Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

Bramwell seconded this. Anyone can post in here I guess but let's try and keep the focus on talking about experiences and conjectures/thoughts about what this whole non-binary gender expression means to you. Queer theory is fine, Bio-truths and imposed rigidity BE GONE!

Have fun!!

I guess I could start by paraphrasing my everything2 post from long ago... basically I identified as an androgynous bisexual male, which means I present as a man, but feel much more androgynous/agendered/pangendered(?).

Sexual as well as Gender identity might be fun to talk about. You want to post in here? You know who you are ;)

I have so! many! thoughts! most of which I have already said in the other thread so I'm kinda burned out on talking right now, but yes! I am so glad this thread exists!

Kinda feel like, sexual identity is linked tangentially to gender identity, but as stated before in a correlative-non-causative way, so personally I'd prefer talking more about gender identity, but that might be 30 years internalised biphobia talking. Maybe overcoming biphobia is something we can talk about...

BUT. I also recognise the fact that gender is an identity separate from sexual orientation e.g. there are heterosexual trans women and lesbian trans women and bisexual transwomen - hey, just like cis women! - so there may be male-identity fancying genderqueers and female-identity fancying genderqueers and "gender is not the principle thing I'm attracted by" genderqueers - hey, just like everybody else.

But, basically, YAY. Excellent thread. Thank you.

30 years internalised biphobia talking

Hah, you're not the only one dealing with that, for sure! Yeah, it seems like sleepy time and I also said a bunch of stuff on the other thread...

I feel like I should have included Trans in the thread title... I might try to get a mod to change that.

But, sleepy time... encroaching... must succumb...

(Tis the season for thinking of departed friends, but god damn, did I just get a nostalgic tear, suddenly imagining Bimble bursting into the middle of this thread announcing "HI GUISE!!!" preferably accompanied by an angular Bauhaus bassline)

Oh! Oh! This is kind of important, so I wanted to add it right up at the top here.

The other reason I'm kind of a bit wary of lumping in discussing "sexual orientation" with discussing "genderqueer identity" is this: I do not wish to participate in the marginalisation of that other oft-erased group: Asexuals

Because, ironically, one of the largest group of genderqueer and agender people I've ever encountered in one place is the asexual community. It was often noted in that environment that there is a much higher incidence of genderqueer and agender people in the asexual community than in society at large. However, no one wanted to go so far as to categorically define a causation loop there. It might be that people who have sexual desire have less reason to signal a gender at all; it might be that being agender causes one to question all aspects of identity, including sexuality as well.

Either way; Asexuals, they exist. It would be remiss not to say so, at the start.

Viceroy, I don't really know what you had in mind for this thread, but I just thought that this page is RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS A+++++++++ WOULD LISTICLE AGAIN

http://the-toast.net/2013/12/17/female-crossdressers-are-hot/

and possibly relevant to the thread, but mostly just kinda hott.

Oooh that is a good one!

As an aside I was hoping this thread might receive more attention but it seems to be just you and me. Wish I had a fun article to counter with.

Also as someone who is very attracted to androgynous people the female crossdressers who were in the middle of the rankings were way hotter to me than the ones who were more convincing males. I think my favorites are #14, #9 & #8.

Oh hi! I've been wanting to participate in the other thread but I haven't really had time to read it. So I guess in the past 6 months/year I've been pretty strongly questioning my assumptions about my own gender and come to the conclusion that I'm probably genderqueer. I've become a lot more comfortable with a more feminine gender expression although I still have my masc days where I just want to walk around in jeans and a black hoodie. I definitely glad this thread exists!

A couple things that have really helped me build confidence over this in the past few months in particular: having an awesome trans roommate who takes me to lots of queer events and meeting my amazing queer gf who is totally into me exploring my feminine side.

I will keep an eye out for more links, Viceroy. They tend to float through Twitter and Tumblr and it would be nice to give them more discussion.

Hey Rev I'm glad you popped in here.

I wonder sometimes why we talk so much about clothing when we talk about Genderqueer, because it goes so far beyond that, and it does make me worry about coming across as shallow (because "thinking about clothing" is coded "female" and therefore "shallow and not worth considering in any serious manner" and really, fuck that particular logic of thinking.) But given that clothing, in our culture (most cultures?) is the single most visible indicator of "coding male" or "coding female" it's not surprising people end up talking about it.

(I mean, obv there are other aspects of my life where I experience other-triggered gender dysphoria, notably "you're the lead guitarist?" or "you're the DB admin?" or "you're the DJ/producer/soundperson/whatevs" but those things don't make me feel *genderqueer* they just make me feel like the person saying these things is a MASSIVE FUCKING SEXIST because those things are such inherent interests/my fucking career/whatever, even though in their heads these activities are "male-coded" and I spend so much of my time doing them in male spaces and I don't think about "presenting male" in those spaces, I just think about "doing my fucking job." There are, believe it or not, Cis Women who also have those careers! This made me feel like it was a political act to identify as a Cis Woman while in those roles, even though really, I am not.)

So we talk about clothes, and we talk about presenting gender through clothes, because clothing is a language that we choose as a way of expressing something about ourselves. And quite frankly, I don't think "jeans and a hoodie" codes "male" at all in this time in this society, it codes "default clothes; unisex." What would be "coding male" in the way that putting on a skirt (a skirt and not a kilt) is coding female? I dunno; putting on a suit? A shirt and tie? Waistcoats? (Waistcoats are such a "girl in drag" signifier, it's hilarious. I have always loved waistcoats p much since high school. Not even Mumfords can take them from me.) Even now that men almost never wear waistcoats, even with suits (more's the pity) and the last time a boy in my office wore one, everybody said "Oh, you're dressing like (Branwell) now?" and he was mortified.

But the thing is, for me, putting on a waistcoat or a shirt and tie does not *feel* like Drag in quite the same way that putting on a dress and pantyhose feels like Drag. And I don't know how much of that is to do with the fact that women's clothes are often really super-uncomfortable, and change the way you have to stand and sit. And maybe it's deep memories of spending my entire childhood up to and including adolescence running around in my brother's hand-me-downs as play clothes and only having to put on Girl Drag for formal occasions like church and dinner parties and jeez, those situations were uncomfortable, so I have projected the discomfort onto the clothes associated with them?

The only place I've ever felt the slightest bit comfortable wearing "girl clothes" was on stage, and that was always a theatrical performance, and that playing the role of "Rock Star" involves putting on a costume whether that is leather trousers or a 60s minidress. (Or "On The Dancefloor" at clubs, which is a different kind of "Stage".) Playing gigs at the Pyramid Club, where there was a rock venue on one floor and a drag club on the other, and as you went in, the drag queens would look you over, and if you went onstage wearing jeans and a t-shirt even at the height of the grunge era, they would say "Honey, you're not even trying" yet if I turned up in a suit with a model on each arm, they'd be far more approving. (And got into the idea of wearing ballgowns and wigs onstage as a drag performance rather than my actual gender expression.) I own dresses I now never wear because I no longer go onstage and I've given up even wearing dresses to weddings and funerals.

But this is something else that Rev hits on. Performing gender implies an audience. When I was working, it went without saying to put on a shirt and tie to go to work. Now I'm unemployed, I'm not going to do the same just to go to the supermarket. Having a roommate, having a partner, going to queer events and the like give you contexts in which to explore performing gender in different ways. Which is great! It sounds amazing! But without a context, sitting around on the sofa in pyjama bottoms and a massive hippie jumper so large as to render me genderless provides comfort on one level (no one is making me perform gender, phew, what a relief) but having a genderqueer space and a context in which to exist and perform without judgement (or at least without judgement on what gender you're supposed to be) would be way, way better.

Hmmm, I don't consider it drag when I wear women's clothes and I've really never cared for drag as an artform at all. It's exactly the performative aspects of it that I find offputting (also, while this obviously doesn't apply to drag kings or "bio queens", I've always found the idea of men caricaturing women gross). I guess I think about it more in terms of inner expression than performance. Wearing women's clothes doesn't feel performative to me so much as expressing my authentic (bear with me on this word) self. That doesn't necessarily mean that when I wear male clothes I'm being my fake self, depending on how I feel. But sometimes it feels off and I feel dysphoric, albeit this is fairly rare. Like on my dating profile I have a picture of myself in a suit which I have there because it was taken by a professional photographer and it's really the best recent picture I have, from a technical standpoint. But I was just looking at it and going, "that's not me." However, on the actual night this past summer when the photo was taken, I felt like an absolute stud dressed like that.

What I really react negatively to these days is having my masculinity enforced by other people, almost always men.

Something I wanted to say on the other thread: I can't relate to people who say they have no inner sense of gender or never thinking about their gender presentations. I'm constantly thinking about how I present my gender, almost to the point of obsession recently. My friend Lorena said something recently (which I can no longer find) that I identified strongly with about feeling alienated by non-binary people who felt felt neither male nor female. Her response was that she wants all the gender. I feel like that too.

Which is probably why I feel comfortable being addressed by either male or female pronouns but don't like gender-neutral pronouns at all.

I mean, obv there are other aspects of my life where I experience other-triggered gender dysphoria, notably "you're the lead guitarist?" or "you're the DB admin?" or "you're the DJ/producer/soundperson/whatevs" but those things don't make me feel *genderqueer* they just make me feel like the person saying these things is a MASSIVE FUCKING SEXIST because those things are such inherent interests/my fucking career/whatever, even though in their heads these activities are "male-coded" and I spend so much of my time doing them in male spaces and I don't think about "presenting male" in those spaces, I just think about "doing my fucking job."

That's clearly some classic sexist assholism...
"What?! A LADY Doctor! *monocle pop*"
bleeecchhh. Why do people even fucking make comments like that?!

anyway, my only takeaway is that being able to admin a database is 1) not a gendered activity and 2) damn fucking sexy.

Obviously none of this is to shit on people who tend more to the agender side, that's just much farther from how I feel personally than either male or female binary genders would be. xp

anyway, my only takeaway is that being able to admin a database is 1) not a gendered activity and 2) damn fucking sexy.

Haha my response would be 1) not a gendered activity and 2) ewwww techies avoid AVOID AVOID but agreed that that's just plain old sexism.

Hmmm, I don't consider it drag when I wear women's clothes and I've really never cared for drag as an artform at all. It's exactly the performative aspects of it that I find offputting (also, while this obviously doesn't apply to drag kings or "bio queens", I've always found the idea of men caricaturing women gross). I guess I think about it more in terms of inner expression than performance. Wearing women's clothes doesn't feel performative to me so much as expressing my authentic (bear with me on this word) self.

I have in the past taken any chance to wear women's clothes in public with the *pretense* that I was in drag/standard straight boy crossdressing, like for costume parties and such... but really I was trying to see how well I could pass for female. Which in its own way is performative, maybe? I don't think its performative in the same way as being a drag queen or a female impersonator is.

For me, it's more like... I would just like agender to be an *option* for me. It is never going to be an option for me because of my stupid fucking annoying body (and the first person who says "binders" to me will get a pop on the nose, because, really, *fuck* binders.)

Nah, really, I'm OK with my body most of the time. But it just means that "body positivity" has an extra dimension to it. It's not me; it's some station wagon that ferries me around.

I'm feeling kinda bummed now, but it's been a kinda "onslaught of bad news" kinda day.

p.s. adminning a database is not "sexy" it is a fucking job. And I would also really like a space where every action I performed was not judged on whether it was "sexy" or not. I'm really not trying to pick on you, Viceroy, I know you meant it as a compliment, but that's part of what I am trying to get rid of. Say adminning a database is "powerful" or "cool" or whatever else. But I'm kinda done with being judged on "sexy."

Sorry, I guess that was flip... I meant really more that it's difficult and brainy and that sort of thing is attractive to me. I understand how you feel and I apologize.

Also...

For me, it's more like... I would just like agender to be an *option* for me. It is never going to be an option for me because of my stupid fucking annoying body (and the first person who says "binders" to me will get a pop on the nose, because, really, *fuck* binders.)

Is perhaps being able to be fully agender is a privilege that people with relatively androgynous can enjoy? I haven't really thought about that.

^ relatively androgynous *bodies

Nah, I get it, and it's fine, but I do appreciate the apology.

I don't think it's related to "relatively androgynous" but more to "man as default gender." It's easier to pass as the quintessential "non-gendered" avatar stick man of the internet when you have short hair, white skin and no visible breasts.

I could say more about "androgynous" becoming code for "pretty boys and slim girls" rather than people that actually have a mix of masculine and feminine features, but... oops, I think I just did anyway.

"androgynous" becoming code for "pretty boys and slim girls"

I think, unfortunately, that IRL, there's no "becoming" about it - that's what they mean. I mean literally androgynous but not in an avatar stick man way cause that sounds weird and gross.

And I agree with the man as default gender thing as it relates to the ease of being androgynous and identifying as agender. Looks like male privilege wins again.

I guess I don't have anything more to add to that line of discussion.

Well, no, because one can separate the concepts of "androgynous" and "agender" and "default gender" - these are different things to be teased apart.

I feel like your're mad at me for agreeing with you and also mad at me for not being able to completely formulate what I mean to say perfectly.

Of course you can separate those concepts, I was trying to talk about how they might be interrelated. But I'm pretty clumsy I guess. No offense intended.

Her response was that she wants all the gender.

love this

Viceroy! I'm not angry at you at all! I apologise if in any way shape or form, anything made you think I as angry at you! I think these are interesting conversations to be having, and I'm grateful to you for having them with me!

OK, honestly, I am experiencing quite a lot of ~ambient anger~ right now, mostly because it's been "International Talk About Sex With 13 Year Olds" today and yesterday and all week really, and, as someone who was raped at 13, that's a topic that generates huge amounts of quite justifiable anger in me - which I do understand, keeping that anger under control makes my posts about any emotive topics kinda short and curt and maybe a bit strained, which can probably be read as "angry." But I'm not actually ~angry~ at anyone right now. Especially not you, Viceroy. This stuff is cool to think about.

oh ok! Damn, yeah I can see why you'd have a lot of ambient anger and distress! That sounds really shitty to have to deal with and highly triggering!!

I think it's an interesting dynamic, that "I want to have ALL the gender" vs "I want to have NONE of the gender" are related in that they are both rejections of the gender binary, but they're also quite different, both in presentation and maybe in the internal experience of it. The confusion over vocabulary is to be expected when it's still unfamiliar (and in many cases, still in the process of words being defined.) (Are any words ever really *done* being defined? That's another question.)

"What does this word even mean?" is a good discussion to start with IMO.

I don't know if anyone else is still even reading/posting to this thread or if there are just too damn few of us to keep this going?

Anyway, this popped up on Tumblr today:

http://pi-ratical.tumblr.com/post/71437998564/i-am-really-extremely-amazingly-excited-to

And there's been a lot of discussion about pronouns in the trans* community (and I still don't feel entirely comfortable identifying as part of that community, even thought "the trans* community" as such was specifically widened from "the trans community" with the aim of including ~people like me~ - which is a weird thing in and of itself, because the bulk of my life has been identity-based communities narrowing themselves to *not* include ~people like me~ - so on one level it's nice but on another level, it's kinda... I don't want to co-opt an identity I have no right to? But that is not the discussion at hand here...)

The discussion I want to bring up is about pronouns. And though I am really, really in favour of the idea of Gender Neutral Pronouns (whether that be Zie/singular They/whatever) just for the purpose of getting the default misogyny out of the English language. And though I am also really in favour of people using - and other people respecting - the pronoun that best fits their gender. And fully believing that actively misgendering someone who has specified a pronoun is an act of aggression.

Still, I don't actually GAF what pronoun someone uses, regarding me, and feel that it's somehow bad that I've not even considered this. (Dealing with shit in my life, I've got bigger fish to fry/hills to die on.) But trying to say that in a way that is not diminishing of people who do feel it's important to them. This is my personal experience, and my personal preference, and is in no way proscriptive of other people's preferences or experiences!

I would love a gender neutral pronoun to use on *everyone*, and to use in place of all those clumsy "him or her" constructions in instruction manuals. I would love that!

But the idea of adopting a pronoun and insisting people use it with regards to me... wow, I have enough battles.

(The thing about thinking "you are the only one" for years, then finding others ~like you~ is that sudden fear that you might actually be ~doing things wrong~ when you had no idea that all along you were even doing a thing.)

iirc Sweden recently introduced a gender-neutral pronoun ('hen'?) into the language. Will be interesting to see how usage picks up over the next few years.

That's the kind of question that thrills my inner linguistics nerd - is that the kind of thing that can be imposed onto a language, will usage pick up, or will it become a kind of formal thing that falls by the wayside?

Not even looking at pronouns, but looking at formal systems of grammar, there are examples of both tendencies. That Latin, with its multiple declensions, had nouns that were masculine, feminine, and neuter. But most modern Romance languages (at least the ones I've studied) have lost the neuter and gone to a 2-gender system. Then you have a language like English, where, even though its source languages have grammatical gender, almost all nouns except personal ones have had the gender rubbed off them.

Feel like on account of this, English should be better. (And for a long time, it seems like it was - have seen evidence that singular "they" was considered good English grammar for most of modern English's history, and the default "he" was actually fairly modern invention.)

I guess this is just kinda indicative of my systems-thinking, that I really want a gender neutral pronoun for applying in general cases, but am completely uninterested in whether or not it gets applied to me specifically.

I read about someone documenting the organic use of "Yo" as a gender-neutral pronoun by young people--oh, here it is!

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/yo-as-a-pronoun

In most cases you can rewrite a sentence to exclude pronouns and thus avoid the awkward "they." For example:

"A student asked me if they could use the bathroom" becomes "A student asked to use the bathroom."

The place I butt up against pronoun trouble the most is actually in writing manuals/help documentation for databases and other apps. So, although to a certain extent, you can replace gendered language by making it plural (Data entry operators should do X... blah blah blah... then they do Y...) but there are times when obviously only one user will be using a particular bit, and shoehorning in "they" becomes more and more clumsy. The obvious solution would be to use "you do X..." but technical writing can't easily take on that tone of informality.

A Friday LOL relevant to this thread: http://www.robot-hugs.com/but-men/

LOL-tastic! I'm going to go and put that on the Gurl Thread because: relevant to our interests!

I think a gender-neutral pronoun is pretty important but their seems to be a weird glut of them and they seem to be not easily pronounceable or at least it's not self-evident how they would be pronounced. Such words won't catch on if you can't use them unawkwardly in spoken English, I feel.

IDK my knee-jerk opinion is that instead of worrying about misgendering someone, you should probably just ask them their name and use that. If they want to tell you their gender they will.

I love that cartoon

um also in the "don't know where to put this so I'm putting it here" department, two teenagers that I currently know have decided to change gender from F to M in the last year or two. I live in a diehard bastion of the Left Coast, so it is really awesome to see them be able to do this with a minimum of hassle and a lot of community support. in fact, one of the families moved back here from Minnesota so that the kid would have an easier time (they had left a couple of years ago).

Pat Califia was probably the first person I read who really started breaking down the science of gender, in terms of how the reality is non-binary. it makes so much more sense to me when you open up the possibilities like that.

Re gender neutral pronouns, I've been saying "they" since I was a kid. It sounds pretty natural. Re misgendering someone, it isn't often that I have to refer to someone's gender at all unless I do so in the third person, which is a situation that rarely comes up when a person is present, and can be avoided with a little thoughtfulness. What I usually do is explain to the person I'm talking to that I don't want to misgender so-and-so, and say "they," or I just say "they" in the first place and forego the spiel. It's not a perfect solution, because it's not what that person would necessarily prefer, but it's respectful, maybe? Or not. I'm not sure. But they don't have to hear something dysphoric to their face.

I was thinking recently that I suspect there are a lot of cis gendered men who would like to be prettier, or would like to look nicer in women's clothing (or even to have the opportunity (which they do have, I admit) to engage with fashion and style the way women do) or who would like to be more "feminine." I also thought about cis men and women's dissatisfaction with their bodies and genitals: balls that hurt, ugly penises, ugly vaginas, stubbly faces and hairy legs, high pitched and low pitched voices, balding heads, weird boobs. (Assume free indirect discourse where you please. Add your own scare quotes.) The wrong shape. The wrong height. All the sex-characteristic pains and discomforts.

I'm totally happy with my body, it's just my presentation and, I guess, personality traits I find myself unhappy with often. I guess that's not quite true. Sometimes I wish I was short so I would have to stand on my tippytoes to kiss someone.

Re: pronouns, I feel bad about it but "they" just feels awkward to me. I use it if someone has specifically requested it or if I have good reason to suspect I might otherwise misgender someone, but it feels so lumpen on my tongue. For other people's usage to describe me, I prefer male pronouns unless I have specifically given permission to use female pronouns.

Viceroy, I'm guessing for most people who choose pronouns like ze and hir and etc, it's more about queering language than practicality of use.

Two of my roommates had a big shouting match a few weeks ago cause one (cis) kept purposefully misgendering the other (trans). I had to intervene on the side of the latter because the former just did not want to listen to him, but I was really glad he finally stood up for himself on that matter.

Oh and, I was going to post about "yo" a couple days ago when BB first brought this up but I didn't have time! I've been thinking about "yo" a lot lately.

There's this weird disconnect between wanting to use people's pronoun's as a way of showing respect for their gender identity, which is great, and this space of "treating trans* people totally differently from the one one treats cis people, which is totally icky.

I was emailing A, who had met our mutual friend B, who is trans, at a concert, and I wanted to ask "What is B like? Zie is hilarious online! Is Zie the same in person?" because I do not know what pronoun B uses and respect B enough to want to get it right, and know that B's trans-ness is an important thing to B. But at the same time realising, that if A had met C, who is cis, I would not have thought twice about saying 'What is C like? She seems really wise online, is she the same in person?" and I would never have thought to use a gender neutral pronoun with C. And not knowing which of those two options is the better - queering everyone, or trying to adjust my language based on known preferences*.

*Yes, I also know that using the words "preferred pronoun" is problematic. When you are talking about e.g. a trans woman it is quite clear to me that her pronoun is "her" and this is not a "preference", this is just her pronoun. But asking to use "their" or "Zie" or "Hir" etc - the act of *choosing one* of several ambiguous pronouns is a preference, where requesting "a gender-neutral pronoun" is not a preference in the same way "a trans woman is she" is not a preference. It's tough. I'm of two minds about this.

It's shitty, because I've heard both sides, in terms of "showing respect means not assuming and waiting until the person volunteers" vs "OMG I am so sick of having to *tell* people what my pronoun is, it would be nice, just once in my life, to be *asked*" which really starts to feel like, whatever choice you make, is wrong. But still wanting to show basic respect.

