I read this in another community.
I asked the poster if I could repost and share. They said yes. Originally written, and probably eventually edited by pennypinkled.
I remember a conversation I had with my mother. She announced her thoughts that my tangled hair and unshaven legs were unsightly mechanisms behind which I hid the "real beauty" that I could possess, but that I didn't think I "deserved". She contended that my legs and my hair were relics of my inability to recover a sense of self-worth after years of childhood bullying. She insisted that by shirking my potential for (a very particular) beauty, I was permitting the bullies of my childhood to parasitize my current life. Her words devastated me. I felt like they trivialized a hard-won part of my identity. She had co-opted a necessary part of my survivorship and dressed it up as failure. And she was partially correct. There was a long, long time in my life when I didn't think I was good enough- for any kind of beauty, or for much else. I did everything I could conceive of to blend in, to become invisible. I worked desperately to mask, compensate, and apologize for the ways in which I thought I was dissimilar to my classmates. As I grew older, I realized that I would never be able to shave away, brush away, scrub away, give away enough pieces of myself to move stealthily through dangerous waters. Piece by piece, I began to collect all that I'd surrendered.
I knew that being invisible would never be enough to keep anyone safe from the systems that are in place to assimilate or destroy their differences, so I began to resist systems that reward people for homologizing themselves. I started to make space for myself in all the places I stood. I came to conceptualize the ways in which I dismantled oppressive systems-- like my feral hair and boyish grooming-- as a kind of triage that made the world safer for me to be in. I wanted myself to be safer, but I wanted others to be safer, too. Because my body was all I had to throw at the machinery, my body is what I used. It was wounding to hear my mother talk about my tangles and boyishness as if they were symptoms of shame, rather than as badges of honor. The ways in which I navigate through the world, and the body that I do it in, are not accessories of damage, or gimmicks of concealment. They are the evidence of my refusal to be concealed.
In recent years, and especially in the wake of the recent Queer youth suicides, I have come to understand that bullying is not just an artifact of everyone's childhood. It is not an innocuous rite of passage, or a common thread that runs evenly through all people's lives. It is a systematic mechanism, designed to make particular kinds of people hate themselves, sometimes to death. The young Queer people who have died recently were systematically executed. And the noose was internalized homophobia. When one or more people collectively convince a person to hate themselves so much that they end their life, it can hardly be said that the person killed themselves. They were murdered.
Many of the ways in which I was bullied were gender-centric. I imagined my classmates had some secret way of knowing something about me. I imagined the pill bugs that burrowed into the floors of our boarding house were spies. I thought one of them must have given me up. That a tiny grey Judas Iscariot had told them all something which I had not yet discovered fully for myself--that the gender identity I was developing was not accommodated by the social gender to which my body was assigned. Where other types of trauma begin and end in a short amount of time, bullying is consistent, pervasive, and in many cases, sanctioned by people in authority. Because my bullying worked to punish me for gender indiscretions that were thought of as undesirable for people to carry into adulthood, it was largely permitted by those in positions to curtail it. The bullying was seen as a "natural" pecking-order through which I would eventually "grow up."
As a result, I became an adult who is acutely aware of my body's position inside rigidly gendered spaces. For the culture in which I lived, allowing hair to grow on the legs of a female body is understood as a resistance to the prescriptions of gender expression. As such, the decision not to remove hair could potentially have more political weight than simple preference. Because it is a kind of body autonomy that also destabilizes expected gender behavior, the decision to allow hair to grow on female legs can be an instrument with which to "do" one's gender. Transgender performity should not, however, be uniquely differentiated from the ways in which Cisgendered people also do their genders. Requiring accountability for gender(ed) expressions presented by Transgendered people, while allowing Cisgendered people's gender identity to remain unscrutinized, naturalizes people whose morphology is not culturally understood as discordant with their gender identities. Disproportionately challenging Trans identity positions Transgender as necessitating more authentication, and as potentially less legitimate, than Cisgender. Using language that standardizes a particular kind of person produces a system in which other kinds of people go unrepresented, and thereby become deviants within that system. This is what privilege looks like.
