sophiaserpentia | Entries tagged with parenting and queerness

Often sited as an objection to homosexual public displays of affection, or transgender... well, existence... is the horrifying prospect of ZOMG having to explain to your children why two women are kissing. As if having to explain something to your child is the worst, most horrendous imposition ever.

A conversation i suspect often goes something like this.

"Hey, mommy! A woman is kissing another woman."

"Yes, dear. Usually when you see a couple you see a man and a woman, but sometimes, men date other men and women date other women."

"Oh." ::shrugs and wrinkles his nose the same way he wrinkles his nose at heterosexual kissing, then turns his attention back to the ball game.::

Children do not get worked up or confused about things like this and usually get the picture much more quickly than adults do. All adult behavior is equally alien and strange to them.

This is a criticism i hear a lot: that most gallae are hyper-focused on skirts, makeup, high-heels, Barbie dolls, and lipstick.

But considering the way we are portrayed in the media, why should anyone believe otherwise? This, from an article about a shelter that provides a place to sleep for the prostituted homeless gallae of New York City:

Every Sunday morning in a second-floor apartment in Astoria, Queens, the Rev. Louis Braxton Jr. rouses a half-dozen sleeping bodies from bunk beds in two cramped rooms littered with stiletto heels and skimpy dresses.

The groggy young adults reach for their makeup kits and fight for the lone bathroom. Once their makeup, hair and clothes are just right, they trudge into the living room, holding handbags and teetering on high heels, and sit facing an altar set up by Father Braxton.

This is the way we can expect to be portrayed in the media even when we resist it. Even when we've shown up to talk about serious issues like HIV, rape, discrimination, or domestic violence, we're asked to pose for the camera in front of a mirror with a makeup brush.

Of course they can't get away with treating "real" women in such blatantly misogynistic and dismissive ways anymore (they used to, of course). But, since we gallae aren't "real" women, all we have is our artifice and pretense to convince people otherwise. Right? So, certainly we spend every minute of every day thinking about lipstick and high heels.

I've even at times felt myself bristle a little when i hear another galla squee that someone held open the door for her or called her "ma'am," but this is because of my own internalized misogyny and transphobia.

Serano calls it "traditional sexism," the idea that anyone feminine is fake, frivolous, and shallow. In the GLBT community it's not only gallae who are seen this way; it's also said about "nelly" gay men and "femme" lesbians. The derogation of these people within the GLBT community is just a reflection of the larger social dismissive and hostile attitude towards anyone who displays feminine traits.

What i do outwardly, in the process of my transition, might look to the casual observer like an obsession with the outer trappings of femininity. I had to buy a lot of women's clothing; i wear makeup; i've had most of my facial hair removed; i may yet go on hormones to feminize my body chemistry and body shape; i may someday have surgery.

But if what i seek seems to you to be a retreat into something artificial, frivolous, and purely socially-defined, then you don't really understand what this means to me. Because it is not those outward trappings that mean anything to me - or to the other gallae who talk about such things.

It is about being able to look in the mirror and, instead of seeing some strange guy looking back at me, i see finally my own reflection. When i look at myself, finally what i see makes sense to me and feels right.

And none of that has fundamentally anything to do with lipstick or heels, per se. Hell, i don't even wear lipstick or heels.

I'm not a rebel. I'm not a sexual fetishist. I'm someone trying to be me.

It took me a long time to get here. Not just the expense and the pain, i mean i started out buried under a mountain of denial so heavy i didn't even have words for what i am or what i feel. A hand had been put over my mouth at a very young age, by my parents, by my church, by my friends, by my teachers, by my politicians, by the leaders of my community; and in the absence of my own words, words were written in my mind to replace them.

But underneath all that, at a place in my subconscious, i still saw myself as female. I pretended to be female when i played, as my sister can attest. I am female in my dreams and in my mystical visions. I don't expect to see a man when i look in the mirror.

Any time these thoughts started to creep up into the realm of words and concepts, there were a million ways for me to shoot them down and retract them. I am still, even today, learning how to give voice to my own authentic words, how to tell them apart from the words written in my mind by other people.

