Why Do Trans People Need To Be Protected From "The Vagina Monologues"?

It's a cliche, but I'll say it anyway:  Sometimes the smartest people do the stupidest things.

Now, I realize that stupid people get into elite colleges and universities.  But, on the whole, I would suspect that most students in faculty members in prestigious liberal arts colleges like Mount Holyoke are pretty smart people.

I would even include whoever makes the programming decisions for their theatre.  And I would say as much even after, as student spokesperson Erin Murphy announced, it was cancelling plans to host a production of The Vagina Monologues, which had been performed there every year since Eve Ensler wrote it in 1996.

Mount Holyoke, one of the last all-female colleges in the US, began to admit transgender students last year.  Hence the rationale for the misguided decision to cancel the play:  Someone decided that it could offend trans students.

Why?  According to Murphy, "At its core, the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman."

All right.  I respect Murphy for trying, as best as she knows how, to show respect for her new classmates.  However, that attempt is seriously misguided.  More specifically, it stems from a very flawed reading of the play.

I've seen several performances of Monologues, though I admit that I haven't seen one in a few years.  Never did I think that the play said, or even implied that being a woman means having a vagina, or vice-versa.  To be sure that neither my memory nor reading is flawed, I did a quick search and found out that Ms. Ensler herself has never advanced such a definition of a woman, and did not write the play with such a definition in mind. 

To me, in the play, the vagina represents a woman's power and vulnerability, her oppression and the ways in which she must be aware of herself and men do not. I saw the play while I was still living as Nick, during my transition and after my surgery. I admit that I identified with it more closely the more I lived as a woman, but even before I started my counseling and therapy, I felt the play resonated with the vagina within me, so to speak.  

And every trans person must be or become aware of the ways we are, have been and can be subject to violence and exploitation, as well as the paths of awareness that open to us, because of our physical (as I now have) or metaphorical vaginas.  That, I believe, is as much a part of a definition of womanhood as anything else I can think of.  

To deny the new trans students at Mount Holyoke--or trans people anywhere--the opportunity to learn those things, or simply experience the power of the play itself, is a disservice.  I don't know Ms. Murphy, but I'll assume that wasn't her intention, or that of the theatre board that voted to cancel this year's showing of The Vagina Monologues.  

In short:  We need it. We don't need to be protected from it. 

Josie Romero: A Child Knows Her Body, Knows Her Self

Quite possibly the most profound message of The Vagina Monologues is that the easiest way to keep someone--especially a woman--oppressed is to keep her from learning about her own body.

I was reminded of this when watching the Dateline segment about 11-year-old transgender child Josie Romero.

I missed the segment when it aired, but I was alerted to it by Kelli Busey's post on her blog Planet Transgender and Vickie Davis' post on her blog.

What struck me is how Josie was able, at her age, to talk about the kind of body she wants to have.  She knows that she was born with male organs, and knows how they are different from female ones.  

Some people would argue that she is "too young" to know such things.  That, essentially, is the argument many people use against sex education:  They believe that, somehow, keeping kids "innocent" will keep them safe, or at least keep them from doing things of which their families, communities and churches don't approve.

Young people in my generation, and those who came before me, did not grow up with the awareness Josie has, let alone the ability to talk about it as freely as she does with her parents and her doctor.  I don't want to impute too much of my own experience to other people around my age who grew up feeling that something "wasn't right" about our gender identities and the ways in which we were expected to express them.  But I suspect that if you grew up with such feelings and your experience was anything like mine, you probably didn't even know enough, at age eleven, to be able to tell a doctor or anyone else why you thought you weren't the gender you were told you were.

Although I felt I wasn't a boy, and I knew I wanted "girly" stuff, I didn't have enough awareness about bodies to be able to say that I was born in the "wrong" one.  Or, more precisely, I couldn't tell anyone why it was "wrong."  Although I knew that girls grew up to be women and that most women could have babies, I couldn't say what about their bodies made them able to do such things.  Once I learned about that, it would be many more years before  I realized that my inability to bring a baby into world didn't preclude me from being a woman; many other women also lack that capacity, and many others never had any desire to do so.  It almost goes without saying that I also didn't understand that boys and girls, and men and women, reacted differently to the same things in part because of their biological and physiological differences.  

