On having an insecurity that is not tied to oppression

I find that in most of the anti-oppression communities I am a part of or in solidarity with we have this idea that if the particular oppression we are focusing on would go away, no one would be insecure about that aspect of themselves. To follow this theory to its logical conclusion, we figure that if all oppression were gone, so would insecurity go. Well, that’s not exactly true. In fact, I come from a place of such extreme privilege that I’m relatively certain that not one of my major insecurities is rooted in oppression. 

The topic of this post is my hair.

If you look through the pictures of me that I have posted on this blog, you will see a variety of hair colors. You will notice that the only pictures that have brown hair in them are in posts about my history. All of those pictures were taken before about March 2008. I have been changing my hair color every month or so for the past three years, and I can’t imagine stopping.

As a white person with relatively straight, easily manageable, soft hair, I have been told my whole life that my hair is the best type of hair to have. Sure, the real ideal is blonde, but that never really affected me as far as I could tell. Still, somehow I have a mental block on having naturally-colored hair. Frankly, even the white is a little too close to natural for me; it’s always a relief to dye it something bright and eye-catching again. I think that a lot of the insecurity for me comes from feeling that I am not, in my natural state, particularly noticeable. 

And the weird thing is that I’m not just worried that people won’t be stricken with immediate attraction to me if I don’t stand out (though that’s part of it, you can be sure), I’m scared that other people won’t stare at me for all the various reasons that they currently do—that if I don’t have something that causes me to immediately catch people’s eye, I’ll lose all the attention—good and bad—that I get right now just for being in a place. I’m afraid of losing the hostile stares too, and the confused ones, and the quizzical ones, and the ones that are accompanied by not-so-secretive discussions about my gender. I’m just an attention hog.

I also like the constantly changing hair colors. I’ve always feared change, and I used to say that my hair was a way to force myself to confront change, but I think that’s lapsed at this point. Changing my hair color isn’t scary, it’s the norm. It’s a way of maintaining the stasis, of being Enoch Riese, that one guy with the colorful hair. It’s funny because when I was younger, I was that one kid with the very long hair and the idea of cutting it off made me panic that I would have nothing for people to know me by. Hair has always been tied up in my sense of self. 

Understanding the politics of other people’s hair makes me wonder if it’s possible that there’s a self-loathing element to my need to keep my hair unnatural, but because the texture and color of my hair are privileged, it’s somehow reversed. I hate to admit it, but I’ve considered that my compulsive hair dyeing is a guilt-driven response to privilege.

I don’t think that’s the case though, because I think that it’s more tied to my other feelings of un-reality and being a constructed person (I don’t know how much I’ve discussed those feelings here, but they’re a lot). Because I don’t always feel exactly like I’m real, I’m not particularly interested in giving people the impression that I am. The way I feel about having natural-looking hair when I meet someone for the first time or when I’m out in public is similar to the way I feel when those things are happening when I’m dressed casually, or, at an earlier time in my life, when I was presenting as a woman: it’s a panic that they won’t see me and interpret me as I interpret myself, and that once their impression is made, it’ll be too late for them to really know me.

Lately I’ve been thinking about growing my hair out a bit and letting it be brown again. I definitely have some friends who are trying to encourage that. They’ve tried to reassure me by reminding me that I am not a low-profile person—I still dress loudly and am highly androgynous. While I like the idea of experimenting with longer hair and seeing if I still get read as male as often as I do now (not all that often, actually), I can’t bring myself to feel ready to give up the colors just yet. I don’t think I’m ready to see what happens when people have to notice something else about me.

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. 

definatalie: Finished! Hair is my friend. Thanks to yeahgrrrl for the reference photo and inspiration! Fun fact about Enoch Riese: ze wishes that hir body hair were always the same color as hir top-of-the-head hair. If anyone knows how I can achieve that without dyeing all my skin, I will do something very nice for you.
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definatalie:

Finished! Hair is my friend.

Thanks to yeahgrrrl for the reference photo and inspiration!

Fun fact about Enoch Riese: ze wishes that hir body hair were always the same color as hir top-of-the-head hair.

If anyone knows how I can achieve that without dyeing all my skin, I will do something very nice for you.

(via tangledupinlace)

Source: fancybidet

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.
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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.

I don’t bind. It’s a painful practice. And I think something should be said about not hurting yourself anymore.

Nicco, Boy I Am (via xyxrebellion)

On the other hand, I love binding. My binder is like a safety blanket I can take everywhere. Even if the world were gender-perfect, I would bind.

I think something should be said about a community initiative to find safer, more comfortable binding methods.

(via xyxrebellion-deactivated2013011)

I don’t have a “model.” In fact, I don’t even have any role models. In the beginning, I think I wanted role models; I wanted to know what other people were doing with their genders. I’m still fascinated by the different approaches people take to exploring their interactions with society, but I’m proud to have built myself entirely outside of a mold, to have conceived of an identity all my own having seen no evidence at all that it could exist. Maybe I don’t have a model because I wasn’t always trans. Instead of having an idea of who I was and what I needed for other people to see it, I had a slight sense that there was more out there for me than I had been presented with. There was no moment in the beginning when I looked at someone and said, “aha! This is what I’ve been trying to show the world.” Of course, maybe I don’t have a model because I’ve never met anyone like me who interpreted their truth in a similar way to the way I do. I’ve never met anyone who styled themselves similarly to the way I do. When I was looking for a more masculine style of dress, I did copy a friend of mine, but she was woman-identified and my style has since evolved quite thoroughly. I try really hard to be like nobody; for me, that’s more fun and challenging that being like somebody.
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I don’t have a “model.” In fact, I don’t even have any role models. In the beginning, I think I wanted role models; I wanted to know what other people were doing with their genders. I’m still fascinated by the different approaches people take to exploring their interactions with society, but I’m proud to have built myself entirely outside of a mold, to have conceived of an identity all my own having seen no evidence at all that it could exist.

Maybe I don’t have a model because I wasn’t always trans. Instead of having an idea of who I was and what I needed for other people to see it, I had a slight sense that there was more out there for me than I had been presented with. There was no moment in the beginning when I looked at someone and said, “aha! This is what I’ve been trying to show the world.”

Of course, maybe I don’t have a model because I’ve never met anyone like me who interpreted their truth in a similar way to the way I do. I’ve never met anyone who styled themselves similarly to the way I do. When I was looking for a more masculine style of dress, I did copy a friend of mine, but she was woman-identified and my style has since evolved quite thoroughly. I try really hard to be like nobody; for me, that’s more fun and challenging that being like somebody.