azurelunatic | Thinky-thoughts: Me, Genderqueerness, and Women's Safe Spaces

Crossposts: http://azurelunatic.livejournal.com/6726812.html

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Thinky-thoughts: Me, Genderqueerness, and Women's Safe Spaces

I got to thinking about why exactly I don't feel comfortable in spaces set aside to be "safe spaces" for women. I think these things are valuable and necessary and a really good idea, and most of them are not for me.

I feel like a fraud if I consider them in the abstract, and the time I was invited into an intentionally created such space online, I panicked, and the space wound up causing me a lot of stress even after I left.

It took a bunch of shower-thinking to pin some more of it down. Yes, I'm genderqueer. I came with clit & tits as original equipment. In comments to someone's entry discussing agenderedness, someone had some excellent phrasing and thoughts about how one can be agendered as one's own gender identity, and not have any problems with one's body, but the general public may see one's body, and misgender one into a gender identity box that is comfortable for them to contemplate. Me, if you ask me to pick one for always and ever, I get cranky. If you ask me what my current gender status is at the *moment* with two to pick from, more-man or more-woman, I might well average mostly-woman. My ideal body does not involve the traditional sort of major genital renovation.

The particular space that I was invited in to had a policy that was friendly to transgendered women, as it was supposed to be broad and comfortable: if you identify as a woman, you're welcome. But it also had provisions for gender-checking prospective members: new members should have at least one member of the existing community vouching for your declared gender identity. That unnerved me.

I traced it back to the assumption of a stable gender identity. I'm not uncommonly a woman, but sometimes I'm a man, and most often I'm a geek, doing geek things, and when I'm not anything else, I'm a lunatic. I can *be* a woman while I'm in a women's space, but it's usually a conscious performance. It's not natural. (I tried to be a girl in 6th grade. That didn't go very well.) I feel like most women's spaces carry the expectation that people who use them should always be a woman, unless they explicitly say that female-bodied genderqueer people are welcomed, or that genderqueer people are welcomed. (I'm not gender-neutral.) I am not always a woman, and I feel dishonest claiming that I am in places that I respect where it matters, or letting it be inferred from my presence there.

I have not felt the same level of Wrong from various women-in-technology groups. Those groups tend to serve two interrelated purposes: 1: to serve as a public promotional face for the awesome work that women and people who are publicly perceived as women are doing in fields where they are under-represented; 2: to serve as a place of refuge where those same women-etc. can get away from some of the day-to-day bullshit that they get because they are perceived as women in a mostly-male field. The feeling of "You get labeled as a woman, you may come hide here from all the bullshit; we have common cause as we are lumped together" is very different to me from the feeling of "We are all women here; we have gatekeepers to make sure that no-one who is not a woman manages to infiltrate our numbers". It also helps that my primary identified gender is geek, and those are geek spaces at the 0th level, while being women's spaces first.

Talking it out helps. Being able to say "I am genderqueer, so these safe spaces are not always appropriate for me", and having people get what I mean, helps. Having safe spaces that say "If other people perceive you as a woman and you need a place where you can get away from the bullshit associated with being forced into a woman's shoes", perhaps even better.

And now I'm thinking about other gendered safe spaces based on area of interest at the 0th level. There probably should be safe spaces for fiber artists and nurses who are men, because they are the minority in fields where the assumption is that everyone's going to be a woman. Probably others, but those are the ones that spring to mind.

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This is of interest and relevant to some of the thinking I have been doing about my gender identity, especially when beingbpresented a binary choice makes me dig in my heels but given a proper range of options, will choose female without griping.

(Icon choice intentionally hilarifying.)

Binary choice represents a whole lot of "I bet you don't even think I do/should exist" subtext for me.

That is a very large chunk of my issue, yeah. It renders the subtleties non-existent. (My feminity is very 3rd wave feminist drag performance art. It is fun. It is also a persona I put on... and not that often. And underneath that it gets quicksand kinds of complicated.)

I bet I would get gender-checked much more often if my daily uniform did not include skirt and long hair. (Or if local masculine gender presentation often included skirt and long hair while also not involving tons of makeup. (Local masculine gender presentation often involves long hair with pants and facial hair, or skirts and tons of makeup, but the only time I tend to wear that much makeup, it's usually to Pride or a Pride-like substance.) )

(Icon choice intentionally hilarifying.)

