Gender Journey

If It’s Not Your Community, Kindly Hush

Toxic normative mansplaining — is there any other kind?

If I tell you something about my community and you are not a part of it, please kindly hold your burning desire to correct me. I’ve become more aware of cisgender-heterosexual (cishet) normative white male oppression since I started questioning my gender than I ever was in the presumed identity of a cishet white woman. I was part of the problem. I know that now. But I didn’t see it, then. Can anyone say, internalized misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia?

This came to my attention when I attempted to help someone. Big mistake. They never asked for help (that’s my bad) and as I quickly discovered, this presumably cishet white man didn’t need correcting. Yes, my mistake. I am wrong. Not you. Not possibly you.

The person in question confused aspects of gender and sexuality. I debated if I should stay the hell out of it, but as we were both students, I thought perhaps he may be open to learning. At the end of my email, I noted that I was transgender, hopefully indicating that I, you know, kind of knew what I was talking about. The response I received was passive-aggressive, at best, and the kicker came at the end when he shared his sexuality (which is kind of creepy). I sighed in the realization that he still didn’t understand that gender and sexuality are different things. Oh well — good luck with that, bro!

But this article isn’t about him, it’s about what I learned from him. What I took from his reply (yes, my assumption) was that he couldn’t possibly be wrong and that even though I was within the community and he was not, he knew better. Classic privilege with perhaps an unhealthy dash of toxic masculinity. And that was the moment it hit me. The moment I realized that until I began to question and to learn the language, I didn’t know either. I don’t think I was ever so presumptuous as to tell a minority group that I knew more than them about their own community, but truth be told, I cannot state it with 100% certainty.

In the subconscious self-recognition of masculinity, did I emulate these traits myself? Is that why I never saw it before? Was it because even when I was presenting as ‘woman’, I didn’t believe that I was oppressed? Perhaps in the admission of my minority status, I would also have to admit that I was a member of that minority, and I just, could not. Not that minority. Not a ‘female’ minority. And let’s not even talk about that f word, yet.

But a strange thing happened when I began questioning gender. Suddenly, I was a minority, but a minority that I wanted to embrace and one that welcomed me with open arms and more importantly, open hearts. I never felt that from the cishet normative experience. I may never know if that is because it wasn’t there or because I didn't want it to be.

I considered the possibility that I am a binary trans-man; someone whose future holds the potential of being perceived as a white man (because my skin does not advertise my aboriginal heritage) and the privileges and problems that come with that. Ah, yes! I get it now. The cishet white man normative suddenly made sense. It is a thing. It is a problem. #notallmen. #notallanything. Funny that it took realizing I may be a man to realize I didn’t want to be one. Oh yeah, that’s a great segue to the argument about transgender being a choice or not. I’ll inevitably write about that at some point.

“We can all fall into the trap of insensitivity and thinking we know better than a person with lived experience.”

For now, I’m happy to have a clearer understanding of myself and a deeper ability to respect the struggles of minority communities. We can all fall into the trap of insensitivity and thinking we know better than a person with lived experience. It’s a human trait that is taught in school: learn these things and you will know. We get grades to tell us how well we’ve learned the supposed facts and we are rewarded and validated when we get the best grades. We learn that it is a good thing to ‘know’ more than someone else. I don’t ‘know’ about you, but I definitely see a problem with this system. It seems there is no need to experience anything if you can read about it.

But I didn’t read about the social construct that is gender. I didn’t learn about it. I wasn’t taught anything about gender or gender identity in school. I learned about presumed sex on a binary scale. I was taught that’s all there was. I was taught that being gay was not ‘normal’. I was taught that transgender people are gay people who want to be heterosexual. This is the ridiculous cishet normative narrative that kept me locked away and wondering why I felt so disconnected for 45 years.

The first thing I did when I started questioning was research. And here’s the funny thing: When you have experience and then you research, what you read, what you absorb, and how you interact within that research is very different than prior to the experience. Without experience, you cannot approach any learning about anything with the same mental gymnastics as someone who has experienced it.

I may never know what it is like to be an astronaut. I can read about it all day. I have a post-graduate degree in Astronomy and I’ve written several sci-fi books. I’ve watched more launches than I can count, read more books than I can remember including autobiographies, and I can give you a second-by-second rundown of a launch, but unless I go to space, I’ll never know what it is like to be an astronaut. And I would never tell an astronaut about their own experience or correct them. Even a cishet misogynistic white man would agree with this. But it is no different to any community of people or experiences.

So, unless you are a member of a minority community, do not presume for a moment that you know more than them. Unless you are transgender, do not presume for a moment that you know more than me about that experience.

Going one step further, even within any minority community, each experience is unique. As a transgender person, I will never presume to know the experience of another transgender person and I know that for most, they feel the same. The trans-normative narrative is a thing too — but again, that’s for another blog post.