on being gwyneth

“You’re interfering with my fabulosity and specialness, you poser.”

Sorry. You don’t own genderfucking, nor “breaking the binary,” nor even the identity. Read up on some anthropology, if not recent queer history.

“You’re not genderqueer, so you’ve got no right to speak.”

Oh? And just how would you know, little Miss Thing?

I live on the fringes of a community that has internalized identity politics to the point where your politics defines your identity. If, within a given subgroup, your ideological gestures fall short of local requirements, the very first thing that comes under scrutiny is your legitimacy, not only as a fellow traveler, but as a kind of person.

And the tool they use to police these boundaries is language. Every exchange is a question of control, and even topics that allegedly are not about specifying who is and is not a tribe member turn out to be little else, in-group and out-group language and supposedly unique concerns strictly circumscribing a territory defended at first by glib condescension – so much lazy reliance on rote phrases – then by shunning and hostility.

Among the less-committed, thoroughgoing leftists have a reputation for being control-freaks… an attitude that confuses and even enrages those of us on the left who believe we actually seek freedom, not constraint. But the longer I am in contact with a certain strain of ideologically-determined, discourse-enforcing, self-limiting boundary maintenance, the more I sort of get the point.

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

The reduction of self to the suffering object, sometimes with the goal of enhancing (especially moral) credibility in a peer group.

It’s a pathology. You get shat on enough, wearing shit on your head becomes a claim to identity.

Genderqueer assholes and crossdressing tourists who can’t inhabit the transsexual mind and so it doesn’t exist.

Identity police, the doglike keepers of the narrative, ill-informed, ill-willed and belligerent.

And in the middle, borrowed repetitious rhetoric, leftist mad libs in lieu of critical, independent thought.

The valorizing of obvious psychosis, let batshit reign because fierce is cool and it serves the purpose.

And there’s only one kind of transsexual isn’t there – yours, and culture and self-knowledge and even the right to be *un*certain be damned, we’re all just women, right, because what could possibly worse than to be *actually trans*, the thing itself, and that there be a world for that.

And I didn’t transition to conform to your certainties, your ideologies, your exacting critera of what makes a good ally, woman, person.

Your rationales as thin as your skins are thick, as rice paper while you hold your torches at the ready and just go ahead and

Burn.

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.

any argument that transpeople ought not to exist – all such arguments – are the same argument.

buying into any part of one, buys into the whole.

just because some part is advanced by someone you may otherwise wish to find affinity with – or worse, purchase the good graces of – does not mean that it has any more merit. it’s still the same essential erasure.

we won’t end gender oppression by ending gender. and those who most strenuously call for it, on the grounds that it “reinforces the binary” (and who object to the idea of “transgender” on the same grounds), want only to establish their own binary: themselves and everyone else. they want gender for their own, and are quite happy to express it, play with it… and most importantly, make choices based on it.

i like gender, and i want more of it, not less. i want more butch and fey, more straight and gay, more of just about every damned thing expressed to its fullest potential by everyone. differences are interesting and beautiful, and the fact that differences are employed as an excuse for oppression is a stupid reason to eliminate the differences themselves.

who cares if it’s binary, or trinary, or wildly multivariate? the fact is that the greater portion of the culture will always tend toward a pair of generally recognizable categories, and for perfectly good reasons. the point is not to erase those categories – and the identities of the people who are quite comfortable with them – but to make room for the variances within and between and outside, and to keep teaching people that it needn’t all be expressed in power relations and dominance games… and most importantly, that variance isn’t deviance.