Soft features

I'm trans. I was assigned a certain gender at birth, and am again and again by the majority of people who so much as glance at me on the street, but it's never fit very well. Now, since the beginning I've been aware that I'm not trans enough. You see, once upon a time John Money decided that trans people are okay as long as they fit certain criteria that make them worthy of medical and social recognition. They need to be binary for one thing--identifying as male when assigned female, or female when assigned male--and they need to be 100% normative for their self-identified gender. Doctors put up bars and hoops for trans people to jump through to warrant medical transition, and legislators used many of the same for legal transition. Only those trans people who need it most--those for whom living without transition would be worse than death, for example--would be willing and able to jump through all those hoops. Plus (and I don't know if this was doctors or others), being trans must be biological. If it's about society, you should get rid of that internalized sexism. If it's a choice, you're making the wrong choice. Otherwise doctors wouldn't put all these hoops in the way, and society wouldn't hate you. Therefore the only people who are legitimate trans people are binary-identified people who suffer intensely and constantly from distress at the sex of their bodies, not anything related to social perceptions of gender, yet want to meet the gender norms assigned to the sex they want for their bodies.

As a genderqueer who isn't trans enough, I desperately want to be more trans. I don't have anything like a stable gender identity, but maybe if I pretend that my genderfluidity never or vanishingly rarely passes through my assigned gender, I'll be closer to "enough". Maybe if I feel more gender dysphoria, maybe if it gets closer to unbearable, I'll be okay. I'll finally be worthy enough that this really important part of me can be recognized. I'll see my true self reflected in other's words. Other trans people will accept me, and I'll stop feeling adrift, invisible.

 It turns out that the real answer was having people I respect tell me, flat-out, that no one should have their gender identity denied. Suddenly there wasn't an "enough" anymore, no more power dynamic, just me. As me. So I'm trans. Not trans enough, just trans.

I still have a weird/uncertain place in the trans community, but I trust that my own communities of the non-binary and non-transitioning will sort that out over time. More saliently, I still have the question about what it means to be trans. And while I want to avoid defining trans identity through dysphoria and suffering, because that rhetoric is a way of erasing people like me and has caused me more suffering than gender dysphoria itself, I do sometimes experience distress when people gender me--or when I look at my body. This post is about looking in the mirror.

It took me years to name it, that rare-but-memorable disoriented despair I'd fall into when looking at my face. The last time I had it, without yet knowing its name, I got on Facebook and messaged with a friend about it, panicked. I probably said something similar to some of the following:

My face looks wrong. It's so innocent-looking. People can't see my spikes and hard edges. They'll see me as soft and pure. Even angelic. I'm not supposed to look like this!

 My friend didn't understand me, of course, but afterward I realized I was talking about sex characteristics. That "angelic" face was a result of bones not thickened by testosterone, pores not widened, and a softening layer of estrogen-invoked fat. Years ago I'd already sighed gratitude for the millimeter of sharpness losing babyfat gave to my face, reducing that dysphoria, but it wasn't enough.

I'll tell you a secret: I say I only rarely get dysphoria, but it's not uncommon for me to get this easily brush-offable buzzing sense of unreality when I see the femininity of my face. I'm often reminded of male anime characters whose angelic faces get them read as female by other characters. I'm reminded of the androgyny of angels, flat chests and soft, pretty faces.

See how complex cultural ideas are inseparable from a supposed "biological" reaction to unexpected anatomy? How can I know I was "born this way", that I'm actually biologically different from cis people, if Japanese cartoons and Catholic angels are the basic unit of my dysphoria?

I couldn't stop asking that question until I got lost answering it. Because gender goes much, much deeper in our culture than portrayals of fictional characters.

I want "strong" features, but instead my body is too "soft." And so I messaged my friend in a panic because people could see me as "soft," see my life as "smooth," but couldn't see how "hard" and "sharp-edged" I was. Couldn't see the "strong" emotional and social forces within me. Each word I just put in quotes is one where I'd use exactly the same word for my physical features and an emotional/social/moral trait I was upset about people seeing or not being able to see in me, because of their physical counterparts. I can't break "soft" down into physical and non-physical components. Our very language for describing personality is rooted in sexist metaphors.

