by Madeline Stump (she/her)
About
Madeline Stump is a Master of Public Health candidate (expected graduation May 2022) and Leading Independent Transgender Health Researcher. Through her MPH candidacy, she is pursuing certificates in Disability and Health Policy; Health Policy and Law; and Community Assessment, Program Design, Implementation, and Evaluation. Stump has worked in the areas of homelessness/housing insecurity, reproductive health/justice, injection drug use, and LGB/T health.
Madeline Stump’s piece is an interjection into feminist, trans, and disabled studies. It is written to draw attention to the absence of disabled trans women and femmes from these fields. Through a practice of radical vulnerability, Stump desires to begin conversations about the intersections of ableism, misogyny, and cissexism through her own experiences as a Mad and chronically ill trans woman.
You can contact Madeline at mstump4475@gmail.com and via Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madeline-stump/
Main Text
Most of the trans women and other trans femmes I’ve known are some kind of mad/disabled/sick/neurodivergent/chronically ill/crip, myself included. Our body-minds don’t quite fit into “normal” in innumerable ways. When I read about experiences of disability, transness, womanhood, and their intersections, never have those of myself and other disabled trans femmes reflected back to me. Why are we forever absent from the vast collection of feminist, trans, and disabled writings? Have we never been handed a quill and encouraged to name our truths? Have we written masterpieces no one will ever care to read much less archive simply because of who we are? Have we been marginalized out of existence before we were ever able to strike a single word to paper? Because I know it’s not because we don’t have valuable lessons to share with the world about the ways ableism, misogyny, and cissexism affect all of our lives. Through this piece I name a small handful of my own experiences, mixed with those of others who, like me, live every day at the intersection of ableism-misogyny-cissexism, in the hope that others will take what I’ve written and continue from here.
Transness as a Disability
Transness as a disability is a boring question to me. My transness is a condition for which I need medical intervention to make the social environment in which I exist more livable, but it is not a disability. In a world in which transmisogyny did not exist, it is my liberatory hope that none of us as trans people would need medical interventions such as hormone replacement therapy or gender-affirming surgeries. Maybe I would still get breast augmentation to modify my body and enjoy it more for its own sake. But in a world without the social degradation of transgender bodies, it is my belief that I would not need medical accommodations of any kind for my transness. I would simply exist as my fully authentic self and that would be okay, regardless of the appearance of my body. A world wherein anyone of any sex and gender, cis or trans, could present themself however they most desire and would still be respected for whomever they name themself to be.
My gender-affirming hormones and surgeries make my life more livable within a context of systemic transmisogyny. They affect how others respond to my body; they do not change anything about how I understand my gender or how my body and gender interact. They allow me to express myself more authentically in my femininity because my femininity will be responded to as less threatening as my body exhibits fewer traits labeled masculine. My other daily medications make my life more livable both because I live under systemic ableism and because of my impairments themselves. Disability and transness can be deeply intertwined in one another in an individual, but to me disability has an additional more grounded component in impairment that transness does not possess. They are similar, interconnected, and yet also distinct traits within me. My transness is not a form of disability any more than my disabilities are forms of transness. We do not question the dis/ability of a cis man or woman’s gender and yet we do the genders of trans and nonbinary people. I believe this is because our genders are both anti-normative and medicalized, are medicalized because they are anti-normative. This is where I draw the distinction between my experiences as a transgender person and as a disabled person.
How We Become Disabled
Sometimes, as trans femmes, we are disabled because of congenital conditions. However, I find that the cause of our disabilities is more frequently a combination of capitalism and transmisogyny. That it is a result of the ways transfeminine people, particularly Black and Indigenous transfeminine people, are systematically denied basic necessities through capitalism for our genders. This interplay manifests in many different ways: a disproportionate amount of transfeminine people are homeless/housing insecure, without insurance/underinsured, unemployed/underemployed, fearful of transmisogynist medical practitioners, etc. Not to mention the ways structural and interpersonal forms of systemic abuse and discrimination write themselves forever into the body-minds of all marginalized individuals. Among many other challenges, this results in potentially smaller/shorter-term illnesses/complications compounding over time into larger/longer-term disabilities. Because we can’t afford, can’t access, and/or don’t trust medical practitioners.
