- Three weeks into term and I'm only just feeling like I'm picking up what I'm supposed to be doing again. People keep talking about this writing thing and I always mean to do, but never seem to be quite ready. Challenge for this term is to be less easily distracted from trains of thought by seeing a shiny book or going to a fun talk.
- On the other hand, I need to be pretty positive about what I've been doing, because since coming back here I've been feeling like I've been dragging myself around all day. Which I had no way to clearly explain, until Robot Hugs drew it.
- My new love is this site which produces lovely background noise. Turns out my favourite combination is thunder and rain, which kind of feels like warm stroking for my brain. Or a blanket, to use a slightly clearer simile.
- Today I have accomplished extreme cleverness (by my standards). I now have all of my references on a browser that lives on a flash drive! This should hopefully be both an intuitive system for me to use and also get around the issue of Uni computers, which reset all preferences to defaults every time you log off, thus making them buggers to work on.
Tuesday, 27 January 2015
A handful of things
Thursday, 13 November 2014
Nights Drawing In
I am not good at winter. It always takes me by surprise when I need to start wearing more layers, and I bristle with annoyance and spend a few weeks shivering before I relearn how to keep myself warm. I can enjoy the autumn colours, the smell of a hazy morning and the start of the changing season, but then once we move into November the dark mornings and evenings start to take their toll. Getting out of bed becomes ever more difficult (and so does leaving the house). I start wanting to take care of myself by doing nothing but eating and sleeping, and hibernation is just impossible when I've got the rest of my life still going on at the same pace.
I have a sunlight lamp - I call it my false sun god - and I spend time each day with it pointing obnoxiously brightly at my face to help me feel a bit more alive. I try to get up and exercise each day - and in my new house I'm a mile away from my office and town, so I walk at least two miles a day. I can still feel depression creeping towards me though, in an exhausting game of 'keep-away' where I tot up each small victory as proof that I am still functioning and fending off the seasonal blues (I often work off to-do lists. When I am doing well, the items I plan include reading whole books, reorganising my desk, planning papers and suchlike. On a bad day, I get to tick off eating meals and washing up). This year is worse, I think, because I am in a new place with housemates I very rarely see (we are all busy students, in different fields) and just starting PhD study.
This stretch heading towards midwinter is better than afterwards though. I know that very soon the christmas lights will come out, and I need to start planning and putting time into preparations for holiday events and gifts. It might be dark at four in the afternoon, but lights in windows (and on roofs, and all over town, and frankly being really tacky in a lot of places) and the building anticipation help my mood enormously. The really difficult bit is post-holiday, when new year jubilance fades but it is still dark and all you can do is wait for the light to slowly come back.
In the meantime, I am going to go eat some soup and light candles.
I have a sunlight lamp - I call it my false sun god - and I spend time each day with it pointing obnoxiously brightly at my face to help me feel a bit more alive. I try to get up and exercise each day - and in my new house I'm a mile away from my office and town, so I walk at least two miles a day. I can still feel depression creeping towards me though, in an exhausting game of 'keep-away' where I tot up each small victory as proof that I am still functioning and fending off the seasonal blues (I often work off to-do lists. When I am doing well, the items I plan include reading whole books, reorganising my desk, planning papers and suchlike. On a bad day, I get to tick off eating meals and washing up). This year is worse, I think, because I am in a new place with housemates I very rarely see (we are all busy students, in different fields) and just starting PhD study.
This stretch heading towards midwinter is better than afterwards though. I know that very soon the christmas lights will come out, and I need to start planning and putting time into preparations for holiday events and gifts. It might be dark at four in the afternoon, but lights in windows (and on roofs, and all over town, and frankly being really tacky in a lot of places) and the building anticipation help my mood enormously. The really difficult bit is post-holiday, when new year jubilance fades but it is still dark and all you can do is wait for the light to slowly come back.
In the meantime, I am going to go eat some soup and light candles.
Thursday, 26 July 2012
Quick Hit: The Men Who Made Us Fat
This documentary can be found in 12 parts on Youtube, and it's an interesting romp through recent food history, from Nixon's agricultural policies to Sunny Delight turning a child orange.
