On Liking Women - thoughts

ANDREA LONG CHU  On Liking Women  via N+1 Mag

I don't usually read feminist essays or write down my thoughts but this one caught my attention - partially because it's rare to see feminist literature written by a trans woman, (rather than trans literature written by a "feminist"). And this essay seems to be fairly aware of that, as it was written to address a problem within the current dialogue of the fourth wave - that desire is inherently subject to politics. Andrea compares this at length to the story of the "political lesbian," in a time when the Secondwave sought to rid itself of the irony of heterosexuality in a sphere of deliberate radical feminism.

If, as radical feminist theories claimed, patriarchy had infested not just legal, cultural, and economic spheres but the psychic lives of women themselves, then feminist revolution could only be achieved by combing constantly through the fibrils of one’s consciousness for every last trace of male supremacy—a kind of political nitpicking, as it were. And nowhere was this more urgent, or more difficult, than the bedroom. Fighting tirelessly for the notion that sex was fair game for political critique, radical feminists were now faced with the prospect of putting their mouths where their money had been. Hence Atkinson’s famous slogan:“Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.” This was the political climate in which both [Beth] Elliott [trans folk singer] and [Robin] Morgan [notorious TERF], as a transsexual woman and a suspected heterosexual woman, respectively, could find their statuses as legitimate subjects of feminist politics threatened by the incipient enshrining, among some radical feminists, of something called lesbianism as the preferred aesthetic form for mediating between individual subjects and the history they were supposed to be making—call these the personal and the political. 

In this paragraph and others Andrea explains the inherent problem within radical movements at the time: If, as in theory, the patriarchy was a poison which has sickened and controlled the likes of all culture and in turn, the minds of women, then women are faced with the problem of facing their heterosexuality as another window to their mind, or womanly spirit, through which men may reach through and warp or limit. And so, in order to live true to your claims of Solonas-esque man-extinction you must become a lesbian, or at least "political lesbian", and never seperate your politics from your desire.

"Political lesbianism is founded on the belief that even desire becomes pliable at high enough temperatures. For Jeffreys and her comrades, lesbianism was not an innate identity, but an act of political will. This was a world in which biology was not destiny, a world where being a lesbian was about what got you woke, not wet."

The next step Andrea takes is to compare this to the modern problem of  "identity." If identity is to remain within the steps of your politics as a feminist - that is to say, tenable and consistent - you have to shed the loose threads of "desire." No longer can the trans identity be something that is made up of desires. It has to be redefined as something as understood as womanhood or the woman-identified woman. Being a transwoman then means that you are inherently a woman. Which is a nice thought, but definitely something I've spent much of my life grappling with.

If it is true, that because I identify with womanhood, that I have always been a woman, then I have a lot of experiences and feelings that become infinitely more confusing and complicated. It's not as if I wasn't always aware that I felt strongly drawn to the experience of womanhood, but it definitely did not always feel like a truth. And out of those many years not living in this truth I racked up an unbelievable amount of desires. Desires that did not go anywhere as soon as tumblr told me that secretly I had been a woman all along.

"The truth is, I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them. For years, the former desire held the latter in its mouth, like a capsule too dangerous to swallow. When I trawl the seafloor of my childhood for sunken tokens of things to come, these bus rides are about the gayest thing I can find."

Andreas acknowledgment of the sort of coexistence of wanting something and wanting to be something is a feeling that I share with a lot of other trans women that I know - and honestly something I even share sometimes with trans men or even cis lesbians at times. It is probably the earliest experience I have of feelings trans. However there's already a problem with it - how can I desire to be something that I already, political framework, am? And then where is this supposedly innate feeling of womanhood among the wreckage of my teenage experience.

"It must be underscored how unpopular it is on the left today to countenance the notion that transition expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire. This would require understanding transness as a matter not of who one is, but of what one wants. The primary function of gender identity as a political concept—and, increasingly, a legal one—is to bracket, if not to totally deny, the role of desire in the thing we call gender. Historically, this results from a wish among transgender advocates to quell fears that trans people, and trans women in particular, go through transition in order to get stuff: money, sex, legal privileges, little girls in public restrooms.... 

I doubt that any of us transition simply because we want to “be” women, in some abstract, academic way. I certainly didn’t. I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys, for the telephonic intimacy of long-distance female friendship, for fixing my makeup in the bathroom flanked like Christ by a sinner on each side, for sex toys, for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts. "

The bigger picture problem with this is simply that so much of what the trans experience is stems from what cis womanhood is trying to escape. So many of us would kill for the shitty experiences. We don't just want the good stuff, we want the shitty stuff too. And in turn, we want the stuff that makes us a bad feminist.

"But now you begin to see the problem with desire: we rarely want the things we should. Any TERF will tell you that most of these items are just the traditional trappings of patriarchal femininity. She won’t be wrong, either. Let’s be clear: TERFs are gender abolitionists, even if that abolitionism is a shell corporation for garden-variety moral disgust. When it comes to the question of feminist revolution, TERFs leave trans girls like me in the dust, primping. In this respect, someone like Ti-Grace Atkinson, a self-described radical feminist committed to the revolutionary dismantling of gender as a system of oppression, is not the dinosaur; I, who get my eyebrows threaded every two weeks, am."

"I am trying to tell you...not the fact, boringly obvious to those of us living it, that many trans women wish they were cis women, but the darker, more difficult fact that many trans women wish they were women, period. This is most emphatically not something trans women are supposed to want. The grammar of contemporary trans activism does not brook the subjunctive. Trans women are women, we are chided with silky condescension, as if we have all confused ourselves with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as if we were all simply trapped in the wrong politics, as if the cure for dysphoria were wokeness.  

This reality, however, just opens up more paths to expressing my truth. As soon as we drop the assumption that trans women all must exist within this rigid political definition of "being," the trans experience becomes more and more clear and, with our desires incorporated, even romantic - in a heartbreak sort of way. I love the way that Andrea compares the first experiences of feeling trans to first love and that sense of desiring something you aren't supposed to. Like a first queer crush.

The deposits of our desire run as deep and fine as any. The richness of our want is staggering. Perhaps this is why coming out can feel like crushing, why a first dress can feel like a first kiss, why dysphoria can feel like heartbreak. The other name for disappointment, after all, is love.

These first feelings of curiosity, and dysphoria, romancing mundane aspects of womanhood, are probably the closest thing I have to a closeted lesbian experience. Some of the strongest feelings Ive ever felt for anyone is really the pain of never having what they had. My version of the stereotypical sleepover turned romance might just be following a curiosity on the internet, a close shave. And how do I deal with feelings of love from before I was out. Were the straight girls I dated, slept with, in a relationship with secretly queer the whole time? Sure, it sounds like a very validating story I'd love to believe, but I know its not true. What then, is my lesbian crush? When it never was wrong for me to love women, but it was wrong for me to be a woman. Maybe it is my dysphoria. Maybe my wants, my desires, should be likened to a crush, an unrequited love. And dysphoria is the heartbreak.

You don’t want something because wanting it will lead to getting it. You want it because you want it. This is the zero-order disappointment that structures all desire and makes it possible. After all, if you could only want things you were guaranteed to get, you would never be able to want anything at all. 

Maybe gender is just a framework of desires. Just like political lesbians couldn't choose to change their desire for their politics, I do not choose my gender. Rather, my gender is formed by the force of my desire. You cannot control or tame desire.