I’m not JUST trans.

This is something that’s been annoying me lately. I realize that anyone who only knows me from this blog might be a bit surprised- but, really, there’s a reason this blog is so dead.

Right now, being trans is complicated. Like I talked about in this post, I’m getting better at social dysphoria, I don’t have big problems with bodily dysphoria since getting surgery, and I’m becoming more hesitant to come out to people because I’d rather deal with unaware misgendering than being rejected when I express what I need. Is that the greatest place to be? Not really, in an ideal world… But this isn’t an ideal world.

I may have before, but right now I don’t want to be an activist. I burnt out severely trying to be one, and right now I have way bigger problems to worry about.

But a lot of people seem to expect me to be Trans above anything else, and it’s really frustrating to me. It’s not that I don’t want people to be aware that I’m trans, but the way people keep expecting that it’s the biggest issue in my life or that I want my life to revolve around that one aspect really bothers me.

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.

Trans Until Graduation

Alright, so the term “Lesbian[Gay/Bi] Until Graduation” exists. It seems a bit busted and biphobic, but I can see how it could be problematic.

Now, a lot of colleges are safe bubbles. You can “experiment” without serious risk of any problems compared to the “real world”. You’re unlikely to be fired or expelled at most schools, you can generally get a circle of friends who’re accepting, and you’re generally far enough from your parents that if there are familial risks there isn’t much danger. The real world generally isn’t so forgiving unless you live somewhere that’s cLG(b) accepting, and not everyone can. There are still camps for all-too-often-married cis guys to try and get rid of their homosexual desires, and they aren’t always bi, this is how strong homophobia and biphobia in the world still is. It’s not really surprising that people would take advantage of a safe bubble then revert back to presenting as straight afterwards.

This isn’t an inherently bad thing, it’s good that people have a safe space to be able to explore other parts of themselves even if they ultimately decide either that isn’t who they are or that it isn’t worth the risk to be out. But I can see how it’s hurtful to people who are lesbian, gay, and bisexual (and generally non-het). For the ones who were used as an “experiment”, if a proper relationship happened, they may feel that their feelings were being toyed with. It also can make the community as a whole look “less valid”, because it’s turning their sexualities into fads. It’s difficult.

Let me make something clear, though: I do not consider this to be the same as a bisexual person meeting someone of the opposite sex after college and getting married while still identifying as bi. Sometimes the term has been applied to people who do this, and I think that’s busted.

Now… trans until graduation. I found a post about it and it seems like it’s far more a touchy issue. Here’s the more relevant bit:

Being transgender has become a fad at Smith College. Yeah, I said it, a fucking fad. Women, especially lesbian women, have come to eroticize and fetishize the trans men in this community or really anyone who expresses masculine traits. I’ve had friends who have had strangers come up to them and ask if they were transitioning simply because they display traits that are not traditionally feminine. When they say they are not, the stranger will respond, “Well, you’d be hotter if you were.” What? Every week I hear of someone else who has changed their name, who’s taking T. Whatever, I guess, you’re choice. But here’s the question no one is asking, after college, will this still be your choice? Some may say, so what if it isn’t? And here’s my response: by co-opting trans identity and shucking it off when it’s no longer convenient or no longer useful, it trivializes the real struggles that transgendered and genderqueer folks have to go through because gender-variant folks can’t do that. They’re playing with oppression, an oppression that they do not have to experience and may not actually fully understand. For so many people, it’s a deeply personal and intensely difficult struggle. Also, it’s a highly politicized identity, which these kids are only playing with, without having to experience the real oppression or the real personal and political struggle.

I still don’t like the word gender-variant and this person is doing nothing to fix that, can’t believe a trans person would actually say “Isn’t transitioning just reinforcing the gender binary?”. That said, I think I know someone who was Trans Until Graduation. I don’t know if she identifies as such, but it seems to fit the bill. Now, I know trans people who don’t medically transition at all are out there, and they can’t always stay out after college, I won’t try to describe the differences as if they’re all-encompassing, but there are differences between that and this. Again, not what I’m talking about. This is much more related to cis appropriation of genderqueer identities.

This whole thing is complicated, obviously. Being too wary of cis appropriators could end up as a dangerous witchhunt of who’s “trans enough”, which we have enough problems with already. There’s no decent way to tell someone to stop identifying as they do, and it’s a slippery slope. But cis people appropriating our identities has its problems. It can end up with skewed ideas about trans people, make people who are trans doubt themselves more than they already do, make others more suspicious of people who only come out as trans after meeting trans people (even though this makes perfect sense) which limits the amount of support the people just coming out get, egg on the trans fetishists who can be very dangerous to our community, etc.

