At a certain point in my life, I began saying something that other males around me were not saying. Something that men in general had historically not been saying. I was stating that certain things were true for me personally, and in making this statement I was contradicting a whole lot of what men in general had said about male experience, about being one, what it was like, what it meant.
Did this mean that I was different?
What if, in saying these things, I was actually speaking for all men, saying things about the male experience that never get said but which basically all men, not just me, have to confront in their lives?
Or maybe I was not speaking for all men but for a minority of males, a hitherto silent minority, a group of males who were different from the rest, a group who didn't yet have a name and a voice?
Or perhaps I was only speaking for myself and myself alone.
I didn't know. I spoke without knowing.
I've received my share of dismissive reactions. I'm a special snowflake. I'm a boringly normal hetero cis guy who desperately wants to be edgy. I have a lot of nerve using a slur term ("queer") that was hurled at other people, as if that were my right. I've been told countless times that I lack any relevant difference. Meanwhile I've only now and then been told that what I say is true for me is true for them too.
Marginalization is a word you hear bandied about quite a bit these days, especially in MOGII (aka LGBTQIA)* communities. It literally means to exist right on the margin, or edge, of things, pushed to the side.
Well, here's what marginalization is like. It's when most of the time you get treated as part of an undifferentiated group you don't consider yourself to belong to, and the rest of the time you get singled out as weird and peculiar, and treated and thought of as such, with your difference defined by other people as they see it, without any input from your own self-definition.
And yes, it is edgy.
* MOGII = Minority Orientation, Gender Identity, and Intersex. LGBTQIA = Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (etc/other) and/or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual/Agender. I like MOGII better.
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Monday, November 26, 2018
Sunday, November 18, 2018
If You Could Be...
So I was casting about for a topic to blog on. (I don't usually have difficulty coming up with something, but given that I try to pump these things out once a week I guess it's inevitable that sooner or later I'd have nothing in particular in mind when the time came, right?) I mentioned this to my partner and she joked that I could borrow a page from those silly corporate exercises and ask my readers "If you could be any animal, what animal would you be?".
Hmm, well... perhaps an appropriate variation of that.
If you could be any GENDER you wanted, which one would you be?
The conventional modern understanding of what it means to be a transgender woman is along these lines: The world consists of men and women; a transgender woman is a person who was born male but wants to be a woman, and transitions.
Trans women themselves would probably be more likely to say: Although I was born with a body that was assigned male initially by others, I *am* a woman. Transitioning is either to correct the body to make it correspond with a person's identity or else to shift the perceptions of other people.
I myself am not a transitioner, and my answer would be like this: The world consists predominantly of male men and female women, but there are also male women and female men, and folks in-between, and others. Just like transgender people, I am already the gender I want to be: a male woman
I want to change people's perceptions (i.e., I want to be seen as and treated as who I am), but I have no interest in changing myself.
What does it mean to "be a woman", though? There are all the attributes and characteristics, behaviors and roles and so on, but interspersed with that is the notion of a correspondence to some degree with the social construct called "biological femaleness" — breasts, vagina, menses, uterus, pregnancy. And it's all wrapped together as a package deal. Even among people who mentally distinguish between femininity (or "the sex role expectation of femininity", if you prefer) and biological female morphology, there are often many things that are thought of, consciously or unconsciously, as part of biological femaleness that someone else would classify differently: sexual positioning and mate selection strategies, the question of desirability or attractiveness, the gatekeeper role as the person who gives or withholds consent, and nurturance and other related manifestations of hormonal states, social interaction patterns determined by having a smaller size and less physical strength, and so on. So while it is highly useful to distinguish intellectually between sex and gender, between biological femaleness (social construct though it may be) and the complex constellation of things we call femininity, there still isn't a consensus about which is which, or which contains which elements, if you see what I mean.
