Processing Guilt and Power in a Legal Gender Change

When I was a comic book journalist in the mid 2010s, I was targeted for sex-based reasons twice by cis men with more clout and power. The first time was by a small time artist with a long time girlfriend who paid me minimal mind at the industry dinner we met at, but then suddenly became really interested in my feedback for his B-publisher floppie covers over Facebook messenger. The second was Warren Ellis, after I wrote a profile about him in The Guardian. In both instances, someone or something interceded, and that as a self-identified ciswoman at the time made me fortunate.

Comics opened my eyes to #MeToo about a year before the actual #MeToo because I was part of a group of journalists who were trying to call out industry sex pests in hopes of inspiring consequences. Ultimately, despite the sheer ordinariness of violence upon femmes in such a small space, few predators were brought to punishment or rehabilitation. Exposed to so many stories and their resulting hopelessness, I became traumatized, bitter, and burned out while I was otherwise in an already difficult mental health space.

In this last week, it has become more apparent than ever that we live in a system that is predicated on women's subjugation to men. There is a lot of reasons that Trump won the election, including powerful branding, Russian-spread misinformation, and billionaire backing. But it is notably the second time that America has chosen him—a cis man who is objectively less than mediocre—over a professional and competent woman.

There is no difference between the circa 100s BCE to 400s CE Greek Magical Papyri's spell XI.a 1-40 wherein the magician calls on an older woman to become his domestic servant through the Egyptian goddess Nephthys and that today most technological voice helpers like Amazon's Alexa are defaulted to feminine names and voices. It's all the same line of man is the assumed actor and the role of woman is to fulfill his whims.

Men make this clear scientifically and they have within art throughout all of time. Valerie Solanas in her famous "SCUM Manifesto" charged that men project all of their own flaws upon women. The majority of older organized religions across the world precluded people assigned female at birth from gaining education and status within their clerical systems. Aristotle, who contributed some of the most important thinking to western philosophy and therefore occultism, also considered women inferior to men whereas his teacher Plato did not.

As for the majority of white women who voted for Trump according to some exit polls*, they likely did so in order to pay devotion to their husbands, fathers, and male religious leaders. White women have some streaks of power they can transact upon through their race. Occasional individuals who are not white like Usha Vance may ambiguously sort of kind of partially but also only in some circumstances buy into that power by marrying white men. For most who have it, that power is the natural state of things and left unexamined when not weaponized.

Anyway... The point. Before this election, I meant to change my gender to non-binary as you can within my state, but I just kept procrastinating on submitting the papers to the DMV. Now I know why. While an X looks nice on my preferred honorary Mx., getting that on my legal identity would potentially put a bigger X on my back.

Another option is to consider in these next two months changing my gender to male.

The power dynamic cishet males wield over everyone else creates a common question in trans masculine spaces in how to navigate one's own identity without perpetuating abusive cycles. Thomas Page McBee's debut memoir Man Alive delves into the complicated emotions and themes inherent to his story of becoming a man after experiencing violence by them. As for myself, I startled the other day as I stopped to try to let a man pass in a store only to realize he was my reflection. If they haven't already, cis men will stop seeing me as a target the way those comics creators did years ago.

That should be nice, and it is. But also, the notion of buying myself safety and privilege via changing my gender is giving me survivor's guilt. This is despite that legal malehood would be assigned to a body that still has a uterus. Meaning I would still lack protection from the higher risks of complications that occur in trans masc pregnancies. I would also not be exempted from the attacks on reproductive health from the political right. A legal gender switch may even possibly preclude me from in the future marrying my girlfriend, whose legal gender is male and won't be able to be changed before the January inauguration.

(An aside: while I do want to marry her on a spiritual level, the institution of marriage itself is a question especially with the way things are headed. To be a man and marry her is to make her a legal extension of myself who theoretically gains protections from it. Yet, like how JD Vance can't grant Usha whiteness, I won't be able to give my wife womanhood. Even being a cishet-passing man comes with limitations in the world you ensure sees so few as worthy as having good lives.)

I'm also only as much a man as I am a woman. Governments and states only need to know your gender insofar as they decide how you are to be treated based upon it. In classifications of gender as class, as gender as title, as gender as hierarchy, I feel much more closer to binary women on the political spectrum than binary men. So should I really bother a change at all?

All these questions, no easy answers in the downfall of the United States empire.

*I tried to find a source to link and had an interesting technological experience... I wonder if something more is to come in the following weeks as the picture of the election becomes clearer.