Tag: Gender Roles

On Not Belonging

There’s a tremendous amount of pressure that I often feel when interacting with others. Call it a weight to carry a burden to bare. I often think of it like friction. There’s a feeling of difficulty that goes into just existing in this world.

The concept of intersectionality is one I think of often. There are often moments where I feel like I’m straddling three different sets of rules and expectations. Rather then high wires each feels more like fishing line. Impossibly hard to balance on and even when you succeed it pierces your flesh.

The intersection of my femininity with my queerness and my transness often creates huge potentials for this friction. My transness makes my femininity conditional and more heavily policed. My queerness is often difficult to express because it’s so intimately related to my transness that it’s off putting or difficult to understand by cis queer people. So each element works in concert to further restrict my range of social acceptability.

It often leaves me in a position where I feel tired. The burden is heavy. The conditions of my existence in this world are limiting. Every action I take needing to be applied through multiple filters to consider not only the impact on me but the reception of others. Often the expectations contradict. Expressing transness often comes with the effect of losing the conditional acceptance of my womanhood.

It’s difficult to say but I often feel like my emotions and expression is too difficult for others to handle. No one likes when you make them feel bad and when my humanity causes others to feel uncomfortable your very presence causes that negative reaction in others.

I’m a walking reminder that the world isn’t as simple or as easy as we like to pretend it is. Rather the. Folks taking a second to question their own biases thoughts or feelings on the subject. The usual response is to put the responsibility for their discomfort on me.

Which gets back to the friction. When your existence makes people uncomfortable and the responsibility for that discomfort falls on you. Then your life is spent wading through negativity, which grinds you down.

There’s no grand solution here. if you’re wondering if there’s anything you can do exposure and understanding do work but incredibly slowly, slower then you might like. But know that you’re not alone and together we can make it through.

Misgendering, a new pain

I’ve never been dismissive of the idea of misgendering being hurtful, but until I started opening up about it I was never bothered by people who didn’t know misgendering me.

It’s a rather unfortunate and painful new experience for me. I spent the weekend with my wife’s family, who are rural, uninteresting, and strangely concerned with gender roles. They do not know I am Trans, and a lot of their everyday conversation revolves around conversations of gender. It’s incredibly odd in the first place, but the sheer volume of it ended up being rather painful.

I want to take a second to say that I also live in a rural area (though not as small, and not anywhere near where we visited) Being rural doesn’t make you uninteresting and backwards. it does however mean that there aren’t many ways to escape family when you visit them in a rural setting, which compounds the discomfort.

One cousin, who has two sons and a daughter, seemed fixated on ensuring her children were doing gender appropriate activities, said children are 2, 4, and 6. Not that it would ever be a sane thing to fixate on but its doubly unfortunate when you start pushing your daughter to under aspire at such a young age.

So that was painful to watch, but I’ve never been called a man so many times in such a small amount of time. I usually don’t really refer to my self in very gendered language and don’t refer to much of anything in a gendered way. So experiencing such a narrow and suffocating worldview was as uncomfortable as it was painful.

I don’t really have any great advice. I was tempted to come out to them out of spite just to throw them for a loop. I didn’t, because that’s not constructive and I don’t want my coming out to be petty. So I guess the moral of the story is similar to that of my other advice; maintain your principles and unfortunately life just sucks sometimes.