20 June 2017
Trans 101 With Julie: The A in LGBTQIA does NOT mean ally
Hello.
Welcome back to another installment of Trans 101 With Julie. I am the titular Julie.
I have spent the better part of the past 24 hours mulling some thing over, and trying to come up with a way to discuss things without resorting to vaguebooking or doing the essay length version of subtweeting. I'm still not sure I've come up with the best way to achieve this, but let's work our way through the mine field that is Julie's brain, OK?
We'll start our little excursion here:
white feminism: A brand of feminism centered around the ideals and struggles of primarily white women. While not outright exclusive, its failure to consider other women and its preoccupation with Western standards and the problems faced by the "average woman" is often alienating to women of color, non-straight women, trans women, and women belonging to religious or cultural minorities.
When I say...and I do...that I loathe white feminism, this is what I mean. You can be white, and a feminist, and not be a white feminist. I know lots of white feminists who don't practice white feminism...they are aware of the unique problems, oppressions, and lived experiences of people outside their social bubble, and ready to step back and ensure that those unique things are noticed and spoken about.
I have seen some pictures that equate the A in LGBTQIA+ as 'ally,' and it makes me sick. It's centering. It's stating that a cisgender or heterosexual ally is an integrated integral part of the community, that their experiences are the same as ours. And that is filled with so many falsehoods that I don't even know where to start.
I have made no small reference to the fact that I do not like ‘allies.’ I don't like the word ally. For me, this is what ally means: you're someone who talks the talk, but when it's time to walk the walk, you shrink back. You post all kinds of stuff all over the place about things, but when it's time to put money where mouth is, silence ensues. While we're out there living our lives and experiencing things you can't understand but might be able to at least see if you weren't busy posting the latest cause you're supporting, you're...talking about how people have so much more to learn.
I'd laugh if I wasn't crying.
Or is it I'd cry if I wasn't already laughing?
It's hard to tell sometimes.
I do not exist to make people feel better about themselves. I do not exist to placate and coddle. I exist to exist, to live my life as safely and fully as possible, and to evolve from the pupal stage I was in for far too long into the person I have always been but hid away under lock and key. If someone steps out of their lane, steps into my lane, and starts telling me how I should interact with them, expecting anything other than a slap back is disingenuous beyond reckoning. I won't be polite. I won't be kind. I'll call you out on your bullshit, and I will call you what you are. I won't be belittled, I will not be denigrated, and I will not stand for being told I'm rude for 'talking down' to someone, or that I haven't earned their respect. I don't want respect that is only given for fitting someone's societal norms.
Someone that really cares for people in a community do certain things. In my mind, these things include, but certainly aren't limited to, the following:
1) They listen twice as much as they speak. I have a saying I live by, and that's 'I have 2 ears and 1 mouth...that tells me how I should act.'
2) They speak with, not for. They amplify our voices, they don't speak in lieu of us.
3) They listen when we say something is ignorant, offensive, or hateful. When one of my friends says something is racist, I trust in their lived experiences that it is what they say it is. This has tripped me up in the past, and I felt horrible about it. I've learned and trust those voices. Basically I don't act as if their knowledge and experience is less important than my opinion.
4) They collect their own. They tell their social group when something is wrong, and direct them to resources to provide empirical evidence and lived experiences to amplify their assertion.
5) They do not give power back to the oppressor.
6) They apologise when they fuck up in a timely manner. And they offer an honest, complete apology. As examples:
I'm sorry for hurting you.
I'm sorry you’re upset by what I said.
What's the difference between these two? Simples: one takes ownership of the fault...the other defers ownership to the injured party.
Which one do you think I would want when someone makes a mistake?
A number of things have changed for me over the past several months. I am in more fear for my continued existence than I have ever been in my life. I do not know what the next four years are going to bring for any of us who is not a white cisgender heterosexual Christian male. And I have been presented with a choice.
To wit:
a) Live my life with my head down, try not to get any attention, and try to skulk my way through the shadows in order to try to blend in and keep 'safe.'
b) Be myself. Get angry. Express my anger. Fight. Point out stuff. Talk about my life in the hopes that sharing my experiences, from my depression to my grey-ace/demi orientation to my transgirl identity, help others to understand theirs should any of those resonate with them...and hopefully, for people who share none of those characteristics, that it gives them some sort of basic understanding of something outside their bubble.
I have spent tens of thousands of words over the past several years talking about my life as a transgirl (and please note...I use the term transgirl because I claim it. Just like I claim the word queer to describe me. You don't get the privilege of using them. They're not your words. Trans women are women, trans men are men, and I'm a woman who happens to like the word transgirl and applies it to herself. Quod erat demonstrandum.). I have spent countless hours tearing bloody open my life and splattering the rawness of it on the digital page for it to be examined. I don't have to do this, and a good number of people have in fact suggested I might be happier, or at least more content, if I didn't. And maybe...it's possible. But the thing is this: while I have a choice, I don't feel that I have a choice. There is so much false information out there, and so many people trying desperately to paint us as mentally ill, delusional, and not 'truly' trans as there's no such thing as 'a true trans.'
In life, we all have a choice. We can choose to live on our knees, or die on our feet. I have spent too much of my life on my knees, trying to metaphorically suck off whoever I need to in order to sneak by in life and keep my head down. And yeah, that's maybe an explicit analogy, but I'm far beyond the point of caring about the words I choose to express myself in matters such as these. I am not a politician, I don't make nice, I don't do respectability or apology to people trying to bring me down or invalidate my life. You can argue all you want, but if you're racist I'll call you a racist, if you're fascist I'm going to bash you, and if you're saying stuff that's transphobic, you can be sure as eggs I will call you a transphobe. And I won't apologise for it.
My initial plan for this, before things went pear shaped, as to write about a number of things that started with the letter A that I felt were important (attitude, acceptance, affirmation) both internally (i.e., the self) and externally. I was even outlining a course through this when I had to put it aside for...reasons. And so, you get this instead.
Thank you for reading. I'll see you back here next time, hopefully with a more optimistic, positive bit of essay.
(This essay is free to share, and I encourage it. 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.)
Welcome back to another installment of Trans 101 With Julie. I am the titular Julie.
I have spent the better part of the past 24 hours mulling some thing over, and trying to come up with a way to discuss things without resorting to vaguebooking or doing the essay length version of subtweeting. I'm still not sure I've come up with the best way to achieve this, but let's work our way through the mine field that is Julie's brain, OK?
We'll start our little excursion here:
white feminism: A brand of feminism centered around the ideals and struggles of primarily white women. While not outright exclusive, its failure to consider other women and its preoccupation with Western standards and the problems faced by the "average woman" is often alienating to women of color, non-straight women, trans women, and women belonging to religious or cultural minorities.
When I say...and I do...that I loathe white feminism, this is what I mean. You can be white, and a feminist, and not be a white feminist. I know lots of white feminists who don't practice white feminism...they are aware of the unique problems, oppressions, and lived experiences of people outside their social bubble, and ready to step back and ensure that those unique things are noticed and spoken about.
I have seen some pictures that equate the A in LGBTQIA+ as 'ally,' and it makes me sick. It's centering. It's stating that a cisgender or heterosexual ally is an integrated integral part of the community, that their experiences are the same as ours. And that is filled with so many falsehoods that I don't even know where to start.
I have made no small reference to the fact that I do not like ‘allies.’ I don't like the word ally. For me, this is what ally means: you're someone who talks the talk, but when it's time to walk the walk, you shrink back. You post all kinds of stuff all over the place about things, but when it's time to put money where mouth is, silence ensues. While we're out there living our lives and experiencing things you can't understand but might be able to at least see if you weren't busy posting the latest cause you're supporting, you're...talking about how people have so much more to learn.
I'd laugh if I wasn't crying.
Or is it I'd cry if I wasn't already laughing?
It's hard to tell sometimes.
I do not exist to make people feel better about themselves. I do not exist to placate and coddle. I exist to exist, to live my life as safely and fully as possible, and to evolve from the pupal stage I was in for far too long into the person I have always been but hid away under lock and key. If someone steps out of their lane, steps into my lane, and starts telling me how I should interact with them, expecting anything other than a slap back is disingenuous beyond reckoning. I won't be polite. I won't be kind. I'll call you out on your bullshit, and I will call you what you are. I won't be belittled, I will not be denigrated, and I will not stand for being told I'm rude for 'talking down' to someone, or that I haven't earned their respect. I don't want respect that is only given for fitting someone's societal norms.
Someone that really cares for people in a community do certain things. In my mind, these things include, but certainly aren't limited to, the following:
1) They listen twice as much as they speak. I have a saying I live by, and that's 'I have 2 ears and 1 mouth...that tells me how I should act.'
2) They speak with, not for. They amplify our voices, they don't speak in lieu of us.
3) They listen when we say something is ignorant, offensive, or hateful. When one of my friends says something is racist, I trust in their lived experiences that it is what they say it is. This has tripped me up in the past, and I felt horrible about it. I've learned and trust those voices. Basically I don't act as if their knowledge and experience is less important than my opinion.
4) They collect their own. They tell their social group when something is wrong, and direct them to resources to provide empirical evidence and lived experiences to amplify their assertion.
5) They do not give power back to the oppressor.
6) They apologise when they fuck up in a timely manner. And they offer an honest, complete apology. As examples:
I'm sorry for hurting you.
I'm sorry you’re upset by what I said.
What's the difference between these two? Simples: one takes ownership of the fault...the other defers ownership to the injured party.
Which one do you think I would want when someone makes a mistake?
~~~//||\\~~~
A number of things have changed for me over the past several months. I am in more fear for my continued existence than I have ever been in my life. I do not know what the next four years are going to bring for any of us who is not a white cisgender heterosexual Christian male. And I have been presented with a choice.
