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radiantfractureI tend not to follow trans-related news, arts, and media as much as might be expected – not out of any disaffection with the identities or ideas, but more as a sort of not very useful self-defense practice against a number of painful and complex emotions. Anyone talking about trans issues, even talking about them really well, hurts at least a little, for the earth is made of knives. Still, a different habit would serve me better.
The (re-)restriction of trans people in American public space is frightening, yet it's almost background noise to me because of everything else that's happening.
And also of course, as a passing transmasculine person, I am least affected by this violence. It's the trans, agender, and cisgender people who don't fit into expectations of gender presentation that are most at risk, and especially transfeminine people. So a powerful if unstable privilege and the frail membrane between Canadian and US politics create a little space of denial in which I lately crouch. It's easier to worry about other people's problems, and the scale is so much greater.
It is maybe not strange, in some larger analysis of the rise and fall of empires, that this institutional violence intensifies as there is a surge of great thinking and creativity in and around gender and sexual identities -- but it feels strange, like boarding a rollercoaster and then finding yourself thrown through empty air.1
Yet I'm inspirited the recent agender, ace, aro, and fluid writing I've encountered. While my default habit is to worry about the way categories put hard borders on the mutable forms of experience, I feel like a lot of air has been let into the rooms of sex and gender lately via these identifications and discussions, and I'm grateful for that. In particular, it's made me reflect on what my own terms of intimacy might actually be.
So I hope -- I even believe -- there is enough power in these movements, these people, these ideas, to keep it all going until -- I guess until the rollercoaster can be rebuilt -- but right now I am ill in body and in spirit.
Um, so, I don't know -- any good fic recs?
{rf}
1. And look, in the final analysis, I refuse to believe in some absolute or causal connection between increase in personal freedom and incipient societal collapse. (I don't buy that goofy story about the granaries either.)
The (re-)restriction of trans people in American public space is frightening, yet it's almost background noise to me because of everything else that's happening.
And also of course, as a passing transmasculine person, I am least affected by this violence. It's the trans, agender, and cisgender people who don't fit into expectations of gender presentation that are most at risk, and especially transfeminine people. So a powerful if unstable privilege and the frail membrane between Canadian and US politics create a little space of denial in which I lately crouch. It's easier to worry about other people's problems, and the scale is so much greater.
It is maybe not strange, in some larger analysis of the rise and fall of empires, that this institutional violence intensifies as there is a surge of great thinking and creativity in and around gender and sexual identities -- but it feels strange, like boarding a rollercoaster and then finding yourself thrown through empty air.1
Yet I'm inspirited the recent agender, ace, aro, and fluid writing I've encountered. While my default habit is to worry about the way categories put hard borders on the mutable forms of experience, I feel like a lot of air has been let into the rooms of sex and gender lately via these identifications and discussions, and I'm grateful for that. In particular, it's made me reflect on what my own terms of intimacy might actually be.
So I hope -- I even believe -- there is enough power in these movements, these people, these ideas, to keep it all going until -- I guess until the rollercoaster can be rebuilt -- but right now I am ill in body and in spirit.
Um, so, I don't know -- any good fic recs?
{rf}
1. And look, in the final analysis, I refuse to believe in some absolute or causal connection between increase in personal freedom and incipient societal collapse. (I don't buy that goofy story about the granaries either.)
