No dick makin' me stupid

No dick makin’ me stupid1 Kay Higgins, September 2024 Given that binary gender is organized as a set of opposing characteristics, it is possible that a “crisis” in masculinity is a destabilization of an entire system. This destabilization appears to be confined to symbolic and rhetorical consequences, and is neither a panacea for transformation of power or a harbinger of social destruction. However, it provides opportunities to produce subjectivities that are not subject to the same sources of instability that have created the crisis, and, with the right circumstances, begin to build new solidarities. Part I, definitions and the lack A fundamental problem in discussing “masculinity” is the lack of a stable definition. If “masculinity” is simply “a set essential qualities of being a man,” then we are compelled to either accept a bewildering spectrum of historical and culturally-specific practices, and variations in individual behaviour, to say nothing of the various exceptions and qualifications required for a stable definition of “man” or “male” itself. The definition becomes a circular, question-begging chase between masculinity being the traits of maleness and maleness being identifiable through masculinity. It follows that a seemingly stable but in fact precarious definition of msculinity is achieved through enforcement that discards the difficult cases as abnormal, deviant, and harmful; and essential masculinity, belonging to a group of people distinguished by particular physical characteristics, 1 Lennox, Ari. “Waste My Time” Songwriters: Uzoechi Osisioma Emenike, Rowan Perkins, Tim Suby, Courtney Shanade Salter. Album: age/sex/location, Dreamville/Interscope Records, 2022. No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 1 characteristics that require an invasive set of inquiries into their genital configuration (current as well as natal), genetics, and blood chemistry. We can’t see those characteristics in order to verify them, and in fact some of the answers may startle or confuse even the bearer. Perhaps an ovary is hiding somewhere, or a wide pelvis, or an “abnormal” level of androgens or other hormones, or even XX, XYY, or XXY genetic markers. We don’t know for sure without looking, and there is rarely occasion to look. The gender revanchist’s “gotcha” question is, “What is a woman?” rather than “What is a man?” and the other questions, such as, “What is an intersex person?”, “What is a non-binary person?”, or more to the point of this discussion, “What is masculinity?” are not posed for rhetorical effect. The answer to “What is a woman?” often seems to hinge upon reproductive capacity (which excludes all women before puberty and after menopause, as well as many others), genital appearance at birth (or in the case of an intersex child, after non-consensual “correction” by a surgeon), and in “tradition,” an obedience to patriarchal norms. When United States Representative Matt Gaetz gave his own answer to the question “What is a woman?,” he was reprimanded by some in his party on his language and mode of expression, but not on substance. That definition was, “XX chromosones, no tallywhacker.”2 The Oxford English Dictionary, by the way, identifies “tallywhacker” as one of many slang synonyms for “penis,” but also as “a stupid, annoying, or otherwise objectionable person.”3 Or to use another word, the one I have already used in my title, a Dick. 2 CSPAN (@cspan) “Rep. Madison Cawthorn (@RepCawthorn): ‘You might amend a bill, but you'll never amend biology. Science is not Burger King. You can't just have it your way...take notes Madame Speaker, I'm about to define what a woman is for you.’" Twitter/X, April 4, 2022 https://x.com/cspan/status/1511015025955196929 3 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “tallywacker (n.),” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8867296069. No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 2 But just as the penis is not always the phallus, it is possible that it is not always a dick. Certainly it is not always attached to a Dick, and possibly a Dick does not need to have a dick. This is already confusing, even before introducing the term dick and its twin meanings,4 and I can’t promise to lead my discussion to a convincing, well-resolved answer to the question “What is a man?” or “What is masculinity?” If there was a stable, convincing, well-resolved answer to these questions it could well quickly close this discussion, in a disappointing way. A contemporary separation of gender identity from physical characteristics (and the recent addition of “gender modality” to produce an adaptable multi-tiered system5) means that the dick can easily be conceived as separate from the Dick. Perhaps the response to “What is a woman?” is simple enough, and that is “Don’t be a Dick,” except that the participants in Dick behavior, maybe Dick culture if that can be a thing, confuse the object and the behavior, and react with fear of emasculation, but also use the opportunity of being opposed to protest their own oppression. Faced with dueling solidarities, one that appears to defend against emasculation and one that comes from a previously shadowy unknown, which side does the dick-haver choose? 