six months pass...
one month passes...
five months pass...
a couple of months ago it occurred to me that i've essentially self-identified as nonbinary for years, but that i've been uncomfortable with the outward identification because i imagine part of what it signifies to others is that i know how to be a better ally than in fact i do, when i have far too much to learn about how to respect others. iow, i "haven't earned it". yikes. i understand this is reeeeally common.
the other thing i had to reckon with was a feeling of not wishing to saddle myself with more labels and identities that i would just have to tear down and dispose of inevitably, and i... eventually put it down to a latent transphobia. i'm a fan of fewer, broader labels, and "non-binary" felt unnecessary to me because i for some reason regarded it as *chosen*. well, that fucking sucks. it was like 'no, i am looking at this the wrong way around, i'm not acquiring an additional identity, i'm divesting myself of a false one, that should be so fucking obvious". cool.
it's been a lot like coming out as gay- by the time i acknowledged it, i had long since settled into it and everyone else already knew. just a matter of fact 'oh, this is what it means, i guess.'
i'd stopped identifying as a "gay man" pretty much since i stopped dating and hooking up and in general living as a gay man several yeara ago and had come to just think of myself as "queer".
i have a wonderfully unisex middle name that starts with the same letter as my first name (and my last name lol), it's tempting to use it but i think my given name actually connects me more to my early childhood when my gender identity was least stable.
― Deflatormouse, Saturday, 10 February 2024 22:30 (two months ago) link
some 3 am thoughts, just kind of thinking through a couple of things.
a friend was talking to me about jules gill-peterson's new book, "a short history of trans misogyny", and i sort of skimmed it last night. i found that a lot of it resonated with some thoughts and feelings i've been having over the last year regarding my own queerness. particularly in conjunction with you kind of "coming out" as non-binary, deflatormouse, if that's even how you'd frame it.
i really appreciate this space because it's really opened me up a lot to taking a larger view of queerness and what i think of as "effeminacy". my transition background, a lot of the people i socialize with, are more-or-less binary-presenting white transfemmes, often from a background where, whether we identify as "eggs" or not, presented more or less as cisgender heterosexual men. i had, particularly early on in transition, this idea of "transness" as being this sort of "correct" superior way of doing gender non-conformity. the last five years, and in particular my experiences in this space, have helped me to challenge this idea. there's this idea in radical thought of "killing the cop inside your own head". that's not something i really intended to do, but...
it was important to me, early on, to prove that i could transition without losing any of the trappings of - well, here's a challenge for me to talk about, when i talk about my past experience, it's the experience of being a white cishet man. because it's the sort of existence that is only really _possible_ for white cishet men. the "cishet man" thing isn't something i was able to do, but the whiteness, that hasn't and isn't going to change. it's dishonest of me to pretend that my whiteness had no relevance to the privilege i had. it's also misleading, at best, for me to phrase things in a way that suggests that i'm not still white and don't still have all of the privilege that comes with that. maybe "white 'cishet man'" is a better way of putting it. i might try that.
anyway, it was important to me to prove that i could transition without losing any of the trappings of being a white "cishet man". the monogamous relationship with a cisgender woman, the house, the professional job. i worked really hard to preserve those things. the last thing i wanted to be when i transitioned is the person i am now. who i am now is the person i was most afraid of becoming. when i started transition i sort of made a bargain with myself, that i'd transition but i wouldn't ever become one of those kinky polyamorous marginal queers who lived an unstable, precarious existence.
in retrospect it was a form of the same kind of bargaining process i had when thinking about whether to come out. gill-peterson talks about her own version of the bargaining process in _framing agnes_ when she said she thought if she wrote _histories of the transgender child_, that was something she could do instead of transition, and of course it doesn't actually work like that. in my case i thought that being a "trans woman", this sort of respectable version of effeminacy, was something i could do instead of being a, well, f-slur. it was really important to me to be a "real woman".
thinking about it now i do think that was a real, genuine need. being able to see myself as a "real woman", to be accepted as a "real woman", is a tremendous and extremely rare privilege. it's also something that i very much _didn't_ want, in the sense that by "real woman" people often at least implicitly mean "cisgender woman", someone whose transness is _invisible_.
there's this question in my head of "why didn't i transition", and the easy answer is "it wasn't possible", easy because it was true. why couldn't i? why wasn't it possible? and the reason is kind of at the heart of the difficulties i face as a "trans woman" today. one is that i believed i couldn't ever pass. the other is that i believed i would have _had_ to pass. my passing privilege means that i have a choice in how people perceive me, a choice between two things: a white "cisgender" woman, or a t-slur f-slur. each is partly accurate and neither are completely accurate. the latter is far more accurate than the former, though - nothing in the latter formulation requires me to use quotes.
one of the things gill-peterson talks about is the, here we go, _dual role_ a word like "transgender" has - in one context, a radical term of liberation. in another context, however, she talks about it as a term employed by NGOs to label people who _don't_ think of themselves in that sense. what i appreciate about "transness", my experiences as trans, is that it's allowed me to see the similarity i have with all of these other femme people, past and present. the thing i think that i perpetuated, early on, is the idea of the white binary transfem as being the Correct Way of doing gender non-conformity. the more i tried to follow that path, though, the more apparent the impossibility of it became to me. the second i make myself visible, people start seeing me as a t-slur f-slur, even (especially, perhaps) if it's not something they'd ever say aloud. i didn't, early on, have the strength to accept being looked at in that way, and because of my background, i had the privilege of not _having_ to confront that. it has been an exceptional privilege and it's a huge part of why i can say unequivocally that i'm a "real woman". i'm also, however, non-binary. i'm also a t-slur f-slur.
