“Doin Transgender Rong”

I interrupt this unannounced hiatus to bring you: New Thoughts On Gender! Part one of two.

One of the things that I realised last time I saw my practically-nonexistent therapist was that I do not particularly care to explain my gender identity to other people. I may have attempted it occasionally on this blog, and that time I came out to my parents, but as of recent months I have taken to just saying “These are my pronouns okay have fun.” I check too many boxes on the list of genders in too many complicated ways, and in a world that barely accepts the existence of trans people at all, it’s not worth it to elaborate.

Problems arise in the combination of wanting my gender to be respected but also being nonbinary; if I explain that I am neither a girl nor a boy, then I get people thinking they can keep calling me “she,” if I tell them I am a BOY OKAY A FREAKING HE-MAN until they remember to call me “he” then I am not being true to my gender either. So I solve this dilemma by being really, really loud about being Transgender.

Gender seems like a private thing to me, or at least, it can be. I’ll tell you what pronouns to use, but you don’t need to know the intimate details of what my gender is. I’m not even sure I could tell them it if someone asked. How I want to be treated, what I would like my body to be like, these things I can answer. “What are you,” as I was asked (or rather, shouted at) today in the hallway, not so much.

But I worry about it, too. One of the core messages of most binary trans activists is, “I am a woman/man. Not a transwoman/transman.” That’s the desire: for the gender, not the transness to be seen. And I wonder if I am hurting their efforts by being so loud about my transness and silent about my gender. Except they’re hurting me with their methods, too. The trans community, inasmuch as one can be said to exist, in a lot of ways unintentionally sabotages other members who have a different experience, because it’s so huge and encompassing. Eddie Izzard describes himself as transgender, same as I do. Yet our experiences haven’t got a whole lot in common (except for liking to wear pretty dresses and speaking French).

Sadly I don’t think society is going to reach a level of understanding that can handle the idea of many kinds of trans people existing in the near future.

I guess the message of this is, “Being that we exist outside episodes of Oprah, trans people are a varied lot, not one-dimensional copies of each other!” *throws about rainbow glitter*

The “Justin Bieber is a Girl” Jokes are Not Funny

I logged on to Facebook the other day to see this status on my news feed:

“Why are so many people mean to Justin Bieber? People really just need to leave her alone.” This status was then liked by 12 other people, including a few people I really expected better from. One person commented, “You mean leave it alone.”

The amount of “lol Justin Bieber is a girl” references really, really bother me. So I’m going to attempt to deconstruct them.

The first thing that I find “interesting” about the phenomenon is that it doesn’t seem to be a girl=gay case. A lot of the time, calling a man a girl is meant to implicate gayness, like being a queen. Although there are people who mean that, I don’t think it’s the majority, as aside from his “girly” appearance and voice, his most recognizable feature is boatloads of adoring female fans. The fact that he’s young probably also affects this; though kids wouldn’t care about implying someone his age is gay, in the minds of most people Justin Bieber falls in the pre-sexual, prepubescent category.

It might be that it’s a case of people devaluing male femininity (and by extension, femininity in general) as frivolous, weak, and lesser. That’s almost certainly part of it, with many people trying to undermine him by writing him off as girly and not masculine enough.

But there’s another part of the Justin Bieber jokes that fall solidly into the category of transphobic: the jokes aren’t just saying “He’s feminine.” They’re saying, “He is actually a girl,” by which they mean having a vagina/high-pitched voice/estrogen/etc. And that because he has a high voice and a female-looking appearance, he is not a boy. What makes me think this is transphobia is the fact that you get whole comment threads of people using female pronouns, or even more egregiously, “it” for him. It’s like using “he” and “it” to refer to Ann Coulter to delegitimize her as a woman by implying that being trans is Very Bad.

I don’t particularly like Justin Bieber’s music, either. But seriously, if you think his music is immature, call it that, instead of making it a comment that implies being a feminine man or a trans man is terrible.

