on being gwyneth

I have gone where I had to go to find the love I needed.

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.

i was asked privately whether or not i’d had any experience with group therapy. this was my response (with minor edits):

—

i was in a group situation of a kind, back in junior high school. the counselor thought it a good idea to bring together those of us who tended to be most involved in “incidents” and consider us as a single class of troubled kids. of course, we hated each other. it was an abject failure. it was my last significant experience of such a thing that i can actually remember.

i think i have a false memory of something else, later.

i did attend a local trans support group – non-therapeutic, self-organizing – earlier in my transition. it put me in touch with a couple of people who i came to consider friends. at the outset it gave me essential local information. and it was a place to try to begin to resocialize. but it was, all in all, quite sad, and i last drove home from it in a strange combination of nostalgia and nausea.

as i keep saying, gender is a relation, not a thing.

put another way, my gender is a working metaphor.

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.

tranny: emits nonconformant behavior
cissy: “you freak”
tranny: “i’m not a freak, i’m a cripple.”
cissy: “oh, well that’s all right then.”

the problem with the idea of GID is that it authorizes “objective” assessment over subjective experience.

recently, i tried to get someone to see the difference. consider for a moment the possibility that the “classic narrative” is true in a sense… not to the degree that we really are “women trapped in men’s bodies” (or men in women’s) but simply that we are what we are, and not delusional or maladaptive. is the disorder that we think we’re something we’re not? or is there a subjective disorder… that internal sense of disconnect or disharmony which becomes our negative compass? “this isn’t right… go that way.”

she didn’t get it. she replied with a laundry list of kinks, quirks and frustrations and conceded that, yes indeed, she must be disordered and they may as well toss her in the nearest rubber room. she had capitulated to the objective, to the objectifying.

i let it go. i’ve had too many of these conversations with too many people – most of whom are comparatively intelligent – who cling to their boundaries and their language.

in any case, the objective sense is the sense that is so easily (mis)communicated when trying to tell others who we are. the distinction is subtle, the common sense facile, and it’s easier to be pathetic than, well, strange.

if you wander around the transblogs a bit, you can come across quite a few references to the idea of “monstrousness” – usually in the context of an embrace of radical difference.

from the moment i first heard the term, i understood completely that trans people inhabit the Uncanny Valley, and that it is the visceral, atavistic reflex to all beings in that strange place that drives just about everything that is screwed up about our social status and even our own socialization… the terror and the fetish, the revulsion and the fascination, the stealthy and the flagrant.

most of us are running an uncontrolled psychosocial experiment on ourselves. is it possible to live in this valley? does one transcend it by scrambling its boundaries, by the levitation of character, or by some completely orthogonal means? what are the longterm consequences of being – actually being, whether perceived or not – the android or mutant with the almost-human eyes, wanting desperately to be… what? exactly what it already is but better known? or “real”?

it’s no wonder that some of us – quite a few in fact – simply set up camp here.