Wild Metaphor for My Gender

I’m reblogging myself because this was just recalled to my attention, and, well, I’m really proud of it.

boygirlboigrrrl:

It’s sunday, which means no sleep for this makeup-wearing, hyper-feminine, female-assigned, male-centered, genderfucked androgyne with a passion for facial hair and women’s shoes.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about exhaustion again, and I’ve got a metaphor for you to ponder.

My gender is like a really fucking sweet pair of orthopedic sneakers. And here’s why: I got these sneakers really tricked out. I went online and I found this site that makes custom orthopedic sneakers that not a lot of people knew existed and I got these babies bedazzled, I got them in rich, bright colors, I got them satin-lined, and I got my name embroidered on them. They’re gorgeous and they go with everything I wear and I go places and people compliment me all the time, “wow, those are some really incredible orthopedic shoes; I didn’t know those even existed and now you’ve blown open my world and I’m thinking of getting a pair.” “Can you give me some advice on how I can make my own pair of orthopedic shoes?” People generally receive them well. Sometimes though, I get shit like, “ew, are those orthopedic?” or “are those regular sneakers or orthopedic? I can’t tell, let me whisper about it with my friends.” The fact of them being orthopedic shoes makes people feel they can ask me highly personal questions about them like what sort of medical condition I must have in order to have to wear such undesirable shoes, no matter how much I’ve been able to dress them up. Sometimes I’m told I’m brave for wearing my socially-unacceptable shoes out of the house and not letting anyone give me shit for them.

And then sometimes I get fake compliments like, “oh wow, those shoes are great. Don’t worry, I’d never have been able to tell they were orthopedic, if only you hadn’t told me, I would have just thought they were regular shoes.” To which I have to reply, “please, you wish you had known they were orthopedic. Not only are they fly as fuck, they’ve got great arch support, and I’m never going to be ashamed of recognizing that I don’t need beauty if it can’t also take care of me.” These shoes are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I can walk for miles without any back pain; I no longer have to hang my head. They make me feel safe and comfortable at all times.

Society, on the other hand, is a ride on the M train from Middle Village to Forest Hills, and the whole time I don’t get a seat. For those of you who are not from New York, that is the first and last stop on the M train. They are a 7-minute drive from one another, but if you take the M, it’ll probably take you about 2 hours to get there. And that’s what I’m doing, I’m standing for a huge stretch of time on a train, taking the longest, least effective route to get very little distance. And by the end of my ride, my feet are tired, and maybe I’m a little whiny and people say to me, “oh, but why are you complaining? I thought those shoes were supposed to be really comfortable,” when really I’m talking about how the whole time I couldn’t find a single place to just give my feet a little bit of rest.

Q:Trigger Warning (?):
What do you think of Judith Butler?

Anonymous

haha, I don’t think this requires a trigger warning, but I appreciate that you marked it.

I wish I had more to say on Judith Butler, but honestly, I’ve only just started really getting into her. I think that the little bit I’ve read of her work has generally made sense, but I don’t understand why she needs to phrase everything the way she does. Gender is complicated, I get that, and it’s hard to talk about because it’s so complicated and the language around it is super limiting, but I think that she actually makes herself inaccessible. She’s too academic. When I’m looking at gender theory, I want to be able to see how I can apply it to my real life. I want it to feel like it’s for me to use and play with, like it’s written for folks who care about gender on a personal, rather than intellectual level. Judith Butler feels to me like classroom gender rather than real-world gender. She’s one of the reasons I’ve pretty much decided not to try to be a professor.

On the other hand, she has her moments that make me say, wow, way to talk about my life. I’m sure I need to spend more time with her and stop dismissing her the way I just did.

Also, why so anon, anon?

Edit:

 spectrumnaut replied to your post:Trigger Warning (?): What do you think of Judith Butler?

I agree. I thinks she has some very good, very real points, but the syntax she uses makes it inaccessible unless you are super able to understand it and (thus) super academic (and I would even say privileged).

yep

 therotund replied to your post: Trigger Warning (?): What do you think of Judith Butler?

