[I started writing this several hours ago, so now the "Rusty in a meeting" part doesn't make sense. But he was in a meeting when I started it!]
While Rusty is at a meeting and I’m waiting for him at the office after hours since we carpooled to work, I should take this opportunity to blog. And there’s so much I could blog about.
Diva’s post about acceptance, sexuality, and gender identity. I don’t disagree w/ the premise. But a few parts of it felt like little barbs, because I’ve had the “acceptance” line used against me to punish me for not staying with my ex after I found out she was trans. You know: “If you REALLY loved her, you’d stay with her!” Love is about the person not the gender, etc. But what none of them seemed to understand is finding out she was trans was about more than the gender. SO much more. That was part of it, of course, and not a miniscule one; but people reduce it to that and draw this line in the sand when they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Often it came from other trans people, probably projecting their feelings of resentment toward their own exes onto me, and at the same time using pronouns I was not ready to hear. Guess what: sometimes it’s not about you. And that’s why I created the SOTS Forum web site, to talk about these things that nobody else seems to get, to have a place where we didn’t have to constantly explain ourselves and do damage control. And this morning, I was cleaning up a few things on the site, and everything felt painful. I know I’ve neglected that site for a long time, and the message board has been broken for over a year and I recreated it as a half-assed Google group… but it feels too draining to try to maintain it, a lot of the time. I don’t think it’s healthy for me. But then I feel guilty because I feel like I’m leaving other SOs hanging out to dry – people who need the support like I needed it when there was nothing there for me (and so I created the group). The good news, though, is that in the years since 2003 a few other support forums/sites have sprung up. I haven’t really taken a look at them to see what they’re like, though; but at least I know they’re there. Then I start wondering about my responsibilities to myself vs. my responsibilities to others, and what the balance is. My dad used to say I should write a book about my experience, and there isn’t a book out there like it; and indeed I’ve referred to it as the book that scares me. That book would be filling an empty space and maybe helping to make some people feel a little less alone, less like bad people for not loving their trans partner unconditionally (not that that’s really what the situation is, but I’m saying, that’s what people spin it as). But for now, at least, I don’t think writing that book would be healthy for me. And yet I feel so strongly empathic to all the suffering people out there who have nowhere to turn.
I could write about going through a depressive spate – but lately I feel hyper-aware of writing about anything like that, even though I really want to. My mom reads my blog, Twitter, etc., even though we don’t openly talk about it (which is probably fucked up in its own right but I need to focus on one thing at a time), and I’m not going to try to stop her, because it’s the internet and we’re both adults. But I do think she has some responsibility, too, to realize that we’re BOTH adults, and if I need her help or support on something, I’ll tell her. Sometimes we’ll talk on the phone and she’ll preface something with, “I know this might make you mad but…” and inevitably it’s about something she read on my blog, and she’s saying she’s worried. Which I didn’t mind terribly the first few times, but it’s getting to a point where it’s starting to feel less like concern and more like, take care of my need to think you never have ups and downs in your life by silencing yourself on the not-so-great parts. Even though those are the parts I most desperately need to write about.
Then there’s this fucking post which makes my brain want to slide out of my ear – but if I write about that at all, I think I’ll do it in a separate post.
I’ve had this post by Daisy saved in an untitled draft for two months, and the thoughts about blogging and what it means to me and how it feels have been hanging around, mostly unwritten, since that time, too (actually more like three months now). That last round of bullshit in late February changed something for me. I actually have mentioned this briefly before. But speaking of being hyper-aware, I’m now hyper-aware of writing about ANY part of my life because someone might pounce on it and attack me for my “privilege,” (never mind I spend half my time calling out ACTUAL privilege), twist my words to fit their own agenda, use me as a convenient punching bag, etc. All that kind of stuff had been in the back of my mind for years – it comes w/ the territory of being a woman blogger, particularly a feminist blogger – but somehow that last crap made it feel even more stark. I’m trying to push it down and push it away and just press on like I always have before, but it feels way harder this time. I was reading back through some of my archives recently, looking at some of the bullshit I was handed by commenters before I either banned them or they got bored and stopped coming around, and to look at it objectively I wonder how I stood it. And how can people be so awful that they think it’s okay to talk to another human being that way? But then, that’s MALE PRIVILEGE for you.
I’m getting off track here. I want to write more about class and my experiences, but I feel like there’s no good way to do it without someone using me as an example for something. I hate the feeling of being analyzed and picked apart under a microscope by people who don’t know the half of it. You don’t know my life. So who the fuck do you think you are?
I think maybe part of it, for some people (the ones I’m at least willing to give the benefit of the doubt – a list which, admittedly, is getting shorter), is that they have a hard time understanding differences in blogs. This is a similar thing to what I mentioned when Toby interviewed me, and I’ve experienced it plenty from that direction too – where people who use social media for business/marketing purposes simply can’t conceive of the fact that there are bloggers out there who have different goals, non-business-focused goals, and that those goals are just as valid as theirs. Likewise, people who use blogging primarily for activism/advocacy can have a hard time differentiating the personal and the political. Yes, sometimes they mesh, and yes, sometimes I write posts of that nature. But my blog has never had one “theme” for me to feel boxed into (I started blogging before there was much of a concept of themed blogs) and sometimes my posts are just PERSONAL. As in, there is nothing here to debate or question. This is my truth. It is not a political statement aside from the fact that I think any woman speaking her truth is an act of personal revolution. But when I talk about my experiences with class growing up, I’m not talking about CLASS in the big-picture, societal, analytical way. I’m sharing something with you, the readers, and if you get something out of it, that’s awesome. I do hope that sometimes my personal posts will help someone out there feel less alone, or whatever. But if you don’t get anything out of it, or you want to project all over it? Just leave it alone, because it’s not that kind of post. Some things are not up for debate.
This is the same kind of thing I mean when I said, for example, reproductive justice is not an “issue” to “debate.” This is MY LIFE. You don’t get to “debate” about it, and fuck you for thinking of it as a dehumanized issue; THAT is one of the hallmarks of privilege.
But back to blogging and how I feel about it… Basically there’s a lot of goddamn drama in the feminist blogosphere and I’m sick of it. I barely read any feminist blogs anymore because I don’t have the energy for all the bullshit. We talked about this a little at Sex 2.0 during the Naked on the Internet panel… Dacia said something like, “I think we’ve all been in the position of getting righteous in a comment thread on Feministing and then saying, ‘Oh, fuck this!‘”
But I will always call myself a feminist. I know that the drama and bullshit is with the feminist blogosphere (and really just part of it – a loud part, but not the whole), not feminism itself. I am continually baffled by people who conflate the two, and I really don’t have much patience for it.
I don’t have a lot of patience in general (except when I do – but that’s another tangent) and I’m fucking DONE trying to explain privilege, feminism, class, etc. I should also be done w/ trying to appease people who are going to complain about what I say no matter what I say. But I just hate that w/ some topics there doesn’t seem to be a good way to write about it that doesn’t make me sound like someone whose views I disagree w/ equally.
I know what I really need to do is what I’m constantly telling myself: write like no one is reading. That is what blogging is about, for me. But it’s not always easy. And of course I always keep in mind issues of where my life intersects w/ other people’s lives, and that even though there are things I might want to talk about, they might not want their life made public in that same way. But that’s a whole other can of worms and not what I’m rambling about here. That can of worms, I actually feel pretty equipped to deal with and I can happily discuss the ins and outs of it all day long!
I guess in a way this very post is indicative of me trying to take back my own blog… half of it doesn’t make sense, I’m talking in circles, making sense to no one but myself, and it’s fucking LONG. Yay!
I had a few other things on my “could write about” list but they’ve flown out of my head at the moment. So I suppose I’ll do what I thought I’d be doing a few hours ago: just hit publish!
May 28 2009 10:35 pm | Category:
Blog | Tags:
blogging,
bullshit,
class,
drama,
feminism,
I speak my own language,
life,
personal,
privilege,
random,
relationships,
social media,
transgender,
writing
|
3 Comments »
…for all of one day.
Freshman year at NYU, there was a job fair at the student center. The Humane Society was hiring office workers, so I applied. The interview was over the phone. The job was paperwork, filing, answering the phone, that kind of thing. Since it was described as an office job I (naïvely?) assumed it would be in an office.
When I showed up for work, turns out the office was just the front part of the building where they kept all the animals. There was paperwork and filing, oh sure, but when that got light, we were supposed to help clean cages. The whole place reeked of dog. I walked in and thought, “You have got to be fucking kidding me. Fuck this.” I worked one day, I guess for appearances, and then told them it “wasn’t what I was expecting” and quit.
—
This is a follow-up to my first jobs post and my subsequent “jobs I forgot” list.
