Wednesday, August 22, 2007

GQ

I keep having anxiety dreams where I'm all exhausted and need to save the world for other people all the time. Know what this means? It means I'm too invested in saving the world. I need to stop paying attention to other people pretty bad and give myself room to sit and to be and to get in touch with myself, in the hippiest, woo-est way possible. Of course it's all related to getting back from Camp Trans a week ago and having to figure out which outside-Camp defenses to put back up and which ones to try and get rid of. 'Scomplicated.

Anyway and relatedly, I'm taking a week off from the internet. Fuck the internet anyway, but when I can't sleep and I'm writing mopey songs about it, not reading things about everybody else's shit everywhere is maybe a good solution. Then I can just deal with my own shit!

Hey speaking of my own shit for a second, can I talk about genderqueer identities for a second? Lots of folks at Camp are super invested in their genderqueer identities, which is great and I don't want to say anything bad about how anybody identifies- I know lots of folks outside of Camp for whom that's a really important thing. For me though? I don't identify that way at all. I mean, I fuck around with gender a lot, right? It's kind of hard for somebody who's trans and also obnoxious not to. It's just- I don't know, I can't think of anything I'm interested in doing that would complicate my identity as a woman. Does that make sense? I get that, for lots of folks, gender binaries don't exist, or are way more complicated than two poles, and lost of other things.

Like, I'm nervous about genderqueer identities shutting down the possibilities of a female identity. For some folks, clearly, "female" is limiting. But for me, I learned to be female from women who IDed as women and who would tell people to suck their cocks, who'd wear spikes and shave bits of their heads, who'd wear ties with skirts- who figured out how to pee standing up. And this was way before I ever heard about IDing as genderqueer. Y'know? That's all pretty surface stuff as examples of a theoretical genderqueer gender, but that's kind of my point: I can't think of anything that feels restrictive, for me, about "female." Maybe it's residual male privilege? Maybe it's the fact that a punk identity precedes a girl one for me, and so I already got my liberation there?

Also there's the fact that I lose my shit when I get pronouned wrong.

Like I said, I don't want to say anybody's wrong about the way they identify, just that, with the way hierarchies of radicalism are maintained (which is its own stupid, frustrated blog post), I felt super shy coming out as NOT genderqueer. Even though, as Alex pointed out to me, in a queer culture (and culture are large) where masculinity is fetishized, "girl" is kind of a revolutionary identity to have.

Anyway, whatever. I'm done talking about it. I wrote "FEEL INGS" across my knuckles at Camp, and then "NO" right about the EE in FEEl to show that I was done with feelings. I'm still done with feelings and now I'm going to go find a marker and write that on my knuckles again and then eat a bunch of vegetables. In a tortilla.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

i sorta moved through genderqueer for a bit and used it as a space to sort my head out, but now..... i don't know. i don't actually get it, but i feel bad about not getting it, because i kinda wonder if that makes me a bad genderqueer ally, you know? then again, i also kinda like the way that gender can still sorta fry my big transitioned transsexual head. like, i know all there is to know about gender because i've switched? ha. think again! it's actually quite comforting.

fuck the internet. i'm going to post photos in my blogs for the immediate future, because words suck.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

oops. um. not sure how i deleted that post. i think i was looking for an edit option? anyway. i said: i used to let people call me genderqueer when i still IDed as butch because it was easier then letting friends see that it upset me. even alex asked me once if i was "genderqueer a little bit" and i said yes because thats what everyone was and i wanted to be cool, even though i felt really weird agreeing. but really why i am commenting is because i want to say that you rule and are the flea's knees. i kinda wish we could be better friends but i feel like life has other plans for me right now. but yeah. you are the awesome. and yeah. kick ass. keep on rocking the world. :)

Anonymous said...

It's weird, because I feel like genderqueer is a mostly unknown concept here and while it's what I think works for me, I'm shy as fuck about discussing it, and also concerned that it'll seem like an undeserving distraction from trans stuff. So it's like the other way round? Or something.