#also the tension between feeling like I identify with being butch and many ways I've read people describe their identity with it

[screambirdscreaming]

I get upset sometimes thinking about the way different branches of the lgbtq+ community argue about certain historical figures we identify ourselves with - were they really a lesbian, or were they a trans man? A gay man, a drag queen, a trans women, a genderfluid person? Was their expression of their gender an aspect of their sexuality, or vice versa? I have seen so many bitter arguments, people pulling out certain facts and quotes as “evidence” - what does it mean if they still dressed as a man after the death of their lover, if they used a different name among friends than among strangers, if they tearfully confessed to a reporter their “real” gender in a jail cell the night before being put on trial for public indecency? As if, by dissecting the few precious stories we have about their lives, we could bring them into the modern day, as if that would be the way to anchor our modern identities to history.

Here’s the thing. Gender and sexuality have always been social constructs, and people’s relationships to them have always existed in the context of society. Even if we still use the same words, the same broad strokes of gender roles, as we did a few hundred years ago, what it means to be a man or to be a woman in our day-to-day lives has changed. What other options are available has changed. Not just in the practical sense of what people do, but also in how people think, how we understand gender, what it feels like. Hell, even in this exact moment, what gender means in one place is so different than what it means in another. Yesterday I was five hundred miles from home in a place where people carried their gender in ways that were so unfamiliar to me it felt almost alien. The week before that, only 20 miles farther west in a place with far different history, gender was something else again. What gender and sexuality mean to us is so specific to the context of our lives and our communities, and it always has been. 

And in that light, it’s bizarre to try to pin down historical figures into exclusive, modern identities. We can’t say with any kind of certainty how they would have lived, if they were alive now, much less how they would describe themselves. And those things are inextricably linked - modern identities exist in the framework of modern society, so to apply modern labels means imagining how they would fit in the modern world. And perhaps, in the modern world, they would have been different people with different experiences - we can’t know. Even if they fell through a time portal, we can’t know if they’d like it here or if they’d want to go home. If they’d like our modern words or prefer their own.

What we do know is how we feel, looking back, reading about their lives and the times they lived in. We can imagine ourselves going back, trying to fit into their societies. And we can say: I would be like you. I would live the way you lived, in your context, in your time.

And that’s our real connection to history, the only thing we know for sure. That there have always been people making choices that twist gender on its head, that there have always been people who loved people they were not supposed to, that people have always found ways to live that were true to them and made them happy in spaces they carved out apart from society’s expectations. That it’s always been hard, and people have always done it anyway. That if we were to fall through a portal to their time - whether or not we liked our words more than theirs, whether or not we wanted to go home - we would have found people we felt kinship too.

Many different identities reach back to connect to the same few people - the only people who’s stories we know, when so many more must have been lost. Even then, the stories we have are often fragmented, told through the biased lens of newspaper reports or other accounts of strangers. If they did have ways they liked to describe themselves, we often as not don’t know what they were. Where there were communities of like-minded people, we only sometimes know what they talked about, how they related themselves to each other. When it comes to the ways gender and sexuality existed in societies that were colonized and forced into colonial gender roles, there’s so much information lost about what those societies of gender even were, much less how people conformed or rebelled within them. (Which is a tiny part of an entire other tragedy.) We know just enough to know that the nature of gender and sexuality were vast and varied through all of human history, and that the ways individuals have interacted with them are incredibly varied within every society. We are looking though pinpricks into a vast obscured space. We are fighting to find something that has been hidden from us. But somehow, we seem to end up fighting each other over the scraps, instead.

If anything, the fact that so many people of so many different identities find themselves reaching back and feeling connection to the same historical figures should remind us of how much we share. How much kinship all our modern communities have with each other. We all exist in different relationships with the social structures of gender and sexuality that surround our lives. What draws us together, with each other and with these communal ancestors, is the process of struggling and deconstructing and rebuilding, carving out a space within those structures in which we fit. In which we are able to share joy, and comfort, and solidarity, and love.

#long post #vague historical rambling #i am not a scholar of queer history #just a person who tries to read about it sometimes and gets confused and exhausted and sad #but also sometimes deeply touched and deeply joyful #I feel like I don't know enough to really talk about this #especially about colonial interactions with gender - something I know as a sort of terrible negative space #so maybe we know more about historical gender and sexuality than this implies - we in the sense of society at large #knowledge that is not totally lost #but it doesn't feel accessible #it feels strange and hidden and distorted #and that's what this is about really #how hard it is to find and connect with this history #and how much it hurts that so much of what I *can* find is people fighting over their claim to a historical figure's identity #it also is kind of about the conflict I feel between identifying so much with historical lesbian communities #and yet feeling incredibly uncomfortable with identifying myself as a lesbian in the modern day #due to my relationship with my gender and the fact that i'm not exclusively attracted to o women #which are things that occur frequently in historical discussions of lesbian community and are probably still common in modern lesbian spaces #but which are also not what people I interact with would understand from my choosing to use that word #also the tension between feeling like I identify with being butch and many ways I've read people describe their identity with it #but also feeling very alienated by most descriptions of butch/femme culture both historically and in the modern day #gender is a fucking mess and I just want more solidarity and more understanding #and more ability to exist on my own terms without having to declare to some label to be part of that community #queer stuff