Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

Just found a draft of a post I was working on a while ago, a response to my friend Marcia's review of a movie I hadn't seen (still haven't!), but that's okay because it's not about The Substance as much as it is about bodies and what we embody: race, gender, age.

This film is really about white women’s insecurities and never did I have illusions that I would feel seen and heard. I think it affirmed that I am an object, and that I owe my gender or allegiance to no one; I create myself.

Feeling not female and trying to bend, cut, open and fold this body into female and instead of it being gender affirming, I felt more alienated from female, from woman.

Oof. Yes. So much of femininity is doing little violences to our bodies. I learned the word tribulation because of my grandmother, complaining about the awkwardness of buying clothes or the discomforts of jewelry, I can't now remember which, telling tween or teen me "these are the trials and tribulations we face as women" with a chuckle, but I wasn't chuckling. I didn't know what a tribulation was but it sounded scary. I was not looking forward to a lifetime of those!

I kept waiting for the little violences I did to my body in the name of femininity to pay off, and they never did. Surely this discomfort and pain, actual blood, sweat and tears, had to mean the payoff would be really good right?? And I mostly rejected even high heels and makeup, never mind plastic surgery. Never had to harm my hair and skin with relaxers or skin-lightening creams. So if even I feel such pain, when mine is a small fraction of the pain there is in the demands that femininity puts on Black and Brown people...

Once on Twitter, whilst I was defending Trans folks, a person wanted to misgender me by calling me a little boy. It was a weird sensation to process, someone wants to misgender me by calling me a boy, which is what I thought would make me most comfortable in the end, being boy, that would make life easier, but instead I work to be comfortable in girl.

I was fighting TERFs on twitter way back when they assumed absolutely anybody with pronouns in their profile was trans, so my "she/her" once got someone to tell me I looked like an ugly man and I'd never be a woman. I had never thought I was anything other than cis at the time, but I have held that in my heart for years and now am delighted to be an ugly man who no one would ever believe is a woman.

When I saw the monster, I saw my future without being honest with myself about what beauty really is, what it truly means to de-center the male gaze, to de-center white womanhood whilst being queer, of color and other identity markers; for me, the monster is the culmination of a wasted life...

I do feel like middle age has found me in the last year or so. I'm leaning in to it for the dadcore vibes and grateful that I get to age because to age is to live (I am twice the age my brother ever got to be, so I will never fear growing older). But my age feels so bound up with my gender because when I was in my 20s and first tried to imagine myself as an older person, I imagined a man. I couldn't imagine a woman at all. I never have been able to think of myself growing old as a woman, and I really want to grow old, so that's the thing that finally tipped the scales for me into I must be trans, I better take action accordingly.

I'd rather have had a trans childhood and a trans young adulthood like a lot of people, but what matters much more to me is having a trans middle age and hopefully old age. Maybe my beard will come in gray already, maybe my hair will disappear any moment, I don't care at all (or I don't think I do; maybe I will feel differently when these things happen but neither has so far). A friend of mine once said that second puberty in your 40s disrupts the usual narrative that the changes in your body after you leave your 20s are unwelcome ones. I think there are lots of ways that body changes can be more welcome, but definitely addressing gender dysphoria in middle age is one way to mitigate the "oh my knee hurts all the time now" etc. type of changes to the body.

I'm also struck by someone misgendering Marcia by calling them a little boy specifically; there's some age-related incorrectness in there too (as well as echoing the racism of Black men always being called "boys" by the kind of white people who still want them as slaves); it's setting up a power dynamic often levelled at women (and definitely at people who are incorrectly perceived as women).

I still want for us to want more than to appeal to the gaze. I want all women to want more for themselves beyond ‘beauty’, not because I think anything feminine is bad, but because I want them to consistently examine what they mean when they are reaching for beauty. Who is really defining what you deem beautiful? Who is paving that definition for you? Is it you? Is it white supremacy? Do these things matter? Yes, to a point I think they do. I want us to want more, and to imagine more.

Anyway, their writing and thinking are great; I'm so glad I can now afford to subscribe to their essays and also their DJ sets!

This afternoon I walked with diffrentcolours to the pharmacy to run an errand.

When we got there, I said "I didn't bring a mask so I'll wait for you outside."

