to bring back in.

Maybe not.

I met a woman there, a lesbian journalist, who greeted my claims of male-identity first with "but you do identify as a lesbian, right?" To which I said, teasingly, "of course, or else I couldn't be at this party." Then I gave a more earnest answer and she said "that's so interesting."

I'm guessing it was an "interesting" like those my colleagues and I at Mother Jones utter when pro-life activists and American Enterprise economists tell us about their views. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The conversation began by being about gay and lesbian journalism. She made a point about it being a male-run show. (I've made a similar point here.) She attributed that to women not having had enough chance to put their sistahs in power. I added "or they don't always hire women." That's where the fun began. She claimed that women are better than men; women help a sister out.

I wanted to make the point that women can be real assholes too. They don't always run the show in a feminist way. (I've made a similar point here.) And I wasn't sure that shoehorning your friends into power was a particularly good quality to emulate. I said prioritizing your people over another people never really helps anybody on either side. She disagreed. She said she was a "radical feminist that way" because she didn't give a shit how white men felt. She said that, as an Asian woman, she had suffered double oppression for thousands of years, and if evening it out meant turning the shit-stream the other way for a while that was fine by her.

So I decided to make it personal, too. I said that as a trans-identified dyke, who was ever going to take me under their wing? This isn't just about white men.

She encouraged me not to see myself as such a victim. Up to this point, dear reader, I had been very friendly in my disagreements. But being told I was acting like a victim by someone who, at age 30, was claiming thousands of years of double oppression was just too much. I called her bluff. She didn't like it much, replying "I think we should end the conversation, Cameron, because it's getting really fucked up."

She needed to see my disagreement about the nurturing benevolence of women as sexism. If I didn't identify as a "woman" and I didn't agree with her 100% about the sweet superiority of women, I must be a sexist. And sexists really piss her off. It was a fascinating experience—and one I probably wouldn't have gotten to witness had my interlocutor not been drunk—to watch someone construct a box around me and then work herself into a frenzy that yet another person fit in that box.

My question is, who is teaching her to hold so true to an outmoded ideology that isn't working for her? And how can she steer so clear of third wave feminism when she (a) lives in San Francisco and (b) works as an online journalist?

I don't know many women under 30 who still think that way. (To support my woman friend Ann, I send you to Feministing.) Sadly, those who do are usually lesbians.

Just to be snarky (it must be the man in me), I will add that this woman works for a lesbian entertainment website, and I work at Mother Jones. Maybe she thought that was a maternity magazine?

Bulldagger in a China Shop

Being a bulldagger in the workplace is a lot like being a bull in a china shop. After working for years outside conventional office spaces, I hadn’t realized how, by refuting mainstream, middle-class assumptions, the alternative worldview I’d come to hold was actually a point-by-point rejection of the way you need to act in an office. (My office is cooler than most, but it’s still got fluorescent lighting and a cubicle city.)

You're wearing that to work?

First and foremost, to fit in at the office, you need to look middle class: The office is the cathedral of the middle-class. The less style you have, the better. The goal is not to be so individual that people have to confront the raw fact that you have a background and a personality that you embody even at work. (This is the limit on our tolerance of difference: It’s OK to be gay or black, it’s just not OK to act gay or black, because that makes mainstream folks realize that they, too, are just a sub-culture.)

The best way to show that you fit in is to opt for clothes from the Gap, preferably khaki, or for preppy classics like wool sweaters and corduroys. The worst way is to wear vintage clothes. Vintage is the essence of alternative culture: You buy from a separate market, and you don’t spend all of your disposable income buying things—new couch, new leather jacket, new dishes, tsotchkes by Pottery Barn. Vintage clothes look great on the street, but in the fluorescent light of the office—where most people don’t recognize the look you’re going for anyway—they just look poor. And poor says, you don’t belong here. The other half of butch fashion is working class uniform chic. Also not a good way to remind your bosses that you're not, in fact, the janitor and that you would like to be considered for that exciting new editorial position. Butch fashion is, overall, a good way to put your name at the top of the layoffs list. Which is likely why butch dykes make, on average, much less than femme dykes (preliminary data, according to the Williams Institute).

That's just inappropriate.

