I recently wrote a series of posts respnding to Spectrums, a collection of essays by trans autistic people.
This is the start of a new series. I’ll be doing a close reading of the book Transcending: Trans Buddhist Voices. It caught my attention because, for reasons explained in that earlier series, I consider Buddhism a reason that I’m NOT sympathetic to the trans movement. Of course, I’m not an authority on Buddhism, but I do have opinions based on my own readings and Zen practice.
Keeping Buddhism in mind…I think these writers are confused. In general, “emptiness” and social constructionism are very similar ideas. Derrida and Lacan vs. Nagarjuna is an interesting topic in comparative philosophy. Nondualism and the deconstruction of binary oppositions. The Symbolic, the Real, and non-attachment to concepts.
I think the trans movement is muddled, as an application of poststructuralism. It’s interesting to see the same problems translated into Buddhist terminology.
The book is a lot of short essays, so I’ll going through in order and commenting on interesting passages, starting with the preface by La Sarmiento:
At that retreat [led by a trans woman], I had, for the first time, expressed gratitude for being born female and appreciated the depth of relationships with women I’ve had all my life that I wouldn’t have had otherwise if I had been born male. This was significant for me in my practice of self-acceptance.
In other words, she didn’t appreciate being a woman until a man envied it.
My desire to accept pain yet not suffer became an aspiration that led to my finding my inner courage and strength to come out as genderqueer and to use the pronouns they, their, and them despite the pushback that often accompanied such a transition.
The need to assimilate, conform, and belong no longer was important to me. What was important was for me to be my authentic self, to claim my belonging no matter who I was with or where I was, to remember my Buddha-nature. This empowering stance has freed my heart and life in myriad ways by knowing that I was worthy of love and a long-term relationship and recently deciding to undergo top surgery to align my body with how I’ve always envisioned it to be. I am clear that I don’t want to transition to become male. I just want to be La with a masculinized chest. It has taken me 52 years to love who I am on the inside, and I don’t want that to change.
In Buddhist terms, I’d say the “authentic self” is expressed when you can react freely and spontaneously, without trying to perform artificial concepts like “I am genderqueer.” You cultivate it through meditation, a nonverbal activity.
There’s nothing wrong with cutting your breasts off if you feel like it, but it doesn’t seem like an expression of going beyond “the need to assimilate, conform, and belong.” It’s what you do when you transition, if you can afford it. For women, it’s part of performing what it is to be “genderqueer”, which is a way of belonging to a community. The very next sentence emphasizes “claiming their belonging.” They’re trying to convince themselves, to dissociate from overwhelming feelings.
The next preface by Caitriona Reed continues the theme:
I’ve always been amazed by how smart most trans people are. But intelligence can be a double-edged sword if it cuts you off from your body, your senses, and your emotions. Being cut off from parts of yourself is an occupational hazard for anyone marginalized by society. We can use our smarts to dodge pain. Cutting parts of yourself off starts as a defense mechanism; then it becomes a habit.
Cutting parts of yourself off…
But yes, I understand. The more therapy I did, the less important Lacan seemed. Interestingly, Lacan also separated sex from gender, and he was a big influence on Butler, whose major quirk is to be so focused on language that the body is almost unreal to her (chronically confusing sex and gender). Getting lost in a thicket of concepts is the opposite of Zen.
Like so many others, I have misunderstood and misused teachings about suffering and about “non-self” to disavow my existence and to dismiss my desire, as if desire were inherently a bad thing. I later discovered that this was neither true, nor intrinsic to Buddhist teaching. Against all odds, we as trans people are in a unique position to demonstrate the possibility of overcoming “suffering,” by embracing our desires and all the contradictions inherent in them.
Hm…sounds like Tantra. Even Tantra has the myth of Rudra, about the dangers of going too far with this idea. You’re supposed to go through all kinds of purifications and initiations and be supervised by a teacher when embarking on such a path. Tantric practices are supposed to be discreet.
But Caitriona Reed isn’t part of any Vajrayana lineage at all, but does offer “neuro-linguistic programming” services to “entrepreneurs.”
Yes, the goal is to end up in a place where you accept in the inevitability of desire, as part of the unsatisfactoriness of life. You learn to enjoy without grasping. But it’s hard to trust this person as a teacher:
When I was in the process of my own transition, one of my students, struggling to understand my process, asked me, “How can a Buddhist teacher wear nail polish?” It was her koan, her challenge, to get hung up on such a tiny detail. But it was also mine. Maybe she was right. Maybe I’d lost my way. How easily self-doubt can eat away at self-confidence when you let it.