And I couldn't even begin to ask what those differences might be until one day when a girl in my class writhed as blood ran down her leg from under the skirt of her uniform and neither she nor any of us in that class had any idea of why.  The nun who taught us was of no help:  She yelled at that girl and whacked her with a ruler.  

Now I realize--as Eve Ensler points out in The Vagina Monologues--that many of the adults in our lives didn't know very much about their bodies, either.  In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to know that some kids' parents knew only that if they had sexual relations at the right time, they'd have another kid--or that those same parents had little, if any, idea of how that happened.  In fact, some of the monologues show us that in the countries, cultures and religious traditions in which women are most oppressed, there are very few, if any, ways for them to learn about the intricacies and needs of their own bodies.  

Even though I would never menstruate (and, of course, I had no idea of why), I felt the terror of that girl in my class.  It wasn't just empathy:  I have some capacity for that, I think, but I am not exceptional in that way.  Rather, I sensed--although I didn't understand why--my body (and so much else in my life) was about to undergo changes that would be just as terrifying if for no other reason that I would be no more prepared for them or, more important, prepared to understand them, than that girl in my class was for her first period.  

Not long after that, I would undergo my own puberty: my first one.  Josie has been taking hormones, in part to forestall her the male puberty I and every other male-to-female transgender child of my generation experienced.  If she continues her treatments and has gender reassignment surgery at, say, age 20, she will not have to endure another puberty later in life, as those of us who transitioned in the middle or near the end of our lives had to experience when we started to take hormones.  

And she will enter womanhood with an awareness of her body none of us had when we were growing up, or even as adults.  And, just as she has adults in her life who can guide her in her journey of self-awareness, perhaps she will do the same for some other child--perhaps one of her own--one day.

Is Prometheus What Pandora Would Have Been Had She Been A Man?

Last night the drizzle turned into rain. It became a torrent that raged, with the stiff winds, against my windows. At least I didn't have to go anywhere today. Even so, I did my laundry when the rain let up a while: the laundromat is only half a block from my apartment. The only other person there was the owner, who was fixing something and chatting me up. He is kinda cute.

Anyway...I'm thinking now about a comment "Jeanne Genet" (I love the tag!) made on my posting about my new vagina. She said I overestimate "how comfortable women who were born with the stuff feel about it." Fair enough: There's still so much I am learning, must learn and will probably never learn about being a woman, or at least being a woman as most women experience it. One of the things I just learned, courtesy of "Jeanne," that "women in general are more detached from their 'stuff' than men are, less aware of how it feels to/in them." I may not know much, but I know enough to agree with her when she says she finds that situation "bizarre."

That, by the way, is one of the points Eve Ensler was making with The Vagina Monologues. I guess that's one of the reasons why the play was meaningful to me even before I started my transition, much less my surgery. Even then, I could see that so much was at stake with a woman's knowledge, or lack thereof, about her body. One reason, of course, is that most women are capable of bearing children and the majority will do so. That means that a woman's health affects not only her life, but the life of someone she hasn't seen face-to-face but knows intimately even before he or she arrives in this world.

But even for those women who have no capacity or desire to reproduce, the stakes in knowing or not knowing about their bodies are, in some ways, even greater than they are for men's familiarity or ignorance of their bodies. Perhaps I am saying that now because I have had to pay attention to not only what I have, but what has been created and what has been developing. For one thing, there is the possibility of infections and other issues that women experience but men don't.

Even more important, though, is the way an external factor such as the cleanliness of my bathtub or towels can turn into an internal matter in ways that never could have happened when I had male genitalia. I'm talking, of course, about infections and such that can develop down there. They can retard or even stop the further development of my new organs. That is not merely a cosmetic issue; it can also affect my health in other ways.