It depends. I've said before, I don't really care what pronouns people use (I've spent a lot of my life being indiscriminately gendered, with embarrassment for the other person, and mostly just amusement for me) but for real, if anyone ever uses "zie" or any other gender neutral pronoun with me, I instantly perk up and just think "you are my people!" because it shows they've thought about this stuff.

OK, I'm going to do some reading on "yo". It feels rather too American for me to use, but it's an interesting idea.

Kind of thinking about other stuff, presentation and the like...

Body dissatisfaction in cis people is a whole nother kettle of fish, possibly tangentially related, but... OK, I spent nearly 3 years working for a cosmetic surgeon, surrounded by an environment that was constantly trying to ramp up body dissatisfaction for commercial gain. On one level, it actually made it easier to ignore, because when you see the brutal capitalist machinery of what is behind the constant advertising/media representation of "body perfection" it does on one level empower (ugh, sorry, horrible word) one to see the man behind the curtain and go "this is fucking bullshit and should be torn down and resisted with every ounce of one's being." But on another level, living inside that environment 40, 50 hours a week, every week for 3 years, I do believe that ramped up my body dissatisfaction and, more saliently, my gender dysphoria to the breaking point. The result was a kind of collapse that I'm able to see in retrospect as a nervous breakdown. Living in that environment would have been difficult and challenging for person who was totally confident in their Cis-ness. Living in that environment as a person who was already trans-ish and questioning and would have called themself probably genderqueer had they had that word, it was one of the most actively poisonous environments of my life, all the most poisonous aspects of late capitalist gender malarkey ramped up to 11, all the time.

So... on level, it's like, yeah, this shit is awful for Cis people. But it's worse for trans* people.

But from a different angle, there's a point where, if you are trans* you are almost never going to measure up to "society"s standards of beauty, so why bother, and it's incredibly freeing to recognise them as impossible-for-you and thus disregard them.

OK, what follows is mine own digestion-of-things-I-have-read and quite possibly bullshit and misremembered because my memory is so poor, feel free to correct me or link the correct source or call me out for unexamined bias, but this is my supposition:

It's inspired by the memory of reportings, IIRC, of self image in fat women - I do not remember if this was an actual study, or just a blog or a comments thread, so I do not know the sample size or how representational this is. In this discussion, there was a discrepancy in the self-reporting of white women reporting poor self image based on their perceived fatness, but fat black women had better self image and were more likely to self report feeling "beautiful" and affirming their beauty than fat white women. And there was some discussion of what might cause this, if it were a greater acceptance of a wider range of body types in African American communities (well, yes and no, different range of body types, but not necessarily wider.) But when those black women were asked about their positive self image, individual women said things like - because the standard of beauty in this country is so based around thinness, yes, but also whiteness, blondness, European looks, those things are just Not Applicable. If you have to recreate a personal standard of beauty entirely from scratch, that standard of beauty for self love can include fatness as well as different standards of skin tone, hair texture. It's paradoxically less of a big project to include that one aspect in an image of beauty and self love made completely from scratch, than it is to try to match a standard of perfection where you are capable of matching several aspects (whiteness, European features and hair) that do look like you, but not the impossible one that doesn't look like you (weight).

I apologise again, for any misremembering, misinterpretation and also for lack of links to where I encountered these ideas - the fat-o-sphere is a big place. It might have been a study, a blog, a comments thread, I have such poor memory, I do not remember the source; I would be grateful if anyone else did. I also acknowledge the possibility that I may have got this completely RONG in a way that is hugely offensive to Women of Colour, though I really hope that I haven't. I do *not* mean to imply that black women "have it any easier" in this culture, because clearly they do not, it's about self-reporting, not about how one is perceived by others.

Now I'm done qualifying and hedging and "trying and probably failing not to express racist things when talking about race": the thing that stuck with me, and the takeaway that I took away, was this idea that when you are trying to measure yourself against an impossible standard that *seems* achievable, it is much harder to resist it than an impossible standard that will *never* be achievable. To use an example switched to enhance its absurdity: there is some capitalist fantasy world where if I buy all the products and use all the things, it is just conceivable that it might be achievable, *maybe* to turn out looking like Claudia Schiffer. There is no fantasy world where I buy all the products and use all the things where I turn out looking like Idris Elba.

Cis-Het femininity, I have just accepted, is just not an option that is available to me. I say this as someone who has been "read" as queer, my entire life, even when I was trying most hard to present as heterosexual. Cis-Het masculinity is also just not an option that is available to me. I am already "other". It's up to me to piece together a personal standard of gender, like a personal standard of beauty, which includes me and that I can live up to.

Talking about this stuff is hard, and I am not up to the task. I apologise again for all the ways in which I have got it wrong. I am often aware of being the stupidest person on any given thread, this is just one more. Sorry.

Oh, and one more thing, which I was thinking of after waking up but before reading this thread: wondering about the intersection of "performing a gender" with "interacting with other people."

This is a thought provoked by how currently isolated I am right now, how few IRL interactions with other people I have right now, and if my increasing sense of "being agender" is related to "no others to perform gender to" rather than an intrinsic quality. Interactions with other people = "performing/identifying genderqueer" while being on one's own for days/weeks at a time = "no performance, ergo identifying agender."

Don't want to sound too mopey or "lonely guy just thinkin bout things" though.

Right. Must. Leave. House. Now.

Realised, on reflection, I can summarise that sprawling, overthinky, awkwardly phrased post up above:

For Women of Colour, and/or also for Trans* people, practising self love as a political act.

Yeah, that whole spiel otm. I guess I'm conventionally attractive, but the less I've worried about imposed standards of masculinity, the more attractive I've felt. When I was trying hard to be masculine, I didn't feel attractive at all.

OK, I'm going to do some reading on "yo". It feels rather too American for me to use, but it's an interesting idea.

Not just too American! On a side note, part of the reason I've been thinking about "yo" a lot, is because my roommate, who is black and trans, has a name that begins with those two letters and is used to being called Yo anyways. So I've ended up trying it out a few times since reading about it. Plus it's just fun to use.

Re gender neutral pronouns, I've been saying "they" since I was a kid.

― bamcquern, Friday, January 3, 2014 8:31 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

we had a long argument once about your refusal to use "they"!

Haha, I can believe it. I definitely used it as a kid, and it felt more natural and "native" to me then than it does now. It was surely my linguistic miseducation that made me argue against singular they, which i don't specifically remember doing, but i have a terrible memory of myself (Broseph is always telling me stories of me). The thing about language chauvinism is that it is usually as ignorant as it is confident.

Some good stuff happened here:

http://www.hashtagfeminism.com/queeringgender-affirming-us-loving-us/

I liked that whole lot!!!

So I'm currently experimenting with "person/per" as both an ungendered third person singular pronoun, and also as an unspecified pronoun for avoiding the ambiguities of that you/I/we/one cluster which leads so easily to problems. Maybe it will start to come naturally, maybe it will start to feel really clunky and I'll give it up. It feels like an interesting experiment to do right now.

Seeing this play out in various timelines has been interesting, although one conjugate of the new pronoun could result in 'pe'.

1) no, it's person/per
2) I recognise that you are trying to make a joke, but where you point your humour is a reflection on you, and I don't find this playful

Uh, so yesterday my mom asked me if I was trans. That was kinda weird.

I said not really, but I didn't really care about presenting as masculine anymore. She said she asked because of my facebook which shows me in women's clothes and says I'm female and people had been asking her. Plus she also knew I've been hanging with a lot of trans people lately.

I kind of wish I'd answered that better, but I didn't really feel like explaining "genderqueer" to my parents at that moment.

Ha, she also noted that my nails are done and hers are not.

prob just jealous of your manicure

lol. My nails are a ragged mess because I was, erm, playing with power tools this weekend.

Have been noticing feedback loops, more, how gender expression in me comes out in relation to other people, or situations.

Like, I went to Homebase because I needed to buy some tools, and of course that means wandering up and down all the tool aisles just picking things up and going "Yes! I need an axe... don't know what for, but I definitely need... oh look, a set of wrenches. WANT. I don't even own a car but these look so great" and the like. And just feeling very kind of manly and macho and trying on leather toolbelts and oh yeah, this is great. I feel so ~masculine~ by which I guess I meant capable and physical and handy and great.

But how it gets you, the separation of gender roles, and on my way to the paypoint, I had to pass through a wall of cushions into the half of the shop that sold soft furnishings and home cleaning products and kitchenware and scented candles and something in the back of my mind just went "Whoops, nope! Not the section for you!" And I caught myself doing it, and just said, this is ridiculous. How do rubbish bins and teatowels have a gender? But of course, most of the people shopping in those aisles were women (sometimes men in tow) while the power tools section had been all men except for me, including the staff. But going on the side of the shop that was full of women felt like encroachment in a way that trying out all the screwdrivers hadn't.

So is that my gender, because I feel more comfortable in one section of the shop? Or is that just ridiculous and absurd, that the way things had been organised had been artificially gendered, and noticing that made me want to express one side more than the other? Oh, consumerist late capitalism, how I hate you! (New work gloves and better screwdrivers = ace, though.)

Also, fancying mostly men again this week, but feeling very gay while doing it. This could just be the men I am currently fancying (nothing makes me feel gayer than looking at pictures of Interpol. Nothing. Well, at least nothing I've done in about 7 years.) But also wondering if this is what causes my eternal fluidity. It's not just that my tendencies/preferences get overridden by an extremely attractive person of any gender (and yes, I said preference instead of orientation deliberately) but my feeling about mine own internal gender changes the nature of my desire. I don't feel like a girl fancying boys right now. Or even a non-gendered girl looking at boys I'd rather be. I feel like a boy fancying boys.

Oh, bodies. Why are you so confusing?

I totally relate to that. My girlfriend makes me feel totally femme and encourages me to explore that side of myself. (It was her, actually, who gave me the purple sparkly nailpolish my mom commented on.) We do a lot of roleplaying, and although she identifies as cis and femme, she usually takes the masculine role. I use the girls holding hands emoji a lot when I text her. Otoh, this other person I'm dating makes me feel very masculine, way moreso than I ever do these days outside of her presence. I'm still trying to figure out my difference in reaction to the two of them.

I think one of my first inklings that something was weird about my gender was when as a teenager I realized I had a very different relationship to girl-on-girl porn than my straight male friends. They enjoyed it in a voyeuristic way, but had difficulty inserting themselves into the scene, at least without a penis or penis proxy available onscreen, whereas I had no trouble identifying with the female performers.

That's very interesting, like your gender identity is fluid enough to change depending on who you are relating to.

Or maybe... I may be way out of left field here, but it's something I was thinking about.

Been reading a lot recently about the definitions of bisexuality - did I talk about this recently? maybe on this thread? I should check. Nope, doesn't look like I did.

How the "bi" in bisexual does not mean attracted-to-two-genders. It means two-orientations, both homo and hetero. Defining heterosexuality as being attracted to those broadly of-a-different-gender to you, and homosexuality as being attracted to those broadly-of-a-similar-gender to you.

But how does that pan out if you are genderfluid or bi/pan-gender, and have a monosexual orientation? Like, if you are attracted to "people-broadly-like-you" then would your gender fluidity orient the gender you feel towards the person you are with? So if you are with a very feminine partner, you will express very femme, while if you are with a masculine partner, you will express much more masculine? Does that make any sense?

When in the past I've dated more feminine women, I often felt very male in the relationship, but I was much more willing to let them dress me up in "girl-drag" and do my hair and make-up. (Even when I end up looking like Robert Smith.) I don't know if that's even particularly sexual, though, as I've let bandmates do it to me, too. I guess, though, I should be more honest about the quasi-romantic nature of bandmate relationships giving way to unrequited-romantic things, which puts a different spin on it.

It's complicated. I'm probably just really into looking at boys in suits at the moment because I'm feeling quite into wearing suits. There's always been this weird identification-desire thing for me, with wanting to be boys I also want to fuck. Why am I such a weirdo. Why.

Oh, I've totally got the wanting to be girls I want to fuck thing going on. But not so much with boys? I want to fuck them, but I don't usually imagine myself as the boys I want to fuck.

With the other girl I'm dating, it might be that she's so thoroughly femme herself that I can't really out-femme her (whereas my gf has more of a "hard femme" style), so I might as well go in the other direction? I dunno.

On a sidenote, my taste in guys has always run toward the femme side, albeit not absolutely. I guess I just tend to be attracted to femme people in general, regardless of their gender identity. I have this theory that people aren't really attracted to gender(s), as society generally thinks, so much as broad gender cues, but most people suppress their attraction to people with genders that fall outside of the one most closely associated the set of gender cues they are most interested. I guess this line of thought comes out of an epiphany I had a while back that if gender is a construct, then so must sexual orientation be.

I don't really identify as bisexual, as I find this term limiting in scope. Usually people use it to mean someone is attracted to just cis men and cis women, but I'm also trans and non-binary people so I guess pansexual works, but I'd feel like a total dork if that word ever came out of my mouth, so just simple "queer" it is.

*but I'm also attracted to trans and non-binary people

And on a related note, I'm suddenly feeling hella disphoric.

Bah, dysphoria is the worst. Sorry, person!

Yeah, I get that the bi- in bisexual is so indelibly associated with "bi" meaning "only 2 genders", but I'm just saying that the ~bisexual community~ (whatever that is) or rather, the definition has been updated to reflect the fact that trans people and non-binary people exist. It's trying to broaden a category, which is always a welcome thing.

Like, I'm not telling you how to identify; you're gonna use whatever words you feel fit you best. But "Bisexual" as a technical term, these days means something different than you're implying.

I dunno. I still feel completely uncomfortable using any kind of -sexual to describe myself because it's been so long since I had sex with anyone of any gender that I don't even know any more what sex would look like for me. (Seriously. It is at a point where it is just stupid, like a mental block. Like, last year I actually asked someone I thought was a friend to, y'know, just help me out so it wasn't such a big *deal* any more. But they freaked out and now... well, they are no longer even a friend. I think I've regressed back to a place of "never feel like I'm going to be comfortable asking anyone ever again" again, because that shit was really unpleasant, and that wasn't really a happy place to be.) So I kinda feel like it would be lying to use any kind of sexual identity except... non-binary. Could be anything. I'll know when it happens. If it ever happens, which it might not. The only thing I know for certain is I *don't* want to do the girl role in the relationship. I'm really done with that.

"Being attracted to" is another matter. I feel uncomfortable trying to generalise my/your experiences onto monosexuals, but yeah, what you describe sounds pretty OTM. I am definitely attracted to a certain set of visual cues, but yeah, during my "I am straight, don't you dare say I'm not, I'm a straighty mc-straight-person" years, if a person I had formerly been giving the eye to stood up and they turned out to be female, I would tell myself "Oh no, I am not attracted, that is a girl" even though clearly, I had definitely been attracted. It's more a question of looking at someone and just thinking "they look interesting" rather than having an expectation. (But that said, I never ever look at, like, super cis-het dudes and think "they look interesting." I think it is ambiguity itself that attracts me. But not always!)

love and good days to you folks. i feel this is an aspect of life i need to better understand.

Well, welcome and feel free to share your own story if that helps you to understand.

the half of the shop that sold soft furnishings and home cleaning products and kitchenware and scented candles and something in the back of my mind just went "Whoops, nope! Not the section for you!" And I caught myself doing it, and just said, this is ridiculous. How do rubbish bins and teatowels have a gender?

i think it depends on the rubbish bin, though tea towels definitely code as femme. But yeah, apart from the cleaning products, these are things I never buy, and I dunno if it's so much a gender thing, as what to me feels like a subset of female, the "suburban homeowning mom." But I also realize that I am fortunate now to live somewhere where there is a broad array of "acceptable female behavior and self-presentation," it definitely wasn't like that where I grew up, which is probably part of why my mother had to drag me (almost literally) kicking and screaming to buy my first bra.

See, I have this beautiful vision of a weird fragmentation/redefinition where "suburban homeowning mum" might be a gender but "urban, gender-non-conforming ex-tomboy who hated bra shopping" might also be a gender and there are dozens of genders, not 2 (or 3) but I get that's not really what you're talking about.

I guess I'm just kinda trying to examine this weird gendering of shops and products and how arbitrary it is, vs how "associated with different activities that men or women perform" it is. Because "Homebase" (I'm assuming this is a US conglomerate, giant DIY/home improvement/gardening centres) is a shop that is full of couples/families/mixed gender groups, but is coded "male". While something like "Ikea" (which is a hugely similar DIY home thing, but more furniture and less power tools) is also full of couples/families/mixed gendered groups but is coded "female". How on earth did these notions of the gendering of shops get into my head? How on earth did the notion that one side of Homebase was coded a different "gender" than the other side? Why am I drawn to one, and vaguely repulsed by the other?

Because I live on mine own, and I don't have "A Man" to put up shelves or do the soldering for me, I'm comfortable with - or even happy and proud - performing those roles to the best of my ability. (I really should take an electrical wiring course, this is how you do not electrocute yourself course to do the rest.) And I'm sure that men who live on their own do, also, somehow accumulate teatowels and washing up implements. "Living by yourself" is a pretty powerful way of erasing bullshit gender landgrabs. (Even *I* own teatowels, though my Mum actually bought them for me.) So *why* do I persist in seeing the "suburban mums" side of the shop as gendered, and why do I recoil from that side of the shop?

It's a dumb question, I guess. I am King of Dumb Questions. (But dumb questions are sometimes the only way you learn anything.)

See, I have this beautiful vision of a weird fragmentation/redefinition where "suburban homeowning mum" might be a gender but "urban, gender-non-conforming ex-tomboy who hated bra shopping" might also be a gender and there are dozens of genders, not 2 (or 3) but I get that's not really what you're talking about.

It is in a way! Like that's how I thought when I was younger, that I was some separate gender from the suburban homeowning moms and those in-training to be them. Now, I am comfortable enough being a "woman" -- and maybe some of this has to do with issues of "passing," I can "pass" and it is easier that way -- and there are women in my life who are more "butch" than I am, or they are about some things, though are more femme about others.

People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

(I am about to start a "passing" thread according to the old, old Greenspun-era "rule of 3" that it has come up on 3 separate threads now, therefore deserves its own thread.)

well BB, I don't really have a story, other than always feeling like a guy who likes guys. Kinda has gotten old at this point.

Everybody has a story! Whether that story is "I'm a guy who likes guys" or "I'm a girl - or so they tell me - who often feels like a guy who likes guys, when liking guys, which I don't always do."

Oh, and as if on cue (due to my prevaricating and carping and endless agonising on the other thread)! Juliet J is a fantastic writer; Aeon Magazine is a fantastic organ for long, thoughtful, interrogating longform pieces, and here are both together, talking about how the whole "before and after photo" phenomenon obscures the long and tortured process of becoming with a quick, easy narrative:

http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/before-and-after-the-makeover-industrys-favourite-trope/

JJ is so lovely and so fucking smart.

*but I'm also attracted to trans and non-binary people

I find myself being MORE attracted to these people. I'm not sure why.... I'm sure if someone wanted to be mean and derogatory to me they might call me a "tranny chaser" or whatever.

I do believe there's a world of difference between treating someone's identity as a fetish and "like attracts like because there's so much less you have to explain to someone who already *gets* it".

Well obviously, cf: the "if people wanted to be mean and try and hurt my feelings" part. It's not some fetish, as far as I am concerned. If some TERF wants to consider my personal preferences a fetish without knowing me and kink-shame me it might make me feel pretty bad but then you gotta consider the source.

"like attracts like because there's so much less you have to explain to someone who already *gets* it".

Yeah, this is totally a thing and why I'm not interested in dating cishet women, even though I'm potentially attracted to them and they are potentially attracted to me.

Found this little quiz to be actually pretty interesting and good:

http://flexuality.wordpress.com/take-the-test/

Also came across this:

Inside Against Me!'s "Transgender Dysphoria Blues"

What a bullshit fucking test!

It came back and told me I was "probably polyamourous" - WHAT THE LIVING FUCK, fuck you, I have never been so offended by a result.

Being polyamourous is fucking lifestyle choice. Being able to be *attracted* romantically to women and men is no more indicative of polyamoury than being bisexual is.

What a crock of fucking shit.

Of their categories (and who the fuck has time for bullshit categories anyway, I'm just pissed off at this test right now, so fuck their categories) maybe Flexamourous and Metamorphic apply quite strongly. Though it told me I was "ambisexual" rather than "queer" but I just have such a raft of associations with the word "queer" because it's an identity that was always denied me by gays and externally imposed on me by straights, so who knows.

Oh, I am cross now, and need photos of Weimar Lesbians or Dirty Dronerock Boys with Koala bears to cheer me up. >:-(

And to make me even more grouchy today, apparently "trans*" as a descriptor is ~problematic~.

http://practicalandrogyny.com/2013/10/31/about-that-often-misunderstood-asterisk/

To which I really want to say... you know, "trans*" is the first time in my life that a (queer) community has widened itself out to actually include me. Most of my experiences have been of feeling excluded from both str8 and queer spaces bcz "not gay enough" vs "you don't look straight to me, are you sure you're not queer?" is a constant tension. And you birches wanna take that away from me? Basically: shove it.

I should really stop reading social media, huh. Especially Tumblr, I guess.

I dunno I got high polyamourous results too but I think it's because I've been in threesomes... (TMI?)

Oh, I figured it out later - they clearly meant something like "bi- or pan-romantic" meaning one was romantically attracted to both women & men, when they said "polyamourous" as if they didn't realise it had another meaning. On the blog they had "flexi-amourous" but clearly hadn't changed they survey reporting tool. Clumsy and poorly defined attempt at realising that sexual attraction is not always the same thing as romantic attraction.

"willing to have sex in threesomes" is not exactly the same thing as "polyamourous".

I really don't have anything against poly people & their google calendar lifestyles; I'm just seriously not built for that lifestyle. I find a relationship with even 1 person difficult & complicated enough. Why would I want to juggle several? If it works for you, more power to you. I just don't want to be called something I'm not.

(sorry that middle bit about threesomes should have a winky face; being quite light-hearted/jokey there)

I don't actually have the grit or perseverance right now to deal with the potential hassle it would incur to start an "I've come to hate my body" thread, for when you can't muster 100% positivity for whatever reason. But since I suspect my lack of positivity right now is mostly due to dysphoria, I'm going to talk about it here. If I'm going to end up talking to myself, I might as well talk in a place I'm on topic, I guess.

So I was talking about trying to feel more positive about mine own body by feeling more positive about a (male) person I really admire's body. Partly, because I'm often more able to accept or even crush on, in other people, things I cannot accept in myself. And partly because I don't know if I'm feeling dissatisfaction with my body for its fatness, or for its femaleness. These things are kind of tied up together in awkward ways. I know, looking at pictures of thin boys in suits, that even if I were male, I would never have *that* kind of body, I would just have my body with lumps in different places. I do, however, think that more variation is tolerated in male bodies, and my current mass would be considered way more normative or even attractive in a man.

