Genderqueer Cissexism

I’m fairly comfortable and confident these days about my negotiation/navigation of my genderqueer identity and my transsexual experience. Also, I’m beginning to see the reason that I am so much more distressed by genderqueer ignorance than I am by transsexual ignorance:

Transsexual people have exactly one thing in common, the way I see it–our birth-assignation (usually based on external genitals) does not match our brain sex. A trans person saying some fucked up bullshit is annoying, but I can separate myself from it without much effort, in much the same way as I approach individual linguists’ failures.

I’ve always seen a genderqueer identity as one that arises after a period of self-examination–of cultural gender norms, of sexism, of the gendered meanings placed on bodies based on anatomy and/or presentation. I feel that I share a lot more in common with genderqueer people–values, perceptions, ideals.

I know that it’s more complicated than that, and much of the time neither of those statements are true, but that’s my subconscious view.

Lately, I’ve been especially uncomfortable when cissexual gender-variant folks conflate transsexuality with gender variance. Obviously there are a lot of people who do consider their own transsexuality a gender-variant experience (valid, of course); the communities share several experiences and issues (because it’s all the same to cissexist/transphobic society). But I think that the size and shape of my genitals at birth is irrelevant to my current gender identity/expression unless I specifically say so. I don’t want to have meanings projected onto my body/identity by anybody else, and I guess I thought that might go without saying in a genderqueer community.

I feel like there’s an expectation, spoken and unspoken, for transsexuals to disclose in discussions about gender, even in genderqueer spaces. The recent posts in genderqueer are great examples of that. The poster seemed to want to compare how students gendered [photographed] subjects to the actual gender identities of the subjects. People of all genders (including non-gender-variant identities) would be included; I think is a pretty valid exercise if you’re wanting to start a conversation about gender and gendering.

But the poster also mentioned that they’d also reveal the subject’s birth assignation, if it differed from a person’s gender presentation. They flat-out refused to see that this could ever possibly be perceived as problematic/fetishistic/cissexist/transphobic–or irrelevant. Honestly, I’d have considered sending a photo their way if they’d gone about it differently (and not been a complete ass). If I’d have been shown in the slideshow, I’d be gendered as male and my gender identity would then be revealed as genderqueer femme.  If I had the option of not disclosing my trans status if I didn’t want to, then I wouldn’t find that problematic at all.

As far as I’m concerned, I’d even consider it relevant if at the end of the slideshow she mentioned that some of the subjects were transsexual without disclosing anyone’s birth-assignation. Inevitably, folks would try to “spot the tr***y”, and another kind of conversation could be started that could be really productive. Namely that, when you’re looking, you’ll see tr***ies everywhere. Phantom tr***ies where no tr***ies exist. Under that kind of microscope, nobody passes. But it’s rare that a cissexual person is put under that microscope. A cissexual woman with a big nose just has a big nose; a transsexual woman “looks like a man”. A short guy is just short unless he’s “really a woman”.

A lot of bullshit happened around those particular posts, and the moderators handled it surprisingly well. But it just served to remind me that, to many folks in the genderqueer community, my transsexuality is always relevant to any discussion about gender. I am expected to disclose. That’d be the “genderqueer” thing to do. I should want to “educate” people about gender variance, using my transsexuality.

The shitty thing about all this is that I’m neither interested in being stealth at this point in my life, nor ashamed of my transsexuality (contrary to popular belief, “stealth” and “shame” are not the same thing). But I’d like to be able to disclose without completely derailing what I’m saying by having the person I’m speaking with completely rearrange their conception of me. It’s similar to how frustrated I get when I disclose to cissexual gender-conforming folks and suddenly my feminism makes sense; I’m speaking as a man, not as a former woman. In some situations, I want to be able to speak as a genderqueer person, not as a transsexual. An angry transsexual who’s quibbling over such unimportant things and making really important allies and great people feel bad… but not really, because for every person who calls out an “ally” for something, there are three people stroking their ego and telling them not to listen to what those mean cisphobes are saying.

This is why every time I enter a conversation with other genderqueer people, I have to carefully decide whether or not to disclose. And it’s never easy. And my internalized cissexism really rears its head, because I feel guilty for not wanting to diclose. I feel like they truly do have a right to know, and I really should be endlessly patient with well-meaning(?) bullshit–or, better yet, I should just be quiet, because I’m really hurting The Cause.

And that’s what’s really fucked up.

I know that I’ve said some really stupid shit in the past few years I’ve been a part of the trans community.  I’ve said transphobic shit, cissexist shit, and I’m owning it.  I still do sometimes, and I have a lot more internalized transphobia/cissexism than I had at first realized.  And, I’m sure, much more than I know now.

I think that’s part of why I’m wanting to become more active as a genderqueer trans person.  At this point in my life, I seem to be in the peculiarly awkward place of being both transsexual and genderqueer, so I’m in a fairly good place to attempt to educate people who are transsexual or genderqueer.  In the online communities I’m part of, that tends to take more place on the genderqueer end, because cissexist bullshit seems to get called out much, much less in genderqueer spaces, compared to cisgenderist bullshit in the transsexual communities.  To be fair, that’s probably because there seem to be [understandably?] more genderqueer folks in trans spaces than transsexual folks in genderqueer spaces.

But saying something feels so much fucking better than just getting mad.  It’s so much more satisfying than being embarrassed to be genderqueer.

I’ve been thinking lately that the fails seem to happen around certain subjects–the “ethics” of disclosure/non-disclosure, socialization, women’s spaces, and third-gendering trans people, etc.  It might be worth my time and effort to start compiling a post/zine/epically long book for cissexual genderqueers about being better allies to transsexual people.

I wonder who would bother reading it.