on labels, identity, and offense

Note: This is sort of a post-about-a-post, but it's also just a post about me and thinky gender identity things that happens to use another post as the springboard. After the first paragraph I use the phrase "OP" instead of the original poster's name: in part to emphasize that I'm trying to be more universal than specific, and in part because I'm lazy with typing. If you're new here, I'm a transguy who's mostly socially transitioned, has just started on hormones, and plans to get a legal name change as soon as he saves enough money.

I've gotten a lot of cool links from elke-tanzer's post requesting women bloggers, vloggers, and twitterers. I also seem to be at odds with some people who found the post and were angered by her initial wording of the gender-specific request. There's a full explanation and heavily edited wording there along with all the original comments, if you care to look at it.

The thing is, when I saw the (now edited) sentence:

Most of my Dreamwidth Circle of people are women, and while I do value the men and transpeople, and the folks who don't identify with any gender at all who are part of my Circle, I really do value the fact that most of the voices I read here on DW are women.

I felt like "transpeople" meant me, and this was a good thing. (I don't know if she was actually thinking about me at all, but really that's immaterial.) I'm still at that stage -- or maybe I'll always be there -- where I see a word that begins with trans* and I'm pinged into full attention the way most people are with the word "sex".

Or cock, or cunt, or boobs, or arsehole, or take your pick.

That is, I feel myself getting viscerally prepared to be either horrified or thrilled: horrified that I-as-trans* am being ignored, or dehumanized, or dismissed, or laughed at, or given violence; thrilled that I-as-trans* am being recognized, or welcomed, or noticed, or validated, or remembered. It so happens that I read that sentence and got a thrill: I felt welcomed, remembered, noticed.

So why is that? Let's deconstruct.

1. I'm new to calling myself transgendered, my transition is still fresh and active, and it's really nice to see a category into which I know I fit.
2. Maybe it's my brand of Geek self-identity, but being looked at askance actually feels like a good thing sometimes.
3. I am on the male side of Trans Ave, so it wasn't exclusionary to be put in a clause with "men" -- actually excluding the 'me' kind of people from a call for Women's voices is validating to my identity, because I don't belong there.
4. I still kind of identify as genderqueer or third gendered -- although it's not my primary identity now that I'm actively becoming a man in the eyes of the world, it's an identity that speaks to me philosophically and emotionally, so placing the Me gender separate from the Woman and Man genders is something I can get behind.
5. I know the OP as a trans ally who's passionate about justice and equality and learning new ways of implementing same. It's REALLY HELPFUL to know who it is that's speaking. In fact, because of my understanding of her intention, I read the sentence pretty much how she corrected it later: ...(cis and trans)women... (cis and trans)men and (those that identify first as)transpeople. Because if you put yourself in the "woman" part of that sentence, here is one person who's not going to deny you entry. Or so is my impression.

One of the fundamental points of dispute here is related to #4: that a phrase like "women, men, and transpeople" can be nonconsensual third-gendering language. Some transpeople fight to their last breath (at times literally) to be recognized as their newer gender For Real and are hindered by (well- or ill-meaning) people along the way who want to ungender them and place them in some woobly in-between space without their consent. Then there are also those people who fight to their last breath to BE that third- or other- or non-gender, and they may ID as many different things on the gender map, but often somewhere in the trans* family of words. And then there are the genderfuckers who think it's fun to use the word trannie, (and I may or may not be one of them, but that's a post for another time.) The point being, it's not right to ungender someone without their consent, but neither is it right to force-gender someone without their consent. How do we avoid doing one or the other when "transgender" is such a wide umbrella with such seemingly opposing identities under it? I don't want to kick the genderqueers out into the rain, and I don't want the cis-queers thinking they know how our genders work, and I don't want to stop the conversation about how we want the world to think about gender. And how to we balance un-gendering and forced-gendering with the initial point of female-oppressing?

No really, that wasn't sarcasm. I'd love to get some answers to that.

So what's the upshot of all this? If I take away the five points I made above, I begin to come to an understanding of why the original wording of the post was (unintentionally) hurtful to some people. I can (sort of, intellectually) appreciate why it became necessary to change the words that recalled negative experiences for my brothers and sisters. I respect the OP for her dedication to apologize, change, and learn. It also makes me sad, because this argument has taken away a set of words that was meaningful to me because they spoke to my way of being trans*; a set of words that it's possible my presence in her reading circle had encouraged in the past. Yes, I'm aware that I have other privileges that probably affect how I see things like this and how little offense I take at them. Not the least of which is that I'm pretty emotionally detached (just ask my exes), but also that I'm white, born in the US, from a liberal family with supportive friends, educated, employed, and as I said above: on the ftm side of Trans Ave. But if there's anything I CAN get passionate about, its getting inside both sides of a trans argument, so I wanted to say something.

Now to contemplate submitting something to that Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation anthology. I actually do hope there's at least one good "Why I Hate The Word Trannie" and one "Why I Love The Word Trannie" piece. Because that'd be awesome.

(x-posted to various journaling services)