I'm really curious to hear what everyone's position on feminism and queer politics in the context of CDing.
I guess I'll share some background narrative to position myself on the matter:
When I was a teen, I used to have self-esteem issues for feeling like I wasn't manly enough. I grew up in a small town and my closest friends were jocks. Didn't have any more-than-casual friendships with girls either. I had occasional fantasies about having a female body and wearing female clothes, but I chalked it up to my lack of manliness and a desire to have more contact with girl culture. I also, despite being not too chubby, had at least size A breasts, or "man tits", so I couldn't help but consider that if I was a girl they wouldn't be a bad part of my body.
Then as an underclassman college student, I realized that the conservative climate around masculinity in my town was actually really f-ed up. I came to terms with the idea that it was cultural constructions of gender roles that was the problem, not myself. I could form caring, intimate relationships with men and no one seemed to care about how much I knew about sports. I helped start a weekly men's discussion group called Men Against Patriarchy which is a safe space for men to talk about how to be better men for the women in their lives and how to deconstruct harmful notions of masculinity.
In the past year or so, I've gotten extremely involved in feminism. I've started to shift towards viewing not just gender as a social construction, but sex as well. Judith Butler taught me everything we do is a performance. Now I believe that in a perfectly equitable world, we would stop categorizing humans into men and women, stop talking about "what men do" or "what women do", stop describing people in terms of the degree to which they fit shared understandings of sex-linked traits (masculine/feminine), and start viewing people as complex individuals, each one of us situated somewhere on an endless number of spectrums.
I used to think the fact that I didn't have urges to CD and/or transition that were so great I would go to any length, putting family, social status, work, etc on the line to act them out- that I've never felt trapped in the wrong body- meant that I wasn't "one of them"- I could have a normal life and simply work on changing male culture. But a class I just took completely changed my perspective on this when we read an article by Pat Califia (look him up!) where he basically addressed this exact line of thinking. He pointed out that yes, there is a huge population of queers that feel like they had no other choice, that their personal lack of identification with their genetic sex/dress code was so great they needed to transgress. However, there are also those activists who shed off gender privilege willingly, and not in order to pass but in order to blend the distinction between sex and gender that much further.
In a couple of months I'm moving to a new city and would really like to experiment with the form of activism. I've realized that I don't really care about being taken as a male, and neither male nor female feels natural or unnatural to me, so I've started to identify as genderqueer. And it took viewing transgression as a form of activism to realize that I not only endorse it as politics but that I actually really like it and it can be fun!
Wow, that turned out to be much more about queer politics I suppose, but for me it's all wrapped together. How does everyone else view their CDing in the context of everything? Is it something you think about? Do you CD to pass or CD to blend?
-Alex