I, uh ... feel silly, because I was distracted by the necklace. :D It looks gorgeous! I love that style of necklace, and don't have anything like it.

(Good point about the binary versus multiple choices thing; I feel much the same way, though I've never really thought about it consciously!)

Hee! It is a lovely necklace, I am quite fond of it! I just don't wear it very often as it doesn't go with much of my non Faire garb. I got it from Fellowship Foundry who also provided the goblets and the cake topper for the wedding. (Which, yes, that photo is from my wedding. *g*)

Aaaah, Fellowship Foundry! I should have known -- years ago, they had a Griffin Goblet that I lusted after (okay, that I still lust after) but never could afford. Don't see it there now, though... pity. :D

I didn't know that was you in the photo ! It looks like you had a wonderful and lovely wedding -- congratulations (rather belatedly, heh)! :D I love weddings where it's clear that the couple was determined to do exactly what they wanted most, and hang convention; always figured that if I got married, it'd be in armour on horseback, so any geek-type wedding gives me vicarious justification, and reassures me that there are fun wedding ceremonies left in the world...

I can't pick one for always and ever either. I get more and more annoyed at feeling obligated to publicly disclose my gender, even tacitly by entering space designated as "for women."

For me it's sometimes that there's an outer layer that's identifying as one gender and an inner layer that's identifying as a different gender (or none), and having to disclose feels like shutting down one of the layers. Does a quantum state ever go "wait, I don't want to be collapsed yet?"

But think of the look on the face of your quantum-entangled twin when *their* state vector collapses without warning...

I feel lucky to not have too much going on with differently-gendered layers.

Weirdly but happily, one of the places where I do not feel strange about going is bathrooms; even when there's a gender-neutral option I tend to leave it for people whose need is greater, given that those tend to also be seriously-accessible and suitable for people traveling with small children, particularly opposite-gender children in the awkward age range.

For me, the logic seems to go: everybody has to use the bathroom at some point; this is the body I was issued; environment within bathroom not expected to be hostile; this is the category of bathroom I have been using forever & no-one is upset enough to make a fuss; proceed.

The spaces that are formally designated as for-women otherwise, the heebie-jeebies level depends on the sort of thing that's going on.

When spaces are designated not officially, but by custom (like, women in the kitchen, men off doing something mechanical or technical) I really enjoy fucking with that if it goes well with what I would prefer to be doing.

And now I'm thinking about other gendered safe spaces based on area of interest at the 0th level.

Yes, this. It's the difference between "a space for writers who are also female" and "women writers' space", IMO.

I tend to assume that "safe space for women" is usually about "somewhere to get away from the bullshit." I am explicitly uninterested in the other kind.

I find gender-checking unnerving as well, but I'm guessing it's because there are some people who love to crash "safe spaces."

I don't fit other people's conception of "girl" very well either...but I don't tend to assume that other women do it any better than I do. Some do. A whole lot of them really don't. Most of the women I know have expressed discomfort with the whole social femininity thing, at one time or another, and I don't just mean they don't like how women are treated, I mean they have said something along the lines of "I'm not very good at being a girl."

If MOST of the members of a putated gender don't feel like they fit it, what then?

To clarify, I don't see why an acceptable kind of safe space has to be tied to a specific profession. Because surely the same issues come up over and over again; some of them might be job-specific, but there's a larger pattern.

The usual answer when something isn't working is to see if it can be repaired; if repair isn't possible or if the thing is simply obsolete, to replace, optionally tearing the sucker down or otherwise tagging it out so no-one gets themselves hurt trying to monkey with it.

Can we declare "femininity/womanhood" a non-functional concept? The feminine mistake, as it were?

Though one could construe much of the intellectual history of feminism as doing that. "The Second Sex" and "The Feminine Mystique" being cases in point. That's kind of what ol' Simone was talking about when she said, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."

I like being a girl. I just don't like what other people expect of me when I do it. :/

I pretty much agree with this; I just think of culturally constructed femininity as Other People's Problem.

