TERF Wars (Part One)

If you have sometimes called someone a TERF (Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist), do me a favor: list some non trans-exclusive radical feminist activists, radical feminist writings and books, etc. Describe the radical feminist insights and concepts you find most inspiring. Tell me which radical feminists you respect the most.

If you can’t – if you only use the phrase “radical feminist” as part of the larger phrase “trans exclusive radical feminist” – you’re trolling. You could have just said “transphobes” and left it at that, without throwing hostility vibes at radical feminism.

If you encountered a person of color who was heavily involved in racial justice politics, and you discovered they had transphobic attitudes and didn’t want trans people participating, would you call such a person a “Trans Exclusive Race Activist”? If you went to a discussion of economic stratification and found the socialists in attendance there to be hostile to transgender people and inclined to bar them, would you launch a tirade about “Trans Exclusive Marxist Socialists”?

Yes, I’m fully aware that gender is a central concern for radical feminists: unlike racial justice activists and marxist socialists, they are specifically organized as women, speaking about gender inequality and patriarchal oppression. And therefore that excluding transgender women is specifically about excluding transgender women from the definition of “women” around which radical feminists define themselves. So, fine: if you want to be a part of that, say some affirmative things about the feminist actions, insights, accomplishments that make you want to be a part of it.

You should want to celebrate radical feminism. We all should. I tend to view patriarchy deniers as being as out of touch with reality as holocaust deniers. Patriarchy is our past and defined a great many of our ways of understanding things, including our mores and moral values and beliefs and assumptions about many things. We're coming out of it but that is something that is still in process. And the vanguard of social change-makers who showed us how to think in those terms and see beyond our entrenched patriarchal world-view, they were radical feminists.



Now, meanwhile... radical feminists have effectively indicted male people for the spectrum of behavior and priorities and worldview called masculinity, in other words for being MEN. They have said that no, this is not males expressing their innate built-in bio characteristics, this is political. So radical feminists are hardly in a good position to object to males coming forth and bailing on the identity “man”.

Let’s take a moment to acknowledge that in any social movement, there’s a tendency to embrace the participation of people who come to the same conclusion for different reasons. This is especially true if the different reasons don’t appear to divide the people into groups who disagree about important goals and objectives. For instance, let’s say there were some inner city residents who were motivated by a desire for social and economic equality, and there were other inner city residents who wanted the best possible outcome for people living in the inner city. For as long as the inner city area is an economically depressed area with a lot of socially marginalized people, there’s no reason to pit these two factions against each other, not when they’re pretty obviously going to be working towards the same immediate objectives, right? But now suppose over a long course of time the inner city becomes gentrified, schools improve, services get vastly better, safety is excellent, and wealthier people and socially successful people move in. Now there’s a lot more opportunity for real conflict of interest between those who want whatever is best for the inner city and whose who want social and economic fairness overall.

Feminism – including radical feminism – has included two overlapping contingents, both of them very much aligned with the same values and purposes for the most part (with many women, I suspect, not inclined to see any meaning in making this distinction): those who wish to bring the social system called patriarchy to an end and eliminate the oppositional polarization of the sexes, and those who want the best possible outcome for women and to promote women’s issues, eliminating sexist barriers to women’s activity. Now, patriarchy is no gentrified inner city by any means – it most certainly has not become the case that to be a woman is to be in a privileged class. (In other words, that's not where I was going with that analogy). But there has always been the potential for individual issues where women’s situation as women might not be directly improved by a specific dismantling of a sexually polarized distinction.

Mostly—to feminism’s overall credit—feminists have supported gender parity even on issues such as child custody and alimony and the military draft, recognizing that even when sexist laws or policies appeared to protect or benefit women, differential treatment as a whole did not.

But the question of who gets to speak as a feminist, to participate in defining what is or is not a feminist issue—that one spirals down into a paradox. Radical feminists have long believed that women’s experience gives women a vantage point from which to see matters in a way that even a well-intentioned man who ostensibly believes in sexual equality would not be so able to. And they know from history and experience that it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that if “being a feminist” were a social role equally available to men, it could become the accepted conventional wisdom that the best feminists are men. It happened with gynecologists, didn’t it? It’s a frightening prospect, that the quoted voices representing feminism might be male, that the published works of feminist theory could be male-authored. What protection would they have against political taxidermy, of feminism being killed from within by being taken over by men, who would start as participants then become obsessed with being leaders, and end up being deferred to as the best and most leaderly leaders by a still-patriarchal general public?


I do think there is space in our definitions for radical feminists to organize and define themselves as those people who have had that lifetime experience, the experience of being, and being perceived as, and being treated as, girls and women. Such a definition does not, in fact, automatically include transgender women, but nor does it exclude them by misgendering them as non-women.

But radical feminism has been a home not only for women who think of men and masculinity as an outcome of social processing, an outcome of socialization that patriarchy nourishes in males; it has also been a home for women who tend to think of the “man” identity and of masculinity as males expressing themselves to a self-satisfied conclusion either because they can (that they are privileged, that they have the opportunity to become that way) or because it is intrinsically a part of their nature, that males are just like that. I’ll remind you of what I just said about movements not tending to divide their membership for as long as the difference doesn’t make a difference. In the absense of large hordes of males rising up to say “patriarchy has to go!” and declaring it their number one political priority, in the absence of people who were born, assigned, treated, and regarded as male saying they wanted nothing to do with this “manhood” thing, it was a distinction that didn’t matter much internally.

Well, now it does.


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Attention Seeking

I have been told that people like me, who present gender in atypical ways, are attention whores. "You can just be whoever you are. No one's questioning that", they say, (contradicting my experience, because some people definitely question that). "But by dressing the way you are, you're drawing attention to yourself, so as far as I'm concerned, you brought it on yourself".

This was in response to me telling about when I was physically assaulted a month ago on 14th street while wearing an orange skirt.

The person went on to say "I don't mean they've got any right to attack you. I'm just saying you did things that we could all sort of predict might lead to that kind of thing happening".

I'll take "Victim Blaming 101" for $500, Alex.

Look, here's the deal. People started drawing attention to me being a femme (sissy, whatever) when I was quite young. How I sat. The clothes I wore and how I wore them. The idea was that they get to draw attention to my difference, and I was expected to try to ameliorate the situation, to make more of an effort to fit in and hide the ways in which I wasn't like other male kids in the school.

My fourth grade teacher never had much patience for "Well, he started it", but, well, I can't help that: They started it. They get to draw attention to my difference but if I do anything that highlights it, I'm an attention seeker?

It reminds me of a conversation in grad school about women's footwear. Someone pointed out that a lot of the shoes designed for women are noisy; they make clack, clack sounds when you walk in them. "So when you wear those, you're broadcasting 'Hey everybody, I'm female' wherever you go. So isn't that luring in the attention you complain about, the unwanted public harassment you get?"

One of the women students replied that she'd originally gone everywhere simply as a person but people kept drawing her attention to the fact that she was a girl. As if perhaps she'd never noticed or something. And she began to assert that she was indeed a girl, especially when she went places that girls didn't generally go, because if she never did and they always did, it ended up feeling like something she was ashamed of, and she wasn't.

That's how I feel about being a gender invert, a sissy femme male. I've spent a lifetime encountering the assumption that I was ashamed of it, that I would prefer that nobody notice, that I agreed that it was inferior to how the other males were.

But I like who I am and I'm entitled to indicate that I'm proud and happy about it.


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Pre-Typesetting: Final Author's Edits

I received from Sunstone Press the text of my manuscript, "formatted" and cleaned of violations of the Chicago Manual of Style and corrected for typos and whatnot, for a final author's opportunity to change anything before it moves forward to typesetting.

I have now gone past a landmark that I never reached with either Ellora's Cave or NineStar Press: I'm looking at the content of my book as it will be when it is released, give or take any changes that I make at this point.

If you are not an author--or even if you are but haven't as of yet worked with a publisher--the impact of that may not be apparent. Publishers accept an author's book contingent on a successful round of edits. Changes. Essentially, they're saying they would like to publish your book but first they want to do some things to it.

Even an established author with a high profile is not immune to changes to their work, and I'm not merely talking about catching typos and fixing errant punctuation, either. I've heard that when John Steinbeck submitted Travels With Charlie, the editor modified quite a bit of it before it went to press.

So although an acceptance letter brings great joy, it soon leads to apprehension and trepidaton: "Yay, finally my book will be published. I wonder what they'll want me to cut or write differently or stick in? Will I hate it?"

In my case, it wasn't a hypothetical situation, either. My editor at NineStar, in 2017, wanted to kill the first 35,000 words, the first five years of the story, and start it in the middle. "You can put some of it in as flashbacks, maybe", he told me. This was so far from acceptable to me that I ended up asking to have my contract revoked and my rights reverted back to me. Having a contract to publish and then finding the editing process so destructive that I had to pull out felt like being rescued from a sinking ship only to find out that my rescuers were cannibals and that I was better off jumping back into the ocean.

