A "they" of one.

[topthemonkey]

This is a response to the monkey's previous post. It may or may not be fueled by caffeine-induced rage, and it may or may not be influenced by the fact that when I tried to explain all this to the monkey this morning, as I felt bad about the way she felt last night, my words fell on sleeping ears.

I realize for some of our readers here, some of the details of our personal lives aren't always apparent, but I should say it: I'm at a new job. I've been there for only a few months. Yes, we live in a relatively open-minded area, but even then: I don't know any of these people personally, and can't manage to pre-gauge their reactions on many things.

As I explained to the monkey: "you identify as (gender) queer, which means I use either pronoun for you. Around my coworkers, the female is most convenient as that is how you were introduced." If it turns out that the monkey starts preferring exclusively male pronouns, then I will start using them. And it means that I will "come out", and will have a talk with anyone who asks about what this means. She's my monkey and I'm with her for better or worse (wow, that doesn't make me feel like a burden at all). For other friends who are trans? I could cautiously introduce my coworkers to that concept. But it's slippery, and it doesn't apply to everyone I might have in my life. I guess I just don't see it as something that should be "cautiously introduced." I don't think that simply disclosing gender is synonymous with discussing sex/personal life.

I'm friendly with my coworkers, but they're not really my "friends". The question I must ask is: 'would I be friends with these people, in the same sense that the details of my love life would be relevant, without a working relationship?' For example, I've known our CEO for years, in a technical sense, but never where we'd talk about anything non-technical. I don't feel any particular closeness to them, and honestly can count on one hand the number of people I've worked with, that I've shared details about my personal life with, that I did not initially know outside of work. (Thus people like AA and CO would count on that list, people like JL would not). Wanting to not be friends with your subordinates makes managerial decisions easier, and makes decisions like hiring and firing and evaluations more clinical, so I suppose I can understand it. These people owe me a paycheck.
They even (because we're in a good place) owe both me and the monkey benefits. They don't owe me understanding or acceptance. That's kind of harsh. They owe tolerance at the very least. At the end of the day, my working relationship with them is simply that: a working relationship.

And in the end: my job is giving me quite a lot to live on right now, and as much of a cop-out as it is: I'm not going to rock the boat. I feel nervous discussing Prop 8 with my coworkers. Yeah, because they all seem like super-conservative homo-haters. I feel awkward talking about fun I have in the more gay neighborhoods in the city. It's not like you're talking about porn shops or cruising. We went to a fucking G-rated movie! This...would be more of that.

The monkey embarrassed me (and another coworker) quite a bit within the first week of meeting some of them. It came up that one of them was furry, and (in a car with others one who were not) the monkey started a conversation about "who was that guy who shit his diaper in a friend's car?" OK, we were on the subject of babyfurs specifically, I didn't bring it up (I think) and I was using that as an extreme example. Fine, it was inappropriate. I don't think before I speak. I don't have an inner censor. I overshare. These are things I need to work on, I admit. But you shared an embarrassing anecdote about ME with fucking everyone and felt no shame. (That same coworker had noticed the monkey's collar, and later advised me to keep kink-related stuff off the radar.) And yet, another co-worker openly discussed going to the Folsom Street (Fetish) Fair and another about wanting to buy pot in San Francisco. AND NOBODY CARED.

The fact that the monkey (and/or other folks, trans or not) would be in my office is because there are reasons: it's not a hangout spot, but occasionally the monkey is there because she has an appointment in the area, or because we have shopping to do after work. People have been cordial and friendly to her, and they've had no reason not to. Because you're made me terrified to say anything. Having other friends there would be for similar reasons, and I would not think it would be nearly as common if I didn't live an hour away from my office.

