The last hurrah, or opt me out

It's highly likely I'll just bugger off and stop blogging about teh trans, but before I go, I'd like to say this:

Trans is a term of oppression.

This is why:

• it hides very real differences between rather disparate groups of people. Lumping together crossdressers, trans men, trans women, genderqueers, third genders and what not makes just one unhappy bunch that has one thing in common: oppression. But even that oppression isn't the same for all concerned; the things that can be of utmost importance to some trans women (for example, vaginoplasty, or HRT) might be totally irrelevant to some other group.
• it lets the cis very conveniently off the hook: it lets them treat us as the other, the false to their authentic selves.
• the constant dissension between disparate groups thus forced together destabilises and undermines attempts to fight oppression.
• it keeps us trying to find common ground in identities when there is none.

I'm not expecting much love for saying this, but I think these identity-things have to go. Identity politics does not work.

I'm proposing fighting specific problems, one at a time, until they're all solved. The solutions must be such that they don't oppress other marginalised groups. "Trans" as a concept is mostly useless for this. Access to care is not a trans-specific issue, it's a healthcare issue. Violence is not a trans issue, it's a power issue, even if it affects trans-identified (identified as trans by others - most people can't tell how you identify if you don't conform to their stereotypes) people more than usual.

I'm also bone-tired of this stuff. I need to rest from this and live my life and protect myself and my sanity. I didn't ask my life to be centred around trans, and there's not that much stopping me from decentring trans in my life. Which is what I've been doing more lately (thanks go to my wonderfully sane and caring therapist, too). So - off I go, thanks for everything, I might not return.

Oh, and I love the acronym CAMAB. It just about sums up my experience.

On the instability of trans and cis

Sometimes I experience myself as trans. Mostly I don't.

But the far more common experience is that other people expect me to identify, or experience myself as trans, which I might not do at that particular point of time. I have experienced myself as more or less constantly trans, but that was before transition. These days, I experience myself more or less constantly as myself, and perhaps I might say I experience myself rather often as cis.My bodily configuration matches my hormones that matches whatever it is my brain seems to want that matches what other people expect of me wrt social roles that matches whatever it is that makes me feel comfortable in my skin. You could call that experience an experience of being cis.

Well, unless you insist on bringing the ciscentric notion of sex assigned at birth. Which I don't.

My experience and other people's expectations of what I am don't always match. The weird thing is, the expectations of people who don't know about my past do, in fact, match my lived experience very very often, almost constantly. The people who know me well - perhaps I should say the single person who knows me in the Biblical sense - her experience of me matches mine pretty much always, with no exceptions I can notice.

Trans and cis are not stable. This is not to say that trans and cis aren't useful political categories, but they take us only so far, and I'd rather not lock myself up in a cage with a cis-derived label on it. "Trans" was invented by cissexual people; it's not our word in the strict sense, and while "cis" levels the playing field somewhat, the pair still doesn't derive from us and our experiences. It's still ciscentric language, meant to other us and meant to remind us of our second-class status, of the assignment slapped on us at birth.

See also Iden-bugger-tity. [ETA link]

The traumatic nature of being trans (on Planet Cis, that is)

The worst is not being able to trust other people much at all.

It's pretty logical, no?

Other people have managed to con you into believing you are not what you are, but something else instead. You find that out. You get mighty pissed, perhaps do a thing or two about it (like transition, maybe), and start really feeling the results. You're relatively safe from the forced assignments within your body and yourself - others may still mis- and/or ungender you, but at least you have a tendency of knowing yourself for what you are.

Here's the kick. When you realise that yes, most people have actively conned you (I'm not saying anything about consciously conning - it may well not be conscious, but the end result is still more or less the same) for, like, decades, it's not a happy moment. In fact, it may well feel like the ground opening under your feet. If other people can be so much in the wrong and so damn adamant about it and willing to spend so much time and energy defending their mistake, what else is there that they're wrong about? Suddenly, all bets are off.

This has, in my opinion, several consequences. One is that it's mighty hard to believe in yourself - in your own reasoning ability, in your own conclusions. No matter how well-founded your conclusions, you're still a human and still fallible. And since you've just had a glorious example of most of humanity failing big time, it doesn't bode well for you either, now does it?

Another is an active mistrust of others - if they managed to keep you from this central bit of information about yourself, what else are they hiding?

There's no easy answers to those. I don't know how to solve those problems - and they're my problems, too. How do you cobble together a trust broken from the very beginning? You've never had the experience of being able to trust - your very first relationships have been forced to fit into a mould that's simply wrong (I don't mean that for the cis it's completely right, but it is far less wrong as far as I can tell). There's no model of social stuff being right, only a broken model. I'm sorry this sounds so dejected, but the cissexist, cissupremacist world is a depressive place.

[Note that bodily issues don't enter into this much at all. Having a trans body is in itself relatively unproblematic - some aspects of your body might need medical attention, maybe surgery, maybe meds - and your body might not be that trans after all of those things - but that's just like having glasses, or corrective surgery, for defective vision. It's no big deal.]

Carto goes gender (and grows iden-titties), #3

This is partially a response to a discussion on active and passive identities, but this is where I was headed anyway: why I prefer, and rather strongly at that, no identity actively whatsoever.

