I was asked recently whether there was anything someone could say about gender or trans issues that would offend me. I actually thought it was a really interesting question and ended up thinking quite a bit about it. What I ultimately realized was that there was virtually nothing someone could say about trans people that would offend me. I almost immediately realized how much of a problem that was.

I started by asking myself what it really meant to be offended. I realized that it wasn’t a word I had an easy definition for, so I went ahead and looked it up. The dictionary, among other definitions, defined offensive as “repugnant to the moral sense or good taste,” as well as “highly irritating.” I think my own understanding of the word is a combination of these two elements: something has to be not only morally objectionable but also personally relevant, and therefore upsetting to me, in order for me to say I am offended.

The truth is, at this point, I’m not particularly upset very often. It’s not that I can’t recognize that transphobic people are ignorant, and that their comments are morally objectionable, but the second piece—the personal upset—isn’t really there for me anymore. I think it must have to do with the fact that others’ judgment of me is so irrelevant to my life as to be practically meaningless. That is, I have a job in which I’m not afraid of being fired for being trans. I generally spend time in trans-affirming communities, and I have many people willing to fight for me if ever I were to experience discrimination. And even if I do catch some flack for my gender history, I have lots of other things going for me—I’m a white, financially secure, educated man. I’m therefore exceptionally prepared to deal with the damage from such an incident.

My lack of offense, though, is clearly a problem, and something to work on in the future. It’s a problem because the kinds of experiences that make me jump to action were the ones that hit me on a more personal level. As a result, I suspect that, over time, my lack of personal offense in the face of transphobia will make me less inclined to actively fight to end it. Indeed, I would argue (and I’m certainly not alone in this, or the first to suggest as much) that this is a larger issue common to most trans men. Trans women often don’t pass perfectly and therefore not only transition into the normative indignities of sexism but also continually experience transphobia. Trans dudes who pursue a medical transition (hormones, surgeries), in contrast, often avoid much of that transphobia because they typically pass well, as well as transitioning into male privilege.

So in this holiday season, my latest resolution is to start being offended more. I want to remember, on an emotional level, not just an intellectual one, that transphobia continues to exist in the world, and that we all need to do our part to eliminate it. Happy New Year to everyone, and good luck on fulfilling whatever your own resolutions might be!

A couple posts back, I mentioned N, a new girl I was dating. It actually didn’t work out, and the reasons for that gave me a lot to think about. One major reason that has given me a lot to chew on, was that it seemed like she really didn’t like men very much. She had formerly identified as a lesbian, and though she’s been dating men for the past few years, she nonetheless still holds them in fairly low esteem.

I gathered this through two types of comments. The first type was when she would comment on how I was “such a man” when I did certain things. So, if I asked if she wanted to grab dinner on Sunday night, I was being “such a man” for trying to make plans around my schedule instead of asking about hers. The second type of comment, which was actually meant as a compliment, was when she would tell me I was “not at all like other men.” So, if I talked comfortably about fluctuations in my sexuality, or if I spoke about my consciousness of my male privilege, I was rewarded with a comment about how unlike other men I was.

What I don’t think N understood was that I found these comments hard to deal with, whether she meant them positively or negatively. It’s not that I explicitly disagreed with them. In fact, I agree that men, on average, tend to expect women to accommodate their needs more often than the other way around. I think this is something that, as a society, we need to work on—men’s and women’s needs should be valued equally. So, I wasn’t really upset when she said that, but rather took it as a reminder of ways I could improve. Likewise, I agree that men, on average, are not comfortable talking about their sexuality or their privilege, and I’d like to see them do more of each of these things.

