Transcending Boundaries: Loose Thoughts

[rax]

I took notes on all of the events I attended at Transcending Boundaries, all of which ranged from good to awesome, but I wanted to get some of my thoughts out on a particular issue, which is how I reacted to being around a whole pile of trans, bi, poly, and intersex people for a weekend. (We were also sharing the hotel and convention space with some sort of cheerleading competition, which was extra weird.) This is all very navel-gazey and mostly about me and those topics up there, so if you don't want to read about that, stop reading, I guess.

At some point during the conference, eredien turned to me and said "You do realize that your voice went way up in pitch and you started adding a bunch of qualifiers into your speech, right?" I was like "No, of course not! I'm totally not doing that, what are you talking about" and it took until the ride home listening to my voice to go "Oh my God I sound like 2003." When I was at the point of Trying Really Hard To Pass, one of the things I did was bring my speaking voice up into breathy-high-pitched-land. Friends and family (sometimes even the same person at different times) were torn about whether this really helped bring home the difference, or just made me sound like a fool; I didn't really have any transpertise to rely on so I just went with it. Eventually I stopped doing this, although it had definitely succeeded in atrophying something in my vocal chords (as I discover on the rare occasions that something causes me to try to sing bass). As you might suspect from my working in sales in California and then in phone support for my current job, I'm not particularly worried about my voice except in brief moments of paranoia; it works, great, whatever. Recently I'd actually been trying to bring my pitch down, for reasons I'm going to leave out here. So discovering I had done this was really frustrating.

I knew why --- or at least I knew the place where I had to start to untangle what was going on in my head. I was spending a bunch of time with trans people, in particular trans women, who I saw as not passing as well as me. Now there are a few things going on here:

• I have a very competitive streak (as anyone who's played Race for the Galaxy with me knows), and so I wanted to position myself as Doing It Right.
• I'm made uncomfortable by some people who don't pass well because of my own internalized transphobia, and often express this in an attempt to distance myself in my presentation, whether it be in "passing better" or in acting unfeminine. In fact, my tiptoes into butchness and androgyny may have a little bit to do with trying to distance myself from what I see as "traditional" transfemininity. Of course, none of the trans women I [know I] interact with on a regular basis really do this at all. But at Transcending Boundaries, there was a lot of "You're six three why are you wearing heels." The obvious answer, of course, is "Because I want to. Why shoudn't I wear heels? To accommodate your trangst?"
• The conference itself as a space full of genderqueer persons actually has some of that internalized "I need to do this better than you" going on. I'm not the only person there with internalized transphobia; I'm not the only person there with a complicated relationship to gender. I think a new friend I made on twitter expressed this really well over in eir blog. This was my first time in a really genderqueer space; I feel like for the most part I fit in well, but there was definitely some amount of "Yeah, boundaries are being policed here too."
• I occasionally have mixed feelings around passing to begin with; someone at the conference made the excellent comment that "Passing isn't a matter of being better or worse than someone else, it's not something to feel guilty about or proud of." Still I can't help sometimes feeling guilty, and sometimes being prideful. It's a thing.

Despite all that I was remarkably comfortable being out and up front about my embodied experience, so that part was cool at least. Even if it was possible in this kind of space to "do trans wrong," or at least to do it more right than someone else, it was definitely not wrong to do trans. That in and of itself is pretty cool; in most social settings, even with people I know are chill, I am usually pretty reticent to talk about trans stuff. (One could argue that I am giving in to a covering demand: It's OK to be trans, and I don't necessarily have to keep it a secret, as long as I basically don't talk about it and just pretend I'm a cis person whenever it comes up.) This is changing gradually, though it's still kind of pulling teeth. I prefer to screw around with gender in my appearance, which feels safer to do now that I'm read as female ~all the time, although in some ways it's actually harder --- it's much easier to freak someone out with a beard and a skirt than it is with *gasp* boy jeans.

