Emotional Violence in Our Communities

There is something I hear very little about in our politicized queer communities, in all of our talk about physical and sexual violence, as well as accountability and healing. It is the invisible dirty secret nobody seems willing to address, and yet it pervades our interactions with each other, how we conduct our politics, how we offload shame from ourselves onto each other and perpetuate cycles of violence and harm: emotional violence.

Emotional violence can be described as all of the non verbal and verbal ways in which we inflict harm upon another. Tactics made to instil fear, dominance, control, to erase the autonomy and will, needs and feelings of another and to supplant with one's own. Tactics meant to penalize and degrade, that are often insidiously difficult to address because of the lack of physical bruise or scarring left behind but which cause damage and distress in people nonetheless, and which can have a tremendous effect on one's ability to cope and function. If you google emotional violence (EV) you will see very standard descriptions of what this may look like and how it may manifest in intimate partner relationships. You may even find some literature and resources specific to queer and trans relationships. What you won't find, is a thorough guide to naming and understanding the nature of emotional violence and its impacts. You won't even find this in child abuse literature.

Perhaps this lack of information on how to name and identify EV is why we rarely address its harms in our communities. It goes without saying that I am writing this from my own narrow perspective of generational immigrant east/western european norms, and I dare not say that my understanding of emotional violence is applicable to all communities. EV and harm may look very different depending on what community one is from and what the norms are for emotional expression in that community. I will leave it up to you to speak on your own behalf of your understanding of what is emotionally violent. What I can offer, is an understanding from my own background, of how I view emotional violence and perhaps it will resonate with you in your own understanding of healing, community building and accountability.

In my family context, emotions were never directly expressed on my father's side. He was a product of the war in Germany in many ways and had learned to bottle up all emotions and convert them into rage, silent or otherwise. My mother was always far more emotive and expressive. I do not know if this is representative of her Balkan heritage but the volume of her voice regardless of her emotional state never falls below what I consider to be mild yelling. Within this context, piled and layered with copious familial stress, severe mental illness of two family members, ableism and a lack of resources for supporting a child with profound physical and intellectual disabilities, created a toxic environment for dealing with distress, in which emotional violence was often the result.

A year after I had stopped speaking to my father (another story altogether), one day my 13 year old self was playing with my best friend in the basement when I acquired a moderately severe injury. I had used our half finished washroom and not realizing my father had placed his toolbox at the edge of the bathroom door, when I excitedly flung the door open to run back to my friend I tripped on the sharp edge causing a thick chunk of my skin, flesh, and fatty tissue to be exposed to the bone beneath. I held my soggy bloodied shin in my hands and crawled crying up the stairs to poke my head for some assistance. My father lay on the couch and my mother was nowhere in sight. I hesitated and kept my face half below the living room floor and asked my father for a bandaid and told him what happened. Without missing a beat he told me to "shut the fuck up, YOU BITCH."

This one memory holds salient in my veins. It is compounded by memories of an innocent 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 17, 21 ... 35 year old who for no discernible reason would experience periods of abrupt rage filled explosions and silence and shutting out from my father for periods of days, to years. One minute I was his buddy - a substitute son at times. The next, I was dead to him. I had no clue what I had done to provoke this.

When you grow up in an environment such as this, many things can happen, the least of which being an acquired sensitivity to the many ways that violence and harm can be inflicted and stay forever embedded in thick strands of scar tissue on your heart, mind and soul. Years of therapy can never erase the impacts of a parent or caregiver deliberately, suddenly, and cruelly shutting their child out. In order to maintain any sense of order at all a child in such a situation determines unconsciously what is needed in order to emotionally protect themselves and cope. This will look different for everybody, and perhaps sometimes the same. But what I had learned from a young age was that the interactions we have with each other, whether in passing or in relationship, can greatly impact our health, hearts and functioning.

Many of us in queer community hold a lifetime of unnamed interpersonal violence in our bones. We struggle to validate our experiences in their entirety, while forever managing ourselves and our emotional lives in connection with others. We may be more or less aware of the impacts, and have more or less insight on our mal/adaptive and preferred coping strategies and how they play out in our interactions with others. We may continuously be drawn to, re-experience, and re-invoke situations in which we are emotionally triggered and react in self protective ways that spill harm onto others. Compounded with transphobia, homophobia, racism, ableism, misogyny, the legacy of residential schools, genocide, and poverty, and a whole array of systems-based harms and traumas - we carry amongst us the ingredients to perpetually re-live and redistribute the harms we have encountered in our lives.

