Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

Thanks y'all. I'd post a picture but IDK if I'm quite to that point yet!

that's great Kate : )

yo kate !!

IDK if I'm quite to that point yet!

Go at your own speed, Kate. Even though it will be a special treat, we'll be patient, like good adults.

Yay Kate!!

missed this, Kate -- hello!

hi everyone :)

Hi Kate, you look gr8! :)

Gonna try giving this thread here a bump. I haven't read the whole thing. It's not something I feel like I can do right now. There's a lot of history here, which can be pretty painful. I have the temptation to say, given what's happened with threads containing awful things in the past, that starting a fresh thread might not be a bad idea... but what I run up against is that my understanding, at least, of gender is still rapidly changing, is still incomplete. I don't know that anything I say about gender today might not, in a short time, be as wrong and painful to read as reading what I had to say about gender issues in 2013 would be to me now.

Uh, transitions are awkward - so what I'm doing is I'm jumping off Branwell's last post in the "no boys allowed in the room!!!" thread. Addressing a couple different points.

Re: Cis people popping in and saying incredibly transphobic things - I have had, myself, a certain amount of opportunity to practice being, uh, _kind_ in cases where that response would not necessarily be called for. Not because of social pressure necessarily, but more as a personal choice on my part. At the risk of, like, undermining all the actual work I did in that particular thread, I'd sort of like to talk a little bit about it.

So I started a rolling thread, I don't know, a couple years? ago where I could post any old crap I felt like posting without having to worry about what _category_ it fell into. In some ways I guess my refusal to acknowledge appropriate boundaries and making everything fucking about me is the most cis male thing ever, but in other ways maybe my utter indifference to arbitrary externally imposed taxonomies is the most queer thing ever. Probably both at once. I don't know. Anyway I quit posting to it a couple months back, and this week a poster with whom I have a, uh, not entirely amicable history posted a question about a video he saw and vaguely remembered to the thread, because it involved two trans women and it seemed a reasonable place to start. (It turned out not to be a band I had any familiarity with - imago listens to way more music by trans women than I do, I suspect, but imago isn't a trans woman and I am, so...)

The problem is that he referred to the women in the video using a, uh. Well, let's just say it is _not_ how I prefer to be referred, and it is _not_ how I refer to other trans women. My response was fairly brief but I had to rewrite it a couple of times before posting it. His use of that word was _very_ upsetting to me, and I have, had, every right to express that upset at his inappropriate language. He should have known better. It wasn't and isn't my responsibility to educate him; it wasn't incumbent on _me_ to assume, particularly given the history we have, that what he said was honest ignorance, a mistake meant in good faith.

But I was, at least, _capable_ of it, which is not necessarily always true, so, after venting to my friends in the trans space I hang out in, I responded in a kind and helpful way, and I'm kind of happy with how it turned out.

Anyway that turned into kind of a vent, hope I don't start any shit with it.

Speaking of ignorance I really want to be open and up-front about mine. I am really pretty ignorant and bad at being respectful of transmasculine identities, to the point where I am not really entirely sure about how to speak about those identities respectfully. And I'm _awful_ with pronouns. I don't know why, but for whatever reason I have a really hard time gendering trans men and transmasculine people appropriately. I need to do more work, and mostly that means listening and learning from, particularly, people who are aligned with that sort of experience.

I like to assume that nobody that we're generally interacting with civilly is trying to hurt anybody else, people are just making mistakes (sometimes dumb mistakes). I like to issue brief corrections when necessary and oftentimes just not-engage if it seems fruitless. I learned just a couple of weeks ago that "savage" is no longer considered appropriate to use, either as a noun or an adjective, as it is painful for Indigenous people. Also: "peanut gallery". Learning learning learning!

Just yesterday I ran into a snag-- I'm setting up shows in Germany and my bio arrived and apparently the language has not developed gender-neutral pronouns-- I have to pick. My booking agent (a lovely woman, not known for being particularly up-on-her-shit, tho) said "I know fgti! he is a he! he is a man!" and I had to rather gently inform her that I was in a state of consideration, and etc., but eventually saw it as a losing battle, and accepted her request that I stick with masculine pronouns in countries where gender-neutral language is in a different place. (No gender-neutral pronouns in German? really? I thought this was the language that already had gender-neutral nouns in regular usage alongside masculine and feminine nouns!)

In general tho I feel that as I age, I'm moving away from idealism and more toward pragmatism. (Next stop: cynicism)

I just have to preface this with an acknowledgement that I'm feeling a bit of trepidation, being back in this particular space, and that kind of nervousness can lead to defensiveness, and that is coming 100% from me right now, not from anything you are doing or saying, Kate.

I suspect, from the stuff you've said before on other threads - even though you probably *are* unfamiliar with "transmasculine" identities (I have ~feelings~ about that word, which will become apparent shortly) - it's probably not the transmasuline aspect, it feels more like it's the nonbinary aspect?

That's why I suggested you go back and read the thread from the beginning, because we interrogated this a lot at the start of the thread, and came to some really good conclusions. I didn't have the word "nonbinary" back then, and as soon as I encountered it, I just grabbed onto it, like... MINE!!!! But at the start of the thread, we talked about how there are many different paths involved in what we were then calling "genderqueer".

Nonbinary is an umbrella, group term for identities which do not neatly fit the binary of "masculine"/"feminine" or "male"/"female", as well as an identity in itself. That there are some people who want NOTHING TO DO WITH GENDER. They want no gender, get that shit off them, it's all oppressive. These are the group generally called Agender, Neutrois, things like that. There's another group of people who, as Rev so vividly put it, WANT AAAALLLLLL THE GENDERS. Bigender, Pangender, Multigender, sometimes Genderfluid are words people use for this. Then there's the Chaotic genders, where it's like... I'm not a woman. I'm not a man. I'm an alligator, I'm a mama-papa coming for you, I'm the space invader, I'm a rock n roll pink monkey bird. I'm a hot damn spider from Mars, OK? (I have a friend who was literally studying nonbinary grammar for their dissertation, and they couldn't even come up with a comprehensive group term for us.) Not pink. Not blue. YELLOW. After a couple of years of engaging with various trans and nonbinary support groups, and therapy, that's the place where I feel most comfortable.

So with "transmasculine", I know a lot of people feel that's a completely natural and appropriate term for them, and that's fine. I feel much more like "Just because I am moving away from feminine, doesn't mean I am moving towards masculine?" For many years, I was treated like a butch woman. I'm really not. If you *need* a binary view, then you can think of me as a super-effeminate and flamoyant dude, which is closer to how I'd like to be seen and treated?

I hope that doesn't feel like I'm jumping down your throat, what I'm feeling right now is actually quite boisterous and passionate and excited about describing something that means a lot to me and makes me very happy!

As a very nonbinary person inhabiting a lot of nonbinary spaces, I am used to inhabiting naturally very mixed spaces. I know that a lot of trans people prefer to talk about their destination, rather than where they've come from, and they don't love the ~assigned at birth~ terms. But in mixed nonbinary spaces, you often can't even talk about which direction you're going, without specifying which direction you've come from? Myself, I'm happy with 'AFAB' of a descriptor.

...

Anyway. I hear you, Kate, about trying to engage politely, despite histories. I think in general, it's a good idea. But also, there is, for ~people who are raised as women~ or ~people who are treated as if they are women~ - there's also this huge social pressure to perform niceness, to perform pacification and mollification and manage the feelings of other people around you, even if it is damaging to your own psyche or your own person. Sometimes learning the gift of "returning awkwardness to sender" is part of our healing process of unlearning harmful gender roles.

hmmm. well, first off, i do appreciate that you would like me to read the entirety of the thread, and i do agree with you that there could be some value in it for me, that it could make our discussion here easier, and it's just not something i'm up to right now. that's on me, i'm really not in a good space for it, and if you need to walk away from this discussion because of that, i totally understand.

with regards to the non-binary thing... i do identify as non-binary, to the extent that i am actually legally non-binary. i don't center that part of my identity mainly because it confuses the hell out of cis people, they have a really difficult time wrapping their head around the idea that i am a non-binary transgender woman. so in cis contexts, or mixed cis-trans contexts, i settle.

especially i struggle with the diversity of trans experience, with the different ways we experience and understand and describe things, struggling with other people actively wanting to be treated in manners that i actively do not want to be treated - just like "dysphoria" "non-binary" can mean many different things in many different contexts and i'm sort of working to understand what that means to you as an AFAB, and even AFAB is something i have tended to avoid in conversation because for me, i really don't want my identity to be based around my AGAB, even though that's unavoidably and necessarily part of who i am. insofar as AFAB is the best way you can think of to self-describe right now, i am definitely supportive of that.

i do relate extremely strongly to what you're saying, to one's gender being Other, because that's part of who I am, part of my gender identity, and it's the part that I mostly keep out of sight because most people just have no idea what to do with it.

and yeah, to reiterate, engaging _politely_, assuming good intent, all those things, that is _my choice_, and not even always that, sometimes i literally do not have that option. it is _not_ required behavior.

