on Ms.

Ms was a hard-won title. I remember the drama of my childhood, and the weight of having to constantly explain being unmarried on my Mom. The disrespect engendered by being addressed as Miss, and the distain when people explained that my Mother's maiden name could not be the same as her married name - the one I used - people treating me as if I didn't understand, and then behaving pityingly, and worse, disgusted when I finally got them to understand. So much bullshit. I am sure it still exists in this world that is centered around the cisgendered heteropatriarchal construction of the family, but I also want to somehow reconcile with the fact that no matter how hard won, or how well intentioned, I still hate being called Ms. I don't identify like that. Never have.  I didn't always mind being a Mrs when I was married, because it was about being part of a unit, and it was a construct - I was being "Spouse 2" and the femme half in a butch/femme partnership. It wasn't exactly right, but it was sometimes right, and I didn't mind being Miss when I was a kid, because it had a kind of princess power to it. I did always like stories of being pretty and rich  - who doesn't love a fairy tale?

But Ms to me is about standing in power as cisgendered and female, and I don't, and have never wanted to do that, not since I was part of christianity.  Once I came out as queer I started wanting to disrupt ideas of how gender works, and I guess that's when the gender queerness started. I had all kinds of radical ideas about how everyone should just adopt Mr, but mostly that's because it's my preference.  I just didn't know it at the time, and it didn't seem possible. I don't really want anyone to call me anything other than my name, but if they have to use a prefix, I prefer Mr, and gender neutral pronouns. 

Off to school in a hailstorm.

Three plus years after the last post I am sitting in the Pacific Northwest in the middle of my first year of a PhD after the election of Donald Trump and wondering what the hell is going on. I am also in the midst of some kind of lupus flare and my brain is not functioning properly.

I am occasionally overwhelmed by panic attacks and people keep going on as if the world is not about to end, has not ended, is not burning around us. Yes, the US Customs and Border Patrol has always had the power to search and examine everything you have with you at the border, but they're generally as relaxed as pistol-carrying uniformed automatons can be. Mostly they let me through with only occasional harassment for being visibly queer, or trans, or a bit too brown... I'm a bit old, crippled and fat to be too exciting. Usually, if anything, they just use a pat down as an excuse to publicly try to humiliate me for not fitting gender norms.

Mostly they are decent and do what they are supposed to do, which is scare people who deviate from the norm. The threat being that normative behaviour is always what is implicitly being policed. As am international student I have been warned to take down my social media profiles and my online accounts.  There is nothing seditious here. I am kinky. Nothing new. I am mad and traumatized. nothing new. I am a feminist. Nothing new. I am disabled. Nothing new. I am mixed race. Nothing new. I live with pain all the time. Nothing new.  This then is the manifesto.  I will bend but not break like a reed in the wind. I will reflect light like a pebble in the moonlight, so that together  with others we will make a luminous path. I will listen for birdsong, and for the voices of the trees and the grass. I will add my voice to the multitude crying out for justice. Whether from a classroom, a street, a bed, a car, or a park, our voices will rise and be heard.

In the meantime I will go and work on my PhD, and not give in to the terror that threatens to overwhelm me, that grabs me by the throat and steals my voice. I am here, and I have things to say.

The agony of gendered costumes

I'm going to a costume party tonight.  I'm supposed to be going as a 70s porn star, but I couldn't get the 'stache right, but I spent two hours in the bathroom creating perfect facial hair with fake fur and double sided tape and it looks great and instead of wanting to go to the party it makes me want to curl up in a ball and cry.

Admittedly it's shark week, (Yes I'm mitigating it with my own special brew of teas) and that doesn't help with emotional lability but being pre-transitional, gendered costumes all feel particularly shaming and/or fake. 

Wearing a mustache, binding and packing, however suggestive or comical, just highlights the gender dysphoria I already feel.  Wearing a girly outfit would be like stuffing myself back into a closet for a night.

Right now I just need things to change and I don't have much of a sense of humour about anything.  I want to go as a sofa cushion or something similarly sexless.

My heart hurts. I don't want to wear my sex or gender/identity as a costume. Maybe I'll get my sense of humour back when I stop feeling so shitty and scared about things.

November of 2010 I wrote: "It's the people who believe this stuff that scare me."

