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I was really taken back by the comments about Roughgarden’s defensiveness in class today. Apparently, I completely missed that. I think maybe I was so thrilled at the representation of trans folk in class that I got distracted. I had just sorta complained about the lack of representation of people who aren’t cissexual/cisgendered in my paper, and then she appeared. So that was really great.

And maybe I didn’t read it as defensive because I agree with her. Or because I’m also defensive about gender. I realized that after class today; I get super defensive about gender, especially when it relates (or might possibly relate) to trans/transgender issues. So maybe the defensiveness is there, and I just didn’t notice it because that’s also how I see things. Maybe it’s because I identify more with her than with the people she’s responding to.  

….And then I read Chapter 14 (Gender Identity). And I guess I was a little disappointed by it. She seems to have four distinct gender categories (men, women, transgendered men, transgendered women), and I kinda thought that she might see more. I mean, with the whole “rainbow” idea, I had thought (hoped?) that maybe she’d see more diversity in human genders. I feel that Leslie Feinberg’s book Trans Liberation treats gender as a rainbow in a way that Roughgarden does not. (Incidentally, if anyone’s interested, Bryn Mawr does have a copy of Trans Liberation on the 3rd floor of Canaday.) I also feel like she didn’t really address the possibility of a person not identifying as either gender (or rather, any of the two/four she listed, depending on how you count them). Other trans folk and genderqueer people just don’t seem to be represented. Granted, I didn’t fully read all of the chapters, but I read all of the relevant chapters and skimmed the rest, and from what I could see, they weren’t really mentioned.

I also feel like the terms “transgendered” and “transsexual” are used rather interchangeably, and I kind of object to that. I feel like it gives a really narrow definition to the term “transgender”/“transgendered,” and there are a lot of people who identify as transgendered (or transgender or trans) who would not identify as transsexual. It just makes me a little uncomfortable that it seems at times that she is giving a kind of narrow account of transgendered people (to use her term) and trans experiences. Granted, it’s way more broad than a lot of the people she references, but I think it still relies pretty heavily on the gender binary in some form. I’m not, by the way, trying to say that trans women or trans men reinforce the gender binary (because I have heard that argument, and I disagree). I’m all for allowing people to identify however they identify and respecting that. I’m just not in favor of limiting the word “transgender” to only those who identify on one side of the binary or the other and thereby leaving out those who choose both or neither.   

Anyway, this is perhaps a bit off topic, but it’s my thoughts for the moment.