Saturday, 26th May, 2007

Wrong On So Many Levels

tranny religion

(I wrote this about a month ago. It was supposed to be the first of a three-part discussion on some of the problems I have with transvestism, the issues I think it generates, and the effects it has on other people. I was going to wait until I'd written all three parts before I posted it, but I think if I stuck to that strategy, it'll never see the light of day.)

...

It would be ridiculous, I feel, for me to even hint at the notion that I think transvestism is A Bad Thing™. Not just ridiculous, ludicrous in fact. I mean, if I thought for one second that what I did day-in, day-out was in someway inherently wrong, well, I'd be a hippocrite of the highest order.

Perhaps.

But that doesn't stop me wondering about it, you know, in a "What if?" kinda way.

1. Religion

I find it comes as a bit of a shock to a lot of people if I mention that fact that I'm quite religious. I mean, here's me flinging myself onto every vice in my vicinity, and defiantly rejecting the piety of my parents at every given opportunity — but, I can't help (call it 'ingrained doctrination' if you like) but share some of their beliefs.

Obviously, I think that half of America is completely bonkers — that goes without saying — and the too-smiley happy-clappy limp-armed weirdoes that prance around spreading "the gospel" make me want to cringe most of the time.

But, in my own little world, and in my own little way, I find — perhaps laughibly — there's a certain comfort in thinking that there's Someone lurking in the shadows looking out for me.

But hey, this isn't about my ongoing inner turmoil about the conflicts of my experiences and reason vs two decades of Irish Protestant "fire and brimstone" warnings, this is about transvestism.

And if there's one piece of text that makes any Christian transvestite quake in her heels, it's that humdinger from Deuteronomy 22...

A woman must not wear the clothing of a man, nor a man the clothing of a woman. For that is an abomination.

You know, despite the voices of esteemed friends of mine, I struggle with this one. Not in a literal way ... let me explain.

See, if you want to disect that particular piece of 'commandment', it's pretty easy. You just take the southern hick that screamed it at you to one side, and you question their definition of what men and women's clothing is.

Clothing is a human construct — I mean, if you want to go all Biblical, then all clothing is evil. Surely? The minute those two happy-apple-crunchers grabbed the nearest fig leaves, we were all on our way to Hell.

But what defines which pieces of cloth belong to which genders? I mean, over the years things have changed dramatically. I seem to recall that I was christened in a dress, for example — at the ages of something-months, my devoutly religious mother put me in a frock and paraded me in front of the entire village.

And if you go back a hundred years or so, the norm was for boys to be dressed in pink.

And if you go back further, then you find examples of fashions — say, Elizabethan ones — where prancing around in ridiculous dresses was the norm for men.

That Elizabethan one is interesting for me, because it's more to do with social boundaries than it is to do with gender ones. If my memory serves me well (which it often doesn't) there were a series of laws passed in Elizabethan times — the Sumptuary Laws — forbidding men to wear dresses. I'm recounting this off the top of my head (because I read it in a book a long time ago), but the general thread seems to be that a group of men from what we'd call today "the Aspiring Middle Classes" were parading around the country dressed up to the nines — emulating the ruling classes. Trangressing their social boundaries.

And the laws that were introduced — based, in no small part on That Verse™ from Deuteronomy — were designed to keep people in their place.

But I digress. The very easy way to defeat some blinkered dullard who bleats that verse out at us, as trannies, is to quite simply ask them to define what they mean by men and women's clothing, considering that there's a constant flux — a constant fluidity — of what those terms mean.

(And, perhaps, scream words like "KILT!" and "JEANS"! in their ear. Repeatedly)

I happen to believe that there's a perfectly sound and logical come-back to that sort of tactic, but what generally happens is that whoever's quoting the Bible, then takes it upon themselves to pluck an arbitrary line out of thin air, and define fashion based solely on that.

Which is an argumentative tactic I despise. It leads nowhere — it's a dead-end line of reason. They tend to scream "Well I think this", and from that point on there's no arguing with them. Or, heaven forbid, they take the ideas that were passed down to them from their peers as being 'The Word of God', and you're pretty much stuck.

...

An aside: Don't you just hate when people argue like that? You reach a sticking-point with them. In this example, it's where they decree that everything is 'The Will of God', and you just know that whatever you say to them is going to fall on closed ears.

For a perfect example, I refer you to that Louis Theroux thing the other day on "The Most Hated Family In America" — you realise that there's a point that you can reach, but after that whatever you say is easily dismissed by their cretinous logic.

...

But yeah, sorry. Like I said, I think there's a pretty easy line of attack to the "well how do you define men and women's clothing?" question.

(Usual caveats apply — I'm speaking from a very personal viewpoint of what transvestism is for me. M'kay?)

I wear women's clothing all the time. A lot of the time — usually at work and stuff — I wear it because it fits me. Being the skinny bitch that I am, I often find that men's clothing hangs off me like a tent. So I often wear women's shirts, or women's t-shirts, because I look good in them.

I mean, I find that one weird enough in itself, having always believed that shirts are male items of clothing. There's a sort of oxymoron in my head when it comes to women's shirts — that such a thing doesn't really exist.

But I don't usually refer to that as me being a trannie. I mean, yeah, I sometimes wonder if people notice that it goes on the wrong way round for a guy, but in general, it's just me trying to look good, rather than flinging back the frontiers of gender-based clothing decisions.

The other time I wear women's clothing though, that's a lot different. Whether it's because of my little sexual kicks, or my general "I Am A Princess™" moments, the vast majority of the time that I wear women's clothing, it's because it's women's clothing.

And that's where you can non-arbitrarily draw the line.

You can't just say to me "skirts are for girls and trousers are for guys, and wearing anything else is wrong", but you can say to me "whatever you define in your head as women's clothing, and if you wear it BECAUSE you define it as women's clothing, then that's wrong" ... and I don't really have an answer for that.

...

Except, well, of course I have an answer for that.

The whole "guys wearing women's clothing is wrong" argument depends entirely on the interpretation of one verse in the Bible.

ONE VERSE

And, if I can refer to Selina , that verse is open to way more interpretations than just some dictatorial, dogmatic question about abstract folds and cuts of cloth.

If I'm right (and I stand to be corrected), the original Hebrew can be read not just as "clothing", but as "armour" — hinting that perhaps the intent behind the words was more to do with socially proscribed roles than it has to do with hemlines.

Context — as I often bleat — is everything. And if you read those words within the context of a pre-feminist-emancipated group of people rambling around a desert, constantly under attack from the outside, in which the social order had to be preserved, then it makes total sense.

There were jobs to do — men had to fight nasty people, women had to do all the other stuff. In an environment (unlike ours) where survival was the key, maintaing a very strict social order was an absolute.

So if women started fighting, or men started shirking their duties by pretending to be women, then everything would go tits-up.

And if you read it in that context, it's got fuck-all to do with me popping on a ballgown to waltz around my house, it's purely about retaining a status quo.

I mean, does it specifically say "Men shalt not flounce around their living rooms, for they will knock nick-naks and oraments off their mantlepieces"?

The Bible (as I learned last night, but have believed for a long time) has continuously been updated and interpreted and translated into language that's "getable" for its contemporary readers throughout history. And the fact that (again) only one verse deals with transvestism — and that that verse is open to hundreds of interpretations — says to me that any moral objections to me pulling on a petticoat based solely on it, is a pile of bollocks.

...

"Ah, but", counters the voice in my head. "What if it isn't talking about clothing? What if it's more to do with an overall presentation of self? What if the 'abomination' the verse speaks about is less to do with fashion, but more to do with a denoucement of how you were made?"

Ah.

I'm not a transsexual — we all know that. If I was transsexual, I might veer off into a series of questions about how sex isn't just a case of "boy and girl" — how there are many, physical states between the two.

I might — for example — introduce Intersex People as something that directly challenges that simplistic, black-and-white approach that a lot of religious objectioners to anything outside their own immediate experience might, and point out to them that their narrow perceptions of the world are completely out of touch with what actually exists.

But.

I kinda fall flat at that one. The only thing I've really got to counteract it is that I was obviously made a transvestite, and for me to deny that would be more severe than me denying that I'm a guy.

But you could pick a million holes in that argument.

Fortunately, for me, the arguments never get to that stage — they always reach the impasse of "But the Bible says this", and I get to walk away with a self-satisfied feeling of non-dogmatic intelligence.

Rather than the crushing defeat if someone ever actually got so far.

Early Conditioning

family random quip

All this week, quite understandably, my ever-so-excited brother has been emailing me photographs of my new nephew

He is, I have to say, enormously cute¹, and I wish I could share the photos with yous — but, you know, Family Privacy and all that.

There's one in particular that I'd love to post. It's of him asleep in the hospital cot, wrapped up in a blanket and with a little white hat on.

The reason I want to post it — aside from Teh Cuteness™ value of it — is that on the cot, just to the left of him, is a sticker with his name on it, and the words "I'm a boy".

God, they start drumming in these gender roles early these days, don't they?

¹ Takes after his Auntie Siobhan, I think you'll find. Except in the photos where he looks like an alien — of which there are lots.

I must just briefly say thank you for the comments on that. I think there was a little voice at the back of my head earlier saying "You're going to get some indepth comments there Siobhan", and it was right.

The general problem I have — in the context of a religious question — with what I do, is something that I really struggle with. I find that it's the out-and-out rejection of a very significant part of me in the first place — a "You Are Bad&trade" attitude to something that I find to be a very core nature of Self — that made me start to question the things that I'd been brought up to believe.

I realise that logically there's no conflict between the two, but it was a very dogmatic approach that started me questioning things. And once I'd started, I couldn't stop.

Just to tie today's two posts together, quite randomly ... when my mother called me a week ago, to tell me about my nephew, she had a disdainful tone in her voice when she told me his name is "Oscar"¹.

"Some literary connection, apparently", she said. And I could tell that there was a disapproving notion in her head that there might be something to do with Mr Wilde in there — disapproving because he was gay.

And I thought, "You know, if only you knew the stuff about me that I don't tell you".

It's things like that — the denial of things that exist — that started me questioning things. And, honestly, I don't like questioning things. Life would be so much easier if I could sit back in a happy haze of ignorance, plodding on with accepted 'truths' like I did as a teenager.

But my own Self got in the way of that, and I found myself to be a contradiction of everything I'd been told. Denying the way that I am is completely impossible for me — in fact, I think it would more wrong of me to do that than it would be to carry on being Me.

I can't deny that I get a lot of comfort out of the belief that there's a Someone beyond my normal perception. And I'm really hoping that that Someone is OK with me expressing myself in the way that They made me.

I guess that sometimes, I'm worried that the more 'unspeakable' parts of the things that I do might not be 'approved' — but I think that we all have that to some extent.

I dunno.

¹ Although, yous all know my real surname yeah? Go Google his name, and celebrate with me that my nephew is named after Junior Delgado. I am so calling him "Junior" from now on...