genderqueer:

guesswhatsvegan:

“Female bodied” or “male bodied” are common phrases in my trans arsenal, ones I use frequently but have been feeling more and more uncomfortable with recently.  It took reading this article to help me articulate why I dislike the terms.  To call myself, a trans guy, “female bodied” reinforces cultural norms about what constitutes female sex and forecloses re-imagining of how gender and bodies relate by imposing the boring and restrictive binary model.  I find s.e. smith’s suggestion that we replace “female bodied” with something like “read as female” incredibly compelling— the femaleness is a faulty projection, not some authoritative truth emanating from one’s sex (which is also culturally constructed).  An excerpt:

“Recently, I read a genderqueer person describing ouself as “female bodied” and after I scraped my jaw off the floor, I started deconstructing this. I sometimes describe myself as “read female” or “read as a woman” and sometimes I identify, specifically, as a genderqueer woman or femme genderqueer. But I wouldn’t describe myself as “female bodied” because my body is not “female,” it is genderqueer. I have a genderqueer body. Describing it as “female” not only erases my gender identity, it conflates gender and sex, it reinforces a binary view of gender, and specifically it reinforces a cis binary view of gender. A determinist view.

Would I describe a trans man as “female bodied”? No I most certainly would not. A trans man is male bodied, just like a trans woman is female bodied. For those of us who are outside the binary or who are not gendered at all, there are no standard words to describe our bodies. But I don’t think that this means that we should utilize the binary gender structure to describe ourselves. Indeed, it kind of defeats the point and contributes to our own erasure.

How shall I describe my body?

When I describe myself as “read as,” it puts the emphasis on the observer, and specifically on observer error. People see my body and they make assumptions about my gender on the basis of what my body looks like, the same assumptions made at my birth when my genitals were seen and that in turn was used to assign a gender identity. Many people think that my body looks like a “woman’s” body should and thus they believe that I have a female gender identity.”

f-isforfeminism:

Perhaps the most sneaky and detrimental misogynist term is the phrase ‘it’s just a joke’. It implies that not only are women, and especially feminists, uptight, bitter women, whose lack of Y chromosome has left them with a missing sense of humour, but also, and even more concerning, is the idea…