So although I had heard only nice and supportive things said about my manuscript by Sunstone so far, I could not relax or rejoice just yet. The editing pen still loomed over my work like the Sword of freaking Damocles and I'd wake up in the middle of the night imagining all kinds of awful dilemmas, horrible choices I might have to confront, depending on what they asked of me.

But they like it! They really like it! (He says, sounding oddly like Sally Fields). I've finished reviewing the first two thirds of the book and the book is still my book, intact, not missing any limbs or vital organs, its face not rearranged by plastic surgery into something foreign. The editor at Sunstone has a light touch and I'm seldom aware of where anything was changed, and where I do see it, he's usually made it cleaner and clearer.

I'm starting to feel like Sisyphus would upon getting the damn stone up over the rim of the slope and up onto a flat level place. Oh, sure, something could still go wrong. A meteor strike could vaporize the offices of Sunstone Press, or the economy could go into such a tailspin that the entire publishing industry shuts down. But I'm starting to feel optimistic that this is actually going to happen this time.


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False Dichotomy

There’s a false dichotomy between “born this way” and “choice”. We encounter it in the MOGII communities, where there’s a rapid embrace of the notion of inherent genetic and brain differences, first for gay and lesbian people and, more recently, for trans folks.

That’s not the only place you find it, though. That same ongoing discussion can be found in the perpetual arguments about free will versus determinism. You ever dropped in on those? The backdrop for those discussions – often hinted at but not always explicitly identified – is the criminal justice system and whether or not it is morally defensible to punish criminals for their illegal deeds or if, instead, we should recognize that they are products of their environment and did not choose their behaviors. If you want to delve back further, this argument dates back to whether God shall punish evildoers for the evil that they have done or if they were preordained by God to have done those things in which case it isn’t their fault.

In other words, the notion that they didn’t choose is used to excuse behaviors that are labeled criminal or immoral.

So if we slide back over to the arguments about whether gay and trans people have choice, the argument that they don’t starts to look a lot like gay and trans people’s identities are being excused and forgiven, as if they needed to be excused or forgiven. As if being gay or being trans was akin to being a thief or a murderer or something. Uh huh.

Are you in a big hurry to buy into the notion that who you are needs to be excused or forgiven, on the grounds that “you can’t help it” ???

Why are our identities on trial? In all these discussions, there’s an unquestioned taken-for-granted assumption about what needs excusing or forgiving in the first place. If you want to discuss criminal justice and punishment, for example, how about we discuss Officer Daniel Paneleo, he whose chokehold on Eric Garner resulted in “I can’t breathe”, and, behind him, the entire police-enforced structure of racist social control. Do you want to start off from the position that Officer Panteleo can’t help it, that he’s a product of his environment and should not be held accountable? That we can’t expect him to change? That he was not a maker of choices? That he is not responsible?

It’s a false dichotomy. When a person makes choices, the kind of person that they are dictates what kind of choices they will make, and yet those are still choices. There isn’t one “self” there who is a decision-maker but who is “affected by” or “determined by” their own biology or their socialization and upbringing, as if those are external to the “self”. They aren’t. A person’s identity consists of all of their environment, their personal history, their built-in nuances from genetics and biology to the structure of prior beliefs and values – that’s all a part of who the person is. If you take all that away there’s no “self” left to do any deciding. But if we consider all that stuff as part of who the person is, the expression of that self takes the form of choices that the person makes. It’s how we experience ourself, as choice-makers.

I certainly do. In second grade, I looked around; I saw girls behaving one way and boys behaving a different way, generally speaking. I was in situations where I chose my behaviors, and the behaviors that I chose were the ones more typical of girls than of boys. I was proud of it, and rejected the notion that I should be ashamed of it. Could I have made a different set of decisions and still been true to who I was? No! But they were still choices. I was affirming who I was.

Last month I was assaulted by an angry individual on 14th Street in New York. I was wearing an orange skirt at the time. He was coming my direction in heavily congested foot traffic and collided with me as we passed; I thought it was an accident but a split-second later he came up from behind me and began pounding my back and head, all the while yelling, “I didn’t hit you! I never hit you!”. Now, sure, social forces and his personal history and widely shared beliefs about gender-appropriate behavior no doubt shaped his worldview, but he also made choices. His choices are a part of who he is, and I hold him responsible for all of that. I could make the same point about the people who shot up the Pulse nightclub in Florida awhile back. I’m not out to pin the blame on the culprit, nor am I a true believer in the moral sanctity of retributional punishment, but we are activists here; we are active. We act. So let’s get one thing established: if I am allocated choice at all to any degree whatsoever in my life, I choose to be as I am, a gender variant individual, and if you think to hold me morally accountable, bring it on, baby. I wouldn’t want to be any different and I make no apologies for who and how I am.

Quit acting like choice is a dirty word.



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Genre Variant

Originality has its limits; to make sense to people, we have to begin in familiar territory; to say something new, we must connect it with something people already know.

But the worlds of publishing and producing constrain originality far beyond that, in their expectation that books and other creative works fit into an existing genre, and that books within a genre fit narrow specifications and tick off the requisite number of anticipated elements.

The popular mystery/detective genre has its well-established requirement of Clues, Character-Suspects (among whom the perpetrator must exist), the Escalation of further perpetrations of subsequent crimes (and further clues), and the False Suspect thrown in our path to throw us off the scent, and so on. I've never written one, although like most of us I've read many over the years.

The romance genre should have the protagonists Meet Cute but initially behave more like antagonists, give us some Steam but establish reasons to defer pleasure for awhile, and insert a Setback just as things are lighting up (a misunderstanding or an unreconcilable difference) before it resolves as HEA (happily ever after) or at least HFN (happily for now). Nothing I've written qualifies as a romance novel, although I've read my share of these as well.

If an author writes within a popular genre, and writes well with an interesting twist that makes their book ever so slightly different while still mostly fitting the template, they stand a chance of finding a literary agent and landing a publishing contract as a debut author. The publishing industry knows they have a built-in audience.

There are some genres that have fallen by the wayside, styles of writing that were once written and sold in large quantities. Would you like to be a brand new author today and find yourself pitching a book set in the 1800s in the west, featuring an upright male citizen who is a bit of a loner, who rides into a town where the establishment institutions of social order aren't working, so he makes a stand, bravely facing death and being outnumbered, but with his skill with a pistol he and his sidekick, with whom he has his conversations, prevail, only to find it necessary to ride off into the sunset because the little town is ambivalent about him?

Or perhaps you'd like to be fishing for a lit agent for your debut book that features a vivacious gal who finds herself in surrounded by deceptive creeping danger, and is fraught with self-doubt and doubt about the attractive but flawed male of wealth and power who lives in near-isolation in a crumbling old mansion; he starts off hateful but she forces his reluctant admiration and shows him her mettle, then she gradually finds that beneath his compromised and ethically questionable exterior and all his characterological flaws, he's actually shiny and principled -- ?

If you're an established author with a proven track record, it might please you to put forth a book that's a clever twist on the old classic western or gothic genre, but I suspect it would be a far more difficult sell for a first-timer.

One of my favorite examples of a creative work that doesn't shoehorn nicely into existing genres is actually a film (originally a screenplay), Miracle Mile. It kicks off as a conventional romance / romantic comedy, invoking the trope of a main character reaching a misunderstanding about something that makes him believe there's a crisis afoot, resulting in him behaving in amusingly silly ways and luring others into doing likewise. Except this time it turns out that the crisis isn't the result of a miscommunication and the story becomes an apocalyptic end-of-world tragedy.

That it ever got made (without being revamped to make it fit into genre packaging better) is a testimony to screenwriter Steve De Jarnatt and his durable stubbornness. He was a graduate of American Film Institute and had credentials for prior work on Hollywood films, but even after the Miracle Mile screenplay won awards there were misgivings about proceeding with the project as written:

De Jarnatt decided to shop the script around to various Hollywood studios and was turned down several times by executives that didn’t like the downbeat ending. The filmmaker said, “I certainly could have made it a few years ago if (the hero) woke up and it was all a dream, or they saved the day.” In fact, at one point, he was approached to shoehorn Miracle Mile into Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) only with a happy ending, but he turned that offer down as well.

-- from Radiator Heaven


I hadn't anticipated as much difficulty fencing my manuscript as I encountered. Like most newbie authors probably do, I thought the writing was the primary challenge. Thousands of people crank up their word processors for NaNoWriMo every year thinking maybe they've got a novel in them, probably assuming that if they do indeed write one, and it's good, they can get it published.

I thought of my book as fitting into a genre: the LGBTQ coming-out story. I figured it would fit on the same shelf as Conundrum: From James to Jan and Rubyfruit Jungle and The Best Little Boy in the World and Stone Butch Blues and Emergence and so forth.