4 There are other meanings, including dick as a nonexistent or exceedingly small quantity (as in “dick all”), but for the purpose of this discussion, these are the two that concern me. 5 Ashley, Florence “‘Trans’ Is My Gender Modality: A Modest Terminological Proposal” in Laura Erickson-Schroth (ed.), Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 22 No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 3 Part II, your crises are ready now If masculinity lacks a satisfactory definition other than being an essence of those persons assigned male, how do we identify it, and how do we identify its crisis? The contemporary distinction between sex and gender is of little help in producing a more stable definition, since it simply moves the problem to a separate box, moving masculinity away from maleness. The expected crisis appears to be one of perceived instability of male power. In that crisis, gender non-conformity, nonbinary identity, and gender transition are symbols of instability, but the causes of instability may vary from year to year and from place to place. Declines in living standards, campaigns against intimate partner violence or coercive sexual abuse in workplaces and entertainment venues, “feminization of labour” (often referring to the replacement of decently-compensated, mainly male, jobs with low-paid or piece-work ones), and various employment equity demands an initiatives, are among perceived destabilizing threats. It is perhaps easier to rely upon received notions of what masculine qualities are, regardless of the many complications that impinge on these notions. Rather than looking for ways to resolve the problems, we can simply say of masculinity that we “know it when we see it,” an unsatisfactory approach in many ways. Or, we could define the masculine in the same way that psychoanalytic theory has defined the feminine, as characterized by a lack. Valerie Solanas is unequivocal about this: … most philosophers, not quite so cowardly, face the fact that male lacks exist in men, but still can’t face the fact that they exist in men only. So they label the male condition the Human Condition; posit their nothingness problem, which horrifies them, as a philosophical dilemma, thereby giving stature to their animalism, grandiloquently label their nothingness their “Identity Problem” …6 6 Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto. London: Verso, 2004. 53. No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 4 For Solanas, men lack the positive characteristics of women: “emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc.”7 The sentimental elevation of motherhood is a sign of envy, an expression of a capacity which the man lacks. In this polemic, the male is infantilized to an extreme, but a milder reflection of this extreme characterization is responsible for lowered expectations of men on a much wider scale. Men are commonly thought to be prone to boastfulness and angry impulses, to be incapable when it comes to domestic or care-giving duties and tasks, to be hypersexual and easily distracted by their desires, and so on. It seems entirely possible that these beliefs relieve them of responsibility for learning entire areas of life skills and emotional self-management. However, the lack, or set of lacks within male identity are real and consequential. They engender fear of losing status, of losing identity, and perhaps of ridicule and even violence. To be a Dick in this environment of fear is to desperately try to reclaim some agency, but to instead invite ostracization, and to raise the level of stupidity in discourse. What appears to be a final stage is impotent anger, and the Dick transitioning to hysteric, is when they experience “ … the feminization that occurs, even to Friedrich Nietzsche, when a thinker must scream to get her thoughts across ...”8 This final stage is also a crisis, as it is a humiliation, although not an unrecoverable one from the Dick’s point of view. Recovering from this breach requires displacement of the problem, maybe projection onto an other, and certainly doubling down. It is the infuriating other that needs to shoulder the blame. An argument against the Dick is only briefly “winnable,” because no quarter 7 Solanas, 38 Ronell, Avital “Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas” in SCUM Manifesto. London: Verso, 2004, 3 8 No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 5 will be given, and the Dick’s knowledge that a loss has occurred must swiftly be evaded and obscured. Masculinity does not require being Assigned Male At Birth. Jack Halberstam’s reflection on the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Female Masculinity9 delves into the differences and similarities between “butch” and transmasculine, also touching on the moral panic of “some white feminists”10 toward both transmasculine and transfeminine destabilizations of sexual difference. In this moral panic, there is a perceived crisis of masculinity, but perhaps not the one that is expected on first hearing that phrase. As for “male masculinity,” an inbuilt instability like the one described by Solanas, when its presence reveals itself is either not a crisis, as it exists continuously, or is a long series of crises, or is one sustained crisis, constantly seeking its own repair. 