Humour me. No...wait...
Jan. 14th, 2013 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sacredchaoThe last couple of days have been difficult. Old insecurities have come out to play with additional tiny insights and incidents to spur them on. Maybe my usual trick of writing them down will make them more coherent.
My body hasn’t endeared itself to me of late. For reasons that I both have and haven’t covered here it’s not something which delights me at the moment. I’m also still feeling exceedingly single and badly missing the intimacies both large and small that come with a closer relationship than just friendship. The launch of the third iteration of Dude magazine over the weekend heightened that as its theme is partners. There was a great deal of discussion about the dynamics of relationships with trans people and that brought the whole issue into sharper focus for me.
While walking back to my car, a random guy sized me up and declared, “You look like a man.” He was part of a group walking in the other direction and once my gobsmacked mind had sorted itself out we’d both gone some way. Probably for the best...a group of drunken lads out on a Saturday night aren’t likely to react well to being called out by an uppity tranny.
It stung though. He had no investment in me whatsoever and was simply reacting to what he saw in front of him. This is unusual in my interactions with people. Most people I speak with know me, like me and want to support me. I’ve mentioned before the fact that phrases like “you’re gorgeous” refer to the person as a whole rather than their appearance and simply mean “You are a person who I like and value and want to support.” This clouds any opinion I receive from people partly because they’re perceiving the entire person and partly because there’s absolutely no way they’d tell me that frankly, I have a bit of a bloke-in-a-frock aspect for precisely the same reason that being told that by a random stranger in the street is considered to be so astoundingly rude. He was unusual simply because he had no compunctions in saying what he honestly thought.
I’ve had a good friend point out that a body is not a unique truth to read and it’s surely not a good indicator of gender but even if each person we interact with has a different impression of us, they *do*each read us visually in all sorts of ways that influence their impression of us and if there’s a dissonance there then it does register, whether it informs their opinion of our worth as a person or not. I know that *I* make those sorts of assessments. They don’t change my opinion of that person as someone I want to know but they do inform things such as attractiveness and if someone is unfortunate enough to have physical aspects wildly at odds with their gender I do think “Oh crap, you poor thing.” I hate myself when I find myself making those assessments precisely because I know it’s a thing I’m worried about myself. It informs more than just attractiveness; it affects how I’m positioned when I talk to people, it manifests in how I read people looking at me in public spaces, up to and including assessment of my personal safety.
So when my friends say lovely affirming things to me, it slowly becomes obvious that each and every one of them talks about me as a personality and how they value me as a person, even when the topic is specifically my physical appearance. This brings me back to the horrible and I hope unwarranted impression that they’re all stepping around the issue at hand to try to say something nice because while they’ll talk about my personality, my abilities, how I dress and a number of other things about me, my physical appearance is rarely if ever mentioned and when it is, it’s about things that don’t address this such as my eye colour.
All of this comes back to the worry I’ve had since I started the process of transition, which is to what extent this winds up with me being considered “other” by *everyone* and how seriously or not my identity will be taken by those around me, both consciously and sub-consciously. This includes myself. I do get instances of imposter syndrome where I don’t feel that I can legitimately speak with a woman’s voice and that it will be resented if I try. I’m acutely aware of the fact that my acculturation is heavily masculine and while I’m scrambling awfully hard to catch up, I still feel thoroughly clueless in many respects. As I’ve said before, I’m also still carting around aspects of male privilege which, while I don’t feel that I need to apologise for it, distorts and fragments my perception of how I position myself. A nasty aspect of this is that some parts of the feelings that contribute to the sense of being an imposter are very much like the arguments presented by some transphobic radical feminists as to why I’m not a real woman but a deceitful, deluded, infantile, mutilated male. I run across these often enough that the ways in which they mirror my own internal dialogues are *extremely* unpleasant. As it happens I came across a particularly nasty example of the type this morning. This meant I spent the rest of the days in a state of mind where I simply shouldn’t be talking to people. I forbade myself from sending even the most mildly critical of emails (which is a part of my job – I provide coaching feedback relevant to the work I do) and left that for tomorrow.
The catch 22 in all of this of course is that there are very few ways in which I’m going to get any kind of validation regarding this one way or another. Collaring my friends and putting them on the spot is a serious imposition that I’m not prepared to explore. Going back looking at my last entry it’s obvious that this is an ongoing argh with a few extra triggers to bring it out in its full nauseating glory. I’m not sure I know yet how to tackle this particular set of ideas but however I do it, it has to be in a way that’s honest with myself. This is also part of the ongoing process of trying to call myself on my own bullshit. So I have to acknowledge that making this public *is* me shoving this under the noses of those around me and I’m totally aware of that and so I also have to acknowledge that nobody owes me the awkward conversation that thrashing this out implies. I have to be prepared to accept that there’s going to be an untidy resolution where some things are validated, others refuted and much not resolved at all in the near future and that each of those aspects may or may not be to my liking. Ultimately though, this is mostly to get this out of my head in a sufficiently coherent form that I can take at least one step back and see it more clearly than I have so far. Otherwise I’ll continue to rehash half-formed thoughts and reach half-baked conclusions.
My body hasn’t endeared itself to me of late. For reasons that I both have and haven’t covered here it’s not something which delights me at the moment. I’m also still feeling exceedingly single and badly missing the intimacies both large and small that come with a closer relationship than just friendship. The launch of the third iteration of Dude magazine over the weekend heightened that as its theme is partners. There was a great deal of discussion about the dynamics of relationships with trans people and that brought the whole issue into sharper focus for me.