To be fair, she IS an academic. Her works aren’t meant to be pop culture. And I think that’s important. The Academy is a bag of shit in some regards but it’s one of the few places you can get paid to be a fulltime philosopher, you know?

I get what you mean, but I don’t think you have to talk like that to get published as an academic. I’m not saying she needs to be pop culture, but even academia doesn’t have to be dry and inaccessible. In fact, I would say that the best academics find a way to express themselves without alienating a lot of interested readers. I’m not talking terminology, have incomprehensible terms all you want, make shit up and take pages to define it, I don’t have a problem with that. It’s her syntax that I really hate.

A paradox:

The only thing universal to all men is an identification with manhood. I truly and unequivocally believe this to be the central tenet of gender identity. If you tell me that you are a man, that is what you are.

Still, can there be said to be men who do not have male privilege? If the answer is yes, who then gets to argue that they don’t have access to privilege? Is it only folk who are not read as men by most of the society in which they move? Does this create a slippery slope of allowing men, both trans and cis, to not confront their privilege? If the answer is no, does that mean that a person is only really a man once they have been handed the keys? Does that leave manhood up to the collective external, rather than to the internal?

It’s interesting to think about. It’s not as though I would ever declare that gender is not something we get to personally decide as individuals, but maybe this can complicate our understanding of all the factors that go into gender? How does this make you feel?

For some reason, tumblr won’t let me give y’all and answer option, so reblog or send me a message or something. What do you think?

Enoch Weighs in On Trans Men in Dresses

A long time ago, during my dry spell, someone rather aggressively asked Micah why someone would transition from (presenting) female to (presenting) male only to then wear dresses or do drag or whatever this person seemed to have a problem with. There was a lot of throwing around of stuff like “why not just stay a woman?” and “if you want to be a man then you identify with a dick. A dick in a dress doesn’t make sense” (these are not direct quotes). I wrote that person a personal message about it because people were getting very aggravated and mostly sending that person messages about how unacceptably ignorant they were rather than helpful an gentle explanations, so the person was getting more combative and probably felt more and more justified in their ignorance. After all, they were just asking a(n obviously narrow-minded and affronting, but nevertheless earnest) question, and no one was trying to give them an answer. Too often, I feel, our explanation is, “I can do whatever I want.” Obviously that’s true, but it doesn’t help a confused binary-dweller to understand why I want what I want. There’s a reason I relish in genderfuck, and I’m not interested in keeping it a secret so that only I get to feel that joy. So here’s what I wrote:

It seems to me that you’re saying that you don’t get why someone who could easily be interpreted as a woman would say that they are not a woman, take steps to make sure everyone knew they were not a woman, and then wear a dress.

There are a few things here that it might be helpful for you to understand:

a) Society says that only women can wear dresses, but that doesn’t make it true. Anyone can wear a dress, and it doesn’t make one a woman if one doesn’t interpret oneself as a woman while wearing the dress. There’s no reason that men can’t wear dresses as men, it’s just that there’s a taboo against it. Lots of people are interested in playing with or breaking that taboo and claiming dresses as clothing that everyone can wear.

b) You should probably just think of the genders of trans folk in the same way you think of the genders of cis folk: as the only gender they’ve ever had. While this is a simplification of what’s actually happened in the lives of many trans people, it’s a good place to start. You can see how a man can wear a dress and it doesn’t make him a woman, right? Well, think of a trans man the same way and you’ll be able to see that it doesn’t make him a woman either. Add to that. You can see how a man can wear a dress in the hope of being read as a woman without it meaning he’s a woman all the time, right? It’s the same thing with trans men.

