I've kept the tranny controversy for the end of this foreword because I believe that any work of literature should stand on its own merits. This book deserves to be judged for its content rather than the shifts in identity that its author has undergone. All I ask is that you give it a chance, despite any reservations you might have, to see if its varied contents don't spark your libido and make you think. After that, you can read what follows about how Pat Califia became Patrick Califia, and what effect that's had on the work I produced when I identified, first as a lesbian, and then as a bisexual, woman.
Many of my lesbian readers were angry and upset when I decided in my late forties to start taking testosterone and investigate transitioning from female to male. A lot of those women have stopped reading my books, so they may never see this response. Still, I think it's important to reply, partly because I still believe in the transformative power of dialogue. As long as people keep talking to each other, some hope exists of coming to a better understanding of one another and some possibility of coexistence and political alliance. I don't believe that lesbians and FTMs (female-to-male transgendered people, for those of you who have been living under a rock without a copy of Kate Bornstein's
Gender Outlaws
) are automatic enemies or even mutually exclusive communities. At the very least, we are neighbors, and no good comes of having one sexual/gender minority be at another's throats. There are too many people who hate all of us, who would gladly see all of us burned to a crispâthe kind of bigots who give straight people a bad name. Many people know they are different in some important ways and wrestle with the question of who they are and where they belong. If I can do anything to make this a less agonizing process, I should. Self-understanding and self-expression are much harder to accomplish when so many supposedly progressive people are saying hateful things about each other and demanding that everybody take sides.
I chose to come out as a newly-transitioning FTM in the pages of
Girlfriends
magazine, in an advice column I wrote for most of that magazine's history. I doubt any other topic created as much controversy. We were buried under an onslaught of mailâmuch of it supportive, and some of it virulently hostile. Granted, my place in the lesbian pantheon of elders was far from secure anyway, because of my earlier work opposing censorship, defending pornography, educating people about butch/femme relationships, and speaking out on behalf of the BDSM community. Being a full-fledged transsexual was the last nail in the coffin that gender-essentialist, right-wing lesbian-feminists had been cobbling together for me for decades.
But there was another element in the letters that demanded the editors of
Girlfriends
fire me immediately. They expressed deeply personal feelings of being abandoned, passed over, and kicked to the curb. There are a lot of reasons why that hurt exists. The hottest-running vein of emotion seems to be the feeling that transmen are betraying feminist principles and selling out the important work that dykes do combating sexism and homophobia. I've supposedly taken the easy way out and decided to bathe in the poisonous, overheated waters of male privilege and heteronormativity. You'd recognize the place in an instant. The hot tub is shaped like a penis.
There's a long-standing tradition among dykes of hating men. And I would be the last person to tell you that hatred doesn't have a valid reason for existing. As the most powerful people in our society, men have been responsible for most of the lesbian-bashing that goes on. Not all of it, however, and that's important to remember. Homophobic women are fully capable of rejecting their lesbian daughters and supporting moral panics that have done things like get lesbian professors fired from women's colleges, kicked lesbians out of the armed forces, and caused other widespread forms of discrimination and misery. But when a man beats you up, fires you, or steals your girlfriend, it feels worse, because the playing field isn't level. Lesbians don't compete with straight women for a sense of sexual prowess or safety on the street and in their own bars and clubs. Men have attacked, hurt, defamed, violated, and murdered lesbians in the most cowardly and despicable ways it's possible to imagine.
Unfortunately, the most simplistic form of feminism encourages women to believe that sexism (and by extension, homophobia) are all men's fault, and can only be fixed if men are utterly deprived of power. This has led to the dead-end alley of separatism in which fantasies of all-female societies are held out as alternatives where women can be strong, safe, and free. I think Joanna Russ, in her book
The Female
Man
, is the only lesbian writer brave enough to spell out that the only way to get there from here is through the cultural catastrophe of a gender holocaust. Do we really want to support a form of feminism that tells us the only way to fix our admittedly broken, binary gender system is to kill all the men? Single-gender societies are not the answer, although they make great escapist fantasies that I continue to write and read and enjoy.
This kind of feminism has another problem. It lets women off the hook. If we can attribute sexism to only one-half of the human race, we never have to answer troubling questions like, Why do some women hate other women? Why do some women hate lesbians? Why do women treat one another so badly? Why is it that a woman who acquires power is every bit as likely to misuse it as a man? How do we create nonexploitative forms of power that are linked to responsibility, so that we can still enjoy individual initiative and creativity without smothering everyone with tyrannical collectivity? As long as feminism is perceived as a politic that is for women only, its transformative and radical potential will be sharply limited. But I do not mean to imply that feminist women should change this. The men who don't see the damage that a lopsided power dynamic does to them, who are not throwing their energy into looking for a better way to live, are culpable.
Any inequitable system inflicts suffering on the haves as well as the have-nots. That pain is not equal, but it's still important to understand. It's not the underclass's job to comfort or educate the overclass, either. But there is a price to be paid for material comfort and social acceptance that's enjoyed while (and because) others suffer. It's an ugly way of life that may look comfortable on the outside, but inside it's stifling and rife with willful ignorance. The things that the haves do to distance themselves from the have-nots are scarring, even if your peers try to tell you they are beauty marks.
So how do FTMs fit into the War between the Sexes? Or the War between Gays and Straights? Some people would tell you there's no question. We are on the side of the men, and we are on the side of straight people. And some FTMs would agree with you. Unfortunately, I can't claim that every other transman is a feminist, a fan of queer theory, or interested in social equality and justiceâalthough many of us are.
