I’ve gotten some interesting comments to my post about belonging and thought more people should check them out.
To all you who responded:
Thanks all for very interesting insights & thoughts.
I have always been an ally of the LGBT – & felt welcome as one. (I was that person all the gay boys came out to after HS, & likewise a little later with lesbian friends.)
But my own sense of my LGBT-ness comes out of my own genderqueer qualities, and I wonder how trans partners who are more gender normative (& not otherwise gay, bi, or lesbian) might feel. To me, it’s all about creating safe spaces, and of course I’ll continue to do that.
On that note, the guys who date transwomen who identify as straight are *never* going to feel part of this community while we all gossip that they’re ‘really gay.’
< Jill and I right before the workshop on trans relationships at TIC.
We had a lot of great conversations with people up at TIC especially in the trans relationships workshop Jill Barkley & I hosted – about identity, compromise, sexuality, fetishization and respect. The one point that came up early was why non-trans people often are accused of being fetishizing or predatory for doing things that trans people might do and not be similarly accused – as in, if a trans person seeks another trans person as a partner, it’s understood as being a shared interest or experience, but if a non-trans person seeks a trans person as a partner, they are accused often of fetishizing transness.
I do value Betty’s transness because of my own gender stuff, but sometimes it feels like that wouldn’t “count.” It kind of reminds me of a story told by two professors I had (who had been married to each other for upward of 50 years), about when they met in the 1930s, when one of them was a Socialist and the other a Communist; their friends lay bets on how soon they would break up, since one was considered a “committed radical” the other only a “fellow traveler.”
I’ve also had people who’ve met me since the book or in my 20s “worry” that my own discovery of my gender stuff is somehow Betty’s fault. It isn’t, of course, and anyone who knew me when i was 20 or younger knows that.
The way these things interlap is of ongoing interest to me, and I welcome your further comments.