He said, "Oh yeah, you don't have your man bag. On International Men's Day??"

#

Three years ago I wrote:

Today is the first International Men's Day where I have felt like it might be anything to do with me.

Thank you to the men and masc people, who've introspected about their gender and decided, whether cis or trans, to embrace manhood. You've shown me it isn't all toxic and unemotional and aggressive and hurtful to everyone it comes into contact with.

Thanks to those who've made me feel welcome with my new name this year and my increasingly defaulting to he/him pronouns.

By now, while I'm still relieved when strangers gender me correctly, I'm also pretty unremarkably a man in most contexts, and it feels comfy and nice.

#

A social media friend said:

So for #InternationalMensDay, I'm interested to hear what your favorite thing is about being a man?

Difficulty: it can't be ironic/a joke, and it can't be protecting someone else.

I wasn't sure how to answer.

Of course, fundamentally, my favorite thing about being a man is that I don't have the fucking static in my brain that it felt like I had all the time before I thought that I could be a man. (I still have other kinds of static in my brain, don't get me wrong. But that actually makes me all the more grateful that I don't have this one.) For me, manhood is a place of security and calm. For all my tendencies to impostor syndrome, I've never once thought "I'm not really a man" since I started thinking it. I've never thought or said "I am bad at being a man" (except in very obvious goofiness, as above) whereas I used to say and think "I am bad at being a girl/woman" all the time.

My favorite thing is probably embracing the dad vibes in a way that feels different when I did the same things (outside chores, sports fan, no fashion sense, inflicting pedantry and bad jokes on perhaps-unwilling audiences, etc.) as an alleged woman. There was something transgressive in how these things were perceived when I did them which never sat right with me. I thought it was because those things shouldn't be so gendered (and of course I was right) but now that people's perception of me doing them is different, I can tell that a part of me feels better now that I fit in to the pattern rather than having to be a surprise or an outlier in the ways that I most easily express my personality and my values.

What I actually said is "it makes my relationships with men gay instead of straight," which I worried was too flippant an answer for someone who said he didn't want irony or jokes (it's not exactly either, but I wouldn't blame someone for thinking it was).

So I also talked about clothes (I know so many trans fems who delight in the millions of colors and styles now open to them but I found it stressful and miserable; I actually find it incredibly soothing to have the more limited color palettes and other options of mainstream men's clothes) and accidentally started a conversation with two other trans mascs who are apparently about my age because we all have strong and negative opinions about cap sleeves and low-rise jeans.

This afternoon, mother_bones and I went to a local fat-positive clothes swap.

It was a really positive experience. We got rid of a lot of stuff we don't wear -- too-femme things in both cases, as well as stuff we just don't wear, doesn't fit right, all the usual stuff.

People were nice, trying stuff on and complimenting each other. It didn't seem like people buying stuff to resell online or alter to sell to thin people, both of which are concerns at these events. It was great to see a variety of gender presentations and races and a lot of visibly disabled people (MB had rollator envy of someone) and the event was wet out in a reasonably accessible way.

I was really impressed to see an event with explicit covid protections.

COVID-19 HARM REDUCTION: To minimise potential spread of covid-19 and protect clinically vulnerable folks in our community, we ask ALL attendees to wear a mask at the swap. Spare masks will be available on the door! We also encourage everyone to consider additional harm reduction practices before the event, for instance by testing before attending, and obviously not attending if you have any covid-19 symptoms.

The venue can't open most of their windows but the ones that could be open were and there was a big air filter, looked like a dehumidifier, labeled something like "Covid Box, must be on while an event is happening" so that's good too.

It was amazing to be in an environment where there were clothes you could be interested in, pick up (they were all laid out on tables) and go "...no actually this is too big for me" and put it back for someone for whom it will be the right size. We're just not used to the physical presence of clothes that are too big.

It was even more amazing to see people pick up stuff we'd brought and look delighted by it. MB had a lot of really striking items that they were so happy to see bringing delight to others: they even saw someone struggling with the corset they'd brought and went over to help the person get it on.

MB came home with a very sedate four new items of clothing, I had stacks of things: two hoodies, a denim jacket, a few nice shirts for when I have to dress up for work... I am feeling very accomplished (and slightly worried as to where I'm going to put them all! I was trying to get rid of stuff!).

