Hezaa?  Seriously?  Seriously? Gee mate, I can’t imagine why *anyone* would have a hard time calling you that.  There is absolutely no reason they should prefer to call you Mike or Joe when your name is Hezaa.

I don’t understand the transmale insistence on having names that [a] aren’t actual names or [b] no one can spell.  No one is ever going to realise that Mykele is meant to be pronounced as “Michael”, particularly not when you’re also insisting that they refer to you as zie and hir.

Normally I’m all for self identification.  Normally I don’t care what the hell people do as long as they leave me alone.  Unfortunately, what other transmen do ultimately reflects back on me.  The reason people continuously think I must have been a lesbian at some point or another and love sports is because most transmen WERE lesbians and DO like sports.  It’s frustrating, but it makes sense and is no more offensive than people assuming that guys in general like sports.

I would have no issues if a person who identified as genderqueer insisted on being called Hezaa and zie/hir.  Why?  Because a genderqueer person does not have a binary gender identity so a completely ungendered name and pronouns makes sense.  Now, I personally don’t get genderqueer, but it doesn’t affect me so I don’t really care.

Insisting you are a transguy, but not wanting to use male pronouns though?  That rather defeats the purpose.  You have to pick one.  Either male, female, or other.  Other can be both, neither, something in between, I don’t really care so long as you don’t try to claim a completely male identity while at the same time saying you’re genderqueer.  Why?  Because that doesn’t make sense.  You can’t be 100% male while also being 100% genderqueer, that’s saying you’re 200% which is physically impossible.

It’s just one of those things that bothers me.  I believe that when you make the decision to transition you are also making the decision to give up those things you did that only people of your birth sex could do.  Not stupid, socialised things like transguys would have to give up knitting (I like knitting), but things like transmen in lesbian-only spaces.  The genderqueer AND trans kids try to circumvent that and I find it disrespectful.  Not only of the women who don’t want to be around men, but also of their own apparently male identity.

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Categories: genderqueer, non-pc, rants

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 1905 and is filed under genderqueer, non-pc, rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.