I finally got to see Catherine Crouch's film, The Gendercator (missed it in Michigan). Catherine also sent me 3 other short films, which I'll talk about in a later post.
If you haven't yet seen it, The Gendercator opens at a women-only pot party in the woods in 1973 (celebrating Billy Jean King's tennis victory). Cute dyke Sally passes out from an overdose, and wakes up, Rip Van Winkle-style, in 2048--having somehow kept her 30 year-old body even though she is now 98. Sally finds herself held, against her will, in a hospital--in which her male doctor is in charge and in power. The female nurse, wearing a femmey nurse's uniform, makeup and high-maintenance hair, has to take disrespectful, condescending orders from the doctor. Sally gets herself together to leave the hospital, having cut her hair into a short, 70s butch style, and wearing jeans and a flannel shirt. When the doctor spots her, he holds her in the hospital against her will, and calls in The Gendercator. The Gendercator is a government official who enforces traditional gender norms that support the evangelical regime that has been in power since the early 2000s. It is decided that since Sally seems dykey, she must be changed into a man, via surgery & hormones. Sweet Sally protests that she likes being a woman and a dyke, and never wanted to be a man, and even pipes up, "sisterhood is powerful!" ... but to no avail.
This film has annoyed some TG folks, who experience its message as unsupportive of their choices. The Gendercator was withdrawn from its scheduled screening at the Frameline International LGBT Film Festival in San Francisco, and Catherine Crouch has been wrongly maligned.
The Gendercator isn't promoting intolerance of TGs, but does certainly question social pressures on us, and on our children, toward binary gender categories. Catherine Crouch, in her film, is mourning the trend in our society toward, and not away from, gender binarism.
Feminists have so few spaces where we can gather without having to attend to men's concerns. Aside from Michigan and a few other women's festivals, all the local events are GLBT, where feminism is absent--it's all about the men. So it's actually not surprising that Frameline declined to screen The Gendercator. GLBT venues are not feminist, and are often, in fact, anti-feminist and pro-patriarchy, pro-binary gender categories & gender roles. Lots of lesbians are anti-feminist, too, and promote, in their own lives (including s/m and porn), the dominator-dominated patriarchal model which is the basis for millenia of women's, children's and poor men's oppression, racial and class oppression, and the ongoing attacks on animals and the planet itself.
It's so good to find Catherine Crouch, born in the sixties, and too young to have been a part of the 20th century women's liberation movement. She really loves women, and I love Catherine! I'll be watching for her upcoming films.
3 comments:
sigh...
breathing...
You have the most interesting, fierce, smart people in your sidebar. I've been visiting them. I think her name is medusagorgon who was writing about this movie.
I also read another person's blog biodiverse resistance who wrote about the controversy over bitch and mary crouch as well.
Thank you for this. I have been thinking about trans issues and what's actually going on for years.
I've marked the silence linked to the fear of challenge.
I'm thinking about that movie the village of the damned. :) But I'll leave that for now. :)
I was thinking a few days ago about "coalition politics" and about how betrayed I felt as a young black lesbian separatist when I heard that June Jordan was saying that it was time stop with politics that centered our identities and to start doing politics that were about hooking up with others who are also oppressed...
Dear god/dess I've tried. I've tried. I've reached out to all manner of people, always finding that their understandings of doing coalition politics very rarely inlcuded me, what I needed to not feel oppressed, the kind of work they actually needed to do, the kind of consciousness raising they needed to do to get close to me or be trusted by me.
I'm thinking about people who experience oppression and how they often shy away from excluding others.
I'm thinking about what I wrote to medusa goron (is that her online name?) about Michigan in part being at fault for the rise of trans politics as something in opposition to radical lesbian separatist feminism.
I understand that they were trying to hold the space. I understand.
I remember having a reaction to the choices they made that was about my not wanting to participate in exclusion.
I think this version of a gender binary questioning movement was born off the back of Michigan as something positioned in reaction to "mean" lesbian separatists.
I think that, in lots of ways, lesbian separatists who believe in biologically based, female hood have been marked as enemies on par with gender challenged heterosexuals, conservatives, etc., people who just don't get trans gendered politics.
I'm thinking about the recent history of transgendered people, so intertwined with the hospital corp.
Again, I'm bound to point out that this is why we need to weigh in on our own history of brutal, idiotic cutting before we get all up in female genital circumcision.
So, babies were born...
Their genitals didn't quite look "right" to their parents, who were heterosexual, sexual conservatives, anal fuckers who were scared of anything that didn't reflect their understanding of the status quo...even physical difference.
The parents and the doctors, all suffering under weird ass psychosis sliced and diced the babies until they looked "right" even if this meant mutilating them right on into their teens until all the parts in question looked "perfect".
This is where the hospital corp first got into the business of "helping" intersexed babies seem more "natural" less "abominable".