Want more? When we say "strong female lead," we don't normally mean she swings kettlebells. But "strong" also means the physical, muscular strength that testosterone nourishes. And further, someone's muscular strength--and the "strength" of their jaw line and other bone structure--is part of how we are trained to categorize them as "male" or "female"when we meet them. So four things--personality, physical traits, sex, and gender--are indistinguishable in much of our core vocabulary. I was stunned when I first saw this. I know now that I will probably never be able to untangle the biological from the cultural roots of my gender dysphoria. I was born into a culture that doesn't make a distinction, programmed from birth not to see one.

I'm guessing the ancestors who made our language mined their own bodies for metaphors. And after all, it isn't entirely sexist: Softness in the body can come from leisure as well as estrogen, hardness from intensity and experience as well as testosterone. But hormones are often a dominant factor, and certainly our culture has long seen women as "softer" and men as "harder". These words--metaphors--are sexist. Our perceptions of who is what sex are sexist, based in an evaluation of someone's conformity to sexist stereotypes. That's why people who don't fit the assigned words mocked as belonging to or being like "the opposite" sex. Our language doesn't know the difference between the associated traits, physical or metaphorical, and the actual gender.

Knowing this has changed how I look at my own body. I look around at presumably cis men at work and realize that some have rounded foreheads and soft faces, or narrow "weak" jaws and shallow brows. My rejection of my own face is a feedback loop, a cycle fed by unrealistic ideals of what someone who's not female should look like, and ridiculous but culturally-ingrained assumptions about a connection between appearance and personality or experience, and an expectation that I should look androgynous if I identify as such, or that I should want to look different than I do since I am trans, with a belief again from the dominant cis-normative culture that other people should be able to look at my physical features and tell who I am. Maybe there's some differences in the sexual development of my brain in there that helps kick it all off, but all the cultural stuff around gender is more than messed up enough for me to not want to be part of it.  And you know what? Either way I'm a legitimate trans person.

Non-binary femme piece

I read this piece exploring what it means to me to be femme as a genderfluid, female-assigned nobinary at When She Speaks I Hear the Revolution's non-binary themed open mic last night. Enjoy!

Femme is the crackling current of a shared experience. It's the melody of beauty mixed with joy. It's the dark sure way our damp eyes hold each other close, resisting the seeping poison-pain of misogyny and femmephobia, from workplace lunches to rape recovery centers. Femme laughter rings out with scorn at the scripts that would reduce lives to weakness, and vapidity, and irrelevance. It's the knowledge that other stories have always teemed throughout the world, surrounding the ones of male archetypes that get written down, taught in class, projected on large screens. Femme is seeing every piece of bling as a locket, holding threads that knit our stories to the world and each other.

Femme is different for everyone, but for me it is also the aching gap between who I am and the distorted misinterpretation that is all the mainstream dares to see of me. I am femme because I am not a woman--I would not be femme if I were a woman.

As a not-woman, I could forget that I like long hair, erase the dysphoria of agreement between aspects of my presentation and how others seek to read my body. I could foreswear kinship with the isolated women in my male-dominated profession, never speak of the strength I found in nail polish, hide the steel of my emotional openness so it cant' be construed as weakness. But I won't butcher myself for normative masculinity, won't empty out the lockets tying me to femininity. That, too, is part of me.

I'm a femme because society will never recognize my masculinity, holds it hostage, offers soothing reassurance that all I have to do is pull the trigger on every memory of moist eyes holding sympathy. I'm a femme because that forced-choice is a knife held to my soul. Society lets me look trans masculine, or cis feminine, but cannot read my femininity as trans, cannot see how it's a response and counterpart to my own masculinity, a part of what I am as a man or an androgyne or agender. Just as society misses the anti-femininity of my core when I am a woman.

