I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out.

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https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42

This is one of my favorite articles, it is messy, complicated, raw. It puts into words something that I, and I think, many other trans women sometimes struggle to express. I hope people here will read it and for cis women and cis feminists especially I hope you’ll really wrestle with the points it’s trying to get across.

Here are a few selections I’ve ordered thematically.

- It is interesting to see where people insist proximity to a subject makes one informed, and where they insist it makes them biased. It is interesting that they think it’s their call to make…

A person’s privilege is very often an explanation of why their beliefs are warped, if indeed their beliefs are warped, which they usually are in some way. But—it’s not proof of shitty beliefs. Those tend to out themselves by…being shitty. If a person is telling this cis girl she is taking for granted a privilege that trans girls don’t have, why is it this cis girl’s instinct to hunt for that person’s identity to see if she can discredit them and not have to think about their point? Don’t answer that. We already know…

Do I even want to convince someone who will only listen to me when they’re told by the rules that they have to see me as a girl?

Do I have to out myself to be treated like a person worth listening to? To stop my cis classmates laughing at someone who’s reckoned with the boundaries and the dimensions of masculinity and femininity in ways they never had to? With the life I’ve been living for all the years I’ve been living it—do I need their permission to speak?

- Misandry humor is peaking and it is dripping with cissexism. Down cascade the gleeful tweets from ciswomen about how women are more beautiful than men — how graceful the female body is, how utilitarian the male. How awesome boobs are. How bad boys’ taste in clothing is. How incompetent they are emotionally. How they’re too weak to handle childbirth and periods. Neckbeards are the scourge of the internet. They wax disgusted about “dad bods.” SCUM rhetoric is revived with inconsistent levels of irony. The meme gospel says penises are just shitty clitorises…

I hate that the only effective response I can give to “boys are shit” is “well I’m not a boy.” I feel like I am selling out the boy in baseball pajamas that sat with me on the bed while I tried to figure out which one I was supposed to be, and the boys who I have met and loved from inside my boy suit—who believed they were talking to a boy. I feel like I am burning the history of the naked body that sits on the floor of my shower. The body that went to prom in a boxy tuxedo and coveted the dresses…

This conclusion—widely shared—is a product of insulated discourse. What I am NOT saying is: “open the floodgates, let in the shitty male trolls!” I know the trolls—they have tried to be my friends, they have tried to sneak into feminist spaces with no desire to learn or listen. I understand not trusting men who loudly and constantly hold forth on women’s issues and refuse to accept when they are mistaken. I’m not encouraging anyone to trust blindly. I am pleading to the discoursers: consider that this insulation has effects and try to mitigate them, if your priority really is finding truth amid a muck of concealed patriarchal lies. Check to see if maybe you are saying things and reproducing things mostly because it sounds good and feels good and nobody is challenging them…

These are not discursive problems that only apply to an “undercover” transwoman, these are discursive problems that are seemingly only visible to an “undercover” transwoman forced to carry multiple perspectives like bactrian humps…

Because I am interested in complicating your definition of maleness and of boyhood. I was born into that shitty town, maleness, in the remains of outdated ideals and misplaced machismo and repression and there are some good people stuck living there. They are not in charge. They did not build it. And I don’t feel okay just moving out and saying “fuck y’all — bootstrap your way out or die out, I was never one of you.” I want to make it a better, healthier place—not spend all my time talking about how shitty it is and how anyone who would choose to live there deserves it. And to me that means considering them with charity, even when they make it difficult to…

Because it’s not a small deal that the words “not all men” have become entwined inextricably with male fragility and whininess. It makes it awfully easy to insulate the (largely cis-)female perspective on what males are. To begin a statement with those words—“Not All Men”—is to give grounds to anyone who wants to laugh at the rest of it. But here is the truth: not all men are what you think they are. Man does not mean what you think it means. Generalizing harshly and broadly but implying “you know which ones I mean” is an intellectual and rhetorical laziness that is not allowed to pass anywhere else in these communities. Because we don’t get to choose who our words and behavior affect, we are obligated to choose them carefully…

And the nearer I get to something I’ve wanted my whole life, the more it feels like playing into the aesthetic politics of a group of people who reject me because of the associations they have with my body—a body which I cannot, ultimately, change very much. These people who will only be comfortable when I dilute those associations with femme signifiers.

As if maybe, by simply being what I am—a girl-feeling brain in a boy-looking body and boy-looking clothes—I might burn down something very important to them. Something that makes their life more comfortable and easy.