Critical Mass: Chicken or Egg Questions

In order to get published, promoted, distributed, represented, featured, etc, you first need to have a critical mass of people paying attention to what you're saying. People begin taking you seriously enough to pay attention to you once they realize that other people, not just themselves, are encountering what you've written or said, which in turn is largely dependent on being published, promoted, distributed, etc.

This is the "platform" conundrum I am up against. Publishers (and literary agents too) want to know if the authors who query them already have a built-in audience of people. People who read their blogs, who watch their YouTube videos, who read and follow their tweets and retweet them, who come to hear them lecture.

I have had some of them informing me that getting a book published is no longer a mechanism for reaching people with your ideas. It is something that you do when you are already successfully reaching people with your ideas.



I have a prepared "about the author" statement that I include in my queries when the instructions for submitting to them say to give some background information about yourself, your prior publications (if any), your education (if relevant), position of employment or expertise (ditto), and, yes, your platform. At the end of it, after describing my academic background and history of being a gender activist and so forth, I have this:

About the Author's "Platform" — Many literary agencies and publishers, when they request the nonfiction author's bio, are primarily interested in knowing who will buy the book based on the author's reputation and stature in the field. This isn't that kind of memoir. No one (except maybe my Mommy) will read it simply because I'm the author; the book is interesting (and marketable) as a "representative" or "illustrative" memoir, the story of what it is like to be a particular TYPE of person (genderqueer, in this case).

Yes, I'm aware that that's probably not what you meant by "platform", that you're less interested in whether I'm a household name than in whether or not I have a following of potential readers and purchasers of my book. Well, I blog weekly; in this day and age, no one leaves comments directly on blog pages, but I post links to my new blog entries in a couple dozen gender-centric Facebook groups and I have a modest but supportive audience who follow me there.

The whole situation is frustrating, but I believe it makes it difficult, not impossible, to get traction. I keep reminding myself that I have twice had a publishing contract for this book, and if it had indeed gone into print I would have reached many people and more people would pay attention to the things that I say and write because I was a published author on the subject.

It's also useful to remind myself that only some people will not pay serious attention to a person's thoughts and ideas until and unless they believe that a lot of other people are also being exposed to what that person thinks. There are, fortunately, people who will get quite excited about or supportive of a line of thought that "clicks" for them, no matter where it comes from or who else is likely to be exposed to it.

Getting to critical mass is to some extent a random thing, a matter of chance. The longer I keep doing this, the more likely it is that my writings will affect someone who has something of a platform of their own, either in the sense of having the ears and eyes of a lot of people or in the sense of knowing some specific key personnel whose attention to this project could help propel it forward. That would, of course, include literary agents and publishers, who certainly possess the power to make my book a success.


Meanwhile, none of the other modalities of communicating with people make more sense to pursue instead of focusing on trying to get my book published. I already have a blog; a small handful of people read it and I don't know how I would increase that. I already post links to my new blog posts all over Facebook, and that's one reason I have the handful of readers that I do have, but again I don't know any magic tricks for drawing more attention to them. I have a Twitter account and I tweet about my blog posts, but I'm a clumsy and clueless twitterer and I'm not likely to suddenly become adept at expressing myself usefully in postage-stamp sized textmorsels. I've addressed some groups, giving presentations and leading discussions, but it's not easy getting booked when one has no authoritative position or official role and does not have a book published. I've even made a few YouTube videos, but they don't tend to pull in people any more rapidly than my blog posts do. And meanwhile, I've got a book, already written, so it kind of makes sense to continue to try to get it into print.

(Be all that as it may, if you have suggestions for how to get more people to tune into my thoughts and words, or for more useful ways in which for me to render them and make them available, by all means give them)

I probably should hire someone to make a home page for me, perhaps with the table of contents (i.e., "Index of all Blog Posts", see below) embedded in it. Or at least find out if I could afford it, etc. I could do something along those lines myself, but graphic design is not my strong suit and my HTML skills are pre-CSS, HTML 1.1 edition stuff at best.