c) There is a difference between being a woman and people thinking you’re a woman. Has anyone ever asked you what makes you think you’re a woman? Have you ever thought about why you’re so certain you’re a woman? My guess is that you haven’t, and that’s fine. There are two reasons I would guess at that make you think you’re a woman, and one is valid and one is a social construct. The socially constructed reason you probably believe you’re a woman is that you have a vagina. Society tells you that vagina means woman, but society also tells you that only women can wear dresses, so I think we can agree that a lot of the stuff society tells us about gender is wrong. The other probable reason you think you’re a woman is that you just feel it, and that’s totally valid. You should never feel you have to present evidence of your gender to anyone; you should simply be able to declare your gender identity and have it taken at face value. Your gender is intrinsic to you. It’s the same with trans people. Our genders are intrinsic to us, but, because they are not the genders people expect us to have, we are often asked to present evidence of our genders and this is where you see a lot of trans folk bringing up stories about how they hated this that or the other thing that they were expected to do or like or wear because of their gender. For some reason, these stories—often rooted in sexist understandings of gender—help people to believe us. They’re also usually the only language that folks have to describe their feelings, and they’re almost always not the whole truth. Usually, if a person tells you that they knew they were a boy because they hated playing with barbies and they wanted to play with trucks, what they mean is that they hated the way they were interpreted when they played with barbies and thought that if they played with trucks, people would read them the way they wanted to be read. Probably if they had been able to be read the way they wanted to while continuing to play with the barbies, they would not have hated it so much. It isn’t the toys that mattered; it’s the gendered meanings of the toys combined with people’s misunderstandings of those individuals’ genders that mattered. So now if we apply that back to dresses, think about the way that women are read wearing dress versus the way that men are read wearing dresses. Very different, right? Some people who can easily be seen as women wearing dresses (and can therefore easily be interacted with in the way that women wearing dresses are generally interacted with) prefer to be seen as men wearing dresses in order to be interacted with as such. They might have been uncomfortable in dresses when people saw them as a woman, but they’ve recognized that their objection is to the way they’re interpreted and treated rather than to the garment themselves. 

On the terms “transmasculine” and “dyke.”

supermattachine:

I’ve been thinking about them a lot recently.  I’m around a lot of transmasculine identified and dyke identified people (all of whom you should follow, because they will make you shimmer with heepers-jeepers glee).  I think this is probably because I ran into them in the course of trying to build community in my various homes and I liked them so now we hang out!  And I love them dearly.  Here is an interesting thing! 

I hear the word “transmasculine” used to describe me sometimes.  This is something that makes me feel weird and uncomfortable and not okay!  I don’t like the way it’s being used to mean people who are female bodied but in some way more male flavored—because while that’s an umbrella I fall under, my identity male—not masculine, and certainly not transmasculine.  I’m actually kind of a femme, though I don’t know about being a femme—I use the word queen more often, because I am an Olde Worlde homosexual.  When I act masculine, which happens every so often when the MOON IS RIGHT, that masculinity isn’t preceded by a “trans”—it’s just masculine, the same way other people in my life act masculine, both women and men, both cis and trans.

In short: “transmasculine” is a bad umbrella term, in my opinion!  WHAT DO YOU THINK, tell me with your KEYBOARD.

In fact, the fact that the word “transmasculine” needs the trans in front of it is interesting to me.  I’m not questioning the way people identify, of course, I just have questions about why these words are the chosen words, and I have to admit that the term “transmasculine” gives me similar willies that the term “transman” or “transguy” does when there’s no space in between.  Is this a different kind of masculinity than the kind of masculinity expressed and/or by cis men?  If not, why not say that one identifies as “masculine” rather than “transmasculine”?  Is it necessary to have the “trans” prefix there to indicate that it’s an identity, rather than just an adjective that describes an aspect of one’s being or presentation?  I’m extremely curious, and I really want to understand this more!

Now let’s talk about dykes!  I have wonderful dyke-identified people in my life (and on my tumblr, woohoo).  But I have frequently had a hard time with the conflation of dykes and trans men in the queer imagination (not to mention the public imagination).  I’m not a dyke!  Not even a little bit of a dyke!  Probably one of the best ways of explaining why not is that I am a fag.  That being said, it’s not enough to say that, is it?  I’ll quote Enoch’s articulate definition of “dyke,” but which I do think gets at the core of dyke-ness, at least as far as I can see as an outside (but fairly immersed) observer.

a) dykes are not necessarily women and they don’t necessarily date exclusively other women, and b) dykes are queer, community-seeking, focused on woman- or female-solidarity, and are politicized by their queerness

I’d like to provide a definition of fag, to go with that.  You can’t have dykes without fags, who will we grab to dance with when the police come to raid the bar?

a) fags are not necessarily men and they don’t necessarily date exclusively other men, and b) fags are queer, somewhat feminine male-centered people, focused on queer male solidarity, and are politicized, willingly or unwillingly, by their queerness.

