1970, the start of a new decade. I was in fifth grade, attending Sallas-Mahone Elementary in Valdosta GA.
We weren't exactly forbidden to use the bathrooms during classroom hours, but you couldn't just rise from your seat and go when you felt like it. You had to raise your hand and ask. Even without the possibility of the teacher asking "Can't you just hold it?" or "Why didn't you go during break?", the necessity of making a request was probably enough to ensure that we mostly used the facilities in the mornings before classes, after classes, or during lunch break.
What that meant was that you were going to be in the bathroom at the same time as a handful of the kids from your classroom. To be more precise, other male kids from your classroom, if you were designated male. As I was.
I've never cared for the expression "assigned male at birth". It always seems to me to imply that my mom's obstetrician said "it's a boy" when I was born, and everyone else just went with that. That he did the assigning and no one else did, they just deferred to his judgment. That's not how it was. The same set of physiological characteristics that led the physician attending my birth to declare me male were intermittently referenced as sufficient reason to assign me male throughout my life, and when they weren't directly being observed, they were assumed from other cues and clues. When I lowered my underwear to pee, the evidence was right there in front of me, and I didn't question it: I was male.
But I did not like being in there, in the boys' bathroom. I wasn't like them, the boys, and I knew it, and they knew it. I didn't like having to go in there with THEM and being exposed.
Do you recall fifth grade? Well, do you perhaps recall Beavis and Butthead? The very epitome of being potty-mouthed rests with fifth grade boys. Everything pertaining to bathroom functions, the body parts involved in those functions, and half-understood sexual matters that also involve the same body parts, were the most interesting and prurient source material possible for the raunchiest and crudest storytelling and discussions, often called "jokes" although I rarely understood what the humorous portion was supposed to be.
Those boys were invasive. Peering, commenting, using filthy language about all this stuff.
They found me prim and hilariously prissy and so I became a focus for their attention when I was in there.
I myself identify as a gender invert, not as a transgender transitioning (and/or presenting) as female. I'm not directly affected by the laws and policies and social discussions about sex segregated bathrooms and the presence of transgender people in them. A law or policy saying I can utlize the women's bathroom instead doesn't really address any of my current issues or social situations. I manifest and present as a male-bodied person and any greater comfort I might otherwise feel to not be in the men's toilets would be offset by worrying that my presence would be disturbing to women in the women's room. And I'm used to it, to using the men's room, and aside from that, adult men aren't as awful as a batch of fifth graders, so not only am I used to it, I've been through far worse than what I currently experience in there.
But yeah, I can relate.
It's not just symbolic. It's not just wanting to be regarded and treated like the rest of the folks of the gender with which one identifies. It's also direct and real. Being in the wrong segregated space can be severely uncomfortable.
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Saturday, December 28, 2019
Saturday, December 21, 2019
Unintentional Gatekeeping
I work in a large organization so there are a lot of personnel; there are also presentations and trainings and the official LGBTQ coordinators here have presented material on gender and sexuality. They’ve never approached me to talk about queer issues and identity, although I show up for work wearing a skirt fairly often and several people know I have a book on the subject of being genderqueer coming out soon.
The material that they present to the organization doesn’t include much info on the experiences of a person like me. No surprise there. I could help with that.
So I decide to write, to introduce myself formallly, although I’ve spoken at these presentations as an attendee and assume they know me at least in passing.
I write that much then can’t figure out what to say next. I start a second sentence several times then erase it. Finally, I decide to simply admit to that. To tell them I’m having a hard time getting this letter started:
I don’t know specifically what kind of response I was expecting. Some kind of reply acknowledging their own uncertainties and awkwardnesses when they first tried to participate in the LGBTQ community? Some kind of personal welcome and some friendly curiosity, maybe?
What I received wasn’t unfriendly or dismissive or anything.
Why was I disappointed to receive that? What caused me to read that and somehow turn it into an excuse to feel brushed off?
It’s so damn easy to become hypersensitive, to the point that other people’s behaviors can feel like microaggressions when all they’ve done is fail to guess exactly what would make me feel understood and accepted.
Want another example? We have a few “any gender” toilets, single person facilities. I was waiting for one to become available and someone informed me that if I did not wish to wait, I could use the men’s room down the hall. I’m sure this person did not intend this piece of information to come across as questioning why the hell I would be waiting for the special facilities, or to imply that I was viewed as a cisgender male and therefore not the intended beneficiary of this policy. But I still managed to feel that way at the time.
Another? Someone started a poll in one of the gender nonbinary FB groups about how often and how deeply do you feel dysphoria about your body. When I answered that I don’t, someone replied that I was the first and only non-cisgender person they’d ever encountered who didn’t. It wasn’t said in an even remotely hostile fashion but it immediately conjured up a whole slew of “I don’t fit in, I don’t belong in here” feelings.