OK, so I guess I have to dig a little into my history with that term: AFAB. Honestly, I had no idea that it was at all controversial until people blew up at me about it. It was taught to me by a trans woman, back in about 2012 or so, as a *neutral* way of expressing this stuff.

We met on a music production forum, we were the only two ~female-presenting~ producers there, and we became allies and bonded over the relentless blast of sexism we both experienced. It was my conversations with her which even made me understand that trans was a thing I could... *BE* in the first place. (You've got to understand, I came of age in the 80s. There was no information, and no way of getting information. When I discovered the existence of trans women, through my obsession with Andy Warhol and the work of the Velvet Underground, I searched for any evidence that there might be... another variety? I read actual books that claimed there was no evidence at all of trans men, and they must be incredibly rare, if they even existed at all. CN Lester calls this The Production of Ignorance, and it was very effective. I met a flesh and blood trans woman for the first time when I was still in my teens. I didn't meet a trans man until I was already in my 30s and had already made a deliberate choice to Try Very Hard at being a ~Cis Heterosexual~.)

Talking with my producer friend, and reading the work of other trans women - it became apparent that not only was 'woman' not a term I related to or identified with in any sense; but that also there was no useable or workable definition of 'woman' that included her, that also included me. I asked her, you know, what do I call myself then? Because I had been treated ~as a woman~ for 40+ years, there was not one single aspect of my life or choice that had been available to me, that had not been shaped by ~behaving and being treated as if I were a woman~ - so I asked her, how the hell do I express that? What do I call myself. And she supplied 'you're just AFAB' and that worked.

I liked the term because it was in the passive voice - it made it clear that this was something that had been *done* to me (non-consensually and against my will - I wouldn't have picked that box for me if I'd had a choice in it) but still expressed "this is how I lived 40+ years of my life that I cannot erase and pretend never happened." Everything that had ever happened to me, everything that had ever been available to me, felt like it had been shaped by that stupid, irrational, completely arbitrary "someone picked this box, not that box". And it was a great way for both of us to have these conversations, where we could explain "well, this happened because I was AMAB" was easier for her to say than the ickiness or trickiness of her trying to explain "well, while I was... living as a man? treated like a man? acting as if I had to be a man when I was actually a woman? How do I say that?" We understood each others' abbreviations as that, shortcuts for describing experiences. Doings, not beings.

And in nonbinary communities and groups, where you have these very mixed groups... it genuinely decreases friction, as I tried to say on another thread. To understand that people can have the same identity, but be pointed in different directions.

To me, nonbinary is an adjective, so it would be weird for me to say "I'm a nonbinary". (I guess AFAB is also an adjective, but I've got more used to nouning it, as it is ~doing the grammatical work~ that the word 'woman' used to do.) Trans is an adjective, nonbinary is an adjective - what's the noun? Person? (That's kind of what we agreed upthread.) I'm not even sure I'm a person, sometimes I think I might be a goddamn alien! (Autist is far more central to my identity, so 'alien' connects with that, haha.)

Like, what does non-binary mean to you? How do you work the adjective non-binary and the noun woman, into a space where you feel like you can live? (That's in no way intended as accusatory, I'm just being curious. Whenever I meet another non-binary person, I'm almost always like, ooh, tell me about it!) But if you don't feel comfortable discussing that in a mixed space, that's fine, too. Please *do* tell me to back off, if I get too much of the autistic-question-bombardment thing going on! God sorry this is a word vomit.

People do use that word in a million ways, and I find it useful and helpful to check in, if you're on the same page, or a different page in the same book - or in another library altogether?

(I did actually just want to talk about all the different kinds of dysphoria, and how to separate out the different kinds of gender dysphoria from other persistent dysphorias and long-term ideations, and also kinda tag FGTI in on that conversation if they feel comfortable doing so. (They know I suffer from that shit, too, and have had *extremely* bad experiences trying to even bring it up on ILX!) But I guess we gotta clear the backlog first.)

Actually, on second thought, we should actually stay off that one. :-/

I don't experience dysphoria. I've never internally identified as male, but functionally was interested in gay sex, so I had no desire to transition, and ID'd as male mostly out of convenience. I've recently have felt a pull toward an MtF transition but have been doing work to determine where this pull is coming from. (It is possibly a response to a decade of traumatic experiences, beginning with a sexual assault in 2009, and although this is apparently a valid response to trauma, the question is whether or not acting on this desire to transition will be positive in the long run is still a decision that is gestating.) Meanwhile, I've felt a desire (and have been encouraged to) change my mode of presentation and my pronouns, and have done so, and found it to be a positive change in my life.

See, I encountered 'dysphoria' as a term meaning 'long-term, persistent low mode and dissatisfaction' during treatment for depression as a teenager - years before I ever encountered it in the Trans sense.

So saying "I don't experience dysphoria" while also saying that you have experienced low mood, trauma, ideation... what you are experiencing might not be gender dysphoria or body dysphoria, but it is a form of dysphoria. That's what I'm trying to talk around? How to tell them apart. If a pull to "be NOT this" is a known response to trauma. Please forgive me if I'm overstepping, or asking you to talk about stuff you don't feel comfortable talking about.

Or if I've totally misunderstood or got the wrong end of the stick. (I do so all the time.)

FGTI, you said something that was extremely useful to me, last week, when I was at the bottom of a pile-on, about how some responses to sexual assault trauma are actually completely valid, and reasonable and rational responses to what's happened - in a way that is pretty distinct from transphobia, and that was so helpful to me. It helped me make sense of some stuff, and I wanted to thank you for the observation.

And also, there was something lovely that came out of a much-problematised Andrea Long Chu piece, which I think bears repeating - that it's OK to want things, even if you know they won't make you happy, or be positive in the long run. It's OK to want a thing anyway.

I'm shutting up now!

I still don't think calling it dysphoria is accurate, in my case. I feel as if changing my mode of presentation (and perhaps a future transition) is a happy thing, not so much an expression of current dissatisfaction but more of a divorcing myself from a psychological identity (gay maleness) that I have increasingly found myself not really having any commonality with. I like the physical acts of gay male sex, but have zero commonality with the way that gay men typically socialize sexually, use sex as a method of exerting power over each other, or are competitive with each other.

My suicidal ideation is unrelated. It is largely the product of external factors, which I'd simplify as: I have two stalkers (one cyber, one meat) who have been terrorizing me for four and two years, respectively.

"AFAB" is less "controversial" to me than it is... for me at least it's really difficult, because there are things we have in common as non-binary people, and things that we don't have in common, and each of us has unique things we find invalidating and, not infrequently, unique traumas informing our responses. There's still not, really, a universal language to describe those experiences. Like, I can say who I am, you can say who you are, but neither of us, individually, can really say who _we_ are or if there's even necessarily a "we" that can be meaningfully spoken about.

When it comes to self-determination it's not always, really, a logical process. I try on words like I try on other aspects of self and presentation, and if they fit, I keep them, and if they don't fit, I let them go, and I don't necessarily spend a lot of time trying to work out how they fit together logically. For a while, for instance, I tried on labels like "ace" and "demi" to try and describe my sexuality, and after a while I decided they didn't describe who I was, and I don't use either of those labels to describe myself. Now, somebody else might theoretically have a sexuality that's functionally completely identical to mine and describe themselves as "ace" or describe themselves as "demi" and they would be right to do that, just as right as I am to not describe myself as "ace" or "demi".

So when I started exploring gender I explored it as non-binary, for a whole host of reasons - it seemed less threatening, I wasn't sure if I really had the right to call myself a woman, so on, so forth. Eventually I did come to accept that I have that right, and so I do, but I have also found that non-binary still describes me. In a way that's hard to put into words. Sometimes I talk to people and they look at it as somewhere _between_ male and female, and that's not it for me. I don't identify as male _at all_. There's just this... otherness. The otherness isn't in conflict with the female, it's not one or the other, they're just orthogonal. Like, I don't wear men's shoes because I'm "non-binary", I wear men's shoes because they're more fucking comfortable than women's shoes. Whatever that "other" is I'm not sure they even _make_ clothes for it.

I do want to... I did write a fucking novel on dysphoria and I never posted it and I'm not sure I'm still confident enough in what I wrote to post it, but here's like part of it.

