Tim's journal

When I say Portland is segregated, this is what I mean. Unfortunately -- and contrary to my intuition -- Boston is only somewhat better. The two cities I'd most like to add as adopted homes, New York and LA are... somewhat better still, I guess that's all I can say. Thanks to techstep for the link.

My upcoming whereabouts:

• Boston, Sat. Sept. 18 (evening)-Tues. Sept. 21 (morning)
  
• New York City, Tues. Sept 21 (evening)-Thurs. Sept. 23 (evening)
  
• Baltimore, Fri. Sept. 24-Sun. Oct. 3
  

If you live in one of these areas and you want to get together, and I haven't already emailed you, let me know! (In Baltimore I'll be pretty busy with conference stuff but can meet people in places not too far from downtown in the evenings.) Posting this here for the 2 people who'll see it who don't read Facebook.

tl;dr version: The discourse of binary and unchangeable chromosomal types is a strategy for stratifying men and women into "real" and "ersatz" men and women. People do this stratification by advancing a notion of "biological male" and "biological female" that they claim is distinct from subjectively-experienced gender. They shore up that notion by using an apparently objective and scientific notion -- chromosomes -- to stand in for the philosophical or sociological idea that the truth about a given's person "biological sex" may diverge from that person's experience of it. We must suspect that any simplifying statement about binary sex as manifested through chromosomes is a declaration of a political agenda, not an invitation to think like a biologist.

---

"But you can't change your chromosomes."

Every Person of Gender [*] has probably heard somebody say this. "You can't change your chromosomes," says the paragon of the respectful, tolerant, liberal cis[**] person -- let's call them "Casey" for gender-neutrality, though I've noticed this person is more likely to be a man than a woman -- plaintively. "No matter what you change in your body, you'll always have XX chromosomes if you're a trans man, or XY chromosomes if you're a trans woman."

One might wonder just how it is that Casey has such an intimate knowledge of the contents of one's genome when they were actually only introduced to one perhaps 15 minutes ago. Let's suppose for the moment, though, that one is a person for whom the hegemonically-presumed relationship between external genitalia and genetics holds. Again, one may wonder why Casey is declaiming on either when they have seen neither. Putting that aside; if pressed further, Casey likely protests further that they're not a transphobe. No, of course not. How could you accuse them of being transphobic? (How could you accuse anyone of being transphobic?) They're not trying to deny that you can present as the gender you identify as (and they are wont to choose words like "present as" and "identify as" in order to avoid acknowledging that you, in fact, are the gender you say you are). No, not at all! They're simply concerned that you might forget that chromosomes can't be changed, and out of her concern for your welfare, wants to save you all the time you might spend at bogus chromosome repair clinics otherwise.

If asked why any of this is germane, Casey might say that they're trying to elucidate the relationship between sex and gender. Sex, one may have been told in one's Introduction to Women's Studies class, refers to the "biological aspects of being male or female" (quotation marks placed in order to draw attention to the ambiguous meaning of most of those individual words as well as their combination), while gender refers to the "social aspects of being a man or a woman". While the sex/gender dichotomy is oversimplified (do you really believe that biology doesn't affect behavior, or vice versa?), it's also beside the point.

I'm not an expert on human biology, which is actually just fine for the purposes of this essay, because statements like "But you can't change your chromosomes" are grounded in a political position, not a scientific one. Such a statement may appear to be about science, and Casey may sincerely believe they're only citing the simple scientific facts that everyone learns in sixth grade. But the context in which the statement frequently appears grants it the ability to do political work: specifically, to lend an aura of scientific legitimacy to power structures, and to rhetorically shore up the superior political position enjoyed by those who bear identity documents that match the gender inside their heads.

For one thing, when someone reduces sex differentiation in humans to a claim that everyone is born with either XX chromosomes and ovaries or with XY chromosomes and testicles, you can tell they haven't learned much since sixth-grade science class. While it is fine to be ignorant of a particular topic, scientific honesty requires admitting exactly when you are and aren't certain, and the excessive certainty inherent in attributing undue weight to chromosomes is a sure sign that somebody is disguising a political assertion as a scientific one. In fact, not every human has a karyotype that falls into the category of XX or XY; not everyone who appears to have a penis and testicles is XY; not everyone who appears to have a vulva and clitoris is XX; and all of these variations (many of which are grouped under the label "intersex") are more common than you think (unless, of course, you're already well-versed in human diversity). The XY woman who gave birth to an XY daughter is just one example out of many. (This particular woman had mosaicism -- a combination of XX and XY cells -- but her existence still points to the fact that dividing humans into objectively-defined classes of "biological males" and "biological females" isn't as simple as you think.) If you want to know what it looks like when a scientifically informed person responds to the "XX=girl, XY=boy" trope, this post from a biologist friend of mine is an example. You know you're not reading the words of an informed and scientifically honest person when you see oversimplifications and excessive certainty, and attribution to "nature" of human norms and intentionality (the notions of "normal" and "disordered" people).

