I give up.

I give up on trying to learn East Asian Languages at this school. I cannot take a class with that teacher, I’m not nearly neurotypical enough to, so Japanese is out. And the Chinese teacher…

Over the break before the semester started, I emailed him about pronouns. As I do with all my teachers. After an interaction that ended with him failing to get back to me, he decided that while he “understood my view” he wasn’t going to do it. In class, not only have the students used the incredibly triggering “she” for me, so did he. One girl picked up on all of it and corrected someone to “he” once. It should tell you the state of the world that that was probably the most heartfelt thank you anyone has gotten from me.

Mandarin, which is just spoken*, has a neutral 3rd-singular pronoun for all. “ta“, with a high flat tone. Should be ideal, right?

No. I know that the people using it think I’m a girl, so it’s now triggering. I’ve never been in favor of only one pronoun, but times like this remind me of why I want gender-implying pronouns. Or even if not gender implying, respect implying. And I don’t give a damn if cis people think they’re being respectful when they smash my identity under their heals and pour salt into wounds that may never heal- they aren’t. I don’t know how to fix this, I realized it one day and wanted to throw up.

I don’t have the spoons to try again with him. I’m finishing this semester, and that’s it.

The way the class is being taught, I should be able to teach myself well enough after it’s over. I have a few people I could get to know better who speak Mandarin Chinese way better than me. I would say natively, but I know one hasn’t been from birth and I don’t know when it counts as natively. Better than me, at least. I don’t know how well I can keep in contact if they go back to China over summer, but I’ll try.

This is upsetting for me. I would’ve liked to minor in one of them, I’m not very good at teaching myself (although at least with Japanese, my partner intends to become a Japanese teacher). This world doesn’t believe you can teach yourself. I’m going to try to get the school, specifically that teacher (apparently, for some reason, she’s allowed to make all decisions when people try to go to Japan), to let me go to a University that has a program specifically for people who have little to no knowledge of Japanese (and also teaches Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese) for my year abroad so my partner and I won’t be half a world away.

*the written Chinese language, if you can read it, can be read no matter what dialect is spoken by the writer. There are probably differences in writing style, but the words are the same because they’re characters. I think simplified vs traditional isn’t as easily understandable, although not all characters effect.

The Chinese language has 3 written 3rd-singular pronouns- one for men, one for women, one for inanimate objects. I am totally okay with being called the inanimate object one if it’s done with respect.

No Options

I have serious problems with social dysphoria. I would really like help with this, but there don’t seem to be any real options. The school counselor probably doesn’t really know enough to offer any really helpful suggestions. Most gender therapists, based both on my experiences and hearing from others, would end badly. I’d first have to find one who isn’t binarist or else face them trying to force me to decide if I’m a boy or a girl. Then I have to find one who has experience in this, because most of the time it seems like they only know how to help people transition because that’s the  main reason a lot of trans people see a gender therapist.

I’m trying to work on it myself, but it’s slow going. I don’t really know how to work on it.

Entertainment

One of the most annoying things, for me, of not having privileges is how hard it is to find entertainment that isn’t triggering. It’s next to impossible. I read a lot of webcomics, and a ton of them throw in random transphobia for the hell of it. Something Positive makes “tranny” jokes (I can not be bothered to find proof), and the author hasn’t gotten back to me about why. C’est La Vie just… ugh. Same with El Goonish Shive. I could go on, and on, and on, and on, and on.

