Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

"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.

see, i come from the opposite perspective - i love labels and i'll take all of them i can.

i know.

i see this kind of queer dialectic going on all the time - the meme is one person saying "abolish gender!" and the other person is saying "more gender!" and both POVs are based and the people who hold either or both POV are awesome.

that is so sweet and really warmed my heart to read.

I actually was thinking of how you've talked about "not existing" before you transitioned, and i have talked about finding that "i don't exist" in a completely different, more positve sense.

There's a lot of brilliant stuff in your last posts that I feel no need to respond to. But i can talk a lit

I am middle eastern with dark olive skin. I think middle eastern kids in America are in an unusual position in that it's about as close to a blank slate as you are going you get. You're conspicuous but you don't really have an identity, other than 'the foreigner'. In fact, lot of people aren't quite sure what race you are; it's almost like you have to choose. There are pressures to assume the culture of white people but by choosing white you are then always bombarded with various forms of "why aren't you white?" - you are never really going to be acceptable.
A lot of Persian guys gravitate much more to the parts of Black culture that reach the suburban mainstream. Obviously, they are not going to be accepted as Black (my brother can attest lol)

I style myself as boyish/very soft-masculine. Because perceptions of softness are closely related to perceptions of whiteness, a friend once called me "white enough". I am still kinda pissed about that years later actually. Buuuuut the image of the brutish queer Arab in The Screwball Asses was really shocking- if I have dysphoria or dysmorphia it probably comes from stuff like that

I see the evolution of how I present myself as a process of subtracting metadata. I'm happy with where it is right now. As an album, maybe Plux Quba- it is vaguely childlike but there is so little information attached to it that you start to think about the difference between "Untitled" and " ". And then what little info you get raises more questions than it answers. It's really important for the content (music), which is so delicate and abstract, not to be overwlemed by the packaging. So much would be lost if you were directed towards a particular reading. It has to be allowed to take its own shape without presuming on what it is. There are a couple of important clues but they're very cryptic. That's all you need and all the material can sustain.

So, I secretly thought of myself as transgender in my early childhood and it was a *major* preoccupation of mine & something i was deeply ashamed of already then. I don't put a lot of stock in that memory, but it's been very helpful to me to hear women talk about their experiences.

I just want to let my own ambiguities take shape, or not.

Kate, i really appreciate your generosity. I'm not the first to say this and I won't be the last, but a number of your posts have helped me personally as i've been working things out. Ngl, I worry that saying so places more of a burden on you to sustain the level of generosity you have shown. but I guess you already addressed this kinda

i'm glad that it helps other people, and also talking about my experience of being trans is literally my favorite thing to do in the whole world. it's not out of a sense of obligation that i talk about my transness on every single thread i post on lol.

i really do think of myself as an "evangelical" in the original etymological sense, like to me, finding out that i was _allowed_ to be queer, _allowed_ to be trans, was such profoundly life-changing good news that i just wanted to tell everybody, like, hey, you know all that stuff you were taught about trans people? turns out it's all wrong! turns out all of the shit we all thought someone _had_ to do or say or feel or think in order to be "really trans" is just some shit cis people made up! i am _so goddamn happy_ to be able to tell people that, i legit feel #blessed that i get to do this. people can say i'm a "social contagion" all they want. the only response i have is that joy is a social contagion.

Yes, I've been "coming out" to friends and family one by one over the last couple of months. I felt i should say something here incase it's an important context for some of the things i post, because i think enough people posting here regularly recognize my handle as belonging to a male poster, at this point.

fwiw i know surprisingly little about a lot of the folks here, i've gathered a thing or two over the years from context but honestly a lot of times i just don't feel like what gender a poster is matters. it's the DS9 thing:

KOR: Curzon, my beloved old friend!
JADZIA (laughing): It's Jadzia now.
KOR: Jadzia, my beloved old friend!

i like when people come out mostly because then i can celebrate, haha! but they don't have to.

I am middle eastern with dark olive skin. I think middle eastern kids in America are in an unusual position in that it's about as close to a blank slate as you are going you get. You're conspicuous but you don't really have an identity, other than 'the foreigner'. In fact, lot of people aren't quite sure what race you are; it's almost like you have to choose. There are pressures to assume the culture of white people but by choosing white you are then always bombarded with various forms of "why aren't you white?" - you are never really going to be acceptable.
A lot of Persian guys gravitate much more to the parts of Black culture that reach the suburban mainstream. Obviously, they are not going to be accepted as Black (my brother can attest lol)

the idea of "passing" is definitely one that i think about a lot. particularly lately because i just watched "framing agnes" last weekend! it's about a lady who had a paper written about her, and the paper, published in the late '60s by a cis guy named harold garfinkel, codified the idea of "passing" in a trans sense. like a lot of trans stuff, "passing" was something that was taken, appropriated sort of, from somewhere else and assigned to us. in this case harold garfinkel took the concept from the pre-existing idea of Black Americans passing as white. and it's one of those things that's similar but not the same. i've talked with this a little with people from other backgrounds, and even though we're different we did have this kind of shared experience of passing being a double-edged sword - one is resistant to certain forms of prejudice, one can be seen for things other than one's Marked quality, but the trade-off is that one is _misrecognized_. it took me a while to figure out what i'm trans-passing _as_. i don't pass as a woman - i am a woman. one doesn't pass for what one _is_, only for what one _isn't_. what i pass as is a _cis_ woman.