You might protest that you ought not to be asked to discard a cherished rule (the rule that there are people called 'biological males' and 'biological females', and that they can be identified based on karyotype, which is always either XX or XY) in order to acknowledge the existence of a few people who diverge from it. But if you take the view that every human is just as good, just as normal, and just as typical an example of a human being as any other human is, then you can't countenance a rule that says that there is a default human state -- having a binary sex -- and that humans who are intersex can only be explained as subordinate people, in terms of their divergence from the norm. While I would be going beyond my expertise if I said much more on this point, I recommend _Fixing Sex_ by Katrina Karzakis and _Evolution's Rainbow_ by Joan Roughgarden if you want to know about diversity that goes beyond the sex binary.

So, as a thought experiment, I'll pretend that there really are only two chromosomal sexes and that it's always obvious from examining the outside of an infant at birth what set of chromosomes it came with. What I really want to ask in the rest of this essay is why cis people bring up chromosomes when the subject of trans people comes up, especially when talking about what it means for a trans person to transition.

Everybody -- we'll pretend -- has either XX or XY chromosomes. You can't see chromosomes directly, but rather, you have to take a blood sample from the person whose chromosomes you want to test, and analyze it in a lab (or have someone else do the same). Everybody has reproductive organs, some of which can be seen directly and some of which can't. And everybody has a set of genitalia, which can be seen directly (if you ask nicely). Finally, everybody has a mental map of their body: it's what tells you how far you need to move your hand to get to the bag of chips next to the computer, or how hard you need to kick someone who says they know what your gender is better than you do. That mental map also represents your genitals, usually as either a penis and testicles or a vulva and clitoris; perhaps some people also have mental maps that are flexible enough to adapt to whatever set of genitalia your body actually has, and others have maps that don't correspond to either. When you get turned on, if you're not asexual, your brain uses the mental map to figure out what you might like to do in order to relieve that situation. You can't see or measure this mental map (or, at least we don't know how to do that yet), and most people probably never stop to contemplate that they have one. There's no reason to stop and contemplate your mental map unless you have one that doesn't match the rest of your body. In the same way in which you imagine that you see the world directly rather than in a way that's mediated through a tangle of optical and neural processing mechanisms, you imagine that you experience your body directly and not in a way that's mediated by your brain's mental map of it (analogously to the way that device drivers mediate between a CPU and a hardware peripheral, if you're a nerd). Needless to say, like any mental event or state, the map has a physical representation in your brain (though as far as I know, it's not well-understood just how that representation works), and so is part of your body in the same way that your toes, heart, or genitals are. When we talk about someone's gender identity, their internal body map seems to be part of that, although identity may not match mental map either, in the same way it may not match the externally observable qualities of one's body. But there does seem to be a correlation, if not a causal relationship, between having a brain that tells you that you ought to have boy bits and needing to be able to recognize yourself as a man when you look in the mirror and to be recognized that way by others.

When well-meaning Casey tells us that it's important to distinguish the category of people who identify as women, and the category of "biological females", what they mean is that for any given person "Jamie", Jamie's identity (which they cast as subjective, non-biological, non-physical, and unreliable) may correlate with a different gender than Jamie's body (objective, biological, physical, unambiguous); so, therefore, a person can have a different "biological sex" than the one that's commonly associated with their gender. Perhaps this is exactly Casey's definition of what it means to be a "transgender" person. Casey goes on to reassure us that they respect how transgender people self-identify and are even magnanimous enough to use the right pronouns (53% of the time, anyway), but it's still always important to remember that a transgender person has a biological sex, which is different from their gender.

If we take this last belief of Casey's as a given, and recall that they were talking about chromosomes a lot, note the choice that these two facts, taken together, reveal. If you believe in a "biological sex", a function from person to sex category that you can compute without asking the input person, what physical evidence do you use to make the determination? (We haven't yet defined what "biological sex" is, but Casey usually doesn't, either.) We could choose evidence that's observable to anyone, without invasive procedures or special equipment (but possibly with a request to doff one's clothes): examining someone's genitals, chest, location and amount of body hair, and so on. The problem for people like Casey, who are invested in the idea of an immutable mapping from person to "biological sex", is that almost all of a person's observable sexed (or gendered) characteristics are mutable. (There are exceptions, like height, but in that case, there is so much variation within sexes that knowing someone's height doesn't contribute much data if you're trying to guess their gender with high accuracy.)

If Casey has to admit that all of the criteria they can use to determine someone's biological sex are mutable, they would have to admit that there is no such thing as a biological sex that someone is born with and that never changes. Oh, no! This won't do. So Casey has to look for something else. Chromosomes are what they find. Chromosomes are such a useful device for maintaining the discourse of objective sex categories that if they didn't exist, we would have to invent them.

But why differentiate based on chromosomes? If you're moving on to unobservable characteristics (strange territory already, since people usually consider themselves to be good at attributing sex based solely on observable characteristics -- characteristics that can be seen in a fully dressed person, even), why not use the mental maps I was talking about earlier? Defining sex in terms of the map your brain maintains of the rest of your body would fit one of Casey's needs, insofar as the mental map is, or seems to be, immutable; if there were a way to change it, people whose mental maps differ from their bodies would surely seize the opportunity to change their minds rather than pursuing the expensive and socially stigmatized procedures that change the body to match the map.

