=The Fran Lebowitz Phenomenon=

Enjoying the rewards of "male privilege"
 in my cherry dress.

I was watching a short documentary about the transgender pioneer and Warhol superstar Candy Darling and was very disappointed to hear what Fran Lebowitz had to say in the short segment in which she was interviewed for the film. I always liked the "idea" of Fran Lebowitz. I was never really that interested in her actual work as a social commentator and cultural critic. As a personality, though, she seems so irresistibly curmudgeonly and outspoken and contrarian. I would have thought to find in her a like-minded champion of the underdog, the outcast, the unclassifiable. I would have thought to find in her an ally. But in this case, at least, she sounded not much different than your run-of-the-mill transphobic hater. Certainly her comments betrayed an ignorance of what it means to be transgendered. They surprised me and took me aback.

What she said, basically, was that a transgender person could never be a "real" woman—only a caricature like Candy Darling—because they lacked the essential early social experience that made little girls grow up to be "real" women. Instead, she opined, transgender females grew up as little boys, with all the inherent privilege that little boys have in a largely patriarchal society. They couldn't possibly know what life was like for a "real" woman. They grew up with "male privilege." 


Well, I guess this is the usual feminist gripe. Many old-school, hardline feminists have a vested interest in preserving the special unique status of women. They can't just be admitting any ole person who hacks off their genitals and puts on a dress into the club. It can't be that easy to become a woman, after all, can it? What's more, how can you continue to argue for how privileged one is to be a man in this society and how difficult it is to be a woman if there are men out there who'd not only rather be women, but who'd go through all kinds of pain, alienation, and ridicule to be women—with the full knowledge that they'll never be fully accepted as one anyway? 

What kind of person would voluntarily give up such a "privilege"? The implication is: only a crazy person.

What's further implied in her comments is that being transgendered is a choice. That a man can "put on" and then "take off" a female persona and go back to claiming his male privilege whenever he likes. However this may or may not be entirely true for a female impersonator, it is not true for a transgendered person. Being transgendered is no more a matter of choice than being born a woman or Asian. It's something outside of your control; it's something you are, not something you choose to be. What you choose is whether you are going to be true to yourself and live your identity or whether you're going to struggle against it, betray yourself, and hide behind a false persona for your entire life. 

Whereas women may be second-class citizens they have at least fifty-percent of the population to call comrades-in-arms. They have an enormous support-system. A sisterhood. 

What does a transperson have? Until very recently. Nothing. And very recently? Still not so much. Certainly, not  nearly enough. And the attitudes of women like Fran Lebowitz certainly don't offer much encouragement, sympathy, or support.

Here's the truth, Fran. 

Growing up as a "boy" didn't do much for me. It wasn't, I assure you, a "privilege." If anything, it was a handicap; at worst, it was an unmitigated horror. Because those things that should have been a privilege were useless to me. Power, aggression, assertiveness, competitiveness, testosterone, a penis (!)—all those qualities traditionally fostered and fed  and celebrated in boys, I felt totally alienated from them all. I felt alienated from boys and the world of boys in general. Whatever advantages I was supposed to have as a boy, I found to be liabilities because I lacked whatever it was that enabled boys to access and utilize them as I was expected to do and those qualities I did have—testosterone and a penis—I perceived as something alien and alienating, a mistake, a deformity.  It was like I'd been  offered a tool designed for extraterrestrial hands for use on an extraterrestrial world. What was I to do with it here, in my world? And the boys among whom I was mistakenly thrown sensed—I don't know how…some kind of animal instinct, I suppose—that I didn't belong among them. No matter how "boyish" I tried to act or, if that failed, no matter how invisible I tried to render myself, I was always spotted, found out, and picked on. I was bullied mercilessly, as if the boys in the pack were driven to drive me out, to destroy me as unfit for survival. 

And where could I turn?

I wasn't a "girl" either. Not according to you, Fran Lebowitz, and not according to the society in which we live and which you represent, contrarian though you present yourself to be.

That left me, like the Candy Darlings of the world, with no tribe to call my own. No place to belong. I lived most of my childhood and adolescent years in the kind of solitary confinement that psychiatrists of prison cultures claim regularly leads to insanity. 

Transpeople have been perpetual outsiders. And where it didn't kill us outright, or drive us crazy, as it did and does to so many, it has the advantage of making those of us who do somehow survive as tough as nails. Or cockroaches. 

You can spew toxic poisons in our direction from now until Doomsday. And we'll obligingly retreat into the baseboards, the closets, the cracks in the walls. But you'll never exterminate us. Never. We've always been here and we'll always be living in your house. Because this is what you don't understand. What we often don't understand ourselves.

IT'S OUR HOUSE, TOO!

So maybe you're right, Fran Lebowitz. Maybe we aren't or can't ever be "real" women. But it's not because we were once privileged males and haven't suffered enough what it's like to be a woman in this society. But because we've suffered more, whether you want to hear it or not. Because when it comes right down to it, a transsexual person is the new nigger of the sexual world. But I, for one, am not content to keep claiming #1 victim status in perpetuity. I've no desire to claim victimhood as my privilege. I really hope that one day as a transgendered female I can relinquish that claim to some other more deserving group. 

I hope transgendered people can one day even dream of being as accepted in society and given the same opportunities as "real" women have today—even if it's only as second-class citizens! I hope that we can be give even the same opportunity to live safely and openly and with full acceptance if not full equality as real women have since the dawn of time! I hope we can be so fortunate as to quibble that we don't get paid as much as men, or, for that matter,"real" women, that our opinions aren't taken seriously, that we're condescended to, that we're treated as sex objects, that all we're allowed to be are housewives. For most transgendered women what you've been calling hell since the 1950's we'd call a relative paradise.

I can't wait for the day that as a transgendered person I can speak on behalf of a group even more disadvantaged than my own. When I can be someone else's ally and champion and not a victim. When I can help someone else up a rung and not merely be clinging precariously to the bottom-most rung. I'm talking the real bottom-most rung, from which I look up at "real" women who are still pretending that the rung they're standing on is the last. Who think the ladder stops with them. It doesn't. We're still down here under your feet. 

In short, I hope I'm a lot more gracious and understanding than you, Fran Lebowitz, you and your kind, of those who come after me on the treacherous ladder to acceptance.