What It Means...

I was reading Bint Alshamsa's blog, and she said recently that “The truth is, I can't know exactly what being transgendered means unless I make more of an effort to seek out and listen to the voices of transgendered people. Otherwise, I'm just doing the same thing as those who deem it appropriate to speak on behalf of people like me without ever taking into consideration what I have to say about my experiences.."

Now normally I find it frustrating to asked what it means to be transgendered, but this wasn’t really directed at anyone, and was framed in a different way, one predicated on reciprocity. Often cis people demand an answer, but since that very question is steeped in privilege, don’t really hear your answer anyway. All of which is to say that I choose to answer the implicit ethical call in bint's post, and to in turn listen to her tell her stories on her blog.

So, to state the obvious, there’s no one meaning to being transgendered. I imagine my experiences will be rather different to, say, Lisa’s, Nix’s, Little Light’s, Nexy’s (some of those minor things like age, nationality, sexual history, sexual identity, gender). So here’s part of what it means for me to be transgendered. Now I don’t identify as transsexual. I think it’s bound up certain kinds of essentialist thinking that don’t really work for me, and I’m not so invested in notions of authenticity or naturalness. A lot of the time I fumble around for words to try to explain, because “trapped in the wrong body” is an easily understood narrative, but it just doesn’t work for me. I think Julia Serano’s notion of “gender dissonance” is much better, that idea that my subconscious gender and the one I was born with don’t match up. So I could explain by saying that I’m a genderqueer trans woman at the moment, but that’s just a way of saying that there’s something that doesn’t fit with me, a sense of tension with regard to masculinity.

But I’m not under the illusion that wearing dresses or whatever equals being a woman (I think that assumption underlies a lot of rad-fem transphobia.. oh those poor MtFs, they actually think that's what being a woman is about). Let’s just think of femaleness as having a greater range of possibilities for gendered expression that work for me. I do consider myself female, or sometimes becoming-female, but I’m not sure I can ultimately grasp any gender as being properly real (I’m not sure if that makes any sense to anyone else besides me). Femme is as solid an identity for me as I’m going to get right now, I hope that will change after a couple years of transition.

So being transgendered means for me, I think, to be radically disconnected in a number of ways. If there’s always a thread of gender non-normativity or dysphoria, when I look back at my earlier life as a boy it seems strangely disconnected from the present. I am very early in my transition physically, but have been out for a number of years. And gender is cut across interestingly with sexuality with me—I have identified variously as a heterosexual boy (if a rubbish one), a bisexual boy, a mostly male-desiring queer boy, a queer third gender, and finally a queer girl who predominantly desires women. All of that has had an important impact on how I—and even more so, other people—see myself and my gender presentation. A lot of people seemed to think that I am transitioning so that I could be a straight woman, as though it were a natural extension of my queer sexuality (heterosexist logic, that). When yeah, I don’t like straight blokes AT ALL.

Then there’s the bodily disconnection. I don’t like talking about it much cos it’s such a trans cliché, but sometimes the sheer maleness of the body I was born with makes me sick to my stomach. Most of the time it’s not so bad, it just feels wrong. I don’t hate my body, I just want it to be different. But yeah, every so often. Not so blasé.

And yeah, obviously the social disconnection. Your relationships with family and friends get more fraught. I have been lucky enough that my family hasn’t disowned me, and some extended family have been supportive, but it’s… tense… with my parents. And it’s amazing that some liberal (feminist, queer) friends who were quite fine with my being not-male suddenly got weird about me transitioning. Clearly being genderqueer equated to “unorthodox queer man” in their heads.

Then there’s the day-to-day minefield of social interaction. Ignoring the whole shitty general public for this post (I’m sick of talking about what bastards random strangers are to me), there’s a disconnection with people you know. When people who’ve known forever call me by my male name or by male pronouns, I don’t like it. I don’t make a big deal about it, because I know how hard it is to change that instinctive naming and gendering people do in their heads, but it’s not fun. And some people, even people who think they’re being supportive, just don’t even try, and that hurts.

And the thing is, with all this talk of disconnection, I think transitioning for me is about connection. It’s not some humanist project of becoming a whole person or whatever (is anyone? Is that even possible?), but it is about making some of the bits fit together better.

Ok that’s enough for now, I might write some more on this topic some other time.