on being gwyneth

look… drawing ever-finer and more tortured distinctions between all those blurry little lines that make up the domain of experience is not the way to get on in the world, ok?

“cisgender transsexual?” give me a fucking break. sounds to me as if, in an effort to stake out our own little specialness, we’ve just wound up back with the essentialists again.

what the hell am i supposed to do, walk around with a little gender manifesto to hand over to everyone just so they can address me? wear a special bracelet on my wrist with all the appropriate acronyms, pronouns and categories etched on it? festoon myself with color-coded handkerchiefs?

for fuck’s sake.

certain basic frustrations have never been resolved, and in fact have just sort of settled into a kind of sediment that lends a certain musty grit to my attitudes about the trans universe.

in a comment to an excerpt on Lisa’s blog from a typically strong-minded entry by Little Light, someone said that “we have to look after our own.”

to which i replied:

except that, by and large, we don’t. we faction, and dismiss wisdom, and walk away. we have no handsign and no mentors. we eat our own.

which is pretty much exactly what i said about two and a half years ago.

i could go on about it, but i don’t feel particularly inclined. i don’t need to enumerate the ways in which we suck, or wax theoretic about why. it’s been done to death by people with no more stake in it than i have now, but with a sustained sense of mission.

gwen smith has argued that we are not a community. i think this is not true… but i think that we’re a kind of bizarro community, where what would be a bond and a sharing between anyone else are for us just more lances, fences and pits. we are a community of shame, of pain and fear and anger. and being humans, not angels, those are the dominant features of our tribe.

it’s been a letdown, i tell you.

it finally dawned on me that one of the difficulties i have with casual group relations – particularly of the kind framed as “supportive” – is that i cannot accept the support, let alone the friendship, of anyone whose judgment i cannot trust. arbitrariness, lack of discernment, superficiality, jealously guarded delusions… all of these are common features of certain social arrangements that make it impossible for me to find value in them or in their regular participants.

this follows closely on a more solid understanding that support groups tend be ok for a certain stage of neurotic neediness, but once you’re a fully realized adult they’re pretty much worthless.

it’s a shame, really. adults – actual people with working critical faculties and an emotional life more complex than that of an eight-year old – have needs, too.

c* used to insist that i was particularly intolerable in the day or so immediately following my shot. right now i can believe it. i’m having one of those “i probably hate you and i don’t even know you” days.

having limited my exposure for quite some time, i’d allowed myself to forget how repellent certain quarters of the online trans universe are, and how easily one can step from lucidity to a shitpuddle in a single link.

there are some great people out there, doing hard work. but there’s a whole lotta crazy, too. damn.

what has always astonished me is the willingness of some people, in the name of “open discourse”, to give digital oxygen to idiots and psychos who really just need to be bagged.

does anyone other than a transperson regularly engage in antisocial behavior and expect to be called “brave” for it?

alison informs me that the online forum where she and i met, and which i subsequently abandoned (twice), is changing host systems… and that as part of that change, its mission description has been slightly modified to serve the “non-cisgendered” community.

the sheer stupidity of which, is an excellent example of why i left the place.

good going, folks. take a term that was coined to reduce obfuscation and imbalance, and just add yet another semantic layer to it. now we’re the “nons” again. we’re the negatively-defined. the permanent other.

just great.

addendum: i see that this entry has been raised as a topic on said forum, in a hidden subarea. since no one i consider a friend would be so foolish, i now know that people who are not my friends are reading this. to all such: hi there. keep your visit brief and avoid the furnishings… they bite.

do no penance for the fact that you ever possessed a penis.

someone at work finally got around to asking me if i’d seen transamerica. he said he’d found it “moving.”

i informed him that, as it had no shatner, zombies or sith, it wasn’t my cup of tea.

i had a tangential thought this morning while thinking about the questions of passing and gender roles: that the degree to which passing is not about “looking the part” is the degree to which it is “acting the part” (where “acting” is not meant to necessarily imply affectation)… and that as much as we like to wave our feminist credentials at each other and declare any descriptive instance of gender performance as “sexist” or “stereotyping”, the fact remains that it *is* performance to some degree. we all take behavioral role models to some extent or another, and i think that the trick is take those models from within a comparitively parallel social class (this is not a new thought). alison, for instance, is a adult, evolved punk chick, whereas i am a middleaged, middleclass professional woman… and i freely admit that my own passing took a turn when i learned how to closely observe and find ways of integrating into myself, the whole field of extremely subtle cues appropriate to that class of women. like a lot of transwomen, i “overdid it” in my early phases, because all i could see was not-me, not-that-guy. i’ve also learned from experience just what my threshold of “underdoing it” really is… and the more subtle, the more integrated, the more *natural* my gender performance is (whether i’m working on the car or shopping for purses), the lower that threshold is.

i had some more thought, on yet another tangent, but right now the new meds are only letting me assemble one paragraph at a time.