Passing, privilege, intelligibility

(This is yet another stepping stone on the path to desire, and it’s a big one I’ve been avoiding for a long time.)

Passing pisses me off, a lot. For me, it’s an issue impossible to ignore, no matter (especially?) since I hate it so much. As I’ve said before, probably at length, I’m not a transsexual, and I’m only transgender in the loosest of definitions. I am not a man, I am not a woman, but I carry the burden of a perpetual awareness of how much like one or the other I must always strive to appear, or else suffer the penalties.

I feel like this isn’t a subject I can engage often, if at all. For those who haven’t encountered it before, it seems to come across as a non-issue; why can’t I just do what I want to do, and not worry about the consequences? (I’ve tried, with varying levels of success, to engage others on the question of the policing of their own gender, but that has tended to get bogged down in questions of what kind of “woman/man” someone is, not if one is a “woman/man” to start with.) For those who have engaged the question of passing, I feel like I can’t engage the issue without others feeling as though I’m somehow being critical of their experiences, choices, and subject positionality. I’m not. Where I am being critical, I’m being critical of the structural inequity that, from my position, punishes me in ways I do not see others being punished (not that they are not being punished, just not punished in the ways to which I am most familiar).

I think it is privilege to have one’s gender position acknowledged, to be socially intelligible from a gendered perspective. I don’t think many people think about this privilege very much (though to be honest, I don’t think that most people think about any privilege very much; it raises too many uncomfortable questions).

I am granted “white guy” privilege by most people, and I fucking hate it. On ideological levels, I don’t want to be given anything I don’t deserve, haven’t earned, and wasn’t freely given. On a personal level, I’m not comfortable with assigned “whiteness”, and I’m sure as hell not comfortable with “guy”. To the extent that difference does leak from me, I think I discomfit some/many because I can’t be placed. Usually, the question is whether or not I’m gay, but since I don’t send clear messages, it isn’t clear whether it’s OK to discriminate (one way or the other) for or against me, but this does little, if anything, to mitigate the assignment. I have often said, and continue to feel, that privilege isn’t the fault of anyone to whom it is assigned; what matters is how one attempts to mitigate, subvert and/or democratize it. From the position of one who does not take issue with the assigned categories, I still imagine privilege is an uncomfortable, troubling burden. From my perspective, I’m garnering extra policing attention for something I don’t want, and actively resist.

The hell of the passing issue is that, while I am not personally or ideologically invested in fitting into perceivable categories of binary gender, I am honestly not sure that I’m strong enough to register as such a basic o(O)ther in almost all of my social dealings. I am deeply envious of the ft* people I know who can fit socially to some degree while having at least some of their choices validated (even if they aren’t validated as choices). I don’t begrudge them this, but I’m bitter and jealous that I don’t have access to anything similar. My feeling is that, no matter how hard I work, the best I can hope for is to be treated as a “man” who wants/expects to be treated like a “woman”, but that requires stepping into the trans narrative, something which I cannot do with good conscience (to me, there is a huge difference between people making incorrect assumptions, and actively encouraging them to do so. In the first case it’s problematic, but in the latter it’s somewhere between lying and selling myself out).

Some of the political blogs I read (Ampersand atAlas, piny at feministe, among others) engage the question of transsexuals (but generally only transsexuals) and the question of whose responsibility it is to challenge binary gender, specifically in relation to the critique by some feminists that transsexuals don’t do that (Sonntag, I’m looking at you). Amp’s response (which I’m too lazy to link directly; check out his site, because it’s good), as far as it goes, is dead on; transsexuals don’t do that, but the conventionally gendered (I’m on the fence as to the use of the term cisgendered; I’m not sure it isn’t a reactionary, but understandable, attempt to put the burden of difference back onto others) don’t, either. My position is that everyone should be doing this, should be more open minded about gender, both their own and that of others; the problem of gender (and race, class, etc) is everyone’s problem. The trick (and this is where I tend to get lost) is getting them to care, to buy in.

Am I complaining because I’m losing privilege? Maybe, but I don’t think it’s “white guy” privilege I’m losing or anticipating missing; it’s the privilege of being intelligible, of on a fundamental level being human to others. That I worry, a lot, about passing, even though I hate it, even though I find it offensive on many levels, only adds a burning anger to my feelings of powerlessness and alienation.