#queer theory

I am privileged to be white and well-off enough to attend and complete college (though not without my share of financial troubles and walking away with a good bit of debt), so I am part of the minority of trans women with a degree. I'd love to use that for something, I'm not sure what yet though. Ask me questions if you want and I can give you my understanding of things synthesizing my lived experience, community wisdom, and academic background, or I can point you to readings that I found valuable.

I'm currently working a manual labor job, idek if I'm gonna apply my degree to anything, but if I had stuck with computer science I suppose I would have been stuck between near impossible odds of getting one of the dwindling number of non military-contractor programming jobs, or being part of the military industrial complex.

feminism is for everyone transfeminism is for everyone. misogyny affects everyone transmisogyny affects everyone. some people [the ones in power] even experience a positive affect!

language is fucking arbitrary and gender is a social construct

queer discourse is a psyop to divide us

a memoir is not queer theory

wanting actors to be out of the closet reinforces both the idea that queerness is opposite heterosexuality on a binary and replicating old concepts of queerness as "sin" even if were not thinking about it in a religious sense, we feel that queerness is a transgression or a lie, something that needs to be confessed.

This is not true and we should stand by our belief in wanting queerness to be recognized as a normal, natural part of human diversity.

Saying "I thought we knew better", "they're allowed their privacy", "I'm disappointed in us", "we have to respect them" or "It's none of our business" is true but sometimes it feels like we're missing the point. I think the opposite of bad fandom behaviors like intrusive boundary crossing is not shaming or forced indifference I think its recognizing that being human is being kinda queer and nuanced and fluid.

In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler says that sex categories are already gender categories from the time they’re created, because gender means category. Seriously, look up the etymology. Gender is a type.

My type is boy, and that’s all you need to know about me to interact respectfully.

You don’t need to know if I’m cisgender or transgender or what type of person doctors thought we were or would become when we were born and recorded in our liberal humanist subject file for the government’s compulsory heterosexuality breeding program.

If you saw me in person, you might feel confused. You probably wouldn’t be able to guess what’s in my pants. You might think I’m intersex, but that’s not my label to claim.

So I call myself “metagender”, because meta is a prefix that means “about itself”. My body is a boy body, when I’m fronting, because I’m a boy, and it’s my body.

If you saw me in person, you might not know whether you wanted to include me or exclude me from your conversations and spaces. You might feel uncomfortable, if you were attracted to me, if you have a self-defining story about being attracted or not attracted to people with certain body parts.

My gender is about me and how I choose to relate to the world. It’s not to help you fit me into a ready-made story about how I did or didn’t transition away from some more objective type, or how I was socialized or whether my report of my own experiences is valid because I’m TME or TMA — how does that even work for a system with different genders? — or fit some other universal narrative.

Everybody gets to define themselves, and if you don’t like that, I’m sorry you were made to feel so anxious and threatened. I felt that way too for a long time, and it sucks. But trying to control how other people think about their own bodies and minds when they’re giving you space to do the same thing won’t make those feelings stop.

Trusting yourself and having your own boundaries is the only way I know how to make it stop. If you can’t trust yourself, it helps if you can find somebody else to trust first. It might take a long time for trust to grow, but people aren’t supposed to live in fear and isolation from each other. That makes us easy to control.