(no subject)
Apr. 5th, 2019 02:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nerdflighterI read Natalie’s endnotes to the aesthetic and this is disturbing the fuck out of me so here are some. rambly thoughts I guess. people are welcome to add to this if they like
first she goes “this video is primarily about trans women” and like. caveat that I am not a trans woman, I’m nonbinary & afab so that’s not an experience I have access to in any way. so keep that in mind I guess
I wanted to show a wider audience the way trans people talk about gender amongst ourselves
look...I’m not an expert on trans people or anything but I watched the aesthetic and I can tell you that that’s not how trans people talk about gender. at least, I’ve never known them to. I’ve never participated in a conversation about gender that works that way.
....no wait. I have. I’ve seen truscum talk about gender, and the way Justine talks pretty much mirrors the way truscum talk.
I wanted to work through some of my private doubts about common explanations of what it means to be trans
I can’t argue with that.
I also wanted to reconcile the existence of a devoted Tabby fandom with my having created the character as a caricature of leftist ineffectiveness
I mean. how do I say this. I’ve been thinking about the difference between revolutionaries and incrementalists, and it’s clear to me that they need each other. but throughout the video, the way Justine treats Tabby mirrors the way incrementalists treat revolutionaries; as laughable, disposable, pitiable. like they’re caricatures of themselves.
I had to google what veracity means.
Some non-binary people disliked this video because they felt that the dialogue excluded or invalidated them. Whereas most of the feedback I got from binary trans people is positive. Which, fair enough—this is a video about binary trans women.
look...I try not to be like “binary privilege” and stuff because when it comes to trans people that concept becomes increasingly incoherent but how else do I talk about how it feels to be a nonbinary person watching that video, listening to people harp on and on about passing, when I myself will never pass? not just because I’m brown even though that plays into it - white people remain the standard of nonbinary presentation and aesthetics - I won’t ever pass. people are never going to look at me and think “oh, nonbinary” because that identity is not articulated in mainstream society at all. and I have to live in mainstream society, right, even as a marginalized person I still exist in the same spaces as other people.
it feels like this is basically going “articulation of a binary trans identity has to exclude and invalidate nonbinary people” which is how you get truscum. it’s literally. the same thought process.
I feel like I'm being grossly misunderstood by NBs when they characterize the desire to pass, Justine's point of view, as "respectability politics."
nonbinary people are not characterizing Justine’s (or Natalie’s) desire to pass as respectability politics. they’re characterizing Justine’s efforts to police Tabby’s presentation, and by association the presentation of all trans people who “fail to pass” (scare quotes because Tabby passes just fcking fine) as respectability politics. you can’t misrepresent our position and then accuse us of misrepresenting you. holy shit.
My wearing long hair, makeup, changing my voice, generally softening my confrontation with the world is nothing like e.g. a black man wearing a suit and speaking in "white voice." I'm not doing "woman voice" to please cis people. I'm doing it because I want to be a woman.
oh god this is a mess. this is such a goddamn mess. starting with that simile I guess but omg Natalie. who the fuck decides what “woman voice” is? why is that song-and-dance necessary to be trans and to be a woman? like if you want to do it for yourself then that’s fine, but trans people remain trans even when denied the ability to perform their real gender. a trans man who is forced by circumstance to wear dresses and heels and makeup when he desperately does not want to is still a trans man. equating your transness with your desire to pass is just, straight up truscum shit. this is why people are calling you a transmed.
Cis women understand this deeply. They know that they aren't oppressed as women because they psychologically identify as women. They know that misogyny is foisted upon them regardless of their psychology, so long as society views them as women.