What if we teased it apart into a sort of checklist, then? For those who wish to (continue to) be a woman, what do you mean when you say you are a woman? For instance (keeping in mind that for cisgender women as well as anyone else identifying as a woman, not all of these will apply)...
[ ] Demeanor and behavior, that yours matches the overall pattern exhibited by women in general
[ ] Perception and interpretation of your demeanor and behavior by others as feminine
[ ] Perception and interpretation of your body: being viewed by others as morphologically female
[ ] The experience of being a sex object, a target of the sexual appetite of those people who are of the sex and/or gender you wish to be sexy to, especially to the extent that this is a different experience for women
[ ] Having the personality and holding the priorities and values and overall perspective and viewpoints that women have more of a tendency to hold than men do
[ ] Others' perception and interpretation of you as having such a personality and being likely to hold such values and priorities etc
[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature
[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy
[ ] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life
[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life
To do this right, we'd need a fill-in-the-blank line after each item to add a comment as need be.
Now, I can readily imagine some people rejecting this sliced-up deconstruction. I've encountered that in a few discussions, in fact, the notion that something gets killed or ignored when you divide the concept up in this fashion, and that "woman" (or "man" for that matter) is an entire package and that to be what it is and retain its meaning it has to continue to be that way.
But I'm not fond of that, since that attitude erases me. It's as reductionistic as the attitude of some of the people on Facebook who post things like "If you got a dick yer a man".
I definitely need to order a la carte. Here's my own response, checks for what I would place an order for and x's for the ones that already apply:
[x] Demeanor and behavior I've got that already
[√] Perception and interpretation of my behavior as feminine Yeah, that's what I want
[ ] Perception and interpretation of my body as morphologically female No thank you
[√] The experience of being a sex object / to those of the sex or gender to which I want to be attractive well yes, actually
[x] Personality and priorities and values and overall perspective I already have that too
[√] Perceived by others as having that personality and priorities etc This is important
[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature Umm, no, I'm fine with the factory installed parts
[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy Neither need nor have any of those
[x] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life I have that, too, actually
[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life I don't have that but I'd be a different person if I had
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Hmm, well... perhaps an appropriate variation of that.
If you could be any GENDER you wanted, which one would you be?
The conventional modern understanding of what it means to be a transgender woman is along these lines: The world consists of men and women; a transgender woman is a person who was born male but wants to be a woman, and transitions.
Trans women themselves would probably be more likely to say: Although I was born with a body that was assigned male initially by others, I *am* a woman. Transitioning is either to correct the body to make it correspond with a person's identity or else to shift the perceptions of other people.
I myself am not a transitioner, and my answer would be like this: The world consists predominantly of male men and female women, but there are also male women and female men, and folks in-between, and others. Just like transgender people, I am already the gender I want to be: a male woman
I want to change people's perceptions (i.e., I want to be seen as and treated as who I am), but I have no interest in changing myself.
What does it mean to "be a woman", though? There are all the attributes and characteristics, behaviors and roles and so on, but interspersed with that is the notion of a correspondence to some degree with the social construct called "biological femaleness" — breasts, vagina, menses, uterus, pregnancy. And it's all wrapped together as a package deal. Even among people who mentally distinguish between femininity (or "the sex role expectation of femininity", if you prefer) and biological female morphology, there are often many things that are thought of, consciously or unconsciously, as part of biological femaleness that someone else would classify differently: sexual positioning and mate selection strategies, the question of desirability or attractiveness, the gatekeeper role as the person who gives or withholds consent, and nurturance and other related manifestations of hormonal states, social interaction patterns determined by having a smaller size and less physical strength, and so on. So while it is highly useful to distinguish intellectually between sex and gender, between biological femaleness (social construct though it may be) and the complex constellation of things we call femininity, there still isn't a consensus about which is which, or which contains which elements, if you see what I mean.
What if we teased it apart into a sort of checklist, then? For those who wish to (continue to) be a woman, what do you mean when you say you are a woman? For instance (keeping in mind that for cisgender women as well as anyone else identifying as a woman, not all of these will apply)...
