Algorithms of dysphoria

I am one of those fortunate trans people who don’t experience a lot of dysphoria around their gender. Really, for years now I’ve been in a place where I go long periods without thinking about my gender at all (which makes a certain kind of sense since I’m pretty much agender, to be honest. Why would I spend time thinking about something that doesn’t exist?*)

The dysphoria I do experience is mostly (maybe entirely?) social rather than physical/bodily – which is to say, I can and do experience discomfort related to my gender when I am misgendered (explicitly or implicitly), but my body itself isn’t a source of dysphoria for me. This makes me very lucky, because it means I can, and do, escape from sources of dysphoria on a regular basis. It’s a lot harder to run away from your own body.

But still, when you get right down to it, social and physical dysphoria aren’t as easily separable as all that. And this is an important point, because there are people who like to gatekeep non-dysphoric trans people, or solely socially dysphoric people from being considered Really Trans (TM). There’s a related misconception that direct physical dysphoria (that is, discomfort with one’s own body) is the only reason someone would pursue medical transition (hormones, surgery, etc.) – the true hallmark of being Really Trans.

Reality is, of course, far more complicated than that.

In fact, if I experience dysphoria because the shape of body causes people to misgender me, even though the *best* solution would be to teach people not to do that, the more expedient solution is still be medical intervention to my body (who wants to wait through the several generations it’s likely to take for the general population to get comfortable with trans people in general, let alone non-binary genders?) But in many cases, even if there are doctors near you that work with trans people in the first place, depending on the model of care they follow, simply being non-binary, being someone who experiences primarily social forms of dysphoria, could make you ineligible for their help.

So people who don’t experience the “right” kind of dysphoria can be stuck in a feedback loop of gatekeeping, they’re not Really Trans because we don’t seek medical intervention, but we often times *can’t* seek medical intervention, on the grounds of not being Really Trans

Ouch.

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*this is mostly facetious. Being gendered all the time when you’re agender can be pretty uncomfortable.

Gender Perspectives Vol. 21

[In the Gender Perspectives series, I aim to highlight diverse kinds of personal narratives and reflections on gender, gender presentation, and identity, to broaden the gender conversation and boost a variety of voices. Check out the rest of the series.]

My gender | Aut of Spoons

I don’t know what gender IS.

How can I know what my gender is, if I don’t know what gender is?

On Coming Out Day this year, I said that I was “less cis than originally advertised.” I don’t know what that means. Perhaps gender is the collection of attributes that are most important to you; your defining characteristics. Your core identity. Why have a word for it, if not your name? Gender Olivia?

Transition, trans becoming | The dancing trans

The process of transition is defined and controlled by cis people in a way that denies transness to many, many trans people. However, we are all still slowly becoming our genders and that, for us trans folks, is our transition, cis-sanctioned or not.

Carve Me Like a Pumpkin | The Junkie Comsonaut

I am preparing my body for surgery, and it is almost there. My brain needs some more time. Anticipating the damage and the aftermath still makes me queasy, but I’ll cope. I want this. I want what it will get me.

The ‘Shit Cis People Say’ Alphabet: Z is for “Ze”

Welcome to another episode of the Shit Cis People Say Alphabet! Today:

Z is for “ze”

We’re going out on a high note, friends! Thankfully not everything cis people say about trans people is bad or wrong or transphobic all the time. Sometimes cis people actually respect and support us(!). Sometimes they use the correct pronouns, even when they’re new or unfamiliar ones, like ‘ze’.

Cis people, you are not doomed to be the people that this series has been about! Although this series only pulled in one person who felt the need to make sure *I* know that #NotAllCis people are like this, it’s probably worth stating it explicitly here. If you’ve found yourself reflected in one or more of the posts here, you can use it as a learning opportunity, and decide to do better going forward. If nothing I’ve written has been a personal call-out to you, then you’re probably pretty good at supporting trans people, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t also still have room to grow.

If you care about trans people, please keep on actively listening to as wide a variety of trans voices as you can, and never stop learning!

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Check out the rest of the “Shit Cis People Say” alphabet!

Phew, and that’s the end of this saga, just one day shy of the anniversary of when I put up “A is for Attention”. So all in all, this series took twice as long as I originally intended it to. I’m ok with it!

The ‘Shit Cis People Say’ Alphabet: Y is for “you’re too Young”

Welcome to another episode of the Shit Cis People Say Alphabet! Today:

Y is for ‘you’re too Young’

A common way that young trans people have their identity invalidated by cis people by being told they’re ‘too young’ to know they’re trans.

