5:54am April 6, 2015

I’m not going to get into whether the day of visibility thing is right or wrong.

Because it’s not. It’s not either one. It’s a thing. It just is. I participated because I wanted to, if you don’t want to you shouldn’t have to and nobody should pressure you to participate. If you do want to participate, nobody should be trying to pressure you not to, either. (Not that that’s what all critiques of the day are doing, by any means, but they could creep in that direction at the drop of a hat at this point.)

Some people need more visibility. Some people need less visibility. Most people need more visibility sometimes, and less visibility others. And you can’t just erase each “some people” and replace it with a particular category of trans people and then decide you’ve Gotten It Right. That’s not how real life works.

I changed my legal name to Amelia rather than Mel because I needed less visibility in hospital settings, where I’ve already got marks against me for having a developmental disability and for having an odd combination of rare conditions that all add up to things that confuse doctors and nurses in ways that make some of the worse ones not want to treat me. I’ve been told by doctors I’m lucky to be alive given that I needed ICU stays and didn’t get them for reasons like that. And my gender(lessness) has already been pulled into my medical care before, from literally the moment I walked into the emergency room. (Half-whispered to my caregiver: “Is that part of the bracelet accurate?” The gender part, of course. And it didn’t end there, it never does.)

On the other hand, I had to come to genderlessness as something that I coined – originally “nongendered” was the only word I could think of, I now strongly prefer “genderless”. I need more visibility because people just like me, are transitioning (in both directions – contrary to popular belief, genderlessness is not “an AFAB thing”) in ways that don’t fit what they actually feel, because they think they only have two options, and anything has to be better than the option they were assigned at birth. Others take drastic measures including suicide because they’ve never seen a person like themselves, anywhere, ever, in a way that it’s explicitly named “this is what this person is going through”.

(This happens to intersex people as well. One intersex person I know who now identifies as “openly and proudly neuter, both physically and socially”… when they discovered at puberty that xe was intersex, they began to pressure xem to identify as a boy because xe was so adamant xe wasn’t a girl. Xe had no differentiated sex organs of any kind when they went to look, and at that point they began to introduce xem to what xe refers to as “the cult of phallus fixation”, and xe had to fend off a surgeon who was determined to make xem a penis while xe was put under for another procedure entirely. I’d link to xyr webpage so people could read xyr own words about it, but it’s been removed from the Internet Archive – xe used to have a website that just pointed back there, now there’s just an error message about robots.txt.)

So… no. Not going to get into some kind of debate where some people categorically need visibility and other people categorically don’t need visibility. The world is far too complicated for that, and privilege in the trans community is more like a giant tangled knot made of fifty different kinds and colors of string and yarn and twine and cable, than like a straight up and down hierarchy. Visibility can kill, invisibility can kill, and we have to find ways to stop dying and being killed.

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