Ordinarily, terms like these aren’t ones I get too caught up in.  (Admittedly, the term “fag” is close to my heart.)  I’m a DEAL WITH THE ISSUES, SUBSTANTIVE LEGISLATION, PEOPLE ARE DYING WHY ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT TERMS PEOPLE ARE USING IN A SMALL PRESTIGIOUS LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE kind of a guy.  But you know, it important that people feel comfortable!  I try to use language that treats people as much like humans as I possibly can, and this is just one more way I can do that.  (Although I’ll always be going BUT BUT GUYS A PROPERLY INCLUSIVE ENDA AND HUMANE IMMIGRATION DETENTION FOR LATIN AMERICAN TRANS WOMEN IS WAY IMPORTANT, WAY MORE THAN WHETHER WE SAY DYKE OR DYKE-IDENTIFIED.)  And of course I expect the same courtesy.

So I’d like to have a bit of a talk with the lovely people who follow me and whom I follow.  What’s being “transmasculine”?  Is it a word you would use to describe binary-identified trans men like me (um, please not me please!  I don’t like it), or is it just for people who identify as genderqueer but leaning in a male-flavored direction?  What’s being a fag?  What’s being a dyke? Talk to me!  ESPECIALLY if you disagree, because that means we both LEARN with our MINDS and it will be EXCITING for our THOUGHTBRAIN MUSCLES.

EDIT:  I have done THINKING and there will be another POST about what it means to be a FAG and it will be GREAT there will probably be GRAPHICS.

An interesting and apt question! You’ve seen my discourse on dyke as an identity and a term and whatnot, so I won’t enter that again, but I feel ready to tackle transmasculine.

While I do not identify as transmaculine, I recognize that I am a person who can be described as transmasculine if one believes that it is appropriate as an umbrella term. Quite the opposite of what Cohen said in hir post on the subject, I am not, under any circumstances, trans masculine; I am transmasculine. No space. This lack of space represents, for me, that I am only masculine as it relates to my transness. I’ll explain.

I reject the binarism in the idea that folks who are assigned female must be masculine in order to be trans, and that folks who are assigned male must be feminine in order to be trans, that somehow our femaleness or maleness must be negated using femininity or masculinity. I can see how this interpretation of the terms transmasculine and transfeminine can be uncomfortable and make you want to avoid them. To me, it has a slightly different connotation. Rather than describing any internal masculinity I might feel (I feel little to none), I think of it as describing the process of masculinizing that has been at the center of my transition. My transition (and yes, I have transitioned) has been a pursuit of the ability to be interpreted as masculine enough of center that I can express the full extent of my femininity without being interpreted as womanly. My assessment has been that, regardless of where a person falls on the gender globe, if they are female-assigned, they have masculinized their appearance in some way, and if they are male-assigned they have feminized their appearance in some way. Let’s keep in mind that our appearances are our base. We layer the parts of ourselves that we feel are important for people to see on top of that base, and the base can facilitate us being read properly, or it can hinder us. Despite my lack of internal masculinity, I prefer to have a masculinized base.

To me, not using the space is a way of recognizing that if I initially had an appearance that people read as masculine, then I wouldn’t even need to factor that masculinity into my identity. Cisfolks don’t do it. That masculinity is only something people notice because, given the shape of my body, especially the sexed parts of it, I had to construct it myself through transition.

It’s true, though, that I’m not really talking about masculinity, I’m talking about maleness. And even though I don’t identify as male, I identify as male-centered, so here we have a problematic conflation of the concepts of male and masculine. Still, I think it could be said that in my transition, I used the trappings of masculinity, rather than the trappings of maleness—short hair and clothing from the men’s section, and even chest binding are hardly things that most people would say belong only to men anymore, but they are things that people usually attribute to masculine people. Some people do use the trappings of maleness—permanent and medical modifications often give people traits that most of society reserves for men only—but what I like about transmasculine as an umbrella term is it covers all of us, those who take on maleness, or those who take on masculinity as a canvas to display our complete lack of internal masculinity, and those who do other fun things.

