Trans people won’t remain invisible

We’ve always been here, but many refused to see us, Tara Sypniewski says.

It’s human nature to believe that if you don’t see something, it doesn’t exist. When that something finally appears, it’s regarded as new and strange. Many appear to have that opinion of transgendered people.

However, the idea that we have suddenly come out of nowhere — while perhaps understandable — is wrong.

I was one of the founding members of Ottawa’s Gender Mosaic. When we started in 1988, we had many calls from trans people who needed to talk, but when we finally organized our first meeting, only six of us showed up. Month after month, more people called. Month after month, the same six people showed up. There was a lot of fear then. We had no rights. Violence against trans people was always a possibility. Invisibility meant survival. It did not mean we weren’t there.

Transgender people, for those of you who don’t know, are people whose gender identity — or gender expression — is different from their biological sex.

Trans people have in fact been living in the world without notice for some time. For cisgender people (those of you whose gender identity matches your birth sex), this low profile is often regarded as deception. For the trans person, this is authenticity. What trans people call “passing ” was also often socially enforced. If you passed, there was less chance of being assaulted.

At one time, psychiatrists at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, the clinic that served as the gatekeeper in Ontario from 1980 to 1998, would not prescribe hormones until a trans person completed the “Real Life Test.” This required that they live in their chosen gender for an entire year and provide supporting documentation that they had done so. It was “enforced passing ” and a form of aversion therapy. If your appearance was sufficiently convincing and you survived the hostility and poverty that the Real Life Test frequently imposed, you could begin your physical transition. A psychiatrist from the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry admitted before an Ontario Human Rights tribunal in 1998 that 90 per cent of trans clients seeking access to hormones and publicly funded surgery were denied.

Erasure is a valuable tool in the oppression of trans people. If we have no history, that makes our current presence abnormal. If we weren’t visible before, then our appearance now makes it easy to pathologize us.

The experience of trans men is particularly instructive. For many years, people who anointed themselves experts claimed trans men didn’t exist, that their history was simply the history of women escaping the confines of an oppressive gender role by dressing and acting as men. This convenient notion had the advantage of eliminating trans men’s agency altogether while then casting trans women as outliers and dupes of a patriarchal system. This is the argument Janice Raymond made in her influential book, The Transsexual Empire. Raymond diminished transsexualism to a male problem and claimed that transsexual women sought to reduce the real female form to an artifact.

Gender variance, however, is cross-cultural and exists across time. Cultures that have long acknowledged its existence have words for third-sex, third-gender people. The West, which has no such tradition, reflects its erasure of trans people through its inadequate vocabulary. This is why the trans community has always been prolific at inventing words such as cisgender, and the genderless pronouns zie and hir (among others). We use these terms because they assert that we exist, even as others pretend that we do not.

Historian Randolph Trumbach has noted that in the West the “paradigm of two genders founded on two biological sexes began to predominate in Western culture only in the early eighteenth century. It was a product of the modern Western gender system, which makes it peculiarly difficult for Westerners to see that this paradigm is not inherent in the empirical observation of the world.”

There are many reasons why you haven’t seen us before, but trans people have always been here. Gilbert Herdt, in the book Third Sex, Third Gender, observes that “categories of being acquire greater force the longer they exist historically and are eventually transformed into social roles and practices.” That cultural process is beginning now in the West. Transgender visibility is social evolution, not social collapse.