Trans men escape misogyny to some degree—generally to the degree that society views and accepts them as men. And trans women are in the sad situation of having to claw our way into a social position where we begin to experience misogyny.
dskjhvdkjfhkfdgdslg this is another mess.
trans women do not have to “claw their way into a social position where they begin to experience misogyny” they already experience misogyny by virtue of being women. a woman who looks like a man is still experiencing the world as a woman. she’s still being affected by the things which affect women.
trans men are harder to parse because trans men who fail to pass experience misogyny and the associated violence in addition to violence for refusing to conform to their assigned gender. but they’re experiencing all of these things through denial of their real identity. and that colours their experiences to a great degree. additionally, the social aspect of trans manhood is very, very conditional because manhood, even for cis men, is very conditional and highly gatekept. it’s very hard for trans men to access these structures and weaponise them against others outside of like...a tiny bubble saturated with queerness. to simplify, they’re men without privilege.
It's not psychological identity that makes this happen. It's the interpersonal recognition that comes about as a result of habitually living/performing the identity. Let's be good leftist materialists here.
I don’t know what kind of materialism it is to reject the realness of the mind, of our emotions and experiences, of our internality. I don’t know much about materialism, but if it leads to takes like this I’m not sure I want to. the internet and what happens on it is real. the mind (or brain, or whatever the goopy shit in your head that lets you be a person is, whatever you wanna call it) and the thoughts and emotions it experiences are real. I feel so stupid arguing this. I feel like I’m trying to teach someone that 2+2=4 but I have to start by convincing them that numbers are real. it’s degrading.
Before I transitioned I identified as genderqueer for a while. I presented basically as what used to be called a male transvestite. People were sometimes shitty about that, but my coming out with the NB identity was greeted mainly by, "sure, whatever bro, wear whatever you want."
I found that as an AMAB NB, I was for most intents and purposes—socially, structurally, materially—still a man.
I don’t want to explain someone’s experiences to them but that’s them dismissing the reality of your nonbinary identity. and because you were and are a massively privileged person in every other way.
surely an account that begins and ends with "I'm not a man because I don't identify as one" is pretty weak.
[uncharitability cw] I mean. sure. lets all set out to prove why we deserve to exist. that’s a good use of the trans community’s time, because we don’t do that enough in our private lives. lets make it the only story we tell. brilliant plan. and then everyone clapped.
okay and then she goes on for a bit about the relationship between Tabby and Justine, which is fine. they’re good characters. if they were 100% fictional I would write fic for them. thanks for the extra content, I guess.
The most hurtful things Justine says are my confessions. I have no security in "feeling like a woman." I feel like I'm desperately trying to be a woman though confronted by endless obstacles. It's a shadow that hangs over me every moment of every day.
But these are just some feelings I have. I don't have opinions.
I don’t like telling people that they need to cope in private but if you’re coping then the content that you create to cope with your feelings and insecurities needs to be separate from your activism. conflating the two is a really bad idea and I have about 4 years worth of fandom drama on tumblr dot hell to show for it. bad things happen when people look at someone working through their emotions and trauma and go “oh yes, are these your politics?” and worse things happen when you do that to yourself and then you end up being invited to ted talks and fuck a whole bunch of people over.
I keep trying not to talk about contrapoints because it serves no purpose and leads nowhere - she’s not going to change. but on some level talking about it helps me and maybe someone wants to hear me talk about it I fucking Guess.
this is written entirely in response to those tweets. if you’ve got additional responses to those tweets or want to talk about something I said, feel free. but but please don't defend contrapoints to me. there are times when I can have a rational, nuanced conversation about this but I won’t ever on this post because that’s not what this post is for.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-05 11:04 am (UTC)(frozen) no subject
Date: 2019-04-05 03:43 pm (UTC)The difference in perspective, to the best of my observation, seems to stem from whether or not queer identity and experience is inherent (born this way/identity is penultimate/language prioritized) or whether it's acted and enacted.
Basically, the idea that queer identity "just is" rather than being a product of action, choice, and creation (action just meaning something beyond existential theory, it can include thoughts, desires, impulses, interests, etc., not just the "act" of dressing up) is really new. And a lot, I mean A LOT, of older trans/nonbinary people (and plenty of younger ones too) simply don't connect with and which we can actually can find extremely upsetting and dehumanizing when it's applied to us by default.