Yet somehow, I’ve never heard tell of any cisgender child being told they’re too young to know their gender. Cis children have their gender identities reinforced and supported all the time, every day, but for some reason the second a child’s professed gender is different from what we expected, we decide that it’s too early to tell for sure what their gender is.

I’ve actually written about this before, and one of the things that makes this argument seem particularly disingenuous is the fact that when someone’s no longer ‘too young’ to know they’re trans, they’re very often ‘too old’ to just be coming out now, because they should have known sooner.

Yes, I know that sometimes children identify temporarily with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, before finally settling into a cisgender identity. But you know what? For every cisgender child who goes through a ‘trans phase’, there’s a transgender adult who went through a ‘cis phase’ in their childhood, too.

So if you’re going to use age to invalidate someone’s professed identity, you’d better do so across the board, because some of those apparently cis kids most definitely aren’t (and I suspect they outnumber the kids who are going through a ‘trans phase’). If it’s damaging to let a child explore their gender as they experience it in the moment, lest they wind up identifying differently in the future, then we’d better prevent all children from doing it.

People often suggest that letting a child with a penis wear dresses for a while might embarrass him later if he does, in fact, wind up identifying as a boy. But again, pretty much 100% of all trans people have to deal with this as it is, so if this is something you are genuinely concerned about, you’d better avoid gendering all children all the time.

You can’t have it both ways. Either children can know their gender or not, but all children may be going through a temporary ‘phase’, not just the ones who are telling you that they were assigned the wrong gender. It seems that for the most part, we accept that kids can and do know their genders, so let’s just extend the same autonomy to trans children that cis kids enjoy every day.

Ultimately, no matter how many times any child – cis or trans – changes their mind about what their gender is, the best thing you can do for them is always to respect and support them.

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Check out the rest of the “Shit Cis People Say” alphabet!

The ‘Shit Cis People Say’ Alphabet: X is for “XX or XY”

Welcome to another episode of the Shit Cis People Say Alphabet! Today:

X is for “XX or XY”

One of the ways transphobic cis people try to invalidate trans people is by insisting that our gender is determined by our chromosomes, that everyone is either XX or XY, all people with XX chromosomes have vaginas, and are women, and all people with XY chromosomes have penises and are men, and that’s that. Cis folks like to think they’re being rational and scientific by appealing to biology in this way, but the truth is that these claims are incorrect on literally every level – there are other chromosomal arrangements, even the binary XX/XY system doesn’t have a 1-to-1 correspondence with genital development (and of course, genitals don’t have a 1-to-1 correspondence with gender), most people don’t even know their chromosomes in the first place, and that’s definitely not how we gender babies, among other things.

If you’re making a claim to chromosomes to justify your transphobia, I honestly don’t think you’re even trying to understand what you’re talking about, and so my motivation to write rebuttals for this is minimal, and I find myself bored before I even start. So, in lieu of rewriting all the explanations for why ‘but *chromosomes*!!!!’ isn’t a refutation of trans people’s identities, here’s a couple of recommended reads instead:

Transgender People and ‘Biological Sex’ Myths | Julia Serano

Chromosomes: cis expectations vs. trans reality | Zinnia Jones, Gender Analysis

Happy reading!

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The ‘Shit Cis People Say’ Alphabet: W is for “womyn-born-womyn”

Welcome to another episode of the Shit Cis People Say Alphabet! Today:

W is for “womyn-born-womyn”

Womyn-born-womyn (sometimes just spelled women-born-women) is a category some radical feminists created in order to exclude trans women from their feminism. Those of us who don’t exclude trans women from our feminism sometimes refer to these exclusionists as Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFs for short.

The entire concept of womyn-born-womyn (in the ways that TERFs mean and use it) would be ridiculous if it wasn’t used to harm so many women every day.

“Womyn-born-womyn” was coined with the apparent intent of meaning the same thing as ‘cisgender women’, before the popularization of the word cisgender (although the people who use the phrase womyn-born-womyn generally consider cis to be a slur (we talked about that one a while back), and have not adopted it).

Of course, the use of the phrase “womyn-born-womyn” with the intent of excluding trans women is based on an incorrect understranding of trans women’s gender, since, just like most cis women, many trans women were born girls (no one is really born a woman – we talked about that already as well) – trans women simply weren’t assigned the correct gender at birth.

On top of this, the folks who use the phrase womyn-born-womyn aren’t just incorrectly including trans women from that category – very often events that are purportedly limited to “womyn-born-womyn” are actually welcoming to trans men and non-binary people who were assigned female at birth. This tells us what “womyn-born-womyn” is really meant to signify, which is quite simply “people with vulvas”.