It is an extremely complicated subject for me, a word that signifies so many different things. In the original thread context, it was more about how even talking about "gender dysphoria" in the '90s indicated a, uh, significantly more advanced understanding of gender nonconformance than could be found in the cis public at large. I do think I am a special case here, in that I did work to actively avoid becoming knowledgeable about trans issues so that I could stay in denial. That was a _lot_ easier for me to do in the '90s than it was for me to do in 2018. "Infinite Jest" was, I think, the first time I had ever come across the word "dysphoria", and since much of the book was centered around the author's ongoing struggle with clinical depression, my memory is that I just thought of "dysphoria" as a special type of depression and had no idea what on earth it might have to do with gender. I also, at the time, didn't understand the difference between gender and biological sex, so... I was confused about a lot of things.

There is this ongoing temptation I have to... not to make determinations, but to wonder. I know that if I'd died in 2008, or 2018, or basically anytime before very recently, I would be remembered, for as long as I am remembered, as a cisgender white man. There are a lot of people no longer with us where I just don't know, can't know, whether or not they were _really_ cis, and the assumption is I guess always going to be that they were. At least some of those people, I suspect, would be trans if that had been something that was open to them, just like I would have been trans most of my life if it had been something open to me. I don't know how many. That's not a question anybody can answer. It doesn't keep me from playing the "Dead People Least Likely To Actually Be Cis" game; it just means I keep my guesses to myself.

Well, there's a start at least. Dysphoria, historically, is also a clinical diagnosis, and shit, explaining to cis people the difficulties around that is definitely some Deep Trans shit. Cis people have this tendency look at the term and focus on how much _better_ it was on what came before - for that matter, better than the clinical terminology that exists _now_. The ICD-10 codes for gender issues are completely, completely awful. And this is a set of diagnosis codes that were only adopted in the United States, like, five years ago - before then the available diagnosis codes were _even worse_.

Shit here in the US is typically done by WPATH standards, standards set up by folks who revere Harry Benjamin, the (cis male) Father of Transgender Medicine, the Father of Transmedicalism, as a hero. And I guess it was him where the term "dysphoria" came from. I don't know for sure. Best cite I could find was this overview:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1665579615000071

Which doesn't specifically give Benjamin as a source for the term, but does say that it was first proposed in 1973, right after a sentence that specifically mentions Benjamin.

And, yeah, there are some problems with it, and honestly as a clinical term I believe it is on its way out. I'm not a huge fan of a term that continues to place the onus on _me_ for feeling bad when other people treat me like shit, even if that feeling is redefined as not being intrinsically "disordered".

For certain trans health issues, I identify more with the term "gender incongruence", which hasn't been implemented anywhere as a clinical term but is part of the draft proposals for ICD-11. Even this term I have some slight reservations about. It posits "gender incongruence" as belonging to a new category, "conditions relating to sexual health". This is not technically false in most cases - my gender certainly has some bearing on my sexual health - but it does tend to blur the distinction between gender and sexuality. I don't have a better answer myself. We're a diverse bunch and we experience what we experience in so many different ways - coming up with one catch-all phrase to describe us is nearly impossible.

But at the same time it's necessary, because all we can say for sure is that whatever it is we all have tends to respond very well to gender-affirming treatments. And we've had to fight so, so fucking hard, still have to fight so fucking hard, to get those treatments. I was just thinking yesterday, one of the really eye-opening things for me about my transition is how contingent my existence is. It has been a struggle, is an ongoing struggle, to be permitted to exist, and if anything helps me in that struggle, you know, I'll take it.

But dysphoria, I think, does exist, does exist as a real thing, outside of those artificial clinical constructions, and the way it is manifested is... culturally determined to a significant extent.

FGTI, I hope you found a better place to talk out your stuff last night! I know from experience of having-been-stalked, how much it fucks with your head, how it can create a sense of social threat hyper-awareness which is functionally indistinguishable from the social threat hyper-awareness of extreme loneliness (as described so beautifully in Olivia Laing's The Lonely City), even while surrounded by friends.

There's so much I want to say about this: "have zero commonality with the way that gay men typically socialize sexually, use sex as a method of exerting power over each other, or are competitive with each other" but there's no meaningful way to say it, without sounding either gatekeepery or dismissive, like I'm just warning you off. If you feel like you want to be, or should be a woman, you should be a woman!!! I say that without reservations. However, if you think that ~being in the class of people who are considered women~ will in any way remove you from sex as competition, sex as power struggle, dominance structures, etc. - please do a lot more research into the topic. ~People who are classed as women~ exert dominance in different ways than cis male gays do, ways you may be wholey unfamiliar with, and ways you may be ill-equipped to cope with (trust me, I speak from experience on this one!) That doesn't mean they aren't there. Yes, even queer women.

This is absolutely not intended as gatekeeping, or warning you off! Just a "please be careful, do some research" to someone I really like and respect and want to help avoid getting hurt.

Kate - I can't tell you how *happy* I am, and how grateful I am, that you write these blog-length posts with so much research and thought in them, and so much to think about and engage with! A couple of days ago, I was reading classic ILX threads like "The Cult of the New" and "Objectivity vs Subjectivity" and thinking "why does no one on ILX write like this any more?" and now here you are, doing just that. And I love it. I appreciate it. During my morning Forest Bathing session, I was walking round my woods mentally thinking through your post and having a conversation with it, and it was the best thing, most joyful thing. I'm going to eat the rest of my breakfast then come back and give you a thoughtful response, but I just wanted to say how much I appreciate your presence and your thoughts!

Gonna tackle Dysphoria first, as the easier of the two subjects. (LOL)

I think part of my confusion around the term is ~all of my austisms~. I often struggle to distinguish physical distress from emotional distress. e.g. I experience a thing I call 'depression headaches' - where the depression is so intense and so localised, it feels like a headache, even though it involves no physical pain! Also, being around a source of unpleasant noise I cannot avoid does cause me actual, physical pain - autistic hyperacusis. The way that trans people I knew used to talk about dysphoria, I kind of assumed it was similar in quality and intensity to autistic hyperacusis, like, "Augh! Augh! Get it off! Make it fucking stop NOW!!!"

We did a group session around dysphoria, and one person said, "no, it's more like - you look at your 'junk' (gestures to crotch) and you just think 'YUCK'" and I was like, nah, mate, that's completely normal. That's just how everyone feels about their own genitals. It's completely disgusting having genitals! And everyone around the table looked at me like o_0. Like, sure, the vaginaphobia of misogyny is a real thing, but most cis people are not revolted by their own bodies to quite the extreme that I am.

I do have "Augh! Augh! Get it off! Make it stop now!!!" responses, but they tend to be towards being on the receiving end of misogyny. "How dare you! It's wrong to treat *anyone* like that, but it's particularly horrible because __I Am Not A Woman!!!__" That is where I experience the most friction around being trans. When I utilise modes of behaviour which are reserved for men, which are considered completely within the limits of normal and accepted behaviour for men, but are off limits for ~people who are considered women~ and will be heavily policed as such. (There are, indeed, other behaviours which are considered off limits for ~people who are considered men~. I'd struggle _just as hard_ with those, if I became a trans man.)

I experience it as *friction* and I've always called it friction.

I think that dysphoria, as a medical depression thing, is that certain specific kind of depression which is caused by being exposed to long-term friction that one cannot get away from. Treating the depression as ~just mysterious depression with no cause~ will not work. One has to work out what is causing the friction, and remove the source of the friction, otherwise all the CBT, the antidepressants, electroshock therapy, whatever, that you throw at the dysphoria is never going to have any effect. (e.g. most therapy did jack shit for my mental health issues, until I got my autism diagnosis, and a few minor but important adjustments at work had a pretty miraculous effect.)

Being a non-standard gender, in a binary-gendered-world is a HUGE and relentless source of constant friction. I think that What Dysphoria Is, is the reaction to the friction. The friction can take many forms, the reaction can take many forms. Friction might not even be experienced as "capital-D Dysphoria" but more like, "But things are just so much *better* and *nicer* and *happier* when I don't have to deal with all that friction!" So anything that removes friction, such as medical transition, but even social transition, and minor things like pronoun changes, will have a salutory effect on relieving the distress caused by the friction.

So medical transition (or even just social transition) can be one theoretical approach to relieving friction. But, also, the promises of genuine Transformative Radical Feminism can offer a theoretical approach to relieving friction. Smashing the gender *binary* into a million shiny, glittering pieces, where everyone could have their own self-determined gender, liberated from biology and respected by all - that would also relieve friction. It is utterly utopian to want to change society on that scale. It would be amazingly wonderful to live in that world where gender assignments ~simply didn't matter~, because we so manifestly and obviously do not. As trans people, we change our individual selves, using gender confirming treatments and methods to reduce friction, because reducing friction reduces suffering.

You're right, we fight so hard for changes that are "only marginally less terrible than the way things were before" like cat shit smells marginally better than dog shit.