I have never felt like the LGBTQ community was my home. That I would be recognized and the doors opened to me, that my concerns and experiences would be validated there. I’ve hoped that would be the case, I’ve prepared to argue that I qualify and that therefore it should be that way, but I haven’t ever escaped the fear that I’d be dismissed with contempt and ridicule. Because I don’t hear or read stories like mine from other people in the community. Similar, yes, but fundamentally different.
It’s easy for me to deal with being an outsider. I’m used to it; I’m good at it. It’s scary to ask to be allowed in, to be an insider. I feel vulnerable and my feelings and sensibilities are way too easy to hurt.
I'll accept that I'm hypersensitive at times like these. At the same time, I think it's fair to ask that people who occupy a position of leadership within the LGBTQ community keep in mind that even if they were always pretty sure of their identity and fit into the community like a hand into a glove, that's not going to be true for a lot of other people; and that's probably especially true for the less common identities.
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The material that they present to the organization doesn’t include much info on the experiences of a person like me. No surprise there. I could help with that.
So I decide to write, to introduce myself formallly, although I’ve spoken at these presentations as an attendee and assume they know me at least in passing.
Hello!
I write that much then can’t figure out what to say next. I start a second sentence several times then erase it. Finally, I decide to simply admit to that. To tell them I’m having a hard time getting this letter started:
*** several minutes later still staring at a single-word email body ***
Damn this is hard. I can so easily deal with people when I'm positioning myself as a "Them", for them to either accept or not. So much scarier to risk being accepted as an "us". Or rejected dismissively at that level.
I didn't grow up feeling a part of the queer community and never had that later in life either, really.
I know you've encountered me at the trainings and meetings. I'm sorry I haven't been more friendly and introduced myself in a meaningful way.
In one of the Facebook support groups I'm in, some of the nonbinary trans folks call it "imposter syndrome". They're usually talking about not being regarded as genuinely trans by the conventional binary transgender men and women. I've had that w/regards to the entire LGBTQ world, and also to the feminist community. I've got a lot of privilege as a person who is altercast by the world as a man and often as a straight man at that; I don't get overtly systematically discriminated against or deal with the medical system like transitioning people have to, so I worry a lot about reaching out and being pushed back and told I'm a pretentious jerk or something.
I don’t know specifically what kind of response I was expecting. Some kind of reply acknowledging their own uncertainties and awkwardnesses when they first tried to participate in the LGBTQ community? Some kind of personal welcome and some friendly curiosity, maybe?
What I received wasn’t unfriendly or dismissive or anything.
We have been glad to see you in attendance at the meetings. We hope you feel welcomed and able to participate fully as your authentic self, both at these meetings and at the organization in general.
It can be hard to reach out to new people, but if there’s anything specific you wanted to discuss with us, feel free to let us know.
Why was I disappointed to receive that? What caused me to read that and somehow turn it into an excuse to feel brushed off?
It’s so damn easy to become hypersensitive, to the point that other people’s behaviors can feel like microaggressions when all they’ve done is fail to guess exactly what would make me feel understood and accepted.
Want another example? We have a few “any gender” toilets, single person facilities. I was waiting for one to become available and someone informed me that if I did not wish to wait, I could use the men’s room down the hall. I’m sure this person did not intend this piece of information to come across as questioning why the hell I would be waiting for the special facilities, or to imply that I was viewed as a cisgender male and therefore not the intended beneficiary of this policy. But I still managed to feel that way at the time.
Another? Someone started a poll in one of the gender nonbinary FB groups about how often and how deeply do you feel dysphoria about your body. When I answered that I don’t, someone replied that I was the first and only non-cisgender person they’d ever encountered who didn’t. It wasn’t said in an even remotely hostile fashion but it immediately conjured up a whole slew of “I don’t fit in, I don’t belong in here” feelings.
I have never felt like the LGBTQ community was my home. That I would be recognized and the doors opened to me, that my concerns and experiences would be validated there. I’ve hoped that would be the case, I’ve prepared to argue that I qualify and that therefore it should be that way, but I haven’t ever escaped the fear that I’d be dismissed with contempt and ridicule. Because I don’t hear or read stories like mine from other people in the community. Similar, yes, but fundamentally different.
It’s easy for me to deal with being an outsider. I’m used to it; I’m good at it. It’s scary to ask to be allowed in, to be an insider. I feel vulnerable and my feelings and sensibilities are way too easy to hurt.
I'll accept that I'm hypersensitive at times like these. At the same time, I think it's fair to ask that people who occupy a position of leadership within the LGBTQ community keep in mind that even if they were always pretty sure of their identity and fit into the community like a hand into a glove, that's not going to be true for a lot of other people; and that's probably especially true for the less common identities.
