I often feel like this comes off as so much whining, but to explain where I’m coming from, what’s happening in my head, I need to keep saying it: I am having a lot of difficulty transitioning with this blog. I am always having those difficulties – this thing is an ever-changing beast. Now that I’m making an effort to adjust myself rather than adjust my blog, I’m getting some valuable perspective on some shit what’s gone on here. Specifically, I’ve got a better idea of what was going on with me when I bungled this post.

See, the other day, I had the singularly exciting opportunity to see my blog come up as a suggested feed for me in my RSS. “Harriet!” my RSS says, “You might enjoy these blog articles by Harriet!” Well, yes, I agree! Checking it out, I saw just how many people are subscribed. It didn’t seem like an objectively large number (though it still tickled me pink), but then, on a whim, I ran it against the subscribers on some of the other feminist blogs I read. You know, the ones I consider to be “real” blogs, with real writers, real readership, real effect on the blogosphere. And I was blowing most of them out of the water.

These are blogs I consider important. Worthwhile. These are the blogs that have helped create the bulk of my post-college feminist theory. When I want to give a friend Feminism 101, I refer them to these articles, these writers. These are my academics, the people that I consider to be out there, doing real things, making real changes. I don’t feel that way about myself. Not because I don’t value my abilities enough (though that’s also true), but because I value their abilities so much. These are people who have put far more dedication, passion, and just plain old fucking work into their little piece of the good fight; I know I’ve got raw writing talent, but in my mind, I just shlubbed onto the scene, said, “What’s up guys, let’s talk about me for a while,” then fell over backwards into some butterscotch fame.

I didn’t start this blog to be a feminist mouthpiece. I didn’t start it to fight the good fight. I didn’t start this blog to create anything other than a safe space for me to go “BLAH BLAH BLAH” all day. As my blog started getting popular, people started commenting and emailing me, telling me that I was all these things I had never wanted or asked to be. I was a voice for others. I was putting out little ripples of good. I’ve really resisted giving in to that. Whatever others are finding to value in my voice, that’s only coming from my ability to speak freely and for myself. I don’t know how to speak for others, or stake a claim outside my body and defend it. I freeze up. I do poorly. I get red-faced and talk for hours and don’t say anything. I don’t want to be anybody’s Internet role model. That’s too much responsibility, too much obligation, too much that hems me in. I should be able to just have a blog and talk about what I want, and everybody should just realize that they can’t expect anything else out of me. Just because other people look up to me doesn’t mean I’m a role model.

The other day, I got into a fight with my boss, which is new to me. At my last job, I never raised a peep. But the dynamics here – though still pretty dysfunctional – are nowhere near abusive, and suddenly I’ve found myself opening my mouth and adamantly disagreeing, only later to wonder, “Who the fuck was that who just told off her boss? Holy shit, it couldn’t have been me.” Anyway, my boss and I were fighting about how to process a certain objective in the office. The way they’ve done it in the office, for years, has never worked, and costs an arm and a leg more than it should. I was arguing for another way, a way that requires much more administrative presence upfront, and much more managerial oversight, but will result in lots of savings. My boss was arguing for the old way, saying, “If we just tell people to do it this way, that should work.” And she was right – it should work. It would be the easiest and the best if it did work that way. But it has never worked yet, and it wasn’t working now, so I was arguing, “Whether it should work has no bearing on whether or not it does. And it doesn’t. So we can keep doing it wrong because it should work, or we can find a way that does work and do it right.”

Suddenly, I was thinking about my blog. I shouldn’t have to take responsibility for being a representative of somebody’s voice in the wilderness. That’s not what I created this space for, and that’s not what I wanted. I shouldn’t be expected to change my way of living because other people look up to me. Other people should realize that I am not a role model. That’s how it should be, but that’s not the way it’s working. So I can keep doing it the way it should be, and keep fucking some crucial things up, or I can find a way that works and do this right. Since I do have significant readership, disproportionate to how much I feel I deserve from the work I put in here, and since that (very likely) comes with readers who are looking to me to set a certain tone and standard, I have to start acting like the kind of person who deserves all that.

