Quick notes on non-cis life

Owning up to your past is almost impossible. Whatever you say will very likely be twisted into something unrecognizable that'll fit into cissexist conception of what you are.

Relating to cis people is highly complicated, as most cis people build their lives as mostly coherent, decades-long wholes; you've had two lives, one in closet, one in the open, and it's pretty hard to bring stuff from one to the other. Well, unless you're ok with being a freak and having yourself identified as one forever.

You don't really learn how to relate to the cis: in the beginning you have to lie both to other people and to yourself as convincingly as possible, in order to survive. How does one learn to relate to other people while doing that? One doesn't. You can stop the lie, but the years are permanently, forever gone. You don't get your childhood back. You don't get many of your formative years back - you just have to make do with what the lies and deceit gave you.

Yet stopping the lie is one of the most important things you can do.

Hanging out with the other, similarly marginalized people won't help much. Sure, they understand a lot, but what you've got in common with them is the trauma, the bile, the hate, the hurt. Who wants to center her life around that? Not me.

You might end up alone. It's still better than lying and deceit, and it's also better than wallowing in your trauma.

Yael Bartana's upcoming movie, True Finn

I won't be writing about this at length, as I don't have the time, but a single quote should suffice.

A Finnish-Québécois man states, in an interview (in Finnish, sorry): "Finland is prejudiced. I stumble constantly into expectations of what I should look like and how I should behave. I get to hear often that I can't be a Finn because I don't look like one. Then they try to find a suitable box to fit me into. A box that can be called anything but Finn.

Search-and-replace "Finnish" with woman, and "Québécois" with "trans".

The movie screens in Bio Rex, in Helsinki, on 31st of March. It sounds like it'll be brilliant.

I'd like to leave this trans crap well alone, but it won't leave me

Here's what, you Good People:

• I'm not your, or anyone else's, badge of tolerance
• neither I'm a collectible item to add to your collection of "different" friends that you can then parade in front of people you want to impress with your, I dunno, breadth of humans you know. Should you do this to me, let me assure you you're no friend. Friends don't objectify their friends.
• I'm not different, unique, or anything else special. I'm a normal human being who's had incredibly strange things happen to her.
• Aaaand finally bugger all this trans shit. Shove it where the sun doesn't shine and leave it there.

Carto's guide to doctors treating trans women

It can be summed up in two words: be careful, and please try to warn before you ask about really intimate stuff. Genitalia and trans, for example, being "really intimate stuff".

There's a background to this, obviously; I got a nice, yummy cystitis the other day (die e. coli, die) and had to see a doctor. My usual GP wasn't around (bless him, he needs his vacations, too), and so I took the first doctor I could get. Now, as I'm sure y'all know, cystitis means an infection is having a party in your urethra, you need to pee like mad and it stings and it's all very nasty, really. You need to see a doctor. DIY-ing is not an option, even though cranberry juice can help. You don't want any nasties in your urethra, and you definitely don't want them in your kidneys. And also, you having a trans background, it might be it's got something to do with surgeries - not very likely if it's been years and years, but it might; and the doctor sure as hell won't know, unless you 'fess up.

Trouble is, I hate explaining my background to people. It's a vile affair, and there's no way to make it comfortable to me. So. When the doctor asks me (he's very polite and affable and all) if I'm on any meds, I tell him I'm on HRT. I take a calculated emotional risk. He proceeds to ask the specific meds (I start getting uneasy at this point because I can tell where this is headed, right there, right then) - I tell, and start cursing silently to myself for telling. He then proceeds to ask me if this is because of trans. Which feels just about horrible, and I feel like I've been stripped naked against my will. I fumble on about it, get the prescription for an antibiotic (well duh, an UTI is an UTI, and my symptoms fit the description to a T).

Afterwards, I feel violated. Yes, I know, I'm sensitive, but blow me, I am. And I don't feel that's really to be faulted; I've had to explain this trans stuff against my will to a number of doctors in order to get the treatment I needed. It's one pact with the devil - yeah, you get the treatment you desperately need, but the price is that you need to play by their rules, and the rules for women brand you as trans: slightly off-the-rocker, pathetic/deceiving (take your pick, girl!) mental case. This seems to be considered as a permanent feature, even when you've gotten all the treatment you wanted and no longer fit the diagnostic criteria.

