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Every trans person I know in romance is exhausted. I think I could probably extend this to say that every trans person I know is exhausted, period, but it bears scrutinizing in rom because the genre is so much about who gets love & who gets relegated to joke, sidekick, villain. https://twitter.com/acosmistmachine/status/1259149633953107969">https://twitter.com/acosmistm...
I think I& #39;ve personally been exhausted since shortly after I came out as trans. Correcting people on my pronouns and getting hostility in return, if they could even hear or understand what I was saying to begin with.
It became clear pretty early on that it wasn& #39;t just a matter of people being overtly transphobic. There were so many more whose worldview just never shifted enough to accommodate the idea that I was who I said I was.
They were often people who, on the face of it, were supportive - but they couldn& #39;t remember to use the right name or pronouns even after 3 or 4 years. Something in their idea of me had never changed and I could see it. I don& #39;t know if they could see it.
I thought about this earlier when @maidensblade so eloquently pointed out that the problem we& #39;re dealing with is not just a matter of the words we use but the beliefs that inform them. Those beliefs will slip out no matter what, unless they change.
I think about why "believe women" is such an important concept. It& #39;s not "women are always telling the truth". It& #39;s "most of us have been collectively raised to believe that women who speak up about their abusers are lying, exaggerating, or irrational".
It& #39;s not about the specifics - it& #39;s about a worldview that doesn& #39;t allow for the truth to be seen. It& #39;s about the fact that any woman who wants to be believed is starting at a tremendous, crushing disadvantage.
Misgendering and using genitals as a shorthand for gender are symptoms of the belief that trans people are not who they say are. The symptoms will not go away until that belief changes.
It& #39;s tremendously exhausting as a trans person to feel like you& #39;re always at square one, stuck explaining the basics. But I think it& #39;s more that the basics are immovable without uprooting the worldview.
I remember an friend of mine, a gay man, who tended to stumble over my name and pronouns. He told me once that he was thinking his sexuality might be more fluid than he thought, because he had found himself attracted to a trans man.
I think - I know - he meant to sound inclusive and probably to show me that he welcomed people like me. But implicit in what he actually said was the belief that trans men are, y& #39;know, not men.
I don& #39;t think I said anything about it at the time. I was exhausted. I ran out of steam for correcting people somewhere in the middle of college, when I stopped taking queer studies and gender studies because I couldn& #39;t deal with being the Topic of the Day anymore.
The other students didn& #39;t want to do their own work to change their binary worldview of gender. They wanted me to do the work for them and put up with their arguments and invasive questions and wide-eyed confusion over my existence.
I was in my early twenties and I was losing most of my family because they, like my classmates, couldn& #39;t make room for me in their worldview. I didn& #39;t even really understand who I was. I just wanted to be believed.
Now I& #39;m 26 and I& #39;m on speaking terms with exactly one member of my immediate family. My dad called me this morning and mentioned that it& #39;s mother& #39;s day tomorrow and we both just sat in silence for a minute. I haven& #39;t seen or spoken to her in years.
I bring this up because I need y& #39;all to understand that this is the backdrop of these conversations.
Every trans person I know has been punished for their honesty and visibility, backed into a defensive position and forced to bargain for basic respect. The bare minimum you could do for us is to listen when we tell you what hurts.
Think not just about the fact that these things hurt our feelings, but that they hurt our bodies and our families and our ability to exist in communities or even in public spaces at all.
Listen when trans women tell you that stigmatizing their bodies and projecting violence and privilege onto them is not only painful, it is actively dangerous
Listen when trans people tell you that we have always been here, not as a weird sub-category tacked on to the Two Real Genders, but as a fundamental, organic part of the human race.
Listen when we tell you that we want to be here, but we& #39;re being talked over, shoved out, tokenized, and insulted.
Listen and then do the work. I can almost guarantee that this will mean re-examining some of your understanding of how the world works. If privilege and sexuality and identity, etc. can& #39;t be summarized by the shape of your junk, how do you think about those things?
A lot of people struggle with using they/them pronouns, imo, because they expect pronouns to flow naturally from someone& #39;s appearance and don& #39;t realize that it takes work and practice to allow for the possibility that any human could use any set of pronouns
(this is why when people complain that they absolutely can& #39;t get they/them pronouns right, I just want to ask... did you practice? did you recognize that something in your worldview needs to fundamentally change before calling somebody "they" feels natural?)
People struggle to use trans-inclusive language because they& #39;ve never actually reconciled these new, challenging words they& #39;ve been told to use with their understanding of human gender.
And yes, change is difficult and slip-ups do happen, because we live in the world! But there& #39;s a difference between "my brain crossed some wires and the wrong name came out" and "I still think you might not be telling the truth".
It& #39;s the latter that is plaguing this community, among many others. And until cis folks decide to do that work, really and genuinely, and start to understand intuitively why these things matter, it will not change.
I think the thing that saddens me most is that I want to love these conversations. I& #39;m figuring my shit out and I think it& #39;s really interesting and I would love to hear how cis folks think about their experiences with gender too. I think it& #39;s all connected!
But that can& #39;t happen when the topic of the debate is, for the 16489328th time, "do you even matter enough to be at the table?"