When the trans argument popped up initially, I could tell I was not handling myself well. I froze up. There was a lot going on there, and I really couldn’t separate any of it out: just one big teeming rubberband ball of privilege, confusion, ignorance, sudden comment moderation, social anxiety, and unspoken expectations about my blog. At that point, I was still really viewing Fugitivus as a livejournal. I did not think of myself as somebody in the class of big-name bloggers, somebody who was Doing Something About Feminism ‘N Stuff or generally accepting a role within a community. Not that feminism doesn’t become inherently personal at points, but I really felt that this space was purely personal. I was unable and unwilling to view myself through the perspective of my readers, who considered me something more than an online diary. So, people coming here to tell me, hey there, that thing you said is really douchey? Okay, fair enough – I can say douchey things and be called out on it, or I can not say douchey things, but I can’t say douchey things and expect nobody gets to call me a douche. But having people come in and argue that I need to change my tone, my thoughts, my blog, is based on a premise that my tone, thoughts, and blog are worth way more than I’m willing to believe. “You, personally, are saying shitty things,” is something I can deal with (with varying levels of success). “You are part of and responsible for a community, you set the tone, you create something larger than the sum of its parts with your work, and you have an obligation to do right by that,” was something I was not able to deal with.

So, rather than deal with the problem from Perspective 2, wherein my blog is meaningful and part of a wider discourse, I dealt with it from Perspective 1, where this is a personal problem. It was a big personal problem – running headfirst into a wall of privilege usually is – and I was wandering around in a daze for a while. I did what I usually do when I’m confused and unbalanced; I retreated. I added my cis privilege to the list of things to keep thinking about until it’s been untangled, and I have been doing that slowly and privately, in the safety of my own head. That’s how I handle personal issues that come up between me and another person. I apologize, I fix it if I can, and if I can’t, I promise to not forget, to keep thinking about ways to fix it, and then I take a really long, patient, quiet time to do this.

Which is all well and good for me personally, and for those who want to hang out with me. But this blog isn’t a personal thing anymore. If it ever really was, it was back in the days when I got five hits a day. Even the rules I’ve enacted on this blog are primarily personal rules. I conduct my comments the way I conduct my life, and I ban or delete the kind of shit I’m not willing to hear IRL. I give some passing thought to what other people might or might not want to hear, but I don’t think about this as a community, or a real place that I am responsible for. The bigger this has gotten, the more apparent it’s become that the personal approach isn’t enough anymore. This is bigger than me now, bigger than I could ever purposefully make it. I’m trying to wrap my head around all the big and little things that changes – like my definition of being a writer, being a success, or doing something with my life – and this just goes on the list.

Here’s the reason all this came up. I was reviewing a bunch of my link trackbacks. I get a fair amount, and about 50% are ending up in shitty, ugly places, forums that are all “ha ha she got raped” or “that isn’t racism, that’s just good sense,” etc. I’m not the kind of person who enjoys or is able to tolerate hanging out in enemy camp, so I do a lot of skimming to quickly determine if I’m at a generally feminist or anti-racist website, or at a place awash in pearl-clutching terror and historical fugue. If it’s generally feminist, I might skim a little harder, but usually not too much. Most places don’t have the very strict moderation that I have, and I don’t enjoy flamewars at all – some people do, and that’s okay, it’s just not for me. I usually skim just enough to pick up the gist of a conversation, but not get involved in anything that makes my blood pressure rise.

So, I find myself linked on what appears to be a generally feminist site. I’m skimming around to find where I’ve been mentioned, and it looks like I’m somewhere in the comments. The commenter has accompanied my link with something about how this is an example of how things go wrong, and since she’s linking to a post about rape, I assume she’s saying something about rape culture – that’s where I get most of my trackbacks. I scroll up to skim the original post, and it’s something vaguely feminist enough, about The Vagina Monologues. I skimmed even more vaguely because unpopular feminist confession: I don’t care for The Vagina Monologues. I think they’re pretty cool, but honestly, I just don’t like monologues. I see, in my skimming, that the poster is discussing trans women performing The Vagina Monologues. I’ve heard of this before, and I think it’s pretty neat. In the adoption world, I got used to referring to adopted or foster kids as having “complicated” relationships to family. It’s a generally value-neutral way to acknowledge the ways losing their first family has affected them, without neglecting to mention that these kids are perfectly capable of loving, being loved, and creating new families around them. It’s complicated. I like people who have “complicated” relationships to anything, because it usually means that they’ve spent a lot more time dissecting, analyzing, understanding, and seeking out these objects of their desire than anybody with a “normal” relationship. When I first heard that trans women were putting on The Vagina Monologues, I thought it was really going to add something to hear from women who have complicated relationships with vaginas. Not that cis women don’t, obviously, but like with foster or adopted kids, there are things trans women have to grieve and have to gain, things they lose and things they build, that cis women don’t necessarily ever have to confront.

Check out my privilege: I totally thought all the other feminists felt this way, so I didn’t skim very hard, and assumed this article was also, “Yay trans Vagina Monologues!”

