[353/366] finally getting around to these questions

[cosmolinguist]

I hadn’t forgotten about the trans questions I offered and some of you asked about, a month ago now. I just hadn’t had the brain power to answer them.

I don’t think I do now – for one thing, I’m starting this at 2am because I can’t sleep, which never bodes well – but I need something to do because, well, it’s 2am and I can’t sleep.

I'm going to start with one that sfred asked me, "8. How does it feel to you to transition?"

I'm starting here because I was kind of stuck on something that resolved itself the other day -- I hadn't been sure at all what "transition" means to me -- without me even meaning to be thinking about it, because I read an article about transitioning when non-binary. Non-binary isn’t a label I use for myself but it sometimes overlaps a lot with my experiences, and this is one of those times. And the question of “how do you transition when you don’t know what you’re transitioning to?” is if anything even more understandable when I don’t even have a gender of any kind to transition to.

It used to stress me out, thinking about having to prove to people that I am transgender and that I am transitioning….

I feel like transitioning isn’t quite the right word for what I do. I reify my gender in my actions every day. It isn’t showy, its components change daily…

One thing that helped me validate my own tiny transitions is the realization that cisgender people reify their gender too. There is a quote I love from a piece called Dress to Kill, Fight to Win:

First, there is no naturalized gendered body. All of our bodies are modified with regard to gender, whether we seek out surgery or take hormones or not. All of us engage in or have engaged in processes of gender body modification (diets, shaving, exercise regimes, clothing choices, vitamins, birth control. etc) that alter our bodies, just as we’ve all been subjected to gender related processes that altered our bodies (being fed differently because of our gender, being given or denied proper medical care because of our gender, using dangerous products that are on the market only because of their relationship to gender norms, etc). The isolating of only some of these processes for critique, while ignoring others, is a classic exercise in domination. To...put trans people’s gender practices under a microscope while maintaining blindness to more familiar and traditional, but no less active and important gender practices of non-trans people, is exactly what the transphobic medical establishment has always done.

The notion of reifying (fancy word for “making something abstract into something more real,” btw) gender rather than transitioning as such makes a lot of sense to me, and reifying gender being something that cis people do as much as trans people really resonates with me because I put so much effort (and resentment) into my assigned gender for decades. What I’m doing now doesn’t feel like more work – it’s a lot less, in some ways – it’s just the same effort better directed. And I like that what I’m doing feels like the same thing cis people are doing, the same as I felt when I was a cis person. It’s a consciousness that anyone can share with me.

So yeah, that’s how I’ll be talking about “transitioning” as I answer these other questions.

Comments

[otter]

"the same effort better directed" I like that. A lot.

[cosmolinguist]

I'm so glad to hear that!

[sfred]

Thank you for writing about this.

[cosmolinguist]

Thanks for asking me about it! <3

[sfred]

<3

[barakta]

Thank you for sharing.

I will have to read those articles when my brain hasn't got Friday-nope-itis. Thanks for those too. You are such a good source of interesting things!

[cosmolinguist]

My brain was feeling extremely nope this Friday too -- I got about three hours of sleep and had to help Andrew with his PIP assessment in the morning -- so it's a lucky thing I'd gotten the day's blog post written really early!

[jesse_the_k]

That pull quote made several dozen light bulbs flash in my head. Yes! Cis people also perform our gender.

I learn so much from reading you -- thanks.

[cosmolinguist]

Aw I'm so glad I could help give you that light bulb feeling.

[silveradept]

I definitely appreciate the reframing of things so as to avoid reinforcing the idea of binary gender transition. Reifying gender, I think, might also be joining my toolbox of ways to describe stuff.