Planning a Gender Workshop

So my co-officers of Trans* Parachute United and I are currently planning a gender workshop for this coming Sunday, and I’m actually really excited. We have some great ideas for it, and I really hope that we can pull the execution off.

Originally, we started planning a simple panel, with people speaking about themselves and their personal experiences, like most panels at Juniata run. After about ten minutes, though, we realized we had the beginnings of an educational workshop on our hands, and we just ran with it. It’s caused some unnecessary stress, but I think we have something good here.

One of the main problems is not knowing exactly what to cover. I’m in up to my neck in transgender-related terms and discussions every day, which makes it difficult to know exactly what other people know and don’t know. I think we have a good beginner’s guide to transgender things, though, and I really hope that we don’t go too far over people’s heads.

It’s been pretty chaotic planning this thing, though. We came up with the first activity pretty quickly, then decided on an hour and a half for the running time, and then laid out a basic framework with four panelists, thinking that we had two weeks. Then we realized that we had one week, a one hour running time, and a panelist that wasn’t responding to e-mails asking to meet up to discuss the event.

But now our event is pretty well fleshed-out, the panelist finally met with us, and now all we can do is wait for Sunday night.

Note to self: Next time you want to plan an event like this, do it more than a week beforehand.

Dysphoria

I’ve had this post sitting around for a while…I originally wasn’t going to post it at all, but I eventually decided to just put it up.

This post is extremely personal for me. Dysphoria is extremely difficult to explain, but I tried my best. Keep in mind that I’m speaking from my own experiences, and I’m not trying to speak for anyone else. This is me trying to explain how my dysphoria feels.

Imagine that you are you, exactly as you are right at this moment. Now imagine that you wake up in the morning and you have all the wrong bits. You now have a penis instead of a vagina, or vice versa. You have developed breasts where there was only flatness before, or vice versa. You’ve lost your beard or grown some facial hair. You say something at the mirror in surprise and your voice is too high or too low. You are still you, you know that. But then you realize that everyone outside your room doesn’t. You go to your closet or dresser, looking for something to wear that might help you assure people that you’re you, you’re not this body. But everything in your closet is just wrong – where there should be skirts, there are baggy jeans, or where there should be t-shirts, there are blouses. You pick out the least offensive outfit you can manage, but everything is ugly and scratchy and doesn’t fit right – not to mention that it’s all extraordinarily brightly colored so you’ll be sure to attract a lot of attention. So you pull on a hat with a brim you can pull down around your face and finally leave the room. Someone’s coming in the building, so you hold the door for them.They just kind of stare at you as you walk past, and you just know they’re trying to figure out why in the world you’re dressed that way, and slowly say, “Thanks sir/ma’am.” The wrong term, of course. They see you as the wrong gender.

But you put up with it, pull your hat down further, and hope you don’t run into anybody else. But then you have to order your morning drink with your too high or too low voice that everyone in the room hears. The card you hand the barista to pay screams your (incorrect) gender, and they don’t even realize. You go to class or to work, and your professors and classmates or boss and colleagues all call you by the wrong gender (things like “hey girls” or “sir”) and they don’t even realize that they’re doing something wrong. They think they know you, they think that by the way you look, they can tell exactly who you are.

Now imagine that your best friend in the world comes to hang out with you later, after work/classes are done. They don’t misgender you, and when they ask you how you are, expecting a proper response, you go to tell them that you hate how everyone sees you the wrong way and calls you the wrong pronouns and is just so sure that their view of you is the right and only view and they do this without even realizing. But as soon as you try to put it into words, you realize that you don’t actually have the means to properly describe this awful, empty, hopeless, despair feeling. And even if you did, you are so sure that you can see the flicker of doubt in your friend’s eyes, and you just know, or think you know, that they don’t believe you. That they only refer to you by the right gender to humor you, that they’re so sure it’s just a phase. But how can this be a phase? You just feel so wrong, your body is not you. It doesn’t fit right.

Now do that again. And again. Some days you feel better in your body than others, some days you feel worse. But even when you feel great, this feeling is still nagging at you.

