Tag: bigotry

What does adulthood mean for a Millennial?

When does adulthood begin?  I read an interesting article recently about a college professor who taught a class on adulting, all about coming of age in today’s society.  In teaching this class, the professor discovered that most of the students did not consider themselves adults, despite being over 18.  They were asked to write about what they felt were the markers of adulthood, something that has become increasingly unclear as we experience some major societal shifts as Millennials and now Generation Z are coming of age.  It got me looking inward and thinking about whether I feel like and adult and what I believe makes one an adult.  I also decided to do a little more digging into what the supposed markers of adulthood are.

I’m going to start by dispensing with the idea of turning 18 being the marker of adulthood.  We have many milestones of that sort, at 16 (or some places 14) you’re adult enough to work many jobs, at 18 you’re adult enough to vote and join the military, but at 21 you’re adult enough to drink, and only at 25 are you adult enough to rent a car, etc.  These are also relevant to the United States, but vary greatly in other countries, which does evidence in some ways how we’ve picked arbitrary lines to draw there.  Yes, they are a general guideline for when we believe a person can handle certain responsibilities, but they aren’t actually very helpful in determining what will make someone feel like an adult.

I found a few analysis of adulthood from a psychological perspective, with such traits meant to define adulthood such as rationality, and non-defensiveness and openness.  Well shit, that precludes the current President of the United States and a good many other political officials, many in their 60s, 70s, and above.  It also leaves out a lot of the shitty parents of folks I’ve been close to throughout my life.  People who have raised a now adult child, paid the bills, and often been little manipulative abusive shits who probably couldn’t grasp rationality and non-defensiveness anymore than they could bench press the Empire State Building, but there you go.  So maybe that isn’t the perfect milestone either in determining what would make the younger generations feel like we are adults.  Our elders certainly have not done a stellar job at modeling that as a determining factor in adulthood.

Going back to the article that started this line of thinking, there was a discussion of the students responses.  Many felt that marriage, having children, and home ownership were markers of adulthood.  I can certainly understand that, we’ve been raised by a generation that often followed a very clear life path, fit a certain mold, and taught us to do so as well.  I don’t remember a time where I didn’t just “know” that you were supposed to go to school, get into a good college, graduate, get married, buy a house, and manifest a few loin spawn to raise who would do it all over again.  There is a script to this, one many people in my generation haven’t been able to follow, or have decided to toss to the wind as we make our own path.  Which does explain why many of us are left not feeling like adults as we enter our 20s and 30s.

It is interesting, because many of the Millennials I know spend more time focusing on traits mentioned in the psychological articles on what makes an adult, than members of earlier generations I know.  That is of course not a conclusive study, just my personal experience.  Many of us suffer from mental illness, often times created by or exacerbated by our circumstances.  We are treated as children by the media and by older generations, accused of destroying industries when we don’t buy into consumerism.  We bought into the dream of college opening all doors to success in life and graduate with bachelors  degrees and 60k in debt, only to find our only job option is to be a manager at a Papa Johns unless we want to get even more in debt for a higher degree.   We put off marriage and having children because we can’t afford it, or we choose different ways of relationshipping or to be childfree because we recognize that we don’t actually have to fit every mold they made for us.  We find the middle class we aspired to has all but disappeared, so we work two jobs and still need food stamps to get by.  Then we wonder why we suffer from depression and anxiety in such high numbers.  We learn rationality because we have to fight irrational systems of oppression and crumbling aged lawmakers who refuse to understand that we are more interested in being allowed to express our love regardless of gender and make sure every town has clean water, then we are in corporations getting more tax cuts.  We learn to be open and non-defensive because we have to nurture each other and promote self care every day and across social media platforms or in person with our friends, because we have to wonder how many more friends we’ll lose to suicide this coming year.  This isn’t true of everyone in my generation, but its what I see growing around me in my small communities and in the thousands I connect with through online platforms every day.

