It looks like I’m not going to be able to follow through on producing that zine at the current time. Hopefully later in the year, when I know if I’m going to have to have surgery or not….

Blessings to all.

I was listening to Ste McCabe’s Rant and thinking about the childhood and adolescence that I did and didn’t have, the similarities and the differences between my youth and those of cis queer men.

(Well it’s not an unusual narrative
For a gay boy in a backward town to find it hard to live
While Thatcher was cooking up the section 28 scheme
And setting up the picture for my teenage years)

And there’s a thing about identity, too. Because we talk a lot in the QUILTBAG communities about the fact that a person *is* the gender that they identify as at a given moment. And there’s a lot of stereotypes both inside and outside our communities of what a Real Trans Childhood looks like. (I’m sure you’re all familiar with them.)

But see, when I was a kid, I didn’t ‘identify as’ a boy. I knew there was ‘something wrong’, but I thought I was a girl. (I didn’t know there was an alternative.) Does that mean that I *was* a girl, because I ‘identified as’ one? No. No, it doesn’t. Other people’s stories may be different, but I’m reaching the point now where I can look back and say: I didn’t know I was a boy, but I was.

As this post describes it, I want to turn a transsexual gaze on my childhood. I went through a lot of identities in my youth, and I want to be able to look at them all and recognise the boy, the youth, the young man that I was.

I want to look at pictures of a kid in a girl’s school uniform running around the playground, over-the-knee socks and tunic, as well as the pictures where I’m scruffy and short-haired in my own clothes, and say: this is a boy child, just like other boy children.

I want to look at the worst part of my teens, when I was drinking a lot and taking a lot of drugs and didn’t know what the fuck I was, only that I was queer and I was wrong – I want to look at the pics of me with my sort-of-girlfriend in velvet goth gear and makeup and say: here’s a queer youth struggling to understand and embrace his feminine side, which is unlike the mainstream female femininity that’s all he’s been offered. And I want to look at other pitures from the same time, of me at home in jeans and a scruffy jacket with my hair braided out of the way, working on the land, and be able to recognise the young man who thought that this was him failing at what he was meant to be, because he wasn’t feminine *enough*.

I want to look at the pictures of myself as a young hippy fem/me and say: here’s a young queer pagan boy who’s basically doing the Radical Faerie thing without even knowing it exists. And I want to look at pictures of myself as a young dyke-identified person with short bleached hair and combat trousers or a suit and say: here’s a young man who’s being allowed to freely explore his own masculinity for the first time in his life.

I want to be able to see the boy, the youth, the man I always was, and it’s hard, and cissexist narratives mean I often have to pretend half of what I was doesn’t exist. And both cissexism and hatred of effeminacy make it far, far harder for me to claim, to own, to recognise myself in the non-masculine parts of my childhood and youth. The parts where I “looked like a girl”, whatever the reasons for that were.

It’s frightening to put this out there, seriously frightening. Cos some of it’s easy, see. This part is easy:

Easy to see those, right, as the baby-boy-youth sequence of the average guy?

But other parts are harder for me. Other pictures, pictures that *hurt* to look at, that *burn*, that fill me with sick choking shame – it’s so hard to look at those and see the boy, the youth. Part of me wants to burn those pictures, erase that moment of history, the lie of the camera’s lens.

But that’s cissexism. That’s part of the Lie that says: this is what a boy, a man, a male looks like. The public trans male narrative of KNEW FROM AGE THREE WAS ALWAYS BUTCH, while true for some people, is part of that Lie *when it is made compulsory*.

I’m not exactly massively butch (he says, picking at his purple nail varnish). Like this writer, my gender *expression* for parts of my childhood was sufficiently within the aceeptable ranges of expression for the sex I was assigned that while I had physical dysphoria of various kinds (increasing as I hit puberty) my gender expression didn’t dominate my childhood as hugely as it does for some trans people. And I was strongly pushed towards femininity (as most assigned-female people are), and there wasn’t enough pain in that to make me resist it massively at all times, even though I constantly felt I was Doing It Wrong, and was actively told by my agemates that I was. And that’s probably unsurprising, since what femininity I expressed was a queer *male* femininity, not a straight female one. I had periods of resistance, but they were, in one way or another, beaten out of me.

