Ana’s Story, Part II: Gender

I am a butch identified lesbian woman. My gender does not conform strictly to pre-scribed ideas about what a woman should be or is.

One, because in the world in which I was raised, being a woman was and continues to be described as being heterosexual. When I first came out, it was the most liberating feeling. Not only had I felt like I was finally getting closer to who I truly am, but I let go of all the heterosexual paraphernalia and expectations that had suffocated me my entire life. I was 16 when I came out. I hadn’t had a lot of life lived yet at that point, but I was old enough to know that my gender brought a whole set of expectations, the greatest being heterosexuality. All the makeup, heels and hairstyles that I had fought for as a young 13 year old teenage girl, that were handed to me as a rite of passage at 15 (the magical quinceñera), became useless for me at 16, when I actively decided to shed the external set of markers of my gendered, feminine identity.

Two, because my gender presentation and my identity don’t always match. I’ve been followed into public bathrooms by cops who think I’m a Black man. White women have clutched their purses close to their bodies when I pass them by, also seeing me as a Black man. To understand how profound this experience is, we only need to look at the media to understand how Black men are treated in this society, and what repercussions this creates on a female body that is read in this way. The perceptions and actions of cops and white women on the street have affected the way I understand myself and my gender identity. I don’t fit neat lines, and I clearly carry a stance that is differentiated from Black and Latina femininity and femininity, period.

Three, because in the context of the greater U.S./white LGBT community, I am seen as femme by people who read gender in purely black or white terms. My greatest shock was being told by women in the Bay Area that I was femme because my hair was long (at the time they met me). But, in my world, being around people of color, being butch went beyond the length of my hair to the stance I had in life and the ways in which I walked through the world. Coming from a Latina context in which assumed heterosexuality went hand in hand with an exaggerated performance of that sexual identity through the use of stylized gender norms, breaking away from that in any way has meant a departure from heterosexuality and femininity. There is nothing wrong with being femme in the world, but for me, my struggle has been engrained in the claiming of space as a non-feminine person – and allowing for the possibility of my and others’ existence as non-feminine people.

I am also struck by how this particular negation of a non-white gender norm as a point of reference is also mirrored in assumptions of what constitutes lesbianism – in other words, the ways in which women relate to each other in non-white contexts requires the proving of a lesbian identity that is usually assumed with white lesbians. The same goes with gender.

Though in subtle ways I identify with the struggles of the trans community, I consider myself a trans ally because as a lesbian, I carry privileges that are specific to being a woman identified female. It is from this place that I speak in critique of the experiences I have had within our movements.

Within our movements, I’ve been angered by the ways in which gender has been used to justify unethical behavior; and how a person’s gender identity plays a role in how they are heard or not heard. When I was doing lesbian feminist organizing in Boston, I remember that one of our organizers came out to us as beginning the process of transitioning in gender from woman to man. The group I was involved with decided to have a series of discussions to talk about whether or not trans people (on the female to male AND male to female spectrums) would be allowed to participate in the group’s political activities. The conversation degenerated into a question of whether bisexual women would also be allowed to participate and essentially, a fight to lay claims to who in the room was a “real lesbian”. Not only was this conversation deeply disturbing in its own right, but it also involved a “side” conversation about whether race was an issue that affected the group - the end decision by the majority being that race was too much to deal with, and not directly relevant to lesbian organizing! I left after that meeting, upset not only about the racism, but also about the narrow ways in which sexual orientation and gender had been assumed and used to justify trans- and bi-phobia. It was also the first critical moment in which I realized that I needed, as a lesbian, to be an active, not just a passive, voice in support of bisexual and trans-identified people.

I would have many opportunities to put this into practice, the least of which was an experience two years following this conversation when an organization I was involved with was determining whether to expand their mission to move beyond the LG to include B and T. Though it was the same conversation, the outcome was different thanks to the unity of those of us present in demanding a space for bisexual and trans people.

A few years ago, I moved from the east coast to California. As I became involved with LGBT organizing groups in California, I was struck by the lesbo-phobia, homophobia and sexism of the movement in the Bay Area. To identify as a lesbian within these spaces meant occupying a space of relative privilege. It meant, too, that people made a very specific set of assumptions about my politics and positioning with regards to the trans movement. It was the first time I was seen as a femme, and that this was insisted on – and that this insistence had everything to do with my identifying as a lesbian. It alerted me to the possibility of my own gender transgressions arising out of very specific contexts that had nothing to do with white-identified gender norms that formed the basis of LGBT gender determinations. And to the very limited, internalized dualistic understandings of gender that even the most radical person I worked with carried. In other words, if I didn’t actively identify as trans, then my identity was collapsed into a “simplified” femininity. Wow! I said to myself – isn’t this simplification exactly what we’re fighting against?

I don’t pretend that it is always easy to maintain a complex understanding of gender. In fact, our language makes it very, very hard (and so does Spanish, which is one of my other languages). I, too, at times have fallen into dualistic thinking around gender, preferring to have identifiable categories to deal with rather than accepting complexities and a lack of vocabulary. And I have usually fallen into this dualistic way of thinking when my own complexity has been denied. But, I find that it is necessary and urgent that we do continue to open ourselves up to new language and increasingly complex forms of identification (including genderqueer, boi, trannie, etc), even when it’s hard to do so.

With this in mind, I did and do identify as a lesbian because my desire and orientation is toward women-identified people (this includes people on the male to female transitional scales and the complex webs in between), as a butch identified female. In my work within the LGBT movement in the Bay Area, I was struck by the responses I received from, primarily white, queer peers when speaking from this place. It happened more than once that I was greeted with a severe lesbo/homophobia and sexism masked within some deep transphobia.

At the same time, in non-LGBT social justice movements, I was upset by how butch women and trans male identified activists were given power by (usually) the straight bio-men in power, and how they were simultaneously silenced. This silencing occurred at the specific moments when attention was brought to their gender variance. For example, the language used to do the work often lacked even the most minimal sensitivity to non-dualistic thinking. Not only did this create an unsafe space for trans people, it created an unsafe space for queer people, period. Gender variant organizers who fell along the male scale specifically, were usually the first ones shut down when challenging the lack of space for our mutual existence. Their shut down was quickly followed by the shutting down of queer women, genderqueer or not. This pattern repeated itself anytime delicate issues of priorities, belonging and reframing the work were brought to the fore. Organizers working primarily on social and economic issues were encouraged NOT to discuss their queerness in terms of sexual orientation or gender – for after all, these issues were framed as secondary to issues of race and class. Which never really left much room for a majority of queer/genderqueer organizers of color to fully live their existence. Nor did this way of framing things shed light on the multiple ways in which race and class form layers to the oppression we experience along the lines of sexual orientation and gender. In other words, even when I am struggling because of my race and class, I am also still struggling because of my gender and sexual orientation. And there is a direct connection between these things. How long can our movements continue to sustain themselves and NOT consider these connections? Who is continuing to benefit by implementing and sustaining sexism, homophobia and transphobia?

Being an Afro-Latina/mixed race butch, lesbian identified female in these multiple contexts has not been easy. But it has also afforded me insight into the connections between oppressions. As a result of my experiences, I have begun to understand in my flesh only a few of the challenges faced by dark skinned men and people on the male scale of gender identity. As a result of my choices –and primarily the choice to accept my lesbianism and gender-queerness – I have had to deal with my own notions of what constitutes socially pre-scribed gender categories and ideas of what is “normal”. I have had to shed not only the expectations of heterosexuality, but also the limitations of homosexuality. For it is in that process that the complexities of my own experience and others’ experiences have become validated and valued.