That doesn’t mean that it covers you, and I will be careful not to use it to cover you. I hope that we can come up with a less problematic term.

(via supermattachine-deactivated2011)

Swedish parents raise “genderless” child: Why I don’t think this is at all a good idea.

fuckyeahftms:

Not specifically FTm related but certainly gender relevant, just read this article online,

http://www.thelocal.se/20232/20090623/

Was wondering what people’s opinions were on the matter :)

I think it’s an excellent way to raise a child for a number of reasons but there’s a lot of mixed opinions and I would love to hear what others have to say!

xyxrebellion:

This is awesome.  Shout out to my friends in Sweden!!

This child was actually the speaker in the persona poem that I recently posted a video of myself spitting, called “Thirteen Years After the Kids at School Decided What My Parents Wouldn’t.” That piece was all about what I felt the child would feel in hindsight, mostly drawing on my own experiences playing with gender.

My problems with these parents’ method is that I think they are completely naive to the insidious ways that gender works in our society. Anyone who’s presented a non-binary identity and walked around for a little while will tell you that, no matter how much we wish they were, our genders are not entirely up to us. No matter how many times I tell people I am not a man, I am a makeup-wearing hyper-feminine, female-assigned, male-centered genderfucked androgyne with a passion for facial hair and women’s shoes, I am always going to be seen primarily as a man, or, in really awful scenarios, primarily as a woman. I have to put in a lot of effort to maintain myself outside of the binary, and it’s something I’m pretty sure I’m only willing and able to do because I know enough about gender to have come to the understanding that I am outside of it. It’s something that I sometimes find very challenging and exhausting and that I do out of love for myself and my gender and because with a lot of practice, I have found the confidence to keep me from letting others dictate my identity.

As far as I can tell from this article, these are cisgendered parents who have no experience living a non-binary identity trying to raise a child to have a gender they’ve never seen. Worse that that, they seem to think that this gender they’ve never seen is a non-gender, rather than a separate gender from the ones they’re familiar with.

The way the parents are quoted in the article makes it sound to me like they don’t understand that simply telling people their child is not a boy or a girl is not going to stop people from deciding that the child is one or the other, most likely a girl (given the that girls are often given more behavioral freedom when they’re young). And because the parents seem ill-equipped to even comprehend that reality, the child, who was two years old when the article was written, is certainly not going to have a proper support system in the moments when ze needs it most—when people are denying the existence of hir gender, or simply ignoring it to ascribe on the child something that is more comfortable for them.

Unless they never let that baby interact with other people, that baby is going to be exposed to all the same gender bullshit the rest of us are exposed to. In fact, the parents’ll probably be part of that exposure without even noticing. Because they don’t seem to have any experience embodying or really working to understand non-binary genders, they’ll probably each secretly decide on a gender for the child that is easier for them to process and subconsciously program their child with some of the roles that that gender is usually more overtly programmed with.

Is that a bad thing? Only if they make those roles concrete and immutable. I think the best thing they can do for their child is to have frank talks about gender roles and to raise hir with an understanding that whatever ze wants to do, ze is allowed to, no matter hir gender. That’s the kind of stuff that holds even when the rest of the child’s environment is teaching harmful ideas about how gender can limit us, and positioning that freedom as something that can only exist outside of gender is just as limiting. Even raising the child with the gender traditionally associated with hir sex and reminding the child that that gender doesn’t have to permanent would, in my opinion, be healthier than throwing the child into the position of constantly having to defend hir existence before ze even knows how to speak.

(via xyxrebellion-deactivated2013011)

Source:

Wild Metaphor for My Gender

It’s sunday, which means no sleep for this makeup-wearing, hyper-feminine, female-assigned, male-centered, genderfucked androgyne with a passion for facial hair and women’s shoes.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about exhaustion again, and I’ve got a metaphor for you to ponder.