in your case, it seems like - and please correct me if i'm mistaken here - by "passing" you get to choose what Marked identity you want to be identified as, which i guess is some kind of passing privilege lol. to me, there's no comparison between my passing privilege and my white privilege. white privilege is being able to be recognized _for what i am_ without being defined entirely by that quality. white privilege is the ability to be seen as an individual and not as a synecdoche for an entire demographic group.

I see the evolution of how I present myself as a process of subtracting metadata. I'm happy with where it is right now. As an album, maybe Plux Quba- it is vaguely childlike but there is so little information attached to it that you start to think about the difference between "Untitled" and " ". And then what little info you get raises more questions than it answers. It's really important for the content (music), which is so delicate and abstract, not to be overwlemed by the packaging. So much would be lost if you were directed towards a particular reading. It has to be allowed to take its own shape without presuming on what it is. There are a couple of important clues but they're very cryptic. That's all you need and all the material can sustain.

god i haven't listened to that record in so long. that's the other thing i sort-of love about transness - since it's not something that has, really, a clearly defined historical form, there are very few "canonically trans" songs before a certain point - and the few that are, like "candy says", are usually cis songs _about_ transness, however great they are - transness is nearly always a subtext. it's possible to read all kinds of songs as having some correlation to one's own trans experiences. transness, to me, is one manifestation of this invisible quality that runs through everything, unobservable except in retrospect. when i look back at past work that's implicitly or explicitly gender-fucky, these days i don't see them as being "trans" or even "proto-trans", just as the slightest hint of this vast, unnameable _thing_, from which transness is only one currently visible outcropping. any name i could give it would be a misrepresentation of who i was - the fact that my transness was not nameable or _thinkable_ is just this intrinsic part of it.

i love your framing of it too - "subtracting metadata". we've all been walking around with all this _shit_ stuck to us that we all take as being somehow an essential part of who we are. just taking off a particular frame and saying "ok, what do i look like now? who do i want to be now?" was an essential part of me being able to say, ok, here is this thing which i am. even this thing that i say i am now, though, "trans", this is just a frame that suits me better. this is just a way i exist in community with other people, a, well, social construct, if you will. that doesn't mean that my gender isn't _real_, that my womanhood isn't _real_, only that the description of it, the way i present myself, the way i communicate my gender to others, all of that is necessarily constructed.

thinking about it i guess it makes a lot of sense that you're hesitant about taking on labels... it sounds like you had the experience of, you could try on a label, but then you couldn't take it off, the people who saw you wearing that label would judge you based on that label from then on. that's one of the fears i had, one of the fears i've seen other people have, and i don't really know how to say to questioning people that it looks completely different from my perspective. when someone changes in a way that sometimes get called "detransition", for whatever reason, i'm proud of them. i'm really happy for them. in some ways they're choosing an answer that's more complicated, more difficult, because what's called "detransition" seldom means "oh i'm actually cis". it's "i'm actually this other thing", or "these hormones don't work for me", or (most of the time, unfortunately) "it's not safe for me to do this right now". it's hard when one decides one has to be outside of a community defined by this one particular word, really hard, and hell yes i'm proud of anybody who's able to do that.

like the absolute essence of transition is _taking care of yourself_. we all gotta make hard decisions, impossible decisions sometimes, and the thing is that when you do that there's no wrong decision. i regretted not transitioning before for a while until i realized that it wasn't really a choice i had. wanting to do something that _should_ have been possible but not being allowed is not the same as wanting to do something and choosing not to.

So, I secretly thought of myself as transgender in my early childhood and it was a *major* preoccupation of mine & something i was deeply ashamed of already then. I don't put a lot of stock in that memory, but it's been very helpful to me to hear women talk about their experiences.

