Looking at Not Looking

Jamison Green -- Look! No, Don't!

If the generally agreed upon objective of "transition" is to "pass" as
unremarkably gendered . . .  then let me suggest that perhaps
"transition" wipes out whatever personal history one might have acquired
as pre-transitional. Let us suggest that transition "means" coming out
of one closet and moving into a second sort of gender closet. 

I am 69 yrs old, and out of the closet maybe a couple years. "Out of the
closet" is a sort of transitional thing. Some days I am more out of the
closet than others: Typically "I'm trans!" is the second statement I
make about myself -- after "I'm Geo, but we incorporated as Allison
Wunderland, LLC." 

And so we can deconstruct the cliche statements: "I'm a male trapped in
a sort of female presentation." I can pull things together and "pass" as
female (in the dark, on the deserted beach -- not in 7-11 getting a soda
and burrito.) And so lately I'm identifying as "queer" -- not
stereotypically "male" and not "female" either.  Physically I am
hetero-sexual. Ontologically  I am "stealth lesbian" and radical
feminist. 

Metaphysically it's complicated. Nearly seven decades of being me and
I'm not ready to set those metaphysics aside in order to "pass" as a
geriatric Caucasian woman.  "I am a different sort of Butch." Three
Harley's, leathers, a penis, long hair in a bun, earrings, lingerie . .
. I like to deconstruct the semes of gender: "not male" and "not
female." 

Transition into "one or the other" requires that I let go of nearly 7
decades of "both" and that ironically I would be entering a second
"closet" where I forfeit half of my identity.  Judith Butler asserts,
"Identification is always [already] an ambivalent process." I think too
that identification is a fluid, dynamic process. Maybe a dialectic in
search of synthesis? The synthesis I keep arriving at is "trans" or
"queer" -- Not one, not the other, but rather an ontological niche in
the midst of recast referents. 

Ultimately, I think -- I suppose -- that my concern is one of identity
and personal history.  In my case "69 yrs as male. 69 yrs. as
trans/queer." I'm not ready to put that narrative into another closet. 

Thanks,