Often those who identify as femme do so because someone sought to take it from them. Because lesbians are supposed to be butch, men aren't supposed to wear ribbons, and a trans person who was first forcibly labeled "female" is trans-masculine. But these threads can't be plucked from our bodies, nor from the tapestries we weave together, and hold in our eyes.

On anger in civil discourse

The short version of this post is that I read Quinnae's Words, Words, Words: On Toxicity and Abuse in Online Activism and am convinced.

The posts I've remembered writing on this blog in the months since I last posted are the excessively angry ones, the ones I've been naggingly ashamed of. At a distance, why did I have to howl my hurt into the internet, there to be forever connected to my name? Why did I call out other community members specifically to rant about things they wrote, sometimes years prior, that hurt my feelings? Shouldn't that degree of hurt feelings be saved for less petty targets?

These rhetoricals have one very specific answer among many more nebulous psychological reasons: Around the time I started this blog, I had been introduced to the concept of "tone policing"--and the virulent resistance to it--by a blogger whose passion and activism I greatly admired and read about eagerly. Quinnae addresses the tone policing meme and also points to the larger culture of political rage, calling it linkbait.

Another article I read on the subject whose link I've lost discussed the issue of minority communities--especially young LGBT people--being trained in the rhetoric of oppression even when they haven't actually personally experienced any of the oppressive acts that loom so large in their understanding of what it means to be part of their minority community. I definitely think that skewed understanding of queerness has affected me negatively, driving rage, fear, and anxiety, which in its turn causes highly unproductive-to-the-cause behavior like staying in the closet despite likely being in a safe-enough place.

As an example, I've only seen first-hand evidence of non-male bisexuals being excluded from the LGB community by LG people a handful of times in my life, but I've been taught that it happens almost constantly. I have far more examples of inclusion in my own memories, but they fade in contrast to the words of fellow bisexuals and especially their example of angrily decrying it.

Now, I believe monosexism is an urgent problem to be resisted, but is it to be resisted with overwhelming force that has been amassed over several months since the enemy last crossed my path, or is it to be resisted with a few assertive words and the sense that most reasonable people can easily be persuaded to our side or are already on it? Was there any point in building up that artillery rather than rational, empathetic arguments for rational, empathetic people?

I'd rather my queer "tribe" not go to war anytime soon, so no.

I think a larger lesson lies here as well: Time to turn off the sound bites and get my nuanced understanding back in the game.

Sometimes tone policing is a form of oppression used to discredit someone's valid complaints; other times it's meant to protect the targets from verbal/emotional abuse, keep all of us from living in fear of mob reprisal if we try expressing ourselves, and/or protect the reputation of the movement from justified perceptions that we're out to, say, murder everyone else.

There are other viral behavioral norms in social justice communities, especially online, that harm if accepted blindly, too. One that occurs to me is interpreting my hurt feelings as a member of a minority group as a knee-jerk reason to demand change or cast someone else's words/actions as oppressive. That may or may not be appropriate and requires critical thinking to execute.

Burdening society

Reposting a blog comment responding to another commenter on Musings of An Aspie:

I really want to question the idea that a disabled individual who needs constant atypical supports is a “tremendous strain” on “society”. The fact that society isn’t organized in a way to provide for everyone’s needs with love and love for the caregivers as well is the strain, not the individual. So while I have no problem with the prediction that having a child who needs constant monitoring would be a strain on the family, because we live in a society with messed up priorities, I don’t think you owe it to “society” to keep your potentially disabled child from existing, and I don’t think being forced to accommodate for people with atypical needs is even a bad thing for society.

What places a strain on society?
Greed. Production of nuclear missiles. Subsidizing fossil fuels and thereby destroying the biosphere quicker. Market failures, like how some people starve to death while others go on vacations in their personal jets. War. Child abuse. Murder. Sexual assault. White-collar crime. Unethical lending practices. Racism. Alcoholism. Meth. Excessive gambling. Undervaluing of education. Past genocides.

