kiya

Note added after writing like half of this: This is way the fuck more stream of consciousness than usual, I am not capable of getting these thoughts into a sensible order, I am going to settle for getting them out of my brain where I can look at them.

Something that comes up in my brain every so often is that, culturally speaking, the only trans experience that is regularly acknowledged to exist is transfeminine. There are a lot of consequences of this, all of them bad. (Targeting/demonization of trans women: very bad. Invisiblizing/infantilization of trans men: also very bad.)


In addition to being long this is more nonlinear than usual because it's been a day on the brain-use front. (I don't even remember what day this was anymore I've been poking at this so long.)

One of the things that continues to live rent-free in my brain and probably will forever is the survey I saw a number of years ago looking to ask people about their experiences with being women in gaming circles. I have had many such experiences, as it happens! But the survey was open to people who "identified as women" and made it clear that it meant that in a trans-inclusive way.

I mean. Okay, sure. You tried. [gold star sticker]

(This was yeeeeears ago, probably coming up on a decade at this point, and I am still sort of low-key mad about it. Genuinely not sure anymore when I hit the break point on 'I don't know what the fuck I am but I'm not a woman' but the survey was definitely after that, obviously.)

(I'm currently working on responding to a person doing research about minority experiences in tabletop and he is not doing that thing, though he's also researching more broadly than 'women in gaming', touching on gender, sexuality, and racial minorities.)

The shape of this in the politics casts the trans women as predators (and socially acceptable women to degrade and target with slurs and violence) and the trans men as deluded little girls whose autism means they can't properly understand what they are (and who need to be prevented from "mutilating" themselves to "ruin their fertility").

(There are genuine, nuanced, and interesting conversations in the autistic/trans crossover space about the ways that autism can affect the self-perception of gender, none of which ever come up on the radar, of course. I do not particularly consider myself autigender, but I absolutely cannot deny that "I do not understand the social norms and expectations around gender, these are all deeply weird" is hard to decipher as a separate, more specific thing than "I do not understand these deeply weird social norms and how I am expected to adhere to them" and not having tools or experience to deal with either is why it took me until my thirties to start trying to figure out gender shit.)

I mean there's other stuff that's why the whole deal can be different for trans men, or specifically was what it was for me. Consider: it is sufficiently culturally normal to have a miserable experience with period cycles that there is an entire reaction spiritual movement trying to resacralize the concept of menstruation. (And in fact one of my ollllld rants in pagan circles is the people saying "women's ritual" as a euphemism for "menstruation ritual"; back when I was having these rants I was pointing out the transmisogyny of the description as well as "you know, I might be into a women's ritual but I am sure as shit not into a menstruation ritual".) Or "It is culturally normal for a woman to be self-conscious and unhappy about her breasts." My physical dysphoria is primarily menstrual and second-rank boob-related, and I am not fucking equipped to tell the difference between "culturally normalized unpleasantness" and "this is actually a Thing".

(Which reminds me of the thing Stef said on alt.polyamory lo those many years ago, that she took ages to figure out she was bisexual because of course women liked to look at hot women; look at the women's magazines, full of hot women. That was normal, so obviously it didn't mean anything.)

(Relatedly: I have spent a lot of time in internet spaces where there is persistent, low-key joking about how attraction to women is both normal and default. (Sometimes that also includes the idea that attraction to men is somehow embarrassing or shameful, sometimes not.) I have never been able to figure out how to express in those spaces that no, I am not interested in those sweet soft curves or whatever is being praised as Correct Attraction in this context, that in fact I have always been gently baffled by the idea of attraction to women with a sort of undercurrent of bewildered gratitude that other people can handle the idea. I have no idea how much of that is Egg Thing and how much of that is Very Exclusively Androphilic Thing.)

(This is of course made more complex by the fact that some people think aesthetic appreciation is the same thing as sexual attraction and 99% of the time my acknowledgement of a human as pretty is "they would make a nice decorative wall hanging" not "fluids could happily be involved here." Which is of course another one of those things that is hard to articulate when the social dynamics are often deeply opaque, and the word "demisexual" wasn't even coined until several years after I was having arguments about whether or not I should try having casual sex in order to "get over" my "inhibitions". (Which these days mostly makes me think about the prevalence of corrective rape; at the time it was mostly just frustrating.) ... I think I'm tangenting, though there's something potentially in there about the equation of horniness with masculinity - look at the word, even! - that adds levels of gratuitous obfuscation to the whole low-libido grey ace thing.)

