Emily Alford


Becoming A People

By Emily Alford


T There's an academic term that I've become used to using, "discourse." I resisted it for a long time, partly because it seemed to be mindless borrowing from French, partly because it seemed to be just one barbarism among many that literary criticism tends to use. But it's crept into my own prose for a good reason. A discourse is a continued discussion, as a subject of common interest gets twisted, turned, examined, and maybe resolved.

It strikes me that TG Forum has turned into a discourse, and that maybe it's time to reflect a little on what we have been saying to one another. I'm not talking just about sharing make-up tricks or comparing our own separate experiences. It's more than that, a lot more and it says (to me, at least) that something really significant is going on. All of us who have come far enough to read TGF and maybe write for it have been through our own "becoming." Now we're becoming a people. I borrow the term from Kate Bornstein, and it's not just Kate's use of it that I have in mind. Kate writeS in GENDER OUTLAW that she knows she isn't a man, and she doesn't think she's a woman either. It's a nice little piece of rhetoric, and all it really means that she didn't grow up female. It speaks to a larger truth. We're making our own identity, and we're starting to work out that identity's terms of being.

Before I go any farther, let me cite the things that have struck me in TGF lately. One is our collective response to Sabrina Robb's troubles with her Congressjerk Cliff Stearns. Another is Judy Osborne's "Tale of Two Towns," comparing Provincetown, MA, with Port Angeles, WA in terms of people like us being part of each. A third is Kalina Isato's most recent "Sexy Vampire," called "Has Cross Dressing come of Age?" I'm thinking too of Roberta Angela Dee's "A Woman is a River," Leah MacLean's "Conservative and TG," and the "Write to the Heart" discussion of what we like to do when we're not crossing the gender line. Finally, I'm thinking of the way that transgender has pretty much replaeed older categories like transvestite, cross-dresser, and transsexual as our organizing category. We're getting close to what we have in common, and we're realizing that what separates us doesn't necessarily count.

It would be tedious to go through all those pieces, one by one. The key may be the "Write to the Heart" discussion. As posed, the question presupposed that there would be a lot of overlap in what we like to do. It didn't happen. Instead, we revealed a huge variety of interests and tastes. It seems to me that that is exactly how we ought to be. The same thing hits me in Leah MacLean's piece. She is self-proclaimed conservative. I'm anything but. So what? Also on the conservative side are various people who want to deny anybody but themselves the right to exist on their own terms. Also on my side are also various people who just plain embarass me. What Leah and I have in common is enough.

Look in the same way at the convergence of club kid Kalina's writing and Roberta's "Memoirs of a Transgendered Lady." One thing they both like is fun, fun, fun (and as an uptight self-punisher I can only envy). But Kalina has just married and Roberta identifies fully as a non-op though permanent woman. Again, so what? In their most recent respective pieces they both explore the issue of being what WE are.

Finally, think about the general issue of how "transgendered" is replacing the older categories that we used to use. There's a fluidity in the term. That silly debate about whether one was TV or TS or gay or straight seems to be fading away. Instead, we're accepting two important points. One is that our situations are just that, situations. They can change. What a person could not do five years ago, she can readily do now. What is unthinkable now could become something that she should do sometime down the line. There's an acceptance of fluidity, rather than a confinement within boundaries that we make for ourselves.

Boundaries are important. They tell us something about who we are, about what we should and should not do. But they also confine. Boundaries of any sort can be imnportant guidelines that keep us from hurting other people, but they can turn into prisons. Everybody who reads this crosses the boundary of male and female, somehow. We're learning, I think, that the boundaries we've created among ourselves need crossing too, at least in terms of having enough imagination to not be bothered about what somebody else might do.

The discourse that we are carrying out seems (to me) to be about this: we transgendered cross what western culture (at least) thinks is the most fundamental of all boundaries. That much, we have in common. But in crossing that boundary, rejecting all that we were taught about being a man or a woman, we don't find absolute resolution. All that we find is the chance to work out our own separate terms of existence, within the recognition that yes, there is something very important that we share.

It seems to me that that's enough. Yes, we are one. Yes, we are also many, which is how it ought to be.


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