Compassion and Tenderness

Part of what “femininity” means to many people, not just by association but embedded in the definition, is a capacity and an inclination to care, to be empathic, to listen and to provide supportive efforts, both of the practical variety and in the form of expressions of understanding and concern. When people are discussing male (and/or Assigned Male At Birth) people who are feminine (femmes, sissies, girls, women), the traits and expressions that they focus on may not emphasize compassion and tenderness, but at least for some of us it is it’s pretty central to why and how we think of ourselves as feminine.

“Everyone should”

In the decade after I first came out as a sissy (which was my word for it, specifically as a heterosexual sissy in order to untie the confusion between gender and sexual orientation), I mostly embraced a feminist analysis of sexist polarized gender expectations: there was no damn reason to foist onto male people all that masculine adversarial belligerence and selfishness and emotionally truncated immaturity.

One way of reading that interpretation is that all of us male people possess the same capacity and tendency to be compassionate as female people do, and that as a male feminist (or profeminist or whatever) person I was just being loud about saying so. And during this era of my life, I did tend to de-emphasize the notion that I was inherently different from other males, because I was positioning my own politics to fit within that feminist framework.

Another, more nuanced take on that is that all of us male people could be that way but that male role socialization and the conformity of typical males to those masculine expectations meant that most males did not develop those traits, whereas those of us who rejected sexist roles and rules and embraced healthy traits labeled “feminine” were far more free to develop as compassionate and tender people. That was more the approach I put into words when discussing the matter in those days.

But when I first came out, the central insight was that I was different from men in general, that how and who I was made me not one of the men but instead one of the women, and that that was why my experiences and, in particular, my frustrations with heterosexuality, were as they were. The political analysis that posited that I was actually a surviving, relatively healthy person in an unhealthy sexist world came a bit later. And now, when I am positioning my politics within queer theory and LGBTQ identity frameworks, I’ve returned to that. (If all the other males wish to say that they, too, are not correctly described by “masculinity”, that they, too, are actually far better described by the components that make up “femininity” instead, then they can certainly say so, but these days I speak for myself and, to an extent, for others who identify as I do). So here is the notion that the sissy femme is perhaps inherently inclined to be more compassionate and tender as an expression of innate femininity. I have often described the “differences between the sexes” using the Snow Cone analogy. Hurl a mango snow cone at the wall, then pick up a mint snow cone and throw it against the same wall but make the center of impact a bit to the right of where the mango cone’s center of impact was. You get a spray of colored ice with orange-colored flecks interspersed with green-colored flecks, lots of overlap, and even though as a group the entirety of the mango particles skew to the left of the mint particles, there are individual mango particles even way over on the right where the mint flecks predominate, and likewise for mint ice-flecks on the far left. So being a sissy femme is being one of the exceptions, genuinely different at least in the statistical / generalization sense, and hence, to whatever extent female people in general are innately more compassionate and tender, the feminine sissy may be feminine in exactly that way, among other ways.

Take your pick. Any way you go at it, it’s a set of character and behavioral traits that I claim to exhibit and to which I aspire and which forms a big part of my sense of who I am.

Not Just Selflessness

As with the entire basket of attributes called “femininity”, compassion and tenderness are often not seen as things that benefit the person who has them. Instead, they’re often thought of strictly in terms of the benefit that they accord other people. Feminist analysis has often pointed to how women are placed in a position of providing multiple kinds of service and support to men, and that this is among them, yet one more form of social labor for which women are exploited and from which energies they are alienated, their efforts along these lines appropriated for men’s use. But we have to be careful not to fall into the pattern of devaluing those ways of being in the world that are part of the feminine, of ratifying the patriarchal definition of them as second-tier and inferior.

We can’t really do that without taking a frank look at the benefits to the feminine person of being compassionate and tender.

