What To Do If You Are Flat Like A Ken Doll

My recent post about not being necessarily out at work has prompted me to think about why people get so worked up about the use of the word “out” in the context of a person’s disclosure of their trans status, history, or identity. As someone who has very few opportunities to even have a choice whether or not to openly disclose my trans identity (as I said in that post, I haven’t mentioned it, but everyone knows), I understand that it is not for me to pick the terms that are used to describe people who are able to not disclose and so don’t for any of a number of reasons. These are just some thoughts I’ve been kicking around.
An argument I have heard against the word “out” in the context of disclosure is that “not out” carries connotations of dishonesty and secret-keeping, that people who don’t disclose are out—they are out as their identified genders. The term stealth, though sometimes seen as problematic, is a widely accepted term to describe people who don’t disclose.
I have to admit that while I’ve spent a long time regurgitating that rhetoric, I don’t really understand it. Stealth, to me, has much heavier connotations of dishonesty. It implies that trans people who are living as their genders have infiltrated cis society and are flying under the radar. It’s like being a mole. While it can feel properly descriptive because it does imply the effort that people who live that way must sometimes put into maintaining their stealth and the dangers specific to living stealth (people who do not disclose must often worry about what will happen if people discover their trans status and feel either tricked or betrayed; people who disclose don’t have to deal with that worry as much), it’s a word that has sinister connotations outside of trans contexts, and that doesn’t sit well with me.
Coming out and being out, on the other hand, have always seemed to me to be about a self-determination of readiness to have people know things about you that are really none of their business and that—if you want them to—should have no impact on the way that people interact with you. I don’t know a lot of people who would say that LGB people who are not out are being dishonest. I know people—and I might be one of them—who would say that those LGB people might feel freer if they were out in more contexts, or might find that their interactions with people are enhanced by a full recognition of who they are, but in the end it’s every individual’s own business how much they care to disclose that information and how much they feel it is a part of who they are. Certainly I could never respect a person who pressured anyone to come out before they felt ready or safe to do so. There are many, many respectable reasons not to be out.
Out is also a term that recognizes the complexity of a person’s openness. Some LGB people are immediately highly visible and never have to come out because everyone knows by looking at them (that knowledge can involve problematic assumptions, but let’s not pretend it doesn’t happen). This type of visibility often limits a persons ability to choose who knows they are LGB. Some LGB people want everyone to know, but are not so immediately visible and are forced to come out all the time in order to maintain their visibility. For these folks, their ability to choose can feel burdensome because they must put in effort to be seen the way they see themselves. Some LGB people who are not visible are glad to have the privilege to disclose to specific people at their discretion. And some LGB people use this privilege to actively avoid letting people know, sometimes avoiding talking about details of their lives. Some of those folks will have mixed feeling about the effort, and some will not. Any of these circumstances are possible for trans people’s disclosure of their trans status, history, or identity.
Another argument I’ve heard against the term “out” is that to say that a trans person living and presenting as their identified gender and not disclosing their trans history, status, or identity, is “not out” is to erase their coming out process. I disagree. First of all, if we use the LGB coming out example again, people go back in the closet all the time for a lot of different reasons. Just because you’re not out now doesn’t mean you never were or that no one ever gave you shit for it. Secondly, The way I see it, when a trans person comes out, they come out about two things that may be as separate or as linked as they experience them: they come out as their identified gender, and they come out as trans. Visibility and degrees of “outness” with regards to these two aspects of one’s life can also be as separate or interwined as one makes them. For instance, a person who is male-identified, has undergone extensive medical transition, and never discloses their trans history is highly visibly male and not at all visibly trans. They are out as male to everyone, and not out as trans to very many people at all. Someone who has just taken the steps to tell some people in their life that they have started to question their gender and has not yet started to present in a way that feels true to them has low visibility as their identified gender and low visibility as a trans person. They are out as trans to only a few people and they may not be out as a specific identified gender to anyone, including themself. I am highly visibly trans, and because I have a non-binary gender, I would say that I am highly visibly non-binary, but only have medium visibility as a male, which is my goal for binary readings of my gender. I am pretty much always out as trans, but not nearly as often out as a makeup-wearing, hyper-feminine, female-assigned, male-centered, genderfucked androgyne with a passion for facial hair and women’s shoes. They are different things to be out about, and they operate on different need-to-know basis.

I was tempted to bind before I went through it because I’m confrontational like that, but then I remembered that airports are not the place to be confrontational. Besides, I didn’t have my binder with me because I don’t bind to fly.

Even though I knew that the scanners would not see anything the didn’t expect to see, those things are pretty scary. While I worry for my privacy from a civil liberties stand point, from a personal perspective I’m not prone to panic at the idea that people I don’t know might learn what my body looks like, so I was disconcerted by how nervous I got as I approached it.

Also, they have cops riding around the airport on bicycles?

GNC? Gender non conforming?

Yep

and lots of other people.

Dream life.