I've spent years finding a way to be my brainy self and my butch self at the same time. San Francisco is, as far as I can tell, the only place where there are enough butches to make the project more viable than, say, being a vegetarian polar bear. Because I work at a progressive publication, I've actually found a job where I think both parts of me should be of professional use. However, I've found that, on the surface personality level, my brainy butch balancing act relies on mixing advanced vocabulary with obscenity. For example, "That is just so fucking disingenuous!" I get away with my profanities at my present job, barely, but I can't get away with my irreverent references to sex and sexuality.

In queer culture, including GLBT nonprofits, it's pretty normal to talk about sex (sans details) and make sexual jokes. Sexual jokes are not acceptable in the straight workplace, and your coworkers let you know by giving you that pinched-mouth, eye-rolling look that says "What you're saying isn't refreshingly naughty, it's frighteningly beyond help." Suddenly your hip, smart, progressive coworker is looking and acting a lot like a church mom. And yet, the straighter the environment, the more I feel the need to say something that marks me as queer; it's hard to do that without being sexual in some way.

Advancing the homosexual agenda

Of course, butches also face the same hurdles that other minorities do. If you're the only woman on the board, you don't want to focus too much on women's issues for fear of being dismissed as a stereotype. Likewise, if you're the only dyke—which is always the case everywhere but San Francisco, and often the case here, too—you risk ghettoizing yourself if you talk about queer issues. I'm a journalist, though, and I think the media is doing a terrible job of covering queer issues despite the fact that the culture is obsessed with queers. I think there should be some way of harnassing queer sensibility as well as simply covering GLBT issues. I have opted to make comedy out of my efforts in that direction at my current job by announcing pretty regularly that I'm a mole, there to advance the homosexual agenda. (Do we have an agenda? Because if we do, we're even worse than the Democrats at advancing it.)

Even at a publication where people are by and large not homophobic, it's hard to get gay issues covered. Gays make up just 4 to 9 percent of the population. So when I proposed a graph looking at how being mainstream pays—men earn more than women, straight men earn more than gay men, married heterosexuals earn more than cohabitating heterosexuals, and preliminary data suggests that gender normative queers earn more than gender deviant ones—the greatest interest was in the comparison between the two kinds of heterosexuals. The concern was legitimate in its way: Most readers are heterosexual and middle class. Facts about other groups aren't as interesting to them about facts about themselves. Yet, the idea that they have pruned their personalities to fit in the workaday world is not an idea that they can capture; they can't see the forest for the trees.

In which I impersonate that feminist who has no sense of humor

And even well-meaning non-homophobic coworkers occasionally fail to see that gay jokes simply aren't funny. Most homophobia, at least of the quotidian variety as opposed to the getting-tied-to-the-stake-and-lit-on-fire variety, comes in the form of jokes. Often the humor behind the telling is meant to be something like "of course I don't really believe it, but you've got to admit it's funny." Larry David, with his endless "not that there's anything wrong with that" shtick, is the worst at this. If there's nothing wrong or titillating about queer sexuality, why are we talking about it ad infinitum?

Now, if I were to point out either of the previous two points to my coworkers, I call the phenomenon that would ensue "Hell hath no fury like privilege called out."

We’re all getting drinks after work.

There are a lot of really great straight people out there. Just do not put them all in a room together! They start to speak another language. Suddenly, the smart, powerful, feminist women I work with reveal that they, too, love to talk about clothes. Words I don't understand occur about 2.3 times per sentence. My coworkers don't understand why I never get drinks with them, but that's why. The one time I tried, I was introduced to the word cougar, and learned that my young male coworkers were so easily impressed by the mere sight of a pair of boobs, that they almost went home with said cougars. (This brings out the "boys, let me tell you how it's done" side of me, which I think ultimately doesn't help advance the homosexual agenda.) The 35-and-up crowd, which is technically my age group, busies themselves talking almost exclusively about real estate. (People who spend their days keeping their personalities to a minimum in tiny office cubicles compensate for it on the weekends. They sprawl out in enormous vehicles and take to the open road. They head to the largest store they can find, with the biggest things: Home Depot. There they buy things to fix up their homes, to personalize the one space they can.) I have nothing to contribute to the real estate conversation, because being butch and middle class eerily resembles being a vegetarian polar bear—I keep looking for the foliage.

Just a quick note to let you know I do my research: The Human Rights Campaign has done a study of employment realities for GLBT people. They find that everything is peachy, and getting peachier every day. But their survey is voluntary and there are only a few states with discrimination laws covering sexuality, much less gender performance, so HRC has only a carrot to use. Read between the lines, though. HRC sent the survey to more than 1,500 companies. 446 responded; 203 prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity.