HOW FEMINISM HELPED ME FIND MY WOMANHOOD By Mattie Carter Tracing back the origins of my gender identity is a hard thing to do. My stock answer is that I’ve known my entire life that the way I perceived myself was fundamentally different to how others perceived me and how my body appeared, but that doesn’t exactly answer the question of when I first realised I was a transsexual. The truth of the answer is that I don’t really know; there’s no one moment which I can point to in my childhood where everything clicked into place, it was just always there in the background. What I can pinpoint though, is what made me decide to transition.
Picture that child going to school everyday surrounded by boys who would make jokes at the expense of girls or endlessly lambast any boy who showed interest in feminine things. Picture that child entering adolescence, as every benefit of male privilege catapulted them through their teenage years whilst the only thing on their mind was how much they yearned to be a woman.
It was a simple fact that my peers, the media and even my family had programmed me from a young age to see a woman as an embarrassing thing to be; weak, submissive and cut off from the upper echelons of society. The Picture a gender dysphoric child, shame that I carried everywhere I presenting as male in a malewent was worse than the shame of dominated world. Picture that child being a transsexual; it was the watching cartoons where a male shame of wanting to be a woman; character dressing in women’s the most embarrassing kind of clothes was shorthand for human being you could be. How weakness or embarrassment. often is a male character being
magically turned into a woman or dressed in women’s clothes used as a punchline? In the world we live in, who in their right mind would want to be a woman? Through all of the drama that led to me dropping out of my first university and doing some bizarre things, the one thing I could never confront was that I needed the male privilege I had benefited from my whole life if I wanted to be successful and live the life I had dreamed of, but I couldn’t even begin to work towards those goals without giving it up and embracing who I was. I had always been aware of feminism, and had even read a book or two, but when I began to understand terms like ‘internalised misogyny’ and ‘male privilege’, I suddenly realised how stupid I had been; how offensive it was to other women to continue to pretend to be male because of the shame piled on women by a patriarchal society. I could be the person I wanted to be, I would just have to fight harder; like every other woman on the planet. Feminists didn’t just help me deal
with my gender dysphoria, they saved my life, and I will forever be in debt to them.
BISEXUALITY, PASSING AND THE ACRONYM HIERARCHY: WHY INTERSECTIONALITY IS CRUCIAL TO LGBTIQ STRUGGLES By Chris Jarvis I’ve technically been ‘out’ for around seven years. As grizzly, turbulent and dehumanising a process being outed was, where friends dribbled away from me and school became a place I feared and reviled, rather than begrudgingly put up with, I consoled myself throughout the process safe in the knowledge that at least it was something I would have to endure only once.
in monogamous ‘heterosexual’ relationships, I seem to ‘pass’ as straight to most people. And because of this, frequent responses to allusions to my sexuality range from confusion to denial.
Bisexuality has for a long time endured erasure. Sexuality as a binary phenomenon is a deeply pervasive notion, engrained into our society and thus our collective Seven years later and I still find consciousness. As such, bisexuals myself repeatedly reliving the are often greeted with claims that experience of having to out myself their sexual preferences don’t exist, over and over again. Every new that they are homosexuals in denial person you meet, the typical through their own internalised assumption is that you are homophobia and that they just heterosexual, meaning at some stage haven’t ‘picked a side’ yet. you have to undergo that same Well, I’m bisexual, and I can confirm process once more. While that I do exist, that I don’t hate myself acknowledging the degree of and that I refuse to pick a ‘side’. perceived privilege this gives me, all of this is exacerbated for me by the fact that for a long time, having been But these attitudes are not exclusive
to those who identify as straight. These attitudes persist throughout the LGBTIQ movement. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I and others have been told by some gay men that being bisexual is reinforcing homophobia by refusing to acknowledge the fact that bisexuality is simply homosexuality in disguise. It isn’t. And these suggestions are a particularly pernicious form of biphobia in that they introduce a hierarchy within the movement that was envisaged so as to create collective liberation of all groups under its banner.
the movement of non-binary people, the LGBTIQ community is finding itself on the wrong side of the argument with worrying regularity and places itself in the uncomfortable position of closing the door on so many people that should be a part of it.