I'll let you ponder that question for a bit; once you've pondered it, we can consider another facet of the mystery of why people like to talk about chromosomes while knowing so little about them. Consider, again, the statement "You can't change your chromosomes." Is it possible Casey has a misconception about just what it is that a trans person sets out to change?

Susan Stryker defined "transgender" as follows: you're transgender if, at any time, you depart from or challenge the assessment of your gender that an observer made when you were born. Nothing about this definition implies that anyone changes their gender, whether they're trans or not. But trans people sometimes describe themselves as "transitioning": if they don't change their gender (or sex), then what do they transition from and what do they transition to? I don't speak for all trans people, but to me, it seems like a trans person who modifies their body chemically (and not all do) typically does so in order to provide their brain with the mixture of hormones that's best suited to the person's individual psychological well-being, or to bring the rest of their body closer to what their mental map says it is, or both. And a trans person who modifies their body with a scalpel (and not all do) does that for the latter purpose, as well. The reason why a person would do all this is the gender that's in their brain. And please understand: I'm not talking about "brain sex" or "brain gender" in the way that people like Larry Summers do, to provide pseudo-scientific justifications for social inequalities that limit certain opportunities to people depending on perceived gender. Rather, I'm simply referring to the idea that some people's brains seem wired to expect a particular hormone mixture and body shape. Is it wrong to use the word "wired"? Is it possible that you could learn to have a brain that expects to be estrogen-based, or a brain that gets excited about sexual situations in which you're doing things with your (possibly nonexistent) penis, or acquire such a brain due to early childhood events? Maybe, but given that nobody is out there trying to create little trans children, it seems unlikely; it wouldn't serve anyone's interests to create conditions that encourage people's brain maps of the rest of their bodies to diverge from the body itself. And it seems exceedingly uncommon for a person's brain sex, in the way I'm using the term, to change over the course of their life. It also seems difficult to impossible for a person to change their brain sex -- and for some people, that's not for lack of trying.

I'm arguing that gender and sex are most sensibly calculated from the state of your brain rather than the shape of your genitals or reproductive organs. Why? For one thing, we know that if a cis person has to lose their breasts or testicles due to cancer, or gets their penis shot off in a war, they don't typically decide to start expressing a different gender as a result. As for chromosomes, while there certainly seems to be a statistical correlation between being XX and having a "female" body and mental map, and between being XY and having a "male" body and mental map, clearly chromosomes do not determine the sex of the body mapped out inside one's head, because there are so many examples of people for whom the chromosomes don't match the map. A person whose chromosomes don't match their map is far more likely to be happy living in a way that manifests the sex or gender that their mental map dictates than in a way that reflects the sex that their chromosomes are usually thought to suggest. So, if you're such a person, what are chromosomes to you besides a biological accident that -- if you're a person who wants to reproduce -- could make it harder for you to reproduce in a way that would feel right for you? Chromosomes are a red herring. A red herring, that is, in discussions of how we ought to talk and think about sex and gender categories in regular social life. They're certainly not a red herring for people who seriously study genetics and sex differentation, and I'm certainly not suggesting that scientific researchers ought not to discuss their work.

So the statement "you can't change your chromosomes" is irrelevant in most contexts in which Casey would offer it, because a trans person like Jamie seeks to change neither their gender nor their sex. Rather, Jamie strives to change some of their sexed physical characteristics in order to increase their subjective level of psychological stability and well-being, because being a woman who developed with a lot of typically-male characteristics can be an uncomfortable state to be in, and the same is true for a man who developed with a lot of typically-female characteristics. Medical interventions are a set of coping strategies, not a way to change yourself into something different from the person you were born as.

I hope this suggests why undue attention to supposedly-objective sex differentiators, as well as terms like "biologically male" and "born female", are problematic: their meaning is unclear, they are predicated on the unreality of other people's subjective experience, and they help reinforce the social norm that it's OK to deny the reality of someone else's subjective experience when they're a member of a subordinate social group. It is apparently very important to some people that there be a distinct notion of biological sex, which they can measure objectively without having to trust the self-reporting of the person whose sex needs (why?) to be determined, and which never changes from the time a person is born. For some people, maybe it is important because they were taught in school that male humans invariably have XY chromosomes and female humans have XX chromosomes, and they simply don't want to admit to believing something that is wrong or incomplete. For other people, perhaps it's just very important to believe in their own assessments of strangers' genders, and locating these assessments in biology rather than in their own set of personal, subjective, psychological beliefs lends some cognitive authority to what would otherwise seem like a capricious set of prejudices. What for cis people is a matter of not having to admit mistakes can be for trans people a matter of life and death; when you're seen as a person "lying" or "pretending" to be a different gender, the consequences can be deadly. And the whole idea that having a brain sex that differs from other sexed or gendered characteristics in your body could be a form of "deception" is rooted in the idea of an objective, observable biological sex.

