Online discussion forums for school classes are always depressing, because the ethos of an online forum is antithetical to the ethos of a school class. Anyone who has something real to say can already say it in a real forum on the open internet, and schoolstudents who are being coerced by Society into pursuing a credential (which is called "education") don't have anything real to say in their capacity as schoolstudents: in either case, why post?
Still, the sight of a forum that's empty (or empty of non-classwork, which might be worse) tugs at my heartstrings for the cruel mockery it makes of real forums—and for all that I might remind myself not to be deceived by surface trappings into confusing it for the real thing, I can't shake the illusion that something real might happen here. Since I'm here—since I have for my own complicated reasons submitted to coercion by Society into finishing up my math degree, and the math degree requires fulfillment of the UD-C Arts and/or Humanities general education requirement—I feel I have a moral obligation to write something. The forum's introductory post says, "Please feel free to use this as a space to share notes, ask questions, build community, drop content, etc." and I can't help but read it as a dare. Any professor at an R2 university knows from weary experience that schoolstudents at an R2 university don't have notes to share, nor questions to ask, nor content to drop—and if I've mostly grown out of the psychotic need to prove that I'm not one of them that made my first stint here such hell twelve years ago, maybe I haven't entirely.
But what, then, to write?
I had considered playing it straight—ah, no pun intended—specifically, in Wiktionary's sense 2, "To perform a role in a manner that is not comedic or exaggerated": to write something about one of the course readings, playing the role of a dutiful schoolstudent engaged with the coursework (as obedient schoolstudents should), and only subtly and indirectly tying it in with the theme and project of my life which explains why out of all the courses at San Francisco State University with which one could fulfill the UD-C Arts and/or Humanities requirement, "Queer Literatures and Media" was obviously the one for me to pick.
I couldn't muster the energy. Between the coursework for "Probability Models" and "Real Analysis II", and violently banging my head flat against some old Putnam problems and Chapter 17 "Differentiation in Normed Spaces" in Schröder's Mathematical Analysis: A Concise Introduction (the former in hopes of organizing the glorious farce of a team representing SFSU, the latter to prove to myself that I'm not letting this Bachelor's degree endeavor consume my autonomy), and everything else I've been hoping to get done in reality entirely unrelated to school, I may not, entirely, strictly, be keeping up with the reading for this course, let alone be ready to put together an above-and-beyond forum post that engages with it at a level above that of your ordinary schoolstudent at an R2 university. So I'm left to play it straight in Wiktionary's sense 1, "To behave in a manner that is straightforward, honest, or sincere."
But how, then, to explain? What does it mean to be sincere when the entire problem to be sincerely explained is precisely the lack of a common language? You ask: okay, so you imply that queer literatures and media are intimately related to the theme and project of your life, that made it important for you to enroll in this class, that gives you a special perspective that you feel the need to express in a forum post. What is it, in less than 700 words, if it's not just that you enjoy hearing yourself talk?
I could say, "Because I'm queer," which would be true and welcome and appear to be understood.
I could say, "Because I'm a right-wing bad guy and think this entire discipline is corrupt," which would be true and unwelcome and appear to be understood.
I could say, "It's precisely because I'm queer that I'm a right-wing bad guy and think this entire discipline is corrupt", which would be truer, but would not be understood at all.
You ask: how could someone be queer, and because of that hold queer studies in contempt? What bizarre excuse for a tragic backstory could begin to make that make sense?
I'll tell you. Concretely, but not too concretely: ever since I was fourteen years old, I've always fantasized about being a girl. I still think about it almost every day. In 2017, I took feminizing hormone replacement therapy for five months, but I quit out of a general caution about medical interventions.
Oh, you say, I see, you're trans.
Sort of, I say.
Oh, you say, I see, you're nonbinary.
No, I say, you don't see at all.
Within progressive political circles, there's a lot of debate and disagreement and discourses, but as far as I can tell, one thing everyone seems to agree on is that trans people know who they are: that if a (without loss of generality) a.m.a.b. person—not a man or a male, but "assigned male at birth", as if the doctor might have made a mistake—says she's a woman, then she is. We might disagree on exactly what that means—whether gender is socially constructed or whether one is "born this way", but whatever gender is, we can be sure that it's something an individual can't be wrong about, not something Society or anyone else gets to decide.
