Monday, April 15, 2013

Dr. Z-Uses Of Black Trans Male Anger

One of the highlights of my recent trip to Dallas for the Black Trans Men, Inc. conference (and I'm so looking forward to making that happen in 2014) was getting to finally meet my fellow blogger and filmmaker Dr. Kortney Ryan Ziegler.

He has this blac (k) ademic post that has found its way to HuffPo entitled Uses Of Black Trans Male Anger  that I definitely needed to share with my TransGriot readers. 

Although I had already learned that as a black male, I had little room to express anger, for fear of the potentially harmful repercussions, what became even clearer to me is that as a black transgender male, I have even less room to be angry. Simply put, thanks to unfortunate societal assumptions of brute masculinity and the damaging myth of aggression as a result of synthetic hormone use, others sometimes interpret our expressions of anger and frustration as inauthentic, in effect preventing potentially healthy and constructive uses of anger in our ongoing process of self-fashioning.

In order for black trans men to move past the limitations of this binary, it is important for us to recognize that our anger is indeed real and is possible to manage within a society that breeds hostility toward our existence. The angry black male that we are perceived to be should not disavow the reality that is our personhood and humanity, and we must seek out healthy ways to reject this distorted image of our identity. This means being aware of our feelings of frustration, rage and resentment and understanding the situations that can provoke those emotions. In other words, use your anger to discover yourself.

You can read the rest of it at blac (k) ademic
 

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