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Betwixt the Clergy and the Sissy-Femme Males

In this society, morality is gender-specific. Good and evil (or good and bad, which are the words actually used) have different flavors and dynamics, as well as different manifestations, depending on sex.

You see, for little girls, good is an active state, a condition of maintaining self-control and being true to one's primal nice nature. Bad is passive, relaxing sinfully into a weak uncontrolled state, like wetting your pants instead of keeping a tight grip on things. Thus, the bad girl is remonstrated and told in one way or another to discipline herself or else lose social approval and be held in contempt.

Meanwhile, for little boys, good is a passive state, where one refrains from this or that, does not do those things that little boys are inclined by nature to do, and bad is actively taking control of the situation, insisting on being true to your nasty little-boy nature, like reaching down, unzipping your fly, and taking a piss against the side of the building. Bad boys are intimidated into acquiescence and told, in essence, to surrender or be punished with considerable wrath.


— from The Amazon's Brother, my 1982-vintage attempt to put these thoughts in writing. (unpublished)

It is not necessary, if you happen to be male, to think of yourself as a girl, or as someone who is like the girls, etc, in order to develop and maintain a sense of yourself as actively, affirmatively good. After all, that's not the chronological order in which it happened for me! But if you do so, you would tend to find that you've largely joined the company of girls, as far as this attitude and outlook are concerned, while differentiating yourself from the majority of boys.

But even that is not necessarily going to provoke you into identifying with the girls, although I did. It is not necessarily going to cause you to react with defiant pride if taunted about behaving like a girl or for holding viewpoints and priorities that they hear the girls giving voice to. Maybe instead you will get defensive and angry and toss back a litany of things you've said or done that girls don't, or recite a list of masculine traits and accomplishments.

But that doesn't mean it isn't gender-polarized territory. It is.



As a student in the early elementary grades, I was taunted by the other boys for apparently being afraid of the authorities, the teachers and parents whose rules and approval were the operating definition of "good". They were wrong about it being driven by fear, but it was certainly true that "good", at that time in my life, mostly had to do with allegiance to adult standards and definitions of what is desirable and approval-worthy.

That didn't last. I outgrew the blind loyalty to the system and its authorities soon enough, but instead of discarding all interest in the "good", I began to question what was good, continuing to take it all quite seriously, pondering moral and ethical and spiritual matters, seeking insights and answers.

Does doing, this, does pursing "good" make a person a better kind of person that someone who doesn't? Well, if I'd remained at the level of blind loyalty to the established powers that be and the people who were nominally in charge of things, continuing to define "good" in terms of obedience to them, I would like to think that most of you reading this would say "no, in fact it could make you a dangerous person, an obedient little Nazi who never questions what you're told". So, given that, does the entire situation get fully rescued by abandoning that blind loyalty and becoming invested in discerning a sense of what is "good" for one's self? Does pursuing "good" mostly equate to putting a lot of energy into formulating an excuse to think of one's self as better than others? It's undeniably wrapped up in wanting to think of ourselves as good; do we end up with a vested interest in thinking of ourselves as better people than others?

If it's worth our time to contemplate what "good" actually is, it seems worthwhile to also ask whether going around being one of the "actively good" is itself an intrinsically good thing. I would like to think it is at least an "OK thing", since I have a lifelong sense of identity wrapped up in it, but I do agree that we're a mixed bag and often do socially destructive things, and at a minimum we should abandon any attitudes that we as "actively good" individuals may still harbor about being better than others, and just accept that it's our way of being in the world and, if it makes us happy, it is its own reward.


Yes, obviously this whole business of pursing the "good" is a preoccupation that has an occupation—the clergy—associated with it.

To what extent is there a tie-in between sissy femme girlish males, on the one hand, and males of the clergy, on the other? Well, the clergy is not exactly a repository for males who identify openly and specifically as being "like the women and girls", as feminine people, that's obvious too. But by this point you should be wondering why it isn't, or why it isn't more of one than it is.


• Other males who aspired to being actively good in this fashion may have juxtaposed themselves against what other males were doing or what they were like, and not compared themselves to girls and women, even if they did perceive that a lot of girls and women had the same interest in being actively good.

