What Even Are We?

I have had.  A pretty emotional couple of days, here.  I still have so much to backfill on writing about, I need to actually write down some of the events and the general dates, so I can remember to write about them in the coming days.  But sometimes, a number of events collide and draw my attention to that point of intersection between them.  Today's collision occurred at "what even are we?"

Because I thought I knew what I was.  I'm a trans woman!  So, I was designated male at birth, but that was wrong, because I actually identify as female.  One of the only two possible choices, as far as most people in Western cultures understand, so.  Great!  That's me, all sewn up.  But if I say I'm trans, and Quinn says he's trans, but his experience is not mine, is one of us more trans than the other?  Or less?  Am I better at being trans than him?  Very much like the whole TERF War thing, the answer is, "no."  As he says, "not all trans narratives and experiences are the same."

He describes himself as nonbinary, but uses he/him pronouns. If nothing else, that, right there, confuses the shit out of me.  I'm not here to challenge him, or try to say that he's wrong.  Not at all.  Here, too, I recognize that the problem is not his gender identity or expression.  It's my (in)capacity to understand it.  My reaction isn't good, because it's a confused one.  But it's not bad, because it's not an angry or fearful or violent one.

Much worse than that, though, is how the general population, who is, by and large, cisgender, sees us.  Here is a tasteful example of the kinds of messages a trans woman can expect to get when she is dating. Not only does this guy, I imagine, have no real idea how to approach women in general, he has not even the slightest clue what he's on about when he wants to approach a trans woman.  I mean, he literally doesn't even know how to refer to me.  Predictably, when called on it, he gets defensive.

People can get defensive when they feel like they've done nothing wrong, and are being attacked for it.  Even if, when called on the wrong thing that they've done, they start to see how and why it's wrong; because of the nature of the dialogue, and the subject, the conversation is adversarial.  And I'm disappointed in myself for going so heavily on the offensive that there was no room for him to actually realize how painful it is to be treated like that constantly, to connect and identify with that, and to ask why things are like that.  To ask how he can help.

But this guy probably just legitimately has no idea at all that trans women struggle.  That we're not rare, beautiful, exotic birds, which, maybe, if one is very lucky, can be caught or tamed or touched just once in a lifetime.  That we're people.  That, because we're not the norm, we're punished in a variety of ways.  Among them, being murdered without repercussion because someone basically didn't like that we were trans.  It's like some guy you've never met before just sidling up to you while you're caught in a firefight in a warzone, while all your people are dead or dying around you, asking if you wanna go the mall later and maybe get some Indian from the food court.  How out of touch can someone be?

To be fair, a large part of why I blew up on him had very little to do with him.  Ordinarily, given our match/enemy numbers, I would've just ignored the message, or maybe put it up on my tumblr, but without any response.  But I'd just been through about an hour-long emotional barfnado which was chiefly characterized by me shaking, with tears in my eyes, while trying to write a response to a post I found from another trans woman.  I was very upset.

I had initially planned to repurpose a lot of what I said there into a standalone text post here.  But then I thought, if I rearrange my portion for clarity, the sense of my struggle to even articulate it would be lost.  So would the frustration of that, of writing to someone to communicate with them, but being unable to find the words. That also is where the tone lies, I think.  It reads less like expository, and more like a scene.  There's a lot of passion to it, and a lot of pain, in both parts.  I had also spent most of that hour, ultimately, getting to the point that her voice mattered, and that we need her to keep using it, so I thought it would be extra hypocritical if I turned around and just summarized her post to set mine up, or something.

It's not just that the different viewpoints matter.  It's that there are different viewpoints at all, and that they all matter.  The trans story in the mass media right now is very rudimentary.  It's like watching a JPG load over dial-up.

Oh, right, I turned 40 yesterday.

Anyway.  Right now, "transgender," in the mainstream media, means, what.  Bruce Jenner?  Chaz Bono? Laverne Cox?  Lana Wachowski?  Their stories are their stories, so they have that inherent value.  I'm not going to try to convince anyone that my story is more important than any of theirs, or more necessary.  But I will argue that it is as least as important as theirs, and at least as necessary.  Because the trans experience is only very rarely defined by wealthy celebrities.

If you're a black male, which celebrity defines you?  Denzel Washington?  Laurence Fishburne?  Maybe someone younger.  Jaden Smith?  But if you're a black male in America, your experience is almost certainly light years away from that.  It is, depressingly, probably quite a lot closer to Eric Garner's.  Or Trayvon Martin's.  Or Jonathan Ferrell's.

