Earlier this year, addressing a National Gay and Lesbian Task Force conference, Laverne Cox (of Orange is the New Black) brought the audience to its feet when she claimed that “loving trans people is a revolutionary act.”
And it’s true, speaking of gender and revolution, that there’s finally a palpable wide-ranging redefining of realness going on. Maybe some justice, too: It’s getting easier to obtain jobs, parental rights, ID cards, healthcare and major network television roles.
Nonetheless, I lost a fair amount of sleep this spring, tossing and turning Cox’s words over in my mind. I can sit with the idea that loving me is a revolution only to the extent that I can believe that loving anyone is a revolution. That is, perhaps all love is revolutionary. Love calls for empathy. It asks us to get beyond our ideas about something or someone and to open ourselves to what is in front of us.
But even if we accept the idea that all love is revolutionary — and I’m not sure I do — I don’t think Cox was talking about love in general. She was talking about trans people loving trans people, about people loving trans women, about people loving trans people and about trans people loving ourselves. She incanted these categories specifically, and her speech was promoted hundredfold in my circles. It was called “galvanizing.”
Believe me, I want to be galvanized.
But what does it mean, that loving me is a revolutionary act? Is it so difficult for someone to love me? Does my transness make me so untouchable that I can only hope for the mercy — and the favor — that someone might bestow upon me with their warmth? Is my self-esteem so far diminished that I can believe that someone’s love for me must be a special category of love, that it’s somehow more difficult, more important, more intentional, than other kinds of love? And that, somehow, I would want, and not be exhausted by, this fraught and special love?
My fundamentalist Christian mother prays daily for me to be broken on my knees before the Father so that He can reveal to me my inner self-hatred and begin healing my heart. My mom calls, and I tell her — after I take an Ativan and call her back in 20 minutes — that I don’t hate myself, that I actually kind of like myself, that I’m grateful God has made me how I am. She absolutely cannot believe it. She thinks that, with prayer, God will take off the blinders so I can see how much I really don’t like myself. This recognition, in her view, would be the first sign of healing.
But I just can’t find it. I really don’t see how I’m especially unlikeable, to myself or to anyone else. And that’s how I feel when I hear Laverne Cox’s speech. I feel as though I need first to access my unlovability to appreciate how powerful it would be — how revolutionary — if people started loving me despite their disgust at some abject innate part of me.
I allow that I may be in denial. That I may be protecting myself on some level from people’s beliefs about me that I can’t bear to deal with. But for now, as far as I can see it, the Trans Love Revolution is not about me. Maybe it’s about my mother, about Laverne Cox, maybe it’s about you. Maybe, just maybe, it’s about stroking cis ally ego: stand up for a trans friend, claim your revolution badge.
Maybe it’s time to own that the idea of a Trans Love Revolution says much more about cis people than about trans people. Trans people and trans movements have made it through some lean years. Sure, we need justice. We need civil rights. We need health care. We need physical safety. But love? If you’re not ready to love us, that seems like your problem, not ours.
I completely agree with you, Quince Mountain (what an outstanding name!). First, make sure trans people can just survive without being assaulted and killed (the tragedy is that RGs and identifiable LGBTs, still have no real equality with straight men in that realm). Here’s how the Rev Dr MLK Jr put it: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.” First, let’s make sure trans and lesbians, gays and bisexuals can survive.
I dealt with the same persecution-disguised-as-piety, just for being female and loving women, from my biological, fundamentalist mom, may she rest. It’s pretty ironic, as she didn’t even bother raising me. So yes, it’s about them, not us.
Loving LGBT – not just trans – both in others and in ourselves is the most revolutionary action we can take. The foundation of socialization into the patriarchal hierarchy is sexual repression. There are two primary aspects of sexual repression. First is the definition of heterosexuality as the only normal – natural – form of human sexuality. All else is deviant and thus socially repugnant. The second is the separation and rigid segregation of human sexuality into strictly defined male and female roles. People’s behavior and thinking are “genderized” into being one or the other but never both.
Human sexuality on the other hand is not black and white, but a continuum with strictly hetero or homo sexuality being the paradoxical ends of a circle. Most people’s sexuality falls somewhere in the middle of the continuum – look at bisexual people as being the most balanced. Apart from the biological structures necessary for reproduction, the complexity of sexuality is primarily about being human first, male or female second. Because of hierarchical socialization, which begins shortly after birth, human sexuality is forcibly divided in two. Depending on whether you have a penis or not, one half of your sexuality is repressed. The other half is magnified and distorted, often beyond recognition. Sexual repression is a form of extreme violence against our human nature.
Rejecting this male/female dichotomy in ourselves and in others is the most revolutionary action we can take. And, it is perhaps the most effective action we can take against a society based on patriarchal hierarchy. The struggle against repressive socialization is for most people the most difficult one they will ever face. It is also the most revolutionary of actions, to reject a society based on hierarchically structured sexuality toward a society where people’s horizontal sexuality is both recognized and celebrated.
Thanks Quince Mountain for the article. Thanks VCUBED and Ed Lytwak for your comments. Thanks Nathan Schneider for being one of the folk who started this site. Generally, this site can be relied on for constructive, insightful discourse.
As for Queer movements, part of what they potentially offer all of humanity is the expansion of ways to develop empathic and compassionate bonds. The world needs more love, not rigid restrictions of how and with whom we express it.
This might be a poor analogy, but i would suggest that Loving trans* people is only as revolutionary as paying a living wage to miners, waitresses, and domestic workers. By that I mean, it is logical, good and the correct response to their value but not something many take for granted because greed (cis-privilege) is so pervasive that it is considered normal.
So, sure , maybe loving a transperson is “revolutionary” but not because you/he/she/zie/they are hard to love, but because society/culture is corrupted by cisprivilege and needs to be reformed.
It also depends on what you mean by “revolutionary.” In large part, it is the revolutionary creation of a new social sexuality to replace the current dominant hierarchical hetero-sexuality. But, it is also revolutionary in the political sense. The hegemony of global neo-fascism (the merger of corporate/financial and state power) makes the practice of horizontal social sexuality a revolutionary political act. For an inside look at sexual underpinnings of U.S. and global neo-fascism check out Wilhelm Reich’s seminal “The Mass Psychology of Fascism.” Although it is about the sexual and psychological basis of historical fascism, it’s relevance for today is complete.