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highlyeccentricConclusion: I should find someone to talk to me about my gender, IN FRENCH. Candidates: my actual therapist; or the social worker at Checkpoint Bern (a native Francophone); or seeing the trans specific social worker at Checkpoint Lausanne.
After Zurich Pride, I'm planning on doing Pride Romandie (much smaller) in Bulle (medium size village, ie, tiny in terms of places that have pride parades). Friend Hobbit S and their partner V will pick me up in Bern and drive me there.
Hobbit S has been asked to point-person an Asexual gathering/marching conglomerate. Parade too small to require that all groups have A Float. I found this out when I suggested that we three (all some flavour of trans) meet up with TGNS.
S is unsure if they should Organise an ace thing.
Me: OH happy to join up there!
Me: I can volunteer my rusty French! I thinK I can even explain why I'm there without implying you're my partner!
And then I had twenty seconds to think and... okay I COULD probably describe the circumstances of my ace-compatibility and how I know that, via describing K, etc. Or I could just... grab the available mostly-fits term, demisexuel*le. (I would have to make strategic choices about nouns and adjectives and pronouns, and I can't get any iel-users to explain how they do grammatical accord, if they don't all do the soft-stop * form, which I'm pretty sure they don't all do and also isn't a top option for me, I just sound like I can't speak French.)
I do not grab this term in English, for two reasons: firstly, most people I know who ID as demisexual react with repulsion to the concept of polyamory and all CERTAINLY go :s to the idea of bangin' on a first date, which I do occasionaly do. My... whatever, my weird situation is composed not of "know well before being able to countenance sex" so much as "I don't actually lust after people, most of the time, until AFTER I've already slept with them". IE, i require the "deep connection" of "able to have sex with this person, and indeed, I did, look" before wholistically lusting. (Some exceptions apply) Most demisexual and grey-ace people I know regard my sexual choices as repulsively hornt.
Secondarily, I have reason to believe that if I invested in asexuality as my primary identity I would use that to restrict myself. Given my well-attested Repression History, and that I... keep dating people with higher libidos than me, and envying them, like I WANT to be hornt but am not... this seems unwise.
And of course RIGHT NOW given I'm off the pill for once, and considering taking T, it seems foolish to sign up to an identity primarily understood as "not horny".
BUT. If I had to introduce myself in French in an ace space, then yes, I would say demisexuelle (probably in that form), with a bit of a shrug. And I therefore realised that if happened to hook up with a francophone... yeah, I would use demisexuelle to approximate my whole... DEAL. And I would feel a lot less angst about it than I would using the analagous term in English. It's just a WORD. If it achieves the COMMUNICATION GOAL, then HOORAY, I have COMMUNICATED IN FRENCH.
I think I really need to talk to someone about Gender in French. My German just isn't good enough to do the job, but my French might.
(Also: what if I signed in to Lingoda classes as Ed and just... used M grammar? It would feel fake. But deliberately fake as opposed to offensively fake. I don't know if it would fuck up my language aquisition, but I feel like defaulting to m is a common grammar error, so if I aquired it, a few weeks of immersion or a chunk of fr>de should break me of it...)
After Zurich Pride, I'm planning on doing Pride Romandie (much smaller) in Bulle (medium size village, ie, tiny in terms of places that have pride parades). Friend Hobbit S and their partner V will pick me up in Bern and drive me there.
Hobbit S has been asked to point-person an Asexual gathering/marching conglomerate. Parade too small to require that all groups have A Float. I found this out when I suggested that we three (all some flavour of trans) meet up with TGNS.
S is unsure if they should Organise an ace thing.
Me: OH happy to join up there!
Me: I can volunteer my rusty French! I thinK I can even explain why I'm there without implying you're my partner!
And then I had twenty seconds to think and... okay I COULD probably describe the circumstances of my ace-compatibility and how I know that, via describing K, etc. Or I could just... grab the available mostly-fits term, demisexuel*le. (I would have to make strategic choices about nouns and adjectives and pronouns, and I can't get any iel-users to explain how they do grammatical accord, if they don't all do the soft-stop * form, which I'm pretty sure they don't all do and also isn't a top option for me, I just sound like I can't speak French.)
