5:04pm June 28, 2014

Writing about genderlessness sometimes makes me uncomfortable.

I write about it for the same reasons I write about a lot of things:

I don’t see a lot of people out there saying things that I think are important for someone to say. And if someone has to say them, it may as well be me.
I worry that other people whose experience of genderlessness is similar to mine, won’t see writing out there reflecting their experiences. And that can be a very lonely and confusing experience. I wish someone had been talking about genderlessness back when I was trying to figure out whether or not I was a trans man. It would have saved me a lot of effort and heartache.
If I look on the tags, I see a lot of people bickering about who counts as what. I always want to add to discussion that goes beyond that kind of bickering, whether we’re talking about gender, disability, or any other attribute a human being can have.
If I put myself out there, then other people won’t have to. (My friend referred to me last night as “always taking one for the team” when it comes to stuff like this. Meaning I put my experiences out there knowing they may be judged, ridiculed, flamed, whatever, but that it will make things easier for the next person. She insists that this is my Gryffindor side coming out. I’m a Hufflepuff but I’ve got strong Gryffindor… tendencies.)
It’s really comforting sometimes to write something and find out, from responses, that I’m far from alone. I’ve known for a long time now that nobody is unique, including myself, and that any attribute anyone has, is shared by lots of other people. That’s one thing that allows me to put myself out there and feel comfortable doing so. But sometimes it still feels good to get real confirmation that I’m not alone in something, and writing can be a good way to do that.

And all of those are very good reasons to write about something. Not that anyone is obligated to write about anything at all, if they don’t want to. But these are some of my reasons for doing this.

But there are things that make it difficult to write about.

It doesn’t always feel healthy to focus on this very much. This is in part because the issue is being genderless. Normally, something you don’t have, isn’t something you’re thinking about all the time. And thinking about it all the time isn’t always the best thing to be doing. It can add artificial elements to something that, for me, normally just happens (or doesn’t).

I don’t like talking about body dysphoria, yet that’s what a lot of the tumblr trans community talks about all the time. I don’t mind that other people talk about theirs. I think it’s totally up to the person to divulge whether they have it, what kind they have, and so forth.

But for myself… I can say that I have it, definitely. And there are some parts of it that I will talk about. But there are other body parts that I refuse to talk about. I don’t think my junk is anyone’s business, much less whether and what I’d want done to it if I lived in a world where that was likely to happen. There are very specific things that I could recount, but won’t, because it’s just too painful to put them on display for the entire world to see. And that should be okay.

In fact it should be okay for me to refuse to discuss body dysphoria at all. To refuse to even confirm or deny whether I have it. And then to refuse to talk about it, period.

But tumblr has this thing… and it’s not unique to the trans community there, although it’s reflected in the trans community. And it’s this thing where the more you suffer, the more “real” your experiences are and the more seriously you’re taken. In the tumblr trans community, this usually takes the form of “Body dysphoria is The Measure of whether you’re trans or cis, forget about all other aspects of being trans including other elements of dysphoria.”

And it also takes the form of talking about it, a lot. I’ve been in enough trans communities to know that while most trans people talk about body dysphoria, the amount to which people talk about it differs, and so does the way in which people talk about it. Tumblr has specific ways you are allowed to talk about it, and specific ways that you are not. And it focuses on discussing it more than the average trans place I’ve been in does.

All of which… it’s not that I feel like I have to prove myself to the Trans Police, exactly. But being around community norms of various sorts, they do have an effect on you. And for me, all of this makes me think more about my body dysphoria than I’m comfortable thinking about it. It makes me focus on it more than I want to focus on it.

Because, of course it’s going to be there whether I talk about it or not. But if I sit there and think about it and talk about it all the time, it gets more and more uncomfortable. Avoiding thinking about it, avoiding ruminating on it, these are not bad things if they work for you. And generally they work well enough for me – it’s always there, but I can keep it down to a dull roar. But tumblr’s trans community social norms make it hard to keep it down to a dull roar, and that creates problems for me.

There’s also an effect that’s much harder for me to name than anything else I’ve described here so far. And that is where, immersing myself in discussions about gender, make things rub off on me that aren’t real for me. That aren’t actually a part of my experience. But I start feeling like they have to be part of my experience.

