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The elephant in the drawing room.
Dec. 31st, 2012 01:30 amI've stated a lot that I have a seething sense of resentment over the fact that I feel that I've missed out on a great deal of what my 20s and 30s should have been. Lately I've been reading more about harassment and gendered assault and general sexual discrimination that exists within our culture. (and others, but given that I am in fact talking about me here, our culture is the one that's relevant. The westernisation of that discussion and how that pisses me off is another topic entirely.) I don't seriously think that I *want* to be discriminated against or harassed like that; nobody sane would. What I do get a sense of is that I have missed out on several decades of gendered acculturation that allows me to understand exactly how it is that women are contextualised in our culture and that badly skews my own personal social positioning and understanding of myself. The basic wariness and disenfranchisement that so many women describe remains as invisible to me now as it did when I was living as a man.
There's a real cognitive dissonance here...as I said before - obviously nobody wants to be demeaned, harassed, assaulted, talked down to, or otherwise treated as a second class citizen. I start to feel like a clueless tourist who yammers on about wanting an "authentic" experience while having no clue what that actually means. That's where the bit that chafes me hits though. I am not a tourist in this gender. I'm not just checking it out with plans to go home later with a few snapshots, souvenirs and party stories. I have turned my life upside down and fucked it and myself up in a variety of ways to make this happen. So there's all sorts of facets to this. There's the petulant desire to be a real and proper member and a sort of whininess that I'm still not being recognised as such. (yeah, that's a fucked up badge of membership that no sane person really wants but it's still a form of recognition) There's the growing sense of disillusionment and anger as I get a more and more vivid picture of how screwed up gendered interactions are simply because of how I'm now positioned. It should not be underestimated how profoundly revealing it can be simply to recontextualise yourself that way. My relationships with my peers, especially those who have come to know me since I started transitioning has been profoundly informed by that shift and *that* has provided me with a whole new viewpoint. Men don't get that level of "girl talk" because it's a conversation that happens entirely within a group of women and one that does treat men as "other" which would inevitably produce all sorts of defensive reactions. So I'm suddenly getting that discussion without being treated as that "other".
This is something that's happened really quite suddenly as well. I didn't get quietly inducted through childhood, through puberty, and then through young adulthood with the deep understanding that comes with having lived that experience. I *do* still carry a messy and partially relevant tangle of male privilege around with me although I'm finding it difficult these days to work out which parts of those still inform how I'm treated. This comes back to the fact that I never was, nor will I ever get to be a young woman. So I'm getting slapped in the face with this all at once and at this point it's somewhat overwhelming and my brain is shrieking "THIS IS IMPORTANT!" in ways that to anyone who grew up with it in the ways that I haven't are going to seem ridiculously self-evident. There's also the usual guilty "Oh this is important now that it's about you, is it?" reaction which is entirely warranted. It's tricky to start discussing this without the sense that I'm cluelessly, oblivously and embarrassingly stating the blindingly obvious. I'm *trying* to think things through before I blurt them out but I'm well behind everyone else.
I have a new set of peers who are providing me with both feminist and trans-feminist material and ideas. This is interesting and useful and probably damn near essential if I'm to properly make sense of who I am once the context of who I am reaches outside of my own head. Working it out is going to take a lot of time and a lot of rambling blog entries, I'm sure. It's probably going to take a lot of extended conversations with some very patient and understanding women to whom I'm going to wind up owing a real debt.
There's a real cognitive dissonance here...as I said before - obviously nobody wants to be demeaned, harassed, assaulted, talked down to, or otherwise treated as a second class citizen. I start to feel like a clueless tourist who yammers on about wanting an "authentic" experience while having no clue what that actually means. That's where the bit that chafes me hits though. I am not a tourist in this gender. I'm not just checking it out with plans to go home later with a few snapshots, souvenirs and party stories. I have turned my life upside down and fucked it and myself up in a variety of ways to make this happen. So there's all sorts of facets to this. There's the petulant desire to be a real and proper member and a sort of whininess that I'm still not being recognised as such. (yeah, that's a fucked up badge of membership that no sane person really wants but it's still a form of recognition) There's the growing sense of disillusionment and anger as I get a more and more vivid picture of how screwed up gendered interactions are simply because of how I'm now positioned. It should not be underestimated how profoundly revealing it can be simply to recontextualise yourself that way. My relationships with my peers, especially those who have come to know me since I started transitioning has been profoundly informed by that shift and *that* has provided me with a whole new viewpoint. Men don't get that level of "girl talk" because it's a conversation that happens entirely within a group of women and one that does treat men as "other" which would inevitably produce all sorts of defensive reactions. So I'm suddenly getting that discussion without being treated as that "other".
This is something that's happened really quite suddenly as well. I didn't get quietly inducted through childhood, through puberty, and then through young adulthood with the deep understanding that comes with having lived that experience. I *do* still carry a messy and partially relevant tangle of male privilege around with me although I'm finding it difficult these days to work out which parts of those still inform how I'm treated. This comes back to the fact that I never was, nor will I ever get to be a young woman. So I'm getting slapped in the face with this all at once and at this point it's somewhat overwhelming and my brain is shrieking "THIS IS IMPORTANT!" in ways that to anyone who grew up with it in the ways that I haven't are going to seem ridiculously self-evident. There's also the usual guilty "Oh this is important now that it's about you, is it?" reaction which is entirely warranted. It's tricky to start discussing this without the sense that I'm cluelessly, oblivously and embarrassingly stating the blindingly obvious. I'm *trying* to think things through before I blurt them out but I'm well behind everyone else.
I have a new set of peers who are providing me with both feminist and trans-feminist material and ideas. This is interesting and useful and probably damn near essential if I'm to properly make sense of who I am once the context of who I am reaches outside of my own head. Working it out is going to take a lot of time and a lot of rambling blog entries, I'm sure. It's probably going to take a lot of extended conversations with some very patient and understanding women to whom I'm going to wind up owing a real debt.
