Tag: genderbox
bc that one post about attachment to womanhood is still hurting people’s feelings, let’s keep talking about it.
radical feminist notions of gender socialization correctly frame it as a traumatizing process. a contradiction arises, in that case, when they assign positive moral traits to female socialization (and femininity by extension) because, much like society in general, they believe that an ideally traumatized woman is able to access moral high grounds that other people cannot. “i was socialized female” becomes an admission of guaranteed prosociality, a set of traits that are only ever harmful because they are at risk of exploitation via external forces.
this is why many radical feminists view trans men as safer & more politically enlightened than trans women – because of their proximity (imagined or otherwise) to femaleness, to daintiness, to softness and benevolence. “male socialization” is synonymous with antisociality, and becomes lobbied at trans women as a whole when individual trans women do things that radical feminists deem “unwomanly,” from having controversial political opinions to committing violent crime. the gender socialization model becomes a way to moralize sex assignment by prescriptively linking particular experiences of trauma to particular personality outcomes. it is no longer a theoretical framework meant to honestly and meticulously analyze how children become gendered subjects. it is now used to reproduce the very gender roles that proponents of the framework claim to be against.
i also. uh. i wouldn’t mind a little testosterone mediated puberty as a chaser to the estrogen kind, but unfortunately the key point there is “a little” and i don’t have much faith in the medical ability to titrate that
weirdly i’ve like–– mentally being doing a lot of Well I Guess I’m Just A Girl After All, Going To Have To Live With It I Guess, Look How I’m Wearing This Boatneck Sweater, and also like………. i visually parse myself as “pretty/scornful boy” and also i am like definitely uh––
idk. at a certain point it’s not as important to me to perpetually query my internal experiences for validity as it is to try to stake out an oppositional life and try to unmake/fray the genderedness of my interpersonal experience and that’s trans enough frankly
How to pass in public as a gender the public doesn’t know about
i’m @ LAX and first i bewildered the pre-check person by saying i was traveling with [chinchilla]— she looked between us a few times in confusion and then said to him “oh, you want to travel with your brother!” which is a new one
then i had to go through the scanner twice because apparently they read me as male, noted “chest anomalies”, and then heard my voice, asked if i’d wanted to be scanned as male or female, and then sent me through again when i said female to avoid a pat down
so uh on the one hand just the barest glimpse of the gnc travel dystopia in which people evaluate your body for Danger and Categorizability
on the other hand i “”pass”” “”sometimes”” and getting read as [brothers] instead of [relationship word static] feels very uh gay rite of passage and is kind of hilarious since of course we look nothing alike
we’ve gone pretty far off the rails with the Dysphoria Question, mostly because we’ve lost track of what gender dysphoria is.
gender dysphoria is not another name for ‘the state of being transgender’. it is not a concept transgender people have developed to describe themselves, their subjective experiences, or their day to day lives.
gender dysphoria is, specifically, a psychiatric diagnosis—a recent one. it has existed only since the DSM-5 was issued in 2013 as a reclassification of its predecessor, gender identity disorder, which itself first appeared in 1980 with the DSM-III. being a psychiatric diagnosis, gender dysphoria definitionally frames transness as some kind of pathology.
this should be easy to intuit and reject, and the only reason we haven’t is because we’re still preoccupied with the idea that trans is something you simply are rather than something you do. our transness takes shape and acquires consequence in relation to the world; it is a certain set of behaviors and relationships to our selves, our bodies, and others that place us in opposition to gender as a social system, in relatively consistent ways. that’s all.
we continue to fixate on the idea of an essential transness because it gives us comfort, as well as the easiest answers. it is easiest—when we’re confronted with the hardest parts of being transgender and find ourselves asking why we put ourselves through this—to say that we simply have to, full stop, rather than implicate the organizational principles of the world around us and our own orientation with respect to them. all of us are looking for consistency in our personal narratives, for a reason we are they way we are, and for a means of justifying our transness to ourselves and those around us.
