Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

See, I have this beautiful vision of a weird fragmentation/redefinition where "suburban homeowning mum" might be a gender but "urban, gender-non-conforming ex-tomboy who hated bra shopping" might also be a gender and there are dozens of genders, not 2 (or 3) but I get that's not really what you're talking about.

I guess I'm just kinda trying to examine this weird gendering of shops and products and how arbitrary it is, vs how "associated with different activities that men or women perform" it is. Because "Homebase" (I'm assuming this is a US conglomerate, giant DIY/home improvement/gardening centres) is a shop that is full of couples/families/mixed gender groups, but is coded "male". While something like "Ikea" (which is a hugely similar DIY home thing, but more furniture and less power tools) is also full of couples/families/mixed gendered groups but is coded "female". How on earth did these notions of the gendering of shops get into my head? How on earth did the notion that one side of Homebase was coded a different "gender" than the other side? Why am I drawn to one, and vaguely repulsed by the other?

Because I live on mine own, and I don't have "A Man" to put up shelves or do the soldering for me, I'm comfortable with - or even happy and proud - performing those roles to the best of my ability. (I really should take an electrical wiring course, this is how you do not electrocute yourself course to do the rest.) And I'm sure that men who live on their own do, also, somehow accumulate teatowels and washing up implements. "Living by yourself" is a pretty powerful way of erasing bullshit gender landgrabs. (Even *I* own teatowels, though my Mum actually bought them for me.) So *why* do I persist in seeing the "suburban mums" side of the shop as gendered, and why do I recoil from that side of the shop?

It's a dumb question, I guess. I am King of Dumb Questions. (But dumb questions are sometimes the only way you learn anything.)

See, I have this beautiful vision of a weird fragmentation/redefinition where "suburban homeowning mum" might be a gender but "urban, gender-non-conforming ex-tomboy who hated bra shopping" might also be a gender and there are dozens of genders, not 2 (or 3) but I get that's not really what you're talking about.

It is in a way! Like that's how I thought when I was younger, that I was some separate gender from the suburban homeowning moms and those in-training to be them. Now, I am comfortable enough being a "woman" -- and maybe some of this has to do with issues of "passing," I can "pass" and it is easier that way -- and there are women in my life who are more "butch" than I am, or they are about some things, though are more femme about others.

People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

(I am about to start a "passing" thread according to the old, old Greenspun-era "rule of 3" that it has come up on 3 separate threads now, therefore deserves its own thread.)

well BB, I don't really have a story, other than always feeling like a guy who likes guys. Kinda has gotten old at this point.

Everybody has a story! Whether that story is "I'm a guy who likes guys" or "I'm a girl - or so they tell me - who often feels like a guy who likes guys, when liking guys, which I don't always do."

Oh, and as if on cue (due to my prevaricating and carping and endless agonising on the other thread)! Juliet J is a fantastic writer; Aeon Magazine is a fantastic organ for long, thoughtful, interrogating longform pieces, and here are both together, talking about how the whole "before and after photo" phenomenon obscures the long and tortured process of becoming with a quick, easy narrative:

http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/before-and-after-the-makeover-industrys-favourite-trope/

JJ is so lovely and so fucking smart.

*but I'm also attracted to trans and non-binary people

I find myself being MORE attracted to these people. I'm not sure why.... I'm sure if someone wanted to be mean and derogatory to me they might call me a "tranny chaser" or whatever.

I do believe there's a world of difference between treating someone's identity as a fetish and "like attracts like because there's so much less you have to explain to someone who already *gets* it".

Well obviously, cf: the "if people wanted to be mean and try and hurt my feelings" part. It's not some fetish, as far as I am concerned. If some TERF wants to consider my personal preferences a fetish without knowing me and kink-shame me it might make me feel pretty bad but then you gotta consider the source.

"like attracts like because there's so much less you have to explain to someone who already *gets* it".

Yeah, this is totally a thing and why I'm not interested in dating cishet women, even though I'm potentially attracted to them and they are potentially attracted to me.

Found this little quiz to be actually pretty interesting and good:

http://flexuality.wordpress.com/take-the-test/

Also came across this:

Inside Against Me!'s "Transgender Dysphoria Blues"

What a bullshit fucking test!

It came back and told me I was "probably polyamourous" - WHAT THE LIVING FUCK, fuck you, I have never been so offended by a result.

Being polyamourous is fucking lifestyle choice. Being able to be *attracted* romantically to women and men is no more indicative of polyamoury than being bisexual is.

What a crock of fucking shit.

Of their categories (and who the fuck has time for bullshit categories anyway, I'm just pissed off at this test right now, so fuck their categories) maybe Flexamourous and Metamorphic apply quite strongly. Though it told me I was "ambisexual" rather than "queer" but I just have such a raft of associations with the word "queer" because it's an identity that was always denied me by gays and externally imposed on me by straights, so who knows.

