Breaking Silence

There's a post doing the rounds in the feminist blogosphere that I think is universally important. It's by Sady Doyle on Tiger Beatdown: On Blogging, Threats, and Silence. I grew up on the internet - not my baby baby years of course, but from intermediate school onwards, ten or eleven. We were one of the few families that had the internet at home because my dad works in the tech industry (software more than hardware). I have never used my real name online. Now that I've gotten it legally changed is the first time - I generally receive letters and packages addressed to a pseudonym, and I only give my address out to people I trust, people I've known for a decent length of time. If something's addressed to my birth name, it's probably something official.

Of course, in the wake of the earthquakes, a sufficiently dedicated stalker could potentially figure out my neighbourhood by tracking what I tweet while talking to other locals, though the fact that I live in what's barely considered a large town overseas in a country way down the bottom of the ocean does shield me quite well also. The ones I have to worry about are locals - like the time, several years ago (I may even have still been in high school!), that I wrote a letter to the paper, something I did fairly regularly, and received a phone call at home from some guy who'd felt entitled to ring me up and tell me how wrong I was.

The funny thing, to me, is that growing up there was this emphasis on teaching kids not to give out their personal details online. But now we're in the age of Facebook. There are raging debates about pseudonyms on platforms like Google+ and the World of Warcraft forums, with a lot of clueless people slinging around aphorisms like "if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide" and refusing to understand even when explained that some of us do have something to hide because there is, has been, and will continue to be a subset of the population that thinks simply speaking out is doing something wrong. And the punishment is severe. Of course pseudonyms aren't just an issue of safety, and safety isn't just an issue for women (vis: me), but it is something that's particularly prevalent in feminist and womanist communities... and the fact that I'm not a woman wouldn't particularly help me at any rate, because to the people like this my gender is wrong and my biology defines me.

My biology does not define me. And it certainly doesn't dictate what I can say online.

Performing gender

When it comes to gender presentation I over-compensate - I have curves and breasts and I'm about 5'3 or 5'4 short, and I hate all of it. In an ideal world I'd probably identify more masculine than feminine anyway, but we're not an ideal world, so I get vehement about women's issues because whether I like it or not, they affect me to a great degree. But it bothers me that it's so damn hard to get people to notice that I'm explicitly trying to present as not-female. An mtf transgender person is recognised more easily (notwithstanding that it's also much more dangerous, since societal misogyny can't deal with the idea that a man would "try" to "look like" a woman, let alone with the idea that she is a woman), but someone who's female-bodied with short hair wearing men's business wear, carrying a completely non-feminine bag from the men's section of the luggage store, is still referred to as a lady and called ma'am.

At any rate, I've been trying to be aware of the unconscious things I do as a result of being socialised female. One example is trying to walk more confidently - head up, brisk pace - because somewhere along the line I picked up the idea that I should try not to draw attention to myself (see: street harassment). Something else, though, was about my messenger bag. I love it, it's very utilitarian, and I can just sling it over my shoulder. I've always had this strong feeling, though, from seeing countless women do the same, that holding onto the strap with my hand to my shoulder was a feminine thing to do - whether that's true or not - though I wasn't really aware of how or why. But today it came to me. I've always held onto my bag strap, whether it's a backpack or a single shoulder strap, because it's on the list of Things Women Should Do To Avoid Being Attacked. It's more geared towards muggings than sexual assault, but it's still tied into the idea that women should always be wary of something happening - even walking through an area full of offices, even at rush hour with witnesses everywhere. Not to mention that if something did happen, hanging onto the strap means you can swing the bag around, build up momentum, and use it to hit an attacker.