[ ] Demeanor and behavior, that yours matches the overall pattern exhibited by women in general
[ ] Perception and interpretation of your demeanor and behavior by others as feminine
[ ] Perception and interpretation of your body: being viewed by others as morphologically female
[ ] The experience of being a sex object, a target of the sexual appetite of those people who are of the sex and/or gender you wish to be sexy to, especially to the extent that this is a different experience for women
[ ] Having the personality and holding the priorities and values and overall perspective and viewpoints that women have more of a tendency to hold than men do
[ ] Others' perception and interpretation of you as having such a personality and being likely to hold such values and priorities etc
[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature
[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy
[ ] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life
[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life
To do this right, we'd need a fill-in-the-blank line after each item to add a comment as need be.
Now, I can readily imagine some people rejecting this sliced-up deconstruction. I've encountered that in a few discussions, in fact, the notion that something gets killed or ignored when you divide the concept up in this fashion, and that "woman" (or "man" for that matter) is an entire package and that to be what it is and retain its meaning it has to continue to be that way.
But I'm not fond of that, since that attitude erases me. It's as reductionistic as the attitude of some of the people on Facebook who post things like "If you got a dick yer a man".
I definitely need to order a la carte. Here's my own response, checks for what I would place an order for and x's for the ones that already apply:
[x] Demeanor and behavior I've got that already
[√] Perception and interpretation of my behavior as feminine Yeah, that's what I want
[ ] Perception and interpretation of my body as morphologically female No thank you
[√] The experience of being a sex object / to those of the sex or gender to which I want to be attractive well yes, actually
[x] Personality and priorities and values and overall perspective I already have that too
[√] Perceived by others as having that personality and priorities etc This is important
[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature Umm, no, I'm fine with the factory installed parts
[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy Neither need nor have any of those
[x] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life I have that, too, actually
[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life I don't have that but I'd be a different person if I had
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Monday, November 12, 2018
Almost Quit My Job...
I have a temporary job working at a Montessori School. Not in the classroom but in the office, where interaction with the children isn't really an expected part of my job. But we're understaffed. The other day, the teacher in the classroom for 3 to 6 year olds needed a bathroom break and there was no teacher's assistant to cover, so I was asked to step in. Except not quite exactly step in. "Just stand at the entrance to the classroom until she gets back", the administrator told me. "I don't want to send a man in with the children, some of the parents won't like that".
I fumed while I waited there, not liking this. (The children know me from the front office; they're alert and bright and know all the adults by name from early September on. They called to me from within the classroom and asked why I didn't come on in). So I stood there doing a slow burn, and rehearsed telling my boss I was unwilling to work there any more because of this.
This, by the way, is what dysphoria is for me. For other gender-variant people, misgendering may occur when people use the wrong pronoun, or when they are referred to as "male" when they identify as "female" or vice versa. In my case, I consider myself to have both a sex and a gender, and don't have a preferred pronoun; I don't mind being referred to as male because I am male, and most of the time being referred to as a man doesn't provoke my ire, either, because in most cases the person speaking isn't using it offensively, just ignorantly. But when I get lumped in with other men, with my attributes extrapolated from what is known or thought of men in general, and distinguished from women, that's misgendering and I hate it personally and viscerally and with shocking pain, personally affronted by it.
When the teacher returned, I stalked down to the administrator's office. "You told me to wait outside the classroom because the parents would not like a man being in the classroom with their children. So you would not have said the same thing to a female office worker if she was asked to cover?" I crossed my arms, already preparing my I-quit sentence within my head.