Oh, I am cross now, and need photos of Weimar Lesbians or Dirty Dronerock Boys with Koala bears to cheer me up. >:-(

And to make me even more grouchy today, apparently "trans*" as a descriptor is ~problematic~.

http://practicalandrogyny.com/2013/10/31/about-that-often-misunderstood-asterisk/

To which I really want to say... you know, "trans*" is the first time in my life that a (queer) community has widened itself out to actually include me. Most of my experiences have been of feeling excluded from both str8 and queer spaces bcz "not gay enough" vs "you don't look straight to me, are you sure you're not queer?" is a constant tension. And you birches wanna take that away from me? Basically: shove it.

I should really stop reading social media, huh. Especially Tumblr, I guess.

I dunno I got high polyamourous results too but I think it's because I've been in threesomes... (TMI?)

Oh, I figured it out later - they clearly meant something like "bi- or pan-romantic" meaning one was romantically attracted to both women & men, when they said "polyamourous" as if they didn't realise it had another meaning. On the blog they had "flexi-amourous" but clearly hadn't changed they survey reporting tool. Clumsy and poorly defined attempt at realising that sexual attraction is not always the same thing as romantic attraction.

"willing to have sex in threesomes" is not exactly the same thing as "polyamourous".

I really don't have anything against poly people & their google calendar lifestyles; I'm just seriously not built for that lifestyle. I find a relationship with even 1 person difficult & complicated enough. Why would I want to juggle several? If it works for you, more power to you. I just don't want to be called something I'm not.

(sorry that middle bit about threesomes should have a winky face; being quite light-hearted/jokey there)

I don't actually have the grit or perseverance right now to deal with the potential hassle it would incur to start an "I've come to hate my body" thread, for when you can't muster 100% positivity for whatever reason. But since I suspect my lack of positivity right now is mostly due to dysphoria, I'm going to talk about it here. If I'm going to end up talking to myself, I might as well talk in a place I'm on topic, I guess.

So I was talking about trying to feel more positive about mine own body by feeling more positive about a (male) person I really admire's body. Partly, because I'm often more able to accept or even crush on, in other people, things I cannot accept in myself. And partly because I don't know if I'm feeling dissatisfaction with my body for its fatness, or for its femaleness. These things are kind of tied up together in awkward ways. I know, looking at pictures of thin boys in suits, that even if I were male, I would never have *that* kind of body, I would just have my body with lumps in different places. I do, however, think that more variation is tolerated in male bodies, and my current mass would be considered way more normative or even attractive in a man.

It's hard, when the image of male beauty I've grown up with is tall, cadaverously gaunt floppy-haired dirty dronerock boys. But it's been kind of mind-opening to see a DDB I admire, growing into a larger body in a way that I find really beautiful. (Yes, I know all the arguments about hottness not being everything, like, conventional attractiveness can go shove it, but beauty, individual beauty, is really important to me. Don't care if that makes me shallow.) That I'm able to look at his body, with a mass probably quite similar to mine, and think that it is good, and attractive, and beautiful, and well... hott. I can look at his body with desire. And I'm trying to translate that, in my head, into "this means that my body is potentially desirable!"

(I *need* to be able to feel like I'm desirable again. This has been the thing that has been missing for too long, the thing I can't seem to surmount, in terms of having a sexuality again. It's not that I've tied my worth to my desirability because, y'know, fuck THAT. But I honestly don't think I'm going to be capable of having sex again until I feel like *I* fancy myself in some way, or at least conceive of myself as fancyable again..)

And I have always been really susceptible, not to peer pressure, but to pop star pressure. Almost always male pop stars. (Male pop stars, and early 80s Annie Lennox. I don't think she counts, for some reason.) I never gave a shit what the girls in 8th grade were wearing, but if Duran Duran wore it, I had to have it. And my Mum used to joke about this when I was younger, like... OK, I used to hate wearing glasses, and I would refuse point blank to wear glasses because glasses were ugly and uncool. So she said "Damn, I just *wish* that some pop star would appear who wore glasses, because then you'd wear yours!" And we laughed at this when I was a teen, but then low and behold, a couple of years later, a pop star appeared named Graham Coxon, and Blur were the coolest pop group in the UK, and Graham Coxon wore glasses, so suddenly glasses were cool, and glasses were hott, and I became a proud glasses-wearer, and started wearing my glasses every day.

Yes, I am that shallow and dumb and easily influenced by pop stars. I was when I was 15, and there's a part of me that will never *stop* being 15.

So I am just really hoping that the 15 y.o. in me can lookit this plump DDB and say "you know what? Plumpness is cool; plumpness is sexy. If he can rock it, I can rock it."

This is really only tangentially related to being genderqueer or whatever - except for the fact that I can only seem to accept my body by comparing it to men. Sorry for derailing, but I wanted to talk about that somewhere, and the Body Positivity thread really didn't seem like the place.

I can kind of relate to that too! I remember being 15 and wanting to look like Robert Smith. And now ... well, I feel like I wear my weight better than he does. (Vaguely shallow lol)

Haha oh god yes. I went through that, too. Like when I was in my mid/late teens and my Mum and then my girlfriend were trying to get me to wear some makeup and I so wasn't interested in wearing makeup like a girl, but it'd be OK to wear makeup like Robert Smith or Daniel Ash. Early goth was so fucking genderqueer, not just Batcave but lots of it.

xp I bet you wear your hair better too!