to that effect, controversy among trans people over the question, “do you need gender dysphoria to be trans” is an internalization and continuance of the older, more explicitly pathologizing taxonomies of transess through which we’ve had to navigate the healthcare system—the other big place we’ve had to justify ourselves. are we crossdressers or transsexuals? are we true transsexuals or autogynephiles? are we gender-conforming or gender-nonconforming? will we have gay or straight relationships? do we meet the criteria for a gender identity disorder diagnosis—and, accordingly, have access to healthcare—or not?
none of those questions have ever been centered around trans people. they are questions asked by a cissexist society to itself as it resists processing trans people, who are themselves too disenfranchised to do anything about it.
this is why so many of our answers to the Dysphoria Question are so unsatisfying. it can’t be solved by expanding the scope of gender dysphoria, by creating a feel-good parallelism of ‘gender euphoria’, or by a simple ‘no’. the whole question, and the history in which it’s grounded, has to be rejected out of hand. the answer to the question, “do you need gender dysphoria to be trans” is not, “no, because transness can mean anything”. the answer is no—because transness is a way of living, in relation to yourself and the world, and no one needs a psychiatric diagnosis to live a trans life.
I feel like I wrote a post maybe abt a few months to half a year ago abt the fact that in both my experience and a lot of people’s I know that binding/tucking regularly can have a sort of shelf life of a set amount of years before it can lead to some bodily issues and you have to like find some other way of addressing the issue (looser clothes, surgery, whatever)
And I guess the issue that I’m coming across now is that I’ve seen a certain set of people who… I guess the word ‘fixate’ might apply here, so they fixate on like the “risks” of (usually exclusively) binding and this has sort of been focused primarily on these risks to “the children” or whatever. I’ve seen a lot of this from a certain sort of ‘radical feminist’ adjacent ideological position and like, I want to note some issues and clarify where I was coming from when I wrote that post.
So! As other people have noted, focusing exclusively on binding here like… illuminates some things. Like, this “for the health of the children” perspective doesn’t get applied the same way to underwire bras, compression bras, ‘push up’ bras, ya know? Further, most of the time people aren’t talking about the unregulated carcinogens that are given to children in the form of makeup. And like, if we are gonna talk about harmful physical situations that could negatively affect children into the future, the focus on something associated w gender nonconformity and transness as opposed to say, the use of laptops and widespread use of cell phones (here I’m talking abt wrist and back damage) is revealing. All of these things are potentially harmful long term, and many of these have a much larger number of people they might potentially cause long term damage to.
When I’ve talked about these sorts of issues with long term binding/tucking, I do not think that the solution is to tell people not to do these things. I mean, I think giving people information so that they might do them in a way that lengthens the amount of time they might be able to do them, or do them safely, some sort of harm reduction – these are the sorts of ideas I have in mind. But the primary issue is that binding/tucking are in many ways responses to the social reception of bodies.
So what I’m saying is that the long term resolution of the problems with these actions is to try to make a society where they are not necessary in order to not get misgendered, where the equivalence of certain body parts and certain genders is no longer pervasive. I find with many of the people who are hand wringing over the effects of binding, that they are also not willing to try to create a social system where bodies and certain body parts are not equivalent or determinative of certain genders.
And of course, that is a (very) long term solution, one that is not going to happen within our lifetimes. So I don’t think we should strand every single person alive in a situation where some sort of future solution is offered for their present issues. So in my mind, the solution to the long term potentially harmful effects of binding or tucking would be to open up access to medical interventions that would make these sorts of practices unnecessary (such as breast reduction, mastectomies, orchiectomies on demand/w informed consent). If we want to keep people from doing things long term that might have harmful consequences, but we also don’t want to strand them w constant social danger (psychologically or physically) then you have to allow people to make decisions w their bodies to avoid these long term consequences! But for the most part, once again, many of the people who are very concerned abt the long term consequences are also opposed to the opening up on medical interventions that would result in people not needing to do these practices, calling them ‘mutilations’ or worrying that young people accessing them thru informed consent shouldn’t be allowed to.