In three episodes it looks at the rise of fast food chains and the impact of high fructose corn syrup, the economics and behavioural psychology of 'super-sized' portions plus the invention of snacking, and the impact of food packaging, legislation and 'health' foods. There's a lovely degree of paranoia around businesses lobbying MEPs and MPs (and a reminder that Andrew Lansley, when looking for a way to reduce child obesity, sat down with the people marketing, selling and profiting from unhealthy food to discuss if they could possibly maybe see a way forward to cut their profits voluntarily), but also a level of recognition that there is economic logic behind enticing people to buy more food that they like. Some of the interviews with people who were in the industry thirty or forty years ago were fascinating - a discussion with a farmer in Indiana about the change to over-producing corn, and chatting with the man who introduced counter service in the UK.
Mostly, watching it made me very hungry.
In terms of fat-shaming, it skirted the edges a lot. In its defence: there was a whole section on the neurological and biochemical responses to food - that sugar can stop people feeling full, that people don't notice if portion sizes are gradually increased, that our brains reward us more for eating sugar and fatty food, that we are duped by marketing etc. (Consumers are portrayed to an extent as being entirely motivated by biological motivations for sugar and shiny packaging - but that is pretty much as they tend to be seen by sciences and economics anyway)
While 'being obese' is presented as a universal negative, the whole series is dedicated to unpicking structural causes and patterns in food production and marketing as the cause, and there is a lot of talk of people who are trying to eat healthily and lose weight, but are unable to do so due to the food industry itself. A couple of interviewees do start to head off into individual-blame territory, and are redirected. Despite that, there were a hell of a lot of stock shots of walking headless bodies
Conclusion: Nice enough basic documentary series, interesting interviews, some of the footage was overused enough to irritate when it was watched as a block rather than (as I suspect was intended) with a week between episodes.
In three episodes it looks at the rise of fast food chains and the impact of high fructose corn syrup, the economics and behavioural psychology of 'super-sized' portions plus the invention of snacking, and the impact of food packaging, legislation and 'health' foods. There's a lovely degree of paranoia around businesses lobbying MEPs and MPs (and a reminder that Andrew Lansley, when looking for a way to reduce child obesity, sat down with the people marketing, selling and profiting from unhealthy food to discuss if they could possibly maybe see a way forward to cut their profits voluntarily), but also a level of recognition that there is economic logic behind enticing people to buy more food that they like. Some of the interviews with people who were in the industry thirty or forty years ago were fascinating - a discussion with a farmer in Indiana about the change to over-producing corn, and chatting with the man who introduced counter service in the UK.
Mostly, watching it made me very hungry.
In terms of fat-shaming, it skirted the edges a lot. In its defence: there was a whole section on the neurological and biochemical responses to food - that sugar can stop people feeling full, that people don't notice if portion sizes are gradually increased, that our brains reward us more for eating sugar and fatty food, that we are duped by marketing etc. (Consumers are portrayed to an extent as being entirely motivated by biological motivations for sugar and shiny packaging - but that is pretty much as they tend to be seen by sciences and economics anyway)
While 'being obese' is presented as a universal negative, the whole series is dedicated to unpicking structural causes and patterns in food production and marketing as the cause, and there is a lot of talk of people who are trying to eat healthily and lose weight, but are unable to do so due to the food industry itself. A couple of interviewees do start to head off into individual-blame territory, and are redirected. Despite that, there were a hell of a lot of stock shots of walking headless bodies
Conclusion: Nice enough basic documentary series, interesting interviews, some of the footage was overused enough to irritate when it was watched as a block rather than (as I suspect was intended) with a week between episodes.
Saturday, 28 April 2012
Magical Intent Strikes Again!
I was in London not long ago, and I made my regular trip to Lush in Covent Garden. While I was there, as well as the usual demonstrations of bath bombs and face masks made of porridge oats, I was asked to sign a petition regarding the EU prohibitions on animal testing for cosmetics.
The person who asked me to sign was, admittedly, a little hazy on the details other than that they considered animal testing for goods which are not medically necessary to be a Bad Thing.
Well, I signed the petition, and then investigated a little more. So far as I can tell, the EU has been gradually introducing legislation to prohibit using animal subjects to test for particular reactions to cosmetics. In 2013, the third phase of this is supposed to kick in – though let's be clear: a lot of it has already come into effect. The legislation was agreed in 2003 (though it had been in the works since 1998), and a wide swathe of tests have already been banned. The particulars of the last bit of legislation include prohibiting the import of cosmetics which have been tested on animals and banning the remaining toxicity and carcinogenicity tests.