I do not grab this term in English, for two reasons: firstly, most people I know who ID as demisexual react with repulsion to the concept of polyamory and all CERTAINLY go :s to the idea of bangin' on a first date, which I do occasionaly do. My... whatever, my weird situation is composed not of "know well before being able to countenance sex" so much as "I don't actually lust after people, most of the time, until AFTER I've already slept with them". IE, i require the "deep connection" of "able to have sex with this person, and indeed, I did, look" before wholistically lusting. (Some exceptions apply) Most demisexual and grey-ace people I know regard my sexual choices as repulsively hornt.
Secondarily, I have reason to believe that if I invested in asexuality as my primary identity I would use that to restrict myself. Given my well-attested Repression History, and that I... keep dating people with higher libidos than me, and envying them, like I WANT to be hornt but am not... this seems unwise.
And of course RIGHT NOW given I'm off the pill for once, and considering taking T, it seems foolish to sign up to an identity primarily understood as "not horny".
BUT. If I had to introduce myself in French in an ace space, then yes, I would say demisexuelle (probably in that form), with a bit of a shrug. And I therefore realised that if happened to hook up with a francophone... yeah, I would use demisexuelle to approximate my whole... DEAL. And I would feel a lot less angst about it than I would using the analagous term in English. It's just a WORD. If it achieves the COMMUNICATION GOAL, then HOORAY, I have COMMUNICATED IN FRENCH.
I think I really need to talk to someone about Gender in French. My German just isn't good enough to do the job, but my French might.
(Also: what if I signed in to Lingoda classes as Ed and just... used M grammar? It would feel fake. But deliberately fake as opposed to offensively fake. I don't know if it would fuck up my language aquisition, but I feel like defaulting to m is a common grammar error, so if I aquired it, a few weeks of immersion or a chunk of fr>de should break me of it...)
no subject
Date: 2022-06-19 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-21 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-20 07:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-21 08:38 pm (UTC)But you should note that this annoys me more than it would have two years ago. And it would annoy MOST trans people more than it annoys me.
Step 1: I, too, wish we did not have to label ourselves by gender. Humans is humans. Just... ugh. If I did not need to do this, I would not.
But I do. For some reason. It has reached the point where I would rather go through *this much stupid shennanigans* to communicate "not a lady". I am open to the possibility that, given physical changes (an interlocking but not exactly cognate issue), I might desire, in 2-5 years, "fine, a man, if you will". I resent MANY of the circumstances where I'm required to communciate this (eg: forms). But others are... uh. I resent gendered languages, but I also fuckin' love both my second and third lang, and Latin to boot. I tried learning Japanese, which is much less gendered (which, i suspect, is why the weeaboo population is more nonbinary than the average anglophone or the average japanese population).
I still don't know why the fuck this matters to me. Like. Can't I just be a gnc woman? Well. I can give symptomatic descriptions of my difficulties there - my chances of passing as a man, tits and all, are, if given access to T, higher than my chances of passing as butch. But no, ultimately, what I'm trying to do by "labelling myself" is communicate "these are the people who I'm most like, you can understand me by looking at them". Which in this case includes an assortment of butch-nonbinary people, nonbinary transmasc (not the same as butch) people, and trans guys. And a few transfemmes!
Step 2: Gender is... important. I don't grok this at a bone-deep level, not the way Serano articulates it. But there are many people who react like *hisssss noooo* at gender-abolitionist feminsit and/or queer politics. A lotta queer people, especially but not exclusively trans women, are... that goddamn certain that they are their gender. I mean so are a lot of cishet people, but I don't trust cishet people to be certain out of actual ... rootedness, rather than lack of introspection.
There used to be a blogger named Ozy Frantz, who has disappeared from t'internets, perhaps because they spent way too much time in the "everything goes" rationalist/sceptic internet and at some point in the last five years that's gotta become untenable for a trans queer pereson. BUT. Despite their cluenessness vis a vis the company they kept, I glommed onto their framework of gender and I am still not convinced they were wrong. They hypothesised that there were people who had a strong gender compass toward "woman" (often, but not always, also toward femininity) and people who had strong gender compasses toward "man" (often but not always, also toward mascuinity). And that most other people had decreasingly less strong gender anchors (eg: anchored to womanhood but not femininity, or to femininity but not to womanhood - i can no longer remember if Ozzy articulated this or if I extrapolated it. perhaps the latter. I was highly attuned to feminist treatements of gay m femininity at the time), and many or even MOST people are "cis by default".
I read that description, cis by default and a HUGE WEIGHT lifted off me. Because, at 21-24, whenever I read that, I *did not have a strong compulsion to articulate myself as something other than a woman*. In fact, I had finally found (for unfun reasons) at 20-21, real inarguable reasons I was "like the other girls". But mostly, I had read transfeminsit commentary and I had read both second and third wave feminist commentary, and I had seen either NO ONE has a gender or EVERYONE HAS A GENDER. I had never seen "people have varying degrees of gender". I breathed a huge sigh of relief. By this time, I knew I sided with trans inclusion politically, but geez, trans women seemed weirdly INTO womanhood. Like the evangelical xn women I grew up with or like new-age "divine feminine" cults or like... I didn't know what, but it seemed weird as hell.
I accepted, per Ozzy, that I could have little to no internal gender compass. And yet continue to describe myself as a woman, because, well. It was 2011 there weren't other options. And even when nonbinary gained prominance as a discrete identity (rather than a politics), I... did not care enough to be nonbinary EVEN THOUGH IT DESCRIBED ME.
Now I care enough. I am as baffled as anyone else.
BUT. If I flip my brain over to second language speaking mode, I stop asking "but what am I? How do I label myself?", because I stop expecting my words to be completely accurate. If asked, in French, am I demisexuelle? Sure. I would quibble with demisexuel*le, on gendering grounds, before I would quibble with the description of my attraction patterns. Because in my second language I care more about *what words let me connect quickly with the actual humans in front of me".
And that, in short, is why identity-words matter. Not for Official Labels. But for *connecting with, or explainging ourselves to, the humans in front of us*
no subject
Date: 2022-06-25 03:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-21 09:00 pm (UTC)Short version is I wish genders in society at large were like queer genders *in the late 20th c and subsequently*. I wish man vs woman had as much salience as "soft butch" or "masc power bottom". I have read ye olde bar dyke literature and sure, my relationship with Stone Butch Blues needs reconfiguring after 5 years, but I would NOT have coped in a strict butch/femme environment any more than a strictly oppositionally gendered one. I hate spaces where masc/femme are correlated to top/bottom, so that also rules out most gay m spaces. I LIKE "woman on top" het erotics - starting with just, like, cowboy position and moving on to pegging; but anyone who has DONE that knows pegging is a service top role, if not a sub-top role - more than I like butch/femme or d/s erotics.
But. Taking into account my social position, my LINGUISTIC position (I might not be where I am now if I had given the fuck up and stayed in Aus! German is my enemy, but hopefully in an enemies-to-lovers way!), and my erotic preferences: I need to communciate SOMETHING. All my attempts to communciate role preferences *even in my love/sex life alone* have failed to be 100% successful. Combine that with, well, one's work life does not allow fine-tuned individual preferences - my boss is fantastic but HR are not and SPEAK GERMAN... the common worst factor here is *assigned gender at birth* Ergo. I need to label myself either "none of the above" or "m, grammatically, regardless of paperwork", in order to achieve a ... a VIBE I can cope with.
I'm giving you the most honest and least defensible position I can. I might not need to label myself nonbinary, or transmasc, etc, if I were still in Aus. Or I might concievably be able to keep working under f and family-ing under "daughter" while conducting my romantic life under "queer as fuck, esp in the gender". But that would involve, due to communal standards, making pronoun choices at the very least.
SO HERE I ARE. Required to describe myself, and those descriptions will be *treated* as labels.