To wit:
a) Live my life with my head down, try not to get any attention, and try to skulk my way through the shadows in order to try to blend in and keep 'safe.'
b) Be myself. Get angry. Express my anger. Fight. Point out stuff. Talk about my life in the hopes that sharing my experiences, from my depression to my grey-ace/demi orientation to my transgirl identity, help others to understand theirs should any of those resonate with them...and hopefully, for people who share none of those characteristics, that it gives them some sort of basic understanding of something outside their bubble.
I have spent tens of thousands of words over the past several years talking about my life as a transgirl (and please note...I use the term transgirl because I claim it. Just like I claim the word queer to describe me. You don't get the privilege of using them. They're not your words. Trans women are women, trans men are men, and I'm a woman who happens to like the word transgirl and applies it to herself. Quod erat demonstrandum.). I have spent countless hours tearing bloody open my life and splattering the rawness of it on the digital page for it to be examined. I don't have to do this, and a good number of people have in fact suggested I might be happier, or at least more content, if I didn't. And maybe...it's possible. But the thing is this: while I have a choice, I don't feel that I have a choice. There is so much false information out there, and so many people trying desperately to paint us as mentally ill, delusional, and not 'truly' trans as there's no such thing as 'a true trans.'
In life, we all have a choice. We can choose to live on our knees, or die on our feet. I have spent too much of my life on my knees, trying to metaphorically suck off whoever I need to in order to sneak by in life and keep my head down. And yeah, that's maybe an explicit analogy, but I'm far beyond the point of caring about the words I choose to express myself in matters such as these. I am not a politician, I don't make nice, I don't do respectability or apology to people trying to bring me down or invalidate my life. You can argue all you want, but if you're racist I'll call you a racist, if you're fascist I'm going to bash you, and if you're saying stuff that's transphobic, you can be sure as eggs I will call you a transphobe. And I won't apologise for it.
My initial plan for this, before things went pear shaped, as to write about a number of things that started with the letter A that I felt were important (attitude, acceptance, affirmation) both internally (i.e., the self) and externally. I was even outlining a course through this when I had to put it aside for...reasons. And so, you get this instead.
Thank you for reading. I'll see you back here next time, hopefully with a more optimistic, positive bit of essay.
(This essay is free to share, and I encourage it. 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.)
19 June 2017
Trans 101 with Julie, Lesson 4: Names and Roses, or When is a Julie not a Julie except she Really Is?
Hello, I'm Julie Knispel.
Except I’m not.
Except I am.
I sound very confused, I am sure, and I am further sure that you out there reading have no blinking idea what exactly I am on about. I'm hoping as we meander through the minefield of what passes for my mind that things will become clearer.
Lest we muddy the waters even further, let's begin.
ONCE upon a time, the blessed bard himself had this to say:
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
In many ways this is true. Even if we did not know the name of the flower, we would still recognise its beauty, its fragility, its sweet scent. The flower is the flower is the flower. How and ever, if we know that it is called a rose, we can know that there is more variety within that tiny corner of the flowerbed than even the name defines. Do all roses smell the same? Does the rose smell differently to you than it does to me? Rose may be the identifier, but it only tells part of the story.
Sorry, Will.
So we can drill down from there. Scientifically, we can know that roses are part of the order Rosales, family Rosaceae, subfamily Rosoideae, genus Rosa. But did you know that there are at least 123 species of roses within the genus Rosa? They are all roses, yet they are also all unique. Each of them has its own name, and each of them is every bit as beautiful as the other, each of them is a rose, and each of them is unique. Do we consider the Rosa gallica as something better or prettier or more useful than the Rosa carolina? Likely not. And more likely, you didn't even know there were either of these two things, so how could you?
However...as people, we know that there are women. And there are women of many colours and ethnicities. And women of varying orientations. And, yes, women with vaginas, and women with penises. And we do judge them differently.
So let's go back to names.
My name is Julie. Specifically, my name is Juliette Alexandria Knispel. I'm Homo sapiens sapiens. There are many things I use as descriptors for me. I am an opera fan, I am a bass player, I am a comic book fan, I am a science fiction and fantasy aficionado, I am a gamer, I am a woman, and I am transgender. I'm Homo sapiens sapiens. If my genus, species and subspecies shows where I fall on the biological tree, each of the other things specialises me further down, and makes it easier perhaps to understand who I am. There may be many many people out there that have the same interests as I do, but there's only one (I hope) who has that set of interests and is named Julie Knispel. In using my name, you are recognising not just what I am, but who I am. You are recognising and seeing each of the qualities that make me who I am, including my gender and identity. You are recognising me.
Yet at the same time I'm NOT Juliette Alexandria Knispel. Legally I am not. Legally, I am recognised under a different name, with a different gender marker, with a name that carries a long history in my family yet is not mine at all, even if the name I go by is a variant of my given assigned name. I was assigned a gender and a name at birth, and those things mark me in a certain way so far as the world that I exist in is concerned.
Here's a story...when I was younger, among the plethora of other things I used to crayon the heck out of (like landscapes and fish and maps of the night sky and animals and so on), I went through a very intense period of drawing dresses and shoes. I didn't question it, it just seemed natural. It still does. In some ways I know this was subconscious expression, but that part is less important than the rest of it. The rest of it was this: I told myself that if I ever had a chance to name myself, I'd name myself Julie. It felt right. It felt good. It felt proper. Of course, I wasn't at all sure why it did, but it did.
Many many years later, as my interests in music broadened and enveloped multiple forms of expression, I came across a quote from the single greatest electric guitarist/composer/band leader/philosopher of all time, Mr. Robert Fripp:
“If I name myself, I recognize who I am. By recognizing who I am, I am becoming myself.”
Can we guess how easy it was to knock me over with a feather after that?
But it is so very true.
For so many people, names are a non-issue. They match our assigned identity and we get on with life merrily and with no consideration for what they mean. For me, a name that doesn't match my inner image is a point of conflict, like bones rubbing together with no connective tissue or cartilage. Like garnet paper scraping across exposed skin. Like lemon juice in an open wound. And many other things besides. In short, it hurts like hell.
Between birth and *muttersyearsago* I went through multiple iterations of my name, both first and middle, in an attempt to try and find something that fit, that at least felt semi-comfortable. Only one, the neutrois Jules, ever felt like it was something remotely close to acceptable and even there it was like wearing a shoe that was a half size too small or too large. It just wasn't right. I chafed against it. The more I chafed, the more I wanted to change it, the more it hurt.
I finally sucked it up two years ago and changed my name on here to Julie. Emotionally the change was night and day. The same could be said for a couple of the web forums I used to frequent, where I started new accounts under Julie rather than the other name...the comfort level was just...it was a wonderful thing, honestly. I felt like myself.
Here's a thing about 'old' names: they have a way of lingering. We call them deadnames, and while we're not dead, the name is. Deadnames are the names we were assigned, the names that we used for expansive swaths (not swatches) of our lives. They're names that we don't identify with for any of a variety of reasons. Hell, even non-trans people can have deadnames...if someone changes their name because of negative associations with their family or whatever, guess what? Their old name is a deadname too. For almost al cases, however, deadnames and deadnaming is a very much trans spectrum thing.
Deadnaming someone is a horrible thing. Deadnaming can happen for a number of reasons.
From Gender Wiki:
1: Someone accidentally deadnames because they're used to using that name.
For example: John Doe called his transgender sister, "Steve" by accident because he had referred to her as that for most of his life. He apologized and corrected himself.
2: Someone purposefully deadnames to cause distress.
For example: At school, while Jen was walking down the hall, Anthony walked by her and coughed "Steve." Jen got upset and tried to correct Anthony, but he just walked away snickering.
3: Someone purposefully deadnames because of their beliefs.
For example: Great Aunt Mary called Jen "Steve" because she believed that Jen is still a boy.
One could sit there and try to rationalise an order of hurt, i.e., 3 hurts more than 2, 2 hurts more than 1, 1 hurts the least of all. However, having said that...it's a load of cobbler's. Hurt is hurt is hurt, and honestly? Even if 1 is the least hurtful of all, on the famous 10 scale that number 1 option can often be an 8 or 9 anyway, even if the accidental deadnaming is well and truly an accident.
When we choose our names, we do so with a great deal of thought in many cases. For one example, I have a good friend on here whom I knew initially under one name, who then came to me and said that she wasn't sure if she wanted to stay with that name, and was thinking back and forth between the name she was using and another name. It's hard to offer advice on a name because it is so intensely personal, but I listened as best I could. She made her decision, and honestly, I think the name she chose fits so well that it's impossible to think of her as the name she was using before (even if it simply moved to her middle name).
For me, I put way more thought into how I'd spell my first name (Julie vs. Juliet vs. Juliette) and what I'd use as a middle name than what my first name would be. If you saw one of the comment threads on here a while back, my friend Sara and I had a little back and forth on the merits of Alexandria vs. Aria, and my response that as much as I love Aria (cos hey, music!) Alexandria means I have a 3-5-3 symmetry in my name and that structural balance suits my sense of math plus the way the names sound together suits my sense of poetry and music. Geekery, thy name is Julie. The long and short of it is that the name matters to me; it defines me for me, it defines me for the people around me (and amazingly, my chosen name has the same basic meaning as my assigned name, a fact that was completely not known to me when I decided on what I decided. Colour me shocked. I was shocked. Shocked, I say. Did I mention I was shocked? Because I was shocked.). It is a name that feels right, like a pair of broken in jeans that are worn and super soft in all the right places.
It's a name that's me, in every way.
I caused a fuss on here, and lost (no, lost isn't the right word...I kicked to the curb) someone who took umbrage over, a statement I made that misgendering and deadnaming is an act of violence, to the effect that such things smack of Tumblr social justice warrioring and cast the entire trans community in a bad light. Let me shed some light on things:
1) Your name is Michael.
2) You like the name, you identify with the name, it defines you.
3) I start calling you Erica.
4) You ask me to stop.