So, the hospital and its doctor butchers, along with their handmaidens the psychiatrists who are brought in to make sure that everything in a person's psyche lines up with the more simply gendred parts that have been chosen for them.
This is where I mark the beginning of the "movement".
As a mama and as a lefty who has chosen to filter my understanding of the hospital corp and its minions through a lens that offers me an analysis based on power, dominance, capitalist economies, fear, silence, binaries, hierarchies and oppression, I am being forced to claim the fact that I don't think all is well here.
I think that something is wrong and that any alliance between biological beings of any gender and the hospital corp that involves money are inherently oppressive and not serving any of us who understand ourselves as politically radical.
I think that slicing and dicing is an easy response to a difficult question, as are hormones.
I think that in an increasingly facist world where difference and any signs of defiance of social norms are to be quashed, it makes sense that people who are drawn or compelled to not play along with gender norms would direct themselves or be directed towards surgery.
This is about tidiness. This is my reading based on the fucking flack I get every fucking day for insisting on manifesting as female, femme-inine, but not the least bit interested in manifesting as soft, hesitant, limp wristed, self doubting, quiet, silenced, indirect, passive aggressive and the host of other imposed, compulsory traits force fed to beings with vulvas if they want to have safe passage through a patriarchal world.
Secondwaver, I have to tell you that I've considered surgery for the benefit of others so deeply confused about how I come to exist, when the pain, backstabbling, attacks from other wimmin and thoughts of suicide and mind dulling drugs just became too much.
My rationale? Why not just give them what they want? A tall, physically strong, verbally direct and confident, trying to not be too self doubting, fierce black woman disguised within the surgically altered body of a man who is allowed safe passage when he manifests the above mentioned traits and more...
I understand that in these times, during the third wave, so defined by the idiot spice girls and their fucking girl power that has insidiously messed with and shifted the paths of the feminism everyday wimmin could hope to access, it ends up being seen as not kewl, not glamorous, not safe, not intelligent, not acceptable, not fun, not understandable to manifest as a woman if you are powerful, loud, strong and not interested in wearing women's clothes.
Many have forgotten about androgyny about the power of the butch woman. It becomes so much easier to just tow particular lines that reify the idea that gender is this or that...while espousing politics that say gender binaries make no sense and are oppressive.
It's a bit of mind fuck, really, to watch the people I know who decide to go the hormones and surgery route simultaneously try to broaden discussions about gender as a continuum while making sure that they manifest in the most gender binary ways possible...Isn't that odd?
I keep remembering one friend who was an ex lover, raised as a girl, horribly abused, who started his transformation...he would talk to me about his boyhood and I would look at him and talk about the traumatized and abused little girl he was...I tried to stand for her because I felt that he was inviting me to forget her, needed me to forget her so that his new identity would be complete and seemless. My difficulty was that so many of his beliefs, so many of his fucked up ways dated back to that time when others saw, read and treated him as a girl. If I agreed to forget who that little girl was and what she went through, if I agreed to not mourn her loss or offer her space to speak her truth, to howl, to cry, to openly rather than passive aggressive rage...she would be submerged and able to do even more harm in my friend's life and in his relationshi with me. If she was denied because of his new identity, she would be incensed and it wouldn't just be him who paid her price.
So, I've got major problems, not with the need to broaden societal concepts of gender, but in how the alliance between th medical corp and people who choose psychiatry, surgery and drugs is creating a movement that isn't necessarily a movement for change, but instead a movement engendering silence, division, derision and attacks against wimmin who will have a difficult time mounting a defense.
What do I think?
I think that lesbian separatists, like any other movement or belief system that is aging will have to think strategically, creatively, fearlessly about gender. Lesbians, feminists, separatists are confronted with a world and with the presence of wimmin who have been born into different times.
My motto has always been stretch or die.
I don't think that lesbians who are separatist need to give up old strongholds like Michigan.
But talks need to be opened in earnest. Whenever the shit hits the fan in lefty communities I dearly wish for mentors, crones who are fearless, triumvirates who are understood to be wise judges.
I've needed them so many times.
I worry that I will never be able to access this dream but will only be able to make it a reality for others when I am old and wearing purple.
More conversation. More courage. More voluntary, intelligent shifts. less silence.
I'm so scared of what is happening. Opportunities for broadening are being lost because of the actions of wimmin who are scared to just deal. It sucks.
This is all over the place.
I hope at least some of it makes sense. This is the first time I've written about this. It feels risky...don't have to worry about loosing friends...don't have m/any...speaking with all the silence and defensiveness in the air feels so...trans...gressive. :)
dd, your moving words are of substance (as always) and i agree that the conversation must continue in earnest, and also, i agree with you that we 2nd wavers must stretch and continue to evolve our analysis as our environment evolves--otherwise we'll fossilise. but remember our radical analysis, and grow from there.
Okay, I bit the bullet and fleshed this out some more, feel free to come by and chat when you can.
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