But we do still need to fight for those changes, and cling onto them, imperfect though they may be.

re: playing the "Dead People Least Likely To Actually Be Cis" game (in the context of DFW)

I think this is a really natural thing to do.

Partly, we (does this "we" mean specifically "trans people" or "people in general" or "people who don't see themselves reflected in art very often"? you tell me!) are attracted to works that reflect our experiences in some way, whether the author *intended* to put those reflections in deliberately; or whether the author just created a shiny surface that people can project their own reflections onto. I don't think it matters. If you see it, it's yours. It doesn't matter if it was the author that put it there, or you. That reading is still there for you.

But I also recently had the experience of... an artist who has been, since my teens, a reflection of "that's ME, that is" what I thought my gender was or should be. Someone who had always been quite gender non-conforming, and someone I had always thought "whatever gender that person is, that is my gender." Once, I discovered and claimed the word nonbinary, I started joking about him being nonbinary and my trans root and all that kind of thing.

We had some... interactions. He picked up the word 'nonbinary' from me, and had the exact same reaction to it as me - "ooh, is THAT the word for it, yes - MINE!" and wrote a song about the word/concept that he made a big point of telling everyone was a (rare) autobiographical song.

Sometimes one sees things in art because one is projecting one's self into it; sometimes one is just recognising stuff that is genuinely... there, but no one else bothered to look at.

Still working on... you know, talking about things. There are a lot of things that are hard to say, that are very difficult and very raw, and my inclination is to speak _to_ those things directly.

It occurred to me yesterday that there _is_ a word that's a noun version of non-binary, and some non-binary people identify with it, and some non-binary people find it diminutive and tend to reject it. It's "enby".

Talking about autism is really hard for me. There are ways, both personally and in my circle, that it intersects with my gender, ways that are difficult and challenging for me. For instance one of the really negative stereotypes associated with autism is people who are "self-diagnosed" as autistic being jerks on the Internet. I'm not aware of ever having received a formal diagnosis of autism. But the scorn that is heaped on "self-diagnosed" people on the autism spectrum has some unpleasant confluences with transmedicalist gatekeeping.

My understanding of the current consensus on trans identity is that it is based pretty much entirely, on a functional level, around self-determination. I'm trans because I say I am. Full stop. All of the other diagnostic criteria that have been proposed, all of the "tests", are either unnecessary or just plain wrong, and wrong, nearly always, in the direction of telling people who are trans or gender non-conforming that they aren't _really_. Even the symptoms... dysphoria isn't _necessary_ to be trans. So much of my dysphoria is based on being told, over and over again in so many ways, that the way I felt wasn't valid or real, was sick or wrong. If I wasn't told that, I feel like my relationship to dysphoria would be very different.

I've never sought an autism diagnosis because I don't know that I would _need_ one. Again, it's about the label, and what use it has to me. There are no drugs I need a diagnosis to get, no surgeries that a diagnosis opens me up to. I don't always think the way other people seem to, don't always want the things other people seem to want, and in the past that has been very difficult and painful and over the course of 40+ years I've learned how to negotiate that in ways that work for me. If someone had been able to diagnose me with autism, if it was understood and treated the way it is now... well, that "what if" has some overlaps with the "if" wherein I could have been understood and accepted as trans when I was young.

There are concrete things, only a very few, that I have dysphoria about. I have pretty bad dysphoria, for instance, about my hairline, about my alopecia. That's something about my body, my physical body, that gives me an intense sense of _wrongness_. I feel that dysphoria more intensely right now, honestly, than I feel genital dysphoria.

But most of my dysphoria, honestly, is due to what you call "friction". There are a lot of people who treat trans people badly now, in ways that were pretty much _universal_ in the past. I think, like, about Lou Reed, about the way Lou Reed treated Rachel, and the way in which that pretty much the best someone like Rachel could even _hope_ for back then. I mean, to me, to look back it, the way he treated her was monstrous, absolutely monstrous. What am I going to do? I say that and people who like Lou Reed, for whom Lou Reed is a role model, will defend him, and I just...

I don't hate Lou Reed, because I mean, what would be the point? He did some things that were very important and very good, and some things that were awful, and he's dead now. "Walk on the Wild Side" is still one of the saddest fucking songs I know. Whatever decreases that "friction" - and there are a lot of things, a lot of ways, some of which are diametrically opposed to each other - I celebrate.

That is what makes it better, I think. I am still miserable a lot of the time, but for decades I was miserable for what I genuinely thought was "no reason". There's no easy remedy to transphobia, to misogyny, to cultures of endemic abuse, but at least being able to acknowledge the problems frees me from _being_ the problem.

Partly, we (does this "we" mean specifically "trans people" or "people in general" or "people who don't see themselves reflected in art very often"? you tell me!) are attracted to works that reflect our experiences in some way, whether the author *intended* to put those reflections in deliberately; or whether the author just created a shiny surface that people can project their own reflections onto. I don't think it matters. If you see it, it's yours. It doesn't matter if it was the author that put it there, or you. That reading is still there for you.

― Branwell with an N

The "we" in this case, I was going more for non-binary people. Binary trans experience isn't universal, I work to not universalize it, but there are things trans women do seem to have in common, things that we can interface on, and non-binary, I don't have that experience. It's this vast unmapped space, full of these tremendous unknowns.

The challenge for me, particularly when talking about people who are dead, is that of self-determination.

This February I ran across a song from one of the later Pink Fairies records, "Kings of Oblivion", from 1973. It's a ten minute fairly good "heavy psych" jam written by their guitarist Larry Wallis. It is called "I Wish I Was A Girl" and that's what it's about.

I looked up Larry Wallis. He has passed away, fairly recently I think. I have no cause, no reason, no ability to speak of Wallis as anything other than a cisgender male, because I do believe, more than anything, in self-determination, that nobody else has the right to tell me who I am, that I don't have the right to tell anybody else who they are.

Gonna cue up that Pink Fairies song now coz my memory is they were rad, and I've not heard that one...

Wow, I have so many feelings about the ways in which being autistic and being trans both are, and are not, very similar...

I think we're very similar and yet diametically opposite on autism/trans, because I have very similar feelings to seeking an official UK Government Sanctioned trans diagnosis, that you have towards seeking an autism diagnosis. (What would be the point, of putting myself through that particular hell? (and the UK process is positively *medieval* right now!)) While, for me, seeking an autism diagnosis was critically important: A) because AFAB folks (sorry, that word again!!! bad trans!!!) have such difficulty getting the diagnosis and being believed whereas the putative ~Schroedinger's Autist~ arsehole on the internet is almost always a cis male and B) (more importantly!) because it allowed myself and my boss/HR the right to demand that I needed the accomodations at work that I needed. So while I'm completely with you on the validity of self diagnosis and the primacy of self determination - if you know, you know! - the things that open up and become available to you with that piece of paper are the driving decision point to seek a diagnosis. The choices we made have been shaped by the options available to us!

(Also, the correlative link between the autisms and the transes is very strong and totally ~proven by science~ so if you are one, you are actually far *more* likely to be the other!)

((Haha, I'm definitely towards the "I use enby but I hate it" side, but you are correct. I am allowed to be complicated and self-contradictory!))

It seems you really grok what I mean by "friction", it's such a relief to explain something like that and not have someone look at you like 'u mad?' but go 'yeah that fits' and apply it in their own life. I do think we understand each other there, so I'm glad.

About the music / writing / art stuff. I get what you mean about it not being *fair* to retroactively apply a label to someone, especially someone who is dead. I think maybe in that case, it's more fair to say, rather than "this person was maybe not cis?!" but more like "wow, this is a really hugely trans *piece of work*". (The Pink Fairies track is great, BTW. Love it!) I have *such* complicated feelings about Lou Reed. But let's not get into the "when 'bad' people make life-changing work" discussion right now when we're getting along so well!

I have a similar feeling about the first Gina X Performance album that you describe about I Wish I Was A Girl, that I listened to it, especially songs like Be A Boy and Casablanca (which is literally about flying off to get gender affirmation surgery, 'feee-male to may-uhl' in a heavy German accent, very sexy) that made me sit up and go o_0, like I could not believe that someone was singing about this stuff in 1978? Gina herself *appeared* to be a cis woman in a heterosexual marriage (I have no idea what her situation was/is, or what happened to her, if this was something she felt, or if she was playing around with kinky concepts because in 1978 West Germany, thanks to Romy Haag and her Berlin club, trans was a pretty ~cool~ concept to be making records about) but I can say without reservation, that this is one of the most trans records I have ever heard in my life. I don't need *her* story to be real, to see myself reflected in those lyrics.

(And she was friends with, and wrote a song about Quentin Crisp, who is one of those "you never know" characters, because he was a gay icon his whole life, but towards the end of his life, as he encountered trans people and trans concepts, he very much said, you know, if this option had been *available* when he was young, he would have taken the path of trans woman rather than Stately Homo of Great Britain.)

