![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Schrodinger's Trans
Apr. 22nd, 2021 10:30 amI volunteered to do an interview slash co-authored personal essay with a transfemale game designer (and old friend of mine) about gender performance in virtual spaces (about authoring an environment and storyline which will be populated by player-authored characters, some of whom will choose to play a different gender expression than the one they wear in the non-fictional world) and I'm currently organizing my notes into something coherent and readable.
Something that I think is probably true is that I need to say up top what our gender self-identifications and presentations are, because that's relevant to our critiques of when we do and don't feel welcome in a character generation system. However, I fucking hate going on record with my gender identity even when it's me asking me to do it. I cannot speak with precision about it. I can only say things that are good enough for an individual situation. I'm super bored of looking for a word that will magically do it, while also feeling it's tedious to launch into a long thing when that's not usually anything anybody needs to know. It's like giving my medical history to the person at the Burger King drive through. I find most of the current discorse alienating.
I sometimes say nonbinary, but it's a kludge and makes people incorrectly assume various things about my level of body comfort, my relationship to pronouns, my political gender stance, and whether I think my experience of life is not ordinary. (I assume it's ordinary until/unless I'm told otherwise and it rarely causes problems for me.) I had the same problems with earlier in-vogue terms like genderfluid or genderqueer, where I'd use them because they seemed to fit, and then would look around at the other people using them and think "hmmm, I don't think we share our experience of gender, so maybe this is not a good descriptor for me. I have an easier time seeing my similarity to people who identify as male or female, although not all men and women and not exclusively men or women."
I don't tend to self-identify as trans because I've never had to transition (notably, I take sex hormones that are specifically available to me because the system sees me as a ciswoman). I also don't self-identify as cisgender because although I don't feel misgendered when someone sees me as a woman (I am) I feel tired and misgendered when someone dismisses me as a man. I operate with male privilege in a lot of spaces, while also facing some discrimination for being female-presenting. It wildly varies as I move between cultures and conversations. (I'm not myself varying or shifting. How I'm received is.) I don't seem to have the body dysphoria common to the trans experience or the body dysphoria common to the cisfemale experience. (I like most bodies, mine included. I think they're vulnerable and weird and elastic, charmingly.)
I don't remember tending to run into the same category problems when identifying as bisexual and therefore queer regardless of behavior. Maybe it's because the mainstreaming of trans identity acceptance is new, or because accommodations are still being worked out. I run into similar issues when somebody asks me if I'm neurotypical. No, I'm probably not, but in ways that seem mostly like advantages or limit breaks. I'm more like an ally than a person in a marginalized group. With questions around whether I'm part of the community, you'd have to ask the community. As to whether I'm on a spectrum, the answer is yes for every spectrum and not just for me - a yes that tells you nothing.
I cannot tell whether saying "yes I count as trans" is helpful by swelling the numbers of trans-identified people, or whether it's minimizing by taking a label that is way more useful to people who aren't me. I incline toward the latter but not with any confidence.
I think I can probably get away with saying I'm ambigender and have breasts and a uterus. I think that probably gives readers enough context?
I feel like Schrodinger's trans, simultaneously trans and cis, and one or the other becomes relevant depending on who is opening the box and when. But by opening the box and forcing state certainty, you are not any better at predicting the next time. You may be further away from understanding what was going on.
Something that I think is probably true is that I need to say up top what our gender self-identifications and presentations are, because that's relevant to our critiques of when we do and don't feel welcome in a character generation system. However, I fucking hate going on record with my gender identity even when it's me asking me to do it. I cannot speak with precision about it. I can only say things that are good enough for an individual situation. I'm super bored of looking for a word that will magically do it, while also feeling it's tedious to launch into a long thing when that's not usually anything anybody needs to know. It's like giving my medical history to the person at the Burger King drive through. I find most of the current discorse alienating.
I sometimes say nonbinary, but it's a kludge and makes people incorrectly assume various things about my level of body comfort, my relationship to pronouns, my political gender stance, and whether I think my experience of life is not ordinary. (I assume it's ordinary until/unless I'm told otherwise and it rarely causes problems for me.) I had the same problems with earlier in-vogue terms like genderfluid or genderqueer, where I'd use them because they seemed to fit, and then would look around at the other people using them and think "hmmm, I don't think we share our experience of gender, so maybe this is not a good descriptor for me. I have an easier time seeing my similarity to people who identify as male or female, although not all men and women and not exclusively men or women."
I don't tend to self-identify as trans because I've never had to transition (notably, I take sex hormones that are specifically available to me because the system sees me as a ciswoman). I also don't self-identify as cisgender because although I don't feel misgendered when someone sees me as a woman (I am) I feel tired and misgendered when someone dismisses me as a man. I operate with male privilege in a lot of spaces, while also facing some discrimination for being female-presenting. It wildly varies as I move between cultures and conversations. (I'm not myself varying or shifting. How I'm received is.) I don't seem to have the body dysphoria common to the trans experience or the body dysphoria common to the cisfemale experience. (I like most bodies, mine included. I think they're vulnerable and weird and elastic, charmingly.)
I don't remember tending to run into the same category problems when identifying as bisexual and therefore queer regardless of behavior. Maybe it's because the mainstreaming of trans identity acceptance is new, or because accommodations are still being worked out. I run into similar issues when somebody asks me if I'm neurotypical. No, I'm probably not, but in ways that seem mostly like advantages or limit breaks. I'm more like an ally than a person in a marginalized group. With questions around whether I'm part of the community, you'd have to ask the community. As to whether I'm on a spectrum, the answer is yes for every spectrum and not just for me - a yes that tells you nothing.
I cannot tell whether saying "yes I count as trans" is helpful by swelling the numbers of trans-identified people, or whether it's minimizing by taking a label that is way more useful to people who aren't me. I incline toward the latter but not with any confidence.
I think I can probably get away with saying I'm ambigender and have breasts and a uterus. I think that probably gives readers enough context?
I feel like Schrodinger's trans, simultaneously trans and cis, and one or the other becomes relevant depending on who is opening the box and when. But by opening the box and forcing state certainty, you are not any better at predicting the next time. You may be further away from understanding what was going on.