So what I’m basically saying here is that many people who are ‘concerned’ about the health concerns of these practices are not offering any sort of long, medium, or short term solution, rather than brow-beating people for trying to do their best in a shitty society. I just want to make clear that my position on binding/tucking doesn’t follow the same sort of solutions or the same sort of perspective. In many ways, somewhat the opposite. And its hard because talking about these things can become a way for the “concerned” to try to guilt/scare/pressure people out of things they wish people wouldn’t do, w basically no solution other than I guess the secular version of praying it away.
there is no position from which paranoia about so-called ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ makes sense. even if you assume that gender dysphoria is wholly biological and should be medicalized, it is logical to conclude that adolescents who know transgender people or are educated about trans issues are more likely to come out as trans themselves, rather than stay in the closet, and seek healthcare. in preventative medicine, this is called ‘awareness’. it is considered, believe it or not, a good thing.
alternatively, you could choose to pay attention to what trans scholars, activists, and laypeople have been saying for at least twenty years and start from the assumption that gender and transness are (to every meaningful extent) biopolitical and social in nature. in that case, it makes even more sense that a teenager with a solid support system that includes gay and trans people would feel more comfortable exploring how they inhabit their bodies, how they imagine themselves in relation to their assigned gender and gender roles, how they are feeling throughout their puberty and sexual experiences, and generally what makes them happy when they look in the mirror and walk outside. this, too, is a good thing.
it’s also what happened to me eleven or twelve years ago after meeting R., a latina trans woman in her early forties and friend of my mother, around whom i learned words for things i’d been feeling for as long as i could remember. i lacked the institutional backing to act on those feelings as a pre-teen, but i would spend the next seven years with them as they came into sharpening focus. this would happen again not long afterward, when i started associating with other gay (and closeted!) kids and acquired the language and knowledge to articulate my sexuality for the first time at about 13 or 14. gay kids find each other, one way or another. it’s how we’ve always coped with adolescence in a heterosexist world.
i would hope that no one could take seriously the assertion that this is a story about me being brainwashed by older gay people and other gay kids into making rash and socially unacceptable decisions about where to put my body. this itself, though, raises the most important point i want to make here: that the idea of pathogenic sexual degeneracy spreading through teenagers and using gay and queer people as a vector feels familiar.
ten to fifteen years ago, certain gay liberals of relative privilege were able to escape that vise by appealing to biology—that, yes, they were gay and this may well have been in opposition to traditional American values (or not), but they were ‘born this way’. claiming that no one on earth would choose to be gay, liberal gay activism apologized for itself and said, effectively, “we would change if we could, but we can’t, and that’s why you have to accept us”.
in fact, i would argue that the liberal gay community, by banking so completely on ‘born this way’ politics, is itself partially culpable for the ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ mess in which we’ve now found ourselves. by abandoning the radical position that gay people should be respected regardless of why homosexuality exists, and by retreating into largely baseless biological essentialism, liberal gay activism handed the question and its baggage off to less marketable, gender-divergent gay and queer people.
only a few years later, those people—trans people—are now reckoning with the exact same arguments. the difference is that, this time around, the homophobia and transphobia has folded liberal bioessentialism into its own line of reasoning. it’s not about gay kids being lured away from family values and recruited into the ‘gay lifestyle’; it’s about so-called fad transsexualism that harms both those who are ‘recruited’ and those the medical institution has deemed ‘born this way’ and worthy of respect and healthcare. moreover, the argument is coming not just from open reactionaries and fundamentalists, but from an institutional source far more difficult to discredit and far more capable of dismantling the gains we’ve made in healthcare access over the past twenty years.
there has only ever been one way out of this: to stop asking why gay and trans people exist, stop asking what we are doing with our bodies, and start asking how we are doing and how our lives could be made easier.
must a sport be entertaining to watch? 