― Deflatormouse

see that's the other thing, the role of memory in the whole thing. writing my transition memoir was such an amazing experience for me, because of the way my story changed as i told it. not in a sense that it became better or worse necessarily. just taking the evidence i had and looking at it and trying to see what came out of it, not looking for some ultimate truth, not looking for what was objective reality. just looking at myself from a certain perspective. one of the things that surprised me the most was when i asked myself "ok, if i'm trans, why did none of this ever come up before", and realizing that it had, and i'd just decided to think around it, put it behind a Someone Else's Problem field. and as far as i can tell that's what repressed memory is, just kind of saying "well i'm not going to think about that". that was a particular frame i had and one of the ones that i took down when i started questioning. so to me, that early childhood memory, and the fact that you not only secretly had that thought but were secretly _ashamed_ of, is something that's just incredibly important. there were a lot of things i _experimented_ with that i believed were bad and wrong, even then, even at that young age. even now it's kind of hard to talk about it. because if i say "i used modeling clay to give my he-man action figure girl parts when i was a kid", one, in was something at the time that i was really ashamed of. i thought it was this incredibly fucked-up thing, but when i look at it from today i can't figure out what's fucked up about, like, when you're a kid experimenting with gender stuff. and the other thing that i see happening is when someone tells their story, like "i did such and such a thing", someone else will be like "well i never did that, i guess i'm not Really Trans". i went through that too. i actually knew a trans woman in the late '90s, and i was really kind of ashamed to even be around her, i figured she could tell that i wasn't Really Trans, that i was an imposter and a disgrace to her. and like it doesn't work like that, none of us get to say "oh you're not Really Trans", there's no high council, i mean basically all of us are high is just how that works.

but then if i don't say that, then people are like "oh ok so There Were No Signs". and of course there were signs, but either (1) they weren't recognizable as signs, based to all of the bad metadata about gender that we were stuck with from an early age, or (2) we were actively ashamed of the signs, read some fundamental moral dimension into them that just isn't there, and buried and repressed them, made them invisible, made ourselves invisble - again, not a moral act, just the kind of shit queer people have to do to survive.

anyway that's an absolutely massive wall of text and basically none of it was what i thought i was gonna say when i started replying, but i hope it helps. it's really good to be able to talk about this stuff with someone else.

Do you ever read ilx on a desktop or tablet? I find that what looks like a massive wall of text on my phone sometimes turns out to be, like, 2 sentences.

It's definitely helpful, way more than I think you realize, at the very least because it's forcing me to consider things directly that i might not grapple with otherwise, or not right away.

by "passing" you get to choose what Marked identity you want to be identified as, which i guess is some kind of passing privilege lol. to me, there's no comparison between my passing privilege and my white privilege. white privilege is being able to be recognized _for what i am_ without being defined entirely by that quality. white privilege is the ability to be seen as an individual and not as a synecdoche for an entire demographic group.

Yes, that's pretty close to what i meant. I was thinking yesterday about DJ Khalid as an example of an Arab man who is accepted, more or less, as Black. At least to the extent that he has real agency in Black culture. He's a teddy bear ofc but he has that very suave and flashy look that would be tough for a white guy to pull off. If you put at him and his brother Alec Ledd side by side, you might not even think they're the same ethnicity right away because so much of what we percieve as "race" is in those social signifiers.
Now I am not going to be able to pass for Black but I would *absolutely* pass as mixed/biracial, especially if styled myself differently.
So yeah I kinda "chose to be white" and so i've been afforded some of the advantages white people have, though not all of them. And my brother was more undecided, for once in his life lol, and has straddled the two cultures more (e.g. he has worked for & with mostly Black men ; he is married to a midwestern white woman).

I'm an odd duck and used to be really tenacious. I always managed to be seen as an individual. When i think about what my male privilege has been, the biggest thing is I was always made to feel like my thoughts and ideas and opinions were Very Important (has this been for my best? idk, it's a lot to live up to). But sure, if I belong to any kind of group I'm always gonna be the "ethnic" one of those.

thinking about it i guess it makes a lot of sense that you're hesitant about taking on labels... it sounds like you had the experience of, you could try on a label, but then you couldn't take it off, the people who saw you wearing that label would judge you based on that label from then on.

This is tough to articulate but with labels, if there is something that applies very harmonoiusly, where I recognize part of my own condition and it leaps off the page, then I can feel a kind of vindication. And there's other stuff attached to it that doesn't apply, and that is dissonant and I just want to sweep it under the rug kinda and focus on the vindication. And i think i'm prone to getting seduced by the labels and the language, because I'm too wrapped up in my thoughts most of the time and not present enough. I tend to get distracted from the other nameless imbalances that the label doesn't address, and from the real core of the matter in some cases. Because i get a rush from feeling vindicated.

to me, that early childhood memory, and the fact that you not only secretly had that thought but were secretly _ashamed_ of, is something that's just incredibly important

The funniest thing is that I thought it was secret then, like nobody would have noticed that I openly preferred girls' activities and entertainment and asked for girls' toys and all of my friends were girls. In my mind, it was covert. Kids are funny.

One of my early memories- I don't remember exactly how old I was but I could read- my family went to Salem for an uncle's wedding. My dad took me and my brother to the Witch Museum and bought us a box of crayons. The pink crayon was labelled "light red" and that made me really happy because from then on I would be able to tell everyone my favorite color was "light red" instead of admitting it was pink, lol

and of course there were signs, but either (1) they weren't recognizable as signs, based to all of the bad metadata about gender that we were stuck with from an early age, or (2) we were actively ashamed of the signs, read some fundamental moral dimension into them that just isn't there, and buried and repressed them, made them invisible, made ourselves invisble - again, not a moral act, just the kind of shit queer people have to do to survive.