Dysphoria: [dis-fawr-ee-uh] (noun) a state of dissatisfaction, anxiety, restlessness, or fidgeting

Gender and body dysphoria is, therefore, dysphoria pertaining specifically to one’s gender or body. I am currently experiencing some really bad gender/body dysphoria.

I’m neutrois. That means that my ideal body is free of all sexual characteristics. I don’t want breasts, or a vagina, or to be immediately recognizable as female. I don’t want hair except on my head. I don’t want my voice to be quite so high.

Right now, the fact that I am immediately gendered, immediately recognized as female even though it’s not true is distressing. I’m extremely uncomfortable and annoyed that everyone misgenders me, and would honestly much rather be sitting by myself in a corner with a book and some tea rather than out on campus where everyone thinks that they know I’m a girl.

Dysphoria is somewhat pervasive in the trans* community, where there is usually an inherent conflict between one’s gender and one’s body. Not all trans* people feel dysphoric, some do sometimes, some don’t at all. Personally, I only feel dysphoric sometimes.

What to do to ease dysphoria is different for everybody, and I haven’t found or heard of any surefire way to make it better. Personally, I wear a binder to hide my breasts. I like to dress up, wearing a button-down, a tie, and slacks. I wear a lot of layers – binder/sports bra, undershirt, t-shirt, sweatshirt. I slouch more to hide any curve of my chest. I drink a lot of tea. But these things don’t fix the problem, they just make it a little easier to deal with.

Right now, I’m hiding in some baggy men’s jeans, my binder, a unisex t-shirt, and a three-sizes-too-big sweatshirt with a hood vaguely reminiscent of a Jedi robe. And, despite all of this form-hiding, baggy, masculine/androgynous clothing, I still feel too gendered. I feel like I stand out, like everything I’m wearing is neon orange with bright purple stripes and a glowing sign above my head saying, “Look at me, I’m female”. It’s hard to talk to people, to look them in the eye, to even go outside, knowing that they are all so unconsciously certain that they have me correctly gendered. Even going to class today was a battle, knowing that in German we would be talking about gendered nouns and that in French I would have to refer to myself with female-gendered words. Even if I had been quiet in every class (which I couldn’t be, so I had to listen to my too high voice all day), just sitting there knowing that everyone in the room assumed they knew my gender was torture.

One of the most annoying things is that (most) people don’t even realize that they’re gendering the people they encounter. They see someone on the street and automatically judge whether to use masculine pronouns or feminine pronouns. One irritating part of dysphoria for me is being sure that everybody will automatically label me female forever. That no matter what I do or say or wear, I will never be seen as anything more than a girl.

The single worst part of feeling dysphoric for me, though, is my complete inability to feel comfortable in my skin. I am anxious and fidgety, and constantly something feels wrong about me. My body doesn’t fit right. It’s not the way I know it should be.

How does this relate to you if you’re cisgender? Try to pay attention to how you judge other people. Next time you walk around near other people, watch how you think about them, notice how quickly you gender them in your head. The next step is to try and stop judging people so quickly. If someone looks male, it doesn’t mean they are. If someone wears a skirt, it doesn’t mean they’re female. Gender identity is different for everyone, and some men like to wear skirts while some women like to wear ties.

I guess what I want you to get from this is, besides a basic understanding of dysphoria as it pertains to me, is that sometimes your unconscious judgements can hurt people. I know I’ve talked about things like that before, but honestly. If we can stop jumping to conclusions about people, I think the world would be nicer. Not free of dysphoria, but perhaps easier to deal with.

For me, educating is one of the most important things I can do to “help the cause”. I like explaining gender and sexuality (particularly as they pertain to me, but also the basic Non-Heterosexual/Non-Cisgender 101), I don’t get offended when people ask me questions, and I just really enjoy teaching people about this stuff.

I attended a Gender Identity workshop and a Safe Zones workshop the other day, and having somebody else educate people (and me) was almost surreal. She was a cool person, funny and engaging, and I liked her a lot. She is gay, and the perspective she had on LGB issues was interesting and insightful.