No, it wasn’t the content of the comments that bugged me, but rather, the frequency.
Not a day went by when I didn’t hear at least one of these comments about how I did or didn’t exemplify my gender. And that started to bug me, for reasons that I had trouble putting my finger on, since I didn’t disagree with the comments themselves. What I realized, eventually, was that it wasn’t the negativity that bothered me, but rather the negativity in the absence of any positivity. See, I think men screw up all the time. For that matter, I think women screw up all the time (in different and sometimes similar ways). But I also think men can do things really well some of the time. The protectiveness that men display for the women in their lives, while obviously predicated on problematic assumptions that women are weak, nonetheless can lead to noble and brave behavior in the face of danger. The willingness to put their own needs first can lead men to stick up for what they believe in and not tolerate mistreatment. And the focus in male friendships on companionship and activities, rather than intimate disclosure, can be really convenient when I want someone to go to a softball game with, but don’t really feel like talking a lot.

Sometimes I identify with men more than other times. Sometimes, I feel like my experience as a woman for sixteen years, and then as a trans person for the last seven, has been so totally different than the experiences of other men that it’s hard to imagine what I share in common with them. Other times, I find myself thinking how similar I am to other men, and how much I like being grouped in with them. But whether or not I identify with men, I certainly don’t see them as negatively as N seemed to. I don’t spend a big part of every day thinking about how much I dislike them, and it was really hard to be around someone who did. I found myself spending the entire time questioning how I was, or wasn’t, measuring up to the negative stereotypes she had of men, and that was no fun at all.

Sometimes people ask me what my birth name was. Or, if they’re really ignorant, they ask me what my “real” name is. Now, for years, I’ve just refused to answer because I simply didn’t want to. I didn’t like saying my former name. I didn’t like other people knowing it, and I certainly didn’t like hearing it. So just in case, on the off chance that someone, in that absurd way that our minds sometimes do, ended up saying exactly what they were trying hard not to say, it all seemed simpler if I just didn’t tell them.

Recently, though, I’ve been thinking more about why it is that I don’t like that question. I think that it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis, including the costs and benefits to both myself and the person asking. Here’s the way I figure it. A name, by itself, doesn’t mean much. Yes, some people are named for relatives, or historical figures, or biblical characters. And those names mean something in the context of their family, or community, or culture. But the name itself doesn’t hold a meaning—it’s just a series of syllables. And so, when some random friendly acquaintance, who doesn’t know much about my background, asks me what my name was, I assume that it’s mostly just idle curiosity. People want to know secrets, and my former name is perceived to be a particularly juicy one. So I don’t feel too bad denying them the satisfaction of their curiosity, since it’s not a meaningful curiosity. They aren’t going to know something more true or real about me by hearing my birth name. They’re not going to understand me in some new way because they know what I used to be called. They’re just going to have another piece of information that, frankly, doesn’t mean much out of the context of my childhood and my family.

But here’s the difference between them and me. My name is meaningful to me. Hearing it brings back a world of hurt, years of correcting well-meaning friends, and less accepting ones who weren’t even trying. My name is associated with parts of my life that, frankly, I’d rather not relive. It’s a reminder of pain that is long past, and the infrequency of those reminders makes them all the more startling when they happen. So, while it’s true that the risk of someone I tell slipping up and using my birth name is pretty slim, the possible outcome is pretty harsh. I don’t want to hear those syllables, since they’re far more than sounds to me. I don’t want a lover, or friend or, acquaintance to look at me like we’re co-conspirators whenever someone with my birth name introduces themselves at an event. We’re not co-conspirators. That pain is all mine, and I certainly haven’t come far enough to think it’s a fun inside joke, and am skeptical that I ever will.

Still, all this is a little heavy for casual conversations with friendly acquaintances. So, usually I just tell them that it’s my policy not to share my birth name. I hope, at those moments, that they’ll think twice before asking the same question of another trans person. Because the truth is, the asker already knows the most important name—the one that trans person has chosen to go by.

A friend, K, recently told me of her mixed emotions at missing an opportunity to come out as a lesbian. She explained how some kids she worked with had made gay jokes and, rather than let them know that she herself was queer identified, she simply told them that a good friend of hers was and so she didn’t like the jokes. K was agonizing over the decision because she and I share the attitude that coming out is an inherently political act, and one that we value quite highly.