I hope I've shown that the rhetoric of chromosomes is an appropriation of scientific language to reinforce a particular ideology, not a manifestation of scientific thinking -- that is, the kind of thinking based on examining evidence and drawing logical conclusions from it. Anyone who does science will tell you that part of the job is to make models: abstractions that explain natural phenomena while inevitably leaving out some details. All sex and gender categories are models. This is why we say that sex is a social construct, not just gender: while individuals in all their natural splendor are observable phenomena, the idea of sex -- an abstraction that clusters concrete individuals into one of two absract categories -- is a human creation that exists only inside the minds of people who know about it. While sex and gender classification systems, like any other models, are useful tools, they are only useful when we remember that they exist to help us understand the world in all its complexity, not to hinder us in that understanding. Models make the world harder to understand when we discard or deny data that doesn't fit the model, rather than extending the model. To argue that a person with XY chromosomes can't really be female because your model says that people with XY chromosomes are always male is to confuse the map with the territory.

Like the XX/XY classification system, the notions of "man" and "woman" also constitute a model -- a social-scientific one rather than a biological one. When you get right down to it, there is, in fact, no such thing as a walking, flesh-and-blood man or woman; to say that any individual dude coincides with the abstract notion of a person with some qualities we associate with manhood, or that any individual chick is an exemplar of the abstract notion of a person with some qualities we associate with womanhood, is also to confuse the map with the territory. Calling people "men" and "women" is a convenient abuse of notation, in the mathematical sense. I'm not an essentialist, though, even if what I've written so far sounds essentialist at first blush. For every person, either "man" or "woman" is an imperfect approximation to the impossible task of characterizing their gendered (or un-gendered) identity in words. (And for some people, neither "man" or "woman" is enough.) Rather than making an essentializing statement that people are born in either the "man" or "woman" box, I'm simply arguing that female-assigned-at-birth (FAAB) women deserve no special access to the tool of labelling oneself as "woman" that male-assigned-at-birth (MAAB) women lack, and that MAAB men have neither more nor less of a right to appropriate the label "man" for themselves than do FAAB men.

Ultimately, people who cling to imperfect models rather than extending them aren't full of desire to obtain more perfect scientific knowledge. Rather, they wish to retain privilege: the higher status associated with being a person whose subjective gender matches the objective sex that results from the sex deterministic criteria they're positing. But being a particular gender doesn't require one to pass a test or be certified by an external authority. The only division of people into male or female that matters in everyday social life is the division arising from each person's conception of themselves as male or female (or neither, or both); think about how even when no trans people are involved, cis people interact with each other based on the gendered cues most people present (like clothes, makeup or lack thereof, or hair) in order to communicate their internal gender identities. Nobody demands proof; the only time when objective standards of gender generally get brought up is when trans people ask for the same privileges that cis people take for granted (mostly, the privilege of being trusted when you say what your own gender is). Even when Casey isn't claiming that trans people should be denied any specific privileges, reminding any nearby trans person that "you can't change their chromosomes" really just means reminding that person that they are subordinate.

To remind me that you believe that my chromosomes suggest my sex is different than what my subjective experience indicates is to privilege knowledge you (theoretically) have access to -- "objective" measurements like blood tests -- over knowledge I have access to -- my own experience. Yet the data that tell me that my mental map is of a male body are no less real for the mode in which I've collected them. Perhaps more to the point, when you remind me of that, you're applying a different standard to me because you know that I'm trans than you would apply to a person who you believe is cis. Normally, we trust that a given person's gender presentation, which is an expression of their subjective sex (except, of course, in situations where someone doesn't feel safe contradicting others' beliefs about their sex), reflects their actual sex or gender. It's only when we believe someone is trans that we have a reason to enumerate different ways to determine their gender (chromosomes, genitalia, and so on; everything but the brain). The rhetoric of chromosomes implies that there is a higher standard of evidence for gender when it comes to a person believed to be trans; that there ought to be any standard of evidence for gender at all. It's both reflective of bad science and of a desire to evade the imperative to respect each individual's subjective experience of being a member of a particular gender. (By the way, why would someone lie about their subjective sex? There are zero social privileges to be gained by voluntarily assuming the social position of a person who's perceived as being trans.) So it's time to relegate chromosomes to the same bin as blood types and cholesterol levels: data that are interesting to specialists and relevant in some particular medical contexts, but irrelevant to determining whether someone has the right to be treated in a manner consistent with their needs.

Notes:

[*] (a phrase coined by imfallingup, meaning anybody who regularly has to explain what their gender is)

[**] A cis (short for cisgender) person is a person whose gender as assessed by others consistently matches the gender they feel themselves to be; you'll also see the more specific word "cissexual", referring to a person whose brain is well-tuned for the rest of their body, without requiring bodily adjustments to live comfortably.

I am a man in a man's body. Whose body would I be in if not my own?

Whenever I say something like this, someone always seems to ask whether there's a particular incident that it's about. The answer right now, like usual, is no. I don't know about anybody else, but I don't generally experience oppression in the form of a specific person directly informing me that they are about to begin oppressing me, so would I please fasten my seatbelt and put my tray table upright. No, it's more like little reminders dropped in passing that I'm not welcome in a particular situation or that I'm not as much of a person as the next guy.

