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Aug. 29th, 2006
Why, oh why, do visions and insights insist on coming to call when I'm in the least conducive and forgiving of times and places? Fuck, I'll likely never know what I'm missing, if I manage to function "normally" the rest of the day, but all indications are that it's fucking huge, and likely important.
Fuck 9-5 rigidity, and fuck The Man, damn it.
Fuck 9-5 rigidity, and fuck The Man, damn it.
(no subject)
Aug. 29th, 2006 02:09 pmPeople won't ever agree 100% as to the nature of reality, any reality (shared, constructed, physical, personal, etc); I really like this a lot. What I like less is that there seems to be a closed-offedness of reality experience, that even in the relatively rare cases where people will acknowledge difference of subject position (if not actual subjectivity), theirs tends to be viewed as inviolable, correct and ontologically accurate when compared to the differences of others. The idea of productive overlap of subjectivities seems to be something foreign or frightening to many.
This comes home very personally to me. In a world in which most people assume gender is a given, attached to physical sex (both of which are exclusively binary), my identity as "something else" has very little traction in the realities of others. That my identity is gender-, and (at least as far as I know) not sex-based, means there is often less elasticity for my existence than for, say, they intersexed. (No, I'm not saying the intersexed live lives of ease and comfort, accepted by all. What I am saying is that since binarism is most often linked gender to physical sex, in the cases of nonbinary physical sex, there seems to be a grudging acceptance of the existence of these people. That this does not lead to acceptance as equals worthy of dignity and respect is a tragic mistake made over and over.) Since gender is not disconnected from sex for most, it makes no sense to them that I could have a body of apparently one gender (before tampering), and an identity that's neither 'male/man' or 'female/woman'; from the starting position, it just doesn't make sense to most.
I'm well aware of the fact that I come from this culture of gender=sex=binary, and yet I don't buy it, at least for myself (I try for others, as well, to various levels of success; I have a hard time not seeing the self-proclaimed cisgendered (even if they aren't even aware of the term) as anything other than female.:women/male.:men. how much of this is honoring self definition, and how much is accepting general cultural defaults, on either side). I don't think I'm arrogant enough (any more) to believe I'm xenogenetic, so there has to be something in this culture that makes someone like me possible, yet... I get caught up in the nonphysical origin of my identity, and while I do believe that the exclusively physical basis for uniform binary gender is fallacious, the seeming shared consensus on this by most with whom I come into contact makes me feel untenable and inexplicable. Were I physically different, like if people believed all eyes were either green or brown, I could point to my own blue eyes and insist that they were real. With something intangible like my identity, I can't do that, so it makes it harder to smile indulgently at the mistaken ontologies of others, at least where I'm concerned, secure on my own existence.
This comes home very personally to me. In a world in which most people assume gender is a given, attached to physical sex (both of which are exclusively binary), my identity as "something else" has very little traction in the realities of others. That my identity is gender-, and (at least as far as I know) not sex-based, means there is often less elasticity for my existence than for, say, they intersexed. (No, I'm not saying the intersexed live lives of ease and comfort, accepted by all. What I am saying is that since binarism is most often linked gender to physical sex, in the cases of nonbinary physical sex, there seems to be a grudging acceptance of the existence of these people. That this does not lead to acceptance as equals worthy of dignity and respect is a tragic mistake made over and over.) Since gender is not disconnected from sex for most, it makes no sense to them that I could have a body of apparently one gender (before tampering), and an identity that's neither 'male/man' or 'female/woman'; from the starting position, it just doesn't make sense to most.
I'm well aware of the fact that I come from this culture of gender=sex=binary, and yet I don't buy it, at least for myself (I try for others, as well, to various levels of success; I have a hard time not seeing the self-proclaimed cisgendered (even if they aren't even aware of the term) as anything other than female.:women/male.:men. how much of this is honoring self definition, and how much is accepting general cultural defaults, on either side). I don't think I'm arrogant enough (any more) to believe I'm xenogenetic, so there has to be something in this culture that makes someone like me possible, yet... I get caught up in the nonphysical origin of my identity, and while I do believe that the exclusively physical basis for uniform binary gender is fallacious, the seeming shared consensus on this by most with whom I come into contact makes me feel untenable and inexplicable. Were I physically different, like if people believed all eyes were either green or brown, I could point to my own blue eyes and insist that they were real. With something intangible like my identity, I can't do that, so it makes it harder to smile indulgently at the mistaken ontologies of others, at least where I'm concerned, secure on my own existence.
