since the last time I got it together to post. I do apologize for this. However, one part of the journey has been learning that, despite my trying to deny it for many years, browbeating myself to do ‘better,’ and desperately hoping for some kind of medical solution, I’ve simply got lower energy than other people — whatever the cause may be — and can’t always accomplish everything I set out to do. Especially since my life has been much busier than heretofore over the last month or so. And this is okay.
I’ve started a new academic career, in a field related to gender and sexual orientation. Much to my chagrin, many of the professors are coming at it from a place of a huge amount of unexamined straight and cis privilege and centrism, that really keeps them from perceiving a big part of their field.
It’s very frustrating.I’m accustomed (and this is in no small degree thanks to my own privileges) to not spending much time at all with people who put their cissexism and heterosexism on me; normally I can just leave the situation, or tell the person off without much fear of the consequences. It’s strange to me to be choosing to put myself in the firing line, and a big part of the first month or so has been managing that stress and finding ways to use the anger to refine my analysis of what’s going on.
Part of what makes me angry is that a lot of my colleagues are coming into university fresh out of cégep, while I’m coming off of fourteen years out in the queer community and a background in queer/trans activism, so I feel frustrated that they’re having a lot of prejudices reinforced with the academic imprimatur. I feel like I have a duty to take on everything they’re receiving in class, for fear of what they’ll take into the post-academic world and how they’ll put it on the people in my community.
And yet I don’t want to be ‘that guy’ — turning them off by being overly vocal, rather than successfully calling things into question — nor do I want to throw my (white, cissexual, male, enabled) weight around and take up too much space. On a grimmer note, I also don’t want to sabotage myself. This field is very political, in the sense of office politics, and I don’t know what kind of drama I’d be starting and if it would be counterproductive.
It’s not all bad. Some other professors are quite aware of the ways in which what they have to teach is problematic; they’re encouraging us to call it into question. One even commented that she thought she and I made ‘a good team,’ and she’s allowing me to create a zine as a resource to bring trans people’s words to the other students. I’ve also gotten some support from other students, especially other ones coming to the program with a certain amount of background and baggage.
The field is one I believe strongly in. I’ve had a burst of ambition that I am very unaccustomed to, and I feel determined to ride it out into a new career in which I can help my community. And I knew I was going to have to confront a lot of institutionalized prejudice and centrism and erasure.
But it’s haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaard >.<
5 comments
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October 10, 2011 at 6:52 pm
manupmakeup
Thank you so much for doing this work, even though it’s hard. <3
October 10, 2011 at 11:59 pm
femmeguy
aw, thanks *smish*
October 11, 2011 at 8:35 am
sivkoburko/CXW
This post really struck a chord re. academics and unexamined privileges and prejudices. I’m actually currently gearing up to teach a seminar next month on trans* issues that to my discomfort is called ‘Theorizing Trans bodies and experiences’ and am trying to work out how to do it in a way that doesn’t simply use trans people as lab rats to problematise (at best) cis conceptions of gender. I’m planning on using cisprivilege as my starting point for discussion, then looking at how trans has been conceptualised and then what that demonstrates about understandings of gender and sexuality WRT embodiment, societal norms and gender policing and the assumption of dichotomous pairings (linking to queer). If you had any particular thoughts for how I can avoid any of the particularly excruciating pitfalls that you’ve seen lecturers trip up on, I’d be really grateful for your input.
October 19, 2011 at 10:55 am
femmeguy
I think the most important thing you can do is privilege trans/gender-variant voices discussing their own experiences above any expert discourse. Spending your time talking about theories about trans and gender-variant people — even sympathetic theories — instead of about the people themselves is still giving greater weight to theories than to lived experience. And we end up again talking more about how cis people see trans and gender-variant people than about trans and gender-variant people themselves, where cis people have already had more than adequate exposure. I’m not saying not to discuss these things, especially in the context of pointing out and calling out cissexism, but I feel that this can be done using the words of trans and gender-variant people.
Here’s a wonderful page: http://sandystone.com/hale.rules.html — “Rules for non-transsexuals writing about transsexuals” by Jacob Hale — which includes the quotation from Naomi Scheman, “Transsexual [transgender, genderqueer, gender-variant...] lives are lived, hence livable.” This might be a useful resource.
October 19, 2011 at 12:04 pm
sivkoburko/CXW
Thanks. That’s very much my approach and I’ve got Jake Hales rules down as an essential reading. I’m coming as it as someone who identifies (and is usually read) as queer and trans*, but I don’t want to be interpreted as speaking for trans*/gender-variant/queer people since there’s such a huge variety of experiences and those voices frequently speak very eloquently for themselves.
One thing I came upon recently was a discussion of cisgender variance, which I thought could be useful (see http://zagria.blogspot.com/2011/10/prolegomenon-to-typology-of-cis-gender.html I’m still thinking about how to frame it – previous experience suggests that not all cis-gender people like their gender becoming a “marked” category and feel that being called cis is pejorative, but that in itself is pretty revealing about normative conceptualisations of gender…