"I am not willing to expose any of the men who work for me to the horrible attitudes of some of these parents", she replied. "Let me tell you about Brian. He was a student here, honor student, really nice boy. I had him working in my office for awhile when he was a young adult. One day the police showed up and demanded to know if I had Brian Jones working here, because they needed to arrest him on suspicion of child molestation. He would never do such a thing, everyone who knew him agreed with that. What had happened was the children were playing flag football during gym class and one of the girls lost her flag from where they tuck it in, in the back of their shorts at the waistband, you know, and she had trouble reaching back there to get it back in, so he helped her. But her mother heard that there was a man working with the children and she asked the girl if he had ever touched her and she had no idea what her mother meant by that. Anyway, I'm not willing to put you or any other man in that kind of situation".
Hmmph.
That does put a different spin on things. If she had said "I am not willing to expose my children to any risk of sexual misconduct" or "I am not willing to expose my school to the risk of such accusations", I would have been so out of there. Because my maleness doesn't make me a threat to children and I'll be damned if I'll tolerate that kind of insinuation. But she'd couched it in terms of the risk to me of being targeted by that kind of bigotry.
Oh, it's still the wrong answer. There exists what I call "The Weather Approach" to social problems. Someone addresses all the incoming women students on campus and warns them not to dress revealingly or to be out unaccompanied by themselves, because there's a risk of rape, and in doing that they are treating the behavior of the men on campus as if they were the weather--no responsibility for their own behavior, so those who might get exposed to it have all the responsibility of dressing for it and carrying an umbrella. We don't expect the weather to develop a consciousness of how it treats the people it rains on, so it makes rational sense to tell people to take the weather into account and plan accordingly. But men are not the weather. Neither are bigoted parents with sexist attitudes. So it's the wrong answer. Ideally she should have spoken to me about what I might be exposing myself to, risk-wise, but not acted so as to protect me without my having chosen to be protected.
The "Weather Approach" always tends to be complicated and convoluted. Does a parent of an oppressed and vilified raise his children to be free and untrammeled and unimpeded by societal labels, or to be savvy and wary of racists and haters?
I listened and went back to my desk, still employed there at least for now.
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I fumed while I waited there, not liking this. (The children know me from the front office; they're alert and bright and know all the adults by name from early September on. They called to me from within the classroom and asked why I didn't come on in). So I stood there doing a slow burn, and rehearsed telling my boss I was unwilling to work there any more because of this.
This, by the way, is what dysphoria is for me. For other gender-variant people, misgendering may occur when people use the wrong pronoun, or when they are referred to as "male" when they identify as "female" or vice versa. In my case, I consider myself to have both a sex and a gender, and don't have a preferred pronoun; I don't mind being referred to as male because I am male, and most of the time being referred to as a man doesn't provoke my ire, either, because in most cases the person speaking isn't using it offensively, just ignorantly. But when I get lumped in with other men, with my attributes extrapolated from what is known or thought of men in general, and distinguished from women, that's misgendering and I hate it personally and viscerally and with shocking pain, personally affronted by it.
When the teacher returned, I stalked down to the administrator's office. "You told me to wait outside the classroom because the parents would not like a man being in the classroom with their children. So you would not have said the same thing to a female office worker if she was asked to cover?" I crossed my arms, already preparing my I-quit sentence within my head.
"I am not willing to expose any of the men who work for me to the horrible attitudes of some of these parents", she replied. "Let me tell you about Brian. He was a student here, honor student, really nice boy. I had him working in my office for awhile when he was a young adult. One day the police showed up and demanded to know if I had Brian Jones working here, because they needed to arrest him on suspicion of child molestation. He would never do such a thing, everyone who knew him agreed with that. What had happened was the children were playing flag football during gym class and one of the girls lost her flag from where they tuck it in, in the back of their shorts at the waistband, you know, and she had trouble reaching back there to get it back in, so he helped her. But her mother heard that there was a man working with the children and she asked the girl if he had ever touched her and she had no idea what her mother meant by that. Anyway, I'm not willing to put you or any other man in that kind of situation".
Hmmph.