While walking back to my car, a random guy sized me up and declared, “You look like a man.” He was part of a group walking in the other direction and once my gobsmacked mind had sorted itself out we’d both gone some way. Probably for the best...a group of drunken lads out on a Saturday night aren’t likely to react well to being called out by an uppity tranny.
It stung though. He had no investment in me whatsoever and was simply reacting to what he saw in front of him. This is unusual in my interactions with people. Most people I speak with know me, like me and want to support me. I’ve mentioned before the fact that phrases like “you’re gorgeous” refer to the person as a whole rather than their appearance and simply mean “You are a person who I like and value and want to support.” This clouds any opinion I receive from people partly because they’re perceiving the entire person and partly because there’s absolutely no way they’d tell me that frankly, I have a bit of a bloke-in-a-frock aspect for precisely the same reason that being told that by a random stranger in the street is considered to be so astoundingly rude. He was unusual simply because he had no compunctions in saying what he honestly thought.
I’ve had a good friend point out that a body is not a unique truth to read and it’s surely not a good indicator of gender but even if each person we interact with has a different impression of us, they *do*each read us visually in all sorts of ways that influence their impression of us and if there’s a dissonance there then it does register, whether it informs their opinion of our worth as a person or not. I know that *I* make those sorts of assessments. They don’t change my opinion of that person as someone I want to know but they do inform things such as attractiveness and if someone is unfortunate enough to have physical aspects wildly at odds with their gender I do think “Oh crap, you poor thing.” I hate myself when I find myself making those assessments precisely because I know it’s a thing I’m worried about myself. It informs more than just attractiveness; it affects how I’m positioned when I talk to people, it manifests in how I read people looking at me in public spaces, up to and including assessment of my personal safety.
So when my friends say lovely affirming things to me, it slowly becomes obvious that each and every one of them talks about me as a personality and how they value me as a person, even when the topic is specifically my physical appearance. This brings me back to the horrible and I hope unwarranted impression that they’re all stepping around the issue at hand to try to say something nice because while they’ll talk about my personality, my abilities, how I dress and a number of other things about me, my physical appearance is rarely if ever mentioned and when it is, it’s about things that don’t address this such as my eye colour.
All of this comes back to the worry I’ve had since I started the process of transition, which is to what extent this winds up with me being considered “other” by *everyone* and how seriously or not my identity will be taken by those around me, both consciously and sub-consciously. This includes myself. I do get instances of imposter syndrome where I don’t feel that I can legitimately speak with a woman’s voice and that it will be resented if I try. I’m acutely aware of the fact that my acculturation is heavily masculine and while I’m scrambling awfully hard to catch up, I still feel thoroughly clueless in many respects. As I’ve said before, I’m also still carting around aspects of male privilege which, while I don’t feel that I need to apologise for it, distorts and fragments my perception of how I position myself. A nasty aspect of this is that some parts of the feelings that contribute to the sense of being an imposter are very much like the arguments presented by some transphobic radical feminists as to why I’m not a real woman but a deceitful, deluded, infantile, mutilated male. I run across these often enough that the ways in which they mirror my own internal dialogues are *extremely* unpleasant. As it happens I came across a particularly nasty example of the type this morning. This meant I spent the rest of the days in a state of mind where I simply shouldn’t be talking to people. I forbade myself from sending even the most mildly critical of emails (which is a part of my job – I provide coaching feedback relevant to the work I do) and left that for tomorrow.
The catch 22 in all of this of course is that there are very few ways in which I’m going to get any kind of validation regarding this one way or another. Collaring my friends and putting them on the spot is a serious imposition that I’m not prepared to explore. Going back looking at my last entry it’s obvious that this is an ongoing argh with a few extra triggers to bring it out in its full nauseating glory. I’m not sure I know yet how to tackle this particular set of ideas but however I do it, it has to be in a way that’s honest with myself. This is also part of the ongoing process of trying to call myself on my own bullshit. So I have to acknowledge that making this public *is* me shoving this under the noses of those around me and I’m totally aware of that and so I also have to acknowledge that nobody owes me the awkward conversation that thrashing this out implies. I have to be prepared to accept that there’s going to be an untidy resolution where some things are validated, others refuted and much not resolved at all in the near future and that each of those aspects may or may not be to my liking. Ultimately though, this is mostly to get this out of my head in a sufficiently coherent form that I can take at least one step back and see it more clearly than I have so far. Otherwise I’ll continue to rehash half-formed thoughts and reach half-baked conclusions.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 08:50 am (UTC)He didn't *not* have any investment in you and how you felt.
He probably also says stuff like "you're ugly", or wolfwhistles when he feels so inclined.
Mind you, I once had a group of guys discuss whether "it" (me) was male or female. I think that was trans-hate.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 09:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 09:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-14 07:25 pm (UTC)For (a quite wordy) example, I have an older friend whom I've thought of as my height for over a decade. At some point she began shrinking and is now two inches shorter than I am. I didn't notice until the other day when I was staring into the partline of her hair instead of looking her in the eyes. I have to assume that she didn't just shrink two inches overnight, but I'd categorized her as "my height" and hadn't been looking closely enough to notice any change. *shrug*