It's hard, when the image of male beauty I've grown up with is tall, cadaverously gaunt floppy-haired dirty dronerock boys. But it's been kind of mind-opening to see a DDB I admire, growing into a larger body in a way that I find really beautiful. (Yes, I know all the arguments about hottness not being everything, like, conventional attractiveness can go shove it, but beauty, individual beauty, is really important to me. Don't care if that makes me shallow.) That I'm able to look at his body, with a mass probably quite similar to mine, and think that it is good, and attractive, and beautiful, and well... hott. I can look at his body with desire. And I'm trying to translate that, in my head, into "this means that my body is potentially desirable!"

(I *need* to be able to feel like I'm desirable again. This has been the thing that has been missing for too long, the thing I can't seem to surmount, in terms of having a sexuality again. It's not that I've tied my worth to my desirability because, y'know, fuck THAT. But I honestly don't think I'm going to be capable of having sex again until I feel like *I* fancy myself in some way, or at least conceive of myself as fancyable again..)

And I have always been really susceptible, not to peer pressure, but to pop star pressure. Almost always male pop stars. (Male pop stars, and early 80s Annie Lennox. I don't think she counts, for some reason.) I never gave a shit what the girls in 8th grade were wearing, but if Duran Duran wore it, I had to have it. And my Mum used to joke about this when I was younger, like... OK, I used to hate wearing glasses, and I would refuse point blank to wear glasses because glasses were ugly and uncool. So she said "Damn, I just *wish* that some pop star would appear who wore glasses, because then you'd wear yours!" And we laughed at this when I was a teen, but then low and behold, a couple of years later, a pop star appeared named Graham Coxon, and Blur were the coolest pop group in the UK, and Graham Coxon wore glasses, so suddenly glasses were cool, and glasses were hott, and I became a proud glasses-wearer, and started wearing my glasses every day.

Yes, I am that shallow and dumb and easily influenced by pop stars. I was when I was 15, and there's a part of me that will never *stop* being 15.

So I am just really hoping that the 15 y.o. in me can lookit this plump DDB and say "you know what? Plumpness is cool; plumpness is sexy. If he can rock it, I can rock it."

This is really only tangentially related to being genderqueer or whatever - except for the fact that I can only seem to accept my body by comparing it to men. Sorry for derailing, but I wanted to talk about that somewhere, and the Body Positivity thread really didn't seem like the place.

I can kind of relate to that too! I remember being 15 and wanting to look like Robert Smith. And now ... well, I feel like I wear my weight better than he does. (Vaguely shallow lol)

Haha oh god yes. I went through that, too. Like when I was in my mid/late teens and my Mum and then my girlfriend were trying to get me to wear some makeup and I so wasn't interested in wearing makeup like a girl, but it'd be OK to wear makeup like Robert Smith or Daniel Ash. Early goth was so fucking genderqueer, not just Batcave but lots of it.

xp I bet you wear your hair better too!

And I've just realised it wasn't even Graham Coxon who first made glasses-wearing cool, it was David J, I tell a lie! God I wanted to be him when I was 16. Ginger, too.

I bought hella clothes from the women's section and some dark lipstick while I was in Portland. The results are in wdyll.

Looking good, Rev. Think I've seen that photo before; did you post it on twitter?

Yahhhh, I did.

I took that test and came up with this:

http://i43.tinypic.com/21dpwk0.jpg

I'm surprised I scored so high for "heteroflexible" and "transitioning" and so low for "queer" and "versatile"

catching up on the caleb hannan stuff, pretty depressing that it happened at all let alone anyone rallying round that twat. we have a long long way to go pt 9348392

That whole mess has been angrily buzzing round my social media for a couple of days now, and I am just too afraid to even read the original piece. I keep thinking "it can't be as bad as it's represented as being" then reading the quotes and going "good fucking lord no." People are justified in their anger and their outrage at this utter douchebag of a writer.

So someone can out and then bully a trans woman to death? That takes a particularly revolting kind of human being. But then am I surprised that people can round their wagons and rally round the cnut and justify and defend the idea of bullying a person to suicide? No, I am actually not surprised. Human beings are capable of some despicable actions.

Has anybody else read this? It's really long but I found it quite interesting:

THE "EMPIRE" STRIKES BACK: A POSTTRANSSEXUAL MANIFESTO

i had never read this before but it's really excellent: http://pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/rqtr/biblioteca/Transexualidad/trans%20manifesto.pdf

oh lol xp

hah!

Hmmm, so my therapist who is supposed to be helping me work through my gender issues was completely unfamiliar with the term "cisgender" until I said it today. Awesome.

Has anyone else watched the Candy Darling documentary and if so was anyone else as disgusted by Fran Lebowitz as I was?

Yeah, LOL @ having to explain basic terminology to one's therapist (me, too) but also total YAY! for therapists who actually get it, and grok the concept, even if they're not familiar with the words.

(Which was the case with mine - doesn't sound very hopeful, depending on whether that "awesome" was sarcastic, which I think it was?)

But, as above, just because someone doesn't know the terminology doesn't mean that they can't still be helpful in working out the issues. Because when you're working it out, it's mostly you do the working, not them. (Unless you have actually gone to a doctor with the idea of transitioning, and you're looking for advice and strategies. n.b. I am totally uninterested in transitioning, what would be the point.)

Yeah, that's kind of where I am.

I finally came out as trans (maybe genderqueer? still feeling it out) to some friends a couple of weeks ago; I'm seriously considering transitioning once it's practically feasible and I have a better sense of where I stand emotionally, but maybe the fact that it isn't currently an option is making it easier to think about. I'll see about therapists' lexicons soon enough.

good luck ows

thanks

Yes, pulling for you!

Thanks! It's nothing I want to be melodramatic about, but knowing how long I've been trying to rationalize it away, it's healthier to confront the dysphoria now.

Speaking as someone who tried to rationalise the dysphoria away for about 25 years, I would highly recommend that yeah, you explore your identity now. (I wouldn't use a term like "confront", tho, it's another kind of othering a part of yourself. And also the recognition that identities can be fluid, that the thing you have to "confront" this year may be the core of you the next.) Really wish you luck, and hope that you find a good therapist who can help you explore this stuff, regardless of what outcomes are feasible/possible or not.

Thanks, BB--you make good points w/r/t self-othering language and the need to recognize fluidity, the latter of which I think is part of why it's difficult but also probably necessary to start naming this. Anyway, I don't want to derail this thread.

Not derailing at all! You are us! Use this space in any way that helps you.

I appreciate that; it'd probably be more apt to say that I don't want to drown anyone else out. In any case, it'll probably be better to work through this with people offline for a while, but I am glad that this thread is around.

Hope this is ok to ask this here, I'd like to ask something (and I'll apologise in advance if I'm using any of the terminology incorrectly) about something that I can see is problematic but I'd like to understand better WHY it's problematic. I'm hoping BB can explain it a bit because it was something I was made aware of reading their posts, but I'm interested to hear from anybody that has thought about it. In the 77 tracks thread there was a male artist recording under the name Sophie; Lex was annoyed by the name and which BB pointed out

"Every time some jerk does this, it just makes it even harder for actual female producers, because it just reinforces that whole myth that behind any female artist, there is *always* a male string-puller making it happen. Why do you do this, dudes. Why."

I hadn't thought about it this way before, I'd viewed it (and I'm thinking mainly about Caribou / Daphni here) as a queering of identity, as someone using music to express another side of their personality, and also to blur the stereotypes of what is male and female music.

Then I was reminded of this identity again when a male poster made a sock puppet with a female display name to create a music poll thread and was criticised for it. Now in that particular case I am assuming that this poster was not trying to queer anything, just disguise their identity. But I'd still like to understand better why representing himself as female in that discussion was problematic.

Reading what I've typed I'm not trying to be meta or provoke arguments here, I'm genuinely trying to understand this better.

ramona is such a fucking awesome name

I don't care if you're black, white, genderqueer...

would say that it's presumptuous to judge the motives of anyone for the name they attach to themselves (or whatever they happen to do). we don't easily know inside one another, and the right to name, to identify, seems among the most basic we possess.

but, you know, bb = worlds beyond my ken

http://thump.vice.com/en_uk/words/please-dont-let-2014-be-the-year-that-female-djs-are-a-novelty

This micro-trend is telling because whilst artist names are mostly harmless word-play, and are rarely given a second thought by fans, there's something that pinches at me about men who choose names that are either explicitly female (Lucy, Millie and Andrea) or imply femininity (Miss Modular, She Works The Night, Body Issues), and do so in an attempt at anonymity, or playful indulgence. Millie and Andrea is apparently framed as an opportunity to “explore sounds not usually associated with their solo productions”, and SOPHIE even warped his voice on a radio show to sound like a young girl. Both weird, both unnecessary, both hiding behind the feminine in a stylistic attempt to create better work through a false persona.

Men who adopt explicitly female monikers and don't engage with the issues implicit in doing so, in an industry where women are often treated as novelty, run the risk of labouring under a false apprehension. Using the feminine to create an air of mystique not only panders to the misogynistic stereotype of the woman as the voiceless and unseen figure, but in only engaging with the female or feminine on a surface level, it could go as far as to actively undermine women who rightly seek to just put in the work, and not have gender treated as a selling point.

OK, I will try to answer your question, since you have asked in a respectful way, and I'm hoping that you might actually be willing to listen and learn, as opposed to blank dismissal. I find these conversations exhausting, and I really do try to limit them, for mine own mental health, if either I am not in the mood for them, or if I don't think I'm going to achieve anything except making myself frustrated and angry.

But I may also need to go off and find some links and possibly think about it.

The short answer is that it's a question of intent, and as you pointed out, the difference between exploring femininity, versus hiding one's identity, often with an agenda. I am trying to find a link to the example a few months ago, where a white person created a whole fake facebook account of a black feminist in order to defend certain actions as "not racist" because this black feminist sock "didn't have a problem with them." That is the spirit in which I saw Kerr assuming a female sock in order to talk about problems - including sexism - within a genre. That is co-opting a lived experience they have no experience of, and no right to speak of on any terms, let alone use it to defend its opposite. His defence of those shitty, sexist metal cartoons when pretty much everyone else on the board saw the problems straight off shows how much he just does not get it and most likely just never will, but he thinks that just putting on a female display name gives him the right to discuss it with authority? It doesn't work like that.

Artists taking on alternate personas in order to explore other identities - this has a long tradition from Bowie to Beyonce and well before. Sometimes it's a way of wearing a mask to convey the truth, but when those adopted identities start to impinge on the locuses (loci?) of other people's oppression, this becomes a problem. (e.g. of Montreal writing songs from the viewpoint of "I'm just a black she-male" and Amanda Palmer taking the piss out of people with disabilities during the course of pretending to be a conjoined twin.) I raise those two cases because Kevin Barnes actually seems to have known some queer people and, indeed, queer people of colour, in his life, and has himself written and performed often of his own feelings of sexual fluidity and frustration with gender. Amanda Palmer, on the other side, basically told the disabled people who criticised her, to shut up and get a sense of humour. I hope you can see the difference why both are problematic, but I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to one, but not the other.

With Daphni, I never did not know for one moment that it was "Dan Snaith exploring his feminine side." He never concealed his intent, I never saw him make any kind of statement, overt or implied, about whether this gave him the right to speak on behalf of women in the music business - and I never saw anyone express surprise that "Daphni is a dude!"

Something like the Aphex Twin's Tuss project is one of those questionable areas. Because I believe his intent was not malicious (again, this is a guy who had explored gender and girl/boy dichotomies repeatedly in his music and iconography) - and also, it was different because the project was a collaboration between himself, and a woman - his wife - though she gets written out of the story repeatedly, first in AFX fanboy minds, then by Richard, after an acrimonious divorce. And in the community of fandom, it just reinforced the endless suppositions that every time a female producer appears on the scene, she must be the sock puppet of some male producer. (e.g. all of Mira Calix's songs are secretly written by Autechre, Ursula Bognor never existed, and another female IDM producer whose name I have forgotten, she did a gig, and WATMM fanboys were all "Oh, *male producer she sounds a bit like* why do you send your girlfriend to stand onstage and play your CDs?) ((And this does *not* just happen in the electronic music community, by any means. It's just really highlighted there.))

Because of the massive imbalance, and the attention (negative though it often is) paid to female artists, dudes often come to believe that it is somehow "easier" to operate in the musical world, as a woman. There's this weird fetishisation of the women involved in the deep history of electronic music (though it does not stop them from mixing up the tags and just labelling any woman with a modular synth as automatically "Delia Derbyshire".) There is the case of an IDM label with an all female roster, founded by a guy whose deliberate aim it was to try to combat sexism in that scene. And, of course, there popped up at least one guy (and another very strongly suspected) who put on a female name, got some photos of a model off the internet, and got signed, then unmasked himself, saying "look how easy girls have it in this industry." As if one label taking women seriously eradicates all the other shit we have to deal with on a regular basis.

It smacks of those extreme makeover experiments where a thin person puts on a fat suit, or a WASP puts on a burqua, and walks around for a day like that, and comes back and says "OMG, you guys! Guess what I discovered? Muslims or fat people or women or old folks have it really fucking hard" as if they've learned something from the experience, learned anything except the fact that it is nothing but a brute display of privilege that they never noticed before and OMG THEY COULD HAVE ACTUALLY JUST PAID ATTENTION TO MUSLIMS OR OLD FOLKS OR FAT PEOPLE OR TRANS PEOPLE AND BELIEVED THEM WHEN THEY SAID THEY EXPERIENCED BAD SHIT IN THE FIRST PLACE.

This stuff is loaded, this stuff has a history. There is a place in this world for "men in dresses" and there is a place in this world for "trans women" but when one starts taking up the space, and because of their privilege, starts dominating the narrative, yes, that is co-option. Dudes who take on female names just to make points on messageboards or sell records are making it harder for trans women as well as cis women.

I have no idea where Sophie, as a producer, fits into this. I know nothing about him, but with the weight of all that stuff above, it is really, really hard for me to give someone the benefit of the doubt.

It's true; anyone can explore aspects of "masculinity" or "femininity" and I actively encourage people of all genders to do this, in music or however makes sense to them. But there is a very big step between exploring gender, and thinking that doing a little bit of exploring of an identity that one can take off and go back to privilege at the end of the day gives them any kind of real insight, let alone authority to speak from, the position of marginalised person, whether that's a cis woman or a trans woman. It happens all the time, men speaking for women, men taking up space intended for women. When a man queers his gender and explores his femininity, it's up to him to recognise that he is still speaking as a queered man, and the world will still, automatically give more weight to his words when speaking about women, because he *is* a man.

Wow, this is longer than I had hoped for. I don't really want to go through this again. I don't think the ~dudes of ILX~ understand, what it costs me, emotionally, to talk about this stuff, and what it costs me to go through it again, and again, and again, because someone didn't hear me the first time. The "not being believed" part is often worse than the injury, with gendered aggressions and microaggressions. I realise that I haven't explained myself very well, but I also do not have the energy for a big fight over this.

otoh, it's evidence of femininity being recognized as intrinsically valid, perhaps even especially valuable. lame dudes cashing in on that = lame, sure. i'm just saying i wouldn't throw stones if i weren't awful damn sure of where those putative dudes were coming from, gender- & orientation-wise (which i wanna abbreviate as "fuckwise", but won't). which perhaps just means i'm sitting outside this convo, speculating ignorantly...

that to lex.

Contenderizer, I'm going to ask you in the nicest possible way, but could you, for once, just try *not* to take the devil's advocate position on this thread?

I know it is impossible to create an actual safe space, anywhere on the internet, but you are the cissest of cis-het dudes, and it would be good if you could actually recognise that this might not be a space where you are automatically the expert.

I am trying to find a link to the example a few months ago, where a white person created a whole fake facebook account of a black feminist in order to defend certain actions as "not racist" because this black feminist sock "didn't have a problem with them."

http://www.forharriet.com/2013/12/dear-ani-difranco-supporters-you-cannot.html?m=1

which perhaps just means i'm sitting outside this convo, speculating ignorantly...

there's a turn up for the books

contenderizer i have zero desire to argue rn but will you STOP doing that thing of "reasonably pointing out the other side of the argument" whenever people talk about oppression? and stop using the language of witch hunts etc. no one is throwing stones. no one is criticising sophie, lucy or whoever personally. people are talking about the context and the fact that this is a micro-trend that rubs them the wrong way. did you even read lauren's piece? in which she interviews one of the male producers who uses a female name, and he acknowledges that it's problematic in ways he hadn't thought of?

LOL xp

I claim no expertise, bb. just, as usual, your spec-ulatin cuz. one of the big differences between u and me is that i have absolutely no problem giving anyone the benefit of the doubt, ever (a function of privilege, i'm sure). that said, i mean not to offend, will step off. ramona is still a fucking awesome name.

hey, lex. just scrubbed my xp for "the language of witch hunts" and came up empty. praps ur referring to my talk of rights and stone-throwing? fwiw, i see no witch-hunting hereabouts. am at least tentatively okay with people identity-flirting with whatever gender seems to suit.

Cis-het white dudes who flaunt their benefits of privilege as if it is some kind of ~NOBLE QUALITY~, part eight billion. What else is new?

Thanks for the link, Lex, that was exactly the case I was thinking of.

xposts

BB, Thanks very much for your reply, that was an awesome post and really made things a lot clearer for me. I admit I was a bit apprehensive in asking in the first place because I was conscious that it was 1) something you might justifiably not want to post about 2) bordering on meta, which I know you dislike and 3) potentially clusterfucky. I was also aware that this was probably covered somewhere else and I was requesting it was regurgitated for my benefit, so I’m really sorry if it stressed you - however, like I said, your post was really insightful and has helped my thinking.

I was just about to reply to Lex thanking him for the link - I hadn’t realised the female pseudonym in dance music was so widespread when I saw you had also posted, and tbh I’ll probably need to re-read it a couple of times cos there is a lot to digest.

Personally, (gay white cis-male here) I’ve always been interested in ambiguity and saw it as positive rather than problematic but I’d been beginning to feel there were aspects of privilege involved without being able to put my finger on exactly how - So thanks to both of you for taking the time and effort to help me out on that.

"because someone didn't hear me the first time." maybe not evertyone reads all of your posts.

Cis-het white dudes who flaunt their benefits of privilege as if it is some kind of ~NOBLE QUALITY~, part eight billion. What else is new?

righteous indignation shit? no, wait...

Personally, (gay white cis-male here) I’ve always been interested in ambiguity and saw it as positive rather than problematic but I’d been beginning to feel there were aspects of privilege involved without being able to put my finger on exactly how

this is probably how i felt when i first came across the phenomenon but it irked me in a minor way that i couldn't put my finger on. then a friend of mine (who used the dj name token girl at the time) said she really hated it, and almost felt cheated when she discovered certain djs were actually dudes, which made me think my being irked wasn't so irrational. then i noticed it becoming this weird micro-trend even as female djs were dismissed, marginalised etc etc, and then lauren's article pretty much articulated why it's not necessarily such a positive ambiguity thing.

Thanks, I Am Using Your Worlds, I am out now, for what I hope are blatantly obvious and understandable reasons.

Yeah that makes sense, the poll thread was the first time I saw it mentioned in a negative way and it hadn't really occurred to me that there was anything wrong with it until then. Lauren's article was well done.

It is appreciated BB, see you around

more from lauren's piece:

This micro-trend has been bugging me for a while now, so I called up Miss Modular to ask him why he's called Miss Modular. He was surprisingly forthright about it all. “I chose Miss Modular a long, long time ago before I even started producing”, he insists. “I used it for a blog I used to do. When I first chose it, it didn’t really occur to me that it was implying a gender, but then as I started producing and getting more attention, people used to message me being like: 'Hey, we’re doing a piece on female producers, do you want to get involved?' I’d tell them I was a man and they’d be like, 'Oh, okay, well, we’re not really interested in writing about you anymore'.”

How did that strike you? “I found it frustrating”, he confesses. “Not because I wasn’t getting the attention because I was male, but because I thought the concept of a magazine wanting to run a piece on female producers was weird. As though being female was some kind of handicap for them, and that if they were good at what they do then it should be, extra celebrated?”

How do you feel about being Miss Modular now, considering that? “In all honesty, I found myself a bit caught up in the whole phenomenon of this. I wonder if men working under female names is them purposefully trying to be anonymous; because of some inherent guilt of being a white male producer, and wanting to present yourself as something else. I’ve definitely noticed that since using a female name people have treated me as a novelty, and come to me about my work purely because they think I’m female. Whenever I’ve done a vanity search on Twitter, people are always talking about it.”

Do you really think it's a trend worth talking about, or are we just being hypercritical? “Oh no”, he says. “I think it's a trend that's really starting to snowball now. I’ve met guys who are trying to start out as a DJ, and been like 'Oh yeah, I might call myself this because it’s female', and I’ve been like, 'You’re saying you’ve actively chosen this name because it will present you as female?!' I really should have probed deeper into that at the time." I asked if it opened his eyes to sexism in dance music culture, and he admitted that:

“It’s both fascinating and frustrating. It shows what these gender politics are like. It's been quite an insight. I feel a bit weird being part of it, to be honest. I’d really like to stress that as a guy working under female names, I had no intention of hiding myself behind some kind of veil of femininity. I thought about changing it altogether, or at least doing variations on it, but then I thought that it might be more effective to use this weird situation I've found myself in in order to speak out about the issues that it's brought up, and try and frame it in a more positive way.”

fwiw (not much, i presume), I agree that the assumption by the privileged of the nominal identities of the not is fundamentally squicky, repellent. all i'm saying here is that i'm in no rush to judge "sophie" given that i have no special insight into where the artist in question is coming from. also, as a straight cisdude, i basically refrain from passing judgement on how (even potentially) not-so-straight, not-so-cis people might happen to construct their identities. i don't see that as any of my business. not saying it isn't yours...

also, i'm 100% outside dance music culture, so the special implications of this discussion as it relates in the present moment are likely lost on me. do not mean to comment in any general way on the micro-trend lex & lauren are talking abt.

reminded here of similar squickiness related to men publishing books under feminine pseudonyms

like what, the privileges "normally" accorded your gender aren't enough?

[= igi, will shaddap now]

Relevant to our interests:

http://queerofgender.com/

^^^Looks like this is going to be a super-interesting project

Haaaayyyy, Brooklyn Boihood mention!

https://www.facebook.com/bklynboihood

OK, they look seriously awesome. Reading the blog etc now.

I don't know them personally but a community group I work with would like to partner/collaborate w them on some anti-street harassment initiatives, so that will happen eventually. Pretty excited!

Oh, that sounds like that would be great.

http://elixher.com/watch-undoing-masculinity-by-bklyn-boihoods-ryann-holmes/

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gonna have to wait until I have better bandwidth to watch that but yes, v v v relevant to my interests!