They'll do another one in September so I think we'll have some coats and stuff to donate by then!

The butt never represents itself. This is how Heather Radke's book Butts: A Backstory begins.

I found out about it from reading 'an interview where the author explains this: "You can’t see your own butt, you are always seeing it through reflection, photography, or other people’s gaze. We don’t have a proper word for our butts, only euphemisms, which is unique to our butts."

She ultimately settles on "butt" as the term she's going to use in her book after discussing other options (buttocks, ass, etc.) and deeming them all inadequate: too vulgar, too childish, too sexual, or something. She also has to make it clear that she's talking about "the cheeks, not the hole."

She says in the interview:

I realized that, unlike breasts, for example, where the biological function is so deeply related to the symbolic meaning (maternity, femininity, etc.), butts really don’t have much inherent biological meaning. And yet their symbolic meaning is so complex and layered. They are deeply tied up with notions of race, femininity, and even hard work (think of the phrases like “work your butt off”). But those associations are ones we have projected onto the butt, and they are always changing."

She writes extensively about Sarah Baartman, an indigenous African woman who was brought to Europe (and given the only name we know her by) by European men who wanted to make money from exhibiting her to European audiences obsessed with big butts and her butt specifically. Radke says

Baartman is a very important figure in women’s studies, African diaspora studies, and the history of science, and so there are a lot of secondary sources about her. I also thought a lot about how to represent her on the page. I wanted to make it clear how difficult her life was, but didn’t want to flatten her story, or participate in another kind of exploitation of her life by making her story seem too salacious.

And I think she did an okay job of it. I think she does good generally in addressing race - later, regarding Miley Cyrus popularizing twerking after appropriating it from Black queers, and Kim Kardashian's rumored butt implants.

I was impressed enough with those topics that I was slightly disappointed that Radke re-visited her white-USian-woman thoughts about buying jeans that fit at the end. Having put in effort to extend her curiosity beyond all the messages that an anti-fat misogynist white-supremacist patriarchy has fed her about her body for the course of the book doesn't leave her immune to their continued influence I suppose, any more than my awareness of the racist sexist ableist history of anti-fatness makes me any more comfortable with the way I look after I've gained weight in the last year or so.

But then, at the end of the interview when asked what other body parts deserve the same treatment, Radke says

Bellies would be great! I do think you could really do a deep-dive on anything and you’d likely uncover a similar set of questions about race, gender, fashion, class, and control. Breasts are sort of the obvious one, but I think I’d be more interested in arm flab, necks (a la Nora Ephron), thighs, or maybe even eyebrows? I’m sure women from different backgrounds and of different ages might have other ideas to offer.

I think any part of the body that carries a whiff of shame would be a fruitful study, because shame often suggests hidden, unexplored feelings and histories. We don’t always know where shame comes from, even though we feel it potently. Exploring that shame doesn’t exactly free you, but I do think it offers a deeper understanding and maybe even a greater sense of control. Realizing that the shame we have about our bodies comes from history and culture — that it is, essentially, a human construction and not a biological one — can offer a bit of freedom even if we still all feel bad when we go into a dressing room and try on pants.

During a quick look through my room to see if I had anything else to donate to the charity shop, I found a couple little boxes of jewelry that I had almost forgotten about.

Untouched since before the pandemic for sure, some of it long before that.

I was surprised at how emotional it made me. Then surprised that I was surprised.

So much of me trying to fit my tastes and expression and personality into boxes that they couldn't really fit in. Chunky (dare I say masc?) stuff, bright colors, "quirky" stuff of the type that provides affectations in place of a personality.

Also so much stuff my mom bought me that was never me. Delicate things. In colors she likes. They never felt like me and I always felt bad about that. I still do.

And for all there were things that gave pangs of emotion to see again, there were many other things that I didn't remember at all, or that I had a vague idea of seeing before but didn't have any idea where I got them or why I had them. I think a lot of them were given to me as gifts. Having no recollection of them makes it feel all the more like they were given to someone else. (Though I'm wary of what feels like leaning too hard into an easy narrative that feels comfortable more than accurate?)

There are downsides to doing this extremely quickly at the end of a work day. But I think there are advantages too: I didn't make it more painful by dreading it or planning time for it.

And now a bunch of that stuff out of the house. Feels good.