Unfortunately, as with the western and the gothic romance, the LTBTQ coming-out tale is treated as an "old genre". As I wrote in my various query-letter incarnations, there have been such stories for lesbian coming-out, gay male coming-of-age, and transgender (in both of the conventional transitional directions) stories *, but nothing addressing that "Q" that sits there at the end of the acronym; nothing that explains genderqueer -- or gender variance by any other name -- that doesn't overlap with the previous four letters. Well, that may have been part of the problem: the people I was trying to sell on the story's concept didn't see any unaddressed need there, because they, too, didn't have a notion of any remaining category for which we didn't already know the story.

Aside from that, "need" isn't the operative word by which the publishing industry makes its assessment. They think in terms of "market", not "need". They consider manuscripts in terms of their potential audience, the people already poised to go out and buy such a book. Genre, in other words.

Instead of being conceptualized as a part of an LGBTQ coming-out genre, my book was typically seen as either an LGBT book or as a memoir. The LGBT genre is mostly fiction, and mostly erotica-romance at that, with an occasional literary fiction piece from an established author. The memoir genre is occupied by the personal narrative by someone we've already heard of, a celebrity or a person who made the news and attracted our attention, and hence has a "platform".


Submission Stats as of October 2019:

Total Queries to Lit Agents: 1453
Rejections: 1441
Still Outstanding: 12

Total Queries Directly to Small Publishers: 117
Rejections: 58
Still Outstanding: 43
Pub Contract Signed (then went out of business): 1
Pub Contract Signed (rights reverted, creative diffs): 1
Pub Contract Signed (publication pending): 1



* to be fair, there aren't many bisexual coming-of-age / coming-out stories either. As with so many things pertaining to bisexual people, I think there's an attitude that if we have lesbian and gay equivalents covered, the story / concerns / situation of bisexual people won't be meaningfully different so we dont need to bother.



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Reality and the Physical Sex Binary Thing

To explain the difference between sex and gender, I often say that as a generalization, there are two sexes, male and female, plus an assortment of exceptions that are largely ignored and erased; and that further generalizations are made about the personality, behavior, nuances, priorities, etc of those two sexes, and some non-factual stuff imposed on it as well for ideological purposes, and those generalizations (distortions included) are what gender is.

I wrote something along those lines two weeks ago in my blog post titled "Clarifying Gender Inversion".

And, as I often do, I received responses from some people denying that, even as a generalization, we can be said to fall into two sexual categories. For instance, eroticawriter wrote this comment on LiveJournal:

While I agree with a lot of what you've said here, you're wrong that "on a biological basis there are two sexes, and a handful of variations that we can dump into 'intersex'". When it comes to sex, gender, sexuality, etc. there is no binary except the cultural constructs imposed by patriarchy and colonialism.

"There's nothing oppressive about making a generalization", I often reply; "the problem comes when the exceptions are treated like there's something wrong with them! Believe me, as a sissy feminine male I'm fully acquainted with the experience of being treated like there's something wrong with me for being an exception to the rule, I've been told that I'm not the way boys or men are supposed to be all my damn life. Legitimacy doesn't require numbers and numbers don't convey legitimacy; cisgender normative people outnumber us but that doesn't make their way of being in the world correct and ours incorrect or sick or wrong".

But my critics are adamant: no, "the binary" is an oppressive ideology, our sexes do not divide up into two categories even as a generalization, and I need to get with the program. (eroticawriter was not the only person to make such a comment; someone within one of the Facebook groups I belong to did likewise, and then later deleted their post and, along with it, my reply to it, perhaps because they did not like the way the discussion was playing out)

I consider them to be wrong about this. More about this below, I promise.

But first, I want to talk about the larger phenomenon I think this is a part of: the notion that there's not a "real" reality in life or nature; instead there's the white male cis hetero able-bodied English-speaking privileged reality... and then there are different, equally legitimate, realities for the rest of us.

That is technically true, 100% true, but in a truly vast number of situations it's irrelevantly true. Let me explain.

Point to the North Star, would you? If it's not visible for you at the moment, wait until it is. Every one of us occupies a different position, so the direction of the North Star is going to be different for each and every one of us. That's 100% true. But if you drew a perfect straight line from every single one of our pointing fingers to the center of the North Star, you'd end up with almost the exact same thing as what you'd get if you just drew a line from the center of our sun to the center of the North Star. All our differences are so minor in comparison to what we have in common that we can ignore them. Even having some of us do our pointing in midwinter while others aim their fingers on the summer solstice, when the earth is on the opposite side of the sun, just doesn't make enough difference to count. And that's the usefulness of the notion of objectivity — not that things really do have a single meaning regardless of the viewer to whom they have meaning, but that many things, perhaps most things, have so little variance in what they mean that we can safely ignore the differences in our social and physical locations.

And it's politically dangerous to discard the notion that anything has actual real meaning. If oppression is all a matter of perspective, then gee, develop a new perspective and get over it. Or at least quit complaining about it because to me (or so says the clever social conservative, at any rate), you're not oppressed and hey, that's my reality and you just went on record as saying there's no objective reality just your reality and my reality and his reality and her reality and so on. (See the problem?)

Like the story of the blind folks and the elephant, we may each only have a partial picture of the truth, and we should keep that in mind when we communicate, but we should also remember that there was a real elephant with a real elephant-reality and elephant-truth about its self whether any individual blind guy had a comprehension of it or not.

OK, back to the physical sex binary, as I promised. Let's posit, for the sake of discussion only, that my critics are right and that I'm wrong. That the majority of human being do not, in fact, fall into the two categories "male" and "female" and instead there are a multiplicity of varied sexes about which no generalizatons can be made that would divide them up neatly into two camps like that, even with the exceptions left over as a minority. What if that's true?

* Well, that makes cisgender people a minority, for starters. Most people were assigned either male or female at birth. But we just posited that it's NOT true that male and female people are a majority. That means most people's actual sex is something other than what they were assigned at birth.

* Defining heterosexuality becomes complicated. There's no coherent meaning to the notion of "opposite" sex if we're not in a two-sexes-generally-speaking kind of world. I suppose we could say that a person is heterosexual if they are attracted to any of the multiple sexes that differ from their own. But heterosexuality the institution -- the structure of expectations and interlocking behavioral dance steps, the courting and flirting and other romantic and sexual behaviors that assume two opposite sexes? That becomes divorced from any underlying pair of sex categories to which the majority of people have ever belonged. It's a restrictive ideology without any visible anchor and it's going to require some explaining to show how it could have gotten there.

* It's unlikely that we would have a single broad category called "intersex" to describe all the people who are neither male nor female. That's not how people tend to generalize. Remember that the people we now call "intersex" are not a single sex that differs from male and from female, a third sex, but are instead a plethora of multi-varied sexes. Here's a person with XY chromosomes who has a vagina and labia, and testicles inside her labia. Here's a person with a four inch clitoris who penetrates his female partners during sex and uses tampons when he gets his period. Here's someone with a vagina but no uterus and who has never developed breast tissue and who has a full dense mass of facial hair. All those people exist in the world that I recognize as reality, of course, but in the world that we are positing, the world in which male and female people are not a majority, all these people we're describing would not be regarded as an exception to the rule, because we have no general rule, remember? Instead, I suspect we would have a name for each of the ten or fifteen most common sexes. Perhaps we'd have some kind of "etcetera" category for the smallest minorities left over. We don't have that, though; we have a situation where we have categories male, female, and, just barely acknowledged in a whisper, intersex, the "etcetera" category into which we cast all the exceptions. If the males and females together don't constitute the majority, indeed the overwhelming majority, this needs explaining, just like the ideology of heterosexuality.

* Insofar as most people identify as either "male" or "female", in order for it to be true that the majority of people are not either male or female, we're saying that most people Insofar as most people identify as either "male" or "female", in order for it to be true that the majority of people are not either male or female, we're saying that most people do not correctly know their own sex.. And that is a rather pompous assertion that certainly needs some explaining! Oh, it's possible, I suppose... we could say people have "false consciousness", that the notion of a sexual binary has been imposed on us all and we've been socialized and brainwashed into believing in it, even though it doesn't really exist in the real world. But who is responsible for this illusion? The cisgender people? They're a minority within this supposition, remember!? And while minorities can sometimes oppress the majority, they don't tend to do so by making the majority believe everyone has the same identity as the oppressive minority; instead, they usually establish their own identity as a privileged special identity that justifies their position over the others, an identity that they can lord over the others.

It's possible but I don't see a compelling case for it, and all my experience has been to the contrary. I've been to the nude beach and I've been inside locker rooms and I've been in a neonatal nursery full of newborns. I'm not going to pretend that I am not socialized into awareness of categories used by my culture, but I don't seem to have to shoehorn a huge bunch of not-really-either people into categories they don't fit into in order for a two-sex categorical system to work for the overwhelming majority of human beings.