5) I keep calling you Erica.
6) I insist you're a woman, even tho you are a man and totally 137.65% ok with being a man.
7) You beg me to stop.
8) I continue to insist you are a woman named Erica.
What would you do? Would you take it? Would you lash out? Would you feel dehumanised, misunderstood? Would you feel like someone is denying not only your identity, but your essential humanity? My guess is that you very much would. My guess is that it would hurt a whole lot. My guess is that you'd look at what I was doing as abuse. And do you know why you'd look at it as abuse?
BECAUSE IT BLOODY WELL IS.
Within the trans community, however...we deal with this every day. A microaggression is still an aggression. Accidental deadnaming hurts just as much as intentional deadnaming. Accidential misgendering hurts every bit as much, and sucks every bit as much, as intentional. My hypothetical to you is my reality every day of the week.
If you know a person's deadname, don't ever use it.
If you see someone using a person's deadname, call them out on it.
If you accidentally misgender someone, apologise. Don't make it about you, don't center yourself. Apologise, own it, grow from it. It hurts, yeah, but we'd (I'd) rather an act of honest contrition than someone falling all over themselves wailing and gnashing their teeth over the offense.
When we tell you our names, our pronouns, our identity, respect them. We respect the damn out of your names, because we know the power that names have. Respect is given to people who give respect. We know it can be hard, we understand that, and I think I can say that we know that we're going to get hurt from time to time out of an honest mistake...because we're human. I say inadvertently hurtful things...I may or may not even realise that they are hurtful, but they are. I own the mistake, I learn from the mistake, and I try very hard not to repeat the mistake. It's only when the same mistake is repeated over and over, with the same 'Oh it was a mistake I'm sorry' that we start to realise it's really not a mistake.
Does a rose by any other name smell just as sweet?
Perhaps it does.
But how much cooler is it to know the sweet rose you're smelling is the Rosa laevigata (Cherokee Rose), and know the history and meaning behind it?
As always, thanks for reading along. Tune in next time when...
* whispers *
...when we just might talk about sex.
(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.)
Except I’m not.
Except I am.
I sound very confused, I am sure, and I am further sure that you out there reading have no blinking idea what exactly I am on about. I'm hoping as we meander through the minefield of what passes for my mind that things will become clearer.
Lest we muddy the waters even further, let's begin.
ONCE upon a time, the blessed bard himself had this to say:
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
In many ways this is true. Even if we did not know the name of the flower, we would still recognise its beauty, its fragility, its sweet scent. The flower is the flower is the flower. How and ever, if we know that it is called a rose, we can know that there is more variety within that tiny corner of the flowerbed than even the name defines. Do all roses smell the same? Does the rose smell differently to you than it does to me? Rose may be the identifier, but it only tells part of the story.
Sorry, Will.
So we can drill down from there. Scientifically, we can know that roses are part of the order Rosales, family Rosaceae, subfamily Rosoideae, genus Rosa. But did you know that there are at least 123 species of roses within the genus Rosa? They are all roses, yet they are also all unique. Each of them has its own name, and each of them is every bit as beautiful as the other, each of them is a rose, and each of them is unique. Do we consider the Rosa gallica as something better or prettier or more useful than the Rosa carolina? Likely not. And more likely, you didn't even know there were either of these two things, so how could you?
However...as people, we know that there are women. And there are women of many colours and ethnicities. And women of varying orientations. And, yes, women with vaginas, and women with penises. And we do judge them differently.
So let's go back to names.
My name is Julie. Specifically, my name is Juliette Alexandria Knispel. I'm Homo sapiens sapiens. There are many things I use as descriptors for me. I am an opera fan, I am a bass player, I am a comic book fan, I am a science fiction and fantasy aficionado, I am a gamer, I am a woman, and I am transgender. I'm Homo sapiens sapiens. If my genus, species and subspecies shows where I fall on the biological tree, each of the other things specialises me further down, and makes it easier perhaps to understand who I am. There may be many many people out there that have the same interests as I do, but there's only one (I hope) who has that set of interests and is named Julie Knispel. In using my name, you are recognising not just what I am, but who I am. You are recognising and seeing each of the qualities that make me who I am, including my gender and identity. You are recognising me.
Yet at the same time I'm NOT Juliette Alexandria Knispel. Legally I am not. Legally, I am recognised under a different name, with a different gender marker, with a name that carries a long history in my family yet is not mine at all, even if the name I go by is a variant of my given assigned name. I was assigned a gender and a name at birth, and those things mark me in a certain way so far as the world that I exist in is concerned.
Here's a story...when I was younger, among the plethora of other things I used to crayon the heck out of (like landscapes and fish and maps of the night sky and animals and so on), I went through a very intense period of drawing dresses and shoes. I didn't question it, it just seemed natural. It still does. In some ways I know this was subconscious expression, but that part is less important than the rest of it. The rest of it was this: I told myself that if I ever had a chance to name myself, I'd name myself Julie. It felt right. It felt good. It felt proper. Of course, I wasn't at all sure why it did, but it did.
Many many years later, as my interests in music broadened and enveloped multiple forms of expression, I came across a quote from the single greatest electric guitarist/composer/band leader/philosopher of all time, Mr. Robert Fripp:
“If I name myself, I recognize who I am. By recognizing who I am, I am becoming myself.”
Can we guess how easy it was to knock me over with a feather after that?
But it is so very true.
For so many people, names are a non-issue. They match our assigned identity and we get on with life merrily and with no consideration for what they mean. For me, a name that doesn't match my inner image is a point of conflict, like bones rubbing together with no connective tissue or cartilage. Like garnet paper scraping across exposed skin. Like lemon juice in an open wound. And many other things besides. In short, it hurts like hell.
Between birth and *muttersyearsago* I went through multiple iterations of my name, both first and middle, in an attempt to try and find something that fit, that at least felt semi-comfortable. Only one, the neutrois Jules, ever felt like it was something remotely close to acceptable and even there it was like wearing a shoe that was a half size too small or too large. It just wasn't right. I chafed against it. The more I chafed, the more I wanted to change it, the more it hurt.
I finally sucked it up two years ago and changed my name on here to Julie. Emotionally the change was night and day. The same could be said for a couple of the web forums I used to frequent, where I started new accounts under Julie rather than the other name...the comfort level was just...it was a wonderful thing, honestly. I felt like myself.
Here's a thing about 'old' names: they have a way of lingering. We call them deadnames, and while we're not dead, the name is. Deadnames are the names we were assigned, the names that we used for expansive swaths (not swatches) of our lives. They're names that we don't identify with for any of a variety of reasons. Hell, even non-trans people can have deadnames...if someone changes their name because of negative associations with their family or whatever, guess what? Their old name is a deadname too. For almost al cases, however, deadnames and deadnaming is a very much trans spectrum thing.
Deadnaming someone is a horrible thing. Deadnaming can happen for a number of reasons.
From Gender Wiki:
1: Someone accidentally deadnames because they're used to using that name.
For example: John Doe called his transgender sister, "Steve" by accident because he had referred to her as that for most of his life. He apologized and corrected himself.
2: Someone purposefully deadnames to cause distress.
For example: At school, while Jen was walking down the hall, Anthony walked by her and coughed "Steve." Jen got upset and tried to correct Anthony, but he just walked away snickering.
3: Someone purposefully deadnames because of their beliefs.
For example: Great Aunt Mary called Jen "Steve" because she believed that Jen is still a boy.
One could sit there and try to rationalise an order of hurt, i.e., 3 hurts more than 2, 2 hurts more than 1, 1 hurts the least of all. However, having said that...it's a load of cobbler's. Hurt is hurt is hurt, and honestly? Even if 1 is the least hurtful of all, on the famous 10 scale that number 1 option can often be an 8 or 9 anyway, even if the accidental deadnaming is well and truly an accident.
When we choose our names, we do so with a great deal of thought in many cases. For one example, I have a good friend on here whom I knew initially under one name, who then came to me and said that she wasn't sure if she wanted to stay with that name, and was thinking back and forth between the name she was using and another name. It's hard to offer advice on a name because it is so intensely personal, but I listened as best I could. She made her decision, and honestly, I think the name she chose fits so well that it's impossible to think of her as the name she was using before (even if it simply moved to her middle name).
For me, I put way more thought into how I'd spell my first name (Julie vs. Juliet vs. Juliette) and what I'd use as a middle name than what my first name would be. If you saw one of the comment threads on here a while back, my friend Sara and I had a little back and forth on the merits of Alexandria vs. Aria, and my response that as much as I love Aria (cos hey, music!) Alexandria means I have a 3-5-3 symmetry in my name and that structural balance suits my sense of math plus the way the names sound together suits my sense of poetry and music. Geekery, thy name is Julie. The long and short of it is that the name matters to me; it defines me for me, it defines me for the people around me (and amazingly, my chosen name has the same basic meaning as my assigned name, a fact that was completely not known to me when I decided on what I decided. Colour me shocked. I was shocked. Shocked, I say. Did I mention I was shocked? Because I was shocked.). It is a name that feels right, like a pair of broken in jeans that are worn and super soft in all the right places.
It's a name that's me, in every way.
I caused a fuss on here, and lost (no, lost isn't the right word...I kicked to the curb) someone who took umbrage over, a statement I made that misgendering and deadnaming is an act of violence, to the effect that such things smack of Tumblr social justice warrioring and cast the entire trans community in a bad light. Let me shed some light on things:
1) Your name is Michael.
2) You like the name, you identify with the name, it defines you.
3) I start calling you Erica.
4) You ask me to stop.
5) I keep calling you Erica.
6) I insist you're a woman, even tho you are a man and totally 137.65% ok with being a man.
7) You beg me to stop.
8) I continue to insist you are a woman named Erica.