I honestly hate everything about “womyn-born-womyn” rhetoric, but I am particularly baffled by the way trans exclusionary radical feminists, who do in theory have a problem with women and women’s roles being defined by their genitalia, who believe that we are so much more than a letter on our birth certificate, being so damn biologically essentialist about gender anyway.

So yes, although the phrase “womyn-born-womyn” does not seem like it necessarily has to be transphobic, know that it’s usage is very much actively and deliberately transmisogynist.

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A positive book review for once!

I seem to only write about books on here when they annoy or anger me. (I do write good reviews when my librarian hat is on, for the record!) Today, you get a reprieve from my negativity!

Ever since I read the trainwreck of a book that was Understanding Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation, I’ve been lowkey on the lookout for a schoolkid-appropriate book that actually addresses transgender people in a thorough and respectful way.

And today I found one!

Identifying as Transgender, by Sara Woods, is part of Rosen Publishing’s “Transgender Life” series (it being part of a series on trans issues is mostly why the title is a little awkward, I think?), and I’m clearly going to need to check out the rest of the series, because this one kind of knocks it out of the park!

Things this book does that I love include:

• Talking about being cisgender on the same level as talking about being transgender, so transgender people are not actively othered.
  

  Everyone, transgender and cisgender alike, has a gender identity. A cisgender person is a person whose gender identity is consistent with their assigned gender… Transgender people, on the other hand, have gender identities that do not match the genders assigned to them at birth. (pg. 7)

• Actively and consistently acknowledging non-binary genders throughout (non-binary people are included throughout, and not just as a side-note which is thereafter forgotten).
• Acknowledging the diversity of trans experiences generally.
  

  Some trans women come to identify as women after many years of life, while others identify as girls when they are toddlers. (pg. 8)

  The painful experience of dysphoria has many sources and impacts many transgender people. But it is not universal. Many find that they are comfortable with their bodies as they are. This fact does make them any less or more trans. (pg. 25)

• Explicitly identifying the book’s primarily colonial North American perspective (it is the target market for the book), and acknowledging that many contemporary societies actively include more than two genders.
  

  Some contemporary examples of nonbinary genders include the muxe in Zapotec communities in southern Mexico, the waria in Indonesia, and the mashoga in Swhili-speaking areas of the Kenyan coast – each of these identities carries its own specific attributes and meanings.

  Here in the United States, and Canada as well, many people fall outside of the binary. [Some explanation of different non-binary genders, genderfluid and agender identities.] In addition, many indigenous people are two-spirit, a term rooted in gender identities specific to some of the peoples indigenous to the continent. (pg. 11)

• Discussing intersex people while also carefully differentiating between being intersex and being transgender (and defining dyadic alongside intersex in the same way that cisgender and transgender are discussed alongside one another).
  

  Most People are dyadic, but many people are intersex… Like dyadic people, intersex people are usually assigned male or female at birth. Because the concept of binary biological sex is so deeply ingrained in medical practice, many intersex people have been subject to nonconsensual treatments by doctors and surgeons (pg. 23)

  People often wrongly confuse the meanings of intersex and transgender. While some intersex people are transgender, many are not, identifying with the gender they were assigned at birth. Similarly, most transgender people are dyadic and do not have any intersex variations. (pg. 23)

• Including inclusive definitions of sexual and romantic orientation (in a chapter intended to dispel the myth that all trans people are gay, and that transness and queerness are the same thing).
  

  Just like cisgender people, transgender people can be gay or straight. They can also be bisexual, pansexual, queer, asexual, greysexual, aromantic, or polyamorous[*] (pp. 29-30).

• Discussing intersecting experiences of marginalization!
  

  All transgender people are vulnerable to transphobia and cissexism. But there are groups of trans people who experience additional marginalization and mistreatment. (pg. 43)

  This section goes on to discuss transmisogyny, and some of the ways in which ableism and racism can combine with cissexism and transphobia to make life even more difficult for multiply marginalized trans people.

• THIS:
  

  When it comes to nonbinary people, the dominant terms that we have for sexuality tend to not make much sense. Who, for example, would a straight agender person date? Would a genderqueer person only be homosexual if they dated other genderqueer people? What if they dated a gender fluid person? (pg. 31)

I am so pleased with this book, y’all. Check it out if you can!

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*I mean, ok, you may object to this being included among orientations (I am extremely iffy about this myself), but in general the idea here is that trans people’s ways of forming relationships are just as diverse as cis people’s, so I’m giving it a pass.

The ‘Shit Cis People Say’ Alphabet: V is for “valuable ally”

Welcome to another episode of the Shit Cis People Say Alphabet! Today:

V is for “valuable ally”

Somehow it seems like the only time cis people really talk about how valuable they are as allies as when y’all are threatening to stop. As in, “Why are you trans people so rude? You’re going to lose valuable allies that way.”