9 Halberstam, Jack. “Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition”, Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, xi-xxi. 10 Halberstam, xviii. No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 6 Part III, but enough about you, let’s talk about me I want to quickly address a question that may well have emerged for some readers when they saw the title of this paper: is she referring to herself? Since we are in mostly-polite company, I do not expect a question about the configuration of my genitals (and “configuration” is probably the best word, as surgeons who perform vaginoplasty and phalloplasty alike have demonstrated that their work involves rearrangement of tissues and nerve endings rather than the creation of new organs or, mostly, the complete disposal of existing ones). I will say this: I do not believe that having a dick (the appendage) or the presence of a dick in one’s life (again, the appendage), makes a person stupid, but the presence of dickish behaviour appears to lower the intellect of everyone involved in it. The song lyric I’m quoting in the title isn’t talking about that in particular, but evidently about sexual longing, the specifics of which involve much more than a dick (“use that mouth” is right there in the first verse11), and is accented by the impatience of a subject who “need(s) someone to get to it.” In writing as an “I,” and delving briefly into my life experiences, I am participating in a “tradition” of trans-ness. Historically, literature and critical writing by trans people has featured a lot of autobiography, not that that is unusual in writing in general, but trans autobiography is distinguished as an attempt to (re)construct history(ies) from the scraps, hints, and traces that survive, unofficially seeing as there are no birth or marriage records that reconstruct past queer kinships, only rumours, the odd letter, maybe a photograph or two, a family history, photographs that are concealed if they are preserved at all. In the contemporary era, a social network begins to persist, from demimondes to semi-secret societies to counterpublics. Is this phenomenon identity politics? When I view it, it appears to be self-defence, which of course is political but not maybe in the way a person first 11 Lennox, op cit. No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 7 thinks of when they think of the term “politics.” If it is political, at times it is highly hamstrung by its own desire to preserve respectability, whether for safety’s sake or not, among those who are striving for social status. Although it is a strategy for survival, it does not have a vision of freedom. As a teenager, closeted, but with some hints around me that something was different – boys at school barely disguised the fact that they were referring to me as “femboy,” and those were my friends – as a teenager, when someone yelled a homophobic slur from a passing car or threatened to queerbash me, when those things happened, I was in that moment 100% queer whether I chose to “identify” or not. Later, having transitioned, and being treated “like a woman” even by people who didn’t regard me as a woman, when I was the object of even mild sexism, in that moment I was 100% female. And when I find that someone has noticed me, and it doesn’t take a detective to figure out that I am trans, and they treat me the way that people who have made me less than human in their minds treat me, yes, in that moment I am 100% trans. These repeated episodes do not present a vision of freedom; in those moments I am relieved of the choice to define myself socially. Neither was social and medical transition, overseen by a small and inaccessible group of specialists, offering a vision of freedom for most of my life. A “successful” transsexual was not someone freely making themselves; those people existed in dangerous, marginal places, and were not perfect gentlemen and ladies. The transsexual who appeared to be most able to adapt to a stereotypical gender role, to be either a commanding presence or a sexually appealing one within heterosexist expectations, could be permitted access to medical and legal transition, but with the instructions that they were to sever their relationships and terminate their employment, and preferably move to a place where nobody knew them, and preserve their “secret.” Even now, transfeminine persons are offered voice training to learn to soften their speech, use rising inflection, vary their pitch “musically,” and so on. Faced with the prospect of possibly compromising my safety when I opened No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 8 my mouth around strangers, I took one of these courses, and I was asked what I wanted to achieve. Being the executive director of an organization, and being tasked with negotiating leases and contracts, I asked, “what does an authoritative woman