Hey, contendo, would you get the fuck out?

Please don't set him off again, Rev?

I would love for this thread to be a safe space, but safe spaces are impossible to maintain without rigorous moderation we do not have available to us here.

hi, rev. i'm a bit baffled by the trajectory, tbh, but in no mood to make a bad situation worse.

btw, v good post BB

Thanks, Rev.

And jesus christ, the fact that he does not even *get* what the problem is, is the literal proof of the problem.

Like, here we had a dedicated trans/genderqueer/questioning thread, and a conversation where in 2 gay men and 1 genderqueer female person were discussing queering gender, and actually listening to one another, and Using Your Worlds said he learned from me, and I certainly learned from Lex, and there was an actual dialogue going on between gay and/or queer people speaking from their experience to talk about those experiences.

What special kind of arrogance does it take, to not just look at that situation and think to yourself "You know what it needs, this special, set aside thread for issues I admit I don't understand? It needs the CIS HET DUDE POINT OF VIEW. That is what is missing." And continue to flap on about that POV, long after you have been asked, nicely, to please leave it out, until at least one person affected by those issues feels driven from the conversation because it has become too uncomfortable for them.

It adds insult to injury, that you can't even *see* why you doing this might result in hostility, anger, and the withdrawal of any remaining good will for you to remain in this space. Cis-het dudes have the ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD as their playground. Genderqueer people ask for one fucking thread to discuss issues relevant to ourselves, and you gotta have *that* one, too?

Someone emailed me off-board to suggest that a dedicated moderator be assigned to this thread, similar to the way someone works to keep guys from invading the girl thread. I did not want to do that, because I do think that many people who wrestle with issues of othering, queerness, gender, gayness, can both contribute to and learn from this thread, without compromising the "safeness" of the space for genderqueer people. But all it takes is one Cis-Het Dude who cannot just shut up and listen, instead of insisting the conversation be centered around him and his needs, to destroy that balance. You are no longer welcome here, Contenderizer. You destroy something that some of us have both worked hard for, and fucking need in our lives. And for what?

I had almost got back to a place of calm & OK again, and now I'm angry and upset again, and disappointed with myself for being angry and upset, and have to start the whole process again.

And there's sure to be another round of how ~mean~ and "retarded" and "crazy" and what a bitch I am because I have allowed myself to be made angry & upset by an upsetting and angy-making action and it's "toxic" for me to express these feelings instead of keeping quiet and being nice-nice and "giving people the benefit of the doubt" instread of someone who does not belong in a space just recognizing that he is not the expert, and exercising the self control to just leave it alone.

best of luck xpost

What special kind of arrogance does it take, to not just look at that situation and think to yourself "You know what it needs, this special, set aside thread for issues I admit I don't understand? It needs the CIS HET DUDE POINT OF VIEW. That is what is missing."

i saw this thread not as a space in need of my particular POV, but simply as home to an interesting conversation i hoped to join. based on the collective response, i consider myself decisively rebuffed. which is fine; i clearly didn't understand the stakes.

fwiw, i don't think I've ever called you retarded or crazy, bb. then again, my memory is short and ilx is long...

Seriously. What part of "you are no longer welcome here" did you not understand?

was answering the questions you asked me, bb. nothing more.

This is like some fucking game to you, isn't it? Proving that you can just go on invading people's spaces and making ONE LAST POST long after they have asked you to leave. You've made your point. You've thrown your privilege around and proved that you are incapable of understanding the meaning of the word "NO". I've given up even hoping that you will leave of your own accord. Congratulations, you've driven me from my own space, yet again.

Dude, you don't have to get the last word in or explain yourself, just take your ball and go home and I promise you will be alright.

bleep bloop, contendo shitposts in another thread... what else is new? Don't let him rustle your feathers.

This interview with Edie Fake might be of interest:
http://www.tcj.com/rad-queers-edie-fake/

Look, I'm going to be completely honest: I was triggered (someone repeatedly ignoring my increasingly desperate "NO"s triggers rape-induced panic, it's a real thing for me) by this thread yesterday, and really badly. A year and a half of LOLtherapy has helped me get better at handling being triggered (walk away, remove yourself from the situation, perform self care, get help/reassurance from trusted people) but it's still an intensely unpleasant experience to go through. Doubly unpleasant to happen in a space where I thought I could talk, safely, about some pretty deep-level realness.

I don't know whether to abandon the space, and the experiment, or to persist - with stubbornness that will probably recoil back on me - just to assert mine own right to exist. I can't pretend it's not wearing, knowing how hated you are in a space.

Videos are still not working for me, which is frustrating. I really like the idea of the comic based one, but it won't load.

Then there was this, yesterday:

http://the-toast.net/2014/02/07/growing-gender-nonconforming/

Which gave me a lot of pause, because it's a woman who exists in the grey area of "gender noncomforming, but not trans" which made me doubt my right to even assert a genderqueer or trans* identity. But this was the line that made me realise that although I identified with many aspects of her story, this was not *my* story:

To go from Fictional Leading Man Child to Girl Who Felt Confident was such a transition that I wasn’t sure if my old self was real, because I knew the new one was.

Because never, ever, did I really feel that the "new girl self" was entirely real. It never stopped feeling like a drag performance. It was a drag performance I could do, the same way I could get onstage and play guitar, and convince everyone that I was a rock star. But it never stopped feeling like a costume that I had to put on in the morning, and had to take off at night. It took effort and energy to maintain. It was a performance, a pose. (This might be why I'm so attracted to image bands, because I admire all that effort to maintain a pose.)

But then, after experiencing a particular noxious example of toxic masculinity and its entitlements, I always feel this wave of revulsion, of disgust, of thinking "I am not this, I can never *be* this, I *will* never be this!" But I guess the thing I've learned from ILX gender threads is that even cis guys feel this sometimes. (Not that it stops some of them from still performing toxic masculinity in all its noxiousness.)

I still don't know what I am. It feels like the process of looking at others' experiences and going "Nope, not *that*. Nope, not that one either". And never reaching a place of declaring "This. I am this!" But I guess that's what they mean when they say "gender is a journey".

I was a short-haired kid in boy’s clothes who couldn’t be a boy but most certainly was not a girl. I was a person being called “It” on the playground who was getting increasingly depressed

I am not genderqueer in any meaningful sense so this is not my thread & I'll get out shortly but I wanted to nod in recognition at this. Good article, thanks.

Though I liked the term "tomboy" as a kid, bcz when I asked my mum what one was they sounded cool and I liked that they were girls but still called "boy", but most importantly because nobody ever gave me any well-meaning picture books of girly-looking "tomboys". Also I never learned to do the dress-up; got laughed at and spat at even harder when I tried, so I stopped even trying. Too old and fat to bother now tbh. So those parts were not my story either, but I still liked reading them.

Too old and fat to look good in all the awesome styles on dapperq.com as linked in the comments, too :( (totally delighted by these by these reader submissions though. and yes, another comment links to http://fat-tomboy.tumblr.com/ which is more my body shape, though I'm still too short for most of 'em.)

Anyway, sorry, not my thread, going now. Hope I haven't made anyone feel unsafe by butting in cz that was not my intention.

Spacecadet, as someone who is describing their recognition of "tomboy" and its discontents, you are totally welcome here, and thanks for the links. I think you have shown here & on other threads that you are capable of sharing space, and discussing yr experiences without erasing or discrediting others'. This is really all we ask for, I think?

OK, wow...

http://www.dapperq.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Bekah.jpg

^^^wore an outfit v v similar to the Dapper on the left yesterday and holy shit, that's it, the rest of my hair is coming off as soon as I can be bothered to go back to the hairdresser. (This is the main reason I don't have shorter hair; pure laziness.)

"January is Celebrity Suit Awareness Month" ... omg I have found my spiritual home.

Oh, shit, wait, no, it's Celebrity Suit AWESOMENESS but I am going to go with Celebrity Suit Awareness instead. Because.

It is really really hard to read, though, when you are not thin and do not have a male-passing body, without feeling basically terrible about the body you do have.

Really, I should just stick with "rugged Cornish surfer dude gone to seed".

Person on the left is KILLING with attitude, even if they were just trying to get something out of their teeth at that instant.

Come on, that's so obviously an attitude duckface!

Yeah, I love it.

The jawline and the sneer are making me feel kinda funny--that is imo why men should never have beards, because I am defenseless against the neck and jaw combination.

Appreciate the dq link and also the "fat butch" stuff because I can only take about 2 screens of "fuck yeah androgynous girls" being no one over age 24 or 115 lbs.

Also cos I just really like this person's style: http://styleenthusiast.tumblr.com/

Sorry, I've been going through bags and bags of old clothes, trying to find the rest of my tie collection (seriously, found them at the bottom of a bag with such a damp problem I had a coughing fit when I opened it. Hope cold water washing will revive them. Liberties ties from the 60s! So amazing!)

I feel kinda weird about perving over a random person who is not a celeb, but their whole look is just so... magnificent. I am just in awe.

I've spent my entire life feeling very, very ~funny~ (one might even say queer, LOL) about women like that. And saying dumb things like "my life would have been so much easier if I were just a lesbian" because duh, the whole sleeping-with-dudes thing put paid to that. But it's actually a huge relief to be able to say that although my feelings about people that present like that are complicated (do I want to look like that? yes? am I sexually attracted to them? that, too) they are also completely legitimate.

(Sorry, I've been having an amazing conversation with a friend who has just blogged up all her feelings on this tonight, on the whole "not queer enough" dilemma, and this is all on my mind.)

Now my 13th listen is almost over, I'm going to go and wash my ties on a Saturday night. Living the life!

I love how this thread is all SRS TRANS* BZNZ one minute, and then "OMG lookit these waistcoats" the next. This pleases me.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/02/13/facebook_custom_gender_options_here_are_all_56_custom_options.html

Hey, that's really cool!

(Still not gonna join Facebook, though.)

Still kind of wish I could just leave it blank tbh

one of my students has recently come out as trans and is getting no support at home. i wish i could tell her mom SHE NEEDS YOUR LOVE TO BE UNCONDITIONAL but that would definitely be outside the scope of my role. i just mostly feel like all i can do is give her support at school the next few years and get her to college someplace with a welcoming LGBT community.

im calling her "her" because she still identifies that way but wants to be male, fwiw

yall have any ideas for a HS teacher?

Wow. That's a difficult situation, and it's really great that you have noticed this, and want to make it better for her, that's really awesome. It's (unfortunately, due to our dumb binary society) a difficult path that she is going to be on, and it sucks that her parents are not understanding, but yeah, I can tell you that even "having just one teacher, at school, that gets it" can and does make a difference.

With regards to the parents, there's no such thing as unconditional love. It's a myth that parents can and do offer unconditional love. I think most parents are terrified for their children in some ways, and project all their own shit onto them. It's scary to have a child that's "non-conforming" in some way (and yes, the phrase "gender non-conforming" instead of "trans" is a dumb one) - both because "OMG, what will it say about me as a parent" but also "OMG why is my child making it HARD for themselves". The only thing I can say with regards to her Mum is, gently, but with authority, repeat, over and over and over again, "This is a Real thing. This is a Known Thing. There are many, many others like your child. This is a Normal thing. Your child is normal." (If you want to give a side-dose of "if there is anything that will make your child's path easier, it will be 'treat this as normal' if there's anything that will make it harder, it will be 'withdraw your support'" but that probably really is outside the role of a teacher.) "This is perfectly normal, trans people exist, we deal with this all the time" is totally within the role of a teacher. (Even if this is your first out trans student, it's the message you need to be projecting.)

It is also a role you can take with other students. Kids learn by example, and "this person is totally fine" is a powerful lesson.

With her... this is the hardest bit, because it's so easy for me to project myself onto her. But yeah, offer support. And support can be passive, in terms of *listening*, showing that you "get it", respecting her and her decisions (following her lead on pronouns is good, but showing "I am the kind of person that cares about your pronouns" is brilliant) and active. I don't know what subject you teach (obviously it would be a little harder if you're, like, a maths teacher). Someone (a friend) gave me a copy of Kate Bornstein's My Gender Workbook when I was 27 years old. If someone had given that book to me when I was 14, my life would have been a *fuck* of a lot easier. That book is now probably 30 years out of date, but there are probably modern equivalents.

She probably has Tumblr and the like, but encourage her to read stuff that is more than Tumblr, and do research. If you're an English teacher, you can give her a research/paper writing project on learning about trans people - this is both "permission to explore", in terms of a legitimate reason to seek this stuff out, but it will also have the added bonus of giving her the *ammunition* to deal with haters? If you're a history teacher, you can slip tit-bits into your lessons about the Chevalier de Eon or male-presenting female pirates or Molly-Houses or the history behind the Amazon myth or Sworn Virgins. If you're a science teacher you can throw in bits about "animals that change gender based on environmental cues" because there are so many other forms of gender in the natural world. All of these things might be good for her, but they will also get a message through to the rest of the class around her. People exist in contexts and settings, and making the context/setting easier for them is a big part of supporting someone, if you have that power, which as a teacher, you *do*.

When I was a freshman in high school, "My Teacher" was my history teacher. He was amazing, he taught European History and from day one, starting with classical civilisation and the Greeks and Romans, he threw in all kinds of salacious tit-bits about the sex lives of the emperors and which philosophers and Kings were probably gay and it had two effects: 1) you want to get the attention of a class full of hormonal 14 year olds and get them to sit down and listen to a boring subject like ancient history, spice it up with a ton of sex and 2) the more subtle lesson, but one that went down all the same: queer people exist. We have always existed, as long as there has been history, there have been queer people in it. He just adopted me that year, he took a special interest in me (we had a mentor system at my high school; I think he volunteered to be mine, even though he was really popular and loads of people wanted him. I've always wondered if it was because I was a little bit lost and bullied, if it was because I was British and he was such an Anglophile, if it was just because I was super geeky and interested in history to start with - or if he just "read" me as queer when I didn't know how to "read" myself.) But he really took me under his wing, and encouraged me, got me to sit at his lunch table, took my side against the bullies, stood up for me, listened to me. So yeah, having a person at school be like that is *so* important (and I had a supportive Mum, just a blankly uncomprehending one).

Talking to other teachers might be better than talking to me, though. Hope this has been the slightest bit helpful, because, you know, high school was 30 years ago for me, now. The world has changed since then.

Thanks you so much for that.

(obviously it would be a little harder if you're, like, a maths teacher)

Well, I am. Oops! Although next year I'm starting a student newsmedia class and hopefully she will apply.

It might require you being a bit more creative, but I think you can still try to do it! You can also, y'know, invite her to apply. (Or maybe your school's policy doesn't permit this? Dunno.)

i am creating the school policy and i have asked her to apply! she's a good writer!

Having just read that article on Microaggressions on the Race thread, I'm rethinking some of my suggestions. It's a hard line to walk, to show individual support, without seeming like you are singling a person out for their difference. It's kinda like 1) stuff aimed at supporting the person individually vs 2) stuff aimed at educating the class/parents/others and helping them to be more accepting/welcoming of her are two separate tangles. Hmmm. I don't know.

-----

This was quite good on Facebook and "why do we even have to have gender options at all?"

http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2014/02/facebook-introduces-choice-50-genders-why-cant-we-write-our-own

(I far prefer things like Twitter or Tumblr where you don't have to specify at all, TBH, but if I *have* to (and why? if it's a marketing thing, dude, market to me as if I were a gay man, you'd probably have a better chance of hitting me) then I'd rather have too many options than not enough)

OK, I generally try to avoid twitter kerfuffles and the like these days, because who has the energy or the attention, but this one just crossed a line:

http://www.redlightpolitics.info/post/76999881939/today-gia-milinovich-as-mainstream-and-well

http://aoifeschatology.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/the-biggest-gamete-as-troll-bait/

It's depressing because Milinovich, in her insistence on making a gender land-grab based on "periods and reproduction" or whatever, is falling straight into the kind of biological reductionism that most feminisim has spent the past century trying to debunk.

But really... eugenetic selection against people with "trans markers"? (What, even the ones of us that suffer from "periods and reproduction", too?) There's so many layers of wrongness on this one I can't even begin to untangle them. Just a reminder of how *gross* discussion of these issues can get out there, and often even from people you thought of as broadly "on your side". (Nice point in the second blog about this being where "Science without the Humanities" ends up leading.) Ugh. Not what I wanted to read first thing.

OTM. Even before Milinovich started getting into eugenicist territory (at least as a rhetorical flourish), I was already depressed by her smug refusal to see why maintaining the sex/gender distinction doesn't mean much if gender is relegated to the mush of oppressive or meaningless convention, above which biology (not at all constituted as a science within concrete social formations by a set of socially agreed-upon practices) is set up rhetorically as the stern Real mandating that trans women are Really Male. (And where exactly are the trans women who want to stop feminists from talking about abortion access, FGM, or the division of reproductive labor?) It's her unwillingness to actually listen to any of her critics in good faith that's most irritating. Anyway, this is why I should stay away from twitter.

Yeah, absolutely.

I have got to the point where I try to avoid the outrage-generation-machine effects of twitter for the sake of my mental health, but this one came over the parapet. I guess the whole nature of twitter really solidifies that kind of adversarial approach into intellectual bunkering. The advantage of longer form conversational approaches in opening debate and dialogue, in place of that "deluge of shit" which twitter delivers, yields better results in addressing nuanced situations, if that's what the intention is. (I don't think that's her intention, though; she seems like she is so deep in her ideological defence of the ~SCIENTIFIC!!!~ position that she doesn't care who she takes in collateral fire.)

She just has this kind of cartoon approach to ~What Trans Women Are Like~ which seems more deeply informed by the Julie Bindels of the world, than ever actually, y'know, talking to any trans women. (And I mean, actually talking, not just engaging in twitter potshots.)

From where I'm sitting (and this is someone who has waded maybe knee-deep into trying to talk with other trans* people) I do sometimes get frustrated with this occasional flare-up of what I call "OMG, the trans* narrative is not ~perfectly centred~ around trans women!!!" - which is a tangential thing to what she seems to be representing (and my complaints more about the sidelining of trans men and erasure of genderqueer/agender people, rather than any inherent problem with trans women) - but what she seems to be complaining about is just this bizarre thing that never actually happens. NO ONE EVER SAID you can't talk about periods or pregnancy or abortion or FGM and the like. What people say is that you can NOT just assign "the reproductive process" to "the female" and define womanhood by the presence or absence of egg cells. That's just dragging us ass-backwards back into everything we've been trying to escape for the past century, out of this paranoia about "what a few imaginary trans women (who exist only in the fevered imagination of a few TERFs) might do to womanhood." Mighty walls of projection. AFAIC, the trans* narrative is the best thing that ever happened to feminism.

I've been suspicious of her for a while, because of her whole "SCIENCE IS THE ONLY MEASURE OF THE ~REALLY REAL~!!!" schtick, and if I feel personally let down, it was because she was one of the first people I ever followed on twitter. It's just this kind of blind science bod insistence that things that are socially constructed somehow aren't 'Real' in the same way that, like, quantum mechanics is 'Real' (ha!) to which I always want to say "Social constructs aren't real? Try living without money for a week."

Mutter mutter. I could say something about this generation of "science spokespeople" and how poor they are compared to Carl Sagan, because Sagan understood the power of myths and symbols and the humanities and how socially constructed meaning is also Real, in a way that these people completely miss. But just... meh. This was probably the wrong thread to complain about this, but really, just... meh.

Ill thought out and ill considered and apologies for how this comes off.

I should not go on ILX when I'm feeling kinda cranky and ill. :-/

(I really wish ILX came with a delete button sometimes.)

No need to apologize! I hadn't been following Milinovich (probably as a result of different media exposure in the US) before this fracas, so I didn't really have expectations of her work that could be deflated, but I agree that we need more people who can popularize scientific inquiry without falling back on crude scientism. I'm not in favor of centering trans* discourse around any one social group, either; I was focusing on her rhetoric about trans women partially for personal reasons, but mostly because they seemed to take the brunt of her hostility in her essays on sex/gender and attendant twitter storm.

Yeah, I totally understand why we were focused on her shitty statements on trans women here, because she specifically went after trans women.

(But in her lumpen attacks, she also tangentially sidelined a whole bunch of other people in the process.)

True enough.

Just popping in to say that redressnyc.com is stocking masculine and butch clothing styles cut to fit plus size curvy people - http://www.redressnyc.com/masculine-butch-styles/. Pretty limited selection so far, but it's a start and seems like it might be of interest to some here.

Maybe it's time we had a dedicated Butch / Dapper / Q / Weimar Lesbian style thread... :D #RelevantToMyInterests

You know what they say about girls who wear ties. They hang out here:

Butch / Dapper / Q / Boi / "Weimar Lesbian" / Style for the discriminating masc-presenting Genderqueer

A substantial interview (video and transcript) with CeCe McDonald, Laverne Cox, and Alisha Williams from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project:
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/19/black_trans_bodies_are_under_attack
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/2/19/cece_mcdonald_laverne_cox_on_facebooks

Thanks for those links!

Will read them when I'm in a better emotional place.

Bruce Weber short on creating a transgender ad campaign:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wp2iilgykA

really good interview with janet mock by brooke magnanti: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10665128/Piers-Morgan-sex-work-and-feminism-transgender-activist-Janet-Mock-unloads.html?placement=CB1

intellectually, I know that piers's show getting canceled probably wasn't related to how terribly he treated janet mock, but I'm happy to pretend it was and feel SUCH satisfaction about it.

Has anyone read Annabel by Kathleen Winter? I just learned about it tonight as part of a Canadian literary event that's going on at the moment, but it sounds like something people here might be interested in. I'm hoping to get the chance to squeeze it in between semesters.

http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/sarah-gadon-defends-annabel-by-kathleen-winter.html

just ordered the book, thanks for the suggestion.

OK, I take it back. Because I have now witnessed a non-binary dude basically throwing a hissy fit because an International Women's Day event featured depictions of vaginas.

And this is one of those moments where big words like "intersectionality" stop being just words and start being this big ugly knot of emotions which are, admittedly, too complicated and thorny for the level of discourse on ILX/the internet. But there's a bundle of sympathies which come from "being a non-binary person" and there's a bundle of sympathies which come from "having a vagina and all the ways in which you are treated as if this *means* something, and all the ways in which other people try to control and police the uses and even the expression of your own vagina" and I just want to turn around to this person and just say "You know what? NO."

But this is not shit that I am ever going to change their mind on. And this is where I need to just follow mine own advice and use the block button, that is what it is there for.

But mostly I just wanted to tell mine own self of a few weeks ago, actually, there is no cartoon so over the top that someone will not be behaving like that somewhere. This applies on all sides.

