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15 May 2022 17:26That very special smile for cis pagans who respond to disclosure of trans status by doing a bit about divine genders and how you're balancing male and female energies and third gender shamans. Friends, don't do this
I don't kick off about it when people do, because I understand it's an attempt to respond to a surprise situation, using a shared language (of pagan spirituality) to communicate they're supportive, interested, and celebratory. I can't fault that, and I know I'm often the first trans person a person has met - which is always going to be a little tense for Cis Allies who are on-edge about doing the wrong thing.
But it's awkward, of course, because I do indeed have sacred gender things going on in my life - but rarely feel like cis people have the full context to be interested, as well as I just don't want to rock the boat within this social interaction. Discussing gender spiritual in detail is for close friends after midnight, it's a complex topic; whereas the context for "you're just like gender shamans" is more like, someone's trying to express support and my role there is to validate them for it. "No, you're wrong (about me/history/how gender functions)" would be an ungracious response, but it grates, it creates that little bit of stress and othering, a thing one has to get through.
Very grateful to my (cis) husband today for stepping in, talking about his experiences of the divine feminine, and saying he felt me and him had had very similar experiences. As well as interesting, it was thoughtful; it recentered the conversation from "Haptalaon's special magical gender experiences" to "men's magical gender experiences", which is the sort of reorientation of the question that trans people tend to appreciate, but cis allies who are very new to this might not quite grok the subtlety of.
I think the social faux pas, in essence, is assuming trans people are the right audience for conversations of gender because it's something they know a lot about and which specially applies to them. Those two things are true, but because of these things it makes trans folk absolutely NOT the right audience for conversations about gender, from semi-strangers or people not already deep-grounded in gender theory.
I don't kick off about it when people do, because I understand it's an attempt to respond to a surprise situation, using a shared language (of pagan spirituality) to communicate they're supportive, interested, and celebratory. I can't fault that, and I know I'm often the first trans person a person has met - which is always going to be a little tense for Cis Allies who are on-edge about doing the wrong thing.
But it's awkward, of course, because I do indeed have sacred gender things going on in my life - but rarely feel like cis people have the full context to be interested, as well as I just don't want to rock the boat within this social interaction. Discussing gender spiritual in detail is for close friends after midnight, it's a complex topic; whereas the context for "you're just like gender shamans" is more like, someone's trying to express support and my role there is to validate them for it. "No, you're wrong (about me/history/how gender functions)" would be an ungracious response, but it grates, it creates that little bit of stress and othering, a thing one has to get through.
Very grateful to my (cis) husband today for stepping in, talking about his experiences of the divine feminine, and saying he felt me and him had had very similar experiences. As well as interesting, it was thoughtful; it recentered the conversation from "Haptalaon's special magical gender experiences" to "men's magical gender experiences", which is the sort of reorientation of the question that trans people tend to appreciate, but cis allies who are very new to this might not quite grok the subtlety of.
I think the social faux pas, in essence, is assuming trans people are the right audience for conversations of gender because it's something they know a lot about and which specially applies to them. Those two things are true, but because of these things it makes trans folk absolutely NOT the right audience for conversations about gender, from semi-strangers or people not already deep-grounded in gender theory.
