I decided to record an episode of a podcast on my thoughts around gender, and my personal perspective and experience of being trans and nonbinary and everything I’ve got going on.

The podcast is titled Some Gender Going On, and the first episode is titled “Community and Gender”. You can play it or download it here:

This is my first time recording a podcast. It was fun, I enjoyed the new way to get my thoughts in order and make them explicit, and I hope you’ll like it too! I’m planning to make more of these, for sure. Let me know if you listened to it!

Notes

I don’t have a transcript, but I’ll post my notes that I based the podcast off of, if you prefer reading to listening:

First episode

Gender as something that arrises out of community and culture, not science or taxonomy or medicine or classification.

Community approach to gender: Who do I want to do gender with? Who am I going to hang out with, recieve support from, give support to, uplift, join hands with, make friends with?

Classification approach to gender: What gender do I have? What category, as defined by neutral, disinterested experts, do I most accurately fall into? Do I live up to the expectations of the category that I am placed in?

I prefer community.

The classification approach is sterile, clinical, medical, and disempowering: It tells us that we are not the authority on our experience, we are not the determiners of our fates. It’s not rich, alive, or joyous, and it doesn’t bring people together. If there is joyous classification, it’s a fun side project, not The Truth. Classification that seeks The Truth is destructive to every other way a person might understand themself.

Community is built by us, and we collectively decide what this experience means to us. No one can diminish us or restict us. We define ourselves.

Labels: In the community approach, labels are secondary to community, they emerge out of a group and they mean what that group wants them to mean.

In the classificatory appraoch, labels are all there is, and they must be True, only the True classification matters and it matters desperately.

It’s the difference between a label like a name tag with little hearts drawn on it, something creative and expressive and self-determined, versus a label like a butterfly pinned to a tray and slotted into a drawer, the place where creativity and beauty and independence go to die, to be compressed into a rigid and diagnosed structure.

Now, I want to clarify something: I am not trying to reject all scientific practice. I do think that a technical, biological, and chemical perspective can be beneficial. I’m trying to contest who should be the final authority on these matters. Should you trust the collective wisdom of a community of people with experiences like yours, or the standardized textbook understanding of a professional expert with years of training on a variety subjects, loosely overlapping with yours? In my opinion, you’re better off listening to community practices as informed by the scientific literature, rather than the standardized medical practice, especially when that medical practice is uninformed by community experiences.

What I’m saying is, if you’re a science-minded trans person or someone who’s just got some gender going on and you want to learn about trans stuff, read the Dysphoria Bible at dysphoria.fyi and read transfemscience.org, rather than the DSM-V or the ICD-10. Join some subreddits and discord servers and make a mastodon account and go to a meetup group, don’t just talk to your doctor.

Community-first

What does a community-first experience look like?

Base our validation, our joy on acceptance and support from our community, from those with experiences like our own, from those who we see ourselves reflected within. And from ourselves and who we know ourselves to be. And give that joy and that validation freely, to all who come seeking it. Reject any outside force or system or group as having the authority to decide whether we are worthy. No gods, no doctors, no psychiatrists can tell me whether I’m trans enough. And if there’s allies or co-conspirators who will join us, they’re welcome, even though they’re not foundational.

There have been many communities of this mindset, in my places and many times. I’ve heard that the travesti community of Latin American is a good example, though I’m not very familiar, and I would point people to Jules Gill-Petereson’s book “A short history of trans misogyny” for more information, or to the Stained Glass Woman blog’s review of that book called “A love letter to the dolls”. It’s a view of a loudly feminine, unashamed, unassimilationist transfem community, specific to a place and a language and a tradition.

As another example, let’s talk about oral and sublingual estradiol. Same pill, different ways of getting it into your system. Oral is standard, parallel to other drugs, easier to measure, easier to implement. Goes hand-in-hand with a slow, cautious ramp up, because of course one does a slow cautious ramp up with every drug out of fear of side effects. Sublingual is a higher dose, takes more precision to measure effects, has lower side effects by bypassing the liver, takes more effort to implement, and is generally agreed upon as a better approach in the community. Some doctors let you pick. Some tell you oral only because they’ve never heard of sublingual and if it wasn’t mentioned in their training then it must be a bad idea.

I read a story involving a big community of trans women, all existing as a self-sustaining organization, outside of proximity to the standardized establishment. And of course, they all took their e pills sublingually. How could it have been any other way?

My community

This history and the vision of a possible future of gender understanding and wisdom driven by community gets me thinking:

What does my community look like? It’s not fully formed, but what could it look like?