I took up this experience (it wasn't an experience from hell, but it was nasty - I'm not used to being identified as trans without my prior consent; the last time it's happened must've been, I dunno, like a decade ago. Yes, I'm one lucky, and healthy, bitch.) with him later that day, and sent him an e-mail describing my experience of the visit. He called back, explained stuff and, well, he's ok in my books now.

In retrospect, what I think he could've done differently is at least give me a warning he's going to ask me an extremely personal question. That might've given me some time and mental space to prepare myself. My rationale for this is that there's really no universal solution to asking about genital configuration; while I'm able to produce more-or-less precise information on mine, I'm pretty sure most people aren't. A question about genital configuration would simply be unintelligible to them, and asking, point blank, if you've got a penis, a vulva or something else is potentially just as invasive (or maybe even more) than asking someone about trans. I would prefer such questions, but I'm pretty sure many more people couldn't take it. And there's no way for the doctor to tell as far as I understand it.

Bibliography

Books I've read during my life as trans that have actually helped:

Practice

Kate Bornstein: Gender Outlaw. Yes. Aunty Kate. I didn't quite agree with her back then, and I certainly don't agree with her now, but yes, it did help. It made me see that I could shake off the coercively assigned sex/gender, that it was a possibility.

Riki Wilchins: Read My Lips. The same could be said of Riki that can be said of Kate; see above. This book was, and is, much more of the blood-and-guts -variety than Gender Outlaw; it's also better. Through it, I found out my pain wasn't unique, that I shared a lot of it with other trans women.

Riki Wilchins and Joan Nestle: Genderqueer. See above.

Julia Serano: Whipping Girl. It's no longer cutting edge, and there's plenty to criticise, but boy did it cut edge back when it was published.

Glenn Schiraldi: PTSD Workbook. Especially chapter on managing anger, plus several others.

Theory

Susan Stryker: My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.

Donna Haraway: Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. (Oh yeah, I'm a bit of a commie, me)

Monique Wittig. One sentence: "Lesbians are not women." It's hard to overestimate the importance of this; it opened my mind to understand that when you drop the sex/gender binary, sexes and genders and sexualities mix in new and unexpected ways. This sentence made me view sexualities through the lens of sex/gender, and sexualities do make a lot more sense to me that way.

Carto's Seal of Approval

This is not a bad article on issues trans. It is from a cis perspective, by a (presumably cis) journalist Jesse Green, and it's not perfect, but hey, you've got to start somewhere, and you could do a lot worse than this. Ignore the cringeworthy heading.

http://nymag.com/news/features/transgender-children-2012-6/

(The comment thread is full of fail, as per usual. Avoid.)

Closet

(This is not a guide for the cis. For that, please use Google, DuckDuckGo or whichever tickles your fancy)

"Closet" actually works, but it doesn't work the way gay people tend to think it does. I was closeted when I pretended to be a guy. I'm out now - no longer pretending to be something I'm not.

There's something else, too. I've actively dismantled the closet as much as I've been able to. I'd burn it down to complete oblivion if I could, but as it is, other people won't let me. They refuse to completely destroy the documentation identifying me as a male, or to completely rewrite it, for example (data integrity, identifying, blah-de-blah). Every time someone wants to interrogate me about my past (it doesn't happen very often, thankfully), that someone basically wants to re-erect a closet for me and, if not push me back there entirely, still remind me about the closet other people forced me to. The one I've done my damnedest to demolish.

What I think this all boils down to is that the majority doesn't want to admit to its mistake in sexing/gendering babies. The fact is, such errors happen, and there's plenty of us living proofs. The majority just needs to get over it, and start correcting its errors. Sans hand-wringing, please.

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.

Slut

There's been a Slutwalk in my home town. It bothered me quite a bit, but I couldn't lay my finger on what it was that bothered me, considering I quite agree with the people organising the thing with the issues: blaming the raped woman for the rape is just sick, and yeah, no means no and yes means yes - that's the way it should go. Period.

The presentation bothered me, especially the "slut" bit. I'm not one to shirk from four-letter words, so I kinda suspect it wasn't that - yet the choice of word in the name left me feeling that this is not for me and I'd just feel wrong participating. Not wrong in the sense of morally wrong, wrong against the organisers, but wrong in the sense that I'd wrong against myself, against who I am by marching with these people. My feeling is not universal, not even amongst Finnish (trans) women, but I know I'm not alone, either.