I told them that I have almost no experience with any sort of bullying and therefor didn’t think that I was an ideal person to take up a spot on the panel, but I guess they really need GNC people, so they said that even if I am able to bring up and analyze other people’s experiences with cyber bullying it would be useful.

So I would really appreciate it if anyone who has experienced bullying or cyber bullying because of their queerness or transness would tell me a little bit about what went down and how you felt about it?

amaevis:

The preferred terms I have heard are “out” and “disclose”. I am “out” because I am a woman and live like one. Before I was “out”, I was living as my assigned-at-birth gender. I choose to “disclose” my trans status because I believe in trans* visibility. I am not “in the closet” when I don’t “disclose”. I am simply not “disclosing”.

Stealth is a judgmental term. It implies that there is something to hide. I am not stealth when I don’t disclose. I am simply not disclosing some aspect of myself that may not be relevant to the situation at hand. Just as all people don’t disclose everything about themselves at all times.

 Thanks! I will use these from now on.

supermattachine:

 I think you’ve misunderstood me.  When you say:

 I agree that the term out is not apt for trans people who are presenting and being read consistently as their gender and who are not interested in having their transness widely know.

You’re articulating exactly the attitude I think is problematic.  Stealth trans people are out.  The only way for a trans person to not be out is if they are not living in their gender.  That is, if I were to adopt a female role in my everyday life and tell people I were a woman, that would be closeting myself.  However, if I choose to present as male but not to make my trans status explicit, I am still out, although I can also be described as stealth.  The condition of being out is that of being honest and open about one’s gender and one’s sexuality.  Unless one’s trans status is included in one’s gender (which, for a lot of binary-identified trans people, it isn’t) being out about one’s gender does not necessarily include being out about one’s trans status.  To say that stealth trans people are not out plays into exactly the cissexist construction of trans genders as “dishonest” that you mentioned earlier.  (By the way, I’m not resting completely easy about the terms “stealth” and “open” either, though I use them myself for lack of better ones—to me they’re also cissexist in flavor.  Does anyone reading this have good ideas for alternatives?)

It makes sense that your experience of not being explicit about your transness means not being out for you, and I’m certainly not questioning or disagreeing with that.  Actually, I sympathize—I struggle with something similar, not insofar as my gender includes my transness, but insofar as a substantial part of my intellectual life, personal politics, and everyday activities include my transness.  But when you make these broad statements and don’t qualify them, especially in the context of a blog about gender and sexuality that is aimed (at least in part) at educating people about trans issues, it leads to unfortunate implications.  Of course your post wasn’t about other trans people, or all trans people, but you know that there aren’t certain arenas that are okay to use oppressive language in.  We all have to be considering our language whenever we speak and especially when we write—but I know that that’s not a new idea for you; I’m just trying to point out a particular aspect of your language that I think could use clarification.

We were making the same point, I just communicated it badly. I meant that once a person who intends to live stealth (and I agree that the term is not so good, but I also don’t know of better ones, and it’s not mine to speak to) is out and living truthfully as their gender, their openness about being trans or of trans experience is not subject to the concept of being out. That’s what I meant when I said

I understand that coming out for trans people who are able to eventually get to a place of being read properly without explaining anything happens when that person tells the people in their life about their gender.

I apologize that there were some issues with clarity, I hope they are resolved now. I would like to say again, though, that because people reading me as male is pretty much as incorrect as people reading me as female, “out” was the proper term for a situation in which people are using the right pronouns but not actually understanding my gender.

supermattachine:

While I appreciate that having a gender that most people haven’t heard of makes it difficult to have that gender fully respected & acknowledged, even if they are using correct pronouns, it’s highly problematic to imply that someone who chooses not to make their trans identity explicit is “in the closet” in a comparable way to, for example, you during that two year period, or me in my junior year of high school insisting I liked girls. There’s binary privilege involved in being able to have your gender blend into other genders but not be disrespected, but there’s another kind of privilege involved in saying that someone is closeted for choosing not to make their trans-ness explicit. I’m not sure yet what to call it, though.

I don’t think you mean privilege, I think you mean opression, and I think that the term is cissexism. Anyone who thinks that a trans person must be open about their transness because not doing so is somehow being dishonest is expressing the cissexist idea that the genders of trans people are somehow less truthful than the genders of cis people. I agree that the term out is not apt for trans people who are presenting and being read consistently as their gender and who are not interested in having their transness widely know. In those cases, I would use the terms stealth and open. I understand that coming out for trans people who are able to eventually get to a place of being read properly without explaining anything happens when that person tells the people in their life about their gender.

My post wasn’t about other trans people, though, and I am not stealth at work. I am personally in the closet because my being truthful to my gender involves being open and explicit about my transness. By avoiding talking about it, I’m not being true to myself, and in that it feels a lot like when I was in the closet about my attraction to women.