First of all, not every female-to-male transsexual spent a portion of his life identifying as a lesbian. This is one of the biggest myths about FTMs. Many of us tried to live as heterosexual women before we transitioned, and some of us could never get any more mainstream label to fit well enough to shoehorn ourselves into it. And not every FTM is straight. Many of us (like me) are gay or bisexual or queer. You can't even claim that FTMs were once butch women who got tired of always being hassled and abandoned the struggle to make space for masculine women in our culture. Many of us tried our best to adopt a feminine persona. We believed that if we just tried hard enough to look the way we were told women should look and behave, all that gender weirdness would go away. The ability to “pass” as a “normal” woman doesn't cure gender difference, although, sadly, it can make it hard for an FTM with this history to get others to take him seriously once he comes out about his need to live in a male identity.
Of course, most lesbians don't meet FTMs whose early lives were spent outside of their own world. Nor do they usually recognize former femmes who transition. I repeatedly hear the statement, “All the butches are going to turn into men.” And the truth is that butch identity
will
be changed by the growing visibility of the FTM community. That process is already in place and cannot be reversed by penalizing those who move from a female to a male identity, or getting paranoid about anybody who displays an interest in crossgender role-playing. Butch identity is, like all labels, much less simple than the term itself would lead you to believe. But my experience is that not all butches are transmen in denial. There are masculine (for lack of a better word) women who are happy to be womenâor would be, if other people on the bus would quit calling them names and potential bosses would stop refusing to hire them because they aren't trying to look like prom queens. Perhaps the changing times will lead to a new sense of pride or clarity among butch women about what makes them unique.
Is the lesbian community any better off if a handful of transmen chicken out and abstain from testosterone shots or full-time male pronouns because they are afraid of losing their friends and hangout spots? I don't think so. I've met some people in this predicament, and their lives are pretty harsh. Their partners feel confused and rebuffed, they feel miserable in their own skins, their lives get stalled in a variety of ways, and they are rarely enthusiastic about contributing to lesbian culture or politics. Butch women
enjoy
being butch. They've got their own lingo, fashion, style, and moves. I won't claim that their relationship to being women is a simple one. It can be damn hard to claim your womanhood if a whole culture is telling you to stop “acting like a man.” But there's a difference between the place of self-acceptance and sexiness that a butch woman gets to when she's waded through the homophobic twaddle, and the perpetual, deep-seated sense of wrongness that a transman has in his body. We always want to take it too far. Strapping it on isn't a simple matter of enjoying a sex toy for us. A dildo can be a prosthesis that temporarily makes us feel better, but it's also a reminder of the gap between our physical and mental realities. As a consequence, many transmen can't go near dildos or harnesses. It's just too painful, not a fun sexual fantasy.
People who have never needed to question the sex that appears on their birth certificate display some double standards when they invalidate the gender identity of my people. A similar process takes place when we are expected to justify our sexual orientations far past the standard of proof that cisgendered people (genetic men and women) need to feel self-satisfied and secure. These contradictions are especially clear when “radical dyke feminists” are pitted against “sell-out transmen.” Most lesbians and gay men will tell you that they didn't choose to be homosexual. It's an intrinsic part of their nature, something they became aware of at an early age, an inherent quality that cannot be changed by fundamentalist Christian “reparative therapy” or other forms of bullying. And most cisgendered men and women never wonder where their gender identity came from. They just take it for granted, like having ten fingers and toes, or a certain skin color.
So why should lesbianism become a privileged identity that is somehow superior to other sexual orientations? If you can't choose whether to become a lesbian or not, why is it a moral failing for others to be something different? The sexual orientations and gender identities of transgendered people come from the same place that other people's do. The same social and biological processes that shaped you, shape us. If you are the product of genetic predispositionâso are we. It may look as if we choose to be this way simply because we do have a choice about whether we own our self-knowledge, express it, and try to live it in the real world. But that's only because we live in a world where the expectation is that everyone be either a feminine woman or a masculine man, and also heterosexual. If you want to be true to yourself, you have to speak up, and this makes it look like you are choosing to be a troublemaker who's rocking the boat just to make other people uncomfortable. Does this sound familiar? Are you beginning to see that some of the same ironclad rules that oppress gay men and lesbians also oppress transgendered people?
I'm not sure we are well-served by essentialist notions of sexual orientation, anyway. This idea that you go through a one-time process of figuring out who you truly are, then you come out, and then you don't need to do that anymore, sure hasn't worked for me. Since straight people, bisexuals, and gay men and women often are not on speaking terms, we don't get to track the changes that many people really go through. I have come to believe that most of us are born with a wider range of sexual potential than we'll ever exercise in the course of one lifetime. Certain things appeal to us more than othersâoften a lot moreâand we gravitate toward groups of those we perceive to be like ourselves because that makes it easier to find partners and friends and, if necessary, borrow rent money or get bailed out of jail. But if we fall in love with the “wrong” person, read something that unexpectedly excites us, see a piece of porn that has a surprising impact, or listen to the far-out suggestion of a more experienced lover, we may find that we can't take our core assumptions about ourselves for granted. When these changes take place, as long as they are truthful ones, we aren't selling out or betraying our ideals. We're just keeping pace with what life has shown us, how we've changed or grown.
Rather than argue about nature versus nurture, and withhold people's civil rights with the spurious claim that queers could be just like everybody else if they tried, I think we need to have a less judgmental attitude about sexâall kinds of sex, everybody's sex, consenting forms of desire in all their intricacy and subtle shadings. If a lesbian tells her parents, “Why should it make any difference that I'm gay? I am the same person that I was before I told you,” perhaps she should take the same attitude toward a woman friend who reveals some bisexual experiences or a growing sense of futility in living as a woman. By using that example, I am not trying to locate the source of sex-negativity within the lesbian community. Lesbians talk about sexual politics more than anybody else! I'm just pointing out that being gay doesn't automatically make you a sexually liberated person. None of us can afford to stop learning and thinking about our society's fear of pleasure and how to change that.