sound like?” to which there was no response. There have been, I am sure, some courses for transmasculine people, perhaps on how to take up more space, or maybe to learn to be unemotional and dismissive. None of these things point toward freedom; all are defensiveness, not the same defensiveness of the Dick trying to compensate for some lack, but not dissimilar either. Facing all of this, I decided that I wasn’t going to be “very demure, very cutesy,”12 and to pursue my own freedom by creating myself. There is an equivalent masculine approach, and non-binary ones as well. (Demure, mindful, and cutesy may well be someone’s freedom, and Jules Lebron, the creator of the original viral videos, is apparently describing a strategy which maintains her dignity and which for her is an expression of freedom, but I just can’t see it for myself.) As a transgender person I am expected to make my choices legible to others by describing myself as someone suffering from an incurable condition, or rather a condition only curable by access to legal and medical levers to adjust my gender, and it is true that the option of non-transition, namely living in secrecy and unfreedom, is dangerous and takes a psychic, social and physical toll on a person. It is also true that my ability to construct myself, to choose what I will be, has been greater in the past nine years than at any other time in my life, notwithstanding the sexism, homophobia, and transmisia that is surging all around us. In other words, I made a positive choice. Rather than casting myself as a victim of a complex medical and psychiatric condition, I want it to be clear that I made a choice, or more accurately a series of choices, to proactively construct myself with respect to gender, and to, do so with critical 12 Lebron, Jools @joolieannie “#fyp #demure” Video, August 5, 2024 https://www.tiktok.com/@joolieannie/video/7399736793119247662 No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 9 attention to the ways in which gender are constructed, and with care to not simply leap from one closet to another. Having been told that I “would be perfect for the Crisis of Masculinity,” I also had a choice in agreeing to make this presentation. To appear on this panel, as a transgender person, is to risk appearing as a stand-in for issues of gender in general, an overreach in which I would be destined to fail. However, my risk is substantially different than the economic, physical, and mortal risks often faced by people who exceed gender boundaries or exert gendered influence in ways that threaten defensive formulations of masculinity. I trust, as always, that my presence, by itself, does not provoke a crisis, unless it is the good kind of crisis. No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 10 Part VI, where is the crisis of female masculinity? Jack Halberstam’s reflection on the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Female Masculinity13 delves into the differences and similarities between “butch” and transmasculine, also touching on the moral panic of “some white feminists”14 toward both transmasculine and transfeminine destabilizations of sexual difference. In this moral panic, there is a perceived crisis of masculinity, although not the one I have been discussing so far. But female masculinity, butchness, transmasculine presentations and medical transitions, depend upon freedom while also constructing freedom. Paul Preciado writes, early in his social transition, , “I’m not taking testosterone to change my self into a man ... I take it to foil what society wanted to make of me.”15 I quickly understood that there were two paths open to me: the pharmacological and psychiatric route to domesticated transsexuality and, with it, the anonymity of normal masculinity or, on the other hand, and in opposition to this, the spectacle of political writing. I did not hesitate. Normal, naturalized masculinity was nothing other than a new cage. Those who enter will never leave. And I chose. I said to myself: speak publicly. Don't silence yourself. And so, of my body, my mind and my monstrosity, of my desire and my transition, I made a public spectacle: yet again, I had found a way out. This is how I escaped my medical handlers, who looked a like you, esteemed academics and psychoanalysts. Let's say I had no other route, always assuming it was not a case of choosing freedom but of creating it.16 It is still possible for a butch or masculine woman, or a transgender man, to be a Dick. However, such a thing is blessedly rare in my experience. Dickishness is a form of defensive masculinity, disguising itself as offensive measures to cover its lacks. Claiming and constructing masculinity without this perceived internal void is different. The butch and the transmasc do not arrive in the world with a presumption of possessing the social power that is invested in maleness, and do not experience its lacks in the same way. Preciado’s masculinity is a choice to the same extent that my 13 Halberstam, Jack. “Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition”, Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, xi-xxi. 14 Halberstam, xviii. 