I am those people now, and it's awesome.  I meditate, have visions, read runes as part of my research praxis, and feel so much more at home in my skin that I ever could have imagined.

Part of that is working out, and part of it is being on a right path. It's terrifying, but right.

I have come so far, and these moments of clarity are overshadowed by moments of realization at the distances I have traveled.

I'm doing good.

There's awful things happening at my university though, and I have a meeting today to try to figure some of it out.  I'd like to figure out what's happening for other people, especially people I care about, but maybe I can at least figure out what's happening for me.

Gender is a complicated thing. There is a new book out called Sex/Gender:Biology in a Social World! It is a pretty decent primer and covers biology and socialization theory. It just came out this year.

Why is it relevant? Well, this is the second coming-out for me, and it has to come along with a major apology to my ex-spouse, which I am afraid has to be public as well,  not in the interests of self glorification, or self abatement, but simply in the interests of truth telling.

The catalyst in my coming-out and getting thrown out of the house was a book by Paul Monette, called Becoming A Man.  I was asked if I planned to become a man, and denied it, but admitted to being a lesbian.

I bent a lot around gender in the early years, but it was easier to catch the interest of the people I was interested in, butches and GQ folk, when I dressed as a girl/femme. It was reasonably easy to put on the clothes and makeup, I like sparkles, love makeup, and have no trouble with getting attention, or being told I am pretty, who would?

The trouble came later, when my unacknowledged gender-essentialism started surfacing. Butches do such-and-such, femmes do such-and-such. I had taken it out of biological determinism, and stopped applying it to particular genitals, but I had not stopped applying behaviours or modes of dress to roles, and trying to reinforce them in myself, and in my life...

Here's where the apology comes in. I had no right to have any expectations of my partner's behaviour, gender, role, or identity. That was appalling, and the fact that I had no idea I was doing it, and that it stemmed from my own terror of who I am , and my own confusion about my own identity, is neither here nor there. I am truly sorry.

Who you are, and how you present yourself to the world is entirely yours. I should have had nothing to say about that, and it should have had no bearing on my identity. My insecurity in my own identity was mine to solve not yours. Again, my shit, and I am sorry.

I needed clear delineations for myself within which I was safe, and yet, every time I ran into those I got mad. I know it was rough, and I hope you can believe that I didn't know why. I never meant to hurt you. Not in a million years would I have wanted to do damage to that sweet glacier-eyed butch who stole my heart. I thought I was supporting you, because it would have been supporting me to do those things, to let me "be the man" or what I thought a man was. I was sacrificing so much, and it hurt that you couldn't see it, because I didn't know what it was, and I couldn't articulate it.

I was giving you my chance to be a man, and I had no idea. Put in writing it is so insane a concept it hardly bears repeating. My dreams are mine, and I am sorry for putting them on you.

I was hurting and angry because of the bonds I put on myself, and I was jealous of your ability to move between worlds. When I could have been listening to and supporting you, I wasn't, I was blinded by my own unseen unhappiness and fear.

So we get to the crux of the matter, I am femme, and I am a man. In a female body. which is partly why it took a long time to figure it out as well.  No objection to makeup, girls clothes or pink.

I have transgender, transsexual, and gender queer friends.  I have watched and supported people through transition, so why the terror I feel over this?

One, I have a history in my family of being sent away, culminating in being kicked out for being queer. I am afraid to lose the people I love. Two, I ruined a marriage over this, more history of losing people. Three, I have a partner I adore, who is a lesbian, and we are both worried that this change might herald the end of our romantic interest for each other.

On pain and rage and school shootings.

This most recent school shooting has caused a lot of hate-filled writing about the young man who did shooting.  Sensationalist media are looking for any kind of oppressed minority to which they can attach his name, so that they can further demean and ridicule him, and incite further hate, it is sickening.

He had a mental illness. Yes, that seems clear, and that he wasn't being adequately helped is also clear.

He was autistic / had aspergers. So do many, many other people who do not perpetrate violent crime. Yes, people with autism spectrum disporders sometimes have sensory overload, but so does everyone else. Have you ever felt overwhelmed by your life, and yelled about it? That's about it.

