Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

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

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

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

<3 u Rev

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

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

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

awesome

10/10 rev

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

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

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

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

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

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

<3 rev

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, Branwell! <3

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

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

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

hiiiiiiiiiiii

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

hmmmph

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

:(

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

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

<3

srsly that is amazing :)

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

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

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

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

What the hell do I do with that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

cool.

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

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

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

(That should be Yasmin Nair, not Blair.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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