15 Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie. New York: Feminist Press, City Univeristy of New York, 2013, 16 16 Preciado, Paul B. Can the Monster Speak? : Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts, Semiotexte/Smart Art, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sfu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6676806. No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 11 own femininity is a choice; even if it weren’t, the many smaller choices that produce it constitute a type of individual liberation. Halberstam attributes the objections to these constructions of freedom to a group which appears to hold relative power as a result of non-racialization and probably economic and social power. I have already specified that trans and gender non-conforming identity is a form of individual freedom, freedom to construct part of one’s own social self. But gender revanchism sees this individual freedom as a social harm, indicating that there is an at least perceived effect on others. Is it possible that individual freedom to construct gender does have a broader effect, beyond the administrative, legal, and medical accommodations that have been (unevenly) provided? Leaving aside the often hyperbolic and ridiculous claims made to support transmisia, is it true that a group of people individually constructing their own gender can have a vast impact on the rest of society? What an awesome power if it exists! To be able to destabilize a familiar, pervasive system of social control and order simply by existing? However much one would like to entertain fantasies of magical thinking winning the day, there appears to be something else at work. Preciado provides a hint when talking about repression: “McCarthyism added to the patriotic fight against communism the persecution of homosexuality as a form of antinationalism while at the same time exalting the family values of masculine labor and domestic maternity.”17 Gender-role defying practices, like “homosexuality” (which at the time of McCarthy was a term encompassing all of what currently constitutes 2SLGBTQIA+ through what now appears to be a sort of synecdoche) were seen as potentially opposed to national identity, in the same way that transmasc and gender non-conforming defiance are seen as opposed to the stability of a predictable system of binary gender. Whatever panic is being produced or engineered, it is not 17 Preciado, Testo Junkie, 26 No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 12 clear that an imagined overthrow of oppressive systems is in the offing, or even a local dissolution of gender norms. No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 13 Part V, “imagine a world worth living in, a world worth fighting for”18 I do not believe in a revolution, but you all do. I believe in the gay power. I believe in us getting our rights, or else I would not be out there fighting for our rights. That’s all I wanted to say to you people. If you all want to know about the people in jail— and do not forget Bambi L'Amour, Andorra Marks, Kenny Messner, and other gay people in jail— Come and see the people at Star House on Twelfth Street on 640 East Twelfth Street between B and C, apartment 14. The people are trying to do something for all of us, and not men and women that belong to a white middle class club. And that’s what you all belong to!19 Sylvia Rivera started her now-famous speech to a gay liberation protest in 1973 by telling the crowd to quiet down. By the end of these four minutes, the shouts and jeers thrown at her in the beginning give way to cheers. She is not afraid of the people who are jeering at her, at least she doesn’t show fear, maybe some exasperation, but what does this exasperation consist of? And what does the crowd’s change in tone signify? Rivera is not using the language of employment equity, or equal marriage, or institutional education, or legislative guarantees of rights, or access to health care. Her language is about liberation, and about claiming and exercising power, and within a few minutes that start with a grievance, and with challenges to the assembled group, they join her in a gay power cheer. She begins by doing exactly what we are often asked not to: by scolding, by sharing complaints. I have to believe, however, for all of her hardships, including physical injury, incarceration, and exclusion, that she is aiming her frank criticism not because she opposes the movement, but out of a sort of love. The collective G-A-Y-P-O-W-E-R cheer at the end of this four minutes is as sincere an expression of solidarity as I have ever heard at a demonstration. 