He was a masochist. Well, this is based on anecdotal evidence that he burned himself with a lighter. So did I, so do many many other young people.  It is one of two things.  1.  Adolescent male rituals of strength and endurance, or self harm by those who don't know any other outlet for the pain and rage that they feel and do not want to take it out on others!  If someone noticed it, they needed to talk to him, and get him help, not identify him as a masochist. 

I'm writing a lot on liminality lately, those moments where we are held suspended in between firmly-rooted states of being.

Liminality is a vulnerable space, if only because in not-fitting social categories we challenge others' perceptions of their boundaries, and make them uncomfortable, but also, because in those moments we can be, or can feel unable to, move forward without the reassurances we are used to having.

An illness is a transition, from a state of wellness, through uncertainty, to something else, perhaps full health, and perhaps, a new (lesser or different) state of health. 

So too, a change in gender, or becoming aware of one's sexual orientation.

For me, being "mixed race" was a site of liminality in my life, and something which could not be avoided, although I found myself trying at various times to move more clearly into one or the other "category" simply to divest myself of the discomfort and difficulty of negotiating the world as someone outside of clearly defined categories.

Ramble

At the Spirit of the North Conference, which was incredible, i found myself in another conversation defending the right to have queer space without allies.  I feel like sometimes it matters that there be in my life people who exactly get what is going on, and that there is room for queer only, or gimp only groups, and that is also space for larger groups which include partners, friends, and allies.

I still find myself feeling excluded though, and I was wondering why, because it wasn't anything anyone else was doing, so I thought I should take a look at what it might be that I am doing and I think it is this:

I am so used to having to fight for the right to be accepted in spaces that I find myself on a kind of automatic pilot at times, caught between these two polar opposite modes of being.  One, a kind of silent defensiveness, waiting, and hoping desperately that I will be welcomed and acknowledged in that space for who I am and allowed to speak and participate; and the second a kind of defensiveness which states that this isn't a space where I would want to participate anyway.

It is partly about feeling like I do not belong or fit in, so insecurity, but it is partly about a history of systemic bias, of being rejected on the basis of things I could not change.  Being female, being fat, being queer, being too black, or too Estonian, being an atheist.  I have built a layer of defense against institutional rejection which is now hampering me.  It is interesting, because I do not like to think of myself as tender hearted.  I think I was initially, but inequities really cut me to the quick, and being unable to change them really became something to innure myself against. 

Tough Night...November is a shitty month.

I've been working on some necessary art.

http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2012/05/10/Bill-C38/

On space and acceptance.

Part one.
I went to a radical activist conference and realized that I stopped "putting the stick down".
I am still drawing lines around myself, holding myself at arm's length (or more) from everyone else, and refusing to be seen, terrified that no one will want to know me.

On love and objects

Like many poor people I have a habit of collecting things.  My grandparents were influential in my life, and they lived in wartime, and so, hoarded food and supplies against potential lack. I like to have extra of things. My childhood involved a fair bit f getting sent away, and so I developed the idea that love, too was something one could hoard and hang onto, in the form of gifts and momentos from loved ones.

Today I realized, for the first time, that I can count on both hands and keep going, the people who love me and would be there for me. It is remarkable. I do not think I need to hang onto all this stuff to try to keep that love and those people in mind.  If the relationships should dissolve, it is nothing a boxful of crap or a stuffed animal will solv anyhow.

It was an incredible lightening, and I am emptying my house.

Back

The runes say to keep journeying forward.

I am terrified.  K an I were talking the other day about a conversation she'd had with a good guy friend of hers the other day about the prevalence of violence in our society, and about how the threat of it is not absent from the lives of men, but that rather than the constant fear of rape, men live with the fear of getting caught in a physical fight that they cannot escape/win.

The conversation she had had was about being physically large and/or intimidating or imposing being something which prevents these fights from starting in the first place, and which, for some women, can be something which prevents sexual assaults, or at least offers a degree of seeming freedom from fear. 

Feeling like one can handle onesself in a fight or altercation offers a degree of protection.

As I enter into the beginning of this, it feels scary to be swapping one set of fears for another.  To go from being a strong woman, to a vulnerable guy.

I'm having a hrd time letting go of the girl. the "pretty face" - so long the only thing about my physicality that anyone was willing to validate - and I'm wondering if there's going to be anything left that anyone will want...

