There was a thread I saw recently, that really struck me as a growing trend I have been seeing online. It has been bothering me and I felt the need to write my thoughts about it. The post in question is about a trans woman joking about being in denial and having tea parties because they are awesome.
Whenever cis people see trans people discussing signs of their gender identity online, they immediately feel the need to jump in and discount the signs in a number of ways. Whether it’s because they did the same things but are still cis or that trans people shouldn’t “police” gender roles, or that kids should be allowed to do what they want without assigning identities to them. Many of them seem like they feel their own cis gender identity is being attacked.
In the beginning of my gender journey™, I clung to signs from my past as a way to justify to society and myself that I am in fact trans and valid, because the truth is, I was extremely insecure about my identity. I grew up during a time that said trans people don’t exist, and the ones that do are to be shunned, and there was only a very narrow way to be trans.
Despite it being completely and utterly wrong, the phrase, FEELINGS AREN’T FACTS are a part of the cultural zeitgeist, and it infects the way people think, including myself. So much of being trans is based on feeling and when you’ve been shoving feelings down and ignoring them your entire life, it can be impossible to hear them. So, for people in similar situations, signs are all they have and they were all I had for a time.
After becoming secure in my gender identity, I truly don’t believe you need signs to be trans. The official diagnosis doesn’t even include signs among its criteria. I actually think it does a pretty good job aside from the clinically significant distress/impairment part. I would be hard-pressed to be convinced that someone isn’t trans if they meet the criteria, but aren’t distressed/impaired by it.
However, I do not think a cis boy enjoying a tea party because it’s awesome and a trans girl enjoying a tea party because it is affirming are two competing ideas and can easily coexist in the same space. You don’t need to have enjoyed tea parties to be trans, but if it was a way for you to feel gender affirmation then it is absolutely a sign. The same goes for any other common trope or sign that trans people use.
This could easily be transphobes being disingenuous and trolling, as they are relentless online, but I still wanted to express my feelings on the matter. My wish is for online spaces to become more empathetic to each other's experiences (fat chance I know) and to stop competing on what makes someone's gender identity in threads like these. There is room for everyone's experience of tea parties and they are all just as valid.
Doc Impossible made a wonderfully written article that is more coherent than I will ever be about signs and gender identity last year that I highly recommend for more reading on the topic.
The way I see it, many cis people that don't understand trans folk (even if they're supportive) and think that being trans is about femininity or masculinity. That's it. So the supportive ones, they're happy to see people challenging those norms, often, precisely because they believe that masculinity and femininity need to be deconstructed. And the non supportive ones, they see trans people "getting it wrong" by focusing on gender (which they don't think is real) instead of breaking down the social norms (despite many of them not wanting those norms broken down).
And then you have trans folk maybe talking about when they were still in self denial or maybe celebrating an aspect of life that society previously denied them, and to the phobic folk, it looks exactly like what they want to believe, which is that trans identity is simply about masculinity and femininity.
Of course, gender diverse identities are far more complex than simply our relationships with masculinity and femininity, but the reality of that experience is something that very few cis people will ever understand, which makes for an uphill battle in trying to get it across to them, and makes for an easy opportunity for the phobes to drive a wedge in.
It's why we won't ever argue cis folk out of transphobia by appealing to their reason and by trying to explain our experiences. We avoid transphobia by appealing to empathy and by normalising our existence
YES, thank you Ada. I completely agree and will be folding your ideas into my understanding. I think you really hit at what was bothering me with how gender identities aren't only about our relationships with masculinity/femininity and it's so much more than that.