Having to adjust to take care of people whose needs aren’t met by default doesn’t put a strain on society. It heals it. I completely understand if anyone doesn’t want to be the one fighting all of society’s failures to get their kid a decent life, but I don’t for a minute agree that society is somehow hurt by reallocating resources to something that’s actually a good thing to do.

Beta Readers and Diversity: Focused or widespread?

I was reading this post: http://tranifesto.com/2012/05/03/ask-matt-writing-a-trans-character-in-fiction/

Overall, I like it and the discussion. There's a commenter who goes way over the top, IMO, criticizing the person who asked the question for even asking the question, since it supposedly objectifies trans* people and portrays us all as a monolith, which kinda bugged me. There are things that are generally good to do and generally good to avoid when writing about trans* characters even though we're all individuals. For instance, avoiding stereotypes and language that cis people don't get to use, or making sure the character's multi-dimensional and realistic, not defined by being trans.

At some other point a commenter called palacinky says:

I agree with the advice about getting feedback from several trans women (ideally people who have a vaguely similar backgrounds and identities to that of the character you’re writing). In other words, don’t ask trans men what they think about the trans woman character (and vice versa), don’t ask a gay man who does drag what they think about the character, if the character is black or latina, then ask a black trans or latina woman for their feedback. Try to not be defensive when you hear the feedback but also understand you’re writing a unique person, hopefully not a trans cardboard cutout or token. And first and formost, you’re writing a WOMAN character not “a man who wants to be a woman.”

I find this advice interesting and am not sure about it. Yes, get at least 2 trans Latinas if you're writing about trans Latinas--but I'd actually have given the advice to specifically include reviewers from other identities under the same umbrella. You don't want to accidentally write things that affirm trans women while denying the existence of trans men or nonbinaries. Similarly, even if your character's white, you probably want a beta reader of color to screen for racism. I think with the trans umbrella in particular it's really easy to fall into definitions and explanations that completely erase entire swathes of people, and while your character is going to be an individual with experience as only one specific trans person of a specific identity, you do run the risk of characters or authorial voice saying or implying something offensive to other sorts of trans people.

So, I'd say, ideally both, but specific is probably more important than broad.

Upset with Cheryl Morgan's Review of The Bone Palace

Okay, this is neither here nor there and nearly 3 years old, but since it's linked from http://hellyeahagender.tumblr.com/resources, I came across it. Can't leave a comment on the post, so here it goes:

Cheryl Morgan critiques Amanda Downum's The Bone Palace as being transphobic. This is mostly based on the fact that the main trans character didn't surgically remove her testicles/penis despite presumably having the ability and Cheryl Morgan apparently thinks that invalidates her as a trans woman:

The biggest problem for transsexual women, however, is between their legs. There is no more obvious reminder of one’s indisputable maleness than possession of a penis. Not only is it very clear physical evidence, but it has a bad habit of jumping up and demanding attention whenever its owner becomes sexually aroused. This makes it very difficult indeed for a trans woman to have any sort of heterosexual relationship prior to surgery. Testicles are a problem too. They might not be as obvious or attention-seeking, but they are a source of male hormones. If you get rid of them, your body becomes more feminine in appearance.

And regarding sex

For a trans woman with a strong female gender identity, there is generally only one thing she wants to do with her penis, and that is get rid of it as soon as she can. (There are exceptions; more about this later.)

And, no, she doesn't fulfill the promise of giving adequate consideration to those "exceptions."

(I say that this is the main basis for the criticism both because she describes this as the turning point, and because the other criticisms have strongly different readings that have been pointed out in the comments.)

When readers, including someone who's very vocal about being another trans woman who did find herself well-represented in the character in question, object in the comments, Cheryl ignores the main criticisms and claims without substantiation that she's not objecting to a particular type of trans person being portrayed, but that the portrayal was somehow transphobic beyond that. She fails to actually consider--after being explicitly told so at length--that she herself is creating/perpetuating transphobic norms by quotes like the ones I put above, which denies the identity of any woman who likes her penis.