Unfortunately, all of these things are subtle. So subtle that I can’t pull one out and say “Here it is, here is something that’s not really part of my experience, but I feel like it needs to be, now.” But I think this is especially a side-effect of the fact that I am genderless and most trans people are not genderless. And most of these discussions are happening in a gendered, trans context. Because genderlessness is decidedly not cis, and trans communities are where people who are not cis are, but trans communities are overwhelmingly also where people who have a gender are. So I start picking up norms and experiences that are geared towards trans people who have a gender. Which is not who I am at all.

And that last one feels like the most insidious and personally dangerous part of trying to talk about these things in public. Because talking about them generally means immersing myself in a community. And that community has ideas about how the world works, that fundamentally rest on people having a gender. And those ideas aren’t on the surface where you can get at them. They’re down deep where I can’t pull them out and find them and name them. So I end up picking up these bits and pieces of gendered, trans experiences that have nothing to do with me. And that does me a lot of harm, because that’s not who I’m supposed to be. I’m not supposed to have these qualities of a gendered, trans person. Or a gendered, cis person for that matter (although all cis people are gendered – not all trans people are… but most trans people who’ve done the bulk of the work building the trans community and its ideas and ideologies and norms, are).

And picking up those qualities by mistake, means damage to me on a personal level. It also means trouble being authentic in a situation where authenticity means everything – after all, a huge part of why I write about my experiences, is so that other people like me can recognize themselves, be less alone, understand things more readily and quickly than I understood them. And it’s hard to do that with all this debris clinging to me from experiences that aren’t mine at all.

Most of this is nobody’s fault. It’s just how things are. The only thing that I do think is people’s fault, and that people could really do well to change?

This thing where the more suffering you experience, the more real you’re considered to be. That idea can be changed. That idea can be resisted wherever it’s found, both inside and outside of trans communities. It’s tied in with the way that body dysphoria is emphasized, even for people where it’s not their biggest problem related to being trans. People feel obligated to emphasize their body dysphoria so that people will know they’re a real trans person. Anyone deliberately making people feel obligated to do that is doing people a real disservice.

Especially since body dysphoria is so heavily tied to suicide, and having to think about it more can tip vulnerable people over the edge. Think about that while you rage at people for not being body-dysphoric enough. Your bullying may have a body count you’re not even aware of. Trying to force people to think about and talk about and obsess about something that makes lots of people feel suicidal is not a good thing.

I’m sure that pushing people over that edge is not the first thought in people’s minds. I’m sure they’re thinking something more like, “I wish these poseurs would get out of here and quit calling themselves trans.” Not that that’s a very noble thing to be thinking either, mind you. But pushing people towards and potentially over that edge is a direct and indirect side-effect of pushing the idea that without body dysphoria you can’t call yourself trans: Some trans people will feel obligated to prove themselves, and will obsess and ruminate over their body dysphoria even more than they normally would, and that can very well erode people’s mental health in dangerous ways. So people who start these fights are playing with fire.

That’s one thing that can be changed.

And again, I don’t think it’s specifically a trans thing, because I see it all over tumblr in general. This glorification of suffering. This thing where people prove their reality, prove their eligibility for group membership, by proving how much they have suffered as a member of that group. It takes different forms in different groups but it’s all over the place around here and it could really use some shaking up and changing. I’m not sure lots of people even realize this is a norm around here, but it is, in lots of tumblr-based communities, and the more we recognize it the more we can stand up to it.

(Also, for me, I’m really unsure about how my body dysphoria ties in with my genderlessness. And the trans community has its own ideas about how body dysphoria ties to gender, and I’m not sure whether those ideas apply in my case or not. I’m not even sure I have to understand it, but writing makes it seem like I have to understand it, and introduces distortions like this.)

Everything else, though?

It’s unavoidable, mostly, nobody’s fault. I just have to walk the line between talking about genderlessness too much, and talking about it too little. And I have to be very careful how I do it, for my own sake as much as anyone else’s. I just wanted to tell people these conflicts in my mind are happening. That I’m very conflicted about how and whether to write about my (lack of) gender, and that it’s not all about how people are going to react. It’s also about how the writing changes me, and how the communities that are attached to the writing change me. And there are ways I don’t want to be changed.

For the most part, until recently, genderlessness is a part of me that I don’t write about, don’t talk about, don’t think about, because it’s the absence of gender, not the presence of a lack of gender. And writing about it makes it into a presence rather than an absence, and that distorts many, many things without even having to deal with all the other distorting factors.