And so, when you look at me you see someone artificial, fake, maybe even monstrous, fussing over makeup and hair. I see... something like the sun finally beginning to rise.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

The officials who run the Miss Spain pageant have changed their eligibility rules so that mothers and transsexual women are allowed to compete.

It’s a strike for… equality?

Won’t it be a shining moment in transgender history when, say, three to five years from now, a galla wins the title of Miss Spain and goes on to have a huge public tussle with the people who run the Miss World pageant?

Eyup, i’m looking forward to it.

It’s kind of sad that the right to be equally objectified alongside women-born-women seems in some ways like a step up. I could write a lot here about the origins of beauty pageants, their fundamental heteronormativity, reinforcement of the male gaze, and, and let’s not forget that modern pageants exist to sell products by bathing suit companies. That stuff is not really what i want to write about today, and it’s easy enough to research if you care.

The average galla, like the average WBW, wants to feel that people think she’s pretty.

I don’t mean “hot” or “doable” or “sexy,” or “i’d hit that.” I’ve been told many times by numerous men that i am an acceptable recipient of their transitory lust — as long as i promise not to say anything to their wives. Few of them bothered to waste the air it would have taken to call me pretty.

So at this point in life i am not concerned about whether or not someone will invite me to bed. But do they think i’m pretty?

Prettiness is… i don’t know. I shouldn’t call it “validation.” It’s more a kind of acceptance, a kind i’ve been starved for my whole life.

I don’t know whether it’s something we’re taught while we’re growing up or if it’s just a reflection of a natural desire to belong and be accepted. It doesn’t matter; either way, it’s too often used as a way to manipulate girls.

It’s not that i think it would confirm that i’m a woman to be told i’m pretty. But most girls, i suppose, are told at least a few times while they’re growing up that they’re pretty; but your average galla, at least those my age, were never told it.

I think my mom said it to me once when i was 14, or at least something to similar effect. I had come out to her, and at first she kind of freaked out. One night, though, she showed me how to brush out a wig, and gave me a few other pointers on dressing and presenting a bit more femininely.

How can i express what that felt like after 14 years of being firmly repressed?

And how do i square this up with what many of my feminist friends have told me, of how it was drilled in their heads non-stop from the time they were small that they had to spend a lot of their time primping so they would look pretty? It is no surprise when WBW meet gallae and hear us “squee” because someone told us we’re pretty, and conclude that we’ve just bought into the social superficial nonsense surrounding femininity and have no idea what it’s really like. I can’t blame them; they were overdosed on the thing which we were starved of, and not only does either treatment make us all pliable it also divides us, causes us to mistrust each other.

Honestly, i don’t find it ‘liberating’ to spend more time in the morning making myself presentable, or to pay thousands of dollars (and cry many tears) to have facial hair removed so i will be more acceptably pretty. But it is ‘freeing’ in the sense that it means i do not have to continue to abide by the course that was set for me by god and country during the first two decades of my life. From my perspective, it more closely resembles the freedom to live life on my own terms.

I am jumping from the fire into the frying pan.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

This morning i had a jarring, chilling exposure to what the word “impressionable” really means.

My wife and i had to go to her son’s school this morning to deal with, well, the kinds of things kids do. All we knew was that the principal wanted to talk to her. I went along as moral support. We didn’t know they were going to drag her son into the room with us so that he could sit on one side of the room with four adults looking at him asking him about what happened. We had no idea we were going to be made into de facto accomplices.

And, to be fair, they didn’t grill him like interrogators. No, it was all maddeningly “reasonable.” It’s just that under any sort of scrutiny whatsoever he closes up, so we didn’t hear much at all of his side of what happened.

I’ve never seen anyone squirm so much in my life. And so, with him basically having been found guilty, we coached him through what he would say by way of apology and reassurance to the other aggrieved kids. To some extent that was appropriate, since kids are still learning about what it means to be an ethical person who respects other people’s boundaries.

But my wife and i were profoundly uncomfortable about the whole “words being put in his mouth” thing. And that’s all i saw everywhere i looked in the school. The “pledge of allegiance to the flag,” which was recited while we were there. Everywhere, ‘motivational’ posters with captions like “Curiosity: i choose to learn.”

The underlying message is, this is a place where we put words into your mouth. You know? I don’t think i’ve ever met a kid who had to be told to “choose to learn.”

When you’re a kid, you don’t have the liberty to choose what you want to do or say. You are told what you want to do or say. And it is often presented obliquely as if it is a desire coming from you, the kid. And when it is said this way often enough, and when you parrot it and get the appropriate reward, it sinks in. Really, really deeply.

It doesn’t matter whether or not kids understand what the pledge of allegiance is about. To them, it’s just dumb words that they have to repeat every morning… which they do in a droning, hypnotic, rhythmic monotone. But they do understand, on a basic level, that it is something they do to make the adults around them beam with pride (”What good, obedient, upstanding, patriotic kids we have!”) and to avoid punishment for not complying.

And much of this is about learning how to perform the gender we’ve been assigned.

Being in school helped remind me about how that worked when i was younger. I remember viewing adulthood as this barren wasteland where you wander around as a broken person, your dreams and individuality stunted beyond repair. I suppose that was my expectation because my preparation for adulthood consisted of this constant pressure to be someone-not-me, by way of the silencing of my own galla-voice and the replacement of it with something suitably “masculine.”

I remember, for example, eagerly joining the high school wrestling team after lots of input from my father about how much he had enjoyed it. I had never been a sporty kid, though being on the wrestling team was actually good for me in some ways. I wonder if people today look at my almost-thigh-length hair and somewhat femme presentation (minus, you know, the occasional stompy boots) and have any trouble picturing me grasping someone and pinning him to the mat?

But i would never have “wanted” to do that if it hadn’t been subtly put there, if it hadn’t been rewarded and encouraged once i said i wanted to do it.

On a bigger scale, this is why women’s “consent” to various kinds of things in a patriarchal society can be so sketchy sometimes.

But this leads into troubling territory because i’m wondering how we can distinguish between “educating” a kid (enabling their cognition while also respecting their identity and will) versus putting our thoughts into their heads and our words in their mouths. Kids don’t always know how to make decisions, it’s one of the things they’re still learning, and they sometimes have to be guided to a decision. (Or… light bulb comes on… do they?)

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

I’m beginning to think that the answer to the question i posed in my last entry is “no.” Not that i am going to give up so easily — i have a penchant for persisting in doing things i feel i have no choice but to do. (But then i also have a penchant for rebelling whenever something starts to feel like destiny.)

But what’s weird is that i feel caught between those who will never let me forget who and what i’ve been, and those to whom my past became invisible when i started to transition.

But isn’t the latter what i wanted? Honestly, no. I mean, i would prefer to have been recognized as a girl when i was seven and raised that way; but i wasn’t. (And yes there are those who have asked, “But why would you have wanted to have been raised as a girl?” Maybe it wouldn’t have been any better than what i experienced; maybe it would have been worse; but it would have been true, and i would have been better able to navigate through it.) The systematic denial and silencing of my gender identity as a child and young adult was deeply hurtful and i want to talk about it so that maybe in the future, parents and other caretakers of transgender children won’t put them through the same things.

And, more simply and basically, i want like everyone else to talk openly about my background.

But come out as trans, and you are suddenly adrift in the sea, tossed this way and that by clashing currents. Everybody on every side has put their hand over my mouth and written their story on my body.

Not that there’s anyone, trans or otherwise, who can’t say the same. Big huge freaking sigh.

When i first came out in 1989, my experience of the queer community is that it was a family of refugees, an entire community of people somewhat adrift because we had nowhere else to turn. Many people i spoke to had been expelled by families, friends, churches, employers, landlords.