I’ve always considered myself a feminist, but college is where I really learned all the ideological background and academics. And we had little trans units, here and there, where we all discussed how trans stuff just blew the fucking top off gender tropes, and that was the awesomest thing ever. It didn’t occur to me, at the time, that we were a bunch of cis women sitting around discussing how the existence of trans people was a useful ideological tool for our own agendas. There wasn’t any discussion of transfolk as, you know, real people, just discussions of what transfolk represented, and what that representation could do for us. What we learned, though very privileged, was still generally on a positive tone: our professors actively encouraged us to celebrate the gender diversity that transfolk brought into the world. We weren’t to consider transfolk as obstacles in the way of feminism’s rolling bus, or separate issues that would be dealt with once the revolution had come. But we weren’t taught to consider transfolk as folk – they were essay titles, intriguing theses, ideological termites, eating away at the patriarchy’s gendered framework and bringing us awesomely helpful pronouns in the meantime. Us being everybody else, because despite the general positivity and tolerance (rather than acceptance), transfolk were still clearly them.

I received my college education not more than four years ago, from a generally liberal field in a generally liberal school, so I assumed that I had been taught whatever the general liberal feminist beliefs at this time were. I mean, yeah, of course, we were also taught that unfeminist people were all trans-hating, and we were definitely taught about trans panic, about murders, about BATHROOM TERRORS, but those were all things that ordinary people did. Not feminists, not anymore. Those days? So behind us.

So, back to this blog. I skim the section on The Vagina Monologues, assuming it’s all “Yay trans women!”, because the world I live in is nice and easy like that. I skim through the comments and find some keywords that indicate a faptrot has begun – words like “always” and “never” and “all you people” and “censorship!” and “ruining our space.” So I figure, because my world is nice and easy, that some assholes came in and had a trans-terror, and all the usual commenters jumped in to start shouting them out. I go back to the comment area where I am mentioned to see where I fit in to all this. I read a comment that is about as shitty as I can imagine. Like, if I were writing a novel with a character called Stereotype McDouchington, this is what they would say about transfolk. Ah! I think. This must be the person causing all the trouble here. Let’s see how somebody jumps in to shut them down, yes yes, because that will be satisfying!

And as I keep reading, the comments keep coming. Things I couldn’t even imagine that people – that feminists! – were still saying, in this day and age, about transfolk. About anybody! On my blog, I wouldn’t let people talk about Ann Coulter that way, because it is So. Fucked. Up. I do not even want to repeat these things, because I read them enough, in the comments I delete, and they’re horrible and sickening. Of course, I expect those things in the comments I get – boys with the Hulk Rage come here to try and make me fear for my life, because my existence punches their privileged belly. I do not expect to read those things from feminists. I do not even expect to read those things from feminists talking about the unfeminist world, because I expect that feminists have a basic understanding (even if it’s a spotty application) of the concept that a rotten principle is a rotten principle. If it’s not okay for Defenders of the Patriarchy to advocate that you oughta get raped so you know what it’s like to be a real woman, then it’s not okay for you to advocate that the Defenders get raped in turn. Master’s tools, master’s house.

Check. Out. My. Privilege.

So I go back to the place I’ve been linked and read the comment more carefully. I am an example of how things go wrong. I am an example of a feminist discussion that was ruined – RUINED – by trans women. I am an example of a woman who was SILENCED. I am a reason why trans women need to sit down, shut up, and possibly do us all a favor and die, because Harriet over at Fugitivus was so oppressed by you.

Fuckin’ ouch.

I knew I didn’t handle myself well in that post that was linked. I knew I was making mistakes. I knew I was too ignorant to get it together, and that ignorance was a reflection of what I had, up till that point, considered important enough to learn about. But approaching it from a personal perspective, I allowed myself the privilege of taking a long and quiet time of reflection. I didn’t step forward quickly with an apology, I didn’t challenge some comments I should have, because I was busy thinking and not talking. And because this was all personal, there was nothing wrong with that.

But from the other perspective, where this is a community where I am the most powerful representative, I created a certain kind of atmosphere. It wasn’t, I hope, an atmosphere where questions couldn’t be asked, disagreements raised, or conversations had. But I did the thing that I loathe so much in other situations, though it always sounds like such a good idea: I refused to take sides. That seemed like a perfectly appropriate way to handle things when I’m talking about my personal space, and the time I need to work things out. There’s nothing appropriate about that in a public space, where the fucked members of the kyriarchy come to be safe. By refusing to take sides, by refusing to take a firm position, I created an image of myself that let a bigot identify with me. I created an event that other bigots can point to and say, “See? See how you’re ruining everything?” I can’t take responsibility for every bigot out there. People see what they want to see, and I have seen some of my posts go to really weird places, full of wild speculations and TimeCube logic. But I can’t honestly say that my actions here have been patently misinterpreted. I can see pretty clearly how they got from Point A to Point B, and I didn’t really offer anything up in between to derail that train.