So yeah I don't think memories like mine say much about my gender identity today, but it demonstrates our awareness and and sensitivity to the ambient social pressures even as really little kids. Because clearly my parents and teachers didn't have a problem with it.

And you're right, I forgot about all of that for years and years.

Something you posted a while ago that was one of my final straws had to do with instantly being accepted into a "sorority" of women where you'd never been 'one of the guys' before. That one set alarm bells ringing. The main thing has been talking to women and finding I relate a lot more to women and find men quite alien most of the time. But also little things like there's an ASMR channel I watch where the girl flips through vintage womens' interest magazines, and the content is the kind of stuff i spend a lot of time thinking about.

I think I was assigned the wrong gender at birth, I have very little doubt about that actually. The delightful twist is that I'm very comfortable in my boy-skin. When I think about myself as a boy, I feel spry and light on my feet when in reality I am flat-footed and lethargic. I feel cute af. I guess that's "gender-euphoria". It's like a happy accident, in a way this couldn't have turned out any better. But there's a danger in it, which is that I start to fill so many roles myself that there is no room for other people in my life. You're prob aware of my psychoses, the oracles whose grand romantic gestures floor me, the stuffed toys i regard as familiars, the common household objects i perceive as showing me love. That's a lot of dopamine, and it's all very fulfilling. Really too fulfilling.

it's really good to be able to talk about this stuff with someone else.

It's a pleasure

My standard line is that I'm a pansexual asexual - I'm willing to not have sex with pretty much anyone.

This is gold, btw
It's been stuck in my head :D

I wasn't sure about pronouns because I always found they/them a little awkward where it refers to an identified singular, and ngl it has tripped me up a bunch of times when i'm reading. Turns out it soothes the dissonance he/him makes me feel, how about that.

*wrong sex sorry

new DN just dropped

haha

kinda side jaunt, deflatormouse i loved your post and i may or may not get back to it. in the meantime i wrote (but didn't post) a thing yesterday about disgust, and then today i wrote this which i figure i will post:

I've found myself talking semi-seriously about what I've started calling "kyphophobia" and today I'm thinking, hey, it's probably worth explaining seriously why I talk about it and what it means to me.

For some number of years now, sometimes I'll be in situations where someone will say "lean back" or "stand up straight" or some such thing, and I will, and they'll say "no, that's not right". That was frustrating, but also kind of routine. My body not behaving the way I wanted it to has been kind of a lifelong experience.

I was born with a developmental disorder that's now known as "dyspraxia". It wasn't medicalized at that time. It was, however, clear that I was unusually poorly coordinated compared to my peers, and as a result I was treated pretty much the same way anyone with any kind of developmental disorder is treated. Oh, you're not good at this thing that everybody else is good at, what's wrong with you? It was something I could get by without it being acknowledged or treated in any way, which I think in some ways is an advantage. Now that I'm middle-aged, though, I find that there are a lot of, like, really effective ways to treat this stuff, and I'm thinking, gee, it would be great if I'd had this 40 years ago instead of being yelled at constantly because my body didn't behave in the ways other people expected.

And this is interesting because this experience is to some extent _correlated_ with my transness, because one of the interesting things about my body is that I have this thing called "hypermobility". Like, there's a normal range of motion joints have, and my range of motion goes a fair bit beyond that. It's a spectrum. I'm not, like, a contortionist like you'd see at sideshows, though I have met some trans people who genuinely are that flexible. It's still enough to qualify as hypermobile. And it turns out this _hypermobility_ is something that is statistically correlated with transness, along with a few other things, like for instance neurodiversity. I got no idea why. As far as I know, nobody has any idea way. Anybody tries to make the slightest _bit_ of causative inference here and I will psychokinetically glare daggers at your brain until you stop. (No, wait, I'm being completely serious here. I don't have psychokinetic powers. Or the ability to double-jump.)

A lot of hypermobility is associated with something called Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes. There are like 13 of these. I haven't been diagnosed with any of them, but it turns out it mostly doesn't get diagnosed. Most people aren't aware of it, aren't aware of the symptoms. As it turns out this is something that's pretty easy to test for! You can genetically test for EDS, which isn't true for a lot of other ways in which people are different. Honestly I'm pretty averse to getting tested for anything just because of the way people use genetics as a form of gatekeeping. If I say "a lot of trans people have EDS", somehow that turns into "if you don't have EDS you're not really trans". I am strongly and actively opposed to that sort of transmedicalist approach, so I haven't had my karyotype done or any of this other sort of genetic testing, because as far as my being trans goes, the results don't matter.

For EDS I guess it does, though, so I'll probably wind up getting tested at some point. For the moment, though, all I can say is that I do have joint hypermobility. See, I didn't think that having joint hypermobility would be correlated with dyspraxia at first. It confused me. I was like, wait, if someone's joints can move that much, that seems more like a superpower than something that would make you uncoordinated. The thing is that humans have the normal range of motion we do for a reason. Because my body moves in so many ways that most people can't, the idea of "OK, here, this is the most kinetically effective way to move", that's pretty difficult for me to get to, even now.

