I wrote the following post in Guangzhou mid-last year after going on a bender with Michael, the Principal Bassoonist in the Guangzhou Symphony, whom I have not seen since last July, and I dearly miss his bitter, cynical, erudite and funny conversation.

Over an industrial strength Long Island Ice Tea in the Overseas Chinese Village a couple of nights ago, once I was suitably liquored somehow I fell into a linguistic exposition on why I like labels like tranny and especially shemale, over the gynecological-sounding transsssexual. (I forget how many ‘s’ …). (Transgender is just plain nasty, it has a whiff of phrenology about it.) Michael was asking me what I thought about ‘tranny’, I said I liked it because it’s two syllables, and sorta rolls off your tongue in a lazy semi-paralysed slur. He thought it sounded like a dinosaur. ROAR! I am Trannysaurus! I thought Pearl River Delta sounded like a drag queen’s name.

There was some intellectualising amidst our drunkenness, which is why I like the less polite and correct labels. Transsexual and Transgender as subject identifiers are polite, they say, “I have a medical condition. Sorry for being a freak”. Calling yourself a shemale or tranny is a bit more offensive and unapologetic. There was an article recently about ‘genderqueer’ another label, and I thought, jeez that’s sad, all these broadly-speaking transsexuals pulling together a new label from the desecrated bones of what was once supposed to be the anti-label for the rest of us. Queer. 10 years ago it was what you were if all the radical lesbian feminist separatists and proud gay men were pissing you off so much with their wimmin’s spaces, Ikea lifestyles and gay marriages you wanted to do something punk like stick a safety-pin in the Queen’s nose.

Then some stupid right-on 1st year cultural studies idiot decided by omission it was erasing their identity so came up with queer-lesbian or queer-leatherman, and by the time Routledge had published the first tsunami of Queer Theory Readers, it was all over. Only cheap watery beer at the queer alternative homocore night at your local left to cry into. So when friends wanna know coz I’m a tranny who or what do I find attractive, or more plainly, cocks or pussy, I’ve always deferred answering that one because, duh! it’s the person, and bisexual transsexual just sounds like a comedy routine, and lesbian transsexual? I ain’t even going near that one. Actually Miss K put it best: Fucking get in touch with reality!.

Nicely condensing my attitude to the ivory towers there, and ultimately why I decided a career in academia was Not A Good Thing. Even when queer theory was around, there was still this gargantuan hangover from the 70s in the form of small-minded people like Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, Andrea Dworkin who did far more harm to feminism than good, ugly humourless philistines who should have been laughed at, or ignored and forgotten, or thrown out of civil society, but never taken seriously.

The thing I loved about Judith Butler and what made Gender Trouble such a fantastically important book a decade and a half ago, a sledgehammer denouncement of the essentialist body fascism of a feminism that had become inbred and just plain nasty, and I think the single text that made feminism relevant to a generation and world inconceivably different from the one imagined by the colonial old guard of Dworkin and Daly – is the anti-universalist, anti-essentialist theory of performativity. Actually what’s far more important is her contention that feminism is mistaken in asserting there is a coherent set of attributes that constitute ‘woman’, and that they are universal and exclusive.

By earnestly adopting the labels of traditional western social roles and identities, even in new and disconcerting and contradictory combinations like ‘lesbian transsexual’, the commonplace weirdness (or actually brilliant diversity) of life outside the gender dichotomy is swamped beneath something very much not radical, not confrontational, something which does not open up the world to greater possibilities, but instead promulgates smallness, blandness, the very bigotry and meanness that drags us back to neanderthalism, or at least variations on the gas-chamber.

It’s precisely because as words and labels ‘tranny’, ‘shemale’ and all the other permutations both astoundingly brutal and often hysterical in their erudite linguistic mangling are offensive, are no different to hate-speech like lebbo, fag or n***er – words that have been re-appropriated – that they need to be jumped on in a gleeful frenzy. Instead there is this almost universal proclamation from transsexuals that the words are “exceedingly offensive”, and this statement frequently includes an addendum that the speaker is confidently addressing ignorant and always ill-meaning non-transsexuals on behalf of the entire transsexual community. “We take offense”.

Not me. I get way pissed at being told I’m being spoken for, as much as I despise the bigotry it opposes. I also am not a fan of lazy incorrect statements being passed off as fact. Shemale, these same defenders of the transsexual claim, is a derogatory word born in the oppressive porno industry. ‘Shemale‘ as an exersise in etymology supposes no such thing; the only definition that could be called etymology dates it from the early 19th century and Davy Crockett.

Primarily, the fixation on derogatory curses seems to me a sublimation of something more odious: the desire to pass as your chosen gender and the self-debasement in doing so.

edit: June, 2018:
I don’t often go back through old blog posts, and after 14 years, there’s a lot of them — and a lot of stuff I wrote that makes me uncomfortable with my younger, stupider self, who was already uncomfortable with trying to write this stuff anyway. I can understand the context I was trying to use that word with three asterisks in, but I can’t defend my use of it, either fully spelt out as it was when I first wrote this, or even now with those asterisks. I know what I was trying to say, but I said it poorly. I was a long way off understanding the profound violence this word carries and understanding how deep racism goes. I’m leaving it here for now because cached versions of this page are in internet search engines, I don’t want to pretend I never wrote this, and, with this addendum, is a reminder to me that I always need to do better.