Gender and Emotions, Part 2
 (part 1 is here. 3 and 4 coming Monday and Tueday-ish)
Mr. Kate to Maggie
I agree with you that our identities are really different, but not in any black and white way, in every way that we could mark our genders as different I think we could find a shared similar experience. Gender became emotional to me when I figured out how performative my gender was, learning that getting up and getting dressed was always going to be some kind of drag. How I present and what I wear affects my moods and emotions.
I don’t think that everyone is as emotionally connected to their gender. People get up everyday and they get dressed and yes, maybe they try on three outfits but I think there are different thought patterns behind it. I also think that some people go through phases when gender is highly emotional. As a member of the transmasculine community I hear folks who struggle with gender, clothing, and presentation, but I also often find that this is not a permanent state of being, that often there comes a point where this struggle becomes less important. But I feel like for everyone emotion centers around being read as the gender and persona we want to be read as. I know for you and me this is often a complicated situation. You commented that often your dyke/queer identity is questioned, personally I feel like I am either read as “butch” or I’m read as “femme” or I’m read as “non-trans” or “trans” and even if I’m simply read as genderqueer or queer, I guess it just never feels comfortable because it never tells a complete story, part of me always feels lost in the shuffle. I get a great deal of satisfaction from my gender, but for me it often takes a lot to make myself understandable and often it takes more emotional energy when I am not.
Often I find gender exhausting and I don’t even have to leave the house. Part of that exhaustion is made tangible in me in the act of removing undergarments. strapless bra, sports bar, binder, body shaper, even packing. There is some connection between the physical sensation of removing such a garment or object and feelings of tiredness and relief. Pulling off a binder is especially gratifying, mostly because it’s like trying to shuck and elastic skin.
There was a time when I fit neatly into the categories of femme and femme who liked butches. I don’t think that I ever really had my queerness questioned, but I also presented in a queer or campy way that was usually very readable. Also, I was read as queer even before I self identified as such. I am still very connected to a femme identity even though I had to distance myself from it for a while, which I did to come to some kind of terms with my transmasculine identity and fight feelings I had of not being “trans enough”. Personally I don’t understand the current backlash to butch-femme, probably because it was dynamic that helped me come out as queer and because it was a community that I was at least peripherally a part of. I know from experience that it is not as wide spread as folks often think it is and I think part of that comes from the way that the terms “butch” and “femme” operate as identifiers in the queer community, which is often in ways that are not really connected to folks who involve themselves in the dynamic. I would guess that folks feel that those terms as gender markers exist only within the dynamic.
As a member of the transmasculine community I don’t always look like a “transmasculine” person should look. I wear femme drag. (for me all clothing is drag unless its pajamas). I identify as trans, but not in a traditional sense of the word (if there is one), and I think most people would identify me as genderqueer. My identity is questioned all the time, but mostly this is because people don’t expect the complexity that I embody. They don’t expect a transmasculine identified individual to want to parade around the city in the daylight sporting a pencil skirt and lipstick, highlighting the “femininity” of my body. It is true that in that action I give up being read as masculine to an outside world, but I can never control how others understand me. Often a part of my identity is negated.
Here, in nyc, my friends and I started a organization, The TransMasculine Community Network and we identify a transmasculine person “any person who was assigned female at birth but feels this is an incomplete or incorrect description of their gender.” Yes, I feel like there is or could be space in my community or in many communities for me and my gender, but really the only way to create that space is for me to talk about my gender, to make noise, which untimely for me can be a very hard thing. I am lucky to have a current community that becomes more and more supportive.
My gender and presentation also orbits my fatness.
originally I asked you these questions, which I still find interesting:
What kind of adjectives would you use to describe your femme-ness?
How do you feel about the privileging of masculinity over femininity with-in queerness?
what kind of gender role models do you have?
how exactly do you want to be read out in the world?
but I was also thinking about these things:
The intersection of my fatness and my gender, which I feel is something that is completely bonded. My body allows for both hyper-femininity and ambiguity of a kind. It defiantly shapes how I present because it shapes what is available for me to clothe myself in. I also feel like there is something about my fatness that makes masculinity, not easy, but somehow even with a female body I still physically connected to masculinity.
I felt my gender questioned while dating a guy who was straight identified. Passing as part of a straight couple was completely un-nerving. I also, totally twisted my gender to fit into a relationship and that wasn’t a good idea on my part.
I a hard time talking face to face about the specifics of how I identify. so:
How does the physicality of your body play into your gender? Is it affected by being a dancer?
How does being seen with the person you are dating challenge or uphold your gender?
Do you find it easy to talk about your gender or is it something that you are compelled to do regardless of the uncomfortability or hardness of it?
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