Wow. So he basically wasn’t listening to the concerns implied by the question at all: ego, vanity, etc. Isn’t shaving your head more Buddhist in spirit than getting your nails done? He knows on some level that this is a good point, but look at the response: first, to gaslight the student, telling them it’s “trivial” when it’s really not; second, to make self-confidence primary and self-doubt secondary. That’s funny, because the point of Zen is to cultivate great faith AND great doubt, and koan practice in particular is supposed to stimulate Great Doubt.
The NLP is more prominent here than the Zen. So is the quest for liberal coolness points:
I improvised as I went. Queer meant transgressive, challenging the status quo. So, it follows that the Buddha was queer! “You are all queer!” I said to a room full of students, mostly straight couples, at a retreat I was leading in New Mexico. Everyone was nodding in eager agreement. They wanted to collaborate in the exuberance and joy that I was experiencing in my new life.
The narcissism here…
The genius of Buddhist teaching and practice is that it has a built-in self-destruct system, whereby whatever you think it is, it is going to turn around and disappear on you. It’s why, as a self-declared former Buddhist, I still love the dharma, and why if anyone asks me if I am Buddhist, I never know for sure if I’m going to say yes, or if I’m going to say no.
Oh, for fuck’s sake! This person is committed to being trans and wishy-washy on Buddhism. In fact, they seem to radically reject the idea of lineage altogether. If Buddhism is so hard to define, how could anyone ever be wrong about it?
Next is an introductory blessing by Fresh “Lev” White:
As the Buddha has offered us the Precepts and the Eightfold Path, and we embrace Three Gems for those of us who recognize gender as a social construct, not truth; those of us who understand the body is not to be clung to like an ultimate us, but instead to be used on our path to live in authenticity, in truth on our paths to freedom; even as the suffering of the world continues to be revealed, may we choose to be open to, and cultivate for self and others, metta, compassion, and humility.
How strange to embrace Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha “for those of us who…”
Are they saying that every social construct is false? Per Nagarjuna and the two truths doctrine, there’s the relative truth, which includes things like social constructs, and the absolute truth, which is wordless. “America” is a social construct, and there’s a sense in which it doesn’t exist. But Buddhism isn’t concerned with pedantry like you can’t talk about the news because countries are a fiction. Everything is empty, but form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.
I’m unorthodox and a convert myself, rejecting reincarnation, but I don’t trust this statement that the body isn’t the “ultimate us.” We arise dependent on conditions, including the body. But the language here is notably dualistic. It’s like we’re an immaterial soul temporarily inhabiting a material body, which is arbitrary and we can sculpt into whatever. They’ve explained their Episcopalian background on the internet, coming to Buddhism through learning about “manifestation.” As a Vipassana instructor, they play Hindu music and talk about Jesus. Love is all that matters, blah blah blah. Well, the trans movement is what happens when you don’t take philosophical rigor and the importance of “view” seriously, in addition to practice. Both are important.
Again, it’s New Age instructions on how to be a good liberal, more than I recognize it as Buddhism.
The bodhisattva path is one of courage and commitment. In its requirement to see the world as it is, we must accept our privileges, as we also recognize and protect those of us who live with bigger challenges on the path to awakening. We cannot successfully walk the Eightfold Path, nor can we connect deeply with the third gem, sangha, unless we acknowledge the additional suffering experienced by people of color in our transgender communities.
What strikes me here is using “we” to mean “you.” It’s a black person lecturing the audience to care about them, by talking about what we must do. This is different than seeing the writer genuinely reflect on their own privilege, setting an example for others.
Next up is an essay by Finn Enke, “What is a Body, Anyway?” It begins with the question they wanted to ask a minister at church:
Is there any way I can make this arbitrary physical stuff of the body matter less?
It’s always been ironic to me to see other people raised as Christians that take solace in Eastern religions because reincarnation lets them escape the idea of death, where the point of those religions is that existence is painful and it would be better NOT to be reincarnated. This person is looking for a religious justification for a pre-existing rejection of the body.
Adults saw me as a nonconforming girl, and I knew myself to be a nonconforming boy. I was taught that everything started and ended with anatomy, but I thought anatomical definitions were superficial and untrue. By the time puberty had conclusively rejected my last bits of hope, I was desperate for ways to integrate my soul with a world that made no sense, and desperate for ways to make my body matter less.
As usual, there’s no explanation of what it means to be a boy, or why a girl going through puberty might not want her body to matter so much. How can we distinguish “gender dysphoria” from natural and instinctive discomfort with patriarchy?
