#reframing binaries

[cool-yubari]

When children have no voice, they have to choose between being rebellious and being submissive. Neither is desirable.

--Excerpt from the essay by David Gribble, Lack of Trust

When children are intimidated and silenced by adults, that is. They have a perfectly functional voice. So let’s lay the blame where it belongs.

Semantic considerations aside, though, I’d like to talk about this. In really general terms, I think he's right: power struggles (or their conspicuous lack) are a problem that generally compound whatever the original problem was. I.e., most of the situations where adults try to assert their authority over children involve something that had to be decided or done. So, while that's not the way to make decisions, bad process layers on top of ... thing that needed to be worked out. And natural reactions to the bad process just add another layer of complexity, without addressing the original thing.

I also think it's inaccurate to portray rebellion and submission as a binary. Not everyone thinks the same way or makes the same sense out of how other people treat them, so of course you're going to have a whole variety of responses, and more importantly, an even bigger variety of motivations for those responses.

Not to mention - I'd really like to break down the idea that people are innately one way or the other, because there's a lot of pride associated with being rebellious and a lot of shame associated with not being rebellious. And I think ... feeling like they have a chance in hell of not being utterly squashed has a lot more to do with rebelliousness than any mythical nobility of nature does.

[cool-yubari]

Externally imposed identities suit no one.

[B]eing assigned a gender at birth is not merely a word, it’s a pretty big package deal. It comes with a set of boundaries, a set of expectations, a set of pressures, a set of dangers, a set of assumptions. [...]

And gender roles never fit. They’re designed not to fit. The ideal male role and the ideal female role are completely unachievable goals that we’re nonetheless pressured to meet. Sometimes, when a man loves cars and beer and the gym and doesn’t cry much, they almost feel comfortable. But on some level, they never truly fit any of us.

So, thing number one: We’re all coercively assigned a restrictive and violently policed gender role that does not fit us.

But that’s not all. A little side story: In 2009 I was sterilized against my will because I am trans. It was a very traumatic experience, a violation that turned upside down every right I believed I had and told me I did not have the right to exist.

Incidentally, I also never ever ever want children and had at several points in my pre-2009 life considered sterilization. [...] I am not childless against my will and do not suffer the same grief and despair as my trans friends who wanted children and find that that option was taken from them. That is a struggle I don’t have. But that did not make my experience any less traumatizing. I don’t ‘agree’ with what’s happened to me. I’m not ‘fine with it’. It was a deeply violating nonconsentual act on my body that marked this body and this life as ‘not truly mine to control’.  

So, thing number two: Being forced to walk a road that you would have walked anyway is still nonconsentual, coercive and potentionally traumatizing.

And finally, quite a few trans POC have already pointed out that what our society defines as ‘man’ and ‘women’ are very specifically white gender identities. Stuck between hypersexualization and desexualization, ‘dangerous’, ‘exotic’ and ‘submissive’, men, women and genderdiverse people of colour all experience that their gender will always be viewed as deviant because it cannot conform to white womanhood or white manhood. For those at the receiving end of genocide, colonisation and westernisation, frameworks for what it means to be a man, a woman or some other gender within their own culture are almost completely inaccessable, erasured, destroyed and replaced with a white western gender binary.

So, thing number 3: Colonialism means people of colour are marked gender deviants by default while being denied a non-colonialized understanding of their gender identity.

Now, put all those things together and I think we need to radically rethink what it means to be cisgender.

I don’t think we need to get rid of the word cisgender. It’s very valuable to have a word that describes not being transgender and not having to deal with specific trans experiences.

I do think we need to get to an understanding of cis that acknowledges that assigning a gender to a person who turns out to be cis is still restrictive, colonializing, potentially traumatizing and ultimately nonconsentual.

This is not fine. This is not in agreement. This is, in fact, still violence.

--Excerpted from an excellent post by Queeranarchism

[cool-yubari]

When having disagreements with people, I’ve found it helpful to actively create room for them to distance themselves from harmful beliefs. If I’m dealing with someone who wants to do the right thing, often, my main objective isn’t telling them they’re wrong. Or getting other people to notice that they’re wrong. It’s to bring up a problem while keeping them calm enough and feeling safe enough to consider what they’re saying / doing from my perspective. I’m trying to keep them thinking, learning, and in a space where we can talk.

More than fighting with them, I’m conceptualizing what I’m doing as both of us fighting against

1. Internalized, harmful programming society instilled, and

2. The fears and effects of past abuse that make people go into survival-mode when they feel confronted.

In so doing, I do my bit to turn an argument from something that can be “won“ or “lost“ into a collaborative process. When I’m right, they also gain, because they learned something. And when they’re right, I also gain, because I learned something. And in so doing, we’ve established a solid dynamic where listening to the truth is more important than who heard what, or who heard it first.

Also, it dismantles the idea that “being right“ is an excuse for preemptive domination, arrogance, or unkindness. 

This isn’t a dynamic you can apply to all your ideological conflicts. Where there is no respect, there can be no understanding. But when you’re trying to communicate effectively with someone who wants to listen, but is scared to lose, this can be an excellent way to address that. Because it changes the game.

(Inspired by this post.)