What would you do? Would you take it? Would you lash out? Would you feel dehumanised, misunderstood? Would you feel like someone is denying not only your identity, but your essential humanity? My guess is that you very much would. My guess is that it would hurt a whole lot. My guess is that you'd look at what I was doing as abuse. And do you know why you'd look at it as abuse?
BECAUSE IT BLOODY WELL IS.
Within the trans community, however...we deal with this every day. A microaggression is still an aggression. Accidental deadnaming hurts just as much as intentional deadnaming. Accidential misgendering hurts every bit as much, and sucks every bit as much, as intentional. My hypothetical to you is my reality every day of the week.
If you know a person's deadname, don't ever use it.
If you see someone using a person's deadname, call them out on it.
If you accidentally misgender someone, apologise. Don't make it about you, don't center yourself. Apologise, own it, grow from it. It hurts, yeah, but we'd (I'd) rather an act of honest contrition than someone falling all over themselves wailing and gnashing their teeth over the offense.
When we tell you our names, our pronouns, our identity, respect them. We respect the damn out of your names, because we know the power that names have. Respect is given to people who give respect. We know it can be hard, we understand that, and I think I can say that we know that we're going to get hurt from time to time out of an honest mistake...because we're human. I say inadvertently hurtful things...I may or may not even realise that they are hurtful, but they are. I own the mistake, I learn from the mistake, and I try very hard not to repeat the mistake. It's only when the same mistake is repeated over and over, with the same 'Oh it was a mistake I'm sorry' that we start to realise it's really not a mistake.
Does a rose by any other name smell just as sweet?
Perhaps it does.
But how much cooler is it to know the sweet rose you're smelling is the Rosa laevigata (Cherokee Rose), and know the history and meaning behind it?
As always, thanks for reading along. Tune in next time when...
* whispers *
...when we just might talk about sex.
(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.)
18 June 2017
Trans 101 with Julie, Lesson 3: We are not written in pencil, stop trying to erase us
1) https://medium.com/@Queerxtian/cleaning-up-after-cis-womens-genitals-bfe5c50330c6#.xo0iv7u7x
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?
(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.)
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.)
17 June 2017
Trans 101 With Julie, Lesson 2: These Five Things I Know are True...
...no one should say these, especially not you.
Hello and welcome back to Trans 101 With Julie. Today, we're gonna hit some potentially rougher ground. For many of you...perhaps most of you...out there, all of this will seem like common sense, because they're similar to the kinds of questions you wouldn't asked of you. However, saying this...there tends to be so much misinformation out there about us that sometimes the questions come out no matter what. In most cases, they're intended harmlessly, but remember...intent does not always mitigate hurtfulness.
Some of these are questions I've been asked before, some of them I haven't, but I can respond to all of them because I know some day I will get them.
And now, with the divine sainted Tori singing in my right ear, let's begin.
1) When did you know you were a girl?
I get it. I really do. When you are cisgender (that is to say, you identify with the gender you were assigned at birth and there is no conflict), the idea of 'changing' gender is incredibly alien. And so often, there's a follow up question that comes with this, but we'll be getting to that one next.'
But here's the thing...there's no one answer.
I could answer for me, but the actual answer is irrelevant. Some trans men/women know from an exceptionally young age that their assigned gender does not match who they are. Others may fight it for years...decades even. Some don't have a fight at all, but slowly come to the realisation that something isn't right. There's no one tried and true answer. And no matter what age someone is when they come to the realisation that there is disconnect between assigned gender and inner knowledge, they are trans. One is not more truly trans if they knew at 5 or 6 rather than in their 30s or later.
For me...well, if you read through my feed, and some of my previous notes...you'll see some of the moments of realisation I've had over the years. The fact that I am * mutters * years old and only now able to begin the chemical side of my transition does not make me less of a woman. It means that I've had a metric merde tonne of shit happen to me (cancer, psychological abuse, heart attack, bilateral pneumonia stem cell transplant) that's kept me time and time again from actually starting this process. I've been fighting for a VERY long time to get to the point I am at, and I won't allow anyone to judge me for this, nor will I allow them to denigrate or diminish me for any of this.
On the other side of the plate...
Younger kids can certainly know that they are a different gender than that which they were assigned at birth. Denying them a chance to understand and be taken care of medically properly is tantamount to child abuse. At the VERY least, the introduction of puberty blockers can offer a welcome and safe (VERY reversible) way for a family to take the time to make sure this is a decision that is right for the child, with the FULL cooperation and involvement of the child. Puberty blockers work amazingly well, their results are reversible, and they will not cause sterility or infertility; they will also inhibit the development of secondary sexual characteristics (broadening shoulders/face/jawline/facial hair/male pattern pubic hair/external genitalia development, or in reverse breast development/uterine/vaginal development, widening of hips/etc.), allowing a child to more easily transition if transition is the right course for THEM.
Not for the parent.
Who will hopefully continue to love their healthy child, and not mourn the dead one when having to live a lie causes them to suicide.
The internalised transaggression of 'I'm 35 and I just realised I'm trans...I can't be because people know when they are younger' is bullshit, and too many people say it to themselves. Too many people have it said to them, both by people outside the community as, sadly, people inside the community.
Being trans is not one size fits all (but One Size Fits All is an awesome Zappa album. Digression over). No judging. Or at least, there shouldn't be any judging.
2) Well, if you identify as a girl, I can identify as a toaster, right?
Ha ha ha. You're funny. I have NEVER heard that one before.
Except I have. And multiple times a day, at that.
This is one of those questions that are intended to stab at the idea that trans men and women are mentally unwell, because you can't identify as a toaster so how can you identify as a gender you're not?
There's two angles to this.
Firstly, gender is not sex. They are interrelated, but correlation is not causation. Sex is what's between your legs. Gender is what's between your ears. Having a penis or a vagina is not a requirement for being a man or a woman. Not only that, but resorting to such a demarcated black and white binary ignores the existence of intersexed people, people born with ambiguous genitalia...people who are valid and matter every bit as much as binary men and women.
The other angle is the mental illness/psychological disorder one, which is really what they're hitting at. If they can deny your identity by assuring that you're really suffering from a disorder, they can deny you entirely.
The DSM-V has other things to say about that. The 2013 edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders greatly expanded upon and clarified the older accepted diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder, adding in Gender Dysphoria as well.
To explain further:
“ In the old DSM-IV, GID (gender identity disorder) focused on the “identity” issue — namely, the incongruity between someone’s birth gender and the gender with which he or she identifies. While this incongruity is still crucial to gender dysphoria, the drafters of the new DSM-5 wanted to emphasize the importance of distress about the incongruity for a diagnosis. (The DSM-5 uses the term gender rather than sex to allow for those born with both male and female genitalia to have the condition.)
This shift reflects recognition that the disagreement between birth gender and identity may not necessarily be pathological if it does not cause the individual distress, said Robin Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist and co-author of the psychology textbook “Abnormal Psychology” (Worth Publishers, 2009). For instance, many transgender people — those who identify with a gender different than the one they were assigned at birth — are not distressed by their cross-gender identification and should not be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, Rosenberg said.” (Gender Dysphoria: DSM-5 Reflects Shift In Perspective On Gender Identity, Huffington Post 4 June 2013)
What does this mean? In part, it shows an evolution in thought and understanding of gender identity, complete with the knowledge that patients may not feel distress over their gender identity because they are distressed over identifying as a gender they were not assigned...that the distress comes from having to conform to their assigned gender rather than the one they are. That is to say, it is not the conflict of gender identity vs. physical sex that causes things such as anxiety, depression, etc., but rather the outside world. External vs. Internal.
This is very much like the situation 40 years ago that led to the removal of homosexuality as a psychological disorder from the manual.
“The concept underlying eliminating homosexuality from the DSM was recognizing that you can be homosexual and psychological healthy or be homosexual and psychologically screwed up. Being homosexual didn’t have to be the issue,” Rosenberg said.
This change irritates the hell out of transphobes, TERFs and the like...if you can't deny someone based on a psychological disorder that's not there, you have to find more difficult points to deny from. Sadly, this change doesn't stop them, really.
3) When are you going to have 'the surgery'?/Have you had 'the surgery'?/Do you want to have 'the surgery'?
Guys.
GUYS.
Guise.
(guys)
Seriously...this is one of the rudest questions ever. It ranks up there with 'Wow when's the baby due?' to a stranger. It ranks with walking up to a black woman with awesome braids and asking if you can touch them.
People...we are not our genitals. And for some of us, our genitals are an incredibly sore subject. There's a reason some of us wear binders or gaffs. There's a reason we look forward to anti-androgens and estrogen. Yeah, the secondary sex characteristic and development is great...but once we (I) start reducing my testosterone level, guess what? I don't think about what I may or may not have down there. It's literally sometimes not even an afterthought...it's a no thought.
And do you know what?
It's FUCKING beautiful to not think about it.
And then you walk up and clock me as transgender, and ask me if I've had the surgery. I'm already upset that I don't even slightly pass if you come to me and treat me like a man in a dress, and then you remind me of the fact that between my legs there's something that doesn't belong there.
Wanna know why we sit here and say 'cishets suck?'
Read the above.
You don't ask. Ever. Unless you are sharing a bed with us, or are in a relationship with us, our genitalia is absolutely no business of yours ever. If we elect to talk to you about it, know that we are extending a huge amount of trust to you. And you damn well better never betray that trust. We're already leery of sharing anything out of fear of being exposed...if someone we thought we could trust betrays us, it can be crushing and potentially life threatening.
4) What's your real name?
My real name is what I tell you it is.
'No, I mean what's your REAL name?'
What I tell you it is.
End of.
Period.
'No, I mean...what was your name when you were born?'
* deep breath *
OK.
Our names are our names. When we pick our names, we put a lot of thought into them. They mean something to us...either because they indicate things we like (flowers, a character from a TV show we love, a historical figure we respect or consider a role model, etc.), or because they disconnect us completely from our past, allowing us to create a complete new start for us. Some of us have horrific memories attached with our old names, and want to get away from them. For others it's a reminder of depression and upset from the issues that came externally (or internally) from being trans. There are a million reasons why names matter, and all of them are valid.