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Saturday, December 14, 2019
Memes and Message Themes
Meme (n.) -- an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.
When I first came out as an identity not yet on people’s maps, I was intrigued by the rapid spread of popular snippets, little ideas that raced through communities as trendy notions you were supposed to know about if you were cognizant. “Hey”, I said to myself, “if I could figure out what makes an idea catch on and take off like that, I could leverage that to get the word out, to spread awareness of people like me existing in the world!”
And although I was not particularly witty and clever nor anything akin to popular, I watched people’s behavior to see what caused them to latch on to one thing instead of another as an item to pass on as if it were the Most Brilliant Thing Ever.
Eventually I decided that there was no identifying characteristic that was making the phenomenon happen around any specific morsel of an idea. If anything, the near-emptiness in content made it slightly more likely to become the newest trend, rather than any element of profundity or exceptionally clever twist. What I saw were people listening to the crowd and trying to discern early on what was being embraced so they could embrace it a little bit before other people, who would then copy them by embracing it themselves.
That’s not strictly 100% true (some appreciation of quirkiness does seem to play a role), but by and large these trendy ideas were being popularized because they were popular. People were competing to see who could jump on the next bandwagon before it became fully crowded, and would jump to the next one when they could sense it, but it was bandwagon behavior at the root. People weren’t adopting these memes because they agreed with them or thought they were insightful or cute. They were adopting them because they were catching on.
One of my friends, a performance artist, ends one of her pieces with the final line “If you live long enough, you become relevant”. After 40 years of trying to come out as a sissy-esque femme who accepts his nature and his physically male body, I may have lived long enough to attain relevancy, as genderqueer is trending. It isn’t all specifically my version of genderqueer, but yes, there are more and more people pushing away from the expectation of transgender “passing”, of asserting the vlable identity of their gender independent of their physiology or their presentation.
I spend a lot of time and energy complaining that MOGII / gender-variant communities are too much geared towards a kind of groupthink, where there is hostility and condemnation for anyone who doesn’t use the right words or echo the sentiments and viewpoints that have been embraced as the Right Way to Think of It. I shouldn’t let it surprise me. People within communities – any type of communities – tend to engage in the bandwagon-hopping because it is how human networks operate, it’s how the collective self, the “us” that forms a community, does its thinking. But I do, I grouse and snarl and complain about it, expecting all the individuals to examine ideas carefully and to be ready and willing to dissent from those around them and offer a different perspective at least a dozen times per week, and to quit chasing the bandwagons.
That may seem natural to me simply because I’ve been a loner for so long, a social hermit without a group. Like so many other MOGII kids, I was a misfit growing up. But in my case, coming out didn’t provide me with entry into a group of like-minded misfits. I sought it, fervently and desperately, wishing to belong. But because it didn’t happen for me, I suppose I developed less of the interactional patterns that lend themselves to bandwagon-jumping.
Which (I should keep in mind) means I’m not necessarily “a more independent thinker” so much as my tendency to independence has been an accident of not having found a place to fit in.
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When I first came out as an identity not yet on people’s maps, I was intrigued by the rapid spread of popular snippets, little ideas that raced through communities as trendy notions you were supposed to know about if you were cognizant. “Hey”, I said to myself, “if I could figure out what makes an idea catch on and take off like that, I could leverage that to get the word out, to spread awareness of people like me existing in the world!”
And although I was not particularly witty and clever nor anything akin to popular, I watched people’s behavior to see what caused them to latch on to one thing instead of another as an item to pass on as if it were the Most Brilliant Thing Ever.
Eventually I decided that there was no identifying characteristic that was making the phenomenon happen around any specific morsel of an idea. If anything, the near-emptiness in content made it slightly more likely to become the newest trend, rather than any element of profundity or exceptionally clever twist. What I saw were people listening to the crowd and trying to discern early on what was being embraced so they could embrace it a little bit before other people, who would then copy them by embracing it themselves.
That’s not strictly 100% true (some appreciation of quirkiness does seem to play a role), but by and large these trendy ideas were being popularized because they were popular. People were competing to see who could jump on the next bandwagon before it became fully crowded, and would jump to the next one when they could sense it, but it was bandwagon behavior at the root. People weren’t adopting these memes because they agreed with them or thought they were insightful or cute. They were adopting them because they were catching on.
One of my friends, a performance artist, ends one of her pieces with the final line “If you live long enough, you become relevant”. After 40 years of trying to come out as a sissy-esque femme who accepts his nature and his physically male body, I may have lived long enough to attain relevancy, as genderqueer is trending. It isn’t all specifically my version of genderqueer, but yes, there are more and more people pushing away from the expectation of transgender “passing”, of asserting the vlable identity of their gender independent of their physiology or their presentation.
