The Caitlyn Jenner post

This post assumes you already understand why misgendering Caitlyn Jenner, even if you don’t like her, is wrong. That’s not what we’re talking about. If you want someone to engage with you on that topic, you’ll have to look everywhere else on the internet where that conversation is happening.

This is another one of those posts I hoped I would never have to make. I can’t stand having to defend Caitlyn Jenner in any way, to be honest. So please don’t mistake this piece as one that encourages anyone to worship Cait or celebrate her ideas- I’m not here talk about her politics either.

Instead, I’m going to talk about a more insidious kind of transphobia I’ve noticed being hurled in her direction and hope that I can help whoever’s reading this understand why it’s inappropriate behavior. Up front, I’ve noticed this behavior more from self-proclaimed liberals than any other group, but I’ve also noticed it in people who consider themselves to be farther left and in moderates. The unifying ideology between these folks is that they consider themselves people who support transgender people.

I don’t doubt that they mean it. I think that the majority of people I see engaging in the behavior I’m going to be describing genuinely do consider themselves allies and try at least a little to be good ones. But intent doesn’t always match impact and isn’t always congruent with one’s actions.

I like examples so let’s imagine a scenario to illustrate what’s going on. Imagine you’re scrolling your social media of choice and you see someone’s posted an article describing Cait’s latest publicly stated political opinion. For fun, you decide to click into the post and look at the replies and comments. Most of what you’re going to see is probably people misgendering her and doing other blatant transphobic things and people correcting those people. A few people will be posting essays about why her political opinion is correct or incorrect. And some people will say things like:
“I can’t believe she went through transition and everything and still thinks like a privileged white man.”

And that’s the one I’m talking about today and there’s a lot to unpack.

The first thing I want to say is something I’ve said a bunch of times in these things I write: transgender and other noncis people don’t all have the same opinions, religions, or anything else. The only thing we have in common is being noncis and there are times when not all of us can even agree on what that means. It is intuitively confusing when someone in a minority group supports policy that can be detrimental for them, but there are a variety of reasons why they might do it anyway. People are complicated and have complicated motivations and desires. So when Caitlyn Jenner spouts conservative talking points and supports conservative measures, she is not talking like a conservative man. She is talking like a conservative trans woman- conservative trans woman isn’t the oxymoron it’s made out to be.

Think about how figures like Ann Coulter are received by liberals et al. Ann is another famously conservative woman and, while people express similar confusion about how her views seem counter-intuitive, I’ve never really seen anyone say that she’s thinking like a man. There’s plenty of discourse about her motivations (a lot of people resonate with the theory that it’s all a “pick me” ploy), but her womanhood is never in question. For the most part, people accept that although conservative views are mostly associated with white, powerful men she is still a woman in that space. Her womanhood is never questioned. She is just, for whatever reason, a woman with conservative views.

If someone were to imply that Ann Coulter is just parroting men’s opinions and not her own, I imagine they would be met with severe backlash. Part of the work of feminists has been to affirm that women have opinions independently of men and these days it’s a huge faux pas (with good reason) to even begin to imply that a woman’s opinions belong to any man.

But when it comes to Caitlyn Jenner, the same feminist protections don’t seem to apply. The evidence suggests it doesn’t apply because she had lived for so long presenting publicly as a man and because people still associate her with that persona. In short, people can’t live in the discomfort of acknowledging a conservative trans woman and revert to thinking about her pre-transition to make it make sense.

And that’s where the transphobia comes in. Like I said before, I believe that the people who say these things genuinely consider themselves allies and would never want to be purposefully transphobic towards.

So to understand why I’m saying that they’re being transphobic anyway, let me ask: what is the core of transphobia? Generally speaking, I’d say it’s not accepting that a transgender or other noncis person is truly the gender they say they are. It manifests in a variety of behaviors from misgendering to outright harassment which seek to force a noncis person to conform their assigned gender at birth, but the core of it is not accepting that someone truly is what they say they are.

Isn’t that what they’re doing when they say she’s “still thinking like a privileged white man”? Is transition somehow supposed to magically transform someone’s entire personality to conform to what you think it appropriate for someone of their gender?

Relatively recently, there’s been a widespread cultural acknowledgement that privileged white women have more in common with privileged white men than they do with poor white women, women of color, or other marginalized groups. This discourse in no way diminishes their womanhood- it instead carves out a distinct section of womanhood that they occupy.

But Caitlyn’s a different story. Because of her background, people think it’s appropriate to diminish her womanhood. To imply that some kind of residual manhood is gumming up the works and holding her back in some way. Delegitimizing her as a “real” woman.

The transphobia here is the insistence that one has the right to associate Caitlyn with manhood without her consent. Nobody but Cait has the right to say what her relationship with manhood is. Nobody has the right decide a woman’s opinions really belong to a man. Nobody has the authority to decide that a way of thinking is inherently masculine or feminine.

There are ways to disagree with and criticize Caitlyn Jenner that don’t involve being transphobic towards her. Let’s do better.