asking for advice
Jan. 19th, 2019 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nerdflighterOne of the things I do on my discourse blog is talk about the nature of binaries and how they erase a lot of grey areas. And recently, I was talking about how it's possible for cis people to be dysphoric, and how cis people can benefit from having access to the narrative around dysphoria.
And I got this message, in the form of a submission.
this person reads as trans to me, and yet? they never would have come forward if I hadn't talked about cis dysphoria. and I can't justify labeling them as something they don't identify as, but at the same time I don't know how to weigh that out against their distress and the possible comfort they would find in a *trans label.
I don't know what I'm doing, basically, and I'd like to know what y'all think.
And I got this message, in the form of a submission.
wanted to i guess vent about my personal experience w/ feeling dysphoria (maybe?) without being trans. you don’t have to post this; it might be better if you don’t since it would be weird to have people debating my Validity:tm: but idk it might be good as food for thought for your theories or you could just not read it. your posts just made me Think and i wanted to get the feelings out. sorry if any of this is weird or bad to read haha…
so personally i don’t consider myself trans in any way but i do experience something that at least to me seems like really really mild gender dysphoria. i might just be wrong about what dysphoria is so i’m gonna try to explain the exact feelings, where i think they’re coming from, and why i don’t think i am trans. for reference i am afab and don’t have any other brain stuff going on as far as i know (never been to a doctor for that kind of thing) aside from getting panic attacks sometimes.
so firstly i experience what is, as far as i know, social dysphoria. i don’t like being called “she” (when i was younger i used to dislike being called “he” too but i think that was mostly because i was offended by male being the default - so for logical reasons instead of emotional ones.) i don’t like being treated as female or the expectations associated with being viewed as female, although admittedly i think most women don’t regardless of if they’re cis or trans because of like misogyny and stuff. you know how it be… society. anyway in general being thought of as a woman makes me uncomfortable in most contexts including ones that are obstensibly positive. i also experience like… physical or sex dysphoria (not sure what the right term is.) i’m gonna avoid being graphic but in general i dislike my genitalia and wish i had a penis and usually imagine myself with one in sexual fantasies. i don’t have the same feelings towards my breasts though but i don’t especially… like them or anything.
so in my opinion the reason i feel like this despite not being trans is that i was (and am) really physically unattractive and socially inept and got bullied for it a lot as a kid. but even when i wasn’t being directly bullied i was still treated differently from female peers with more acceptable appearances and behaviors. when i would wear feminine clothes or makeup i was treated badly for it, because i was not a “real girl” to my peers. obviously this isn’t at all the same as what trans people experience but it created a disconnect for me between my technically assigned sex and how i was gendered by others. since i wasn’t seen as or treated as a girl but as some degendered/desexed other (and also i am still treated that way irl most of the time) so being treated as one pretty much solely online feels disorienting and upsetting and i feel some level of compulsion not to have the physical attributes that make me afab.
i have no desire to transition through surgery or hormone treatment so i think i’m not trans. it’s not for practical reasons either i just don’t think it would fix my dysphoria in any way. i don’t think socially transitioning would help either.
again i realize this isn’t the same as what trans people experience and it’s extremely mild but idk what to call it except dysphoria. not sure if i am cis or maybe some kind of non-trans nb?
whew long wall of text… anyway have a great day. you are cool!
this person reads as trans to me, and yet? they never would have come forward if I hadn't talked about cis dysphoria. and I can't justify labeling them as something they don't identify as, but at the same time I don't know how to weigh that out against their distress and the possible comfort they would find in a *trans label.
I don't know what I'm doing, basically, and I'd like to know what y'all think.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-19 05:44 am (UTC)(I keep sitting on my narrative of How I Know I'm Cis because I don't want to be That Cis but uh... if it's ever wanted... hit me up)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-19 06:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-19 06:56 am (UTC)I've always had gender euphoria when I hit the appropriate level of femininity. My mom is not very feminine, so when I was a little kid, we always got into fights because I wanted to keep my hair long, but she didn't know how to brush it out without tangling and always suggested I'd be happier with it short. I always wanted the prettiest dresses I could find, and I loved wearing them even when it wasn't a formal occasion. I lobbied hard to get pierced ears beginning around age six, and when my mom set it in stone that I had to wait until I was ten, I woke up on my tenth birthday like "BITCH WHERE ARE MY EARRINGS"
There were times when it became unpleasant or onerous--old men of my grandfather's set stifling me with the insistence that I behave exactly how they wanted or insinuations that a pretty little girl shouldn't ask questions. Boys who wanted to "play doctor" and pushed me to do things I was afraid or ashamed to do. But that was about violating my own comfort zone, not about who I was. I had a lot of media with feisty princesses who wore dresses and kicked butt, and I knew that was what I wanted to be like.