I spend a lot of time and energy complaining that MOGII / gender-variant communities are too much geared towards a kind of groupthink, where there is hostility and condemnation for anyone who doesn’t use the right words or echo the sentiments and viewpoints that have been embraced as the Right Way to Think of It. I shouldn’t let it surprise me. People within communities – any type of communities – tend to engage in the bandwagon-hopping because it is how human networks operate, it’s how the collective self, the “us” that forms a community, does its thinking. But I do, I grouse and snarl and complain about it, expecting all the individuals to examine ideas carefully and to be ready and willing to dissent from those around them and offer a different perspective at least a dozen times per week, and to quit chasing the bandwagons.
That may seem natural to me simply because I’ve been a loner for so long, a social hermit without a group. Like so many other MOGII kids, I was a misfit growing up. But in my case, coming out didn’t provide me with entry into a group of like-minded misfits. I sought it, fervently and desperately, wishing to belong. But because it didn’t happen for me, I suppose I developed less of the interactional patterns that lend themselves to bandwagon-jumping.
Which (I should keep in mind) means I’m not necessarily “a more independent thinker” so much as my tendency to independence has been an accident of not having found a place to fit in.
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Friday, December 6, 2019
Review: GenderQueer by Maia Kobabe
There's another genderqueer memoir out now (since mid-spring, I guess, but I just obtained my copy); this one's a graphic novel, an autobiographical comic book from a talented comic book artist.
One thing I particularly like about Kobabe's account is that ey drives home the lack of simplicity in figuring out one's own gender identity. Kobabe didn't have the possibility of being genderqueer dangled in front of em as a possibility growing up. For years e knew e was different from the other students in eir class or in her culture, but did that mean e was a lesbian? (No that's not quite it); Transgender? (Not exactly, not precisely...) Well then what I am I?
It's messy and complicated when none of the choices you're familiar with resonate with you as the correct answer, and you have to figure it out all on your own. It's not like ordering from the takeout menu. If having an "etcetera" category is useful as an umbrella term, that convenience runs in both directions. It is important to be able to offer a welcome mat to people whose experience is only sort of akin to our own, people whose specific gender experience is not something we could have predicted and described in more precise language.
Kobabe's tale also points out the importance of retaining "genderqueer" as a not-fully-defined "etcetera" category. I've read several essays and memoirs from genderqueer people, not to mention oodles of posts on Facebook and elsewhere from people explaining what they mean by genderqueer. Until now I had not had the privilege of reading a genderqueer coming-of-age story from an asexual agender person, though. Nor had I read a first-hand account from anyone who did not identify as transgender who had strong physical dysphoria. Dysphoria is typically regarded as a definining characteristic of transgender people, even if it isn't required of everyone who identifies in that fashion. Kobabe explains a genderqueer identity with physical dysphoria. In eir case, it is not so much focused around the pain of failing to be identified as a specific other sex, but more around the pain of being stuck with being identified as belonging to a specific sex e doesn't embrace as eir identity.
Interestingly, as the number of genderqueer memoirs starts to accumulate, the subcategory that I tend to think of as the most typical thing that people have in mind when they say "genderqueer" -- being genderfluid -- has yet to be represented. Audrey MC wrote as an AMAB person who had transitioned to female and then found that too confining; Jacob Tobia wrote as a person who is male but identifies as a sissy. Which makes two of us, since that's effectively my identity as well (male, sissy/femme/girl), although we have material differences in our storylines. Now Maia Kobabe gives us a genderqueer story from an AFAB agender / asexual person.
So if you're genderfluid and have a memoir to lay on us, you should definitely get it out there.
Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe. 2019, Oni Press
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One thing I particularly like about Kobabe's account is that ey drives home the lack of simplicity in figuring out one's own gender identity. Kobabe didn't have the possibility of being genderqueer dangled in front of em as a possibility growing up. For years e knew e was different from the other students in eir class or in her culture, but did that mean e was a lesbian? (No that's not quite it); Transgender? (Not exactly, not precisely...) Well then what I am I?
It's messy and complicated when none of the choices you're familiar with resonate with you as the correct answer, and you have to figure it out all on your own. It's not like ordering from the takeout menu. If having an "etcetera" category is useful as an umbrella term, that convenience runs in both directions. It is important to be able to offer a welcome mat to people whose experience is only sort of akin to our own, people whose specific gender experience is not something we could have predicted and described in more precise language.
Kobabe's tale also points out the importance of retaining "genderqueer" as a not-fully-defined "etcetera" category. I've read several essays and memoirs from genderqueer people, not to mention oodles of posts on Facebook and elsewhere from people explaining what they mean by genderqueer. Until now I had not had the privilege of reading a genderqueer coming-of-age story from an asexual agender person, though. Nor had I read a first-hand account from anyone who did not identify as transgender who had strong physical dysphoria. Dysphoria is typically regarded as a definining characteristic of transgender people, even if it isn't required of everyone who identifies in that fashion. Kobabe explains a genderqueer identity with physical dysphoria. In eir case, it is not so much focused around the pain of failing to be identified as a specific other sex, but more around the pain of being stuck with being identified as belonging to a specific sex e doesn't embrace as eir identity.