I still grieve for the kind of boyhood I didn’t have and will never have, the kind of adolescence that was denied to me. But now I look at the other pictures of me as a child, and I look at how I *felt* at the time, the commonality with now, and *know* I’m seeing a boy, no matter how I consciously identified, the labels I’d been taught to put on myself.

This is a boy child:

This is a pubescent male:

This is a young man:

And if you can’t see that, it’s because of cissexism in *you*, not because any lack of maleness in me.

[[Postscript: NOT putting up any pictures of me as an adult for personal safety reasons.]]

holding on

I believe in trans people.

Not because we are magically insightful. Not because we are full of arcane shapechanger wisdom. Not because we are more or less great or holy than anyone, in our way. We have among us wonderful people and people who do and say terrible things. We have our crooks and our hypocrites and our abusers and our traitors, same as anyone, right alongside our heroes and champions and grand examples of high character. We are a mixed bag, you and me and you and you and you. We don’t have any more or fewer secret Mysteries in our blood, wherever it bleeds from. We’re people, with our tiny daily mistakes and triumphs, our hopes and our hopes for forgiveness.

I believe in trans people.

Not because we have suffered, though so many of us have suffered. We have hurt in ways that have transformed us as individuals and communities, and we’ve talked about that. I’ve talked about that plenty. We all know the numbers and the statistics and the terrible stories, these days. We pass them around as something that’s a little bit heartbroken hagiography and a little bit campfire scare gossip. We know who has sneered at us, and who has shut the doors. We know all of this. You certainly know this about me, by now, where I’ve left blood to sink into the dirt, where I’ve looked into same dark you’ve looked into, where I’ve gotten lost, where we’ve all felt alone.

The thing is, we’ve defined ourselves in those terms. Justified ourselves in those terms. Believe we are here, we say, showing our scars and fresh cuts. Believe we are real. Believe we matter. Believe that we are people because what we have been through, people do not deserve, and I hope you see we didn’t deserve it. We have aligned ourselves, symbolically and narratively, with our suffering: our dysphoria and abandonment and grief and martyrdom. And all of those things are true, and they will stay true, at least until we change this society and go to the grave with it, ceding the field to happier generations. But I want to propose an alternative–and not the alternative that has been offered before, either, the carnival-glam alternative that presents us as the glitter-crusted disco-ball jesters of a new postmodernism. That’s true for some of us, too, and I won’t deny that. I just want to suggest something simpler.

I want to suggest that we believe in us because we, as a people, are marked above all by our integrity.

]]> http://foxfetch.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/59/feed/ 0 foxfetch http://foxfetch.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/54/ http://foxfetch.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/54/#comments Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:58:06 +0000 foxfetch http://foxfetch.wordpress.com/?p=54 ]]> You choose — triggering, tokenism or erasure

Relevant to many things.

]]> http://foxfetch.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/54/feed/ 0 foxfetch http://foxfetch.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/48/ http://foxfetch.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/48/#comments Wed, 02 Mar 2011 22:27:15 +0000 foxfetch http://foxfetch.wordpress.com/?p=48 ]]> Even if I don’t get any submissions from the people who’ve said they’ll send something (or anyone else) I’m going to just go it alone and do this shit. We need it.

]]> http://foxfetch.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/48/feed/ 1 foxfetch http://foxfetch.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/44/ http://foxfetch.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/44/#comments Wed, 02 Mar 2011 22:03:56 +0000 foxfetch http://foxfetch.wordpress.com/?p=44 ]]> I am now accepting submissions for an upcoming online publication (format still in the works – it may be a periodic online journal/zine or it may be a less formal blog) on trans-centered Paganism. If you are interested, please contact me at solarclothoid (at) gmail (dot) com.

What we are looking for:

- essays, liturgy, personal experiences, spells, poem, practices, stories that reveal the lives and power of trans* Pagans, in our own words.

- the voices of all trans* people are welcome, whether binary-IDed or not, so long as there is a focus on challenging cissexism and ciscentrism.

What we are NOT looking for:

- anything that automatically places *all* trans people within a “third-gender” or Other category, regardless of how individuals identify/experience themselves

- anything promoting cissexism, transmisogyny, sexism, racism, classism, (dis)ablism, psychobigotry, or other oppressions.

- while cis people are welcome to submit works, there will be a policy of centering trans* voices.

(Please note we’re unable to pay anyone for submissions at this point, though hopefully down the line it will evolve to a place where we can.)

]]> http://foxfetch.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/44/feed/ 1 foxfetch