The outcry from the cosmetics industry, and the basis on which they are appealing for a delay to the legislation, is that there are not viable alternatives for carrying out these tests. This does sound like an almost valid reason for people who aren't strongly committed to animal rights – after all, you can argue that it sounds far more practical for toxicity tests to be carried out on animals, rather than people where the effect of failed trials could be horrific. But this is exactly the same argument that was made in 2003 and 2009 – when other toxicity and irritancy tests were prohibited. The industry has been accused of dragging its feet – after all, there has been a 14 year warning that this will happen. A last minute claim that there are no viable alternatives (but that, maybe, there just might be one by 2017 if you delay the legislation...) sounds like a last attempt to delay standards that they do not want to comply with.
So, after that research, I was pretty happy with having signed that petition. But that wasn't what I wanted to write about. Today, I saw the video of the live performance 'endurance' art [trigger warning for violence and abuse] that Lush put on in a shop window, in which a woman playing an 'animal subject' was put through various tests by scientists, which included restraints, shaving her head, injections, forcing substances into her mouth and which concluded by having her carried out of the shop and placed on a pile of bin bags by the side of the road.
Well, damn. Suddenly, I'm kind of regretting signing that petition. The video talks about how shocking it was to the passersby, how they got so many people signing their petitions, so I will have to agree that it can be effective, but the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Like the PETA adverts have for years, this is using a woman as a reasonable stand in for an abused animal.
Even worse, the Lush campaign manager is apparently fully aware of how problematic the performance was – she has already faux-pologised in a blog post, in which she explains that nothing other than a woman being abused by a man in a shop window could possibly have accurately represented the systemic abuse in animal testing. The “important, strong, well and thoroughly considered” decision to have an abused woman at the centre of the piece was apparently deliberately made with an awareness of the context in which images of the abuse of women have been used by campaigning groups in the past, which said campaign manager of course entirely condemns, because she sees this one as being different due to there being no intent to titillate or capitalise on the attention it would get due to being a ten-hour display of violence against a woman.
Is this really a case of intent being not-as-fucking-magic as people think? I would challenge that campaign manager to analyse why precisely it made so much sense to carry out the performance in that way – why, for instance, there weren't images of animals instead (surely just as horrific and rather more to the point).
What on earth makes her think that HER campaign makes this acceptable, when she is doing the exact same thing as PETA? And, if a campaign features a man hurting and humiliating a woman for ten hours, is it okay to reap the attention so long as you didn't mean for it to benefit from that? If you don't WANT your art/protest/campaign piece to be seen as part of a wider cultural context in which images of violence against women are are used excessively for advertising and campaigning, does that mean that it shouldn't count?
Well done for being aware of the problems, Lush, but saying that you were aware that it was problematic and then went ahead anyway doesn't get you any brownie points.
Well, I signed the petition, and then investigated a little more. So far as I can tell, the EU has been gradually introducing legislation to prohibit using animal subjects to test for particular reactions to cosmetics. In 2013, the third phase of this is supposed to kick in – though let's be clear: a lot of it has already come into effect. The legislation was agreed in 2003 (though it had been in the works since 1998), and a wide swathe of tests have already been banned. The particulars of the last bit of legislation include prohibiting the import of cosmetics which have been tested on animals and banning the remaining toxicity and carcinogenicity tests.
The outcry from the cosmetics industry, and the basis on which they are appealing for a delay to the legislation, is that there are not viable alternatives for carrying out these tests. This does sound like an almost valid reason for people who aren't strongly committed to animal rights – after all, you can argue that it sounds far more practical for toxicity tests to be carried out on animals, rather than people where the effect of failed trials could be horrific. But this is exactly the same argument that was made in 2003 and 2009 – when other toxicity and irritancy tests were prohibited. The industry has been accused of dragging its feet – after all, there has been a 14 year warning that this will happen. A last minute claim that there are no viable alternatives (but that, maybe, there just might be one by 2017 if you delay the legislation...) sounds like a last attempt to delay standards that they do not want to comply with.
So, after that research, I was pretty happy with having signed that petition. But that wasn't what I wanted to write about. Today, I saw the video of the live performance 'endurance' art [trigger warning for violence and abuse] that Lush put on in a shop window, in which a woman playing an 'animal subject' was put through various tests by scientists, which included restraints, shaving her head, injections, forcing substances into her mouth and which concluded by having her carried out of the shop and placed on a pile of bin bags by the side of the road.