I also like being girly, when it suits me. Other days, I am more butchly, for some value of that. I have gender whims. That also seems to unnerve people.

Oh yeah. Once in a while either because the activity requires it (skirts = not a good choice for touring a battleship where you have to go up ladders with strangers under you) or because I'm in a Mood I turn up looking very butch, and the annoying comments are annoying.

one can be agendered as one's own gender identity, and not have any problems with one's body, but the general public may see one's body, and misgender one into a gender identity box that is comfortable for them to contemplate

So I'm not agendered. But that also happens to me, too, and it is painful in what I probably think is a different way, and I think that part of that is that my gender identity as female is a different thing than the Feminine Gender Identity As Prescribed By Kyriarchy.

The Feminine Gender Identity As Prescribed By Kyriarchy actually seems to have a lot to do with why F exists--which is something I realised, while reading this post. There are things I don't feel safe feeling and doing as a woman, because while it's true that when men feel and do them, those men get no end of shit, but when women do them, they get taken for granted and exploited and nobody notices. So if F does those things and I don't have to, I can take on the variant feminine gender identity that John Ford called the Baroness and not have so much of that shit expected from me.

One of the reasons I sometimes come off as ragey and angry is that there is this very deep core to me that really is sweet, but I have to protect her from all of the jackrods who think that being like that and dressing like that means that you are supposed to be demure and sweet and self-sacrificing and willing to take care of their bullshit and clean up their messes and respect them and love them anyway--and in relationships, still want to have sex with them even after they’ve reached a truly infantile level of dependence on your emotional work and caring and cleaning and fussing and you don’t want to fuck them anymore, because that’s not sexy and anyhow, what kind of sick fuck wants to have sex with her baby? (This is why the idea of Scully with Mulder and Pepper with Tony is actively rage-inducing. Not the power differential. The combination of dependence and the amount of work those women have to do for those men is an unequal relationship of a different kind. There are people whose asses I will wipe and people I will fuck. They are not the same people.)

I could be the girliest girl that ever girled, but it isn’t safe. People take advantage of girly-girls and expect them not to mind, and they also get angry when girly-girls take control of things. The reason I am sometimes annoyingly insistent on people making choices around me even if they’d rather not or can’t and I haven’t noticed that, is because of the many times in my life I’ve been criticised for telling people what to do and being bossy for simply saying what I wanted. People just went along with it and resented it. (I always thought people would, you know, also say what they wanted and we could negotiate.) This always makes me feel kind of betrayed, because how can I just know people are hurt by my behaviour if nobody expresses any pain? Do they think I don’t want to know and don’t care? Ugh.

I often don’t feel safe in women’s “safe spaces” because the women in them see the outside of me and they think I’m a collaborator with the gender hegemony or something, idk. I’ve had it suggested that maybe it’s rude of me or I should just try to fit in because there ARE people who are threatened by my extreme girly look. But I’m really not happy if I have to look butch when I don’t feel like it.

And in women's "safe spaces" you are often expected to behave like a well-socialised female, which means subordinate behaviour patterns--not being forward about what you want and trying to guess what other people need and want without asking, and never trying to lead even in a group that clearly wants to do something but can't decide what. And I get that this is because men do that and they want to get away from it. But I'm not a properly socialised female and I don't know HOW to "act like a girl" (not express one's wishes firmly, not step into a void of power when everyone wants to do something but can't figure out what, not keep talking till you're done). And a lot of subordinate behaviour patterns seem to me to be essentially time-wasters.

I’m also frustrated that in a lot of feminist groups there is so much pressure for everyone to adopt subordinate behaviour patterns, not as a temporary measure while those who know nothing else learn how to speak up and be assertive and that it’s safe to, but rather because these behaviour patterns are lauded as better and less oppressive and more humane. I don't think they are. I have always felt that for women to get what they want a large part of what is needed is for women to learn that they don’t have to adopt subordinate, placating behaviour patterns and that in fact doing so is part of what keeps them down.

Edited (wait, this is a public post!) 2011-08-31 18:53 (UTC)

A lot of this, except I seem to have the luck of being around assertive women who aren't all, "and what do YOU want to do?" all the time. I personally have not found that other women have a big problem with my tendency to say what I want and keep talking til I'm done (except for specific individuals, whom I should have realized were Not My Friend based on that alone). Men sure are prone to...though again, not the ones who tend to be my friends.