I remember a conversation I had with my mother. She announced her thoughts that my tangled hair and unshaven legs were unsightly mechanisms behind which I hid the "real beauty" that I could possess, but that I didn't think I "deserved". She contended that my legs and my hair were relics of my inability to recover a sense of self-worth after years of childhood bullying. She insisted that by shirking my potential for (a very particular) beauty, I was permitting the bullies of my childhood to parasitize my current life. Her words devastated me. I felt like they trivialized a hard-won part of my identity. She had co-opted a necessary part of my survivorship and dressed it up as failure. And she was partially correct. There was a long, long time in my life when I didn't think I was good enough- for any kind of beauty, or for much else. I did everything I could conceive of to blend in, to become invisible. I worked desperately to mask, compensate, and apologize for the ways in which I thought I was dissimilar to my classmates. As I grew older, I realized that I would never be able to shave away, brush away, scrub away, give away enough pieces of myself to move stealthily through dangerous waters. Piece by piece, I began to collect all that I'd surrendered.
I knew that being invisible would never be enough to keep anyone safe from the systems that are in place to assimilate or destroy their differences, so I began to resist systems that reward people for homologizing themselves. I started to make space for myself in all the places I stood. I came to conceptualize the ways in which I dismantled oppressive systems-- like my feral hair and boyish grooming-- as a kind of triage that made the world safer for me to be in. I wanted myself to be safer, but I wanted others to be safer, too. Because my body was all I had to throw at the machinery, my body is what I used. It was wounding to hear my mother talk about my tangles and boyishness as if they were symptoms of shame, rather than as badges of honor. The ways in which I navigate through the world, and the body that I do it in, are not accessories of damage, or gimmicks of concealment. They are the evidence of my refusal to be concealed.
In recent years, and especially in the wake of the recent Queer youth suicides, I have come to understand that bullying is not just an artifact of everyone's childhood. It is not an innocuous rite of passage, or a common thread that runs evenly through all people's lives. It is a systematic mechanism, designed to make particular kinds of people hate themselves, sometimes to death. The young Queer people who have died recently were systematically executed. And the noose was internalized homophobia. When one or more people collectively convince a person to hate themselves so much that they end their life, it can hardly be said that the person killed themselves. They were murdered.
Many of the ways in which I was bullied were gender-centric. I imagined my classmates had some secret way of knowing something about me. I imagined the pill bugs that burrowed into the floors of our boarding house were spies. I thought one of them must have given me up. That a tiny grey Judas Iscariot had told them all something which I had not yet discovered fully for myself--that the gender identity I was developing was not accommodated by the social gender to which my body was assigned. Where other types of trauma begin and end in a short amount of time, bullying is consistent, pervasive, and in many cases, sanctioned by people in authority. Because my bullying worked to punish me for gender indiscretions that were thought of as undesirable for people to carry into adulthood, it was largely permitted by those in positions to curtail it. The bullying was seen as a "natural" pecking-order through which I would eventually "grow up."
As a result, I became an adult who is acutely aware of my body's position inside rigidly gendered spaces. For the culture in which I lived, allowing hair to grow on the legs of a female body is understood as a resistance to the prescriptions of gender expression. As such, the decision not to remove hair could potentially have more political weight than simple preference. Because it is a kind of body autonomy that also destabilizes expected gender behavior, the decision to allow hair to grow on female legs can be an instrument with which to "do" one's gender. Transgender performity should not, however, be uniquely differentiated from the ways in which Cisgendered people also do their genders. Requiring accountability for gender(ed) expressions presented by Transgendered people, while allowing Cisgendered people's gender identity to remain unscrutinized, naturalizes people whose morphology is not culturally understood as discordant with their gender identities. Disproportionately challenging Trans identity positions Transgender as necessitating more authentication, and as potentially less legitimate, than Cisgender. Using language that standardizes a particular kind of person produces a system in which other kinds of people go unrepresented, and thereby become deviants within that system. This is what privilege looks like.