Interestingly, as the number of genderqueer memoirs starts to accumulate, the subcategory that I tend to think of as the most typical thing that people have in mind when they say "genderqueer" -- being genderfluid -- has yet to be represented. Audrey MC wrote as an AMAB person who had transitioned to female and then found that too confining; Jacob Tobia wrote as a person who is male but identifies as a sissy. Which makes two of us, since that's effectively my identity as well (male, sissy/femme/girl), although we have material differences in our storylines. Now Maia Kobabe gives us a genderqueer story from an AFAB agender / asexual person.
So if you're genderfluid and have a memoir to lay on us, you should definitely get it out there.
Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe. 2019, Oni Press
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Saturday, November 30, 2019
The Amazon's Brother
I've uploaded my 1982-vintage unpublished book, The Amazon's Brother, to my theory web pages.
This was my first attempt to put these ideas into writing and reach people. Have an effect on the world.
Well, actually it wasn't my first. The first attempt was handwritten and was scribbled down in excitement, much of it written in the middle of the night. It didn't go over well; the most tangible outcome of that was being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.
So it's more accurate to say that The Amazon's Brother was my first serious attempt to say these things carefully with a considered effort to make sense to people.
The first half of it, titled "Sissyhood", was -- like my current book, GenderQueer -- an attempt to use my own experiences as an "Exhibit A" example. The second half, "Patriarchy", was social theory.
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This was my first attempt to put these ideas into writing and reach people. Have an effect on the world.
Well, actually it wasn't my first. The first attempt was handwritten and was scribbled down in excitement, much of it written in the middle of the night. It didn't go over well; the most tangible outcome of that was being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.
So it's more accurate to say that The Amazon's Brother was my first serious attempt to say these things carefully with a considered effort to make sense to people.
The first half of it, titled "Sissyhood", was -- like my current book, GenderQueer -- an attempt to use my own experiences as an "Exhibit A" example. The second half, "Patriarchy", was social theory.
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Saturday, November 23, 2019
Bookstores and Libraries and Community Centers, Oh My!
Having given approval to the formatted manuscript and the covers (back and front), I've now effectively switched effort-gears from "getting book published" to "getting people to read the book", even though it hasn't rolled off the Sunstone Books presses yet.
At this phase, where the book's availability is predicted but still slightly off in the future (January 2020, for benefit of the curious), the focus is on women's and gender studies programs at colleges, and LGBT community centers. I can be booked to speak at such venues even before it's possible to show up with a stack of the books on the table in front of me.
I actually did some of that in 2016-2017 when I had previously thought my book was on the verge of coming out. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Learned a lot, too. When I next have an opportunity to present, the presentation is going to be more closely focused on my specific type of gender identity and what it brings to the table. People like the "Gender 101" introductory material but I think I can encapsulate it in a much smaller portion of my talk.
Later, once the book can be purchased, I will add libraries and bookstores to the list of targets.
To be sure, a library or a bookstore, theoretically speaking, could also have a presenter or speaker before their book is available for purchase. But in the case of bookstores in particular, my research thus far indicates that they aren't much for "events", or at least not the kind of event that revolves around a gender-variant person discussing gender identity. Some of the new age and mystical / spiritual book stores do host events but they're most often focused on chakras and healing and the sale of gems and oils and other non-book substances that they market along with books on the subject. University bookstores generally don't do events at all, of any sort, and the remaining balance of independent bookstores mostly want the author's book to be available for purchase first.
Meanwhile, my publicist, John Sherman of Sherman & Company, is going to have an additional focus: getting my book reviewed. That, surprisingly enough (for me at least), is something that needs focused attention before the book's release date. Some important reviewers won't review a book once it comes out.
My day-job skills as a FileMaker database developer are again serving me well, just as they did for the querying process. For this publicity effort, I have 11614 records in my database (with many of them containing multiple contact persons to fire emails or snailmails or phone calls off to). Of those, 864 are college campus women's and/or gender studies programs; 412 are LGBT community centers, a mixture of on-campus and independent. Then I have 1552 academic libraries and a whopping 7263 public libraries, any and all of whom could theoretically acquire a copy of my book for their shelves. I have no experience pitching this possibility to libraries, but with any luck I will learn as I gain experience. Then I have 32 LGBT-focused bookstores (a declining phenomenon, unfortunately, although part of the decline may be that the subject matter is more mainstream and more often carried by mainstream bookstores), and 1351 other (generic) independent bookstores. The independent bookstores and libraries are dual-opportunity: they could book me to speak, and purchase copies of my book to stock and sell as well. Finally, I have 139 reviewers, bloggers, booktubers, and individual people who asked me to alert them when the book becomes available.