And, most recently (for me), Scandinavia and the World failed. Twice. First: (both quotes are from the artist’s comments) “Denmark was the first country in the world to turn a transsexual man into a woman. … Sweden is not a fan of man-boobs” Second: “Denmark once invented man-breasts“

HAHAHAHA IT’S SO FUNNY BECAUSE, SEE, THE AUTHOR DOESN’T KNOW JACKSHIT ABOUT TRANSITION OR WHAT GOES INTO IT OR HOW THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE, REGARDLESS OF COERCIVELY ASSIGNED SEX, HAVE BREAST TISSUE OR HOW SOME CAMAB PEOPLE NATURALLY HAVE “BREASTS” AND BECAUSE TRANS WOMEN AREN’T REALLY WOMEN, THEY’RE MEN- HAHA, SILLY MEN WHO THINK THEY ARE WOMEN

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, really, I’ve got two options here:

1. Figure out how to be completely unphased by this, especially because there are no trigger warnings so I can’t be like “okay, this next bit contains transphobia, I’m ready”.

2. Stop trying to read things I enjoy because it may end up like this, which is seriously upsetting for me.

Horrible System

This school caters to rich kids. What this means is that they expect you to have a lot of spare change, so that it’s okay for them to randomly shut the dining hall to make people eat at the fundraising dinner for the school. Which really, really bites you in the ass when you aren’t rich.

One of the issues is that, if you miss a counseling appointment, they charge you money. Now, I could understand that if you get charged $X for every session, so even if you miss that session you still get charged that $X. But, no, that’s not how it works. They only charge you when you miss it. So if you’re missing it because you’re really stressed out and have been sick for a month and really did try (I set a fucking alarm and everything) and still managed to miss it, you get charged. Which is fine if you’re rich and have a lot of money on hand, so mummy and daddy give you a stern talking to about being more responsible while pumping a few hundred more dollars into their account.

When you haven’t got that much disposable income? Not so great. It costs 3 weeks of pay for every appointment I miss. I’ve missed two, entirely by accident. 2 weeks ago I realized exactly an hour late that I had an appointment. Today I really did mean to. I was reminded of it every time I checked my email. I set an alarm to go off half an hour before it. But it ended up under a pile of about 5 coats during dinner so I didn’t hear it. I didn’t have enough time today to check my email because I’ve been so tired because, once again, I’m sick. I can’t do that. I’m too stressed out to be getting counseling appointments because I keep forgetting them and get charged money I don’t have for it.

This also means that I didn’t get my prescription for anti-depressants, but I can’t do this right now. Weening yourself off something over 2 days is hardly a good plan, but it’s what I’ve got to work with. And I can’t help but be so pissed off and upset that this school is set up that this is the option I’m left with.

T

Reasons not to start T (personal list, please be aware this applies to me only):

• Baldness runs in my family, I love my hair
• more body hair, do not want
• more acne, I have severe issues with my acne already
• can’t control how deep my voice becomes
• clitoral growth, may end up being another source of dysphoria and makes it harder to use STPs and the surgery to be able to pee through it is fucking expensive
• Different health risks
• Give up the ability to pretend to be cis when I need to
• Need fucking expensive surgery to be able to change all my legal information
• Doing this may invalidate my marriage in the eyes of the government and result in my partner being deported
• May not be any happier being seen as male full time
• Make wearing dresses & skirts much more dangerous
• May never fully pass as a cis male
• shots are painful, and get more painful as time goes on, cost money I don’t really have. All other forms are incredibly expensive.
• Not sure what emotional effects it will have
• Not sure if I’d like what it’d do to my overall body shape or facial features
• Sweat more

Reasons to start T:

• Might get people to stop reading me as female
• Easier time building muscle

That this is still something I’m seriously considering should shed a little light on just how freaking awful social dysphoria can be.

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I’ve been pretty harsh this week. I got into a debate with a person in my East Asian Studies (better called “Orientalism 101″) class because he insisted that while it may be “noble” to want to live a simpler lifestyle (Noble Savage anyone?), it prevented progress so can we really let people live the way they want? And we can’t just find a compromise because two opposing viewpoints can never coexist! Someone commented afterwards about my “vehement opinions”, I don’t know what he thought about those opinions. Someone else said it was a good debate (someone who was annoyed at the other guy as well), it wasn’t, it was hell. I was sick through that class because I’m so sick of oppression- of facing it, of being guilty of it, of knowing it exists- and seeing all this government abuse and reading about it and… eurgh.  I didn’t debate because it was fun, I debated because I was in a class mostly made up of rich white americans (and some people from Asia who may not feel safe saying what they think about the whole thing, or may be part of the oppressing group in a given context) and I didn’t want that supremacist bullshit to be seen as a-okay. I think the only way I got thorugh that class was because I had art before, and it actually really does help.