Having a rough couple days where I've been completely consumed with the idea of being a woman. I feel like w/o my gf to reassure me I would have gone completely nuts last night. :/

Hang in there! I don't have any experience in this area but would it be okay to say, ride the feelings out: it's not your sanity that's straining, it's the lessons we learn too well. So well that unlearning them is a trauma...maybe even...a birthing? This is over-reaching even for me but I feel like you have the sense and self-knowledge to steer yourself through!

<3 to Rev. You are a great person.

I know these feelings can be really scary and vertiginous, but in orbit is right. I hope you can have faith in yourself, and open up to the people you're comfortable talking to. I find dysphoria can be much scarier when it goes unexpressed.

I think about being born and giving birth a lot, for reals and as metaphors for change and renewal, and it strikes me that giving birth to yourself could be...an intensely womanly act? I can't actually unpack that, but I had that stray thought.

Dunno if this will be helpful to you, but it is to me: when I get in those overwhelming "can't cope" moments (days/weeks/etc) my therapist has these ways of stepping back and getting perspective. And she usually asks really deceptively simple questions. One of them is "What do you feel right now?" as in, not the big, tumultuous emotional BLLAARRRGGHH but actually a physical kind of sense check, am I hot, cold, hungry, drunk, lonely where is the physical lump that is me, at? The other, which I think might be more helpful in this case, is when she asks "tell me, what do you need right now?"

That's a much harder question for me, because either I need such intangible or impossible things - "I need to have been born and raised, as a man, and have been treated as one my whole life" is not an achievable goal, and I can't *need* something that's impossible. But I can *need* other things. I can *need* someone external to agree with me "this is real, your emotions are real, your observations are true, your statements about the inside of your head are drawn from the truth of your experience." Sometimes working out what you actually need, at a more base level, can give you something to pull you through that sense of going crazy?

Really feel like the blind leading the blind here, though, and I'm sorry if none of that is helpful, which it admittedly probably isn't.

A discussion of North American trans women's writing, which also touches on the reception of Annabel (mentioned upthread): http://cwila.com/wordpress/trans-womens-lit-an-interview-with-trish-salah-and-casey-plett/

I posted this in the Against Me! thread but worth crossposting here: http://youngist.org/post/77692828622/laura-jane-grace-crucified-trans-woman#.Uwtm0w1Gs_4.twitter

Really feeling this:

http://mediadiversified.org/2014/03/17/first-boi-in-dressing-queer-in-the-corporate-world/

Nice! I felt fortunate that the last time I worked a corporate dress code job, it involved having to lift 50 lb objects over my head, so I basically had to adhere to the male dress code, because forcing employees to do this while wearing heels would result in a lot of workplace injuries and/or sexual discrimination suits.

Some legislative progress in Maryland:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/md-lawmakers-pass-legislation-banning-discrimination-against-transgender-people/2014/03/27/c455b43a-b5e8-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_story.html

yayyy

the trans student i mentioned upthread competed in debate yesterday and did great for her first time and had fun!!!

she has/had a lot of anxiety and she OVERCAME, it was wonderful!

Hi! How is everyone doing? I'm doing great! I've been pushing my gender presentation more and more toward the femme side and now I'm pretty much wearing 90% clothes made for women (except for underwear, I get uncomfortable without the support that boxer-briefs provide) and the reaction I've been getting has been 95% positive. :)

I'm thinking about getting microbraid extensions so I can have long hair, maybe with an undercut on one side? Also I've started shaving my face regularly and I need to learn more about makeup.

Hope you're all well!

That's awesome, Rev! I'm really happy for you. I'm in a weird space, myself, where almost all of the important people in my life know that I intend to transition and some of them are already using my preferred name and pronouns, but I haven't really started presenting in a more femme way, and am not really sure yet where to start. I'm considerably more at peace with myself than when I started posting in this thread, though. I'll join you in wishing everyone well!

mentioned this in the 77 teacher thread, but i asked my trans student if he wanted to be called a different name and he said yes and i am calling him that name now (and sir and him and he) and it feels p special

That's great, m bison! I'm really glad he's had your support, especially if his family isn't accepting.

xxp: Yeah, I've been kind of doing the opposite and openly changing my presentation in front of everyone while only really stopping to explain myself if asked other than a few confidants. On the other hand, I've started to reverting to introducing myself by my more feminine middle name which I was known by as a kid, rather than the more masculine first name I started going by in HS.

This gets a bit confused though, because I decided I'd continue to use my first name at work for simplicity's sake, but then I work for the tiny LGBTQ services component within a larger organization and it's like the other day I was tabling for them at a transgender film festival and I felt forced to use the name on my work materials I was handing out exactly when I would most like to use the other name. :/

(also btw, I bought my first pair of heels today and they're thiiiiiiiis cute)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BnaHl--CUAAz9AD.jpg

the rest of my outfit today (which I wore at work and to see my dad, since my sister apparently absconded my mom to the mountains without telling me and I wasn't able to see her on mothers day even tho I went to visit her, heh) although I wore flats, rather than the heels

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BnZaW1qCEAEnzD5.jpg

jic you miss it, make sure u peep my <3 earring

Yeah, names are tricky for me right now too; I still mostly introduce myself with my birth name when I don't feel like talking about being trans with people I've just met, which feels like backsliding, but hopefully that will change when I have a better sense of what I want to do with presentation. <3 the <3 earring, and the pattern of your heels seems to go really well with that of your jacket.

you look fly as fuck!

:)

so Justin Bond had some words on Facebook for the LGBT Word Police:

A Missive to My Community: I'm writing this because I want to be very clear on where I come down on the recent controversies around the language issues with regards to our trans-narratives. I've been an advocate for finding new, inclusive, thoughtful and evolved language for those of us in the trans and gender non-conforming communities for some time now. Therefore I feel personally compelled to weigh in on these latest dramas that are really annoying the shit out of me. In my opinion there is ABSOLUTELY nothing wrong with Heklina changing the name of Trannyshack in an effort to "rebrand" her legendarily inclusive, irreverent celebration of Queer fabulousness. But keep in mind that the reason she has "evolved" is because she's been forced to due to harassment from a group of people who have decided that instead of learning from our queer history of re-appropriating, owning, and disempowering words that ACCURATELY DESCRIBE WHO AND WHAT WE ARE -instead of taking those words that are sometimes used to hurt us by those who WILL HATE US NO MATTER WHAT and making them a part of what makes us wonderful, a small group of vocal "queers" has decided it's better pursue a shame-based agenda. Therefore, it seems, Heklina has decided it's easier to "rebrand" her party to avoid any more grief. That's her decision and I applaud her for doing what she feels she needs to do. It still makes me sad. I also think there was nothing wrong with the whimsical "Female or Shemale" game played on RuPaul's Drag Race -especially because the contestants couldn't even tell the difference. Hello! That's revolutionary!!! Not to mention the amazing talent displayed later in the episode by the transgender artists on the show which has now been pulled from the air. So. In lieu of standing up to the haters who seek to diminish us and our accomplishments and standing UNITED IN PRIDE IN OUR DIVERSITY these thoughtless "word police" instead go on the attack and achieve easy victories by harassing, silencing and shaming members of their own community and the allies who are thoughtful and sensitive enough to the reasons and feelings behind their anger that they are willing to listen and -as usual, blame themselves and make the changes because it's just EASIER to "evolve" back into silent, bullied shame. What they fail to recognize is that by banishing the use of the word TRANNY they will not be getting rid of the transphobia of those who use it in a negative way. What it does do is steal a joyous and hard-won identity from those of us who are and have been perfectly comfortable, if not delighted to BE TRANNIES, but the fact is WE ARE NOT GOING AWAY. In case you didn't know it WE'RE TOUGH! A reality check, if people think you are a tranny it's because you are perceived as one. OWN IT! If they think that's a bad thing then THEY ARE STUPID! If you don't wish to own that word or any other word used to describe you other than "male" or "female" then I hope you are privileged enough to have been born with an appearance that will allow you to disappear into the passing world or that you or your generous, supportive family are able to afford the procedures which will make it possible for you to pass within the gender binary system you are catering your demands to. If you're capable of doing that then GO ON AND DISAPPEAR INTO THE PASSING WORLD! Otherwise quit using your big, privileged -yet ignorant- mouths to make the words used to describe who we are a shameful thing. It is not shameful to be a tranny, a she-male, or any other word used to desctibe a gender variant individual. It's shameful to harass people for being comfortable with who they are and the words they choose to use to describe themselves when you aren't. That is my opinion on this ridicuous subject. As you can tell I'm angered by this trifling bullshit. We should be working on unifying our community and getting ourselves basic protections under the law. If everyone who is expending so much time and energy harassing their sisters about this word would harass their elected officials with the same amount of verve and fervor we'd be on the way to a much more trans-inclusive society. These words were written in love and anger.

Mx Bond

As a brief counterpoint, Red Durkin on sexual assault and the ambiguities of the language debates v is alluding to: https://www.facebook.com/reddurkin/posts/10152428660888599

Do we really have to have the argument about the right to *self*-identify however a person damn well wants, vs the right of people who are called that epithet in anger, objecting to outsiders who are not part of that group throwing that term around?

Because I feel like ILX and indeed the whole internet has really already covered this in depth.

One would hope so, but the debate goes tediously on.

In more consequential news in the US, Medicare's blanket exclusion of coverage for transition-related procedures has been overturned, although the ruling doesn't affect Medicaid or private insurance plans: http://transequality.org/news.html#Medicare2014

xp - some of the people using that term are not outsiders! That is the crux of the complexity of the issue

http://www.lgbtsr.org/2014/05/30/the-truth-about-trans-slurs/

If we are looking at the use of trans* slurs through the lens that says people should be strong enough to stand up for themselves, that this is just a joke and people shouldn’t take it seriously, we are casting aside those people who are not strong enough. We have chosen strength as a measure of worth. Is that not the same exact choice that is made by bullies? Have we not, ourselves, become bullies to the ones who are harmed by the use of words like tranny and shemale?

Do you think in the last year that no gay teenagers took their own lives because they were repeatedly referred to as fags; that no young trans* person ended their life because someone was calling them tranny? Should I consider these tragedies to be unimportant? Is someone’s life less valuable because they are harmed by words that we don’t find personally offensive?

In happier news, my band's playing our local TransPride fundraiser in July.

Justin Bond, I am sad to say, can go kick rocks.

*sigh*

I saw a very insightful post somewhere else on the internet talking about how a lot of these debates break down to the intractable differences between "gay culture" incubated in gay bars and "queer culture" incubated in feminist spaces.

My blanket assumption in these cases (and certainly in this one in particular) is that gay male culture is always wrong.

I've talked with a couple friends who do drag and they're just adamant in defense of the t-word as Mx. Bond and also to a few transgender friends who find this defense totally unconscionable and all I know is I'm more worried about the safety my friends who are perceived as trans people anywhere and everywhere they go than the rights of people who are seen as cis men 98% of their time to talk like assholes.

Another Obama admin thing that came down the pike a little while back, using Title IX to protect the rights of trans students:

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/transgender-students-protected-under-title-ix

To be fair, I've never felt comfortable in gay bars. Plus I'm still smarting from an incident last weekend where I was with a group of about 12 queer people of color, and we were effectively all kicked out of a gay bar after a white drag performer did an act based on offensive caricatures of black women and a couple members of our group tried to confront them about it.

ugh one of my gay friends (white) is rly into this online drag dude who str8 up in blackface and ive confronted him about this and he's basically like "oh its ok he's gay" smh

every time a young white cis gay man complains about feeling alienated from the gay community b/c they're not effeminate or w/e

something should happen. maybe just we all take a shot

It's just really frustrating and annoying how, whenever there is a dialogue within a community about whether it's possible / desirable / whatever to reclaim slurs (which is an interesting and laudable debate to have) it invariably means that a bunch of people outside that community will *use* that debate as a justification or excuse as to why it's ~perfectly OK~ for them to go on using that slur. (Let's not play games about what prompted the revive of this thread here.)

I dunno; my thought is almost always... if a group of marginalised people have got together and said "hey, this usage is offensive, please could you think about your language" my response is not to stop using the term because "OMG people might get ~offended~" but because of what continuing to use that term would say about *me*. It's like announcing in 24 point bold comic sans "I am an insensitive douchebag who thinks my right to LOLs is more important than other people's right to feel safe in their own skin". If that's the message you wanna give out, then go ahead, but be aware you're sending it. And it's never about the *word*, it's about the knot of beliefs and prejudices that power the word. Both of the tools used (both 1. asking people to think about their language before throwing slurs around and 2. people of the in-group using that term in reclamation) are addressed at the concept-knot, rather than the word. Saying "oh, other people use it, so it's *fine* for me to go on using it wherever, whenever" is a blank refusal to even look at their own concept-knot. Which is a double dick move, as far as I'm concerned.

The distinction between Drag and Trans is one of those thorny, knotted areas. They are two things that are not necessarily coming from the same place, and one group does not get to speak for the other group. I agree with Rev, that in terms of intersectionality, cis men who perform in drag occasionally are way up the fucking privilege hill from trans people who live their lives in danger 100% of the time, so they can STFU and find another word.

There's a long history of feminists Problematising Drag, and debating it. (This has contributed to the tension between Rad-Fems and trans people, due to a conflation of the problems of Drag with trans people.) It is not a settled question, by any means. Is Drag good, because it is queering gender, and smearing boundaries, and attacking heteronormative ideas of what it means to be female or male? Is Drag bad because it reinforces and perpetuates grotesque stereotypes of "femininity"? (Then again, can even "grotesque stereotypes", when used in a clever way, help to dismantle the gender binary? Maybe.) There have been some feminists who have argued that Drag in itself is the ~gender equivalent of Blackface~, and is therefore inherently offensive, even before bringing *actual* Blackface into it. (I don't agree, but I think they do raise interesting points that are worth addressing. "Problematising" does mean discussing the problems with, and whether they can be outweighed or resolved, *not* just outright "Condemning".)

But, still, Drag is not the same thing as being Trans at all, and when ~dudes who do drag~ try to speak for or indeed over Trans Women, I really think they need to take a seat.

'dick move' is a highly offensive sexist term btw

BTW, I mean, I don't necessarily agree that "drag is (necessarily) the gender equivalent of blackface". Actual blackface remains gross and offensive. Because this is ILX, I do feel I have to clarify that.

I saw a very insightful post somewhere else on the internet talking about how a lot of these debates break down to the intractable differences between "gay culture" incubated in gay bars and "queer culture" incubated in feminist spaces.

My blanket assumption in these cases (and certainly in this one in particular) is that gay male culture is always wrong.

― pugger pugger (benson) (The Reverend), Sunday, June 1, 2014 12:06 AM (8 hours ago)

If this is a post you can link to, as opposed to something that happened in passing on ILX, I would very much appreciate it if you could find it. Because this is basically the history of ~my problems and conflicts over sexuality and gender since the age of 15~ in a fucking nutshell. If I'd encountered "queer culture" as incubated in Feminist Spaces at the age of 15, instead of "gay culture" as incubated in gay bars, my life might have taken a very different shape. But I'm not even sure it had been invented at that point in the 80s.

I dunno; my thought is almost always... if a group of marginalised people have got together and said "hey, this usage is offensive, please could you think about your language" my response is not to stop using the term because "OMG people might get ~offended~" but because of what continuing to use that term would say about *me*. It's like announcing in 24 point bold comic sans "I am an insensitive douchebag who thinks my right to LOLs is more important than other people's right to feel safe in their own skin". If that's the message you wanna give out, then go ahead, but be aware you're sending it. And it's never about the *word*, it's about the knot of beliefs and prejudices that power the word. Both of the tools used (both 1. asking people to think about their language before throwing slurs around and 2. people of the in-group using that term in reclamation) are addressed at the concept-knot, rather than the word. Saying "oh, other people use it, so it's *fine* for me to go on using it wherever, whenever" is a blank refusal to even look at their own concept-knot. Which is a double dick move, as far as I'm concerned.

― Branwell with an N, Sunday, June 1, 2014 1:39 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This all otm, and honestly I've never cared for drag at all for a lot of reasons including the ones you decribe.

Subpost: Y'know, every time I pick up yet another yappy-headed little dude intent on chasing me creepily from thread to thread, hollering his little hate-crush at me, I realise that I am more and more fiiiiiine with it, if my language happens to represent me to them as a ~Misandrist~.

Rev, I have mixed feelings about Drag. It totally can be used in really interesting and thought-provoking and even just ~fun~ ways. I have learned a lot about gender and gender performance and the theatricality thereof, from Drag Queens. But it can also be just a repository for every lazy, bad stereotype about ~Femininity~. It's the cleverness of the performer, and the sensitivity of the audience that makes the difference. There's positive and negative renderings of Drag, there's positive and negative readings of Drag. It's complicated! But I think the conversation Drag raises is still one worth having.

Yeah, I feel that. It's just never appealed to me.

If this is a post you can link to, as opposed to something that happened in passing on ILX, I would very much appreciate it if you could find it. Because this is basically the history of ~my problems and conflicts over sexuality and gender since the age of 15~ in a fucking nutshell. If I'd encountered "queer culture" as incubated in Feminist Spaces at the age of 15, instead of "gay culture" as incubated in gay bars, my life might have taken a very different shape. But I'm not even sure it had been invented at that point in the 80s.

― Branwell with an N, Sunday, June 1, 2014 2:04 AM Bookmark

The reclamation of 'queer' didn't even start until 1990 or so although that doesn't necessarily mean the seeds of queer culture didn't already exist. It was an ACT-UP splinter group that was a big catalyst for that happening.

Oh god the comment was in *shudders* a comment section at The Stranger (prob in response to Dan Savage... hey, have I mentioned Dan Savage can go fuck himself? Dan Savage can go fuck himself... being a dick about this) lemme try to find it.

From here: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/05/28/justin-bond-on-rupaul-trannyshack-and-the-word-police

There's such a strange dichotomy between gay culture and queer culture. We don't talk to each other, share identities, occupy the same spaces, or even use the same vocabulary. Or when we do, like the word "queer", it means entirely different things. I've been completely baffled when I use the word "queer" and someone takes it to mean gay men. I don't know any queers who identify in any way as "tranny", "transsexual", or "drag king/queen", for example, and don't really understand those that do. We don't have the same cultural history -- gay male bar culture vs. feminist space culture.

We should absolutely understand and accept each other. But one of the groups obviously has more political and cultural power than the other -- you probably see entire TV series about gay culture more often than a single person who's part of queer culture in mainstream media. It's the responsibility of the group with more power to listen to and not hurt people in the less powerful group, if they don't want to be called out on it and lose cultural legitimacy.

Well I don't bother arguing/debating with you because you seem to be incapable to taking on any other view..

But you do exactly what you accused LJ of doing..."How can you possibly thinking I'm sexist, when I use sexist language like 'sausage party' and 'dick move'...and then carry on doing exactly that...

Terms like that are actually offensive to me..and I'd personally you rather didn't use them tbh

if a group of marginalised people have got together and said "hey, this usage is offensive, please could you think about your language" my response is not to stop using the term because "OMG people might get ~offended~" but because of what continuing to use that term would say about *me*.

I think an important aspect of this, in terms of the reactions and responses of people like Justin Bond and Annie Sprinkle, is that previously, for decades, they viewed themselves and trans people as part of the same marginalized community. Trannyshack has been around for almost 20 years, and people are now saying that the usage is offensive. And yes, language changes, and marginalized people have every right to think and re-think the language they want applied to them. However, there are plenty of people who are conservative about language, or just get set in their ways, whether it's appropriate terms for oppressed peoples or the oxford comma.

The day that you go and read a 101 and get it through your head what Sexism actually *is*, and what the word means with regards to societal power, is the day that I will engage you in conversation. Now go away with your little creepy crush and attempts to get me to pay attention to you and your derailments; grown-ups are talking.

Rev, I try to avoid Dan Savage for many many reasons, but I think that is a really good point, and one I'm going to try to look into further.

Well I don't bother arguing/debating with you because you seem to be incapable to taking on any other view..

But you do exactly what you accused LJ of doing..."How can you possibly thinking I'm sexist, when I use sexist language like 'sausage party' and 'dick move'...and then carry on doing exactly that...

Terms like that are actually offensive to me..and I'd personally you rather didn't use them tbh

― Sausage Party (Bob Six), Sunday, June 1, 2014 3:24 AM Bookmark

lololol "MISANDRY!" sit the fuck down dudebrah

It's not Savage who said that! Someone else in response to him.

I think an important aspect of this, in terms of the reactions and responses of people like Justin Bond and Annie Sprinkle, is that previously, for decades, they viewed themselves and trans people as part of the same marginalized community. Trannyshack has been around for almost 20 years, and people are now saying that the usage is offensive. And yes, language changes, and marginalized people have every right to think and re-think the language they want applied to them. However, there are plenty of people who are conservative about language, or just get set in their ways, whether it's appropriate terms for oppressed peoples or the oxford comma.

― sarahell, Sunday, June 1, 2014 3:24 AM Bookmark

Yeah, ime there's a ton of disconnect between different generations of LGBTQ people. A fair amount of older people under that umbrella abhor the word "queer" to this day but define themselves in terms the younger generation find passe or offensive. I just had a work meeting the other day (my day job is working with LGBTQ youth) where we discussed the possibility of abandoning the use of umbrella acronyms altogether because the teenagers we're trying to reach just simply aren't responding to that type of language.

yeah while queer is tossed or hurled around with great currency and intended positivity some people find it v offensive

Well I don't bother arguing/debating with you because you seem to be incapable to taking on any other view..

But you do exactly what you accused LJ of doing..."How can you possibly thinking I'm sexist, when I use sexist language like 'sausage party' and 'dick move'...and then carry on doing exactly that...

Terms like that are actually offensive to me..and I'd personally you rather didn't use them tbh

― Sausage Party (Bob Six), Sunday, June 1, 2014 3:24 AM Bookmark

lololol "MISANDRY!" sit the fuck down dudebrah

― pugger pugger (benson) (The Reverend), Sunday, June 1, 2014 5:37 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

looking for favorite button

rlv.zcache.com/chocolate_smiley_face_i_really_love_chocolate_button-rf2af6cd3bdaf45129626fdbe9fbcd20c_x7j3i_8byvr_512.jpg

http://s17.postimg.org/65vb30c5r/chocolate_smiley_face_i_really_love_chocolate_bu.jpg

It's not Savage who said that! Someone else in response to him.

― pugger pugger (benson) (The Reverend), Sunday, June 1, 2014 10:37 AM (4 hours ago)

Yeah, I know. But reading (albeit sound) comments threads about Savage generally requires paying attention to Savage, which is something i try to avoid.