I run into this problem with women MAINLY in three places:

1) political orgs that practise "most dysfunctional person will always win" non-facilitated consensus, which I now have the sense to run from;

2) work, usually with regard to female supervisors who expect everyone they supervise to be Nice Girls;

3) fandom, usually in regard to group projects, where not saying or doing anything (and online, in the complete absence of any body language that might communicate discomfort) is common and the people who don't say or do anything expect you to go the extra mile and ask them privately what they think and draw them out. Fandom is often alleged to be something that should be a "safe space" and while I think it's fine to expect warnings for common triggers I have even had people tell me that I should warn on any fic that isn't emotional comfort food because that's "what people want" from fandom.

I run into this problem with men usually in dating--which is a total NEXT (although I think all the guys in the Internest had it in spades which was why it was so toxic for us). I have found that at work men usually start out annoyed with total lack of submissive behaviour patterns but typically grow to respect you far more than they do the women they like and praise openly, some of whom will then accuse you of sucking up to the men when in fact they're the ones who do that.

Edited 2011-09-01 15:32 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing!

Oddly enough, just two nights ago I was seriously thinking about making a Big Rambling Post about my various gender issues. (There was stress; I have no other place to vent, and it seemed like ramblong on and on about it might eventually lead me to some kind of useful data.)

I still might do it, though I am feeling slightly less stressed by now. If talking it out via DW helped you, maybe it'd help me, too...

Thanks for posting this.

There are in fact a bunch of regional men's knitting retreats.

I had something like this come up recently, sort of. I was put into a women-only filter. I had to politely point out to my friend that I am not a woman. I didn't object to being in the filter, and she was fine with having me in the filter, because really, she meant something a bit broader than "women". I think she meant something more like people who identify as female or don't identify as male and are generally perceived to be women. I don't think she really gave it much thought, as I hadn't had reason to mention in that social circle I've started identifying as agender. But I would not, at this point, go into a space that were specified for women. But I definitely would see value to a space that were for people to deal with the problems that come from being perceived as women, since it's not like identifying as agender means *poof* I no longer have to deal with women-oriented sexism. (Or maybe it does, I haven't been doing this for long. But I highly doubt it. If it does though, then I so wish I'd done this ages ago.)

But then, any place where I have to identify as a woman has always made me uncomfortable. So, I haven't really been in female-only spaces much. That and I have identified far more as geek, so I've often been much more comfortable and felt much safer in geek spaces. Although some other not nearly as geeky spaces have been quite nice, like the casts of plays I've been in or the group of people doing tech for plays (very different feel between cast and tech in my experience, but I've had very positive experiences with both).

I find that there's a certain amount of sexism-aimed-at-women that just sort of flies right past me because I graciously assume that it couldn't have possibly been sexism meant for my lil' ol' geek self now! But there's some that still sticks.

I used to be less effective, and when I was younger, I even bought into a lot of it. But as I've gotten older, it bothers me a lot more. I resent that I was raised to be sexist and attacked other females, because I was taught that the sexism didn't apply to me and that other females were inferior to me. Oh no, we don't mean ~you~ when we say women are illogical. You're clearly the exception. But most women are. Well, yes, most women are, but so are most men. Most humans are. And when you discount every "exception" you render your hypothesis unfalsifiable. So now it bothers me more.

Hunh. This is interesting.

I do identify as a woman. But like you, I'm very rarely comfortable in women's-only spaces. I'm often comfortable in women-in-technology groups, and have even set up a few of them at conferences and the like (and have been thinking about setting one up at my current heavy-duty-geek employer). But most women's-only groups give me the screaming heebie-jeebies. Having female be the 0th level isn't enough for me to feel comfortable in such spaces because we don't have enough, or really anything other than identifying as female, in common.

I don't have a point here, just thinking out loud (as it were).

