Livre d'Or

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

( read the essays by the experts first, but my thoughts fwiw )

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.

Seen several variations of this floating around. This particular version I got from ghoti_mhic_uait who pointed out that whether and how some of them are gendered can be really regional.

( list with comments )

As far as I can work out, International Men's Day started as a sarcastic joke because lots of people were whining about how it's not fair that there's an international day for women but not men. This year I was heartened to see a lot of sincere pro-men stuff on social media, including some corporate PR about inspirational male role-models. Admittedly they were inspirational because they do what the large majority of women in the workforce do: succeed in their jobs while taking an active parenting role, but still.

I didn't get round to posting this on the day, but I saw several conversations talking about gendered violence. ( TW: sexual assault )

I don't really have a conclusion here. I don't want to waste energy looking for ways to be sympathetic to people who use their privilege to hurt others. But I do want a world free of sexual assault for people of all genders, and I don't know how important this stuff is, or if it's even real rather than me piecing stuff together from glimpses of a gendered experience I don't understand.

Someone on Twitter linked to this article: How I broke, and botched, the Brandon Teena story by Donna Minkowitz. It's about the real life rape and murder of a trans man depicted in the film Boys don't cry.

( transphobia and violence and some identity noodling )

More on this hopefully soon, I have loads and loads of thoughts bouncing off that article and other stuff I've seen or watched recently.

So two posts about terrible letters to agony aunts crossed my radar recently:

oursin: Sexual bucket list WHAT?, and agonyaunt: Women need to loosen up. In the Guardian column, the writer asks for validation of his desire to either cheat on his wife or pressure her into anal sex. And in the Dear Abby one, the writer wants his wife to give him an exceptionally nice surprise and stop being so inhibited. I mean, both of these are entirely gross and inconsiderate and in both cases the agony aunts and the DW commenters quite rightly slate the men concerned. But what's bothering me is that both the comment discussions go in directions of jokes along the lines of, bet these awful men wouldn't be so keen if their wives suggested doing them with a strap-on! (Paraphrasing rather that quoting, because the point is not to get at the particular people who made these kinds of jokes, but to talk in general about that sort of rhetoric).

( grumpy and somewhat sexually explicit )

I had an interesting conversation about this sort of general topic, which reminded me: do you prefer compliments on your appearance and body, or compliments on your intellect and personality?

( mentions body image, assumptions about beauty and intelligence )

This is liable to be controversial, and I should emphasise that I'm trying to work out what to think here, not proclaiming the right answers.

So it happens that the latest Captain Awkward discussion is about loneliness and how it can be a vicious cycle, if you don't have enough fulfilling social contact you can become miserable and self-hating and push people away or think everyone's out to get you.

The Awkward Army are being very good at firmly squashing the idea that all problems are just caused by bad attitudes, and pointing out that plenty of people have disabilities or external circumstances meaning they can't "just" make more friends. But still, loneliness is one of those types of suffering that people seem to treat as mostly the sufferer's own fault; the most comparable example I can think of is physical fitness. Like somehow, if you're likeable enough, whatever likeable means, in a fallaciously just world you should have as many friends and lovers as you wish. But that means it's very common to assume that anyone who complains about being lonely must in fact be an obnoxious person. And problems which are stigmatized like that are particularly hard to tackle!

The other thing is that "lonely" means two related, but to my mind different, things. Sometimes it means not having enough social contact, but sometimes it means not having a romantic partner. Or perhaps more precisely, the feelings of sadness and inadequacy that come from not having those connections. A really striking example is the guy in the Captain Awkward comments who says

The article is bull. I am horribly lonely. I shoot pool with friends once a week. I go to church every week. I go out to a party every month. I am active in two local communities. I have hundreds of friends [...]

I mean, sure, it's possible to be lonely in a crowd, but it's clear from the rest of the comment and subsequent thread that what's eating this guy is that he's middle-aged and doesn't have and never has had a romantic partner. And being stuck without a partner but wanting one means being perceived as a failure, to an extent that really worries me.

I think loneliness is a very serious problem, and from what I can understand a pretty widespread one. Some people are lonely because they're obnoxious, yes, but it's still a problem; you have to be a lot worse than just obnoxious to deserve how miserable it can be to be deprived of meaningful contact and emotional support. Anyway, lots of entirely lovely people are lonely because they have other stuff going on making it hard to make friends, or because they're just plain unlucky. That includes the not having a spouse-type partner side of being lonely. It's easy enough to say that marriage isn't everything, that people should be able to manage without that specific type of relationship set-up, but the fact is that lots of parts of society are set up so that it's really hard to function at all if you're not in a romantic dyad. Also, it's perfectly reasonable for an individual to want that in their life, even if it's not necessarily the only road to happiness for everybody.