As with other columns, I should be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that every queer and/or trans person should feel obligated to come out to everyone they meet. There are plenty of circumstances when it’s not appropriate, or when it’s simply not relevant. I’m also not saying that there is anything wrong with choosing to not share one’s trans or queer status with the world—in fact, for many trans folks (as Tobi so eloquently wrote about), the presented gender is the real gender, and nothing is being hidden. To imply that a trans person should feel obligated to come out is to suggest that they are somehow deceiving the world, when in fact, they’re being quite honest from the get go.

What I am saying is that, when I tell people I’m trans, I don’t just do it because I want them to know. Yeah, that’s the immediate goal of the conversation. But the long term outcome is bigger than that. I want the world to know that trans people exist. I not only want people to have images of trans folks as existing in their very midst (Gasp!) but to know that trans folks can be successful and sane, two adjectives not traditionally associated with trans folks.

I think back, sometimes, to my parents’ reaction when I initially came out to them. They were terrified at the life I might have as a trans person. I can’t help but wonder how their reaction would have been different if they could have seen me today. Let’s be clear—I haven’t done anything particularly special with my life. But I’m doing okay. I went to college, got decent grades, and got a job after graduating. Over the years, I’ve had friendships and romantic relationships that make me happy and that are no less healthy or more tortured than any other kid my age.

So when I say that coming out feels like a political act to me, I mean that my very existence, and the existence of other trans folks who are going about productive lives, is a political act. It seems to me that it’s easy to deny rights or protection to a group that doesn’t exist, which trans people may as well not, for all the exposure the average person has to us. It’s also easy to marginalize a group that is perceived as uniformly emotionally unstable, as trans folks have been portrayed in the past.

But it’s not so easy to imagine denying me, or any number of my trans friends, protection from harassment and access to affordable, appropriate, medical care. And I suspect that the more people know trans folks, the harder it will be for folks to remember why anyone ever questioned what the right answer was to issues of antidiscrimination laws and health insurance. It’s not that I think the 20 year olds that I come out to today will immediately go out and join a campaign to mount trans friendly legislation. They won’t. But I do hope that when they get to vote on legislation like that, someday, they think of me or my friends, and realize how ridiculous the status quo is.

I had an interesting and somewhat disconcerting experience this past month. I spent the time backpacking with a friend whom I hadn’t hung out with in years but had known for a long time and been very close with in the past. This time, though, out of nowhere, he started using the word “gay” as an insult and generally taking every opportunity to make clear just how straight he is. My reaction started with shock, moved towards upset, and ended with some self-reflection about what might be going on.

To give some background, T, who is male bodied and identified, and I, who was female identified when T and I met, were good friends in highschool. We went through a lot together, including both of us questioning our sexuality and experimenting some. In his case, he ended up straight, and in my case, I ended up a lesbian, but even then, we bonded over our newly shared love of women. All was well. And, in fact, he seemed generally comfortable at the time with the fact that he’d experimented, though he decided it wasn’t for him ultimately.

So imagine my surprise when T starts saying things are “gay” and, upon being asked what he means, making explicit that he is using “gay” to mean all manner of negative things. And imagine my surprise when he offers to give me a massage, but then promptly revokes it, under the explanation that “that’d be pretty gay.”

Now, at first, I was just plain surprised. I was confused by the fact that this had started apparently out of nowhere. Yeah, those are annoying comments, but I hear them all the time and they don’t get to me all that much anymore. But from a good friend? A friend I’d known since I was 15 and who had been my confidante through thick and thin? I was just plain shocked.

It wasn’t until our last night there that I got a clue to what might be going on. See, we were talking about tattoos, and what and where we might get. I said something about getting one on my hip bone, to which he looked generally dismayed and said “You can’t get a tattoo on your hip! Guys don’t do that.” I looked at him, mildly annoyed, and filled him in on the fact that I’m not super committed to the rules of gender. To this he replied that he was “just providing a healthy level of male socialization.”

