While writing "The Death of the ‘Transgender’ Umbrella," it became necessary to clarify something in my own mind.  The language is changing, yes, but the aspect of the word "transgender" that had especially changed was also the thing that seemed to make it most valuable: its use as an umbrella concept.

The way we frame our issues currently, sets us up for serious conflict between binary-identified and non-binary trans people when addressing issues of legal documentation and accommodation.  It also spawns confusion and misunderstanding when the general public is faced with multiple narratives and tries to figure out how to parse them into a single entity.  We need to recognize — and sooner rather than later — how couching transsexual and gender diverse issues under a single umbrella creates an expectation of a single narrative with a single solution to all associated challenges.

I doubt that people who embrace a trans umbrella of any sort ever intended to erase these differences — instead, the intent often was very much a spirit of "let’s accomplish everything together."  But umbrella thinking usually leads us down a path where we’re looking to one solution, one neat and tidy accommodation that will work for everyone.  It also causes us to give the impression (intentional or not) that a single one-size-fits-all solution will work for transsexual and gender diverse people.  Just like some of the things we struggle against, it too expects a certain amount of conformity.  And this is where shedding a trans umbrella hurt most — acknowledging my own hypocrisy.

In my defense, this was largely because I wanted to believe that gathering under an umbrella didn’t have to mean erasure, and didn’t have to mean forcing a single narrative on everyone, provided we were all conscientious and diligent.  But what I know about decolonialism tells me otherwise.

To me, the umbrella didn’t mean a single narrative.  To those I interacted with, though, this was very much not the case, no matter how clearly I tried to communicate it.  This was most evident when speaking on trans issues to general audiences or medical groups.  What became most organic was to say a bit at the beginning on how diverse the trans community was, and then move on to specifically transsexual issues while trying to remain clear that the medical processes and needs were specific to transsexuals only.  Invariably, the question period afterward was fraught with questions from people who were trying to resolve for themselves where non-binary trans people fit into that narrative.

I wanted to believe that unity didn’t have to mean erasure, but inevitably, I needed to recognize that’s what had been happening, once I started to reflect:

How are we to be identified in society?  Are we to be accepted as men and women, or have a third-sex / third-gender designation?  As long as we’re under a single name, society will look for a single solution and see us as a single entity, so there’s a serious risk of it becoming an either/or question,  affecting identification, accommodation in gendered spaces, and to some degree how we interact with society overall.

We don’t get to frame the whole debate, but the way we frame it when we initiate it through lobbying, instruction and protest forms a foundation.  Society’s understanding of trans people is growing and evolving, and with the "you can’t change your chromosomes" attitudes that are out there, it’s certainly a risk that as society becomes more trans-aware, non-binary gender markers could become the easy solution for legislators, seeming to appease both trans people and our opponents (because they always look for an easy way out).  Except that a non-binary gender marker becomes a scarlet letter for many transitioned transsexuals.

We’re not consciously doing it, but this is how we’re presently initiating the discussion.

It was a particularly difficult article to write for a number of reasons, not the least of which were the facts that I am still personally comfortable with the term "transgender," and that I still realize that there are issues that touch on most or all trans people, requiring a collective response.  The Transgender Day of Remembrance is one such reminder that transphobia touches all of us.  But points of mutual empathy should not be mistaken as evidence of sameness, and that is why the umbrella failed.

I’ve been interested in decolonial theory for awhile, although I look at it somewhat differently than most do.  I won’t go into depth, but in simple terms decolonialism is about how various classes lay claim and ownership over each other and impose regulations, will and rules of conformity that run counter to other classes’ needs.  It’s not a popular subject, since the language of communicating colonial struggles — words like "oppression" — tend to cause immediate defensive reactions, and something I didn’t initially recognize as a proponent of a transgender umbrella was how I was slipping into that trap.  In this argument, we had people clearly reacting to a perception of colonial annexation.  The typical colonial response is to dismiss it as "all in their heads" or simply rationalizing it away as bigotry or reverse discrimination.  I didn’t like the part I found myself playing.