Like tonight. I was leaving an ostensibly trans/genderqueer/gender-variant-person-friendly
event when I noticed copies of an article sitting around about "genderqueer etiquette". I'd like to draw your attention in particular to this passage:

In the age of girls’ nights out, bachelor parties, women-only Sacred Goddess gatherings and men-only nights at the hot tubs, genderqueers are often playing the "Am I welcome?" game. It can be a difficult thing for any event organizer to figure out. If it’s a "safe space for women," will some participants consider ladies with dicks a threat? If it’s a "gay dudes only" night, will a guy packing a silicone cock ruin the mood?

Whatever you decide, be abundantly clear in your invitations. It’s okay to say that something is "for female-bodied people only." If your event is open to a broader crowd, it’s useful to say something like "This event is open to all self-identified men" so non-male-bodied men know they’re welcome.

While the author of this article IDs as genderqueer, I, as a binary-identified trans person, still feel completely confident in responding: Allies, ur doin it wrong. I'm addressing trans people and their would-be allies in what follows; if you're about to tell me that I shouldn't police your language and you'll use whatever words you want to use so don't be so nit-picky, you shouldn't bother, because I'm not talking to you. I am talking to people who are interested in speaking accurately and in making it clear, through the language they use, that they accept trans people as equals.

That said, let's deconstruct some parts of the above passage. The author assumes that it's a given that it's okay to hold events that exclude people based on... well, based on what, exactly? Before we can critique that assumption, we have to know what it really means to limit an event to "female-bodied" or to "male-bodied" people.

I would presumably be welcome at an event listed as being for "female-bodied people" (why? I'll get to that), but I suspect that any ladies attending such an event would look funny at a bearded interloper who sings in the bass section, and I wouldn't feel welcome in such a forum anyway. (For similar reasons, I don't go to events billed as being for "women and trans people", which usually means "cis women and trans men".) I'm pointing this out not to belabor the obvious, but to further complicate the meaning of a phrase like "female-bodied people".

What about an event for "male-bodied people"? There are fewer of those (why?), but if someone were to tell me I was not welcome somewhere because they believed I was "female-bodied", I wish they would do me the courtesy of telling me what they really mean by that and exactly which body part they presume I have that menaces them so. I don't know why somebody would segregate an event based on body parts that aren't visible in most social contexts -- and, depending how you interpret "male-bodied people" and "female-bodied people", possibly based on body parts that aren't visible unless you have a scalpel or a microscope -- anyway.

But I'm being deliberately coy, because in general people organizing events for "male-bodied people" or "female-bodied people" are organizing events for "female-bodied people" and wish to exclude trans women. So, again, I ask -- not just in the context of event planning, but in the context of people earnestly trying to describe what it is that makes trans men different from -- y'know -- regular men -- what does "female-bodied" mean?

When somebody is trying to differentiate a trans man from a man who was assigned male at birth (we call the latter a "cis man"), and they call the trans man "female-bodied", what do they mean?

Do they mean that he has breasts? Well, many cis men have breasts (or perhaps all of them do, depending on whether you're talking about breasts per se or just breasts of a certain size), and many trans men don't.

Do they mean that he can become pregnant and give birth? Well, clearly that ability isn't necessary in order to be "female-bodied" (did your mom become "male-bodied" when she entered menopause?). If we're saying that having that ability is sufficient for being "female-bodied", on the other hand, it's not a case for trans men being "female-bodied", since trans men who have taken testosterone for more than a few years generally aren't fertile (unless they stop taking it).

Do they mean that he has a female brain (that is, a brain that functions best with an estrogen-based hormone balance and that's wired sexually to expect a body with a clitoris, vulva and vagina)? Well, he doesn't have one, because he's a trans man. But if you're the kind of person differentiating bodies into "male" and "female", brains apparently don't count as part of the body. (Cartesian dualism lives!)

Do they mean that he has a vulva? Well, maybe he doesn't, but it's likely that most trans men do, given the inaccessibility and varying quality of genital reconstruction surgery for trans men. So if you really want to organize an "event for people with vulvas", then say that that's what you mean, rather than being coy with terms like "female-bodied".

We could rattle through a long list of other traits of supposedly "female-bodied" people, and generally we can point out that most traits are absent in some trans men and present in some cis men. Chromosomes? Let's talk about XX males, not that you typically know what someone else's karyotype is anyway; what kind of party requires a DNA test for entry? But rather than doing that exercise, let's try a different thought experiment. In the common parlance, is it possible for a "male-bodied" person to become "female-bodied", or vice versa?

Since "female-bodied" and "male-bodied" are so often used as synonyms for a cis woman or trans man (the first) or for a cis man or trans woman (the second), I think the answer is "no". Someone whose externally observable sex characteristics were all indistinguishable from those of a woman who was assigned female at birth would still be deemed "male-bodied" by someone who's apt to use these terms in the first place. And that's why we have to consider the possibility that "female-bodied" and "male-bodied" are terms that describe your body only indirectly (at best), and that really describe the judgment that an observer made about you when you were born.