And up until 2016, I had accepted that. Trans people claim to have a gender identity at odds with their assigned sex? Wow, so lucky, I thought—I believed it, you see. I believed it could be true of other people, but obviously not of me; I was just a guy who fantasized about being a woman, which was obviously a different thing.
(I know, it sounds funny now, but it made sense at the time.)
Well, you say, those were cisnormative times, good thing we know better now.
But do we? What do we know, specifically, as the result of what experiment? Those fourteen years (2002–2016) that I thought of myself as a boy/man who fantasized about being a girl/woman, but not trans (because that had to be a different thing), it wasn't that long ago, and I wasn't ignorant. Of course I heard of transsexualism as a thing that existed (on TV, if not in my real life). But all the reputable sources said that that was a matter of inner gender identity, and I couldn't claim to have one of those. (Indeed, the whole idea seemed sexist.) My thing couldn't be a "gender identity" because my thing was—
Well, I'd rather not be too concrete.
Why not? You ask.
I mean, I say, I always fantasized about being a girl, ever since I was fourteen years old. Do I need to spell out what that means?
You think for a few moments. Yeah, sorry, you say, I still have no idea what you're talking about.
Without being too concrete, I can say that my cross-gender fantasies had and have—well, an erotic element to them. It wasn't about wanting to be a girl because I "really was" a girl on the inside (whatever that would even mean), it was about finding girls beautiful and wanting to somehow experience that beauty in a first-person way.
You ask, so what's wrong with that?
I don't think there's anything wrong with it! But it's also ... not the same thing as actually being female? Straight men who wish they were women don't particularly have anything in common with actual women? We just—don't? The magical euphoric feeling we associate with the idea of being female almost certainly has nothing to do with what actual women feel about themselves? Like, why would you even think that?
I know, I can't prove it. But isn't it weird that no one who asserts the contrary thinks they should have to prove it? In the cultural environment of the current year, it's hard to even explain how obvious this used to be—obvious to the extent that, when I came across the word autogynephilia ("love of oneself as a woman") in 2006, I immediately thought, There's a word for it; there's a word for my thing. I was actually surprised that it had been coined in the context of a theory of MtF transsexualism (in which, briefly and bluntly, androphilic MtFs are feminine gay men but more so, and gynephilic MtFs are guys exactly like me).
And so—look, obviously I was being facetious when I called myself a right-wing bad guy. I don't want to lock people up for being gay. Though I didn't go through with HRT myself, I am, in fact, in favor of guys like me being able to get sex changes if that's what they really want after thinking about it carefully. Hurrah for morphological freedom!
But the "thinking about it carefully" part actually matters! And the queer culture I see around me—the queer culture institutionally supported by the university where I'm trying to finish off my math degree—seems ... pretty staunchly opposed to facts, logic, and reason when they conflict with the feelings of someone in a protected identity group? Sorry, I know that sounds like a mean thing to say, but the entire problem I'm trying to call attention to is that people at universities should care more about whether claims are literally true or false than whether they sound like a mean thing to say.
At a minimum, I would expect to live in a culture where people can say, out loud, in public, that trans women are male and trans men are female and that this is sometimes decision-relevant, not in order to hurt or exclude, but just as a literal description of how currently existing hormonal and surgical interventions don't suffice to change sex, which is still a robust natural category.
And it's heartbreaking, because you can imagine a different world where people still affirm the values that make progressive politics sound like a good idea—the glorious ideals of liberty, sorority, and equality—without evading or denying the implications of cold equations of biology and economics implying that these things are not so easy to achieve. You could imagine a gender studies department that included a course on, say, evolutionary psychology, as part of its mission. (The good stuff, like Cosmides—a woman!—and Tooby, not pop-sci trash.)
Until then, all I can do is write—not my truth, but a guess at the truth that underlies everyone's stories, and isn't on anyone's side.