Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

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

I don't care if you're black, white, genderqueer...

would say that it's presumptuous to judge the motives of anyone for the name they attach to themselves (or whatever they happen to do). we don't easily know inside one another, and the right to name, to identify, seems among the most basic we possess.

but, you know, bb = worlds beyond my ken

http://thump.vice.com/en_uk/words/please-dont-let-2014-be-the-year-that-female-djs-are-a-novelty

This micro-trend is telling because whilst artist names are mostly harmless word-play, and are rarely given a second thought by fans, there's something that pinches at me about men who choose names that are either explicitly female (Lucy, Millie and Andrea) or imply femininity (Miss Modular, She Works The Night, Body Issues), and do so in an attempt at anonymity, or playful indulgence. Millie and Andrea is apparently framed as an opportunity to “explore sounds not usually associated with their solo productions”, and SOPHIE even warped his voice on a radio show to sound like a young girl. Both weird, both unnecessary, both hiding behind the feminine in a stylistic attempt to create better work through a false persona.

Men who adopt explicitly female monikers and don't engage with the issues implicit in doing so, in an industry where women are often treated as novelty, run the risk of labouring under a false apprehension. Using the feminine to create an air of mystique not only panders to the misogynistic stereotype of the woman as the voiceless and unseen figure, but in only engaging with the female or feminine on a surface level, it could go as far as to actively undermine women who rightly seek to just put in the work, and not have gender treated as a selling point.

OK, I will try to answer your question, since you have asked in a respectful way, and I'm hoping that you might actually be willing to listen and learn, as opposed to blank dismissal. I find these conversations exhausting, and I really do try to limit them, for mine own mental health, if either I am not in the mood for them, or if I don't think I'm going to achieve anything except making myself frustrated and angry.

But I may also need to go off and find some links and possibly think about it.

The short answer is that it's a question of intent, and as you pointed out, the difference between exploring femininity, versus hiding one's identity, often with an agenda. I am trying to find a link to the example a few months ago, where a white person created a whole fake facebook account of a black feminist in order to defend certain actions as "not racist" because this black feminist sock "didn't have a problem with them." That is the spirit in which I saw Kerr assuming a female sock in order to talk about problems - including sexism - within a genre. That is co-opting a lived experience they have no experience of, and no right to speak of on any terms, let alone use it to defend its opposite. His defence of those shitty, sexist metal cartoons when pretty much everyone else on the board saw the problems straight off shows how much he just does not get it and most likely just never will, but he thinks that just putting on a female display name gives him the right to discuss it with authority? It doesn't work like that.

Artists taking on alternate personas in order to explore other identities - this has a long tradition from Bowie to Beyonce and well before. Sometimes it's a way of wearing a mask to convey the truth, but when those adopted identities start to impinge on the locuses (loci?) of other people's oppression, this becomes a problem. (e.g. of Montreal writing songs from the viewpoint of "I'm just a black she-male" and Amanda Palmer taking the piss out of people with disabilities during the course of pretending to be a conjoined twin.) I raise those two cases because Kevin Barnes actually seems to have known some queer people and, indeed, queer people of colour, in his life, and has himself written and performed often of his own feelings of sexual fluidity and frustration with gender. Amanda Palmer, on the other side, basically told the disabled people who criticised her, to shut up and get a sense of humour. I hope you can see the difference why both are problematic, but I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to one, but not the other.

With Daphni, I never did not know for one moment that it was "Dan Snaith exploring his feminine side." He never concealed his intent, I never saw him make any kind of statement, overt or implied, about whether this gave him the right to speak on behalf of women in the music business - and I never saw anyone express surprise that "Daphni is a dude!"

Something like the Aphex Twin's Tuss project is one of those questionable areas. Because I believe his intent was not malicious (again, this is a guy who had explored gender and girl/boy dichotomies repeatedly in his music and iconography) - and also, it was different because the project was a collaboration between himself, and a woman - his wife - though she gets written out of the story repeatedly, first in AFX fanboy minds, then by Richard, after an acrimonious divorce. And in the community of fandom, it just reinforced the endless suppositions that every time a female producer appears on the scene, she must be the sock puppet of some male producer. (e.g. all of Mira Calix's songs are secretly written by Autechre, Ursula Bognor never existed, and another female IDM producer whose name I have forgotten, she did a gig, and WATMM fanboys were all "Oh, *male producer she sounds a bit like* why do you send your girlfriend to stand onstage and play your CDs?) ((And this does *not* just happen in the electronic music community, by any means. It's just really highlighted there.))

Because of the massive imbalance, and the attention (negative though it often is) paid to female artists, dudes often come to believe that it is somehow "easier" to operate in the musical world, as a woman. There's this weird fetishisation of the women involved in the deep history of electronic music (though it does not stop them from mixing up the tags and just labelling any woman with a modular synth as automatically "Delia Derbyshire".) There is the case of an IDM label with an all female roster, founded by a guy whose deliberate aim it was to try to combat sexism in that scene. And, of course, there popped up at least one guy (and another very strongly suspected) who put on a female name, got some photos of a model off the internet, and got signed, then unmasked himself, saying "look how easy girls have it in this industry." As if one label taking women seriously eradicates all the other shit we have to deal with on a regular basis.

