October Trans Manifesto

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 OCTOBER TRANS MANIFESTO 

“FOR THE PLEASURE AND FREEDOM TO BE TRANS”

Just 25 years after “homosexuality” was removed from the international bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), transexuality and transvestism are still classified as mental illnesses. As long as diagnoses like “gender identity disorder, “gender dysphoria,” and “transvestite fetish” exist, psychologists and psychiatrists around the world will continue to impose their pathologizing point of view upon those of us who don’t fit the picture in which they try to contain our bodies, our words, and our identities.

They’ve already announced it. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) will keep “gender dysphoria syndrome” in the DSM-V, to be published in 2013. Unfortunately, the consequences of psychiatric conservatism aren’t confined between the wall of the doctor’s office, where trans persons must face institutional version of the insult they might face in any school, job, or sidewalk: you are ill. No, the manual’s effects on our lives has a far greater reach: the APA also dictates legislation regarding name and sex change. We need not look any further than the Spanish State to see its effects. In the Spanish State, a diagnosis in accordance with the DSM is prerequisite to access to hormonal treatments, gender reassignment surgery, and legal name and sex change. As far as political interference is concerned, the APA is our International Monetary Fund of Gender, our European Central Bank of Sex, our Standard & Poor’s of Identity.

The effects of this diagnosis and the legislation that demands it are very clear. Because we are deemed “ill” for being trans, we lose our autonomy before medical teams that should be at our service. In the Gender Identity Disorder Units (UTIG), new forms of violence against the trans population are invented and enacted. By way of the so-called Real Life Experience/Test, our personal lives are invaded in order to determine whether or not we are conforming to our medical team’s expectations regarding our gender. Our behavior at work, with our families, each and every gesture we make and piece of clothing we wear will be evaluated according to what this Gender Police understands as a “true” man or a “true” woman. Whether we are fit for the operating tables depends on its approval.

They aren’t doctors. They aren’t psychologists. They aren’t psychiatrists. They are the border patrol of gender. The Real Life Experience/Test that they administer in the UTIGs is the gender version of the Coexistence Test for immigrants. That is why yet another year we take it to the streets: just as we don’t want closed borders for the migrant population, we don’t want them for gender dissidents, either. Gender isn’t anyone’s private property. We rebel against anyone who attempts to impose their rules about how we must behave, how we must look, or what it means to identify as a man, as a woman, and/or as trans. We’ve had enough of gender nationalism. Gender is our public space, our street, our park, and our plaza. We’ll go wherever we want, whenever we want, because gender is—and, of course, will always be—whatever we make it to be.

Changing the legislation would not erase the transphobia that we must face in our streets, our neighborhoods, our towns, our cities, at work and with family. But if we must fight, if we must keep fighting, we want it to at least be in equal conditions. We demand the law be changed to permit name and sex change without diagnosis required. We want there to be doctors and psychologists whom we can consult by will—not by obligation—and who treat us as equals—not as patients whose rights depend on the decisions of others. For the same reason, we also are radically opposed to all forms of genital mutilation of intersexual babies, with the sole exception of interventions for health reasons. The intersexual person is who must decide, with complete autonomy, what to do or not do with their own body.

As gender dissidents, we demand the removal of mention of “sex” on the National Identity Document (DNI). Many of us are identified as men or women, but we all know that more than two genders exist. We also know that the only point of listing our legal sex on identity documents is to make the Gender Police’s job easier.

Against the dictates of normative, legal, and psychiatric binarism, but also social binarism, we fight to inhabit a world in which many worlds, many bodies, and multiple ways of living and reinventing pleasure all fit. Trans bodies are as diverse as they are desirable. Many of them are situated outside the normative paradigm of sexual functionality centered in penetration. Trans bodies have enormous potential to subvert stereotypes of sexual practices and the binary categorization of corporality. Trans bodies make possible new forms of creating and self-managing pleasure that go far beyond the borders of heteronormativity. Let’s participate in a long-standing feminist tradition against restricted gender roles and against the roles of heteropatriarchal sexuality, just as we propel feminism itself toward a perpetual process of renewal: feminism will be transfeminist or it won’t be at all.

As trans persons who find a last resort in sex work given the exclusion that we suffer in the work world, as trans persons who insist that transphobia stop intervening on our professional life—but also as trans persons who choose sex work because we feel like it—we demand, yet another year, the recognition of our labor rights as sex workers. Rights that worry us especially in the case of immigrant sex workers: sex work is no excuse for suffering police harassment and ending up in a CIE (Center for the Internment of Foreigners) to be deported. Sex work, just like any other job, should also serve as a medium to regulate the administrative situation of the migrant population.

Throughout this October Trans, for yet another year, we will not remain silent. The international campaign for trans despathologization (STP 2011) brings us together with 65 cities around the world in an unprecedented activist effort to demand that governments and international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) put an end to the pathologization of all gender expressions, trajectories, and identities. It’s the only way to overcome the transphobia contained in laws, norms, and protocols of health interventions.

Yet another year, we take it to the streets. Yet another year, we keep on fighting. The gender dissidents want to be heard:

Enough is enough!!

Transexuality is not an illness…but transphobia is!

Madrid,  October 22nd, 2011

Organized by:

Asamblea del Octubre Trans

Asamblea Transmaricabollo de Sol 

Acera del Frente 

Migrantes transgresorxs 

Support:

Ciclobollos Dykes on Bykes

 Cuerpo Libre

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