Ah, the moment of clarity that hit me a few minutes later. The subject dropped, but it had served its purpose. The piece of him that had changed, I finally realized, wasn’t just about the specific comments he’d been making. It was about the fact that he was suddenly policing my gender in a way that he’d never done before. Maybe it’s that two years had passed since we last hung out, and previously, I’d had 2 years less testosterone in my body and therefore was less obviously masculine. Maybe it was that two years of male socialization had had their effect on me, and I walked, talked and joked in ways that were more clearly masculine than before. Or maybe it’s just that he’d changed, and come to see me more as a guy friend than as whatever he’d seen me as before.

Whatever it was, T had decided that I was a man, and therefore believed I was interested in his feedback on how best to be a Real Man. He didn’t seem to understand that I was far past that stage of my gender development. Yeah, there was a time when I was looking for tips on how to pass. But that time is long past. Now I’m in a place where I construct my masculinity actively, and usually with disdain for many of the standards upheld by college aged men.

It was a sobering moment for me because I’d never considered that friendships might suffer as people accepted me as a man. And no, I haven’t given up on T’s friendship yet—we’ve been friends too long for me to give up on it without at least talking to him—but I feel fairly confident that it’ll take a real conversation now, and real effort on his part, to curb this instinct to socialize me into “appropriate” male behavior. Ironic, isn’t it? I spent a long time dreaming of the day when all the people in my life saw me as wholly male, without ever considering the potential downsides of such perceptions. Luckily for me, though, there are plenty of guys I’m friends with now who see me as male but get that I’m not aspiring to be He-Man. And I’ll just hang out with them until T gets his act together.

I’ve talked before about how I tend to date queer women. In that column, I talked about how I was attracted to the sorts of interactions I had with queer women, interactions where I felt that my gender identity could be fluid and unconstrained by traditional gender roles. A friend challenged me, though, when she asked me recently why I still identified my relationship with M as queer, even though I was a man dating a woman.

Once we talked further, I realized that the question she was actually asking was a question of what it is about my relationships with women that is queer, and not just progressive. She pointed out that a lot of the things that made my dynamics with M different from those of traditional couples was simply enlightened gender dynamics: no, I don’t hold the door for M or believe that she should be emotionally vulnerable while I remain stoic, but rejecting those things doesn’t in itself make the relationship queer, just progressive.

I struggled a lot with this question, but eventually came up with the following explanation. My relationship with M is queer because I am queer and she is queer. It is queer because neither of us is comfortable with entirely traditional gender and power dynamics, and we therefore actively construct those dynamics in our relationship. It’s not that we reject traditional gender roles entirely—she still dresses in skirts regularly while I rock the baggy jeans—but we pick and choose which aspects of our respective gender roles we’re comfortable embracing. Yes, I love strapping on a cock and fucking her. And in that moment, maybe our dynamics look like those of a straight couple. But the next night, maybe she’s fucking me, or maybe I’m gushing emotion while she shows none. Either way, we’re aware of the power dynamics at play, and we’re choosing to perform them, not simply accepting them.

The piece to this that I think wasn’t entirely clear to me initially is that it’s not just the specific actions or beliefs that M and I embrace, it’s also the experiences that led us to prefer those things. So I don’t embrace non-traditional gender roles in a relationship randomly, I embrace them because I was socialized female, learned to date within the lesbian community, and only subsequently came to identify as male. I simply don’t know the rules, or want to know them, for traditional straight masculine behavior in a relationship with a woman. And M doesn’t want these things randomly either—her preferences have a basis in the queer identity and politics that she holds. So our relationship is queer not only because of what we do in it, and what we want from it, but because those desires come from a queer personal history.

I don’t know how far this distinction between straight and queer relationships goes. For instance, I don’t know how this plays out in a situation where one person is queer identified and believes that they bring a queer perspective and experience to a relationship, while the other person identifies as straight and progressive. Is that a queer relationship? I think that one person can certainly exert a huge influence on the dynamics of the couple, even without the other person actively identifying those new dynamics as queer. But does it make sense for one person in a pair to identify their relationship as queer while the other doesn’t? I’m not sure.