• I've encountered a widespread attitude in theological and philosophical thinking that girls' and women's goodness somehow does not "count". Sometimes this is expressed in terms of lack of temptation or lack of opportunity and power; sometimes it is expressed more as women having a "nature" that automatically makes them good, as if female people were on moral autopilot and that this kind of goodness doesn't quality as a character attribute. And there's a somewhat dismissive lack of interest in what they do anyhow.

• Surrounding the clergy is the church, of course, and the congregation of our churches tends to have a strong female spine, with more enthusiastic female participation. It would be a rather thin church if the female people all dropped out. But the official church leadership has generally been male.

I should confess something from childhood days: in aspiring to exhibit the characteristics that adults valued and to constrain my own behavior to be in accordance with the rules that the adults set, I was expecting to get ahead. I was demonstrating maturity, I was being a good citizen, and it was implicitly promised if not quite spelled out in writing that the reins of society would be placed in our hands, whereas the kids who misbehaved and were disruptive and who constituted a discipline problem, they'd be left behind. I bring this up here because I think the same implicit promise was held out to the girls. But long before adulthood, girls and women may come to perceive themselves as having been sold a bill of goods on this whole "being good" thing, and hence they are no longer expecting a payoff. (If and when they end up "in charge" and "holding the reins", it tends to taste and feel a lot more like responsibility and duty than power and privilege). But the males may be more inclined to still be expecting a reward for their goodness, and the clergy offers some social prestige and stature.

• Masculinizing the good. Picture Mel Gibson being all self-righteous and oozing as much divine testosterone as possible, being authoritarian and aggressive as he embodies the active good. The allegiance of the males who get to the point of exercising some authority as clergy is harnessed to the conventional male world, with a lot of reward made available for throwing the girls, women, and feminine traits themselves under the bus and ignoring female people's conventional and loyal orientation towards the active good.

• Vindictiveness! I've seen strong strands of this poison too, actively retaliatory attitudes towards women from male clergy. A lot of it has the same contours as bitterness of the Nice Guys™, and I can't help but suspect that the accusations of being evil temptresses and vile oozing soul-sucking repositories of wickedness and all that tie back to the heterosexual sissy-femme dismay at discovering that the actively good girls often prefer the actively bad boys.

Hence, when we think of males in the clergy, we're often more likely to think first of Cotton Mather condemning witches than to conjure up an image of a gentle male who is trying to be good and whose personality and behaviors are diametrically offset from masculinity.

But I suspect a lot of us end up there, although damn few are inclined to speak from the pulpit about gender, masculinity, and their personal trajectories that took them there.


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Singing the Sissy Femme Blues

This song could get me in trouble.



I've occasionally mentioned that at the time I was coming to the realization of my gender identity, and outed myself on campus and to the world (to the extent that I could), I was a music major at the University of New Mexico, hoping to hone my skills as a composer, songwriter, pianist, and singer.

There I was, wanting to explain being a gender invert, wanting to educate the world, wanting to communicate. So, with music among my available tools, I started writing songs about it.

This song is straight out of the blues tradition, a howl, or a whine if you prefer, bewailing what it's like to be male, femme, and attracted to women.

It's an easy target for accusations of insensitive and unwoke political incorrectness: the singer apparently wants to be congratulated for not treating women as sex objects like so many other males do (yeesh, like according women the minimal courtesy of treating them as humans instead of sex toys should win him some kind of prize?), while using objectifying language about female anatomy to do so (yeah, folks, content warning), and he dares to criticize women for reacting to male people in general based on the behavior of males as a class, as if that were somehow unreasonable.

Yeah, well that's a big part of why singing songs about it isn't the ideal mechanism. Too much of this gender situation requires careful and precisely nuanced explanation. I soon realized I needed to write about this, that I was best off depending on my skills as a writer.

I am, of course, well aware that the behaviors of both women and men are structured by the social situation, that none of us behave in a vaccuum but instead face penalties for behaviors that depart from the imposed pattern. I am, of course, complaining about those same kinds of patterns as they get imposed on male people, the whole gender polarization thing.

