Thoughts After a Year of Posting
I've been blogging since 2014, but starting last spring, I began doing something a bit different: I started echoing these blog posts on a high-traffic fast-moving general-purpose message board.
To put things into perspective, here on LiveJournal a given post will sometimes get a comment, maybe even two; on its DreamWidth clone, a couple of comments were entered during the year; on Facebook, where I post links to the blog on several gender-related groups, I'd get a couple "likes" and an occasional comment as well; meanwhile, on the Straight Dope Message Board, copies of these same blog posts generated 415 replies during one week, 279 on another, with people interacting with each other as well as with me and my own replies to their comments and so forth - a full-blown conversation.
Well... I have always thought that if I had people's attention for long enough, I'd make sense to them, they'd get it. That even if some people took an adversarial stance or became dismissive of me and what I was saying, I would be making sense to enough people that I'd have supporters, and that the overall weight of public opinion would have my back.
And, well... it didn't work out that way.
The first post in the series that I reposted to the Straight Dope was Regarding Matters Psychiatric, which delved into what happened in the spring of 1980 in the weeks and months after I first came out: some people on campus found me disturbing and unsettling, they couldn't make sense of the things I was saying with such fervor and intensity, and they began to wonder about my state of mind - perhaps in part because I was obsessing so much about sex and sex-related matters, which are considered personal and somewhat weird to talk to people about, perhaps in part because I was behaving as if I was onto something of earth-shattering, game-changing importance, but probably mostly because people who are this excited and passionate about some set of ideas have usually acquired those ideas from some religion or cult or other font of ideology, but I had apparently made mine up on my own.
So I suppose it is fitting in a way that I have just finished a year trying to make sense to the folks at the Straight Dope, being intensely focused on the things I wanted to explain to them and discuss with them, mixing my own home-brewed gender theory with anecdotes from my personal life and, as the months ticked by, leaving them more and more with the impression that here amongst them was someone who was very self-immersed, very obsessed with a bunch of ideas that didn't make much sense to them, someone who was impervious to their attempts to get me to realize that this stuff either doesn't matter or isn't anywhere near as important as I act like it is... in short, someone disturbing and unsettling who kept posting things they couldn't make much sense of, someone who struck them as not being in a very stable and balanced state of mind.
Well... I've always been out, on the message board, as a psychiatric patients' rights advocate and activist against psychiatric oppression. There have been times when there have been debates about forced treatment and patients' rights and a few people have said I was too coherent to be a real psychotic:
When I first read your posts on this subject it took me a while to realize that I fell into a "True Scotsman" fallacy about you: No true schizophrenic could be so functional, rational and lucid, therefore you could not be a true schizophrenic.
So, on the bright side of things, I guess the people of the Straight Dope now have a more direct and personal experience of how it might be possible that someone like me, who is not a danger to anyone and who merely has some strongly held odd ideas, might be experienced as someone whose mental status comes into question, even to the point that school authorities request that he be put on a locked ward for evaluation. Yeah, deja vu all around: this is pretty much how it went down in 1980. (Except that having a lot of cyberspace between me and the denizens of the Dope seem to have ameliorated any sense of compelling in loco parentis type responsibility).
On the less bright side, it's very frustrating and rather demoralizing. I tend to think I write well. That I express myself in words quite skillfully and can make some very complex concepts materialize in verbal form. Maybe instead I write with great opacity, making sense mostly only to myself.
And of course I'm trying to get a book published. Let's not forget that. The book isn't written as a work of gender theory (fortunately), and I like to think it is written in language that is a hell of a lot less off-putting. Still, the bottom line is that I wrote it with the confidence that if I had people's attention for that amount of time I would make sense to them, I could show them how it was and they would get it, and yet that's also what I expected of my blog posts... so you can see how this is kind of worrisome, yes?
The replies I got over the course of the year gradually escalated in hostility, contemptuous dismissal, and in their frustration with me. The Readers' Digest Condensed Version of their reaction to me was that, while they understand transgender people, I wasn't trans, since I was not at odds with the body in which I was born, and therefore I should get the fuck over it, I wasn't much different from many other male people who also weren't John Wayne or the Marlboro cowboy. And that, furthermore, I was the one going around stating that men in general have chacteristics A, B, and C, which others observed and I myself observed were characteristics that I lacked, while women in general had characteristics D, E, and F, which both I and other people observed that I did have - and by making such statements and observations, I was the sexist one mired in traditional gender assumptions and beliefs.
