Reading: Transgender Warriors (Leslie Feinberg) To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State / Chapters 10-11 related tags: #HNvPtS
Imagine turning on the news channel and seeing male-to-female cross-dressers leading an angry demonstration against the Ku Klux Klan. Or watching a movie in which powerful and dignified striking male workers wore dresses and wigs and called each other sister. That was not the image of cross-dressers I grew up seeing portrayed in popular culture. At best, transgender has been treated as comedic. At worst, this form of self-expression has been characterized as anti-social behavior.
That’s why I think it’s so important for everyone, particularly trans people, to know that cross-gendered warriors led important battles that helped shape history. I say cross-gendered because these activists didn’t just cross -dress, they also adopted the names, identities, and familial relationships of another sex. The male-to-female leaders went to the trouble to curl the coifed horsehair wigs on their heads. That’s cross-gendered behavior.
Okay, but I've seen men cross-dress during their bachelor party and do so in a very curated and careful manner. Perhaps this could be cross-gendered behaviour, but I can't know without asking him. It could be that he has a different view of the matter than the blokes who do it like some kind of cross-dressing clown.
Personally, I'd love to know the motives behind the Rebecca and her daughters folks and their choice of strategies. I also find it hard to say that it was done specifically as a cross-gendered or transgendered expression, especially when I know that dressing up as one thing was done in other times (one of the initiating events of the US revolution against Britain featured white colonists dressed as indigenous peoples... certainly we wouldn't say that was them engaging in trans-racial identities).
I'd have to know more to say more, but it's hard not to be sceptical when the more privileged classes of an under class (e.g., poor men are comparatively more privileged than poor women) decide to utilise the roles of the less privileged class for their rebellions. This could be an interesting event to look further into, and I plan on adding it to my research rabbit hole.
For the most part, historians report male-to-female trans leadership in these urban uprisings and earlier rural rebellions. But does that mean there were no cross-gendered female leaders? As a social science, history, like anthropology, is subject to all the prejudices of the society in which it is based, so historians’ sexism may well have skewed their observations, resulting in under-documenting the role of female-to-male leadership.
I agree with this, definitely.
Many historians dismiss the female attire the male peasants wore as simply a convenient disguise. It’s frustrating to me that historical examples of cross-dressing are so casually dismissed. When women military leaders like Joan of Arc cross-dressed, some historians claim men’s clothes were most suited for warfare. Then why would male peasants choose women’s clothes for battle? And since when is a dress an effective disguise? Cross-dressing is a pattern in rebellions in far-flung countries. And most importantly, this tradition appears to have ancient roots.
The problem is that there are numerous times where groups of people obscured who they were behind a clever rouse, so people are likely to go with an explanation that has less friction. (See above. I already mentioned colonists who instigated an event dressed as indigenous peoples, and I highly doubt it was because they held part of those indigenous cultures as their identities.) Because we know the simplest explanation to be true and common, it's hard not to look back and see similar events through the same understanding.
I'm willing to entertain the possibility that these could include transgender or cross-gender expression in the mix, but I hesitate to apply my own modern understandings of gender on other people. Perhaps this is because I don't feel myself to have a gender, and I'm tired of people applying their notions of what they see on me (and the same would be true regardless of whether I put fort a more masculine or feminine presentation—people keep assuming I am what I'm not).
So while there may be grains of transgender expression here, I hesitate to label these people rather than see them as examples to search for more information on. I'm not going to take the Church at its word for labelling a woman as “trying to be a man,” and I'm not going to take their story for truth of the men who rioted in women's clothes. They have a specific goal in labelling these people as such.
But I also don't think it's fair to start applying what I know of gender in the 2020s (and for Leslie in the 1990s) to people who've been long dead. We can seek our inspiration and recognition in them, we can analyse the events and find the trans history and the history of gender development within them, but we shouldn't force them to be something without knowing what they thought.
I was excited to find these detailed accounts of nineteenth-century guerilla warfare by cross-dressed farmers and agricultural workers in Ireland and Wales. Once I feared examining history, terrified that I might find that trans people have always been hated. Instead I’ve discovered that bigotry is a relatively recent historical development that had to be forced on human beings for several thousand years before it took hold.
See, this is what I mean by “being inspired and possibly seeing yourself” in the history. But I also would highlight for the dozenth time that assuming our modern moral frameworks are identical to that of the past isn't helpful. Bigotry isn't a “relatively recent historical development,” but the forms and shapes that bigotries take are.
It's like how various parts of the feminist movement keep looking at women in the workplace as an achievement, even though women have always been in the workplace... just not the wealthier ones who didn't have to work (I also suspect that's why so many of the jobs of such inanity, like becoming influencers or some kind of tedious micro-celebrity, are done by primarily wealthy women).
Buried in the history of the Middle Ages and right np to the dawn of the industrial revolution, the ancient respect for transgender had not been rooted out, even after centuries of illegality and violent punishment under slavery and feudalism.
This is super presumptuous, and I hate this call back to a more positive past that may've not been.
Cis men can (and do) dress up as women, and they can still be misogynistic. We know this because we've seen how some (not all) drag queens who are cis men talk about women. The same could be true of a man who wore a woman's dress to a riot, so I don't like pretending that they revered trans people without having evidence of it happening. Could they have revered trans people? Possibly. But I don't want to get my hopes up without actually seeing it.
These examples of transgendered leadership have great meaning for me. I grew up unable to find myself anywhere in history. Now I have examples of transgender in the leadership of social change. Here were peasants who cheered their cross-gendered leaders. Here were moments in history when transgender was a call to arms, when cross-dressed people fought for justice in the front ranks.
See, once again. This should've been marketed as a memoir via historical exploration. If Leslie saw hirself in these moments, fine. I see a lot of questions and a lot of frustration in both sides making assumptions without first understanding the wider social contexts or recognising the possibilities of what can be.
I am hesitant to label things as such, but I would not refuse to do so if we ever found a label that the people applied to themselves. That doesn't mean I think that people like Leslie can't look to this history and feel a little vindicated by the existence of people doing something that feels like transgender expression.
Most accounts passed down to us today are of those who were caught and exposed. The reasons that these individuals offered for their life decisions were made under duress in front of police and magistrates.
Yes, this is true. Therefore, we should question what they say to varying degrees... But then why does it make it okay to take the words of the magistrates, church officials, etc as if they are gospel? We should be treating them similarly for different reasons.
How could females have lived and been accepted as men without hormones or surgery? They must have been masculine; they must have been transgendered. If they were not, how could they pass?
... This seems oddly bioessentialist and transmedicalist for this book. It's also assuming that people perceived femininity and masculinity identically to how we view it now (or in the 1990s). I can see how Feinberg's friend (5'3” with narrow shoulders, broad hips, and tiny hands and feet) could pass as a man in the past (as the hypothetical situation being discussed mentions) because... the culture of the past is not now. Things were different, which has ironically been a point of the book until now.
Feinberg does this a lot. Nostalgia for a past ze didn't know and might not have been as ze thought... and then intermixing modern values and notions into them. I don't like it.
I also don't think that Feinberg intends to be bioessentialist or transmedicalist, but it really comes off that way.
I just don’t believe that the debate about why “women pass as men” can be understood only in the light of women’s, or of lesbian and gay, oppression. It has to be viewed in the context of trans history in order to make sense.
I agree with this. I think it's simplistic to say that women cross-dressed as men to escape oppression (and it's still a modern TERF talking point), and I think there were other reasons for why people did it (ranging from it being part of their gender expression to their own personal other reasons). But we can't just shove our values onto people of the past without first trying to contextualise the world around them and see what they said of themselves (if we can find that).
It is passing that is a product of oppression.
I also agree with this. Passing, or feeling obligated to pass, is a product of oppression.