About where I am emotionally.
Sep. 3rd, 2012 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
agent_daniThis post will probably get a little dark. I assure you that I am okay, just not great right now.
I've struggled with thoughts of suicide. Last night I realized that one of the more powerful motivators against it for me is that if I did, my death would be used as part of the fucked-up justification supporting ever more restrictions of the bullshit sort that I have endured for four years (and counting.) That's how it works with gatekeepers and their supporters - that people have problems under that system is used as proof that the system is good. That I have any regrets from dealing with the process, even that those regrets are of having to deal with the bullshit, are taken as proof that it is necessary and needs to be made even more stringent.
I describe myself as both lesbian and a trans woman. While neither can be truly separated for me because they are tightly intertwined, they are still distinct in many ways. One example is that I am comfortable being out as lesbian at work but I am not comfortable being out as a trans woman at work. There's a simple reason at play: being out as lesbian does not put me under undue scrutiny while being out as a trans woman will. It's a matter of familiarity; lesbian and gay individuals aren't so foreign to them and, thus, the actions of one aren't so much used to judge all. I know that I get a significant amount of that already as a woman in a part of the IT field which is very much overwhelmingly male; being out as a trans woman would most likely make me the only one they know and that has the effect of putting me under a microscope that I do not want.
I am also asexual, which doesn't factor into this point, though I have had punitive treatment from medical professionals for that reason.)
I feel even more that I sold my soul. With the customer last week I was directly supporting something with which I strongly disagree. Also, a part that I didn't say from the therapy appointment, was seeing someone I know, who is fairly early in transition, walk in for the next appointment as I was leaving, knowing I had effectively just reinforced what was being enforced upon her.
I've struggled with thoughts of suicide. Last night I realized that one of the more powerful motivators against it for me is that if I did, my death would be used as part of the fucked-up justification supporting ever more restrictions of the bullshit sort that I have endured for four years (and counting.) That's how it works with gatekeepers and their supporters - that people have problems under that system is used as proof that the system is good. That I have any regrets from dealing with the process, even that those regrets are of having to deal with the bullshit, are taken as proof that it is necessary and needs to be made even more stringent.
I describe myself as both lesbian and a trans woman. While neither can be truly separated for me because they are tightly intertwined, they are still distinct in many ways. One example is that I am comfortable being out as lesbian at work but I am not comfortable being out as a trans woman at work. There's a simple reason at play: being out as lesbian does not put me under undue scrutiny while being out as a trans woman will. It's a matter of familiarity; lesbian and gay individuals aren't so foreign to them and, thus, the actions of one aren't so much used to judge all. I know that I get a significant amount of that already as a woman in a part of the IT field which is very much overwhelmingly male; being out as a trans woman would most likely make me the only one they know and that has the effect of putting me under a microscope that I do not want.
I am also asexual, which doesn't factor into this point, though I have had punitive treatment from medical professionals for that reason.)
I feel even more that I sold my soul. With the customer last week I was directly supporting something with which I strongly disagree. Also, a part that I didn't say from the therapy appointment, was seeing someone I know, who is fairly early in transition, walk in for the next appointment as I was leaving, knowing I had effectively just reinforced what was being enforced upon her.
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no subject
Date: 2012-09-03 04:30 pm (UTC)Gatekeepers seem no close to getting it now that they were forty years back! I don't know what they gain from it other than a control freak's sense of empowerment.
As you know _scattermoon_ has got to where she needs to go and lord knows the equivalent so and so's here gave her a real runaround- something they should be thoroughly ashamed of but probably aren't. :o(
As they say in the best canine Latin:
Nil illigitimae carborundum!
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Date: 2012-09-04 02:52 pm (UTC)I didn't keep him, though: he loved his motorcycle more than he loved me, it seems.
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Date: 2012-09-04 03:25 pm (UTC)(my wife gets frustrated with the Standard Trans Narrative fairly often, but never with individual *people* whose lives happen to match up to it; not their fault they're often used as a bludgeon.)
(...because she so does not, including that she identified as a perfectly content cis male for many years, albeit one who was not particularly aggressively masculine. that's the sort of story that ends up losing the "trans enough" competitions really fast.)
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Date: 2012-09-04 03:36 pm (UTC)So it went with that I wasn't in overtly feminine dress at my first endo appointment, that I rode motorcycles and did not intend to give that up, that I intended to stay in my marriage... And that was by an endocrinologist, not a therapist.