But the point is - your *reading* of the song is what makes the song trans, it doesn't matter about the person who made it!

I have more I'd like to discuss on the subject of nonbinary and your experience of feeling both 'woman' and feeling 'other' but it might require a blog-length explanation of ~how I see nonbinary~ that I'm not sure you have the patience for. Would you be interested in reading that, or should I save it for a blog?

"The choices we made have been shaped by the options available to us!"

YES. This. True in the present tense too.

I can definitely see how being clinically identified as autistic for you is really valuable and important.

My wife actually was just talking to me, literally just now, about reading a link between autism and transness. I think being able to establish these correlations is good and helpful. I also, though, worry, given the endemic tendency towards conflating correlation and causation that both cis and neurotypical people seem to regularly experience.

And it's not necessarily because of the way autism is conceived of differently in AMABs and AFABs (I do want to reiterate again that I endorse AFAB as a self-descriptor, that the lack of universality of that term doesn't mean that it's "bad" for you to self-determine with it).

Because also lurking in the background is the spectre of abuse. My anecdotal experience - and this may just be based on the specific subset of trans people that I encounter - is that a background of abuse seems to be more prevalent in trans and gender non-conforming people than it is in the general population.

At least for me, I don't think the two are causatively linked. My personal experience - and this is absolutely _not_ generalizable, this is just me - was that acknowledging and coming to terms with my childhood abuse was a prerequisite to acknowledging myself as trans. A lot of the, uh, friction, I worry about experiencing around my trans identity (and mostly, as it turns out, I haven't experienced much of that friction; my experience is uncommon in that respect)... a lot of these behaviors are experiences that were normal and common to me in the environment I grew up in, and learning cope with other people behaving in that way better equipped me to deal with the challenges anybody who wants to come out as trans has to deal with.

I am definitely familiar with Gina X Performance - I have heard "Be A Boy" and I got the exact feeling from it that you did. About two months ago I went on a major "no wave" kick and it's a weirdly bifurcated genre - on the one hand you have wacky marimba music made by people who have clearly listened to a lot of Frank Zappa, and then on the other side you have gender radicalism - groups like Unknown Gender (hmmmm), Ludus with songs like "Anatomy is Not Destiny", and, later, "God Is My Co-Pilot" with their "Gender Is As Gender Does" EP (HMMMMMMM). I love that kind of stuff so much. It is so hugely inspirational to me.

I would love to read your thoughts about what non-binary identity means to you. I may or may not be able to coherently respond, it may take me a long while to process them, but it is just amazing to be able to talk about these sorts of things - it's not usually an opportunity I get.

Haha, God Is My Co-Pilot were responsible for one of the easily top 3 WORST gigs I have ever seen in my life, but I might have to give them another go. I can remember, that in the late 70s/early 80s, when I first discovered the life-changing properties of music, there was a lot more experimentalism and give-and-take around gender than that period is usually given credit for. But it went hand in hand with an attitude towards being *transgressive* purely for the sake of transgressiveness, which led quickly to a lot of *badness* when people did not interrogate the power dynamics of what was being transgressed.

I don't really know what your experience around abuse is, and I don't want to dig into anything that is painful to you. I think you are generally correct - there *are* a huge amount of abuse-histories in the big-tent Queer community of trans-(ish) folks. And I personally think there may well be a potential causative link - and I want to say this in a way that there is no *possibility* of it being read as at all victim-blamey! And places the blame and responsibility firmly on the shoulders of the abusers.

But people like to shit on those that are different. Some abusers even feel that it is justified or righteous or even GOOD to shit on certain types of difference they view as disruptive, and the difference of 'queerness' and the difference of 'autistic' are very visible and noticeable differences that draw intense amounts of shit-throwing, as well as a sense of righteousness in the shit-throwers, because wow, are autists and queers kinda disrupt-y? The problem is not our difference as gender non-conformers. The problem resides squarely in those who cannot tolerate difference, and use violence to enforce moral conformity.

(It is my own experiences of abuse, that make me extremely suspicious of Orthodoxy in many forms, where 'Correct Belief' is privileged above all else, and 'Being Seen To Be Thinking Correctly In Public' is seen as more important than 'Actually Interrogating Systems Of Power and their Abuse'. These attitudes exist in Queer spaces and Femininst spaces, the same as they exist everywhere else, because people who have internalised abusive patterns sometimes replicate that abuse. (I do not exempt myself from those tendencies.))

((There's something else really, erm, touchy around ideas of self-determination and self-labelling that I want to re-examine in that light, but maybe today is not that day.))

I actually wrote an absolutely enourmous 1200-word epic on ~what is nonbinary?~ but it turned into ~what is gender anyway~ with a long detour into physics and I need to rewrite it in such a way that it re-focuses on ~what does nonbinary mean to ME~ but I am unfortunately a very top-down systems thinker and I struggle both with not-generalising, and with ridiculous word-vomit when I try to qualify and hedge and de-generalise. Autism, huh!

Good post. Here are some thoughts, which may or may not intersect with yours, I've been having lately about gender. My approach to systems is, I suspect, slightly different from the one you describe. I have developed, over time, an approach to things that often puts me in direct conflict with certain uninterrogated communication norms. It interests me that it can be upsetting to people when I decline to argue with them, for instance.

Mostly my approach is to talk about specific examples. I was thinking about Richard O'Brien yesterday, the writer of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. They are non-binary, and they are also transphobic. This immediately raises hackles in a lot of people on the grounds that it "doesn't make sense". Well, I mean, yes, but transphobia is stupid and wrong in anybody. I don't know that it's more wrong for a non-binary person to be transphobic than it is for a cis person to be transphobic. In any event I don't require that what people believe make logical sense. Start doing that and people (including me) start throwing up all kinds of excuses and contortions.

What interests me more about Richard is that their understanding of non-binary is just really fundamentally different from mine. The last I read they said they thought of themselves as 70% male, 30% female. I think of this sort of approach by analogy with musical genre. Richard's approach is this weird sort of Osmonds-esque approach wherein they are 70% country and 30% rock and roll. In the meantime I'm over here self-identifying as gabber.

In the meantime I was going through with my wife some of the stuff about the intersection between ASD and gender identity and a lot of it was pretty unpleasant and really personally upsetting to me. I haven't really engaged with how the clinical community talks about autism. I guess I'm not surprised that the same sorts of pseudoscientific normative crap infests that community, but that didn't make it any easier for me to deal with Simon Baron-Cohen's theories. I had, in particular, a strong visceral negative response to his "extreme male brain" theory.

Abuse itself is, yes, a fraught and difficult subject for me. I experienced chronic childhood abuse. I learned to suppress and deny that abuse for my own survival. I started to behave in ways that replicated the abuse I had been raised with. After intensive work and intensive support from others I learned to recognize and acknowledge those patterns. The most difficult and painful part of this for me was accepting responsibility for the ways in which I hurt other people without jumping from there to believing that I was an inherently bad person or that I consciously chose to hurt people. Ultimately, acknowledging how I was hurt made it possible for me to better avoid replicating that behavior.

Aw crap, don't get me stared on Simon Baron-Cohen, the dude is a massive, MASSIVE transphobe and awful and icky in so many ways that have actively harmed autistic people and especially AFAB autistic people - and/or trans people and the intersections thereof, but he just gets an endless free pass on his shitty, shitty transphobia because he's not a ~femininst~ so who cares. Argh. He makes me so mad. The way people ignore his shittiness makes me even madder.

Here's the thing: Richard O'Brien can say shitty, transphobic, exclusionary things about trans women. Trans women also, sometimes, can and do say shitty, transphobic, exclusionary things about nonbinary people, that we're freaks, we're weirdoes, we're fashion victims doing it for attention, lesbians in denial about our sexual identity and every other shitty horrible stereotype about nonbinary people. Neither makes the other OK. Neither makes sense - except they *do* make sense, for people whose minds have only opened up far enough to accept themselves, and cannot imagine that other people might be different, or have different experiences of themselves that are also and equally valid. People who have had to fight so hard to get a space for themselves will often fight *harder* to keep other people from disrupting or even sharing that tiny space they've claimed. (See also: transphobic feminists (and I mean, actual feminists, not just 'any random person with a cervix who says transphobic things'))

OK, now I need to take a moment and hydrate, because I'm not mad at you - I'm mad at shitty people like Simon Baron-Cohen (hate! hate! haaaaaate!) But I want to be calm and friendly for a discussion with you, because I feel you are a friend and I want to show your conversation respect.

Like, what even is autism? It is a set of clusters of difficulties and strengths and variations from the Neurotypical. And the clusters are so different, I don’t know how anyone could look at the whole of them, and go “extreme male brain” because like...