We may find ourselves going through cycles and circles of friends, lovers and pockets of community. We may feel helpless and enraged on a continuing basis when the same harms continue to surface amongst us. We may feel that our politics and language allow us to speak provocatively and expressively about the nuances of community building and accountability all the while covering up the harms we perpetuate amongst each other. We work in fields of violence. We support others in their experiences of violence. And we enact violence on each other in sophisticated ways that go unnamed, unaddressed, and unaccounted for. They may even be endorsed as good politics. The politics of shaming ourselves and others in our communities. The politics of righteousness.

But what is left unaddressed is a focus on the genuine healing interactions that are so needed they are foundational to actually building a community with one another. You cannot speak of community nor accountability while neglecting, divesting, or harming your personal relationships or navigating social relations in ways which undermine, exclude and harm others.

What I would like to call attention to are the myriad ways we offload our shame and rage onto each other. When we refuse to take accountability for how we address each other, approach each other, speak to each other, acknowledge each other, exclude and demonize each other without trial or process, we are perpetuating cycles of violence. We can no longer claim immunity. There are no discreet lines between perpetrator and victim. Anyone can enact harm on another at any time, all the while performing amazing acts of compassion and non violent intervention in the rest of their everyday lives. When we allow our experiences of harm to govern our interactions with others in ways that preemptively shame, exclude and punish, we are participating in emotional violence. We are carrying our legacies forward.

How do we avoid this? There are no easy answers. But I do believe each of us must commit to doing our own personal work around our own healing. We must seek whatever personal and social resources we can muster to do so. We must commit to a reflexivity of evaluating our own emotional states, responses, triggers, and ways of communicating that forever checks, pauses, and diffuses the desire to operate from a place of reactive pain and suffering and to legitimize one's behaviour as not having an emotionally harmful impact on those you interact with, whether casually or intimately. This is not to say that we must abandon self protection. If one has experienced harm by another in or outside of our communities, we can limit the ways we interact with that person so that we do not continue to expose ourselves to harm. We can be protective of ourselves in ways that are fair and do not enact processes which effectively result in character assassinations. We can support each other in ways that provide much more room for feeling the impacts of our conflicts and harms while allowing for space for each party to come together with support to figure out ways of raising awareness, restoring ourselves, and recovering from the impact of harms.

If we are truly to address healing in our communities, if we really would like to invest in our collective health and functioning, we can no longer look to intellectualizing the notion of anti-oppression in our politics. We cannot rely on our ability to cite terminology to excuse the ways in which we justify the perpetuation of shaming and social exclusion amongst each other. But most of all, we need to get real honest with ourselves about what harming each other actually means and looks like.

For a valuable introduction to this topic read "The Revolution Starts at Home."

My Dick is a Pussy

My thoughts have been preoccupied of late.

I was having a conversation with my talented girlfriend the other night about the courses we take in life. She was talking about the value of choices which lead to a particular struggle, and the importance of the knowledge that comes when one's spirit is formed around that struggle.

It got me to thinking about my own life choices, particularly around engendering myself in my early years and how I've chosen to express (supress) my gender for the bulk of my life. And, I came to the conclusion that my choices around attempting to perform an empowered femininity and femaleness have, over the course of my lifetime, actually been necessary in forming my conceptualization of what it means to inhabit maleness and manhood. Simply put, I wouldn't be the type of 'man' I am today if I hadn't walked the path of feminine girl and womanhood. Those choices which I have previously felt were an acquiescence of my being and my soul, which have cumulatively felt like a betrayal of my trans masculinity and boyhood, have served a very important purpose of maintaining the ferocity of a gentle spirit informed solely by what it means to live as a pussy centered being.

That's right. My pussy has informed my manhood. Growing up and walking through the world trying with every cell of my molecular being to claim my femaleness as my own despite what has been assigned to me, has meant that I have a deep appreciation for the power of femininity, womanhood, physical embodiment and what it means to carry the weight of misogyny and sexism on my body and in my soul. I am now embracing my choice to try for so many years to make my femaleness work for me, because it has given me the gifts of a struggle of living in the world in a way that I never could have, had I expressed my transmasculinity consistently throughout. I had to carve space for the kind of being I wanted to become, but that being was purely informed by my ownership of my wholeness as a complicated female subject. Every choice I've made about how to transition and how to move through the world now gendered as male, has been lit by the fire of my battle with patriarchy as a female subject.