I was too young to go to bars legally, but my new girlfriend Dee and i would get in, not to drink but to perform in "AIDS benefits," talent shows the community held. Performers would get a dollar here, a dollar there, which would go towards assistance for people with AIDS who had nowhere else to turn, because the charitable, medical, and church communities treated them like pariahs (many of you are too young to remember what the atmosphere around AIDS was like during the Reagan years), and many of them could not turn to families for help, because they had been utterly rejected. AIDS made people unemployable and homeless back then (and it still does, but perhaps not quite as often). This trickle of money we raised in these performances was sadly significant and direly needed -- and it sent a signal to people with AIDS, that we would stand by them, even if their families and churches and community no longer wanted them.

Like bubbles on water, society's currents pushed us together. We made a liferaft of our huddling, clinging souls in a hostile sea. And this is what it was like in Asheville, a relatively liberal oasis in North Carolina.

Things have changed somewhat, but as the saying goes, the more they change, the more they stay the same. I find it impossible to shake the feeling of being a "refugee," even when i live in an era where people with AIDS are legally protected against discrimination and some places have laws protecting against employment and housing discrimination for queer people. My birth family is not any more accepting of me than it was then, and neither is the Christian religion which i left behind, or the communities in which i've lived.

I see Christians calling us sinful and immoral, but i don't know how to match up their claims with the compassion and solidarity i've witnessed from other queers, given when i had it to give, and drawn upon when i needed it. I don't know how to match up Christian claims of being morally upright with the ugliness i've seen directed at me and people i've known and loved. If Christians are truly interested in 'reclaiming us lost souls,' then they are going to have to treat us with MORE compassion than we use with each other. They've got a long ways to go.

[Poll #614733]

Same-sex couples with children have fewer financial resources than heterosexual married parents, with an average household income almost $12,000 less and a home ownership rate 15 percent lower, new research from UCLA shows.

More than 39 percent of same-sex couples in the United States, age 25-55, are raising children, more than 250,000 of whom are under 18 years old.

The picture of same-sex couples raising children presented by the 2000 U.S. Census is much different than the popular misconception that gay people are predominantly male, affluent, urban, white and childless, said Gary Gates, co-author of the study, sponsored by the Williams Project, which studies sexual orientation law.

"Same-sex couples raising children are more racially and ethnically diverse and do not fare as well economically as their different-sex married counterparts. As such, they and their children are in particular need of the legal, social and economic benefits of marriage," he said.

... The study provides an indicator of how "inequality in marriage truly harms our families and our children," said Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of the Family Pride Coalition. "It's still the case that many LGBT parents are forced to spend significant amounts of money to cobble together whatever legal protections they can -- if they are able to afford that at all -- because they can't access all the rights and responsibilities of marriage that come freely to heterosexual couples and parents," she told the PlanetOut Network.

from Study: Gay parents poorer than straight ones

Someone on my friend's list has been posting stuff about birth order and its effect on personality, and i got curious about whether or not there is any correlation between birth order, sexual orientation and gender identity.

I found this:

Schott's findings show that crossdressers are more likely to be oldest siblings and male-only siblings than the average population. His findings also shows that crossdressers experienced a better relationship with their mothers than the control group. Schott concludes that because crossdressers perceived their mothers as warm and tender and their fathers as cold and hostile, that they developed an aversion to masculinity. (from Aspects Of Transgenderism)

Although as someone male-born and first-born who is perhaps more strongly attracted to men sexually (my sexual moods oscillate slowly over a 6-9 month period), i bucked one trend:

For a male child, Blanchard found, the more older brothers in his family, the higher the probability that he would be gay. A firstborn male has a likelihood of homosexuality of about 2%. But for a boy with four older brothers, those odds jump to 6%, Blanchard found. In all, he estimated, one in seven gay men owed his sexual orientation to this "fraternal birth order" effect. (from Pieces of the Puzzle)

I find it really eerie to read descriptions of other people's childhood that could have come from my own (this from the second article above) -- and sad-making to read about parental acceptance i wish i could say parallels my own experience:

The distinction, say researchers, is gender-bending behavior that is neither subtle nor temporary. It isn't "just a phase," say parents like Angela and James, a couple who spoke on condition their last names not be used.

By the time he was 18 months old, their son, now almost 7, was drawn to his mother's shoes and scarves--the silkier or more glittery they were, the more enticing they were. From 3 years old, he "'would obsess" about the Little Mermaid and Cinderella, mimicking their dresses, their songs and their gestures, according to his parents.

"Being the progressive, modern-thinking parents we were, we thought, 'Let's not stereotype,' " said Angela, explaining why the couple bought their son a Barbie doll (and a Ken, whom the child pointedly ignored) when he asked for it.

It was a poignant moment of epiphany--the day their then-4-year-old son stood up in a shopping cart and wept at the realization that he would not grow up to be a mommy--that drove the couple to seek treatment for the child's "gender-identity disorder."

"Teach him to play Monopoly, not to sing in the rain." -Jethro Tull, "Thick as a Brick"

Though I yesterday characterized my voice as "that of queer-fat-trannie," I shouldn't neglect the aspect of me that still remembers what it is like to be a white hetero male.

I'm still white, of course, and it's arguable whether or not I was ever "really" male or hetero, but that's how I identified, and that's how society saw me. When I first began to examine critical and feminist thought 13 years ago, I was soon to be married, and the world was my oyster. I wanted to learn about oppression and social stratification, but I was hindered by the problem of how exactly to relate to the issue or to literature about it.

The assertion that I was privileged didn't gel with my experience. I never questioned exploitation or discrimination, but personally, I felt anything but 'privileged.' My life had been mapped out for me by my parents and by society; I was to excel in academic pursuits and then settle into a suitably bourgeois white-collar life with my wife and the kids we would have.

As a teen I was extraordinarily angsty because I had no way to articulate how constricting this life-plan felt. As I wrote a few months ago, "Have you ever pondered that what it means to be an adult, might mean to finally have your spirit broken?" A lot of you challenged that, but that was how it felt to me. Three years before I became a Women's Studies student, I had told my parents that I was transsexual and their reaction was harsh and unapproving. The tension was released (or I should say, went back inside me) when a year later I retracted, and I started dating women shortly thereafter.

I also felt that my emotional and creative expression was terribly stifled. The range of things you're allowed to express as a white hetero male, especially emotionally, can feel very constraining. Your expressions, your mode of dress, and so on, are critically examined all the time to make sure you "stay in line." I don't recall being explicitly told that "boys don't cry," but it was more than obvious that crying was forbidden. "Being a man" requires a lot of effort and other men are always examining you for signs of insufficient masculinity. I went from living with a family that expected me to be stoic, to a marriage with a wife who expected me to be stoic.

I often felt that the only emotion I was free to really express was anger, and when I was young, I had a LOT of it.

The mythopoeic men's movement fascinated me. It was the first time I had ever heard anyone say that lots of men felt just as constrained by their gender roles as I did. The "voice with the microphone" in this culture may be that of a white hetero male, but that doesn't mean it speaks their experience, but often offers instead only a constructed facade, the experience that they "should" feel. If white hetero men stop acting as the footsoldiers in the hegemony of domination, the elites in the upper echelons will lose their privilege, and we can't have that.

Now, my own experience might not actually be that of a white hetero male. I don't know the answer to that.

But in any case I felt that it was plainly obvious that the forces which constrained me were the same as those forces which constrained women and people of color, and it hurt when a few of the feminists I tried to say this to told me that discussion about how patriarchy hurts men is not appropriate in a feminist forum. (I didn't understand then what I do now, about how bringing up men's issues in feminist forums reflected male privilege.)

Now I see things from a different perspective. If I could speak to my younger self, I would counsel him to learn how to listen to other people's anger, because learning that enabled me to see the ways in which I was truly privileged and kept myself from seeing it. I would also counsel him to listen to perspectives without presuming an agenda.

Over the past few days I've been tagging the entries in my journal (I'm back to Nov. 2004 now, what a wonderful tool tags are!) and have noticed a pattern -- a few contentious journal entries aimed at Christianity and usually inspired by anti-queer agitation in the news, followed by a resolution not to let myself get drawn into posting divisive comments. Then a month (or even a week) later, I'm doing it again.

I've been wondering over the past few days whether it is possible to examine the question of power inequality without getting drawn into divisiveness. The prime examples often cited are from exemplary people -- MLK Jr. and Gandhi and a brave few who are able to speak about racial or sexual or religious inequality while remaining completely unflappable. They've set a standard of perfection and dignity which is admirable, but which sets the bar uncomfortably high for the rest of us to meet in a healthy way.

Then this morning it came together when a friend mentioned in a locked entry that even things like reading a newspaper can trigger a PTSD response -- fear and anxiety. I haven't been able to find online an article outlining a clear exposition of this link, but many times the advice given to people being treated for PTSD includes avoiding the news media.

I began to wonder if maybe PTSD makes oppression possible. If people of a given class are more likely than average to suffer from abuse, then a random person from that class is also more likely than average to respond with fear and anxiety to news about similar things happening to others in the same class.

Figures for the prevalence of depression in our society are estimated at 5-7%, with higher percentages for women than men. The one-year prevalance for generalized anxiety disorder is 3%, again with higher percentages for women than men. Compare this to the figure of over 40% of people in the GLBT community at any given time I cited a while back.

Now, depression statistics are not proof of PTSD, but they might be suggestive of it. Other evidence which I've cited before show very high percentages for major disruptive or traumatic abusive events in the lives of GLBT people. So it does not seem out of line to suppose that much of the depression or anxiety experienced by GLBT people is due to (mostly undiagnosed) PTSD.

One line of research has suggested a link between racism and PTSD response.

People who are victimized because of their race share an unfortunate legacy with victims of terrorism. Both suffer the effects of violence inflicted on them because of factors beyond their control—effects that are often both severe and chronic.

This is the contention of Chalsa Loo, Ph.D., a clinical research psychologist at the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’s Pacific Islands Division. The center is a project of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

... She noted that her findings on the relationship of racism and PTSD are in line with those of studies done in the mid-1980s that showed that African-American Vietnam veterans showed more psychological problems and adjustment difficulties than Caucasian soldiers. She suggested that a major factor in the postwar problems experienced by African-American veterans may have arisen from guilt and rage related to emotionally identifying with the "devalued" and oppressed Vietnamese people they were fighting.

"This finding tells us that the personal experience of racism is a potent risk factor for PTSD," she stated, and one to which clinicians and researchers have rarely paid attention.

The message for psychiatrists, Loo suggested, is that clinicians who fail to account for and discuss possible race-related stressors with their non-Caucasian patients are potentially missing a major cause of PTSD symptoms. (from Race-Related Stressors Can Trigger PTSD)

The picture is starting to become clear. I noted above the higher depression and anxiety figures for women because the typical explanation is to suppose that there is something about women's biochemistry that makes them more prone to mental illness. In light of sexism, could it be that women are simply traumatized more often then men?

So, news of intolerance-inspired abuse spreads like fire through an oppressed community and generates fear and anxiety not because they can imagine it happening to them in an abstract way, but because on a mass scale it triggers a PTSD flashback. In the GLBT community, this response can also be triggered by anti-gay comments styled in Christian language because so many of us were traumatized with this language as the soundtrack; for example, one fourth of us have been expelled or alienated from families or homes, often because the parents could not accept their child's "un-Christian" lifestyle.

Anxiety, fear and depression dampens one's will and lessens one's access to political and economic resources -- creating an advantage in someone who does not have it. Therefore PTSD is an effective tool of exploitation and therefore of oppression. Furthermore, in a typical victim-blaming pattern it is often cited as "proof" that there is something inherently inferior or unclean about women (feminists)/racial minorities/religious minorities/queer people or the way they live.

This thought doesn't give me a lot of optimism for the question I posed at the outset.