For me, adulthood begins with disillusionment.  It starts when we realize the lies we have been fed, that the boxes we were taught to fit in are unneeded, that the life path we were taught to follow was unrealistic.  It continues as we start to unpack all of that and struggle with the impact it has had on our psyche, our morale, our self esteem.  We grow more into adulthood as we gain the ability to remove ourselves from the system, to choose which pieces of it work for us, and which to discard as soon as we gain the power to do so.  Adulthood is that determination to find that power, within ourselves to stand up for who we are, and within the system as we elect as more and more of our number to office so we can change the way the oppressive system functions.  Adulthood is being able to kiss your same gender partner in public after years of fear.  It is taking a moment to breath into yourself after two retail shifts, telling yourself it is okay to break out a coloring book if that is your self care, as you bat away the dread that you’ll be doing the same thing every day for the rest of your life despite the shiny diploma tucked away in a box in the wore out apartment you share with three friends.  It is choosing to not have children because you are comfortable not wanting any, or because you desperately want them but can’t face bringing them into this broken world or know you can’t afford them.  It is having four children and having to coordinate between family who takes care of them as you each try and work the hours your employer pretends to graciously give you, wishing you’d be taught about safer sex during the abstinence only age.  It is getting divorced for the third time because you have found the inner strength to leave people who abuse you.  It is deciding against marriage because you love all three of your partners equally.  It is wanting to get married but knowing that disabled people still don’t have that right equally, because you can’t survive without the disability benefits that cover your life sustaining medication, and your partner makes too much for you to keep them, but not enough to cover the prescriptions if you wed.  Adulthood is rebellion, against all that we were taught, and it is finding our own way instead and paving a better way for generations to come.

Refusing to be erased – on being seen as a trans man

“You can’t be a man, you didn’t play with trucks as a kid!”

“Are you sure you aren’t just a butch lesbian instead?”

“Thank you ma’am” “Uh, I’m not a ma’am” “Oh don’t worry, you don’t look manly” “No, I mean I am a man”  “Don’t say that honey, don’t worry, you’re pretty I’m sure.”

This is just a small cross section of reactions I got when coming out as a trans man.  It is not an easy thing to live your whole life feeling like there is something deeply wrong, or to know that the way everyone sees you is a lie.  It is not an easy thing to wake up one day and realize it after years of not acknowledging it, you have the agony of so many years gone by where your expression of self was mysteriously discomforting or feels false.  Once you finally feel that click, if you aren’t someone who was well aware that you were trans from a very young age, it is liberating for a moment.  The acknowledgement of yourself is sweet freedom on silver wings, it fills you up with golden bubbles of giddy hope.  That moment is often heartbreakingly short before the icy cold dread sets in. You start to wonder who you will lose, who will leave your life, who may hurt you, if you will become another murder statistic if you start trying to present yourself as you are in a cruel bigoted society.  I was extremely lucky, I’ve only been assaulted once (for being trans at least), I lost very few friends, and my family struggled but have managed to come to some degree of acceptance.  I had to fight for recognition for a few years before I developed the infamous “passing privilege” though.  Now when I go out, people see my face even with my new long hair, they hear my voice, and to them it all speaks of man.  The years before that were true, were a hell though.  Once you have felt incredibly whole and at home with yourself when you acknowledge your gender, you have something precious that society can tear pieces out of with every misuse of pronouns or deadnames, with every slur, with every unfeeling comment.

I did play with trucks as a kid.  My favorite toy for the first seven years of my life was a big yellow dumptruck and I played with it outside incessantly.  I hated dolls and teddy bears, though realistic plush animals were something I adored since I had always loved animals.  I loved my StreetShark action figures. I hated going to a school where skirts were mandatory, and insisted if I must wear them that they be patterned with lizards or frogs and have hefty pockets built in for collecting rocks.  These things mean nothing to determining my gender, gender isn’t built by your toys or your hobbies or your interests.  But when I came out, my father cited my lack of interest in trucks to explain his surprise.  The fact that he’d apparently blocked out such a large portion of my childhood to get that facts wrong was irrelevant.  The message was the same, he would rather forget the markers that could have clued him in if we’re buying into binary gender rolls, and he needed me to justify the core of myself with childhood toy preferences to be valid in his eyes.

