![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
![[twitter.com profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
HTHRFLWRS offered some questions about gender for cis people to take a half hour and think about, because that means spending half an hour more than society thinks a person should take to look at their gender identity (especially if they're cis). Many of those questions are interesting for people who haven't questioned or thought about their identity at any point in their lives. I really think they would be good ones for cis men, because at least to some degree, because popular opinion has placed "happy blissful religious and submissive housewife and mother" and "career-focused, pants-wearing, no time for children or men feminist" on opposite ends of the gender presentation spectrum, women are often asked to think at least a little bit about their gender identity and presentation and how they want to navigate the world. And if masculinity was a lot less interested in retaining and reifying toxic behavior and made room for a bigger range of possible behaviors that would fall under the umbrella, rather than pushing nearly almost always to the fringe and policing each other's behaviors to stay on that fringe, I feel like a lot more men would be more comfortable in themselves and be less likely to engage in terrible behaviors.
So, here's one of the questions from that list
I visualize gender as being a spectrum that works in multiple dimensions. Wherever the intersection of all the appropriate axes are is the point in the gender multidimension that a person has for themselves. Understandably, a lot of resources to help people understand gender identity are created by trans folx, both to help themselves figure out where they are in the gender space, and to also help cis folks understand something that's not their own lived experience. Because most of our society assumes that a person's sex assigned at birth is also their gender identity and there's no reason to think that things might be different than that. TSER's Gender Unicorn is one of the more common representations of primary axes of gender identity, presentation, and sexuality, and on their site they say that the gender unicorn includes people whose ideas of gender and sexuality is "nope!" (all the sliders to the left) I tend to visualize gender kind of like all of those Cartesian coordinate planes that I spent far too long staring at as I was learning maths, and while I've never figured out how that works once you get into hypercubes and beyond three dimensions, the best I could represent it would be as a long series of coordinates. Which might be poorly represented in multiple drawings of those Cartesian planes. To bring it back down toward something that could be drawn, I've seen gender visualized as being a map full of cities and towns, each of which represents the pure fullness or antithesis of any given aspect of gender and each person lives in the spot on that suits them most effectively and is the best place for them to be. So some people cluster closer together and have plenty of neighbors, and other people are farther away from others, and might have a few people somewhere in their vicinity.
Now that we've talked about the thirty-thousand foot view, we can get all the way down to the up and close, for the other question that's there, what does my gender, in specific, look like? I've generally described it as "conscientious objector to gender," because there's so many assumptions wrapped up in what a person of any given gender is or does and most of them are unflattering or weaponized in one way or another. Things that are advantageous for men to embody are disadvantages for women, and aspects that are expected behaviors for women are anathema for men, at least according to the forms of masculinity that are most commonly valorized and put before us in media and stories. That toxicity in masculinity is a really big reason why I didn't relly feel like I fit in with the idea of being a man, because if being a man means restricting your available emotional states, "bros before hos" mentalities, seeing women transactionally or as something to be conquered or disparaged, and insisting that your worth is solely a function of your physical strength, penis size, and/or the number of zeroes in your paycheck, then there's no way that I'll be able to measure up in any meaningful way that I would take pride in. Furthermore, that's not a competition that I want to even try to take part in. I object to that as being the only acceptable mode of masculinity, and while I know there are people who are doing work to try and shift the window so that there are multiple modes of masculinity, or to try and shift the window so that the default picture of a man is someone who is more balanced and less toxic, until that work is done and set, I'm not considering going back to that space. And even then, I might still not, because there will still be people who think the old way was better or who revel in their toxicitiy and want men to be seen that way.
Which someone could read as "You're still a man, just not like those men." That's still wrong, because I don't want to be in the same post code as those men, even if I have some things about me that do read as being masculine. I have many years of playing with and being encouraged to examine and work with technology as a tool, rather than a black box, an so, yes, I do conform to a cetain stereotype of man in being interested in technology and playing games. And some cultural values that were instilled in me about being a provider for my household with my wage. I like watching sport. But I'm also someone who regularly does storytelling and programming and silly stuff in front of children and grownups, I work in a highly feminized profession, I write fic, I think transformative fandom is really cool, and I generally try to be good to people, instead of thinking of them as rivals or needing to posture. I'm sure that there's someone who could explain all of those things away as being part of the wide and varied spectrum of masculinity, and that there's no need to be outside of it, but that person is still wrong. I'd much rather be dragon over human at this point anyway. Having been raised as a boy with the idea of becoming a man, I have the knowledge of how to act like one, if it would be advantageous to do so. Just by existing where I am, I'm giving people an example that not all youth librarians look like. which, hopefully, translates for them into thinking about what other people look like and whether they might look like that person, too, even if it's not what you would expect that person to look like.
I'll admit that I don't really try for androgyny or more feminine-coded things in my gender presentation. I don't express my rejection of masculinity in my outward appearance all that much, and I freely admit that I'm using my gender presentation and professional self to both reinforce and shatter stereotype about men, especially men in my profession. This can cause a certain amount of "but am I really this?" thinking, because a significant amount of the narrative around transness and existing outside the endpoints of "man" and "woman" is very firmly rooted in presentation and visible signs of change. Even if the discourse manages to not trip over itself in assuming that everyone who's not cis is in some form of binary transition or would like to undergo some sort of binary transition, there's a secondary assumption that people who aren't in binary transition are attempting to erase any kind of gender marker from their presentation, to be seen as agender so that people don't make gendered assumptions about them. And for some people, that is desperately what they want, because they don't want to be read as a gender that they are not. Especially if the underlying assumptions that come with misgending a person paint that person as an acceptable target for harrassment. I don't get that, because I look like a dude and people who look like dudes are generally not socialized to accept all the harrassment they receive or suffer worse consequences for fighting back against it. So I'm not making a specific effort to change my outward appearance. I don't have a dysphoria about my body, and I'm mostly willing to let slide wrong assumptions about my gender if it's not critically important that someone get it right, or I'm in a space where I trust that people will actually get it right. If I were listening to someone else talk about this, I would tell them that their gender identity is no less valid even if there aren't any outward signs, but it's a lot easier to reassure other people than yourself, and to trust in someone else's conviction of reality than your own. It's harder to believe that you exist if you can't see yourself in others.
There's a certain amount of irony in definiting yourself to be "not that," because the thing that I'm "not that"-ing defines itself on a shifting platform of "not that" itself, where their "not that" is something that's been decided to be a womanly thing. Which changes all the time and in differing circumstances. But it's the best that I've got for trying to nail down what I am because most of the discourse that exists in non-binary space (right from the name) is that being enby is that you're not at either of the endpoints described as "man" or "woman". There are some specifically defined identities and presentations, and some gradations that talk about presentation in regard to how close they are to "man," "woman," "absolutely," and "no thanks," but there's not really a robust discourse that I've seen where people start coining identities for themselves or discussing other axes to talk about identity and presentation about that aren't related to the binary. (On the obverse of that, of course, the ten thousand things can cause jam choice problems, and there's still the likelihood that even with ten thousand possibilities to choose from, none of them actually fit.) Maybe I'm not hanging out in the right spaces.
So, here's one of the questions from that list
How do I visualize gender? What does my gender, in specific, look like?
I visualize gender as being a spectrum that works in multiple dimensions. Wherever the intersection of all the appropriate axes are is the point in the gender multidimension that a person has for themselves. Understandably, a lot of resources to help people understand gender identity are created by trans folx, both to help themselves figure out where they are in the gender space, and to also help cis folks understand something that's not their own lived experience. Because most of our society assumes that a person's sex assigned at birth is also their gender identity and there's no reason to think that things might be different than that. TSER's Gender Unicorn is one of the more common representations of primary axes of gender identity, presentation, and sexuality, and on their site they say that the gender unicorn includes people whose ideas of gender and sexuality is "nope!" (all the sliders to the left) I tend to visualize gender kind of like all of those Cartesian coordinate planes that I spent far too long staring at as I was learning maths, and while I've never figured out how that works once you get into hypercubes and beyond three dimensions, the best I could represent it would be as a long series of coordinates. Which might be poorly represented in multiple drawings of those Cartesian planes. To bring it back down toward something that could be drawn, I've seen gender visualized as being a map full of cities and towns, each of which represents the pure fullness or antithesis of any given aspect of gender and each person lives in the spot on that suits them most effectively and is the best place for them to be. So some people cluster closer together and have plenty of neighbors, and other people are farther away from others, and might have a few people somewhere in their vicinity.
Now that we've talked about the thirty-thousand foot view, we can get all the way down to the up and close, for the other question that's there, what does my gender, in specific, look like? I've generally described it as "conscientious objector to gender," because there's so many assumptions wrapped up in what a person of any given gender is or does and most of them are unflattering or weaponized in one way or another. Things that are advantageous for men to embody are disadvantages for women, and aspects that are expected behaviors for women are anathema for men, at least according to the forms of masculinity that are most commonly valorized and put before us in media and stories. That toxicity in masculinity is a really big reason why I didn't relly feel like I fit in with the idea of being a man, because if being a man means restricting your available emotional states, "bros before hos" mentalities, seeing women transactionally or as something to be conquered or disparaged, and insisting that your worth is solely a function of your physical strength, penis size, and/or the number of zeroes in your paycheck, then there's no way that I'll be able to measure up in any meaningful way that I would take pride in. Furthermore, that's not a competition that I want to even try to take part in. I object to that as being the only acceptable mode of masculinity, and while I know there are people who are doing work to try and shift the window so that there are multiple modes of masculinity, or to try and shift the window so that the default picture of a man is someone who is more balanced and less toxic, until that work is done and set, I'm not considering going back to that space. And even then, I might still not, because there will still be people who think the old way was better or who revel in their toxicitiy and want men to be seen that way.
Which someone could read as "You're still a man, just not like those men." That's still wrong, because I don't want to be in the same post code as those men, even if I have some things about me that do read as being masculine. I have many years of playing with and being encouraged to examine and work with technology as a tool, rather than a black box, an so, yes, I do conform to a cetain stereotype of man in being interested in technology and playing games. And some cultural values that were instilled in me about being a provider for my household with my wage. I like watching sport. But I'm also someone who regularly does storytelling and programming and silly stuff in front of children and grownups, I work in a highly feminized profession, I write fic, I think transformative fandom is really cool, and I generally try to be good to people, instead of thinking of them as rivals or needing to posture. I'm sure that there's someone who could explain all of those things away as being part of the wide and varied spectrum of masculinity, and that there's no need to be outside of it, but that person is still wrong. I'd much rather be dragon over human at this point anyway. Having been raised as a boy with the idea of becoming a man, I have the knowledge of how to act like one, if it would be advantageous to do so. Just by existing where I am, I'm giving people an example that not all youth librarians look like. which, hopefully, translates for them into thinking about what other people look like and whether they might look like that person, too, even if it's not what you would expect that person to look like.
I'll admit that I don't really try for androgyny or more feminine-coded things in my gender presentation. I don't express my rejection of masculinity in my outward appearance all that much, and I freely admit that I'm using my gender presentation and professional self to both reinforce and shatter stereotype about men, especially men in my profession. This can cause a certain amount of "but am I really this?" thinking, because a significant amount of the narrative around transness and existing outside the endpoints of "man" and "woman" is very firmly rooted in presentation and visible signs of change. Even if the discourse manages to not trip over itself in assuming that everyone who's not cis is in some form of binary transition or would like to undergo some sort of binary transition, there's a secondary assumption that people who aren't in binary transition are attempting to erase any kind of gender marker from their presentation, to be seen as agender so that people don't make gendered assumptions about them. And for some people, that is desperately what they want, because they don't want to be read as a gender that they are not. Especially if the underlying assumptions that come with misgending a person paint that person as an acceptable target for harrassment. I don't get that, because I look like a dude and people who look like dudes are generally not socialized to accept all the harrassment they receive or suffer worse consequences for fighting back against it. So I'm not making a specific effort to change my outward appearance. I don't have a dysphoria about my body, and I'm mostly willing to let slide wrong assumptions about my gender if it's not critically important that someone get it right, or I'm in a space where I trust that people will actually get it right. If I were listening to someone else talk about this, I would tell them that their gender identity is no less valid even if there aren't any outward signs, but it's a lot easier to reassure other people than yourself, and to trust in someone else's conviction of reality than your own. It's harder to believe that you exist if you can't see yourself in others.
There's a certain amount of irony in definiting yourself to be "not that," because the thing that I'm "not that"-ing defines itself on a shifting platform of "not that" itself, where their "not that" is something that's been decided to be a womanly thing. Which changes all the time and in differing circumstances. But it's the best that I've got for trying to nail down what I am because most of the discourse that exists in non-binary space (right from the name) is that being enby is that you're not at either of the endpoints described as "man" or "woman". There are some specifically defined identities and presentations, and some gradations that talk about presentation in regard to how close they are to "man," "woman," "absolutely," and "no thanks," but there's not really a robust discourse that I've seen where people start coining identities for themselves or discussing other axes to talk about identity and presentation about that aren't related to the binary. (On the obverse of that, of course, the ten thousand things can cause jam choice problems, and there's still the likelihood that even with ten thousand possibilities to choose from, none of them actually fit.) Maybe I'm not hanging out in the right spaces.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-29 12:46 am (UTC)