Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

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