(Ask me sometime about my feelings about the etiology of the sexual assault rates experienced by autistic women though, if you want a goddamn earful. I will try to stop tangenting now, I did have a point with this post, just I also spent all my executive function trying to deal with fussy technical shit this evening so I'm uselessly unfocused.)

Actually no that's slightly on point, because the whole concept of relating to the body is made even weirder by having a whole lot of nonconsensual experience. Sorting through the whole morass of "I don't understand why you would want to do that, but okay", "My first memories of someone doing something like that are Complex on the consent front", and "I am uncomfortable with the existence of that body part, actually" is not, it turns out, simple. (The possible question about how much of my kink history has roots in trying to make this functional: also uninterrogatable in any useful way.)

(Related stray thoughts include things like connections between depersonalization, neurodivergence, being trans, and trauma recovery as relates to the body; the prevalence of piercing, tattoos, and body-modification practices in trans and GNC communities, as well as for trauma/sexual assault survivors, as shifting the locus of control on physicality to something deliberately chosen; threads on bsky a while back on trans experience as a form of disability, about which I have a number of thoughts and feelings about the complexification of relationship to the body that is involved.)

(Transphobe: "You'll be on external hormones for the rest of your life."
Me, with an autoimmune disease and a bottle of hormone pills on my bedside table since 2012: "... and?")

Um. I've lost track of my train of thought, but have definitely displayed a certain amount of "if I ever manage to get my shit sufficiently in order to get an undergraduate degree, it's definitely sociology".

I think my point was something about how the relationship to the body is culturally gendered in ways that Make It Weird on the transmasc front and aren't, generally speaking, acknowledged. That dealing with the body as a public product makes it hard to figure out how the body is one's own, and that adds a layer of processing over dysphoria that is only aggravated by "the female-coded body is axiomatically wrong, including in its sexual characteristics, but also intrinsically desirable" as a cultural norm.

(Insert tangent here, to go back to the earlier thing, about how the cultural assumption that attraction to the female form is intrinsic and "everyone" does it is not only fuckery for the androphilic but reifies the whole "sex class" thing in radical feminist arguments that was absolutely exhausting to engage with back when I was having those arguments.)

(Insert other tangent here, about how a massive amount of what writing exists about transmasc experience starts from the assumption that prior to egg-cracking, the trans guy was a lesbian. Which is not part of my personal damage, but is infinitely frustrating even though Lou Sullivan is terrifyingly A Mood, I would like to read more than Lou Sullivan.)

(At some point I may have to reread Lou Sullivan so I can articulate why, despite being dubious that I am a man, so much of his struggle to be recognized - both by himself and others - as a man is agonizingly relatable. And how much of it was specifically looped through the complexities of being recognized not only as a man, but as a gay man. Which has had me snickering at myself because I am unclear on the gender thing but if I can't commit as far as being a demiguy maybe I can commit to being demigay.)

(Shoutout of the grumpy sort to the asshole cisgay pundity types - including in pagan circles - who handwring about how someone's gonna trans the kids in order to make them not gay, which always makes me snort because I have personally met ... one or two straight trans people? Sorry fellas we're manufacturing more... well, mostly bisexuals, I think, but 'gay' is a substantive trans population. Consider the eternal Greater [Cityname] Transbian Polycule joke.)

(There's a whole other thing about the trans guy/lesbian thing where I look at it from the cultural, not the purely denotational, perspective and feel like the whole concept of affiliating with womanhood to that level is profoundly alien to me and I couldn't have pulled it off when I (thought I) was cis either. Even if I had liked the soft curves or whatever the smell is or ... whatever it was I last saw being 'but of course everyone likes'.)

(... I am apparently just low-key perpetually annoyed by this rhetoric, perhaps like I'm low-key still pissed off about the gamer interview thing.)

(Other thoughts on the topic of body, and should I pull all the body thoughts out into a separate post for ongoing coherence reasons, yes! Am I going to do so, no! Now wondering if my low-level teenaged buyin on Cartesian dualism and my retreat to the life of the mind as a child was partly a dysphoria thing or partly a sexism thing, given also the surrounding culture that is very much invested in woman-as-body (and man-as-intellect) and that is a box to escape, but also not so comfy in the body even before I spent a year or so so dissociated out of it due to trauma that I did not write memories for approximately tenth grade aside from, like, a few bits of Spain and ranting at my English teacher about "Beyond the Yellow Brick Road" being a better version of The Great Gatsby than Gatsby was because its narrator fucked off and didn't let the careless people destroy him. Anyway, BothIsGood.gif.)