I'm used to being a pair of tits, a hole, a pretty face, a servant, a masochist. -used to trading on the body and the bits for the things I need - respect, honour, love, care, affection, a sense of place and belonging. 

I want a place to belong that has nothing to do with my flesh.

I am tired of waiting on others to tell me when I am finally good enough. Tired of hoping to pass the test enough times, to pass enough times, to finally look good enough,  or fit in enough, or somehow convince others, adn through them, myself that I deserve to be here - wherever that is at any given time.

I have passed as a girl a lot. For the family business, I spent some years as a "nice girl". Coming up north to do a teaching degree, I again passed as "teacher" - long hair, plain makeup, then got a more radical haircut for the Master's degree, but I cant do it.  I don't want to be a woman - never did - I could cope with being a girl, grrl was better, but woman was never something I aspired to or wanted to grow up into. 

 I would have told you that I was ok with being a girl, but that I want to grow up to be something else...

 

Do we ever know

For the first time in a long time, I am teetering on the edge of a cliff, and it is scary, but not for once in a bad way.  I'm not worried about my family disowning me. I think they won't. Not anymore. They did that once, and we've grown together, and are beyond doing it a second time, although it might come as a shock.  I've recently reconnected with my sister, and she might not be ok with this, that thought is scary, but scary-sad, not scary-terrifying.

I am used to standing on the edge of the abyss feeling like I want to throw myself in. I am used to struggling with feeling suicidal, a lot.  I didn't realize how much, until I suddenly don't feel suicidal anymore.

I remember figuring out I was queer, feeling terrified that someone might know - telling the first person that I 'might' be - the relief, the joy, the satisfaction at finally having words for all of me.  I never imagined feeling so tongue tied again.

I don't really have any always statements, I've been around a long time, and have used most of my non-gender-conforming stories to prove my queerness, or my dykeness, or something else already...
...I used to wear men's clothes as a teenager; spent most of my adolescence dreaming androgyny like most 80s punk/mod aspiring fatties (but the boobs got in the way); I did 80's preppie christian drag, which was pretty asexual, and then quickly went to a school with a uniform before having to form any more fashion sense; I had an epistolary romance with a girl in my grade 5 class, where I pretended to be Boy George's Jr., and she herself, until we got caught, etc...

Where it got confusing was the imagining of 'junk.'  I don't hate mine, it works fine, but I'd prefer the other.  It was the imagining of sex roles that confused the fuck out of me - see, I imagined myself on the bottom, like every good girl; except, I thought, with a woman on Top... but then I tried a man on Top, and that was hot too, and butch women are hella hot... and then, well, me with a cock, being validated as a boy with a butch woman on Top is pretty much heaven, and that's when my brain fell apart.

Because my cock not a sex toy, in fact it's not a toy at all.  And then the boy energy didn't leave...
Other people started seeing it, and validating it which was scary - no, I thought, I'm a grrl... and then I thought about it some more, and all of the carefully constructed walls started to crumble.

Here's the heresy - I don't hate my cunt. It works well, and it has given me a lot of pleasure over the years, but all of the language I use to refer to my sexual desire is generally penis-based... "I have a hard-on for x", "jerking off" etc.

I understand that for a lover of women the ability to make someone "wet" is a signifier of their prowess, and that regarding my physiology, it's a sign of how hot I am for them, but applied to me, it sounds wrong, and has the power to ruin sex if I don't re-code "wet" into "hard" or "hot" or some other gender neutral or cock-related language.

I'm scared to be a boy because I'm not the right kind of boy. I'm girly. I like pink, and shiny things, and sparkles, and glitter, and probably still even heels.

I'm scared of losing my chosen family, even though they're the most awesome people in the world, and I can't imagine them deciding not to love me anymore over this.

I'm scared of losing the woman I'm finally letting myself fall in love with... because she sees me, and I'm not awful to her, but I'm not exactly what she thought she wanted either.

I'm scared of losing my femme bf-bf.  If I'm a boy, then what happens?

I'm scared. 

I haven't felt scared of how people will react to me being me in a long time. 
I remember this.

Art

I have started doing art again. It is a good thing, even if it a slow process. There are a million ideas in my head, and I have been dreamin art for months, but it is only just now that I am starting to put things out of my head. Nothing spectacular so far, but it is good to be working again. Soldering links, wood burning, etc.