The other thing about my hypermobility is that I wasn't aware at all that I was hypermobile until after I transitioned. Some of the biggest symptoms of gender dysphoria for me were dissociation and depersonalization. I didn't so much feel like I was born into the "wrong body" as much as I resented having a body at all. I hated how it looked, sounded, and felt, I didn't see any possible way to change that condition, and as a result, I mostly tried to ignore it as much as possible. So much of the joy of my existence is what I call embodiment - the feeling of having a body and existing in that body for the first time.

And part of that is realizing the ways in which my body is different from "normal" bodies beyond, like, the trans stuff. When I started spending more time around other people (another knock-on effect of my transition), people started seeing me do my normal wrist stretches for my carpal tunnel and asked me "Wait, how do you do that?" I genuinely had thought that everybody could bend their wrist that far. I didn't think of myself as hypermobile because I wasn't a contortionist or anything. I also realized that my back wasn't curved the way backs usually are, so I went in to get spine X-rays. My physical therapist went and looked at them.

"OK, so these are the ones of you bent over - where are the ones of you standing up straight?"
"Those _are_ the ones of me standing up straight."
"Ohhhhh. Uh. So did this just happen, or...?"

Apparently it's unusual for someone to have kyphoscoliosis as severely as I do and just not _talk_ to anybody about it for decades. Honestly, I have no idea whatsoever how to benchmark pain, what's really severe and I need to get looked at, and what's something I can just deal with and don't need to talk to anybody about. I don't know how much it's _normal_ for people to hurt. See the thing is that physical and emotional pain have a _lot_ more in common than people often like to acknowledge. Not only did gender dysphoria hurt to such an extent that it was very difficult for me to accurately understand or diagnose other sources of pain _before_ transition, but I am still dealing with some pretty significant long-term effects from spending several decades working really hard to ignore the effects of an extremely painful, potentially lethal health condition, one that I really fucking needed to get treated. When it got so bad I couldn't ignore it, I tended to deal with it by doing things like curling into a ball for hours on end or screaming "IT HURTS" repeatedly, and being unable to elaborate any further. I got a reputation for being a bit of a hypochondriac.

My physical therapist is actually really great. I was able to tell her why I spent several decades not caring about my body, and she understood really well. She gave me some physical therapy exercises I can do in case I have days where I'm too depressed to get out of bed. It's worked out really well - sometimes doing the exercises gives me the kind of strength I need to actually get out of bed.

-

All of that is pretty much just background, though. What really has me thinking about this whole thing is what happens when I tell people I'm a hunchback, which is that people will tell me I'm not. It's funny, because the thing I was most scared about when I was coming out as trans was that someone would respond with "no you're not". When people tell me that I'm not a hunchback, though... well, it's just given me a lot of perspective. When I was coming out, what worried me most is that if somebody else said I wasn't trans, _they might be right_. When someone's in a position of authority, it's just so easy to kind of assume that what they're saying is right. With my kyphosis, though, I find people who are situationally in positions of authority arguing with me about my own body. Not maliciously, is the thing. Like one of the people telling me I'm not kyphotic is trans herself. That's kind of what's interesting to me.

I say "I'm a hunchback" and not "I'm kyphotic" because nobody fuckin' knows what "kyphotic" means. I've thought about, you know, is hunchback a slur, am I using a reclaimed slur, but ultimately I gotta tell people things in language they'll understand. Except they don't, because the only thing they know from "hunchback" is Quasimodo.

I don't really know a lot about _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_. I haven't read any Victor Hugo. I didn't see the Disney version (came out after my time). I think I saw some of the Lon Chaney version. I really like him as an actor, even if his girl voice in the sound version of _The Unholy Three_ wasn't exactly all that and a plate of chips. (Heat from fire, fire from heat, Lon.) Overall my impression is that it's a good story, a good movie, and my GOD is it kyphophobic.

Like kyphosis really isn't a super rare condition. Lots of people have it. It's a form of scoliosis, which again, is pretty common. The only conception anybody has in their mind of it, though, is this grotesquely deformed creature, which, like, OK, he's not evil, he has a heart of gold or whatever, that's nice. The Disney character design makes him look pretty loveable even. He's still deformed. I was actually writing about this the other day, the disgust response. Humans often feel disgust when we see something that we consider "extremely ugly". So the only idea in someone's heads of a hunchback is someone who's extremely ugly and disgusting, even if the moral lesson is that, hmmm, when I see someone who I consider to be so ugly that I'm disgusted by them, I shouldn't act on that emotion.

So when people tell me I'm not a hunchback, not kyphotic, what I hear them saying is more that "You're not extremely ugly, I don't feel disgusted by you". Which is good! I'm glad they don't consider me extremely ugly and feel disgust when they look at me. I'm still a hunchback, though!

It helps me to frame things in this way because the stakes for "kyphophobia" are so incredibly low. Nobody's going to try to "clock" me as a hunchback. It's annoying that people try to claim I'm not kyphotic when I am, but people who recognize me as kyphotic don't think of me as disgusting or grotesque because of it. I don't suffer prejudice because of my kyphosis. It's actually not a big deal at all.