If you wish to put forth a theory that explains how an ideology supporting a completely fictitional belief in a physical sexual binary was created and is maintained against the evidence of a non-matching physical reality, feel welcome to do so, but I regard that as an extraordinary claim, one that is not necessary in order to acknowledge the existence, dignity, and self-determination of intersex people, or the similar legitimate existence of people who do not fit general patterns that describe the two primary sexes, such as gender inverts and genderfluid people and agender folks and demiboys and demigirls and so on.


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Transition is a Transitive Verb

On one of the Facebook transgender boards, someone writes:

Does transgender mean you want to transition from your birth gender to the gender you identify with, like MtF or FtM? And you have to have gender dysphoria to be transgender?

That's the classic model of transgender, often called "binary transgender".

On a different transgender board, someone else complains:

I just love it when people tell me I can't identify as trans. As if nonbinary people aren't trans.

It's complicated. Part of what complicates it is that sex isn't the same thing as gender. And yet I often see transgender defined as "when a person's GENDER identity differs from the SEX they were assigned at birth". But the definition doesn't directly speak to whether being transgender can mean you have a GENDER that differs from the SEX you are assigned now and every day whenever people see you, or a GENDER that differs from the SEX that you consider *yourself*, for that matter.

Do you need to present as the SEX that corresponds to your GENDER in order to be transgender? Do you need to "pass"? What if you are fine with the SEX to which you were assigned at birth but your GENDER happens to not have the same value and you happen to be perfectly fine with that mismatch? (Even if the rest of the world is a lot less fine with that?)

I have chosen NOT to identify as transgender, preferring genderqueer, but most of my transgender allies acknowledge that that is my choice and that they'd accept me as transgender if I did choose to call myself that.



I encounter people denying my identity, too. I've had socially liberal educated people who accept gay, lesbian, and transgendered people dismiss me.

"I consider Trans people as the Gender they feel they are, whether they've had surgery or not. That isn't at all relelvant to your case because YOU AREN"T TRANS!"

And I've had transgender people tell me, as they've told the person who identifies as "nonbinary transgender", that we don't count:

since you strongly believe you're a woman...then you need to transition. There's no such thing as a male woman you're confused or you're a troll

... and other transgender people have informed me that I am seeking the impossible or even that I'm a threat:

if you mean to say that a 'woman' (trans or cis) can be 'male' in that they can have facial hair, a deep voice - any of those trappings that categorise them in the mind of the masses by default as 'men' rather than as 'women', there we have a problem...

We are a collective society, and thus our actions, decisions, and ideations have to, at one way or another, be corroborated by, or rebuked by, the collective society we are a part of. If you present outwardly as 'male' but you identify as a woman, one cannot ever expect the collective to acknowledge the latter while the former exists. You cannot push the fabric of society so far to breaking point and expect any sort of acceptance...

What happens to those of us who actually worked hard to transition? What happens to those of us who have nearly been brought to bankruptcy because we have felt the disconnect, have suffered through, had gone through the torment of society making us suffer for it, and worked hard to make the suffering cease? If your ideologies are to be a new 'norm', that would render all of our hard work meaningless.

When I go to give lectures and make presentations, one of my storyboards is a sign that says It's something else. I am sorry that people in the transgender community sometimes feel like I (and other people trying to explain new identities) are picking a fight with them. The process of differentiating can sometimes come across that way. Any group trying to explain themselves to the world at large is likely to start off with a group that the world is already familiar with, and then explains how their identity is different. Didn't trans people themselves have to do some of that a few years ago? --

People used to say and think things like this (CONTENT WARNING: DISMISSIVE AND INTOLERANT LANGUAGE):

Oh yeah, the transsexuals and tranvestites. They're the gay guys who dress as women and call each other 'girl' and call each other 'she' and stuff. It's a subcommunity within the gay world.

OR

Transgender people... it's like it's more socially acceptable to be a straight woman than to be a gay man, and more acceptable to be a straight guy than to be a lesbian. So that's why they do it.

NOT TO MENTION...

So let me get this right... she was a he, she was born male, and then transitioned and became a woman, but she likes girls, so she's a lesbian? I'm sorry that's all fucked up. What's the purpose of transitioning to female if you're attracted to women? This dude needs a psychiatrist!

So transgender people had to explain that being transgender is about gender, not sexual orientation. They had to differentiate themselves from gay and lesbian people. And some of the people they had to explain this to were people in the gay and lesbian community, so they spent a fair amount of time saying "I am not like you. I'm like this instead".

Now you're on the receiving end. And we're pushing off against you.

But we could not have done this without you. Your prior success makes this possible.

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Clarifying Gender Inversion

I participate on a message board where I've been variously characterized as an attention-seeking special snowflake, a "transtrender" wishing to be edgy, and dismissed repeatedly. But recently, I posted a response that, for reasons I still don't entirely comprehend, seems to have gotten through and made sense to people who previously said I was a pretentious jerk.

So, on the offchance that I said something more brilliantly than I yet realize, I'll repeat it here.



[ I am replying to this: ]

I think I said this before in one of Ahunter's threads, but I fear that by starting too many catagories and boxes you run the risk of them losing all meaning.

And on one hand, I hate to sound like I'm "gatekeeping", but surely there has to be SOME kind of criteria to actually count as LGBT, not simply just claim to be one, without actually having ANY sort of trait of such.

(This would probably be for another thread)

I'm reminded of Person A, and her whole, "I'm an asexual non-binary furry who's into BDSM" schtick.[

/end of what I'm replying to]

A whole bunch of gender identities (that "stargender" thing, "alien" genders, altgenders that invoke animal personae, etc) fall into the broader heading of genderfuck —*the notion that gender is a social notion with no redeeming features so we should fling our sabots into it and make it break down.

I respect the people who think gender in its entirety is a fucked-up notion and that we should deep-six it. I'm not entirely on board with it though.

I think on a biological basis there are two sexes, and a handful of variations that we can dump into "intersex", like Kleinfelder's and androgen insensitivity and plain old variances like having a 3" long clitoris and so forth. That's the physical.

We pay attention because sexuality hardwires a significant percent of us to have sexual attraction to the opposite (of the two conventional) sexes for reproductive evolutionary purposes. And because we pay such attention it becomes an important part of how we classify people.

GENDER is a sociologist's notion, the batch of concepts and expectations and nuanced interpretations that we have come to attach to those two sexes. (One such notion is that there are indeed just two sexes — we ignore the handful of intersex variations and hide them, surgically shoehorning them into conformity to a two-sex schema, and they are now actively resisting that politically). GENDER is often acknowledged and rejected as a bunch of stultifying old-fashioned bullshit notions about differences between the sexes, because WTF, we all grew up with feminism and we're so past that bullshit, right?

But if you peruse our message board (a good example of a decently educated community with a somewhat progressive worldview) you still see a plethora of posts popping up in which differences between the sexes are taken for granted. And if they proliferate there, one can readily believe such notions persist elsewhere, such as in one's hometown, school, or office.

If there are still a batch of persistent notions and expectations and interpretations etc, then the experience of coming up against them is still real. That's GENDER.

I dunno...maybe the genderfuck folk have the right of it, but I'm not that enlightened; I formed a reaction that's shaped like "No, I don't fit over here, I fit over THERE ", and having done so I lived decades with that understanding-of-self in my head.

Lots of trans folks (of the normal mainstream variety, M2F and F2M) did that too.

I may finally be getting my fucking book published. I say "may" because this is the third time I've had a signed contract and the other two times didn't put any books on Amazon's site or otherwise for sale anywhere, and I could manage to fuck this one up too. I'm not M2F. I don't think my body needs fixifications and I don't seek to be perceived as a female-bodied person (because I'm not). [b]Guin[/b] and others see me as seeking special snowflake status * and/or complicating up the map of reasonable identities. I don't. If anything, I think mine is simpler than what the conventional trans people wish you to comprehend:

M2F person: "I was born with a body that the hospital folks printed 'male' on my birth certificate. But who I am is a woman. And I am female, either with or without a medical transition, and you should regard and treat me as such"

Me: "I was born male. But just like the M2F people, I'm not the person my social environment assumes I am on the basis of my maleness, I'm a far better fit for the person my social environment assumes of people who are female. That makes me a sissy, or a male girl, or a tomboy-in-reverse, or whatever you wanna call it, but either way my body ain't the problem."

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responses:

[Person B]I think that post is worthy of a thread in its own right, either here on or the other board. It's interesting information and would make an interesting discussion.

[Person C]Hey there. I will confess to having been confused and irritated at times with your many posts and threads about gender.I pretty much gave up on reading them. Today I read your post in the Behind Your Back snark thread, and it was so well-written that it broke through my ignorance and prejudice. It clarified some of the things I have been confused about, and it really clarified your particular case. Thanks for posting it.

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Tréjà Vu — I Have a Publisher for my Book!

I'm happy to report that I have a contract with Sunstone Books for the publication of GENDERQUEER: A Story from a Different Closet. Sunstone is a Santa Fe NM based publisher, which I'm happy about since the action in the book takes place in New Mexico. I don't have a formal release date yet but I expect it to come out in the general vicinity of January 2020.