I first became really and intensely aware of this from experiencing its absence as a child: I was capable of being a caring person, of being a good listener, a sympathetic and supportive friend, but as a boy (or person perceived in those terms) it felt like no one wanted it from me. I was jealous of the kind of emotional sharing and reciprocal connections I saw among girls my age and felt strongly that I could participate in that, would be good at it if given the opportunity, and felt very much left out. Over the years of thinking about this and analyzing it more fully in the years after I came out, I came to think of this flavor of emotional intimacy as something for which we have an appetite, and from which we derive personal pleasure from the connection. Conceptualizing it as some kind of selfless sacrificial service to others denies this; and it’s wrong. It’s the same kind of cognitive mistake that a person would be making if they were to think that no one gets sexual pleasure from pleasuring someone else, or has an appetite prompting them to do so. On an emotional level, we get off on being compassionate to others and making them feel loved and understood and cared for. It is seldom spoken of in this fashion, to be sure, but in order to claim it for myself and to explain that being deprived of it is indeed a deprivation, being blatantly honest about this aspect of the experience seems vital.

Then there is the ancillary social aspect of being perceived as such. It should be easy enough to see why one might wish to be thought of as a compassionate and tender caring person. Alternative gender identities are proliferating, and one fake-tolerant pseudoliberal response to it takes the form “you can identify as whatever the heck you want, hey you can identify as a pine tree if that suits you, and more power to you, as long as you realize that I don’t get it and probably never will”. The problem is that we don’t need anyone’s permission or cooperation to be who we are within the interiors of our own heads or even, to a significant extent, within our everyday behaviors; but like everyone else we receive the identitities projected onto us by everyone else who perceives us, and, again like everyone else we derive some degree of social comfort and satisfaction from being perceived in ways that are congruent with how we perceive ourselves. Cisgender males are generally perceived as men and expected to be masculine, and they are, and they get the received / perceived signals like a warm friendly thumbs-up, a confirmation of identity.

There are specific nice things that come with being seen as compassionate and tender, and woven into them, for us, the confirmation of identity in which we are vested.

Finally, going back to the notion that caregiving is a service that others do benefit from, there are transactional advantages to being the resource to whom other people turn in order to obtain it, being in demand for it. In the interpersonal economy of human interaction, it is definitely to the advantage of a person who has these traits to be appreciated for them, to be sought out for them. Just like being a good cook or being a funny person who can be counted on to tell entertaining stories and jokes, having a capacity to give people something that they benefit from brings them to you and in the resulting interaction it is something of value for which those others may give other benefits and services in exchange.

Against Trivialization

I said up above that when people think or talk about sissy femme male (or AMAB) people, compassion and tenderness isn’t typically what they will choose to emphasize. More often they make it all about lipstick and high heels, being prissy and fabulous, and behaving seductively.

Now, there’s definitely a positive good in fun, frolic and frivolity. Joy and pleasure are among the components of life that have been devalued in favor of anger and seriousness and sacrifice and all that, and I am happy to be in the tradition of Emma Goldman, who said that if she can’t dance at it, then it isn’t her revolution. So let’s not even trivilialize the playful accoutrements of femininity…

But yes, a part of the devalorization of the feminine – as attested to by Julia Serrano in Whipping Girl, among other prominent places – takes the form of treating the entire feminine package of traits as if there’s very little of real substance going on there.

You’ll get no traction from me if you devalue compassion and tenderness. There’s absolutely nothing trivial about it. These are among the most noble and important of human characteristics and I have always been proud of being a part of them and them a part of my identity, and never had any sympathy or interest in a masculine identity that seemed founded on disparaging all that, of treating it as weakness or dismissing it as less relevant than winning and triumphing over opponents and whatnot.

I am a proud sissy and I have never for a moment looked across the aisle at conventional masculine males and felt that I was in any shape way fashion or form LESS THAN.



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The Art of Talking Past Each Other

This sentence is false.

Gender discussions are often paradoxical pretzels of the same order, have you noticed? Have you been there? Does it frustrate you too?

Kim starts off talking about the requirements pushed onto male people, this thing called "masculinity", and provides several examples of what is culturally considered to be masculine, and what it is like to be judged for not measuring up or conforming to that.

Blake gets offended at the sexist notion that the items listed by Kim are somehow "masculine", because seriously, who the heck gets to dictate what is and what is not masculine? Who gets to say that it isn't masculine to be an involved caregiver, an emotionally connected relationship-tender, a gentle sensitive artist and a fine hand with a sewing needle, a peacemaker, a sensuous vulnerable individual? Clearly, Kim is the one brandishing outmoded and reductionistic notions of what is and what is not masculine!

Kim say aww c'mon, get real, are you seriously intending to deny that society does maintain all these notions of masculinity and femininity? And that people do have to contend with those notions?

