extended - gender worshipping and gender on white bodies

tranqualizer:

hot summer days make me settle into my booty shorts - white FTMs once told me about the relationships of bodies and genders, of medical institutions that I don’t trust, my momma doesn’t trust, doesn’t trust us; told me to paint body on my gender but the canvas was wrong; told me this 6785th youtube video about t was about me but they were dead wrong; told me that the deliberateness of my gender needed a long winding narrative when I’ve always managed to have one, it just wasn’t theirs; told me in enough ways to make me avoid searching for intentional communities that spoke to me in a way their whiteness couldn’t. But thank the fucking trees I’m settling into my booty shorts in a haven filled with fabulous glittery femmey rad surviving and thriving folks who aren’t asking for my capital investment in institutions that want nothing more than my capital investment - who are interested in collective healing, responsibility, and resistance - who aren’t jaded by nonsense that just doesn’t werk. 

i see a lot of hot ass trans poc here on tumblr who are fabulous just for living and i don’t have enough pretty words to show appreciation for the ways their bodies are dressed up and dressed down to dismantle this system but to also just living. living is so beautiful sometimes. 

and then i see a lot of hot ass trans poc who are getting the love that they deserve but then i think, where are we trying to channel this love from? trans poc love for trans poc love is enough right? i guess i’m just fed up with white trans bodies that get like a million fucking notes for putting on lipstick and applying eyelash make up to their lip hairs and then all of my trans poc lovers are getting dissed for being all swagged out and werking their shit. 

people don’t realize how white centric their gender appreciation is and when certain people on the internet get raised to this level of godliness i want to puke because yeah, you’re deconstructing some cissupremacist shit but you don’t want to step back two seconds from your ego and acknowledge that some people are taking on hella bigger waves. so the next time i see y’all fawning over a trans femmey white body i better not see that as reflective of your entire blog.

I’ve been talking a lot lately about /my/ femme identity and have no fucking clue what I’m talking about ever. Parts of me feels like it’s appropriative because I have ‘historically’ presented as more “masculine” (whatever that means!) and femme identity represents, I feel, things that I’m not strong, fierce, or tough enough for. The other parts of me feel really excited because I’m slowly pulling myself away from this macho trans masculine narrative which has always made me uncomfortable. 

I just don’t know.

asterisk is an ass.

I’ve mostly given up on trying to explore what the asterik on my trans identity could even encompass. And, at least for me, there is no way in hell that my gender identity and expression don’t influence (whether positively or negatively) how I view my sexual identity. The notion that these two frameworks never overlap hurt my feelings a little bit.

I’ve always felt an attachment to the following titles/identities/words: dyke, butch, stud, sister. They all come with their own baggage and own power and it’s frustrating to have to filter through that or feel like I can’t even filter through it. What does it mean for me to be a dyke but feel no sort of connection to the realms of identities for women who are attracted to some other women? And am I really trying to be a part of some gender revolution which could, in many ways, remove the historical powers and significances that lay behind heavily gendered identities? And what does it mean for me as a POC to identify as butch but then also identify as stud? Because there’s such a cultural difference between those identities… Am I trying to paint over a heavily colonized identity with some color? And then sister? What the hell am I doing? What worries me most is that claiming these identities, finding strength and solidarity in them, really hinder the comfort levels I have with my surroundings. I just really don’t enjoy the paradox of deconstructing something’s gender to redefine it but ultimately still attributing it to some sort of initial framework which would affirm the gender that isn’t self-defined (what kind of sentence was this?).

And then sometimes I’m attracted to gay cismen and I don’t even know what I’m doing with my life.

I suppose the reason why I’m even discussing this right now is because I had someone ask me the other day what the asterisk means… and I had no answer. But it is interesting to see that trans* itself is not viewed as an identity but as an introductory to the “actual” identity. Forget that, yo.

I feel like this is an extension of the distress I felt when I identified as/with genderqueer and really had no sort of language for it.

This is just the type of person that I am: I need to actively seek for asylum in words, in labels, in identities. It’s not easy to just forget about these things when you spend your entire life looking for them (for always every damn part of who you are). My only hope is that I don’t get consumed as an extension of any label but rather as an independent, variation (I guess?) of that label.

on identifying as genderqueer transsexual

I had a few questions in my neutresex ask box about this and I held it off until I had energy to actually elaborate on my response.

So, it’s fairly simple actually. I identify with genderqueer (still, even amidst uncertainty) because I am still exploring genders and all of the jazz that I referenced in (dis)owning genderqueer. Identify with transsexual because I do anticipate on physically transition along with a social transition that I’ve already began. My feelings towards my chest has changed greatly and I expect it to continue to fluctuate so I don’t plan on top surgery but I do want to go through with hormones. In even greater specifics, I tie the words genderqueer and transsexual together because I don’t feel like a physical transition reflects defines or social transition or vice versa. I also don’t feel like I am transitioning from woman to man. So with genderqueer, I am still searching for stable ground in terms of my gender, but I am at least 90% in the know what what physical changes I want.

i gave up on putting the asterisk at the end of the word trans because it’s not the right word for anything anyways

y’all are reminding me that sometimes I should update this blog. 

I don’t know - part of me has been consumed by so many other aspects of my life, all of these feelings - unsure what for - and so gender has gotten the backburner.

is that what I want? 

I just want to be fabulous, damn it!

I’ve been really frustrated as of late re: how I see myself and how I think others see me and all of this is in addition to musings I’ve read (and really agree with) about trans* being so fucking whitewashed and that being so fucking true.

I wake up most days and am comfortable in my body - I learn to love the curves more and more and I learn to thicken my skin more and more. And it brings me to question that ways in which trans* narratives are constructed or how some narratives or valued over others and what it means to write your own story or to buy into some sort of fairytale  dysphoria meets HRT and gender reassignment surgery shit. I don’t know; sometimes I’m just really sad and I want to sit around and cry all day because the journey that it took to get to this point is just as painful as the idea of abandoning this journey. For brief seconds my identities seem to exist in trajectories and immediately become fleeting beings - completely void and independent of any of my essence of living. And I can’t help but wonder if it’s going to be like this forever, if I’m going to be stuck and wedged forever. I just want to be fabulous, damn it!

today is august 2nd and I am okay.

The last time I updated this blog I was in a fit of rage. I had created a masterpiece of self doubt, self loathing, and shame. I had become the perfect temperature, the perfect depth, the perfect environment for a hurricane to ravish not only my body but my spirits. And damn, it was both sad and beautiful in the most sad and beautiful of ways. No matter what state of mind I’m in, I always feel like the beating of my heart escapes the cavities that its claimed from day one - sending itself through my body, to the point where when I look at my navel, I see the residue of heartbeats. I feel the tension ripple across my body. And it’s in the moment of curiosity of the vulnerability of my body that I inspect the brokenness of my hands, the sensitivity of my belly, the width of my hips, the length of my feet, the sharpness of my face as if I were getting paid to investigate the scene of a gruesome murder. It’s funny how words like that can dictate how we convince our minds to feel. I’ll be quite honest, I don’t think I’ve come a long way. The thought of challenging binary genders in our society makes me repeat the scenes I’ve just described over and over and over again - all of the time. When I think about redefining masculinity for my own, I psych myself out. Yet, if I’m lucky enough to push across that road hump, I feel like a caged bird that’s just been let go. When I think about redefining femininity and even expressing it more, I am scared shitless of the possibilities, both good and not so good. I’m saying all of this just to say that yes, I’ve moved beyond the mindset that I’m trapped in the wrong body. No, I’m not. This body has wrapped itself around me, it has embraced me with its strong legs and toned arms. It has whispered in my ears sweet nonsense - nonsense that makes me weak, but motivates me to keep going. This body and me gets into fights - fights so ridiculous that by the end of the night, for a brief moment, a brief lapse in my daily reality, I feel like my body and I have become one. And it makes me happy sometimes, to breathe out and feel like I’m not longer the puppeteer to my body and my body is no longer a ventriloquist for me. I wish that my existence weren’t so bifurcated; literally separated into two beings (and maybe even more). I wish that things would just fit, but I have to wonder if they were to fit the next time I wake up, would I be okay? I’ve conditioned myself for so long to being used to instability—even in moments of sincere longing for a place to hold on to—that the very thought of being able to exist without questions terrifies me. My biggest challenge in the past couple of months has been working on embracing who I am and what I am instead of trying to destroy everything that I am. And that’s not to say that some mornings I don’t wake up upset and wanting to get rid of my breasts or my hips (I do, all of the time), but I think it would be nice to find breathing room even in that mentality to tell myself, “feeling like this shouldn’t be out of the ordinary.” Sometimes my life doesn’t feel real; I walk into spaces (queer spaces, trans* spaces, or neither) and there’s just this odd atmosphere. And maybe that’s because the spaces I have access to are spaces that only acknowledge trans* folks that admit that they’ve started somewhere and are ending somewhere. I don’t know where I started, but I know that I have. I don’t know where I want to end, but I have the feeling that I’ve ended so many times just to restart myself. And hey, it would also be nice to be able to pinpoint all of the things that created me, but that would probably just call for havoc. What makes all of this even more complicated is that I am constantly treading between my gender identity and my cultural identity (that is not my gender identity). I think to myself, “where the hell will I find a Viet trans* and queer person?” or “fuck, I’m never going to be able to tell my mom. Coming out to her as non-heterosexual was heartbreaking enough.” or “will my identity ever transcend beyond the notions of alternative gender expression as something more than what only white people can claim?” All of this rambling really just prompts me to ask myself even more frequently where I’ll be in life, and when I am wherever where I am, am I going to be okay?

tattoo

So, one of the several tattoos I’m planning to get is going to be on the right side of my back. It’s going to be of a portrait (probably from shoulders up) of the “traditional Vietnamese” woman. So she’ll have on a white traditional dress and her hair will be pitch black. It’ll be a side view of her face so her hair will be flowing from the wind. So I’m going to get it really nice and detailed and everything and I’m going to have text either outlining the woman or underneath her image. It’s going to say “hinh dung nguoi phu nu Vietnam” Which translates to “the image of a vietnamese woman.”

In my head I have a clear cut explanation and reason for this tattoo, I really do. It’s to show the contradiction in my existence as faab Viet person. It’s to remind myself of unhappy memories but also a reminder of the transformations I’ve been able to make. I think it’ll serve as the ultimate expression of my gratitude towards being a Viet person, but also as a reminder that I’ve got the will to mold myself into an image of my own.