To summarize the above (to summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem), I guess, there are unavoidable particularities of being transmasc that are rooted either in the body-experience or the treatment of the body-experience in surrounding culture that are, from what I've been able to find, not actually well-discussed. Like, it would be nice that in a culture of constant relentless "yay boobies" to have at least a little resonant space for "I had a fucking mammogram last Tuesday and aside from the part that sucks for everyone who has to deal with it I spent the entire drive home basically 80% of the way to bawling because they have me on a six month checkup schedule and it is destroying my ability to cope with the universe".

Barbie gets to be all hype about going to the gynecologist at the end of the movie as part of her trans narrative. I have to endure a gynecology-and-sedation appointment to deal with my goddamn ninja IUD in order to keep my actively destructive hormonal dysphoria under control until the system finishes shutting down for menopause. We are not the same.

But anyway.

Here's a list of theorists of transness I have seen discussed broadly:
- Sandy Stone
- Kate Bornstein
- Pat Califia
- Susan Stryker
- Leslie Feinberg
- Judith Butler
- Julia Serano

Califia is a trans guy who identified as a lesbian prior to transition. Aside from him (and he's one of the least mentioned of those in my experience, though I think Stone mostly gets nods for her historical importance rather than influence) I just ... don't see a lot. And I am not knocking the work these people have done! I have read a bunch of Stryker in particular and her work is amazing. Butler gets mainstream citation even though they're nonbinary.

But there's just not the conceptual space for trans men in the academic sphere. There are trans men writing, but it's often at the blogger level, the side gig level. Not people who are generally cited, not people who are writing the sort of thing where there's in-depth theory happening. (And I've seen people commenting on this, and I've seen a thread of trans women responding to it with "look, the men are expecting women to do the work for them again" as if that's... what's going on with it. Not a majority! But I just. First of all the body experience is different and we need people who know it talking, second of all ... I feel like the only trans guy theorist I recognize the name of is someone who came up in queer BDSM circles and was kinda notorious there first is ... relevant? Here? Califia and Serano are bisexual and the whole rest of the list is at least lesbian-adjacent. We don't even have any straight trans women theorists that I know of, let alone trans men who don't have pre-existing status.)

It's bloggers doing the transmasc theory stuff. To the extent it gets done. I mean. We've got, what, Jude Doyle and Devon Price? Am I missing someone? And Price's wheelhouse is at least somewhat more "autism" than "transmasculinity", while Doyle started in feminist cultural criticism, at least as far as I was aware of him pre-transition. Though I just read Price's 'I don't feel safe around cis women' and have a handful of emotions about it for sure and it links to a book on transmasc experiences with employment, so there's some stuff out there. Though as I read the summary on the book in question it is very much using the existence of trans men to investigate sexism in the workplace rather than being about the trans guys in the way I wish I could see.

The Library of Trans Alexander doesn't have what I'm looking for either. I'm pretty sure it doesn't much exist, not least because I've seen multiple people - including reasonably prominent trans women like Talia Bhatt - comment that it doesn't exist. (There are a lot of transmasc folks in that thread articulating things that I have felt about the acceptability of speaking on our own experiences from multiple angles, for the record, which is why I bother linking it; it matters that Bhatt made a space where that was a thing that was okay to do.)

And yeah I've seen the hostility trans men get when trying to talk about stuff. More than once I've become aware of transmasc folks trying to theorize and articulate about experiences specifically because other people on social media got angry about it, and I have been unable to figure out why the anger was there. Which is fun! It's a great and encouraging environment for working collaboratively, huh?

Maybe that has something to do with a theorist shortage maybe. Just maybe.

(Meanwhile I have discovered Paul Preciado as part of the research for unloading my brain here and am contemplating what of his I oughta read. He seems like he might be the closest transmasc I'm likely to find to the sort of difficult, somewhat nonbinary weird I mix appreciating and wanting to fight behind a Denny's that is Kate Bornstein and I enjoyed Kate Bornstein.)

I am... very tired.

There is too much of my life that I have to build from scratch and I am tired of this being that too. I feel like there were things I wanted to say when I started writing this that I haven't, but that was like two weeks ago and it's all gone.

I'm tired of bootstrapping.