Firstly, on a philosophical level, I don't think identities are very real, or anything you should attach yourself to. I consider my identity to be rather ephemeral and passing, and I can't pin it down anywhere. To me, the question "what do you identify as?" is a bit meaningless: what would it change even if I did identify, say, as a woman? It might be a means to an end for me, sure, if I felt like I wasn't a woman already - a means to map out possible ways of being. But I can do that in other ways, too. If I feel like putting on culturally coded stuff, be that behaviour, looks, anything, I already can, resources permitting. If I want to behave in a genderqueer way, there's nothing stopping me. The question of what am I, what do I identify as is, as far as I can tell, irrelevant to me, and if forced, I'll just say I identify as myself.

This approach has its caveats. Firstly, there's the question of resources, and safety. I can very well say I can do whatever I want, but the fact is that if I haven't the resources needed - say, social networks for going out and partying the night away - I, in fact, can't. So the freedom isn't quite as expansive as it could be, if given infinite resources. Secondly, there's the question of me doing stuff that provokes reactions from other people: I, for example, cannot fuck around with gender in just any way if I want to live unharassed. The two are not mutually compatible in practice.

Secondly, what people in linked posts call passive identities tend to trump any active identity any time you're dealing with potentially stressful situations with people not entirely respectful of you. What you're being passed as tends to overrun whatever identity you claim whenever it'd be really important for you to be recognised as, passed as what you are (or identify as, in identity-speak). Whenever there's a disagreement, the majority vote seems to hold the sway. Now I don't think this is right, or an agreeable situation, but I think this is the way it is, here and now. For examples, have a look at stories on trans women in your local newspapers. Are they misgendered? Sensationalised? In my corner of the world, those two things are almost a rule. When the local newspaper (Helsingin Sanomat, 24th of Jan, page C1 in case you're interested) did a whole page piece on Jin Xing (she's coming to dance in Finland), what did they write about? That's right - it was her transition that got the attention - dancing was mentioned in passing ("the best dancer in the world"), and the writer didn't connect the two in any meaningful way I could decipher. Why bring her trans status up at all, then?*

Thirdly, I'm not that hopeful on humanity. I really don't think we can stop other people clinging to their silly ideas about how everything in the world is easy to chop into discrete sets of stuff: men, women, girls, boys, sick, healthy. It might be possible to change it if there was the good will plus willingness to understand and the humility to accept we're colossally wrong every now and then, but I don't think that exists. We're not always good, we're certainly not humble every one of us and the willingness to understand people different from you is seriously lacking. So I don't think the respect for other people's self-declared identities is going to be the be-all, end-all solution to the problems of segregation, violence, oppression and discrimination.

I guess I'm less interested in frameworks, and more interested in solving practical problems, mine included. Like getting journalists (Wikipedia's another repeat offender) to stop shitting on trans women because we've transitioned every time one of us manages to do something wonderful and amazing and noteworthy - anything at all. Not everything we do can be derived from our transitions.

Writing the last sentence felt like talking down to someone particularly thick - I really think cissexuals should be able to get that bit on their own.

*yes, a trick question. Of course it's important to put the uppity trans woman in her place as a circus freak. God forbid they'd just write about her dancing when there's this unspeakable act of daring to raise against the gender forcibly assigned to her at birth. It's the modern-day equivalent of blasphemy.

Carto takes on gender, #1

I guess I'll be writing more than one of these.

Let me start with two common words that describe parenthood. Namely, mother and father. Both are gendered. Sure, they can be queered, but I wonder how many other people get that, without, at the same time, ungendering the subject that utters the word.

I prefer mother. I don't think this is surprising at all to anyone who knows the least bit about me - I really intensely truly dislike anything masculine pushed upon me, and given the choice I tend to opt for the feminine end of the spectrum. Not always, but very very often. I am cisgender - I don't feel uneasiness with being a feminine woman: it suits me.

However, I also intensely dislike pushing things upon others. I don't think it's a good idea to attribute motives, or prescriptive roles to other people. Calling someone a "mother" (or a "woman") can be precisely that kind of attribution. I find there are at least two ways of using words; you can use them to prescribe, to say what ought, in your opinion, to be, or you can use them descriptively, to say what, in your opinion, is. But the wording is mostly similar, and the usages are very often concurrent and inseparable.

Trouble is, I approve of descriptions. I think they're useful. I think descriptions help us people connect with each other. And I do try to avoid prescribing, but end up nevertheless, because if I want words to have intersubjective meanings, they have to be limited in those meanings. A word can't mean just anything whatsoever if it's to retain meaning - if a word can mean anything it will mean nothing.

So. WRT common, gendered words, I try to limit my usage to more or less common usages. I use words like woman, and man, and I try to use them descriptively - if someone looks, acts and gives an impression of being a woman I describe her as a woman. It's a phenomenological approach. I supplement this phenomenological approach with an additional caveat - if a subject declares herself as a woman, I take her word for it as a starting point. This does mean I describe self-identified women as women even if they don't look like women are conventionally thought to look like, and it means the word "woman" is open to reinterpretation - but it also means I make judgments on what the word "woman" can mean, what it can meaningfully point to. I can, of course, be criticised for my judgments, and indeed I welcome such criticism because, obviously, I can be in the wrong. And, mutatis mutandis, I try to follow this approach for all other words, too.

This means I also prescribe some meanings: I accept that responsibility. I don't think that can be avoided, so my choice is to accept it and try to be a mensch and not fuck up too badly.

So much for words pertaining to sex and gender.

(There's three of these: this is part one, here's part 2, and here's part 3)