That does put a different spin on things. If she had said "I am not willing to expose my children to any risk of sexual misconduct" or "I am not willing to expose my school to the risk of such accusations", I would have been so out of there. Because my maleness doesn't make me a threat to children and I'll be damned if I'll tolerate that kind of insinuation. But she'd couched it in terms of the risk to me of being targeted by that kind of bigotry.
Oh, it's still the wrong answer. There exists what I call "The Weather Approach" to social problems. Someone addresses all the incoming women students on campus and warns them not to dress revealingly or to be out unaccompanied by themselves, because there's a risk of rape, and in doing that they are treating the behavior of the men on campus as if they were the weather--no responsibility for their own behavior, so those who might get exposed to it have all the responsibility of dressing for it and carrying an umbrella. We don't expect the weather to develop a consciousness of how it treats the people it rains on, so it makes rational sense to tell people to take the weather into account and plan accordingly. But men are not the weather. Neither are bigoted parents with sexist attitudes. So it's the wrong answer. Ideally she should have spoken to me about what I might be exposing myself to, risk-wise, but not acted so as to protect me without my having chosen to be protected.
The "Weather Approach" always tends to be complicated and convoluted. Does a parent of an oppressed and vilified raise his children to be free and untrammeled and unimpeded by societal labels, or to be savvy and wary of racists and haters?
I listened and went back to my desk, still employed there at least for now.
———————
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Monday, November 5, 2018
Summarizing a Life
As a consequence of my mother dying and an unusually high volume of other friends', relatives', and associates' lives coming to an end within the last year or so, I've heard a lot of summaries of people's lives, condensations of who those people were around some ongoing themes or primary accomplishments.
I've been doing this all my life. Or all my adult life at any rate. I started when I was 21.
Trying to explain being a person whose body is male and yet whose persona is feminine. Trying to become understood by other people in those terms. Trying to get people to add that to the list of possibilities and accept it as a valid identity.
I've had limited traction. I've put a lot of energy into it but it has mostly gone into spinning my wheels without propelling me very far forward. I've had limited effect. Perhaps I am not very good at what I set out to do; perhaps I lack the talent or the appropriate skill-set or something. I don't have a significant following of people listening or reading what I have to say on the subject.
I've occasionally seriously considered putting this down and walking away from it. I mean, the problem with being Don Quixote is that you do not merely fail to defeat your windmills, you don't even get the satisfaction of having the windmills become aware that you're making the attempt. It gets discouraging.
When I was 22, at the end of a year in which my initial efforts had caused me to be detained in a psychiatric facility and disenrolled from college, and in which attempts to "find my people" had gotten me nowhere, I began to question whether these ideas really made sense, or even if they did, whether they were anywhere near as important as they'd seemed when they first came into my head. I came out of that period of questioning convinced of two things: I didn't have to do this, it was not my duty; but yeah, they made sense of my life and they made sense of society around me, and without them there was a boiling meaningless chaos, and so I was inclined to continue to hold onto them, and in believing in them I was driven to continue to try to communicate.
Many years later, at the end of my 30s, my plans appeared to have collapsed around me with no significant progress made: I'd come to the New York area again seeking to "find my people" but the lesbian gay and bisexual scene such as it existed in Manhattan in the 1980s was just starting to open to transsexual (now called transgender) people, very few of whom were coming to participate; and I didn't find a space in which I could explain my own situation and find anyone with similar identity or experience. I'd also latched onto the idea of majoring in feminist studies: I'd write about this stuff and interact with classmates and teachers and I'd connect with people instead of just finding kindred souls within the pages of feminist theory books! But that hadn't quite panned out either, and now my graduate school career was over with no PhD or teaching position in sight. But I'd obtained an MSW in social work along the way and landed a job and figured over the years I'd make professional connections and get to inform policy makers and write grant proposals and create relevant services to bring my people together somehow. But the social work organization had disbanded and I'd been cast adrift and, finding myself unable to get a job offer in social work, had taken an office job developing database software. Lucrative but not relevant to my "mission". And I'd connected romantically with people several times only to always have them unravel, leaving me concerned that I couldn't maintain a relationship or that I wasn't a desirable partner. So I started to think of myself as someone in early retirement, a social activist driven from the field with nothing to show for it.