It's hard to express complex political analysis within the lyrics to a song.

But the blues are not about justifying the reasons for having the blues. The blues are about howling, saying that this is how it feels. And that's something people should know. Analyses of who is entitled to feel this or think that, or theories about blame and causality and so on certainly have their place, but if you want to understand social phenomena, you need to get a sense of how the people in various identities and social locations feel.


Without further ado... Another One © Allan Hunter 1981



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Sex Versus Gender

Marie, a transgender woman, does not like my distinction between sex and gender.

I identify as a person who has both a sex and a gender, the first of which ("male") I explain as my physiological or morphological physical structure and the second ("sissy" or "femme" or "girl") is who I am as a person, which isn't defined by my body or its parts.

Marie objects to the way I speak about physiological sex. She considers herself to be both wholly a woman and fully female, but has not sought out bottom surgery and says that if I establish that my sex is male on the basis of having physical male parts, that language could be used to say that she is male because she has a penis.

Is there room for us both?


"Biological sex is ALSO a social construct"

Marie says that "biological sex" is a social construct, just as gender is. She brings up the existence of intersex people to illustrate how the notion that there are two biological sexes is not an empirical physical fact at all. She says all this as a prelude to dismissing sex as different from gender: if they're both social constructs, and gender is defined as social, sex isn't a different thing, it's all gender. (And hers, she says, is all female; she goes on to state that I sound confused about what I am; I don't consider myself confused at all though).

What does it mean when we say something is a social construct? It means that we are relying on definitions that we've learned socially in order to interpret the thing, whatever the thing may be, so our interpretations have those socially learned definitions stirred into them, they aren't just inherently there in the "thing in itself". The implication of saying that something is a "social construct" is that it could be constructed differently — that whatever inherent characteristics may be attached to the "thing in itself" could be interpreted different if we had different socially learned definitions to apply to that thing.

In the 1950s our culture had many shared beliefs about gender differences that by 1970 had been brought into question, most centrally by the feminist movement. So here we have elements of femininity (and masculinity) that were originally seen as built-in but later seen as socially constructed, and the possibility that they could be constructed quite differently was widely recognized.

Are our notions of "biological sex" as loosely tied to anything that isn't similarly flexible and arbitrary?

I personally don't think so. I can't know for sure, since I can't magically get my head outside of socially learned concepts, and this is an important point, this lack of certaintly, but my strong suspicion is that if we could indeed magically "reset" social beliefs about sex over and over again in random ways and then have the resulting culture try to describe human bodies, we'd end up with descriptions that we would recognize as "male" and "female", with the changes mostly around the handling of variations and exceptions. In other words, I do think our culture's insistent shoehorning of people into two categories and denying variations and exceptions is a social construct, but I don't think it's likely that any of those alternative-reality resets would fail to come up with the observation that for the most part people tend to fall into two primary categories based exclusively on their physical morphology.

The descriptions and terms might be different but we'd still recognize them as descriptions of the human body and the sexes that we know about. Perhaps they would speak of whether the urethra comes down the barrel of the tingly erogenous tissue or instead comes to a separate opening farther below, and with that as the initial distinction they would note that most (although not all) of the people with the separate urethral opening have a comparatively small tingly-erogenous-tissue organ with much of it embedded below the surface of the pelvic muscles, and that most (but not all) of the people with the urethra-down-the-barrel configuration have two glandular masses at the base surrounded by a loose envelope of tissue, whereas the majority (albeit not all) of those with the separate opening have similar glandular masses internally located and significantly higher up, and so on and so forth.

Scientists often use what they call a "double blind" test, which means neither the researchers nor the participants know how previous participants have categorized or classified something. I believe that, within the limitations of different words and terms being used or created, human observers stripped of all our current cultural beliefs about what the sexes are would describe two (not five, not fourteen) primary structural configurations as the main pattern, plus a double handful of variations and exceptions. And those two primary patterns would be quite recognizable to us as what we call "sex".

