So, as I was getting at before, @bitterpunktrash wrote a series of good posts this morning talking out something that I’ve been thinking over a lot lately about the flaws in which dominant discourse goes at group identity: of how the “are you X enough to ride?” approach to policing identity is fundamentally unhelpful, while there are a bucketload of issues with trans stuff around people on the fringes acting like (to quote her) “a simple identification means they don’t get any cis privileges.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to reconcile these things in terms of my irritation with CAFAB NB people who paper over the cis privilege they continue to have, in comparison to my experience with disability.
I was born with two different conditions that had a massive impact on my childhood. I was a sickly child, and the reasons my childhood was so shitty had far more to do with ableism than they did with transmisogyny. I needed a lot of occupational therapy to get to the point where those things haven’t been obvious to anyone I haven’t told in a long time, alongside with a fair bit of self-workarounds-after-way-too-many-years because able-bodied people were fucking clueless about really obvious ways in which those conditions were impacting my ability to do basic shit. I’ve struggled, significantly, with mental illness since I was about seven, and it’s always impacted upon my ability to hold down work. I would not ever graduate from university if it wasn’t for the help I’ve received from university disability services. And I’ve acquired two chronic pain conditions along the way that, when they flare up, can take out my ability to walk or sit respectively. I have no fucking clue if I’m ever going to be able to work a nine to five as a result.
But when I’m in disability autonomous spaces, I’m acutely, acutely aware that my experiences are a lot more at the able-bodied end of that spectrum than they are for so many people who really depend on those spaces to survive. I’ve seen different autonomous disability spaces where people with my-or-less-actual-experience-of-ableism come to dominate those spaces, and I’ve seen the sort of dynamic that shits me up the wall when CAFAB NB people to do it to trans women happen there and I can see that it’s fucked - only that my presence is tangentially part of that. I used to be pretty close friends with one of the more prominent Australian disability activists of my generation, and when we were out together I may as well have been able-bodied for how people treated them versus how they treated me and the way our lives were impacted.
And so, while broadly I do identify as someone with a disability, I pull my fucking head in when I’m in those spaces. I try to not centre the experiences of people like me. I don’t pretend that the label necessarily means I have shit in common with the majority of people in it. I’d be irritated if people started policing that identity and those spaces, but I feel the onus is on me to recognise my own standpoint and my privileges within that group and to not casually fuck shit up within those spaces out of ignorance or papering over differences. And fuck, do I ever wish non-socially transitioning NB people would take the same sort of approach. I’m not going to police their identities, but if they’re going to lay claim to them I wish they’d lay claim to our differences as well.
And I think this over-focus on identification impacts a lot on our intra-community discussions as well. One of the reasons bitterpunktrash is one of the people on this site I read most avidly is because in the abstract, we fit into the same demographic categories of privilege, but our experiences of how that has played out in our lives are about as different as it gets. My politics have gotten fleshed out a lot for the better for having the opportunity to talk out those differences and flesh out how umbrella identity politics works in those categories.
And these the importance of recognising internal difference also filters down to things like passing privilege: this post got (rightly) widely circulated in the last couple of days, and yet because I usually pass as cis and very intentionally present in a way so as not to be seen, I’m a trans woman who has been out for fifteen years and who has never had that happen, nor seen it happen to anyone else: it’s not like any of us in that discussion aren’t trans, but that’s one piece of the shit I’ve managed to completely escape and things like that are something I need to factor into the way I come at shit as well.