I mentioned before that I’m spending the summer in a work environment that uses the right pronouns for me and that it’s meant that there’s no discussion or overt reference to my transness. I have this problem where I’m so queer-centric that it’s damn near impossible for me to go through a conversation without bringing it up, especially when a lot of the conversations I have here revolve around past work experience, aspirations for the future, and vague descriptions of what you did over the weekend. As a person who spends a lot more time in trans-inclusive queer spaces and trans-specific spaces, it’s not impossible for me to talk openly about being part of these spaces without talking openly about being trans. Interestingly, this has resulted in me being out as queer without being out as trans. They are so intertwined in my understanding of myself that I’ve never before thought of the two as separate. My gender is as much a part of my queer sexuality as my partners’ genders, and my sexuality is as much a part of my gender as my presentation and mannerisms, and both of them have an enormous impact of my queer politics.

The weirdest part, though, is that I’m realizing that I began here “not out” because it hadn’t come up, but it’s very nearly come up in a few conversations so far and I’ve steered clear of mentioning it. Even though I’m sure everybody already knows, it would appear that I am keeping it quiet.

This happened to me when I was younger and I spent two years reassuring myself that there was no difference between gay people and straight people and that I shouldn’t have to come out and if I did it would only deepen the imaginary divide between gay and straight (yeah, I used gay as an umbrella term back then). Once I realized my mistake—and also that I wasn’t simply not calling attention to it, I was actually avoiding talking about it—I pulled myself together and came out. I didn’t want to languish in the closet. So why am I allowing that to happen to me now?

I’m shocked by how much binding hurts me these days. Like, I put it on and my back immediately throws a fit. Oh well, I’m not going to stop. Whatever.

But today on my way home I caught myself wondering how other people put up with it day in and day out for years and years and years. And then I remembered that for most people binding is a means to an end, a band-aid solution while they wait for the fruition of their long-term solution. Obviously I’m not the only person who’s gone bound for four years, but for most people, there’s an end somewhere in sight. I hope that, for those people, the knowledge that it will end makes it more bearable.

I’ve been thinking about all of the accounts I’ve heard about folks who get top surgery not out of a need for their chest to be flat per se, but more out of a need to not bind any more. Surgery becomes the solution when binding stops feeling feasible for the long-term. 

I’m really happy for people who are able to be satisfied with surgery even when it was not their initial plan, but I have tried to promise myself that I won’t take any transition measures that feel like settling or allowing the friction I receive from the world dictate my choices, especially permanently. I’m really hoping to find another solution that allows me to keep my chest the way it is. So if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know?

This post was initially going to be titled, “On Being a Topless Trans Person at Dyke March,” but my transness is not all that relevant to what happened. Of course there were problems with misgendering as I walked around with my top off, but I tried to head some of it off by writing “not all dykes are women” on my back and recieved nothing but support for my message.

This post is about being a person with a chest that society calls female and baring that chest in a way that is supposed to be radical in a space that is supposed to be safe.I felt none of those things. In fact, this dyke march felt to me like the most politically diluted one I’ve been to yet. Not so much because there were cis guys in the march—I don’t ever have a problem with having allies around when they know what they’re there to support—but more because there was so little chanting, there seemed to be so little general understanding of what we were doing there, and maybe most of all because I was one of very few people who were topless. I got a lot of looks of solidarity from the other topless people, and a few not-topless people also offered support; one person even asked if I was trying to get everyone to be topless and, when I replied that I would like for more people to be topless but understood that it was a highly personal decision that I would never pressure anyone to make, she said that she had always thought of dyke march as synonymous with politically-motivated toplessness and was sad to find this one so lacking.

There were a lot of people who were supportive in that they seemed to understand that being topless in public is risky—and it’s true, I’ve been working towards toplessness for three or so years now—and there was one awesome person pointedly taking pictures of creepy straight men who were taking pictures of the topless dykes, but other than that, I didn’t feel that I was in an atmosphere that understood what my toplessness was supposed to mean.

I wrote in a post last year about dyke march that being topless at dyke march ”is important to me because it is legal to be topless in new york city, but frowned upon if you have a chest like mine. Fuck that. Dyke march is a time to reclaim our sexuality and our bodies and own them as sexualized only when we want them to be… More importantly, though, I am trans and I have been taught that as a trans person I must hate and be ashamed of my chest; I must not own it or be proud of it or want people to see it. It is particularly important to me to prove this stereotype wrong, particularly in a space where my trans identity is seen as a rejection of my ‘womanhood.’” That still rings really true for me.

If toplessness at dyke march is about rejecting the hypersexualization of our bodies that happens without our consent, imagine my dismay when I found my chest hypersexualized without my consent by people both inside and outside of the march. Of course I expected for there to be skeezers on the sidelines who thought it was appropriate to use my political statement for tittilation, but I never expected a dyke to come up to me and (ask permission but not wait for my response) to run her flag over my chest just to watch the way it moved.

I’m out of thoughts, after that. I’m glad that I went, and I’m glad that I went topless, but I’m not sure I would do it that way again.

Sometimes it’s very late and I can’t tell why I’m not sleeping.