I'm guessing that other women experience parallel, if not similar, problems. But knowing one's body is not just a matter of preventative medicine, as important as that is. Rather, I think it is also a way of learning about one's self. I mean, really, how can you not be interested in learning about yourself? Perhaps my perspective is colored by the fact that I have a vagina, and to a great degree, the body I now have, by choice. But I feel that knowing what one's body can do, and respecting its limitations, is a very important way to learn about one's capabilities, or simply to feel more confident and happy. That's really the reason why a lot of people take martial arts classes: Yes, they want to defend themselves. But they also feel so much more confident when they truly understand their bodies' capabilities.

It's funny that when I was in as good condition as some professional athletes--and in better shape than about 95 percent of men my age--I didn't know very much about my body at all. I just pushed it as hard as I could and gave it the nourishment it needed. Tammy once remarked that for someone who was in as good physical condition as I was, I had surprisingly little self-confidence and even less self-esteem.

Now that I think of it, I realize that lack of self-esteem may well be, if not the reason, then at least an important reason, why I didn't accomplish more than I did, given my status at the time as a white male.

But I've digressed a bit. Why is it that women are "more detached from their stuff"? Something tells me that it isn't a lack of desire to know more; I know enough to know it isn't that women are less intelligent (!) than men.

The short answer is, of course, is that most anatomical and medical knowledge comes from a male point of view; even the ways of learning about them are male-centered. The male-centeredness of medical education has been alluded to for decades; it seems that although things are changing, male is still seen as the "default" gender in medicine and that women's medical issues still receive much less attention than those of men. Also, Freudian psychology is notorious for thinking of women as unfinished men, which means, by extension, that a clitoris is an undeveloped penis. (Aside: I'm a living argument against his notion of "penis envy!") It seems to me that the resulting lack of information about women as women can only exacerbate whatever other inducements not to learn, or disincentives to learn, women seem to absorb from their schools, families and cultures.

I grew up with none of that discouragement to learn about my body, much less the prohibitions some religions place on women gaining knowledge about themselves in any way. In other words, I did not grow up with, or carry into my adult life, the idea that I am auxiliary, or an accessory to, some man. That, ironically enough, gave me the means and permission to learn about my body, but it also gave me the luxury of not having to know too much about it. After all, whatever I didn't know, some man--whether or not he was a medical professional--would know.

Plus, I didn't want to know too much about my body because, well, it never felt like my body. Or, at least, it wasn't the body I felt I was supposed to have, much less wanted.

Now I have, at least after some fashion, the kind of body I wanted, and was meant, to have. That, of course, makes me more interested in it. But I also feel, in some way, more protective of her--I'm talking about Ms. V, of course!--than I might otherwise feel because I had to wait until I entered middle age to find her. And now I am experiencing, in some way, another kind of puberty as my vagina and clitoris develop, and the tissues and hair develop around her.

Now I understand, a little bit, why people like Eve Ensler believe that knowledge of their bodies is a political issue. In Western democracies (actual or so-called), women still have less access to knowledge of their bodies than men have about theirs. And we also have less status, overall, than men have. In some countries, such as conservative theocracies (I'm not talking about Muslim ones, now.), women have even less access to such knowledge and to the care we need. Some countries, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban and Saudi Arabia (which exists courtesy of the American taxpayer), take things even further by mandating that women be completely enshrouded and by keeping them out of public life. When you can see the world only through a grille around your eyes, nobody can see--or hear--you. To my admittedly Western and bourgeois eyes, that's a form of living interment. It's no wonder that when such repressive laws were enacted, the state of women's health, not to mention their education and overall well-being, plummeted.

In the so-called advanced countries, most women don't have dominion over much besides their bodies. And even that ownership is tenuous because most of what little information women have about their bodies is from a male point of view. So I can only imagine what life has been like for Afghani or Saudi women, or even women in countries like Ireland until fairly recently.

Anyway...I didn't mean for this to be a treatise or a call to arms. But "Jeanne Genet" made me aware of at least one way in which my experience as a woman is, and most likely always will be, different from that of other women.