I think many of them found it frustrating that after they had pointed this out, I kept on doing it. I was being stubborn, dense, and it was annoying to them: they'd pointed out the error of my ways, and although they outnumbered me I wasn't taking their word for it! We've all told him, over and over, how many times do we have to tell him? Yeesh, he's thick as a brick!
Is there any less humiliating spin or interpretation I can put on their reception to my ideas and my attempt to express them? Well... yeah, actually, although in my position I need to be cautious about embracing the explanations that make me feel good, if you see what I mean... anyone in my situation should seriously consider that maybe they're not saying important meaningful things that make sense after all. But having said that...
• Things that I say seem crazy to people sometimes because they don't already understand it. To state the almost ridiculously obvious, it is easier to understand something you've already listened to and understood in a slightly different form before than to understand something that's more completely new.
• Add to that the fact that I'm one individual person, and we don't actually tend to take individual people's thinking seriously. It's as if folks secretly believe that all ideas actually come from outside of people's heads. Last week's blog post, in fact, was in part about the audacity of saying "we" to refer to a not-yet-established social identity. I've also spoken on occasion about socially liberal modern culturally aware people who behave as if they had been issued a little paper score card listing all the marginalized outgroups they need to care about.
• Meanwhile, gender and sexuality are areas of powerful emotional content for all of us; we all tend to have a degree of emotional investment in the models of such things that we hold in our own minds. And, as Elizabeth Janeway once said,
[T]oday's facts are embedded in today's situation. We accept them as being self-evidently true, as signifying what they are; or at least, we try to. We are unhappy with puzzles and ambiguities, uneasy with shifting roles and mysterious behavior. Why?
Because they demand something from us. Present events act on us and call for action by us. Since we can change them, not simply define or describe them, they acquire a moral presence. They pose a question of responsibility, and by doing so they change the way we look at them.
Well... (I apparently like to write "well..." a lot)... anyway, yes, I have found all this disconcerting and worrisome, and yet my ideas still make sense to me, including the idea that this stuff is important and is worth expending the time and energy trying to put it out there. So despite doubts and insecurities about it, I am, on balance, inclined to continue doing what I've been doing.
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
To put things into perspective, here on LiveJournal a given post will sometimes get a comment, maybe even two; on its DreamWidth clone, a couple of comments were entered during the year; on Facebook, where I post links to the blog on several gender-related groups, I'd get a couple "likes" and an occasional comment as well; meanwhile, on the Straight Dope Message Board, copies of these same blog posts generated 415 replies during one week, 279 on another, with people interacting with each other as well as with me and my own replies to their comments and so forth - a full-blown conversation.
Well... I have always thought that if I had people's attention for long enough, I'd make sense to them, they'd get it. That even if some people took an adversarial stance or became dismissive of me and what I was saying, I would be making sense to enough people that I'd have supporters, and that the overall weight of public opinion would have my back.
And, well... it didn't work out that way.
The first post in the series that I reposted to the Straight Dope was Regarding Matters Psychiatric, which delved into what happened in the spring of 1980 in the weeks and months after I first came out: some people on campus found me disturbing and unsettling, they couldn't make sense of the things I was saying with such fervor and intensity, and they began to wonder about my state of mind - perhaps in part because I was obsessing so much about sex and sex-related matters, which are considered personal and somewhat weird to talk to people about, perhaps in part because I was behaving as if I was onto something of earth-shattering, game-changing importance, but probably mostly because people who are this excited and passionate about some set of ideas have usually acquired those ideas from some religion or cult or other font of ideology, but I had apparently made mine up on my own.
So I suppose it is fitting in a way that I have just finished a year trying to make sense to the folks at the Straight Dope, being intensely focused on the things I wanted to explain to them and discuss with them, mixing my own home-brewed gender theory with anecdotes from my personal life and, as the months ticked by, leaving them more and more with the impression that here amongst them was someone who was very self-immersed, very obsessed with a bunch of ideas that didn't make much sense to them, someone who was impervious to their attempts to get me to realize that this stuff either doesn't matter or isn't anywhere near as important as I act like it is... in short, someone disturbing and unsettling who kept posting things they couldn't make much sense of, someone who struck them as not being in a very stable and balanced state of mind.