And this is frustrating to me because in my mind, that's how people _should_ deal with my being trans. I just can't imagine saying that I shouldn't be allowed in the bathroom because my being kyphotic makes me a predator or some such ridiculous nonsense, but thanks largely to transphobic media narratives, people seem to actually believe that my being trans rises to that level of significance. It's just so bizarre to me that people are looking at me for "signs" of something that's far less observable than my FUCKING HUNCHBACK and meanwhile not only don't _notice_ that I'm a hunchback, they don't BELIEVE me when I tell them that I am! You ask me about my bones and I'll say things like "kyphosis, scoliosis, thoracic compression fractures", but transphobes, all they say is "BONES OF A MAN". Like, it's not even about them being _wrong_. It's not meaningful, accurate, or useful anatomical knowledge. There are a lot of interesting things about my skeletal system. If all someone's interested in doing with it is arbitrarily assigning a gender, they're missing a _lot of clinically interesting shit_. I guess that's what frustrates me the most about the pseudomedicalism of transphobes. If someone doesn't _like_ my body, fine, but if somebody's going to spend that much fucking time thinking about my body, it's absolutely appalling to me that they wouldn't at least find my body _interesting_.

-

So I guess... that's what my kyphosis, my hunchback, my experience with "kyphophobia" means to me. My body is interesting in a lot of different ways _other_ than being trans. Some of the ways in which it's _more_ interesting as well as more _obviously_ interesting are seen as _less important_ than stuff that just really doesn't matter at all to most of the people who make a big deal about it. The "kyphophobia" I experience is directly a result of negative, inaccurate portrayals of "hunchbacks" in the media which lead people to think of "hunchbacks" as grotesquely ugly and disgusting. The only way I can even _describe_ my kyphotic condition to them is by using a word which I'm just gonna go right ahead and call a "slur".

Despite this, my being a hunchback has _not_ caused me to suffer any significant prejudice. Even when people have misunderstandings about my being a hunchback, they don't go into a whole moral panic about it or react at all in a way that's grossly incongruent with my actual condition. People don't assign any moral value to my kyphosis. All of these things are particularly remarkable to me because of how starkly they contrast with the way people react to my transness. Talking about "kyphophobia" is in large part, for me, a way to communicate how grossly inappropriate and malicious the prejudice associated with transphobia really is. My being a hunchback isn't in and of itself important or noteworthy, and it _shouldn't be_.

Not only did gender dysphoria hurt to such an extent that it was very difficult for me to accurately understand or diagnose other sources of pain _before_ transition, but I am still dealing with some pretty significant long-term effects from spending several decades working really hard to ignore the effects of an extremely painful, potentially lethal health condition, one that I really fucking needed to get treated. When it got so bad I couldn't ignore it, I tended to deal with it by doing things like curling into a ball for hours on end or screaming "IT HURTS" repeatedly, and being unable to elaborate any further. I got a reputation for being a bit of a hypochondriac.

ok this is why revising my drafts is good, the "extremely painful, potentially lethal health condition" i'm talking about isn't kyphosis, it's _gender dysphoria_. having kyphosis hurts but god, nothing hurts like gender dysphoria.

I didn't so much feel like I was born into the "wrong body" as much as I resented having a body at all. I hated how it looked, sounded, and felt, I didn't see any possible way to change that condition, and as a result, I mostly tried to ignore it as much as possible. So much of the joy of my existence is what I call embodiment - the feeling of having a body and existing in that body for the first time.

i'm telling you, Plux Quba is the best! it's the only high school classic that I still go back to a lot (i am probably forgetting something). it's... i wouldn't say it's front-loaded, but it is "top-heavy" in that most of the density and physical mass is located in the first 2 or 3 tracks which are each like a minute long. And then after that the dominant voices on the record are disembodied voices.
So like the disembodied voices on Plux Quba are really the clearest expression i can find of how i experienced life as a child. Of, above all, detachment- and also perceiving things slowly, through a haze, and of the tactile and sensual being limited to the euphoria of a gentle lull, a brain sensation like ASMR.

Maybe what i'm trying to describe is trouble activating. And i still experience that some of the time!

I don't know if it's dysphoria or something else, because most of my life i regarded my body as just an avatar, and that kind of outlook leads to neglect and forming bad habits and it becomes like a self-perpetuating cycle. Having the sense that the self and the body are separate, or the mind and the body has been a very good way to experience life as a void ime.

I think I required other people to snap me out of it, honestly. I needed people to force me to be present, in real time. And I needed to be touched! It was never something I could do on my own, or by thinking or talking.

I hear you about how it's easier to just say a recognizable, misleading thing.

I don't know if it's dysphoria or something else, because most of my life i regarded my body as just an avatar, and that kind of outlook leads to neglect and forming bad habits and it becomes like a self-perpetuating cycle. Having the sense that the self and the body are separate, or the mind and the body has been a very good way to experience life as a void ime.