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At this phase, where the book's availability is predicted but still slightly off in the future (January 2020, for benefit of the curious), the focus is on women's and gender studies programs at colleges, and LGBT community centers. I can be booked to speak at such venues even before it's possible to show up with a stack of the books on the table in front of me.
I actually did some of that in 2016-2017 when I had previously thought my book was on the verge of coming out. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Learned a lot, too. When I next have an opportunity to present, the presentation is going to be more closely focused on my specific type of gender identity and what it brings to the table. People like the "Gender 101" introductory material but I think I can encapsulate it in a much smaller portion of my talk.
Later, once the book can be purchased, I will add libraries and bookstores to the list of targets.
To be sure, a library or a bookstore, theoretically speaking, could also have a presenter or speaker before their book is available for purchase. But in the case of bookstores in particular, my research thus far indicates that they aren't much for "events", or at least not the kind of event that revolves around a gender-variant person discussing gender identity. Some of the new age and mystical / spiritual book stores do host events but they're most often focused on chakras and healing and the sale of gems and oils and other non-book substances that they market along with books on the subject. University bookstores generally don't do events at all, of any sort, and the remaining balance of independent bookstores mostly want the author's book to be available for purchase first.
Meanwhile, my publicist, John Sherman of Sherman & Company, is going to have an additional focus: getting my book reviewed. That, surprisingly enough (for me at least), is something that needs focused attention before the book's release date. Some important reviewers won't review a book once it comes out.
My day-job skills as a FileMaker database developer are again serving me well, just as they did for the querying process. For this publicity effort, I have 11614 records in my database (with many of them containing multiple contact persons to fire emails or snailmails or phone calls off to). Of those, 864 are college campus women's and/or gender studies programs; 412 are LGBT community centers, a mixture of on-campus and independent. Then I have 1552 academic libraries and a whopping 7263 public libraries, any and all of whom could theoretically acquire a copy of my book for their shelves. I have no experience pitching this possibility to libraries, but with any luck I will learn as I gain experience. Then I have 32 LGBT-focused bookstores (a declining phenomenon, unfortunately, although part of the decline may be that the subject matter is more mainstream and more often carried by mainstream bookstores), and 1351 other (generic) independent bookstores. The independent bookstores and libraries are dual-opportunity: they could book me to speak, and purchase copies of my book to stock and sell as well. Finally, I have 139 reviewers, bloggers, booktubers, and individual people who asked me to alert them when the book becomes available.
———————
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Friday, November 15, 2019
Friday, November 8, 2019
TERF Wars (Part Two)
If you’re a radical feminist and you’ve raised objections to transgender women being in certain women-only spaces – separatist feminist groups, perhaps, or other events designated for women only – please do me a favor and list the times and places where you have written about or spoken about transgender people as a challenge or a noncompliant response to patriarchal definitions of sex and gender.
If you can’t—if you never refer to transgender people except to accuse transgender women of invading women’s or feminists’ space—you’re a bigot. You could easily enough define a group or an event as being for people who have endured the experience of being, being seen as, and being treated as women and girls for a lifetime, without rejecting transgender women’s self-identification as women.
More to the point, radical feminism in particular has identified masculine behaviors, masculine priorities, masculine value systems, and the rest of what constitutes the identity “man” in this patriarchal society, as politically and socially harmful. Radical feminists have shown that these personal, individual-level traits and characteristics are reflected and writ large in our institutions, where they represent a threat to all life on this planet and are responsible for imperialism and colonialism, slavery and racism, hierchical authority and autocratic concentration of power, the obsession with control and the fondness for coercion, and the myriad forms of oppression that our species has suffered from for millennia.
In light of that, it’s extremely difficult to shrug away your complete lack of recognition and interest when significant numbers of male-born people have tossed aside the identity “man” and opted to join women instead.
Radical feminism has indicted males for being men. It has refused to excuse male behavior as natural and therefore inevitable. I grew up hearing this. I grew up nodding along with it, agreeing, because I, too, found these behaviors and attitudes and values detestable and inexcusably wrong. I grew up male. It’s the body in which I was born.
I’m not asking you to call me “woman”. I’m demanding that you recognize my situation, regardless of what label gets attached to it. You’ve demanded that males change, that they cease to behave as men. You need to come to some kind of terms with males who reject an identity as men, since a hypothetical success in your overall endeavor implies exactly that outcome, does it not?
Surely you do not believe that someone born male has an inherent nature different from your own (and inherently patriarchal in its effects)? If you think the set of social problems associated with men that feminism has identified are inherent in people born male, if you think patriarchy is that nature writ large, you’ve declared an Enemy. You’ve declared us inherently evil, our presence intolerable on a biological level. If that’s actually what you think, feel, and believe, then...
