The Theory and Practice of a Swift Kick to the Junk

[tim]

Friends, suppose you are a cissexual man. If you are one, this should be easy enough. If you aren't one, this should also be easy, as the use of most socially-sanctioned narratives in any culture you're likely to originate from is predicated on the appropriation of a distinctly male, assigned-male-at-birth persona.

Now suppose that I were to kick you in the balls repeatedly. I have reason to believe you would likely find that painful. But I can make it up to you! How about once you're recovered, you go ahead and kick me in the balls repeatedly? Go on, imagine it. Okay? Well, that didn't feel like much at all. I'm clearly impervious to being kicked in the balls, and that's clearly a reflection of my superior strength of character.

The only problem is that this is an unfair comparison, since my balls are made of silicone and kicking them would only serve to further cushion the blow that my already much-less-sensitive crotchal accoutrements would otherwise absorb. I'm not better than you because I'm less sensitive to a swift kick in the crotch -- I just don't have testicles, a lack that is hardly on my list of personal accomplishments and is in fact something I would change if I had any idea how.

Cis people often call trans people "oversensitive" or "easily offended" because they react to certain kinds of verbal attacks differently than a cis person would to the same comment. Of course, the person making such an attack does not always mean it to come off as aggressive, but since meaning is determined by the recipient of a message and not the sender, these comments are attacks nonetheless. For example, a cis person might call a trans person "oversensitive" because she reacts badly to being addressed with the wrong pronoun, and a cis person would just laugh or shrug it off. Or a cis person might say a trans person is "easily offended" and should "know what I mean" when he says "born female" to mean "assigned male at birth": when they say such a person is easily offended, they mean they react to such a comment more strongly than they would expect a cis person to react. Cis people stack the deck (they take advantage of their socially sanctioned privilege to define what a "normal" level of sensitivity is) and then complain when trans people won't play.

Like a swift kick to the crotchal region, verbal attacks are received differently depending on what, inside the recipient's body, takes the blow. A pair of testicles that you can't even see (when your victim has pants on) make the difference between a few moments of discomfort and a thoroughly ruined day. A collection of emotional baggage that you can't even see, comprising memories of, and learned reactions to, transphobic violence -- the kind of violence that hides behind words and makes its victim do all the dirty work -- makes the difference between a dickish comment that's laughed off and a dickish comment that ruins someone's trust in you and jeopardizes a relationship.

If I were to request adulation for what I characterized as thick skin developed through my own efforts, but is really a matter of (a certain kind of) luck, you'd rightly suggest I was disingenuous. So why is it a mark of good character to be "thick-skinned" and "not easily offended" when that really amounts to having had the good luck not to grow some brain structures that -- like your testicles, if applicable -- you don't think about all the time, but that make it difficult for you to regain your composure when someone stomps all over them? Why it's considered a virtue to not be "sensitive" -- that is, to be indifferent to other people's emotional states and responses -- and to be "thick-skinned" -- that is, to not care about your relationships with other people -- is another question as well. Why is "you're just being oversensitive" an all-purpose silencer, while "you're not being sensitive enough" gets you laughed at and called a castrating PC cunt (and then accused of oversensitivity when you don't like being reduced to the genitalia you're presumed to have)? But even if we take it as a given that apathy is a virtue, are virtues that accrue by accident of birth really so praiseworthy?

When you say that a trans person (or, you know, any person whose life is different from your own) is "oversensitive" because you are incapable of imagining their response to anything from a misplaced pronoun to a "Saturday Night Live" sketch dedicated to mocking and denying the humanity of a group of people to which they belong, you are really saying that it's easy to maintain a serene state of indifference to everything other than yourself. Easy when the rest of the world is indifferent to you, too -- and, just as easy when the rest of the world would prefer to see you dead.

You're saying that if it's harder for you to do something that's inherently more difficult than it is for someone else to do something easier, then the problem is that you're not trying hard enough.

And really, that takes balls.

Comments

[winterkoninkje]

Why is "you're just being oversensitive" an all-purpose silencer, while "you're not being sensitive enough" gets you laughed at and[...]

In part I think this has to do with the imbalance between the definitions of "male/masculine/..." and "female/feminine/...". Masculinity is defined by what you are not (namely not feminine) and is correlatedly accorded a position of prestige, whereas femininity is defined all to often as "everything else". So saying someone isn't manly enough is an insult and clearly "points out a character defect", whereas saying someone isn't womanly enough is just trying to "drag them down to your level" and should be scoffed at accordingly. Similarly for other imbalanced dichotomies like "white" vs "everyone else", "straight" vs "everyone else",...

I find the praising of apathy and coldheartedness a condemnable thing. And the association of those "virtues" to masculinity does a disservice to men by denying them the right live a life that doesn't revolve around psychiatric issues resulting from the inability to express and own their emotions.

[ptc24]

Some quibbles:

Virtues aquired by accident of birth: a virtue aquired entirely by accident of birth might not justly be considered praiseworthy (desirable, though, and people might, all else being equal, understandably prefer the company/employment/etc. of people with such a virtue), but there are also virtues aquired partially by accident of birth, which can nevertheless be cultivated. It would seem unfair to deny praise to someone who has cultivated such a virtue, don't you think?

The value of a thick skin: if you're thick skinned, people don't have to be so careful around you. Time spent thinking about how to avoid causing hurt is time not spent thinking about the content of what you are going to say, and when the best strategy for avoiding causing hurt is to give some topics a wide berth, it restricts the scope for conversation. This can be difficult sometimes if there are important issues to deal with. Furthermore, some thin skinned people can also be aggressive, and this can result in a lot of hurt when they fight back against accidental hurt. This is not to say that thin-skinned-but-aggressive people cannot be valued friends - I can think of several people I know who at various times have fit into that category, sometimes they've been the person I've most wanted to see but sometimes they have been extremely trying. That said, there are other ways to be problematically thin-skinned. Being a doormat in public and a brooder in private is one, one that I'm not particularly proud of.

I was going to say something about "sensitive", except it seems I failed to spot the "not" in 'Why it's considered a virtue to not be "sensitive"'. Possibly this misreading says something about the difference in our social circles, I don't know. Certainly it does not seem good to be considered "insensitive".

It's notable that there's considerable individual variation in sensitivity to things such as misgendering, both among transsexuals, and among other trans*/genderqueer people. How much of this variation is due to differences in brain structures, how much is due to differences in life experience, and how much is due to differences in general character is unclear.

That said...

Your analogy with testicular vulnerability is a good one, drawing the distinction between specific vulnerabilities and generic thin-skinnedness. Possibly you could expand this further (sorry, over-extending metaphors is a hobby of mine), to draw analogies with the Queensbury rules, and what is and isn't "below the belt" (so to speak) when sparring with someone.

Also, the "unclear" bit a couple of paragraphs above cuts both ways. A couple of weeks back someone praised me for being very accomodating about names and pronouns (a comparison was drawn with genderqueer-IDed people she'd met at BiCon who were rather less accomodating). I felt very awkward about this, and had to explain that the way things work for me (discovered through trial and error, rather than by introspection) isn't necessarily the way it works for other people, and that perhaps they weren't being as unreasonable as she thought they were. I quite like it when people go back and forth, when people aren't sure which name or pronoun to use and stumble over themselves - it matches the way I feel inside somehow. This, it seems, is luck-of-the-draw, and not something that can be expected of other people. That said to the that said, sometimes it's hard to tell where being a good ally stops and making excuses for people starts (and when you do that, I worry there's a danger that you stop being a good ally to the people who aren't doing the thing that's being excused).

Incidentally, if you ever find yourself in a legalistic frame of mind, try looking up "eggshell skull". I was quite surprised to learn about that.

[anemone.livejournal.com]

I like this analogy.

[picklish]

This analogy is *so* great. Blowing people off as being oversensitive always feels so much like victim-blaming. "You know, I'd be less sensitive if y'all would just stop kicking me there!"