I'm with my Mom in her hospital room. Her body flung a bunch of clots into her circulatory system; one of them wiped out some brain functioning, mostly motor and sensory stuff but some cognitive functions are messed up too; the worst of them plugged up her femoral artery and it cost her most of her left leg, so she's in bed with no knee or anything below it on that side; yet another tried its best to claim her other leg as well, but the surgeons sliced deep into her calf muscle and removed the clot, and after a few iffy days she had enough circulation in that foot that they stopped saying they might have to remove her right leg as well.
It's a huge insult to body integrity; it's almost impossible for me to be here without identifying with her situation and recoiling from it in horror, thinking life would not be worth living, that I wouldn't want to continue like that, and of course she does feel and express a lot of that (to everyone else's dismay). But she wants out of the hospital and to regain control of her life, since dying doesn't seem imminent. She sent me downstairs for a grilled cheese sandwich, bypassing the hospital dietician's tasteless pablum (and ate half of it, which is more than she's been eating off the hospital trays), and then asked me to help her sit up and swing her legs over the side of the bed (this is something physical therapy has been working towards, but my Mom is pushing the issue; she wants maximum mobility and she wants it now).
She and my Dad both fall into that difficult-to-explain middle space when it comes to understanding and accepting me as genderqueer. On the one hand, they've never rejected or made an issue of my femininities. Didn't seem bothered by my lack of interest in sports or my preference for girl playmates when I was a little boy. Didn't join their voices to those of other adults — relatives, neighbors' parents, people from church and school — in questioning why I wasn't more like other boys. And there's no way it wasn't brought to their attention, so they had to have dismissed these concerns as immaterial and irrelevant. The way I was was fine with them. They even suggested a career in nursing back when I was in my early 20s.
On the other hand, I've been out and have tried to be vocal about it since 1980, taking a public stand as a male feminine person, explaining it as a social issue, but their reaction has consistently been "Why do you want to talk about that? That's a personal matter, it's private and nobody else's business and it isn't polite to bring it up". In short, they're OK with me being a male person who happens to have some feminine traits or to have made some choices and decisions that are viewed as appropriate for women and girls, but not so OK with me defining who I am in those terms. They don't like me distinguishing myself from other identities, from straight, from cisgender, from transgender, from gay, in order to explain that my identity is different, that it's something else.
My reading material this week has been Hida Viloria's Born Both, an intersex memoir. Once again I'm finding the thoughts and experiences of intersex activists to be very topical and relevant to my own even though I'm not intersex myself. A great deal of the focus of Born Both is the distinction between viewing one's self as an (otherwise) ordinary man or woman with a physical (medical) intersex condition, or viewing one's self as an intersex person, a person whose body is intersex (not male or female) and whose gender is hermaphrodite (not man or woman). That definitely resonates with me, kin as it is to the distinction between viewing myself as an (otherwise) ordinary male guy who has some feminine traits and behaviors or instead as a gender invert, a male girl or male femme.
Late in the book Viloria writes about her discomfort with the formulation "cisgender": it is a term that sometimes been defined as that state where one's gender matches one's birth sex, and sometimes instead as that state where one's gender is consistent with the gender assigned to one at birth. The problem for Viloria (and for intersex people) is that in the case of the first definition for cisgender, a person who identifies as intersex would be cisgender (the birth sex is intersex and so is the gender identity), which is misleading, and in the case of the second definition, intersex people would be labeled transgender instead because virtually no one is assigned "intersex" — but that's misleading too. The possibility of "intersex" gets erased by binary assumptions that are built into transgender versus cisgender definitions.
And again I find myself nodding with recognition, because I often feel erased by the same definitions. In my case, I have a body, which is male, which was assigned male when I was born, and which continues to be assigned male by anyone who views it. So my sex is cisgender, right? Well, I have a gender too: girl, or femme — definitely not guy or boy or man. Yet my assigned gender, both at birth and as an ongoing act of assignment-by-others, is perennially boy, guy, man. So my gender is trans. The problem for me is that there is a very lazy distinction between sex and gender in the definitions of cisgender and transgender. Those definitions erase the possibility of someone having a current sex that does not "match" their current gender. In other words, they erase me.
