12:19am May 20, 2014

I think Anne is right about gender fluidity being very feared.

And I think some of it – sometimes – stems back to an extreme attachment to “I’ve always been like this, I was born this way, and that justifies everything about my existence. That makes my existence okay.”

You see it among gay people too, a fear of people who can turn from gay to straight or straight to gay. A hostility towards them, a tendency to call them liars or say they’re really just bi because only a bi person could change like that. Even when the changes aren’t voluntary, even when someone who was straight for 30 years suddenly finds herself 100% lesbian.

I know a woman who has no name for the type of woman she is. Most people in the trans community would wish to call her a cis woman, because her gender identity matches her biological sex that she was raised as. The problem? She’s only been a woman for a few years now. Before that, she was not at all sure she was a woman, she experienced dysphoria, she had an experience of herself that most people would put somewhere in the trans umbrella. But someday, one day, things clicked and she became a woman, she became happy with her womanhood, she became comfortable in her skin as a woman.

You can’t call her cis, in any honesty, you just can’t. Because her history is not cis. But you can’t necessarily call her trans, either, because her current state is far from trans. We don’t have words for people like her, but parts of the trans community like to pretend they have it all figured out, and all the inconvenient people like her, don’t exist.

There are people who go the opposite way, too. There are people who grow up absolutely comfortable in their skin, absolutely cis, and then something changes. They develop the sense that they are another gender than they’d always assumed they were. They may eventually transition to that gender. They are trans, but they were not always trans. And that goes against the dominant picture in people’s heads, that trans is about something that goes back to infancy, it’s the way your brain was formed in the womb, that it can’t possibly happen at any point later in life. Such a person is more likely to be called crazy than to be reached out to with love by many parts of the trans community.

There are lots of trans or genderless people who, whether our stories are stereotypical or not, our views of ourselves are very much not the current stereotypes of how we are supposed to view ourselves.

Because there are trans men who will absolutely say that they were women prior to transition. And there are trans men who will absolutely say that, while they were never a woman, they still feel a strong connection to womanhood and women’s communities by way of the common shared experience of growing up under sexist and misogynistic standards of living. And there are trans women who will describe their ‘boyhood’ rather than their 'girlhood’, because they personally, just for themselves, feel that their womanhood began at a certain turning point in their lives (not necessarily transition, possibly a moment of inner realization). There are trans people of all sorts who acknowledge that they have been shaped by the privilege or oppression they grew up under, even if that was the privilege or oppression given to a gender they didn’t technically belong to.

There are trans people whose identities shift from male to female and back very rapidly, and people who experience much slower shifts, with years in one gender identity and then years in another. There are trans people with extremely specific gender identities that don’t map onto male or female, or that don’t map onto Westernized ideas of male or female. (And there are people who don’t map onto Westernized ideas of gender and resent being called trans, because that is a racist imposition of Western gender standards on their non-Western societies. Then there are white people with no connection to those cultures who try to steal those identities for the trans community, who are… not appreciated by the cultures in question.)

And there are people who don’t have a gender at all. And we get in trouble, often, for doing things that seem to have a gender, then doing things that seem to not have a gender, then doing things that seem to have another gender, and not putting them together in any sort of order that makes sense to people. I’ve heard trans people griping about us, saying that we’re really just cis people in denial. The worst is being told “You’re doing feminine things, so you’re really just a cis woman in denial”, which is really weird coming from people who are always talking about subverting the gender binary. It’s almost as if you’re allowed to subvert the gender binary by looking gloriously gender-ambiguous, but if you do anything socially correlated with the gender people assign to you based on biological sex, then people assume you’re just not being subversive enough. As if it’s not subversive to say “I’ll look how I want, no matter how close or far it is from expectations.”

Anyway, some of these things are more feared than other things. But I do get the sense a lot of them are feared, or hated, or both. And not for good reason. A lot of it comes back to widgets. And to fears that, while legitimate… acting on those fears results in trans people on the top of the hierarchy stomping on those of us lower down.

(What does the trans hierarchy look like? It’s always changing. Sometimes a trans woman is above a genderless person, sometimes a genderless person is above a trans woman, usually both at once in different ways. There are too many lines of power and control and privilege, to create a single, stationary map. But there are hierarchies and they almost always go unspoken. And many of the times that they are spoken, they’re spoken backwards… in the hopes that nobody will realize that they’re upside-down from what someone just said they were.)

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