Finally, I found this excellent bit of thinking (read the comments, too, they're full of win also), and the bits finally clicked into place. I found this bit especially pertinent to my thinking:

"Therefore, the word slut has not been used to discipline (shame) us into chaste moral categories, as we have largely been understood to be unable to practice “normal” and “chaste” sexuality anyway."

As if "slut" was somehow a unifying experience. It's not. I've personally been told I'm a pervert. I've been called a tranny. I've been called sick, mentally ill, deluded, twisted, mad, sexually deviant. There's bunches of books naturalising all of that, too, from respectable publishers. The minority I find myself in is more often than not depicted in the media and literature as hypersexual obsessive-compulsives hell bent on plastic surgery, sexy clothing, high heels and makeup (you want examples? Go see Skip the Makeup). I've been told that I can't possibly be a woman, no matter what the evidence to the contrary. And obviously, if I dare raise my voice against this, I must be either a pathetic loonie or an evil liar.  Nice options, those. 

But I haven't been called a slut, and I think that's 'cos that would've implied I'm a woman, and that was something the cisarchy was hell bent on not doing, ever. And besides, "slut" doesn't quite carry the institutional power like slapping a diagnosis does, or the power that lies in the hands of the magistrate who gets to decide whether you'll be classified as a female or a male. And in a perverse way, calling me slut back then would have been an improvement over what was before. Sure it's an "improvement" in the sense that instead of taking your both legs they're just going to take your arm, but that's what it felt like and no, I'm not over it yet.

It's not just men who've called me those things, either - women, including some self-styled feminists, have done more than their fair share of it, too (for examples in English, just go look up Sheila Jeffreys, Julie Bindel, Mary Daly and Germaine Greer. Nice, (white) middle-class people who wish people like me could be mandated out of existence). I don't feel safe with a random bunch of feminists. It's just as likely that there's some cissexist people around, and I'm not at all confident on the rest of the cis feminists' ability to call out the cissexist behaviour in their midst - my experience has been one of "oh just suck it up, they're all right otherwise". Err, right. I'm quite sure your attitude towards racism is just as dismissive.

Finally, there's the issue of dressing how you like. I'd just like to point out, that I had precisely no chance in hell of dressing in gender-appropriate clothes anywhere I liked until i was in my late 20s. Sexy or not. And this was policed not just by some moral-majoritarians, but by practically everyone. And that's one right I'd be ready to march for - the right of everyone and anyone to dress how they please, without ridicule, discrimination or oppression. But this is so far from the practice of a slutwalk that no, it just doesn't feel the right place for such a statement. If words and actions are at odds with each other, actions win for me every time.

The organisers do say that you don't have to own up to the word "slut" (in Finnish, sorry), but I think that's begging the question - if you march under such a well-publicised banner, how the heck are other people to know you don't, personally, own up to it? 

The practice of Slutwalk and the brand of feminism that goes with it just doesn't cut it with me. It's far too lightweight in my opinion, and doesn't do much to advance any of the pertinent issues - in fact, it just seems like a general call of young cis women to be able to dress as they like without having to fear rape or getting victimised for their dress or behaviour. It's a valid point, but to me personally it feels like arguing about the floorplan when the foundation's all rotten. 

Sod visibility, too

(It seems I'm growing this into a series!)

International Transgender Day of Visibility? Count me out. I need visibility as trans like I need a hole in my head. I don't want pity. I don't want condescension or some fucking understanding, which is what actually happens almost all the time if I'm outed as trans. Oh, and don't forget the perverse questions and looks you get from people when they start furtively looking at your crotch, or the condescending remarks of the "welcome to womanhood" -variety. Yeah, I'll pass.

Here's yet again what I do want. I want the same decent treatment, same privacy and same rights and duties as everyone else, trans or cis. In my utopia, the whole concepts trans and cis would not exist at all, because if needed, we could just say "oh, they effed up my legal sex, but it's corrected now" or "I had this congenital defect fixed last month and was thus unable to work". If we, the people undergoing this stuff, so chose to.

If you absolutely have to have a day, have one called "International Day of Cis People Having a Hard Look at Their Oppressive Behaviour and Perverse Curiosity".

Looking back to my youth: Carto's "do not do" -tip

Navel-gazing leads me to my history, and Aiden's recent answer to a question from a young trans girl recalled a few memories. I'm not proposing this as a course of action for anyone, but this is what I did. It's dangerous, and not to be recommended.

Well, I did contemplate and plan for suicide. That carried me through my teen years and twenties, if I'm being completely honest. I planned how I'd like to die (permanently, and in such a way I'd really die and not stay on living, no matter what doctors might want to do - I also didn't want collateral damage to other people, so jumping in front of a train was completely out of the question. I was serious), got all the stuff I needed and was set to go. I got rid of the necessary implements of suicide when I had my legal sex changed to reflect the reality; that is, quite a while ago. But I still remember what it was like.

What I wanted was an exit, an exit no-one could deny me. An exit that was in my control, and no-one else's. At the time I felt (quite reasonably, in my opinion) that I had very little, if any wiggle room in my life to express what I was; I had to keep on play-acting a boy if I was to survive. An exit clause that I could invoke on a moment's notice was what I needed, and it did help me carry on as I knew I could leave whenever I wanted to.

I guess it gave an outlet to my self-hate. I didn't cut (well ok, I did eat in rather a chaotic and self-harming way), I didn't do much risk otherwise. It kept me alive.

Community?

Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that I feel most trans people (self-identified, identified by others - doesn't seem to matter) have some sort of common experience of having had to slug it out with the society at large as far as their sexes and/or genders are considered. It does create some community. But in my opinion it's based on oppression and very little else.

No, in the sense that the life experiences of various trans people differ to such a great degree that it's really hard to find common points of self-interest: what would a third option on legal sex do to me? Either nothing (if you can choose for yourself - I'd obviously skip it as I ain't no third sex), or a great deal of hassle and harm (if it's chosen for you, whether you like it or not).

I think it boils down to how trans people would like to be treated by others. Some of us (see, community) would like to be treated in a separate way with regards to law, medicine, or social interaction. Some of us would rather not have anything special (Oi! That'd be me!) apart from correcting errors in documents. Those wanting new, different options tend to fall to the transgender/genderqueer side, and those of us who don't, tend to fall on the transsexuality side of things.

Now I don't propose to have a solution to this problem; it has to be sorted out politically: by discussing, arguing, fighting amongst ourselves. But I am saying that there needs to be options: we've got to sort out a way in which transgender/genderqueer people can live safely and respectfully, and it's got to be done in a way that respects trans women and men who'd really rather just drop the trans bit altogether. In other words, no non-consensual third-gendering, no branding people as trans, no forcing people into sexes or genders at all. The third item on that list being much harder to implement than the others, but it needs to stay on the list for us trans women, too - it'd have some serious potential of saving our girlhoods from being a nightmare they all too often are.

All of that has to, in my opinion, be sorted out by the people affected by it, that is, trans people of all kinds, even the people with trans pasts. And in that sense there must be a community if we're to do the right thing.

But will there ever be a trans community in the sense people see there is a gay community? No. And I don't think there's much of a gay community, either. Gays come in all colours and sizes and varieties. What I would see superficially as a gay community is fairly likely just a very visible subset of all the variety of gay people, and 'cos I'm not a part of it myself, I just tend to do the very human thing, and lump 'em all in the same heap of gay. But it's not the truth about them, it's my simplification, and I'd really better not make any political statements based on my silly generalisations.

I'd like to pontificate on the reasons for trans people falling so afar from each other: I think a large part of it is due to fear, uncertainty and other contradictory feelings. The following is highly speculative, so try to bear with me.

From my pov, transgender/genderqueer people seem a tad unrealistic at times. It's all very good to demand equal rights for all people (and especially themselves), but actually implementing those rights can be a bit of a bastard. And not only that, but it'd be neat if the said implementation wasn't an ad hoc -mess, but something that can be applied in a general sense, too. For example, consider scrapping legal sex/gender. (I'd sure like it, no harm would be done to me even if I am a woman - I'd be just as much a woman after that, too) Marriage legislation would have to be rewritten. Parenthood legislation ditto. Military conscription has to be redone. All kinds of registers have to be redone. Passports, DLs, the lot - it's not a trivial task, nor is it in any sense clear that that is actually possible to pull off in one fell swoop; it requires a lot of political will. Just yelling "our rights now" (or even worse: "my rights now") won't do it. Actually talking with politicians, or becoming one oneself are steps into that direction, but what little I see about transgender/genderqueer politics, it's all about anarchism and not getting dirty with the state and let's have a revolution. Yeah, right. Pull another one. You guys couldn't have a revolution and even of you could, you'd just end up oppressing in new ways. It's happened so many times already - what makes you think you're different? And please, pretty please, have a look at the sexism in your midst. There's a reason why there's so few trans feminine spectrum people present in those circles.

From transgender/genderqueer/queer pov, binary trans women such as myself probably raise some squicks. Our surgeries do that. Our trust in medicine, our delight in our conditions, nay, make that illness's, medicality seems to do that big time. I love what I got from the surgeries I've underwent. I think medical science and skill is just great in some respects. Micronised estradiol pills <3 <3 <3  For people who don't trust medicine the way I do, this must be a bit distressing. My dependence on modern Western medicine must be a bit depressing to someone who likes to do things by hirself, for hirself, and if a thing can't be done in an ethical way, it'd perhaps really better not be done at all.  I also suspect my apparent femininity must raise some eyebrows, too - the combination of the determination needed to get medical and legal reassignment and then just flowing into this new almost ridiculously standard sex/gender must be a bit mind-bending - I'm not sure, but I feel the thinking might go along the "she went to all that trouble and fighting to get that bog-standard woman stuff, instead of this gender/sex neatness we have?"

I don't have the solutions. But I think a description of the problem is the beginning of the search for a solution. This is my offer.

The interlocking nature of sexisms plus a note

Consider this: if you don't believe there are two, and only two sexes and genders (cissexism), you can't really uphold heterosexism ('cos once you go down the slippery slope of more than two, what's stopping you from seeing everyone as a different sex and gender?  Nothing, that's what). And why would you, indeed, see any necessary complementarity in masculine and feminine? And if you don't believe masculinities are inherently better and more valuable than feminities, or some other -inities, what'd be the point of dissing any people not on either spectrum, or people rejecting their assigned sexes and genders?

It all holds together. Sexism comes with cissexism which comes with heterosexism - they're a nice, evil compact bundle, full of misery for everyone.

They can't be teased apart, either. You can't pick a nice dose of transphobia to go with opposing sexism, or heterosexism - if you want to oppose sexism, it's just not on to diss trans women for being feminine. If you want to oppose heterosexism, why would you exclude trans-cis homo couples? And if you're against cissexism, it's no good to be homophobic: how could you defend people's rights to ditch their assigned sexes and genders as they like, and then require them to conform to hetero-only relations? As if you could define hetero-only to exclude anyone without bringing in cissexism!

Other than that tidbit, I'm rather down and out - turns out my childhood was not quite as bad as I thought it was - it was considerably worse. Hello, therapy (no, it's not about teh trans, for a change). This time, I really actually need therapy, and seems like I can benefit from it, too.

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]

STP puh-lease

"That transsexuality would no longer be viewed as an organic illness, because the gender of a person, trans or not, is not biologically programmed (this is the organic or physical dimension of depathologization);" (STP Best Practices Guide (pdf), p. 17)

Umm, no. Darlings, dearies, do not pretend to speak for me. Transsexuality was very much an organic, physiological illness for me. My sex and gender seem to be biologically determined to be female. There was precisely fuck-all I could do about it, except conform to the fact that I'm deeply unhappy if I a) have to be on wrong hormones, b) have to have a wrong kind of bodily configuration and c) have to pretend to be a man which I am not, and I stopped being unhappy precisely when I a) had the right hormones, b) a suitably configured body and c) could (safely) stop the stupid pretense, and be the woman I was and am in the eyes of other people, too. That required physiological treatments, and those treatments fixed my very organic body. So yeah, it's an organic illness all right.

While I'm at this, I'd also like to point out that while it's wrong to push Western ideas on non-Western people, I've no personal objection to Western ideas and paradigms - I'm Western, and a European myself, and wouldn't want to appropriate some other culture's way of doing sex and gender for mine.