School Policy: Slut-shaming

Where I live, the temperatures have risen from the mid-forties to the mid-seventies and eighties in the timespan of about a week. With this in mind, our principals took the opportunity to remind my high school of the appropriate rules for dress, stressing emphatically that shirt sleeves must – ABSOLUTELY MUST – cover the entire shoulder.

In the short term, this created a buzz around school, mostly from girls, who wondered, “Why is it just us who they target?” “Aren’t saggy shorts bad too?” “I thought the policy was that sleeves have to be three fingers wide, did they change it?” and above all, “Does this cover enough of my shoulder that I won’t get in trouble?”

What became evident, however, was that the answer to the last question depended more on who was wearing the shirt than the width of the sleeve. Girls who date, who are not upper-middle class, who have sex, who are not white, and who have lower grades are targeted far more often. I have seen teachers talk to an upper-middle class girl with good grades wearing spaghetti straps without mentioning it and then walk across the cafeteria to call out a girl with poor grades and a reputation for having lots of boyfriends wearing the same shirt.

The girls who get called out on this are those who lack popular support in school and who have low test scores. Many are seen as stupid sluts by the student body. With neither grades nor student support to back them up, the administration can safely chastise these girls for wearing “slutty” and “inappropriate” clothing without fear of backlash.

It is very disturbing, although not really surprising, that even the adults in charge of the school are complicit in widespread shaming of girls who aren’t considered essential enough. To pretend that the rules are fairly applied to everyone is dishonest. I am rapidly discovering, as I talk to school leaders more, that as long as the words look fair on paper, the manner in which they are enforced is less than important to some of them. As they see it, the people they are going after are hardly going to affect them in anyway.

The heads at schools wonder why these girls don’t seem to listen to them, why they ignore them and continue to do whatever they were doing before. But what do they have to gain from obeying the organization that sees them as nothing more than hopeless sluts?

Gender Guessing

Pre-scriptum – To the person who inspired this post, I’m not trying to rag on you! You just made me coalesce my thoughts on something that’s been bugging me in general for a long time.

People gender other people all the time. Along with race and apparent age, (perceived) gender is one of the first things that you notice about someone when you meet them. It’s pretty much instantaneous, unless you’ve trained yourself very hard not to do so. The only time people tend to notice that they are gendering people, however, is when they come across someone they can’t instantly categorize based on physical appearance. The point of asking, “Is that a guy or a girl?”

To start, this is irritating as it presumes binary gender, but also implied is a level of cissexism. Although some people may ask this really meaning “I wonder what this person’s gender identity is,” the vast majority of times, the meaning is “Was this person born with a penis or a vagina?” The answer to which is always, “None of your business.”

Realistically speaking, I can’t ask people to stop gendering everyone. Goodness knows I wish I could, having lived through the painful time of looking like one gender-normative person and feeling like another. But there are improvements that can be made that I don’t find to unreasonable.  If you see someone who is gender-ambiguous walking down the street and find yourself wondering about their gender, STOP. Just backtrack and forcibly turn your thoughts elsewhere. You’re never going to see them again, their gender doesn’t matter to you.

If you’re in a situation where you need to know a person’s gender, things can get a bit more awkward, but my suggestion is to ask. Do it politely and privately. Regardless of potential uncomfortableness, doing it this way is much better than guessing and finding out later that you were wrong. 

I won’t pretend this is a perfect solution, or that I know what such a solution would be.  But it will help make the path a little easier for gender non-normative folks out there.

Mini-linkspam for IDAHO…t

I haven’t got anything witty to say about this other than what others have said, so instead here’s some things related to homophobia and transphobia I’ve read in the past week that I happen to still have links to. Also, yeah, I’m late. Ah well.

IDAHO: A Plea for Honest Initiatives – THIS. Just this, so much. Either make transphobia a serious issue to address in the day, or come up with another separate day for it; don’t give nominal support only.

Transphobia in Family Guy - Just in case anyone has forgotten that trans people are still a lolworthy joke for majority culture.

Barney Frank’s trans failure – To translate, “We’re totes including trans people in the bill! It’s just that we’re not going to include the protections they actually need!”

Killings of gays in Mexico increases – Speaks for itself. This could probably apply to many other places besides Mexico.