bodies, connection to

[adrienmundi]

Sometimes I wonder what it's like for people who aren't trans or have gendery issues with their bodies. Do they have some sense of physical self that more or less matches their tangible bodies? I remember thinking the cleverest thing about Butler's "Gender Trouble" was the argument she made that everyone has an imagined body overlaid over their actual, and I still think it was situationally brilliant philosophical judo, but... I'm not sure I buy it, or at least buy it in the way I think I was being asked to.

For instance, I have this quest to seek out what I experience as an internal, almost tangible 'click' of bone sliding into place, or something of a similar texture, that to me means things line up, I can feel and act from the tips of my fingers to the tips of my toes, weight is lifted from my shoulders and my spine is pulled up from the crown of my skull. Things are possible then, things both physical and not just physical, possibilities expand and doubt recedes. I've experienced it in small ways before, usually moment or task specific, but when I did, it was revelatory. I'm not sure I can describe the sense of not being out of synch, physically, better than I have, and I'm not even talking definitionally (that's a whole different issue).

This ties in, for me, with a sense of what it feels like my body wants to be like (not at all the same thing as what I think it should be like, or what meaning it should carry; those things come later, I think). It's not an idea that feels external, and I do root pretty savagely for traces of co-optation. I don't think this arises from guilt and/or conflict, and would actually suggest that the guilt and conflict arise from running into assigned meaning and external valuation. I've no idea from whence it comes, but having laid some of my most damaging etiological fears to rest, I'm coming to be of the opinion that it doesn't matter, and I don't think the burden is on me to explain it to those who would attempt to exercise the privilege of insisting that I do.

But I don't know what it's like feel at home in one's mass as a state of being, and most of the intentional changes I make are attempts to get closer to that goal. I want to be at home in me; I guess that's what makes me my flavor of trans.

Comments

[k-navit.livejournal.com]

I had about 300 things to say reading this, and none of them made it past the end of your post in anything resembling English. And none of them would have been helpful, anyway, and that comes with the obligatory mea culpa of wanting to fix or help first and foremost, and I'm aware of the limitations of that, the bias of that, and the flagrant imperialism of that. I don't know what empire I might be coming from from but I know that my well-meaning doesn't mesh with your-being very well at all sometimes, and this makes me very sad. I admire the hell out of you. And I care. And I adore you. And that's about all I can say, other than acknowledge my ignorance and my numerous, numerous faux pas.

I happen to be in a place, apparently to occupy permanently a place, where body never matches potential or even what I imagine on good days, when I think I'm allowed to imagine, what it would be if I could imagine it. Shit happens. I'm stuck to it physiologically in some cases, not so physiologically in other cases. My status of (relative to yours) indifference leads me to say absolutely nothing most of the time, because I don't have a right to opine in something I plainly don't grok.

I just wish there were something I could to to 1) help, and 2) not be such a fucking jackass in general about. I don't have all this shit down very well, and I don't know what all the words mean, but you're on the one hand-count of people I'd kill a motherfucker for, for whatever that's worth, and all that killing energy can be usefully redirected into other areas I'm sure. Or so I'm told. Or so I want to believe.

Wow, I'm really bad at this.

[adrienmundi]

Nah, you're actually pretty good at this, whatever it is.

I don't want you to think you can't or shouldn't express whatever adjacent, covalent or tangential experience or thought or maybe-connection for fear of... what, exactly? It'd be pretty hard for you to offend me, I think, and I'm acutely aware that I don't know everything, or that there are countless things I haven't thought of, so if there are smart, impassioned people I adore (like you) who might have something to say that might shed some light, I'm enthusiastically for it.

But also, I don't want you to think you can't talk about shit of your own for fear that it might not mesh well with my shit. Seriously. I think we should, or can, be past all that (an imperative my way at least as much as at yours).

[becket.livejournal.com]

"Do they have some sense of physical self that more or less matches their tangible bodies?"

I struggle a lot more with self perception and external categories. I grew up in a thunderingly racist environment, but the stories and songs in my head drowned it out pretty effectively. Echoes of that childhood shit bounce around, like bullets fired into a tank before the armor got bolted on.

It wasn't until I started buying clothes for myself that I noticed I was actually not usual. Of course, in the mill town where I was born, in the years before 'brown' became important, there was black, and there was white. Asians, as a whole, were sort of honorary whites because of harmonies with class struggle. But in a clothing store my feet are too wide, my legs aren't right for my height, my trunk and arms aren't of the common proportion.

I grew up being called the wrong ethnic slur. They new they wanted to call me a name, and so would settle for whatever was at hand. On the upside, it made it easy to shrug off. On the other, there's no epithet I get to embrace and make my own. I still feel sort of third party in racial conflicts.

This is obviously not a comment about gender, so I hope you'll forgive the tangent. But, like most of my comments here, I'm expressing what I think is a sympathy with the struggle.

[adrienmundi]

I think I get it. I try really hard to resist the race metaphor because on one hand, I don't know that it's mine to invoke, and on another, because I think the issues don't overlay smoothly, and I'd not like to give the impression that I think they do. That being said, I think the larger issue, of being outside the grouping of the hegemonic, so-called norm, does have a lot of similar resonance for those who find themselves there, across specifics, and I'm glad to have you on my side.

[fairyhead.livejournal.com]

Not recognizing a picture of me at my grandmother's is terribly illustrative of how I experience my body. It goes beyond the media story of what people should look like and it goes beyond getting my brain around aging. I don't look like I feel. I don't know. I never feel a 'click'. The closest thing I get to is when I hit that dancing high or at times moving through the airport. Most other times, if I don't actively work to avoid it, there are so many moments of WTF? That's part of why I don't dig the mirrors or photos - it's this weird, disorienting underscoring that I should be ... more? I'm not sure what the more means, except something around more considerable or something like that.

[adrienmundi]

That's very interesting, thanks. I mean, it's kind of what I often assume is the case for people, to varying degrees, but then it gets tainted with suspicion of my own motives, because it seems to match so closely in some ways to what I experience that I worry I'm projecting, and have lately just decided others can't possibly experience it similarly (if that makes any sense at all).

[fairyhead.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't know how similar it is or if the causes are similar (at first glance), but I do know that I sure as hell feel that and, like, all the time. At home or out, it's always there, if just at the edge. Sadly, I can't live my life with a dancing high and/or intimidating folks at the airport ...