"oh no gender variance has become a fad!"

26th December 2010

Post reblogged from DapperCat with 225 notes

“oh no gender variance has become a fad!”

ichmuss:

1. More people challenging the binary/challenging cissexism is not a bad thing.

2. No one has any right to tell anyone that they are or aren’t gender variant. You know you better than I or anyone else can.

3. While I could say “no one does this for fun” (this: not “passing” in any bathroom, having your pronouns disregarded and disrespected, having people tell you that your identity isn’t legitimate (doesn’t that sound familiar?), dealing with any variety of cissexist responses to gender variance), it doesn’t even matter. Maybe someone physically transitions because they’re into body modification and it would be a fun adventure. Maybe someone is playing with gender identities because they think it’s sexy or fun. Maybe someone is experimenting with gender identities. So what? That’s just as legitimate as any other experience or use of gender. Which brings me to:

4. There is no such thing as an authentic trans or gender-variant experience. There is no one narrative of feeling like you were a boy since you were two and a half, of hating your body, of feeling you’re trapped in the wrong body, of being masculine or feminine, of using a specific pronoun, of transitioning or not in a specific way. And it doesn’t matter if you’re “sure”: maybe today, maybe for the next twenty years, you’ll feel very strongly female, and maybe over time your identity will shift, and that’s okay because gender identities are (sometimes, for some people) fluid. Everyone experiences or doesn’t experience gender differently. There are not people who transition (or don’t!) who are “really trans” and people who aren’t. There is not a hierarchy of gender variance with people who are “more” gender-variant at the top and people who are “just experimenting” or “just doing it for fun” or “not trans enough” at the bottom.

So, I can’t speak for all gender variant people, and I don’t claim to. But this is how I feel: I have no right to tell you what your identity is. You do not have to answer to the trans police or the genderqueer police or the anything else police about your identity or the way you express your gender. When I see or meet or hear about someone engaging in any kind of fucking with gender, I don’t think “oh man, you’re totally not as gender-variant as I am” or “I can’t believe you’re appropriating my experience” or “you’re not what you say you are.” I think “thank you.” For taking steps in fighting the binary. For making me feel like I’m not alone. For doing whatever you need to do to make your life more livable.

Maybe gender variance has become a fad. Awesome.

yes yes yes. read read read.

The thing that strikes me about reading this, is that some of the worse aspects of this, are things that came up in my dealings with psychiatrists over the last year or so. Really, as gatekeepers for the treatment I seek, they are the gender police, and they do seem to tell people that their identity isn’t real.

One that I spoke to wasn’t a “specialist” in gender identity at all, but he told me that once some time ago, he had come across “a man” who only thought “he” wanted to “be a woman” and had come to this psychiatrist for help. That the “man” in question was “delusional” and now he was “cured” of the issue. I sat and wondered to myself for a while, whether the “man” he spoke of had just given up trying to deal with the person in front of me, and sought treatment from someone else. Whether the psychiatrist I was with had dismissed this person as being “deluded” because their narrative hadn’t fitted some blueprint. I hoped that where-ever they were, that the person he dismissed as “cured” was happy in their identity; not still trying to live out a miserable existence because they had believed some privileged middle-aged white guy, when he told them they were wrong.

I feel ashamed to say the only thing I felt I could speak out against was when he dismissed the surgery I was asking for as “mutilation” of the genitals. I am a little happier to say that there was a good deal of frantic back-pedalling. Unfortunately this also came with words to the effect that it wouldn’t be mutilation for me, because I’m a “real transsexual” and it’s ok. I sighed inwardly. In my own validation I had seen the othering of a whole group of people, including me, as well as the denying of a whole group of people whose experiences and feelings didn’t match his blueprint.

It’s not without my own guilt, or a feeling of guilt, that I came to very slightly better my own situation by partly diminishing that of others. Though I do feel that in making my own situation better I have merely ended up back where I was a year ago, having fought through a year of crap forced upon me by the NHS in Wales.

Tagged: nhs psychiatrist wales gender variance

Source: soft-animal

The girl in the mirror

“oh no gender variance has become a fad!”