Terms like that are actually offensive to me..and I'd personally you rather didn't use them tbh

― Sausage Party (Bob Six), Sunday, June 1, 2014 6:24 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol dude shut the fuck up

*Awed by the adult conversation*

Will watch and learn

it's always a good look to disrupt a thread with petty and infantile 'misandry' whines and then sit back with a patronizing Alfred E. Neuman grin on your face when you get called on it.

it is, quite possibly, a 'dick move' in fact

:D

Burning ears. Anyway, I've long accepted that petulantly attacking BB with the r-word in response to a not-unreasonable check-yr-ableism was a profound dick move, and regret it enough to ensure I never do such a classless thing again. Bob, you have no business picking fights on this of all threads, and neither do I, even if I look dashedly good in drag if I may say so myself (cis drag 'tourism' versus trans identity tho etc)

sistren and brethren, please

Imago, that was a thoroughly decent thing to say, and thank you.

The derail is tedious, because the things that Rev has been bringing up are really interesting, and particularly salient for me.

I'm just of the generation inbetween. ACT-UP was just slightly before my time, but still something I remember as a teenager. However, "Queer" is something I still think of as a thing yelled out of car windows at me, whether for dressing in a masc-presenting way, or walking with my girlfriend. And because of that, it's hard to identify with that word, even in a positive sense. Even though that word, that space of "Queer" as meaning "the huge grey area on the map which is neither 100% heterosexual nor 100% gay" is something that would have saved me so much grief over the course of my life.

So much regret, so much wasted self-loathing, so much time being forced into a biphobic closet because of people (usually in the gay club-subculture) saying things like "dick always wins" and that crap. So I carry a lot of resentment about that particular space/subculture, and both wish feminist queer space had existed sooner, but also wish it had a different name, because that one is so loaded.

But you can't win on either front - if you make up a brilliant new word for a necessary and needed new concept (e.g. Intersectionality) you'll get people going OMG SUCH A WEIRD ABSTRACT ACADEMIC WORD I CAN'T UNDERSTAND IT OH THE MULTI-SYLLABIC HORROR. But if you take a word that already exists and use it for a new meaning (e.g. privilege) then you get all this resistance to the new meaning, and people unable to shift from one usage to another, and getting defensive about the old meaning rather than understand or adapt to the new meaning. And I kinda feel like "Queer" is one of those words that is in the latter category.

I haven't said anything about 'misandry', and I don't think BB is misandrist.

I just think it's hypocritical to be gender and sexism aware and continue to use sexist language.

DO YOU GET HOW SEXISM WORKS?

DO YOU ALSO SAY THINGS LIKE "WHY ISNT THERE A WHITE HISTORY MONTH?"

as a man i feel i'm reclaiming slurs like cockfarmer, dickwit and complete fucking tool

Hey! Don't you dare say I'm "nuts". That's OUR word!

Subpost: Y'know, every time I pick up yet another yappy-headed little dude intent on chasing me creepily from thread to thread, hollering his little hate-crush at me, I realise that I am more and more fiiiiiine with it, if my language happens to represent me to them as a ~Misandrist~.

― Branwell with an N, Sunday, 1 June 2014 09:56 (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This (not your post, the offending one) just made me do a double-take. Bizarre. Killfiled.

bob, calling women out for "sexist" language in response to completely harmless phrases like "dick move" is never not going to be a bad look. and this thread is about the worst possible place to try it on. a word of advice from the twice shy.

It's a hobby of his.

"two bald men arguing over a comb"

No sexist comments please

― mohel hell (Bob Six), Wednesday, 23 April 2014 15:35 (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

One of the worst examples of casual gender based derogatory stereotyping I've seen for a while on ilx

― mohel hell (Bob Six), Wednesday, 23 April 2014 15:37 (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(again, immediately after a BB post)

Gold medalist in the False Equivalencylmpics he is

it's fine if the bald men in the comb scenario are bald by choice but that should be made clear

getting strange ass all around the globe, you may doubt the earnestness with which I think this is sexist language is expressed but it's hardly the equivalent of DO YOU ALSO SAY THINGS LIKE "WHY ISNT THERE A WHITE HISTORY MONTH?" so you get a podium place too

Dafuq

It's actually rooted in the exact same kind of disingenuous "won't someone think of the privileged" bullshit thinking so i'd say it's at least a first cousin, captain pedant.

The idea that trans* or genderqueer people could have a thread to discuss issues we face as relevant to our lives, that's just too big an ask, isn't it.

(sorry, derail partly my fault)

Yes apologies here as well...proceed

Not your fault, but trolls gonna troll, derailers gonna derail, grandstanders gonna grandstand, but the end result is still that the actual discussion gets shut down, which was the OP's desire in the first place. I am just really tired of this. It's tedious and exhausting and fucking boring.

However, "Queer" is something I still think of as a thing yelled out of car windows at me, whether for dressing in a masc-presenting way, or walking with my girlfriend. And because of that, it's hard to identify with that word, even in a positive sense.

Yeah, I guess it's easier for me to accept because I've barely heard it used as an insult in my life, and even before I learned of its current connotations, it always seemed kind of a quaint, outdated feel to it, like I dunno "poofter" or "fruit" or something. Those times I did hear it, it was used in kind of a jocular, teasing manner that didn't pack the sting of epithets like "faggot" or "homo", but I respect that other peoples' experiences with regard to that word may be different.

Yeah, I guess it's just proof of how words change, usages change, connotations change, both from neutral to bad, but bad to neutral, too. But it's important to be sensitive to or at least aware of all of both past and present meanings.

WOW FUCK THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

http://www.glaad.org/blog/chicago-sun-times-remove-grossly-inaccurate-op-ed-and-apologizes

it IS the position of major pubs to present opposing views, even when they are liars.

Heinous though the column is, it's no worse than any Bush administration/David Brooks/Bill Kristol horror that the WaPo publishes every day. Columns elide info or outright lie all the time.

National Review writers really are the scum of the earth

I liked this.

http://upw-prod-images.global.ssl.fastly.net/nugget/536b94b14e2f5ad4ba000070/attachments/bflowchart-5e68227d7254fc2ffec3bdde34900bac.jpg

Um. "Gender-determining brain structures" is some pretty leaky science, TBH, but it's not an argument I want to get into ever again.

oh I just liked the overall message etc.

it's no worse than any Bush administration/David Brooks/Bill Kristol horror that the WaPo publishes every day. Columns elide info or outright lie all the time.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, June 4, 2014 6:24 AM Bookmark

ok sure, but this is a lot more personal to me.

There's been some truly hateful stuff going round social media today about "non-binary" people.

So someone else reposted rather amazing piece, which is old, but I feel expressed something rather profound:

http://cnlester.wordpress.com/2014/04/14/why-were-all-non-binary/

It's not about whether an individual is "binary" or "non-binary" - it is about acknowledging that we live in a non-binary world, when it comes to human gender.

the stuff some prominent media feminists have been coming out with on trans issues is absolutely shocking. not even coded.

a more +ve story - r kelly's 13-yr-old son came out as trans. i didn't know where to put it initially, as he seems to have so little contact with his dad that the link seems tenuous, and he explicitly says that he doesn't like the way the media have caught on - but anyway, his ask.fm is just a really touching and encouraging place, and all kudos to his mother

http://ask.fm//MI_YLNO_NAMUH

I haven't had a chance to read all of this yet but looks interesting and relevant: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-tobia/genderqueer-professional-_b_5476239.html

Deconstructing "Professional Appearance"* is a very very interesting debate on so many levels and so many different axis, and it's such an insidious thing, and so hard to fight, because the costs are so high. It's one of the places where all the really pernicious -isms meet the worst aspects of ... (god I feel like such a college student for wanting to type ~capitalism~, maaaan here) but it really does show the whole concept of "Corporate" as a blunt instrument of erasure.

But, on the other hand, even while trying to read that article, I kept getting distracted by the sidebars and adverts and trappings all around the Huffington Post site, and realising that they have now codified "Queer" as a marketing demographic, which makes me feel revolted and icky and pressed into some corporate mould in a different, but still bothersome way.

*One of my favourite stories to tell of ~how I get things so wrong~, was when I first got to NYC, honestly, I was about 23 and had no idea how to dress myself. I'd gone to a school with a uniform, and grown up wearing charity shop clothes. So a couple of weeks into my first Proper Office Job, I was taken aside by my boss and told that there had been complaints about my dress, and though she appreciated my hard work, could I maybe dress more professionally? And I confessed that I had no idea how to "dress professionally", what should I do? So she told me to walk about the office and look at how all the other ~successful people~ in the office dressed, maybe surreptitiously peer under desks and check out people's shoes, because apparently my footgear was a problem. So I did exactly that, and walked around peering at board members as they came out of their offices.

Then went home and my housemate took me clothes-shopping in this big warehouse in Brooklyn, and I kitted myself out in what I had seen, and came into work on Monday wearing a grey suit that some old man had probably died in, and shirt and tie and clompy black brogues. And my boss came in and saw what I'd done and was just like *headdesk* "Branwell, noooo...." I was sacked from that job soon after. ~Can't imagine why~

I mean, I tell this story like it's really funny, and make out like I was so much more naive (well, I was, but also, I knew what I was doing, though I didn't understand the reaction I'd get) but then again, this was the same workplace that I tell the green card story about. It's kinda LOL, but it's also... y'know.

Sorry, I generally hate the "drop a link on a thread without explaining or reacting or otherwise commenting on its contents" school of ILX posting, but there's this, too:

http://the-toast.net/2014/06/05/fanciest-genderqueer-youll-ever-meet/

On perceptions of "genderqueer", class intersection and "fancy".

been thinking about the media feminists reacting so strongly against the label "cis" the other day, and...even if they think it's because gender is a construct and weapon of the patriarchy (which, yes, but more about how narrowly socially acceptable performances of gender are defined), it's at root a denial of the trans experience. it's what we all talked about on branwell's gender thread really.

I haven't seen the twitterbarney but there's one aspect I can sympathise with: many prominent cis feminists, well before they were accomplished and recognised as such, had to run a gauntlet of abuse re. their gender or presentation of same by individual men (in addition to The Patriarchy bullshit we all suffer with and rail against to varying degrees). If they're being mean to transpeople on that basis, though, ARGH, the following words are important:

Intersection
Continuum
Spectrum.

We're all on one somewhere and the sooner we collectively understand that, the better.

No, sorry, I just don't buy that shit, because there are loads of feminists who went through all that same shit and yet still managed to come out of it managing to get through their lives without bullying trans women.

There's a part of me that thinks it's that same tight ringfencing, of people who have had to fight for a tiny modicum of power, hang onto that power for all its worth, yank the ladders up behind them. (Same as the persistent, recurring stink of racism within ~White Feminism~; I think it's telling that it's often the *same people* involved.) Someone who has had power used against them their entire lives, and finally gets a tiny bit of power, they have that sense of "I get to make the rules now, I set the boundaries" but instead of using those experiences of having been the subject of oppression to empathise with others, and attempt to find common ground with people being marginalised in other ways, they use it to exclude people worse off than them. Which is so counter-productive, and in which case, Patriarchy Wins Again (mwah hah hah hah!)

It's just infuriating, because there have been so many times I've tried to read TERFy logic, and it's so frustrating, because there are so many points where their logical argument goes A (yes, I agree) therefore B (yup, agree there too) therefore C (WHOAAAA NELLY NO, WAIT WTF). And part of that, I think is a logical error, of conflating "Gender is socially constructed" with "Gender is entirely a social construct" and then claiming that social constructs do not exist, or are purely imaginary or something.

I dunno; it's just that blunt-faced denial that other people's experiences are what they say they are and that a huge part of the ~feminist project~ is supposed to be believing that and practising that, even in the face of people who have not even had access to those kinds of experiences insisting that they cannot possibly be.

I mean, I can understand to a certain extend, the idea of the right to reject labels that are applied to you without your consent (rejecting negative labels like "bitch" or "slut" or "bossy" or whatever) but it's that weird mindset where it seems like people are rejecting "cis" not because it's applied to them without their consent, but because they object to the very concept, and are tainting the word with some negative connotation that it does not inherently have! It's one thing to say "I am not Cis, I feel very much non-binary, thank you"; that is a perfectly reasonable response. But that whole "there is NO SUCH THING as cis!!!" is just unaccountable.

Blah blah blah I feel like a broken record at this point and I have a garden to weed.

But mostly, just wanted to say "but I was hated on by the Patriarchy/individual sexists on my way up the ladder!!!" is just a pretty piss poor reason to throw shit at people on the ladders below you. Not buying it.

TERFs get no sympathy from me, just so we're clear. And I'm not buying it either, because I just plain don't buy allowing once-bullied people to perpetuate cycles of bullying/ganging up once one's 'gang' forms as if they're passing a particularly troublesome parcel. I wasn't terribly hetero-normative growing up (how many seven-year-olds toga themselves up in a zigzag afghan and scream "I'm a DRAG QUEEN!" while running around the neighbours' lawn, I ask you) and I got a lot of shit for it until I was about 16. If someone tried to apply cis to me in a very personal, hurtful way (as opposed to a theoretical, spectrumy way) I think my response would be the 'no thanks' one rather than the no-such-thing example.

Yeah, there's the rub. "I don't know that that fully applies to me?" is a valid response. "That doesn't exist" is not.

Ugh, I broke down and checked out what went down on twitter and all I can say is fuck TERFs forever, especially when just in the past couple days the body of a trans immigration reform activist in Anaheim was found behind a Dairy Queen, and a trans teenager here in Seattle who a bunch of my friends knew committed suicide. Straight to hell with that lot.

re: "Professional dress" - This is another good article I read not too long ago. Though the author identifies as a cis woman, she's working through a lot of the same things while trying to figure out how to present as butch in a corporate world that demands she wear dresses and heels:

http://mediadiversified.org/2014/03/17/first-boi-in-dressing-queer-in-the-corporate-world/

brazilian mecha ‏@fujoshidad

@CCriadoPerez 'we are all nonbinary' is the new 'i dont see race'

Ugh, I'm so sorry to hear about your friends' friend, Rev. I think I missed most of the Twitter harrassment toward non-binary people, and I don't want to ask anyone to dredge it back up, but was the Sarah Ditum blog post the catalyst?

Actually, never mind: there's no reason to give TERF discourse more attention here.

Yeah, on one level, I just feel like... ugh, stop giving the oxygen of publicity to TERFs, with a few notable exceptions*, they make a lot of noise but they are not the ones killing trans women and dumping their bodies behind Dairy Queens, why can't we direct the outrage and the vitriol towards those monsters, as well as merely old-fashioned feminists on twitter. (But maybe I'm just all out of outrage at the moment and trying to cut down the anger in my life right now, so TERFs are just something to avoid, for me, at the moment..)

*The exception being a noted TERF who I am not going to name here, with a nasty habit of genuinely vicious outing trans women's birth names and targeting their employers and using the legal system to make people's lives hell.

But then again, it does all form part of the same ecosystem of denial and erasure and hatred.

Basically, I just think that TERFs and MRAs should go off and form their own colony together in the desert somewhere, where they can live out each other's worst nightmares forever.

Also, I know her heart is in the right place, but this: "'we are all nonbinary' is the new 'i dont see race'" reads as much "throw non-binary people under the bus" as the crap it's against. I don't think it's helpful.

Should there be gender segregation w.r.t. restrooms & other public facilities at all? This is a serious, non-troll qn; I'm just curious about the take of people who know a lot more about this stuff than I do. I feel invested in the gender politics of restroom access because I have Crohn's disease & have to use public restrooms fairly often. Feel free to dismiss/ignore.

You know what the best loo setup I have seen recently was? A whole corridor of individual loo-lettes, each with its own door and lock, and everybody of every gender had to queue to use them.

I mean, why is it such a big deal to gender segregate public toilets? (And why is it so important for trans women to be able to access them?) Because SOME men feel so entitled to the bodies of people that read as "women" that if they are undressed or vulnerable for any reason - including relieving themselves - that they feel entitled to attack them.

I feel like I'm probably going to get piled on for even saying that. But the whole hundreds of years of "modesty" codes which have resulted in gender segregation of loos, changing rooms, locker rooms, basically boil down to "women cannot be seen naked, because men cannot control themselves." Which is total rape culture bullshit, I agree. But when trans women actify (is that even a word? I don't know that it is) to use gender-appropriate toilets, it is often because it is *their* safety that is at stake.

So, y'know, self-locking loo-lettes work for me.

sorry for the following quick derail: actify is listed in merriam-webster online as another word for activate, but I have no idea how you were using it just now

I was using it in the sense of trying to cram the political sense of "agitate" and "perform activism" into a short catchy verb but I'm not sure it works.

Yeah, the individual full-door rooms would definitely be ideal to me. I've seen those before & I'd love to see more of them, but I guess it is less economical in high-capacity venues? idk.

(the WORST restroom setup I've ever seen = a men's room with a trough & a stall-less toilet just out in the open and no door lock. I stepped in there and got freaked out and ended up going to another establishment to use the restroom. I am big on privacy!)

Thanks for responding!

the toilet debate is important insofar as trans users need to feel/be safe rather than re: cis users' feelings.

in r kelly's son's ask.fm, he said he used the toilet in the nurse's room iirc

a club here has a setup for a unisex bathroom I like, a big row of individual stalls + a few urinals tucked around a corner + a communal washing station

Also, I know her heart is in the right place, but this: "'we are all nonbinary' is the new 'i dont see race'" reads as much "throw non-binary people under the bus" as the crap it's against. I don't think it's helpful.

― you go PUNCHING yourself in... THE DICK! (Branwell with an N), Monday, June 16, 2014 1:39 AM Bookmark

Eh, I don't see this as an attack or erasure of non-binary people. If anything, it's pushing against the erasure of the former statement.

#HowToSpotACisPerson has been a good one to follow today

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23HowToSpotACisPerson&src=typd

timely; my new office is casually proposing unisex toilets and everyone is o_O
Ally McBeal amirite

Unisex toilets, as in shared washing up area, and urinals out in a space that women have to use just provokes in me a deep, instinctive FUCK NO.

The only way unisex toilets really work for me is if they are entirely self contained.

But, this may also be due to my perceiving loos as a safe space for MH issues, and I do not want to have to explain to strangers why I am crying in the toilet if I am having a bad MH day.

shared basins ok but I prefer separate M/F areas for cubicles.
ours would be entirely self-contained cubicles (but not designated M/F at all) in a shared space ie no urinals

The urinals in the bathroom I described are hidden around a corner from the rest of the bathroom behind a sign that says "urinals", no one even would see them unless they specifically went over there. (Plus the stall doors are totally solid and not open air.)

I really like this on the #howtospotacisperson tag:

https://twitter.com/ixKylie/status/478619667888476160

Kylie Jack ‏@ixKylie 1h

I’m not into this #howtospotacisperson HT. As Ive said before, cis people should always disclose.

no one even would see them unless they specifically went over there.

Really not familiar with the WHOOPS MADE YOU LOOKIT MY DICK tactics of ~~~~****SOME****~~~~ str8 dudes much, huh.

I mean, true, if a dude really wants to show you his dick, he will do it to you on the street or in hallways or staircases or wherever, regardless! (Yes, I am speaking from experience.) But I would rather not give them the opportunity to do it in what I think of as my "safe space".

I really like this on the #howtospotacisperson tag:

https://twitter.com/ixKylie/status/478619667888476160

Kylie Jack ‏@ixKylie 1h

I’m not into this #howtospotacisperson HT. As Ive said before, cis people should always disclose.

― The Reverend, Monday, June 16, 2014 8:59 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not sure i get this one--a riff on 'trans people should always disclose'?

yes

Yes.

Branwell, I am sorry, you are right. This is my privilege as someone who is usually perceived as male speaking. :/

(Also it's a gay{-ish?} club, although that definitely does not mean there aren't sometimes noxious str8dudes there.)

Justin Vivian Bond has a longer explication of his defense of the word "tranny" in The Stranger's new trans-centered queer issue: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/about-the-word-tranny/Content?oid=19946137

Wasn't the first one long enough?

I really don't have the time to read anyone whose first sentence is equating "can you be more sensitive with your language" with "OMG CENSORSHIP!!!!!11 ~CONSERVATIVE~!!!"

You got your shovel, you just keep digging, but don't expect me to watch.

Anyway kinda burying the lead there I guess; The Stranger's whole queer issue is about transgender rights:

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/queer-issue-2014/Content?oid=19946096

Sorry to just do the 'link drop' thing; I don't really feel this is an area where I am qualified to comment. I am trying to learn tho & I appreciate this thread for how much I have learned from it.

Sorry, Crabbits, that "shovel" comment was directed at Mx. Justin, not at you, in case there was any doubt.

Oh no, I know! That said, I always have my shovel in hand for about the same reason.

eg constantly making mistakes and saying disagreeable shit
also for gardening

I somehow have little faith in an issue on transgender rights from a paper edited by Dan Savage.

And written by Albert Camus! #shoveling

who needs productive discussion about modes of interaction wrt gender identity when we can react and react to insensitive language.

I would argue that using insensitive language makes it difficult to have a productive discussion

agreed.

I just discovered this thread when I was trying to ctrl+f "Transformers."

A friend's take on tensions within LGBT activism, touching on the language debate in which Mx. Bond's essay takes part: http://prospect.org/article/45-years-after-stonewall-lgbt-movement-has-transphobia-problem

hiiiiiiii

https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xaf1/t1.0-9/10251916_10202958359054705_8527134742160850902_n.jpg

Rad! (Is that CeCe with you, Rev?)

it is. I also danced with her for a moment :P

Amazing!

holy shit!!!!

we exchanged a couple of letters but you danced with her i'm so jealous

and watched her rap along to "Beez in the Trap" iirc

rev :D

http://lowerdens.tumblr.com/post/90448691182/on-pride

Can I please ask, in future, anyone who would like to participate in this thread, not to link dump?

Firstly because this is an emotive topic for those of us that are affected by these issues. Secondly because, as you can see several times upthread, some people have been using this thread not-in-good-faith.

If you have something to share, please can you explain what you are sharing - what it's about - and why you are sharing it? I really think that would be helpful in terms of generating respect and good faith, and it would lead to more productive discussions. Can I just ask you folks to do that? Thanks!

xp - Jana Hunter is really great, thanks for posting that.

http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/

Mordy posted this Jack Halberstam blog entry in the creepy liberalism thread but I'm curious to what people in this thread think of it. I feel a bit of unease about the tendency towards individualism I sometimes see in queer circles and so a lot of what Halberstam says here resonates, but then his Gaga feminism thing doesn't really seem to account for the kinds of suffering that lead to that individualism seeming like a necessity. Maybe I think both sides are too positive about how self-construction can work? But I dunno.

