"but all girls feel that way"

[shweta_narayan]

(from Shira Lipkin’s The Changeling’s Lament:)

When I was little,
I asked my alleged mother,
what’s a girl?

She said
you,
you’re a girl,
and she laced me into dresses
(that I tore off in the school parking lot,
in line for the bus).
Laced me into ballet shoes
that left blisters
and bloodied my feet
until I had calluses.
Which she had filed off,
beauticians

Comments

[redbird]

On the non-binary ID, I think there is a difference between "I think I am neither a man nor a woman" and "my gender doesn't matter here." In some utopian future, it wouldn't matter what gender the editors of a magazine are; here and now, it does matter to people whether the editors are female, male, or genderqueer [all of those single words describing either a set of things or prescriptive definitions).

No, it's not co-opting. Don't let people tell you "You must be this oppressed to ride." It's relatively easy for me to be queer, living when and where I do; that doesn't make my experience less "real" than those of a lesbian teenager in rural Arizona, or a bisexual person in Iran. They have other and often more difficult problems to deal with, but neither of our experiences invalidates the other's. And nobody else's experience invalidates yours. If the category is accurate and works for you, then you should use it.

That "if" is about who benefits from you identifying with those categories: it's not just about accuracy. You don't need to say "this is me" to other people when it's difficult if the benefit is only to other people and/or the people benefiting aren't offering you any sort of support or recognition. [You know at least some of this, but it seems worth mentioning, especially given the multi-sided conversation here.]

[shweta_narayan]

This resonates for me in a lot of ways. Thank you! Things to consider. & "who benefits" is definitely a good lens to view different-cultures issues through, too.

I'm crashing right now for mostly other reasons - temperature regulation being difficult again, but will hopefully come back to it with more to say.