I liked pretending to be a boy sometimes, partly because I read a lot of stories about girls pretending to be boys so they could go on adventures, but the one time I remember being actually accidentally misgendered when I wasn't expecting it, I was about 10, it was like this lightning bolt of invalidation. It felt like I'd failed in my basic task of existing, as though they'd looked right at me and not actually seen anything there. I knew I wanted that to never happen again, unless I was very purposefully crossdressing.
I was excited when I got my period, because it meant I was growing up like Alanna the Lioness. I was so excited when my chest started to grow, even though other girls in class told me that it was "gross" that my chest showed under some of my shirts. When I was 12, I was excited to picture myself as a woman in her 30s.
I didn't present as very feminine, partly because I got mocked when I tried to do things like wear makeup or wear fashionable clothing. I always wanted to dress well and look pretty, but I had very limited friends or social contacts who would shop with me or teach me about fashion or makeup, so I did my best to be invisible and draw feminine outfits and pretty girls I wanted to be like in my notebooks. In university, when I had friends I could dress up and go to the opera with, I was overjoyed.
I've also had a sense of my sexuality since I was really small. This is embarrassing--but every day for my first year of school, I'd wait until a boy I liked came onto the schoolgrounds, and chase him around trying to kiss him, which he did his utmost to avoid. (Oh god! HOW I wish someone had stopped me. But they all thought it was "cute") I saw Aladdin with Jasmine pretending to be Jafar's besotted slave, Return of the Jedi with Slave Leia, Terminator 2 with Sarah Connor being groped and licked while in restraints, and something in my brain went *!!!* about that--I remember being about 6 and trying to get my brother's friend to play a game where I got to be a sexy slave and he was very confused and not into it. I was kinky before I even knew what sex was.
These days, I can raise my mood really easily by adding jewelry, makeup, or feminine hairstyle to my look. I'm delighted if someone I like lets me know that I'm pretty. Wanting to be feminine affects very little of my behaviour, and I know that confuses men, because I look like a sweet small not-particularly-bright woman and then I open my mouth and tear apart their opinions so hard their grandfathers hurt, but I do so with a sense of relish--I like being a small sweet-looking woman, and it just shows that they're stupid for underestimating me.
So yeah, it breaks my heart that people think that dull resignation is all they can hope for out of gender. My gender, when I get to live it, delights me.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-21 08:33 pm (UTC)This doesn't absolve her of being a dick about my gender presentation, of course--but I think it might be a surprisingly common form of anxiety driving people who nervously police gender-non-conforming folks, because they would be incredibly uncomfortable to get that kind of reception. (Me, I thought it was hilarious when I got mistaken for a boy at about the same age, and was busily yearning after the short haircuts on women in media and "tough" women pretty early on.)
I have a similarly very strong sense of my own gender, which is lucky enough to match my body fine, but is definitively not femme. When I have been hauled into the small sweet looking dynamic, I've been skin-crawlingly uncomfortable and really upset about it. One of the worst experiences of my life was throwing all the femme drag on in order to be matron of honor for my sister, an event in which I basically let other people dress me and dictate how I acted and pretend to be a totally different person in order to let my sister's wedding come off well. I don't think anyone in my family quite understands exactly how awful that was for me to pull off, or how much I conceptualized it both now and at the time as a gift for my sister.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-24 09:41 am (UTC)my horribly postmodern take (cw: nihilism)
Date: 2019-01-19 01:24 pm (UTC)Honestly, this person does not read as trans to me in a traditional sense. If this were like 2013, there would be much better options available to them for grey-area language like trans* or genderqueer or genderfucked... but nowadays, genderqueer is trans and trans* is unnecessary, and genderfucked... just isn't a thing anymore? For some reason? But nowadays in internet discourse, the trans/cis binary is way more black-and-white than it was not too long ago, when it was acceptable to be non-binary or otherwise a big gender-y question mark without being cis or trans.
