Queer Enough

It's one of those moments late at night where I can't help but write because there's a thought that keeps weighing on my mind. I run the risk of trampling upon some rules of PC, but this is an honest post and I hope to be informed in my writing.

A significant portion of my summer has been spent reading and writing and thinking about trans* experiences, surgeries, perspectives on life. As I've said several times before, it rather perplexes me sometimes exactly how involved I feel, and have felt, compelled to be since my junior year of high school. I find myself now entering my sophomore year of college and spending the most of my own money I've spent on anything in recent memory to attend a trans-related gender conference in Seattle. The trans* community has become a very significant part of my life, and it's not because I have trans friends or because I volunteer with/work for a trans organization, and certainly not because I'm interested in being a man. But what I have been discovering is that, as someone that frequently identifies herself as "cisgender," hearing many statements made about cis people in broad generalization, I've developed a kind of internalized self-exclusion - that in some way my experiences with gender are not valid because they are not queer enough.

Now, my experiences with gender as a "woman" are obviously my property in the eyes of society, and recognized as such. Because I am a woman and look like a woman and sound like a woman, no one questions me when I speak on that ground - perhaps questioning the objectification of women by men, or something of that sort. I find myself making blanket statements about "straight men" to people that are technically straight men but that really don't fit the criteria I'm discussing. But that particular brand of generalization is still received with respect and acceptance in feminist and feminist-friendly spaces, because so much value is given to the marginalized voice.

This is one of the things I love most about queer and feminist spaces. At least ideally, the very weakest of voices is sought out and given dignity and respect. In fact, weak or small or oppressed voices are often given the most respect. I believe in this very firmly as a matter of asserting what is lost in the larger society. As a lover of uniqueness and a strong believer in equality of worth, it is a passion of mine to hear perspectives discredited by others and to find what in it can be understood and validated.

But as a "cisgender"-defined person in "transgender" spaces, I have found myself with a strange, small, backwards perspective, an emerging Hegelian antithesis, if you will, on this very strong principle I continue to affirm. It's hard for me to admit to myself and it's even harder to put into print, though I've often alluded to things similar enough that no one that hears me talk about my experience with the trans community would be surprised.

Because "cisgender" is often defined as "having no feeling that your birth sex and assigned gender don't match up with your internal sex or experiential gender," I sometimes find myself unable to relate. I am not in any way becoming male - I was told I was to be a woman and I find myself identifying as such, so in that I am definitely cis - but I am in some kind of transition and am apparently not as cis as many cis people (which I've talked about at length in Ways to Be a Girl and Thoughts on Queer Cissexuality). Because I have had feelings that my physical sex, though not my genital sex, aren't aligned with something internal, and because I have had to make a conscious decision to move beyond a gender that was and is continually assigned to me but really isn't healthy or sustainable, I've been shutting myself out of a space for which I feel as though I'm not queer enough.

At the conference today, I found myself reflecting upon the fact that most everyone that gets involved with the trans community has had some kind of very close interaction with transness - being trans, having a trans kid, having a trans partner. All I can say to explain my own seemingly-random involvement is that I'm interested in trans healthcare, and every time I say so, it feels lacking, like an excuse.

The biggest self-motivated reason I love interacting with the trans community is because trans people have taught me how to make peace with my own very bitter, conflicted relationship to gender in ways that cis feminism has not. I feel so free around trans people. But every time I learn something from trans* or gender-nonconforming people, I have to do so as an outsider, as someone that's respectfully reflecting on a different group's experiences, as if I could only possibly imagine what it's like to be in their shoes.

I look cis. I act cis. I dress cis. I am cis. But I do not "just imagine" what it's like to be in trans shoes. Being trans is a sliding scale just like every other socially-constructed label, and even if I don't fit the bill, I sure as heck can relate.

Reflecting on my subconscious decision not to validate my gendered experience as a thoroughly legitimate queer perspective has served to further cement my feet in whatever stock version of femaleness and femininity I've been prescribed. It is extremely difficult to me, loud and verbose as I am, to recognize that what I say about sex and gender is no more and no less valid than anyone else's, even if they're trans. But I am well-educated, I continually recognize what privilege I have, and I continually seek to find voices that have not yet been heard. There have been too many very strange occasions in which I've found myself in conversations about cis privilege or the harms that cis people impose on trans people where I have felt... overwhelmed, almost wounded, sometimes to the point of tears. It's my instinct to shut down this response because it's supposed to be ridiculous for cis people to feel bad when criticized by the trans community. But I'm starting to recognize that this is a different kind of hurt.

I know what it feels like to have white guilt, and this is a very different experience. Unlike the momentary self-hate I've experienced because I have white skin or am the perfect example of what it means to have white privilege, what I experience that I've mistaken for something like "cis guilt" in the past is more like shame and disentitlement. For one, it is legitimately not possible for me in the place I'm at right now to take trans experiences any more seriously, to do any more than I am doing, or to be any more conscious of the issues surrounding this community than I have become, so taking on criticisms people lay on "cis people" as my own is unproductive and stupid of me.

But it's deeper than unlearning cis guilt. My own bodily dysphoria and irritation with gender norms and expectations have not been nearly strong, concrete, or independent enough of socialization that I would've come up with whatever kind of "transition" I'm engaging in without the voices of people that have had to transition because the dysphoria was so severe, or that have known instinctually exactly what they needed to become. I often have no clue what I want to become because it's very unclear to me what's been imposed and what's authentically comfortable. I don't know if I'll ever get any kind of surgery, because even though it's been a fantasy of mine since I was 11, it's not necessarily realistic or, well, necessary. Things come and go. But the reason any of this is a mental possibility for me and the reason I feel so safe and liberated in trans spaces when I forget I don't belong is because ... in certain ways, I do belong.

For now, the most important transition I think I can undergo is a transition from assuming that my queer perspective isn't queer enough to a perspective that puts all stories on an equal playing field. Yes, my transfeminine sisters may have experienced very different, much harsher realities than I could ever dream, and having to face a decision like the one to use neutral pronouns is one I can barely imagine - it's not something I've gone through. But what I do experience is no one's but my own. It does not belong to trans men or trans women or genderqueer people or my mother or father or the Church or Seventeen Magazine or anyone else. And if I end up speaking collectively with trans people because of it, not as an outsider, but as someone that's also growing into their gender identity, and get judged for being perceived as "THAT arrogant cis person".... Well, then, fine, I guess. (Gulp.) So help me God.