skankassqueer:

atannerfiercely:

nonbinary:

CAMAB butch trans women talk about their past and current genderqueer, nonbinary or gender-binary-challenging self identities at the Butch Voices conference:

I’m really uncomfortable with nonconsensually identifying folks by their assigned sex at birth. If someone were to take a video I was in, and attached the sex I was coercively assigned at birth along with that video, I would be pretty darned uncomfortable. 

Also: I’m pretty sure not everyone in the panel identifies as a woman.

yeahhh the panel was called “butch trans women” and brynn and tobi both identify as genderqueer butch trans women. jamie is genderfluid, and i now identify as femme. i don’t like that the CAMAB part was included in this description.

Thanks for the feedback, I prevaricated repeatedly over how to describe this video as, after watching the two parts posted on YouTube so far, it seemed that at least one of the panelists wasn’t self describing as a woman or solely as a woman (based on the agender-fluid description at ~11 minutes), and I even got some way into writing an abortive critique of the wider problematic tendency to apply labels like MTF/FTM, trans woman/trans guy or transfeminine/transmasculine as umbrella terms covering nonbinary people who don’t necessarily identify as female/male, womens/guys or feminine/masculine.

My interpretation was that the panel was actually talking about trans* butch experiences and identities of people coercively assigned male at birth, including the experiences of both trans women and nonbinary people, but I erred on the side of caution and followed the description(s) used in the videos’ titles and their on screen captions (but in an unfortunately problematic way as you’ve rightfully noted).

I’m extremely careful to only refer to gender assignments at birth when it’s directly relevant information revealed within the source material I’m linking to. I judged in this case that it’s a big part of what the video/panel is about (although after re-watching I realise that it’s mainly discussed in part one of the panel on identities and role models rather than the one embedded here and only explicitly explained by two out of the four panelists).

There is a definite shortage of discussion and representation of CAMAB butch, nonbinary and genderqueer experiences and role models (as discussed in part one of the video) so I do look for those and highlight them when I find them. But again, only when the people I’m linking to are explicitly mentioning their birth assignment as relevant.

So I apologise, I should not have assumed that people on a panel called ‘Butch Trans Women’ would necessarily hold that identity (I know I’ve spoken on conference panels with titles I didn’t identify or agree with before!) and should not have assumed that all four panelists would be happy to be identified as CAMAB despite the use of that label by half the panel. I’ve now edited the original post to simply give the title of the panel. Thanks again for calling me out on this.