The thing about this phrase is it seems to misunderstand what allyship is in the first place, and what makes an ally valuable.

So first things first: simply believing that trans people have the same right that cis people have to go through life as the gender they identify as does not an ally make. All that qualifies you as is “not a virulent transphobe”.

Allyship isn’t about your personal beliefs, it’s about actually fighting alongside us and taking actions to make trans people’s lives better now and in the future. This can be something as simple as calling out people who say transphobic things, or doing work to educate your fellow cis people on trans issues (thus taking the burden of education off our shoulders), but it has to be something you’re actually *doing*.

Second, if your allyship (or, as is often the case, your “allyship” in the form of believing that trans people are worthy of dignity and respect) can be lost because a trans person (or even more than one trans person!) was mean to you one time, let me tell you: your allyship ain’t worth shit.

All people are worthy of dignity and respect, regardless of how they treat you. If trans people’s basic human rights are being offered to us at the cost of us being nice to cis people all the time, then what you’re talking about isn’t even equal rights in the first place. What you’re talking about is extending trans people the privilege of being treated as well cis people, as long as we behave correctly.

Cis people don’t have to deal with any of that shit, and neither should trans people.

Real talk: if you were actually a valuable ally, you wouldn’t be wasting your time telling us how to act, or making sure we know how valuable you are. You’d be doing the work, and your actions would speak for you.

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Check out the rest of the “Shit Cis People Say” alphabet!

Gender Perspectives Vol. 20

[In the Gender Perspectives series, I aim to highlight diverse kinds of personal narratives and reflections on gender, gender presentation, and identity, to broaden the gender conversation and boost a variety of voices. Check out the rest of the series.]

It’s been far too long since our last installation of Gender Perspectives, and I’ve been accidentally sitting on this draft for a while, so let’s get right to what I have for you today:

My Transgender Day of (in)Visibility | Wandering Aloud

Being trans is difficult; being middle-aged and non-binary doesn’t make it any easier. I know that there is ‘no right way to be trans’ and as a rule I’m proud to be out and visible. Still, sometimes I am left with the feeling that perhaps there is a ‘wrong way’

 

What I Want | THEMAGICSPACESHIP

I want to experience the relief and joy and affirmation my binary trans friends experience when they begin to transition and the world starts to read them correctly at last. Confusion is not good enough. Avoiding referring to me is not good enough. Being read half the time one way and half the time the other, and wrong all the time, is not good enough.

 

Self-Expression After Coming Out | Queerly Texan 

My self-expression changed when I became comfortable with myself [as a lesbian], and I think that’s true for a lot of people. When you spend months, years, or even decades being uncomfortable the second you stop feeling even a tiny percentage of that awkwardness, you never want to go back.

 

Gender? I Don’t Know A Gender! | Sofhoney

What are you?

I’m me! I’m Sof. I change frequently – that goes for mood, attraction, appearance, & a whole lot of other things, too. It’s something I beat myself up over – a LOT. It’s something I’ve come to realize doesn’t matter. Not to me, anyway – some people identify very strongly with a gender or sexuality & that is great & amazing & I support & uplift those who identify that way…it’s just that I personally don’t!

 

The ‘Shit Cis People Say’ Alphabet: U is for “unless/until”

Welcome to another episode of the Shit Cis People Say Alphabet! Today:

U is for “unless/until”

Cis people often seem occupy this convenient malleable position vis-à-vis trans people. Although cis folks are quick to plead ignorance when they misstep or use damaging words to talk about trans people, at the same time they often like to hold forth as if they are the judges of who is and isn’t ‘really’ trans.

These rules aren’t constant, of course, but cis people really do love to set up goalposts for the conditions (usually related to medical interventions) trans people must meet before their identities become worthy of respect.

As in, “You’re not really trans *unless* you’ve had ‘the Surgery’”. As in, “I’m not going to call you by your correct name/pronouns *until* you grow your hair longer (or cut it shorter)”.

Among the many (many) things I have to say about this bullshit (there are often double standards in here that cis people don’t need to meet in order to have their pronouns respected, for instance), I am mostly just baffled and tired by it all.

If someone tells you they are a woman, or a man, or non-binary, or anything else, what harm does it do you to respect that? If someone doesn’t look like what you think someone of their gender *should* look like, so the fuck what? How is that your call to make anyway?

Let people be the boss of their own gender, for fuck’s sake. I promise it won’t kill you. Whereas being denied recognition of something so basic as their gender does regularly contribute to transgender people’s decision to commit suicide, so.

Make the right choice, y’all.

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Check out the rest of the “Shit Cis People Say” alphabet!