One of the clusters that neurotypicals notice an awful lot, is “problems with social stuff”. Sometimes we really struggle to comprehend the inside of other people’s heads. We can never do eye contact right. We never know when it’s our turn to speak in a conversation, or when we’ve been speaking for too long, and we need to shut up. We monologue, we talk either in monotones, or ALL-CAPS 24 POINT HELVETICA BOLD BECAUSE WE’RE EXCITED. You know who’s supposed to be good at all that conversation stuff? Women. You know who’s allowed to be bad at conversations? Men. EXTREME MALE BRAIN!!!

But when you talk to actual autistic people, the thing we tend to flag up as causing the most trouble is: extreme sensitivity (or insensitivity) to sensory stimuli. OMG, what’s that weird little sound, it’s driving me insane, make it stop. I really like the way this fabric feels on my skin, I’m going to touch it for an hour or two, but get all of those awful itchy labels out of every one of my clothes. This song is amazing, I’m going to play it 200 times in a row until everyone wants to kill me. Neurotypical researchers don’t seem to get this at all, or else they come up with these bizarre studies, like “how would we measure sensitivity to colour, would we expect an autistic person to be able to see more shades of green?” (Lads, that’s Irish, not autistic.) When autistic people are more like, “sensitivity to colour means: I would really like to read this webpage but I am too distracted by the incredibly bright green of the header!” How on earth is this gendered? It isn’t. Extreme male brain is horseshit.

Neurotypicals are like, “you guys are weird around being verbal, you either create these great logorrhoea cascades of verbiage, or you’re completely non-verbal and don’t talk at all.” Words are… something that… women do? We think? Except for writing books, that’s EXTREME MALE BRAIN again. Autistic people are like “My Special Interests! Let me show you them! The intensity of the Special Interest is the most wonderful and exciting part of being autistic” and neurotypicals are like, “you like trains? AHA extreme male brain.”

It’s extreme male horseshit is what it is.

Some autistic and trans people I’ve spoken to think there’s some kind of genetic link, because trans and autism and hyperflexion are all super-coincidental with one another, and the latter two definitely have a genetic link. Me, I tend to think… autistic people really struggle with complex social systems that have no apparent rules, that aren’t written down or clearly explained anywhere. Autistic people really struggle with logical inconsistencies and apparent contradictions. Autistic people really struggle with producing the correct and expected response to social expectations. What *is* The Gender Binary, except one giant totally illogical, complex social system with no apparent rules and full of inconsistencies and double standards – do you *really* expect us to produce “correct gender responses” to this quagmire? I don’t understand how neurotypical people navigate the convoluted nonsense of The Gender Binary, you cannot be serious if you expect an autist to do it.

I’m so sorry you had to read Baron-Cohen, he really is dreadful.

What interests me more about Richard is that their understanding of non-binary is just really fundamentally different from mine. The last I read they said they thought of themselves as 70% male, 30% female. I think of this sort of approach by analogy with musical genre. Richard's approach is this weird sort of Osmonds-esque approach wherein they are 70% country and 30% rock and roll. In the meantime I'm over here self-identifying as gabber.

See, this is the problem for me, is that I just *don't* understand music in terms of 'genre' for this exact reason. What even *is* genre? Some weird arbitrary grouping. (Rather like gender!)

This is not really how I understand *my* gender, but what if, instead of saying they were "70% acid house and 30% country", they were actually trying to express "this song is like 70% pumping 808 beats and squelchy basslines and 30% twangy guitars". How would you even express that in terms of 'genre'? But that's what nonbinary is *like*. (But still not really approaching what nonbinary *is*.)

Hi Branwell! I think we are on the same page re: Simon Baron-Cohen. It is one of those struggles that I find myself in constantly - certain people will just casually say things that are just incredibly grossly offensive or upsetting like saying that ASD people have "extreme male brain" and the cultural norm sometimes seems to be that whoever can say the stupidest shit without seeming upset is the person you're supposed to listen to. Because the best lack all conviction, right? Scientific objectivity and monstrous banality have so much in common, and so much pseudoscience is presenting the latter as the former.

I can definitely relate to hyperacusis. I have these acute bouts where I just get overwhelmed by external stimuli and have to shut down out of self-preservation. And that lack of response, weirdly enough, has in the past made people around me think I'm some kind of emotionaless robot or something. Nowadays it's different. People around me will sometimes say they wish I wasn't so _sensitive_.

See, the reason I use gender as an analogy is _because_ it is some weird arbitrary grouping, sometimes imposed by other people who have a limited understanding of what drives the people in that "genre", sometimes identified by those other people with a flat-out slur.

I also think a little about genre-exclusionary self-definition, the way people work genre into their identities. Like, back in the day I would run frequently across people who said "I listen to everything but rap and country". Maybe there are still people who say things like that. I don't think I would want to talk to those people. Because not only is there the explicit exclusion, there's the _implicit_ exclusion, there's the failure to even recognize e.g. gabber as something that existed.

Genre is utterly arbitrary to me but it's not meaningless. It's important to making sense of music, which is really important to me. If I want to listen to music, I often do want to listen to a specific sort of music, and that can be a particular artist or, more often for me these days, it can be certain particular qualities. It's sort of about how increasingly music is social to me, talking about it, experiencing it, coming to a common understanding, is more important to me than just hearing a record I like - it's about finding the _right_ music for whatever the situation is. Genre is an important part of that process to me. I can't just put all my tunes on random because if I do I'll go right from Aphex Twin to Komitas Vardipet and there's no flow there. No flow at all.

For a while during my explorations I did go through a phase where I was kind of a gender anarchist, feeling like gender is arbitrary and meaningless and we should just get rid of it altogether. I'm not quite that way now. I do have an identifiable gender. I am a woman, and that phrase does have meaning and value to me, and it seems to have meaning and value to a lot of other people. Is there some sort of extrinsic universal meaning to it, a universal grammar of gender? No, not really. It just happens to be one of the more common ones, one of the two that is accepted as valid by the majority of people.

My non-binary is still there, though, and I work when I can to keep it from disappearing. And it's not a matter of percentage, either. I am 100% woman, in a way that doesn't invalidate my non-binary nature but in a way that _also_ doesn't mean that people who _are_ exclusively binary-gendered are anything other than totally fundamentally equal to me. It's just not that sort of math.

The bit where abuse comes into it with me is that my abuse experience means that I struggle a great deal with _appropriate boundaries_. I overdisclose or underdisclose. What's weird is that most cis white men seem to have the same problem to some degree? But everybody pretends they don't, everybody else is expected to work around many, many of their flaws and deficits. They aren't even _allowed_ to have problems of their own, and this of course makes their problems even worse, and since they are considered both normal and normative, it makes things even worse than that for the rest of us.

I hope that makes sense. I feel like I did really struggle with putting some of the stuff I'm feeling into words.

I'm sorry you are struggling with putting this stuff into words, because I am really enjoying your words and reading them. I want this to be a good, interesting conversation for both of us! Even if it's sometimes hard to express this stuff, because language wasn't made for people like us. (Funnily enough, one of my queer theory reading groups is doing a set of readings/videos about autistic communication this week.)

Wow, yeah, I also struggle with finding appropriate boundaries. My way of experiencing that is: because I was abused, I have a hard time understanding sometimes, that *I* am allowed to have boundaries. In the past, I have definitely had the feeling that if *I* was not allowed to have boundaries, why should anyone else? I work hard on not acting like that, these days. It's still hard, because: Autism! Boundaries are another weird set of social conventions I can't work out. Autism makes me unable to work out how much is "oversharing" versus how much is "undersharing" or what to say when or how.

I really am going to work on my ~Colour Theory of Gender~ post. Some people think in percentages, some people think in degrees. I have maths brain, that's how it works. But I feel like right now, it would be a lot of me waving my hands about and shouting excitedly about "yellow!" But the fact that colour theory acknowledges that there are different ways of forming colours - additive processes (RGB) and subtractive processes (CMYK) - I think captures what you're talking about, in terms of defining gender (or genre) by exclusion? And things can be more than the sum of their parts, and add up to something other than 100%.

But for now, I'm going to try to do it in your language of music genre, since we're both music nerds.

OK, imagine a planet, let's call it, oh, Germany, where there are two, and only two genres of music, which are arbitrarily declared and sorted by how they are used, as much as what they sound like. There is Art-Music, which is serious and important and thoughtful and is like classical and avant-guard and prog. It is for listening to very intently. Then there is Pop-Music, which is disposable and fun and catchy and is like pop and rock'n'roll and dance. It is for dancing and singing along to. All music has to fit into one of these two genres, no exceptions! Those are the rules.