When you ask us our deadnames, you are literally asking us to dredge up a body...a life...we wish to leave behind. You are asking us to bring back memories that cause us hurt. Or, you are asking us to deny who we are to satisfy your morbid curiosity.
For me...I am not ashamed of my dead name. I am not ashamed of the history behind it...if I were, I would not have selected a feminine version of my assigned name for my chosen name. I'm not comfortable with that name, because the person I was was hard for me to come to grips with, and people who knew me then can vouch for how deep in the black I was. I am not ashamed of the things I experienced (I own my failures and the bad things I did), but I'd rather not continue to use a name that causes me discomfort.
My real name is Juliette Alexandria Knispel. Or Julie. Sometimes Juelz. Or Her Infernal Majesty. A bunch of you knew me under a different name, and none of you use it. That makes me happy. You all get cookies.
5) You know you'll never be a real woman, right?
As I formulate a way to answer this one, please watch me sharpen this spork. It's a more civilised weapon from a more civilised time.
OK.
This question is predicated on one massive assumption: all a woman is is a uterus. This diminishes ALL women to the point that they are just a pile of body parts that are intended to act as a life support system for a fetus.
So think about this.
ESPECIALLY if you're a woman.
Did you like it when all those politicians cast their doubt on rape because if it was real rape women's bodies have a way of shutting that thing down? How did you feel when you read articles from people denying your ability to choose because women have a sacred duty to have children? When you're told that even if you're raped you have to carry that child to term?
Did those things disgust you?
Do you feel you're more than your womb?
Then why do you feel someone who was not lucky enough to be born with a uterus, yet is absolutely 100% a woman, isn't a woman?
Diminishing a woman if she can't have a child, or because she can't bleed once a month...you diminish the womanhood of every post-menopausal woman in the world. You diminish the womanhood of every infertile woman out there...every woman who's had uterine cancer and had to have a hysterectomy, every woman who's had a tubal ligation to ensure they can't get pregnant again.
Listen...I would love to have a uterus and vagina and Fallopian tubes and ovaries, I would LOVE to have a menstrual period every 30 days plus or minus 5 days. And you laugh. I can hear you laughing. I can't understand the cramping and pain and blood and having to wear pads or tampons. But you know what? Having to deal with all of that would mean I actually had a body that matched who I know I am. And you may not get it because you've had this as part of your life all of your life but I have NEVER known this. You talk about it as if it is something that is quintessential for being a woman, and when we cry that we'll never know it, you mock us for that. You mock us for being pretend women, and then you mock us for WANTING to have the experiences you have, both the good and the bad.
We're not people wanting badly to be oppressed and then go home to our cushy lives and 2.5 kids and our suburban neighbours and our 2 car garage and flat screen tv and a blow job and 5 minutes of pumpy pumpy before the husband falls asleep and we have to finish the job with our friend the Hitachi Magic Wand. We long for the rest because it'd mean we're finally COMPLETE.
And not only don't you get it...you can't get it.
And it's honestly OK that you don't.
Just don't deny that for us it's a very real thing.
And yes, I use we throughout this section, and I'm using it as a generalisation because I also get that these experiences do NOT make us more of a woman, just as the lack of these experiences does not make us less of a woman. Additionally, I understand that not all transwomen feel the same way, because we do get that these experiences are not the cornerstone by which womanhood should be built. How and ever, in a world where cisgender is the 'norm,' couching it as we offers some sense of universality that I hope is helpful.
If it further helps, pretend that I wrote 'I' every time I used the word we. You don't like being reduced to a breeder, I don't like being reduced to not a woman because I can't breed. Crass, but honest.
There are so many other questions that I could write about here. Unfortunately, I hamstrung myself when I titled this essay ' These Five Things I Know are True.' However, keeping in mind we're brushing up against the three thousand word mark already, I'd like to offer a bit of brevity at this point, as well as give myself space to return to this in the future with ' These Are Five More Things I Know are True' or something along those lines.
I do as always appreciate you reading through this, and I hope it was enlightening for you. Being able to navigate the choppy waters between curiosity and crassness can be difficult, because it's not so much a thin line as it is a blurry line that...also...happens to be thin. Or sometimes non-existent. Common sense and common decency are always the hallmarks, really...think about whether it's a question you'd want asked of you before asking it. If you think it'd upset you, perhaps you shouldn't ask it.
Basically...if you have to ask yourself if it's a good thing to ask, maybe you best not ask it.
Once again, thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time :-)
(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.)
Hello and welcome back to Trans 101 With Julie. Today, we're gonna hit some potentially rougher ground. For many of you...perhaps most of you...out there, all of this will seem like common sense, because they're similar to the kinds of questions you wouldn't asked of you. However, saying this...there tends to be so much misinformation out there about us that sometimes the questions come out no matter what. In most cases, they're intended harmlessly, but remember...intent does not always mitigate hurtfulness.
Some of these are questions I've been asked before, some of them I haven't, but I can respond to all of them because I know some day I will get them.
And now, with the divine sainted Tori singing in my right ear, let's begin.
~~~//||\\~~~
1) When did you know you were a girl?
I get it. I really do. When you are cisgender (that is to say, you identify with the gender you were assigned at birth and there is no conflict), the idea of 'changing' gender is incredibly alien. And so often, there's a follow up question that comes with this, but we'll be getting to that one next.'
But here's the thing...there's no one answer.
I could answer for me, but the actual answer is irrelevant. Some trans men/women know from an exceptionally young age that their assigned gender does not match who they are. Others may fight it for years...decades even. Some don't have a fight at all, but slowly come to the realisation that something isn't right. There's no one tried and true answer. And no matter what age someone is when they come to the realisation that there is disconnect between assigned gender and inner knowledge, they are trans. One is not more truly trans if they knew at 5 or 6 rather than in their 30s or later.
For me...well, if you read through my feed, and some of my previous notes...you'll see some of the moments of realisation I've had over the years. The fact that I am * mutters * years old and only now able to begin the chemical side of my transition does not make me less of a woman. It means that I've had a metric merde tonne of shit happen to me (cancer, psychological abuse, heart attack, bilateral pneumonia stem cell transplant) that's kept me time and time again from actually starting this process. I've been fighting for a VERY long time to get to the point I am at, and I won't allow anyone to judge me for this, nor will I allow them to denigrate or diminish me for any of this.
On the other side of the plate...
Younger kids can certainly know that they are a different gender than that which they were assigned at birth. Denying them a chance to understand and be taken care of medically properly is tantamount to child abuse. At the VERY least, the introduction of puberty blockers can offer a welcome and safe (VERY reversible) way for a family to take the time to make sure this is a decision that is right for the child, with the FULL cooperation and involvement of the child. Puberty blockers work amazingly well, their results are reversible, and they will not cause sterility or infertility; they will also inhibit the development of secondary sexual characteristics (broadening shoulders/face/jawline/facial hair/male pattern pubic hair/external genitalia development, or in reverse breast development/uterine/vaginal development, widening of hips/etc.), allowing a child to more easily transition if transition is the right course for THEM.
Not for the parent.
Who will hopefully continue to love their healthy child, and not mourn the dead one when having to live a lie causes them to suicide.
The internalised transaggression of 'I'm 35 and I just realised I'm trans...I can't be because people know when they are younger' is bullshit, and too many people say it to themselves. Too many people have it said to them, both by people outside the community as, sadly, people inside the community.
Being trans is not one size fits all (but One Size Fits All is an awesome Zappa album. Digression over). No judging. Or at least, there shouldn't be any judging.
2) Well, if you identify as a girl, I can identify as a toaster, right?
Ha ha ha. You're funny. I have NEVER heard that one before.
Except I have. And multiple times a day, at that.
This is one of those questions that are intended to stab at the idea that trans men and women are mentally unwell, because you can't identify as a toaster so how can you identify as a gender you're not?
There's two angles to this.
Firstly, gender is not sex. They are interrelated, but correlation is not causation. Sex is what's between your legs. Gender is what's between your ears. Having a penis or a vagina is not a requirement for being a man or a woman. Not only that, but resorting to such a demarcated black and white binary ignores the existence of intersexed people, people born with ambiguous genitalia...people who are valid and matter every bit as much as binary men and women.
The other angle is the mental illness/psychological disorder one, which is really what they're hitting at. If they can deny your identity by assuring that you're really suffering from a disorder, they can deny you entirely.
The DSM-V has other things to say about that. The 2013 edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders greatly expanded upon and clarified the older accepted diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder, adding in Gender Dysphoria as well.
To explain further:
“ In the old DSM-IV, GID (gender identity disorder) focused on the “identity” issue — namely, the incongruity between someone’s birth gender and the gender with which he or she identifies. While this incongruity is still crucial to gender dysphoria, the drafters of the new DSM-5 wanted to emphasize the importance of distress about the incongruity for a diagnosis. (The DSM-5 uses the term gender rather than sex to allow for those born with both male and female genitalia to have the condition.)
This shift reflects recognition that the disagreement between birth gender and identity may not necessarily be pathological if it does not cause the individual distress, said Robin Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist and co-author of the psychology textbook “Abnormal Psychology” (Worth Publishers, 2009). For instance, many transgender people — those who identify with a gender different than the one they were assigned at birth — are not distressed by their cross-gender identification and should not be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, Rosenberg said.” (Gender Dysphoria: DSM-5 Reflects Shift In Perspective On Gender Identity, Huffington Post 4 June 2013)
What does this mean? In part, it shows an evolution in thought and understanding of gender identity, complete with the knowledge that patients may not feel distress over their gender identity because they are distressed over identifying as a gender they were not assigned...that the distress comes from having to conform to their assigned gender rather than the one they are. That is to say, it is not the conflict of gender identity vs. physical sex that causes things such as anxiety, depression, etc., but rather the outside world. External vs. Internal.
