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

Continued

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

To take an example closer to my heart: wow do I ever bristle when people speak of science. I do not mean that I don't value science, or that I don't try to live up to its ideals of objectivity, clarity and thoroughness. I'm training to be a physicist, of course I value those things. But as such, I am also more aware than most of the limitations of experimentation, the difficulty of the argumentation, the consequences of complexity and chaos, and the problems of scientific authority. This awareness is all too lacking in those who, so to speak, draw nourishment from the cultural status of science -- Randall Munroe, say, with his belittling of other fields, or the recurrent people who say of some inquiry, "But it's not science." The conclusion I draw from my passionate responses is not that I have lingering insecurities when it comes to physics (I do, but they show up in different ways), but that by studying physics I become more qualified to criticize those who study physics.

This may also be why I found that comment about transphobia suspicious. Here, too, you are able to judge matters of being transgendered better than an outsider would, even if the problematic nature of judgment -- its past harm to many (most?) trans people, its reinforcement of cultural norms, its airs of authority -- are also more clear to you. Anyway, I know very little about the specific instances which motivated your words, but I think that the point is worth making even if it applies to no particulars.

I apologize for the presumptuousness of my words.

Re: Continued

[rax.livejournal.com]

This may also be why I found that comment about transphobia suspicious. Here, too, you are able to judge matters of being transgendered better than an outsider would, even if the problematic nature of judgment -- its past harm to many (most?) trans people, its reinforcement of cultural norms, its airs of authority -- are also more clear to you. Anyway, I know very little about the specific instances which motivated your words, but I think that the point is worth making even if it applies to no particulars.

I apologize for the presumptuousness of my words.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to apologize; I don't find what you said presumptuous at all. I think it's fair to find the comment suspicious, but I stand by it; I do think some trans women end up tending too far into the feminine for them early in transition, and that there's societal pressure to do so. (Someone today pointed me to a blog entry about "learning to high-five like a woman," which I found patently ridiculous.) But I don't think I can judge that about someone based on sitting near them at a lecture. Of all of the people who tweaked that reaction in me, I'm sure some of them are overperforming femininity in order to be recognized as legitimate in a way I find unfortunate. But the fact that my response to them was "Eww?" That's my problem.

Re: Continued

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure why you feel the need to apologize; I don't find what you said presumptuous at all.

Well, I'm glad I was wrong. I could tell that I was writing aggressively, saying things that I would normally ordinarily not venture to say, so it seemed to me that I needed the apology.

But the fact that my response to them was "Eww?" That's my problem.

Well, I'm still skeptical that it's a problem. There's the problem about an excessive refusal to judge, but you already noted that you were only talking about reactions in superficial encounters. However, it may also be wrong to view such a feeling as a problem. Here I'm totally departing from the specifics in question, partly because it's a chance to articulate some things I've thought about recently.

One reason not to view a feeling as a problem is that you don't have any direct control over such feelings. Thinking about what would constitute ethical criticism, I surmised that there's a hierarchy of what it is acceptable to criticize: actions most so, thoughts and opinions less so, emotions only in extreme cases, if at all, and never perceptions. The relevant quality is how much control a person has over each of these elements of their life, that which is less controllable being less often alright to criticize. If you accept that, it's reasonable to conclude that a similar ranking would appear in one's own behavior towards oneself: it is most acceptable to criticize one's own actions, somewhat so thoughts, less so emotions. Of course, a person has a lot more leeway in how she can rightly treat herself than in how she can treat others, but how and when is it right to view an uncontrollable feeling (which does not yet determine thoughts or actions) as a problem?

A second consideration: what about the potential for introspection that such a feeling affords? By judging a feeling to be bad (or good, for that matter) you may forgo or diminish the chance to learn _why_ you feel that way. Maybe the act which inspired it is unproblematic, but suggestive of a wider phenomenon that does have harmful effects. Or maybe the feeling is a displaced uneasiness that you have with yourself, directed at others precisely because it has not been dealt with in yourself. That uneasiness might not even be due to an insecurity, as you concluded, but to an alienation or an inarticulacy, in which case the feeling itself may be helpful (insofar as it spurs you to interact differently with the group or to put the feeling into words). I wrote earlier that a reasonable act may also be problematic; similarly, something unreasonable may nonetheless be valuable.

Again, I departed completely from the specific examples we started from, as it was a chance to articulate some things. Would you object if I use a couple of paragraphs for a later entry on my own LJ? I ask because the context would be even less present than is usual for such extracts.

Re: Continued

[rax.livejournal.com]

You are totally welcome to use those paragraphs for an entry of your own, which I would enjoy reading. :)

Also, I think I understand what you're getting at here, or at least part of it, and I think that maybe we're talking a bit past each other? What I was trying to demonstrate here was the potential for introspection that this feeling did afford, and specifically how it resonated with a "displaced uneasiness [I] have with [myself]." It's possible I skipped too many of the steps in the middle and so it looked like I didn't think about it. I'm certainly not sitting and kicking myself over having this feeling; it's more that I was (sloppily?) using having a problem with the feeling as shorthand for having a problem with the thing [I perceive to be] causing the feeling in me.

Thanks for making sure I looked at that. :)

Re: Continued

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

Also, I think I understand what you're getting at here, or at least part of it, and I think that maybe we're talking a bit past each other?

Yes, I think so -- sorry about that. I did interpret your response to the feeling as one merely of disapproval.