Well, damn. Suddenly, I'm kind of regretting signing that petition. The video talks about how shocking it was to the passersby, how they got so many people signing their petitions, so I will have to agree that it can be effective, but the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Like the PETA adverts have for years, this is using a woman as a reasonable stand in for an abused animal.
Even worse, the Lush campaign manager is apparently fully aware of how problematic the performance was – she has already faux-pologised in a blog post, in which she explains that nothing other than a woman being abused by a man in a shop window could possibly have accurately represented the systemic abuse in animal testing. The “important, strong, well and thoroughly considered” decision to have an abused woman at the centre of the piece was apparently deliberately made with an awareness of the context in which images of the abuse of women have been used by campaigning groups in the past, which said campaign manager of course entirely condemns, because she sees this one as being different due to there being no intent to titillate or capitalise on the attention it would get due to being a ten-hour display of violence against a woman.
Is this really a case of intent being not-as-fucking-magic as people think? I would challenge that campaign manager to analyse why precisely it made so much sense to carry out the performance in that way – why, for instance, there weren't images of animals instead (surely just as horrific and rather more to the point).
What on earth makes her think that HER campaign makes this acceptable, when she is doing the exact same thing as PETA? And, if a campaign features a man hurting and humiliating a woman for ten hours, is it okay to reap the attention so long as you didn't mean for it to benefit from that? If you don't WANT your art/protest/campaign piece to be seen as part of a wider cultural context in which images of violence against women are are used excessively for advertising and campaigning, does that mean that it shouldn't count?
Well done for being aware of the problems, Lush, but saying that you were aware that it was problematic and then went ahead anyway doesn't get you any brownie points.
Sunday, 6 November 2011
Nostalgia
I really intended for this blog to be for more than trans issues - I have links to feminist posts, political theories that I want to comment on, so on and so forth. Yet when it comes down to it, it's generally when I get hit by thoughts that I can't explain so easily that I turn to writing here. I need to improve that habit. But for today, I'm still talking about the trans thing.
Mostly, I'm talking about the nostalgia for the person, or people, that we could have been. Some people will say that they always knew that they identified differently from their assigned gender, for others it is a discovery. For some, including myself, it is a discovery which can make you look back and re-interpret events in your life.
But if you didn't always know that you were/would become a person living outside of cisgender expectations, then the journey to accepting that can include giving up a hell of a lot of dreams and expectations. Maybe having a family in a particular way, or working in a particular job suddenly becomes much farther out of your reach.
A few random examples - I would now be much less safe travelling in a lot of places. While I am lucky enough to live in a place with enough equal opportuinities legislation to be fairly confident that I will not be overtly discriminated against in the job market, unless I start passing and become entirely stealth then it will always be a factor in considering employment. A whole range of fields (including ones that I am particularly interested in) will be much harder to work in.
And...that's hopefully my self-pitying whinge out of the way for the evening. My sudden loss of privilege, it hurts :P
The particular trigger for that was considering my own future employment. You see, I know how to do job interviews presenting as a female. I learned over years how to dress and act, and I could do a reasonable facsimile of that even today (though I might have to engage in some colourful cursing afterwards). How to present as an employable, normative, professional guy, though? I know the body language tips, and the phrases...but they have not had enough time to become natural reactions - and goodness knows I can't seem to find a shirt to fit me decently.
I guess these things will come in time, with practice and assistance from the NHS. But damn, it does make me miss the person who knew how to dress and act appropriately, and the dreams of the future that that person had.
Here endeth the indulgent navel-gazing.
Mostly, I'm talking about the nostalgia for the person, or people, that we could have been. Some people will say that they always knew that they identified differently from their assigned gender, for others it is a discovery. For some, including myself, it is a discovery which can make you look back and re-interpret events in your life.
But if you didn't always know that you were/would become a person living outside of cisgender expectations, then the journey to accepting that can include giving up a hell of a lot of dreams and expectations. Maybe having a family in a particular way, or working in a particular job suddenly becomes much farther out of your reach.
A few random examples - I would now be much less safe travelling in a lot of places. While I am lucky enough to live in a place with enough equal opportuinities legislation to be fairly confident that I will not be overtly discriminated against in the job market, unless I start passing and become entirely stealth then it will always be a factor in considering employment. A whole range of fields (including ones that I am particularly interested in) will be much harder to work in.