My father was the same person who asked me why I couldn’t be a butch lesbian when I came out as a trans man.  As the man who reacted with homophobia when I first had a girlfriend, it was clear what this meant.  He had come to accept I was something he didn’t understand, something he had prejudices against, but good god at least that something wasn’t transgender, and now that it was, he wished for the good old days where I was just a “mild normal queer”.  I tried to explain to him that I could no more be a butch lesbian than he could, since neither of us was a woman.  In fact, I was farther from such then he was, because at least he was interested only in women, whereas I had realized by that time that I was mostly gay.  I spelled out how in being a man who likes men, I was pretty much the opposite of a lesbian by binary gender and sexuality standards.  His response was to protest, “but if you were a lesbian you could still wear flannel”.  Yes father, because I would like to undergo societal prejudice, risk my life by being myself, inject my muscle with a big ass needle every two weeks, subject myself to extensive surgeries, and have to fight to even be seen by the people closest to me….because I want to wear flannel.  If this was about flannel I would have just bought out a fucking L.L.Bean.

A nice woman at school was selling cookies.  She “ma’amed” me, and I was tired of not standing up for myself, so I tried to correct her.  Instead of hearing me when I said I was a man, she tried to reassure me, thinking I was talking down about myself.  It didn’t occur to her that I might actually just speaking my truth, that my words might mean exactly what I had said.  It was easier for her to interpret some imagined hidden message and apply it to me than it was for her to just see me as I said I was.  I spent a week replaying the moment in my mind, formulating the perfect responses for next time to be more clear.  The only thing that usually works is outing myself.  If someone doesn’t want to see you as a man because they don’t fit their notion of it, no matter of insisting on it seems to help.  You have to explain you are a trans man, another breed of human in their eyes so they can justify why you don’t fit inside the boxes they can’t look beyond. So for the few years it took for me to develop a deeper voice and some facial scruff I was faced with a series of choices.  Either I could try and insist I was a man and not be believed, I could crumple inside with every “ma’am” or “miss” and have the words repeat at night until I wanted to disappear or die; or I could out myself, usually in public in the hearing of multiple strangers.  I didn’t know which of those were accepting, supportive, indifferent, or deeply prejudiced.  I saw trans friends dying every year of violence, killed by partners, acquaintances, family, and strangers.  I couldn’t know which passerby might hear me and be so offended by my very existence that I would be the next funeral in an endless procession of trans deaths.

These days my existence is happier, I am safer existing as I am.  I don’t have to make choices between my mental health or physical safety multiple times a day, I don’t have to justify my childhood toys or clothing choices to prove myself.  That spark of joy that shone so bright when I finally acknowledged this aspect of me has been fanned into a bright flame.  There are still shadows though.  My safety is contingent still on not being seen.  I am acknowledged now as a man, that is far more affirming then before.  My identity is respected and seen.  But my experience is not, because I am not just a man, I am a trans man.  I have a lived experience in fighting for manhood that a cis man will never have.  And my safety and comfort on a daily basis is contingent on my lived experience being a carefully guarded secret.  None of this can change until society does, and I fear for my new baby trans friends who are just beginning to come out.  My heart aches for what they might face, especially knowing the road I barely survived was one of the easiest paths to this end.  All I can hope for is those moments of joy and acknowledgment, that exhilarating feeling of freedom and truth on it’s vast silver wings, will be enough to carry them through.  Or society can change, one leap at a time we can stop with the assumptions and the stereotypes and the enforced gender rolls and the bigotry, until this life path is just as much a challenging but engaging climb as any other, and not a harrowing trip through the valley of death.  I still out myself when it might help, when it might change someones thoughts, when there is a chance it might pave the way for the trans folk of the future.  That choice is worthwhile for me, there is still something worth risking my life for, and it is a better world.