Programmer socks Cat ears Dysphoria hoodie Boymode Trans affirming meme formats Often autistic Often adhd Often sapphic Often poly Often animalness, therian, furry, not-a-person Often techy in an open-source way Often sex-positive Often sex-work-positive Often left Often anarchic

Maybe a bit more personal, but I’d love to find people who like waxing philosophic about gender and nonbinariness.

For a lot of people, finding community for the first time is intimately connected with discovering oneself. Meeting my first nonbinary people at a community level was very directly connected to hatching. Meeting my first nonbinary person taking HRT at a community level was very directly connected to starting HRT.

“I just want to be girls with somebody” - Haus of Decline

A plurality of communities

A plurality of communities, with different ways they do things, different ways they understand themselves, mutualistically coexisting, validating one another, no monopoly on truth.

MOGAI

MOGAI: Marginalized orientations, gender alignments, and intersex. Big lists of gender terms, orientation terms, pride flags, neopronouns. More gender-diversity, pushback from the “you’re making us look unserious, exclusively transmedical, binary-first” crowd. Truscum Mostly teenagers on tumblr, term started 2013-2014. A lot of modern genderqueer and nonbinary terminology draws heritage from those days, even as lots of terms have fallen by the wayside.

Communities are good, join what you like and let live and go in peace if you don’t. Don’t feel the need to approach The Truth. Don’t be truscum (insult, reclaimed?)/transmedicalist, don’t smear people as transtrenders. Even if someone’s gender experience is unfathomable to you, let them go in peace.

That was easy for me to talk about. It’s easy for me to criticize exculsionary transmedicalists and stand with MOGAI-ers, because if I’d been better at finding the supportive parts of the internet when I was a teenager, maybe I’d have been in that community during its heyday.

Transsexual

Let’s talk about a group I don’t identify with, the “transsexual” community. These folks draw heritage from a time when the word transsexual was in more popular use, and use the terms “transsexual” and “transgender” to mean different things. “Transsexual” as an identity puts the emphasize more on the sex as what’s being transed. It’s about changing your hormones, changing your organs, and the intention to do so, that is the central point of one’s identity, in this community. In contrast, transgender people are thought of, in this community, as people who trans their identity and/or social positioning, without necessarily transing their sex. And people in this community would describe themselves as transsexual. The heyday of this mindset was 15+ years ago, with works like Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl and Lynn Conway’s homepage preserving that era of the midset and the community.

This focus on sex as the thing being transed is in heavy contrast to trans people outside of this community, who mostly think of transsexual as a synonym for transgender, albeit an outdated and archaic synonym.

People who identify with this positioning are often trans elders, trans people who hatched 15+ years ago, and have maintained that community and that mindset this whole time.

I can distinctly tell that this mindset, this community isn’t right for me. While I am taking HRT, I do not plan to have any other bodily modifications, and I’m not interested in any other bodily modifications. In fact, for me to be comfortable starting HRT, I had to first reach the point of self-acceptance and self-relization that I am nonbinary, that my nonbinariness is central and real and irrespective of any particular body I may have, and that there is no “right” hormonal system for me, there’s just a choice. And I can choose whatever I want. And so I did.

So I’m not transsexual. I’m not in that community. The pathway of body modification, of transing my sex, is not core to my identity. It’s not central to my sense of self. It’s explicitly peripheral, in fact. I need it to be.

But I’m not going to sit here and deny that identity, that mindset, that community, to anyone who finds it validating, sustaining, a source of comfort and community, and shared wisdom and understanding in their community. I don’t have a monopoly on The Truth. I’ve heard people describe that to them, identity and social positioning feel to flimsy and tenuous to want to base a sense of self off of. That body modifications, HRT and FFS and top surgery and bottom surgery feel more solid and permanent and capable of building an identity and a life upon.

I’m happy that community exists, and uplifts the people who join in it. I support their finding the wisdom that works for them. I’m happy I’m not in that community, and that I can find community that works for me.

Conclusion

I see a future where we seek community, not The Truth.

Where we find as many communities as work for us, rahter than being classified into at most one little box that we struggle to live up to.

Where all of our communities can come together to push for common goals, no matter how we see ourselves, no matter how we find fulfilment and support and love.

If this episode spoke to you, maybe tell a friend about the podcast. Read some of my blog posts. Consider getting in touch. My name is Izzy Grosof, you can search for me, there’s only one of me. Thanks for listening!