Duh (A Brief Response To Dodson & Ross)
I found this incredibly stupid, sexist and naive.
1. “Women” are not “sexually fluid.” That is the stupidest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard. The fact that you are sexually fluid and a woman does not mean that all women are sexually fluid. Duh.
2. My sexuality could not be less fluid, and I’m extremely sick of the implication that this is some kind of character flaw. I don’t need to be “healed” from not wanting to sleep with dudes. I’m a butch dyke, and that is just as valid as any other orientation. Duh.
3. The fact that you “identify with being alternative” does not make you gay. Being gay makes you gay. DUH.
Some More Butch & Femme Links, And A Video
Recent additions to the DD blogroll: FemmeMobile, Break It Down, Butch, Twelve-Bar Butch. Great, great, great stuff. And just for fun, “Butch/Femme” by Team Gina:
What the most interesting femme- or butch-themed thing you’ve come across lately?
A Note On Identity, Affinity, And Class Membership
My friend Teresa and I had an interesting conversation yesterday, in which we pinpointed something that had been bothering me for awhile — a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of identity. Thanks also to Freyr for helping me further clarify these ideas.
Identity is not something you choose. The way folks talk about identities — whether sex, race, culture, gender, or anything else — often implies an act of voluntary selection, as if from a buffet table of life. But while it is an act of free agency to choose the labels and words we use to describe our identities, we don’t choose the identities themselves. They are what we already are.
This is complicated, of course, by our multiple uses of the word identity. A person can talk about her identity as a guitarist, say, or a dancer — things over which she obviously has a large measure of control. The sense I’m discussing here is identity as membership in a social class.
I think this misunderstanding is part of why people can be so clueless about cultural appropriation. I live in a town full of wealthy, white New Age types (hello, Santa Fe) — cultural appropriation is pretty much constant. The attitude that a person’s identity is something she chooses, something she voluntarily affiliates with just because it suits her, is a bedrock that prevents people from seeing why white people, in the Southwest of all places, picking and choosing from other people’s (i.e. Native Americans’) symbols and ceremonies is problematic.
This applies to gender and sexual identities, too. Yes, I choose to use the word “butch,” thereby affiliating myself with everyone else who uses that word and with the word’s history. But I didn’t choose to be the way I am, to be the kind of person that word describes. The application of that word by someone who wasn’t butch — or gay or queer or anything else — would be a misuse and a misnomer, no matter how much the person “liked” butch/gay/queer culture.
More than one white person has told me that she “identifies as” some other ethnic group, simply because she thinks she likes that culture better than her own. But that is not what identity is. We do not get to choose.
Protected Posts
I’m going through a hard time right now, and I want to be able to write about it on DD without worrying that the wrong people will see, so you’re going to be seeing some password protected posts around here. I don’t know how many it will be — maybe a dozen, maybe just one. All ordinary DD readers are welcome to the password; just email me at s.lisa.bond at gmail dot com and ask. If I don’t know you from the comments or from around the ’sphere, I’d appreciate a link (to you blog, Facebook, Twitter, anything) to verify your identity.
Thank you for your understanding.
Music Meme
As you might have noticed, I’m not usually one for blog memes — but this music meme that alphafemme posted, in which one answers questions with the names of songs by a particular band, was too much fun to pass up. Here goes.
Pick Your Artist: Neutral Milk Hotel/Jeff Mangum
Are you male or female: Communist Daughter
Describe yourself: Sailing Through
How do you feel about yourself: Everything Is
Describe where you currently live: Where You’ll Find Me
If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Holland, 1945
Your favorite form of transportation: Up And Over
Your best friend is: She Did A Lot Of Acid
What’s the weather like: Tuesday Moon
Favorite time of day: Candy Coated Dream
If your life was a tv show, what would it be called: Leave Me Alone
What is life to you: Oh Comely
What is the best advice you have to give: Someone Is Waiting
If you could change your name, what would it be: The King Of Carrot Flowers
Your favorite food is: Three Peaches
Thought for the Day: Ghost
How I would like to die: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
My soul’s present condition: I Will Bury You In Time
My motto: Oh Sister
Share your answers in the comments here or back at alphafemme’s.
How To Change Your Name
As folks who’ve been reading for a while will know, I changed my name to better match my gender some months back. It was one of the best choices I’ve ever made — in retrospect, I can’t believe I didn’t make it sooner. Just yesterday I asked my immediate family, the last holdouts, to switch to my new name full-time, marking, I hope, the final chapter in the story of my name transition. My old name really, really isn’t my name anymore — I’m honestly surprised when I hear people say it.
