i know next to nothing about queer theory, but i did exist online during (what felt like) huge exclusionary periods (ace discourse, bi/pan discourse, and transmedicalism were the big ones i remember)
i wonder if the first drive for sexuality being something unchangeable and intrinsic to you had something to do with those things, that queerness was fixed and definable, which meant that there were strict lines to be drawn about who was and wasn't gay/lesbian/bi which was only made worse by trans and nonbinary people who didn't exactly fit the previous molds
ill be doubly honest and say i only interacted w/ the community online at the time bc living in a homophobic country doesnt give you a lot of opportunities to meet up in person which means my view of the whole thing is skewed. im not sure if this makes any sense
What I’m about to say isn’t a diagnosis of the causes behind those discourses (partly because i don’t think there is a single reason animating those arguments), but like I guess in general a very baseline authority people fall back on is biology. Dominant reactionary discourses describe being gay trans etc as a lifestyle choice, as an active decision to participate in sexual and gendered degeneracy, and so a very appealing counter-claim to make is to point to biology - we are born this way, we can’t help who we are just as cishet people cannot help who they are, so you should accept us because we can’t change our identity. That rhetorical strategy requires/assumes a stable sexual and gendered ontology, a primary authority of the body that can’t be altered. While I believe this argument is fundamentally flawed, I think this is a straightforwardly easy argument to make re: sexual orientation. With trans and non-binary people this is more difficult because the foundational claim to our existence is that gender is mutable, is alterable, is subject to change (and also “I’ve felt this way since I was a child” is a pathological model of gender dysphoria that is enforced through medical and psychiatric institutions, not a reflection of lived reality for many, many trans and non-binary people). That doesn’t necessarily mean being transgender is a “choice” (although if someone said they woke up one day and chose to be transgender then that is a perfectly authentic justification), especially because “choice” in these discussions is often framed as individualised, private, detached from the social world - we are all just free agents making rational autonomous decisions in a field of equally rational choices, etc. which I think is a very impoverished way to understand choice and agency. Gender is an institution, it is a set of behaviours and performances that we choose to engage in in many different ways, and my use of the word ‘choice’ there does not imply these choices are free from coercion, violence, or harm. I chose to transition, I chose to engage in performances and behaviours that signal to the social world that I am a man - where that desire to make those choices arises from is another matter, and honestly not one I’m super interested in figuring out. Like if I discovered the ‘origin’ of my transness it wouldn’t make any difference to me. Similarly, how I choose to signal masculinity is very obviously bound up in dominant gendered assumptions. Trans people get accused of upholding gendered norms a lot, but that’s only because we aren’t taken seriously unless we do so! It is a survival mechanism that allows us to better navigate incredible amounts of violence and social exclusion, and arguing that our desire to do gender with our bodies comes from some grade-school assumption that dress = woman and pants = man or whatever is pure projection on the part of cis people. cis men think if they drink pink wine they’ll become gay - trans people are not the ones enforcing these norms here.
Getting a bit far afield here, so to loop back around - I think a stable state of sexual and gendered subjectivity or “being” is very appealing to a lot of people because it’s a way to dismiss reactionary fears and to justify to yourself that your oppression is entirely out of your control (which is true obviously!). Again I think these arguments are flawed because they buy into cisgendered and heteronormative ideas about gender and sexuality, that it is a biological burden imposed on us, that deviance is not a choice, that gender is done to us as opposed to being gendered agents, that we are similarly trapped in a sexual prison and should be accepted on those grounds, etc, but they have massive rhetorical power.
As I’ve said before I’m a pretty staunch believer in Butler’s assertion that it is social all the way down, that gender is not discoverable in the body but rather the body is the medium through which gender is done in the world. Cis people choose to do gender just as much as trans people do! The only difference is that institutional architecture is set up to facilitate and make invisible (in very misogynistic and racist ways) those gendered practices. I think the stronger counter argument to make is that cis- and het-normativities are deeply violent and miserable status quos that need to be dismantled and discarded, that true choice can only emerge vis a vis gender and sexuality once those institutions are abolished, and that choice is actually a desirable end-goal - I want people to be able to participate in gender and sexuality as free agents, as non-coercive practices that are sites of great joy and wonder and pleasure. And this world is only possible if we accept that there is no gendered or sexual ontology, that it is all smoke and mirrors, that this current system’s primary function is to reproduce the nuclear family, to maintain the hereditary nature of class and wealth and race, to provide a standardised system of labour division, to maintain a distinction between the public and private labour realms, and so on.
So again like, is this what animates discourses about who gets to be counted as lgbtq/queer/whichever label you want to use? I don’t know. Probably some of it has to do with that. Queerness is in party a pathological category that is used to describe a failure to meaningfully reproduce cishet norms and practices, it is a set of relationships you have to legal and political and medical and administrative institutions (which is especially true for trans/non binary people). I like this definition because built into it is the possibility of change - I do not want trans people to be assimilated into cishet society, I want society to become transgender, thereby making transgender an irrelevant medical and legal category of person. Much like communism aims to abolish class by universalising the proletariat, I want to abolish gender by universalising the legal and political and medical mechanisms of transition. Only then will cisgenderism be abolished.
One thing I have been thinking a lot about is something a friend said to me, which is that human rights to do not begin with a definition of human - in the same way, I think trans rights do not require a definition of transgenderism. Just universalise and de-pathologise the mechanisms through which transition is expressed. Make it easy to change your name, remove all barriers to hormones and surgery, make everyone economically secure enough that they can change their wardrobe however they please, desegregate all gendered spaces, de-gender clothing, remove gender markers from all documents, and so on and so on. Doing so would make both cisgender and transgender an irrelevant legal and political category and, again, allow choice to emerge as a meaningful mechanism of gender expression.
This isn’t a comprehensive policy platform, there are many things I’m sure I haven’t thought through and a large portion of this discussion has to contend with the colonial and white supremacist nature of the western binary gender (bringing us into discussions of decolonial efforts, socialist efforts, and so on), but this is already getting long and I feel like I’m rambling. But like fundamentally I believe in a radical political imaginary that argues that all of this is subject to change and therefore any arguments about an essential gendered or sexual being is, at the end of the day, a reactionary description of gender and sexuality
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sorry to be nosy, but do u have any insights as someone who went through a divorce at a young age?
don't be sorry - what a fascinating question! it's STORYTIME. i don't know if this is so much my 'insights' as it is ruminations, but i digress.
i guess my number one tip would be: don't marry a bigot,,,
i'm kidding. mostly.
i'm very transparent about why i got divorced (if you know me in real life, you know how true this is), but that's what it boiled down to. i got married VERY young, 95% due to deeply religious family on both sides, 5% because i truly believed i had found the person i was going to be with forever. if you're going to be together forever, why not just bite the bullet and get married young, right?
i came out to my ex-husband as bisexual super early on in our relationship (i think 2 months into dating) because i obviously needed him to a) know i was queer and b) be cool about it, and he was. if i recall, he said, "oh. ok, good for you."
(later, he told me that that moment was almost a dealbreaker for him. i NEVER would have known, based on how he reacted in the moment.)
as a married couple, we were awesome roommates and very good friends and overall a wonderful team. then i started properly deconstructing christianity around the same time i started thinking about gender, and covid hit immediately after. i didn't come out to anyone as nonbinary until march 2021, and when i did, he was the first person i talked to. he was... significantly less cool about it than he was with bisexuality.
here's the thing. he LOVED having a wife. in hindsight, it's really easy to see that i could have been anyone, and he was really ready to settle down. i have to give myself some credit, because i think i'm excellent, but i do think that to some extent i was in the right place at the right time and checked off a lot of his boxes. if that sounds a little cold to you -- a SHOCKING amount of cishet men do this. it's weird.
anyway, i was His Wife™, and while i was by no means a traditional christian wife, i was still a very she/her slay queen girly.
then i started committing sins. (got some tattoos. started writing about The Gays. started speaking out against the church. Cut My Hair Short [cue gasps]. started dressing more androgynously.)
he couldn't get his head around using gender neutral language for me. to his students (he was in education at the time) i was His Wife. to his family, i was His Wife, even after i came out to them too. classic wifeguy stuff.
my current partner (who is SO wonderful) was in the process of becoming that best friend you have really confusing gay feelings about, and had to deal with me talking about this and how i was just going to have to settle for being with this guy who wouldn't respect my gender, even when that disrespect started actually making my skin crawl when he'd get close. because hey, marriage is for life. it didn't even occur to me that we might get divorced until about 4 days before The Conversation. i was genuinely ready to stick it out with this guy who refused to really See me, because i thought that was what i had to do.
then came The Conversation. i'd been invited to be a bridesmaid in his sister's wedding and had agreed to wear a dress, because hey, it's her wedding. if she wants bridesmaids in dresses, sure. (i was still very much reeling from my own wedding, but that's another story i'll tell if anyone's curious.)
anyway. dresses. i go to a fitting. i stand there numbly while wearing the most godawful dress i'd ever seen, feeling like Garbage. i go home. i step in the door, i burst into tears. sobbing, on the couch, i tell him that something's not right. i can't wear a dress to this wedding.
i think that was when he realized i wasn't going to grow out of being nonbinary. we had a really long, brutal conversation, mostly about how i was probably going to want top surgery one day, that ultimately resulted in him ending our marriage.
"i can't make you be somebody you're not," he told me. "but you can't make me attracted to you."
that's right, folks! the thing that ended my marriage was my tits.
we'd sat through and endured many conversations in which i shared my feelings about the church, about christianity, about the patriarchy, about gender as a whole, but in the end, the thing he could not get his head around was a version of me that didn't have a chest.
i won't lie, that shit stung. the constant rejection of my gender expression had sort of eroded any romantic love i felt for him at that point, but he'd been my closest confidant for so long by that point that i really had to work through some shit about worthiness in the weeks after. it was just surreal to me that me With tits was good and worth being married to, but a hypothetical version of me with a flat chest was so repulsive that he'd rather end a marriage than endure it.
and like, i get being a boob guy (trust me), but damn.
p.s. some really interesting notes: he waited to have this conversation with me until literally the week after i received the first 5-figure portion of my book deal advance, which meant when we were settling affairs, it counted as "marital income" and he got half, and then he hired lawyers behind my back after we said we wouldn't do that.
in hindsight? maybe it was never about the tits at all. ;)
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