Doing a Workshop at a Trans Conference

this is nice

Thanks to some really awesome people- primarily Nome/Nathyn & anyone else who posted it on facebook, HobbitDragon, and Chartreuse- my trans 101 has gotten 815 views.

My school is doing their “how to be a cis supremacist and look good” 101, er, “trans” 101 this week and I’m fairly certain they won’t even get 50 people. Even if 90% of the people barely browsed it before closing their browser or looked at it multiple times, there are still more people who’ve seen my version of trans 101 than theirs. That is awesome.

I also put this up on non-op (which I’m trying to fix… I need some website organizational skills. And a time machine to whap my past self with a list of acceptable terminology) so I can spread this without people finding my blog.

Not Your Mom’s Trans 101

Not Your Mom’s Trans 101.  Introduction below:

There is a huge problem with the way that people are taught about gender in this society. Children are indoctrinated early to believe that there are two sexes, corresponding with two genders, which are both immutable and non-voluntary and completely beyond our control. This worldview is called the gender binary, and it has no room in it for us.

Trying to teach a new perspective to the victims of this extremely aggressive brainwashing can be daunting. In fact, the task can seem downright impossible. The temptation, therefore, is to “dumb things down” for the benefit of a cisgender audience. This situation has given rise to a set of oversimplifications collectively known as “Trans 101.” These rather absurd tropes, such as “blank trapped in a blank’s body” cause confusion among even well-meaning cis folks, feed internalized transphobia among us trans people, and  provide endless straw-man fodder for transphobic ‘radical feminists,’ entitled cisgender academics, and other bigots.

Read this. It is awesome, and I love the way that Asher words things. One thing that I don’t like about how trans 101 works is that it dumbs it down, which means two things. 1. Trans people are too complicated to be explained without putting us in cis-acceptable (aka: transphobic) terminology 2. cis people are too stupid to understand trans people.

Obviously, this being a cis privileged world, the first is what’s believed. But I really don’t buy into the second one. Cis people are perfectly capable of understanding trans stuff- they just choose not to.

Also, “dumbing it down” is really code for “allowing trans experiences to be defined and controlled by cis people”. It isn’t dumbed down the way trans people feel is appropriate- it’s catered to the way that cis people demand that the information be presented to them, and way too many refuse to accept it any other way.