GENDERQUEER is the coming-out and coming-of-age story of a gender nonconforming male. Set in the late 1970s, it's a work of nonfiction and highlights the realness of an identity that is not gay, bisexual, lesbian, or transgender, but isn't cisgender and heterosexual either -- "it's something else".

It's a work of nonfiction. It's my story.

GENDERQUEER is a 96,000 word tale with real people, characters and dialogue, that is intended to make some fairly complex social concepts accessible to people who aren't regular readers of political and social theory.

It will be my first published commercial piece. So I'm a debut author.



I don't feel like a debut author. I feel like an old and rather weary traveler plodding across the damn desert.

That probably has something to do with the fact that this is the third time I've had a contract to get this book published.

Ellora's Cave was going to publish it in 2016 but they went out of business.

Original Announcement
Retraction

Then, in 2017, StarNine Press said they would publish it, if I worked with the editor to shorten and tighten the first third of the book. It turned out that by "tighten" they meant "discard", and we were unable to reach a mutually satisfactory understanding and publication was cancelled at my request.

Original Announcement
Retraction


I sent out nearly 1500 queries to literary agents about this book and never succeeded in getting a lit agent. Eventually I began querying small independent publishers and at this point the tally of those is 117 queries to publishers, resulting in three signed contracts.

The third of which had jolly well better be the proverbial charm.

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Polyamory and the Self-Actualized Sissy

Occasionally it comes out in conversation that I am polyamorous and have had multiple simultaneous partners. This is a fact that often gets misconstrued:

Jake: Whoo, well, sissy or no, I see we have some stuff in common. Rock on! You may not be in to all that masculinity be-a-man stuff but when it comes down to the important things you know how to get what you need, huh?

Maud: Is this like a compensation thing, to make up for being left out and pushed to the sidelines while the manly men were getting all the girls?

Now, I like occasionally having a moment of solidarity and experience-in-common with the non-hostile incarnations of the conventional male, and it may in fact have some element of compensatory pleasure or “making up for lost time” associated with it, I suppose, but I feel like most folks miss an important connection between being poly and being sissy.

Polarization versus Unification

The conventional portrait of sexuality, gender, and companionship looks something like this. I’ll work from the cis hetero male model since I am male and perceived as male and hence compared to this more often, regardless of how I identify. Ready? He has a cluster of same-sex friends, his “group” or his “buddies”, his “crowd”, and some are closer friends than others; these are easy informal relationships, without definitional structures. They are certainly multiple in nature and he may become closer to one friend over time or more distant with another, all without any need to redefine the relationships (since they don’t have formal definitions anyhow). Meanwhile, entirely separate from that, he has erotic interests in women, and is predisposed to form long-term pair-bonding with one if there is a sufficiently strong emotional attachment formed. Outside (or prior to) such a pair-bond, he may pursue sexual activity with multiple different partners, and may in fact behave in such a way as to preserve this sexual freedom by doing things to postpone or reduce the likelihood of pair-bond emotional passions forming. But it is still assumed that eventually he wants that to occur and that when it does he will be sexually exclusive. Even if not, it is assumed that he will not form similar deep emotionally connected pair-bonds with someone else, that the pair-bond relationship is at least exclusive in its own domain.

I am not going to critique this model for its inherent healthiness or desirability, at least not at the moment. Instead, let’s just toss this masculine model out of the way and bring myself in, a sissy male, and examine what changes from that alone. Well, first of all, instead of all my friends being same-sex, I tend to form friendships with women. Second, in contrast to some notion of a separate “friend zone” versus a “romantic possibility” classification, it’s not a separate phenomenon for me: the people I like as friends, being of the sex that I’m attracted to, are the people with whom there’s a potential for a sexual connection, a romantic connection. At the time that the connections are forming, I don’t know where they’re headed. Sexuality isn’t something foreign to friendship for me. Thirdly, just as the cis hetero guy’s friendships change over time, with him getting closer to some and farther apart from others, my relationships shift, and those shifts include into and out of sexual and romantic expression and feelings. So not only do I not know where they’re headed when they’re starting up, they may change.

That’s what it means, what it’s like, to be a person who is “like” rather than heterodifferent from the sex to whom I feel sexual attraction. It doesn’t make sense to “break up” with someone or to attempt sexual exclusivity or to expect or request it of someone else.

Works for Me


When I describe this to people, they sometimes say that it's a sad and inferior version of sexuality. They also sometimes say that it's a sad and creepy version of friendship. For my part, I think it would be sad and kind of pathological to be unable to be friends with someone you're strongly sexually attracted to. To be unable to feel that attraction without erupting into sexual aggression, sexual harassment, rape, molestation, sexual intrusiveness, etc; to find it necessary to attain that person sexually or else to run for the hills, to get away from them. I don't have that problem. I mean, yeah, I want sex and romantic love to be in my life, with someone, at least now and then; I need to experience that, and it's quite painful to be completely isolated from it. But as long as that's happening now and then in my life, I don't need it to be happening with this particular person, and it's OK to find them exquisitely delicious and not have anything develop out of that. And also, I don't think of sexual feelings as some kind of filthy things that are going to pollute a friendship.




There are people who practice a narrowly constrained form of pseudo-polyamory, wherein a person (nearly always male) is OK with his partner(s) having other partners of their own but only partners that are not of his sex. In other words, a “one penis policy”. In essence, he is isn’t seeing other female partners of his partners as competitive threats, but would see another male as such.

I don’t think I’m particularly inclined to see the sexual realm of life as all about competition, although I suppose some competitive aspects may be inevitable. But there’s another factor there for me, which is that I don’t tend to see other male partners of my partners as direct competition. Female partners either, for that matter. If there’s one flip side to sissyhood as a marginalized and rarefied identity, a structural advantage for a change, it’s the sense of veritable uniqueness. If someone likes being with me, they may also like being with other male people or other femme people but neither of those categories is going to be a snap-in replacement for me, so anyone with a taste for someone like me is going to be inclined to keep me around! I guess the closest approximation to a “one penis policy” in my case would be a “one SISSY policy”, but hey, we don’t exactly grow like weeds, with sissy suitors lurking around every corner, so I’ve never felt the need for that kind of protection either.

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A Diagnosis of Dysphoria

When I was 38, my girlfriend broke up with me. She indicated that her life had become too complicated to maintain a relationship – too many other demands on her time and energy. And Iw as obviously just casually involved, enjoying the connection for the sex and fun. She knew it wasn’t serious for me because I hadn’t tried to restrict her from dating other guys and, besides, I was a guy. Things are different for guys, she said. It might hurt now but within a month or so I’d be dating someone else.

The combination of this characterization and the horrifying prospect of trying to flirt and date again kept me sidelined for over a year in hurt and anger, and then drove me into a more specific despair. I felt alien, unknowable.

I had come to New York City 12 years earlier, to find support and understanding and community as a male who felt and thought differently than other males; I’d come to New York as a would-be activist heterosexual sissy. But I hadn’t found others like me or an identity-community to be an activist within.

Since I had counseling services covered by my employer-issued health plan, I made some calls, wanting someone to talk to.

“Oh, yes, there’s term for that now, and a lot of literature about it, it’s called gender identity dysphoria. Can I schedule you for next Tuesday?”

That snapped-in, over-the-phone diagnosis was partially correct. I was in serious distress, I was feeling very poorly understood in all my available social environments; I felt trapped and imprisoned within the set of beliefs and assumptions that I was a Man. But the diagnosis was partially incorrect as well: I did not have any issue with my body or with how my body per se was categorized by the people around me.

My real complaint lies not with the specific inaccuracy of the diagnosis, but with the mindset behind it, the tendency to medicalize differences, to define them as pathological. I was, as I said, in distress, but my difference was not and is not an ailment. Even if the distress would not have been occurring if it weren’t for my difference, the difference wasn’t and isn’t the location of the malady.

This was not the worst offense of this nature that I’ve experienced. In 1979, I had gone to the university medical clinic’s walk-in therapy facility to talk about feeling like I was more of a girl than I was kin to the other boys, only to be told “We know what causes that now” and prescribed Stelazine, an antipsychotic neuroleptic drug.

Medicalizing, or “psychiatrizing”, people’s differences – such as being gender-atypical – defines the problem as residing in the suffering person’s own self, when in cases like these the problem actually resides in society and its shared systems of beliefs and understandings. Or lack of understandings, if you prefer.

This mindset, this clinical behavior on the part of therapists and therapeutic practices, is an outgrowth of our western medical tradition, where patients are subdivided up into systems and organs and thought of as ailments to which the correct medical intervention merely needs to be applied. The right pill, the appropriate intervention. The tendency is exacerbated by the insurance companies, which pay for the treatment of ailments (“please provide the diagnostic code on line 7”), and medical malpractice law, which sees culpability for anything going wrong when a specific medical malady is not addressed with the established protocol.

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The Sissy and the Stigma of Sexual Interest

I was so painfully self-conscious.

