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Nov. 1st, 2024 09:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
numinousdread Found some old Queer Secrets I didn't remember submitting-- I know there are a couple more but I've yet to find them. It's funny how they jump out at you among hundreds of others. It has to have been me who produced this, because it's simply not likely someone else would pair those sentiments with those graphic design choices. I made them all in MS Paint and I remember getting fussy about text placement.
Sometimes I used my secrets to experiment with seeing myself as trans and/or male, without "officially" claiming the feelings.
I guess I'd call my understanding of transness back then pretty essentialist; you are either a "real trans", therefore this is anything, or you aren't and it's meaningless or maybe even bad. I feel like a lot of the discourse I saw from trans guys reinforced that dichotomy; I don't remember seeing "you can be trans if you want to" until later and then from nonbinary/genderqueer people... who I liked because they were chilled-out and not "respectable"; there was still an assumption of certain feelings "making you" genderqueer in some sense but it was murkier and not (in my circles) tied as strictly to performance. Certainly there was no assumption that a medical authority could or could not reveal if you were genderqueer. Plus I was very hype about androgyny, which people hadn't problematized yet.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm inclined to play up genderqueer feelings I have because of a sentimental attachment or nostalgia. And it's also kind of strange because the discursive winds turned and people were more suspicious of non-binary stuff on materialist feminist grounds. Partly because it is a really heterogenous category and we were, unfortunately, underweighting people's lived gender positions. But that was a sad and in some ways traumatic era for me; I'm not claiming that it was just The Discourse but a lot of fucked up things in my life accumulating, something like extreme dysphoric avoidance or agoraphobia, then crab-walking away from any trans position as I reintegrated into the world. And in the places where I could be trans, it's not so clear that I am trans or should be. Crying in my room about my "materially meaningless" radlib identity. Facts don't care about your feelings. I feel gender dysphoria just like "any other woman", and I have no one to talk to at school because I know that's not true.
And part of me I think... wants to identify as genderqueer out of spite, a fuck you to the kind of 2015 matfem who thought having pronouns was vaguely embarrassing and also a coping mechanism for patriarchy. Voidgender jokes out of one side of their mouth; "these poor kids" out the other.
I should probably instead work on forgiving and cultivating compassion for those people, who were just making sense of the world that hurt them. I know they didn't want to hurt me, but it did feel like they were rolling their eyes at a form of suffering that was then eating my life, that was already a punchline for Redditors. Short-sighted and fumbling like the rest of us.
One day I'll acknowledge the pain without assigning blame or litigating whether it should or shouldn't have happened. I'm still scared and ashamed to be trans sometimes in this world.
Sometimes I used my secrets to experiment with seeing myself as trans and/or male, without "officially" claiming the feelings.
I guess I'd call my understanding of transness back then pretty essentialist; you are either a "real trans", therefore this is anything, or you aren't and it's meaningless or maybe even bad. I feel like a lot of the discourse I saw from trans guys reinforced that dichotomy; I don't remember seeing "you can be trans if you want to" until later and then from nonbinary/genderqueer people... who I liked because they were chilled-out and not "respectable"; there was still an assumption of certain feelings "making you" genderqueer in some sense but it was murkier and not (in my circles) tied as strictly to performance. Certainly there was no assumption that a medical authority could or could not reveal if you were genderqueer. Plus I was very hype about androgyny, which people hadn't problematized yet.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm inclined to play up genderqueer feelings I have because of a sentimental attachment or nostalgia. And it's also kind of strange because the discursive winds turned and people were more suspicious of non-binary stuff on materialist feminist grounds. Partly because it is a really heterogenous category and we were, unfortunately, underweighting people's lived gender positions. But that was a sad and in some ways traumatic era for me; I'm not claiming that it was just The Discourse but a lot of fucked up things in my life accumulating, something like extreme dysphoric avoidance or agoraphobia, then crab-walking away from any trans position as I reintegrated into the world. And in the places where I could be trans, it's not so clear that I am trans or should be. Crying in my room about my "materially meaningless" radlib identity. Facts don't care about your feelings. I feel gender dysphoria just like "any other woman", and I have no one to talk to at school because I know that's not true.
And part of me I think... wants to identify as genderqueer out of spite, a fuck you to the kind of 2015 matfem who thought having pronouns was vaguely embarrassing and also a coping mechanism for patriarchy. Voidgender jokes out of one side of their mouth; "these poor kids" out the other.
I should probably instead work on forgiving and cultivating compassion for those people, who were just making sense of the world that hurt them. I know they didn't want to hurt me, but it did feel like they were rolling their eyes at a form of suffering that was then eating my life, that was already a punchline for Redditors. Short-sighted and fumbling like the rest of us.
One day I'll acknowledge the pain without assigning blame or litigating whether it should or shouldn't have happened. I'm still scared and ashamed to be trans sometimes in this world.
