We have this idea in the TG literature about a real self buried inside a fake shell, or some variation of that. True Selves would be good example. I find myself thinking about those terms and wondering about authenticity as a part of this issue: am I more authentic now, as a result of self-examination, therapy, some insight into my nature, and the slow removal of all that inauthentic dead-weight hanging off me? If so, then would my voice, tone, and identity be more real, less distant? Was my voice before fake? What is real or original?
These concepts bother me because I’m not sure if we can find a real core inside a TG, or any complex individual, for that matter. Let’s think of synonyms and antonyms as a way of brainstorming terms we might use to talk about our selves. Original is troubling to me because it suggests that we are best when we are closer to our origins (sexual, gendered, cultural, class, ethnic), and I’m not sure I buy that idea entirely. Real is also loaded with positivistic difficulties, and is set against either imaginary or unreal. True is in the realm of logic and doesn’t appeal to me as the opposite of false. Both authentic and genuine suggest a sort of true-false split, but is opposed to fake or counterfit and thus might be more to the point where GID comes in.
In thinking about voice, I’d like to play with the idea that a subset of voice is tone, stance, ethos, and subsets of those would be diction, etc. Might we think of voice not as a foreign language or a dialect to be learned through hard practice, but rather clothing and presentation? It’s easier to visualize because while we all don’t learn a foreign language, we all know what clothes feel “natural” and which ones feel “artificial.” But we also understand shades of formality in clothing in ways most of us don’t when it comes to language. Would the act of moving from one voice to another be a trans-
- formation?
- vestment?
- gression?
- sition?
March 29, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Trans-tenor–you’ll be working in a new tenor; you’ll still use the same language and lines of argument relying on metaphor and example for explication, but now your words will have a new tenor.
And…you’ll be living in a new register–a new situation and context. You’ll still have at the core of the new register the same language, or self that ran your life in the old register, but now the new register will change how you use that core-self to interact with the world. As I’m learning, despite using the proper language and words, meaning can be completely lost if you don’t convey them via the proper register. A new register embues language with new meaning.
It’s not that your self was inauthentic, but rather you were forced to adapt to an inauthentic register. Something you clearly really good at, but once you shift the register, your authentic self will create authentic meaning more easily.