2) https://medium.com/fuckthisshit/fuckthisshit-day-five-129ec7179555
3) https://medium.com/fuckthisshit/day-five-an-apology-da6e2a847469#.72ns9rmta
Read the post above (1), read the original (2), read the retraction/mea culpa (3).
There is so much unpacking that needs to be done in general, and I know how hard it is. Owning up to situations where cultural/societal blindness keeps us from seeing the impact of our words, vs. running from that responsibility, is key. I have historically been guilty of not seeing the impact of things, and I work hard to unpack my cultural issues to see how they impact my world view and my biases, implicit and complicit.
I am an angry woman; I do not deny this, nor do I run from it. I am told at every turn that I am not a real woman because I was born with a penis. I am told repeatedly that since I was socialized as a man, I have inherent male privilege and cannot understand the demands on women. I am told by some that I pretend to be a woman so I can have access to women's safe spaces in order to attack them. It hurts, And I get angry. And I think I have every right to get angry and be angry.
I may have been raised as a man, but this means I had to fight what I knew to be true inside every day of my life. I had to argue to grow my hair long. I got screamed at on the regular when I got caught with makeup or trying on clothes that I thought were right. I had a breakdown when I realised that I was never going to grow breasts, and that my penis was not going to magically disappear and become a vagina and uterus. I say that the lack of a uterus doesn't make me less of a woman while at the same time wishing I could experience that because it would mean I was finally not broken. I got from a very young age that society crushed women under the weight of expectation to look a certain way, dress a certain way, act a certain way. It affected me even tho I was not directly impacted, because I realised that because society saw me as one thing, I escaped some of that openly while still being affected by it inwardly.
I have a tonne of issues because of all of this. Forget the body self image problems that come just from being dysphoric; I get the added bonus of knowing in my heart of hearts that I'll never have even the slightest chance at passing privilege. My depression is horrific, and even with large amounts of antidepressants and mood stabilisers, it's touch and go every day. I am terrified by every doctor appointment I have had or will be having at the clinic I am now going to because I am certain they'll decide I'm not trans enough and tell me I can't start contra-hormonal therapy.
And then I get to hear from people on the daily that I'm not a woman.
I am not my body parts, just as no woman is. Except when I am. When it's time to reduce me, to diminish me, to deny me my essential identity and personhood, then my body parts are everything.
In my previous essay I talked at length about labels and how they can be used divisively as well as communally. I think this is really key here. We are all, to lesser or greater degrees, complicit in forwarding on the cute memes saying things like forget manning up, grow a pussy instead, they take a beating and stuff like that. Yes, it's a cute thing, and it makes a half hearted attempt at reclaiming or overriding the idea that women are weaker and patriarchal misogyny is a toxic thing. But it is also exclusionary and erasing of identity.
Invitations to 'grow a pussy,' while possibly well intended as a retort to toxic misogyny, are erasing. Do you want to know how much it will cost me to grow a pussy?
- I am looking at $35,000 of uncovered, 'elective' 'non-necessary' surgery in order to get my body to conform to what I know it's supposed to be.
- Plus another $30,000+ if I wanted facial feminisation surgery (tracheal shave, browline reconstruction, cheek bone reconstruction, etc.)
- Plus $7 to 10,000 for top surgery.
- Plus roughly $8,000 for an orchiectomy.
(and now you know why I was hoping, even tho I knew that it was fake, that I really could sell my nads for 25K a piece...I'd have a lot of this covered and hell I could prolly skip the FFS just give me my neo-vagina and breasts please and thank you.)
It's not cheap, and it's beyond the reach of most of us. If I'm lucky I'll be able to scratch up for one of those, even if I could do it cheaper via urban legend pacu fish (they're actually mostly vegetarian even if they have human looking teeth...they're better for snapping up and crushing fruit and seeds). Yet for some people, I am less of a woman because I do not have a vagina, I do not have a uterus, I don't bleed once a month plus or minus 5 days or so, etc. Because I can't have those essential quintessential woman experiences, I can't know what it's like to be a woman ergo I'm not a woman ergo I'm just a fetishiser looking to sneak my way into women's spaces to attack them.
Here's a further thing associated tangentially with all of that:
You know how we are working very hard to tell kids you can be anyone you want to be? There aren't girl toys and boy toys, just toys? It's all well and good, and it's a lovely sentiment and in the perfect world in which I fart rainbows out of my butt, not only would this be true but it's be unspoken.
Yet.
Yet.
Yet.
I don't have to wear makeup and heels and dresses because women don't have to...but I have to because otherwise I'm faking it. But I can't be too femme because then I'm trying too hard. But I can't be not femme enough because then I'm just not putting in the effort. But if I wear too much makeup I'm a whore and a sex worker. But if I don't I'm just not trying hard enough. Butt if I like jeans and running/jumping/climbing trees/whacking people with a French loaf, I'm just a boy. But if I wear a dress I'm just a bloke in a dress. Even if I can run in heels better than a lot of people.
I wear makeup because I like to. I don't need it every day, but it's affirming to me. It was one of the first things I could do that gave me some semblance of comfort that THIS IS ME. I wear heels on occasion because I like them. I love my boots. I think they look cute. I don't need to...and am I less of a woman on days I wear my Nikes? Or a pair of jeans? I think not, but many people think so. And thus, consciously or subconsciously, I feel that I am compelled to conform to a gender binary. And while I AM very much binary in my gender identity, I shouldn't feel forced to HAVE to do certain things in order to affirm my identity for other people. It should be about myself...yet for myself and so many other girls like me, it's not. It's really not.
Passing privilege should not be a thing...and yet it is. We're almost expected to conform to a gender binary in order to make people around us not see us. And that passing privilege is erasing as well. Would I like to be able to look like a cis woman every day? You bet your buttons I do. At the same time, should I live my life trying to make people around me, people I know, comfortable? They say well behaved women never make history, and we know how well behaved I am. But it goes beyond that. I talk about my non-compliance...yet I do not deny that there's a voice saying comply or die, and the scary thing is that it's a real thing. I am as crushed by society's expectations as any woman can be, with the added complication of having to push that even further to ensure my safety even though it really doesn't.
Yet, when we present ultra-femme, we trivialise women and are encroaching into their spaces. We're mocked as 'men playing dress-up,' even tho we do it as a sort of armour to try and protect from the absolute worst of humanity out there.
And there's the rub...we are compelled, either internally or externally, to conform to the gender binary in order to seem serious about our trans status. We get complaints that we just enforce the binary, when the occasions we don't we're accused of not being who we know we are. I am guilty of being affected by this: I go to my psych appointments and my clinic appointments and refuse to wear jeans, and always have my make-up just so, even tho perhaps I don't need to. Because I fear if I don't, I won't be seen as trans enough, woman enough, trying enough. And you don't know how hard that is, even if maybe you know a little because you're a woman reading this and you get it on one hand but not on the other hand but on the third hand you kinda do.
That's three hands.
It boils down to erasure. And erasure happens in so many ways, from the overt to the subtle and perhaps unintended.
In the end, I am very glad that they took a long hard look at what people said about the piece, realised that there was unpacking to do, and addressed it head on, rather than either ignoring it or posting a half-meant mealy mouthed 'apology' that was anything but. Ownership is important...we are all our flaws just as much as we are the things that make us shine.
Join us next time when we actually do the talk about names and how they matter. Until next time, this is me, saying by to you, and hoping you have a frabjous day.
Callooh.
Callay.
(NB: as always, this is posted under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license with the intent that you may share it if you have found it informative, helpful, or enlightening. You may use extracts, properly attributed, as part of your work as long is it is openly shared under similar license.)
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