my experience isn't one of _mujerisma_, in the sense gill-peterson uses it. i have also, though, through this space as well as through nominally "trans" spaces, come into contact with all different kinds of queerness. when, here in portland, a queer bar calling itself "sissy bar" opened, run by people who i guess could roughly be framed as "cis gay men", i was aggrieved. i took it as an example of the gulf between cis gay men and trans women. i had, particularly, this ignorance about drag. what i got most from gill-peterson's book was words to frame an understanding i implicitly had - the difference between the professional drag queens, the "dual role" folks, and the street queens, the ones who didn't change out of their clothes before going out on the street - in other words, not just being gay, but being gay and doing crime, because going out on the street dressed like that was illegal. it's not drag itself i ever had a problem with. it's the ones who try to be gay _without_ also doing crime.
i don't "do crime" in the same sense that street queens do. that's largely, i think, a function of privilege. as much as i can be oppositional, doing crime is also _work_ for me. it's not illegal for me to go into a women's restroom and pee, for instance. it's not illegal for me to take estrogen. if i lived in a lot of other places, it would be. if i lived in a lot of other places, i'd be doing crime, just by existing. it would be a lot of work for me to _not_ do crime.
well, no, because it's not about the estrogen. in other places, in other _times_, before I had the privilege i do now, the crime isn't _existence_, the crime is _work_. even today, if you're not in tech (i'm in tech), it's hard to get by without doing sex work. it's important to me to not _have_ to do sex work. always has been. i'm also very much in favor of sex work, in favor of people having the ability to _choose_ sex work, to be able to do it safely and be respected for it. that's one of the first things i learned from being around other queer people - not trans people, queer people. you do what you need to do in order to get by. if other people judge you for that, well, they can think what they think. it doesn't change who you are. i needed to learn that in order to survive. i didn't learn it from respectable trans women.
--
transition, to me... in one sense i chose it, but in another sense i tried very hard, for many years, to _not_ transition, and failed. i can portray my transition as a "success", convince other people to recognize me as "valid" or whatever. among other trans women, though, it is different. among other trans women there's not the pressure to be "brave" or a role model, to say that yeah, i transitioned because it was too fucking hard not to.
these days it's important to me to talk about that experience. a couple of years ago that was mainly for the benefit of other trans women, and now, i still do that, but i also think of it in a broader sense of queerness, of effeminacy. one of the other things gill-peterson talks about that i related to was the way, in the '70s, masc queerness became the normative paradigm for queerness. that was the world i grew up in. one of the things i'm most angry about, w/r/t transmedicalism, was that it erased my _queerness_. i do think that erasure came from a number of different places, most of them, i think, more _situationally convenient_ than intentional. i don't see mustachioed leather daddies as being an intrinsically more "respectable" form of queerness. they're differently queer from me, _very_ differently queer, but we're not opposed - we both act to make the invisible visible. it was that generation and the genocide they suffered that taught me "silence = death".
i don't think that it was their _fault_ that femme queerness wasn't something open to me at that time. i'm glad it's open now. i'm glad that as a trans woman i can see myself as part of a larger femme diaspora, and that i've had the opportunity to learn that my being a trans woman isn't the Correct Way of being femme.
― Kate (rushomancy), Sunday, 11 February 2024 12:53 (two months ago) link
I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once last night and selected The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams to listen to immediately afterwards, probably because in it Me'shell Ndegeocello erects and populates simultaneously occurring tiered dimenson-worlds (the different planes in 'Man of my Dreams' don't quite merge together the way the temporal layers in, say, b&w Blue Oyster Cult do. for BOC provide 'access points' only to immediately shut them down; Ndegeocello sustains your awareness of multiple space-time layers through an entire album by constantly pointing out interdimensional sightings)
But it got me thinking about the album title in a context of her expressions of gender fludity and i guess my own needs. It's very meaningful to me suddenly, almost talismanic, where it was a little perplexing before. I'm able to see confluence in the dissonances of my past and the divisions between my various selves. This is like the point where my own spatial-temporal layers merge together. Feels good.
I misspoke before, this isn't like coming out as gay. I came out as gay when after a long period of living as gay, it had become completely undeniable. Here, i have to keep reassuring myself that I'm not faking it. As much time as I've taken to settle into it, in some way it feels premature.
If i were to enter into a new relationship with a boyfriend, would i again consider myself a gay man? YES
Would I still identify myself as nonbinary, in that case? YES
Is there a queer subculture that i want to be part of, "like goth"? YES
SO WHAT
Are you afraid you might have to walk this back?
SO WHAT
Ndegeocello is an important role model for me in how she deals with overlapping and sometimes conflicting identities and how to deal with a language of categorizations that is hopelessly inadequate BY DANCING OVER THE FUCKING ABYSS
brb
― Deflatormouse, Sunday, 11 February 2024 22:41 (two months ago) link