She is also cisgender, however, and that makes it difficult for her to fully understand trans* concepts. I’m not saying that cisgender people can’t be good allies or can’t really get the lives of trans* people – actually, I am kind of saying the latter. Cis people can’t really get the lives of trans* people, just as the opposite holds true. And that makes it harder to teach other (mostly cis) people.

She didn’t do a bad job. I rather enjoyed the Gender Identity workshop. However, there were a few problems with the way she set it up. Firstly, she didn’t introduce the word “cisgender”,  just “transgender” and “transsexual”. This seemed very othering to me; though I’m sure she didn’t do it on purpose, it reeked of, “These people need a label because they’re different, and we don’t need a label because we’re normal.” That didn’t really sit well with me.

She also never mentioned that trans men are real men and that trans women are real women. This may seem trivial, but to a room of people who haven’t thought much about trans* people, stating this clearly would be really helpful.

The other main thing I had a problem with was how the matter of cis privilege was handled. She only mentioned briefly the horrors of being trans* in a cis privileged world – however, we spent quite a while on how privilege negatively affects the privileged.

This really bothered me. Discussing how privilege negatively affects everyone, even the privileged, is fine. But to focus almost completely on that? No. Privilege exists, and it puts other people at an extreme disadvantage. Being unprivileged in terms of gender identity is not something to gloss over, especially while talking to a room of mostly cisgender people who don’t really know what trans* people live through because of their lack of privilege.

I did like the woman who ran the workshops. She was nice, funny, knowledgeable, and a good ally. She explained things well and was engaging. Those two things just didn’t sit well with me, and it seemed to me that her being cisgender had a lot to do with it.

I think that if someone wants to educate people like this, that’s fantastic. But they should also ensure that they are fair to all people being represented, and aren’t inadvertently exerting any privilege.

Lobsterfest

Juniata College has this tradition called Lobsterfest each fall in which every club on campus can get a table and sign people up. A few friends and I put together a club called Trans* Parachute United, and this was our first Lobsterfest. Basically, this meant that I got to sit on the quad at a table by myself for three hours in the hot sun while people walked past and gave me weird looks.

Now I had wanted to look as androgynous as possible, which would normally mean wearing my binder (a shirt-type-thing that kind of squishes the developed breast tissue and pushes it away from normal boob area to achieve a flatter/more “masculine” chest) along with a button-down shirt. It was, unfortunately, far too hot for that. It was way too hot even for the t-shirt and jeans I was wearing. And, since you may not know, wearing a binder when you’re sweaty results in prolonged feelings of stickiness and grossness and general discomfort.

But while I was sitting in gross discomfort at the T*PU table, I had a paper in front of me with the Gender Diamond on it.

On the top of the paper, I wrote “Where are you on the gender diamond?” (I had also replaced “Polygender” with “Other Gender” and “Genderless” with “Agender” in fitting with my personal definitions) and had a Sharpie next to it. I labeled my own gender right at the very bottom point and encouraged everyone who came up to me to label theirs as well. I am friends with many of the people that put themselves on the diamond, and have had gender-related conversations with most of them, but there were still some really interesting things I noticed.

1. Almost everyone hesitated at putting down a point, often changing their mind at the last minute before placing a dot
2. Even people who said, “I am definitely cis” didn’t place themselves at the extreme point of their birth-assigned gender (except for one)

Point two is especially interesting to me. These people did place their dots, for the most part, within the circle I would consider cisgender, but several fell closer to the purple center than I expected. This isn’t to say that I doubt that such people aren’t cisgender – if they say they’re cis, and that’s what they identify as, then that’s their decision. I was just a little intrigued by the cisgender people placing themselves closer to the purple than I would have initially guessed. I certainly expected more dots on the feminine and masculine corners than were there.

I also thought it was interesting that people who never seemed to question their gender before hesitated greatly before finally placing their dot.

Overall, it was a good day. A bunch of people came over to the table for information. Most of them wandered off giving me strange looks, but a few people looked honestly interested. I’m glad that we’re around to get the word out and help educate people. If we want to get anything accomplished, we need to make sure everyone knows we exist.

(Eventually people will know what neutrois means… Eventually. XD)