Probably the first thing I ever wrote about gender identity
c. 2016. Still about a year before I started looking into it...
A friend of mine just launched a fundraiser for a gender identity "clinic" in _____ that pushes hormones on children, rather than saying, the way you are is OK. Society is wrong about women — it's wrong about men, too, for that matter. Whatever you want to do, you can do it and still be a woman. Nobody identifies with those stereotypes — let's abolish them.
It's been nearly two years since this friend started taking testosterone. Lately, I feel as though we can't talk, even about other things, after a decade of telling each other everything. No matter the topic, the misogyny leaks in around the edges: it's essential to the project of gender identity. For my friend to embrace identifying as a man that means embracing masculinity, essentializing femininity while discarding sex, that inconvenient hurdle. All those stereotypes we used to deplore together, my friend now accepts them as creeds, suggesting, ludicrously, that I 'identify' with wearing makeup, a comment that cracks my commitment to avoiding the subject that will tear us apart: "What? Who identifies with wearing makeup? What's that even supposed to mean?" Or embracing violent language (wanting to "fuck" someone who detransitioned "in the ear"). I wish this friend would say, "Let's stop pretending..." But that seems unlikely. My friend is in deep, and now sounds to me like just another voice saying, "Society is right about women. If you don't identify with that [toxic, misogynistic morass of bullshit], then you must not be a woman!" In a society where girls are shamed, restricted, punished on the one hand, and — on the other hand — encouraged at every turn to identify with boys and men and their interests, there are many reasons that a girl could hate being a girl or want to be a boy that testosterone and top surgery won't help, while harming a healthy body. It seems like medical abuse to me, rather than addressing the underlying problem (the fucked-up ways women are regarded and treated in our society, which is only reinforced by individuals identifying out of womanhood). I know the horror of growing into a female body. My culture raised me to despise grown women and I was — in that subject the same as all the rest — a good student. The first time someone commented on my changing figure, I stopped eating. I was 14. Long after I had starved away my breasts and hips, they were all I could see in the mirror, a walking prison of flesh. In reality, I was starving myself to death.
What does it mean to reject the way your society sees you? What's the proper object of reform? You, your breakable body, so that you conform to a more comfortable set of stereotypes? Or your society and its gender hierarchy, the way it splits the human personality in half and ruthlessly polices dissidents? It disturbs me that the pain of young women and girls is finally being acknowledged, but misdirected back at the self, away from the systems, structures, patterns of socialization and devaluation that warp every young woman. Opting out is a myth.
Truth.
So true. Systems of power will always redirect critique away from themselves. We see this on a micro-level when abusers ingratiate themselves, redirect criticism away from themselves and onto others, gaslight, and just outright lie to others in order to protect their position of power. Patriarchy is the same. The patriarchal order is framed as desirable and "natural" and any sort of criticism is met with dismissal, gaslighting, or an attack on the character of the person making the critique.