Over the course of my 40s I retraced my steps, mental ones and actual physical locations, trying to get a clear sense of what had happened in my life and whether or not this was still something I wanted to do, and if so how I was going to proceed. It took awhile but increasingly as I looked back on who I had been and what I'd attempted, I saw it as worthwhile and began to think about what to do next.
From the self-examination activity there came an autobiography, and at it took form I began to think "this is what to do next; show people what it is like, don't theorize about it, show them!" And from the autobiography came the distilled and augmented story that I'm trying to market as GENDERQUEER: A STORY FROM A DIFFERENT CLOSET. My memoir and coming-out and coming-of-age story.
Five years into the process of trying to get it into print, I still don't have much to point to except a massive pile of rejection slips (mostly digital, and hence a virtual pile in an email program's folder). It continues to be frustrating.
I've had an occasional success though! Firstly, back when I was a grad student I got an article printed in an academic journal, and it has generated discussion and affected some of the people who've read it over the years. It's some of my best writing and I'm quite proud of it. Same Door, Different Closet: A Heterosexual Sissy's Coming-out Party
Secondly, I've twice had signed contracts with publishers who were promising to publish this book. It didn't happen, but that's a different situation than if I'd been querying for five years and never gotten a serious nibble.
I blog and I post into Facebook groups for genderqueer and other gender-variant groups and/or LGBTQ-in-general groups. I don't have the audience I wish that I had, with a multitude of followers subscribing and commenting. But I reach a few people.
And I've had the opportunity to speak to some LGBT groups and to college women's studies / gender studies classes on campus and in some other venues (including BDSM lifestyle conventions, interestingly enough) and although my audiences have not been huge, I've had people come up to me later and say how relevant my presentation was, and that they've never had those thoughts or feelings validated in that way before.
Anyway, I am now on the cusp of turning 60. It seems increasingly likely that yes, this is going to be "what I did with my life". My life's work. My primary lifetime project.
So... if you encounter someone like me -- perhaps someone who wanders into your Facebook group and says "I don't know what to call myself... I was thinking maybe genderqueer, or perhaps nonbinary... my body is male and I don't think it is wrong, and I don't want people to think of me as a female person, I'm not... but who I am, my identity, is feminine or femme or like basically I'm one of the girls or women" -- do me a favor and tell them about me. Tell them I call it being a "gender invert". Refer them to some of these blog posts. And if my book is published by then, tell them to read my book.
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I've been doing this all my life. Or all my adult life at any rate. I started when I was 21.
Trying to explain being a person whose body is male and yet whose persona is feminine. Trying to become understood by other people in those terms. Trying to get people to add that to the list of possibilities and accept it as a valid identity.
I've had limited traction. I've put a lot of energy into it but it has mostly gone into spinning my wheels without propelling me very far forward. I've had limited effect. Perhaps I am not very good at what I set out to do; perhaps I lack the talent or the appropriate skill-set or something. I don't have a significant following of people listening or reading what I have to say on the subject.
I've occasionally seriously considered putting this down and walking away from it. I mean, the problem with being Don Quixote is that you do not merely fail to defeat your windmills, you don't even get the satisfaction of having the windmills become aware that you're making the attempt. It gets discouraging.
When I was 22, at the end of a year in which my initial efforts had caused me to be detained in a psychiatric facility and disenrolled from college, and in which attempts to "find my people" had gotten me nowhere, I began to question whether these ideas really made sense, or even if they did, whether they were anywhere near as important as they'd seemed when they first came into my head. I came out of that period of questioning convinced of two things: I didn't have to do this, it was not my duty; but yeah, they made sense of my life and they made sense of society around me, and without them there was a boiling meaningless chaos, and so I was inclined to continue to hold onto them, and in believing in them I was driven to continue to try to communicate.
