Queer and queer activism

For some years now I have defined myself as a genderqueer, a non-binary gender identity: neither man, nor woman, nor - in my case - at any point between the two extremes. I have come to define myself this way after a process of many years. I was assigned male at birth; I was raised and educated as a boy. In this process I have benefited from the privileges that patriarchy assigns to boys, but I have also suffered a lot and continue to live with my wounds and scars. I had a rather conflictive relationship with (my) masculinity, having tried to fit into various masculinities (hetero, gay...), with less and less success. I got to a point where I said "enough is enough", I was tired of being defined as a man, and of the pressure of fulfilling (or resisting) what it means to be a man in our society.

On June 29, 2019, as Bloque Critico - Disidencias del Sur, we participated in the "official" Seville Pride 2019, that is, the capitalist pride, depoliticized, mercantilized, homonormalized. But we are not silent! We reclaim our pride, a political pride, a pride of dissidence, a pride as revolt.

For already nine weeks I am now taking hormones, more concretely oestrogen. With this I initiated a process of transition, a change of my body, or my relationship with my body, and of the relationship between my body and society. This process is still pretty new, at the very beginning. Nevertheless, I’d like to share how I feel with this process.

A necessary conference – but do we want to mainstream queer identities?

“We identify as queer, have an analysis of gender and sexuality as power and are positive about women and gender non-conformists in tech” - this is what we say on our page about our ethos and ethics. I myself define as genderqueer, a non-binary identity, and have had some experience with queer or transphobia in tech (see the comments on this feature request for ISPConfig for example). So when I heard about Non-Binary in Tech, I thought “this is the conference for me”.

My experience of being genderqueer, non-binary

Almost every day people deny me my existence, but here I am, and I exist. But yes, I’m pissed off, pissed off by this almost daily negation of my existence, of my identity as a genderqueer, a non-binary person. I’m pissed of by people putting me into their binary boxes – man-woman – boxes in which I don’t fit, boxes that impose on me the binary system of sex/gender, and nobody ever asks me if I do agree with this. How many times when someone greets in a supermarket as “sir” I would lime to respond “fuck off! I am not a man, and you don’t have any right to impose on me this identity!”. But I don’t do it. I don’t have the strength to every time when someone imposes on me how they read me (without asking me) to correct them.

In summer 2015 in Brooklyn, New York, the collective and campaign Gender is over (if you want it) was born, adapting the famous slogan by John Lennon and Yoko Ono War is over (if you want it). Basically the collective, formed by Marie McGwier and Nina Mashurova, two persons who identify as non-binary, promotes its message via t-shirts with the slogan and the occasional event. With the income they support trans* and queer collectives.

Today I got my new (German) passport which includes a small but important change of my personal data: now in the field sex it shows 'X' for 'indetermined'. I thought for a long time that it would not really be important what these official documents say. However, I am getting more and more tired and annoyed of always having to choose between two binary options on any form, when I buy something on the web (for example an airplane ticket), and on many other occasions.

Personal reflections on the death of Rio Reiser (Ton Steine Scherben) - * 9 January 1950; † 20 August 1996

I wrote this article in September 1996, shortly after the death of Rio Reiser, for the German nonviolent anarchist magazine ‘Graswurzelrevolution’. It was published in issue 212, October 1996 (https://www.graswurzel.net/212/scherben.shtml). In March 2017 I added – first in the Spanish translation – a personal update.