like there are plenty of trans ppl who can’t & won’t ever ~pass~… you look like a dickhead complimenting someone on being able to move thru the world in a certain way when there’s so many ppl who can’t bc of circumstances outside of their control.
i love what s. bear bergman has to say about the word “passing” — that it puts the onus on trans people to make their presentation more legible to cis people.
“rather than talking about who passes, let us talk about who reads.”
transcript:
My suggestion is that we put the burden where it belongs: on the observer. Imagine a construction of language that, rather than reinforcing an idea of transgender or transsexual people as creating a falsehood, supported by the notion that our genders are perfectly natural and inherently truthful. For that to be the case, however, some blame needs to be assigned in cases of disagreement (and noone will allow me to blame the media culture and its great love affair with the binary, regrettably). I say we assign it to the cisgendered. Rather than talking about who passes, let us instead talk about who reads
“They read me as a man.” See how this works? That sentence assigns responsibility to the person or people doing the seeing, the reading, rather than further objectifying the object of gaze. Not just that, but in the sentence it is not clear what the speaker’s identified gender or sex assigned at birth is.
amusedAnarchist 