In the book I’m working on, I’m writing about dropping in at Identity House, circa 1986. So I’m conjuring up the memories. Coming up the stairs and opening the doors and then being afraid to make eye contact with anyone.

“Hey there, welcome”, said a thirty-esque guy with wire-frame glasses.
“Hi”, I nodded back at him. I broke eye contact and glanced around. A woman with spiky styled blue-tipped hair and wearing snug dark blue jeans was sitting on the arm of a couch, watching a red-haired girl stapling paper to a large green sheet of construction paper. A black guy with large oval earrings was singing softly along with his radio over in the other direction.

I felt awkward, as I often did in gay and lesbian environments. Didn’t want to display overt interest in the attractive girl; lesbians presumably don’t come to gay and lesbian centers to be stared at by guys. Didn’t want to focus attention on any of the guys, lest they get the wrong idea. Stupid social clumsiness. Like they’re going to think anything faintly approaching friendliness from me is an act of sexual aggression. Yeesh.

Do you want to know where that came from, that overwhelming fear of being perceived as person with [gasp!] sexual lusts and interests and appetite? Here’s what that has to do with being a sissy –

Let’s start with the boys. As a sissy I was periodically accused of harboring sexual interest towards my male classmates and other acquaintances. I’m using the word “accused” advisedly – the notion that I had any such feelings was addressed with significant hostility, contempt, outright hatred. If I had indeed felt such feelings, these attitudes would have made it difficult for me to feel comfortable with my identity and my nature, and I would have had to wrestle with that, I think. In my case, I didn’t; if I had ever been inclined to find males sexually attractive, any such signal was rapidly drowned in the noise of being accused of it, mocked for it, having my face rubbed in it, so to speak. After a few years of that, I was less likely to be friendly, to be curious or interested, to expect to be included or welcomed. Standoffish and snobbish elicited their own forms of the same basic hostility, so I was trained to a mild and non-judgmental presence, neither recoiling from them nor paying any attention aside from getting out of their way.

Well, that left the girls. Here’s the situation with the girls: they made observations about unwanted and intrusive sexual attention from boys, observations that were the precursors of #metoo, that lots of boys were sexually creepy, with “hands problem”, selfishly pushy about sex. And also that, within relationships or on dates, boys would press for sexual activity, not caring about the girl as a person, and what self-respecting girl would want to get close to that? I, as a self-respecting sissy, most assuredly didn’t want the girls thinking of me that way. I wanted the girls to respect me as they respected themselves. Oh, I wanted sex, all right, no question about that, but I wanted it to mean something. I wanted a girlfriend. I wasn’t opposed to the idea of casual sex, but if it was going to be casual sex it had to be mutual, and it had to take place in such a way that both of us felt OK about our participation, and not like we’d been throw down into the sewer.

I go through life walking on eggshells terrified that someone’s going to think I’m sexually interested in them. That’s part of my experience as a sissy male, that people react to the possibility of me being interested in them with disgust and irritation.

In an LGBTQ context, like Identity House, you might think it would be easier, right? But although I was for once not in a context where males having sexual interest in other males would be stigmatized as something disgusting, I was walking into that situation with a lot of unease and lack of general comfort about people thinking I had sexual interest in them. I was afraid the boys, if they misread me and got the wrong idea, would later think I was being judgmental or prudish or rude; I didn’t have a well-developed repertoire for turning aside sexually interested people gracefully. Then there were the girls, of course. It was easier, to be in a situation where they’d be less likely to assume any guy they encounter was likely to be on the verge of expressing unwanted sexual interest. But on the other hand, most of them would be lesbians and I was afraid that it might be especially annoying to a lesbian to encounter some guy in a place like Identity House and pick up on him being attracted, because presumably she isn’t hanging out at gay and lesbian centers in order to be stared at or focused upon by males.


This was the situation in which I found myself as a young adult. It was very much an empowering insight to rethink that situation, for the first time, by comparing it to that of women my age. They were widely considered (and expected) to be, to varying degrees, wary and cautious about expressing their sexual interests and appetites. It was socially understood that even when they did, in fact, feel sexual interest towards a person, they might have ambivalent attitudes and feelings about acting on it, including the act of letting that interest be known and perceived. (Admittedly, they seemed to do a far better job of coping with unwanted attentions, but perhaps that came with practice)

Here was a model for accepting this kind of hesitant and uncertain sexuality without regarding it as pathetic, damaged, unhealthy. In fact, being aware of one’s own complex feelings about sexuality was often portrayed as a sign of a good healthy respect for one’s self, in contrast to which enthusiastically availing one’s self of sexual experiences whenever the opportunity held some degree of appetizing attraction was seen as a possible sign of lacking sufficient standards or appropriate boundaries. In my case, it was liberating to be able to view myself as a non-pathological sexual creature, ambivalences and wariness about my own sexual interests included. Maybe it wasn’t a very practical way to be in the world if one were male, but when I considered it this way, it looked like I would be not so far outside the normal if I had been female. Or if I considered myself to be the same kind of person that they were.

And it meshed with the rest of how I saw myself. It immediately fit. I’d always emulated the girls, admired them, measured myself against them as my role models.

I stopped feeling ashamed and stopped worrying that I was sexually broken, some kind of basket case. I liked who I was and now that could see my sexual nature from this vantage point, I liked my sexuality as it was. And I realized I wasn’t going to find a suitable expression of it within any of the behavioral models offered to men. If I were going to make it work, I would do so by looking at how women, the people who were most like me, had made a successful go of it.

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To Gender or Not To Gender?

Do we want to rid the world of gender, that evil conformity-demanding set of constraints, or do we like gender, as long as we don’t get the wrong one shoved down our throats? This is a recurrent discussion within my Facebook groups and other support environments. Some of us have gone to a lot of trouble and expense to package our presentation so as to receive the altercast gender-identity from others that matches how we think of ourselves; others among us have gone to a similar degree of effort and hassle to get out of the gender-cage that we’ve felt trapped in.

I’m not neutral in this debate, although I try to remain open-minded. I’m a gendered person. I have a gender atypical for my physical sex, but it’s a real gender and not just the lack of the typical, expected one. I’m a femme, one of the girlish sort; I spent my life seeking approval of, competing with, and otherwise evaluating myself against the girls and, later, women that I saw as people who were like me.

Some people contest my identification of myself as genderqueer, stating that “genderqueer” is for people who want to subvert and undermine the world’s evil gender system, throwing their metaphorical sabots into the cultural gender-machinery. Is gender inherently evil?


Gender is social, not biological. But that doesn’t mean gender was arbitrarily invented or that it’s entirely capricious and meaningless. I think of gender as having two components: generalization and ideology. At the level of generalization, gender is that set of descriptions and attributes that, in general, are more true of one sex than the other, and hence are associated with it. Then, stirred into the mixture, there’s ideology, a sort of propaganda that isn’t about how people actually are but instead is prescriptive, how the system wants people to be. The system in question is patriarchy, and therefore a lot of the ideological part of gender has to do with how a patriarchal system “wants” people to behave a certain way. For example, the patriarchal system wants men to have authority over women, so servility gets built into femininity for propaganda reasons.

The handling of exceptions to the general rule is also tainted by ideology. A generalization by itself doesn’t become prescriptive; if we generalize that roses are red, that by itself doesn’t lead us to go around chopping down rosebushes that sprout yellow or white or purple roses instead. We may in fact prize the exceptions for their rarity and regard them as special. But our social system positions the sexes against each other, perhaps so that they’ll expend lots and lots of energy trying to gain the upper hand instead of joining forces, or perhaps that’s the invariable result of inequality. But it does polarize the two identities into opposites, exaggerating differences and encouraging us to think of the other category as other and foreign and very different. And that creates an ideological hostility towards the exceptions.


What world will we be able to have if we successfully dismantle the ideology? If it is no longer socially unacceptable for the male-bodied people to exhibit the traits and behaviors associated with the female folks and vice versa, will we end up with a world that has no notion of “feminine” and “masculine”, no notion of gender remaining? Or will there continue to be a sense of general differences?

In the 1970s, the mainstream feminism of the times created the notion of “unisex”, a humanistic and egalitarian belief that everyone should be treated with identical expectations instead of sexist different standards. Nowadays you mostly only see the word “unisex” in the windows of hair salons. Meanwhile, we’ve come to recognize that the sex of one’s birth should not and does not define one’s gender, and we speak of transgender as well as cisgender women, transgender as well as cisgender men. Will gender itself wither away and die, so that in years to come no one will be either trans or cis, feminine or masculine?

I don’t know. Give us fairness and social flexibility to be the selves that we find most affirming and I guess we’ll find out!

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Tomboys

"I think you have a misconception", my women's studies professor told me. "Feminism is not 'for women who step away from traditional feminine expectations and roles'", she said, making air quotes. "Feminism is for all women. We want to support women's freedom to choose their own options, and that includes being a mother, or a receptionist. It even includes being a sex object". She paused and sighed. "In my day we were trying to get away from that, but now lots of women are seeking it. Anyway, my point is, feminism isn't about telling women how they're supposed to be. It's fine to not conform to the expectations that are projected onto women but it's also fine if you do, if it's what you want for yourself".