In terms of practical things to say to such a person, just encourage the adoption and exploration of whatever language. A really low pressure opinion is okay ("this sounds similar to trans narratives" or "this doesn't strike me as how cis people usually feel"), but nothing too definitive (no "I think you're trans"). Definitely offer up some suggestions that maybe they didn't think about:
"there are plenty of ways to be cis, trans, or non-binary, which can be any combination of cis, trans, or neither"
"there have been plenty of ways questionable genders have been described before which do not have to fall under specific umbrellas, for example gendermeh, wtfgender, genderfucked, gendervague, genderqueer, xenogenders, etc"
"you don't have to personally link [these experiences which are normatively associated with gender] with gender
"you can absolutely conceptualize yourself as a gender non-conforming (in identity, not necessarily expression) cis person (or other category) and that's totally okay and entirely your own business... or just go label-less, because the same premise applies that it's no one else's business, no matter what tumblr discoursers say"
Honestly, these kind of ethereal introspective crises of gender go way deeper than this and like... words are meaningless and nonsensical and way too contingent upon specific contexts and assumptions to actually be worth the effort. Do what fulfills you and let it sort itself out in its own time. And</em, most importantly, don't be afraid of being wrong.
Re: my horribly postmodern take (cw: nihilism)
Date: 2019-01-19 08:03 pm (UTC)Re: my horribly postmodern take (cw: nihilism)
Date: 2019-01-25 02:18 pm (UTC)!!!! Is this a thing you've generally/casually observed, or are there specific more broad collections of data, or does it just fit into the more general thrust of the internet towards strict binaries of identity? Either ways I have some Big Feelings about it
Re: my horribly postmodern take (cw: nihilism)
Date: 2019-01-26 04:37 am (UTC)Re: my horribly postmodern take (cw: nihilism)
Date: 2019-01-27 10:40 pm (UTC)I wish I had a more cogent response for this intellectual angle you gave me! I feel like there's some lesson about inclusion and exclusion and the constant give and take in community building, maybe? this precise language issue has also been deeply relevant in my own year and I wouldn't have thought to look, uh, longitudinally at word development within my own queer experience like you have here.
edit: I think what this is also reminding me of is the labeling of historical figures with modern terms, and uhhh the way there is a confusing plurality of identities. Same theme, different timescale, I think.
Re: my horribly postmodern take (cw: nihilism)
Date: 2019-01-28 01:41 am (UTC)I love technology and our interconnected world and this age of information, but culture spreads and develops incredibly quickly now, and it's pretty common for those who were born into this kind of world to forget that not all experiences are actually standardized, and not all people are willing to shed skins they've had their whole lives, just because they're not abiding by the most popular definition anymore. And I say that as a young person who absolutely grew up extremely comfortable with rapidly developing technology--being mindful that history is living, as embodied by real living people who have lived through it, is a learned skill. My rule of thumb for terminology is to keep in mind how the oldest possible living people who have encountered it might understand it, based on its previous usages; after all, a lot of "common knowledge" words and concepts were really only coined in the past decade or two, and it's not unreasonable to account for the existence of somebody who has been out of touch enough for that long to not know about them.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-19 10:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-23 04:33 pm (UTC)I've generally been okay with femme stuff (although I grew up in a family that really didn't push the gendered child-rearing, so a lot of what I hear other people describe as part of being socialized female isn't stuff I got) but I'm also okay with butch stuff - I tend to rotate between 'lacy sweater, prairie skirt' and 'men's corduroys and polo' for my work clothes. And I'm fine identifying as female. But I've always kind of had a sense that 'female and proud of it' was a thing I chose and worked on (because the alternative was siding with the boys who thought girly stuff was gross, and no) rather than because femaleness was some kind of inherent part of me.
(It's also really hard to untangle from my sexual orientation, because so much of explicit femininity, especially for young girls, is still tied to wanting boys and love and romance, and I never did, and never even wanted to want to.)
