"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

[shweta_narayan]

<3
And yeah it's possible/likely that accuracy is the wrong question entirely. But my brain will keep poking at it.

And if the goal is comfort, how can anyone ever be out as an otherwise multiply-marginalized body? Being further from default is not a way to be comfortable around others, even if it means being more comfortable with my own skin. IDK.

[shweta_narayan]

Yeah, though in my case I think not dangerous; I have plenty of privileges that mitigate that (middle-class, cissexual, married) & even misogyny works in my favour on this one because, female-bodied person presenting more masculine = no big deal.

[shweta_narayan]

Thing is I've tried that, just "this is how I'm being a woman" without trying to change other people's categories, and it doesn't work. It doesn't fit. I'm very good at acting the part; it's a survival skill. And it's never felt like anything other than another part I have to act. It's a constant grating pressure, though the extent of it varies day to day. Today it's pretty bad

[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

[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.

[fjm]

I am not trans. But neither am I cis. The only way I can explain it is that my body is the first layer of my clothing. I decorate it in conventionally "female" ways, but it always feels like it is itself a decoration. My sense of my own gender is in my head and it is fluid and responsive to the gender identity of the person I am with.

I liked this post a lot.

[shweta_narayan]

I don't have much of a sense of gender, is part of the thing for me. So it's all vague feelings I don't fully understand. But, yeah, they're not comfortable in any sort of set box, I think I need the fluidity more than any particular place to stand...

[pantryslut]

Oh, the sheer number of conversations I've had in my life over "all girls feel that way."

Well, no. All girls may chafe. But not all girls feel the same way. "This is a rigged game" is different than "even if it weren't, I don't wanna play."

And yes, I remain with one foot in the woman box for now because of what papersky touches upon, the fact that if I leave the box nobody takes seriously anything I say about "not all girls feel/say/do that way." But then again, nobody takes me seriously anyway on that subject most of the time, so fuckit.

...
...
...

Yeah.

[shweta_narayan]

"This is a rigged game" is different than "even if it weren't, I don't wanna play."

Yeah, that's... yeah. Before I realized how badly the game was still rigged, I wanted *more* to be out of it; now that I understand that I'm more reluctant to leave a side I have much empathy and many feels for.

Whee categories!

[spacehawk]

Well, no. All girls may chafe. But not all girls feel the same way. "This is a rigged game" is different than "even if it weren't, I don't wanna play."

Yes, this.

I've been struggling with the issue of pronouns lately -- if I reject "she" (which establishes identity within a completely accepted social category, i.e. woman), and embrace a gender-neutral pronoun, what gender identity does it convey? "Ze" and "E" do not represent actual understandings of gender -- they represent not being "he" or "she", but not what you are. This Western culture does not have any other widely accepted gender categories to name. So in my experience, using gender-neutral pronouns at most conveys "confusing otherness" -- and my gender being confusing to others is not the same as me being "confused". (Also, I'd rather assert what I am, not what I'm not.)

[vvvexation]

...I think you may have just explained why I feel weird about using GNPs myself.

*ponders*

[spacehawk]

Thank you so much for this very well-articulated post!