I think Halberstam is right to call for more granular, intersectional analysis of marginalization and violence, which is why it's disappointing that his narrative about the spoiled queer kids of today seems to crudely efface experiential and material differences among LGBT youth for the sake of a tidy story about generations. On the whole, I agree with Natalia Cecire's reservations (see http://nataliacecire.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-neoliberal-rhetoric-of-harm.html). I'm also amused to see that Halberstam's essay has already spawned a Twitter parody, the work of the game designer and critic Merritt Kopas: https://twitter.com/halberslam.

I also rolled my eyes at Halberstam's use of Justin Vivian Bond's open letter: no one is stopping v from identifying as v pleases; what is offensive is when v casts other trans women as censorious and conformist if they don't want to accept being called what has mostly become a transmisogynistic slur.

(Credit where it's due: I see now that mattresslessness linked to Cecire's response first on the creepy liberalism thread.)

(i guess i picked the wrong week to order my first halberstam book, huh)

I've reached a point where, right now, I no longer have the emotional energy to read, digest, unpack, and respond to the ~latest outrageous thinkpiece~. It's work, and it's (often unpaid work, unlike the people who get commissioned to write the big ~thinkpieces~) work that marginalised people are expected to pick up and carry on top of the stream of bullshit that is living a marginalised life. (I mean, how's that for ~neoliberal~?)

I am glad, however, that other people have the time and the energy to sit down and unpick them. These are two other pieces which have been circulating in response. I have still not read the original piece, and may never find the energy to do so, but I on reading these pieces, they feel packed with good points.

On the failure of "Academia" to accommodate practices developed in Activism:

http://navigatethestream.tumblr.com/post/90947046597/another-anti-trigger-warning-article-has-come-and-im

On the failure of Halbermeschdude to actually understand the difference between Content Warnings and Trigger Warnings and the uses and meaning of either:

http://alicebreckless.wordpress.com/2014/07/07/trigger-warning-a-response-to-jack-halberstam/

thanks, I'll read all these later. And I'll also note for now that I kinda scanned the Halberstam piece before posting it here, noting the interesting bits about relating to race and class struggles and seemingly not noting the willfully outrageous pull-yr-socks-up tone, which I'm not at all down with.

I think Natalia Cecire already basically nailed the problems with Halberstam's essay, but Julia Serano has now weighed in, and has some interesting recollections about tensions within 90s queer and trans activism:

http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/07/regarding-generation-wars-some.html

lol halberstam

Hardly an event would go by back then without someone feeling violated, hurt, traumatized by someone’s poorly phrased question, another person’s bad word choice or even just the hint of perfume in the room. People with various kinds of fatigue, easily activated allergies, poorly managed trauma were constantly holding up proceedings to shout in loud voices about how bad they felt because someone had said, smoked, or sprayed something near them that had fouled up their breathing room. Others made adjustments, curbed their use of deodorant, tried to avoid patriarchal language, thought before they spoke, held each other, cried, moped, and ultimately disintegrated into a messy, unappealing morass of weepy, hypo-allergic, psychosomatic, anti-sex, anti-fun, anti-porn, pro-drama, pro-processing post-political subjects.

i interviewed for a job phonebanking at an environmentalist n.g.o. and i was told repeatedly, in advance, on the phone, in person, in documents, 'this is a scent-free environment'

apparently that one really stuck in halberstam's craw too

yeah, I'm old enough to remember lotsa folk who were environmentally ill in the Bay Area (before the Todd Haynes "Safe" film) and I gotta say, I am with Halberstam here a bit, and perhaps that's my generational prejudice talking. But I clearly remember the slaying-the-gay-father dramas that went down as the hip radical queers of the 90s got rid of the bad-old-gays who were trapped in their essentialist paradigms, etc. and on one level, yes, useful theoretical work was being done, but on another level, there was a drama of self-serving "victory over the old folks" going on, in which Foucault was in, the Mattachine Society was out, and anyone who didn't use exactly the words that we used was guilty of various sins that we would police in order to pump up our own cultural capital and feel younger / cooler / more enlightened. And watching (and chuckling along at some of the jokes, admittedly) as young trans activists revile someone like halberstam on Twitter w fake/parody accounts kinda just takes me back and makes me rethink the Queer Nation / ACT UP era that I came out in, and wonder about what was going on then, and whether queer culture might do generational difference with more or less venom than other cultures? Elizabeth Freeman to thread here on "temporal drag", stat.

I've read the Cecire and Serano pieces, and yeah, they have some useful points, about the pre-emptive gensture of "overing"-via-Ahmed, etc. so I get those critiques- but I also see something going on in people's vicious Twitter reactions to Halberstam that seems to me to reveal an aggression and, yes, age-ist hostility that sits rather oddly beside the demand for a world in which everything be served up pre-labeled with trigger warnings, like a mom cutting the crust off sandwiches- these ostensibly sensitive people can be awfully cruel, apparently.

to be fair to crustless sandwiches, they are delightful.

The weird thing about this "generational war" idea is that I can distinctly remember having endless discussions about content/trigger warnings, deciding whether to use them, whether they were protection or censorship, deciding ultimately they were no more harmful and slightly more useful than film ratings systems... back in the 90s.

Side point: When you read someone acting "with aggression" on twitter, or elsewhere, kindly take a moment to think about how much defensive behaviour and aggressive behaviour can look alike when viewed from outside. When someone returns hostility for hostility, is that really "aggression"?

But really, I don't think this is the thread for all that.

ostensibly sensitive people can be awfully cruel qft

"People who have been treated cruelly their entire lives can sometimes return cruelty with the same cruelty they have learned at the hands of others" qft

nobody's perfect

yeah, MCS is definitely the silliest thing my activist queer friends get up in arms about. I want to just start yelling "PSEUDOSCIENCE!" at people sometimes

xps

just today read the Serano response, really good

(also I'm happy today cause I found out my friend is gonna be able to get the top surgery he wants!)

commentary by porpentine

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
the only real feminism is meme feminism

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
if your ideas can't make it viral, you should consider whether you're a real feminist or not, and if those ideas in fact suck?

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
i completely agree that feminism is for everyone. it is for everyone who can generate enough social media buzz, not no-follower randos

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
there are two kinds of women. women who can go viral, and women who are randos

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
but there is a problem when transgendered individuals have male socialized virality and not female socialized virality

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
there are just feminine and masculine ways of liking or faving a post and some people have the socialization for that

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
would i accept a transgendered female identified person as part of a woman and transgendered female identified person movement? absolutely

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
But they need to get the female socialized favs. We need to get on Buzzfeed. On the Atlantic. On Bustle. On the Times. This is core

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
Until people see that transgendereds are exactly like them, they will think they are not like them. Like a dog or opossum.

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
Do you know when the killing of transgendered female people stops? It stops when we have enough articles in the Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Bustle.

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
Do you care about transgendered females not having health care, hormones, housing, food? Make a VIDEOGAME with a TRANSGENDERED CHARACTER

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
Do you know why people were killing & discriminating against transfemales hundreds of years ago? Because there were no inclusive videogames

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
If someone comes up to you and tells you they were "abused" or "assaulted", just stop drop and roll. Roll right out of the building

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
Because you know what's really abusive? Trying to guilt someone with what happened to YOU. Ever hear of TMI?

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
There is a time and a place to be abused and it is by someone who is not well known or important or socially connected!

@aliendovecote · Jul 24
And if you have less followers than them, I'm sorry, but maybe you were asking for it? They are obviously going to out-viral you

is there a point to posting a hostile, sarcastic missive with an indiscernible point (or even POV) itt?

The only point was that I liked it, and I think her point is pretty discernible. As someone very connected to twitter and Internet culture and the blogoverse, she's upset and irritated by well-connected feminist bloggers co-opting and policing trans women's thoughts and identities for clicks. She laments that the discussion and writing she sees most focuses on trivial issues instead of the issues that affect trans women most: violence, housing insecurity, unemployment. I admit that her being involved in game development and writing probably influences what she reads and what discussions are peripheral to her, but her tweets show that she casts a wider net than that, too.

A variety of this click/like/follow visibility thing came up here on ilx after the TN-C reparations article was published. Some guy's tweet was linked to on the thread where the article was being discussed, and the guy was basically dismissed for sort of sub tweeting and also for not having enough followers, but what ilx didn't notice or look into was that behind that guy's tweet was a conversation happening among black women, that the guy, who was twitter-follower-challenged, didn't really originate the conversation, and that the conversation regarding that article that the group of black women were having didn't even register as existing.

What criticisms of theirs that I remember are:

- black women have been writing and talking about those issues for years in the academy and they weren't getting credit
- these same women write painstakingly for peer review while potentially legitimate criticism of TN-C's article is drowned in click bait noise and the usual white supremacist garbage
- TN-C seems to think America is worth saving (some of the black women writing have a different attitude). TN-C is spinning his wheels idealistically instead of focusing on pragmatic means of tactical interest convergence.

That's all I can remember!

Porpentine talking about clicks and follows and the salience of her and other trans women's opinions and identities seems appropriate for this thread. The immense power and noise of the new yellow press and the make-a-buck savior mentality of do-gooder liberalism seems pertinent, too.I don't think this is some tortuous extrapolation.

and that the conversation regarding that article that the group of black women were having didn't even register as existing.

amazing that a bunch of tweets along the lines "How dare TNC speak about women's hair" didn't lead us back to the discussion of which you speak

There's some validity to Porpentine's tweets, but their lack of specificity means they lose some force. Her comments on abuse and invisibility are also complicated, for me, by knowing that at least one friend of a friend, along with several other people, has called out Porpentine as having been emotionally abusive towards her, and I don't feel I have grounds to doubt her or others' claims. (Of course, having acted abusively obviously doesn't exclude having experienced abuse, so it's complicated.)

Anyway, Julia Serano has some useful critical comments on the recent New Yorker article on TERFs here: http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/07/two-articles-related-to-femininity-and.html

I was going to post this to the Butch/Dapper Style thread until I realised that is actually on the Style board and presumably primarily for style tips and links to stuff you can buy or at least style blogs, so, uh - recent PBS segment on dapper/genderqueer style which also touches on a few recent fashion advertising campaigns with trans models:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/right-handsome-clothing-gender-non-conformists-rise/
(video, though there is a transcript, which reads OK on its own but is a little confusing in places without the video)

These people all look awesome but they are all also v skinny and I am still struggling not with lacking the right to be handsome but with the right not to be handsome or pretty or anything in between, but hey, more power to those people

xps: ok, I understand now but when I first read them I couldn't even determine whether it was a trans woman speaking! So I was very confused.

She seemed to be shooting in every direction and I couldn't determine which tweets were genuine and which were sarcasm.

Spacecadet, that link would have been fine on the Butch/Dapper thread ("style", to me, is so much more than just photos of clothes and where to buy them, it is about the semiotics of clothing itself, what it means, etc. which that link certainly goes into.) But I guess it also certainly belongs here... Though, to me, the most interesting but disconcerting bit to me, which I suppose is just because it is an American programme, is talking about pushing a growing acceptance of Trans/genderqueer people and issues because of the growing *financial* clout of the LGBT demographic. Which on one level is Market Capitalism showing how "Neo-Liberalism" *can* in point of fact have a liberalising effect on a society, because it's impossible to ignore how lucrative that certain market is. But also showing exactly how *gross* the "liberalising" effect of Neo-Liberalism is, because it seems to imply that only demographics which are perceived as lucrative will be tolerated, and the whole thing gets turned into a ~lifestyle~ for the positioning of consumer products, rather than an exploration of gender and identity and meaning, and just... wow, no, gross.

And yeah, the message that comes through the filter of Class, is that the current class signifier is to be very thin, and you can be accepted and marketed to if you look rich, thin, attractive, can afford a $1500 suit. Which is something that other people are fighting on multiple fronts to keep the fuck out of this. (The link, I can't remember if I put it above or on the dapper thread about the perception of genderqueers as "fancy" and highly Classed.)

I mean, it's a conversation worth having, but I don't know about having it here or having it on the other thread. When Viceroy and I came up with the idea of this thread, I didn't see it turning out the way it did. Like, I wanted a space for genderqueer and trans* persons to share our own experiences and discuss the issues affecting our lives. Kinda like the Girl thread or the Gay thread but for genderqueers. Except it hasn't really turned out that way, and I guess ILX maybe needed a general "Trans Discussion Thread" where people could dump links and discuss news items or, y'know, Cis people can perform "caring about Trans* issues" or "shout at trans people" or whatever.

But that does crowd out individuals wanting to discuss the minutia of their lives, and that issues of "how do I get away from performing pretty OR performing handsome and just have the right to BE" seem trivial by comparison with "Here is the latest Outrage and 50 blogs discussing it". But I do actually think that those trivial "how the fuck do I work my life in this space" questions are also important, and deserve a space for discussion. But maybe not in a place where people are link-dumping outrages, because it can be uncomfortable to have try to address our small and very personal issues in a room full of Big Important Political Issues. (The Personal *is* Political, yes, but... rooms full of strangers demanding explanations and Debate! versus rooms full of friends who have been through the same thing and are facing the same issues and just talking about them.)

This quote from that piece kinda gets at that tension, though:

RACHEL TUTERA: Yes it has been emotional for sure. Shopping or wearing clothes seems like a really mundane thing. But actually it’s, like, incredibly meaningful and incredibly powerful and it can really, like, make or break an identity.

S.H.O.P.P.I.N.G. I mean, it's so trivial, because it's what girls do, it's what gays do, and should not be afforded attention because it's mundane. (That attitude can go fuck itself in orifices.) S.H.O.P.P.I.N.G. and turning our most personal and intimate details into the driving forces of market capitalism, that's a different question, and one I'm still not sure how to resolve.

so yeah, I posted this on fb last night. I didn't really plan to, it just all came out, and I'm feeling very emotional today.

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10203677555634170&id=1075536484

its amazing

I'm out as a trans woman, not as genderqueer, but I can relate to a lot of what you've written, especially about the gradual process of self-recognition. Congratulations on being able to share this, Rev! (And I'm so glad your friends are supportive!)

Thank you! How is everything going with you? (If you care to share.)

Rev I was crying and smiling all over your post this morning, thank you for sharing it.

<3 u Rev

(yr post inspired so many feelings, and a lot of recognitions, but ILX is not the place for them, for me)

Rev I never ever talk about my gender with anyone, largely because it's been my whole life so mercurial. When you described how variable these factors had been for you, both in terms of sexuality and gender, it rang so true

Rev, if I liked posts on FB I would like yours so hard.

awesome

10/10 rev

Sorry I didn't see your post sooner to reply, Rev--my internet access is intermittent these days. I'm actually doing really well--I've been on hormones since May, out to pretty much everyone in my social circle since June, and going exclusively by my chosen name and female pronouns since coming out. It's been almost shocking how little friction there's been socially (at least insofar as I'd been mentally amplifying the stigma involved for most of my life)--my father's uncomfortable about it, but everyone else has been really supportive. At times it does feel like my gender only exists for myself and my friends, because I still get read as male pretty constantly, but I haven't been on hormones long, and haven't done much to change my presentation yet, so I just have to try to be patient (not that I'll ever pass as cis, and not that "passing" is at all useful to think about). That's a really minor frustration compared to what I'd expected when I started being honest with myself, though. I'm probably moving to Seattle late next year, after finishing some academic work in my current town, since I have a few friends in the queer community there and it's supposed to be one of the more trans-friendly cities in the US (among its other qualities). Anyway, I don't want to derail this thread. Congratulations (again), Rev, and thanks for your openness!

p.s. OWS, this is not derailing the thread, this is what the thread *is* (or at least its intention was).

I mean, there's a part of me that wants to say (without a hint of irony or sarcasm or anything that is not genuine) "welcome to womanhood" because when you start to apologise for taking up space, or apologise for expressing yourself or even for being on topic on a thread, that is an aspect of Becoming A Woman that most of us born with innie genitals and turned into women are unfortunately all too familiar with. Like "passing" is not just about appearance, it's about demeanour. And that demeanour of apologising for talking or being loud or taking up space or even existing is part of the expectation of womanhood, for cis and trans women. (And it's a fucking trap.)

But this shit isn't helpful, so I'll shut it. But basically, congratulations and I hope that moving to Seattle is wonderful and life-expanding for you!

Really good post, Rev, and glad to hear things are going well for you, ows.

rev, that was so thoughtful. Thank you for sharing it.

<3 rev

Rev, you are awesome and brave for writing this. I especially love:

I hate how the closet narrative presupposes that we step into this world with full knowledge of ourselves, our gender, our sexuality, and doesn't allow for the process of self-discovery. Some people are very certain of these things from the jump, but oftentimes that's not how it works. Consequently, it is often assumed that the person coming out was hiding their true self, rather than taking time to work out who they really are for themselves. Never mind that these factors are variable, not fixed, and may shift over the course of a lifetime or an hour. It's hard to reveal these sides of ourselves to people when we don't fully understand them.

hey rev, i saw this come thru on twitter yesterday; i found it very moving and i'm grateful to you for writing it. all love and happiness to you.

Thanks, emil.y and Branwell! (Branwell, my not wanting to derail the thread was specific to my not wanting to digress from Rev's post, but you're otm about the way that discomfort taking up space is gendered, and how poisonous that gets.)

That's cool. :) I just wanted to say, gurl, this is yr space too. <3

Thanks, Branwell! <3

Thanks all! OWS you rock and I'm glad you're doing well and Branwell OTM this is definitely your space. I live in Seattle and it's a really great place to be queer or trans, if such a thing exists. Definitely hit me up when you get here. <3

A close friend of mine (also in Seattle) just celebrated a two-year anniversary of being out as genderqueer, one-year anniversary of being out as trans, and is abandoning what she terms "boy mode" starting this week. She's also consistently happier than I've ever known her to be.

Belatedly, thanks, Rev! I'd love to eventually hang out. I'm really happy to hear about your friend, JoeStork!

hiiiiiiiiiiii

https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xap1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/10313742_10203713429450993_3754619771575169115_n.jpg

hmmmph

https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xap1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/10313742_10203713429450993_3754619771575169115_n.jpg

:(

facebook is trifling and not letting me post the photo of me and Janet Mock

love to you, Rev, esp for your FB piece.

<3

srsly that is amazing :)

Rev you are awesome for that FB piece and now double awesome for meeting janet mock.

Trans* people of ILX, I have a question for you.

I mean, I've asked this on twitter, but the only answers I have got have been from helpful cis people, who, although I appreciate their input, it's not really an issue they face.

The dreaded "gender" box on forms - especially on job applications. Now, when it asks "Sex" and provides only two options, I bite the bullet and tick F because that is indeed the body I was assigned at birth. (If "prefer not to say" or (ugh) "other" is an option, I usually take that.) Today, I've got a form where it asks for "Gender" and specifies four options: Man / Woman / Transgender Man / Transgender Woman

What the hell do I do with that?

On level I do feel like, "thanks for acknowledging that trans people exist" but also b/w "thanks for erasing the experiences of nonbinary people".

On a personal level, I have no right to tick "transgender man" because I am not, and it would be absurd to tick that one. I am not a man, and I will never be one. But I also feel like ticking "cis woman" would be a lie, that is not my gender or my identity, I do not want to represent myself as something I am not, nor create expectations in them of my being something I am not. On a wider level, I feel like "why the hell do you need to know whether a person is transgender or not, for a programming job? In fact, for *any* job not directly involving genitals?"

What sets off my alarm bells is this: the job is at a women's charity. It's a charity whose work I respect enormously, and I would be honoured to be an employee of. But looking through their website, everything is extremely gendered, and extremely binary. There are 3 results in a search which acknowledge the existence of trans people, but no resources for them. I understand the reasons for things being so gendered when it is, specifically, a women's charity, but I am also deeply suspicious of women's organisations that use binaries, because they are often used as a way of excluding people who don't fit neatly into them. (Smell of TERF in the UK feminist scene is strong. This just really makes my spidey-senses tingle.)

So I guess the questions are: 1) am I being paranoid? (probably, yes) and 2) how the hell do I handle a form like that (short term solution is just to skip that question, or, better yet, the whole diversity section with a giant "prefer not to answer at this time."

its deeply strange to offer no nonbinary options alongside trans options imo

Yeah, it seems like they're trying to sound inclusive and failing badly out of ignorance or apathy (besides the nonbinary erasure, there's also the implication that binary trans people aren't really their genders). I might skip that question and talk to them later about revising that section (ideally, at least--this may not be feasible in practice).

Yeah, I guess "trying to sound inclusive and failing badly" is a more charitable explanation, but yeah, I agree totally with why you find it problematic.

I ~do data~ for a living, and trying to gender data and trying to find non-offensive ways to collect gender data* is one of those issues that I wrestle with.

*One of the major issues I raise is, *why* do you need this data gendered? When working with e.g. medical data, sex and gender (and cases where they don't align) might be completely legit pieces of data to be looking for. For diversity records... um, do better than this. Please.

It's the kind of thing I would raise as a concern in the job I'm interviewing for, but right now I'm having trouble with a stumbling block of "we need these forms filled out" vs "I cannot fill this form out as it stands, there isn't a legitimate option for me" and them coming across as a totally inflexible employer and me coming across as 'special snowflake' (good god, when you're working with data, identifying potential snowflake data issues is half the battle! How do you handle non-binary data in a binary database is part of what my job is about!!!)

Grrrrrrr. Feeling not very posi about this whole experience rn.

Leslie Feinberg has died: hir last words were "Remember me as a revolutionary communist." (Hir writings weren't quite as important to me as those of Julia Serano, maybe for generational reasons, but I always respected hir refusal to separate resistance to gender coercion from anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles.)
https://www.autostraddle.com/leslie-feinberg-transgender-lesbian-activist-author-and-revolutionary-dies-at-65-264663/

drummer from a Western Australian rock band: I Don’t Know If I’m A Boy Or Girl, But That’s OK, Right?

Julia Serano was in a really crappy power pop band. I am glad that she is doing something better with her life atm

Ha! I was aware her band once existed, but that's a fairly distant association for me. Her analysis of transmisogyny in her first book of essays, Whipping Girl, has been pretty foundational for me and for a lot of trans women over the last several years.

cool.

apart from the band she was in, my only strong memory of her was that she got married prior to transitioning back when same-sex marriage was still illegal, and I thought that was pretty clever.

I think Serano's said (about halfway down this page) that she and her partner at the time had decided to marry before she was certain that she was going to transition, so the wedding seems more like a complicated emotional, legal, and practical situation than a ruse (not to read too much into your choice of "clever" there). I wasn't part of the Bay area scene in 2000, though, so I'm speaking about this from a distance.

...Though also, obviously, the ethics of anyone marrying where same-sex marriage is illegal are murky, and Yasmin Blair's arguments for the political regressiveness of state-sanctioned marriage have to be considered. (I'm sorry if this is taking your comment too seriously!)