As a follow-up to the post I wrote in the middle of the night (when I couldn't sleep) about the way I feel I was failed by my parents (which in turn was a follow-up to my reflections on the way I feel I was failed by religious school), another aspect of this is the thought that they simply didn't have faith in me. My parents were not all that religious, but they sent me to religious school anyway. They said they did this because they wanted to make sure I received a quality education, but I wonder how much of it was an effort to program my queer tendencies out of me?

One of the earliest comments I can remember my father making was that he was afraid that watching Mr. Rogers (who I loved when I was four) was turning me into a wimp, so I wasn't allowed to watch his show any more.

He rarely actually told me to do one thing or another, he just made it clear what it was that I should do if I wanted his approval, and that his approval would be withheld otherwise. Memories from my childhood are sketchy, and it is hard for me to consider how anything other than my childhood experience was normal (something I understand that people who were abused as children have difficulty comprehending). So I have to piece this together using clues: I must have been emotionally starved as a child. I have overpowering fears of abandonment and dependency, a willingness to do anything to earn even slim tokens of approval, and a driving need to find male affection. (Even so, I have trouble accepting male affection when I find it, which means that I usually seek out unhealthy expressions of male affection.)

A few years ago I was puzzled when I heard a therapist describe me as having been neglected as a child. After all, I received all kinds of encouragement -- to study math and science, and participate in sports, and learn how to do "manly" things like car repair and house repair. Many times as a teen I was dragged down to the garage to help him with car repairs, being bored out of my skull, and wondering why he wouldn't let my sister (who is also, as it turned out, genderqueer) go instead because she really wanted to be there.

Taken alone, none of those things sound all that bad. So it's very easy for me to rationalize and say that I am making a lot out of nothing. I mean, here I am, complaining about how injured I am because I had to help fix the car? But the underlying tone, the nonverbal message, the sum total of what these things added up to, was that I was valued and nurtured only to the extent that I pretended to be someone I am not.

When I was eighteen I told my father that I am transsexual, and his response (after thinking about it for a few days) was that I must have searched high and low for the one thing that he couldn't possibly accept. Even if I was gay, he told me, he could learn to live with that. As if the person I am is a personal attack on him or something.

There is an extent to which all of this adds fuel to my efforts to debunk fundamentalist Christianity, even though this was not a prominent part of the abuse from my family when I was a teen. (Well, outside of the occasional unprovoked vitriolically homophobic exclamations my mother sometimes made.) As I wrote a while ago, I think many of us tend to look at God as a father-equivalent, and those of us with anger towards our fathers are likely to be angry at God, too. (Edit: just to be clear, that's not why I do it -- I do it mostly because I believe that the fundamentalists' ridiculous beliefs contribute to human suffering. But it adds a degree of eagerness to the task that might not otherwise be there.)

tw1stedwh1spers asks,

it seems to me that shaping the behavior of a child towards socialization is the purpose of being a parent. If we have an intrinsic inherent identity, it would seem to me that we must be born with it. Socialization is something that has to be taught and for some is harder than others. But it is a necessary skill for a child to learn and is the primary duty of a parent after the protection of a child from danger and meeting its needs for survival. If you want to throw feces around the room, your parent has to convince you not to do it so you don't grow up thinking its okay to throw feces. It's that simple. So where do you stop? Maximizing the desire for having your child fit in would include an attempt to normalize their sexual identity. Is that wrong? Is sexual desire sacrosanct and thus shouldn't be interfered with? If you live in a Puritanical society that's going to burn homosexuals at the stake, aren't you doing your child a service by convincing them homosexuality is wrong and thus keeping them from rogering the neighbor's stable boy in the barn and getting the two of them burned alive?

The actions and attitudes of parents who hold these views contribute to the perpetuation of these patterns. A homosexual child who gets the message from her parents that homosexuality is bad, internalizes these views and never quite gets over them, and in the end finds ways to subconsciously sabotage her own happiness. This is one of the ways in which homophobia creates inequalities in the social playing field and reduces queer peoples' access to economic, political, and social opportunity.

A generation of children without internalized homophobia are more likely to stand up against overt homophobia and act for its end.

To illustrate what I mean in more concrete terms, suppose a black child's parents told him that black people never amount to much in American society, so he really shouldn't get his hopes up about having a good life. As an adult, he is going to be much less likely to find the courage to oppose racism in his life. Many (if not most!) of the women I've known received messages like this as children, either from their parents, or from society around them, or both. What's worse -- teaching children to accept the existence of sexism or racism and hide and cower in the face of it, or raising them to defy it and thereby force people to examine their prejudices?

Internalized transphobia has damaged my life greatly. For years I found numerous ways to sabotage my own happiness, because I was convinced that people do not love me for who I am but for who I pretend to be. My parents did not prepare me for the dangers of transphobia in society, they taught me to hate myself. And because of it, I am not interested in speaking to them right now, and I'm not sure I ever will again.

A child's parents should be her advocate against the wrongness in the world -- not her critic. So as a counterpoint to the scenario illustrated above, suppose the parents instead tell the child, "You are a wonderful person as you are, but society is very screwed up, and you will have to be careful. But know that we will love you and fight for you no matter what."

When I first read your question, and pondered how I was going to answer it, I asked myself if I would rather be raised by the parents who taught me to hate myself, or by the parents of the fourth-grade transboy here in Massachusetts who stuck by him against the complaints and resistance of other parents in the school district, or the similar case (again here in Massachusetts) of a transgirl who's grandmother sued on her behalf. Or the parents of Gwen Araujo and Brandon Teena, who have become advocates for ending transphobia after losing their children to transphobic violence.

Thinking about this question made me cry, because I realized the profoundness of what I'd been denied, by my parents, by my church, by the people and institutions who raised me. I was taught not to fight for myself but to deny who I am, and I still suffer every single day because of it.

Current Mood: angry

I was actually very surprised to see that most people didn't seem to resonate with my comment about adulthood being about killing your dreams, breaking your spirit, and pretending to be someone other than who you are.

Is it that unusual to come away from childhood with the message that this is what it's all about?

Current Music: Poe "Wild"

The private conservative Christian school I attended when I was young has a webpage, which I finally sought out today.

It makes me think of the song "It's a Sin" by the Pet Shop Boys:

At school they taught me how to be
So pure in thought and word and deed
They didn't quite succeed

My parents and teachers did literally everything they could, short of physical violence, to turn me into what they wanted me to be. My mother once admitted she saw me doing things when I was two years old which indicated that I was going to be different.

So how is that, despite the Bible studies and Sunday school and all the "boy" things my father pushed me into and the pressure towards dating and marriage which I received, that I'm not a good Christian heterosexual monogamous married man? I pretended to be those things for years after I realized I wasn't, because I have a powerful fear of abandonment and have, for most of my life, been willing to do things which are wrong or bad for me in order to find any degree of acceptance.

In spite of all that, I am what I am now.

You can take someone who is naturally left-handed, and train them to eat and write with the right hand, but you can't change the fundamental handedness orientation in the brain. It shows up in ways not compensated for by special right-hand training.

I think it comes down to this: you cannot use words and concepts to make someone into someone they are not. And where this causes emotional stress, it is a socially-sanctioned form of abuse.

Have you ever pondered that what it means to be an adult, might mean to finally have your spirit broken?

Current Music: Blue Oyster Cult "Harvester of Eyes"

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sophiaserpentia

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please god someone think of the parents who have to EXPLAIN things to their children!
the sun beginning to rise
the right to be equally objectified
what “impressionable” means
essentially adrift
compassion and families of choice
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my life as a white hetero male
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and oppression
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They didn't quite succeed

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The Serpent's Wisdom

Eat of this fruit; your eyes shall be opened, and you will be as Gods.

Entries tagged with parenting and queerness

please god someone think of the parents who have to EXPLAIN things to their children!

the sun beginning to rise

the right to be equally objectified

what “impressionable” means

essentially adrift

compassion and families of choice

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

my life as a white hetero male

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and oppression

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

They didn't quite succeed

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December 2021

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