This issue also intersects with gender stuff; people of all genders can be lonely, and people of all genders can be excluded because they don't have a spouse or aren't romantically "successful" as society measures it. But I'm getting the strong impression that there are aspects of this problem that affect men specifically, and that there are very few sensible conversations covering male experiences of loneliness. I doubt we can magically fix this, but I'd most certainly like to start some discussion if I can.

One thing that prompted me to think about related issues is Lis Coburn's essay Anatomy of a scar, which has an original and really insightful take on what's sometimes called the Nice Guy™ phenomenon. In some ways Coburn is much more sympathetic than a lot of the folk on the internet who use the term Nice Guy™, while she also buys into the idea that Nice Guys, men who are upset because they don't have a girlfriend even though they do their best to behave decently and treat women well, are potentially dangerous misogynists.

( wild speculation about gender and relationships )

I've had some half-baked thoughts about being female on the internet for a couple of months now. My basic thesis is that the internet isn't all one thing, and specifically the parts of "the internet" that have most media visibility aren't the whole story. This may actually be several different ideas muddled together, mind you, and it's always risky to make broad generalizations about gender and social media. But let me have a go, and see if I can refine my vague ideas by discussing them.

( muddled and anecdotal; mentions gender violence )

OK, that probably should have been two or three separate posts. And now I really must get back to my marking!

shreena asked for my views on single-sex education (schools/colleges/universities). I like this prompt, it gives me an excuse to pontificate on a topic I don't get into too often.

( views, I have them )

[January Journal masterlist]

Several cheerful upbeat articles about trans* and genderqueer matters have crossed my radar recently, some via Twitter and some on my DW readlist and some just in my general surfing around. I'm cis myself so if I've made a misstep and these are wrong-headed or in fact not cheering I apologize.

agonyaunt recently highlighted a lovely column where the correspondent is hand-wringing over a grandchild who is insufficiently gender-conforming, and the advice is to show love and understanding (and stop panicking over nothing). I like how the agony aunt doesn't assume the child is trans or genderqueer because they're not a pink princess, and also doesn't assume the child is a girl just because that's how they were assigned at birth, but gives advice that is sensible and compassionate for any of the possibilities.

Talking of supportive families, this letter to my transgender father rather endeared me. It's interesting that the writer addresses his female parent as "Dad". I sort of like the idea of degendering the term, but some may find its masculine connotations too strong and therefore unpleasant to encounter in an article about a woman.

Ashley Altadonna listed 30 things she learned while transitioning. There's a bunch of really sweet stuff there; her #1 is that her family and friends are wonderful, amazing, supportive etc, and her #30 is that her wife is wonderful too. The post also makes a pretty good guide, from what I can tell, to trans etiquette, and because it comes in a happy bouncy context, not a theory-heavy or angry context, it may be palatable to some people who might otherwise be resistant to the advice.

This article, from Svenska Dagbladet, a right-leaning Swedish broadsheet, is basically a conservative columnist having a giant freakout over some progressive initiatives in Swedish education. Titled Genusförskola är inte jämställdhet [Pre-school gender studies is not equality], it is flapping about such things as:

Gender studies academics propose that some of the height difference between men and women is cultural rather than genetic.

Gender studies experts may have input into pre-school education

There is one pre-school in a trendy area of Stockholm where gender-neutral language ('friend' or 'person') is preferred to gendered language like 'boy' and 'girl'.

Some schools are intervening in children's playtime when the kids start segregating toys and activities by gender.

Parents will not be allowed to opt their children out of gender egalitarian initiatives in pre-schools. The horror!

kaberett came out as trans, genderqueer and Queer and started some really excellent conversation, thinky and informative and supportive, on their post. What particularly struck me, among a whole bunch of cogent explanations, is kaberett's comment: the idea that the only way I can be recognised as genderqueer is by looking like a skinny white boy with long hair is bullshit. Which makes me want to reexamine my relationship with androgyny; maybe the fact that I have breasts and broad hips and little desire to alter my body doesn't automatically exclude me from that range of gender possibilities.

Sidenote: when I congratulated kaberett on running such a good discussion, they said it was nearly as awesome as my conversations, which made me completely fall apart with feeling so well complimented. So, um, apparently we each think the other is amazingly awesome at facilitating good conversations on difficult topics...

cxcvi also came out as trans and transfeminine, and announced her engagement at the same time. Many congratulations to cxcvi and sophie ♥

As it happens, several of my friends who happen to be trans have been bouncing at me about happy relationship developments recently; obviously I'm not going to list them here, but it's very pleasing.