A rant about a teacher

My partner is majoring in Japanese. My partner’s Japanese teacher is the head of the department and also one of only two people (one of whom is away and will be for most of our time in college) who can be my partner’s academic advisor. She has a lot of power over my partner. This is not a good thing.

The first thing about her that bothered me is that she’s commented on how she doesn’t want to produce “handicapped Japanese speakers”. By this she means she wants everyone in class to be as fluent as possible. But it doesn’t erase the ablism of it. The way she teaches class, a deaf person would almost certainly not be able to learn, and my partner has a hard time due to undiagnosed hearing problems (they probably need a hearing aid, but yay being poor with sucky health insurance). The undiagnosed making it impossible to get the school to tell her to lay off, although I doubt she would anyways.

This teacher expects you to go to class sick. Not just go to class, but go to class completely prepared and able to function as well as you can while not sick. If you can’t do this, she gets furious with you. She gets furious with you if you don’t go to class. Generally not going to class is the better option, but she still expects students to go to class no matter how sick they are and do just as well as they would on a good day.

She also communicates very badly. I don’t mean this to be a jab at her English. I mean that she’ll say “You can use your books in class” then get angry when people use their books in class. I think that what she wants to happen is that she says “You can use your books in class” and then everyone is so awesome that they don’t need to even though they have the option. Similarly, she says “you shouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes in class”. However, if you make a mistake she felt that you shouldn’t have made, she won’t call on you for the rest of the class, meaning that you lose valuable practice. Again, I think what she wants to happen is for her to say that and then everyone is so awesome that they don’t make mistakes. This sets up an incredibly frustrating situation for everyone.

My partner is a UK citizen and a permanent resident in the US. Most of the people in the class are US citizens. The teacher sometimes sends out emails with scholarship opportunities to study Japanese, at least one of which said it was only open to US citizens. My partner pointed this out and the teacher responded with an email giving a link that had to be followed through several pages just to be told “Countries who have an agreement with Japan” (which may or may not include the UK). This link was accompanied with scolding that in the future, my partner should do their own research. She then publicly said to the class not to email her about unnecessary things, which is something she does to publicly shame students.  Let me point out once again that US citizens are not expected to do their own research.

And right now my partner is passed out exhausted next to me and can’t rest as long as they need to and has another unneeded stressor added. Namely, the teacher decided that because they have a midterm tomorrow and can’t study for a test for tomorrow, my partner should just do it today. This was decided this morning, the test’ll be at 2. So rather than having the extra time to study for the midterm at a relaxed pace, my partner will instead be cramming for a test.

This is all without going into the utter fail of the sections on gender or that she forces my partner to use male first-person pronouns (when there are fine neutral options) and say they have a “wife”.

I am not happy with her at all, and there are plenty of other things I’d love to tell her off for. But the problem is that she is the only Japanese teacher in the school and essentially the only person who can be my partner’s advisor. My partner is stuck with this person for 2 of the next 3 years (plans to go to Japan for Junior year. We get to arm wrestle with the school to get them to let me go to a place in Kyoto for a semester as well because she doesn’t want people to go to Japan unless they’re doing it her way).  I do not think that she is in any way above making my partner’s life hell if I let her know that she’s already discriminating against my partner on the basis of their citizenship. Which I’m pretty sure is against the school rules to do, but I don’t know who to go to about this because, again, she’s the head of the department and I can’t risk getting someone involved only for her to take it out on my partner.

The Vagina Monologues

My school did the vagina monologues. I did not go. I don’t know if they did either of the two about trans women, but I sure as hell hope they didn’t because I’m pretty sure that, if they did, they were performed by cis women. I only know of one trans woman on this campus and I’m pretty sure she wasn’t in it. Maybe they did have trans women doing it if they did it, but I doubt it.

They’ve been advertising in part with posters that feature a line drawing of a person’s torso from roughly the hips to below the bust. It is clearly curvy, considerably more curvy than you’d expect someone perceived as male to be and even curvier than a good number of people perceived as female. Not to get into how people identify. It’s also thin. The poster features a microphone roughly in the area of this line art’s genitalia because, you know, the vagina is talking. Even though the play is people talking about their vaginas.

Only it isn’t. It’s Women talking about women’s vaginas. Well, vulvas. But anatomy fail aside, it’s just about women. Even though women aren’t the only one who have or even want vaginas or vulvas. And not all women have them. I will be okay wtih the monologues when and only when they feature a really burly, been on T 10+ years trans guy who you’d “never guess” isn’t cis go upthere and talk honestly about how much he loves his vagina. And a few other men as well, ones who never want to take T, ones who don’t look cis, ones who are really feminine. And, of course, non-binaries as well. But I want the stereotype of macho manliness to talk about how much he loves his vagina.