This is very much like the situation 40 years ago that led to the removal of homosexuality as a psychological disorder from the manual.
“The concept underlying eliminating homosexuality from the DSM was recognizing that you can be homosexual and psychological healthy or be homosexual and psychologically screwed up. Being homosexual didn’t have to be the issue,” Rosenberg said.
This change irritates the hell out of transphobes, TERFs and the like...if you can't deny someone based on a psychological disorder that's not there, you have to find more difficult points to deny from. Sadly, this change doesn't stop them, really.
3) When are you going to have 'the surgery'?/Have you had 'the surgery'?/Do you want to have 'the surgery'?
Guys.
GUYS.
Guise.
(guys)
Seriously...this is one of the rudest questions ever. It ranks up there with 'Wow when's the baby due?' to a stranger. It ranks with walking up to a black woman with awesome braids and asking if you can touch them.
People...we are not our genitals. And for some of us, our genitals are an incredibly sore subject. There's a reason some of us wear binders or gaffs. There's a reason we look forward to anti-androgens and estrogen. Yeah, the secondary sex characteristic and development is great...but once we (I) start reducing my testosterone level, guess what? I don't think about what I may or may not have down there. It's literally sometimes not even an afterthought...it's a no thought.
And do you know what?
It's FUCKING beautiful to not think about it.
And then you walk up and clock me as transgender, and ask me if I've had the surgery. I'm already upset that I don't even slightly pass if you come to me and treat me like a man in a dress, and then you remind me of the fact that between my legs there's something that doesn't belong there.
Wanna know why we sit here and say 'cishets suck?'
Read the above.
You don't ask. Ever. Unless you are sharing a bed with us, or are in a relationship with us, our genitalia is absolutely no business of yours ever. If we elect to talk to you about it, know that we are extending a huge amount of trust to you. And you damn well better never betray that trust. We're already leery of sharing anything out of fear of being exposed...if someone we thought we could trust betrays us, it can be crushing and potentially life threatening.
4) What's your real name?
My real name is what I tell you it is.
'No, I mean what's your REAL name?'
What I tell you it is.
End of.
Period.
'No, I mean...what was your name when you were born?'
* deep breath *
OK.
Our names are our names. When we pick our names, we put a lot of thought into them. They mean something to us...either because they indicate things we like (flowers, a character from a TV show we love, a historical figure we respect or consider a role model, etc.), or because they disconnect us completely from our past, allowing us to create a complete new start for us. Some of us have horrific memories attached with our old names, and want to get away from them. For others it's a reminder of depression and upset from the issues that came externally (or internally) from being trans. There are a million reasons why names matter, and all of them are valid.
When you ask us our deadnames, you are literally asking us to dredge up a body...a life...we wish to leave behind. You are asking us to bring back memories that cause us hurt. Or, you are asking us to deny who we are to satisfy your morbid curiosity.
For me...I am not ashamed of my dead name. I am not ashamed of the history behind it...if I were, I would not have selected a feminine version of my assigned name for my chosen name. I'm not comfortable with that name, because the person I was was hard for me to come to grips with, and people who knew me then can vouch for how deep in the black I was. I am not ashamed of the things I experienced (I own my failures and the bad things I did), but I'd rather not continue to use a name that causes me discomfort.
My real name is Juliette Alexandria Knispel. Or Julie. Sometimes Juelz. Or Her Infernal Majesty. A bunch of you knew me under a different name, and none of you use it. That makes me happy. You all get cookies.
5) You know you'll never be a real woman, right?
As I formulate a way to answer this one, please watch me sharpen this spork. It's a more civilised weapon from a more civilised time.
OK.
This question is predicated on one massive assumption: all a woman is is a uterus. This diminishes ALL women to the point that they are just a pile of body parts that are intended to act as a life support system for a fetus.
So think about this.
ESPECIALLY if you're a woman.
Did you like it when all those politicians cast their doubt on rape because if it was real rape women's bodies have a way of shutting that thing down? How did you feel when you read articles from people denying your ability to choose because women have a sacred duty to have children? When you're told that even if you're raped you have to carry that child to term?
Did those things disgust you?
Do you feel you're more than your womb?
Then why do you feel someone who was not lucky enough to be born with a uterus, yet is absolutely 100% a woman, isn't a woman?
Diminishing a woman if she can't have a child, or because she can't bleed once a month...you diminish the womanhood of every post-menopausal woman in the world. You diminish the womanhood of every infertile woman out there...every woman who's had uterine cancer and had to have a hysterectomy, every woman who's had a tubal ligation to ensure they can't get pregnant again.
Listen...I would love to have a uterus and vagina and Fallopian tubes and ovaries, I would LOVE to have a menstrual period every 30 days plus or minus 5 days. And you laugh. I can hear you laughing. I can't understand the cramping and pain and blood and having to wear pads or tampons. But you know what? Having to deal with all of that would mean I actually had a body that matched who I know I am. And you may not get it because you've had this as part of your life all of your life but I have NEVER known this. You talk about it as if it is something that is quintessential for being a woman, and when we cry that we'll never know it, you mock us for that. You mock us for being pretend women, and then you mock us for WANTING to have the experiences you have, both the good and the bad.
We're not people wanting badly to be oppressed and then go home to our cushy lives and 2.5 kids and our suburban neighbours and our 2 car garage and flat screen tv and a blow job and 5 minutes of pumpy pumpy before the husband falls asleep and we have to finish the job with our friend the Hitachi Magic Wand. We long for the rest because it'd mean we're finally COMPLETE.
And not only don't you get it...you can't get it.
And it's honestly OK that you don't.
Just don't deny that for us it's a very real thing.
And yes, I use we throughout this section, and I'm using it as a generalisation because I also get that these experiences do NOT make us more of a woman, just as the lack of these experiences does not make us less of a woman. Additionally, I understand that not all transwomen feel the same way, because we do get that these experiences are not the cornerstone by which womanhood should be built. How and ever, in a world where cisgender is the 'norm,' couching it as we offers some sense of universality that I hope is helpful.
If it further helps, pretend that I wrote 'I' every time I used the word we. You don't like being reduced to a breeder, I don't like being reduced to not a woman because I can't breed. Crass, but honest.
~~~//||\\~~~
There are so many other questions that I could write about here. Unfortunately, I hamstrung myself when I titled this essay ' These Five Things I Know are True.' However, keeping in mind we're brushing up against the three thousand word mark already, I'd like to offer a bit of brevity at this point, as well as give myself space to return to this in the future with ' These Are Five More Things I Know are True' or something along those lines.
I do as always appreciate you reading through this, and I hope it was enlightening for you. Being able to navigate the choppy waters between curiosity and crassness can be difficult, because it's not so much a thin line as it is a blurry line that...also...happens to be thin. Or sometimes non-existent. Common sense and common decency are always the hallmarks, really...think about whether it's a question you'd want asked of you before asking it. If you think it'd upset you, perhaps you shouldn't ask it.
Basically...if you have to ask yourself if it's a good thing to ask, maybe you best not ask it.
Once again, thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time :-)
(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.)
16 June 2017
Trans 101 With Julie, Lesson 1: Labels are for clothes...but they help us too
Considering that I'm seeing so many posts from people on my wall/feed recently calling out transphobia/transmisogyny/transantagonism, I wanted to try and write down some stuff on a fairly irregular basis to help give some insight to stuff.
All this is done with the caveat that unless I'm tossing out hard numbers, everything is opinion really. I can speak from my experience, and my experience is unique and mine. It is not the same experience any other transwoman will have, and certainly not the same as a transman. Some things remain universal, but so many are personal and individual.
There will be points I talk about...you know...sex...but hopefully from a more clinical standpoint. You have been warned.
Also, I'm going to be fairly surface level; unlike the Trans 101 posts my friend Zinnia Jones writes, which are amazingly deep and researched, I'm going to be looking at and discussing stuff that's a bit more immediate.
With all that said, let's dive in.
One thing that often gets thrown about is the purpose and necessity for labels. It is incredibly easy for people to say to a trans man or woman some or any or all of the following:
'Why do you feel the need to have a label?'
'Can't you just say you're a man or a woman?'
'When you say you're trans, you're just proving you're not a real (man)(woman).'
'You're just separating yourselves? I thought you wanted inclusion?'
Wow, let's unpack this, OK?
In a perfect world, yes, labels would be unnecessary. We'd just accept people for who they are, the world would be sunshine and butterflies, and rainbows would shoot out of my butt.
Also...in a perfect world I'd have been born with a functioning vagina, uterus, and ovaries.
Since neither of those things is a fact, we have labels.
Here's the thing about labels...yes, they can be divisive. They also signify a communal/community aspect. They express a set of lived experiences that are unique to that community, experiences that are often shared or understood better by those people in the community.
Saying 'I am a black woman' does not deny your essential womanhood; it does say 'My experiences as a woman are not lessened by being black; on the contrary, my being black and a woman gives me a set of experiences that are unique to my community. There may be, and often is, intersectionality with your community, but there are things that are unique to me because I am black as well as a woman.'
I do often preface my identifier with trans, usually in the form of transgirl (because despite the fact that I am a full grown woman, there is nothing at all diminishing about being a girl). I am proud of being trans...my experiences are coloured for better or worse by my transness. I will always be a woman, and I will always be trans. Erasing that part of my identity is erasing part of me. I don't stand for either, and no one else should. I am resplendent in my divergence and non-compliance.
Now, not everyone feels the way I do, I am sure. I am absolutely certain that there are many transwomen who think of themselves as women and women alone, and I think that's great. The thing about identity is that it is intensely and inherently personal and unique; just as you may like pumpkin pie more than apple, your identity is not lessened by the fact that I think pumpkin pie is of the devil. And mine is not superior because of that (even tho it totally is cos apple pie rules, pumpkin pie drools).
