gender agony
content note: besides the obvious (see title), there is rumination on Joanne Rxwling as well as GxmerGxte
I can't discuss my appearance on a game show until the episode actually airs, but I can share, probably without any repercussions, that I was invited to that taping by a friend and professional peer. Actually, that's putting it too strongly—the "peer" part—because I am nowhere on his level, nor have I even really worked in the same fields. So we'll just say "friend," but one whom I met through other friends/colleagues who've since moved into other avenues.
This distinction is extremely important to make, since one of the most horrifying things about GxmerGxte was that the mob conflated anyone I'd ever met—any peer, colleague, boss, friend, pal, subordinate, industry professional, or complete rando—into a possible link, a potential conspiracy actor and therefore a worthwhile target. The ‘movement’ had mistaken what is the normal, sometimes mysterious, interconnectedness of being human, into a conspiracy map for its own anxieties. In practice, it felt a bit like a Red Wedding, but also an Indian Wedding, where everyone you ever met, and anyone your respective families ever met, are all attending. I guess this is why I've felt an overwhelming over-responsibility toward anyone I've ever subsequently met, which has made me a fucking wreck.
Anyway, the taping. I think it's safe to surmise that the only reason I was invited up as a contestant—at the production's peril, I'm sorry to say—was because this friend suddenly told the contestant producer that I was the "game industry's mother" or some similar something. He explained that for years I'd been caretaking and nurturing and mentoring people who'd come up through the ranks.
Now, I do think this would be very surprising information to almost anyone who has ever worked on a triple-A title; I was equally surprised to hear this.
At the time I probably felt a soupy mix of emotions. I do care about people and their nourishment and edification, and it's nice to be seen and complimented in this way. But I'm also acutely aware that giving-care is perceived as gendered labor; we leave glory, "important stuff," to the men. In January, my young neighbor—who, by a twist of fate or circumstance, went on the same game show not long after I did—referred to me as a "hen," and I'd responded sharply.
I previously wrote that my "shadow" persona, the "character I roleplay under stress [...] is that of 'dutiful daughter'." However, in July, I would learn the worst possible thing about myself: my enneagram type. I had mistaken my disintegrated personality for my actual personality and, conversely, my 'real' personality for my 'shadow' personality. (There's also the notion that, at a person's 'best', they take on the positive traits of a different enneagram profile entirely, which comes as only slight relief.)
Taking a quiz and being told by simple math that my organic personality is 'helper' or 'caregiver' had left me floored. I literally laid backward onto the floor and screamed. It is information I feel so endangered by, I have managed to keep it a secret for years, especially from myself.
I think a lot about how I'd refused, in a white-hot rage, to take home economics in high school. I didn't want to learn those skills and then be trapped and taken advantage of. (I was extremely early to that "weaponized incompetence" tip.) In practice the outcome of my rebellion is, okay, now I don't know how to sew a button onto a shirt or jacket. Great. I lament this fact frequently. I keep meaning to sit down and learn how; I guess I'm mostly fearful about poking myself. But, like, weirdly extremely scared of poking myself.
And I hesitate to acknowledge that I am in any way helpful or handy—and I definitely don't want word getting out about it—because I still don't want to be taken advantage of. In other words, my rejection of any personal adroitness at "gendered" labor hinges on the fear of how a bad actor would attempt to leverage it: this is the source of my gender agony.
To be honest, I'd always identified with my dad more than my mom; as a direct consequence of that, from earliest childhood, I was terrified of becoming, somehow, some way, someone else's victim. So I refused to learn to sew buttons or hem cuffs or any of the other things people might naturally expect me to do. Obviously cisgender men wrestle with a version of this—some people claim they invented this, har har—like when men pretend not to know how to shop for groceries.
Anyway, my personal gender ideal, or ideology, is "soupy": a mix of good and bad and neutral traits from all genders, floating around in a roux. I'm soup. I'm soup, and I'm about to go into the Vitamix.
I think a lot about the fact that in 2020, Just Keep Rolling wrote, in public for all to see, that if she were a young person today, she "might transition," herself: as in, she would choose to be trans masc or nonbinary. And it's like, duh, obviously; she's defaulted to gender-neutral pseudonyms her entire life. So the heart of her particular brand of 'gender essentialism'—gender fascism, really—is seemingly akin to those people who rage at student loan forgiveness. "I paid my debt off," they fume, "so everyone else has to." In Joanne's world, boys have to stay boys and girls have to stay girls forever because, she reasons, she had to stay a girl. For her, sticking to gender and gender roles is punitive.
Rxwling is also open about being a survivor of D.V., and I'm trying to think of how to make a point very delicately. I have already written about seeing scenes of D.V. play out as a child—with the usual gendered roles of "victim" and "perpetrator" in fact inverted—and I think Rxwling genuinely defines gender solely by her own sense of victimhood? Her idea of gender is as reductive and pat as "who is abusing whom?" and she is so tied to her own concept of "cis-man evil, Joanne good," Joanne always the one being hard-done-by (by all the evil 'men' creeping around in elaborate disguises), that she can't seem to wrap her arrested, unimaginative brain around being an incredibly powerful 1.2-billionaire who is actively and aggressively terrorizing the most vulnerable group of people. She is, by her own definition of gender—"who is abusing whom?"—a "rich man." She's the rich and powerful, awful, abusive man she always wanted to be.
She is still chasing the feeling of "never being anyone's victim ever again," and at this point it's clear that there is no degree of accumulated wealth or power that will solve her particular agony for her. So now she's made it everyone's problem.
When I think of my silence during and after GxmerGxte—I turned down a lot of interviews and at one point pleaded with a journalist to not write about me—it was because I did not want some horrific gendered victim narrative to follow me. I wanted no part of it. I just wanted to keep my head down, keep working. (I didn't get to do that, either, due to a combination of being both nonfunctional as well as, now under a public microscope, a liability for others to work with.) But by remaining silent, I victimized myself more completely, more totally, complicit with the larger narrative of disempowerment and helplessness, by self-deplatforming and hiding myself away. It was a type of mob-enforced coercive control, but also, I was scared and I fell for it.
Back then I guess I thought any for-profit victim narrative was a shitty thing to do. My view has softened since then; a willingness to lay out the facts, at potential personal risk, is a profound emotional labor that is presumably worth reimbursing in some way.
Now, as I look back on that particular time period, I find it interesting how the people who would lob accusations of others being "professional victims"—a phrase you'd often hear in those days, which was super effective at sending their targets into hiding—tended to be bullies themselves, hurling abusive spaghetti at the wall hoping for someone to react so they could discredit their target, lay a claim to their own victimhood, and then disingenuously leverage it for a raised profile and hopefully some cash. The allegation of "professional victim" was, shock of shocks, a projection all along! People are always telling you exactly what they're up to.
Anyway. I'm reviewing all this now because, if I ever hope to talk about or process GxmerGxte—if only to do any fact-checking for someone else—it's going to require divorcing myself pretty fucking hard from any sense of victimhood, any grief, any fear, basically any emotion ever. And I'll also need a fresh infusion of that valkyrie juice, a substance that I do not produce naturally.