Spring Cleaning

This past year I've been seeing little glimpses of the road not travelled in my life, and there's parts of that I'm sorry about, and parts of it I'm really not so sorry about. 

I think I like my life. 

Amazing what remaking part of your living room can do. 

I found some good books in the cleaning:
Two on brain recovery and brain training that I'm going to send to K's Mom.

One for K:
'When you are the partner of a Rape or Incest Survivor'
about living with a partner who has PTSD, and the process of dealing with someone coping with it - I'm not kidding when I'm telling her I'm doing really well.  I'm in the second year of dealing with this stuff, and it's going well - tough, painful, hard, but well.

Two for me to read:
'The High Conflict Couple'
'Lesbian Relationships' - yeah I know, we don't all identify as that, but it's a good book

I've been watching Brené Brown's TED talks on vulnerability and shame and they're clearly heavily condensed versions of her academic work, but not only do I want to read her academic writing, I feel deep respect for her willingness to talk about her personal experiences.  It is, as she says, brave.

So,  I have marking to do, essays to write, readings to do, and space to do it in.

Dave Lizewski: How do I get a hold of you?
Hit Girl: [sarcastically] You just contact the mayor's office. He has a special signal he shines in the sky; it's in the shape of a giant cock.

So, feminism.

I'm teaching about masculinity this week, and the ways in which our culture enforces masculinity on boys and men, and the militarized masculinity which is sold in our culture as the domain of "the real man" and it's interesting, because in some ways it's a culture which we all idealize - women and men both.

I love violent movies - action movies in particular, adore knife fights, and well choreographed sword and gunplay.

I like MMA, although I am less certain that I like UFC, the participants of which are often engaged in homophobic, misogynist taunting, and the organization of which is engaged in a lot of "women as sexual object" entertainment policies. The problem is, that there is a lot of it which _is_ entertaining.

Boobies are pretty nice to look at, and hot girls in skimpy outfits are pleasing to the eye - do they always have to have post modern self-reflexivity to make that ok?

Ought it to be one's pre(pro)scribed role? no. Combined with violent testing of one's fighting prowess against another? is that necessarily bad?

On sobriety, and

7 things you don't realize about addiction (until you quit)

Sobriety is unpleasant. That's something that I've been struggling with, especially as I've been taking all kinds of medication, and especially since I keep having to get doctors to increase my pain medications so I can do more things.

I want to be more active. I am happier when I do more things, but the more I do, the more pain I am in.

Two weeks ago, I tried snowboarding. It was awesomely fun.  I screwed up my back. badly. i have been in pain ever since. i am only just able to do push ups again, and i still can't do as many as before.

the weather also hasn't been helping.  hovering around zero and humid is the worst thing for me. it's awful. pain and swelling, and not much else.
bah

Schools, bullying, Facebook and legislation.

Another teen lost to suicide because of bullying

So, my homelife was really variable - sometimes wonderful, sometimes horrendous.

My school life was also variable. I loved schoolwork, enjoyed many of my teachers, and liked being challenged.

I had no friends most of the time.  I was odd, fat, initially christian fundamentalist and strange, poor, MPD, and not always hiding it well, and living in my head to cope with trauma a lot.

My best friends were from books, and starting at about 8 I wanted to be a vulcan so I wouldn't have to feel anything.

I was bullied.

JK- Gr 1 -  Her name was Elever, and she bullied me in the Christian school I went to.  When I left, she told me she didn't hate me.  I had no idea.

Grade 2 -  I went to a school I could walk to when I was 7, I was chased home by bullies, Chris and some other guy, who kept me from getting into my building, and beat me up.

Grade3-7 I was bullied by the gym teacher, and a rich girl named Heather at the gifted program I was bussed to. She and I had a rivalry, but she was clearly better, and we both knew it.

Grade 7, my one friend left, because the people in the school were jerks.

Grade 8 I got sent away (which is the subject of another post, maybe, someday), but I came back to a girl-disaster in my school, and re-friended a best friend from years ago.  We spent the year being chased to the bus, getting mooed at, and being ostracized.  The group accepted her back, but not me.  Maybe it's because I don't forgive and forget.

