Ryan, Sociological Images, and Trans Narratives

Ryan Radclyffe-Hall is back, writing not only at one blog but at two! There’s his new personal one, and the one he keeps for A Gender Agenda. I love his post called Language Wars, about “…what it feels like to have our names and identities be a very bad word…” and respecting all the different trans identities (transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, men, women, etc). Also check out his post about history and its importance for the trans community.

I’ve also been sending stuff I found to Sociological Images –articles, images, videos–, and they published some of it, adding their analysis: Women as Tools of Economic Development, On Being Genderqueer, Gender-Ambiguous People as Incomplete, the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and One Laptop Per Child.

“No Dumb Questions” is a place for trans people & friends to tell their own story: “By sharing our stories we can change hearts and minds from fear and bias to understanding and love.” The idea sounded nice to me, at first, but then I started thinking: are these stories supposed to represent the “trans experience”? I don’t think there even is one “trans experience.” I started thinking about these issues after seeing the trailer for Against a Trans Narrative (via Malcolm), which expresses concerns about the visibility of “the trans experience;” for instance, you’re supposed to tell a certain story to acheive access to hormones.

I think no one should claim to speak for the whole community, but if each of us speaks for ourselves, we’ll end up showing a great diversity of trans experiences. Maybe the solution to misrepresentation, then, would be for all of us to tell our stories. What do you think?