feelings
I think I was way harsh on myself in my last post. My thinking is closely tracking what I'm reading in Serano's book, and my previous post was motivated by her chapter on the transexual dissonance between the sex one's brain expects one's body to be, and the actuality of one's body. (Serano theorizes a biological basis for subconscious sex, because it helps her make sense of her own experience, even though she wisely stops short of claiming that this theory actually reflects reality). Reading about her gender dissonance made me cry (and mind you she only gives two or three personal anectdotes, all presented matter-of-factly with a minimum of sentimentality, in a book that is about ideas, and not at all a memoir). She explains that her lived experience of gender dissonance "most of all... felt like sadness... a sort of gender sadness -- a chronic and persistent grief over the fact that I felt so wrong in my body". When she decided to transition, the dissonance had escalated: "it hurt more than any pain, physical or emotional, that I had ever experienced".
So in the face of something that severe, my own seemingly elective gender-playing seemed gauche and rather callous of both transexual and transvestite experience. Strangely, though, I didn't think to ask why the phrase "gender sadness" seems to echo in my own soul, different as my experience is from Serano's, or why exactly I was crying reading about her wrapping a lacy curtain around herself (in the body of a then 11 year old boy with long hair), and staring at herself stunned for over an hour. It's a pretty fucking deep empathy on my part for an experience she relates in a less than one third of a page of straightforward decription. I suspect that my "seemingly elective gender-playing" of today indeed stems from something prickly about gender that's been bothering me since my own childhood.
I should have kept reading, for Serano's very next chapter focuses on what she calls "oppositional sexism": ideas about gender that not only essentialize two binary genders, but that underlie homophobia and transphobia, and that create false heirarchies even within movements of queer activists: gay trumping bisexuality; transexuality being more 'real' than variant non-binary gender expression; or queergendered people being more radical than transexuals.
Ultimately, Serano concludes, lived experience trumps any theory: "an impenetrable wall.. exists between our own *experiential gender*, which we live,... and the genders of others, which we merely percieve or make presumptions about.... It is time... to move beyond the insolent rhetiric of gender entitlement and one-size-fits-all gender theories".
In other words, Serano gives my felt experience of gender far more leeway than I was giving it myself. Binary gender prescriptions have hurt me plenty. It doesn't matter if it's due to my reacting against social prescriptions or due to something innate to my gender identity. What matters is that I don't assume that what makes sense for me gives me any right to invalidate, project upon, or prescribe for someone else's gender identity.
While cross-dressing in certain safe contexts may give me some kind of unearned privilege, and that's one motivation for me to do it, it's not the important thing. What's important is to not self-invalidate my own hate for singular, binary prescriptions of gender expression. Yeah, I'm not transsexual, but that doesn't mean that US mainstream society's definition of 'male' doesn't fuck with me and wear me down every day of my life.
It's about time I started fighting back.
So in the face of something that severe, my own seemingly elective gender-playing seemed gauche and rather callous of both transexual and transvestite experience. Strangely, though, I didn't think to ask why the phrase "gender sadness" seems to echo in my own soul, different as my experience is from Serano's, or why exactly I was crying reading about her wrapping a lacy curtain around herself (in the body of a then 11 year old boy with long hair), and staring at herself stunned for over an hour. It's a pretty fucking deep empathy on my part for an experience she relates in a less than one third of a page of straightforward decription. I suspect that my "seemingly elective gender-playing" of today indeed stems from something prickly about gender that's been bothering me since my own childhood.
I should have kept reading, for Serano's very next chapter focuses on what she calls "oppositional sexism": ideas about gender that not only essentialize two binary genders, but that underlie homophobia and transphobia, and that create false heirarchies even within movements of queer activists: gay trumping bisexuality; transexuality being more 'real' than variant non-binary gender expression; or queergendered people being more radical than transexuals.
Ultimately, Serano concludes, lived experience trumps any theory: "an impenetrable wall.. exists between our own *experiential gender*, which we live,... and the genders of others, which we merely percieve or make presumptions about.... It is time... to move beyond the insolent rhetiric of gender entitlement and one-size-fits-all gender theories".
In other words, Serano gives my felt experience of gender far more leeway than I was giving it myself. Binary gender prescriptions have hurt me plenty. It doesn't matter if it's due to my reacting against social prescriptions or due to something innate to my gender identity. What matters is that I don't assume that what makes sense for me gives me any right to invalidate, project upon, or prescribe for someone else's gender identity.
While cross-dressing in certain safe contexts may give me some kind of unearned privilege, and that's one motivation for me to do it, it's not the important thing. What's important is to not self-invalidate my own hate for singular, binary prescriptions of gender expression. Yeah, I'm not transsexual, but that doesn't mean that US mainstream society's definition of 'male' doesn't fuck with me and wear me down every day of my life.
It's about time I started fighting back.