Importantly, Enke could see the surface incompatibility between Buddhism and the trans stuff on their own:
For the next two decades, I dismissed my transgender experience on the grounds that, just as form matters, there is no hierarchy of forms. The bunny is as necessary and precious as the bee and the human and the sun; violence taking place outside me is also inside me; we are not separate. I convinced myself that my body is precious and sacred, and also that the specific form of form doesn’t matter. It made no Buddhist sense to say that I wasn’t a woman, and the feminist in me also rejected that articulation. Besides,my particular body was also a source of joy: I was healthy, strong, grateful for my physicality and the miracle that life is.
“I convinced myself that my body is precious and sacred” is spoken like they don’t believe the words, and they could see that there’s something anti-feminist about trans activism.
I don’t understand how their description of social problems is different than anything I’ve seen autistic people write about masking:
By the time I was in my forties, I barely noticed the chafing confusion I felt whenever people addressed me as “ma’am.” I was so used to seeing multiple images in the mirror that I literally could not see the physical form that most others interpreted as female. I was inured to the hum in my brain during social interactions as I tried to sort out how to act as though I was a woman while my energetic body and soul were busy running around the block. The work of passing as what people perceived me to be (female) was so much my version of normal, that when it all busted open one day on an ordinary walk, I literally fell down in my tracks.
And again, notice how much dissociation there is in her account. Being out of touch with your own physical form sounds like practice going poorly.
I changed my name and for the first time in my life, I felt addressed when people called to me. Half a year later, I changed my pronouns and had to deal with the way that few people were uncomfortable using “they” or “he.”
Hm…they’re aware that something they’re doing for their self-image is making others uncomfortable. I’m not saying that Buddhism requires unhealthy self-sacrifice, and I’m not saying it’s bad to make people with harmful ideas feel uncomfortable. The tone just strikes me as uncompassionate. The discomfort of others isn’t skillful means; it’s just something you have to deal with once you’ve decided to be trans…for yourself. A qi gong practice is mentioned a few pages later, so is this a harmonious approach to social relations?
Next, they have a bizarre take on the parable of the blind men and the elephant:
Well, this was always a troubling parable for me. It implies that sighted people would automatically assign the name “elephant” to this being and that they would be correct. As a child, I was equally distressed that they have this whole committee of people to determine what it is and no one ever thinks to ask this magnificent creature itself. To my protestations, people usually responded with some version of “Elephants can’t talk” or “An elephant doesn’t know what it is.”
Humans have applied this arrogance to everything on the planet and beyond. We grow up learning “conventional designations”; we’re taught to call it an elephant and believe it is an elephant. Naming brings worlds into being; naming is artful, beautiful. But thinking we know it is an elephant that can’t talk might do great harm. How, then, can we listen to all beings?”
It’s hard to take someone’s spiritual insights seriously when this is how they interpret a parable that’s meant to be straightforward. Sure, we could talk about the ultimate emptiness and transience of the elephant, the way our concepts divide the One into the Many. Are there elephants, in an ultimate sense?
I think “don’t trust your eyes” and “talk to the elephant using words, because magic happens” are reasonable interpretations. Apparently most people agree.
It also makes me wonder about autistic affinity for animals. It sounds a lot like an autistic child, being alarmed that others aren’t recognizing the obvious personhood of animals.
But instead of accepting the terms of the parable before making an interpretation, she willfully changes the premises to new ones that she likes better: elephants CAN talk and answer questions about themselves. There’s something avoidant about it.
Eight months of intensive, embodied meditation practice showed me that there was no objective judgment about whether taking testosterone would be a good thing or a bad thing for me. Just as being transgender or being anything else is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Only experience could tell me if testosterone felt right, with the privilege to try it on my own terms and pay close attention…Many months later, I started a low dose of topical testosterone, allowing me to navigate and define transition on my own terms.
Sounds like somebody was dealing with social conditioning from the drug war.
Yes, better living through chemistry. I take multiple drugs to get through the day, myself. It’s arbitrary that, in order to keep myself feeling right, I change activity at certain transporters and receptors instead of the ones for testosterone. I don’t think I’m “less real” because this is my preferred state of self-regulation. There’s no fixed self.
I think it’s interesting that there’s a parallel history of female athletes doping with testosterone for performance reasons without believing they’re on a metaphysical journey of transition. It’s just, y’know, changing body chemistry to achieve a goal.
It’s true that cannabis and other drugs help me to “be who I want to be”, but those goals for how to behave would still exist if the drugs were taken away. It’s something so similar, which even affects gendered behavior to the extent that it makes you more cooperative and less aggressive, but most people can enjoy it without needing to change their names once they start.
The trans business seems “extra”, in the sense Suzuki uses the word in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. It’s neurosis built on top of what simply is. The idea is to reach a kind of flow state where you can spontaneously be, without filtering yourself through a bunch of self-limiting concepts.
I’ll stop here for length reasons and resume in the next post.