#also i'm pretty sure this counts as vagueblogging. but that's mostly because this is me trying to work stuff out on my own

[gynoidgearhead]

I feel old.

At the risk of confirming that I have finally shriveled up into a moldy crouton who represents an impediment to progress: It’s absolutely freaking me out to realize I’m going to have to navigate a version of the LGBTQIA community and discourse where there are people involved who are young enough to have completely missed a lot of the things that inform my positions about transgender issues. (Context here if you want it.)

I privately rolled my eyes at Natalie Wynn (of ContraPoints) for saying on Twitter that she sympathized more with “old school transsexuals” than trans women younger than herself, because she felt excluded when people were explicitly asking for pronouns instead of attempting to gender her correctly without asking. That was, I thought, ridiculous - gendering somebody correctly at a glance is a minefield, especially once you start to factor in nonbinary people; and accommodating people who couldn’t fit under that paradigm was, I thought (and still think), worth giving up a little hit of personal gender euphoria and vanity-stroking.

But... fuck. She’s only five years older than me. I am older now than I was when I started this blog by a wider margin. I’m a whole-ass decade older than some of the people dipping their feet into The Discourse on this site.

And today, I finally learned what Wynn meant on a more visceral and complete level, and I’ve felt it. I have stared into the void, and the void has stared back.

And I hate myself for it, because I know that it means I am now a Problem.

There are trans kids alive today whose first exposure to the idea of transgender people wasn’t through crass jokes. This is a good thing.

There are trans kids alive today who didn’t have to watch (or hear about) trans women getting dragged out onto Jerry Springer, to be publicly humiliated and sometimes even embroiled into physical fights. This is a good thing.

There are trans kids alive today who grew up with a more holistic and inclusive version of the internet, who have had access to information about transgender-related topics without having to go to dodgy websites. This is a good thing.

There are trans kids today for whom positive transgender role models have been present on television since they were pre-teens. This is a good thing.

There are trans kids alive today who had immediately supportive parents and who even may have begun transition before puberty. This is a good thing!

I am none of those things. That makes me sad, but I never thought of any of those things as alienating me from younger people. Today I finally found the one that I think does, and I don’t know how to deal:

There are trans kids alive today who have had access to online trans communities since they were old enough to go on the internet, and have thus been subjected to the griping of older trans women and transfem people about the ways public opinion and the media used to vilify trans women and transfem people specifically (before trans men were even on the media’s radar, really), but who missed the entire cultural backdrop from which that griping was born in the first place. This is... I don’t know, just a thing that has happened.

On one hand, the trauma that older trans people have had to live through is absolutely real. Past events are absolutely real, and there are things that younger people can and should learn from history. I know my understanding of queer culture has been deeply enriched by learning about the history of the movement. If I have things to say about my lived experiences, why shouldn’t I?

On the other... how long are communities really obligated to support backwards compatibility? At what point are older queer people like me just making our trauma into the next generation’s problem? I can’t even begin to count the number of times I thought to myself about an older queer person, “please just move on and accept that things are different now, that this is the cost of progress”. I thought that about people as young as Natalie Wynn. I’ve thought that about a lot of people I’ve run into on this site. Was I wrong to think that about them, or are younger people right to think that about me?

This post brought to you by the word “transandrophobia”.

I initially rolled my eyes at hearing that coinage: “‘Transmisogyny’ exists to describe the intersection of misogyny and transphobia,” I thought to myself. “The term ‘transandrophobia’ posits the idea of misandry as a dominant cultural force,” I thought to myself. (”They even missed the opportunity to just call it ‘transmisandry’,” I thought to myself.)

“‘Transmisogyny’ exists because trans women and transfem people have unique problems to deal with, and those problems just aren’t applicable to trans men and transmasc people and don’t even really have counterparts,” I thought to myself, not accounting for the possibility that the situation could have changed, that those problems that were breathtakingly obvious to me might mostly be footnotes today (I’m still not convinced that that’s the case, but I at least owed it to other people to stop and consider the possibility), and that new problems might have developed that need to be talked about, which means sometimes new language is needed.

So I learned something today. I’m not sure if I like what it says about me, and it makes me feel closer than ever to irrelevance and the dustbin of history, but I have to suck that up and deal with it like the adult that I am. I owe humility to future generations. I’ll be damned if I turn into the old coot who spends too much time scolding people who are mercifully young enough not to have felt the same wounds I did, let alone to the point of inflicting them myself.

#do i qualify as a trans elder or something yet #i'm gonna go with ''no and this is pretentious as hell and i probably just like to hear myself speak'' #(also look i am *not* looking for a fight over any of this) #(if your takeaway from this is ''that old person has a Problematic Old Person Opinion! discourse time!'' then you probably missed the point) #(which is ''of fucking course i do. things looked different in my formative years than in yours. please understand that'') #(''and maybe learn something about The Way Things Were while you're at it. i'm grateful if you missed that shit.'') #(obvs don't do it if your mental health can't take it but like. understand that that means you might be missing context) #also i'm pretty sure this counts as vagueblogging. but that's mostly because this is me trying to work stuff out on my own #dropping all this baggage on some random person who has never met me would be 3000% irresponsible and unfair #/ #// #/// #//// #///// #transmisogyny #transphobia #trans stuff #transgender #trans community #lgbtqia intra community stuff #lgbtqia community #horizontal hostility #lateral hostility #aging #getting old #queer history #queer community #trans history #lgbtqia history #contrapoints