Pass / Fail
April 13, 2012 at 9:57 am Natalie Reed
http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/13/pass-fail/ (http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/13/pass-fail/)
Oh, passability. You most intensely problematic, yet utterly inescapable, of trans concepts. What a rascal you are! I think it's time we had a little chat...
Passability is an issue that cuts pretty close to the bone for most trans folk. It's immensely complicated, tied in to a dozen or so different larger issues, connects very deeply and intimately to intensely personal things like one's body image and dysphoria and sense of validity in one's identified gender, it's hopelessly tangled up in privilege and risk and oppression and the day-to-day facts of our lives, and it breeds endless jealousy, disgust, resentment, alienation, and internalized transphobia, hierarchies and conflict in our own community. Can't buy into it, because that elevates cisnormativity as what we "ought" aspire towards, measures our validity, beauty, worth and identity by cis standards, and positions being a good little ->-bleeped-<- as being all about being as cis-like as possible. And you can't really reject it either, because it's deeply connected to what most of us are working towards, which is a body and social / cultural / interpersonal identity that are in accordance with our sense of self, our gender identity. You certainly can't seem to ignore it, despite how many voices within the trans community want to just scrap the word entirely, because it's completely impossible to talk about things like cis privilege, cissexism, transphobia, gender-based discrimination, our experiences, our lives, our fears, our beauty, our daily hassles and so forth without talking about passing.
It's a great big mess, really. Can't live with it, can't live without it.