A post in which I follow up

To explicify previous implicities

On my recent (and well received, thank you for the discussion and support!) article celebrating Mike DeWine’s veto of trans hating legislation in Ohio I realized while reading various and numerous of those sundry supportive comments that I had left one thing implicit which should probably not be. My post focussed on valuing every single trans child (and adult!), and came at the topic from an explicitly trans perspective. What it did not do, however, was discuss why perspectives that centre trans people look at that veto differently.

While I am a relentless fan of Wonkette and Pharyngula and several other outlets that cover or have covered attacks on trans people (I miss you, We Hunted The Mammoth!), these publications speak from a cis perspective. This is not bad! It turns out that not only are cis voices needed to fight cissexism, but also cis people have their own issues from time to time and therefore we probably need at least a few cis voices participating in political and policy debates.

But what it does mean is that their excellent coverage still tends to ask different questions from a trans-centred publication. And I don’t just mean trans-written. I am a fan of Erin in the Morning as well, but Erin Reed writes as trans but for a largely cis audience. This, too, is fine and good. (I said I’m a fan, remember?) Reed is a good journalist who keeps in mind what her audience does and doesn’t tend to know, providing background where appropriate, and often prioritizes happenings in the cis world that cis people can change but whose impacts fall largely on trans persons. Given how much the legislatures —state and federal— of the USA where she writes are often as cis as cis worlds can be, this is necessary and laudable. Her work serves an excellent, necessary, and noble purpose and don’t let me catch any of you saying I think otherwise.

Even so, in addressing these vital issues the practical requirement that a small minority appeal to voters and activists outside its strict boundaries means that much of what Reed has written and much of what many other trans people have written still appeals to the cis perspective. In the DeWine article on Wonkette that occasioned my last post and similar reports on his veto of the Enact 🤮hio SAFE Act this meant that much of the reporting, editorials, and illegal internet non-commenting on that coverage focussed around DeWine’s motives, the state legislature’s next steps, and other things related to what the fuck is going on with cis people.

None of this is bad, the lawyers are requiring me to say. None of it is even irrelevant to trans lives or trans political strategy. It is absolutely fine to have articles about WhatDoesThisMeanForMikeDeWineAndOhioRepublicans? But it is all about the cis people and what they want to do, or might do, to trans adults and children.

So as much as I like to be tolerant of the cis folk, I think it’s telling that I didn’t ever see explored in any of the coverage I read, “What does this mean for trans people?” The veto after all at the very least delays the process of criminalizing trans existence.

So let’s imagine what coverage centering trans kids would look like. The 🤮hio act would have banned trans kids from participating in gendered sports except according to the legal sex recorded on the child’s birth certificate. As far as I know, I am literally the only one to report on how many trans kids should be playing in children’s organized sports leagues if access to such leagues was as easy for trans children as for cis kids (the answer is a bit over 50% of all trans kids, who are not well enumerated but should be 2.5% or less of all teen children, but not less than 0.4%). This seems like a fact that outlets should have reported if they were taking the time to think from the perspective of trans kids. But there are many more as well. Enough to fill whole articles. If an outlet were to be interested in centring the impact on trans children some facts that might be relevant include how many out trans children are currently participating in intramural sports, what sports are currently in season, whether any delay caused by the veto would allow students to finish an ongoing season, and how soon upcoming seasons would be affected. They could even list the first sports likely to be affected and interview trans children who would like to be able to participate in those sports.

None of this, I repeat NONE was in any of the coverage I read. And to belabour the point because I hate people deliberately misunderstanding me, I am not saying that articles centring cis experience or a cis politician’s political prospects or strategies become illegitimate topics for reporting the moment any policy or action of that politician begins to encroach on trans lives. I am making a different point, and that is this, or not this, but let me start with this: while it’s legitimate to centre cis perspectives on some stories, there is also nothing wrong with centring trans perspectives on those stories. And yet in all the coverage that I read, there was zero representation of this legitimate perspective.

And this brings me to my real point: being trans is fucking exhausting. There is a concept in feminism called “the second shift”. This term was coined for the purpose of discussing how the number of hours worked by married women outside of the home had increased faster than the number of hours of work inside the home were reduced or the number of hours of work inside the home by husbands had increased. The point was that women often worked full time jobs, but in married het families where women were doing just that, neither childcare nor housework had equalized. The expectations for how much of this work had not changed, even though women’s time available had. So women were expected in these relationships to work a full shift outside the home, then come home to a second shift.

This is not directly relevant to our discussion, but out of conversations about the second shift came the identification of a third shift: the social and emotional work performed to keep relationships (in families, workplaces, communities, institutions, societies) healthy and functional. I’ve been spending a few days trying to track down this idea, and it seems to have no agreed upon genesis. However my first experience with the term the third shift in the context of feminist theory related to Black women and the additional emotional burdens placed upon them in a racist society. The argument went something like, given that racism increases risk factors for any number of bad occurrences and outcomes, Black women wanting to take care of their families have to work harder to do so, necessitating even more work than the standard “second shift” described in the 1989 book of the same name. Elaboration on this basic foundation eventually led to the broader concept of protecting, nurturing, and healing relationships which cannot be fairly said to be paid work nor housework, but is nonetheless a responsibility, and one disproportionately put on women generally and women of color especially.