(To the retort that once female-bodied, always female-bodied because "you can't change your chromosomes", I'd note that you can't change your blood type either; so? Such an argument is based on confusing the common (but inaccurate) logical deduction "A appears female to me, therefore A's karyotype is XX" with a nonexistent inference rule that says "If A's karyotype is XX, then A is a girl or woman." The point is that we attribute gender based on observable characteristics, and the only time non-researchers tend to bring up unobservable characteristics like genes and chromosomes is when they're looking for a post hoc justification of the decision they've already made to deny someone's gender. Saying a trans man is "female-bodied" because he has XX chromosomes -- or because you believe they do, more likely -- is essentially saying "I insist you're not a man because I'm aware that you're trans," since the chromosome test never gets applied to people whose gendered legitimacy hasn't already been questioned. It's just an attempt to clothe subjectivity in a cheap facsimile of scientific objectivity.)

So if you mean to limit your event to "people who were assigned female at birth", then say that. And in any context, when you mean to say that a person was "assigned female at birth", it's best to describe them as just that, not as "female-bodied"; it's primarily a matter of clarity and secondarily a matter of declining to participate in the reproduction of an oppressive discourse.

(Now for extra credit, dear reader, you can deconstruct "biologically male" and "biologically female".)

Going back to the original passage: Being "abundantly clear" about your intentions, as an event organizer, seems hard to argue with. But that's really not good enough, because if you're going to exclude some people, you need a reason. Events that are just for people of color, or just for women (need I remind you that by that I mean self-identified women?), or just for trans people, are justifiable because people in all of the above groups have histories of being shouted down by the majority in a group that includes both majority and minority people. Events that claim to be for women but that exclude trans women -- given that cis women are in a superior political position to trans women -- are harder to justify. "No Irish need apply" is very clear, but these days we can generally see the problem with that.

In short, why are you segregating your event in such a manner at all? Some men have vulvas, some men have penises, some women have vulvas, and some women have penises. Isn't it time -- as a culture -- to get over it?

I was working some of the exercises from _Conceptual Mathematics_ while waiting to de-planeget off a plane, like you do. A possibly-drunk guy looked at what I was writing in my notebook, read out loud "Given two infinite sets A and B," and started laughing hysterically.

I kind of wish I'd been writing about anal fisting or something.

Also, it seems well nigh impossible to get a beer in O'Hare if you don't want to drink it in a food court.

Last night I was in the office working on some Coq proofs (or trying to, anyway) when M., another volunteer, came in and asked if I wanted to go on a hike to see a waterfall tomorrow (Sundays are our day off). I didn't require much persuasion. So today at 7am, 17 of us stood outside the mini-bus M. had reserved, which (they'd promised her) would be big enough for 15 people. The bus seated 10, including the driver. But not to fear, they could send out a second bus for just $20 more! So whatever. And before long, we took off along a series of increasingly bumpy, then increasingly steep roads to go see the Bassins Bleu. Eventually we were on a winding mountain road that just went up and up and up. But then the road was closed! Fortunately, the driver asked some local people and we got directed to a route that would get us to a different point along the river. We kept bouncing up impossibly narrow gravel roads (one of which had a "22% Grade") sign.

The plan had been for an hour-and-a-half hike to the waterfall, but Plan B ended up taking us almost all the way there in the buses. Oh, well. The experience when we arrived was more or less what the Lonely Planet guide said it would be: local people offering to be our guides, us saying "no", them following us anyway. We walked over rocks and through the river to see the first two waterfalls, which had me thinking that I'd seen better in Ithaca (or Oregon, for that matter). To get to the third waterfall, Bassin Claire, we had to rappel down a cliff (using a rope supplied by the guides who'd attached themselves to us) for a short distance -- though once we got there, I realized we could have just as well gotten there by swimming.

Bassin Claire, well, that was worth seeing. We took off whatever we were wearing our swimsuits on the rocks and jumped into a very blue pool surrounded by pale cliffs, and the braver people in our group (not me) climbed the rocks next to the waterfall to dive into the water from about 50 feet up. (Actually, I thought I was really brave for jumping in from the lowest rock, which was about 4 feet above the surface.)

That was pretty fun, then we ate the food we'd purchased at a gas station supermarket along the way (bread soaked in evaporated milk for me, because I'd already eaten the bag of Combos I got.) We split into two groups, one of which headed straight back to base; the rest of us wanted to go see Jacmel. This was sometime between 3-4 pm. After an even more impossibly bumpy ride, we got to a very crowded but still pretty beach in Jacmel. We didn't end up going in the water, although it looked like that would have been fun. We did have some beer, though I had rum, which I poured into a coconut that I bought and drank out of it, mixed with the coconut water. (I also ended up with about twice as much rum as I wanted, and paying accordingly, due to language barriers. Oops.) We figured we needed to leave before 6 if we wanted to get back to the base not too much after dark.