I feel a sort of joy whenever I get misgendered because I love the idea that I can be, that I'm not locked in to female, and I feel most at home in spaces where I don't have to declare a gender. (The least comfortable I have ever been with being female was when a trans woman friend of mine told me she had always taken me as her model of cis womanhood and my entire soul recoiled at the idea that anybody thought I was a model of cis womanhood and I wore ties and Timberlands for a week because looking at my skirt collection made me feel like I was unintentionally lying.)
And similar to your correspondent, I have no particular feelings about my breasts except being glad they're small enough not to get in the way, and my positive feelings about my genitals I feel like are mostly the result of a conscious process of reclaiming them from the patriarchy; in fantasies I have all sorts of different genitalia.
...spelled out that way that doesn't sound very cis. And yet. I don't have any particular objection to being female or a woman? Whatever, it's fine, it's not worth the trouble of trying to change, and it'd feel weird to push on it next to people who do actually have strong feelings.
Which I think is where your correspondent is coming in repeating that it's "extremely mild". Because yeah, that's it. I don't really feel that strongly about it, or like it really matters that much. It just doesn't feel like it would matter that much if I was amab or anbab either. It's not important?
Probably if I'd lived in a time where binary was the only option, I would have never even questioned being a woman, or a man if by some odd turn of events I'd wound up amab (...except for the bits where it intersects with my sexuality). Probably if I'd lived in a time where nb was unremarkable and required no effort, I'd be that. But I don't live in either of those times, quite. I feel like there's probably more people out there with that total lack of strong inherent gender feelings than most people realize, because the cultural signal overlying it is so strong, and because "I have no strong feelings either way" is not the sort of thing that makes one shout about it in the streets. And those people get really left out of the gender discourse that's all about knowing your 'true' gender that you 'identify' with.
It feels wrong to claim the trans or enby label because... that's not what I've experienced, at all. And because I know if I tried to claim I wasn't cis in the current wider discourse I would be shouted down immediately. But the way people (both trans and cis) describe being cis isn't really me either. So. IDK?
That feelingsdump is probably not helpful to you! But probably the best answer there is something like "It's okay - you should feel what you feel and label it how you want to label it. None of us know what we're doing, basically."
Yup
Date: 2019-01-23 06:59 pm (UTC)On a more... general? theoretical? level: As far as i can tell, you're correct in that there's way more people out there with that total lack of strong inherent gender feelings than most people realize, but that they're not talking about it because of gender binarism, both the woman/man dichotomy and the cis/trans one.
An example: There's a paper about a study done in Israel with about 2000 people, called "Queering gender: studying gender identity in ‘normative’ individual" [pdf]. Here's the graph on the part where they asked how strongly respondants they felt "as a woman" and "as a man" (note that "Queer" here means non-cis):
Another example, related also to what
Re: Yup
Date: 2019-01-23 07:43 pm (UTC)Most of the stuff I said up there about "a woman and proud of it" and so on I phrase that way deliberately because it's very contingent on when and where I grew up (a second-wave-feminist but not super lgbt-aware family & community in the 1980s and early 1990s.) So I got a lot of my early gender awareness via "Girl Power!" sorts of things. If I was twenty years younger and growing up on Tumblr, I'm pretty sure I would have done a lot less work around owning the idea of woman-ness and be a whole lot more wavery about maybe being nb and genderqueer. (Which goes back to the idea of feeling like I'm sort of stuck between a world where femaleness would be default enough to feel fine - which is going away - and a world where nonbinary would be default enough to feel fine - which feels like it's coming - but not really being there either way.) (I've started using "lawful neutral" as my gender when it's fill-in-the-blank.)
That graph is really interesting! Although honestly I have no idea where I would put myself on it, absent cultural factors.
Re: Yup
Date: 2019-01-23 08:05 pm (UTC)Another interesting thing in that graph: No one seems to have put themselves in a 5 in either category.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-24 09:48 am (UTC)Honestly I feel like I’m doing drag anytime I venture too far into Femme territory, not in like, a necessarily upsetting way - it’s usually actually pretty fun but I am very conscious of it being ‘an act’ but it’s SO hard to coherently explain why
no subject
Date: 2019-01-25 04:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-25 08:20 am (UTC)