And I've just realised it wasn't even Graham Coxon who first made glasses-wearing cool, it was David J, I tell a lie! God I wanted to be him when I was 16. Ginger, too.

I bought hella clothes from the women's section and some dark lipstick while I was in Portland. The results are in wdyll.

Looking good, Rev. Think I've seen that photo before; did you post it on twitter?

Yahhhh, I did.

I took that test and came up with this:

http://i43.tinypic.com/21dpwk0.jpg

I'm surprised I scored so high for "heteroflexible" and "transitioning" and so low for "queer" and "versatile"

catching up on the caleb hannan stuff, pretty depressing that it happened at all let alone anyone rallying round that twat. we have a long long way to go pt 9348392

That whole mess has been angrily buzzing round my social media for a couple of days now, and I am just too afraid to even read the original piece. I keep thinking "it can't be as bad as it's represented as being" then reading the quotes and going "good fucking lord no." People are justified in their anger and their outrage at this utter douchebag of a writer.

So someone can out and then bully a trans woman to death? That takes a particularly revolting kind of human being. But then am I surprised that people can round their wagons and rally round the cnut and justify and defend the idea of bullying a person to suicide? No, I am actually not surprised. Human beings are capable of some despicable actions.

Has anybody else read this? It's really long but I found it quite interesting:

THE "EMPIRE" STRIKES BACK: A POSTTRANSSEXUAL MANIFESTO

i had never read this before but it's really excellent: http://pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/rqtr/biblioteca/Transexualidad/trans%20manifesto.pdf

oh lol xp

hah!

Hmmm, so my therapist who is supposed to be helping me work through my gender issues was completely unfamiliar with the term "cisgender" until I said it today. Awesome.

Has anyone else watched the Candy Darling documentary and if so was anyone else as disgusted by Fran Lebowitz as I was?

Yeah, LOL @ having to explain basic terminology to one's therapist (me, too) but also total YAY! for therapists who actually get it, and grok the concept, even if they're not familiar with the words.

(Which was the case with mine - doesn't sound very hopeful, depending on whether that "awesome" was sarcastic, which I think it was?)

But, as above, just because someone doesn't know the terminology doesn't mean that they can't still be helpful in working out the issues. Because when you're working it out, it's mostly you do the working, not them. (Unless you have actually gone to a doctor with the idea of transitioning, and you're looking for advice and strategies. n.b. I am totally uninterested in transitioning, what would be the point.)

Yeah, that's kind of where I am.

I finally came out as trans (maybe genderqueer? still feeling it out) to some friends a couple of weeks ago; I'm seriously considering transitioning once it's practically feasible and I have a better sense of where I stand emotionally, but maybe the fact that it isn't currently an option is making it easier to think about. I'll see about therapists' lexicons soon enough.

good luck ows

thanks

Yes, pulling for you!

Thanks! It's nothing I want to be melodramatic about, but knowing how long I've been trying to rationalize it away, it's healthier to confront the dysphoria now.

Speaking as someone who tried to rationalise the dysphoria away for about 25 years, I would highly recommend that yeah, you explore your identity now. (I wouldn't use a term like "confront", tho, it's another kind of othering a part of yourself. And also the recognition that identities can be fluid, that the thing you have to "confront" this year may be the core of you the next.) Really wish you luck, and hope that you find a good therapist who can help you explore this stuff, regardless of what outcomes are feasible/possible or not.

Thanks, BB--you make good points w/r/t self-othering language and the need to recognize fluidity, the latter of which I think is part of why it's difficult but also probably necessary to start naming this. Anyway, I don't want to derail this thread.

Not derailing at all! You are us! Use this space in any way that helps you.

I appreciate that; it'd probably be more apt to say that I don't want to drown anyone else out. In any case, it'll probably be better to work through this with people offline for a while, but I am glad that this thread is around.

Hope this is ok to ask this here, I'd like to ask something (and I'll apologise in advance if I'm using any of the terminology incorrectly) about something that I can see is problematic but I'd like to understand better WHY it's problematic. I'm hoping BB can explain it a bit because it was something I was made aware of reading their posts, but I'm interested to hear from anybody that has thought about it. In the 77 tracks thread there was a male artist recording under the name Sophie; Lex was annoyed by the name and which BB pointed out

"Every time some jerk does this, it just makes it even harder for actual female producers, because it just reinforces that whole myth that behind any female artist, there is *always* a male string-puller making it happen. Why do you do this, dudes. Why."

I hadn't thought about it this way before, I'd viewed it (and I'm thinking mainly about Caribou / Daphni here) as a queering of identity, as someone using music to express another side of their personality, and also to blur the stereotypes of what is male and female music.

Then I was reminded of this identity again when a male poster made a sock puppet with a female display name to create a music poll thread and was criticised for it. Now in that particular case I am assuming that this poster was not trying to queer anything, just disguise their identity. But I'd still like to understand better why representing himself as female in that discussion was problematic.

Reading what I've typed I'm not trying to be meta or provoke arguments here, I'm genuinely trying to understand this better.

ramona is such a fucking awesome name