Grade 9 I survived on auto-pilot, with no friends, attending a "group" for students with difficult home lives - an emancipated minor, two siblings whose parents beat them, and a few others I don't remember.

Grade 10, I switched to a private boarding school - I was the wrong kind of person, not christian enough, and again everyone hated me, but I met my best gay friend who kept me alive for the next 15 years.

Grade 11 Half a year at the boarding school, I try to kill myself, and am expelled, then out to a public school, this time an Academy, so uniforms, and try to get out as fast as possible.  I join the SAC, get some credit for university.

Grade 12 - keep my head down, pass unnoticed, get out. No one hates me, and I make it out.

I used to escape onto the BBS network, and talk to people online.  I used to escape into books.  I used to escape into making friends from other schools, who didn't know the people who were hating me.  I didn't have many, but a few who didn't know what a freak I was.

If I'd had a Facebook with all the hate and rage and bile from the people who were maing my life miserable available not only during my school life, but also all the rest of the time, as well as for the entire world to see, I am not sure I would have been able to compartmentalize things well enough to avoid ending my life.

I attempted suicide once, and almost succeeded.

I self-harmed, I had eating disorders, I hated myself.

I can't imagine having available to me a public forum for other people to help me hate myself.  Especially as a teenager when I was already so incredibly vulnerable.

As a society we need to teach our youth to be better people.

The culture of difference, of "othering", of sameness and conformity, and media bombardment by imagery of perfection - these are all contributors to the issues causing bullying.

Girls gain status in social realms through possessions, boys and bullying each other.
Boys through sports, achievements, possessions including girls and money, and violence.

This is the problem.

Girls are still left with very few "legitimate" avenues of gaining status in our culture, particularly teenage culture, and bullying is one of the ways to gain status.

Achievement needs to be a way to gain peer status among girls. Whether at sports, intellectual pursuits, or other skillsets.

The commodification of "girl power has been a horrifying phenomenon, as it has eliminated the essential ideology behind the original message which was the egalitarian ideology that girls are as good as, and as valued as boys. Girls have the same innate abilities, and the same potential for achievement, and that it is possible to be a girl, and to achieve whatever one wants to, in whatever way one wants to.

The concept of "girl power" has become little more than a motif to be emblazoned with a few flowers onto a toddler t-shirt.

It is appalling.

Girl power needs to be rethought, and re-empowered as the potential for change within adolescent female community as something to create powerful social networks without status deliniation, without harmful class and race boundaries, and without the necessity of gaining power at the expense of another.

The lack of intersectional anaysis including the powerless nature of femaleness and childhood becoming adulthood leaves a gap where lives are slipping through.

Can we legislate the gap away? close a loophole? Put the lid onto the pandora's box opened by the internet's ready availability of blogs, facebook, free hosting, and all the tools available to legitimate authors, as well as those with the intent to do harm?

I don't think so.

I don't know what we can do.  Some people are suggesting work camps, harsh(er) sentencing for bullies, loss of privilege, school sanctions.

I know that when bullying was brought to the attention of the school in my case, they held a "talking circle", and the bullies promised to stop, later threatening me and the other girl with renewed violence in the event of further reporting.

In most cases, it never occurred to me to report it. Bullying was a fairly constant part of my school life, and it was easier to avoid other students than to report it or deal with them. Reporting it often exacerbated the situation, as schools are powerless to deal with violence off school grounds, and parents are reluctant to become involved in what is seen as"normal."

Perhaps in the age of Facebook, where these things are documented, there is greater accountability. 

Connecting with the cosmos, and becoming sXe

I see drug use as a form of the sacred. A way of connecting with the cosmos, moving outside yourself and gaining greater awareness than you might otherwise have.  Marijuana helps with pain and seizures, and made a big difference to me.  Psychotropics engage parts of the consciousness and the brain which are normally disengaged.

That said, I have made a conscious decision not to, anymore.  I do not drink, because it interferes with my seizure medication.

I don't think we make enough space for the magical in our spirituality anymore.  There is no room for personal experience, for mysticism, and for experience.

My transcendent experiences were pretty much all positive, I was either with good friends at wonderful, community events, in loving homes, or outdoors in the beauty of nature.

The worst that happened was that I got sunburnt.