Having someone say that labels don't matter, and why do you have to call attention to your special snowflakeness, is the same thing as saying 'I don't see colour.' It's erasure. It's stating 'If only you could conform to my parochial belief system and be invisible, I'd be much happier.'
There are a lot of labels for us out there. It can get confusing. And I grok that know. When I was younger, and fighting with myself over my identity and trying desperately to be what I thought society demanded of me (and slowly dying in the process), I didn't get it either. It's much easier now...and as I meet people on here, my horizons expand even further. I never gave much thought to concepts such as genderfluidity, agender, non-binary, gender non-conforming, transfemme and transmasc, and so many others. Understanding that is like suddenly having more colours added to the spectrum...I can see better, and more vividly, as a result.
So...here's a list/glossary/thing. It is far from totally inclusive, and I am saying that up front. I am gonna have some words in here I hate. I don't use any of them. You really shouldn't either. I know some of them have been reclaimed, and I respect people who accept them. I am not one of them with the reclamation. I still respect the identity tho.
Here we go.
Trans: trans is a Latinate prefix that literally means "across, over, or beyond." For some of us, we use it to preface woman or man or girl or boy or boi or whatever.
Trans*: Really, probably don't use this. See, the idea behind this was to show that the trans community was more than binary...but the issue here is that the community is about as hegemonic as something that can't be hegemonic. I used to use it, I learned more, I stopped.
TERF: Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. A TERF is a hoofwanking bumblecunt. TERFs are a subgroup of radical feminism characterized by transphobia, especially transmisogyny, and hostility to the third wave of feminism. They believe that the only real women™ are those born with a vagina and XX chromosomes. They wish to completely enforce the classic gender binary, supporting gender essentialism.
Sometimes, "exclusionary" is expanded as "eliminationist" or "exterminationist" instead to more accurately convey the degree to which TERFs advocate for harm towards trans people, specifically trans people who were coercively assigned male at birth.
All TERFs are RadFems, but not all RadFems are TERFs. There are many radical feminists who embrace accept and protect their trans sisters and brothers. Do not call a RadFem a TERF unless they are actually a TERF. ALSO: most, if not all, TERFs are SWERFs. SWERF means Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist. I mention this because there is some cross over in the trans community between the two categories...the Venn Diagram is very interesting here...and trans men and women are this doubly excluded and stuff. Just a thing to keep in mind as we go along.
Autogynephilia: IS NOT A THING. Autogynephilia is the "mental illness" described by the theory that transgender women who aren't exclusively attracted to men actually have a sexual fetish for viewing themselves as female. This covers lesbian, bisexual, and pansexual trans women. It is discredited. It does not exist.
The theory is often accompanied by the notion that transsexual women attracted exclusively to men take an identical developmental route as homosexual, but are so overtly effeminate that they find it difficult to operate in life as even a gay man. And since these trans women are developmentally identical to gay men, they are labeled "homosexual transsexuals." (Never mind that trans people describe their sexual orientation in terms of their preferred sex, meaning that trans women attracted to men consider themselves heterosexual.)
It totally removes the existence of transmen. And since I know a few, they will be very shocked to know they don't really exist.
Transgender: Transgender is an umbrella adjective describing people whose gender is other than the one they were declared to be at the time of their birth. Under the umbrella are trans men, trans women, bigender people, those of a third gender, those who don't identify with any gender, and many more. To be absolutely precise, transgender is an adjective describing people who identify with a gender different from their assigned sex at birth (which often but does not always fall into the gender binary).
Transsexual: Transsexual is an adjective describing people who have physically transitioned to living with a different gender & sex than was assumed at birth, or desire to do so.
(Julie identifies as transgender, even though transsexual is in some ways a more cogent descriptor. See, identity IS personal!)
Crossdresser: A crossdresser, on the other hand, is a person who dresses as the opposite sex despite not identifying as such. The reasons for doing so vary, as it can be of a performance (drag), fancy dress or a sexual fetish.
Transfemme: A transfemme understands themselves, and/or relates to others in a more feminine way, but they don't necessarily identify as women. Feminine-of-center individuals may also identify as femme, submissive, transfeminine, etc.
Transmasc: Trasmascs understand themselves, and/or relate to others in a more masculine way, but don’t necessarily identify as men. Masculine-of-center individuals may also often identify as butch, stud, aggressive, boi, transmasculine, etc.
Transvestite: A transvestite is typically a male, often heterosexual, who regularly wears female clothing as a sexual fetish or as an act of expression of social defiance etc. It is totally not the same as a crossdresser.
Genderqueer: In addition to being an umbrella term, genderqueer has been used as an adjective to refer to any people who transgress distinctions of gender, regardless of their self-defined gender identity, i.e., those who "queer" gender, expressing it non-normatively, or overall not conforming into the binary genders, man and woman.
There are a lot of times Julie seems to present genderqueer rather than full femme, but that's because Julie is a lazy Trans girl.
Non-Binary: Often conflated with genderqueer. NOT AT ALL THE SAME THING, tho it can be. Non-binary includes such wonderful things as third gender, two-spirit, hijra, Fa'afafine, and more. Neutrois and agender can fit here, but not all agender people identify as non-binary and vice versa.
Enby: SEE NON-BINARY.
Agender: Agender is a term which can be literally translated as 'without gender'. It can be seen either as a non-binary gender identity or as a statement of not having a gender identity. Many agender people also identify as genderqueer, non-binary and/or transgender. However, some agender people prefer to avoid these terms, especially transgender, as they feel this implies identifying as a gender other than their assigned gender, while they in fact do not identify as any gender at all.
Preferred Pronouns: I really like the idea of just calling them pronouns, i.e., 'What are your pronouns?' but I am totally OK with preferred. Pronouns, like names, are huge. They are affirming. You should always ask if you're not sure. Many people are OK with the right binary pronoun. Some prefer the singular they. Others prefer non-gender specific pronouns such as ze, zir, sie, hir, co, ey and others. Respect the pronoun. And when in doubt, ask. Every time I have been asked it's told me that my identity is important to the person asking.
* takes deep breath *
Shemale: Oh god really please don't. Yeah, a LOT of porn is labeled as such. I get that. I know a more than small amount of trans sex workers (they are a huge part of my region of Trans Twitter), and they bemoan the fact that it exists, yet use it to have their work more easily found.
Tranny: * gags * I am not a car part that is an important part of the drive train. Yes, I use that line every time someone calls me that. I know this is a word that has seen some degree of reclamation. I won't be thank you very much.
Shim: *vomits* I also am not something used to keep windows in place. I can't believe this is really a thing but guess what? It is.
He/she: FFS if you're going to go that far use one of the ones above. I just got to see this one in use this week. I am not the least bit confused about my identity, but I am sorry that my identity gives you that same funny feeling in your stomach as when you were told you were getting ice cream as a treat. *skeeves*
Trap: Here's another one I've been called derogatorily, and yeah I was bothered by at while also feeling some degree of affirmation that they thought I passed that well. A slur for boys who dress like girls with the intent of 'trapping' innocent men thinking they were getting with a girl. Yes, it's also seen some degree of reclamation. Yes, it's used in porn too (one of the most famous trans sex workers, Bailey Jay, was once known as Line Trap).
There's more, I know. And I am sure some of my friends out there will point out where I came up short, and I will appreciate them for it and add their info to the piece.
I hope some of this was helpful. Please feel free to comment or ask questions below. I am open to questions, with the obvious caveat that there are some things that just aren't cool to ask.
Join us next time when we talk about names and how names are an important part of the self-knowledge process.
(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.)
All this is done with the caveat that unless I'm tossing out hard numbers, everything is opinion really. I can speak from my experience, and my experience is unique and mine. It is not the same experience any other transwoman will have, and certainly not the same as a transman. Some things remain universal, but so many are personal and individual.
There will be points I talk about...you know...sex...but hopefully from a more clinical standpoint. You have been warned.
Also, I'm going to be fairly surface level; unlike the Trans 101 posts my friend Zinnia Jones writes, which are amazingly deep and researched, I'm going to be looking at and discussing stuff that's a bit more immediate.
With all that said, let's dive in.
One thing that often gets thrown about is the purpose and necessity for labels. It is incredibly easy for people to say to a trans man or woman some or any or all of the following:
'Why do you feel the need to have a label?'
'Can't you just say you're a man or a woman?'
'When you say you're trans, you're just proving you're not a real (man)(woman).'
'You're just separating yourselves? I thought you wanted inclusion?'
Wow, let's unpack this, OK?
In a perfect world, yes, labels would be unnecessary. We'd just accept people for who they are, the world would be sunshine and butterflies, and rainbows would shoot out of my butt.
Also...in a perfect world I'd have been born with a functioning vagina, uterus, and ovaries.
Since neither of those things is a fact, we have labels.
Here's the thing about labels...yes, they can be divisive. They also signify a communal/community aspect. They express a set of lived experiences that are unique to that community, experiences that are often shared or understood better by those people in the community.
Saying 'I am a black woman' does not deny your essential womanhood; it does say 'My experiences as a woman are not lessened by being black; on the contrary, my being black and a woman gives me a set of experiences that are unique to my community. There may be, and often is, intersectionality with your community, but there are things that are unique to me because I am black as well as a woman.'
I do often preface my identifier with trans, usually in the form of transgirl (because despite the fact that I am a full grown woman, there is nothing at all diminishing about being a girl). I am proud of being trans...my experiences are coloured for better or worse by my transness. I will always be a woman, and I will always be trans. Erasing that part of my identity is erasing part of me. I don't stand for either, and no one else should. I am resplendent in my divergence and non-compliance.
