Interesting essays about gender margins

[liv]

I was very interested in Jude Doyle's TERFs, Trans Mascs and Two Steve Feminism, and even more so in sbqr's thinky response.

I don't strongly care about Doyle's beef with Moira Donegan, but everything else he says about comparing the discrimination he experiences as a trans man with how he was treated as a mildly well known feminist presumed-woman is interesting. As is the 'Two Steves' model, that gender is a word for two overlapping things, a deeply felt sense of personal identity and also a social construct used to make people in the 'woman' class lesser. This problem has been an ongoing source of contention among my social group, with people I consider to be coming from well-intentioned places ending up on opposite sides.

sqbr has some great clarifications and expansions on the Doyle piece. I very much appreciated

Being raised as a woman has some huge inherent disadvantages even if you ultimately decide you're not one ... Acknowledging this disadvantage does not mean implying that being raised as a man always has equivalent advantages

And some really good examples of how cis women can be sexist and transphobic even if we're starting with good intentions.

I'm pretty sure I'm not secretly a TERF. I am not and never have been a radical feminist, I do not at all believe that sexism is the root of all oppressions or that men are inherently the Oppressor class, and I basically always prefer liberalism over radicalism (I am shading towards the more radical side on climate catastrophe, but basically I want tolerance and diversity within a functioning society, not revolution or separatism). I believe strongly in intersectionality and for many years I refused to identify as a feminist because I thought feminism required me to hate trans women and hating trans women is just bigotry as far as I'm concerned. But I think I am somewhat guilty of what Doyle calls out in his piece, of being prejudiced against trans men on the grounds that they are, well, men, and therefore assuming that they are advantaged rather than oppressed by the patriarchy.

On a related note, I very much resonated with this piece by kiya: Better Days Were On Their Way, as well as the linked Grace Petrie anthem, about the specific brain damage that comes of having been in high school in the 90s I have a very different experience of gender from kiya and in a different continent at that, but I think we must be very close to the same age. So we were for the most part alone, and we knew to be afraid. I knew zero out gay people at school, and almost none in my wider circles. A couple of friends tried to come out to me and I didn't respond well because I didn't understand their necessarily coded language, so probably they thought I was basically more or less straight and cis and likely dangerous with it.

I definitely don't want to presume, but maybe this is an avenue of solidarity with trans men: a partially shared experience of being perceived as cis girls in a world where it was not only dangerous to be anything at all other than straight and binary gendered, but almost impossible to imagine anything else. Which is not at all to say that I think trans men are actually women, that would be a really offensively wrong opinion. But maybe we have in common the same danger and the same deliberately engineered ignorance affected people from lots of different genders and sexualities and backgrounds.

Comments

[kiya]

jenett pointed this out to me since you quoted me, and yeah, that's a thing, the experience of perception-as-cis-girls. Though in my case that is also deeply complexified by the gender consequences of autism.

I commented recently that I have four stolen siblings (in the queer chosen family sense though I think one of them may be cishet), and one of them we bonded over shared girlhood even though we are trans in opposite directions. Obviously I had "better" access to girlhood than she did in some ways, but it's still a thing that's true.

Also I adore Grace Petrie she is so very very good.

(Also, I am gently boggled that you have a quote from my livejournal in your userinfo.)

[liv]

So hi, I have indeed been a fervent admirer of your excellent words for over 20 years now. I did ask for permission to use the quote at the time but it was half a lifetime ago. I was at the same table with you at Worldcon but you were being admirably clear about the fact that you were completely out of social spoons, so it didn't seem like a good time to be incredibly starstruck. The reason I have been in a position to admire your writing for all this time is general 2000s social media interconnectedness but specifically I'm friends with rysmiel.

Autism... someone close to me is nebulagender, and I did feel some connection to the description and started wondering if it would work for me too, but it turns out that it is a gender for autistic people specifically so I'm not magpieing it. Come to think of it, was it you who wrote the essay about geek as a gender, possibly even back on Usenet if not early LJ? I remember finding it helpful when worlds like 'demigender' or even 'non-binary' weren't in common currency.

[rysmiel]

This exchange was a very cheering thing to come across for me right now, thank you both.

[siderea]

I think there's value in the Doyle piece, but I think it should be taken with a grain of salt. He's draped it with a number of reasonable and astute observations, but under the surface it's really "'I Didn't Think They'd Eat MY Face,' Sobs Trans Man Who Joined to the TERFs-For-Leopards-Eating-Trans-Faces Party".

