Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something that is important for me to remember is this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Sorry for the word vomit)

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

enraging

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

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

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