I grew up among the Pop-Music people, I was taught to play and write pop music. I kinda know how the rules of how pop music works, but I've never felt comfortable with it, or very happy with its limitations. I keep writing songs, and the other Pop-Music musicians are like, "Sigh! Branwell, this song is 27 minutes long, with 4 different movements. That is not Pop-Music, that is a symphony. Art-Music. Try harder!" and "Branwell, this song is more like it, it's 4 minutes long and has a recognisable tune (nice of you to give us one of those for a change!) but in the middle 8, where you are supposed to put a nice sax riff or a guitar solo? You have stuck in a string quartet! String Quartets are NOT Pop-Music, That is Art-Music!!!"

Finally, I just give up. I gather up my recordings and head over to the Art-Music side of the music school. Here, I'm gonna try to be an Art-Music composer. "No, no, NO," say the other Art-Music composers, "you have arrived with a drum machine, drum machines are NOT allowed in Art-Music, that is Pop-Music." And I'm like, please just listen to my recording, it's 27 minutes long, and it's got string quartets in it, it's Art-Music. And the other Art-Musicians recoil in horror and go "RECORDINGS?!?!? Absolutely not. Recordings are for Pop-Music. We work from *SCORES* here. Show us the score and we will consider it" and I'm like, erm, I can't do a score, since I can't write music. No one ever taught us how at Pop-Music School. "YOU MUST WRITE SCORES OR YOU WILL FIND NO ALLIES HERE!!!" Man, I am 50 years old, it is way too late to learn how to write a score, anyway, a score is totally inappropriate for my piece, it relies a great deal on improvisation. And the Art-Musicians are "Improvisation!??! The horror! That is Jazz, that is Bee-Bop, that is Pop-Music, get OUT!"

And I'm like "No, it's not jazz, it's more like... can you imagine a planet where the serious Art-Music is improvised, like Classical Indian music is? Or... like, Joik music, or First Nations improvisational music, where, it's kinda like folk music, so it might be Pop-Music, but it's also serious ethnography, so it might be considered Art-Music, but it doesn't actually conform to either Art- or Pop- Music standards because the way the people make it and use it is less like ~performing music~ and more like... a game, a social ritual, an improvisational sing-off, but also a bonding, friendship thing to Joik together? It's a completely different way of even conceiving what music is even *for*, distinct from dancing to Pop-Music or thinking hard about Art-Music? But also 27 minutes long, with movements like a classical symphony and a string quartet in the middle, so it's quite *like* Art-Music. But with a drum machine beat."

OUT, BRANWELL. O. U. T. OUT.

Now tell me. Where the hell in the music school, am I supposed to sit? I have no idea. That's how I feel about gender.

Your color analogy makes me think of Don Joyce's "Squant". Do you know that one?

I like your high/low culture analogy though. In this analogy, I was raised to write classical music, from birth. People just look at me and said "Ah, now, they're clearly a classical composer." Turned out that I was really shit at a lot of aspects of being a classical composer, but it turned out I was fucking great at, let's say, orchestration. Just an amazing orchestrator. So that was OK. The ways I was taught to orchestrate were bullshit. Pure 101 strings schmaltz. I was good at it, but it was stupid. All I was doing was making music I hated more popular.

So I quit doing that, and I started writing pop tunes, and I don't know if I was any good at it or not but I LOVED doing it. So I said "OK, I'm a pop songwriter now", and to my surprise people were generally OK with it, even if nobody really understood why I would do something like that, even if there was this assumption that classical music was the music that was Important and respected, the music that everyone went out of their way to listen to and talked about how much they liked it even if they didn't really.

But I also, you know, I sometimes try to write a different sort of music. And I talk about it and people are like "Oh, so you're looking to write a cross between popular and classical music?" And I say no, I'm not interested in classical music at all, there are some people, particularly people who grew up writing pop music, who are doing a really amazing job at classical music, way better than the popular crap I grew up with, and I admire and respect them but classical music is really not my thing. It means nothing to me.

And they say OK, well, if it's not a cross between popular and classical music, what is it, then? And I say, there aren't really any good words for it. Like, first off, it's not a cross between popular music and anything else, I like pop music but it's not pop music. What is it? It's something I've sort of seen and heard somewhere sometimes and I think it's really cool but I don't know what the formal word for it is. And they stare at me blankly. And they say that doesn't make any sense, that sounds like you're just doing a cross between popular and classical and you don't want to admit it.

And I kind of shrug and walk away and keep telling everybody that I'm a pop songwriter.

Ha! I'm listening to Squant, and it's reminding me amazingly of Anish Kapoor and the whole squabble over Vantablack and the World's Pinkest Pink, but it actually years earlier? Again, Negativland proving to be amazingly prescient in so many ways.

I don't see nonbinary as being about 'squant' at all - it's about recognising the existence of 'yellow'.

And it's funny, because I didn't really lampshade this at all in my analogy, but you absolutely picked up on it. The non-reversability of power structures. That the prestige of Art-Music and the disposability of Pop-Music creates a power gradient. Like, if you pick up and move your concert from the Grand Royal Opera House to a cheap venue on the wrong side of town, where the Pop-Music gets played, people at the Opera are going to think you are incredibly weird and strange, but it's no skin off their back if you go.

But the people who are going to *object* the loudest are the people in the Cheap Seats, because damn, you can play at the Opera any time you like, why are you taking space away from all the Pop-Musicians who are waiting for just 5 minutes onstage in the cheap venue with a sticky carpet and no mirrors in the dressing rooms. They didn't create the rules that confined Pop-Music to the Cheap Seats. And they know - if someone gets up from the Cheap Seats and decides to go and sit in the front row of the Opera, there are so many damned *ushers* who are going to try to stop you from getting there! No one sees the *ushers* who are also enforcing the stupid, arbitrary rules about keeping Pop-Music out of the Opera as being objectionable, they are ~just doing their jobs~.

It's the whole fucking system, that assigns prestige to one genre of music and disposability to the other, that sucks. But if people don't see the Opera-House ushers as part of that same system, but only ever see the people in the cheap seats complaining as being THE problem, they just *replicate* the whole power dynamic that keeps the Opera-House prestigious and well-endowed and covered in gold cherubs and the Cheap Seats poor and shoddy. Why on earth would Art-Music Composers ever complain about a system that benefits them?

Haha but if you say "I'm not interested in the Cheap Seats, *OR* the Opera House, I just wanna go play my own kind of music in a field somewhere!" - everybody piles in and invokes the Criminal Justice Act to stop people having raves in fields.

y'all, help me out a little bit here

i'm on this huge prince binge and i'm reading this bio of him and look

i believe in self-determination, really i do

but then i run across shit like this

https://www.towleroad.com/2009/04/prince-is-not-gay-but-he-is-a-fancy-lesbian/

Did you first think Prince was gay?

Lisa: He was little and kinda prissy and everything. But he’s so not gay.

Wendy: He’s a girl, for sure, but he’s not gay. He looked at me like a gay woman would look at another woman.

Lisa: Totally. He’s like a fancy lesbian.

look, goddamn everyone who knew him at all will say shit like this about him. this is less like "canonizing anne frank as a mormon" and more "canonizing anne frank as a mormon after realizing that her diary is absolutely jam-fucking-packed with references to the angel moroni". i am having a real, real, fucking hard time maintaining self-determination kayfabe on this one

I'm really struggling with Prince in general, after reading the reveals on the #MeToo thread, so everything I say is going to be kind of filtered through that - the importance of separating the intensely personal and culturally important Meaning of The Work, from the fallible and damaged and damaging human that made it. And also separating the public figure of "Prince" (also, a work of art, and at least partially the co-creation of the viewers) from the human being Prince Rogers Nelson.

I'm not saying that as a caveat, I'm actually arguing that that distinction is *important*.

With some artists, and Prince is really one of them, their presentation of their onstage Self in public *IS* part of the art, which is available for interpretation and projection and identification by fans.

Prince, again and again, in his work, presented himself as nonbinary, presented himself as a lesbian - I do not think it is stretching or breaking anything, to read 'Prince's Life', as depicted in songs, videos, interviews, to be a work depicting a nonbinary lesbian. Prince as nonbinary is about as close as you can get to *canon* for a nonfictional universe.

Whether that means that Prince Rogers Nelson, the actual human being in Minnesota, conceived himself as any kind of trans (big-tent or small-tent) is beyond anything that any of us *can* know. We don't have access to the actor behind the role. We can't make that call. But for a fan to read the work of art that is "Prince", the fabulous purple pop star, and say "I read this as a nonbinary lesbian" - I think that's 100% A-OK, and that is what art is *for*.

And sometimes, as I said above, queer people often *do* have a kind of sixth (sorry, Colin, seventh) sense, for ~people of our kind~. Gays have a gaydar, bis have a bidar, I do actually think that trans people have some kind of transdar that operates on the same kind of 'you are too *like* me to be a coincidence'.