She responds to an articulate argument (see Quinnae Moongazer's comments) pointing these things out by saying

I appreciate your input, but basically it seems to come down to telling me that my reading of the book was wrong.

 Which is basically her either misunderstanding the argument (and I don't see what's not clear about

One, I was not suggesting your context was unreal or irrelevant or invalid. I *was* suggesting that statements like:

“For a trans woman with a strong female gender identity, there is generally only one thing she wants to do with her penis, and that is get rid of it as soon as she can.”

Distort trans women’s experience and tells cis people what they think they already know about us.

), or she's intentionally ignoring the main criticisms and pretending the person she's responding to had made an entirely different argument. Note that Quinnae does say her reading of the book is wrong--I'm not trying to distort things here--but the point is that her criticisms in the book are grounded in her own commitment to transphobic stereotypes/assumptions, with the right or wrongness of her criticisms being a lesser matter (IMO, at least--not sure if either Quinnae or Cheryl would agree that literary criticism << transphobia in importance). In any case, it's obviously crucial that she address her own transphobia when called out on it by other trans people, and she fails that miserably.

I'm pretty disappointed in hellyeahagender tumblr for linking to it (indirectly, through this post that's very closely related), and more disappointed that Cheryl never edited her post to note that some trans people found her comments/assumptions offensive. I don't think Cheryl's wrong to have her reactions, or to criticize potentially negative narratives about trans people in media--but it's always wrong to do that by dismissing entire swafts of trans people and then failing to address your mistake when they call you out. Saying that something's upsetting because it portrays a trans character with a similar identity to you but a different experience of sexuality/dysphoria than you, and that the character not having the same dysphoria/sexuality as you means they don't have a strong gender identity, is pretty damn clearly transphobic and that doesn't change just because you claim that's not what you're saying. You have to, you know, actually go back and change what you said, or apologize for it. Failing to realize even when it's explained clearly to you that your reading of something as transphobic is actually due to your *own* transphobia (thinking the author must not have intended this character to be a real woman since she doesn't think/act like you think real women have to/almost always do) is... a pity, really. I'm still hoping the blogger goes back to this post one day and adds an apology at the top.

Some points I want to make:

- Degree and type of gender dysphoria aren't the same thing as strength of gender identity. There are people who don't have a gender identity who needed to get surgery to reduce the dysphoria they feel for their bodies. There are people (like FTMTF types) who have body dysphoria but identify with their assigned genders. There are also very much so people with strong gender identities different from their assigned genders who only feel social, not body-related dysphoria, or who have body dysphoria in many ways but appreciate the pleasure their penises can bring them, or who find that the risks/costs of surgery would outweigh the rewards.
- Yes, it would be really cool to have another work of fiction realistically exploring a trans woman of the type Cheryl Morgan would want explored, who for instance might have resorted to castration in a world without reconstructive surgery.
- The original post didn't bother me much. It was just like, "Cool, an opinion." The fractal failure to respond upon being called out was what bothers me.
- I think I might actually find some parts of the book uncomfortably sensationalized (the pregnancy part seemed like a bit much), too.

Yes, I do want to end gender

Reposting a comment I left on this blog post. The original post, I don't have a problem with--haven't read either of the articles it's talking about, and the one being criticized does sound awful.

But a couple of the comments hit an old nerve--reiterating this idea that somehow people who want to "do away with gender" can't be part of the trans community.

The way I experience gender is fragmented and doesn't fit either dominant models of (genitals == penis ? man : woman) or of somehow "knowing" that you're a man/woman/whatever and feeling severely dysphoric if this isn't recognized or doesn't "match" your body (whatever gender has to do with anatomy), so my political belief that imposing or requiring gender is tyrannical and unnecessary actually fills out a lot of the core of what I'll call gender identity because other people decided gender identity was a thing. Unfortunately, to a lot of people apparently politics is an unacceptable explanation for being trans. They feel threatened because anti-trans people have used politics against them in at least two ways:

1. Developing a straw-trans who's basically a "laughable" rebel and using that to dismiss the authentic and seriously-effing-important experiences of actual trans people. This is what Nat's article is speaking out against.