That was all fine and good, until -- once we were back on the main, winding mountain road -- we got to a roadblock. At first, we thought that there had been an accident and people had blocked of the road in protest over the police not arriving. Then, it started looking more like the roadblock was a political demonstration (we never quite figured out what the protestors were protesting). So we all got out of the bus and tried not to look too American. Fortunately, there were a few fruit stands, and I used a deft combination of French and pointing to acquire three huge avocados and a big bag of guavas for 50 gourdes (a little over US$1). The guavas turned out to be different from fresh guavas I've had in SoCal -- much harder, with less good stuff in the inside, but the pulp is still delicious. Somehow there was something reassuring about the presence of women selling fruit and, slightly in the distance, a group of children singing -- this didn't seem the setting for a violent riot to break out. But it was getting dark, and we started to wonder how late we'd be waiting. There was an alternate road back to Leogane, but it would take 4 hours instead of 2, and none of us liked the idea of being on those roads after dark -- plus, what if there were more roadblocks? We ran into another HODR volunteer who'd arrived in a different group who said he'd heard that it was announced at a UN security meeting that the roadblocks were systematically being erected by "militant groups" (I don't know what that's code for). We thought it would be best for us to go back to Jacmel and spend the night in a hotel there, but our drivers were pretty set on getting back to Leogane, and thought the roadblock would be lifted soon. Fortunately, they were right, and without too much to-do we were on our way.

There was something very strange about being on a car ride that was that long and not seeing any lights (aside from our headlights) anywhere. Towns and cities aren't lit up at night here. The hills look more mysterious in the dark than they probably have a right to. And the moon was full.

We made it back to base at 8:30, I ate an avocado for dinner, the end.

---

For reasons I'm not sure I'll articulate now or at all, I'm leaving Haiti a bit more than two weeks earlier than planned; I was planning to leave for my mental health break in Puerto Rico this Friday, and I still am; I'm just not coming back. I'll be back in Portland late at night on August 2.

Anyone who's leaving here gets to make a speech at one of the daily meetings if they so choose. Something one of the volunteers said during her speech was something like -- "even when you try to give, you always end up getting more than you give." I've come to see that that's true, and also that what Haiti has to give would be mostly wasted on me. That seems like a waste, and so I'm leaving to make space (if only figuratively, since new volunteers don't come here on a moment's notice) for people who have more passion for the work that remains to be done here. I've also come to see that whether you love what you're doing and love the reasons for what you're doing shows through in your work, even if you're just shovelling rocks. This is less to say that anyone has a great passion for shovelling rocks in and of itself (which they probably don't) and more to say that there's a difference between "someone should do this" and "I want to do this"; a difference between wanting to change a situation out of an abstract sense of justice and out of love for the people involved; and thinking about those differences, it makes me feel more and more uncomfortable to fake what I don't feel. Even for two weeks.

If this all sounds like a giant cop-out, then maybe it is. But I just can't see how I can serve anyone by being here out of a sense of obligation; not when I can see around me that most of the other folks volunteering at HODR are driven by so much more than that.

Maybe someday I'll be back, maybe not; in the meantime, I'll do what I do best and what I love most, and try to sit with the painful reality that that isn't something particularly relevant to anyone's immediate needs.

We have a new, lightning-fast Internet connection at the base (have you ever experienced a factor-of-300 decrease in latency within the space of 24 hours? Also, I'm now using an IP address with a whois record with a Haitian address, which is pretty exciting.) To celebrate, I'll write some more about what I've been doing in Haiti.

For the first two weeks, mostly I cleared rubble. I worked on two different sites, each of which took about a week, with rotating teams of about 12 people. Clearing rubble means hitting rocks with a sledgehammer until they break (very fun, but tiring, especially if you're in the sun and/or you're a weak little kitten like me); cutting rebar and pulling it out, once it's no longer covered in rubble; shovelling rubble into a wheelbarrow; and wheeling the rubble to... well, somewhere else. That's kind of the sticky bit. I think I read an estimate that there are about 26 million tons of rubble in Haiti right now. Where is it all going to go? IT IS A MYSTERY. For now, an answer along the lines of "in a pile next to the house" suffices, so that the homeowners can get to building temporary shelters on the foundation of their former houses and eventually do something more permanent with the space.

I wanted to try something different, so this week, I signed up to do concrete rendering instead. One of the things HODR is doing besides just moving rubble around (very important by itself!) is building schools. The school I'm working at is the third school HODR has built. I'd never worked with concrete before, but it's quite fun, using what my team leader described as the "monkey-flinging-poo-at-the-wall" method. That is, you get to fling poo (or rather, concrete) at the wall to do the first coat (the rough coat), then you apply a second, smooth coat with a trowel, smooth it around with a float, and -- the part that most appeals to the detail-oriented -- smooth out every last rough bit again with a trowel. It's less sweat-inducing than working rubble, but pretty challenging. Also challenging is keeping the swarm of kids who may or may not be wearing pants at a given moment away from the construction site. They like to hang around exactly as close as we'll allow them to hang around and stare at us all day. I'm not sure why we're so interesting.

Getting back and forth from the job sites is fun because we all get to ride in the back of a tap-tap, which is a hacked pickup truck, which means that 8 to 14 volunteers share the truck bed with several wheelbarrows, assorted shovels and other tools, and sometimes lumber or fencing. It's pretty great, especially when you're sitting high up on the railing that's been welded onto the top edge of the truck bed and you can catch a nice breeze (particularly during the 3 minutes of the ride that's actually on a paved road smooth enough to go fast. I'm guessing "fast" is about 25mph here).

