the-real-seebs:

discoursedrome:

unknought:

This is a really large project and not one which I’m remotely qualified to figure out by myself, but here are a few disconnected thoughts:

For a lot of people especially in the early stages of coming out, it can be easier to say, e.g. “I want to be a man,” than “I am a man.” The prevailing narrative right now is that a trans man was always a man and doesn’t leave much room for desire or becoming. This narrative is convenient for people who can confidently assert a transgender identity, but it makes it hard for people to recognize the qualitative experience of dysphoria, which very frequently manifests as wanting to be rather than feeling like you already are. I don’t think it would be a good idea to replace one totalizing narrative with another one, but if there had been a little more pluralism in how we talk about these things I wouldn’t have had to worry if it was offensive to trans people for me to think about wanting to be a woman without being one.

Due to both community dynamics and the narratives we’ve settled on, it can be really difficult for someone to recognize commonalities between their experiences and trans people’s while thinking of themself as cis. Cis people (and “cis” people) are told that they can’t understand what it’s like to be trans, that transitioning would make them incredibly dysphoric and if they don’t realize that it’s because of a failure of introspection, that it’s offensive to even make the comparison. This results in closeted trans people assuming that their experiences can’t possibly be the same as trans people’s and therefore don’t constitute any evidence that they might be trans.

People keep throwing around the phrase “gender identity” like it refers to a specific qualitative experience, of course without describing what that experience feels like. (Giving such a description would be impossible because that’s not what gender identity is.) How the fuck is anyone supposed to know what their gender identity is when you put it that way?

There were some things that the trans student organization at my undergraduate university did that seemed really helpful in ways that I don’t see very often. It was explicitly for trans people “and allies”. I don’t think anyone showed up there because they were a cis person who just really wanted to support trans people, but it meant people could show up without being sure they were trans, or without being comfortable asserting a trans identity. People could make friends and work through questions, and if they eventually decided they were cis they could keep showing up and maintain their relationships and place in the community. A significant fraction of the organization body didn’t identify during the time of my involvement as anything other than the gender they’d been assigned at birth, and they weren’t considered lesser members of the community for it. This made it a place where people could figure things out in a low-stakes environment without worrying that their place in the community was predicated on eventually coming to the right answer. I don’t think that every trans community should be like this –it is understandable and legitimate for trans people to want a community where they don’t have to deal with cis people– but if there were more communities like that one I think it would be really helpful.

In the sphere of Yelling About Things On The Internet, I think it would be beneficial for trans people to engage more seriously with things cis people write about their experiences with gender. Existing engagement tends to involve grouping experiences into either “you’re cis so your experience has nothing to do with mine as a trans person” or “you’re actually trans, you just don’t know it yet”. Actually listening and examining points of similarity and difference without trying to fit everything into a particular narrative doesn’t happen very much. This would make those conversations more accessible to questioning people, and would also aid in the development of language to help clarify the qualitative differences in question. Obviously no one’s obligated to do this kind of outreach, but I think it could do a lot more good than some of the other things people devote their energy to, like arguing with TERFs.

A position I’ve been turning over in my head lately is that a lot of the problems this approach is designed to fix come from the intersection of trans advocacy and SJ culture generally. The basic framework of modern SJ is that there are a handful of binary “axes of privilege” that define the social dynamic and one’s position within it – usually three to six, but never enough – and someone on the “privileged” side of an axis isn’t permitted to contradict or criticize someone on the “unprivileged” side on anything pertaining to that axis. On the whole, people on the “privileged” side are expected to function as silent Pythagorean initiates sitting outside the curtain in any serious discussion of those issues.

I think this approach causes problems across the board, but I can recognize that in many situations it’s trying to solve an actual problem by giving the control of small, personalized spaces (those where this philosophy holds sway) to people who are disenfranchised in the broader social sphere. The problem with applying this logic to the trans/cis binary is that in terms of social perception and usually self-perception, everybody is presorted as cis. That’s what “cisgender” means. When you apply this sort of logic to a category like trans/cis, the effect is that it pushes most people toward the “privileged” category that isn’t allowed to talk about the subject and locks them there, except the ones who are so eager to be allowed to have an opinion on the subject that they’re prepared to adopt whatever affiliation gives them the right – who can be very nice people in their own way but aren’t really the group you want to select for.

I think it’s good to include allies in general for the reasons mentioned in the OP, but I think the word “allies” should never be used under any circumstances as it’s unsalvageable by this point. It’s functionally an idpol category of its own just for people who want to help out with other idpol categories. Setting aside the fact that “allies” have a justifiably bad reputation as making other people’s problems about themselves and being in it mainly for their own woke self-image, the term imports the entire narrative where you’re a pair of hands with no right to an opinion. I can’t imagine any context where I would ever be willing to identify as an “ally” of anything in the SJ sense on account of all the freight yoked to it, so a group that’s for “trans people and allies” is still a group where I’d feel unwelcome. If you want to know what would work to be genuinely inclusive: make it a community of shared interest or goals, rather than centering it around an identity group and assuming that the shared interest and goals will follow naturally.

I am unwilling to give up “allies” just yet, since many of the queer adults I know used to think they were “allies”; I just reject the “no right to an opinion” narrative. Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, they may not be entitled to a ton of deference to it.

But also, yes, I have known so many trans people who were severely harmed by the “cis people can’t have these thoughts or opinions” notion. Understanding that gender dysphoria is a thing most cis people can also experience is incredibly useful.

Most cis women, if they thought about “being a man”, would experience revulsion and horror. It would feel awful. Same for most cis men thinking about “being a woman”. That’s gender dysphoria. If you think you’re a cis woman, and you think about being a man, and it sounds awesome and comfortable? You’re probably not actually what we normally mean by “a cis woman”.