Own it, embrace the vision as espoused by Valerie Solanas, but be honest about it and where you’re coming from.
But most of you, you don’t. Most of you aren’t in this space, this world-view. You just aren’t inclined to point fingers at any sisters who might be; you don’t want to divide women from women. As I said last week, when I was blasting transgender people who only speak of radical feminists in order to label them TERFs,
Most radical feminists do not hate males categorically, nor do they regard anyone or anything as their enemy. This is obvious to me from reading and listening. But be that as it may, “most” is not “all” and you do have among your tribe those whose hatred for patriarchy and for the ways and behaviors and institutions of men goes on to exist as a categorical hatred for male people, and, with it, the belief that we are innately your enemy and that it is inherenly in our nature that you cannot trust us. You know it as well as I do; you’ve heard your sisters say so just as I have. Of course a good feminist has better things to occupy her time and energy than to spend it criticizing her sisters and being divisive. If legitimate and understandable anger gets warped into hatred sometimes, so what? Look at all the people and institutions that have chosen to treat radical feminism as their enemy! Yes, I get that. But that does not mean you should join your voices to theirs, and it does not mean you don’t really and truly need to come to terms with our existence.
By “come to terms” I mean in a non-kneejerk fashion, a nuanced consideration of transgender women as women, of antipatriarchal males as people who are not men, of people assigned and treated as male being activists who speak within the feminist tradition.
Gender is socially defined; that process of defining is very much a PLURAL process — that is to say, Joe Jones and Sue Smith do not each define gender inside their own heads as if in a vacuum, but rather instead they do so in interaction with the culture of which they are a part.
Out of all the Joe Joneses and Sue Smiths of the world, there are some for whom it is true and correct that WHO THEY ARE is at odds with the gender expectations of the world around them but the plumbing, the bodies themselves, is not at issue, because FOR THEM gender as they apprehend it in their minds leaves room for them to be who they are (despite being at odds with expectations) and be physically the sex that they were born as. Then there are some for whom gender and plumbing are irreconcilable; WHO THEY ARE is not only at odds with other folks' expectations but also cannot be apprehended in their minds as making sense in the bodies in which they were born.
In between, perhaps, are those who might accept that in some hypothetical alternative reality, where their biological sex would NOT have the social meaning it has to everyone around them that it does in this reality, who they are might NOT be at odds with the world's gender expectations, but that's not the world they get to live in.
You are perhaps unimpressed with the transgender phenomenon because you perceive it as people hopping the fence and fitting in on the other side, leaving the fence intact. I understand that sentiment too, but unless you intend to point fingers at each and every person who makes concessions to the things they don’t have the power to change, it’s an uncharitable jump from there to rejection and condemnation of transgender people. It harkens back to the 1970s and the hostility of some early feminist activists towards women who wore makeup, lived as stay-at-home moms, or married wealth and live ensconced in jewels and furs as some male’s trophy. You outgrew that. Outgrow this. People do what they decide they must do.
Aside from which, you’re way out of date if you think of transgender people strictly in binary “male to female” (or “female to male”) terms and the imperative to “pass”.
It’s just a matter of time before you have to take a principled stand. Phyllis Schlafly was born female and Camille Paglia was both born female and chooses to identify as a feminist. I think I’m not being unfair to posit myself as a better feminist ally than either of them.
———————
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If you can’t—if you never refer to transgender people except to accuse transgender women of invading women’s or feminists’ space—you’re a bigot. You could easily enough define a group or an event as being for people who have endured the experience of being, being seen as, and being treated as women and girls for a lifetime, without rejecting transgender women’s self-identification as women.
More to the point, radical feminism in particular has identified masculine behaviors, masculine priorities, masculine value systems, and the rest of what constitutes the identity “man” in this patriarchal society, as politically and socially harmful. Radical feminists have shown that these personal, individual-level traits and characteristics are reflected and writ large in our institutions, where they represent a threat to all life on this planet and are responsible for imperialism and colonialism, slavery and racism, hierchical authority and autocratic concentration of power, the obsession with control and the fondness for coercion, and the myriad forms of oppression that our species has suffered from for millennia.
In light of that, it’s extremely difficult to shrug away your complete lack of recognition and interest when significant numbers of male-born people have tossed aside the identity “man” and opted to join women instead.
Radical feminism has indicted males for being men. It has refused to excuse male behavior as natural and therefore inevitable. I grew up hearing this. I grew up nodding along with it, agreeing, because I, too, found these behaviors and attitudes and values detestable and inexcusably wrong. I grew up male. It’s the body in which I was born.