While this broader understanding of the third shift helped reveal how able-bodied Christian white women face the additional burdens of this work, the more privileged a woman’s community the easier this work might tend to be. There was commonality here to link women’s struggles, but also distinctions that when clarified helped elaborate why some women experienced this work differently from other women. Countering spoken racism and what would later be termed micro-aggressions was identified as an expectation placed on women of color not placed on white women. The pressure here is real, because those micro-aggressions take their toll. Epidemiological work over the last 20 years has shown that racism takes a toll on health.

But you can also just ask any Black person if it ever gets tiring to listen to the shit that comes out of white mouths. For people of color, addressing racism in the work place and in social environments is self defense. But because this is social work, relationship work, there is greater pressure on women of color than men of color to engage in this risky work. On top of this, while white women often feel similarly pressured to engage in self defense against sexism, there are simply more women total available to address sexism than there are people of color to address racism. And while men of color do perform this work, the disproportionate amount of the burden remains on the shoulders of women of color, who are a smaller group still. Caring for the people you love who are so negatively impacted by racism is a defense of others that in the context of maintaining healthy social dynamics and relationships places even more pressure on women of color than the need for self defense does alone. While women of color do, in fact, sleep and so the idea of first, second, and third shifts loses some of the clarity of the parallel that the original second shift metaphor held, this shit is indeed exhausting. And that dynamic where the combination of additional marginalization of race and gender with fewer individuals available to do the work of social defense against racism I hope helps to explain just exactly why this can be so draining.

That brings us to combatting cissexism. While numbers are not going to be as specific as we might like for at least a few more decades, trans people are reasonably approximated as similarly numerous to Japanese Americans (1.5 million), Vietnamese Americans (2.2 million), Jewish Americans (7.6 million) or somewhere in between (3.5 to 4 million is my guess). At any fair estimate, we are far less numerous than women of color. As a result, we can imagine that during times where expressions of cissexism are as common as expressions of racism, the pressure to address interpersonal and social effects of expressions of cissexism will impose a heavier burden on trans people than the pressure to address similar effects of racism will impose on women of color.¹

What that means in practice is that coverage of issues specific to trans people can be even more focussed on cis perspectives than issues of racism are focussed on white perspectives. And on top of that, there can be a huge and uncomfortable pressure on trans people to scream “STOP THAT SHIT!” while somehow doing it in a way that builds and maintains healthier relationships at the individual and community levels. This is not easy, and while all trans people have thoughts on such things, we’re not all practiced speakers. Moreover, even when shit is really, really bad, we’re quite aware that if we react with overt anger we will only reinforce negative stereotypes about trans persons.

For me, that’s part of why this blog exists. Every once in a while I just have to scream, and I don’t want to do that in someone else’s living room. Blogging while trans is a balancing act, providing helpful information on most days, while still being able to perform that necessary self-defence. Honestly, I don’t know how people like Reed write with such consistent dispassion. IANAJ, I guess.

But there are other practical implications, and the most important of those for today is this: since cis people aren’t inherently evil and speaking from a cis perspective isn’t inherently bad, very frequently the limit of a trans person to tolerate the relentless centring of cis perspectives is reached not when Ken Paxton writes another letter threatening trans children, their parents, and children of trans parents and their parents. No, there are simply so many expressions of cis people on trans issues that the odds that this camel’s straw comes from one of the Ken Paxtons of the world is actually quite low.

Ultimately this means that behaviour that is individually fine becomes intolerable by being baled with too many other individually fine behaviours into one back breaking package. I’ll say it again: the individual behaviours are often fine, even when trans people feel themselves breaking. This happened with my most recent post which was occasioned by a few comments, but most directly by one from Les Bontemps², a perfectly delightful person I am quite sure. They recognized themselves in my post and followed up with a nice reply, but the truth is that I regret that any of this ever felt like it was about Les Bontemps at all.

Working three shifts is a pain in the ass, even when that third shift is metaphorical. It’s hard to read things about trans people from a cis perspective day after day. That doesn’t mean it’s not necessary. Cissexism can only be ended by cis people. It’s good that cis people are talking about these things. And it’s good that cis lefties are skeptical of Mike DeWine. It is not anyone’s fault — certainly not Les Bontemps’ — that trans people are a small minority or that there are more cis people on the internet than trans folks.

Even so, trans folks, including me, are going to need to recentre conversations sometimes because necessary or not, every once in a while we just get sick of the fact that the internet seems unable to spend more time on how anti-trans legislation affects trans kids than it spends on how it affects cis politicians’ career prospects. It is that matter of self defence I spoke of before. It won’t always be comfortable for any of us, but I promise to break out the knives only when I have a good reason. And I am so amazed and grateful that I have a reading audience that will appreciate those reasons when I do.

1. Remember that this does not mean that expressions of cissexism are in fact as common as those of racism, nor does it mean that all effects of racism together fall less heavily on women of color than all effects of cissexism fall on trans people. This is a comparison strictly limited to clarifying how a smaller pool of persons sharing a burden results in proportionately heavier burdens for the persons affected.

2. I would not mention Les Bontemps by name, save that they already identified themselves in the previous thread. Again, this was never about them, and they have shown themselves to be nothing but wonderful and cis, and I do try very hard not to hold being cis against someone.