0. here comes an extremely long thread about intersecting systems of oppression spurred on by calls for scores for female composers! it is EXTREMELY tentative, so take it with salt, and feedback is V V V V V welcome

1. if you've spent much time around calls for scores for female composers, you probably know that they're bedeviled by issues of trans-inclusivity. sometimes that's b/c they're TERFy and exclude trans women, but more often...

2. it's b/c they don't seem to understand trans existence outside of a strict binary. i've talked to a lot of admins to ask if nonbinary ppl can apply, and overwhelmingly the response is "oh yes! anyone who identifies as female is welcome!", which obvs doesn't answer my question

3. what would a fully trans-inclusive call like this look like? the answer some ppl seem to be coming to is "a call for women, nonbinary people, and trans men — basically anyone who isn't a cis man". which like, ok. i can see where that's coming from

4. but there are several ways it's weird. it can put trans men in kind of an unenviable position of having to out themselves to submit to it, and it plays into the dynamic that lets DFAB people explore their gender freely while forcing DMAB people to choose demarcated boxes:

5. a DFAB person can identify w/their assigned gender, question it, try being a man for a bit, move to somewhere nonbinary, and return to femininity all w/o jeopardizing their ability to apply; a DMAB person has to be sure enough in themself to disavow their assigned gender...

6. to apply, and if they decide after further explanation that they actually *are* a man after all, they'd have to rescind their application. and that seems not great!

7. but more fundamentally, lumping everyone who isn't a cis man into a single category and treating them all as interchangeable also strikes me as Not The Best Practice. trans men and trans women actually have fairly different life experiences!

8. many nonbinary people have fought *really hard* to establish the claim that they're Not Women, and lumping them in with a group that's treated as "women plus some other people i guess" again seems Not Super Great

9. so is the solution just to exclude nonbinary people and trans men from calls for scores aimed at redressing representational inequality??? i don't actually think so! but i do think it's . . . significantly more complicated than that ( #NoOneIsShocked)

10. basically, i think what's happening is that there are two axes of oppression getting muddled up here. there's the gender axis, which *broadly* speaking divides ppl into "men" and "women" and treats men as superior to women

11. (Big Footnote: there are non-trivial arguments that the Mainstream Gender System in the contemporary United States is actually quite a bit more complicated than that, including categories like "failed man" and "failed woman")

12. then there's another axis that we don't have a word for (to my knowledge!): whether someone is trans or cis. to save on typing, let's call it the sproink axis — broadly speaking, it divides people into "trans" and "cis" and treats cis as superior to trans

13. (another Big Footnote here about the legibility of nonbinary ppl and whether or not we're a single category and whether or not we fall under the trans umbrella insofar as societal power dynamics are concerned. i don't think any of this is simple!)

14. now! these two axes are obvs closely related! your sproink is obvs p dependent on your gender, and it's hard to totally tease out the effects of one from the other. but i think it's a useful framework to have, and i think the lacuna of language here clouds a lot of discussion

15. as an example: it seems Awkward to say that trans men are marginalized because of their gender because men *as a societal class* aren't marginalized by the gender axis. but like, trans men obviously face societal marginalization, and gender seems to be at the root of why?

16. and i think rlly the answer is it's not a matter of gender, it's a matter of sproink, but we don't have a word for it, so we fall back on "gender" and get confused. conversely, trans women are marginalized on account of *both* gender and sproink, and we call it transmisogyny

17. and i think this is why these calls get so mired in conceptual difficulty: they're essentially trying to uplift the marginalized end of *two different axes of societal marginalization at the same time* without realizing that's what they're doing

18. it's like if there were a call for "female and black composers" — obviously those aren't mutually exclusive, and also that framing raises questions about why those two groups are being focused on as opposed to other axes such as class, orientation, or dis/ability status

19. AND YET (and this, i think, is the crux): gender and race aren't actually unrelated, even if we usually think of them as orthogonal. i'm not saying anything new or groundbreaking here — there's a long tradition of intersectional scholars/theorists/thinkers pointing out...

20. the ways black femininity and masculinity are treated *very* differently than their white counterparts. (as tiny examples: black women tend to be seen as much less susceptible to pain than white women, and black men are not treated as Intellectual Authorities By Default...

21. ...see also just like, narratives around black criminality and the kinds of things that white teenagers can get away with that black teenagers get murdered for—where white femininity and masculinity are celebrated/upheld, black femininity+masculinity are stigmatized/punished)

22. and this isn't unique to race! again, i take this to be a fairly standard understanding of dynamics of societal oppression: class affects one's ability to conform to gender roles, as does ability, as does sexual orientation, as does . . . everything

23. all these axes may appear orthogonal, but they're *inextricably intertwined*, so focusing on any one of them necessarily gives a distorted picture, since each is affected by all the others, albeit in ways often rendered invisible by the project of marginalization writ large

24. and the reason gender and sproink are so fraught is that instead of appearing to be at 90º (and thus Basically Unrelated), gender and sproink appear to be at like, 1º (and thus Basically Indistinguishable). if, with gender and other axes of oppression, we can kind of...

25. ...Pretend They're Not Related, with gender and sproink we fundamentally Can't, but that breaks the Fundamental Conceit of the single-identity-based approach to combating inequality and sends its philosophical underpinnings into a befuddled tailspin (MORE COMING)

26. i don't know what the answer is! this is complicated and massive and messy. but i think what i'm moving towards is an increased skepticism towards approaches to addressing under-representation in the arts that rely on cordoning off and amplifying single identity categories

27. but i'm also not sure how i feel about that! b/c i love a good trans cabaret, and i pretty firmly believe that people of color should have spaces without white people. so i guess i'm kind of...at an impasse, and i'mcurious how other ppl think abt this and square this circle

28. so, uhhhhhhhhh thoughts?

29. END OF THREAD