Blake says what is wrong with you that you need to care so much about what other people think, just be yourself why don't you?

Kim gets exasperated and says I am most certainly not conforming to what other people expect, but you make it sound trivially easy to just not care how other people treat you and that's not realistic, but I'm not saying these are things one should conform to, I'm saying it's a social problem that these pressures and expectations exist like this.

Kim goes on to say it is a revolutionary thing when males bail out on the idea of being "men".

Blake says what do you mean they aren't men? Are you saying they have to be belligerent and emotionally stunted or they don't quality as men? That is so sexist of you!

Kim describes what is considered in our culture to be "a man" and how it is projected and imposed on males, and why it is therefore important to be able to get out from under that.

Blake says a male person should just be a man and not let someone else define what it means to be a man and push them out of the definition. Why surrender the definition to a bunch of knuckle-dragging troglodytes? You're advising people to think of themselves as inadequate or insufficient to be a man just because they don't subscribe to your reductionistic notion of what it means to be one!



I'm not a neutral nonpartisan observer on the sidelines, to be honest. There is no real Kim or Blake (they're fictional characters, albeit based on lots of real-life folks I've encountered); Kim and Blake represent factions I've encountered in these conversations and debates often enough to caricature them, but if truth be told my allegiances are with Kim's perspective. In my opinion they aren't equally valid viewpoints, not really; Blake's gender-blind approach is very reminiscent of people who claim to "not see race" -- very convenient if you're in a situation where the social situation doesn't directly affect you, personally, but for most people that's not realistic when it comes to gender. It's one thing to go forth unbothered by what other people think, but you can't get a job with an employer, go on a date, or deal with the police and the neighbors and the school psychiatrist without having to concern yourself with what other people think, because you do have to deal with those other people.

Having said that, yeah, there are positive take-aways from the Blake perspective. It is empowering to bracket off other people's opinions and reactions and emphasize your own, to be brave and self-defined enough to do that. I do recommend that attitude. It's just that it has its limits. Society is still there and it, along with its entrenched attitudes, is still something we all have to contend with. And so we need to be able to refer to those entrenched attitudes, to generalize about them.


If you wish to see a real-life discussion of the Kim vs Blake variety, I offer you " 'Toxic masculinity' and 'toxic femininity'. Real things or sexist mumbo-jumbo.", a currently active message board thread on the Straight Dope Message Board. Although, honestly, in doing so I feel like I've pointed out a dandelion. These conversations recur everywhere, don't they?


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Church and Sunday School

You’d think a place associated with being nice (kind, sweet, gentle, good) would be appealing to sissy femme males. Their mascot sported long hair in an era when males in general did not. But no, I didn’t find it so.



In my book, woven into the section about growing up, I describe how I tried to fit in and find friends and acceptance among three cliques or groups – Boy Scouts, the choir, and the countercultural mellow potheads. I mention church in passing, as a place through which I’d met this or that person or as the sponsor of this or that event, but I don’t develop a story-theme about trying to find friends and fit in among the others in the church congregation where we attended. That’s mostly because it would have been redundant, wouldn’t have added much to the story. (Three examples are enough).

But I have sometimes thought (and blogged) about the possible affinities between the clergy and the phenomenon of being a feminine male, so lately I’ve been musing about what church was, and wasn’t, to me growing up.

First of all, church wasn’t a place where boys and girls of a certain interest or disposition chose to go, so that those were the kinds of people your own age that you’d encounter there. Instead, church was a place to which children were taken – dragged, if necessary – by their parents. My childhood prior to 8th grade was mostly in south Georgia, and starting with 8th grade (which is when the book’s story gets underway) we lived in Los Alamos, a small and insular community that was also very churchy, populated as it was with scientists recruited from small and often conservative towns. So it was something that people of my parents’ generation did – you took your family to church on Sundays. To whatever extent your children didn’t seem enthusiastic, it was thought to be true to at least that same extent that they therefore needed it all the more. That meant that the other children my age were often there under duress or, at a minimum, would not have picked this as the place to be on one of their weekend days.