― O Fundo Escuro de (Deflatormouse)

um yeah that's actually textbook dysphoria, that's dissociation, that was most of how i experienced my dysphoria. i legit didn't think i had dysphoria, because i thought "dysphoria" just meant constantly hating your dick and wanting it cut off, which i never did. (yeah i've had it cut off but i didn't ever hate it or even _want_ it cut off or anything, there was just other stuff i wanted that was incompatible with my continuing to have a dick.)

anyway "dysphoria" turns out to be all kinds of shit that i just thought was totally normal. and that also meant that when i felt bad because of dysphoria i didn't ever think of it as "dysphoria" or imagine that it had anything to do with my gender. i just hurt a lot and i wasn't ever to make the connection about _why_ i would have these attacks. like i'd see a girl in a pretty dress and my brain would be like "i wish i could be pretty like that", but i couldn't allow myself to consciously acknowledge that, which didn't make me feel better and sometimes i feel like might actually have made it worse. i felt like wanting to be pretty the way girls are was awful because women had to deal with patriarchy and all that and it was awful of me to want anything like that, i felt like i didn't have a right to want that stuff. i was never big into the stones but i thought about the lyrics to "paint it black" a lot.

My thing with the Stones is the indelible image of their recent incarnations playing Start Me Up or it's Only Rock n Roll in a hockey stadium makes me forget how good they actually were in the 60's.

anyway "dysphoria" turns out to be all kinds of shit that i just thought was totally normal. and that also meant that when i felt bad because of dysphoria i didn't ever think of it as "dysphoria" or imagine that it had anything to do with my gender.

Yeah it's a tough thing to recognize and diagnose.

like i'd see a girl in a pretty dress and my brain would be like "i wish i could be pretty like that"

I have only and always had eyes for the boys tho. Not sure if that complicates things more, or less 😅😂😭

Yeah idk on second thought I mean I have worn eye glitter and mascara, little girls' plastic hair clips, pink and purple feather boas etc on rare occasions, like, the overall look i was going for was still basically male but there is prob some repressed shit going on here LOL

Like at the very least there is def a certain pixie-ish candy/glam/kawaii style that I'm drawn to and have emulated at times

i mean i don't think it's necessarily helpful to be committed to any one label, that's just how it went for me because i present "binary femme" (although also things change and evolve over time, i'm not actually very femme most of the time - i wear sweaters and jeans or t-shirts and jeans). the way i went about it was that anything i was afraid to do because of how people would judge me, i tried it out to figure out how _i_ felt about it. and, you know, one road leads to another; i've done lots of things since starting to explore that i was absolutely sure i _never_ wanted to do. so i'd say don't be afraid to try that, particularly if it's something like... the biggest thing that was a challenge for me was feeling like i had to "dress my age" and that is _absolutely_ not a requirement.

Thanks Kate <3
Oh I’m not at all concerned about what to call this. Much more focused on how I can use it to live more fully

Yeah I do a lot of things that are not age appropriate, nobody gives fewer fucks

I just realized Tuesday was the 20th anniversary of the live premiere of Brian Wilson's "Smile". This is, was, an important album to me. I've seen multiple trans readings of it. Not sure why. For me it's the idea of it. This fragmented, incomplete thing which has sort of been _reconstructed_ many years later. Except "reconstructed" isn't quite accurate. In 2004, it was constructed for the first time, in ways and using methods that wouldn't have been possible in 67. At the same time, a lot of the people who were part of those '67 sessions had passed away, were gone. There's a sense of loss overshadowing it. A sense of "what could have been", of "if only". It's hard not to feel that way about myself. It's hard not to feel a sense of injustice. My constant struggle is to acknowledge the grief I carry with me, grief I will always carry with me, without allowing it to harden into _grievance_. Grievance leads to entitlement, and entitlement leads to the dark side. Or something.

In any case, I've never gotten on really well with people who held on to some prelapsarian idea of the "real" Smile. The theoretical me who didn't get to transition when I was 20 isn't the "real" me. My incomplete transness manifested in fragmentary ways. I wasn't able to genuinely smile. At best I was able to work up an unconvincing imitation. The metaphor isn't perfect. I genuinely love Smiley Smile for what it is. My past self is someone I... have compassion for. See value in. I don't love what they did. It was hard and painful.

If people want to construct their own versions of Smile, cobble it together using what they have, out of the bits and pieces they have access to... I love that. I love _derivative work_. I kind of think of all work as being derivative work, in a way. Smile is one of the bits and pieces a number of us, I guess, have cobbled ourselves together from. The idea of... the Creature raging against its creator... it's not enough for me. More and more these days I think of myself as my own creator. The world gave me these fucked up parts but I'm the one who crudely stitched them together into a whole. In a metaphorical sense. In terms of corporeal surgery I had some fucking _amazing_ work by some fucking _amazing_ surgeons. I'm really fortunate and privileged to be able to have that done.

