Transgender Issues
Jan. 22nd, 2020 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmith Here's a long, rambling post about issues of gender, identity, sexism, politics, racism, classism, and other mayhem.
In short: Society is a mess and it hurts people. There are many experiences of transgender and other identities. People have different feelings and talk about them in different ways.
I don't think picking on each other helps. You decide your stance and vocabulary; other people decide theirs. If it's wrong for the mainstream to force its ideas on others, it's just as wrong for minorities to do so.
In short: Society is a mess and it hurts people. There are many experiences of transgender and other identities. People have different feelings and talk about them in different ways.
I don't think picking on each other helps. You decide your stance and vocabulary; other people decide theirs. If it's wrong for the mainstream to force its ideas on others, it's just as wrong for minorities to do so.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-22 10:08 pm (UTC)Yes ...
Date: 2020-01-22 10:34 pm (UTC)Re: Yes ...
Date: 2020-01-22 11:15 pm (UTC)Like you said, there are some good ideas... but it's patch-work, not all of them are compatible with each other and there's no over-all framework for it all. Certainly there's no end-to-end design or even any logic to it all.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2020-01-22 11:46 pm (UTC)Re: Yes ...
Date: 2020-01-22 11:54 pm (UTC)We also need to recognize a lot more ways that people connect as long-term social units, because the historic man/woman marriage is declining in popularity. If the state has legitimate cause to know who's moving through life together, they need to cover all those versions; and if they don't, they need to stop favoring man/woman marriages over everything else and just butt out of private lives.
Older examples include trends toward ethnic equality and gender equality. Both are in bad shape, but less worse than a century ago.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2020-01-23 01:50 am (UTC)Spouse-and-husband, single household, joint taxes, coparents, joint medical proxy, shared finances
Brother-sister, separate households/taxes, joint medical proxy, joint emergency caretaker for kids, not coparenting, separate finances
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2020-01-23 03:17 am (UTC)That is what I would recommend. However, I would collate a number of standard packages based on common configurations and needs, because "marriage" bundles together THOUSANDS of rights and obligations. People should have the right to build from scratch, but forcing everyone to do so is impractical. Judging from historic cultural examples, a set of 6-12 standard packages should cover almost everyone, with customization a nice modern addition. I can't think of a culture that had more than about a dozen marriage versions.
>> Honestly, the government only needs to be involved insofar as collecting taxes, ensuring safety if children, and mediating disputes over property.<<
I agree.
Socially, however, people need to know who should be treated as "one social unit" meaning they customarily get invited to events together and telling one of them means the other will find out unless secrecy is requested and agreed upon. This is another place where not respecting the ties creates a lot of tension: either the victims play along and suffer ill health, or they say "fuck you" and leave in search of decent company. Neither is ideal.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2020-01-23 01:28 am (UTC)Sounds a lot like life itself, over a million-times-longer time scale. Makes sense to me.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2020-01-23 02:00 am (UTC)Analogy from some of Daniel Quinn's works.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-23 05:12 am (UTC)Society still sucks...
Yes ...
Date: 2020-01-23 05:30 am (UTC)Re: Yes ...
Date: 2020-01-23 05:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-23 01:59 pm (UTC)The young ones have no real idea why I'm not out and loud and proud- and if it needs saying again, the seventies was a dangerous place to be trans.
We were taught that the whole point was to become, to blend back in and get on with life.
Works for me. :o)
Well ...
Date: 2020-01-23 06:42 pm (UTC)I think there has always been a disconnect between people who wanted to merge as seamlessly as possible into their target gender vs. people who wanted to stand out. Some say that they want to be women not transwomen, and it's alienating for them when the other side says that growing up treated as male made them different so they can only be trans.
The arguments exist because experiences just differ. All the stuff that's battered for being a cliche is stuff that feels true to some transfolk, whether it's "I was born in the wrong body" to "I'm a girl. This is my body. Girls have all kinds of bodies." So people squabble, because the different feelings get described in different ways, and the other descriptions don't fit.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-23 04:46 pm (UTC)I also agree that the whole "my feelings are The Truth" to which "you must conform" is infuriating, and often actively harmful. Given the truths various people have told me, which I'm expected to "respect", I'm not male, female, or even a person. I'm not any of the letters in LGBTQ - all have passionate defenders of definitions that exclude me. And there are times when I want to tell someone - usually an activist for something like pronoun circles - that I'll respect their <expletive> pronouns when they respect my existence. (I don't, though, unless they are clearly a self-appointed crusader in favour of their own view of what would be good for some victim group they don't belong to - if their activism is about their own experience, there's probably a lot of pain behind it, and there's no point adding to it, just to make a point that they probably won't be able to hear anyway - folks early in finding themselves and accepting their own worth aren't really ready to empathize with other people's unrelated problems.)
I'd like to see a lot more teaching of empathy, and a lot less inventing and imposing of rules that make some people happy, at the expense of others. And you can "respect" me all day long - while still not hiring or promoting me, etc. etc. I'd like to see a lot more attention to real issues, rather than rules to avoid hurt feelings - if I have to chose, I'd rather be called an "unfeminine freak", but hired, promoted, and paid at the same rate as male peers - than be politely and kindly relegated to a pink collar ghetto. (Don't get me wrong - I'd rather not have to choose. The flack I'm getting lately for being on the autistic spectrum has me eagerly racing towards retirement. But the fact that I'm getting paid just like my peers means I can afford to do that - and for that matter my nice salary and benefits are paying for the resulting therapy.)