Many years later, at the end of my 30s, my plans appeared to have collapsed around me with no significant progress made: I'd come to the New York area again seeking to "find my people" but the lesbian gay and bisexual scene such as it existed in Manhattan in the 1980s was just starting to open to transsexual (now called transgender) people, very few of whom were coming to participate; and I didn't find a space in which I could explain my own situation and find anyone with similar identity or experience. I'd also latched onto the idea of majoring in feminist studies: I'd write about this stuff and interact with classmates and teachers and I'd connect with people instead of just finding kindred souls within the pages of feminist theory books! But that hadn't quite panned out either, and now my graduate school career was over with no PhD or teaching position in sight. But I'd obtained an MSW in social work along the way and landed a job and figured over the years I'd make professional connections and get to inform policy makers and write grant proposals and create relevant services to bring my people together somehow. But the social work organization had disbanded and I'd been cast adrift and, finding myself unable to get a job offer in social work, had taken an office job developing database software. Lucrative but not relevant to my "mission". And I'd connected romantically with people several times only to always have them unravel, leaving me concerned that I couldn't maintain a relationship or that I wasn't a desirable partner. So I started to think of myself as someone in early retirement, a social activist driven from the field with nothing to show for it.
Over the course of my 40s I retraced my steps, mental ones and actual physical locations, trying to get a clear sense of what had happened in my life and whether or not this was still something I wanted to do, and if so how I was going to proceed. It took awhile but increasingly as I looked back on who I had been and what I'd attempted, I saw it as worthwhile and began to think about what to do next.
From the self-examination activity there came an autobiography, and at it took form I began to think "this is what to do next; show people what it is like, don't theorize about it, show them!" And from the autobiography came the distilled and augmented story that I'm trying to market as GENDERQUEER: A STORY FROM A DIFFERENT CLOSET. My memoir and coming-out and coming-of-age story.
Five years into the process of trying to get it into print, I still don't have much to point to except a massive pile of rejection slips (mostly digital, and hence a virtual pile in an email program's folder). It continues to be frustrating.
I've had an occasional success though! Firstly, back when I was a grad student I got an article printed in an academic journal, and it has generated discussion and affected some of the people who've read it over the years. It's some of my best writing and I'm quite proud of it. Same Door, Different Closet: A Heterosexual Sissy's Coming-out Party
Secondly, I've twice had signed contracts with publishers who were promising to publish this book. It didn't happen, but that's a different situation than if I'd been querying for five years and never gotten a serious nibble.
I blog and I post into Facebook groups for genderqueer and other gender-variant groups and/or LGBTQ-in-general groups. I don't have the audience I wish that I had, with a multitude of followers subscribing and commenting. But I reach a few people.
And I've had the opportunity to speak to some LGBT groups and to college women's studies / gender studies classes on campus and in some other venues (including BDSM lifestyle conventions, interestingly enough) and although my audiences have not been huge, I've had people come up to me later and say how relevant my presentation was, and that they've never had those thoughts or feelings validated in that way before.
Anyway, I am now on the cusp of turning 60. It seems increasingly likely that yes, this is going to be "what I did with my life". My life's work. My primary lifetime project.
So... if you encounter someone like me -- perhaps someone who wanders into your Facebook group and says "I don't know what to call myself... I was thinking maybe genderqueer, or perhaps nonbinary... my body is male and I don't think it is wrong, and I don't want people to think of me as a female person, I'm not... but who I am, my identity, is feminine or femme or like basically I'm one of the girls or women" -- do me a favor and tell them about me. Tell them I call it being a "gender invert". Refer them to some of these blog posts. And if my book is published by then, tell them to read my book.
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