2. Dismissing many aspects of trans experience, such as transitioning from one [perceived/presented] gender to another, by saying we should just "do away with gender" instead of promoting trans rights. I was unaware of this phenomenon until reading the comments that I'm replying to.

I've basically been collateral damage in other trans people's fight against these attacks. It's not necessary, though--you can seriously want to abolish gender while respecting trans rights and perspectives. The necessary distinction is really simple, actually: The gender that should be abolished is coercive, other-imposed gender, while the gender that should be respected is personal expression, identity, self-definition, and experience.

So, here's the comments:

makomk said:

Think this is part of a running pattern of cis people using the idea that trans and non-binary folks are an obstacle to ending gender/gender roles/gender rules/... as a way of dismissing them, whilst actually relying heavily on binary gender and everything that traditionally goes with it. By now I may even visibly twitch when someone suggests doing away with gender

I was twitching at the "twitch" comment, but still not really objectionable since it's personal experience and clearly attacking the attackers, not me.

Rani Bakr replied in a way that took it too far, IMO:

 Yeah, when people say things like "doing away with gender" there's a 1000% chance they mean the elimination of people that don't display a masculine (aka "default" in our sexist, heteronormative world) gender expression.

So I said (and btw disqus is really annoying, was trying to post under my real name and failed):

 Umm, no? If I say something similar to "doing away with gender" (and I try not to, even though it's what I believe, since I know I'll offend people), what I mean is ending societally imposed gender labels and other forms of gender coercion. That includes but is not limited to:

Never assigning gender to a baby at birth
Using gender neutral pronouns as the default for all people unless someone expresses a preference otherwise (simply "looking" physically and socially female/male isn't an expression of a preference)
Not having gendered public facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms
Never putting gender on legal documents or ids
Actively fighting prejudice and inequality based on gender/sex
Prejudice based on gender/sex includes prejudice against interests, traits, and communication styles considered "feminine"
Not giving children names that carry heavy gender connotations (like "Alicia" or "James")--for that matter, I'd prefer if children routinely chose their own names upon coming of age
Ending all segregated activities like Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts, choirs, etc

Yes, around the time I came to identify as non-binary, I was also discovering that I believe gender is an illegitimate form of social control. I am not sure whether the concept of gender would exist if we'd never tried to control or oppress people based on it, but certainly body dysphoria would exist anyway, and certainly preferences for certain styles of self-expression would exist anyway. In any case, that's hypothetical, and "gender" also has another meaning of involving personal identity and expression, and that's fine. It took me a couple years to realize the two ideas--respect for people who value being a certain gender and opposition to coercive gender--aren't actually contradictory. So I'd rephrase "gender is an illegitimate form of social control" as "imposing gender upon people or using it to control them is an abusive practice that's often made obligatory in societies and governments."

I don't think I should have to prove that my non-binary identity is based on something other than my political beliefs for it to be recognized as legitimate--and I'm tired of feeling that I do. I think it's pretty easy to make the connection that a teenager who doesn't understand the point of gender and doesn't feel that the gender binary as imposed by society is a real thing at all probably isn't experiencing their own gender in a normative way, and so I'm not saying that it *isn't* about self-expression and reducing discomfort and all that for me (now in my mid-twenties), but I am rejecting the idea that those personal factors are good reasons to be genderqueer while all the political ones are embarrassing and backwards and I should keep them to myself.

I'm not okay with other people who want to do away with gender using that opinion to erase or dismiss trans people. But I'm not okay with other trans people using stereotypes to erase or dismiss my own beliefs (and in doing so my gender identity, since I connect my non-binary identity very strongly to my beliefs), either.