1:10am March 13, 2014

➸ I think maybe I was right.

youneedacat:

I probably shouldn’t write about my experiences of gender in public.

I also probably shouldn’t read people’s posts about gender.

If I do the first, I piss people off, almost always.

If I do the second, I nearly always run into discussions about how people with my (lack of) gender either don’t…

Gab, hopefully I didn’t make anything worse by responding?

I don’t know. Apparently we have a grasping sense of entitlement because we were describing what happens to us around femininity, and why we didn’t like it. And apparently the fact that we described experiences around femininity when femininity was what was already under discussion means that we put femininity first in gendered activities we supposedly want to eliminate. (If masculinity was under discussion, of course, I’m sure both of us would’ve described equivalent experiences regarding masculinity. I certainly have hundreds of such experiences. Given that I presented in a very ‘masculine’ way up until recently when I just barely started daring to do anything remotely ‘feminine’ seeming because of exactly this sort of bullshit.)

Basically, as far as I can tell, the person has had a lot of experiences with people who have said a certain thing, and we said things that they thought resembled that thing, so now they’re going on a giant rant about people who do that thing, and projecting it onto us. At least that’s the only remotely close thing I can come up with, because nothing under discussion is at all even tangentially related to anything we actually said. (Go read the response to my post if you don’t believe me. It’s like they’re talking to a phantom standing behind us, and calling that phantom us, and blaming us for what the phantom has done. I assume the phantom is based on actual experiences with actual people, but I’m 100% certain the phantom is neither you nor me.)

I’m glad I’m starting to get a bit of a backbone, because until recently I would have assumed I’d actually done something horribly entitled and self-centered and spent weeks of agonized soul-searching to find the phantom inside of me before finally concluding it wasn’t actually there. But honestly it seems like the conversation is following a script, and anything that happens outside the script is ignored. And I don’t do that kind of conversation anymore.

I do feel bad, though, because I didn’t mean to cause that kind of havoc, or to remind her of people who undoubtedly actually have the attitudes she thinks you and I have. But there’s a point past which I refuse to any longer take responsibility for things that didn’t actually happen. And this seriously didn’t happen, and every time I read a new post she writes, it contains mostly stuff we didn’t say or think or do, even remotely, tied with a very thin thread to things we actually said. And I’m beginning to be able to recognize when that’s happening.

Not that I’m incapable of being self-centered and entitled, mind you. Everyone is capable of that. But I think if I were actually being so, then people who are close to me and care about me would have told me. And they would have done so without reading twenty lines of nonexistent backstory into every real line of text I typed.

I just have this weird feeling like she’s talking to people who aren’t present in the discussion, who have actually said and done the things that she’s saying you and I have said and done. And who have said something similar to the idea that having gendered clothing (or gendered other things) is a problem for them. And therefore, if we say that having gendered things is a problem for us, then we must have the entire worldview that comes with that, and also that we must be demanding that the entire world drop gender for our sake. Which I know neither you nor I would ever, ever believe or do, because we’ve talked about it many times. In moments of frustration, I sometimes wish the world didn’t have gendered things, but it does, and I don’t want the world to get rid of them.

Weirdly enough, in saying everything she’s said, she’s done far more to dismiss the importance or weight of our experiences (you, me, people like you and me) than either of us have done to dismiss the importance or weight of her experiences and those of people like her.

But this sort of thing happens every time I try to discuss my relationship to gender. I am starting to think that there are people out there who have completely poisoned the idea of genderlessness, so that when people who just happen to be genderless discuss our experience and identity and problems, everyone flashes back to the people who have political agendas around genderlessness. And everyone sort of assumes that our genderlessness is the same as political genderlessness. So if we discuss problems around femininity, there’s an assumption that we want to do the “abolish all gender and femininity first” thing that’s on some people’s political agenda. Of course, I still think it’s a bit of a leap to explicitly discuss femininity, and then when someone else starts discussing femininity, to say “You talked only about femininity so you must be one of those abolish-femininity-first people!” I mean… if she’d been a trans man discussing masculinity in clothing I would’ve had just as much to say, and I’d have been discussing masculinity because it was what was brought up at the time. I’ve had just as damaging experiences with presumed masculinity as presumed femininity, with clothing and otherwise.

But she said get the fuck off her blog and her posts and stuff, so I will. I’ll never reply to one of her posts again. I’ll put her on ignore so that I’ll never see one of her posts, and therefore never respond to it. (Although I can’t guarantee I’ll never accidentally reply to one that someone else has posted, because I have a really hard time memorizing blog names, and hers looks synaesthetically a lot similar to a bunch of other blog names I know. And I tend to categorize blog names by synaesthetic colors, not the words themselves.) But it’s a shame, because this conversation didn’t have to go like this.

Part of me wants to never discuss my experience of gender in public again, because I don’t enjoy becoming someone’s target practice in their fight against a bunch of people I don’t even agree with. Part of me wants to be defiant and lay everything out on the line and see what happens. I don’t know which will win out. I don’t think I’ll ever lay everything on the line, because I’m not a masochist. But I may discuss some things, piece by piece, that I’ve been intimidated into silence about for too long.

One thing I know deep down in my bones: Our experiences of gender are not some kind of trivial footnote to the experiences of trans and cis people(*), and we do face actual oppression and actual serious emotional issues, not just “I’m annoyed because people see me in a way I don’t like”. And it’s so much more complex and difficult to describe than a lot of people on all sides want to make it.

(*) I know some genderless people identify as trans, others don’t, because some define trans as having a gender other than cis, and others define trans as anything other than cis. I’m trying to respect both here. I’ve personally been in and out of the trans community and I feel like both an insider and an outsider there, especially because everyone I knew in the trans community when I was involved with it, had a gender and defined transness in terms of having a gender, whether that gender was male, female, both, or neither.

Notes: