Long survey is long, #3 of n

[tim]

What is this, and why am I posting it?

Nothing particularly explicit this time.


What events and leaders are important to you in transgender history?

I don't think that history has been written yet.

What do you think causes people to be transgender?

To answer that question, I would have to know what causes people to be cisgender, and I have no idea what that is. Being trans doesn't need any more of a justification than being cis does, any more than being gay needs more of a justification than being straight does.

Are you involved in transgender or genderqueer communities (community/advocacy/political groups, organizations, friendships)? What are these communities like? How did you meet these people?

I have quite a few trans and genderqueer friends, most of whom I met through Internet communities -- mainly LiveJournal. I'm not actively involved in any advocacy groups at the moment, though I'd like to be. I've attended a few meetings of a trans guys' support group here in Portland, but found it was oriented towards guys who weren't thinking about much other than being trans, and that it didn't seem to provide much of a path to political action.

Are you involved in minority communities within the transgender community (racial/ethnic groups, disabled groups, or others)? How are these different from the larger transgender community?

While I'm a trans man who has sex with men, which makes me part of a minority within the trans community, I don't feel part of a corresponding minority community.

Do you engage in performance of gender (ex. drag performances, ball competitions)? If so, do you do this as part of a group or community?

No. I'm too busy making my gender presentation what it needs to be for my survival to use it to entertain others.

What do you know about transgender and gender-variant communities in other countries?

Practically nothing; I'm a pretty typical American that way. I know that in some countries such as the UK that have universal health care, access to transition-related care is nominally universal but that the gatekeeping involved can be more onerous than in many parts of the US.

What has been your experience as a transgender/gender-variant person within the larger LGBT community? Have you experienced discrimination from the gay and lesbian community or do you feel your identity has been embraced?

I can't really say what I've experienced from the community, because I haven't interacted with the community as a whole. Mostly, I feel ignored by the larger LGBT community.

How have you been received by feminist communities? Do you feel accepted?

While I've encountered individual feminists who had trouble reconciling the existence of innate gender identity with their views on gender, I can't really comment on "feminist communities" as a whole, either. That seems like a pretty vague abstraction to me.

Comments

[kake]

I like these posts — thank you for sharing them.

[imfallingup]

Have you seen "Paris is Burning"? Well-known and excellent doc on ball competitions. At least in their origins, they were not equivalent to drag performances in the vein of Darcelle's. As entertainment they were something by non-gender-normative people and for non-gender-normative people, rather private to that (primarily Black, incidentally) community at the very start (when they became more open, Madonna appropriated the vogue style invented there in, well, you can guess the music video, and the color of the people in it). As survival they were critical, as success in the ball was both based on artistic qualities of performance and how well you were performing the gender you were aiming for: it was instant honest community feedback on how well you were going to survive the streets as a poor black transperson. Fragments of this idea are of course found in other areas of gender performance, but in general the whole question is worded kinda weirdly, so...yeah. Anyway. Check out the documentary, it's awesome.

[tim]

I've seen it, 13 years ago. The short answer is when I answered the "drag" question, I was thinking much more of types of drag I've experienced (white liberal arts college students doing the new trendy thing, and white Bay Area people doing similar things) than of the type depicted in Paris is Burning. This is a totally fair criticism, though.

[miang]

What imfallingup said about the ball scene, with the addition that it still can very much be about survival, not just in terms of feedback but also in real material support -- housing, money, etc -- not to mention emotional support, especially in cities where the supposedly LGBT-friendly venues aren't so friendly after all to racial and ethnic minorities.

[tim]

See reply to imfallingup above.