It smacks of those extreme makeover experiments where a thin person puts on a fat suit, or a WASP puts on a burqua, and walks around for a day like that, and comes back and says "OMG, you guys! Guess what I discovered? Muslims or fat people or women or old folks have it really fucking hard" as if they've learned something from the experience, learned anything except the fact that it is nothing but a brute display of privilege that they never noticed before and OMG THEY COULD HAVE ACTUALLY JUST PAID ATTENTION TO MUSLIMS OR OLD FOLKS OR FAT PEOPLE OR TRANS PEOPLE AND BELIEVED THEM WHEN THEY SAID THEY EXPERIENCED BAD SHIT IN THE FIRST PLACE.

This stuff is loaded, this stuff has a history. There is a place in this world for "men in dresses" and there is a place in this world for "trans women" but when one starts taking up the space, and because of their privilege, starts dominating the narrative, yes, that is co-option. Dudes who take on female names just to make points on messageboards or sell records are making it harder for trans women as well as cis women.

I have no idea where Sophie, as a producer, fits into this. I know nothing about him, but with the weight of all that stuff above, it is really, really hard for me to give someone the benefit of the doubt.

It's true; anyone can explore aspects of "masculinity" or "femininity" and I actively encourage people of all genders to do this, in music or however makes sense to them. But there is a very big step between exploring gender, and thinking that doing a little bit of exploring of an identity that one can take off and go back to privilege at the end of the day gives them any kind of real insight, let alone authority to speak from, the position of marginalised person, whether that's a cis woman or a trans woman. It happens all the time, men speaking for women, men taking up space intended for women. When a man queers his gender and explores his femininity, it's up to him to recognise that he is still speaking as a queered man, and the world will still, automatically give more weight to his words when speaking about women, because he *is* a man.

Wow, this is longer than I had hoped for. I don't really want to go through this again. I don't think the ~dudes of ILX~ understand, what it costs me, emotionally, to talk about this stuff, and what it costs me to go through it again, and again, and again, because someone didn't hear me the first time. The "not being believed" part is often worse than the injury, with gendered aggressions and microaggressions. I realise that I haven't explained myself very well, but I also do not have the energy for a big fight over this.

otoh, it's evidence of femininity being recognized as intrinsically valid, perhaps even especially valuable. lame dudes cashing in on that = lame, sure. i'm just saying i wouldn't throw stones if i weren't awful damn sure of where those putative dudes were coming from, gender- & orientation-wise (which i wanna abbreviate as "fuckwise", but won't). which perhaps just means i'm sitting outside this convo, speculating ignorantly...

that to lex.

Contenderizer, I'm going to ask you in the nicest possible way, but could you, for once, just try *not* to take the devil's advocate position on this thread?

I know it is impossible to create an actual safe space, anywhere on the internet, but you are the cissest of cis-het dudes, and it would be good if you could actually recognise that this might not be a space where you are automatically the expert.

I am trying to find a link to the example a few months ago, where a white person created a whole fake facebook account of a black feminist in order to defend certain actions as "not racist" because this black feminist sock "didn't have a problem with them."

http://www.forharriet.com/2013/12/dear-ani-difranco-supporters-you-cannot.html?m=1

which perhaps just means i'm sitting outside this convo, speculating ignorantly...

there's a turn up for the books

contenderizer i have zero desire to argue rn but will you STOP doing that thing of "reasonably pointing out the other side of the argument" whenever people talk about oppression? and stop using the language of witch hunts etc. no one is throwing stones. no one is criticising sophie, lucy or whoever personally. people are talking about the context and the fact that this is a micro-trend that rubs them the wrong way. did you even read lauren's piece? in which she interviews one of the male producers who uses a female name, and he acknowledges that it's problematic in ways he hadn't thought of?

LOL xp

I claim no expertise, bb. just, as usual, your spec-ulatin cuz. one of the big differences between u and me is that i have absolutely no problem giving anyone the benefit of the doubt, ever (a function of privilege, i'm sure). that said, i mean not to offend, will step off. ramona is still a fucking awesome name.

hey, lex. just scrubbed my xp for "the language of witch hunts" and came up empty. praps ur referring to my talk of rights and stone-throwing? fwiw, i see no witch-hunting hereabouts. am at least tentatively okay with people identity-flirting with whatever gender seems to suit.

Cis-het white dudes who flaunt their benefits of privilege as if it is some kind of ~NOBLE QUALITY~, part eight billion. What else is new?

Thanks for the link, Lex, that was exactly the case I was thinking of.

xposts

BB, Thanks very much for your reply, that was an awesome post and really made things a lot clearer for me. I admit I was a bit apprehensive in asking in the first place because I was conscious that it was 1) something you might justifiably not want to post about 2) bordering on meta, which I know you dislike and 3) potentially clusterfucky. I was also aware that this was probably covered somewhere else and I was requesting it was regurgitated for my benefit, so I’m really sorry if it stressed you - however, like I said, your post was really insightful and has helped my thinking.

I was just about to reply to Lex thanking him for the link - I hadn’t realised the female pseudonym in dance music was so widespread when I saw you had also posted, and tbh I’ll probably need to re-read it a couple of times cos there is a lot to digest.

Personally, (gay white cis-male here) I’ve always been interested in ambiguity and saw it as positive rather than problematic but I’d been beginning to feel there were aspects of privilege involved without being able to put my finger on exactly how - So thanks to both of you for taking the time and effort to help me out on that.