I have a different and related set of issues surrounding non-monogamy (and some of the other groups at the conference --- in particular the couple of people walking around in lots of leather made me kind of uncomfortable --- but I'm going to focus on this one here). There's this voice in my head that sees "I <3 > 1" pins and shirts with three people-symbols holding hands and is all "Ugh, do they really have to flaunt it? That's so gross." This leaving aside, of course, that I've gone to restaurants with two partners, or walked down the street, in a way much more in your face than wearing a button, and flaunted much more at the public than wearing a button at a poly conference. I mean, come on Rachel. :) I think part of what's going on here, and maybe a little in the trans case too, is a sort of ageism --- I associate black-t-shirted poly people with the Diesel crowd frozen in time when I was a terrified undergraduate and they were all Oh My God Old. I'm now actually friends with a number of those people, and occasionally even go, but not all of that wiring is cleared out of my head yet, and this conference was definitely an opportunity for me to see the places where I still hold some of this discomfort and am projecting it onto other people. It should arguably go without saying, but if I'm uncomfortable with someone's non-monogamy, the problem is with me, not with their behavior and presentation. And if I'm uncomfortable with their non-monogamy, what does that mean about my level of comfort with my own?

If grappling with this stuff was all that I got out of the conference, it would have been well worth my time, but more draining than rejuvenating and maybe not so fun. Luckily, the actual workshops and the other experiences I had there were super awesome. Hopefully I'll be writing about those soon! In the meantime, here's some stuff I need to work on in my own head. It's so much easier to do that if I can enumerate it, so, rock.

Comments

I Said Yes I Meant No

[etesla.livejournal.com]

But at Transcending Boundaries, there was a lot of "You're six three why are you wearing heels." The obvious answer, of course, is "Because I want to. Why shoudn't I wear heels? To accommodate your trangst?"

This. And it's not just trangst - not to coop your experience, but I'm a 6'2" non-trans woman, and I get that shit all the time. Are we in Siam? Do I really need to keep my head below the emperor's? I wear flats (or close to flats) about 90% of the time, but I have a few pairs of heels I absolutely love, and I'm not going to selectively wear them so as not to offend peoples' sense of how unhappy I should be with my height.

I leave you with a bit of Dean Young, for he is wonderful:

Each case is profoundly nuanced
like the lock systems of Holland.
Some, frankly, are beyond help,
but if you are a tall woman, wear shoes that make you look taller!
Candy corn, what kind of person doesn't like candy corn?
Tell that 70/35% rock couple you cannot come,
you forgot your fencing lesson,
your cat had a puppy,
your tongue is green,
you are in fact dying.
-- Dean Young, I Said Yes I Meant No

Re: I Said Yes I Meant No

[rax.livejournal.com]

That's an excellent point, thank you.

Wherein Heels are Problematic.

[eredien]

I wear flats (or close to flats) about 90% of the time, but I have a few pairs of heels I absolutely love, and I'm not going to selectively wear them so as not to offend peoples' sense of how unhappy I should be with my height.

Huh. I have to think more about this. I am short (5'2") and was forced to wear heels occasionally during formal events at my last job. This gave me the impression, "you are too short and too unfeminine, which is ok most of the time, but if we need to give off the impression that you are taller and more feminine, we will, even if it makes you cry." (Heels cause a great deal of foot pain for me, and from other women I've talked to, I'm not the only one.) I feel kind of like I am forced into wearing heels so I don't offend people's sense of how unhappy I should be with my height/femininity. Hm.

Re: Wherein Heels are Problematic.

[jessiehl.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I'm not short (5'7"), but I still get occasional pressure to wear heels, which I loathe, with the implication that I should want to make myself more feminine and "attractive" by wearing them. The issue with me doesn't seem to be height, since I'm already in the tall-but-not-"too"-tall range, it seems to be some idea of how a woman is supposed to walk and be shaped (to paraphrase my mother, "Yeah, shoes that make your butt stick out, thrust your boobs forward, and make it difficult to move normally or quickly - of course people think that women should wear them").

Re: Wherein Heels are Problematic.