I don’t really care how much you love this play, it’s cis supremacist as hell because of the way it associates vaginas with women. The advertising in this specific case was horrific for the same reason. I don’t care for any apologist bullshit about how it’s okay to erase and degender all the non-women out there who have vaginas and/or who have curvy bodies because “but they help women feel good about their bodies!”. Yes, it is horrible the way that non-societally-accepted-as-male bodies are treated. But fixing that by adding to the oppression of people isn’t okay.

This really gets to me because, yeah, my body looks a bit like that poster. It is curvy. Too curvy to be perceived as male. It’s probably at least part of the reason people constantly mistake me for a woman. Associating my body type with “women-only” shit is to erase my gender, and the gender of all curvy people who aren’t women. It is to reinforce the very problem that makes it so that I, and a good number of those like me, will never be correctly perceived. That isn’t okay.

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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.

Questioning

Questioning your gender is an incredibly delicate time. Any trans-friendly resource you can find (or apparently trans friendly resource) can have a much bigger effect on you than it’s likely to later on. Now, everything in our lives effects us, but when you’re still coming into your identity and aren’t quite sure who you are and are able to find acceptance for what may be the first time, that can be a bigger deal than when you’re comfortable with yourself. This isn’t always for the best.

My first trans-friendly resource was an incredibly binarist forum. Because of that forum, I spent a year and a half trying to identify as male even though someone had told me about neutrois my first day there because people told me that it was unacceptable to be neutrois.  Even for half a year after I found a non binarist trans resource, the effects of that first one were still pretty heavy on me.

So when I keep hearing about how the leader of the cisCenter is so great for helping people who are questioning their gender identity, that makes me really uncomfortable. From what I can tell, she doesn’t direct them to trans-run resources. She may take them to a trans conference, but not immediately. She basically sets it up so that they’re main source of support is cis people who, well, are very possibly transphobic cis supremacists. These trans people think it’s totally okay for cis people to be in charge of educating about trans issues. Who think that just being a feminist helps trans people. I don’t get the feeling that they feel comfortable speaking up for themselves or even being out on this campus.

It really makes me uncomfortable. The whole thing does. The closest trans support group is an hour away, so it’s very very likely that these people won’t be able to get a non-transphobic “trans friendly” resource until after they graduate from this place. So if they do realize later on that she added to their internalized transphobia and cis supremacy, they’ll probably be in no position to tell her this and she’ll just keep on doing what she’s doing. I don’t think she’s set out intending to do this harm, but that really doesn’t matter, does it? Maybe she is helping them, but really? She could be doing a damn better job of it.

Opinions

It’s funny how much your opinions of people can be shaped by other people. If a person you trust tells you something about someone you thought was nice, and what they say makes you think they aren’t so nice, you’ll probably end up warier around that person. It’s difficult when you find out that you shouldn’t have trusted that person, though.

Keith from the Center told my partner and I that the counseling services treated them badly when the cis people in charge of the “trans” group brought up them being more helpful about trans things. Now, I wasn’t privvy to any of these interactions. At first I, assuming Keith was a decent person, believed what he said. This was pretty early in the semester, when my partner was still starting with their therapist. Now I know from dealing with him exactly what he considers being “treated badly” (not spinelessly grovelling at his feet). My partner’s therapist hasn’t been the best so far, but I don’t know how much of that is because the two just don’t mesh and how much is because my partner’s views ended up being colored by what happened. Later on he and his therapist ended up spending an hour and a half of an hour long session talking complaining about Keith (which meant me sitting there, after the place had closed, wondering if I should still be there or if they’d left without me), which I imagine was pretty damn cathartic for my partner.

There’s a genderqueer on campus that, at the start of the term we were getting on with alright. Then a few weeks in she just stopped talking to us that much. The timing coincides with a few things, including that group starting and us spending time with Keith. Keith’s girlfriend told us that the genderqueer unfriended her on facebook, acting as though she had been very inconsiderate and rude. We based part of our view of her on that and assumed it was just how she was. After dealing with these two I can’t help but wonder if what really happened is that something similar went down between her and Keith, and now she doesn’t want to deal with people who have anything to do with him any more than I do.

I don’t really know, I don’t have much of a way to know. I don’t know her well enough to ask her and I don’t talk to her often enough to be able to casually bring up the fiasco with the center. But it really bothers me how much these two have effected my judgement of others, because now I really don’t know what’s right or wrong in a few situations.

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.