There are at least three 0th level types of women's-only spaces that don't work well for me: femme, maternal, and padded-edges-very-emotionally-careful-nurturing. There's clearly a need for all of them, but cis-het-femme spaces are often actively mutually hostile with genderqueer-fat-tomboy-geek women, maternal spaces are often scarily Christian and heteronormative, plus I have neither actually adopted children nor children of my body, and the sort of emotionally careful nurturing space where phrases like "Are you in a space where you can hear ___?" make me want to act out and break things. Lots of things.

the sort of emotionally careful nurturing space where phrases like "Are you in a space where you can hear ___?" make me want to act out and break things. Lots of things.

OMG. THIS. Seriously.

Now, see... if there happened to be a group for women who WANT TO SMASH every time they hear this sort of crap, I might join that. LOL ;)

It's trying to replicate the emotional safety of being amongst close friends without first earning the requisite level of trust. Which, well, some people don't have enough good close friends who can call them on their bullshit and unconditionally accept them, but the contrast between a padded-edges safe space which is safe because everyone is so careful to not hurt anyone else, and a safe space that's safe because of earned trust and because everyone in it is trustworthy... the difference is striking. (And smashing.)

I am just very much against the growing trend of assuming (and enabling) emotional fragility, particularly in women. It is becoming an expected norm in far too many areas, and I do not believe it to be a healthy pattern to set in society.

Interesting. The padded-edges safe space you describe is sort of a default tactic I take with people when I am not sure whether they want my (very, very blunt) honest opinion or not: "Do you just want me to listen or do you want advice?" "Disclaimer as always: I'm giving my opinion, you can take it or leave it as you need to." etc. I suspect I have also used "Are you in a space where you can hear ___?"

I'm not sure I've ever thought about it as assuming emotional fragility; I'm just aware that I have a very masculine approach to problem-solving that really bothers some people. That, and I tend not to default-assume neurotypicality or mental health, so if I'm in a position where I feel like the appropriate response is to rub someone's back/give advice/any sort of strong interaction, I try to ask permission first, to make space for other people to enforce their current boundaries.

I'm not hugely feminine in the girly-wear-makeup-etc-etc-etc way, although I do enjoy some of the trappings. My toenails are pink right now, after all, and this amuses me. Your observations about those types of women's-only spaces are many of the reasons that I dislike them too. In short, they all tend to display their assumptions and privileges in a way that makes me massively uncomfortable.

One of my major complaints about women's-only spaces is that they're often antagonistic towards professional women, and being a professional geek is a very important part of my identity. If you argue that women get to make their own choices and thus being a stay-at-home mom is a totally valid decision (which is an argument that I agree with), then you also have to accept that the professional career woman is also a totally valid decision. I'm not letting down the sisterhood by not having children, and I'm doing a whole lot to ensure that little girls have better opportunities than I did in fields like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. I don't look down on women who have made choices that differ from mine. We've all got differing abilities and interests, and I don't assume that every woman should be a geek.

I attended a women-only session at BiCon last year, and although they were very welcoming even though I said I wasn't sure I was a woman, I felt so uncomfortable in that space, and won't be attending a similar session this year.

I think mostly I just can't be bothered with gender. I'm me, and deciding on a gender feels like sorting out various traits, habits, quirks and feelings into little piles and going with the one that's biggest. I'm not happy with doing that, so I'm just going to be me. My body is intersex and my gender is E, I'm happy with 'she' and 'her' as pronouns (but don't mind 'he' or 'they' either), I'm perceived as female generally and I'm okay with this, but hope in future to change the way I look to be slightly more androgynous, and not to feel as I currently do, that I'm almost 'overcompensating' with femininity.

Overcompensation is not comfortable.

The few times I have tried to perform full-on girl, it's involved a level of hypervigilance of my own actions that stood fair to make me crazy in a very short timespan. I cannot actually wear white, or any other item of clothing that must not get dirty, for more than about two hours at a time, and I can't eat while doing so. I did not get those classes; I could probably use a round of martial arts in order to get me better-embodied and more aware of the presence of all the bits of myself at any given time, but all this gender stuff has all that stuff that boils down to "don't do these things lest other people misgender you!" and FUCK THAT NOISE.

I identify as female, though "geek" and "kind of autistic" also feature heavily into the picture, as they are the reason I reject a lot of the ways of social interaction that are commonly considered female and which I find to involve too much dishonesty and what seems like mind-reading. I'm not comfortable in women's spaces either. I'm not totally sure about why, but I think some of it is my perception of women's mysteries as something I am on the outside of.