One problem that decolonial theory has is that academia treats it as its own possession, as though it’s their noble responsibility to lead the unwashed masses to salvation, thus perpetuating colonialism yet again.  This is something I’ve experienced plenty of myself, having had no shortage of people throughout my life to decide that they’re a better authority than I am on who I am and what I need.  In order for real decolonial change to happen, it needs to be something that’s recognized and understood by the public at large.  When I bring it up here, it’s not to be aristocratic, but to simply engage the discussion on a community level.

Most often, decolonial theory is used as an examination of how a primary class governs others, but minorities do it to each other too.  In this understanding of minority issues, privilege is not a you-have-it-or-you-don’t proposition, but rather an edge that we find ourselves on differing sides of, in differing situations.  So I see colonialism not as something that happens between nations but as something that happens among majority and various minority classes as each seeks personal power.  Colonialism keeps getting perpetuated because it’s the only framework we’ve ever had with which to view society, and we expect that one collective group (whether democratic, economic class, ideological or characteristic in nature) is supposed to rule, and everyone else needs to be governed or to "get with the program."  And when the majority makes accommodations for various minorities, it’s often in a paternal, tokenistic way because its privilege blinds it to the deeply-rooted needs that the minorities have, and instead seeks easy and soft fixes.  Which is why true beneficial change for a minority needs to be initiated and defined by the people in question themselves.

The whole point is that by looking at the struggles of minorities on a global scale, patterns emerge in how they self-define, seek personal power through the same colonizing behaviours they have struggled against, assert authority (sometimes justifiably, sometimes not), and often succumb to the idea of ownership rather than partnership.  Decolonialism attempts to rethink this process, recognizing that either we’re truly committed to social justice, or we’re simply seeking to better one’s own class – if we do the latter, we inevitably perpetuate colonial thinking, however much or little we’ve been able to elevate ourselves.

If There Are Different Defining Characteristics, You Can’t Portray Sameness

And when you have a group or groups with unique and strongly defining characteristics (say, a medical process, identification issues that affect citizenship, accommodation concerns in the 24/7 day-to-day) grouped with ones who don’t share all or some of those characteristics, all the while claiming to speak with one voice, you have a situation that is absolutely rife with the potential for colonial conflict and attempts at possession.

Personally, I don’t think that transsexuals have been completely annexed by other gender diverse peoples (and yes, I realize that "gender diverse peoples" is itself an umbrella phrase, but am currently using it for now because it at least acknowledges diversity), nor gender diverse peoples completely annexed by transsexuals.  In my local community, I see more danger of the latter happening.  But by setting up an umbrella communal framework, we’ve created a colonial structure, and we’re now seeing the push-pull.  It’s happening more often online because that is where our self-definition has been mostly taking place, and that is also where people feel most empowered and safe enough to speak about it.

It only escalates from here, unless we rethink how we’ve defined things.  And we may not have had a conscious will to annex anyone — but the conviction that it is advantageous to present ourselves as a single whole is all the seduction we need to do so unwittingly.

The idea of an umbrella is that we can all stand under it — race, ability, sexual orientation, age, gender identity and/or expression — and that is why the idea is so seductive.  It appeals to a sense of strength through unity.  But an umbrella implies one people, one collective narrative and one solution, allowing colonial thinking to set in as we try to define a singular course of advocacy, thinking that anyone who doesn’t initially like it will one day thank us anyway.

We also often rationalize a transgender umbrella by equating it to a spectrum of gender expression.  While some of the conflicts can be separated between binary and non-binary -identified people, we as individuals cannot always easily be sorted that way.  Some gender diverse people feel a need to transition to a degree; some transsexuals don’t completely adopt one gender or the other for a myriad of reasons — this all seems to validate the idea of a spectrum, and maybe it does.  But we can’t use this as a reason to ignore the potential for conflict along binary and non-binary lines.  In fact, the impulse to see everyone as part of a whole has caused us to completely fail to understand how people at either end of the question can feel triggered or erased when someone else’s narrative becomes perceived as dominant.

Next Month: Part 2