(That should be Yasmin Nair, not Blair.)

so riverside, CA has decided thursday is the "lgbt" day of rememberance, as opposed to the trans day of rememberance

https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/14382_723118074430940_4028475351544180271_n.jpg?oh=3e1a86910a1fbfa2ec5d326d123b7861&oe=54E5B5E8&__gda__=1423360183_742d174cc33f73bef4a8622645b52a69

How inclusive!!! Even Transgender Day of Remembrance as it stands is frustrating in its reticence about race and class (although at least at the TDoR vigil in my town this week I got to say that we also need to talk about structural violence, the violence of the prison industry and policing, and the reasons why the people killed by transphobic violence are overwhelmingly often trans women of color and trans women supporting themselves through sex work).

There's a solid essay about some of the limitations of TDoR here (http://www.autostraddle.com/remembering-us-when-were-gone-ignoring-us-while-were-here-trans-women-deserve-more-264792/), and also some useful comments on Morgan M Page's twitter feed in the last few days (https://twitter.com/morganmpage).

Anything that tries to play the whole "oppression olympics" game by suggesting that "trans men get a free pass" is just... well that's one way to get me to not read past the first paragraph.

I'm truly done with any kind of agitating for the rights of one marginalised group of people that comes by dancing on the backs of another group of marginalised people. I'm just done with it.

It's be one thing if they rephrased that as something more like "Trans Men's very existence is erased by the tendency to not-really-recognise their maleness in feminist spaces" but instead, that whole "gets a free pass" bullshit is just... OK, this is one more "Oh Noes! The Trans Dialogue Is Not Perfectly Centred Around The Experiences Of Trans Women" exercise, which, y'know, really, no thanks.

That's a fair reaction, but in this specific context I think it's worth acknowledging that transphobic violence doesn't affect all trans people in the same way--the overwhelming majority of the victims of transphobic murders are working-class trans women of color, so there's a strong case to be made for foregrounding intersectional issues at TDoR, which struck me as what was useful about that Autostraddle essay. (For example, I can recall how disturbed I was by the murder of Gwen Araujo in 2002, and how knowing about that and other killings contributed to my trying to bury my sense of my gender rather than come to terms with it, but I also have to recognize that, as a middle-class white person in a university town at this point in my life, there are many forms of violence from which I'm relatively sheltered.) I'm going to avoid generalizing on the gender politics of queer and trans communities, because I haven't been transitioning for long and because the queer and trans community in my current town is small enough that its hierarchies seem nebulous so far (and most of the trans men I know here are pretty chill). I can't speak to conditions in the Austin community.

Yeah, and I did see a lot of interesting and salient discussion on and around TDoR, especially on twitter, about how transphobic violence disproportionately affects Trans WoC. Which is a completely legitimate point!

Which is why it so disappointed me to open up that article, and literally in the first 2 paragraphs, boom, goes in with this whole "trans men get a free pass" BS which is not just a complete misreading of the relation of trans men to ~feminism~ but is just wilfully off topic - and a sidetrack diversion from highlighting those legitimate intersectional issues. (And then we are dragged off into what looks like this in-fighting quibbling, instead of addressing what she said we were going to talk about.) It is always important to foreground intersectional issues! But throwing trans men under a bus is not "foregrounding intersectional issues", it is erasing them.

It's the kind of deep-level conceptual error that makes me suspicious of engaging with a person's arguments further, in case they are just as deeply flawed.

The issues that trans women and trans men and non-binary people face are different - and yet related. And yes, it would be completely foolish and illogical to say "erasure is as bad as violence" because obviously violence is much worse than erasure, and violence disproportionately affects trans women and gender non-conforming men. (Though that is not to say that violence *never* affects trans men and gender non-conforming women, because, wow, would that ever be news to me! It just does not happen on anything like the same scale or severity.) But the idea that erasure somehow... does no harm? No.

(I mean, you want to talk about personal experience and how that contributes to people burying their sense of gender... when I was a teenager in the 80s and first wrestling with issues of gender, there was literally NO INFORMATION about what transgender might mean for FAAB people. It was interesting to see in Leslie Feinberg's obit, like, why had I not read this book when I was young enough for it to have made a difference - it came out in 1993, a couple of years after I had already fallen out of any queer community where I would have encountered it. But, y'know, it's pointless to be ragey about not being able to find the information that you needed at a point in such distant past.)

I'm going to be away from the internet for most of the weekend, but I want to respond to this more substantively before long--I can't speak about transmasculine experience, but I'll just say for now that in my own experience, having access online to trans women's writing about their lives and conditions that wasn't primarily intended for the cis gaze (so, for example, writing by Imogen Binnie, Elena Rose (Little Light), Casey Plett, Anna Anthropy, and others) was really helpful to me in coming to terms with myself and seeing the limits of the True Trans Narrative, so yeah, cultural erasure is definitely harmful and isolating and complicit with the marginalization of trans identities in its own way.

...Though, obviously, erasure also looks significantly different for trans women (where it tends to be a matter of the massive proliferation of dehumanizing or misleading or cisnormative representations rather than a lack of available information) than it does for trans men or for nonbinary people.

...And also, obviously, there are also important differences in the history of trans men's communities and discourses (I think in part because it took longer for trans men to secure relatively accessible medical treatment and start effectively organizing? most of Lou Sullivan's work took place in the eighties, iirc). I think it can be worth interrogating cases in which specific queer communities seem to reproduce hegemonic values (such as privileging "straight-acting" or masculine-of-center expression) but I can see why you found that essay off-putting, and I wish you'd had other resources available to you when you were first dealing with gender (growing up closeted-trans in Louisville in the 90s was isolating enough, but contending with all of this in the 80s sounds much harder).

As a postscript, Samantha Allen has a potentially less polarizing essay on TDoR and the dynamics of transphobic violence today: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/11/transgender-dead-and-forgotten/

Thanks for taking the time to reply, OWS. And thanks for taking the time to try to understand where I'm coming from.

Something that is important for me to remember is this:

-when I am responding with that mix of resignation-anger-eyeroll-fuckthis, that response is coming from a place of trauma.

-but similarly, I need to remember that when trans women are writing the things that provoke this reaction in me, that writing is also coming from a place of trauma.

Trauma is not an easy place to speak from. It generates strong emotions, it can even warp reactions and twist the perceived intentions that can be read in the speech. In some cases, it's important to read beyond the trauma to hear the message, because both the message, and the trauma that has shaped it, are important.

There are so many places - as someone (probably Rev?) said above - where it feels like there are, even within 'LGBT', that there are two (or more) cultures that have been jammed awkwardly together. That there is Feminist/Queer Theory space on one side, and Gay Male Space on the other, and although they should have so much common ground, in practice they have diverged so widely that they are unintelligible to one another.

But on the other hand, it feels like there's this cloud of 'masculine of centre' queerness on one side and a cloud of 'feminine of centre' queerness on the other. Which, although not inherently inimical to one another, are pointed in such different directions that their 'agendas' (for lack of a better word) appear incompatible.

Hegemonic values are inescapable: the masculine is privileged, the feminine devalued, scorned, rendered secondary.

So where there is this 'cloud of masculine centredness' it *appears*, to outsiders, like these people have access to ~hegemonic privilege~. In practice, it does not work like that. Whistling girls, crowing hens and FAAB who are masculine of centre have their own special world of shit thrown at them. You want to talk erasure, there is not even a *word*, like the useful and catchy term 'transmysogyny' to describe the unique brand of shit that trans men and masculine of centre FAAB experience. How do you describe an experience that does not even have a name?

(This has caused so much fuckery in my life - I have spent my life interrogating, and being interrogated by others, wondering, do I actually *feel* masculine of centre, or do I just want access to male privilege? At this point in my life, it no longer matters. Even if I were to wake up tomorrow with a penis and and one of those long, thin male bodies I covet so much, having lived 40+ years being treated as if I were a woman, I would *still* not have access to certain aspects of Male Privilege on a psychological level.)

Femme is devalued by everyone, because of the privileging of Masculinity. However, there is a difference between 'femme is devalued because: privileging of masculinity' and 'a masculine of centre FAAB person viewing 'femme' as a pink prison with which they have imprisoned against their will from birth and are actively rejecting in pursuit of an authentic life'. They are not the same thing at all, even if they may *appear* similar to trans women and femme of centre MAAB people looking from outside.

We can talk about this, and we can interrogate the hegemonic problems induced by being masculine of centre in a male-privileging world.

But what I also want, is for Trans Women and femme of centre MAAB to interrogate the common or garden misogyny that they so often bring to the table! Our society is soaking in misogyny and sexism! That shit gets *everywhere*. Trans women are not exempt from internalising misogyny any more than cis women are! Trans women do *not* get some special 'get out of misogyny free' card if they add 'cis' before 'woman' when complaining about 'shit girls do' (that boys also do, but boys are never criticised for). And I do acknowledge that there are deep problems within feminism regarding trans women. That is a legitimate complaint! But! But, but, but!

But I am fucking *tired* of "Feminism" being held to standards that Cis Men are never held to! I am not even a Cis Woman, but I am still tired of criticisms of 'Cis Women' that are never, ever applied to 'Cis Men'.

I read pieces on violence against trans women. I read TDoR pieces that talk about the terrible litany of assaults and deaths. And then sometimes I read a nice, neat little conclusion about how feminist spaces need to be more accepting towards trans women. And there's this disconnect, like, yes. I agree that something needs to be done about violence against trans women. I agree that feminist spaces need to be more trans-women-inclusive. But reading this litany of violence, and counting the number of times the words 'women' or 'feminist' get used (search is good for this) and counting the number of times the word 'man' or 'men' gets used (usually 0). You know... it would not be a leap to come to the conclusion that there is some cabal of Cis Feminist serial killers going about the world murdering trans women. Because this is what is being problematised - 1) violence and 2) feminism.

Who the fuck is going about the world murdering trans women? Is it Feminists? (Well, B*g Br*nn*n excepted) No. We talk about the police that fail to investigate, the judges that fail to prosecute, the unfair sentences - all of those people involved are supposed to be Feminists? No, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, the majority of them are Cis Men. So why, why, why, in this list of "people who are oppressing or failing to support trans women" is the number one target *never* Cis Men? What about the men? Why do they seem to get a 'free pass' from trans women? Why do we never discuss the role of Cis men in Cis Oppression?

Because that's how sexism works. "Feminists" or "Cis Women" is a singular group, all of whom are responsible for the actions of all them and if one feminist is trans-exclusionary that means all of feminism is up for critique and problematisation. But "Cis Men", oh no they are all individuals, individually responsible for their individual actions, even when those actions include, as a group, the assault and murder of many, many trans women. "Cis Men' as a group are not responsible for the violence against cis women, or the violence against trans women, even though the majority of that violence, is committed by cis men. Why do cis men not get named, as the source of that violence? Picking on or problematising women is easy. Picking on Cis Men, not so easy.

Name the fucking problem. Cis Male Violence. Who kills trans women? Cis Male Violence. Why are 'feminist spaces' often closed to MAAB people? Cis Male Violence. Wow, who gets the eternal fucking free pass forever? Cis Male Violence.

Tired of it. Feel like a broken record. Speaking from a place of trauma. Not fun.

I mean, I get it, about the intersectionality. That white supremacy means that PoC are devalued, therefore the deaths of trans PoC are ignored.

Feminism has a huge race problem! Because of the privileging of Feminism within the western world, that is riddled with white supremacy, and that shit gets *everywhere*.

The intersectionality that Morgan brought up - in terms of how many working class trans people end up in Sex Work. And Sex Workers are devalued in our culture (because of a complex knot - often involving class and gender and christianity). Therefore the deaths of PoC trans people who are working class, and engaged in Sex Work are double, triple, quadruple devalued and ignored.

There is a long dialogue within Feminism about Sex Work, and that issue is far from straightforward or resolved, because guess what, Feminism exists within that same space of the complex knot of class and gender and christianity which devalues sex workers because that shit gets *everywhere*. Like, I do understand why feminism gets brought up, given its problematic relation to these issues.

I don't want to seem like I'm ignoring the issues that were brought up in the series of articles, because I need to vent my personal... crusade against endless double standards. I acknowledge those issues. I just want to point out that the same shit that gets *everywhere* is also there, too.

(Sorry for the word vomit)

doubly sad news from my home state: Transgender woman dies suddenly, presented at funeral in open casket as a man

enraging

Seriously, can we try to refrain from turning this into another "thread of link-dump outrage", please?

Like, if a non-depressed person went into the "depression and what it's like" thread and posted links about terribly depressed people killing themselves in awful ways, it would probably be recognised that this was not a productive or helpful way to act.

Similarly, I understand that you mean well, but going into a thread for trans* people to talk about our lives and the issues we are facing, and posting "terrible, outrageous and enraging things happen to trans* people" might not be the best or most helpful use of this space?

Sorry. Should've known better.

fuck you branwell

you are such a fucking hypocrite

i'm sorry for that, i get what you're saying.

there's a cultural / geographical element to that particular story that makes it worth sharing. not everyone is as advanced on these issues as you are.

it's one more reminder to get a will
my friend from twin who shared this went to hs with her
shoulda just kept it to social media

shouldn't have even said that
this is not an area where i can comment
:/
sorry again

It's not an area where "you can't comment*" it's just a request to think about what you're sharing, and why, and where.

*except you, Matresslessness, because seriously, if "fuck you" is the level of your discourse, please leave. (Or just make another fakey-fake "I've chaaaanged" non-apology and do nothing about controlling or moderating your responses to things and people that make you angry. Because that is what you do. I do not understand why you continue to get a free pass on this board, but I have nothing for you, and have no wish to interact with you any further.)

It's entirely possible that ILX needs a space for expressing outrage and sadness at atrocities affecting trans people! Maybe someone should create *that* space instead of using this one all the time!

Something OWS said above really got me thinking, about how 9 times out of 10, when you see a trans woman in the news, it's something *bad*. It's something awful, it's a story about murder or suicide or something *terrible*. And there's a need for a space to express "this stuff is awful".

But there is a *greater* need, I feel, for a space where trans* people can be just normal people, living our normal lives, discussing our stuff, with the same amount of respect and understanding and tolerance as people discussing other difficult, personal stuff which is hard to express (especially on the internet, with people shouting "fuck you" at you for no reason while you are making polite requests). Respect us, and respect our space.

I have asked before, on this thread, for people not to link-dump. If you have something to share, say why you're sharing it. ("This is one more reminder to get a will" would have been a salient thing to say.) If you are unable to stop yourself, link-dumping, try to balance "50th trans woman murdered horribly this year" stories with "Laverne Cox wins 17th award for awesomeness" and "local trans boy elected homecoming king" stories. Maybe. I dunno.

K I have a good story, my student is going by his preferred name and pronoun for his byline for our school newspaper, he is so rad.

(this is the same trans* student I've discussed here before.)

That's great news about your student, m bison! Belatedly, I want to respond to a few points from your posts, Branwell, though I feel like doing so would be easier in the context of a conversation than in an asynchronous medium like ILX. (The questions you raise about the purpose of this thread and whether we need a separate trans politics/lamentation thread are also valid, but I'll leave them aside for now.)

...what I also want, is for Trans Women and femme of centre MAAB to interrogate the common or garden misogyny that they so often bring to the table! Our society is soaking in misogyny and sexism! That shit gets *everywhere*. Trans women are not exempt from internalising misogyny any more than cis women are! Trans women do *not* get some special 'get out of misogyny free' card if they add 'cis' before 'woman' when complaining about 'shit girls do' (that boys also do, but boys are never criticised for). And I do acknowledge that there are deep problems within feminism regarding trans women. That is a legitimate complaint! But! But, but, but!
But I am fucking *tired* of "Feminism" being held to standards that Cis Men are never held to! I am not even a Cis Woman, but I am still tired of criticisms of 'Cis Women' that are never, ever applied to 'Cis Men'.

I know you were speaking generally rather than in direct response to my posts or those TDoR articles, but I guess the notion of trans women being broadly hostile toward feminism is fairly alien to my experience (although, yeah, everybody living under patriarchy needs to struggle to recognize and undo their internalized misogyny). Most of the criticisms of TERF arguments I've seen distinguish between those fringe positions and feminism more generally. I generally tend to think that it's better not to engage TERFs when it's not necessary, but there are historical reasons (i.e. the 70s through the early 90s, when trans women were being purged from many lesbian communities and women's spaces with the approval of figures like Robin Morgan, Mary Daly, and Janice Raymond) why their claims, while no longer very relevant to feminism today, can't entirely be safely ignored, and TERF arguments are on a continuum with institutional violence against trans women even if they aren't at this point significant drivers of that violence. (Also, just speaking from my own experience: the trans women I know are way more likely to express frustration with men, or with cis people in general, than with cis women or with feminists. Most of the trans women I know consider themselves feminists, and my own situation would be considerably more difficult to deal without feminist critiques of misogyny and gender normativity, even if there was a time in my life when I was internalizing TERF discourses out of sheer self-loathing, and using TERF discourse to convince myself that transitioning would just be appropriating women's experience.)

Femme is devalued by everyone, because of the privileging of Masculinity. However, there is a difference between 'femme is devalued because: privileging of masculinity' and 'a masculine of centre FAAB person viewing 'femme' as a pink prison with which they have imprisoned against their will from birth and are actively rejecting in pursuit of an authentic life'. They are not the same thing at all, even if they may *appear* similar to trans women and femme of centre MAAB people looking from outside.

I think there are a lot of ways in which trans women and trans men or transmasculine people can speak past one another; part of that is the working of transmisogyny concurrent with the transphobia experienced by trans men and masculine FAAB people, and part of that has to do with the different ways masculinity and femininity signify and are visible under patriarchy. I'm aware my relationship to femme expression would be different if it had been forced on me growing up rather than presented as something debased or off-limits (there are obviously all sorts of ways in which normative gender socialization is painful and oppressive); I just bristle against cases in which masculinity is treated as generally "natural" or "desirable" in a way that's continuous with the systematic devaluing of women and femininity. I've read complaints about how this has played out in some queer circles--for example, Imogen Binnie, Julia Serano, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore have all written about transmisogyny among Bay Area queer spaces in the 2000s. (In Binnie's essay here, for example: http://www.keepyourbridgesburning.com/2013/09/we-see-through-you-18/.) As I've said, though, I haven't experienced that in my own town so far, and I want to avoid generalizing about queer spaces I haven't been part of. I'm also aware that masculine-of-center FAAB people are expressing themselves in the way most authentic to them, even if in my own experience there is nothing I see worth salvaging in masculinity. There's another irony here: my own presentation at this point tends to read as soft butch if I'm even perceived as a woman at all, and one of the hardest--and ongoing--parts of transition for me has been trying to work out what aspects of myself are, for lack of a better word, authentic, and which were learned on the basis of fear but have come to seem natural.

Anyway, this is all obviously endlessly complicated and often painful to talk about, but I felt like your posts deserved some response. (I want to come back to your point about how dysphoria is situated in relation to questions of social privilege at some point.)

That is cool, m bison, and he sounds awesome. :)

OWS, I think we got some wires crossed here. (Which is, admittedly, pretty easy when I'm on a tear.) It was never my intention to state anything like "trans women are hostile to feminism." Because the majority of trans women I've known or read are pretty pro-feminism; and they have had valid (and constructive) criticisms of feminism. It's just weird to read articles about TDoR which talk about trans women being murdered, followed by "feminism needs to change" rather than "men need to stop murdering women."

I've read that Imogen Binnie thing about 3 times and I'm sorry but I think it's a confused mess. But hey, LiveJournal is for being a confused mess.

She seems to feel kinda angry and disappointed that she moved to San Fran and the lesbian scene there was kinda... uh... butch? That the trans man scene was full of transmasculinity? If it's not for you, it's not for you, honey, but you don't seem to understand that trans men have had to fight for the same space to shout "I am trans and I AM a man!" from their jockstraps? That trans men might not be acting that way because masculinity is more ~natural~ or ~desirable~ but because expressing their masculinity is as important to them as femininity to a trans woman! (and also often denied to them, in oppressive and sometimes violent ways!)

I typed out more but I deleted it because I don't really feel like there's any point to hammering this stuff. There have been many, many (male-coded) Gay Spaces that have felt awful and exclusionary and humiliating for me to inhabit. But the difference is, I never felt like I had any right to feel entitled enough to ask that they be centred around *my* needs. I just read them as "not for me" and didn't stick around.

I need to not think about this for a while. It's starting to just feel like shitty in-fighting.

I think the point of Binnie's essay was pretty straightforward (that the queer spaces she was in in the bay seemed to marginalize her and other trans women while claiming to be OK with trans people), and I don't think she was asking for them to be centered around her needs so much as explaining why she found them alienating, but I won't belabor that. I'll be away from the internet for the next few days, so to continue this thread on a more conciliatory note, here are a couple of links on Feinberg and Stone Butch Blues, one on sex work and the other, more light-hearted, on casting a hypothetical adaptation:
http://titsandsass.com/remembering-stone-butch-blues-pledge-to-sex-workers/
http://the-toast.net/2014/07/30/casting-stone-butch-blues/

(I was also kinda gunnysacking in that post, when I was making that snipe about 'trans women need to address their own internalised misogyny' - like, that was in response to something unrelated, which wasn't posted on this thread, but had made me angry. I know from experience, should not post to ILX when I'm worked up. (I mean, really, I should know better than to post to ILX at all.) Because inside, I am reacting emotionally to a really angry-making thing, while trying to more calmly discuss a more ambivalent thing requiring more equanimity. I am sorry for doing that.)

And, no, I don't think that the point of Binnie's essay was that straightforward, but I am not going to argue it any more.

love this photo gallery
http://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2015/02/24/photos-transgender-elders-show-us-meaning-survival

the former Bruce Jenner is a privileged attention whore/idiot who does not need to be 'supported'.

responding to ghost posters

I don't think I need to tell you where the flag post is.

No interest in her personal story or w/e but it's kind of a watershed moment for trans people + a huge step in making the USA in particular a safer place for transpeople, no?

don't be an asshole, bill.

always

i dig that jenner's celebrity / wealth / glamour makes her seem more untouchable and inexplicable than her gender ever could, but fgti basically otm.

I was talking to my 90 year old mom a few days ago and one way or another Orlando by Woolf came up in the conversation. As the subject meandered on from there I discovered that she was unaware of the name Christine Jorgensen, or the fact of sex reassignment surgery. So, she may be in a small minority, but the availability of such surgery is not universal knowledge and some publicity about it is not useless to those who may never have heard of it before.

for someone who already had a long career as a public figure to make this transition is a pretty huge cultural moment, imho. that said i wish that there was less attention & importance placed on the surgical aspect of her transition in terms of the media / the public accepting & recognizing her gender.

an actual trans athletc hero:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9e_Richards

but hey, every era gets the symbol it desrves i guess.

They look a lot alike! is my stupid contribution.