Fuck You Reloaded
Fuck You and Fuck Your Fucking Thesis
Why I Will Not Participate in Trans StudiesDear Mr. or Ms. Grad Student, I am sorry to report that I will not participate in your study as a data point. I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish. I don't trust you. I don't like you. I don't care if you succeed. In fact, I kind of think you suck ( Read more... )
Why I Will Not Participate in Trans StudiesDear Mr. or Ms. Grad Student, I am sorry to report that I will not participate in your study as a data point. I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish. I don't trust you. I don't like you. I don't care if you succeed. In fact, I kind of think you suck ( Read more... )
The fact is, I'd be in that 70%- I've disappeared as far as my initial therapist knows. That's because the program (yes, my experience reaches back to The Programs) was such a horrible experience that I was, how shall I say, lost to care. I don't doubt that people "disappear" from individual contexts, but somehow whenever I lose a friend that way, I track them down a few years later and find that the particulars of their life haven't changed except in location and social set. They are still (seen as) the same person. I won't accuse therapists of having a commercial conflict of interest in making this sort of claim the way I accuse surgeons, but I do think there's a level of pride that wants to think that young trans girls are "so pretty they must be doing well" instead of "running screaming from me and my manipulative requirements for consistent presentation."
The basis of my own estimation is working as a peer counselor and also, frankly, as a friend. This is (suddenly) an outrageously public forum for me to talk about my own life, but I have, indeed, been able to "disappear" in certain contexts- individual jobs, for instance- for extended periods of time. I have never been able to truly enter any "woodwork" though, and I've certainly never met anyone who did, either before or after I met them. Of all the people I've known before and through transition, not one was "passable" enough to disappear in a healthy way? I feel like the stealth horde is an argument from ignorance- we don't know what we don't know, so lets assume...
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My only F2F interactions with other trans people have been around service providers, and almost none of that since SRS. My only substantive interactions with the trans community are online and those are through layers of anonymity. I attended a local informal support when I was first starting out and it was full of tragic/scary grownups and I stopped after the second one. I tolerated my gender therapists but dropped them as soon as I had letters.
I've had FFS and I moved right after that and had a few rocky years being "mostly stealth but pre-op". Finding boyfriends in that situation is nerve wracking and bad. Surgery fixed the feelings of having an ugly secret. I went to Suporn and am orgasmic. About two years after that I started really feel like an actual adult.
I came out to my husband before he proposed. I've never had a grownup (post-college) job presenting as a male. I find it relatively easy to find work and my various jobs have all been OK gigs as far as work goes - nothing incredibly "fulfilling and wonderful" but my impression is that most everyone in the world has issues with their job eventually...
From what I can tell, if there is anything especially unusual about me it is that I've stayed around online trans contexts (which is how I found this post) rather than leaving them completely behind. I know of others, roughly like me, who decided that online stuff was making them crazy and they really did just drop out and move on. I can think of one or two where I heard vague rumors of marriage without even telling their guy.
I think "passability" would be pretty easy to measure and is essential to avoiding the obvious and horrible discrimination visible trans people face on a regular basis. Its just one of those brutal truths, I think, that lots of trans women who are poor and can't get jobs could have their life massively improved for decades afterwards by $25k in surgery which they can't scrape together because without the surgery they can't get a job :-(
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