The
Interview

...with Riki Anne Wilchins

A series of talks with leaders in the Transgender Community

By Cindy Martin
Transgender Forum Publisher


Riki Anne Wilchins is a key person in Transexual Menace, an activist group that has recently been getting a great deal of attention inside and outside the community.

This is the second of a two part interview with Riki, who graciously agreed to write down some of the basics of her philosophy, a philosophy many of you will find intriguing. If you have Comments & Questions on the philosophies and issues that are raised here please do write and mention that your note is for Ms. Wilchins.

This article may be freely distributed


Transgender Forum: What is the primary philosophy driving it TSM in particular and the transgender liberation movement in general? What are some of the questions you feel a transgender liberation struggle engages and with what problems must it grapple? What are some possible solutions?

Riki Wilchens: Well, no one speaks for the whole Menace. I'm only one member, and a NYC member at that. I can tell you about my own philosophy and goals, which are approximately the same thing.

I believe there is a fundamental cultural impulse to create, regulate and stabilize gender. I refer to this as "gender-based oppression." That is, oppression based on the “gendering” of bodies and their expression within culture, whether by means of dress, deportment, adornment, or object of desire.

When I say "create" above, I refer to a specific argument of French philosopher Michel Foucault (lately taken up by feminist theorist Judith Butler, among others), that culture creates the identities it then works to suppress.

For example, prior the 1800's, there were no homosexuals. For millennia, people could engage in homosexual *acts*, but the idea that these actions could somehow be construed as an "identity" would have been entirely foreign to most people.

For that, Eurocentric culture had to wait until it pathologized various kinds of sex in the last century. Then, "homosexual" was no longer an adjective for various kinds of actions, but a noun, a name with a face, a person, a specific history, a set of concrete preferences, a style, etiology. In short, an identity. If homosexuality had been an act in which some people sometimes engaged, the "homosexual" was now a species. Having thus *created* the identity, culture moved to suppress it. But note the process: for cultural power to punish an identity, it first had to *constitute* that very identity.

Now, a couple of hundred years later, we see the rise of a "homosexual" civil rights movement which explains and defines itself in almost precisely the same terms as those used to create and then stigmatize it.

Traditional cultural conceptions of gender require a coherence between bodies and the object of sexuality ie., that bodies with penises express themselves in a manner denoted as "masculine" and direct their desire only towards (females).

This conception, in which sexual behavior defines primary human identity, remains unchallenged in the "gay rights" movement. in this sense, a "gay rights" movement, whatever its successes, will have failed in some fundamental ways, since it has been co-opted at the outset by the *terms* of its oppressors.

It is unable to look "upstream," as it were, and question its own foundations: Should the ways in which people engage in sex be used by us to define who and what we are?

Should Sexuality Define Us?

Do we believe it's right that culture uses our sexuality to define our fundamental identities? In what ways are we missing the opportunity to ask how it is that "gay, lesbian and bisexual" *requires* heterosexuality, in fact, are radically dependent upon a prior heterosexuality for their own existence (see Katz's _The Making of Heterosexuality)?

In the same connection, how is it that transexual might *require* a heterosexual binary of bodies, which seeks to define *all* bodies in terms of their sex organs and reproductive capacity? If this is the case, how might we begin to *contest* the creation of primary categories of human identity based on reproductive potential and genitalia?

How is it that the identity of "transgender" might *require* and cement the concept of the much-vaunted "spectrum of gender" to which we all pay so much homage, anchored, as it inevitably is, at each end by our old binary friends: "Male" and "Female," with us lodged firmly somewhere in between?

Gender-based oppression does *not* include just oppression based upon the ways in which people express their sexuality or gender.

It includes the cultural requirement that each of us HAVE a sex and gender. It includes confining the very ways in which we can conceive our ourselves within a narrow, and vaguely ridiculous system of thought about the meaning of our bodies.

It includes the fact that without a sex and gender, we become culturally unintelligible, freaks, marginalized people without a pronoun, without rights, without a social existence. "Sex" and "gender" here appear, not as nouns, but as cultural commands: "SEX! GENDER yourself!" Or pay the consequences.

Within this view, claiming to be a "transexual," or that the clothing or adornment one wears makes one a "transgender" or "cross-dresser," that these things constitute identities, is in itself the original form of oppression.

Language is The Original Form of Oppression

Language is not one form of oppression, it is the original form of oppression; not one form of violence done to people, but the original and most profound sort of damage. It is a tool is used to limit us, to limit our thoughts, and to punish us. It forces us to think of our selves and our bodies in ways that are at once disturbing, painful and violent. It makes it impossible to explain ourselves to family and friends alike, obscures our deepest and most meaningful experiences, renders unintelligible the secrets and the wisdom we have to tell.

It confines us within a straightjacket of identity, forcing us to claim to be "something," just to be understood, an act which then colors every successive thought and utterance like a drop of ink in a glass of water. Language is the way people are made to hate themselves and their bodies, and it results in friends in my eating recovery groups stating "mirrors are my enemy," my transexual-identified best friend who is suicidally depressed because whenever she looks at her feet and hands she sees "boy," my friend from the Nation Women's Music Festival who said "gosh, excuse my fat and ugly hips," and my transexual male friends who think that their particular genital configuration much propel them through a series of hyper-masculine gestures in order to prove a manhood they believe their bodies constantly betray. The language of gendered bodies is a chain which binds us to a particular "self" closer than confinement in any cage could possible hope to accomplish, a rack of meaning upon which transpeople are broken, a tool which successfully controls us, not only on the street and in our interactions with other, but in our own minds and our interactions with ourselves and our bodies. It limits the very ways in which we can apprehend, understand, and even create ourselves within own consciousness and it is at the root of our struggle.

This touches upon Foucault's argument regarding punishment. In the Middle Ages, much punishment was inflicted as a way for the throne to consummate its control over wayward subjects. As such, it was between the throne and the subject, and carried out privately, in dungeons.

But some bright folk got the idea that controlling people by punishing their bodies was not very effective: it was much better, they held, to control people's minds. What better way than to carry out the punishments and tortures in the most public ways possible? Then you mark *all* subjects with fear, you control their minds forever, and with that, control of the body is easily achieved.

Punishing us for the way we express ourselves is one form of regulation, but only the most obvious. The requirement that we *all* think of ourselves as sexed and gendered, within vary narrow strictures, is in itself the more profound, insidious and intractable means of controlling identity. Odorless, colorless and completely invisible, and difficult to discuss, since it involves an inspection of the very terms under which discussion itself can proceed. It seeks the production of docile bodies and subjects, who not only cannot contest the circumstances of their domestication, but cannot even conceive of alternatives.

Feminism's Flaws

Butler extends these kinds of concerns to mainstream feminism. Feminism is *supposed* to be about women. But in making "woman" its founding premise, does it not accept at the outset the idea of two sexes, only one of which is representable within feminism? And what will we do with those who do not meet the foundational criteria for "woman?" What about stone butches or passing women, or transexual-identified women, or transgendered people who live dressed full-time? If we let these people in, the doesn't the term "woman" become meaningless? If we don't, then what is the point of forming a group for "women's liberation," if its first act is to police its own borders, to marginalize certain identities claiming representation within its boundaries, to create a hierarchy of legitimacy, and to require that all its members conform to a particular conception of "womanhood?" Isn't that the opposite of its stated goals?

In addition, how much can you liberate "women" if you continue to demand that all people identify as either men or women? Is that what a "radical" struggle looks like? Or is it not a capitulation at the outset to the terms of the oppressor, settling instead for only a redistribution of power within the original framework.

Then maybe we can and should base our feminism on people who have had "women's experience." But then, if we define women's experience is having been through a certain kind of oppression, doesn't this mean that at the outset we have allowed "the patriarchy" we are fighting to completely determine our identities. e.g., what a "woman" is? And what about people who have lived as 'women," but don't meet our criteria or cannot identify with it? For instance "passing women" who have lived as men in society. Furthermore, who's experience forms the prototype for "women's experience?" Is it white, Eurocentric, heterosexual, middle-class experience? Then what about Leslie Feinberg's observation that for 75% of the women-identified people on this globe "women's experience" means gathering firewood and carrying water?

And how might a transgender liberation movement avoid the exact same pitfalls? What does it mean when we divide so-called pre-ops from post-ops, and set up a hierarchy of who is more "legitimate?" What do we do when we have some groups which patrol border as "post-op only," "transexual only," or "crossdresser only." Is policing gender, requiring that we all have SEX! and GENDER! to know where we are welcome and acceptable what we really want? Is this a new set of terms, or simply the old terms in another ghetto?

What does it mean when transexually-identified people themselves utilize terms like "real women," or "biological women" or "genetic women," as a way to continually re-enact the terms of their very own disenfranchisement and stigmatization, leaving us, I suppose, as "non-biological women," or perhaps "unreal men and women," composed, I guess, entirely of compressed soy by-products.

In fact, given that we know what it feels like to be marginalize and suppressed, to be demonized as the "enemy," what is the point of waging a liberatory struggle at all if it means creating a new "enemy," and new hierarchies of legitimacy and power, trapping yet another class of people within a new binary of us/them, whether it's those scummy non-ops who can't make up their minds or those cruddy guys on the streetcorner who yell rude things at us.