My gender is like a really fucking sweet pair of orthopedic sneakers. And here’s why: I got these sneakers really tricked out. I went online and I found this site that makes custom orthopedic sneakers that not a lot of people knew existed and I got these babies bedazzled, I got them in rich, bright colors, I got them satin-lined, and I got my name embroidered on them. They’re gorgeous and they go with everything I wear and I go places and people compliment me all the time, “wow, those are some really incredible orthopedic shoes; I didn’t know those even existed and now you’ve blown open my world and I’m thinking of getting a pair.” “Can you give me some advice on how I can make my own pair of orthopedic shoes?” People generally receive them well. Sometimes though, I get shit like, “ew, are those orthopedic?” or “are those regular sneakers or orthopedic? I can’t tell, let me whisper about it with my friends.” The fact of them being orthopedic shoes makes people feel they can ask me highly personal questions about them like what sort of medical condition I must have in order to have to wear such undesirable shoes, no matter how much I’ve been able to dress them up. Sometimes I’m told I’m brave for wearing my socially-unacceptable shoes out of the house and not letting anyone give me shit for them.

And then sometimes I get fake compliments like, “oh wow, those shoes are great. Don’t worry, I’d never have been able to tell they were orthopedic, if only you hadn’t told me, I would have just thought they were regular shoes.” To which I have to reply, “please, you wish you had known they were orthopedic. Not only are they fly as fuck, they’ve got great arch support, and I’m never going to be ashamed of recognizing that I don’t need beauty if it can’t also take care of me.” These shoes are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I can walk for miles without any back pain; I no longer have to hang my head. They make me feel safe and comfortable at all times.

Society, on the other hand, is a ride on the M train from Middle Village to Forest Hills, and the whole time I don’t get a seat. For those of you who are not from New York, that is the first and last stop on the M train. They are a 7-minute drive from one another, but if you take the M, it’ll probably take you about 2 hours to get there. And that’s what I’m doing, I’m standing for a huge stretch of time on a train, taking the longest, least effective route to get very little distance. And by the end of my ride, my feet are tired, and maybe I’m a little whiny and people say to me, “oh, but why are you complaining? I thought those shoes were supposed to be really comfortable,” when really I’m talking about how the whole time I couldn’t find a single place to just give my feet a little bit of rest.

Even after I stopped assuming that I was a woman because everyone else thought I was, I continued to assume I was at least occasionally a woman because I wasn’t willing to give up women’s clothes, especially the shoes. I became less and less comfortable with the idea of people seeing me as a ciswoman, but still could not let go of my conception of myself as a woman when I wore women’s clothes. After all, I passed so well as a woman when I wore them. Eventually I realized I was still trapped by my understanding of my body as female and that I was the only person standing in my way.  Think about it this way: Is a person with long hair necessarily a woman? Is a person who has teddy bears necessarily a woman? Is a person who collects high heels necessarily a woman? I’m pretty sure most people would answer all of these questions with a “certainly not. none of those things belong exclusively to women.”  So the question then becomes, what about these objects necessarily makes you a woman in having them? Nothing. If you’re not a woman, then nothing you own or wear or do can make you a woman. I personally love my high heels so much more now that I know how to wear them without implying to anyone that I think I’m a woman because of them.
Pop-upView Separately

Even after I stopped assuming that I was a woman because everyone else thought I was, I continued to assume I was at least occasionally a woman because I wasn’t willing to give up women’s clothes, especially the shoes.

I became less and less comfortable with the idea of people seeing me as a ciswoman, but still could not let go of my conception of myself as a woman when I wore women’s clothes. After all, I passed so well as a woman when I wore them. Eventually I realized I was still trapped by my understanding of my body as female and that I was the only person standing in my way. 

Think about it this way: Is a person with long hair necessarily a woman? Is a person who has teddy bears necessarily a woman? Is a person who collects high heels necessarily a woman? I’m pretty sure most people would answer all of these questions with a “certainly not. none of those things belong exclusively to women.” 

So the question then becomes, what about these objects necessarily makes you a woman in having them? Nothing. If you’re not a woman, then nothing you own or wear or do can make you a woman. I personally love my high heels so much more now that I know how to wear them without implying to anyone that I think I’m a woman because of them.