My survivors group was amazing. I think they have such a magic formula. The fact that we listen to each other, and we recognise the same feelings, the same patterns. Patterns that we thought made us so wrong. Really tough things bubbling up and being seen but really being held with compassion and understanding. The isolation, the shame. And there I am as a transitioned woman in a men’s group, and I’m totally accepted. No. Loved.
I find it quite strange – women’s over-generalisations about men not being emotionally literate. They are. It’s funny how some women can relate to ostracism from women, but also not feeling total connection with men, mentioning the “sexism” and “misogyny” while being almost unaware of how women and men isolate each other within their own social schema.
It’s a funny space to inhabit, isn’t it? The knowledge that even constructs designed to be helpful are, in fact, defective. How pattern-recognition becomes deception.
People really love holding schemas about themselves and others, of gender and of embodiment (and a lot more), and make constructs which may feel right, or justified, or protective, but by their very nature lack nuance and precision. They’re often intellectualisations of feelings, superficially rational but functionally deficient. They’re actually more responsible for fostering misunderstanding, disconnection and loneliness than most are aware of. These subtle shortcuts dramatically affect our experience of life. If you hold the schema that all men are dangerous, it becomes self-reinforcing. That want to hold a schema binds anything to reinforce it, and rejects any evidence against.
And while seeming to be “protective” the actual function is harmful. For example, someone mentioned how they were verbally attacked for “looking at a woman in the wrong way”*; he’s sensitive, thoughtful, caring, and sweet. It emotionally hit him – painfully so. He’s lived with being in a position of vulnerability and carried that mostly alone. Sometimes people look, but aren’t actually looking; they might be lost in thought, or in a state of dissociation, not actually there. It assumes that men must not ever do that because, in all cases, it is predatory, when in many cases, it is not. He’s an older guy, not some randy teenager. He might be totally disconnected from sexuality, who knows?
By extension, these schemas: what a woman is, and what she has to be, are built on a mixture of feelings and rationalisation of disgust, and are the secret sauce that excludes transitioned women. Not because we are predators, not because we’re perverted and want an excuse to look at women, not because we want anyone to be uncomfortable, but because they apply that schema of predatory men, and simply reapply it to us. It’s not based in reality, it’s based on a construction, a schema, that must be true, because they decided it’s a fact. Based on feelings.
But what they don’t see is how those schemas replicate abuse. They name those who are worthy and those who are not worthy of empathy. They create an artificial “them” and “us” which has no basis in reality. In my survivors group, there is so much empathy, so many experiences that bind us, so many hooks to find connection that it’s almost a fait accompli.
Popular feminism by contrast, is blind not only to its schemas but to the context of female socialisation. It doesn’t want to talk about the damage done to women by female socialisation. This perversely encourages those who unwittingly break the rules to identify away from womanhood, towards something less painful than their painful experiences and relationship with female socialisation. With the pain of exclusion for being too loud, for not thinking about everyone, for being disloyal to the queen bee, for being autistic. And yet it simultaneously poisons the escape: female socialisation teaches women that men are toxic simply by what they say, rather than any true understanding, without lived experience of what male socialisation, for that individual, has been. And that reinforces the isolation. Many men feel isolated as well, for unwittingly violating the “social norms”, for defying male socialisation, for daring to be different. Because gender, as Judith Butler so brilliantly explains, is a construction, and it’s also malleable.
There was mention of being trapped between an unnamed toxic female socialisation and a schema that says men are always bad*, always sexist, always predators. Perversely, female socialisation and popular feminism seems to teach some women to become unwitting predators, to exclude the most vulnerable from help and services they so desperately need. It is blind to the fact that the prevalence of SV/SA/DV and all forms of violence against LGBT people is twice that of cisgender women. It unironically teaches that women’s feelings override lived reality while claiming for itself the position of “most caring”, “most empathic”, “most vulnerable”.
No doubt I will be maligned as a predator and a misogynist for even expressing this. Because to do so is to betray the tenets of female socialisation: to put the group above all else. But here’s the thing: I’m not in the group, this much is perfectly clear, and it is from this position, outside of both male and female socialisation, that I find myself freed from those constructions. And here’s the thing, what bothers me isn’t that they exist, that one is “better” than the other, or that I might be suffering personally from the effect of these schemas. Because I’m already an outcast. The pinnacle of painful exclusion has already passed. The thing that bothers me most is the tragic loss of connection, of disconnection, of a systematic fragmentation and fracturing of the joy of actually being heard, and actually being seen. Because at the heart of human experience, I think that’s what most of us are looking for.
Schemas are where nuance is lost. Where we stop trying to learn about people, to be curious, to make space for others “not us”, it is where empathy stops and is replaced with righteous indignation. But as an outcast, it wouldn’t be me to just to stop there. I am so painfully aware of these shortcuts being used within the “transgender” umbrella. As a transsexual woman, it pains me to hear of transsexual women weaponising the same schemas used against them, and freely and willingly persecuting others. For not having dysphoria. For being a guy who dresses up for fun and has sex with men. For not being their schema of “truly trans”. Now I must admit I’m not overly fond of the umbrella; it groups together profoundly different people and experiences and expects us just to work and love each other. That’s not going to happen without a *lot* of leg-work. And the result, in the current socio-political construct, is that it replicates the same malevolence that cis people use against the gender diverse, the outcasts. Those who refuse to comply with the social constructions they’re told they must conform to, otherwise they’re not a true [insert sex/gender or identity here].
Rather than perusing schemas, rather than solidifying division in an ever-increasing circle of definition and righteous indignation, wouldn’t it be nice just to put that down? To connect, rather than to disconnect, to hear rather than judge. I’ve seen the joy of it and felt it personally. I’ve felt the loneliness of disconnection, of being unheard but trying so hard anyway. Don’t lose hope, it will happen. It takes time (and analysis of our own schemas and socialisations) to get it right, to really feel the person behind the fog of projections, schemas and assumptions. And then it arrives, often unannounced. Oh! I get that now, and there you are, vibing as if disconnection was a thing of the past.
* No actual words or exact experiences are used to protect anonymity.
