The person I am
Someone wrote…
I’m a male-identified genderqueer and a feminist, and I have mixed feelings about personally going on hormones. I’ve learned to accept and love several things about myself, such as my short stature and being overweight, but at the same time, I sometimes wish that I had more of a male look, and that I could pass better and be taken more seriously as the person I am. Is comfort a less worthy goal than fighting the fight?
What’s your experience?
Posted by Freiya on May 14th, 2012 at 08:00 am
Category: your voice 5 comments »
May 14th, 2012 at 1:09 pm |
Comfort can HELP you fight the fight. You can take hormones, be comfortable in your gender, and still challenge norms, assumptions, and even binaries within transgenderism.
Don’t think that anything you desire for yourself will prevent you from engaging in the struggle–part of struggle is accepting what we want and moving toward gaining it, if that’s our path. Only you know if hormones are right for you, but don’t avoid them because you think they will change your ability to fight.
to each queer their own queer path!
long live the queerrrevolution
radical/rebel
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Hodge Podge replied:
May 15th, 2012 at 9:26 am
Awesome.
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May 15th, 2012 at 7:12 pm |
I agree with radical/rebel. There is no inherent moral right or wrong about taking hormones: each person does (or rather, should be able to do) what is right for themself. Personal comfort and activism/struggles are not mutually exclusive or in conflict. Ideally, they go together.
That said, as a genderqueer feminist on T for a year and a half, it certainly can impact your activism. When people take you seriously as a man, your male privilege becomes much more of a thing; i feel (not wrongly, i think) that i need to be more careful about how i take up space and interact with people, because people allow “boys” to take up more space in a messed-up way. Conversely, you can take the increased male privilege you get from hormones and use it to smash patriarchy, which is always fun. On the whole, people in general relate to you differently, so you approach the fight from a different place. I think it’s definitely possible to manage the effects of T on fighting the fight, though, so long as you’re conscious of them.
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May 21st, 2012 at 2:07 pm |
I’d argue that only you can actually make that call. Good luck doing so though.
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June 3rd, 2012 at 2:36 pm |
I agree that only you can make the call. I personally would feel highly uncomfortable and perhaps even suicidal if I did what was comfortable rather than what I felt was right, but that’s just me, and I certainly know that conclusion is not right for other people. I also know that if I lived in, say, Uganda, my answer might be quite different.
Living in this insane gender system forces us to make difficult decisions. You are not the problem. The system is. We all do the best we can as far as trying to figure out how to deal with this system and live the kind of life we can be happy with. Do what you think is best for you, and as long as you’re not hurting anybody, you can’t rightfully be faulted for it.
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