18 Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues. Self-published edition, 2014, p. 389 Rivera, Sylvia.”Y’all better quiet down” Archive.org video, 4:08, posted by Ecco Chamber, https://archive.org/details/sylvia-rivera-yall-better-quiet-down-1973 19 No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 14 Organizing movements with an eye to expanding solidarity is not a project that can be completed with one speech, and it requires connections of greater scope than this example provides, but Rivera skillfully brings race and class into the picture, while making a plea for support of the most vulnerable members of her community, and challenging the crowd to build collective power. All in four minutes. There is something about her position, maybe as a person who has endured considerable hardship to produce her self, produce her identity, that allows Rivera to speak frankly, and in a compelling way where others possibly could not. Having already liberated or constructed, at considerable personal risk and cost, this version of herself, she occupies a place of considerable rhetorical freedom. But our subject is the transmasculine rather than the transfeminine one, which is how we come to Leslie Feinberg. Leslie Feinberg’s novel Stone Butch Blues opens the possibility for building an even wider solidarity. Feinberg’s character Jess emerges from a gender-stereotyped lesbian demimonde of butches and femmes, who also have to work in and navigate the world around them as poor and working-class people, into an attempt at black-market medical transition, into a life that seems formless and aimless but brings us to the novel’s resolution. Prefiguring the ending are several labour disputes and physical conflicts, where lesbians are excluded from workplace organizing or have male workers actively organizing against them. Feinberg was a labour activist and socialist organizer as well as an LGBT organizer, and hir book reflects that. Besides writing a history of 2SLGBTQIA+ communities and liberation movements No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 15 from the vantage point of the early 1990s, Feinberg intended to do more, saying, “I wrote it, not as an expression of individual ‘high’ art, but as a working-class call to action.”20 Here, I am tempted to simply read the final chapter of Stone Butch Blues. Jess, the protagonist, emerges from a subway station and sees a protest rally. Jess stops to listen to speakers talking about the violence they have lived through. Jess climbs the stage to speak. She is initially misgendered, owing to her butch appearance. “I know about getting hurt,” I said. “But I don’t have much experience talking about it. And I know about fighting back, but I mostly know how to do it alone. That’s a tough way to fight, ‘cause I’m usually outnumbered and I usually lose. “I watch protests and rallies from across the street. And part of me feels so connected to you all, but I don’t know if I’m welcome to join. There’s lots of us who are on the outside and we don’t want to be. We’re getting busted and beaten up. We’re dying out here. We need you – but you need us, too. “I don’t know what it would take to really change the world. But couldn’t we get together and try to figure it out? Couldn’t the we be bigger? Isn’t there a way we could help fight each other’s battles so that we’re not always alone?”21 Toward the end of the book Jess visits Duffy, a straight, cisgender male co-worker from her past. She talks about speaking at the protest: “I wanted to tell them how it was in the plants, how when a contract’s almost up management works overtime trying to divide everybody. I didn’t know if they’d get what I meant if I said it took the whole membership to win the strike.”22 It is Duffy who asks Jess to “imagine a world worth living in, and then ask yourself if that isn’t worth fighting for.”23 But this could honestly have been Feinberg hirself speaking. The novel itself establishes the position from which a working-class or poor transmasculine person speaks from, grounded in a history of gender, work, exclusion, self-construction, and self-repair. 20 Feinberg, 397. Feinberg, 382-383. 22 Feinberg, 386. 23 Feinberg, 387. 21 No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 16 Forms of discrimination and oppression, although they are all different, tend to resemble each other, and people who are willing to practice one form of discrimination (including Dicks) apparently find it easy to transfer their skills to practicing other forms. These similarities are not enough to build solidarity(ies) on their own. I think there are grounds for solidarity, but there are scarce grounds for trust from people who have been repeatedly Dicked over by people who resemble, or seem to occupy the same societal position as, the people who they – who you, me – might need to make common cause with. It takes actual work. It also takes the ability to speak frankly to each other, without the resentment that results from incomplete comprehension of our own lacks. It requires some people to make exceptions, and for others to refuse to do so. The self-constructed individual who envisions how forms of power including class and gender, can be rerouted, detourned, and reassembled to produce new forms of freedom, is the one we need to hear. Self-constructing gender, and subjectivity, without the deficiencies that manifest as lacks that require repressive compensations, is not a golden ticket for transformation of the political. At best, it presents a set of opportunities to be used critically and strategically. No dick makin’ me stupid Kay Higgins, September 2024 17