Trans 101

1. You are a person. You are worthy of respect. You deserve to be treated with the same dignity as anyone else. There is nothing inherently wrong with your gender. You are not broken, you are not disgusting, you do not deserve to be hurt.
2. You’ve been brought up and live in a world that’s designed to erase and demonize your existence, you’ve probably internalized a lot of that- and that’s not your fault. But it can be hard to deal with. But you aren’t alone in dealing with it. And sometimes you have to buy into it to be able to handle it (trigger warning: transphobic violence). And that’s okay.
3. Your gender is no more or less than anyone else’s. Your history doesn’t make you “not really” or “less” your gender than someone with a cis history, it just makes you a person of your gender with a different history.
4. You do not deserve to be held to higher standards than cis people. You do not have to “prove” your gender by forcing yourself into societal roles that may not fit. You are not “failing” anyone by fitting into societal roles that are comfortable. It is not your job to break down the binary/patriarchy/or anything else. If you want to, go for it, but you have no obligation to do anything for cis people just because you are trans.
5. Being yourself does not hurt trans rights (so long as you aren’t trying to do so while stopping others from being who they are) and is not a reason why people don’t have to treat you with respect. There is nothing wrong with being a feminine man or masculine woman, or being a person who’s comfortable in their body, or being a person who doesn’t transition all the way, or being out about having a non-binary or genderqueer gender. You have not “failed” anyone by doing this, you are not “less” of your gender than someone else. Being who you are is not a valid argument for why people can’t treat you as who you truly are.
6. No one else has the right to say your body needs to be changed. It only does if you need to change it. Or if you want to change it, that’s valid, too. Your body does not make you “less” your gender. It doesn’t make you “not really” your gender. It doesn’t mean you’re trapped in someone else’s body. You do not have to fix your body to “become” your gender- you already are your gender. All you need to do is what you need to do to be comfortable in your body. And if that includes reclaiming your right to label your own body, you are allowed to do that.
7. You have just as much of a right to privacy as anyone else. You do not need to tell anyone about your body, your medical history, or anything else. Whether or not your body needs to be changed for you to be comfortable, you do not have to change it to deserve to be treated as who you are. You do not owe anyone intimate details about your personal life before you can be treated as who you are.
8. You have no obligation to educate anyone. This includes trans people, but is most important with cis people. You are not a walking encyclopedia of transgender and/or transsexual information, you are a person. You do not have to answer every question any cis person comes up with, you do not have to represent trans people as a whole, (see 7) you do not have to bare the most personal and vulnerable parts of your soul to other people on demand.
9. Not educating people does not “hurt” trans rights. NEVER let anyone try to guilt you into educating people or doing something you don’t want to do by insisting that doing otherwise will “destroy trans rights/acceptance/whatever”. Trying to force trans people to become walking information desks or to put themselves in dangerous situations regardless of whether or not you’re even up for dealing with this destroys trans rights and shows a great deal of intolerance. Asserting that you don’t have to tell anyone anything you don’t want to? That really doesn’t.
10. If you do want to educate people, you are allowed to set limits and boundaries. You are allowed to say that you won’t talk about certain issues, or that you will only talk about them on your terms. You are allowed to decide which people you will talk to about which issues. You are allowed to change these boundaries if you become uncomfortable educating people you were previously willing to educate. You are not obligated to educate anyone just because you educated someone else.
11. You deserve to take care of yourself- whatever that means. You deserve to be comfortable and safe. You deserve not to be in dangerous situations. If you can’t handle something alone, you deserve to ask for- and get- help or, if you can, take a break from it until you can handle it. Or just stop doing it all together, that’s okay. Taking care of yourself does not make you weak, it does not make you an attention-grabber or overdramatic, it does not make you “less” your gender, it does not mean you betray other trans people by not being a full-time (or even part-time) activist. You’re human, you have limits, and that’s okay.
12. You deserve to have your boundaries respected. Any boundaries- how and where people can touch you, what information you give to who and when, what places you feel comfortable going or who you feel comfortable going with, what people can tell others about you.
13. You deserve to have the words you are and aren’t comfortable being referred to as respected. You deserve to have the proper pronouns used (and, if there are times when it’s unsafe for that to happen, you deserve to have your safety maintained by those around you), you deserve to be called the proper name, you deserve to have the words you want used to describe your body used, you deserve not to be called by any label, pronoun, word, or name that you don’t want to be called.
14. If you’re asking for something that you need to feel respected, comfortable, and safe- you are not asking for too much. Your identity is not “too complicated”. Your needs are not less important than anyone elses’.
15. You are a person. You are worthy of respect. You deserve to be treated with the same dignity as anyone else. There is nothing inherently wrong with your gender. You are not broken, you are not disgusting, you do not deserve to be hurt.

Trans 101- for realz

As soon as I find out the school policies on posting things on campus, I’m going to try posting a ton of flyers directing people to a website I’ll make where people can go to educate themselves about trans stuff. Part of this is that I want to compile various levels of trans resources (ex trans 101, 201, 301, 401- to use the US university system).

Hopefully it’ll help a bit, but one thing that bugs me about trans 101 stuff is the language. It’s generally still rife with othering and cissexism because it’s trying to communicate with people who have grown up in a culture rife with othering and cissexism. I know that I’m going to put better resources the more complex it gets… resources that talk about the importance of langauge, etc. But it still makes me feel a bit gross because I can’t find a decent trans 101 that doesn’t do something like remove the right of trans people to define our own bodies. :/

Transphobia 101

This happened the very first time I ever spoke to the cis!leader. During the planning for the “trans 101″ workshop that’s run by cis people.

For some reason, our Cisglorious Cisleader decided to make the entire fucking thing about gender neutral bathrooms. So she asked the cis people what some reasons are why these might not be a good idea. I froze at that question. Why was she asking that? Was she planning on making this an exercise during the workshop? Why would she open up the floor for cis people to tear into how trans people don’t have a right to have a bathroom that’s comfortable? (yes, I realize that gender neutral bathrooms aren’t the answer for binary gender trans people, but they are for me)

One girl starts going on about how she couldn’t use a bathroom with men because she’d think it would be SO filthy. Let me remind you something that most trans people know and most cis people may not get. Every bathroom she was ever in has probably been used by men. She’s probably pissed in a cubicle right next to a man. Washed her hands right after a man had. She may even have asked a man if he had a tampon she could use or to pass her some toilet paper because there was none in her stall. And she took it. And she didn’t have to scrub her hands with bleach afterwards to get the man-taint off. Why? Because she didn’t realize he was a man. Not because he wasn’t a man- he was. He was a man. But because she didn’t realize he was a man.

Yeah, that’s right, at a trans 101 workshop someone was not only erasing the genders of trans people- she was erasing us all together. Let me repeat that, at a trans 101 workshop someone was being incredibly transphobic.