I am not cock identified, I am pussy identified. Even my dick is a pussy.

Men are consistently, implicitly, and overtly rewarded every second of their lives for performing stereotypically masculine aggressive behaviours. They are constantly under threat of being perceived as pussies. This is evident in homophobia and transphobia. Men who take up space, who take over space at others' expense, who consistently play into the legitimization of their own power by the choices they make in terms of how they dress, walk, emobody themselves physically, emotionally, and in how they non verbally interact with others, will always be validated in terms of their manhood in everyday life. We see this in gay male communities where Butchness is rewarded and Femmeness degraded and devalued. We see this carried over into trans male communities in terms of the stereotypical narratives, understandings of gender, and ways of displaying masculinity that have taken precedence and gone unchallenged. Trans men who enact these masculinities and behave badly are rarely held to task by their brothers or siblings, and continue to reap the rewards of admiration and desire for this masculinity. The same can be said for traditional Butch masculinities in queer women's spaces.

I don't believe in the state of being or having a pussy as a receptive, submissive, bottomy, failure. I don't worry about the huge gap between my thighs as waiting to be filled with a symbol of my empowerment for me to swing forth and clobber those around me with. I don't need to widen my stance, throw my head back, swagger like a cowboy, or dominate others, especially queer Femme women, to embolden my manhood. I have a cock but it is surely outweighed by the power of my pussy. This power of the pussy is something more men could benefit from intimately understanding within their own being. My strength in my gender is informed by my absence of *true maleness* as a categorical biological necessity, and by my rejection of patriarchal manhood.

I am my own man. And my pussy will swallow you whole.

In the Eye of the Beholder

For the past two years, I have seen my evolution in the eyes of others reflected back at me in ways that I can only make meaning of as enlightening, and disturbing. My trajectory into being read as a male subject has been, shall we say....interesting.

There seem to be at least two distinct things going on here: 1) being read as a 'str8, masculine, able-bodied, white man' and, 2) being increasingly read as an effeminate, gay, able-bodied, white, male. The latter has been increasingly made known to me by the regularity with which I have been approached or shouted (even spat) at with terms such as "pretty boy faggot," regardless of which city or context I am in. Here at home in Toronto, and abroad, it seems that my presentation as a male subject has taken a turn from acceptance at perceived/assigned manhood, to being degraded for my perceived femininity. I will touch on the latter, momentarily.

Early on in my transition, I became aware that folks that did not know me, particularly what I perceived to be heteronormative, straight, masculine, men, had drastically shifted their reception of me. Being perceived initially, and now only some of the time as a hetero-masculine, straight subject resulted in noticeable changes socially and interpersonally, resulting in my absorption into the Western-Anglo patriarchal system.

I noticed something had changed when men started touching me. Strangers. The kind of men who would generally react in hostility or indifference to my very presence as what they read to be a butch female person, previously. Suddenly, these men started to see me as "one of their own." These times that I am perceived to be "one of the boys," are very confusing to me.

From inhabiting a visibly genderqueer, butch expression, I had been accustomed to being pushed to the margins in terms of human interaction in everyday life. When you are read as a gender non-conforming "woman," you are treated in a very particular way. From my experience, as someone that inhabited an uncommonly muscular, male-ish physique, wearing tattoos, and shaved/close cropped haircuts and "men's" clothing while not passing as male, it was regularly assumed that I was de facto, an aggressive person. My masculinity was read to be hostility directed outwards at society, particularly at men. I'm sure many theses have been written on why this is so, and I have my own interesting thoughts relating to this subject. Being read as a hostile subject by way of my gender presentation most people would interact with me with a pre-emptive defensive, or aggressive communication. Otherwise, silence, staring, or disregard were the norm in everyday life.

Since then, as I have come into my self as a more visible male-appearing subject, the expression that I previously embodied as butch, temporarily landed me in the category of 'masculine man.' This is not how I identify, it is simply how I was perceived. When strangers, especially men, first set their gaze upon me in this new shell they tended to see a reflection of themselves. Oddly, the qualities that make up my person have always been centered around gentleness, compassion, and a reluctance to take up space; to be more the silent observer, or the background organizer. Having been perceived as a gender transgressor previously, had unwittingly placed me in the cross hairs of most people's narrow views. A subject of unwanted attention and scorn.

