8:36pm September 15, 2014

Seriously if a DD agency is accepting trans women as women, nobody else has any excuse, given the abysmal history of trans people in the DD system.

I go to a resource center for self-taught artists with developmental disabilities. And one of the amazing things that happens there is something that shouldn’t be amazing at all. In fact, it shouldn’t even be the sort of thing that needs remarking upon. But it does need remarking upon, because in this context it’s utterly remarkable that this is happening.

There is a trans woman with an intellectual disability who goes there. She doesn’t shave, she makes no physical attempt to make her body look feminine. But she wears entirely women’s clothing, carries a purse, and has a female name and pronouns.

And nobody, nobody ever misgenders her or uses her birth name (which I don’t even know what it is, and don’t want to).

Understand, this is the developmental disability service system we’re talking about here. This is a place that has involuntarily sterilized people for being sexual at all, even more so for being gay or bisexual, or for being transgendered, and this was considered normal and common practice and totally okay to do without the person’s consent. Many times people would be tricked into signing consent forms — an easy thing to do when many of your clients can’t read.

Understand, that trans women in the developmental disability system are put on behavior programs to teach them not to be women. Understand that the same thing happens to cross dressers. Understand that in this system, there’s often no distinction made between trans women and cross dressers because the idea that we have an inner life doesn’t matter, it’s only our “behaviors” that define who we are. And a AMAB person wearing “women’s clothing” is all that they see, they don’t care the reasons. Reasons don’t matter in behaviorism. Motivation doesn’t matter. So all they do is try to stamp out the behavior of doing “women’s” things and wearing “women’s” clothing, and they see cross-dressing and being a trans woman as identical because both usually involve an AMAB person wearing women’s clothing. And these behavior programs can be brutal, whether they use punishment, rewards, or both – especially since they’re basically trying to change someone’s very soul.

I haven’t talked to Cindy (a pseudonym for privacy), because I don’t really talk to anyone in the art group. But I wonder what she’s been through in order to become as confident as she has, in order to win the acceptance of a community that doesn’t practically ever accept trans people, especially trans women. And she’s doing it with a full beard and other features normally associated with men. But this community accepts her completely as a woman.

Staff accept her completely as a woman. Staff of an agency that probably historically has put trans people on behavior programs to stop them from expressing their true gender. That may still be doing that to other clients. Clients accept her completely as a woman, without any question at all. She says she’s a woman, she says her name is Cindy, that’s all there is to it. Never heard anyone call her he, never heard anyone call her anything other than Cindy, never heard anyone react to her clothing with anything other than respect and sometimes admiration. And this despite the fact that, aside from her clothing, she looks stereotypically male in the extreme, and is the sort of person who would normally be seen in the yuckier trans circles as “not trying hard enough to look like a woman so probably not really trans” or some bullshit like that. And everyone. Everyone. Gets that she’s a woman.

This gives me hope that maybe, maybe they will accept me there as genderless. Maybe they’ll be able to do sie/hir pronouns. Maybe. Maybe that’s still going too far, maybe I’d have to be binary to be accepted. But I can hope. And Cindy gives me hope.

This is also something that has to do with ordinary people, in a way I can’t describe. Cindy is an ordinary trans woman and an ordinary person with an intellectual disability, and these things connect. The DD people who accept her so readily are also ordinary DD people, they’re not part of any elites. I think there are people in the more elitist parts of the tumblr trans community who would criticize her on seven different ideological grounds, for not being trans ‘correctly’. Ordinary people are not always this accepting, mind you. But when they are, they really are, in ways that other people could learn from. And I do think there’s something about the experience of all of us being ordinary DD people together in the same program, that makes it that much easier for her identity to be accepted among the rest of us, whether we’ve heard of being trans or not. It’s not because “DD people are sweet and innocent” (we’re anything but), but it is, I believe, something about being straightforward and matter-of-fact and profoundly ordinary and all-in-this-together. And the world could use more of that mentality.

TL;DR: I am really happy that a trans woman in my art group has gained so much acceptance from the DD agencies that have historically (and still are, most places) been utterly horrible towards trans and gender-variant people of all kinds. Nobody misgenders her, nobody uses the wrong name, nobody gives her shit for having a very masculine-looking body and wearing very feminine clothing. This gives me hope that my genderlessness may be similarly accepted in this community. And there’s also something about this that ties back to being ordinary, but I can’t explain that very well even though I tried. And seriously, if the representatives of a system that have been so thoroughly terrible to trans people are so willing to thoroughly acknowledge her as a woman, then nobody else has any excuse, any excuse at all, to insist on seeing trans people as our assigned gender and nothing more.