Quote from: Padma on July 28, 2012, 03:31:47 AM
I can't quote anything specific, but the worst I've had so far has been from a good friend who's polluted by 80's feminist conditioning - she's so full of assumptions about why I'm transitioning and what I want, it's like wading through cooked spinach*.
I'm really, really tired of hearing people "tell" me that I didn't grow up as a woman, so I didn't have the same experiences. Like I don't know that already. They always go on about the oppression, and I always counter by pointing out that from where I'm standing, growing up as a woman is a "privilege" I was denied, whilst at the same time being denied the "privilege" of growing up as a man who was accepted as such.
Honestly, why do people assume we haven't spent a lifetime thinking this through?
Okay, I'm over it now 
.
*on reading this back, I realise this sounds a bit insane . But I meant how spinach is thready, and clings to stuff when you're trying to get it off.
Oh, goodness, if I haven't heard enough about "privilege." Sadly this "80s feminist conditioning" you speak of is not at all 80s-restricted. By era nor by people born in it. It's true, from where we stand having the correct body for your sex is a privilege. Having that upbringing is a privilege. So why do we need to be so overly concerned with a society with which we've become consistently disillusioned and dissociated? Which brings me to the favorite lines...
"...male privilege." (All I'm going to say is that to say a FTM has male privilege is to say gender is entirely socially constructed. If that is true, how can there be such a thing as "gender identity"? Thank you, for dismissing my entire existence and identity.
(A similar one, is anything implying my sexual preferences are/have been socialized, especially w/ regards to
specific nitpicky things like preferring women to have "curves" or breasts... lol. "I know you don't think you were indoctrinated...but..." oh really? People are indoctrinated into their sexuality? Does this mean we can change them?
)
"Why can't you just be YOU, who cares what other people think or how you look? That won't change who YOU are..."
"Why can't you just be a lesbian?"
My parents said this stuff for several months when I first came out to them. The complete disregard for the reality that your role in society is largely determined by others' perception of you, especially with things like gender (hence the tendency for trans people to isolate and withdraw), was kind of amusing... helped to offset the frustration.
"Why do you have to fit a heteronormative stereotype?"
I don't. Maybe it just happens that I do...or at least appear to. But unlike gender, stereotypes are ENTIRELY socially manufactured. So I'm not really bothered by the stereotype, although I am and always have been pretty overburdened, for many reasons, by the fact I fit a "stereotype" such as this one but in all other ways was born defying social norms.... so I'm too busy to have some sort of nefarious agenda, leave me alone!
"Does testosterone make you stupid?"
(My mom asked this fairly recently... to which I replied, "I dunno... that depends... does estrogen make you stupid with math?")
"...you're supposed to care, but you don't"/"what do you mean you don't care? This was your decision"
No, it wasn't, it was someone else's. It wasn't even my
life. But somehow others' lives inherently involve mine, which I was not aware of, so please, go on....
