
Something that’s been on my mind lately is how to navigate my relationships with cis people, and especially cis men, that I’ve known since pre-transition. At meals and get togethers with friends and family I keep finding myself in conversation with the men more than the women, and it feels like they’re talking to me man-to-man, and I’m not enjoying it. Some examples of what this looks like include getting cornered when it’s just the two of us in the kitchen, or being at a table with another couple and the conversation splits to cis women / cis guy and me, and never comes back together. I can see a number of factors involved with why this might be happening.

One big part of this is that we had a male relationship before my transition, and so it’s easy to just keep acting like that’s how we relate to each other. Similarly, the women in this scenario don’t have as well defined a relationship with me, so it’s not as easy for us to slip into a comfortable socializing pattern. A lot of cis people seem to have no idea how to talk to people in transition. I know a lot of trans people would rather not get questions or comments from their friends and family, which is understandable in the case of having transphobic people in your life, but in my case I’m supposedly surrounded by allies who don’t seem to notice or want to ask how things have been going for me. I’m willing to have that conversation, transition is so WEIRD and COOL and EMOTIONAL and I want to share! I want to be seen and acknowledged as a woman by my friends and family, and I wish they would show an iota of awareness about it.

I probably look pretty nervous at cis-heavy social gatherings these days. There’s so much that I’m trying to juggle when I’m out with cis people - how’s my appearance? Is my voice too deep? Am I being too loud and obnoxious in a male way? Am I lapsing back into old patterns? How are they perceiving me? I’m extremely self-aware in ways that I’m not around the trans folks in my life. I experience internal transmisogyny around “living up” to being a woman, not wanting to embarrass other women by sharing their pronouns. And so when it comes to being around men, I feel like it’s extra important for them to see me exhibiting these traits so that they won’t keep perceiving me as a man, and sometimes this has been translating into making myself small and quiet to get a handle on the shitstorm of pressures in my head. I think that some of these men are picking up on this, and trying to make me feel more included by engaging me in conversation. There’s like a “chivalry” component to it?

Lastly I’m not forgetting that as a cis man it can be intimidating to be in social situations with a lot of women, and “guys have to stick together” in those sorts of circumstances. One meme of sexism is the mystery of the “fairer sex” - women are supposedly  unpredictable and emotional, and their bodies are weird. You can’t understand them! On the opposite side of the coin, men are, of course, calm, cool and rational. We all know this is a heap of bullshit designed to take away women’s autonomy and give men a free pass for feelings of entitlement. But even the best feminists can internalize this thinking to some degree. Cis men especially seem to struggle with awareness around these stereotypes since they aren’t taught how to relate to their feelings, which means they’re easily scared in non-male settings. So since I’m the closest thing to a man in the room, the cis guys light upon me for companionship. This feels like an additional emotional burden for me to carry. I’ve already talked about my hyperawareness of self, and now unintentionally a guy friend is asking me to soothe his ego and protect him from the icky girls. I absolutely do not want to be in this role, and I have plenty of this crap to work through in my own brain before I can start helping somebody else.

This post really doesn’t have a point or a positive ending, it’s a vent about a common experience in my life right now. It feels good to try and get some of the steps of this dance written down, at least. Just one of the papercuts of transition.


Guys in the Kitchen

The author's egg crack, refusal of the call, and subsequent acceptance of self as depicted by GitHub contributions


It’s only Tuesday, and the vibes are fucked this week. Through my trans community, I’ve been very active since June on a Discord server of trans and gender-diverse people in the area. Since I joined, the server has swelled in population, from about 50 members to nearly 250. I was recently added to the moderator team, and have been doing my best to provide feedback on decisions and suggest improvements for the server. But I feel like I jumped in at a bad time, because like I said, the vibes are fucked.

One of the reasons that I think I was tapped for joining the mods was my involvement in some delicate situations involving safety of the other server members at public gatherings. Safety has begun to be more of a concern as since there is so little oversight of members of the Discord at this point (despite being invite-only), some less than savory members have joined and subsequently been expelled, stirring up a lot of shared stress in the process. I think some of the mods and admins have since been on higher alert for dangerous behavior from the other members, and that this has been burning people out. There’s high alert and then there’s triggers from trauma, and when you have a trans community there’s no way for trauma to not be involved.

People are down, the mood is down. Maybe it’s partially a seasonal thing. There are a lot of people in this community with relationship stressors that have been festering and seem to have hit the fan this week. I know there’s some statistics around the holiday season being correlated with violence or divorces or something, and I feel like I’m watching something to that degree play out across a population. It’s brutal.

On top of that there are a lot of newer members who, despite not breaking the rules, tend to bring a lot of negativity without growth. Lots of complaining and worrying self-talk and misery. And you want to feel for these people, and you want to help set them on the right path, but that’s not what they’re here for, and it drains energy from well-meaning folks. I’m not the most well-meaning, I don’t think of myself as being very good at talking people off the ledge, but I’m watching it all happen and it’s stressing me out, too. Again I think this has a big link to trauma, and the stuck points that traumatized people tend to repeat to themselves that keep them from growing. Sometimes people need a place where they can be heard, like a support group, but the difference between a support group and a large Discord server is shared values and intention.

When I attend my weekly support group, I agree to share certain values and provide support to others as best I can, even if that just means listening to them talk. Everyone agrees to be kind. Everyone agrees to protect each other by maintaining confidentiality. But we agree to more than that. We hauled our asses to a community center, or emailed someone and got a Zoom link, because we were willing to actively participate in receiving and sharing support. We have to sit with each other, look each other in the eye, be physically present with each other’s pain. In a Discord of 250 people, that social contract barely exists - you get a link and here’s a chatroom to do whatever in. There are rules for conduct, but rules are not shared values, rules are a blunt tool used for removing the worst offenders. I think when the server was only 100 people or so and most were coming from said support group things were pretty smooth sailing because we carried those values forward with our fellow participants. But the server has grown beyond that and our group cohesion is being tested.

I’ve been rereading this week a famous feminist essay from 1970 titled [The Tyranny of Structurelessness](https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm). The author Joreen writes about the problems she was facing when trying to turn 1960s feminist consciousness-raising circles into activist spaces capable of organization. She talks about a lot of struggles that groups of any form face, like informal power through friendship networks as a pitfall, celebrities and big personalities undermining message cohesion, and the impotence of different scales of groups due to lack of structure and shared goals. She talks about learned helplessness that a lot of group members brought to feminist spaces since they were new to thinking outside misogyny and didn’t realize their own potential.

I think where I’m at reading this essay and comparing it to the server’s current state is that a line was crossed and a scaling problem has begun snowballing. Where informal friendships and shared values once dictated the vibe, a sense of aimlessness now pervades just because there are so many new members present who outnumber those initial networks. And so of course individuals feel hit harder by their problems, their support network has been diluted and stretched thin. Finally add on top of this the burden of internalized transphobia and transmisogyny that tells participants that they are less-than and unable to act in the face of bigotry, that their problems are individual. All this combined keeps people from organizing and taking decisive action, which would in turn provide structure and shared values for the group.

The only way that I can see to turn a vibe shift like this around would be to find ways to establish a culture of shared responsibility and empowerment to take action and form bonds. At some point it’s not simply enough to share space with people, everyone needs to contribute to a vision in order to support the whole. We need to learn from the struggles of our predecessors, because we are neither alone in space nor in time. The vibes are fucked this week, but I’m still hopeful that we can unfuck them.

Human Kibble

The author's egg crack, refusal of the call, and subsequent acceptance of self as depicted by GitHub contributions

Guys in the Kitchen

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