All this being as it is, I thought it might be fun to share what I’ve learned with any prospective name-changers who may be in the audience. Share your tips and ask questions in the comments!
Without further ado, how to change your name, in five easy steps.
1. Pick a new name. Obviously, this is the the most important part. Take your time with it. Choose something that really fits. Choose something that makes you nervous. Something a little too big, to grow into.
2. Announce the change. This doesn’t have to be anything big. I made my main announcement in my Facebook status, and then went about telling individual people. It’s okay to be embarrassed, but remember that you don’t owe anybody anything. Just say, “I’ll be going by X now, everybody.” If you want to, say why.
3. Announce the change again. And again and again and again. Expect to be doing this everyday for awhile, and to continue doing it regularly for some time after that. Unless the switch is accompanied by a move to another city or something, you’re going to be running into people who know you has Old Name for a long while. That’s okay. It’s gets easier to say every time; eventually it’s as simple as shaking hands.
4. Correct people. This is really important. Telling someone your new name is meaningless if you don’t make sure they actually use it. People will slip up — sometimes quite sincerely, sometimes not — and it’s your job to remind them. This can get exhausting, but it doesn’t need to be a big deal. I usually just say my name, and nothing else, when this happens. Example:
“Hey, Y—”
“X.”
“Right, X. Sorry. Can you take a look at this?”
Easy as pie. Remember: You’re not being rude, selfish, or disagreeable by asking people to use your name. You are totally within your rights to change your moniker. Other people are being rude, selfish, and disagreeable when they refuse to respect your wishes. (more…)
The Soapbox Blues
Blogging has been rough on me lately. Sometimes I wish DD were a different kind of blog — something fun, like pretty pictures, videos of my favorite bands, all camaraderie and witticism. It gets hard to come back to this place every morning, where there is so much seriousness, where I often & inevitably fuck up and I hurt people’s feelings and people hurt mine and sometimes I feel like we are all talking past each other. Wish we were all friends (I know: stupid). Wish my skin were thicker. I’ve been doing what I do here in one form or another my whole life and I’m walking around with a lot of bruises at this point. I know in my head that you folks, DD commenters, are not ten kids in my 11th grade AP US history class who don’t care that I’m crying because they hate me because they have decided I lack compassion and the irony is forever lost on them and my teacher eggs me on and I throw up in the bathroom. But my heart forgets it, and I don’t know why I care but I do.
I know I’m not right about everything. But I can’t take anything back, and I can’t do this any other way. I have my piece and I have to speak it. There is no other choice.
Gender Is Not Fluid
I hear the statement “Gender/sexuality is fluid” all the time, probably more than once a day. People say it so often it almost sounds like a tic, or a code, the sentence heavily inflected and exclaimed, head shaking, hands raised. “Gender is just so fluid!” It is an expression, in the sense of an aphorism. A dictum. A cliché.
My Oxford American says: “fluid, adj., (of a substance) able to flow easily; not settled or stable; likely or able to change.”
Do any of these things apply to gender, personal or political? Or to sexual orientation? I’m well aware that people transition among gender identities and expressions, that a person’s sense of self may change over her lifetime, that many people experience attraction to a plurality of genders and that these preferences may evolve. All that said, is anything about sex, gender, or sexuality actually fluid, as in especially amenable to change?
Maybe I’m uncommonly settled in my ways, but in my experience, though people take some time to discover their sexual preferences and the gender expression that works best for them, it is rare for these things to actually change. Although they do evolve over the course of a person’s lifetime, I think it is inaccurate in the extreme to compare this trajectory to the scattershot and ever changing patterns of water. Gender identity is fluid like a person’s face is fluid.
I also think these statements sometimes serve to wave away the very real problems faced by gender and sexual minorities in our decidedly un-fluid society. To me at least, these statements always imply that a person could change herself if she really wanted to; if these actually were “all just really fluid,” well, couldn’t she? Couldn’t she tilt the board of her heart a little a to left to the make those waters run toward men? Or shift her weight a bit and make her gender identity rush right back to feminine? Sex and gender behave like a lot of things — growing trees perhaps, or archeological digs, or caged animals — but I have never seen them behave like liquid.
It is my best guess that when people say that gender or sexuality is fluid, what they actually mean is that gender and sexuality are diverse: that there exist many genders and many sexual orientations, that all of these ways of being are healthy and valid, and that their many nuances, their intricate folds, are beautiful. And to that: amen.
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