This was then flipped to an unearned place of approval, and esteem. Men who would have previously felt threatened by my very presence, instinctively placed their hands on my body as signs of acceptance and comraderie. They engaged and started conversations and small talk with me around whatever it was that was on their minds. They looked at me. They assumed and imbued my person with an unearned respect and validity that I rarely experienced from very few, sensitive, and aware, mostly queer men. In essence, they let their guard down around me and invited me into a realm of space that prioritizes my opinions, experience, and voice.

Interactions with cisgender straight women also shifted momentarily. From similary hostile, distancing, and strained relations previously, I was prioritized as a subject worthy of taking up unearned space. My presence drew immediate attention and validation, as well as responsiveness. If I wanted something, I barely had to ask for it to get it. Again, I am thinking of everyday interactions and transactions that one makes from travelling through the world. I was presumed to be knowledgeable, powerful, capable, and worthy. I was expected to be aggressive and given permission and acceptance for stereotypical male behaviours around aggressiveness, particularly objectification of women.

I have noticed in either case of interactions with cis men or women, my perceived white maleness signalled to them that I should be prioritized and respected. I do not believe this male privilege can be extracted from my whiteness, and the racial hierarchy that validates and gives power to white, male subjects, specifically. Brown and Black identified trans men, or transmasculine subjects I am sure, suffer from a whole new form of degradation vis a vis processes of racialization and racism as men that are probably difficult to discern from any gender based masculine privileges they may accrue.

This state of affairs of assigned masculine male privilege, though, has been confounded by an ever increasing perception of my person as a feminine male subject. I am pondering on why this has changed, and I believe that since I am now passing for male nearly 100% of the time, I no longer hold myself in the same way physically and expressively that I did while being read as a butch female. I have loosened up and come into a restful relationship with myself and this is taken as femininity. Being read as male has guaranteed that I don't have to keep up any kind of energetic hyper vigilance at proving, creating or asserting a perception of maleness in the face of my contrary appearance.

Now that I have settled into being read as male, I do all the things that I had learned to stop doing before, that come naturally to me. I make eye contact. I tend to look directly at men and women when I speak to them. I look to them preemptively to make connections, visually. I speak softly and expressively. I laugh with a giddy squeak and cry openly. I don't take up much physical space (I am 5'6", 145lbs). If one were to glance at me in comparison to most cis males I would probably be placed in the smallish category. I don't have rugged skin or facial hair, or other socially construed signifiers of maleness such as baldness. My voice is not very deep. The muscular physique that I had as a female is now obscured by notions of my smallness (and significantly, shortness) in stature as a male. I don't do things to physically take up more space in terms of my posture, way of speaking, or choice of dress. I don't hyperexaggerate my masculinity like many short small straight men in order to be "man enough." In fact, my masculine dress preferences, which while read as a butch female signalled gender transgression, are now viewed as gay or flamboyant (fluorescent colours, close fitted jeans and shirts.)

I believe all of these things, coupled with a sense that I am now read as a "pretty," non-rugged male, and hints of womanly femininity that the observer has no clue the source of - have created a situation where I am now obsurdly faced with the opposite side of the misogyny coin - a not so distant cousin of the transmisogyny that trans women face. I pass as male. Yet, I am read as an uncommonly feminine subject, energetically and physically - despite not presenting with androgynous or genderqueer clothing selections. This assigned femininity which I am now mostly experiencing, means that I am once again avoided, diminished, or disregarded non-verbally. It means I am subjected to threats based on my physical gendered appearance. My voice is no longer given priority, my person no longer assigned the same validity of space as hetero-masculine maleness in most contexts. If the reader is confused by this turn of events, imagine my mindset!

All of this, while confusing in terms of the unspoken interactions with others vis a vis my own internal stability and core traits, has got me thinking about the "pull to manhood." As a male subject, having all of the aforementioned experiences, I can definitely see why cis men, especially, are pulled to perform a very particular, aggressive, rigid masculinity that proves they are indeed man enough. If I was a sensitive, soft, straight, cis man, I am quite sure I would have experienced a lifetime of bullying and homophobia as a result of this patriarchal call to uphold masculinity. I wonder how many male subjects answer this call by stifling their softness, their vulnerability, their emotiveness, and their capacity to relate gently to others as a result of this crushing pull.

I wonder at the psychological, emotional, and relational costs to men in giving up a natural way of being that contravenes masculine norms.