My World

I've been thinking about this post for a long time now, a month or more I would say. I feel like I have come to a point where I'm not sure what else to say. I feel like I have been saying more or less the same things over and over just in a different way and quite honestly, I have gotten somewhat bored of it.

What I never get bored of is thinking. I get frustrated with it, I get angry or depressed with it even but I never stop. This is something I have been thinking about in relation to me and nothing else for several months, it is only the last few months that I have been thinking about how to make this a post.

It started when talking to a friend, the conversation was about me specifically and how I was feeling. It was all in good intentions and went something like this.

Friend: "Yadda yadda"
Me: "blah blah"
Friend: "As long as you feel like a woman then it'll be ok."

Now without getting into where that came from, and through no reason of it being said by this person, I couldn't help but think about that statement non-stop. And the question I kept asking myself was a simple one, in form if nothing else. "What do you mean 'feel like a woman'?"

That question has been the focal point of my journey as a trans-woman ever since I knew I wanted to be a woman. I would think to myself constantly that if I were meant to be a woman, or later when I knew the label for it, if I am transgender then there should be something intrinsic about me that is definitively female. I searched my inner self high and low, and over two decades and have only found the question to be a non-starter. The test that every seemingly good answer always failed to pass was, "Is this feeling I have ONLY able to be had by a woman."

The answer to that is of course, "No.". To be the person I am, to be real followers of the values the majority of the LGBTQ2 world seems to profess and I certainly do, I simply cannot believe there is a single one thing that either gender exclusively feels. How sexist to suggest otherwise, wouldn't you agree?

But I've come to see how I live in a perfect world, largely because I spend 90% of my time alone. Not because I'm perfect (lol) but because everything in a world that consists of 90% me is something I clearly mostly agree with. The real world doesn't seem to fully accept this spectrum. Now I'm sure these people have their hearts in the right place, the problem tends to come when the spectrum doesn't work for them. I'll try to explain...

An increasingly large amount of the population is started to see gender and sexuality as a spectrum. I think one could argue a circle, but I'm not going to try that here. Essentially you have male and hetero on one side female and hetero on the other and people fall somewhere in between that. Now in my world people don't care where other people fall in that spectrum. In my world anyone can be who they want to be, love who they want to love, use which bathroom they want to use. Sorry, not "don't care" that's too harsh for my world, people love the fact that you are being you in my world.

In the real world however, a lot of people do get upset if you are something they don't agree with, you can only love certain people and who goes to which bathroom is up for debate. The problem, as I see it, is people lump all of these things together when it comes to fighting for rights. Where people get very emotional and defensive when you try to tell them how they can dress or look or who they are allowed to love, and with understanding. These are the sort of things that are absolutely not up for debate. These are the sort of things that is no one else's business like who or how you fuck. With these, case closed, move along, nothing to see here as far as I'm concerned. Because in my world gender and sexuality isn't something you try to hide from the world, it is something you try to bring to the world, something every human being needs to cherish about themselves.

The other questions though, like who can go where, I'm far more uncertain. The public washroom question is one that seems like I can't think about fairly because I always simply fall on "who really cares"? Clearly some people do but I can't think of a sensible argument that they may be correct so I can't come up with sensible reasoning that could convince these people.

Honestly, that is a problem I have for most of these questions, the Wiccan Rede is the perfect answer, "Harm none, do what ye will." But let me talk about a problem that I had to try to solve in the real world and honestly, didn't. Now honestly my answer would have affected nothing, I'm not in that sort of position, but there was a point that it came to me to figure out.

I was talking with two friends of mine, we were getting together to talk about a workshop we were going to do with the women's center in my city. We ended up talking about inclusion, who would/is accepted in a woman's center? We didn't know the answer, and sadly I didn't find out through no fault but my own from not asking yet. (something I will have to do)  But we had a little brainstorming session. I won't get into our talk but I will explain my thinking on the whole situation.
I looked at it this way. Let's go down the list of who is and isn't included, so we start with women, obviously women are welcome in a women's center. Next is trans-women, which as far as we knew were also welcome. I guess we skipped over gender neutral (sorry) and next was trans-men, we honestly had no answer for this, were they already welcome, should they be and should we convince a center to? And then there is men who aren't welcome. My inner question is, where is the dividing line between trans-men and men? I sort of defaulted to how the trans-men feel about it because I have no idea, really. This is where the spectrum gets complicated and sometimes works against us. And by work against us, I mean it doesn't work in our immediate favour. Nothing but good can come from getting the entire population to accept and fully understand this spectrum.

Why should trans-men be welcome? I couldn't help but think about being in the opposite situation. If there were such a thing as a "Men's center" and they were to say they welcome trans-women I would actually be insulted, profoundly insulted. Honestly, asking myself where the dividing line between trans-men and men felt insulting. Imagine if someone were to ask me, "Where do you think the dividing line between women and trans-women is?" I'd probably go ballistic. If a Men's center was welcoming trans-women I would think they should be welcoming cis-women. Therefore, the opposite seems to make sense to me as well. If you allow trans-men in a women's center, then you should allow men. To say other wise feels to me to be insulting to the trans community as a whole. You are basically saying, while trying to be helpful, you aren't entirely a man and you're close enough to a woman to be allowed. I would chew on a cinderblock if someone said the opposite to me.

I guess I could come up with a working decision if I ran such a place and had to make it myself, but since I don't I have yet to answer this question in any sort of meaningful existential way. I can't answer this question for the same reason I can't answer the question I started with. Where is this line that everyone wants to draw? What are these feelings that are absolutely male or female? I feel like the world is locked in the binary frame of mind simply by giving weight to those questions because I think a lot of people think they have answers. People seem to think too small, they think of one or two hyper examples and assume the rest falls into place. We know the real world isn't like that at all. The real world consists of every option you can think of and they are ALL valid.

I feel like I am example of how much harm these absolute questions with no answers caused. When I was trying to figure myself out in my young years I knew nothing about the world, all I knew was what was around me. What was around me, especially back then, was a constant barrage of binary gender and sexual do's and don'ts. This works for most people because most people are cis-hetero but when you aren't one of those people, the pressure of this imposed binary becomes your cage. When your gender becomes a question, because for most it never is questioned, you have nothing to look at for answers but the ocean of possibilities within your own heart and mind. All I had was this whimsical desire to shed the body I was in and don a new one. I couldn't place my feelings in boxes labelled "male" and "female"

And that's it, that's all I can come up with. The only thing I can equate "feeling like a woman" to is how I feel about how people view me. I can't say "I'm a woman because I feel pretty.". "Pretty" has no gender, it's just a word, but I can say I love how I feel when someone tells me I look pretty. (female being implied) It is the person who I present to others that makes me feel like a woman everything else is just "me".

I guess I spend a lot of time thinking about how the world around a trans-person affects them because I feel deeply affected by it myself particularly when I was young. That's why I have invented my world. In my world there is no gender or sexual pressure on kids, or anyone really. I feel no need to keep sex away from children, in fact I have always found it suspect when people say we can't show kids sexual material but encourage them to violence. (and then wonder why violence is sexualized, sigh) The more comfortable our entire culture becomes with gender and sexuality the easier these young people will find it do discover themselves. Imagine a world where 100% of the children grow up not just being ok with, but being confident in their sexuality and knowledgeable of the sexuality of others. Once that generation grows up we will have law makers, civil servants, volunteers, doctors and their patients, etc etc that would have no need for questions like "what bathroom should a certain group use?". Gendered bathrooms, change rooms, clothing, toys would become a thing of the past, a relic of the "old way we used to think."

Then maybe, just maybe, I could welcome you all to my world.