Objectify This

IV. Inflexibility of Gender/Pay Relationship

Transgender pay differences reflect gender pay differences. Last October, Andrew Sullivan pointed to research that “found that women who become men (known as FTMs) do significantly better than men who become women (MTFs). MTFs in the study earned, on average, 32% less after they transitioned from male to female, even after the authors controlled for factors like education levels. FTMs earned an average of 1.5% more. The study was just published in the Berkeley Electronic Press’ peer-reviewed Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy.”

What explains the pay difference between the transgender groups? Certainly, transgendered women face more kinds of discrimination than other women do. But why is there so much more financial loss around a male-to-female transition than around a female-to-male transition? I’d argue that it’s because a male-to-female transition moves against the power structure: it represents the culturally stigmatized choice of embracing a “lesser” identity.

Presumably, those who undergo a MTF transition are already female-identified, and thus have structured their life according to that identity. The moment of true physical transition carries a larger stima than the assumption of cross-gender behavior or clothing: it’s breaking both taboos against rejecting one’s biological gender identity and taboos about body modification.

We’d expect that gender bias would pale in comparison to the cultural weight of these taboos. But the increased pay discrimination against MTF trannies suggests that a widespread, proto-Freudian stigma against castration is at work in our culture. When trannies no longer “have the balls” to be men, they are not worthy of financial compensation– like women.

But most Western women seem to resist practices like genital cutting and female circumcision, and data show lower rates of FTM gender transition surgery despite significant controversy about measurements of gender transition overall. It could be argued that women are more heavily socialized into their gender as children, or that contemporary women have more freedom to take on a variety of identities, including some that used to be male-identified, without compromising their gender. But overall, women are still undercompensated for their contributions to society.

The far-right reaction to the feminist movement– which paints every feminist as a  manhater — has apparently succeeded in preventing women from banding together to point out the obvious: women play important roles, and deserve significant compensation.

In times of financial crisis, like, say, right now, these issues are brought to the fore, because households headed by women are particularly vulnerable to such crises, since these women are often underpaid anyway.

Although the New York Times reported in early February that many female-dominated industries are safe from immediate layoffs, the Center for American Progress was quick to add that the Senate compromise aid legislation “cuts aid to programs that disproportionately employ women, while cutting services that help women and their families.” This is because women compose 59.3% of state and local government workforces, and because households headed by a single, newly unemployed female will have little recourse but to sign up for state aid.

In an interview in July 2008 (referenced in this 2009 issue of n+1 magazine), David Harvey, a distinguished social theorist, anthropology professor, and founder of the modern academic field of geography stated “I don’t have sufficient information to say what proportion of the people who got foreclosed upon were themselves flipping or speculating. Some of them were, in some parts of the country—in California, for example, there was quite a bit of that going on.

“But in a city like Baltimore, that was not going on. It was largely a low-income, African-American population that had been pulled into the dream of home ownership and they’ve been wiped out. And in effect if you look at cities like Cleveland or Baltimore the foreclosure wave has been like a series of financial Katrinas.

“I’m very familiar with Baltimore, and I have a map of the foreclosures in Baltimore, and it’s clear who’s being affected. A lot of it affects women, particularly single, head-of-household women–they’re just being completely destroyed.”

Baltimore is an especially vulnerable area, because it is a low-income community– Business Week.com notes that the cost of the median morgage in Baltimore was $56,000, while the median income was $20,843.

Women get the short end of the stick. Unsurprisingly, women who are transgender or single mothers or black americans or members of other marginalized groups are doubly shorted. But women appear not to view ourselves as one group; we tend to say, I am a white, upperclass woman, or a black, working single mother, and these distinctions distract us from parsing the shared effects of gender identity politics.

Since this kind of discrimination appears to occur on all levels of society, it represents a threat to democracy. If all men were created equal, were women, too? The Founding Fathers didn’t think so, as John Quincy Adams wrote to Abigail, ” depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems.” At this point, on paper, it seems more than likely that he was right.