In short: STP folks, you're mistaken at some points. Stop pretending you're speaking for all people who are identified as trans by the cis majority. I may be trans in their (and maybe your) eyes, but I sure don't feel like trans any more much at all. Our needs are different, don't subsume mine under your agenda.

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.]

It might get better, but it might not.

Dear trans girl,

It's possible it gets better. That's about as positive as I can get. Sorry about it - it is very depressing, but life sometimes is. I hope you get a bit less harassment, a little less violence, a little less un- and degendering. I really do, from the bottom of my heart. But I can't promise that. No-one can. Don't believe just anything you're said - evaluate the statements yourself. That applies to this piece, too.

I sincerely hope you will find peace. Peace with myself wasn't actually that hard to get. Peace with others... shall we say that's a war in progress? And, unfortunately, it's not yet us who are winning. People do think their way of seeing and thinking and living sex and gender trumps our experience.

Stick by the people who really are loyal to you. And to hell with the others. Really. If someone gets onto your tits, don't spend too much time with them - there's so many idiots and so little time. It's just not worth it, educating the unwilling. They just sap your energy, will to live and generally suck the joy out of your life. Sod them. But the ones who do love you - love them to bits. Never, ever let them down.

Don't be too disappointed when people close to you let you down. It's not unusual. It's incredibly sad, but I've seen it happen so many times I find it hard to be surprised at anything any more. There's no bottom to the depths of stupidity, meanness and plain ol' cis privilege.

Love your own. Help other trans girls and women. Even when they're being arses. I try to do that, too. 

Above all else: Love yourself. Get help. Be brave. Be smart. Be the girl you are.

Why we probably need strictly trans-women-only spaces

Relationship abuse. That's why.

Helen G reported couple of days ago on the depressingly expected results (pdf) to research on domestic abuse against trans people. I also stumbled on a story at The Spectrum Café on crossdressers' problems, and I realised that those problems are definitely not limited to crossdressers alone: the power dynamic in a lesbian relationship, where one of the women is cis, and the other is trans, but not quite come to terms with her stuff yet, can be scarily similar.

Imagine: a trans/cis lesbian couple lives like their life was one of a cissexual, heterosexual, cisgender couple. One of the partners, however, knows that this is not strictly speaking true, but for a lack of words, courage, or just plain fear for her own safety keeps her mouth shut. She knows something is not quite right, the dynamic of the relationship isn't quite the cishet dynamic it's expected to be. The other, cis partner, is at least consciously unaware of this, or if not, wants to be unaware - there are no prizes given by the larger, sexist and cissexist society, to those who start messing about with its hallowed cishet structures, especially when such messing about goes against not only heterosexism, but cis- and plain sexism as well.

Anyway. The trans woman finds out a name, or several names, for the situation she's in. She finds out that she might actually be a woman, and that her coercively assigned manhood is a... lie. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what the possible consequences of acting out on such information can be. Amicable divorce (if they've already gotten married) is kinda nice outcome - if they have children together, the trans woman faces a very real prospect of losing her family altogether, and a substantial chunk of her income, too. Which also tends to plummet when one transitions - that's no rocket science, either.

So, what's the trans woman to do? "I'll give the family a shot but if it goes titsup, it will, and no can do - I'll likely transition anyway, and those two are not strictly connected" was my choice, but I now realise that this is not at all a common choice. The common choice is, I think, trying to negotiate your way into transitioning with the family. Asking for permission, if you like - in order to minimise the collateral damage.

What scenarios that leads to? There's at least two I can think of, and I've seen both happen many times.

The first is the "come out, get a divorce" -scenario. Once the trans woman speaks about the need to transition, the family implodes and that's that - if she's lucky, she can see her children and isn't destitute afterwards. If things go bad, she's not only cut off from her family, but totally broke, too.

The second, however, is ominous. The trans woman brings up that she really isn't a man, or somesuch stuff - the exact details don't matter. She asks for support. The cis woman, on her part, is shocked, or perhaps flat out disbelieves the seriousness of what's said. Once the situation develops a bit, and it becomes increasingly clear that trans woman's, well, womanhood, isn't going away, transitioning becomes a war of attrition on part of the cis woman partner. The trans spouse is kept from transitioning by controlling her, controlling her body, controlling her access to medical resources, controlling her visibility as a woman (either by threatening with forced outing or threatening with divorce if she does come out at circles not approved of by the cis spouse) and, of course controlling her access to other trans women. This can be subtle - painting other trans women as irresponsible, selfish failures who definitely are not worth associating with and then painting the trans woman partner as someone who's so much more responsible and rational - or it can be a lot more blatant, as in not letting the trans woman partner go to support group meetings, transcentric events, trans-women-only message boards, seeing a doctor to talk about her medical needs or even plain violence.

