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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