I also don’t know what to call it if two people are queer identified but happen to enjoy traditional gender roles, and actively choose to embrace them. I’m not willing to label that as a straight relationship because I think that actively choosing traditional gender roles is fundamentally different than having them imposed and never being entirely aware of them (as happens in a lot of traditional straight relationships). Similarly, I see huge problems with men dominating their wives historically and currently, but I don’t see the same problem with 24/7 dominance/submission couples, even when the man happens to be dominant and the woman submissive. I think that the key here is an active awareness and choice to perform gender and relationship styles, a choice that comes from both partners and with full familiarity with the implications. This is similar to the argument between old and new feminist movements: one generation fought for the right of women to work outside the home, and the next fought for the right of the housewife-by-choice to work inside it and be respected for it.

There aren’t easy answers to these questions because we don’t have the language yet to answer them. We don’t know how to define the sexual orientation of a straight identified woman who falls in love with a trans man. We don’t know what to call relationships between a lesbian and her trans man lover who have been together since long before his transition. And the truth is that someday, we’ll probably develop labels for all these things, as time goes on and more people talk about their experiences. But I’m not particularly excited for that day because I don’t need it. Queer has worked for me thus far, and I’m not likely to abandon it any time soon.

I have a few friends from college who studied anthropology and love to talk about the effect of an anthropologist on the population being studied. The idea is that the anthropologist often can’t study a culture without also affecting that culture with their very presence. The funny thing is that, though I’ve never taken an anthropology course, I totally get their ideas. Why? Because I’m one of the rare anthropologists who can blend into the culture I’m studying.

When I walk into Man Land, I do so looking exactly like a man. I dress like one, act like one, talk like one, all that jazz. Indeed, I am a man, so all this comes quite easily to me. But in some ways, though I identify as a man, I realize just how much of a visitor I am in Man Land. There are customs among men (and specifically, I mean, in all male contexts) that are unfamiliar and strange to me. There are assumptions that I don’t know about and conditioned responses that I have to learn late in life.

In the beginning, my anthropological work in Man Land started as a survival technique. I studied the behavior of men around me because I wanted to fit into their culture and be a part of it. Perhaps more importantly, I didn’t want to screw up and reveal that I wasn’t just like them. So I carefully observed how men moaned and reached to cover their own bits when they saw another guy get kicked in the balls. I learned to sit with my legs far apart, taking up as much space as possible. Little things that I’d never had to think about, like what tone to use when I answered a question, became the focus of my meticulous observations of male behavior.

Let’s be honest—that part of my transition took a lot of work. It was exhausting to learn new rules about every little thing. Eventually, though, the new habits became much easier, and some even came to feel natural. And that’s when the fun part began. Once I could stop worrying about the little things, I started thinking about the bigger things. I began to analyze how guys comforted eachother when tough things happened, and how that differed from the way girls did so. I looked at when physical touch was acceptable and when it was absolutely forbidden, and how teasing about sexuality was used to police this type of thing. Though I don’t spend all my time in groups of guys thinking anthropologically, I certainly spend some of it analyzing what’s going on.

You’d think that the guys I was analyzing would be less than thrilled that I was spending my time observing their social behaviors. I expect that some will feel a little put out, as if I’ve somehow failed to respect their privacy in some way. But actually, when I’ve talked to guys occasionally about it, they’ve responded fairly positively. They argue with my conclusions sometimes, tell me that I’ve missed something critical, but sometimes they agree, and tell me more about the phenomenon I mention.

The truth is that I don’t think I’m particularly good at anthropological observation. Like I said, I’ve never been trained in it in any way. But at the same time, I think that trans folks have a special gift, the ability to blend into a community but still view it from the outside, that allows us to see things that cisgender folks miss. It’s not that we’re smarter or better at observing, but just that we can taste the proverbial gender air which cisgender folks have always just breathed.