The Dangers of Creating A TG Hierarchy

How can we form a transliberation movement, if its sole goal is to get some for ourselves, to form yet another group demanding its own slice of "identity pie" and retiring from the table when it's had its fill, and reserving to itself the right to hate those who hate it, its demonize its own blind, unknowing and ignorant oppressors?

Perhaps we need a movement based, not on stable identities, but which takes the fluidity of identity as its starting point and goal, as a norm not an impediment, which focuses as the functions of gender oppression, and not simply on enumerating, cementing, and finally connecting the various identities created within its regime. What might this look like? What can it mean to center on function rather than identity?

Lets look at a few examples.

When I can walk down the streets of NYC, and within the space of a single month be harassed as a "dyke," a "sex-change," a woman, and a "faggot," can someone truly tell me that these are all different oppressions, that there is not something out there, lurking in the tall grass, which is fundamentally similar and concerned with creating, maintaining and regulating gender? Or maybe I ought to join 4 different groups to fight 4 different oppressions, and in each of them claim this same temporary flesh to be 4 different identities. Does the hatred that hates me as a "cunt" originate from a whole different place of ignorance and pain than that which hated me as a "chick with a dick" and now as a more simple "freak?"

Can I be against the rape of women, and not also speak out against the rape of men, which occurs almost as frequently but is wrapped in a consuming silence of cultural and feminist embarrassment, and also still the rape of people who are neither, and are these so different? Is the impulse which assaults and abuses *anyone* who is sexually vulnerable not one and the same?

And if all these assertions above are true, then should we not begin to organize around the *functions* of gender-based oppression and what it *does* to us in employment, bias-related crime, assault, and discrimination, instead of organizing around the *identities* which that very oppression has created for us and sectioned us into.

And while we are considering the practical consequences of the theoretical aspects of struggle, maybe we also ought to be considering a movement which encompasses a spiritual heart within all that muscle and bone. Perhaps we need to spare a thought for those who have oppressed us, and maybe they, in a different way and degree, are gender-oppressed as we are. You know, I sometimes think this struggle is very Christianlike in it inception. You *do* suffer for other people's sins, you die in many large and small ways, and if you're lucky, you're reborn. And the trick is to heal yourself, and not perpetuate the hate that put you through it.

Now, most of us will endure practically anything, if only we can see a purpose to it. But for too many of us, our struggles and private humiliations and pains have seemed all too meaningless, devoid of purpose, a case only for bitter and shameful tears. Thoreau was right: most of us *do* lead lives of quiet desperation. But is it *not* because our dreams did not come true. And it is *not* because we did not accomplish all those things we wanted and planned. It is instead because we have suffered through an agonizing and transforming experience, and we have not found its meaning, a way to make what we have endured *count* for something, something good.

For me, a movement which works to make things better for others, for those who come behind us, is a way to answer the question of meaning. Through some kind of magic, it transforms the all too painful question: "Why me?" into the more meaningful "Why?," and it begins to supply the first answers. Because we can use that experience to make things better. Because we can use that experience: the pain, the shame, the family struggles, the bashing, every single bolt and beam of it, to make something good come out of it. To end, in some small measure, the pain in this world. To help someone else stuck here in this particular life, struggling with the same things. And the truth is, that almost every human being on this planet struggles in some way or another with gender-based oppression, and we have it within our power to put an end to some of it today.

And so for me the point of a trans-liberation movement, if indeed we have a movement and it may be said to have a point, is not just to valorize and sediment yet one more narrowly-focused identity, leaving behind as we do so some other more marginalized minority, perhaps the intersexed, to wage the struggle for their own civil and social rights, but to work for all people who are "gender oppressed" until all of us are free.

And by "gender oppressed," I do not just meant those of us whom Kate Bornstein refers to as "transgressively gendered," those identities inevitably corralled as specimens in the binary zoo: the stonebutches and dieseldykes, the faghags and he-shes, the shemales, nellyqueens, tranfans, t-birds, F2Ms, weekend warriors, dragkings and dragqueens, leatherdykes and dykedaddies, transexuals, transgenders, intersexed and transvestites. But also the 17 year old Midwestern teenager who destroys her health with anorexia because "real women" are preturnaturally thin. The Joe SixPack who wraps his car around a school bus on the way home from the bar because "real men" are heavy drinkers. The woman who expresses her sexuality through fat and is verbally assaulted and spat on in the street. And the aging body which endures an unnecessary hysterectomy because certain kind so bodies simply don't matter as much.

And not only for people like Brandon Teen or Marsha P. Johnson, who were killed simply for their expression of gender, but also for those who felt impelled and even empowered to kill to preserve the regimes of gender; until, in short, each and every one of us is delivered from this most pernicious, divisive and destructive.


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