9:07am June 20, 2013

➸ my two cents (or more): josiahd: Gender variant and sexual orientation issues get so damn...

youneedacat:

twocentsormore:

josiahd:

Gender variant and sexual orientation issues get so damn *complicated* and full of hate so quickly.

I wish they didn’t.

If it helps, I try to keep my Tumblr a “safe space” for people who want to talk about those issues but have trouble talking about them in the expected or…

Thank you for that. I wish there were other safe places to go and discuss these things.

People tell me I can’t be nongendered and lesbian. They tell me I have to pick and choose, and that my choice reflects some profound truth about myself. Such that identifying as lesbian actually means I’m not nongendered, that womanhood is what I identify with in the end. Or that saying nongendered instead of nongender shows I’m all wrong in the first place. Or that being nongendered should negate that I have anything to do with being female, even female bodied (which I’m very much not supposed to say), and therefore reject lesbianism.

I don’t know how to tell them that gender and sexuality are complicated and interwoven, not just neat hierarchies. That there is a reason trans women sometimes find themselves attached to the gay male community, trans men to the lesbian community, and all sorts of mixed gender and between gender and no gender people find our way as best we can throughout all these different communities.

And the communities are not a string of letters. They aren’t a hierarchy of privilege where we each have our place. They aren’t mutually exclusive categories where our bio sex means nothing at all to every single one of us (without being cis when it does), where it formed no important ties for us.

Yet we’re supposed to abandon it or face accusations of giving too much weight to the entire idea of being bio anything but what we identify.

And it’s too big a mess to fix in one post or ever. It’s just something that looks simple to me, but people make it complicated with ideology and the desire to see us all go by their rules their language their hierarchies their words their idea of reality.

Fortunately for the rest of the world, we are getting along fine, or badly,or both, in our chosen communities in the real world underneath all the hyperintellectualized stuff and nonsense they are trying (badly) to make a world out of.

^This

And a lot of times, relationships and friendships are not all about what we have in common with a person. Sometimes having some differences can make things better. And most relationships have taking care of eachother or enjoying eachother’s company as a big part.

And some communities are more about taking care of eachother. Not just having things in common. People with very different lives/identities can end up together in those sorts. (So that’s one way Trans people can end up in communities that “don’t match their identity” - because you don’t stop caring about people just because there’s some transitioning going on. The bonds are still there.)

also, a lot of this terminology is rough approximations of big sweeping gradients, like the way sunset colors blend into eachother (or a rainbow). So if you happen to be on the edge of a couple of territories described by two words - you can either go between both…

…Or you can come up with your own word. But then you end up possibly being called a “special snowflake” just for being on the edge of other people’s categories and wanting to be precise with your words. *eyeroll*

(but thank goodness under all that, relationships still *happen*)

That explains so much of it for me that I’ve never been able to put into words. Because these communities aren’t just identity. And because identity itself is very multifaceted and changing and spectrums and blended together and isn’t just you are this or this or this. And there’s this weird thing where if you’re a trans man who hangs around lesbian community or a trans woman who hangs around gay male community it must be because you refuse to acknowledge who you really are, not because you accept complexity and history and historical ties or whatever. Instead you must be hurting someone, somehow. And especially reinforcing the idea that you’re not really a man or not really a woman.

And let’s pretend the complexity around orientation mixing around with gender doesn’t really exist. Pretend it’s all tidy and neat and can be summed up in a quick few words. And, absolutely and cleanly, separated. Because there’s no real connection, not ever, between being other than straight, and gender issues. Turning my sarcasm on real loud here. And it’s not like trans/genderqueer/nongendered and LGBPQ* people don’t have a long shared history despite our other conflicts. Much like many disability subgroupings have shared histories that belie our seemingly separate definitions.

This has been exhausting just to type. Because it’s so hard to reconcile thought with language when that’s all I’m doing. But here I’m doing much more than that. I’m reconciling my thoughts and language with the thoughts and languages of cultures and ideologies around me that see things real different from me. And it’s hard even just to find the words, even when I know I’m among friends here in a place that’s relatively safe to talk about this stuff.

(I, like others, would rapidly start blocking if anyone came in and tried to force fit us into their ideologies. Having places outside such ideologies is too important to allow it to devolve into a flame war over language skills and ability to do ideology and stuff.)

Notes: