From The Tumblr pt. II: Butch->FTM->WTF?

Another question from the Tumblr, this time touching on the perennial Butch/FTM border wars, and on the many meanings of little girls in cargo shorts.

Anonymous asked: so i'm totally pro-trans, but as a butch dyke, it rubs me the wrong way to see people using their non stereotypical gender conforming behavior as proof that they must actually be a boy or girl as the case may be. i played with trucks as a kid. i hate wearing dresses. but that doesn't mean i secretly want to be a man. it means i'm a butch. i have had so many people tell me that i'm not really butch, i must be trans, but i like my female body. i fear butches are disappearing or being pressured to transition to fit in. i feel like that takes credibility away from people who actually are trans. I guess my question is what do you think of this?

Now, a good, meaty question, and good meaty issues! Forgive me in advance for not addressing everything brought up by this inquiry.

First, I’ll clarify my below post: I didn’t mean to come off as “I played with such and such and therefore I am such and such.” I meant the recitation of my childhood activities more to challenge that binary notion, or even the notion that the gender(s) we exhibit as children will predict or determine how we will identify as adults. By and large, my girlhood was just that—a girlhood—but the nostalgia I have for my three story Victorian dollhouse doesn’t make my manhood any less valid. I was trying to describe, with these mixed signifiers of Barbies and legos, that I existed in a kind of ungendered/multigendered ether as a kid, and didn’t put much thought into my girlness or boyness until later.

I am with you on the notion that gendered behaviors or preferences do not have the same implication for every person who performs them (ie. hating wearing dresses does not equal being a boy, or even a boi.) As an effeminate man (my giant silver rings are clicking against each other on my red-nailed fingers as I type this) I know this all too well. I like to wear dresses sometimes, and lipstick, and stilettos, but this does not make me a woman (even if I was raised as one) and it doesn’t mean that I want to be a woman: it means that I simply am a man who does these things. I think we’re at the point in pop gender theory where people agree that sexuality and gender are separate things, but the differentiation between gender (still too often essentialized to man/woman) and gender expression (femme/butch/androdyke/genderfuck/queen/etc/etc) is still too hard for some people to parse.

On the issue of butches and transmen specifically: I’m uneasy about the idea of “people who are actually trans.” I think deciding who is really trans and who is really butch or genderqueer (engaging in “ftm/butch border wars,” if I’m recalling my Judith Halberstam right) is as specious as deciding who is “actually a man” and who is “actually a woman.” Everyone’s reasons for transitioning, or for being a confirmed butch, or for living a conventional heterosexual life, for that matter, are different, and none of us wholly match the platonic social ideal of our gender. I also like to think there is room for fluidity—that a butch can take hormones and still be a butch, if one so chooses.

I don’t think it’s a zero sum game, and I’m not sure that the sudden visibility of transmen means a decrease in butches. I think we can support each other’s struggles (and celebrate each other’s lives and accomplishments) without diminishing our own or fearing the others. I personally have the greatest respect for butches, for the strength it takes to live in our culture as a masculine-appearing female-bodied person, and for what it takes to stake your territory in what we are told is an ambiguous space. So kudos to you, anonymous butch dyke, and keep askin’ questions!

From the Tumblr: "Did you always know?"

So, I've started a tumblr account called Render Me Boobless, which is a more focused chest-surgery donation push and general depository for pithy man-boob silliness, as well as a way to thank donors with amusing youtube videos. There's a question/answer function on it I've dubbed "Ask The Transfag," and recently I got a bite. The anonymous asker asked, simply, "Did you always know?" Here's my answer:

Kind of a personal question, but let's just imagine for a moment that you plan to donate plenty of money to the surgery fund to the right of this post, and that I'm willing to shill my unusual psychological development for a few dozen dollars you're my therapist. This is always a question (the question?), and it has variable answers. I was a pretty androgynous child in a lot of ways--yes, I was a Girl Scout and dressed as a fairy princess for Halloween (exactly), but I also loved Legos and action figures and usually preferred shorts to skirts (though I had a pretty serious spandex obsession.) While I definitely--and outwardly--fell into the spectrum of how young girls are expected to behave and appear, I don't think I had the same concept of myself as a girl that other girls had. In playground games of Girls Chase Boys I would generally run alongside the boys cheering them on in getting away from the girls (#storyofmylife.) But I didn't realize in a meaningful way that gender variance existed or was something with a name until later, and didn't start identifying with it until I was 10 or 11, and even then in a fairly rudimentary way. I didn't consider transition or living as male as something that interested me until high school, and I didn't give it serious logistical thought until maybe three or four years ago. So there's really not just the question of "did I always know," but of what it was that I knew, and when.

But perhaps more importantly, how relevant is the answer to this question? I hear the question of how long I've "known" with pretty great frequency, more or less at a dead tie with surgery questions. I think it stems from a fear--and even just a benign, fascinated-unsettled fear--that perhaps anyone can transition, that someone can look entirely normally-gendered one day and then POOF (so to speak), one can wake up a trans person, Orlando-style. Knowing when trans people realize that they are different (and, ideally hearing the "ever since I was a small child" answer) calms this fear. It keeps trans experience neatly separate, and keeps it from infecting the stable and conventional gender identities of others.

Did you always know you weren't trans?