That corporeal surgery is important and valuable but it's not the essence of my _creation_. For me it's more a sense of stitching together consciousness and body, things which were split, at cross purposes. That's why I think of myself as my own creator. It was work I did.

I think of something I heard someone say about 2004 "Smile" once - something to the effect of "It's only about 10% Brian Wilson, but 10% of Brian is all that's left". Well. I guess in some sense I am diminished. Still. 10% of something beats 100% of nothing at all.

my aborted replies to this would make a pretty good blooper reel ("oh fuck, i'm just talking about Smile again") but the analogy sorta works- because the 3 movement Smile has a surprising emotional arc, a humanity that the unsequenced outtakes don't. And because a 3 movement structure was never gonna happen on 2 sides of vinyl, it's almost unbearably awkward...

We talked about some of the other stuff in a Smile thread months ago (i was heavy handed in declaring my appreciation for The Creature)

the way i went about it was that anything i was afraid to do because of how people would judge me, i tried it out to figure out how _i_ felt about it. and, you know, one road leads to another;

so starting with the glitter shadow, black liner and mascara, now i wanna see it with the little black dress kinda thing? b/c my instinct is 'now i wanna dress more phys ed class than i would have today' and i think buzz-cutter jock boy in extreme glam eye makeup is an underrated look. but i'm already comfortable and familiar with that, and this is about exploring, so, black dress- not terrible on the first try, i'll give it another shot but i wanna put my boy clothes back on *right away*.
second try- alright, swaying a bit, starting to see there's a difference between "i've never wanted to wear dresses" and "i've never wanted to wear that particular dress, or lamented that this look is unavailable to men" and i look at the boy clothes i was going to wear and they seem a bit boring, like inverse wizard of oz stepping back into the b&w universe
otoh, i still want to put the boy clothes back on- if nothing else, i need to get on with my day

how does wearing a dress feel- ehh, it's not a yes or a no rn, it's complicated.

i've been kind of avoiding this since 2018-ish, avoiding the question, feeling i couldn't manage yet another major upheaval. as though i could control the shifts in awareness that happen without my electing to actively "tackle an issue". lol.

but now it does feel more like "electing to tackle the issue"

play with it

I still don't know what my style is I'm trying to branch out from my usual militant androgyne black/navy uniform but it's hard to know what will actually look good when your entire fashion sense has been based on not wanting to be looked at. I'm trying things and some of them look good but feel bad or vice versa which is a whole other issue from what might draw the wrong kind of attention. but I'm trying not to take any of it too seriously. hopefully some things will click eventually

I like the idea of masc and femme days and maybe genderfuck weekends but I'm not brave or stylish enough to pull any of it off yet

yeah that's the thing
it's better imo to think of style as a vehicle for personal transformation than a camouflage
not 'what looks good' but 'who do i want to be today'

i also think it's harder than a lot of people realize to be objective about how your personal style comes across

i wear a lot of dark monochrome, too (at this point, everything in my rotation is black, blue or gray except one lilac t shirt and one grayish-lilac)

that can be conspicuous, of course

on the whole i think it's clean and minimal, but more on the 'genteel' side (if that's a suitably negative word) than utilitarian, in a way i'm not always conscious of. i used to wear shorts much of the year but it made me the target of a sexual assault late in the fall, which i only narrowly avoided, and i've stopped.

now, my bed looks like an 8 year old girl went to town. i've got the princess canopy, the fairy lights, the hanging die cut stars covered in silver glitter, pink and orange tie dye throw pillows. it's a masterpiece, queers. this is part of who i am when no one is looking, i guess.

I still don't know what my style is I'm trying to branch out from my usual militant androgyne black/navy uniform but it's hard to know what will actually look good when your entire fashion sense has been based on not wanting to be looked at. I'm trying things and some of them look good but feel bad or vice versa which is a whole other issue from what might draw the wrong kind of attention. but I'm trying not to take any of it too seriously. hopefully some things will click eventually

― Left

presentation is still a really big challenge for me... i don't know if i've mentioned it but i just realized last week that it's not just worry about being perceived as disgusting, that perhaps the lion's share of it is tied back to SA trauma, to not wanting to be "too cute". it's one of those things that's easy enough to understand intellectually, but a lot harder to put into practice.

for me the pressure to place myself within the "butch/femme" dichotomy is itself a problem. i think i look good in a tank top and tight shorts. i think i look good in a pretty dress. like, a lot of the time i dress for the occasion, i don't know why that has to be part of my _identity_. i mean much as it pains me to say it that's not even _gay_ really.

this weekend i wrote a pilot for a potential serial work that kind of addresses some of these anxieties, about a middle-aged cis lesbian who finds out she's a magical girl and how she navigates things after realizing that - anxiety about femme presentation, anxiety about age, and some other stuff in there as well. now i just have to establish a work routine to keep going with it :)

y'all

the moment y'all have been waiting for is here

f1nn5ter is trans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3reFDwM0yIA

(big umbrella trans. genderfluid. not, like "binary trans" or w/e.)