For the long span of years from early elementary to junior high, the boys I encountered in our church’s Sunday school classes were full of misbehaviors, being rambunctious, destructive of materials, noisy, crude, and belligerent. Sunday school – for the benefit of any who weren’t raised in a Protestant Christian churchgoing family – is an hour’s worth of time before the church service, and is divided up and, at least for children, age-specific (so it parallels the kind of divisions that define elementary school classrooms); adult classes might be focused on some theme or general topic of discussion, while children’s classes were taught by an adult Sunday school teacher who would come in armed with lesson plans and songs and construction paper and crayons and scissors and whatnot. The adult leaders teaching us (usually women) tended towards condescension and our classes were geared towards absorbing and regurgitating religious-content facts or memorizing verses or learning lots of trite children’s religious songs.

As usual, the girls were better behaved and were generally more willing to get immersed in the purpose of whatever lesson was being dumped on us, and their interaction with each other was nicer and I respected them more for that. There were girls I liked that I saw there and encountered in classes over the years, but since Sunday school wasn’t a discussion format for us, this wasn’t really a place where I made many friends with them either.

I liked the church service better, with its formality and ritual, and the quiet and serious solemnity. Reintegrated with the adults, I wasn’t forced to be among boys my age. I liked the hymns and I particularly liked the choir.

But I was happy when it was over and the rest of the day was available to me. Part of it was the damn clothes. Since I’m a sissy femme, that may seem odd, that I didn’t care for dressing up in the fanciness of Sunday clothes. Was it because, like the rest of the experience, it was imposed on me and not something I chose for myself? I’m not sure, but I hated the suit coat and the collared shirt and the tie, and the cut of the dress pants. Everything had a way of hanging on the body like a set of curtains, loose in places I preferred clothes to be tight yet bunched up and distracting in other places where I preferred to be unencumbered. Little boy dresswear is adult male dressware scaled down to size and I think maybe it just doesn’t fit as well because it wasn’t designed with a child’s body in mind in the first place. Part of it may also have been the gender disparity of it all, too, although I wasn’t conscious of being annoyed by it at that point. People made a fuss over the cuteness of the girls and the prettiness of their Sunday dresses, and the girls seemed to enjoy their garments a lot more. Certainly what they were wearing was quite different from what I was wearing. That wasn’t so true for everyday wear – I would go to elementary school in pants not particularly different from girls’ pants (and they did wear pants as often as they wore skirts and dresses), shirts not particularly different from girls’ shirts. Male formal wear is far more of a costume, all composed of clothes quite different from our everyday clothes but the same for every male except for minor variations in cut and color. It was a uniform. I hated it and wanted out of it as soon as possible.

In later years, in New Mexico as an older kid, the Sunday experience continued to involve the same nasty bullying classmates I was already at odds with from school. There did start to be a shift towards discussion of moral issues and socially relevant topics, and I liked that, at least. I think the church scene could have ended up being an outlet for me. Yet, by sheer luck of the draw, our church congregation consisted of a lot of boys my age but no girls, and a similar concentration of girls a few years younger who were therefore in a different youth group. I do make reference in my book to some church-sponsored activities that gave me opportunities to socialize and mingle, or to discuss important things like sexuality and the possibility of having a girlfriend and being able to date.

But mostly the church scene was not much of a resource for me.

For the purposes of the book, I had a better example with the Boy Scouts; it, too, was an organization that was affiliated with the notion of Doing Right and Being A Good Boy; and although there was considerably more self-selection and I did make better connections there, it, too, was eventually a venue where I didn't have enough in common to keep me from feeling like an outsider. I placed a scene in the book where the Scouts are telling dirty jokes that become increasingly crude about sex and misogynistic towards women. I think it makes my point sufficiently.

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Skirting the Issue

Let me describe what I like to call the "skirt trick".

An author named Ami Polonsky wrote a Young Adults book titled Gracefully Grayson about a tween-aged boy who, in essence, is one of the girls. To illustrate and convey to us, the readers, that Grayson is like this, she describes how the character wears an overly-long nightshirt and spins in it and imagines that it's a skirt or a dress and wishing for the opportunity to wear a real one.

Just this spring, Jacob Tobia came out with Sissy, a book that mine will probably be compared to quite a bit, since Sissy is the first real genderqueer coming-out / coming-of-age story. Jacob, too, presents the fact that despite being male they were "one of the girls" by recounting how they would dress in their mom's clothes and put on her makeup in secret and wish they could go forth into the world adorned that way.

