Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

True enough.

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for those links!

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

Bruce Weber short on creating a transgender ad campaign:

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

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

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

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

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

just ordered the book, thanks for the suggestion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

<3 to Rev. You are a great person.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really feeling this:

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

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

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

yayyy

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

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

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

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

Hope you're all well!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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