dancing the tightrope of gender

[leilanimichelle]

i posted something in my own journal about this and i figure i would write about it here where people will actually comment on it and maybe i would feel less alone with it.

here is what i wrote...

sometimes i think my transgenderism is a curse...  actually most of the time i do.... but i dunno.  sometimes i can actually see it as a blessing.  i

Comments

[d_for_dont_know]

let me first say i love that song and haven't thought about it in ages. thanks for posting it!

yeah...i personally walk many tightropes...or dance, or teeter and fall off. gender included. depends on which minute you ask. lately my gender queerness is in a hazy area undefined by the binary of curse/blessing. it just...is...i guess? and sometimes that means it's a huge pain, and sometimes it really freakin hurts, and sometimes it's beautiful, or fun, or even funny. i guess that's kind of how i see being alive and conscious. beautiful and painful and frustrating and absurd...at least it's not boring.

i graduated from college this weekend and they read my birth name. i specifically asked them not to, and they said they wouldn't, and they did anyway. and as i was walking up to take the diploma, i was so humiliated and ashamed and pissed off...but at the same time, i was also thinking "well, that's just not me, and everyone who's important to me knows that, and everyone else i'm never going to see again anyway, so whatever? i don't want to be here in this cap and gown anyway."

i definitely don't think transness is a disease or a problem though, even when it feels like it. i think the diseased/problematic one is society for deciding what's "acceptable" and what's not. and insisting that things have to stay put.

i dunno...this probably doesn't help at all. but i certainly hope it didn't hurt. take care.

[eriktrips]

i think the diseased/problematic one is society for deciding what's "acceptable" and what's not.

I think you are quite on target with that. other cultures at various times have had a completely different take on those among them who wouldn't have fit the western anatomy-based and essentialist binary, and it seems that when 'differently gendered' people are accepted and integrated (and at times even honored for having a special gift) that the whole idea of disorder and disease falls by the wayside.

to the OP: I don't know if you are planning on transitioning or if you feel your place is in the middle or outside the whole bipolar system, but one thing to keep in mind that might help is that your experience is a unique and rare one, and one that many people would find interesting and attractive. the hard part is finding those people. so much of how we view ourselves depends upon how society views us that it is impossible to abstract out the "condition" of transgendered from the culture (ours) in which it occurs, and our culture wants to call it a disorder and many transfolk even claim this for themselves as a way of making sense of their own biographies, but you can decide whether or not to take this model on as appropriate for yourself.

I don't know if you are much for reading, but I'd recommend Walter Williams' The Spirit and the Flesh for a survey of how differently gendered people were treated in various Native American communities. it helped me a lot to see what I imagined I recognized as myself in a completely different cultural context, to see how the phenomenon of other-gendered people has been treated by other systems of belief than our own.

I hope that you can find a way to make peace with who you are, whether that involves physical changes or not. I do know some transgendered people who don't consider themselves as either/or who have still taken hormones of the "opposite" sex in order to shape their bodies into something more like what they want. although it is impossible to choose what features you will get with hormone treatment, it is something to consider: whether moving in that direction would make you more comfortable in your body, and whether that would make it easier to mover through the world.

[boidragon]

When I graduate in a year, I'm actually choosing not to walk because my birth name will be read. The college itself doesn't mean a lot to me either so whatever. My true friends are at other schools & they all know who I really am.