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Date: 2012-09-04 04:16 pm (UTC)I got into big bikes _after_ transition so how that fits I don't know! :o)
'overtly feminine'? so it's not only Julie Bindel that accuses us of being 'extras from the cast of 'Grease' '? The 'experts' want us to be too?
Facepalm! :o/
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Date: 2012-09-04 04:25 pm (UTC)I've had many insist that it couldn't have been that since she never directly demanded I dress in that way, but at every appointment there were questions about how I dress...
As for the bikes, I think it was having too many unfemme things.
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Date: 2012-09-04 04:30 pm (UTC)Perhaps 'many' also need to go away and read some history?
'You can't want to be a woman if you don't wear skirts.'
I heard that so damn often- although not, I have to say, from my pshrink, who was an absolute star. So I do when _I_ feel in the mood, but like an awful lot of my cis acquaintance, these days I tend to live in jeans.
What's the age of majority over there?
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Date: 2012-09-04 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 04:37 pm (UTC)You begin to see why people have trouble in understanding what people go through!
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Date: 2012-09-04 04:54 pm (UTC)Worse, though, isn't the straight-up disbelief but the belief that, while it did once happen, it hasn't happened since around the 1960s, i.e. that it used to happen but could not have been threatened against me. Furthering this is one of the big disagreements I have with the new movie "Trans."
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Date: 2012-09-04 05:04 pm (UTC)Some of these people are the ones needing psychiatric treatment for incipient control freakery!
Don't get me going on trans films.
I'll watch the first one played by a trans actor or actress!
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Date: 2012-09-04 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 05:24 pm (UTC)So the ones I knew that didn't make it (and there were just so many) were all imagining it were they?
I'd love to meet some of 'them' from back then as I am now- fulfilled and happy in spite of them, not because of them.
Yet 'they' have real trouble finding 'regretters'. Odd, that, isn't it?
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Date: 2012-09-04 01:01 pm (UTC)This was also not helped by a certain physician who needed to learn to not ask questions if she wasn't prepared to accept the answers. I believe part of the radical change of HRT, away from something that was working well for me, was that I admitted I was happy with no libido in response to her questions.
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Date: 2012-09-03 08:09 pm (UTC)I am so sorry that it is still so bloody hard for you, and that people who should help, don't
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Date: 2012-09-04 03:22 pm (UTC)I do have to admit, it's hard for me to imagine a workplace where being a woman is subjected to some amount of tokenism but being gay isn't. :) Still, it sounds like a great place to work in regards to *some* liberal attitudes, which I suppose beats none...
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Date: 2012-09-04 03:33 pm (UTC)I'm in a field where women are rare, and it's very much a function of being a woman in this particular job. Over fifteen years in and I have only once worked with another woman who was a system administrator. Extend it to DBAs and I have worked with five more in that time.
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Date: 2012-09-04 04:20 pm (UTC)Moi aussi, but luckily I'm freelance and pretty damn good at what I do. Female military historians are rare beasties.
And what _lietya_ says- please do things that you need to do for you, not for others. There comes a time to be at least a little selfish.........
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Date: 2012-09-04 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 04:49 pm (UTC)... and this was a career choice that I made post facto
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Date: 2012-09-06 01:54 am (UTC)I've found that casual misogyny is plentiful in STEM fields. The number of such remarks to which I've been party...I have to decide "is this worth being The Troublesome Bitch in my department or division?"
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Date: 2012-09-04 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-05 05:09 am (UTC)next
I'd like to put a challenge to you for when your body is the way you want it to be
Become a gatekeeper
I've know you for what almost 20 years
I know you're smart
if you can afford it, go back, get your degree, and become a gatekeeper
and change the system from within.
it's tool late for now, and you have to walk the hard path
but you could make it easier for a future generation.
The women of the 60's and 70's made it easier for the women of the 80's and 90s, and they made it easier for today's people
you can make it easier for the next generation
in the 60's and 70's you got to keep nothing, no one, no job, no friends
you walked away from everything to be you.
look how much has changed, even though much is still the same
so given time, you can help the future
but don't do it now, you still need hugs and help
later when you're ready
change the world
huggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
no subject
Date: 2012-09-05 05:10 am (UTC)you are right, it is better for them
so don't let that anguish eat you up, ok?
more hugs
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Date: 2012-09-06 01:48 am (UTC)