Sucky sucky suck

After the giant shitstorm of drama that came about because the cissupremacy Center doesn’t think that we could handle doing it on our own so took over without thinking to ask us. This kind of pisses me off. And it annoys me because this thing that I was really excited about has turned into a situation of confusion and dread. Today I’ll be sitting in the student cetner and have NO IDEA how many people will show up. This has gone from something fun the 3 of us are working on to something stressful that I’m doing alone because they’ll be in the ciscenter to keep the peace (I don’t begrudge them this, I agreed that it’s the best thing and I’m the only one who can’t stand that place to such a degree)

But it pisses me off because this shouldn’t have happened. I don’t know where there was a breakdown in communication or what. I just know that there was and that the cis!leader, rather than figuring out what happened, took the side of thrwoing accusations and trying to break us (or, at least, me) down for not being mindless obedient zombies. This situation sucks.

We were (accidentally?) screwed over

The drama of my last post, apparently, is due to a lot of misunderstandings. Basically, here’s what happens:

We wanted this to be a student run thing not directly linked to the center, with us in control. Keith*, the cis guy in control of the trans group, suggested we talk to the cis!leader about this. We figured “hey, she knows about how to do this stuff- she can point us in the right direction”

Turns out, talking to her constitutes making it, officially, a center thing. Now I don’t know if that’s a general rule- or if Keith misrepresented what we wanted to do to the cis!leader, thus giving that impression. We didn’t know this, so went on thinking it was ours and I was a bit put off that they were announcing this to everyone and their grandma.

My partner tells Keith and his girlfriend Dawn*, who is involved with the group, that we want to do this in the college center instead of the cisCenter. We think it’s more or less sorted, the cis!leader will be informed, etc. Monday we make up fliers with the correct place. Tuesday we get an annoyed “Who made these flyers?!” (me, FYI). Turns out that the cis!leader was not informed and this is a serious crimp in their plans for our independent thing.

Drama. All because of miscommunications. That I’m sure weren’t on purpose.
That is, I think it wasn’t.
That is, I hope it wasn’t.

Because if I can’t talk to anyone in the cisCenter if we ever want to do a trans thing separately, this is a seriously busted situation.

*not real names

This isn’t yours

Last time I talked a bit about the thing thursday. It’s turned into a giant drama storm. Here’s the breakdown:

The trans people wanted to do something fairly informal to help educate people
The cis!Leader didn’t see this as valid and refused to let us
For some reason, we appealed to her and the cis!leader agreed to it, so long as it happened on her terms, which included taking control otu of our hands and putting it in an extremely dangerous space.
The trans people were not happy about this, and tried to get it back on their own terms
The cis people ignored this and sent out fliers and all sorts of stuff to ensure their terms be acknowledged and reinforce their control over this, all without bothering to even check if their wording was inoffensive. (it wasn’t)
The trans people said “no, this is our thing” and continued spreading the word that it’ll happen on their terms
The cis people got pissed off about this and demand that we be the ones to change and are angry at us for “confusing” people and how we aren’t allowed to change anything without going through the ciscenter

This is our thing. This is not their thing. We included them to be nice, not because we need them or want their approval. They promptly stole it from us and made it into something that I’m extremely uncomfortable with. My attempts to fix this are treated as something horrible.

They can all go to hell.

Thursday

After the teach-in, us trans people wanted to set up a follow-up session because we got a ton of good questions and realized we’d just end up with more questions after we answered it. So we finally got one set up on Thursday, it might have been sooner (or we might have had more than a week to plan) but first we had to get the OK from the cisDirector of the cisCenter for whatever reason. She decided that it should be at the cisCenter (which, by the way, is somewhat small and can only comfortably fit less than 10 people) during the center’s “tea”. It would be called the “Trans Tea”. You know, because “T” is a shortening of “trans”… yeah.

First- let me reiterate how incredibly unsafe the cisCenter is for me, at least in part due to the cisDirector who makes me feel like my voice would be treated as more valid if I went up to the Pope and expected him to start preaching that the Bible is wrong. At least with the Pope he could possibly help me with Latin. So we’re going to have this “trans tea” in the cisCenter that makes me feel like I can’t actually talk about trans issues freely (sort of defeats the purpose, no?). I don’t even feel safe saying how incredibly unsafe that space is for me.

Who knows, maybe I’ve misjudged her and her reactions to anything I’ve ever said to her has been a coincidence and she’ll actually take me seriously and do what it takes for me to feel that it is a genuinely safe space for trans people, even non-binaries, (note: that includes a bit more than having everyone introduce themselves with their pronouns). Or maybe she’ll just tell me why my own experiences are wrong or only give my lip-service while allowing everything to continue as-is.