(I was reading the RIP Bimble thread recently, which I sometimes do around the anniversary of his death, because I loved him, and I feel like I never expressed that love enough while he was alive. But reading that thread, I was struck - he *knew* that I loved him, without my having to tell him. He did tell me in emails, that there was an instant and powerful attraction, we both had a sense of "you are *like* me" - that was actually independent of both of us going through very similar friction on ILX. When he told me he was trans, my reaction was a completely visceral "OMG I love you *more* now!" which didn't make sense at the time, but in the light of understanding more about myself now, that was something like my transdar kicking my very repressed homo tendencies into high gear. That how much I used to *fight* for the right to fancy men was very much linked to repressed trans-homo-ness. I wanted to fancy boys ~as a boy~ which was something that Mark was one of the few people to allow me.)

But to come back to Prince, I honestly wish that more people would understand that the trans / cis thing really isn't a binary. There is no hard and fast divide. Sometimes our transdars make false positives because we're so starved for role models, but sometimes our transdars *do* pick up the non-cis that exists even in some cis people.

it's particularly challenging. i posted over in the prince thread about having just read duane tudahl's book on 83-84 prince, on which tudahl agrees with the statement that prince _is_ his music. "separating the artist from the art" is not _possible_ with prince. all of his convoluted dances, all of his work, he's trying to reveal himself while at the same time protecting himself from the consequences of what he's revealing.

a great example of this is the song "if i was your girlfriend". i listen to the song and to me, what hits me is holy shit, there is no way in hell this guy is cis. and my wife, you know, she listens to the song and says holy shit, this guy is openly controlling and abusive.

and those two things, both of which were undeniably obvious to anybody who spent any time at all around him, both of which are attested over and over again in interviews with people around him, are the two things that he was trying the most to protect himself from the consequences of.

it's also complicated because of the extent to which he is a public figure. gina x, you know, she has her life, she has her privacy, and she has the right to it. prince is dead, has been dead for four years, but he's not quite a historical figure. who he is touches the heart of a lot of unresolved conflicts - the racial conflict in america, most obviously, but he is also very close to the heart of lgbtq issues.

he's still the most famous genderqueer person, as far as i can tell. i mean, the "celebrity" people talk about is caitlyn jenner? that's... even people my age don't remember her athletic career. she's not famous for anything she did. she's famous for being famous.

prince is different. he was a genius, he was an abuser, he was a gay-basher, he was genderqueer.

i don't, morally, have the right to him, _nobody_ has the right to him, but the harm he did, the damage and pain he caused... those of us who are alive today, those of us who are genderqueer today, those of us who were made invisible the same way prince was made invisible when over and over again, for decades, the only question anybody would ask is "hey is that dude gay", we have a right to the truth.

and the truth, in this case, is "no fucking way was that guy cis".

Yeah, I don't know that there is "a truth" in the way you are looking for.

There is only interpretation of the artist's work. You do not have access to any truth beyond that, except your own. Own your own truth.

i do think "transdar" is a thing. i would, honestly, say it's _more_ of a thing than gaydar. the heart of homosexuality is who you love. the heart of gender identity is who you _are_. to me, that's a lot harder to hide than sexuality. "transdar", for me, is not a "sixth sense", it's, well, an ability to use the senses we have. it's absolutely completely fucking baffling and hilarious to me the circumstances under which i pass. because cis people... they can be incredibly ignorant. not as a moral judgement, just as a practical matter - the shit they learned about trans people, the media stereotypes, we tend not to conform to those stereotypes. cis people will walk past a six foot six woman with pink hair wearing a pink white and blue striped sweater and never even consider the possibility that she might possibly be trans. i'm not sure my ability to take that possibility into account is any sort of mysterious gift!

Yeah, I don't know that there is "a truth" in the way you are looking for.

There is only interpretation of the artist's work. You do not have access to any truth beyond that, except your own. Own your own truth.

― Extractor Fan (Branwell with an N)

in general, i do agree with you. my entire argument is special pleading; i think this is a special case.

That is the point of good art - to give you (either a window to see another world) or a mirror to see yourself.

Something can look a *lot* like you, in art - but ultimately what you are seeing is yourself.

I mean, I have literally in the past year, had someone I always viewed as a ~trans root~ agree, yes, what I saw was real - that nonbinary, genderqueer, genderfluid are all very good terms for how he experiences himself! And I know how amazing that is, and what a validation it is and how much one WANTS that.

But in the absence of that confirmation, it is still projection, it is still about you - but it’s allowed to be.

And transdar isn’t what you’re talking about - it’s anout the ability to recognise another trans person sometimes even *before* they are out to themselves (let alone transitioned). That is just a vibe thing, which is not opaque.

That is the point of good art - to give you (either a window to see another world) or a mirror to see yourself.

Something can look a *lot* like you, in art - but ultimately what you are seeing is yourself.

― Extractor Fan (Branwell with an N)

I mean, that's the thing, I don't see myself in Prince. I see someone who is NOTHING like me. I'm white. I was born 18 years after he was. I have no musical talent. God means nothing to me. I'm afraid of and avoid religion. I have no idea what the hell my sexuality is, but it's nothing like his. I'm not nearly as controlling as he is. I work hard to create and maintain boundaries instead of expecting other people to accommodate my every whim.

It's the abuse thing, that's what fucks me up. If he hadn't spent his whole life hurting everyone around him, you know, it might be different, maybe. As it is, as we are, I can't consider it _right_ to talk about Prince without talking about the fact that he was an inveterate, chronic abuser. Prince wouldn't accept that. Prince would vehemently reject it. But it's true, it's not something to which self-determination applies.

And his gender identity... Look, his gay-bashing hurt Wendy and Lisa. Hurts gay people, still, to this day, because his ideas, his beliefs, are embedded in his work, _he_ is embedded in his work, and to talk about him, to talk about him as if he really was a cisgender man because of some _default assumed gender_, even though his lifelong behavior was deeply at variance with that default gender...

It's those fucking assumptions. Not-abuser. Not-queer. For decades the only question anybody asked was if he was gay, and the answer was always "no", because he liked to fuck women, and four years now he's dead and nobody even wants to ask the question, the question he asked on record in 1987: What if he _wasn't_ a cisgender man?

And he could ask that because nobody would take the question seriously. Lisa and Wendy said what they said about him in _2009_ for God's sake and what they said meant something completely different back then than it means now, and all I can do is go back and read that and say "You know what, I think those statements are worth taking at face value."

I don't believe Prince ever would have _seriously_ said that about himself. Because he was filled with hatred. Because he was an anti-gay bigot. Because he was an abuser. I sincerely believe that if he was alive today, he would be saying some completely awful things about trans people, and Christ does that fucking hurt.

And transdar isn’t what you’re talking about - it’s anout the ability to recognise another trans person sometimes even *before* they are out to themselves (let alone transitioned). That is just a vibe thing, which is not opaque.

― Extractor Fan (Branwell with an N)

I get what you're saying. I think in that case, with a so-called "egg" (I guess that's not necessarily a term that crosses over to AFABs?), it's not quite the same, but it's similar. Because someone who's not out to themselves is often operating from a similar position of ignorance to a cis person. I know I was. Once I understood what trans people were actually _like_ it was not very long at all before I started to transition. So much of transphobia and trans erasure is predicated on lack of understanding, lack of insight, and sure, there are times when I understand things about other people before they understand them about themselves, and I have to hang back and wait for them to figure it out.

I am familiar with the term "egg", yes, but I just don't find it a useful or descriptive term to apply to my ~gender journey~, and... my experiences were different from yours.

FWIW, in Glitter Up The Dark, Sasha Geffen agrees with you on Prince's genderqueerness, and writes quite a bit about it. But Geffen's book is about the wider, more big-tent subject of "Gender Nonconformity In Pop Music" - and they acknowledge that "gender nonconformity" is a much wider category than "trans", and you don't need a self-description to assign someone to the category "gender nonconforming", and genderqueer can be a description of someone's presentation, as well as an identity. (There are huge swathes of gender nonconformity that are *not* trans; just as not all trans is "gender" "nonconforming".) So Geffen is quite happy to call Prince genderqueer, and cover him in depth in a book about gender nonconformity, and leave out the question of whether he was "cis" or not, because that was a question that only Prince could answer.

I guess the question I would ask is - why is it so important to you, that you classify this dead rock star, as "not cis"?

I guess the question I would ask is - why is it so important to you, that you classify this dead rock star, as "not cis"?

― Extractor Fan (Branwell with an N)

i think it's a good question, but i sort of tried to answer that in my last post on the topic. i don't know if i did a very good job of it!