I've spoken to a lot of trans people who talk the way Natalie does here, not just because they're binary (many of them aren't) but because for them, trans identity is intensely physical, embodied, and - importantly - social.
I'm not saying any of this because I think you're wrong to identify with the version of transness that you do, and in fact I do agree that because of her speech patterns (patterns I share ironically) and who her primary audience is, Natalie often does a poor job of communicating trans experiences she doesn't have, and her ~frequent~ statements that trans people aren't a monolith and have different experiences often go unnoticed by cis and trans people alike when they discuss her work.
But in a similar way, I find it stressful to hear your condemnations of her expression of experiences that I and many of my trans/nonbinary friends and family share when they are so targetted at saying that they can't be of value. I've sometimes talked about my sense of my nonbinary identity being deeply created and enacted with young nb people who have never been able to talk about transness in any way other than you do here who have cried/thanked me/been stunned to realize that their experiences have language and that they're not alone in feeling like common modern nb narratives simply don't include them. I've also talked to a lot of nb people who discuss how other identity factors including assigned sex, disability, race, etc., impact their experiences of how embodied their gender is and how they experience social interaction. For one, Natalie isn't the first AMAB trans person I've spoken to who talks about the fact that when they are perceived socially as nb/women, they are treated wildly differently (not always for the better) than when they were perceived as men. And the many people I've seen share this experience often struggle with it intensely because they are given no language to describe an incredibly painful thing that's happening to them, and when they try to make do with approximate words, they are often accused of hating trans women.
Basically, I understand and respect your discomfort, but respectfully, you are showing an enormous lack of information and compassion towards a number of trans and nb people, including myself, that I suspect would shock you. It may or may not be of any value/interest to you to learn more about some of the trans experiences that really do get discussed (and often) when trans people are in homogenous groups. You don't have to like Natalie or her work, and you certainly don't have to agree with it or pay attention to it. But the fact is that a lot of trans/nb people do not in any way connect to transness in the popular identity-priority expression of it, and do connect with transness the way Natalie describes.
(frozen) no subject
Date: 2019-04-05 04:21 pm (UTC)I was wondering why so much of her shit resonated with me even though I should hate her content, and I think you just hit the nail on the head.
I don't really view my agender identity as inherent to me as much as other genderqueers do. It's more so like something deep inside of me that I want to bring out, to construct a persona that gives the feeling of genderlessness, and I'm wondering how much of my current identity is my cis-sona, to speak, and if there is even a real true agender me beneath the girl shit.
You can feel free to ignore this.
(frozen) no subject
Date: 2019-04-05 05:57 pm (UTC)I suspect, however, that we probably shouldn't continue this conversation in the thread of a person who has already expressed discomfort with her content, so if you're interested in discussing this more I'll make a post on my page that you are welcome to reply to! I definitely am always happy to talk about my - admittedly somewhat atypical - experiences with queer and trans stuff or to be a sounding board for people who want to talk through their own stuff.
Please feel free to reach out!!
no subject
Date: 2019-04-06 06:46 pm (UTC)What I'm wondering is, what's the difference between someone who feels that gender is hugely performative, a lot to do with how you're treated in society and perceived by others, without becoming a truscum?
My suspicion is that it has a lot to do with how you deal with people who don't clearly fit into a binary box. My impression is that truscum tend to treat NBs and people who don't pass as interlopers, failures, menaces. Whereas the reality seems to be that people who don't fit in face more oppression; their genders are invalidated at every turn and they always have to deal with people who are clumsy, disbelieving, and treat their existence like a threat to their entire understanding of the universe.
It seems like when Natalie was nonbinary, the people around her didn't treat her in a way that acknowledged her NBness. But she rejected Tabby's point of view--"People should accept my gender because it's what I say it is"--and focused more on transitioning, until the social response to her was more validating. So her response to NBs tends to be like... "Why would you put yourself through all that pain, you can't expect the world to change just because you want it to."
IDK. This is bringing me back to my thoughts about revolutionaries and incrementalists, how much of it has to do with how much it feels like you can control.