I understood her point, but it was still nevertheless true that lots of women who were not traditionally feminine had felt a special resonance with feminism. Feminism told them it was okay to be the way they were, in a world where everyone else was saying otherwise, so of course they had a special interest in it!

I just finished rereading Tomboys!, a collection of short reminiscences edited by Lynne Yamagushi and Karen Barber. The subtitle is "Tales of Dyke Derring-Do". It is specifically about the experience of growing up unfeminine, or masculine if you prefer. Tomboyish, hoydenish, boisterous and forward and irrepressible, physical, nervy, athletic, competitive, immodest and not demurely amenable. Hell on wheels.

The women writing the pieces were definitely seeing themselves as revolutionary insurrectionists, and they saw it as specifically feminist bravery. How could they not?

Anyway, I'm reading these stories again, and, not for the first time, wishing for a similarly compiled collection from tomboyish women whose sexual orientation was towards male people. In particular, I'd be interested in reading how they negotiated a sexuality that didn't require betraying their personalities and behavioral patterns as tomboys in order to be sexual participants with male partners. And how they structured their relationships.

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Masculine

It’s a well-worn trope, an ancient meme: masculine guys are a problem for us sissies. They bully us, they oppress us, they’re hateful to us, and so forth.

I said “masculine guys” rather than “cis het males” because I’m not really focusing on how they identify but rather how they come across. I’m talking about masculinity as that set of personality and behavioral traits that are historically and conventionally associated with males; they’re presumed heterosexual and most of them probably are, although some are not.

Certainly some of the problem is homophobia – or, more precisely, sissyphobia – on their part. But even when you bracket that off, there is a tension there.

I know because I feel it. They set my teeth on edge sometimes. It can be like chewing on a strip of aluminum foil even when they aren’t bigoted sissyphobic assholes. And I suspect I have the same effect on them.

I don’t personally happen to be sexually attracted to the male morphology – it’s just not a set of shapes and contours that does anything for me. As for them, the masculine guys, some of them find males sexy but it isn’t the norm. But I exhibit characteristics of personality and behavior that are more commonly present in the people they are attracted to – female people – which is why those characteristics are called “feminine”. And for me? Well, it’s an oversimplification to describe the women I’m attracted to as being the same people as these masculine guys except expressed in female form, but yeah, they’re usually women who have been told over and over that they behave like guys, so it’s an oversimplification that works here.

I find it jarring to be around the masculine guys. The tension is sexual whether either of us experience it as sexy or not. Have you ever heard women complaining about feeling groped or undressed just from the speech and look of guys they encounter, of being leered at, spoken to in a jocular familiar tone with a wink in the voice and face even when it’s not a literal overt wink, something that’s subtle enough that nothing has been said or done that one can really object to. I’ve heard those descriptions, and along with them the assessment that sometimes it’s like swimming in sewage whenever you’re out and about. And I’ve nodded because I know the feeling.

Meanwhile, the masculine guys apparently find it jarring to be around people like me. I can’t say for sure what they’re feeling because I haven’t been directly inside their brains, but they often complain that sissy guys, by resembling women in various little unsettling ways, are teasing or provoking them, and it tends to make them angry.

Neither one of us may actually be doing anything to cause this feeling in the other. I didn’t start off with that charitable attitude though. I totally thought it was them and that they were being contemptuous and amused and invasively disrespectful of my dignity, broadcasting it as a threat. I disapproved of them and broadcasted back my resentment. If they weren’t actually doing anything, aside from simply being who they are, you could say I was bigoted and biased against them for being different. I definitely felt like I was “doing it right” and they were not being the way people are supposed to be. If this is true, then the only sense in which I can say they oppress me is that they significantly outnumber people like me, so their disapproval becomes a surrounding environment.

Interestingly, I became a lot more tolerant of people with masculine characteristics when I became aware that a lot of the women I found fascinating were expressing those traits. Doesn’t make sense to only hate them in guys. Especially while complaining that I’m being put down for exhibiting the same traits that are celebrated in female folks, does it?

None of this excuses hostile homophobia / sissyphobia, etc. But I don't think I'm an inherently better person than they are.


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Progress on THAT GUY IN OUR WOMEN'S STUDIES CLASS (Book II)

I'm still plugging away on the second book to be extracted from my autobiographical tome. This is a complete rewrite; the original text of the autobio is not directly usable, unlike the portion I used for the first book, so I just reference it for notes and reminders. With the scene that I wrote yesterday, I'm up to 96 pages, which should come out to be roughly a third of the final manuscript.

I'm a participant in an author's group where we bring up to 1800 words' worth of our work-in-progress and read it out loud to get feedback. That's helping immensely, not just for the direct advice but for the overall sense of connecting to an audience and hearing that yes, they find the story entertaining and engrossing.

Plotwise, I'm at a point where my main character (that's me, of course) is in the first year of women's studies classes, a college freshman, successfully making an impact with professors and connecting with some of the other students, but hasn't yet been able to explain the whole "male sissy" thing in such a way that people understand what these social issues are all about.

In the second year I will show him (i.e., me) getting established on campus as an outspoken political type, with a reputation mostly associated with militancy about pyschiatric rights and homelessness, and known for being that guy who is into feminism. He (i.e., me) also gets a romantic interest! The second and third year together should be no more than another third of the book; the first year section is longer because it has a long retrospective backstory portion and has to do a lot more initial setup.

The big challenge all along was whether I could manage a sufficient balance between complex intellectual ideas versus interactive personal stuff with conversations and characters and all that. So far so good, I think.



By the time of the events in this story begin, I had come out in 1980 as a heterosexual sissy, a person with an identity that was different in the same general way that gay & lesbian and transsexual (see next paragraph) people were understood to be different, but, well, different from those identities. I had even written a book by 1982, The Amazon's Brother. But I was very isolated; I wasn't connecting with anybody who understood WTF I was talking about and I had no one reading what I'd written. I hadn't succeeded in getting a publisher interested.

The scene that would later be called the "LGBT" community did not include gender variance back then, not really. It was all gay rights. I viewed gay people as allies (particularly lesbians who were likely to be feminists) but not really comrades in the same cause. Transsexual people -- yes, that was the word in use back then, nobody was saying "transgender" yet -- were people who transitioned by getting operations and taking hormones, and there was no sense of other kinds of trans people who didn't want to align their physical sex with their gender identity, so I didn't see myself as fitting in with them either, aside from which their presence in the community was mostly just hypothetical. They were so thin on the ground number-wise that a person did not actually encounter them at community centers and so on; officially there was probably starting to be some inclusiveness, some mention on fliers about them as part of what gay and lesbian centric organizations were about, but really it was all gay and lesbian, and mostly gay guys for that matter.

I hitched to New York to become a women's studies major in college. (The book's backstory section covers how I made the decision to do that, and my adventures getting there). I figured that the things I wanted to talk about -- that the expectations for people of a given sex were socially created, not built-in natural, and that the intolerance for people who were different was sexist -- would be right on topic for the women's studies classroom.

And besides, my head was deeply into feminist theory by this point anyway. I felt like the whole way society is set up, its overall values and structures, is a direct consequence of how gender is set up, that society is a machine and it runs differently depending on how gender gets configured. And feminist theory, especially radical feminist theory, made the same claim, that this was the political axis around which all social issues revolved. Not class, like the socialists believed. Not race, like the 60s activists had mostly believed. This. And that insight, incidentally, is something I still find missing from most gender discussions even to this day -- we do a lot of identity politics about who is marginalized and oppressed and unfairly treated, but not so much discussion about whether global warming, the military confrontations and economic deprivations, or the buildup of religious intolerances and so forth are all the way they are as an outcome of how gender is socially organized on this planet.

The trajectory of this book will bring my main character (i.e., me) to the limits of the role that a guy can authentically play in women's studies and in feminism, just as he's getting an academic article published and burning his final bridges with the graduate school department and leaving without a PhD to go figure out some other way of approaching all this.



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Sex, sex, sex, sex!

“I agree! There’s no reason for all these labels! Just be who you are!” This comment was written in response to last week’s blog post, which was about retaining the authority to invent your own label instead of feeling like you have to choose from among the existing gender identities that you’ve heard about.

I feel like I’m perpetually see-sawing between these two arguments – that, on the one hand, people should not feel pressured to squeeze themselves into an identity-box if it doesn’t fit them, and yet, on the other hand, that no, that doesn’t mean labels and specifically described gender identities should be discarded.

I often get the “you don’t need labels, just be yourself” attitudes and responses, and I feel like I’m constantly explaining that I didn’t have the option to “just be myself” growing up, and while things have improved somewhat since I was a kid or a teenager, it’s still a concern – the situation has not defused yet, it’s still problematic for people coming of age. So, yes, dammit, I still see a need to draw attention to the situation, the phenomenon, the social politics of being different in this specific way, and doing so requires naming it.