I’m not asking you to call me “woman”. I’m demanding that you recognize my situation, regardless of what label gets attached to it. You’ve demanded that males change, that they cease to behave as men. You need to come to some kind of terms with males who reject an identity as men, since a hypothetical success in your overall endeavor implies exactly that outcome, does it not?
Surely you do not believe that someone born male has an inherent nature different from your own (and inherently patriarchal in its effects)? If you think the set of social problems associated with men that feminism has identified are inherent in people born male, if you think patriarchy is that nature writ large, you’ve declared an Enemy. You’ve declared us inherently evil, our presence intolerable on a biological level. If that’s actually what you think, feel, and believe, then...
Own it, embrace the vision as espoused by Valerie Solanas, but be honest about it and where you’re coming from.
But most of you, you don’t. Most of you aren’t in this space, this world-view. You just aren’t inclined to point fingers at any sisters who might be; you don’t want to divide women from women. As I said last week, when I was blasting transgender people who only speak of radical feminists in order to label them TERFs,
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.
Most radical feminists do not hate males categorically, nor do they regard anyone or anything as their enemy. This is obvious to me from reading and listening. But be that as it may, “most” is not “all” and you do have among your tribe those whose hatred for patriarchy and for the ways and behaviors and institutions of men goes on to exist as a categorical hatred for male people, and, with it, the belief that we are innately your enemy and that it is inherenly in our nature that you cannot trust us. You know it as well as I do; you’ve heard your sisters say so just as I have. Of course a good feminist has better things to occupy her time and energy than to spend it criticizing her sisters and being divisive. If legitimate and understandable anger gets warped into hatred sometimes, so what? Look at all the people and institutions that have chosen to treat radical feminism as their enemy! Yes, I get that. But that does not mean you should join your voices to theirs, and it does not mean you don’t really and truly need to come to terms with our existence.
By “come to terms” I mean in a non-kneejerk fashion, a nuanced consideration of transgender women as women, of antipatriarchal males as people who are not men, of people assigned and treated as male being activists who speak within the feminist tradition.
Gender is socially defined; that process of defining is very much a PLURAL process — that is to say, Joe Jones and Sue Smith do not each define gender inside their own heads as if in a vacuum, but rather instead they do so in interaction with the culture of which they are a part.
Out of all the Joe Joneses and Sue Smiths of the world, there are some for whom it is true and correct that WHO THEY ARE is at odds with the gender expectations of the world around them but the plumbing, the bodies themselves, is not at issue, because FOR THEM gender as they apprehend it in their minds leaves room for them to be who they are (despite being at odds with expectations) and be physically the sex that they were born as. Then there are some for whom gender and plumbing are irreconcilable; WHO THEY ARE is not only at odds with other folks' expectations but also cannot be apprehended in their minds as making sense in the bodies in which they were born.
In between, perhaps, are those who might accept that in some hypothetical alternative reality, where their biological sex would NOT have the social meaning it has to everyone around them that it does in this reality, who they are might NOT be at odds with the world's gender expectations, but that's not the world they get to live in.
You are perhaps unimpressed with the transgender phenomenon because you perceive it as people hopping the fence and fitting in on the other side, leaving the fence intact. I understand that sentiment too, but unless you intend to point fingers at each and every person who makes concessions to the things they don’t have the power to change, it’s an uncharitable jump from there to rejection and condemnation of transgender people. It harkens back to the 1970s and the hostility of some early feminist activists towards women who wore makeup, lived as stay-at-home moms, or married wealth and live ensconced in jewels and furs as some male’s trophy. You outgrew that. Outgrow this. People do what they decide they must do.
Aside from which, you’re way out of date if you think of transgender people strictly in binary “male to female” (or “female to male”) terms and the imperative to “pass”.
It’s just a matter of time before you have to take a principled stand. Phyllis Schlafly was born female and Camille Paglia was both born female and chooses to identify as a feminist. I think I’m not being unfair to posit myself as a better feminist ally than either of them.
———————
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————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Friday, November 1, 2019
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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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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————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, October 26, 2019
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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————————
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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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, October 19, 2019
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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Friday, October 11, 2019
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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, October 5, 2019
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:
-- 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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, September 28, 2019
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:
"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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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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Saturday, September 21, 2019
Transition is a Transitive Verb
On one of the Facebook transgender boards, someone writes:
That's the classic model of transgender, often called "binary transgender".
On a different transgender board, someone else complains:
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.
And I've had transgender people tell me, as they've told the person who identifies as "nonbinary transgender", that we don't count:
... and other transgender people have informed me that I am seeking the impossible or even that I'm a threat:
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):
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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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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Friday, September 13, 2019
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: ]
/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."
-----
responses:
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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
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."
-----
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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Thursday, September 5, 2019
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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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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Thursday, August 29, 2019
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:
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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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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Friday, August 23, 2019
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 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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Saturday, August 17, 2019
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.
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.
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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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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