Now, not everyone feels the way I do, I am sure. I am absolutely certain that there are many transwomen who think of themselves as women and women alone, and I think that's great. The thing about identity is that it is intensely and inherently personal and unique; just as you may like pumpkin pie more than apple, your identity is not lessened by the fact that I think pumpkin pie is of the devil. And mine is not superior because of that (even tho it totally is cos apple pie rules, pumpkin pie drools).
Having someone say that labels don't matter, and why do you have to call attention to your special snowflakeness, is the same thing as saying 'I don't see colour.' It's erasure. It's stating 'If only you could conform to my parochial belief system and be invisible, I'd be much happier.'
There are a lot of labels for us out there. It can get confusing. And I grok that know. When I was younger, and fighting with myself over my identity and trying desperately to be what I thought society demanded of me (and slowly dying in the process), I didn't get it either. It's much easier now...and as I meet people on here, my horizons expand even further. I never gave much thought to concepts such as genderfluidity, agender, non-binary, gender non-conforming, transfemme and transmasc, and so many others. Understanding that is like suddenly having more colours added to the spectrum...I can see better, and more vividly, as a result.
So...here's a list/glossary/thing. It is far from totally inclusive, and I am saying that up front. I am gonna have some words in here I hate. I don't use any of them. You really shouldn't either. I know some of them have been reclaimed, and I respect people who accept them. I am not one of them with the reclamation. I still respect the identity tho.
Here we go.
Trans: trans is a Latinate prefix that literally means "across, over, or beyond." For some of us, we use it to preface woman or man or girl or boy or boi or whatever.
Trans*: Really, probably don't use this. See, the idea behind this was to show that the trans community was more than binary...but the issue here is that the community is about as hegemonic as something that can't be hegemonic. I used to use it, I learned more, I stopped.
TERF: Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. A TERF is a hoofwanking bumblecunt. TERFs are a subgroup of radical feminism characterized by transphobia, especially transmisogyny, and hostility to the third wave of feminism. They believe that the only real women™ are those born with a vagina and XX chromosomes. They wish to completely enforce the classic gender binary, supporting gender essentialism.
Sometimes, "exclusionary" is expanded as "eliminationist" or "exterminationist" instead to more accurately convey the degree to which TERFs advocate for harm towards trans people, specifically trans people who were coercively assigned male at birth.
All TERFs are RadFems, but not all RadFems are TERFs. There are many radical feminists who embrace accept and protect their trans sisters and brothers. Do not call a RadFem a TERF unless they are actually a TERF. ALSO: most, if not all, TERFs are SWERFs. SWERF means Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist. I mention this because there is some cross over in the trans community between the two categories...the Venn Diagram is very interesting here...and trans men and women are this doubly excluded and stuff. Just a thing to keep in mind as we go along.
Autogynephilia: IS NOT A THING. Autogynephilia is the "mental illness" described by the theory that transgender women who aren't exclusively attracted to men actually have a sexual fetish for viewing themselves as female. This covers lesbian, bisexual, and pansexual trans women. It is discredited. It does not exist.
The theory is often accompanied by the notion that transsexual women attracted exclusively to men take an identical developmental route as homosexual, but are so overtly effeminate that they find it difficult to operate in life as even a gay man. And since these trans women are developmentally identical to gay men, they are labeled "homosexual transsexuals." (Never mind that trans people describe their sexual orientation in terms of their preferred sex, meaning that trans women attracted to men consider themselves heterosexual.)
It totally removes the existence of transmen. And since I know a few, they will be very shocked to know they don't really exist.
Transgender: Transgender is an umbrella adjective describing people whose gender is other than the one they were declared to be at the time of their birth. Under the umbrella are trans men, trans women, bigender people, those of a third gender, those who don't identify with any gender, and many more. To be absolutely precise, transgender is an adjective describing people who identify with a gender different from their assigned sex at birth (which often but does not always fall into the gender binary).
Transsexual: Transsexual is an adjective describing people who have physically transitioned to living with a different gender & sex than was assumed at birth, or desire to do so.
(Julie identifies as transgender, even though transsexual is in some ways a more cogent descriptor. See, identity IS personal!)
Crossdresser: A crossdresser, on the other hand, is a person who dresses as the opposite sex despite not identifying as such. The reasons for doing so vary, as it can be of a performance (drag), fancy dress or a sexual fetish.
Transfemme: A transfemme understands themselves, and/or relates to others in a more feminine way, but they don't necessarily identify as women. Feminine-of-center individuals may also identify as femme, submissive, transfeminine, etc.
Transmasc: Trasmascs understand themselves, and/or relate to others in a more masculine way, but don’t necessarily identify as men. Masculine-of-center individuals may also often identify as butch, stud, aggressive, boi, transmasculine, etc.
Transvestite: A transvestite is typically a male, often heterosexual, who regularly wears female clothing as a sexual fetish or as an act of expression of social defiance etc. It is totally not the same as a crossdresser.
Genderqueer: In addition to being an umbrella term, genderqueer has been used as an adjective to refer to any people who transgress distinctions of gender, regardless of their self-defined gender identity, i.e., those who "queer" gender, expressing it non-normatively, or overall not conforming into the binary genders, man and woman.
There are a lot of times Julie seems to present genderqueer rather than full femme, but that's because Julie is a lazy Trans girl.
Non-Binary: Often conflated with genderqueer. NOT AT ALL THE SAME THING, tho it can be. Non-binary includes such wonderful things as third gender, two-spirit, hijra, Fa'afafine, and more. Neutrois and agender can fit here, but not all agender people identify as non-binary and vice versa.
Enby: SEE NON-BINARY.
Agender: Agender is a term which can be literally translated as 'without gender'. It can be seen either as a non-binary gender identity or as a statement of not having a gender identity. Many agender people also identify as genderqueer, non-binary and/or transgender. However, some agender people prefer to avoid these terms, especially transgender, as they feel this implies identifying as a gender other than their assigned gender, while they in fact do not identify as any gender at all.
Preferred Pronouns: I really like the idea of just calling them pronouns, i.e., 'What are your pronouns?' but I am totally OK with preferred. Pronouns, like names, are huge. They are affirming. You should always ask if you're not sure. Many people are OK with the right binary pronoun. Some prefer the singular they. Others prefer non-gender specific pronouns such as ze, zir, sie, hir, co, ey and others. Respect the pronoun. And when in doubt, ask. Every time I have been asked it's told me that my identity is important to the person asking.
* takes deep breath *
Shemale: Oh god really please don't. Yeah, a LOT of porn is labeled as such. I get that. I know a more than small amount of trans sex workers (they are a huge part of my region of Trans Twitter), and they bemoan the fact that it exists, yet use it to have their work more easily found.
Tranny: * gags * I am not a car part that is an important part of the drive train. Yes, I use that line every time someone calls me that. I know this is a word that has seen some degree of reclamation. I won't be thank you very much.
Shim: *vomits* I also am not something used to keep windows in place. I can't believe this is really a thing but guess what? It is.
He/she: FFS if you're going to go that far use one of the ones above. I just got to see this one in use this week. I am not the least bit confused about my identity, but I am sorry that my identity gives you that same funny feeling in your stomach as when you were told you were getting ice cream as a treat. *skeeves*
Trap: Here's another one I've been called derogatorily, and yeah I was bothered by at while also feeling some degree of affirmation that they thought I passed that well. A slur for boys who dress like girls with the intent of 'trapping' innocent men thinking they were getting with a girl. Yes, it's also seen some degree of reclamation. Yes, it's used in porn too (one of the most famous trans sex workers, Bailey Jay, was once known as Line Trap).
There's more, I know. And I am sure some of my friends out there will point out where I came up short, and I will appreciate them for it and add their info to the piece.
I hope some of this was helpful. Please feel free to comment or ask questions below. I am open to questions, with the obvious caveat that there are some things that just aren't cool to ask.
Join us next time when we talk about names and how names are an important part of the self-knowledge process.
(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.)
Some words on what is about to follow
On 6 December 2016 I officially began contra-hormonal therapy (both estradiol and aldactone). Three days later I wrote and posted to Facebook the first of an irregularly regular (or vice versa) series of essays titled Trans 101 With Julie.
Contrary to the title, these are really less a primer on the trans experience meant to give generalisations to the public as they are a diary of my journey of my particular journey through my transition.
To date I have written maybe a dozen essays, of which nine have been uploaded to my Facebook, totaling some thirty thousand words. The essays are many things...intensely personal, occasionally harrowing, and often optimistic. For people who know me, the essays include some fairly dry, droll humour and a load of pop culture references that are almost never pre-thought out, and just happen in the flow of prose.
I've been asked repeatedly to post them to a blog, and of course I have this blog here, which I have not updated since...well, since I started hormones. I've wanted to, of course, but I generally do not run at a surfeit of spoons, so thinking about it and wanting to do it are generally all I have been able to do.
Today I am going to upload the first of the series of essays, and over the next several days I'll be posting one a day until I am caught up with the essays that have already been posted.
After the backlog is cleared, I will post them here on a one for one basis.
Thank you for your patience, and I hope you enjoy my thoughts.
Contrary to the title, these are really less a primer on the trans experience meant to give generalisations to the public as they are a diary of my journey of my particular journey through my transition.
To date I have written maybe a dozen essays, of which nine have been uploaded to my Facebook, totaling some thirty thousand words. The essays are many things...intensely personal, occasionally harrowing, and often optimistic. For people who know me, the essays include some fairly dry, droll humour and a load of pop culture references that are almost never pre-thought out, and just happen in the flow of prose.
I've been asked repeatedly to post them to a blog, and of course I have this blog here, which I have not updated since...well, since I started hormones. I've wanted to, of course, but I generally do not run at a surfeit of spoons, so thinking about it and wanting to do it are generally all I have been able to do.
Today I am going to upload the first of the series of essays, and over the next several days I'll be posting one a day until I am caught up with the essays that have already been posted.
After the backlog is cleared, I will post them here on a one for one basis.
Thank you for your patience, and I hope you enjoy my thoughts.
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