I have to go medicate my weasels right now (that is not a euphemism, though it sounds like it should be), but I will come back to this. I have thinky thoughts about this subject, since I don't really understand myself on it.

The thing where one actively socializes well above and beyond the minimum pleasantries with someone whom one actively loathes, and one suspects that it's mutual? I don't like that one at all.

I don't mind mind-reading so much, so long as it's *accurate*. I'm half-decent these days.

Or a lot of the "dating game" stuff -- pretending you're not as interested in someone as you are, or asking someone to do something just to see if they'll do it as some kind of test. Manipulative bullshit. The way I "seduce" people is generally by sending them an email saying "Hey, do you want to have sex?" because I don't see any reason in beating around the bush. This way there's no misunderstanding, and it doesn't take up half a day's worth of social spoons to get through one conversation.

On the mind-reading front, it's just baffling to me how people manage to exchange so much information that isn't readily accessible to me. I can sometimes puzzle it out, but it's work, and it drains my ability to be around people faster. And the one that always gets me is "I told you to do X so you should have known I also wanted you to do Y". It's like, I did what you told me to do, what the hell else do you want? Yes, you do need to spell it out for me, because I cannot read your mind.

FWIW, I am completely female in my identity as well as my assorted bits. I comfortably identify with being a woman on every level... and I can't stand "women only" spaces. Heh. I have never figured out why gender or gender identity are qualifying common ground for gathering. I don't get the point, and I find myself very uncomfortable in those spaces where my matching chromosomes are the only key to being admitted. I've actually spent some time trying to figure out what drives some women to seek this sort of space. (Like you said, "we are women dealing with being women in this particular area" support systems are different.)

So... you aren't alone in how you feel, because I agree with your assessment of the different types/reasons for gathering where gender is not the only reason... and that's without identifying as anything besides female.

I suspect that the sort of person who thinks that gender/gender identity is sufficient grounds to divide a room by common interests is also likely to mistakenly think that identifying as a woman presumes a strong interest in the things that advertisements targeted towards women target towards. The sort of person who is apt to make sweeping generalizations about women and include them in an email forward. MAKES ME STABBY.

I have been in women-only groups that did not inherently annoy me; my writers' group was women-only, as it formed at a women's center. It did cause some problems when there were guys visiting, though. But the 0th level was writing, there.

Edited 2011-08-31 08:48 (UTC)

Yes, I have noticed that one of the "common ground" things seems to be "women who have bought into the stereotype of what it means to be a woman today".

On the other side, I have noticed that there is the Empowered Woman ideal, which actually seems to translate into isolating into safe places to "roar" about just how much patriarchal society has made victims of females. This particular thing generally has me wanting to smash my head into stuff, mostly because smashing the heads of others is frowned upon (and unladylike!). :P

I prefer to acknowledge the deeply-fucked-up while not being a victim, y'know?

I grok totally.

Men in fiber arts is... interesting. Really interesting. I would *love* to see an anthropologist do serious work on it.

But yeah, they do have safe spaces. Most disciplines have one or more men only real world class sessions, in addition to various men only places online.

Makes perfect sense.

And a dear cisman friend of mine is in hot pursuit of his nursing degree.

Azure, I wish we'd talked more about that stuff when you'd been in state. Yea, I can see a lot of your points. I can't stand women only groups and yes, the only reason the writing group worked was because it was all writers, we identified ourselves that way first. Or I identify as a gamer but not girl. I feel like screaming when I hear talk of kids now but could have ended up being a mushy girly type if I had kids. But then again, I was a tomboy and I think like a man on many levels but not all. Not to mention the whole feel like a man sometimes. You've mentioned this topic before but this time it just clicked how much I don't feel that fit in groups, mostly because of the atypical thinking. Hmm, I might need to do more thinking on this.

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Thinky-thoughts: Me, Genderqueerness, and Women's Safe Spaces

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warning, rambling

Re: warning, rambling

Re: warning, rambling

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I am musing out loud and also kind of hoping you will elaborate on how I can do this better

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