Gender is different. Almost any component of gender is arguble as to whether it would reliably show up again and again if we did these magic "resets": aggression and adversarial tendencies? nurturing and caregiving behaviors? attention span differences? verbal fluency? math skills? social awareness and facilitation of the social peace? visual-spatial skills? visual sexual erotic responsiveness? We don't know whether these would necessarily be observed to be sex-linked differences or if our culture's beliefs about them have more to do with history and various ideologies and prescriptive attitudes. That is why we call these things gender and distinguish them from sex, which is the "thing" to which they are attached by social definition and connotation and so forth.



The Female Penis

I do see why Marie wouldn't appreciate being told that insofar as her body includes a penis, it is a male body. Marie says she is female, therefore this is a female penis. "There have been enough gatekeepers going around saying I don't count as trans unless I intend to have bottom surgery, and I don't see how all that gatekeeping is making things better for anyone", she says.

Suzanne interrupts to explain that she is the proud owner of a clitoris, not a penis. It was incorrectly described as a penis when she was born, and some people might still call it that if they didn't know any better, but it's a clitoris; it's hers and she's female. She has a friend, Malcolm, a transgender man, who has a mangina. "The identity of a person's body parts is a matter for the person to decide. Defining something as a vagina or a penis or whatever, that's socially constructed along with everything else, OK?"

It does seem like it would be useful when considering questions like "what sex is this person?" or "what organ is that?" to ask the question "according to whom?" That would enable me to say that I am male, not because my body is inherently male but because I have classified it that way myself, without imposing an unwanted definition on Marie, who is female, who classifies her body in that fashion.

It also lets us reference altercasting, of which I have spoken before. Altercasting is the assignment of identity by other people. Transgender people tend to speak in terms of having been "assigned male at birth" (AMAB) or "assigned female at birth" (AFAB). That's actually not a process that occurs just once (when someone is born); instead people continue to assign other people to a sex (and to other identity-factors). When some (or most) other people tend to altercast a person in a way that contradicts the identity that they claim for themselves, that creates a tension, usually an unpleasant one, whether we designate it as "dysphoria" or not, whether we identify as "transgender" or not.

Intersex people have tended to get altercast as one of the two binary sexes, and then their physical divergence or variations from the norm for that sex become treated as something wrong and in need of fixing. This coercive and invasive practice destroys physically healthy tissue for the sake of imposing an altercast physical identity on people without their consent, perhaps the ultimate form of this tension. But any of us may have reason to interpret our physical morphology in a way different from how others have done. I'm not trying to take that away from any of us.

The tension I experienced in my lifetime has not been because I disputed the categorization of my body as male, but because I was at odds with the additional meanings that are culturally associated with maleness. Gender. I was being misgendered but without being mis-sexed.


A New Color in the Spectrum

I don't identify as transgender. I don't consider myself to be a female person who was incorrectly identified as a male person. I consider myself to be a male person who has correctly been recognized as a male person.

But there is a huge component of characteristics, behaviors, personality attributes, priorities and choices and stuff, that are assumed about a person who is perceived as male. These were wrong. My constellation of attributes and characteristics were recognized by others as being more like what tends to be assumed about people who are classified as female. They said so. I saw it myself, I clearly fit in with the girls, not the boys. These traits had far more to do with who I was, as a person, than my biological plumbing did. Other people made an issue of it, it wasn't "normal". Meanwhile, whenever I was treated as self-evidently one of the boys, I experienced it as being misgendered, that's not who I was. So I, too, made an issue of my difference.

It's not the same situation that Marie is in. Similar, but not the same. It's something else. I'm a gender invert. I'm an authentic person. I have authentic political and social concerns. They are different concerns than those of Marie and other transgender women, although we have things in common and should be supportive of each other. Clearly we're in the greater LGBTQIA (or MOGII *) spectrum together and should be allies.

But I will not be silenced as the price of Marie's comfort level.


* MOGII = "minority orientation, gender identity, and intersex"


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In a Southern Small-Engine Repair Shop

Went with my Dad. The gasoline-powered log splitter wouldn't crank up. I was down visiting family for the Christmas season. I helped him hook it to the trailer hitch on the pickup and then rode along.