I was originally going to make today’s blog post about that, and elaborate a bit on it and leave it at that, but I found myself dwelling on how I had not anticipated this “just be yourself / no labels” reply when I wrote last week’s blog post. And that, in turn, got me thinking about what replies I might get to this one. And what came to mind was someone crossing their arms argumentatively and saying “Yeah, like what? What bad shit happens to ‘people like you’ that you want to change? What horrible things happen to genderqueer sissy boys? Just what is it that you’re trying to fix?”

I could quite authentically point to physical violence and verbal abuse and ridicule. We are subjected to what most people think of as “homophobia”; one could just as viably label it “sissyphobia”. Certainly some of the violence dished out that is indeed specifically geared towards gay males because they have same-sex sexualities (for example, the Pulse shootings) but in many cases the bashers and haters have no concrete reason to harbor any beliefs or make any assumptions about who their victims prefer to fondle and frolic with; it’s “how we are”, and they assume from that “what we do”. But let’s be honest here, let’s get real and cut to the chase: the concern that make me an activist was that I was not getting laid.

(That’s an oversimplification but it works as a thumbnail summary: being sidelined and isolated from sexual interaction that others of my age and cohort were able to participate in)

And that practically qualifies as a confession. Complaining about it immediately puts me in the select company of incels, Nice Guys™, and people like Elliot Rogers and Marc Lepine. And meanwhile, there is nothing close to a social consensus that anyone has some kind of right to sexual activity per se. Which is, itself, interesting, and we should unpack that, so I will.

We do have a growing consensus that if you do things in order to satisfy your sexual urges and inclinations, it is oppressive for society to try to stamp out those venues or interfere in those behaviors, as long as they are consensual and involve adults of sound mind. Stonewall. ‘Nuff said, right? But if it isn’t a behavior for which you’re being selected and subjected to reprisals, you’re just whining if you complain that sex is not available to you. It could be that no one wants to do you because you’ve got the personality of a doorknob or the appeal of splattered roadkill; it could be your stinky underarms or your deplorable fashion sense or that perennial favorite, your failure to do what you gotta do, your failure to step up and go out there and make an effort to get what you want.

To get under a sheltering umbrella of attitudes that support the notion that perhaps it is oppressive to be denied opportunity, I’m going to borrow from the disability rights movement. It’s not a perspective that says “each citizen is guaranteed a sex life”, but it does take the stance that no barriers should interfere, including the passive barrier of simply failing to provide mechanisms that a marginalized population needs but which aren’t needed by other people -- that a reasonable degree of social facilitation is necessary and appropriate.

Sissy males who are attracted to female people are not heterosexual simply because they are male people attracted to female people. Heterosexuality is composed of roles and rules, a courtship dance with specifically gendered parts to play in the pageant, and the part written for the male participant is based on a set of assumed characteristics (including personality, priorities, goals, and behavioral nuances and patterns) that are not at all a good match for being a sissy. The assumption that is tied to us, that we must be gay fellows, is really based on the notion that a person like us could not participate in heterosexuality, that we’re not right for the part. That’s a barrier. Or, rather, both of those things are a barrier – the fact that we’re not right for the part and the fact that we are assumed not to be playing.

I have learned things that no one taught me, things that were not shown to me in movies or described to me in romance novels. I have felt good and sexy and lithe in my body, in its shape, in the way that I move. As a potential object of desire, as an attractive target. I have learned nuances of voice and gesture and the parts of speech that enable a person to indicate that they know of the possibility that you’re looking upon them in that fashion, and which let them play with that without being overt, predatory, forward, centered on their own appetite… i.e. without being masculine. Does it work the same way when a male person uses this traditionally female language in communication with a female person? Well, not often (I won’t lie) but better than any other tactic that was at my disposal. It may or may not be sexually provocative in exactly the same way so much as it speaks a message that the recipient is able to parse and recognize, and, having recognized it, to realize the implications. Or maybe I’m smokin’ hot (I could live with that).

I've been in relationships that started from there. They were different; I wasn't defined within them as "the boy". It is not that avoiding the appetite-symbol sexual initiator role guarantees you won't be cast as "the boy" for other reasons or in other ways, or that if you reach or kiss or make a pass first you don't get to have this, but it makes a good filter and it gets things started on the left foot.

The point is, I learned it in utter ignorance, tested it with no role model to emulate, and projected an identity by using it that had no name and no social identity that would enable any of the people I encountered to recognize me, to say “Oh, I get it, I’m dealing with one of those”, so their response was dependent on intuiting what it could possibly mean and what an appropriate response just might consist of.

Having to figure it all out in total darkness is quite a barrier. Having to expect my potential partners to do the same is definitely a barrier.

The label is important and necessary to draw attention to the situation; drawing attention to us, and what it is like to be us and how things work for us, is the intended fix.

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"Do you think I'm a Demigirl, or more BiGender?" (etc)

You may not intend your question as it sounds to me.

And I get that -- I mean, I could be reading into your question a bunch of stuff that's coming from me, stuff I'm projecting onto it, and not what you meant or how you said it.

But here I am in GenderQueer Support & Talk, and a dozen or so other gender-variant themed Facebook groups, and I see so many of these questions --

"Hey, peeps, what do you think? I have my days when I'm not male or female but it's weird to be called 'he' or 'sir' and there are other days when I put on makeup, so do you think I could be a demigirl? I've been calling myself 'bigender' but lately I've been wondering if I might actually be a demigirl..."

-- (not an actual quote, but that kind of thing...)

... and when I read that it sounds like a chemist in the laboratory, trying to determine if Core Sample A contains potassium or silicon, bismuth or antimony. Like there's an absolute empirically correct answer. And like they're asking "Would one of my esteemed gender scientist colleagues help me decide how to test my sample and determine its composition?"


Connections

Does it annoy you when some old fart quotes some dusty-ass lyric from some song from before you were born and acts like because it was in this song that makes it profound or something?

Yeah, sorry about that, but I am sixty and sometimes I act like it...

I'd gather everyone together for a day
And when we gathered
I'll pass buttons out that say
Beautiful people
Then you'd never have to be alone
'Cause there'll always be someone
With the same button on as you

( -- Melanie, “Beautiful People”, circa 1971, obligatory YouTube link) cf: the sense of belonging, of not having to be alone because you have a shared identity with other people.

I do get that when a person is saying something like “I’m not sure if I’m a demigirl or if I’m more bigender” or whatever, part of what they’re often saying is “I might fit in with the other people who identify that way”. And believe me, I know what it feels like to be cut off from feeling like you fit in anywhere; I know what it's like to wish for a sense of belonging, to have a place where you fit in after a lifetime of sticking out as weird and different.


But let’s go back to the beginning of the journey. There was a social norm -- heterosexual and cisgender -- and that norm did not fit for you, did not work for you, it was incorrect and inadequate, it was wrong, and it was confining, right?

OK, I want to suggest to you, to all of you, that it is important for you to approach gender identity with the attitude that maybe no one out there has ever described your identity, that it has never been given a name. Don't get me wrong, I'm not wishing that on you, that you should have to create for yourself an identity and name it and explain it to everyone. But that you should hold it in your mind and heart as a possibility. That it is OK for you to walk away from "demigirl" and "bigender" and "genderfluid" and all of the others you encounter out there, saying (if it happens to be true) "NO, THAT'S NOT IT... NO, THAT'S STILL NOT IT... NO, NOT THAT EITHER..."

Why? Because otherwise -- if you haven't given yourself permission to do that -- you're confining yourself to slot yourself into one of these pre-existing identities. That makes it similar to just conforming to the cisgender hetero identity that was being foisted on you originally, something that doesn't fit but which you're allowing to define you instead of defining yourself. Oh, OK, it's only sort-of similar because there are a lot more choices instead of just one, and there's less focused pressure to accept them (and also less freedom from still being treated like a deviant as the payoff for accepting one of these identities).

But still, it's at least partially like that situation. You were willful enough and self-affirming enough to reject what didn't fit. I'm suggesting you hold onto that attitude and don't feel obliged to pick from any of the identities you encounter until and unless it fits.

Taste test identities

Somehow, having been a tomboy had taught me that the other side of "not fitting in" is a subtle subversive energy -- the power of difference

p 182, Marianne Dresser, in "Confessions of an Unrepentant Tomboy" / Yamaguchi & Barber, Editors, TOMBOYS



Gender is full of "shouldn'ts" and restrictions; if a gender identity is a net positive and not a net negative, it has to empower. I think it's NOT like a chemist trying to identify the elements in a sample. First and foremost, recognize that the absence of a gender identity is the absence of those gendered restrictions. Recognize also that all gender identities are social constructs: someone made them up and then continued to use them because they felt comfortable wearing them. Find what resonates for you. And if you don't find it out there, find it within yourself and give it a new name.

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