Viloria also identifies as a "hermaphrodyke". Her gender is hermaphrodite, her sexual orientation is towards women, and she thinks of herself as a lesbian, not as a straight guy. She of all people would not be inclined to box in everyone as either male or female, and hence as objects of attraction to her as either one orientation or the other; but although in her book she describes times when straight women were attracted to her as a straight guy, and gay men to her as a gay guy, her own appetite seems linked to those set of morphological characteristics that make up classical female body structure. That is true for me as well. There do exist viewpoints among people within the LGBTQIA communities to the effect that no one should have a morphological preference. That it is transphobic or chauvinistically binary to go around requiring that the people to whom one is attracted be in possession of a standard-issue penis or that they own a conventionally defined vagina or whatever. Reciprocally, there is a suspicious mistrust for people whose sexual interests are expressed specifically towards transgender people. Trans women and trans men often find it creepy and objectifying in a fetishy and dehumanizing way to encounter folks who want to become sexually involved with a trans woman (or man) when they themselves identify as women and men, not as trans women or trans men.
But among nonbinary people there has emerged the term skoliosexual, i.e., "to be attracted to transgender or non-binary/genderqueer people". Not all non-cisgender people are people whose identify is anchored in the binary identity opposite to the one they were born into (or assigned to at birth), and as a consequence some of us actively prefer to connect with people who are affirmatively attracted to us as we are, for what we are, for our configuration. Viloria proudly described partners who found her intersex body intrinsically attractive and relays similar tales and experiences from other intersex people she's compared notes with.
My mom is an attractive woman. She has nice curves, nice female shapes even at 82. I'm seeing a lot more of it than I'm accustomed to — hospitals are like that in general, and in her case she keeps feeling so hot that she can't get comfortable, so she's almost become a naturist here. There's a first-tier reaction of turning away from it, embarrassed by proxy. She's from an era and a culture where you kept yourself covered up, especially if you were a woman. But being attactive, being perceived as attractive, is a part of her identity, part of how she thinks of herself: she brushes her hair here, and puts on makeup: blusher, powder, lipstick. She isn't seeking to be attractive in order to prompt active sexual behavior from anyone (she's got that situation handled; she's got my Dad), but because it is woven into her concept of who she is. For me to find her so, on the other hand, is inappropriate, disturbingly so to most people. It's supposed to be so taboo that it would be impossible for me to see those contours in sexual terms. We've put a lot of energy into supposed to when it comes to sexuality. As a culture we invest in shoulds and should nots and leave little room for people to feel what they feel, alleged sexual revolutions beside the point. Poke at this particular one and you'll see that under it is the hidden notion that male people can't help acting on any sexual feeling that they experience. The #metoo movement says that's bullshit. I do too. The attraction is there because my mom is female. Not because I'm imposing a litmus test that says I can only find someone attractive if they're female. I'm pretty sure I'm not imposing much in the way of shoulds here if you see what I mean. I can also state with confidence that finding her attractive doesn't make it likely that I'm going to climb into her hospital bed and commit acts of sexual assault. People don't recoil in quite the same way at the notion of a daughter seeing her Dad as a sexually attractive man. But that's because there's a preconceived notion about what male sexuality is like, one that lots of folks hold in their heads without being fully conscious of it.
The difference between being a guy who has some feminine attributes and being a male girl is the same as the difference between being a woman (or man) with some sexually ambiguous characteristics and being an intersex person. It's the difference between noun and adjective, it's the declaration of a phenomenon, a thang. Before 1980 I knew myself to be a male person who had more in common with the girls than with the other boys; I was aware that that made me subject to being classified as a fag, a sissy queerboy, which wasn't right but neither was it right to say that no, I was a regular guy, a straight boy. After 1980 I knew myself to have an entirely separate gender or sexual identity, something just as different as being gay, but not that, and not being male-to-female transgender either. Something else. Something folks hadn't heard about yet, weren't talking about, had no awareness of. It was a sense of identity instead of a box of attributes. It converted the attributes into normative aspects for a male girl instead of peculiar aspects for a guy. It explained my experiences in political terms instead of implying that character defects on my part had brought my experiences upon me. It made a huge difference in my self-esteem.
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