"Mateo works at my favourite coffee shop. He is sleight of stature and effeminate in nature. At first, I was a bit freaked out by his androgyny. But my classifying brain did its thing -- 'subject is gay male' -- and stopped worrying about it."
There's a really interesting collapse of binaries going on here. McKeen, at least, is willing to admit his honest feelings here, which seems more self-reflexively critical than just saying "I'm super-tolerant, I'm gender-blind." He doesn't know, really, how Mateo prefers to be read. And he doesn't know if he even could read Mateo the way s/he might want to be read. He's not even sure that it's a horizon of possibility for him. Visually, he reads Mateo within his own, experiential index of what it means to be a gay male--effeminate, slight--and provides Mateo with subjecthood. To McKeen, it's not an especially limiting subjecthood. It's just the only one available, and seems to fit, visually, with what he's noticed about other people, maybe other queer people; but maybe also, included with that memory, is a patchwork of 1950s American cinema, D.H. Lawrence, Proust, Tennessee Williams, Musical Theater, and Felicity Huffman playing Bree in TransAmerica.
"He is not gay. Not biologically male. Not female, for that matter. At the moment, he is betwixt and between -- not this or that."
McKeen places Mateo's gender interiority alongside the context of "that," of a thatness, an abstraction that also substitutes as an exclamation: "What's that? What is that? What is that?" Because the only thing to do, the only possible thing to do, in order to snuff out that fear of the anticategorical is to provide an identity. Just slap it together. Quick. Like drywall.
But there's also, in McKeen's writing, the willingness to expand vocabularies. The conscious flux of she and he. As if a personal grammar is being redacted, or even rewritten. There is more description in the piece than actual speech by Mateo. But McKeen does give Mateo a print forum in order to speak a claim to rights:
"Some people think their tax dollars are being spent on freaks who want to mutilate their bodies...[W]e aren't perverts, or whatever they see us as. We just want to be treated humanely. We just want to be treated as citizens."
This crystallizes the current governmental debate in Alberta around gender reassignment surgery. There are reasonable, ethical modifications to the body, civil modifications, civil piercings, and metaidoiplasties and skin inversions are not covered. They are not to be covered by Alberta Health and Wellness, because their coverage would actually result in a kind of epistemological crisis for the province. They would, to borrow a phrase from Butler, "become radically undone."
In Light in a Dark Room, Jay Prosser describes some of the possible realities of GRS:
"It is almost impossible to develop a penis one can piss through without its developing disabling fistulas or complications. It is impossible to develop a penis with which one can have penetrative sex....[A]nd still one must choose between these ‘options,’ between either pissing or having sex—as if life could be decided between urinary or sexual function....[T]he end result will anyway leave severe scarring, the loss of flesh in the donor body part sometimes so shockingly large as to leave that part dysfunctioning. Literally, to have a penis one must give an arm and a leg" (172: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
In order to improve the safety and increase the availability of gender reassignment surgery, granting institutions need to invest funding within the process. In Canada, NSERC and SSHRC in particular need to offer more funding, not only for trans studies, but for research into innovative, safe, non-invasive technologies for personal gender expression.
As a queer person who doesn't identify as trans, I feel very uneasy making these arguments. I know that there is an intense divide between LGBQ Studies and Trans Studies. But queer academics, cisexual scholars, and straight allies need to 1) acknowledge their theoretical debts to Trans Studies, 2) stop crafting queer theory engineered for gay white men, and 3) try to join conversations on trans rights whenever and wherever possible.
Coverage on the GRS debate is still appearing in the Edmonton Journal, but the articles definitely dropped off after Apr 24. I've submitted a short piece. I hope others will do the same. Because, sooner or later, you're the one who's getting 'delisted.'
There's a really interesting collapse of binaries going on here. McKeen, at least, is willing to admit his honest feelings here, which seems more self-reflexively critical than just saying "I'm super-tolerant, I'm gender-blind." He doesn't know, really, how Mateo prefers to be read. And he doesn't know if he even could read Mateo the way s/he might want to be read. He's not even sure that it's a horizon of possibility for him. Visually, he reads Mateo within his own, experiential index of what it means to be a gay male--effeminate, slight--and provides Mateo with subjecthood. To McKeen, it's not an especially limiting subjecthood. It's just the only one available, and seems to fit, visually, with what he's noticed about other people, maybe other queer people; but maybe also, included with that memory, is a patchwork of 1950s American cinema, D.H. Lawrence, Proust, Tennessee Williams, Musical Theater, and Felicity Huffman playing Bree in TransAmerica.
"He is not gay. Not biologically male. Not female, for that matter. At the moment, he is betwixt and between -- not this or that."
McKeen places Mateo's gender interiority alongside the context of "that," of a thatness, an abstraction that also substitutes as an exclamation: "What's that? What is that? What is that?" Because the only thing to do, the only possible thing to do, in order to snuff out that fear of the anticategorical is to provide an identity. Just slap it together. Quick. Like drywall.
But there's also, in McKeen's writing, the willingness to expand vocabularies. The conscious flux of she and he. As if a personal grammar is being redacted, or even rewritten. There is more description in the piece than actual speech by Mateo. But McKeen does give Mateo a print forum in order to speak a claim to rights:
"Some people think their tax dollars are being spent on freaks who want to mutilate their bodies...[W]e aren't perverts, or whatever they see us as. We just want to be treated humanely. We just want to be treated as citizens."
This crystallizes the current governmental debate in Alberta around gender reassignment surgery. There are reasonable, ethical modifications to the body, civil modifications, civil piercings, and metaidoiplasties and skin inversions are not covered. They are not to be covered by Alberta Health and Wellness, because their coverage would actually result in a kind of epistemological crisis for the province. They would, to borrow a phrase from Butler, "become radically undone."
In Light in a Dark Room, Jay Prosser describes some of the possible realities of GRS:
"It is almost impossible to develop a penis one can piss through without its developing disabling fistulas or complications. It is impossible to develop a penis with which one can have penetrative sex....[A]nd still one must choose between these ‘options,’ between either pissing or having sex—as if life could be decided between urinary or sexual function....[T]he end result will anyway leave severe scarring, the loss of flesh in the donor body part sometimes so shockingly large as to leave that part dysfunctioning. Literally, to have a penis one must give an arm and a leg" (172: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
In order to improve the safety and increase the availability of gender reassignment surgery, granting institutions need to invest funding within the process. In Canada, NSERC and SSHRC in particular need to offer more funding, not only for trans studies, but for research into innovative, safe, non-invasive technologies for personal gender expression.
As a queer person who doesn't identify as trans, I feel very uneasy making these arguments. I know that there is an intense divide between LGBQ Studies and Trans Studies. But queer academics, cisexual scholars, and straight allies need to 1) acknowledge their theoretical debts to Trans Studies, 2) stop crafting queer theory engineered for gay white men, and 3) try to join conversations on trans rights whenever and wherever possible.
Coverage on the GRS debate is still appearing in the Edmonton Journal, but the articles definitely dropped off after Apr 24. I've submitted a short piece. I hope others will do the same. Because, sooner or later, you're the one who's getting 'delisted.'
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