That the aforementioned is totally fucked hardly needs an explanation. What it does do, however, is introduce a cis-made split into trans women's lives - we're cut off from each other. Women early in their transitions don't get the role models of real, live trans women going on about their lives, working, living, loving and fighting on the planet cis, but get only the bits that suit their cis spouses - and somehow I think that the societally instilled sexism, transphobia and cissexism do affect the choice of such bits.

Because of all of the above, I'd like to have something. I'd like to have a trans-women-only space.  Where it wouldn't matter squat where you are in your transition, wouldn't matter where exactly you want to go, but if you wouldn't mind people identifying you as a trans woman, you'd be welcome. You'd be welcome to a space not controlled by cis people. Where what you say will not be scrutinised by the cis. Where questioning cissexist notions is welcome, and common. No cis women bossing around and telling us what we can do, say or be. No need for apologies, or for policing cis-instated norms on behalf of the cis. Where said policing can be dismissed for what it is: controlling. Controlling the way we speak, act, live and love. I want to get rid of that controlling so I can speak with my sisters face to face and expose the coercion and abuse for what it is.

Yeah, I know, won't be easy, but it's worth a shot, dontcha think?

Carto's special theory of trans

This is mostly a note to myself, and written perhaps more to clarify my thoughts to myself than for anything else.

Trans consists of actually being something of some other sex, or gender, than the sex, or gender, assigned to you at birth, or later, by others.

That's about it, really!

Trans is thus a problem of other people - the core of the problem being the forced assignment of sex and gender, and the (misplaced) faith of the majority in the correctness of the communal assignment.

Trans becomes a problem for the trans person hirself only if other people make it a problem.

This can happen by ungendering, misgendering, physical violence, denial of necessary facilities, denial of medical care - this is not an exhaustive list.

The problem is not trans. It's the oppression.

(the headline is a nod to Einstein, in case you wondered).

[ETA to clarify the second sentence]

On relatives, and their tediousness wrt transition

This cropped up in a discussion with a friend - you know who you are.

One of the major reasons why transitioning is such a shitty business is the people who are, in principle, close to you. The logic behind this statement goes like this: when people view themselves as close to a transitioning individual, more often than not they are not close to the individual hirself at all, but to the rôle this individual has played in order to survive without too much harassment. And there lies the rub.

Transitioning requires that that rôle, that act has to be stopped. But, because the close ones are usually heavily invested in that rôle, stopping the act is not necessarily seen as stopping a lie, but is seen as a betrayal instead. The person transitioning, of course, betrays no-one by transitioning, but stops betrayals instead, and this might be the reason why transition is so hard for the near and dear to accept. If they accept the transition for what it is, they also tacitly admit to fooling themselves and their apparently near and dear transitioner, often for decades. They also admit to having policed sex and gender, often in quite backhanded and devious ways - transition brings out all this for everyone to see. It's probably not too easy for the cis people around.

The natural reaction seems to be to blame the transitioner for being manipulative, difficult, intransigent and deceptive. In reality, the transitioner is anything but: a transition is probably the ultimate statement for stopping manipulation and deception.

Another common thread in trying to hold onto the lie is emotional blackmail, and not letting go even when it's perfectly clear that the transitioner wants to have nothing with hir relatives unless they accept the reality of transition. "We do this because we love you" might hold water if transitions were a whim, a passing madness, but as far as I can tell, transitioning is neither - we don't do this stuff just to piss you guys off, y'know.

Eliot put it nicely: "human kind Cannot bear very much reality." (Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, 42-43)

Unfortunately I, and my fellow trans people have to live with this.

[ETA] This trouble with reality seems to undergird a common journalistic trope of trotting out person's trans past, no matter if it's relevant to the discussion or not. It's just so damn impossible for the cis to get that they do make mistakes when gendering other people, it seems.