disingenuous

There was a thread started on one of my regular political blog reads* about whether "men" should use the label feminist. The post initiator appeared to be agreeing with the position that maybe it's not a good idea for "men" to claim the label due to lack of first hand experience. Because I'm genuinely curious, I asked:

how, if at all, is the feminist monicker informed by any number of trans identities and issues? Is a transguy still capable of being a legitimate feminist due to the experience living as assigned female? Does passing as male in any way dilute one’s claim to the label? Are transwomen eligible to be feminists at any point? Is the legitimacy of the claim based on self-definition, on socially assigned definitions, some combination of the two, or something else entirely?

The poster is self-defined as a transguy, so it seemed valid and possibly illuminating. But, there's something in phrasing of the questions for understandability that felt... bad, to me. If I intentionally use language as a rhetorical stance that discourages the consideration of nonbinary options, am I participating in my own erasure? This raises the related question for me of how I can participate in the feminist struggle even though many of the fundaments seem problematic in relation to me personally. I feel dirty, and don't know how to get rid of that feeling.






*feministe, if you're interested

stories

I realized today that I actually do want to tell stories, that I both need and enjoy that. Problems abound, however. I worry that I have no stories in me to tell, or if I do, I have no means of telling them. I worry that if I craft a story for myself, it will go no further than that, but if I craft it for others, it will be constrained by the intended audience. Over time, more and more of the training wheels and kiddie pools of psuedo story telling have fallen away, but nothing yet has replaced them. To invert one of my most often invoked analogies, I'm out of methadone, but don't think I'm up for the real opiate, leaving instead a growing want.

I suspect there's something to confidence here; I'm finding myself cursed with a more general applicability of certain advice than I anticipated, but having welcomed that insight, I find myself unable to ignore it now. The one size fits all answer is that it takes practice to become confident, but practice with what, and how, are rarely offered. I think this goes beyond my usual response to spring, but I'm not sure I could tell you how, exactly, at least not yet.