And no, I don't mean that hurt feelings aren't real, and don't sometimes lead to a lot worse, like clinical depression and PTSD, if chronic etc. etc. But using the right pronouns is a cheap gesture like banning plastic bags with which to carry home dozens of plastic products wrapped in multiple layers of plastic wrap - from a store that's zoned to be unwalkable, in a city without usable public transport. It's neither anywhere near enough, nor particularly useful in itself, compared to the scale of the problem being addressed.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-01-23 05:05 pm (UTC)Well ...
Date: 2020-01-23 06:51 pm (UTC)They seem to outnumber transmen, and they don't have all the same issues. Not to mention the people who are actually agender and can't get any help for that.
>>As someone categorized female at birth, I've the socially assigned job of affirming other people's feelings<<
I just refuse to do it. That's not what I am, and trying to fake it doesn't work anyway. When people complain, I just narrate what they're doing and why it is wrong. That usually makes them much more uncomfortable than whatever I was quietly doing before. They tend to stop demanding that my hardware store sell them candy.
I've learned that no matter how enraged people are that I have opinions, the amount of damage they can do to me is consistently less than the amount my own body will do if I let them get away with it.
Most of the time, I find it more effective to avoid people. Very few of them are worth putting up with, let alone a positive improvement in my life. I have a handful of friends and family in facetime, and large audience of online friends, and my life is not improved by trying to make assholes pretend to tolerate me.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2020-01-24 01:59 am (UTC)I can do it - not well, but well enough to get by, some of the time at least. But unless I actually care about the person, I'd rather clean sewers. And if the emotional labour is not reciprocated, I'm unlikely to care for them for long.
>> I've learned that no matter how enraged people are that I have opinions, the amount of damage they can do to me is consistently less than the amount my own body will do if I let them get away with it.
I sure hear you there. I don't need any more stress-induced physical issues, and having a classic Aspie "nervous beakdown" from decades of pretending to be neurotypical was a whole load of no fun - but that was more than a decade ago now, and these days anyone who doesn't like the way I naturally am is welcome to do an anatomically-impossible act or two with themselves. (Most of the time, at least - sometimes I still fall back to apologizing for breathing, particularly when I feel like someone has dangerous levels of power over me.)
Re: Well ...
Date: 2020-01-24 04:04 am (UTC)At maximum effort, I can fake being normal for about three hours. I've known three people I cared about enough to shift my language for, and two of them were little old ladies now deceased. Mostly I figure if people don't like who I am, we shouldn't be together.
Some parts of emotional labor are things I consider standard parts of a relationship, like learning each other's likes and dislikes. I let people know I'm not great at social skills, and my actual friends don't mind it. I expect reciprocity. I not tolerate unequal relationships where people just want to use me.
>> I sure hear you there. I don't need any more stress-induced physical issues, and having a classic Aspie "nervous beakdown" from decades of pretending to be neurotypical was a whole load of no fun <<
I have noticed that most of the "therapy" is really aimed at making people pretend they don't exist, don't have problems, and are just there as performers to amuse people who matter. Obviously that builds up to a raging case of PASS eventually.
>> but that was more than a decade ago now, and these days anyone who doesn't like the way I naturally am is welcome to do an anatomically-impossible act or two with themselves.<<
Yay!
>> (Most of the time, at least - sometimes I still fall back to apologizing for breathing, particularly when I feel like someone has dangerous levels of power over me.) <<
Yeah, people in power can be very credible threats.
Frankly that's one reason my willingness to interact with health care keeps dropping. They have literally behaved so abominably that I no longer want some things that would work because it's not worth giving leverage to the enemy. >_< Sometimes when people annoy me I stab them in the identity with that. It seems to distress them a lot. I'll take what I can get.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2020-01-24 04:39 am (UTC)What I can't do is have a real relationship - as compared to e.g. a commercial transaction at arms length - while passing, and it's difficult to spend large proportions of my day being "quiet". In an open office, I'm exhausted from the constant acting job, and can't get much in the way of useful work done - with a private office, I can put on the face when I leave the office, and take it off again as soon as I get back to it. Or I'm a noisy, cranky, rumbunctious, opinionated nerd right out in public, and then too many of them try to "coach" me to "improve" my behaviour.
That's separate from emotional labour - I try to listen to my housemate when she's upset and needs to vent, or express concern and sympathy when e.g. I see someone looks ill, or injured, or takes a sick day. But I do it in a nerdy kind of way. If all else fails, there's always the therapy technique of saying things like "you feel really upset", when it's something that would have me celebrating rather than complaining. Sometimes though I'll say "I'm sorry - I've had all the second hand distress I can cope with this morning" or whatever. And if that can't be said, for whatever reason, then the relationship has insurmountable problems.
It would be nice to work in a 1980 or 1990 software organization again, where my way of being was well within what was considered normal, and in an y case the primary concern was whether the person could do the work. Now, simply acting the way I do - female body and all - is said to be excluding women from STEM, since all women universally need a heavy ration of face to face small talk in order to feel welcome. Or so I'm told by various people, usually without them noticing I'm female-bodied. But before I was wickedly excluding women, I was already deemed inadequate for not having the tastes and habits of someone who went into software - rather than art or sales, either of which they'd have preferred - solely because the money was better. So I can hardly blame self-described feminists for their attempts to exclude nerds - they were just jumping on the bandwagon of excluding those nasty icky nerds from technology, now that it's a position of power and status, or at least income, rather than something wierdos do in their garages and basements :-(
Sigh. I'm afraid the way I am *today* is very much eager to vent, but hoping I haven't gone over the edge for "being weird" to "being a whining asshole" ;-(
Re: Well ...
Date: 2020-01-24 06:12 pm (UTC)I hear no whining.
Fwiw, I transitioned at fifteen in the seventies avoiding most of the male privilege stuff and I hear you on having to be the one to affirm other people's feelings! I was amazed how quickly those assumptions kicked in!