From the mouths of Queerios – the difference between offensive speech and humor as coping

“the day I poured heavy cream up my vagina, I definitely stained some body’s shirt”

I’m not sure the conversation that spawned that statement, but it happened last night as we were gathered around cake and laughing at absurd things. That wasn’t the first strange nonsensical things that’s come from conversation with the oddball quirky group that makes my polycule and network of close friends, and it won’t be the last. Some of the others things said though, in fits of humor and good will, may at times border on offensive and problematic in another context. I wish I could have remembered an exact quote of something of that nature that would have better applied to the subject of today’s post, but heavy cream and vaginas and shirt staining stuck with me, so at least I could open on a slightly absurd but humorous note. But what I would like to speak to is the quality of speech in marginalized groups as opposed to in general society, and how it does at times cross into the realm of things that may be problematic or offensive.

I remember as a kid when the passion of the christ came out and the next day there where swastikas spray painted on my synogogue. I remember older members of the congregations who had lived through the holocaust, sobbing in fear. These days, under our new Commander in Hate, we suffer much worse then spray paint on sanctified walls. And when among my polycule where I feel safe, I occasionally make jew jokes about myself.

A few months ago at the supermarket I was wearing one of my many shirts sporting a pride rainbow, and an elderly gentleman felt it was an invitation to tell me how us gays were going to hell. That wasn’t the first time I’d heard something of the sort, and it wasn’t even close to the worst thing I’ve heard. In fact, it was quite friendly compared to some of my experiences. Imagine when someone telling you that you’ll be damned for all eternity is considered quite friendly… And my queer platonic life partner and I are constantly making gay jokes about eachother. A typical response to certain outfits and behavior when we ask the others opinion is simply “Gaaaaayyyyy!!” If someone said that to me on the street, I might be tempted to imagine melting their face off in a vat of melted chocolate (no, no, that would ruin perfectly good chocolate), but from my fellow queerio it is a good natured complement.

So is it simply a matter of intent? My QP means it as complementary when teasing me about things that society uses to marginalize and oppress, but your typical cishet standard humanoid would usually mean it as an insult. I don’t think it’s just intent though. After all, I’ve heard too many jew jokes that were amusing when coming from my mother, a sassy New York jew, that raised my hackles when they came from well intentioned Douchebag McGee in the bar. But he was just trying to be funny he whines, having no idea I remember those painted swastikas and women wailing. No, it’s not about intent, it’s a deeper issue of marginalization versus shared pain and healing.

When I hear a joke or dig that targets marginalized community coming from your standard human who does not face marginalization, or possibly does in some context, but not that context, what I’m hearing is someone who does not understand the shared pain and suffering. They know that their token gay friend may be cool with them making gay jokes, they have “permission”, but they don’t understand the actual experience of being gay. They don’t intend to harm, they intend to be funny, but they don’t have the cultural context of being queer to recognize if their joke is adding to the pain and suffering of that marginalized person in the moment. They also don’t realize that while they may think they are showing their gay friend “Hey we can joke about this cause we both know I’m actually cool with you bro”, they are also showing the rest of society “Hey its okay to ridicule people for this and I’m getting a free pass, so your problematic behavior is okay too”.

When I hear a joke of that sort coming from one of my fellow queerios, I’m hearing a different message. What’s being said underneath that humor is “we’re all suffering shared pain here and barely surviving, and if we can turn that pain into laughter and throw our ability to still laugh and endure in the face of those who harm us, we can survive another day”. I’m not saying that marginalized folks cannot be problematic when joking about themselves. And certainly it’s problematic when it’s about a seperate marginalized group you aren’t a part of. But even when just targeting yourself, I’m sure it’s possible to be problematic, because while you might find it cathartic, you still may be harming your compatriates in that oppressed group without realizing it. And I would hope they would speak out and call out those who do so, because when this is done among marginalized communities I don’t think the intent is ever to cause more pain. We do it though because humor is a coping mechanism, and because we are empowering ourselves. We are taking what they throw at us as knives and daggers and turning it into laughter.

I don’t know if it’s okay, or it’s right. But what I do know is the quirkiest shit comes out of our mouths, and sometimes that shit does skate into the territory of taking digs at the marginalized groups we are part of. And when any of my queerios shouts “Gaaaaayyyyy!!” at my outfit, I laugh and swell up with pride. Because yes, we are really heckin gay, and we are laughing and not apologizing for it, and those who threw that shout at us to harm us before, can’t do shit about it.