Princess Debbie philosophises (again)

A blog is 'performative', isn't it? It doesn't just chronicle the writer's life, describe who they are, it is a part of their life, it is part of who they are. Alternatively, it can more detached from offline life: regardless of the writer's offline life, the blog is their life, the online identity is who they are. Your online name is your name, your avatar is what you look like.

This is also true elswehere on the internet, of course, and even more so on Second Life and other animated interactive sites.

The pertinence of all this for trans people is obvious.

I want to be my trans identity - Deborah Kate - here, rather than just be a commentator upon trans themes. There can be something defended about being the commentator rather than the player. This is certainly evident in many academic works. Whole theses have been written on trans themes, without the writer revealing how they feel about their own gender.

Central to trans is affirming an inner identity despite not only the identity given to you by others, but also the physical evidence of the body. Once one is established within a trans community, it can be easy to forget how bold it is to do this, initially.

There can also be  a defensiveness in sub-divisions. I'm a this sort of trans-person, but, oh, don't worry, I'm not one of those odd other sorts of trans-people.

A further complication is the sense many of us feel throughout life that we are somehow fraudulent. In our work, for instance, we may have the qualifications, the experience, yet secretly we feel like we are somehow playing the role and hoping to get away with it. Maybe at parties we feel that, while we see confident people around us, we hide our insecurities behind a confident  manner, yet it takes another person to recognise that we actually do have a confident  manner: we qualify as confident as much as the other people we recognise as confident. Internal insecurities do not invalidate.

All this leads to my uncertain acknowledgement that I am feminine in character. I am all those words: I am a queen, I am a princess, a fairy, a t-girl. Listen, Debs, girl, there's no 'yes, but' about it. I've got the evidence.

Perhaps I should overstate the feminine before I step back into a less ostentatious femininity.

So maybe this blog will go all girly. Judging by the evidence of this particular post, probably not, though. Continue to get your dissertations on postmodern selfhood here, girls.