Tag Archives: you can't identify your way out of this

gendertreyf, longer writing

on fem

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is “femme refers exclusively to lesbians” a white thing or no?

what tf am I missing

– alder-knight –

trying to write this quickly, if i can… my sense, fwiw, is that “fem” (i use joan nestle’s spelling, not the frenchified one) as a term is in a state of almost total incoherence right now, because there are at least three or four versions of it in circulation, all with quite different histories behind their different meanings and breaking down to some extent along racial lines.

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gendertreyf, longer writing

on trans demographics

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valkyriethunderbitch wrote:

We’re both seen in many ways as embodying aspects of both male and female, but rather than cis people seeing both of us as simply “in between,” trans men and cafab trans people in general tend to be seen as somehow possessing the better qualities of men and women, while trans women are seen as abominations embodying the worst of both genders.

Trans mascs get to have their manhood validated while also being reassured (and reassuring everyone else) that they have no icky core of misogyny or oppressive maleness, and that they essentially have all these positive woman qualities in place of the “bad parts” of maleness.

and i commented:

yes this.

but also note, from the 2011 Injustice at Every Turn report (flawed in its sample, but the best we have in the u.s. so far), and the A Gender Not Listed Here report based on its data, these things (mainly using the survey report’s terms):

respondents were 60/40 assigned male/female at birth. the surveyers’ analysis broke that down into trans/gnc/crossdresser splits of 47/3/11 for MAAB, 28/9/3 for FAAB, which is about 78%/5% & 72%/23% trans/gnc, respectively.

those replying “a gender not listed here” (i.e not male, female, or switching between) were 73/27 FAAB/MAAB.

but

of respondents identifying as either switching-between or not listed here (a different analytic for nonbinary+fluid), it’s 61/ 39 MAAB/FAAB. and with a little work, we can discover numbers for a more limited definition of fluid gendered folks (id’ing as switching-between but not analyzed as crossdressers): 9% of MAAB vs. 1% of FAAB).

and we can learn that 9% of MAAB vs. 14% of FAAB respondents identified as their initially assigned gender.

both of which, i think, complicate the picture. but mainly on the level of how people think about themselves, which of course is different from how we present ourselves in the world, and how the world understands us. which is what the analysis above is about.

gendertreyf, longer writing, revolution

the category of gender

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this is more of a placeholder than anything else… building off a few scrawled notes from this past spring that i’d been hoping to get back to in a more elaborated way, but i’m not sure when i’ll have the time to do that in a complete way. so this is gonna be partial and not necessarily something i’ll stand by forever, or even for all that long.

and yes, i’m putting this up now because i’m cranky about the current bit of drama around “gender nihilism”, mostly because i see smart people whose analysis i like seeming to miss the ways their positions seem to me to support each other rather than being in contradiction.

so here’s two or so cents, for whatever it’s worth:

talking about “abolishing gender” means completely different things depending on what we mean by “gender”.

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gendertreyf, revolution

kids will not be pawns

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building on a critique of the ‘think of the children’ strategy that liberal trans organizing has adopted (another layer of toxic on top of the ‘born that way’ rhetoric imported from the liberal gay/lesbian world):

beyond the strategic problems, another thing that the focus on ‘trans kids’ does is pushes kids towards an extremely restricted set of gender options.

we know from the world around us that some male-assigned kids will end up being binary-identified, conventionally feminine trans women; some binary-identified, butch trans women; some genderqueer trans folks of a variety of gender presentations; some fem gay men (cissexual, but not cisgendered); some butch gay men. and we know that folks may move among those positions many times in their lives. we also know – from our own lives and those of our friends – that kids who wind up in all of those places at, say, 28 years old, often express ‘cross-gender’ desires.

when what we do with all those kids’ cross-gender expressions is either track them as ‘trans kids’ towards binary-identified, conventionally feminine trans womanhood, or dismiss them as ‘not really trans’, we’re not supporting their self-determination, we’re obstructing it.