This isn’t surprising. Social movements and activist groups are at permanent risk of embodying the very structures they seek to overhaul. The attitudes and actions of some LGBTIQ groups and activists adopt and mirror the systems of oppression and use them to oppress those within our own community. Because of this, And this is merely emblematic of it is even more important that we ensure that our movement takes an wider problems that we’ve failed to intersectional approach to liberation; address yet. that we see the different ways that Time and again, we tell ourselves society has oppressed different that LGBTIQ groups are very good at people and work to ensure that we representing the G, but are poor at seek to overthrow the forces of oppression, rather than take them representing the full diversity of our acronym. But time and again, existing home with us and reinforce them within our own community. groups fall short of taking any effective steps to deal with this. From the fetishisation of black men and trans women, to the erasure of intersex and asexual people and from the trans exclusionary writings of Julie Bindel et al to the shutting out of
SEX WORKER HISTORY IS LGBT+ HISTORY By Charlie Wright Trans babes, gay and queer people, sex workers, we all exist in very specific places in society: ‘please do it somewhere else’. It’s a plaintive cry; we exist, sure, but do we have to do it like… here. Where people are trying to have fun. It’s all well and good to put down the ‘chunks of dead prostitute’ or ‘passible transvestites’ card in a friendly game of Cards Against Humanity, but to have to actually deal with the reality of the overwhelming violence against these populations (violence focused upon our black and latina sisters), or worse, think about sex workers and trans and/ or lgb people (specifically women) whilst we’re still alive, or even celebrate us… eh. Rather not.
worker. Though the insinuation that depicting trans women as sex workers is inherently insulting or defamatory is duly noted, thanks GLAAD, this is less of a reflection on trans women themselves, who are disproportionately represented in sex work, and more of an indictment of the way media tends to handle both trans women and sex working characters. (Extremely badly.)
It’s funny (haha), because the intersection of queerness and sex work are as old as, well, the oldest profession. Throughout history being a sex worker was an option into independent work and living that a woman could manage entirely on her own, and one that GLAAD wrote recently in it’s third annual Trans Images on TV report explicitly accepted and allowed gender non-conformity and nonthat is was glad to see trans straight desires. From sacred women characters on television prostitution in the houses of depicted in roles other than sex
heaven along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the four angels of sacred prostitution that mated with the archangel Samael, Japanese courtesans in the Edo period and the street-based workers that populate the novels of Tolstoy, sex workers’ existence throughout history intertwines with LGBT+ history. This is, typically, especially well documented with regards to male sex workers and their male clients, but also the presence of eunuchs, castrati, and other gender nonconforming people in sex work.
worker named Angie, writes a love letter to femme ‘stone pros’. It’s a history of queerness, of labour and love, and the sex working queer women that fill its pages are given as much love and consideration as the butches working factory jobs.
LGBT+ and sex working history is entwined; patchy, difficult to find, and badly written as the current history books are. To celebrate our history must, by necessity, include finding it. We, all of us, deserve an exploration and celebration of our histories as lovers, workers and transgressors along the rainbow spectrum. To be recognised as more than a punchline to a badly worn joke on A more modern exploration of the Family Guy. intersections of LGBT+ history and sex working history can be found in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, a story of Jess as self-professed ‘stone butch’, set in the lesbian working class bar scene during the Stonewall era. The protagonist, mentored by femme sex workers while still in her teens, learning how to be gentle and respectful of sex workers, having sex for the first time with a Black femme sex
We are holding out International Women’s Day event on 9th March 2015! If you are interested in lecturing/performing or know someone who is, let us know!
Discussion group Tuesdays (C Hall 01.20) and Thursdays (C Hall 01.10) 5pm-7pm uea.feminism@gmail.com @UEA_Feminism http://www.ueafeminism.wordpress.com/ http://www.ueafeminism.tumblr.com/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/uea.feminism/
Front cover and borders by Asia Patel. If you would also like to submit a piece for next month’s zine, please contact us using the details above!