Well... I've always been out, on the message board, as a psychiatric patients' rights advocate and activist against psychiatric oppression. There have been times when there have been debates about forced treatment and patients' rights and a few people have said I was too coherent to be a real psychotic:
When I first read your posts on this subject it took me a while to realize that I fell into a "True Scotsman" fallacy about you: No true schizophrenic could be so functional, rational and lucid, therefore you could not be a true schizophrenic.
So, on the bright side of things, I guess the people of the Straight Dope now have a more direct and personal experience of how it might be possible that someone like me, who is not a danger to anyone and who merely has some strongly held odd ideas, might be experienced as someone whose mental status comes into question, even to the point that school authorities request that he be put on a locked ward for evaluation. Yeah, deja vu all around: this is pretty much how it went down in 1980. (Except that having a lot of cyberspace between me and the denizens of the Dope seem to have ameliorated any sense of compelling in loco parentis type responsibility).
On the less bright side, it's very frustrating and rather demoralizing. I tend to think I write well. That I express myself in words quite skillfully and can make some very complex concepts materialize in verbal form. Maybe instead I write with great opacity, making sense mostly only to myself.
And of course I'm trying to get a book published. Let's not forget that. The book isn't written as a work of gender theory (fortunately), and I like to think it is written in language that is a hell of a lot less off-putting. Still, the bottom line is that I wrote it with the confidence that if I had people's attention for that amount of time I would make sense to them, I could show them how it was and they would get it, and yet that's also what I expected of my blog posts... so you can see how this is kind of worrisome, yes?
The replies I got over the course of the year gradually escalated in hostility, contemptuous dismissal, and in their frustration with me. The Readers' Digest Condensed Version of their reaction to me was that, while they understand transgender people, I wasn't trans, since I was not at odds with the body in which I was born, and therefore I should get the fuck over it, I wasn't much different from many other male people who also weren't John Wayne or the Marlboro cowboy. And that, furthermore, I was the one going around stating that men in general have chacteristics A, B, and C, which others observed and I myself observed were characteristics that I lacked, while women in general had characteristics D, E, and F, which both I and other people observed that I did have - and by making such statements and observations, I was the sexist one mired in traditional gender assumptions and beliefs.
I think many of them found it frustrating that after they had pointed this out, I kept on doing it. I was being stubborn, dense, and it was annoying to them: they'd pointed out the error of my ways, and although they outnumbered me I wasn't taking their word for it! We've all told him, over and over, how many times do we have to tell him? Yeesh, he's thick as a brick!
Is there any less humiliating spin or interpretation I can put on their reception to my ideas and my attempt to express them? Well... yeah, actually, although in my position I need to be cautious about embracing the explanations that make me feel good, if you see what I mean... anyone in my situation should seriously consider that maybe they're not saying important meaningful things that make sense after all. But having said that...
• Things that I say seem crazy to people sometimes because they don't already understand it. To state the almost ridiculously obvious, it is easier to understand something you've already listened to and understood in a slightly different form before than to understand something that's more completely new.
• Add to that the fact that I'm one individual person, and we don't actually tend to take individual people's thinking seriously. It's as if folks secretly believe that all ideas actually come from outside of people's heads. Last week's blog post, in fact, was in part about the audacity of saying "we" to refer to a not-yet-established social identity. I've also spoken on occasion about socially liberal modern culturally aware people who behave as if they had been issued a little paper score card listing all the marginalized outgroups they need to care about.
• Meanwhile, gender and sexuality are areas of powerful emotional content for all of us; we all tend to have a degree of emotional investment in the models of such things that we hold in our own minds. And, as Elizabeth Janeway once said,
[T]oday's facts are embedded in today's situation. We accept them as being self-evidently true, as signifying what they are; or at least, we try to. We are unhappy with puzzles and ambiguities, uneasy with shifting roles and mysterious behavior. Why?
Because they demand something from us. Present events act on us and call for action by us. Since we can change them, not simply define or describe them, they acquire a moral presence. They pose a question of responsibility, and by doing so they change the way we look at them.
Well... (I apparently like to write "well..." a lot)... anyway, yes, I have found all this disconcerting and worrisome, and yet my ideas still make sense to me, including the idea that this stuff is important and is worth expending the time and energy trying to put it out there. So despite doubts and insecurities about it, I am, on balance, inclined to continue doing what I've been doing.
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts