Teaspoon Politics

This piece originally appeared in February 2013 in the LGBT+ student magazine No Definition. The full issue, with the theme of "Politics", is available in PDF format here.

“All I ever do is try to empty the sea with this teaspoon; all I can do is keep trying to empty the sea with this teaspoon.” – Melissa McEwan, founder of shakesville.com[1]

I never used to have much interest in being “political”. For me, “politics” just meant an argument that you dusted off once every four years at election time, neatly compartmentalised off from “real” life, boring and safely ignorable.

But politics doesn’t just mean which party you vote for. It has another, much broader definition. Coming from the Greek “polis” (city), it encompasses all aspects of being a citizen - part of an organised social grouping of individuals, a society. How any given society organises itself can vary enormously, but it will always have to settle on a system for allocating its collective power.

Politics, or power relations, is everywhere. And being queer can have quite some bearing on where we stand within the system of power.

In 1969, the feminist Carol Hanisch famously said “the personal is political”. The implication was that when we sit down and think about it, a lot of the ‘personal problems’ we suffer don’t just spring out of nowhere, but they have their roots in a wider social context - they are influenced by the politics of the day.

Marriage is obviously a political issue, under the more popular definition of the word: some couples have the legal right to get married, other couples (or members of committed relationships involving more than two partners!) do not. But it’s also political in that it affects individuals’ relative levels of social power. Marriage is not just a personal choice, but something which comes with considerable fringe benefits. Obviously there are legal rights associated with it, such as custody and inheritance rights. But these rights have knock-on effects on other aspects of the couple’s lives. They are more financially secure; they have fewer worries in the way of getting on with their lives, advancing their careers, and so on.

A society which doesn’t allow gay couples to access the rights and benefits of marriage is making a statement: it believes gay people should stay at the bottom of the social power hierarchy, and it will make their lives more financially and emotionally difficult than heterosexual couples’, in order to ensure that they stay there. The same principle is at work in a society which forces transsexual people to go through the upheaval of dissolving supportive marriages made in their birth gender in order to access vital treatment, with no guarantee that they can restore these legal ties once their transition is complete. Societies can load the dice such that gay or trans* people have a harder time getting by, and then, when they fail or give up or break down, legislators can argue that they are clearly more fragile, less well-adjusted, than ‘normal’ people – and therefore less able to cope with, and less deserving of, the rights which they are denied.

But once we realise that our personal problems are so bound up in a wider political framework, we might ask ourselves: what can we do to ameliorate them? After all, electoral politics can seem impossible to change. There might be a hundred “political” issues we feel strongly about (whether clearly within the remit of politicians, such as who has the legal right to marry, or more subtle matters of power relations, such as how bisexual people are treated in society and culture at large). But when electoral politics is presented as the only way of making a “political” difference, we feel that we have to delegate our voice in all of these issues to just one person who, out of a mere handful of choices, looks like ey might do the least worst job of handling them. Thus it’s easy to fall into apathy, feeling as though we have no power.

But we have to remember that although very few of us have power in vast quantities, such that we could change our situation at the flick of a switch, we all have some power. Every day, in every situation, we’re negotiating a matrix of power relations – of politics! – where we can exercise an influence, some influence, however small. Where we can take out our teaspoons and bail out a few millilitres from the sea of inequalities in which so many of our LGBT+ companions are uncomfortably submerged.

For me, being openly transsexual is a political act. Power relations are inevitably tilted in favour of the ‘normal’, and when we as trans* people buy into the idea that being trans* – or ‘not normal’ – is something to be ashamed of, disguised, hidden, we reinforce that power relation within the culture. I’m certainly not denying that some situations are actively dangerous if you don’t try to disguise your trans* status. But boldly and shamelessly standing up and being counted at times when you’re expected to stay humbly silent – when acquaintances are making transphobic ‘jokes’, for example – can act as a reclamation of power.

The balance of power demands that we meekly and uncomfortably sit through these situations, because this is the fate we have earned by being ‘not normal’. But when we refuse, it makes people think twice about what they can get away with – about how stable the power they derive from being ‘normal’ actually is. Suddenly it gives a personality to the faceless mass of ‘otherness’ that they or their companions or the media they consume make jokes or comments or accusations about. And bit by bit, thought by thought, person by person, the “accepted” power hierarchy of ‘normal > not-normal’ changes. Teaspoon by teaspoon, the political landscape changes.

And when a society (which starts from a person, which starts from a thought) accepts a minority group as legitimate, full, equal, well-rounded members, that’s when electoral politics are likely to change in their favour. One day, if our society gradually grows to view transsexualism as no big deal, just one of those quirks of human variation, a personal handicap easily resolved by simple procedures, then the pathologizing hoops we have to jump through to access treatment will start to look unsuitable and outdated. It will seem only common sense to allow all trans* people the right to bodily autonomy, rather than only permitting it to those who have been psychologically assessed, who have survived a stressful and potentially life-endangering extended period of living (and therefore dressing, and ideally also finding employment) as their chosen gender, who happen not to transgress their clinicians’ (sometimes simplistic, sometimes binary) ideas of what makes someone a man or a woman or neither. After all, it seems only common sense, these days, to allow gay couples autonomy over who they legally bind their lives with.

This is my manifesto: I will cling fervently to my teaspoon, and I will try to use it whenever I have the strength. I will stand up and be counted. I will never stop believing in the cumulative influence of the infinitesimal power of each action I commit. Because it is we who, if we give up and give in to political apathy, have the most to lose.

[1] Following the initial publication of this piece, I came across criticism of the sometimes problematic behaviour and attitudes of the Shakesville bloggers, including Melissa McEwan. I think the quotation is a useful one regardless of other things McEwan has said, but I understand the criticisms, I do not endorse Shakesville uncritically, and I want to warn readers that clicking through may be triggering.

Body of Evidence

"So then, one last question: What do you want us to do for you?"

The answer in my head was "I want you to help me work that out". But it would have been the wrong answer.

I was there for a diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria, and if you have Gender Dysphoria, then by definition, you must want gender confirmation therapy. You must want to do everything within your power to make your body conform to the right binary gender... no matter what the risks.

There was one question he hadn't asked me. In fact, there was one whole topic he hadn't even touched on. He hadn't asked me how I felt about my body.

He hadn't asked me if I felt nauseous, alienated, at seeing my naked female-phenotype form. He hadn't asked me if in glancing at my hands I subconsciously felt as though they must be someone else's - as though my hands, surely, would be bigger, hairier. He hadn't asked me if instinctively I reached for a penis that wasn't there, if I was overcome with fresh horror every month at the reminder of the thing between my legs that my brain just couldn't process.

In short, he didn't ask me - not even in crude, insightless terms like the ones above - he didn't ask me if I have body dysphoria.

On the whole, I don't. Not every trans* person does. For those that do, of course, gender confirmation therapy is a strongly desirable course of action - the bodies they have cause them genuine pain, pain which hormone therapy and surgery are extremely effective at relieving.

But me? Huh, well. Maybe if I had stubble, I'd get ma'amed less often.

I've blogged about this before; I've been wavering about medical transition for years. It always comes down to this: there's very little I think I'd miss about my female-phenotype body if I put it through a second puberty. And at times, that "very little" feels like a cheap price to pay to escape the pain of being constantly misgendered. But at other times, the scales tip the other way. And at those times, it seems frustratingly ridiculous that in order to be seen as my true self, I should have to change something - my body - which I just do not feel has any connection with my sense of self.

So that was the question I wanted to ask. What can I do? What should I do? How best can I navigate living as a man without having to break things that don't need fixing?

But I know what the answer would have been: if I have no desire to change my body to conform to the male phenotype, I have no business living as a man.

Popular conceptions of transsexualism are frequently - overwhelmingly - boiled down to issues of the body. In laypeople's eyes, "being transsexual" just means "wanting a sex change". (It never seems to occur to them to ask why one would want it. Funny, that, since it's by far and away the most interesting aspect of the thing.) Indeed, it's often argued (by people I have no desire to link you to) that transsexualism didn't, couldn't, exist before the development of medical techniques for gender confirmation. And, when you're a trans* person, the path is so neatly laid out in front of you - hormone therapy, chest/genital surgery, starting a new life and going 'stealth' - that you sometimes forget it can be (has been, might one day be) any other way.

Three days after those questions (the one that was asked, and the one that wasn't), I went on a walking tour of Brighton, focusing on its LGBT history. We heard the story of Dr James Barry, a celebrated surgeon in the 19th century, who travelled the world on army postings as a Medical Inspector, and performed one of the first known Caesarean sections in which both mother and baby survived. It was only when he died, and his body was - against his instructions - examined, that he was discovered to have been assigned female at birth. Had his wishes been respected, nobody would ever have realised.

Nobody would ever have realised.

And then there was the story of "Colonel" Victor Barker, whose exploits with the National Fascisti in the 1920s remind us that trans* people can be flawed human beings just like anyone else (and whose Wikipedia page genders him as female), but who played the role of a retired colonel like such a natural that his peers never suspected that he was legally female until it was revealed during a court case. And those are just the famous stories - the ones where the "truth" was uncovered, the ones where the person involved was important or notorious enough for the story to hit the news. Who knows how many other lives have been lived contrary to assigned gender?

What it means to be trans* has changed a lot over the years. For untold centuries before our modern, medicalising era, it could simply mean putting on the right clothes and forging yourself a new life. That's if you were one of the lucky ones, of course - if you had the means and connections to start afresh, and if you 'passed' well enough to go unsuspected (which, I'm well aware, is often far easier for the male-identified than for the female-identified). But it's notable that after Dr Barry's posthumous outing, acquaintances were quick to step up and testify to his smooth skin and high voice. If his female-coded attributes were such a giveaway, how come nobody challenged him when he was alive? It's conceivable that back when gender roles were much more rigid and segregated, the idea of anyone female-assigned putting on trousers and going through medical school was so unthinkable that not even a whole host of 'giveaway' cues would arouse suspicion.

I certainly don't want to idealise the past with that observation, but it's intriguing in the light of the following: Gender confirmation therapy first started to become widespread in the 1970s, a time of unprecedented freedom of expression for both genders, and yet its gatekeepers would only treat those trans* people who rigidly conformed to "traditional" ideas of masculinity or femininity. Trans* women ran the risk of being refused treatment if they didn't attend appointments wearing skirts and makeup, a situation which persisted long after such sartorial expectations became outmoded even for cis women - and woe betide you if, in-role as your chosen gender, you identified as anything other than 100% heterosexual.

The simple fact is, a lot of people who like to consider themselves "normal" have a lot invested in the idea of the gender binary. And for them, the existence of transsexualism is scary: it raises the possibility that they might not be as "normal" as they thought. It makes them feel better if they can claim that only the manliest FAABs and womanliest MAABs ever want to transition; that everybody who transitions is at least upholding good old traditional gender roles in the bedroom; that nobody would ever want to admit to such a shamefully not-normal thing as having a trans* history; that nobody would want to transition to anything other than "male" or "female". For decades, gatekeepers have pandered to such people's gender anxieties when setting up the hoops for transitioners to jump through. And slowly, slowly, many of these requirements have been eroded away, as even the gatekeepers admit that they're starting to look outdated. But it's too late for anyone who, in the seventies, desperately needed relief from eir body dysphoria, and was faced with the choice, for one reason or another, between lying or losing out.

We can't say for certain whether Barry and Barker were "actually" trans men. "Trans man" is a label which, like many others ("lesbian", "genderqueer", "asexual"), belongs to our time - it only makes sense within the context of modern (and Western!) ideas of "man", and of "transness", and of the interplay between them. We don't know their motives, we don't know their true desires, and we don't know how they would have identified, or what steps of transition they would have taken, if they had lived today. All we can say is that they did what they felt they had to in order to forge out a satisfactory life within the society they had to live in.

And that's all that anyone who's lived contrary to their assigned gender has ever done - whether they took hormones or not, whether they had surgery or not, whether or not they [would have] identified with the label "trans*" (or "fa'afafine", or "hijra", or any of the dozens of other non-Western cross-gender identities). If I did undergo medical transition, I'd undoubtedly feel more comfortable within the society I have to live in (and, note, that is definitely not to be sniffed at). But I would always be uncomfortable knowing it's not the society I want to live in. I would always, deep down, rather live in a society where the phenotype of my body mattered as little to other people as it did to me; one where I could politely explain I was a man and that was that. And I would always worry that our society might never reach that stage without reckless self-important idiots people like me choosing the road less travelled, swimming stubbornly against the tide, expending the energy they are lucky enough to have in politely explaining, again and again, until that is that.

As my clinician was fond of mentioning, he's been "doing this" - that is, diagnosing people's genders - for 25 years. (I doubt he would have taken the point that so have I.) But in that 25 years, much has changed. And - with any luck - I'm going to be living as trans* for another 25, 50, maybe even 75 years. Do I really want to sacrifice my voice, my surgical virginity, my comfortably post-pubescent hormonal cycle, on the altar of what cis people expect of me now?

Some men have breasts. If I can't get over that, then who will?

Aromantic Pride: A Decade in the Making

Life through a lens

I've spent the past year and a half internalising what behaviour is expected of a man. At first, it was entertaining; it was amusing to rewire my conditioning, to project somebody different. I was, possibly for the first time in my life, "performing gender".

I'm starting to get sick of this performance.

Some demands of masculinity I just refuse to comply with - the conscious, nagging, self-second-guessing ones. For instance, being socialised as female, I never learnt to suppress the instinct to flail and squee. Now that I live as male, I will not police my expressions of happiness and excitement simply for fear of looking effete. (While I was living as female, I never much wanted to flail or squee, so I'm damn well going to do it now.) But others have taken hold of me by stealth: insidious, subconscious.

There should not be a social pecking order for who is expected to move out of the way of whom on a stairwell. I should not think of it as reflecting on my gender if I move or if I stand my ground. I absolutely should not start instinctively assuming that if a woman's coming the other way, the cultural onus is on her to move.

I'm not performing masculinity. I'm performing being a dick.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong. It would be nice to think so. But I know that we all grow up surrounded by gendered expectations, expectations which can't help but have some kind of an effect on how we behave. I know, because I spent my entire youth picking them out, and stubbornly rejecting them.

If I hadn't been raised as a girl, I might never have come to experience myself as a man.

I have always hated being seen as something I'm not, or being seen distorted through the lens of one aspect of myself. I hated that the ways I behaved could be written off as not simply me, my marvellous unique personality, but as "typical for a girl". So I changed how I behaved, determined to defy expectation. I exaggerated everything about myself that was "tomboyish"; I worked on it, I performed it.

I don't know how I would have turned out if I hadn't been born with a vulva. I honestly don't know what's "inherently-male-me" and what's just the byproduct of rebellious reverse conditioning. I was shaped by gendered expectations: so determined not to be seen through the "girl" lens that I pushed myself to its edges, let myself become distorted. Those lenses will get you in the end.

And now it's happening again. There's a tension between my desire to hold on to my true self, and my painful awareness that my masculinity is, culturally, somewhat lacking. I want to prove that you can be a man without being A Man (TM), but I'm constantly tempted to tone my effeminate self down by way of overcompensation. Same shit, different lens.

Everything I do, I can feel the lenses flipping. Say one day I feel like wearing stockings. That makes me a saucy vixen. No, flip the lens. It makes me an outrageous cross-dresser. Better, or worse? Say I break out in road rage while cycling over a dangerous junction. That makes me a pre-menstrual bitch. Flip the lens. That makes me a macho arsehole. Better, or worse? How about now?

How about no?

Can I not just be a person who likes the feel of stockings? (The long answer is no, I can't: I'm a person who, due to long years of conditioning, derives a sense of daring thrill from wearing an item culturally coded as feminine and therefore implicitly degrading. But let's not worry about that right now.) Can I not just be a person who gets pissed off at getting cut up? The thing is, I can't. Society doesn't work that way. And whether I stay like this, with my feminine face and high-pitched voice, or whether I go through second puberty, I'm still going to be read through one lens or the other, all the time, whatever I do. Subtly, innocently, subconsciously, maybe - but everyone I meet will pick a lens.

I wonder, when you get right down to it, whether transition can help me at all. My objection is to being seen as what I'm expected to be, not what I am. But surely it's churlish to expect to be seen always and solely as my true self? It is, after all, a luxury that's afforded to few. Who doesn't have to negotiate being seen as "short", "pretty", "Asian", "wheelchair-bound", "middle-class", "fat" (etc, etc, etc) first and having a personality second? How many of us don't get so used to being seen through the same lens, time and time again, that our interactions get coloured by our expectations of how other people will respond to us?

Some time ago, I learnt the phrase "social dysphoria". As I understand it, this refers to the aspect of gender dysphoria which involves intense dissatisfaction with the gendered way one is treated in social interactions. But I couldn't help wondering where the line is drawn between "social dysphoria" as a manifestation of trans*-ness, and simply as a reasonable reaction to REALLY FUCKING STUPID social conventions. Are women who dislike being subjected to sexual innuendo in the workplace suffering from "social dysphoria"? Are people of colour who dislike being randomly stopped and searched suffering from "social dysphoria"? Are disabled people who dislike being ignored and talked past suffering from "social dysphoria"? Is the solution for everyone to "transition" to being white, male, heterosexual, neurotypical, able-bodied? Or - here's a novel idea - is the solution maybe for society to sort its fucking shit out?

I don't feel as though "female" is what I am. But my identity has been shaped by the pressures of being "female". And everyone's identity is, to some extent, shaped by "who they are" - by how they react to the lenses through which they're seen. Do they try to fight it, or fit it? Do they try to become as "normal" as they can, or do they wear their difference like armour? Do they play up to the stereotype, seeing its advantages or hoping for a quiet life, or do they do their darnedest to smash it? And how can they possibly be sure what's "the real me" in amongst all that?

I look back on myself, and see a childhood and pubescence littered with smashed lenses. I forged myself in the heat of blind fury against all I was "expected" to be. Perhaps, for me, with my nebulous sense of "subconscious sex", turning out as cis or trans* wasn't a matter of my "innate gender", but of whether I buckled down or whether I rebelled. And boy, am I a stubborn fucker.

Defence mechanisms. Attack mechanisms. Safety mechanisms. All these conditioned, mechanised behaviours overriding spontaneous expressions of our "true selves" - until they become our true selves. This is how the lenses burn us. And only after eighteen months living full-time as male am I starting to see my scar tissue. To wonder what's really underneath. To question whether my transition is an act of empowering rebellion, or yet another step along a path of twisted conformity, bending under the unbearable pressure of social expectations.

Given that my first Gender Identity Clinic appointment is in a week and a half, it's not the best timing.

Narrative, Imperative

Stories have power.

The stories we tell about ourselves ("I was born a girl, but I've always felt like a boy"). The stories we tell to ourselves ("I used to live as a girl, but that doesn't make me any less of a man, because I wasn't doing it right"). The stories others tell about us ("she's some weirdo who thinks she's a boy"). The stories society tells us ("transitioning is difficult and shameful and a Big Deal"). The stories society tells others about us ("trannies are freaks").

And then, there are the stories we tell each other, about ourselves.

When I was growing up, it was TV that told me stories; more specifically, it was sitcoms that told me stories, about people in general, and men and women in particular. They were glib, lazy, stereotyped stories. With every poorly written female character, they told me "Girls aren't funny". With every cheap smutty joke, they told me "Men only think about sex". With every hetero-domestic scene of a nagging girlfriend and henpecked boyfriend, they told me "All relationships are like this". And with everything they missed out, every character, every characteristic, every mode of being or doing or relating, they told me "The world is narrow, and there's no place for you in it".

The world I saw in stories was so much narrower than the world I've grown up to live in.

We all absorb stories like this, stories about a world that isn't quite our own. (If this didn't happen to you when you were growing up, please, tell me how you managed it.) Mainstream media, popular culture, is hard to ignore - even if you don't have a TV - and it shapes the way we see the world, the way we see ourselves. Stories are what give us the power to imagine what paths our lives might take. If you're an outsider of any stripe, if you don't see yourself in any character in any story, you can feel horribly alone. As a girl, I could only imagine myself growing up to be a poorly written, humourless, nagging stereotype. As a trans* boy, the only story I saw reflecting me was that of Brandon Teena.

But this is changing. There's a whole world of new worlds out there being storified, making their modest way into the undercurrents of popular culture, a broad world of broad stories composited together from the worlds of all the minorities who are seldom given a voice by the mainstream media. When I was growing up, it was TV that told me stories. But now that I'm grown, it's the Internet. (Who else?)

The more I discover about fan-fiction, the more I fall in love with what it can do. Fanfic, or "transformative works" - taking an existing plot, character, framework, and transforming it into a completely new story. Sometimes it's faithful to the original creator's intent, but sometimes it utterly turns it on its head - and when the intent was dubious, that can work magic. A good work of fanfic can make you realise that there were more sides to a story than the creator ever explored, or even thought of. It can elegantly point up the utter failures of imagination or empathy or tact that a mainstream writer can perpetrate. What's more, the body of fanfic taken as a whole contains absolute shitloads of porn, and THIS IS AMAZING, because there is space for every predilection, every orientation, every fetish, every harmless little fantasy or desire for a consensual act that any lost, lonely, "freakish" pubescent has ever spent needless hours shamefully anguishing over.

Even within a fandom like Red Dwarf (a show where - much as I love it - the girls aren't funny, the men only think about sex, and the writers once had a thankfully-never-used plot idea for a "gay ray"), you will find queer gems, and plenty of them. In the Red Dwarf universe, the charismatic space hero Ace Rimmer roves the dimensions rescuing and then bedding swooning damsels-in-distress. In the fanfic universe, his character is the jumping-off point for a humorous parable about asexuality. In the Red Dwarf universe, a male-identified mechanoid with no (count 'em: no) genitalia is classified as female (wahey, definition-by-absence!) for bunk allocation purposes, and, um, hilariously decides to make himself an animatronic penis in order to get reclassified as male. In the fanfic universe, this plot arc (minus the animatronic penis part) becomes an apt metaphor for gender dysphoria. (And as for the absolute shitloads of kinky multi-orientation porn, well, someone's currently writing a multi-chapter male-on-male epic called Fifty Shades of Smeg. I'll just put that out there...)

Even more important than the stories which rewrite a narrow universe to give a place to the overlooked outsiders, though, are the ones which turn on their head a negative portrayal of these outsiders. (My own modest contribution to Red Dwarf fanfic came about from a burning desire to do just that, and I must say that writing it really helped me work through the simmering resentment.) Take Natalie Reed's mind-blowing transformative essay about the vile Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. As the reader comments testify, this film was many trans* girls' first exposure to anything resembling a story "about them"; unsurprisingly, for a lot of them it contributed greatly to a sense of internalised transphobia, set them several steps back in their decisions to transition, and/or was a horrendously triggering experience requiring extensive repression. Reed retells the story from the point of view of the transsexual "villain", and the perspective shift creates a masterwork, helping trans* and cis* readers alike to fully work through and be justifiably outraged at the film's assault on their childhood consciousnesses, and showing up exactly how much of a hideous affront to decency we can be persuaded to swallow when we're fed it as a "story" by the mainstream media.

We instinctively hold up those whose work makes it into the mainstream as "special", talented, obviously superior by virtue of the fact that they've "made it". This, of course, ignores a million issues of fluke or zeitgeist or opportunism or systemic oppression or just plain stubborn determination that might have started them higher up on the playing field. It can take decades before we learn that the story-world is narrow because it only reflects the worlds of a very narrow set of people: the largely Straight White Able Cis Guys TM who "make it". At last, with growing Internet communities, we have the tools to learn this before the narrowness does us too much damage - not just fanfic, giving a voice to people from broader worlds who might be just as talented, but also fora where we can discuss and deconstruct problematic story elements the moment they're broadcast. Fanfic and other transformative works help to reinforce the lesson that not everything is black and white, that every story can be seen from another perspective (a perspective that's just as valid), and that we don't simply have to accept the boundaries Straight White Able Cis Guys TM impose on the world.

Mainstream writers have immense power: they are the only ones who are allowed to tell our stories (if they choose to tell them at all) where they will be heard. But engaging with fanfic, taking the products of these writers' cultural power and twisting them, is empowering. A cheap joke targeting a minority group has the power to reach maybe a million viewers, make a subset of them chuckle for a few seconds, and infinitesimally reinforce their already-sturdy prejudices before being forever forgotten. But a transformative work overturning that joke has the power to stay with its hundred or so readers for a long, long time, fondly remembered as their comforter in a time of need, the one friend who stuck up for them when nobody else would, who reassured them "hey, you're not the only one who thought that wasn't cool".

Once a story's told, once it's out there in the public domain, we can do anything we like to it, original authorial intent be damned. (I believe that's called "the death of the author", and it would certainly be rather enjoyable to imagine you were killing whatever moron wrote Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.) Lots of mainstream writers aren't happy with that, of course; George R. R. Martin is quoted in Time magazine as saying "My characters are my children ... I don't want people making off with them, thank you. Even people who say they love my children." But, as the (highly readable) article concludes, that's what happens to children - they grow up and move on. They fall in love with people you wouldn't approve of. They follow career paths that aren't what you hoped for for them. Above all, they grow up in a different generation, a different era from yours, subject to different influences, in - perhaps - a more enlightened time.

Children are our future, as the cliché goes. And transformative works certainly give me hope for the future.

Mindset Entitlement

When I was at school, we had a debating society. Whenever the motion was "x should not be compulsory", I would be in favour. And whenever I spoke in one of these debates, I would lose. Combined Cadet Force should not be compulsory? Nah, why not? You get to fly planes and shit. It's cool. Therefore everyone should be forced to do it. Sports lessons should not be compulsory? Nah, why not? You get to play hockey, and I like hockey. Therefore everyone should be forced to do it.

I always made the same points: something not being compulsory didn't mean that you wouldn't be able to do it if you enjoyed it; some people don't enjoy it and they should be spared that pain. And the debate always played out the same way: an audience where the majority enjoyed the activity under discussion sat, listened, and gave a collective "meh" of approval for dictatorship.

In my post reviewing three works of trans* literature, I touched on Julia Serano's theory of "gender entitlement" - the tendency (in trans* as well as cis people) to assume that everyone's experience of gender is the same as yours. I'm starting to wonder whether a lot of prejudiced behaviour in other contexts stems from a similar tendency to project one's own experiences onto everyone else - a sort of "mindset entitlement", if you will.

The most common examples of this tendency are relatively harmless. If, say, somebody really hates the idea of having to sing, and has gone along with some friends to a karaoke bar to be companionable and watch and drink and chat, it's really not fair for eir friends to start trying to coax em into doing a song. And because their mindset entitlement tells them that karaoke is fun, singing's not a big deal, they might compound eir discomfort by repeatedly trying to persuade em, or by incredulously asking em why ey doesn't want to join in, or - cardinal sin - by just ignoring eir protests and putting in a song request on eir behalf.

It's easy to fall into this trap of mindset entitlement - to kid ourselves that the odd-person-out wants to join in really, or that ey'll enjoy it when ey finally tries it (asexual people get that one a lot!), or that the enjoyment we feel from being part of a big group with everyone joining in with what we love has greater priority than the discomfort ey feels from being made to join in. And if ey points out to us how upset we've made em feel, it can come as a real shock.

It's understandable, it's only human, to feel shocked when we realise we've unintentionally been hurtful or disrespectful. Having one's mindset entitlement challenged can provoke painful cognitive dissonance - if everyone doesn't see things in the same way as we do, then perhaps we're the ones who are "wrong", or "crazy", or "mean". We set up powerful buffers of denial in our heads to try to avoid confronting these horrible possibilities; this usually results in us making matters worse by trying to protest our innocence (which, in these matters, implicitly means protesting the injured party's guilt), or by deciding that everyone is so damn over-sensitive and "politically correct" these days that it's hard to say or do anything without being lambasted for it, so we might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. (And thus a troll is born.)

Okay, it's hard to say sorry, and it's even harder to admit - to ourselves - that we might have done something wrong. But where mindset entitlement is coupled with privilege, it can have horrendous effects on the people who are further down the privilege scale.

Take "invisible disabilities". Someone who doesn't suffer from depression, Asperger's or chronic fatigue (for example) can't possibly understand what it's like to feel so down that ey literally can't get out of bed, or to find public spaces so overwhelming with stimulus that eir system basically shuts down, or to be able to walk for 200 metres but then be so exhausted by the effort that ey later on collapses immobile and sleeps for 16 hours straight. But there are two possible responses to not being able to understand something like that. You can accept that, although it's totally outside your experience, it's true for some people. Or you can let mindset entitlement instinctively kick in, decide that these people must be "faking it", and (egged on by the current Tory climate of "burn the benefit cheats") contribute to the massive rise in scapegoating and harassment of disabled people.

It's bad enough when this "entitled" view of other people's mental states just leads to ableism from the general populace, but when entitled people are put in charge of official bodies, that's when the issue becomes one of accessibility. Mindset entitlement creates accessibility problems when, for example, the people in charge of making forms, or arranging toilet facilities, have no idea of how much it hurts some people to be forced to choose a binary gender box. Everyone makes mistakes and it's hard to remember to consider every possible accessibility barrier all of the time; if somebody doesn't think to set up a ramp at a venue and a wheelchair user complains, you'd expect em at the very least to apologise and ensure that the (obvious, visible) mistake was rectified. But when a person's accessibility difficulties are not apparently physical or visible, it's easy to let mindset entitlement prompt you to tell em to just "deal with it" or "get over it". Like, for example, if ey requests that you use trigger warnings in things you post or share.

As with all the other examples, mindset entitlement leads people to think they can guess what it's like. When told that mention of certain distressing topics can "trigger" certain people, they imagine that being "triggered" is just like being offended or being nauseated or being scared - feelings that they've manfully (I use the term advisedly) learnt to sit through or push down, because nobody likes a crybaby, and it's just making a fuss over nothing, isn't it? They don't for one second imagine that being triggered can involve a full-blown episode of post-traumatic stress disorder.

It's natural, when attempting to understand someone's feelings, to look for a probable analogue in feelings one has had oneself. But sometimes you just can't understand... and people who behave with mindset entitlement would much rather make false assumptions, and be offensive and disrespectful and dismissive and hurtful and mocking, than admit that there is something in the world that they can't understand. Sometimes you just have to look at a reported experience, and go "Huh, I can't even begin to imagine what that must be like," and take the reporter on trust, and support em when ey says that certain things, certain little things that you take for granted your ability to overcome, hurt em deeply.

And sometimes - often, in fact - that involves admitting you're wrong, and realising you've been an arse, and feeling like shit. Sometimes you'll be tempted to duck out of those painful responsibilities, and write it off as "just a little thing", you "didn't mean to", the other person "shouldn't have taken it so seriously". But remember that if you let yourself be guided by your mindset entitlement in the little matters, the seemingly harmless matters, you run the risk of behaving in an immature, entitled, privileged, prejudiced way where the bigger matters are concerned. Accessibility, ableism and acceptance shouldn't be treated like motions in a school debating society. We are old enough and mature enough to start trying to accept the mind-boggling truth: other people's perspectives can be different from ours, and just as valid.

Male Privilege for Speakers of Other Languages

It's difficult, questioning one's gender. So many different things are thrown haphazardly together under the label "gender" that it's hard to disentangle the parts that are really you. Is it in the way you behave? Does a long-held disdain for pretty clothes and dollies prove that you're "really a boy" - or does it only prove that you're scared to be seen to like anything "girly"? Does the fact that you are softly-spoken and sensitive mean that you could never become a "real man" - or does it just mean that you were never taught to choke back your vulnerabilities as a child? By the time you start to realise that so much of your "outer" gender was carefully, unconsciously constructed while you grew up, you can no longer tell which aspects of your character would have been different if you'd been encouraged to behave in different ways. You can no longer be sure where your "outer" gender ends and your "inner" gender begins.

So you conduct experiments. I've gradually been teaching myself male privilege. Since I began experimentally identifying as transmasculine, I've been experimentally adopting more masculine-coded behaviours. It's partly to see if I'll pass better, and partly to see if it feels more natural, and partly to find out just how easy it is to re-train oneself in all of these "innately" binary characteristics. And I'm inclined to conclude that outer gender - the way you behave and express yourself when you are conscious of other people's gendered expectations - is not innate, but learnt... and with practice, you can learn a new one. Having been taught "female" as a native gender, I'm slowly becoming fluent in "male".

The thing that's changed the most is my confidence - or, more specifically, my ability to act as though I am confident. I always struggled with a lack of confidence growing up, which was deeply linked to a fear of failure or criticism. Finally finding safe and supportive spaces went a long way towards mitigating these tendencies. But I still worried about what people thought about me, even within my safe spaces, surrounded by friends who loved me for who I was, whatever my flaws. I was still scared to behave in certain ways, selfish or careless or impulsive ways, in case people thought less of me.

It wasn't until I started consciously trying on some male behaviours that I found the freedom, the confidence, to do that - to be selfish, to say thoughtless things, to make jokes that might fall flat, and to not care. Obviously, these are character traits that aren't very positive if you take them to an extreme. But they're all about daring. If you dare to be selfish at the times when you really just can't cope with being selfless any more, you might save yourself from a breakdown. If you dare to make a questionable joke, it might fall flat, or on the other hand, it might get the biggest laugh of the evening through its sheer edginess. If you dare to do something impulsive, it might go badly wrong, or it might be a genius move. And, of course, it's about daring to be a flawed human being. We are all flawed, we are all selfish sometimes, we all say rude things or behave thoughtlessly sometimes, and yet the people who matter love us all the same. Not all of us have the confidence to believe that's true.

Who dares wins. And, in our culture, it's boys who are taught, gradually, incrementally, cumulatively, to dare. The proof is found in sociolinguistic evidence that male-assigned people tend to interrupt more than female-assigned people; in the overwhelming gender disparity in fields such as comedy or politics where the risk of being shot down is high; in the way that seminars about "unblocking creativity" and "finding your voice" are attended overwhelmingly by female-assigned people.

Some might see that as "proof that men and women are different" - proof that inner gender is binary in just the same way as outer gender. But would that make sense, given that I could never have found the confidence to risk behaving like a bit of a dickhead when I was presenting as female? Or that I, who used to be incredibly emotionally over-reactive, have drastically reduced the regularity with which I cry about things, simply by wondering what it's like to have internalised the mantra "boys don't cry" and seeing what happens if I don't allow myself to let go? (Compare the trans women who have the opposite experience, and find that, long before any hormone therapy, they are a lot more able to let themselves cry.) I've even had to stop myself on occasion from being borderline misogynistic: I could get away with idly objectifying female-presenting strangers, or steamrollering female-identified friends in lively discussions, just because it's expected of men and allowed for, and that's a temptation that's difficult to fight.

Try consciously learning to speak a foreign outer gender for a few months. See whether you manage to re-condition yourself; see whether that "proof" that inner gender is naturally binary still holds up. And if you don't manage it, ask: what's stopping you? Who's stopping you? The deeply-ingrained fear of social opprobrium is a very powerful force. People who don't live up to gender norms - men who don't dare, men who don't "banter", men who don't push themselves forward - are subjected to it. People who live up to the wrong gender norms - men who cry, women who interrupt - are subjected to it even more forcefully. And if you're a man who's crying, you're not just a person who's been overcome by a strong feeling (it might be justified, or it might be a bit over-dramatic, but it's generally acceptable) - you're a pussy. If you're a woman who frequently interrupts, you're not just a person who's a bit irritating (the interruptions might be amusing, they might just be asinine, but they're generally tolerated) - you're a ball-breaker.

Perhaps I would eventually have learnt to be confident, learnt to dare, if I had stayed thinking of myself as female. But it's easier to dare when you don't risk as much. It's easier to dare when you're expected to dare, and it's easier to cry when you're expected to cry. Both behaviours are healthy, but not all healthy behaviours are equally permissible to all people. And that's the injustice that I'm thinking about when I declare that I'm a feminist. That's the depressing reality that makes me want to "smash the binary". People can keep their inner genders, be as binary or non-binary as they want, be men or women or neither or both or manly or effeminate or butch or feminine or sensitive or selfish - but outer gender has to go.

Mx-ing it up

Mx (title, pronounced /məks/, by analogy with "Ms", or /mɪks/, as in "mix"): a handy alternative to those peskily gendered and status-specific titles "Mr", "Mrs", "Ms", "Miss". Variant form: Misc (from "miscellaneous").

I'm due to give blood again soon. So, like a good person, I went to blood.co.uk and tried to book myself an appointment via the webform. Then I remembered what the webform looks like:

Note that mandatory field right there. If you want to cut down on faff (both for you and for the blood service) when you give blood, you have to - have to - be comfortable being addressed by one of Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss or Dr.

I think I'll just drop in and hope they've got a bed free. And so, I expect, will any Professors, Reverends, Sisters or Imams who turn up.

This might sound petty or facetious to you. After all, not many people feel distressed to the point of self-exclusion by being forced to identify themselves as either Mr, Mrs, Ms or Miss (even if they're actually Dr). But I, as it happens, am one of them. We're a minority, but there's quite a lot of us. We even have our own national campaign.

Here's a fun fact: in the UK, your title has no basis in law. If you're male-assigned, you're not legally obliged to call yourself "Mr [Surname]", just like female-assigned people can request to be referred to as "Miss" or "Ms" according to their preferences; what's more, they can adopt the title "Mrs" even if they're not married, and vice versa. Therefore, all these thousands of organisations who have mandatory title fields on their webforms are gaining essentially zero information by it. I strongly suspect that it's only requested (or rather, demanded) so that they can painlessly auto-fill the greeting "Dear [Title] [Surname] on their automated email replies. This can lead to hilarity when an organisation tries to be inclusive but doesn't quite think about it hard enough: a (binary-identified, incidentally) friend of mine selected the helpful option "Other" on a webform once, and got the response "Dear Other [Surname]"...

Mr, Miss, Mrs, Ms (etc.) are known as "courtesy titles"; that is, by saying "Dear Mrs Exampleface" instead of "Oi, Vera", correspondents (even automated ones) are supposed to be being courteous. But for many trans* people, it ends up being the other way round: we have to do the organisations the courtesy of selecting one of their woefully inadequate options. And while this is a minor annoyance on a webform, when individual correspondents know someone's trans* (like, for example, when they're the psychiatric "professionals" who are meant to be objectively reviewing someone's suitability for referral to a gender identity clinic), the "courtesy" title can become a vicious, disgusting weapon for making their prejudices clear.

The gender-neutral title "Mx" (or "Misc") won't solve all of these problems. But the more widespread and well-known it becomes, the more it can help English-speaking society to become more inclusive. Simply including it on a webform will help gender-variant people, or cis people who are uncomfortable with being asked for unnecessary personal information, to feel more accepted. Meanwhile, those people who are blithely ignorant of gender issues are more likely to learn about them, and become more sensitive towards them, if they regularly encounter this strange new option on the drop-down menu and it piques their curiosity.

And, importantly, "Mx" doesn't have to be - shouldn't be - a title reserved only for non-binary-gendered people. It would actually be an incredibly useful resource at times when you're corresponding with a stranger and you're not sure whether ey's Mr or Ms. (This happens an awful lot in my office, and some of my colleagues waste ridiculous amounts of time googling "[foreign first name] gender" just so they can send a flipping letter.) We've all had someone take a punt and address us as "Miss" when we're actually "Ms", or as "Mrs" when we're actually "Dr" (or as all manner of things if we're called Sam, or Chris, or Alex, or...), and we smile, correct em and move on. If everyone who was unsure defaulted to "Mx" on first contact, it would work exactly the same way, but with a lower embarrassment/faff factor.

What's more, the receptionist at the medical institution who loudly calls out "Mr [Patient]?", when ey knows full well that the patient is, or might be, a trans woman, would no longer be able to innocently declare that ey "wasn't sure" or that the patient's first name "sounded like a man's name". Because in that case, ey bloody well could have, and should have, defaulted to Mx. Out of courtesy. And everyone in the waiting room, and at the institution, and who responds to formal complaints against receptionists, would know that.

But this will only happen if the gender-neutral, status-neutral, assumption-neutral title "Mx", or its variant "Misc", or both, becomes more widespread. And as a linguistics graduate, I can assure you that the way to make a new word widespread is to use it. The UK Deed Poll Service has already started accepting it. The more examples we can give of it being used in official documents, like bank statements or council tax bills (I treasure mine proudly), the more leverage we have when trying to convince other organisations to include it in their databases.

I'm slowly beginning the long and irritating process of trying to get my title changed in all my records to Mx (and complaining when I can't). It's the teaspoon effect - it's a tiny action, and it's a drop in the ocean of the status quo, but every drop has ripples. If you're a binary-identified ally reading this, what are your teaspoon options? Well, there's a petition you could sign, for a start (incidentally, the petition claims that Mx is short for "Mixter", which many people dislike somewhat or suspect to be unfounded, but I'd sooner sign a slightly dubiously worded petition than none at all). But since you're not legally obliged to use a title which reflects your gender, or your marital status, or anything else, you could always consider doing the same as me.

Think about it. Think hard, and fully explore the vague, irrational discomfort you feel when you imagine calling yourself Mx [Surname], and getting letters addressed to it, and and having it called out in doctors' wating rooms. Now reconsider whether I'm really being so petty.

Transliterate

1. (v.tr.) To write or print (a letter or word) using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or language.
2. (adj., also "trans-literate") Well-versed in transgender theory and/or experiences.

OK, I made that second one up. I like wordplay. But it strikes me that trying to write intelligibly about trans* experiences bears some similarities to transliterating text between one alphabet and another. Being trans* is one of those ineffable personal experiences that are very hard to wrap one's head around without direct experience. More than that, there's such a vast range of differing trans* experiences (as I always encourage readers of this blog to remember: YMMV) that it's often hard for trans* people to understand each other's experiences. All one can do is try and decipher little snatches of one's own vast and indescribable depth of feeling, and then attempt to re-encode them in a way that speakers of a completely different language might possibly begin to understand.

Thanks to my excellent local LGBT+ library, I've recently been trying to improve my trans-literacy, starting with three books that between them emphasise the YMMV principle: Jamison Green's Becoming a Visible Man, Julia Serano's Whipping Girl and Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw. These are the kinds of books that I wish (hope?) "gender professionals" would read, if nothing else so that they could recommend them to trans*/questioning individuals seeking counselling. It's vital (and difficult) to realise, as a trans* person, that there is no one way of being trans* - that one doesn't need to compromise or bemoan one's personality, sexual orientation, or even physical body, in order to accept and own a trans* identity.

Becoming a Visible Man is a "this is not just an FTM transition story" kind of book, written in an accessible style by a thoughtful, sensitive trans man whose experiences have fed into his belief in treating all people with dignity and respect. Whipping Girl, meanwhile, is a searing manifesto of trans-feminist theory, written with devastating insight by a trans woman biologist with a talent for seeking-and-destroying bullshit and hypocrisy. And Gender Outlaw is a form-echoes-content patchwork of ruminations, reminiscences and penetrating questions from a happily-transitioned MTF who is now coming to identify as genderfluid.

All three work hard on challenging and taking apart our tangled societal assumptions about all things gender, repeatedly making the point that physical sex, social gender, sexual orientation, gender expression and gender identity are not necessarily connected. Many parents worry that because their son likes pink things he might grow up gay, and many adolescent FAABs who have a penchant for masculine clothing think that perhaps they must be lesbians (even though they're not actually attracted to women), and great swathes of people will boggle at the concept of an androsexual FTM or a gynesexual MTF. This assumption that gender expression = sexual orientation (= gender identity) is deeply ingrained into our culture, meaning that anybody who varies even slightly from the prescribed scripts of "manly straight man" or "girly straight woman" or "flamboyant gay man" or "ultra-femme 100%-androsexual trans woman" etc. immediately has a whole heap of internalised everything-phobia to deal with.

You don't have to have done a lot of untangling of all this bullshit in your head to become a happy self-accepting trans* person, but it helps. And it's exceedingly useful (to anyone who struggles with gender norms, not just trans* people) when such people write books about their untanglings that articulate what you were sort of thinking but just couldn't put into words. Serano insightfully pins down a widespread cultural devaluing of feminine qualities as being at the heart of a vast number of these assumptions and prejudices (from gay male fetishising of "butches" over "femmes", through feminist disdain towards women who enjoy expressing femininity, to the massive over-representation by science and the media of trans women over trans men). Meanwhile, Green opens with a knife-sharp chapter mischievously knocking down accepted ideas about "the two biological sexes" (a large portion of which is available on Amazon's "see inside this book" function, and I encourage you to have a read of that if of nothing else I review here).

What's more, you don't have to be a trans* person to have untangled some of this bullshit, but again, it helps: experiencing life "from both sides" (as it were), and needing to come to an unusually clear understanding of what it means to be a "man" or a "woman", have given these authors particular insights into the mechanisms of social, hormonal and psychological gender, and allowed them to think critically about which gendered expectations they do and don't wish to live up to. Or, sometimes, it doesn't: Bornstein struggled to understand the ineffable concept of gender all her pre-transition life, and although she loves her female body, and feels solidarity with those who experience the world as women, she still can't come to terms with gender other than as a social phenomenon, and a dubious one at best. Seeing it as a quietly insidious form of class-based oppression, she encourages us all (gently) to do as she does: to transgress it, thumb one's nose at it, ask it awkward questions, and point out that it (like the proverbial emperor) is wearing no clothes, at every possible opportunity.

I have great sympathy for Bornstein's position, which is why I was particularly intrigued to read Serano's theory of the "subconscious sex": an individual's mental sense of what form eir body ought to take. This subconscious sex is separate from the societal pressures that can affect a person's relationship with eir gender or gendered body; it is just there, effectively existing in a vacuum, a quiet insistence that there ought to be a vagina there, for example - whether or not there actually is a vagina there, or whether or not the person in question identifies as female-gendered. I'm not sure I have a subconscious sex, and it seems from Bornstein's writing that she probably doesn't either;. While people like us, the gender-bewildered, have many valid things to say about the negative aspects of social gender, we must remember that our insistence on destroying the binary can offend or alienate those people (cis or trans*) who do have a subconscious sex. In Serano's terminology, we must avoid behaving with "gender entitlement": the unconscious tendency to project one's own individual experience of gender onto everyone else.

In trans* people, the subconscious sex can be a massive source of physical dysphoria. In cis people, it can be a massive source of gender entitlement. Cis people, Serano reasons, usually have a subconscious sex - they just don't notice it, because it aligns more or less perfectly with their physical sex (and, to a greater or lesser extent, their social gender). Therefore, having no experience of gender dysphoria, they may be unable to understand or believe trans* people when they insist that they are a gender other than the one assigned to them. It can also lead to fractures within the trans* community, based on entitled assumptions of "my experience is the transsexual experience - your experience does not match mine - therefore you are not a true transsexual".

In both cases, the entitled behaviour can stem from an underlying insecurity in one's own gender, a fear that the way one experiences one's own identity might not be "valid". However, those who are brave enough to put aside these layers of defensiveness and try to empathise with other people's perspectives can gain a great deal from it. The initially reluctant Green gradually became deeply involved in the evolving FTM community of the 80s/90s, during which time he got to know (either face-to-face or via correspondence) more trans* people, each with a different trans* experience, than most gatekeepers would ever meet. The result is a text which is imbued with a deep consciousness of and respect for each individual's perspective on gender, and is richer for it. Very few of the (numerous) books, scholarly articles and scientific studies about trans* people have this level of real understanding of their subjects, Serano argues. Most of the "gender professionals", theorists or polemicists who wrote them didn't actually bother to properly get to know any trans* people, and this is why she feels that books like the ones I've discussed here, books written about the trans* experience by trans* people, are so important if we want to come to any meaningful conclusions about gender and those who struggle with it.

Transliterating between alphabets is not the same as translating between languages: all it does is make the words legible, rather than comprehensible. Some extra work is required by the reader if ey is to understand their meaning; ey must try to learn some elements of the writer's native language. Therefore, while I heartily applaud these three authors' prodigious efforts at transliterating their unique experiences into relatable stories, the onus is now on us to become trans-literate.

Gender in theory and in practice

Drafted on 26/3/12


My GP is an exceedingly nice guy, and he's not - can't be expected to be - a trans* expert. He performed the last(?) of his gatekeeping duties for me this morning with endearing humility, constantly apologising for being so "challenging" as he asked me probing questions. As he explained, in future referrals, people were going to be similarly challenging, trying to make sure that I wasn't making a bad decision.

Although I can just about get my head round a world in which this has to happen (so what if I made a "bad decision"? why would it matter if I stopped taking testosterone after a few months then spent the rest of my life as a slightly hirsute woman with a low voice and clitoromegaly?), I was somewhat perturbed by the thought that, in order to access treatment, I would have to have my identity, my confidence in myself, constantly "challenged", and to constantly defend it. No wonder the referral process is so emotionally draining for the more fragile of us (and bear in mind that our experiences are likely to have made us fragile).

But what disturbed me more was the idea that the healthcare "professionals" who stand in our way might have such a simplistic, unprofessional idea of gender as was displayed in his questioning. I have been thinking about my gender for over half my life, off and on; as remarked an FTM acquaintance of mine (who on the face of it is the most masculine-conforming obvious candidate for the treatment), you have to deconstruct the binary before you can work out where you stand within it (and then, if appropriate, you put it back together with yourself firmly in the "other" bit). I have read blogs, books, resources, theory; I have answered for myself to my own satisfaction nearly all of the questions that feel relevant connected to the decision to "change sex".

I do not count among them the question "so if you're not planning to have surgery, what would happen if you started a relationship with someone?"

I am a very lucky person. I have an "alternative" worldview and I live in an "alternative" world which supports, celebrates and nourishes it. Very rarely does the "real" world intrude, the one where people aren't broad-minded and over-intellectualising, the one where people eschew critical thinking in favour of shocked instinctive reactions when faced with a "she-man". I've brainwashed reeducated myself more than sufficiently in matters of queer, [a]sex-positive and feminist theory to conclude "instinctively" that all relationships are different, all people are different, all genitalia are different, and there are a million and one ways of having sex, or not having sex, or having a relationship with a person primarily and eir genitalia second. The "professionals" who gatekeep gender have, in many cases and within the confines of what their job description demands of them, thought about these things only so far as concluding that they don't want to accidentally create freaks.

Perhaps it's unreasonable of me to raise an eyebrow at the question; I'm sure there are plenty of candidates for medical transition who don't want to be turned into freaks, or who honestly haven't thought about these things, or who would respond with an "unhealthy" plan for how they'd deal with such matters. But I would really hope that, rather than just being rejected for referral (which might seem to the "professionals" like the "safer" way of dealing with "confused" people, but in actual fact might lead to much greater distress and confusion than an ill-advised partial transition), such people would be given access further down the line to appropriate counselling. And by "appropriate", I mean "grounded in queer-positive theory": giving them the tools to accept that their genital configuration (whatever it is currently, whatever they would like it to be, and whatever it's likely to actually end up as) doesn't make them "freaks", doesn't mean they won't be able to have successful relationships, and doesn't make it "wrong" for them to obtain whatever sexual pleasure is available to them.

Easier said than done, perhaps, if said people are surrounded by that tiresome "real" world in which acquaintances disapprove of their actions. But even if they come to an understanding of themselves, their genders and their bodies which the "normal" people around them will never take the time to understand, it might be the key to their own self-acceptance and self-confidence - things which, if they've reached a point of suspecting themselves to be trans*, might otherwise remain a lifelong problem for them.

I freely admit that I'm an idealist, and perhaps naive with it. But that's because, in some respects, I live in an ideal world. By lucky chance, I've landed in a life situation where, as yet, my trans* status has not once caused me to be harassed, lose a friend or family member, or encounter friction or prejudice at work or in other social groups. I hear about less fortunate people, am "challenged" by my GP to consider how I'd feel if transition led me to encounter one of these negative scenarios, and I'm determined to prove that trans* life doesn't have to be like that. Maybe it won't happen; maybe I will get knocked back by a homophobic (or acephobic, but I've had relationships with men, so in their eyes, who's counting?) consultant, maybe work colleagues will start to swallow their acceptance once they realise it comes with facial hair. But that's the "real" world, and I never liked the sound of it much. I've already proven that, with a measure of good fortune and some boldness in seeking out progressive people, a trans* person can build eir own little world in which ey can live out eir gender happily.

Who really lives in the "real" world, anyway? We must pander to its demands and live under its conditions, and we can desire to change it or try to change it, but all of our happiness and security, all of our meaningful encounters, all of our little everyday triumphs and despairs that together mount up to "living", come from our Own Little Worlds. And the best we can possibly hope for, regardless of what the "real" world thinks of us, is to seek out or build or stumble upon a little world which feels right. I like mine. And if one day someone wants, really wants, to come and live in my corner of it with me, I guarantee that ey will not care about the shape of my genitals.

Where does the money go?

I recently got signed up to a company pension. I was given an appointment with a financial adviser, and presented with reams of documents to read through (if I chose - most people didn’t) beforehand. The documents were full of “tech specs” about the different pension schemes, likely growth and returns, projections of how much the pension would be worth on retirement under a myriad different conditions, financial jargon aplenty.

But there was one piece of information I couldn’t find, no matter how hard I tried: Where, exactly, were they going to invest my money?

I read through all the factsheets, found portfolios with names like “Sustainable” and “Ethical”, tried to work out what the words “Sustainable” and “Ethical” meant (short answer: they won’t invest in companies that gain more than 10% of their profits from arms dealing), went to my appointment, got talked at for five minutes about how much my pension would be worth when I retired, and the adviser was on the point of signing me up for the standard “new graduate who knows nothing about finance” package before I said “hang on a minute, I have ethical and sustainable priorities” and ey let me get a word in edgeways about what sort of scheme I actually wanted. And even then, ey couldn't really answer my question: where were they going to invest my money?

Banks like to tell you a lot about what you’ll get back if you invest with them, but they’re less keen to tell you what’s in it for them. As we’ve discovered in recent months, years even, the answer is often “quite a lot”. They’re even less keen to tell you how it all even works. And as I discovered, the answer is often “nobody knows”.

The bank will invest your pension money in whatever stocks and shares are likely to get you the best returns. They can't tell you what companies your money will be invested into, because even they don't know from day to day. This means it could be going virtually anywhere. It means it could be funding virtually anything. And the more of your money that goes into some promising new up-and-coming arms dealership, the more said dealership will be able to expand its business, and it’ll become even more promising and up-and-coming, and even more banks will invest even more of even more people’s pension pots into it, and...

In the “About Me” section of this blog, I state that I’m an anti-capitalist. That’s not entirely true. In the purest sense of the word, the non-ideological sense, I’m a capitalist.

My pension money (capital) is being loaned to businesses, who knows which, could be Vodafone, could be HSBC, could be Prudential*, and this capital is allowing them to expand their activity and make more money in turn, and they’re thanking me by giving me returns on my capital. In fact, if you have any form of savings (and I’m pretty sure most people reading this will, even if they also have a far greater amount of student debt), you’re a capitalist too. Your money, whether you like it or not, is being reinvested by your bank in whatever industries they think best. (Protip: these will be the ones that create lots of wealth for their customers and keep them from all walking out in search of a better interest rate. Conscience be damned.)

*all of these were among the top holdings last year for the pension scheme I now have; judge their sustainable and ethical credentials for yourself.

You might be the type to boycott Nestle or Unilever or Shell, or to buy fairtrade products when you can, but your money might be supporting all those companies and enabling unfair trade practices behind your back, to the tune of a lot more profit than you're withholding from them with your consumer choices. Even if you’re not the type to do any of those things, your savings money is probably one of your greatest sources of consumer power. If you’re investing it blindly, concentrating only on which investments will get you the highest returns (which is the only thing banks encourage you to concentrate on), you’ll gain marginally more interest, sure. But you’ll be contracting out your (small but significant) individual power to another much bigger, much more powerful entity - which can use your power, combined with everyone else’s power, to do basically whatever the fuck it likes.

Then again, once you start thinking about this, you realise that actually you do have a small but significant source of power which you never really thought about before. And that’s where being a capitalist becomes fun.

Around the same time as I was badgered into getting a pension of questionable ethical credentials, it was beginning to dawn on me that, for the first time in my life, I had regular income in excess of my outgoings. As a hopelessly naive idealist with a fuckton of middle-class guilt an aspiring young ideological anti-capitalist with a social conscience, I wanted to dispose of the disposable portion of my income responsibly. Giving to charity is what usually comes to mind for people of that inclination; microloans are another canny idea that’s been floating around my social network.

But what I was really excited to learn was that there are banks, proper banks, that offer a limited but functional range of common or garden personal savings products, and only invest your money, transparently, into sustainable, ethical, socially positive industries and charities. That way, once the capital’s been used to help one loan recipient get one project off the ground, and they’ve paid it back, it can be reinvested in another project, and another, and another... Why just give your money to charity when you could invest it in charity as well?

We're currently halfway through Move Your Money Month (okay, more like three-quarters - I'm sorry, I had a busy March...). The campaign is designed to harness the collective hacked-off-ness of everyone outraged by the recent (and not so recent) banking scandals, encouraging them to show their banks who really holds the (small, but collectively very significant) power, and vote with their feet, moving all that lovely capital to a more ethical alternative. Ethical Consumer, which has detailed reports on many companies' social and environmental impact but unfortunately charges a subscription fee to access them, has even joined in by giving free access to their Banking Special Report until the end of the month.

It would be great if this campaign meant more power to the elbows of Triodos, Shared Interest, or Charity Bank (to name a few). But it would be equally great if it also encouraged people to think about their own consumer power. The dominant narrative in our culture is that money gives you power to improve your own quality of life - which, of course, it does. But it's a very individualist, limited view. Once you get past a certain level of income, there's really not that much more improving you can do - would you really like to think that the only significant power or influence you could exert in the world was to buy yourself an iPad 2 to replace your iPad?

Personally, I'm happier forgoing that 0.25% extra on a competitive interest rate from a high street bank (which I think would translate roughly in buying terms to one bonus bottle of gin per year - 70cl, mind, and not the good stuff), if it means I can use my savings, my capital, my power, to enact my principles in the world and support the things I believe in. And that doesn't just go for charities - there are also crowdfunding websites springing up which let you "invest" in awesome projects your friends are working on. That's real consumer power, right there - directly funding the kind of arts and entertainment you'd like to see get produced. 

It's real capitalism, too (albeit with somewhat non-traditional returns on your investment). No indeed, there's nothing wrong with good old-fashioned, non-ideologically-perverted, base-form capitalism... (as for the kind of capitalism that I do think there's something wrong with? that'll be a whole 'nother post...)

As Move Your Money Month draws to a close, the end of the financial year approaches, and we continue to reel in shock after the Budget, why not have a think about what your money's doing behind your back, and what you'd like it to be doing? An extra bottle of gin per year, or the chance to reconnect with your neighbours (both local and global), play a part in shaping society and culture, and know that you are in control of all that hidden fiscal power... the choice is yours.

Why not just STFU and get on with it?

A friend of mine commented, regarding my post on [a]sexuality and self-identification, that ey thought the world would be better all round if people spent less time banging on about What They Like To Do In Bed (or similar), and more time just doing it.

Ey has a point. It prompted me to wonder why so many of these self-identification labels do revolve around What People Like To Do In Bed (bisexual, asexual, "sexual", pansexual, panromantic, aromantic, polyamorous, monogamous, sex-positive, kinky, vanilla, heteroromantic, gynesexual...). Why should What One Likes To Do In Bed be of anyone else's concern apart from the other person[s] in the bed?

The ones that don't (genderqueer, transmasculine, butch, femme, neuro-atypical, cisgender, feminist, neurotypical...) seem to have the broadly unifying characteristic of describing What You Are Like (stop me if I've missed something here). Presumably, if these labels describe What One Is Like, one spends most of one's time being like that - so why should one need to wave around a label proclaiming that One Is Like That?

Maybe there's a label to describe what the people are like who spend most of their time using labels to proclaim what they're like. That would be enjoyably meta.

The answer I came up with:

Actually, the sexuality labels don't just tell you what the person likes to do in bed. They tell you how ey negotiates some of the most intense and complex relationships someone can possibly have with [an]other human being[s]. They tell you, through eir choice of label (pansexual over bisexual, gyneromantic over homoromantic, "sexual" over "but... I'm not like that...!"), how ey views these other human beings, on what levels ey chooses to interact with them, and how ey responds to the ways eir sexuality is perceived in society at large.

In short, they tell you an awful lot about the most intimate facets of the person's character. In this way, they're just like the What You Are Like labels. If someone chooses to identify as genderqueer, ey's making clear the angle from which ey approaches interactions with other people, the way in which ey responds to the pressures and perceptions of society at large. If someone identifies (positively) as cisgender, ey's sending a message to other people that ey recognises the diversity of human experience and identity, and is willing to engage with them on a deeper level than would, say, Simon Hoggart.

It's funny that these issues of (largely) gender and sexuality are, essentially, the last great taboos* - in that even in These Enlightened Times TM, the vocabulary to describe them is mushrooming year on year, as people finally find the courage to try and express who they are. And, no, they shouldn't need to, it should be obvious from "what they're like". But it's not. If people don't stand up and wave their labels around, their true personalities will be ignored, drowned out by the default white noise of Everyone Is A Monogamous Heterosexual Man/Woman Who Behaves Exactly Like This [In Bed].

Sure, it saves time and effort. You're more than welcome to go with it. But personally, I prefer my interactions with other human beings to be more intense, complex, and rewarding - cos, y'know, people are fascinating!

And that's said as a true a-romantic. :)

*Okay maybe they're not I don't know I hope I haven't horribly offended someone with my sweeping ignorance please don't flame me :S

Neuro-atypical Prophet





Image-editing competence provided by EHM :)

 Yes, that's supposed to be me.

Yes, I'm just as arrogant and po-faced as Morpheus.

The social model of social disability

Or: Neurotypiconormativity.

If you've seen my previous posts on the subject of Asperger's Syndrome (and autism spectrum conditions more generally), you'll know I'm exceedingly sceptical of the "science" behind it. You'll also know I'm fond of impressionistic ranting. :) Here, I'm attempting to set out my case in a slightly (but only slightly) less ranty and slightly more objective fashion.

[Mild] Asperger's could be described as a social disability: it hinders effective communication and socialising between those who have Asperger's and those who are neurotypical. And, indeed, that is the main way in which it's "disabling". When Science tries to quantify such conditions, it's taking the side of the medical model of disability - the model which says "Something is wrong with you and needs to be fixed".

I think that Asperger's (like many other "neurological conditions" and mental illnesses) desperately needs to be viewed using the social model of disability - the model which points out that if society happened to be organised differently, your disability wouldn't be a problem - i.e., functionally, you wouldn't be "disabled" (here's a primer on the pros and cons of both models, for those who would like more eloquence). Because, in my opinion, the medical/scientific model not only causes needless distress to the people it identifies as "disabled", but it also, well, just doesn't really make much sense.

Let me explain...

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- The central tenet of an Asperger's diagnosis is this: "your brain is Wired Differently [from those of neurotypical people]".

- Therefore, even if you have improved in leaps and bounds since childhood to the extent that you have learnt (albeit with difficulty) most "normal" social skills, you still have Asperger's - you never grow out of it, and if you exhibited it in your childhood then you will always still have it, even if it no longer impedes your daily or social functioning.

(- Side note: Asperger's does not solely affect your social functioning, but in dealings with neurotypical people it's the aspect that's likely to cause most distress; all the rest is just internal quirks. After all, I lived quite happily for 24 years without realising that I have "impaired (social) imagination", i.e. although I can be quite creative and I write a lot, I can only really invent variations on themes I've already encountered, rather than pulling plots out of thin air.)

- My argument is this: Humans do not come in one-size-only. We all differ from the "template" (and I use the word in a loose sense) in various ways: different height, different hair colour, different nose shape, different IQ, different motor skills. I believe the label "neurotypical" means about as much as the label "brunette" - brown may be the most common human hair colour[1], but it comes in many subtle shades, and it isn't inherently "better" or "more normal" (the latter implying the former) than, oh I don't know, ginger. :)

[1] It isn't. Black is. At least, according to a Wikipedia article with no concrete references (apparently the Wikipedian has a vague memory that it was in National Geographic once). Sadly there is no cute word for "black-haired", so poetic license reigns.

- Furthermore, there are many things problematic about the diagnostic criteria for Asperger's. Each one of the Asperger's traits is also found to some extent among the neurotypical population - it's only when they occur in combination that they lead to the diagnosis of a "syndrome". I reckon that's only to be expected, when everybody's brain must vary infinitely in the way it's wired. We all know someone who's bad at reading people's moods, someone else who gets upset when eir routine is disturbed, someone else who has a remarkable memory for car numberplates, someone else who has a favourite subject about which ey will not shut up... so it's actually quite common for someone who would not achieve a professional diagnosis of Asperger's (i.e., someone who'd be labelled "neurotypical") to score within the autistic-spectrum range on Baron-Cohen's classic test (which is why it's not a reliable tool for self-diagnosis).

- However, the way "Asperger's Syndrome" (and other autism-type conditions) is presented is as a binary distinction. There are only two kinds of brain: "neurotypical", or "on-the-autistic-spectrum". Asperger's is at the high end of the spectrum, near "neurotypical". Except "neurotypical" isn't on the spectrum, because it's on the other side of the binary. Um, the binary between one thing, and another thing that's a spectrum. Yeah. Right. Isn't it likely that "neurotypical" is also a spectrum, going from "outgoing and bubbly" to "shy and geeky" to the point where the "shy and geeky neurotypical" would score highly enough on the AQ test to self-diagnose (incorrectly) as neuro-atypical? Isn't it likely that the spectra blend in the middle to make one big spectrum of just people?

- Well, no, it can't be, because of all that concrete neurological evidence about neurotypical brains and neuro-atypical brains, and the obvious ways in which they're different. Right?

"Unlike many other brain disorders..., autism does not have a clear unifying mechanism at either the molecular, cellular, or systems level." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism#Mechanism)

Right. Okay. So there's actually nothing that researchers can point to in the way of brain structure or brain functioning that says "Yep, that's an autistic-spectrum brain, and that's a neurotypical brain, and never the twain shall meet". This is why my assessment involved not one speck of empirical measurement of brain activity (e.g. MRI scanning), and relied solely on a neurotypical (we presume) clinician chatting with me and interpreting my responses. There's actually nothing that gets around the fact that all through your life your brain is changing, developing and creating new neural pathways with the result that perhaps one day, with lots of hard work reinforcing those brain connections that govern social interaction, the Asperger's child will grow into a neurotypical adult.

And yet they tell me, they told me to my face, that I've "clearly spent a lot of effort learning to function socially", to the extent that I'm "masking who [I] really am inside". In other words, I haven't learnt anything - I'm still a socially hopeless Asperger's case, and any appearance of being friendly, sociable or empathetic is just me blagging it.

Do not we all spend a lot of effort learning to function socially? Do not we all have to mask, to some extent, who we are inside? Do not we all regularly have to swallow down our impulses to be impolite or uninterested or self-obsessed or introverted, in order to make sure the social wheels stay oiled? Seriously. Neurotypical people may find it easier and more intuitive to learn social interaction than Asperger's people, but the way Asperger's is presented borders on implying that all neurotypicals are homogeneous saintly paradigms of effortless social perfection...

- So in essence, this is how Asperger's was discovered:

• Ooh, that kid's a bit odd. So's that kid. That kid too, although at least he talks to people and doesn't just sit in the corner rocking all the time. In fact, he talks a hell of a lot, in a really boring way. How odd he is. He probably has a Syndrome.
• Lots of people have this Syndrome! It causes them not to be able to interact properly with normal people like us.
• This Syndrome must be caused by something in the brain! Let us hypothesise that Normal brains are inherently different from Syndromey brains, and look for what the difference is.
• We haven't found anything in the actual brains yet, but it must be there. And if it's there, that means it'll never go away. What a shame. I'm so glad I'm normal.

(Fun game: substitute in the words 'male' and 'female' for 'normal' and 'syndromey', for hours of weakly-argued, poorly-thought-out satire on social constructs of gender!)

Whereas this is how it's presented:

• We know for a fact that there is something weird about your brain. We say this with a conviction that implies that we've measured it empirically. The weirdness will never go away, and any attempt you make to interact properly with normal people will always underlyingly be inauthentic.

I could live with that diagnosis (although it would be fairly upsetting, see previous post) if it weren't for the fact that it's so obviously based on a medical model of disability (i.e. "if you are not normal, there's something wrong with you that needs fixing, um, except we don't know how to fix it, whoops") rather than a social model (i.e. "the difficulties encountered by people who are 'not normal' are a product of the way our society constructs 'normality', not of an inherent inferiority").

Show me something that's concretely, unchangeably unusual about the wiring of my brain, and I will accept your diagnosis without fuss. Show me that I don't fit into society right and claim it's neurological, and I'll show you something that's wrong with society.