[zdenka]

I am also short (5' 1") and I unrelatedly have ankle problems such that if I were to wear heels, I would probably fall on my nose. :-) I am deeply unhappy with the idea that a woman has to wear make-up and high heels to be acceptable (I add in make-up since the two often go together). I know that how much pressure one gets depends on the job and the industry. I'm grateful that I've never had a job that gave me a hard time about it. But I think that if a place insisted I wear make-up, which is not consistent with my identity, and high heels, which I personally view as a torture device, I would not work there. (If other women, whether cis or trans, find it enjoyable to wear make-up and heels, I may be mildly confused by it but I totally respect their choice.)

As it is, I only wear make-up when on stage. :-) There was one show where they tried to put me in shoes with a high heel, and I politely but stubbornly refused. I think the costume designer was kind of unhappy with me, but I feel justified in refusing to do anything on stage that endangers my physical safety. Not wearing my glasses puts me at enough risk of tripping over something; add high heels to that and I am more likely to get up close and personal with the floor than I feel comfortable with.

Re: Wherein Heels are Problematic.

[eredien]

There are a lot of places that, either as you move up in power (director of department to director of program, for example) or move up in an overall power structure (my job in food service in Erdman serving mozzerella sticks was not the same as my job in fundrasing, although both took place within the confines of higher-education institutions), you are expected to be more public-facing.

And since there is a huge amount of cultural effluvia and outright organizational rules surrounding who you have to be or what you have to look like to represent an organization in public, I feel like these demands--wear these shoes, wear make-up, wear tights (or shave your legs if you think you can get away with doing that instead of not wearing tights), don't pierce your nose or get a tattoo, you must wear a tie--there is a lot of demand for institutions, even wildly diverse ones, to conform. If you're competing to get a contract and you are wearing a comfortable sweater and jeans and the other person is wearing a suit and tie, that's going to factor into your chances of getting the contract and remaining a viable company. Even if the fact that you are wearing a comfortable sweater and jeans means that you are actually more comfortable and hence, productive, at work.

I, too, have come to the conclusion that I won't take a job that requires me to wear make-up or high heels. Ideally, I look for jobs where I do not have to wear a bra unless I want to, because bras tend to give me welts and make it hard for me to breathe, plus playing into my gender identity issues. I also look for jobs where I don't have to take on one gender identity and people won't freak out if I dress less "girly" than they feel I ought to be. When I put on makeup (unless it is for a special event like a party or your example of being in a play) I feel like I am literally putting on a "girl mask," plus it is itchy/uncomfortable/makes my skin break out.

Unfortunately, I feel like this really limits the kind of jobs that those of us who make a choice to avoid the high heels and the makeup and the associations that come with those can take, and/or how high we can go once we get there, which really stinks.
I have been thinking about this a lot since we may eventually move, and I may have to eventually look for another job in a different city/state--and each section of the country has its own rules for what's generally "ok" there, too, which makes it even harder.

There is a really interesting discussion of makeup and hair as a cultural and/or personal identity practice and the ways in which those practices conflict with employer policies in the pages of "Covering" by Kenji Yoshino, which I totally recommend to everyone.

Re: Wherein Heels are Problematic.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm definitely skirting the boundary professionally of "need to dress standard feminine professional;" if I were to move up another level I would have to dress differently. I've managed to find mostly-flats and outfits that involve pants that I like, but I haven't really compromised on makeup or hair color. My boss has implied that I might be more likely to move up another level if I dressed differently. I haven't changed my appearance significantly; I'm willing to wear "nicer" clothes for an actual job, but not (barring interviews) for a theoretical one. "Luckily" the recession came along and killed all my chances for mobility anyway.

(Although lately there's been talk of sending me to customer sites, which could be Exciting.)

Re: Wherein Heels are Problematic.

[lotusbiosm.livejournal.com]

Well, short women are supposed to want to be taller, and then there's the height that models are, and if you're taller than that, you're not feminine enough. (Because women are supposed to be delicate and petite so that men can protect them). If you're naturally taller than the average man, you're not supposed to make yourself taller.
But high heels aren't just about height, there also about changing the way you walk and the shape of your leg, which is where the femininity comes in. I may be 6" in my favorite heels, but damn do they make my legs look good.