I didn’t get to tell off the person who was talking about how everyone enjoys music and art, which is ablist, so nomads can’t be happy because they don’t have either (WTF?). Blah.

Today at lunch I met a friend of some friends for the first time, who commented on how he “doesn’t believe in feminism”. He was just joking. Only not, because he thinks the really hateful feminists give them all a bad name and it’s true for all women. Eurgh. Tone arguments there, lovely. And there was no comment about how some feminists have been hateful in an incredibly bigoted, oppressive way to women who lack other privileges (white, temporarily able bodied, middle+ class, non-intersex, cis, etc). I will never identify as feminist because of the incredible bigotry involved in it, a lot of them want me dead and too many of those who don’t justify this because “they do such good things for feminism as a whole!” so it doesn’t matter how much damage they do to me and mine. It sounded more like “Those women call me out on my male privilege and I don’t like that”. Boohoo. And when he talked about how all feminists/women are made to look bad by these “hateful” women, with no proof of how this is sexist and busted but proof of why they shouldn’t be like that. And it is sexist, because a vocally hateful group of men doesn’t get all men labeled as hateful like that, there are plenty of loud and hateful men who spout misogyny and people like this guy still talk like women have no right to be hateful. I didn’t respond to this, I left.

I don’t usually call this stuff out. But I don’t have the spoons anymore. That might sound odd- that I “invite” drama because I don’t have spoons. But it tears at me to let this stuff slide. I’m still upset about what happened- but I’m upset that it did happen and it was allowed to happen, not that I was a part of it. I don’t have the spoons to be a good little minority.

I have a friend who’s half-black & half-white, some people read her as hispanic but she can also be read as white as well as black. She seems to be from a low/er class family, but I could be wrong. She talked about how she doesn’t let her bug her, how she doesn’t really care if someone calls her the n-word because she knows she’ll get that in the real world and that’s life. It wouldn’t surprise me if part of that’s because she’s always been that race, always been from that family (to my knowledge), so has had more time to deal with it, time to build up defenses with the help of her family and those around her. I’ve pretty much been shielded by the privilege of invisibility until about a year ago, not even, and have basically been thrown into this without any safety net, any guaranteed support beyond my partner, anything.

You have no power over me. …in a perfect world, at least.

I am really nervous about going back to college because of how transphobic the cisCenter, which is generally considered to be an expect on trans issues by cis people because they have a “T” in their official title, is. I think it’s a sign of how widespread the myths that “trans people are just super gay and/or gay people trying to get acceptance” and “you’re either gay, straight, or lying (so you can’t be bi, poly, pan, or ace)” are that people think that just because you call yourself “LGBT”, you’re automatically knowledgeable about to only the LG but ALSO the B and T. Come on, it’s the same thing, the last two letters just want to horn in on straight privilege! That or it’s just bright eyed idealism that otherwise privileged gays and lesbians are above prejudice and ignorance.

Bitter rant aside, it’s probably going to kick me in the ass because it means that cis people are a better authority on my life than I am. I can’t just say “X is offensive to trans people”, they have to check with the cis people at the “LGBTQ” center to make sure it really is. You know that us gender confused trannies can’t be trusted to know what’s going on in our lives, we don’t even know what our gender actually is!

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The more you can accept the kyriarchy, the easier things are. It would be much easier for me if I could accept cis supremacy, if I could cower before the cis people who feel they deserve special treatment for taking spaces away from trans people. It would be easier if I could be happy with the support that takes little or no effort on the part of the people giving support. If I could tell myself that trans people are too complicated, that I deserve not to be treated as an equal, that I should be happy with the kind of transphobia that doesn’t involve spitting in my face. I’d have a lot more support, I’d be able to go through life feeling that things aren’t a horrible hideous mess.