But I've been here only a few months. I cannot gauge the typically closed-minded reaction of people, who talk to the monkey about when we're going to get married(1) and why we're pushing the DP angle, to not have the same biases I do. People just assume, male and female together for awhile, must want to get married. It sucks, but you can just say "we're not interested in marriage." Several years ago, I struggled with many of the same term-biases that other people have: that a bio-female in a long-term relationship with a bio-male couldn't logically identify as a lesbian (even though the same bio-male is now (and was then, to a lesser degree) trans). Or struggling over being corrected for calling someone by a pronoun defined their "legal" gender, and including hearing the stories of the pigheadedness that comes with things like "have you legally changed your name? Do you have a penis yet?" (Several, in varying sizes and colors.) then I'm going to call you what you are. On my own side, I occasionally get mistaken for a female (it's embarassed my father a number of times to hear "Oh, is this your daughter?". Even as recently as a month ago, I got called "miss". It usually happens when I'm clean shaven, and happened a LOT more often when I had my hair longer and in a ponytail. My voice is higher than most, which also makes people think I'm gay(2) . So I've had at least a small taste at not being taken for my true gender. I'm not saying "I know what it's like to be trans" or "I know the excitement and feeling of acceptance you get when you pass". I'm just saying I've had a small taste.

And yes, as language is a concept, and language is fluid, there are terms that most people just don't get yet. No excuse. How will they learn if everyone takes that attitude? "They" is already a word everyone knows, and people already accept it as a given even for a single. E.g:"I'm sorry, they can't come to the phone right now."(3) Much like the word "womyn" seems to some to be less about fairness and equality, and more about unshaved flannel-wearing there-are-penises-on-the-land radical over-the-top-feminism, (This sentence makes me angry in ways I don't have words for) forcing myself to use a term like "sie"(4) or "hir" would evoke immediate confusion, 20 minutes of explaining, another half hour of Q&A, or just plain awkwardness, and some people at work have told me outright that they just don't care about (and don't want to hear about) my personal life. And in dealing with Language, you're at the mercy of negotiation: just like computers on a network, you have to agree on a common set of terms and protocols to get a message across.(5)

The monkey doesn't like "being referred to by the plural", but some people, whom I consider friends, even when I've tried earnestly to explain what it means to be genderqueer, have preferred another term: "it." And then they've explained that they're just joking (I make some off-color jokes myself but you just called the person I love "it". How is that funny?) Who said that? Is that better?(6) "They" is a nice way of slipping things under the radar, of preempting reactions, seeing how a person is perceived without any, and when it becomes clear that I only use that term or a proper name rather than a gender-pronoun, I can turn around to a person I feel might be accepting and say: "Have you ever heard me use the word 'her'?". Yes, that's deceptive, I suppose. But I'd prefer people get to know my friends as people-first, and trans-entity second. Pronouns other than "they" screw that up.

I can also always just use a person's given name, but that gets tedious and obvious, and the goal here is NOT to be obvious. Not because I'm trying to HIDE their gender, but because I'm trying not to FORCE their gender. There's a (very fucking) subtle line, but given my own pessimism of people, I prefer to work to that point slowly. Maybe this is part of the monkey's issue. It's not about pride, it's not about embarrassment. It's about need-to-know.

I revealed the Monkey's gender identity to my mother, while I was recovering from surgery (and I will continue to blame both the drugs I was on and my mother's attitude.) I wasn't trying to weaponize her identity, and I feel that may have created a sore spot. You totally were! You were using me against her and we both knew it. Don't use the drugs as an excuse.

My monkey is my monkey. I love my monkey. And I'm going to take care of my monkey. What else should matter?

--

(1) (I explained our domestic partnership as being for religious reasons, which is coincidentally also true -- once again, the reality versus what people NEED to know is not unrelated.)

(2) (and maybe I am, after all, I fucked a boy in the ass last night!)

(3) (On the same note, we say "your party cannot come to the phone right now". Isn't that also implying the plural? No.)

(4) (as an aside and to make things more confusing, "SIE" is also a technical term where I work).

(5) This will be a long footnote, but it was always a common argument of the monkey to state that "sex" is about physicality, and "gender" is about identity. Um, not exactly, but pretty much. Also, anyone remotely educated about gender issues knows this. I argued that at least in some circles (lingual dialects) gender is a technical term that has its own meanings. For example: in computers, a Gender Changer changes the PHYSICAL characteristics of a port, but NOT the signaling coming out of it. To take this tangent further, her definition of Gender would apply more to something like an identical port that changes context but not its physicality. For example, the distinction between an FXS interface and an FXO interface: one is likely the phone jack on your wall, the other is the (physically identical) jack on the bottom of your phone.

(6) (We also lack a term for true asexuals that doesn't imply inanimate object. You're conflating gender and sex with sexual orientation. That's outside the scope of this post for discussion.)