It's all cis women this and feminists that, but he reveals that the so-called feminism he got his stripes fighting on behalf of is the "feminism" that - he is shocked! Shocked! to discover - has always predicated itself on a doctrine of gender that invalidates and rejects trans experience, and not by accident.

A friend sent me that article, and in my reply, I explained: "That first Steve is, uh. It's *predicated* on being the only Steve. It's the Steve that shows up at the party saying "I am the only real Steve, all other Steves are liars and fakes and probably just my crazy ex's flying monkeys", and complains endlessly about his ex, gets drunk, and pukes on the stairs on the way out."

I am trying to remain sympathetic to the guy, because I'm sure he's in a world of hurt. But he threw in with a notoriously trans-hating branch of pseudo-feminism – the "feminism" that lead you to believe that to be a feminist you had to hate trans people! – and then came out as trans and was surprised at his reception. This entire article is him arguing, "But, wait, I'm one of the good ones!" at the backs of a bunch of TERFs as they abandon him.

[liv]

That is really interesting. I've been following Doyle for years, long before transition, I don't remember him being trans-excluding or transphobic. It's very possible I missed some dogwhistles! If he did in fact join the TERF party then yeah, some of his problem is face-leopards. But he mentions being friends with Serano and maybe he's just straight up lying about that, but I don't think she'd put up with a TERF. She might a bit, she's quite inclined to conciliation and big tent and that sort of thing, but I think of Doyle as being part of that broadly intersectional feminist circle of early 2000s bloggers.

Just to clarify, when you say 'the first Steve' you mean the one who claims that gender is a social construct used to oppress women? That's the one who wants to be the only Steve, not the one who talks about personal gender identity? I am inclined to believe the Steves can co-exist because I don't think "gender is a social construct" means "gender is fake". Gender is a tool of oppression and trans people are also real and correct about their own experience and identity.

[hashiveinu]

Your recollection of him matches mine.

[finding_helena]

The "raised as a girl/boy" thing is interesting to me. My daughter transitioned shortly before her 6th birthday. She's now 7 1/2. How much does she even remember now of "being a boy"? How much will she remember of it when she's an adult, if she continues on as she is? In what meaningful way will she have been "raised as a boy" at that point?

And it'll be different for different people based on their experience. I'm sure you and I share experiences that go with having others *perceive* us as cis girls and that some trans men can relate to that too... but there are probably others who don't find that relatable or useful.

This was a really interesting article, thanks for sharing.

[liv]

Nono, I don't mean, trans men are like me because they were 'raised as a girl'. That's just another version of gender essentialism, substituting 'socialization' for 'chromosomes'. I mean, trans men of around my age and similar-ish cultural backgrounds have something in common with me, because they grew up in a world where there were only one and a half genders: normal person, and girl. And you only get to be a normal person if you're a totally straight, masculine, boy / young man, and if you're a totally straight, feminine girl, that's ok but you have to accept that normal people get priority over you. And if you're not either of those things, you have no identity and no aspirations, but a lot of fear that at any time the normal people could turn on you. Being a trans man isn't at all identical to being a cis, bi woman, and clearly not all trans men have the same experience and not all bi women have the same experience. The thing we might have in common is not 'raised as a girl' but spending our childhood in that void that didn't have a name where we were supposed to be girls and didn't live up to the standards. And of course not universally, everybody's experience is unique as you say some wouldn't find this relatable at all.

I really really hope things are entirely different for your daughter! I don't think anyone my age (46) transitioned at 6. They might have known internally that their assigned gender was wrong by that age, but it was very unlikely they'd have accepting parents, let alone schools, communities, any sort of option for social transition as children. I could be wrong about that, it is possible that some people were accepted as their true gender from a really young age, but they wouldn't be in the same situation as the writers linked in this post who changed their gender presentation and how they described themselves as adults.

[finding_helena]

"Nono, I don't mean, trans men are like me because they were 'raised as a girl'. " Yeah, I got that part. Didn't mean to make it sound like I didn't.

I'm only a few years younger than you. I think back on how when we were teens/young adults there was a whole ton of hullabaloo about gay marriage, gay people adopting kids, gay people being in jobs where they worked with kids, etc. and now it's much more commonly accepted and less of an issue, so I'm hoping that a generation from now there will be some headway regarding trans issues. Raising a kid who is in the group it's currently fashionable to hate on is stressful. So far she doesn't seem to have noticed much, but I know that can't last forever. She will have a lot of stuff to eventually deal with that I cannot shield her from, I can only have her back while she deals with it. *sigh*.