One of the trans people at my school is like this. She can still go to the “trans” group and the “LGBTQ” center. She can talk to the cis supremacist asshole because she’s willing to bend to his will. But she isn’t really happier, not from what I can tell. I don’t want to sit there and smile and agree that cis people know best when around cis people, then lament to trans people that they aren’t doing what you need, that they’re disrespecting you, that it makes you so angry you want to throw a chair across the room. It would be easier. I would be able to delude myself, have the kind of support you get when you’re willing to swallow the poison they feed you. The kind that feels like strength in numbers but eats you up from the inside and and tells you that you deserve nothing more than to grovel at the feet of cis people in desperate hopes that they might toss you table scraps. You don’t even deserve the scraps, really, it’s pretty damn presumptive to expect them but you should grovel nonetheless because it pleases the cis people. And that’s all that really matters.

Spoons

I don’t know if I really have a right to talk about spoons, but I’ve officially been diagnosed with double depression so I guess I do. If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say spoons, give this a read.

Having a smaller supply of spoons makes life more difficult than having a larger one. Especially because having a smaller supply of spoons generally means you’re lacking at least one privilege, so you have to deal with discrimination. So you have to either waste precious spoons fighting discrimination by fighting against people with far more spoons than you and far more power than you, or you have to live with the discrimination. Which takes up spoons in its own way. A no win situation.

I’m not up for a lot of things. There’s a post I wrote 3 weeks ago that I can’t put up because I expect cis apologist & cissupremacist responses and I can’t handle that right now. I have at least 2 emails from that cissupremacist asshole that I haven’t read and may never be able to read, I can’t even check the folder to see what the titles are because I physically shake uncontrollably when I do that, not that I expect htem to be anything I’d like to see. I’m not up for fighting with the leader of the cisCenter, twice now I’ve told her she’s said something offensive to me and she just responded with “well, you’re wrong”, I don’t have the energy to handle that. I’m not up for finding out if two people who might be my friends are actually able to be trans accepting, because if they aren’t then I can’t really handle it. I’m not even up for correcting people misgendering me, which means that I have to live with the pain of being misgendered and the horrible questions of what would happen if I did correct them and how I could handle it. I’m barely up for contacting my teachers to try and get the right pronouns.

This is one thing I hate about oppression. I have to expend energy, make myself vulnerable, just to ask to get what I need. And if I get rejected, then I have to expend more energy, make myself more vulnerable to find someone to help me or I have to live with not getting what I need. And lately it mostly means living without just because I don’t have the energy to do anything else.

I don’t want to do this

I don’t want to email my teachers to ask for the correct pronouns

I don’t want to go to another class or room or place where everyone thinks I’m a girl

I don’t want to have to explain my gender to have any hope of getting it

I don’t want to deal with a world that refuses to acknowledge I exist except to attack me

I don’t want to feel like I have to take T even if I don’t want what it’ll do to my body

I don’t want to have to wonder if my friend’s room is actually a safe space or not or if it sort of is but she’d still vote against me having equal rights to her

I don’t want to have to wonder if I’ll ever have true friends in meatspace

I don’t want to take two tests tomorrow because on Thursday I threw up breakfast and probably had had the flu for a week so couldn’t take the test then and I haven’t been able to study well for either of them because of depression and exhaustian and still being sick.

I don’t want to continue living on this hall where I have to hear that asshole‘s voice because the walls are too thin and he practically lives here

I don’t want to have to move when he doesn’t

I don’t want the best place to move to be so far from everything else that on days like this it’ll be even more difficult to drag myself to class or food.

I don’t want to have to convince some cis guy that I’m depressed just to get medicine that may not even help

I don’t want to worry about money any more

I don’t want to deal with this