The problem with using the skirt trick is that whatever the heck it may mean to "be a girl" or to "be feminine", it doesn't mean your brain is somehow hardwired to make you want to wear a skirt (or high heels or put on makeup, etc). Trust me, there is no shortage of cisgender women who have never had the faintest interest in adorning themselves in ankle-torturing high-heeled devices, Revlon and Avon gels and creams and powders, or nylon hosiery, and considerably more who don’t necessary hate the stuff but resent having it imposed on them as part of gender-specific “office standards”. Skirts and dresses blow up in the breeze and threaten to show your underpants to the world, often lack sufficient pockets for your keys and wallet and lip balm, and catch on the velvet ropes when you try to step over them at the bank instead of zigzagging your way back and forth down empty lanes during non-busy banking hours – and many women recall, unfondly, having them imposed at a young age and finding them a hindrance to riding bikes and climbing trees *.

But if you try to write a book where you're introducing a character and stating "this person is male but how he is, who he is, the way he is, is more like one of the girls than it's like the other boys", you’re expected to show, not tell, your reading audience that this is true; but no matter what specific behavior you describe, no matter what thinking processes you reveal your character engaging in, you run the significant risk of people saying “Aww, c’mon, that doesn’t make this fellow a girl, I’m not like that, my daughter is not like that” or “How does that make this dude any different from me and a million other guys, lots of boys have feelings like that”.

There is no single behavior that all the girls engage in and none of the other boys do; and if there was, then our main character could not be engaging in it, by definition, unless he was absolutely the only one like that, in which case his story would be the story of an anomaly, not a representative story that explains what it's like to be one of those boys who is essentially a girl despite being male. To complicate matters, the female population has among them some gender-variant individuals too, whose existence dilutes the universality of what girls do and what girls are like. So on the one hand the author needs to show the reader that this character is basically a girl, but on the other, there's no obvious and compelling way to do that.

The difficulty of navigating that complexity and still bringing the reader along, accepting and not contradicting my premise, is a challenge that makes me grudgingly appreciate the skirt trick. But my tale is a memoir, a work of nonfiction, and I did not, in fact, spend my childhood and teenage years donning dresses and skirts and stockings and lace, or applying cosmetics to my face.

There is no single vegetable, meat, or spice that all by itself makes a dish a part of Italian cuisine or Mexican or German or Indian. But I still know the difference between them. I recognize it when I taste it, when I smell it. There’s no single note, chord, or chord progression that is unique to Baroque music, but it sounds a certain way, has a certain feel to it. I think gender is like that, too – we grew up in a social backdrop and absorbed the component notions of it. To borrow the famous aphorism of Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it. People also know when they don’t see what they expect to encounter, which is why outliers, gender-variant exceptions, are so often noticeable to other people and not just aware of it themselves. I didn’t have to wear a sign that said I was a sissy femme in order for the kids in eighth grade to start calling me out for it.

In my book, I’m trying to put a feast of samples in front of the reader, little vignettes and selected events, some mental processes and interior dialogs that I recall, some choices that I made, some behaviors and whatnot. The book has a blatant title and it has an explicit three-page flyover of my early childhood, both of which promise the reader that this book is going to feature a genderqueer person, specifically a boy who is basically one of the girls. But once the book gets started, I’m depending on the reader to react to the samples provided and to reach their own realizations without me pointing to each occurrence and saying “See? See? A conventional boy would not have done that. See? Just like a girl would have!” None of the individual scenes or events is definitive in and of itself, and I don’t lay down any definitions to start with (to the annoyance of at least a couple potential publishers, who insisted that readers are as dumb as a box of rocks and need that).

Ultimately, to make this work, I have to rely on the readers’ independent perception. I’m not going to be able to argue them into seeing it. The experiences are going to have to speak for themselves.

But I’m confident that I’m a pretty damn good cook and that I've prepared some evocative morsels.



* Skirts are so much more comfortable than pants on a humid or hot day, there's something fun about the way they swish around when you move, and you can find them with usable pockets and with belt loops as well. And they take up less room in your suitcase than pants. And unlike pants they don't chafe or bind on you when you're sitting down. Also, they're great if you have nice legs and consider them among your best features and don't want to keep them covered up all the time.

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