I don’t have a good conclusion here. Things aren’t all different now, and I haven’t got a plan for how I’m going to fix this. I’m trying to educate myself more. I don’t know where that will lead. I’m still very uncomfortable talking about anything that isn’t cis, because I don’t think I have a right to assume I can be an authority on anything that isn’t cis. But there is a conversation I’ve been having over and over with some no-name bloggers I’m soliciting. I ask them what they want to write about, and they say, “I haven’t been raped, so obviously I can’t write about that.” Nobody has to write about rape here, but I don’t want to let that statement go by unchecked. So I tell them, you don’t have to be raped to be affected by rape. There are a thousand ways rape has limited or damaged your life, too, even if you’ve never known a rape victim. You live in the same pond the rape victims do, and you’re drinking the same water. You know what we’re thinking because you’ve thought it about us, about yourself, about others, because we all grew up with the same toxic thoughts about rapists and rape victims.

But I understand why the no-name bloggers believe this. I imagine my awareness sometimes like a big bubble surrounding me. The more I learn, the bigger my bubble gets, and new things end up inside, bouncing around. Inevitably, every time my bubble has expanded, the “new” thing that shows up turns out to be not so new at all. Before I became aware of the thing, I thought of it as something out there, independent, floating around in the World I Do Not Understand. After I become aware of the thing, I realize that it was actually another bubble, surrounding me and mine. Like a big failure of a Venn diagram. Suddenly, I can look through the keepsakes in my bubble and see all the different moments in my life that were touched by this “new” thing, because it was never new or different. It was always there, but unconnected, without a name. My new awareness is actually just a new name.

Intellectually, I understood a lot about rape before I was ever raped. Only afterwards did the personal start to reconnect itself, reform under this new name: This Is What Rape Looks Like, Harriet. I was able to see all these little times and places in my life that were a part of what I experienced, finally, at the hands of my husband. My life had been filled with rape, but I had been calling it jokes, drunk assholes, catcalls, bad sex, fear out of nowhere, self-injury, self-hatred, eating disorders, locker room conversations of “what did she expect?” Before I was raped, though, if you were to tell me, “You have lots to say about rape!” I would have parroted back some statistics I’d read. Certainly, I have no personal investment in this word, this concept. It exists out there, for the people who know something about it. All those moments in my life? They belong under different names.

So I’m trying to apply that to this. I’m cisgendered, and I don’t have any right to talk about a transgender experience. But I do have a right – and now an imperative – to talk about the ways in which strict gender roles have limited or damaged my life. These are things that have always fallen under the concept “Feminism,” but that’s a word that very obviously isn’t specific enough, because it’s a word that allows transphobic bigots to spread their wings. I need to find ways to understand, personally and politically, how my freedom rests on the freedom of transfolk, that these things cannot be divided. I know I have these experiences – I know many people have – and have just never believed that they had anything to do with transsexuals.

A brief example: at the start of junior high, my grandmother chopped all my hair off against my will. It’s a longer story than that, but to shorten it, I hadn’t really developed yet, and I was going into a new school and a new period of my life looking like a boy. Girls wouldn’t let me into the bathroom unless I stripped. Boys made gay sex jokes around me, and simulated anal rape in the halls. Teachers frequently called me by the wrong pronoun. People who knew my mother was a lesbian told me that must be why I thought I was a boy. None of this was helped by the fact that, in real life, I have a somewhat gender ambiguous name. I’ve often thought about those experiences under the umbrella of “feminism.” I surprised myself, considering this the other day, when I realized that I’d never thought about this when reading about trans issues. I’ve never read a news story about the Bathroom Panics and remembered being followed into stalls. I’ve never heard a transgendered person describe the personal pain it causes them when they’re called by the wrong pronoun and remembered what it was like to have shopkeepers address me as “little boy,” and then treat me with open hostility when I corrected them. I’m amazed at my lack of empathy with so much opportunity to connect. But this is why it’s important to call a thing by the proper name. It’s not just confusion, ignorance, or foolishly good intentions that kept me from pulling on my own experience. It’s bigotry. And it’s bigotry that feminism is still happily flirting with, bigotry that will cause future generations to call this a part of our dark age (if we’re lucky).

END OF SQUALID INTROSPECTION

Now a solicitation.

I am seeking a self-identified transgendered no-name blogger to make a post. Let me know if you’re interested!