It's strange that this would come so full circle. I would love to have posted this piece here. Take a look at the description on the blog and as the piece progresses you may find yourself understanding why.
Either way, albeit on the second blog I registered, this will be my first ever personal blog post.
*swings champagne bottle at laptop screen*
I have been in the habit of posting these sorts of musings to Facebook as notes, but when I started that with this piece, I experienced an immediate reluctance. I may well link this to Facebook at some point, but I don't trust a lot of you out there to be non-judgemental and I'm scared of the rejection I'll feel from the rest of you not engaging.
So here it goes:
I've been doing an immersive amount of reading on gender related topics
since hearing about Leelah Alcorn's suicide last week. It's fascinating and
illuminating and has started stirring a number of questions within me. For starters it's made me start asking more pointedly about my own gender identity - a question which I am slowly answering for myself.
I'd say for understanding's sake that I see myself currently as a cisgender woman who has had limited bicurious experience. I'd like to get into the habit perhaps of making cisgender people consider these sorts of self-definitions, because I can't image what it must be like to be misgendered, other than I imagine I wouldn't like it. My prefered pronouns are she/her. And I like being called Rachel - Rachel Erica if you really want to make me smile. I am starting to learn that unless you know without a shadow of a doubt that someone is cisgender, you probably shouldn't go ahead and assume by looking at them whether they prefer he/him, she/her or they/them.
At this point in my life, I can honestly say that I have no recollection of having engaged with a transman or transwoman, but not for any active avoidance. My first encounter with the language of transgender and sexual nonheteronormativity/cisnormativity came from one of those horrifying tabloid talk shows - probably Ricki Lake - in either the late 1990s or early 2000s - which makes it equally likely to have been Tyra.
I recall jeering, screaming and generally heightened discourse - trashy TV - and a strange sense of both othering based on unfamiliarity and accepting, I guess based on a sense of collective otherness that defined these shows. However inappropriate for an 8 to 10 year old the context was, it did give me early intuitions into ideas that I am now later in life reinvestigating with a hope to understand better and more deeply, and not be another misinformed, cisgender hater.
I remember feeling the need to explain to an adult who walked in on me watching an episode of one of these talk shows why the woman on the couch "could possibly be trying to call herself a gay man..." (said with an obvious snort of derision). The explanation felt obvious - and stands under correction given that I, myself, was (am) young and uninformed: who or what people themselves wanted to be and who they wanted to be with were not part of a simple sum; you couldn't simply look at the answer of what someone wanted in the sex of their partner and look at who was sitting infront of you and call the two things equal. It made sense that the two things affected one another, but also that they had to be distinct. This woman wanted to be a man. The physical embodiment of self they found themself presented with was wrong, deeply and the embodiment they wanted was a man's. This really didn't seem like a stretch at all. In the same breath this person knew that they wanted a physical relationship with men. While I'm sure now, given the growth globably of the trans* community, there exists a preferred way to refer to someone who is female to male trans who would pursue sexual and emotional relationships preferably with men, at that point in time for that woman to be calling themself a gay man trapped in a woman's body made perfect sense to me.
So then what happened? Because the clarity in the mind of that 8 to 10 year old certainly didn't persist all the way into my adolescence. Somehow I became so entrenched as a ciswoman in the sexuality spectrum that I completely forgot that there was a whole gender thing on the go as well - maybe because people have needed my gender concerns to be primarily feminist?
Anyway, where my young self had answers... intuitions, my older self is now picking up with questions. Questions such as how much of my sense of (sexual) self actualisation is determined by being perceived as that which I most deeply feel I am by those people I am attracted to? I would be inclined to say A LOT. And then by extension, why is this something that cisnormative beauty standards make me deny or at least question? Why do I feel fucked up by these standard? Is it because they require of me to hide? They require of transwoman to hide. They require of me to hide too; to hide behind veneers that tell the world "we are women" as though women are obliged to answer a question that is never actually politely asked. And hell, they appear to build a meta dynamic for transwoman that I couldn't even begin to confront. Transwoman are further othered when they hide well enough and are outed by reminders that because of their (not actually apparent and utterly personal) "at-birth" biology, no matter how much better they achieve these cisgender beauty norms than actual cisgendered woman do, that they are still not "real" women - always with little to no investigation of what a "real" woman actually is.
There are many parts of identifying as a woman that I love, but when others can't freely do the same without fear of discrimination, harassment or even death, there are many parts of identifying as a human that I resent. I hold that the same would be true of me if I were hypothetically a cisgendered man.
* This is a first investigation into the subject for Rachel Erica and while every conscious attempt was made to not offend those trying to be understood, Rachel apologises sincerely for offences committed and awaits correction or at least insight where it is lacking.
Rachel believes in the value of dialogue and extends an open invitation to anyone reading this to join the conversation provided they undertsand that an open, non-judgemental space is being saught as much as it is being offered. Anyone who fails to respect that can politely go and read another blog.*