My experience as a trans woman is not even remotely close to the celebrity trans experience.  Most of us don't have the resources for clinically proven effective treatments for our gender dysphoria.  Some, like Zaira Quispe, try dangerous "back alley" measures.  Some, like Leelah Alcorn, kill themselves.  Far too many, like Penny Proud, are murdered.  Stories like Legacy's on tumblr are commonplace.

Celebrity stories are the book jacket.  They're the synopsis on the inside flap.  They're still people.  But so are we.  They still matter.  But so do we.  There are so many more stories, and without them, the trans experience is not defined.  It can barely even be understood.  It's a couple of big blocks of different colors that might be trying to represent a cow, or maybe an airplane, or love.  Who can even tell?  We need more blocks, higher resolution.  We need the rest of the picture to load.  We need more pages.  We need more stories.  And we need them to be heard.

A Now-Open Letter to Any TERF

I corresponded briefly with a girl who is, for lack of a better term, a TERF.  She never responded to my last letter, which is too bad.  I’m not going to post her reply to my previous note, which prompted this one, because it was a private Ask.  But, I will share what I sent back to her with all of you, because I wrote it, and I think it’s important.

In her last note to me, she had essentially said that she very strongly resents males trying to define womanhood to her, and that women deserve a way to sort themselves by shared oppressions, and safe spaces in which to discuss issues specific to themselves.  That, like other trans women, I am male, and that I (and other trans women) are trying to tell her that the word “woman” is not for her or other women to use anymore, but for us (trans women) instead.

Here, more or less, is my reply:

I agree, I also would resent males trying to define womanhood to me.  I would resent anyone doing that.  I don’t know what other trans women may have said or been reported to have said, but for my part, I am not interested in telling anyone that the word “woman” is no longer theirs.  I am interested in bringing everyone’s definition to the expanded place that includes women like me.  It is not a zero-sum game.  Acknowledging that I am a woman will not make you less of one.

I am not a man who believes he is a woman. I am a woman who believed she was a man.  I do find it ironic that your issue is with someone else telling you what your gender means in terms of fitting into larger society, but that that is the very thing you are then doing to trans women.

Trans women have quite a lot in common with cis women insofar as how society treats them.  Yes, our childhoods were different.  But I also don’t know any trans woman who would not give anything to be able to go back and have an even slightly more authentic-feeling girl’s childhood.  If you are a cis woman, you cannot understand the hell that is gender dysphoria.  You can sympathize, but you cannot empathize.  It is something I would not wish on anyone.

So I again agree with you, we deserve a way to categorize ourselves by our shared oppression.  Trans women have many experiences that distinguish them from cis women.  The difference matters enough to be worth thinking of these two groups of people as two separate groups, in some instances.  But they have many more things in common than they have differences, so it is more useful more often to think of them as one general category of people: women.

Being groomed to be oppressed from birth is probably the single greatest difference between your childhood and mine.  But, sadly, it does not take long before the publicly out trans woman experiences the vast majority of daily misogynistic microaggressions and more minor sexual assaults, the kind that are still incredibly damaging, but too common to take the time trying to report when, most likely, nothing will come of it anyway.

I was groped on the street in December.  I have my pepper spray, and I’ve been keeping myself prepared to deal with a direct physical assault of any kind.  But I was not prepared for someone walking the opposite direction to just reach out and run his hand along my crotch, across my thigh to the outside of my leg, and then just keep on walking, never breaking pace even slightly.

I had never in my life experienced anything remotely that vile.  I think I was in shock, because I was so confused by the unexpected nature of the assault.  I ended up getting on my bus and going to school anyway, because it was finals week, and I could not be late.  But it did some very real and lasting damage.  I could not focus for at least a week.  At all.  I was hypervigilant for over a month.  I am far more uneasy around unfamiliar men than I was before that, and the catcalls that were previously just annoying are terrifying, now.

I had involuntary and grossly intrusive thoughts that disgusted me, and left me feeling like a disgusting sub-human for having them.  Sometimes the thoughts would also arouse me, which made me feel even more disgusting, because all of it was out of my control.  All of it.  These thoughts would just show up, and destroy hours of my life because I could not focus on anything else when they arrived.  Perfect timing, right at the start of finals week.  My therapist tells me that all of that is normal in response to sexual assault.

It was barely three months since I was out publicly as trans.  Three months.  That’s how long it took for someone to sexually violate me.  Yes, it was a very minor assault, as sexual assaults go.  But people who have never experienced one at all have no idea the kind of deep and lasting psychological damage even a minor sex assault can have.  It really does not take long before the trans woman is living the same day-to-day experiences as any other woman of her ethnic background and social status.

Except that sometimes, people call her a man.

So, I’ll leave you with this question.  Who decides what you are?  Are you what you say you are, or are you what other people call you?