Transfeminine, Fat, and Disabled Bodies
Transfeminine bodies, similar to disabled and Fat bodies, are labeled as less socially desirable than cisgender, able, and skinny bodies. As a result, our bodies are policed in bizarrely similar ways, for physically embodying difference. For example: take clothing manufacturing. Clothes are designed to fit specific (normative) bodies. But as disabled, fat, and/or trans people, we need clothing which differs from the norm to fit our non-normative bodies. My closet, for example, contains clothing of every size from small to extra-large in order to accommodate my unusually small hips yet atypically broad back/shoulders from the normative cisgender woman. Not to mention the greater cost and less availability of clothing which meets our needs. Our transfeminine bodies, for example, are deemed so socially undesirable that, especially in recent years, lawmakers have been further criminalizing the existence of our body-minds from public spaces. Often referred to as “Bathroom Bills”, in actuality the wording of these bills often extend well beyond public restrooms to include erasure of us from any public spaces at all (Landsbaum, 2017).
The “Crazy Trans Woman”
Many of us have been the “Crazy Trans Woman” at one time or another (Page, 2015). Sometimes for existing in mostly/entirely neurotypical spaces as people who are neurodiverse and/or neuroatypical, mostly for naming our needs in spaces not built to hold us as trans femmes. In these cases, “crazy” is used as a pejorative to both dismiss trans femmes’ needs and accounts, and as a way to avoid accountability. Labeling trans women as “crazy” simply for naming our discomforts when in spaces designed to exclude us is not only transmisogynist and ableist on its face, but also perpetuates the idea that all “bad” trans people are neurodiverse/neuroatypical, and all “good” trans people are neurotypical. Or at least can “pass” as such. “Passing” for neurotypical, “passing” for cis, “passing” for both are coercive, exhausting, and self-perpetuating systems that leave cis and neurotypical ways of being as the ideal and only ways to exist.
My Medical(ized) History
I know well what it can mean to have seemingly every aspect of one’s life and body-mind medicalized. Throughout my life, I’ve been diagnosed with many conditions: treatment-resistant Persistent Major Depressive Disorder (PMDD), Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Pernicious Anemia, and Gender Identity Disorder (GID)/Gender Dysphoria (GD). Although I’m only 24, for several years now I have taken eleven or so different medications every day. Some for physical conditions resulting from the circumstances of my birth, others for the ramifications of experiencing years and years of child abuse, and a couple to align my body more closely with others’ expectations of how a woman should look. They all make my life more livable in their own ways, even if none truly “cure” me of any of my conditions.
My body-mind has been heavily medicalized my entire life. Feeling entirely without autonomy over or validated knowledge of my body-mind has long become a part of my norm. I was born with a bacteria which ate half of my intestinal tract. My initial doctors didn’t know how to treat the infection and all but pronounced me dead until my parents transferred me elsewhere. As a result, I have had and will forever have gastrointestinal complications. Early in high school I first started seeing two mental health practitioners, who started me on my journey towards treatment for what I would later name severe persistent depression and CPTSD, resulting in frequent suicidal ideation starting around age five or six. So when I finally publicly came out as transgender at age 18, the medicalization then of my gender too felt somewhat expectable. As a trans person, a woman, a Mad person, and a chronically ill person, my body-mind has never been mine.
Conclusion
This piece exists for the purpose of beginning conversations which by my perception are absent from the fields of feminist, trans, and disability studies. Because those of us who exist at the intersection of these experiences have been systematically labeled as less valuable than those whose voices currently dominate these fields, whether they be cis, masc/male, and/or Currently Able. I hope for and work towards a future in which the lives, perspectives, and contributions of disabled trans women and trans femmes are valued. A world in which contributors to feminist, trans, disabled, as well as many other fields centering otherwise marginalized individuals and communities, can work collaboratively towards liberation for us all.
References
Landsbaum, Claire. “Laverne Cox Explains Why Anti-Trans Bathroom Legislation Isn’t Actually About Bathrooms.” The Cut, 24 Feb. 2017, https://www.thecut.com/2017/02/laverne-cox-explains-what-bathroom-laws-are-really-about.html
Page, Morgan M. “Crazy Trans Woman Syndrome.” Ravishly, 30 Mar. 2015, http://www.ravishly.com/2015/03/30/crazy-trans-woman-syndrome
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