I haven't been using my French much beyond the "Je m'appelle Tim. Comment vous appelez-vous?" level. Some of the local people speak it, but most speak Creole. The little kids would be the ones I'd be most likely to be talking to, and I think most only speak Creole. Which, by the way, sounds completely different from French and don't let anyone convince you otherwise.

Life aside from work is about as comfortable as you'd expect at a base equipped with bucket showers, bucket-flush toilets, electricity between the hours of 6-10 PM every day, and rice and beans for every other meal. But our Internet connection is now far, far modern than our plumbing! And that's what really counts.

Neither Internet nor rice and beans come free, and Project Leogane will be in full swing at least until the end of 2011, so you can donate to HODR and help keep me and the other 100 volunteers able to work effectively. Or something approximating such.

- Seen: Haitian guy riding moto wearing "I'm Proud to Be An American" shirt.

- Things I've never done until today: sung "The Star-Spangled Banner" in a tap-tap with 15 other volunteers while bumping up and down a road in Haiti.

- QOTD: "I'm glad this isn't a Christian organization, so we can swear."

- QOTD2: "They should really design houses to make it easier to tear them down later."

Finished our rubble site today! (About 70 person-days of work over 7 actual days.) At this rate, I'll be working five more sites, unless I spend some time doing something other than rubble (never!)

ETA: It's not on the web site yet, but we just got an announcement that Project Leogane will run through the end of 2011. If you want to lead my exciting current life, keep watching HODR's web page.

I haven't gone out of my way to make a big announcement about this, because it was on and then off and then on again. But it looks like it's for real now, so I should say: I'm taking a leave of absence from my research assistantship to go to Haiti for six weeks to volunteer with Hands On Disaster Response (HODR). Specifically, I'll be in the city of Léogâne, about 11 miles from Port-au-Prince, from July 5-August 15 (except for a required 3-day mental health break, during which I'll be visiting the fabulous wealhtheow in San Juan).

I heard about HODR through wordweaverlynn, one of whose partners went to volunteer with HODR back in January. I filled out their volunteer application immediately after that, but I didn't think I would be accepted, since I have no relevant skills (except for Web programming and IT, which, yes, they asked about). To my surprise, several weeks later, they replied saying that they had volunteer space available. The answer to "what are you going to be doing there?" (the first question everyone seems to ask me) is "whatever they tell me to do". Mostly, I'm guessing, clearing rubble.

I have asked myself whether I'm a disaster tourist, whether I could be doing more good by donating the money I'm spending on my airfare to Haiti and on related accoutrements to a relevant organization instead. I have no answer to that, but writing checks wouldn't lead anywhere for me, except for possibly writing more checks later on. As a person who is still struggling on whether to follow the career path for which I've been training for most of my life, whose utility is real but often seems rather divorced from the task of remedying injustice, or whether to do something (and what?) to address other people's needs directly, I'm hoping that doing this work might bring a bit of moral clarity. I'm also pretty sure I'll be doing an amount of good that's greater than zero, so I hope that justifies not having figured out what the optimal strategy is for me to put the resources I have to use.

I've also asked myself why I should go to a (somewhat) distant country to volunteer when there's plenty of useful work I could do as a volunteer much closer to home. I don't have a great answer to that either, but I do think that globalization counters the imperative to act locally. For many years, the US has maintained foreign policies towards Haiti (and not just towards Haiti) that have advanced its own economic interests at the price of supporting repressive dictatorships. Because the US economy has benefited as a result, so have I; a rising tide lifts all boats. Spending six weeks clearing rubble is not going to make amends for the ill-gotten gains that I and all other affluent Americans have enjoyed, but maybe it's a start. I, for one, am tired of hearing news coverage about Haiti (not that we're hearing much news anymore) that takes the "How'd that happen?" approach to its poverty. The high standard of living that I enjoy and the low standard of living that most people in Haiti endure are linked. I enjoy what I enjoy at the expense of others. This isn't liberal paranoia or zero-sum cynicism; it's just historical and economic fact. Reading _The Uses of Haiti_ by Paul Farmer drove that point home for me.

So I'm hoping that even if I go ahead and become a computer science professor and spend the rest of my life sipping wine in Corte Madera, having been to Haiti will make me feel just a little bit more uncomfortable about believing in a certain set of technical problems to be the most compelling matter demanding my attention, or about believing that social progress is occurring at a faster rate than the one at which it actually is. I don't know what difference that would really make, but I figure that anything that decreases the amount of denial in the world is a good thing.

Finally, if you think that what I'm doing is a good thing, please express that by making a donation of whatever size you can afford, either to HODR or to Partners in Health, rather than by telling me so. Some people walk or bike or blog to fundraise for a cause -- I'm not doing any of those things, but if it helps, you could think of this as my equivalent of the Blogathon or AIDS Ride or whatever else.

Phrases I should use more often: "It's a personal choice, and also a wrong one."