And...that's hopefully my self-pitying whinge out of the way for the evening. My sudden loss of privilege, it hurts :P
The particular trigger for that was considering my own future employment. You see, I know how to do job interviews presenting as a female. I learned over years how to dress and act, and I could do a reasonable facsimile of that even today (though I might have to engage in some colourful cursing afterwards). How to present as an employable, normative, professional guy, though? I know the body language tips, and the phrases...but they have not had enough time to become natural reactions - and goodness knows I can't seem to find a shirt to fit me decently.
I guess these things will come in time, with practice and assistance from the NHS. But damn, it does make me miss the person who knew how to dress and act appropriately, and the dreams of the future that that person had.
Here endeth the indulgent navel-gazing.
Thursday, 15 September 2011
On Dysphoria - Part Three
[Please note: in this series, I am discussing only my own experiences of dysphoria. Other trans* people have very different experiences, and one person's cannot be generalised]
So, that body positivity thing? I support it. I really do. No body, regardless of sex, size, age, colour, ability or other feature is less worthy than any other. Nobody should feel shamed for the body that they have, and working towards everyone feeling comfortable in their body is an important goal. But it doesn't follow that everyone should feel comfortable in their body, as some people seem to think.
In fact, as a teenager, I worked hard to be okay with my body. Worried about going out? Paranoid about your appearance? That's okay, it's just typical teenage delusions. You appear to be suffering from misguided low self-esteem. Just convince yourself that everyone else is equally uncomfortable. And it may take you a while, but eventually you'll manage to propel yourself out the door. Most of the time. And if you didn't make it into town when you'd been planning to, I'm sure it was just inherent laziness. After all, people say you look good enough. And you can wear skirts and low-cut tops as a particular 'fuck you' to the world.
That method worked just fine until I found myself independent enough to determine whether or not I went out. In hindsight, university life was never going to work out that well. But that could be put down to laziness of course. It wasn't until I found myself in Canada, half a world away from the people who worried about me, that I actually spoke to someone about how difficult it was to leave my room and we settled on general social anxiety as a diagnosis.
Fast forward another year and I had dscovered the joys of anti-depressants for increasing my confidence in going out, but I still didn't feel quite right. But i still knew that it couldn't be my body which was wrong - it was just my delusions about it. After all, I was young and healthy and had clearly just let idealised images in advertising affect me too much, as so many young people do.
(I had, for the past eight months or so, been considering the idea of binders. Without linking it to being trans or any other issues a part of me seemed quite comfortable with the idea that, at some point, I would be getting one.)
It always makes me blink when people want to let me know that I'm making very serious decisions about my life and should maybe take time to think it over. After all, they weren't in my head when years of growing feminist thought met a sense of self that, frankly, didn't seem to like the idea that much. The only logical response to such a collision was, of course, internalised misogyny! And I'd dealt with this kind of thing for years in a minor way, so I clearly just had to sort out where my internal prejudices were to sort everything out.
Well, that ddn't go too well. Eventually, the deadlock broke, the other way. A bit step towards that was the day that I actually got a binder (still without connecting 'trans' to it - that was far too scary a thought. It was just something that felt right to try out.)
And without stress, without the long moments of panic about being seen, I put it on and stepped outside.
So that body positivity thing needed a little modifying, perhaps. A little bending of principles to allow myself to fail to meet that ridiculous ideal. But I come back to it a lot. My mother, for example, will respond to my talk of surgeries with examples of teenagers undergoing plastic surgery. And while a part of me wants to dismiss that idea entirely, I always end up wondering just how analagous the two experiences are. After all, it's not as if I think a trans guy who has not opted for a medical transition is less of a man. I am fairly confident in saying that that I don't think my own identity is invalidated by my body.
This isn't a universal opinion, I have to say. I know that many trans people do not consider that they can live happily without certain medical modifications to their bodies. But many will also say that their identification is independent of that - the medical intervention does not magically re-create them as men or women, rather, the intervention occurs because they already are such. And honestly, should a non-trans person experience such horror and discomfort regarding their own body, regardless of the cause, I cannot help but want to support them in resolving it however they can.
I guess the element I struggled with is that body positivity is all very well, but it's okay not to like your body as well. There was a size positive activist who recently wrote about how much better she felt after losing weight and many people in the community felt betrayed by that, and said so. Even among self-proclaimed body positive people, there seems to be a policing to make sure that they are positive enough. And it's strangely reminiscent of the divisions that people in the trans* community are trying to get over - between medically transitioned folk and not.
Perhaps it's too fine a balancing act, to support body positivity while allowing space for those who cannot be positive about their own bodies. Maybe it's a dilution of the cause, mixing messages and making us all less effective. Finding a clear path between the conflicting forces and messages of dysphoria, positivity, policing and autonomy is a theoretical puzzle I am clearly not yet equal to.
The most helpful thing to come from this theorising and wondering? The idea that it can be okay to feel bad about about myself. That it is not a failure to yield to societal expectations of what my body should be like. It may not be ideologically pure, but the energy that it took to fight that battle can be put to better use elsewhere.
So, that body positivity thing? I support it. I really do. No body, regardless of sex, size, age, colour, ability or other feature is less worthy than any other. Nobody should feel shamed for the body that they have, and working towards everyone feeling comfortable in their body is an important goal. But it doesn't follow that everyone should feel comfortable in their body, as some people seem to think.
In fact, as a teenager, I worked hard to be okay with my body. Worried about going out? Paranoid about your appearance? That's okay, it's just typical teenage delusions. You appear to be suffering from misguided low self-esteem. Just convince yourself that everyone else is equally uncomfortable. And it may take you a while, but eventually you'll manage to propel yourself out the door. Most of the time. And if you didn't make it into town when you'd been planning to, I'm sure it was just inherent laziness. After all, people say you look good enough. And you can wear skirts and low-cut tops as a particular 'fuck you' to the world.
That method worked just fine until I found myself independent enough to determine whether or not I went out. In hindsight, university life was never going to work out that well. But that could be put down to laziness of course. It wasn't until I found myself in Canada, half a world away from the people who worried about me, that I actually spoke to someone about how difficult it was to leave my room and we settled on general social anxiety as a diagnosis.
Fast forward another year and I had dscovered the joys of anti-depressants for increasing my confidence in going out, but I still didn't feel quite right. But i still knew that it couldn't be my body which was wrong - it was just my delusions about it. After all, I was young and healthy and had clearly just let idealised images in advertising affect me too much, as so many young people do.
(I had, for the past eight months or so, been considering the idea of binders. Without linking it to being trans or any other issues a part of me seemed quite comfortable with the idea that, at some point, I would be getting one.)
It always makes me blink when people want to let me know that I'm making very serious decisions about my life and should maybe take time to think it over. After all, they weren't in my head when years of growing feminist thought met a sense of self that, frankly, didn't seem to like the idea that much. The only logical response to such a collision was, of course, internalised misogyny! And I'd dealt with this kind of thing for years in a minor way, so I clearly just had to sort out where my internal prejudices were to sort everything out.
Well, that ddn't go too well. Eventually, the deadlock broke, the other way. A bit step towards that was the day that I actually got a binder (still without connecting 'trans' to it - that was far too scary a thought. It was just something that felt right to try out.)
And without stress, without the long moments of panic about being seen, I put it on and stepped outside.
So that body positivity thing needed a little modifying, perhaps. A little bending of principles to allow myself to fail to meet that ridiculous ideal. But I come back to it a lot. My mother, for example, will respond to my talk of surgeries with examples of teenagers undergoing plastic surgery. And while a part of me wants to dismiss that idea entirely, I always end up wondering just how analagous the two experiences are. After all, it's not as if I think a trans guy who has not opted for a medical transition is less of a man. I am fairly confident in saying that that I don't think my own identity is invalidated by my body.
This isn't a universal opinion, I have to say. I know that many trans people do not consider that they can live happily without certain medical modifications to their bodies. But many will also say that their identification is independent of that - the medical intervention does not magically re-create them as men or women, rather, the intervention occurs because they already are such. And honestly, should a non-trans person experience such horror and discomfort regarding their own body, regardless of the cause, I cannot help but want to support them in resolving it however they can.
I guess the element I struggled with is that body positivity is all very well, but it's okay not to like your body as well. There was a size positive activist who recently wrote about how much better she felt after losing weight and many people in the community felt betrayed by that, and said so. Even among self-proclaimed body positive people, there seems to be a policing to make sure that they are positive enough. And it's strangely reminiscent of the divisions that people in the trans* community are trying to get over - between medically transitioned folk and not.