"Hey there Earl. Doing as well as could be expected, thank you. Oh, because it's my first Christmas without my wife of 60 years. Yes it's hard. I keep thinking it will get easier but not so far."

"Sorry to hear that, Ray. I lost my own wife three 'n a half years ago and even now I hear something and think it's her in the next room. Yeah, exactly. Hurts fresh each time. So, you got anyone come by to spend Christmas with? It's not good to be by yourself all alone."

"This is my son Allan from New York, he came down and has been with me. And my daughter and her husband, and her daughter with her husband and children, they all came for Christmas, and I fixed a baked ham and tried my hand at biscuits, but I just can't get them to come out the way she could."

The proprietor and a couple of his workers and the previous customer all continued to catch up with my Dad, discussing the weather, the commercialization of Christmas, and whether their respective cable channels were going to cover the Clemson v Notre Dame bowl game and whether the suspended players would make a difference.

All this before explaining what brought us here: "I pulled and pulled on the starter cord, got the choke set and the fuel line turned on, but not so much as a cough out of it. Now, Earl, you do know if you go out there and give it a yank and it goes 'pucka pucka pucka' and starts right up, I'm gonna have to say a few words that the preacher wouldn't approve of."



I gave a nod and a wave when mentioned, but throughout the conversation I was feeling aware that I could not have done this. I don't mean I couldn't have brought in a piece of equipment and asked to have them look at it, but I would have approached them politely and they'd have politely listened to my description and jotted down a work ticket.

It's not that I'm a snob or that I'm unwilling to open up and talk. It's also not really accurate that these fellows were doing some kind of competitive "manly men" contest and actively trying to disqualify guys who don't measure up. If anything, during all the times in my life when I've entered all-male social environments like this, they WANT me to belong, they're squirmy and uncomfortable if I DON'T fit in; they would welcome me if possible, but they would be waiting expectantly for me to send the appropriate signals, the boy shorthand that somehow reassures them that I'm like them, that I'm one of them and don't think of myself as different.

Except of course that I do. There's some male expression of being knowledgable and confident and competent in a certain way, and a willingness to pretend to more of that than you actually have, an amusing pretense that usually isn't done seriously, a pretense that's sort of an in-joke where you let the other guys see through it; there's a rhythm and a meter to it, and I've never been good at it, never learned how to play. I often see myself reflected back as they tend to see me, prissy and standoffish, moderately oblivious, awkward and perhaps hostile or more often / more likely just not companionably at ease with them.

There's a lifetime history of feeling uncomfortable in groups of males, of not understanding what is being asked of me. I think it's better now because I have my own confidence and they do like confidence. But they don't find my behavioral nuances reassuring and comforting. I'm haunted by that lifetime history, too. I step into rooms like these and immediately think "Here we go again".



My Dad always engaged with me on a different channel. He's never excluded me for not being one of the boys. When he is in this kind of context himself, it always sounds to my ears like he's speaking a second language, with impressive fluency, but it's not really who he is natively either. I've found it difficult to get him to talk about fitting or not fitting in among males. When he discusses it at all, he sees in in terms of class and education, of himself the guy with the physics doctorate not being a pompous intellectual. I can't get him talking about whether he felt isolated growing up or whether diving into an intense college curriculum felt like an escape from a world he was never going to really fit into or if he actually identified with the boys and the brainy stuff was an extra, an add-on element rather than a fundamental difference that set him apart either to himself or to the other kids.

Unlike my Mom, he never read my book. I think he read some earlier writings I created back in my 20s, but he associates all that with a "bad time in my life" and I think he views the whole subject matter as an unhealthy obsession I had, or even a breakdown. (Well, to be sure, I did get detained in a psychiatric facility during the season when I first came out).

His current line on the book is that he isn't interested in reading it because it contains "profanity". I'm toying with the idea of doing a global search and replace on every occurrence of "shit" and "fuck" and any other four-letter terms and printing the results as a special Dad-edition. I dont know... this could just be a convenient excuse and it's actually the subject matter that makes him uncomfortable. Still, my mom's death last fall underlines the non-permanence of opportunity.

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