Perhaps it's too fine a balancing act, to support body positivity while allowing space for those who cannot be positive about their own bodies. Maybe it's a dilution of the cause, mixing messages and making us all less effective. Finding a clear path between the conflicting forces and messages of dysphoria, positivity, policing and autonomy is a theoretical puzzle I am clearly not yet equal to.
The most helpful thing to come from this theorising and wondering? The idea that it can be okay to feel bad about about myself. That it is not a failure to yield to societal expectations of what my body should be like. It may not be ideologically pure, but the energy that it took to fight that battle can be put to better use elsewhere.
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
On Dysphoria - Part Two
Typically, after posting part one of this series, I've started a period of really struggling with dysphoria again. So rather than a nostalgic look at gradually becoming more and more uncomfortable with myself, I'm really only capable of thinking about how it's hitting me right now.
I have groups of people that I'm more or less comfortable with, depending. On a good day, I wear my binder when I'm in public and until it becomes uncomfortable, and drink lots of peppermint tea on those days that I miscalculate how long I will be around people. Housemates, ex-housemates, metamours and my partner count as one strange extended family that I can stand to be around without binding (which is useful, since otherwise I would be damaging my health far more than I already do). And on a good day, I can forget about it.
On a bad day, I can't forget. Sometimes my body protests, and I choose between physical pain and not socialising. Other times the binder isn't enough, and I'll spend time hating my voice or hips for the way they are. At times, I'll look at friends or acquaintances and feel nothing but envy for their body. I've seen one person describe their experience of dysphoria as the 'Ah Shit!' moment of seeing a person and longing for that ease or those physical features. I think of it as a moment of vertigo, the ground dropping away beneath my feet.
Those are the days that I'll bind for twenty hours and make myself ill, the days that I will be struck by discomfort mid-conversation and have to escape to my room, the nights I'll stay fully dressed until under the covers with the lights off. And I'm never sure what triggers it. Possibly it's just being tired or stressed in my day to day life, maybe I've run out of the mental resources to ignore or reimagine my body as fiercely as I usually do.
This weekend I found myself in a situation - due to long hours - where I had no choice but to socialise without my binder, and it took me forty-five minutes to leave my room. Not because I was concerned about the people I was with, or felt unsafe in any way. Just because there was an irrational terror and unwillingness to be around them while being so wrong. I got over it in time to go out and have fun, and I'm glad I did, but it was anxiety on a level I've not experienced since before I started binding.
And where the hell does that leave a body positive feminist? I mean, really, what right do I have to even try and claim that kind of philosophy when I'm working towards hormonal and surgical alteration of my own body just so I can face people?
I have groups of people that I'm more or less comfortable with, depending. On a good day, I wear my binder when I'm in public and until it becomes uncomfortable, and drink lots of peppermint tea on those days that I miscalculate how long I will be around people. Housemates, ex-housemates, metamours and my partner count as one strange extended family that I can stand to be around without binding (which is useful, since otherwise I would be damaging my health far more than I already do). And on a good day, I can forget about it.
On a bad day, I can't forget. Sometimes my body protests, and I choose between physical pain and not socialising. Other times the binder isn't enough, and I'll spend time hating my voice or hips for the way they are. At times, I'll look at friends or acquaintances and feel nothing but envy for their body. I've seen one person describe their experience of dysphoria as the 'Ah Shit!' moment of seeing a person and longing for that ease or those physical features. I think of it as a moment of vertigo, the ground dropping away beneath my feet.
Those are the days that I'll bind for twenty hours and make myself ill, the days that I will be struck by discomfort mid-conversation and have to escape to my room, the nights I'll stay fully dressed until under the covers with the lights off. And I'm never sure what triggers it. Possibly it's just being tired or stressed in my day to day life, maybe I've run out of the mental resources to ignore or reimagine my body as fiercely as I usually do.
This weekend I found myself in a situation - due to long hours - where I had no choice but to socialise without my binder, and it took me forty-five minutes to leave my room. Not because I was concerned about the people I was with, or felt unsafe in any way. Just because there was an irrational terror and unwillingness to be around them while being so wrong. I got over it in time to go out and have fun, and I'm glad I did, but it was anxiety on a level I've not experienced since before I started binding.
And where the hell does that leave a body positive feminist? I mean, really, what right do I have to even try and claim that kind of philosophy when I'm working towards hormonal and surgical alteration of my own body just so I can face people?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)