"Do you think I'm a Demigirl, or more BiGender?" (etc)

You may not intend your question as it sounds to me.

And I get that -- I mean, I could be reading into your question a bunch of stuff that's coming from me, stuff I'm projecting onto it, and not what you meant or how you said it.

But here I am in GenderQueer Support & Talk, and a dozen or so other gender-variant themed Facebook groups, and I see so many of these questions --

"Hey, peeps, what do you think? I have my days when I'm not male or female but it's weird to be called 'he' or 'sir' and there are other days when I put on makeup, so do you think I could be a demigirl? I've been calling myself 'bigender' but lately I've been wondering if I might actually be a demigirl..."

-- (not an actual quote, but that kind of thing...)

... and when I read that it sounds like a chemist in the laboratory, trying to determine if Core Sample A contains potassium or silicon, bismuth or antimony. Like there's an absolute empirically correct answer. And like they're asking "Would one of my esteemed gender scientist colleagues help me decide how to test my sample and determine its composition?"


Connections

Does it annoy you when some old fart quotes some dusty-ass lyric from some song from before you were born and acts like because it was in this song that makes it profound or something?

Yeah, sorry about that, but I am sixty and sometimes I act like it...

I'd gather everyone together for a day
And when we gathered
I'll pass buttons out that say
Beautiful people
Then you'd never have to be alone
'Cause there'll always be someone
With the same button on as you

( -- Melanie, “Beautiful People”, circa 1971, obligatory YouTube link) cf: the sense of belonging, of not having to be alone because you have a shared identity with other people.

I do get that when a person is saying something like “I’m not sure if I’m a demigirl or if I’m more bigender” or whatever, part of what they’re often saying is “I might fit in with the other people who identify that way”. And believe me, I know what it feels like to be cut off from feeling like you fit in anywhere; I know what it's like to wish for a sense of belonging, to have a place where you fit in after a lifetime of sticking out as weird and different.


But let’s go back to the beginning of the journey. There was a social norm -- heterosexual and cisgender -- and that norm did not fit for you, did not work for you, it was incorrect and inadequate, it was wrong, and it was confining, right?

OK, I want to suggest to you, to all of you, that it is important for you to approach gender identity with the attitude that maybe no one out there has ever described your identity, that it has never been given a name. Don't get me wrong, I'm not wishing that on you, that you should have to create for yourself an identity and name it and explain it to everyone. But that you should hold it in your mind and heart as a possibility. That it is OK for you to walk away from "demigirl" and "bigender" and "genderfluid" and all of the others you encounter out there, saying (if it happens to be true) "NO, THAT'S NOT IT... NO, THAT'S STILL NOT IT... NO, NOT THAT EITHER..."

Why? Because otherwise -- if you haven't given yourself permission to do that -- you're confining yourself to slot yourself into one of these pre-existing identities. That makes it similar to just conforming to the cisgender hetero identity that was being foisted on you originally, something that doesn't fit but which you're allowing to define you instead of defining yourself. Oh, OK, it's only sort-of similar because there are a lot more choices instead of just one, and there's less focused pressure to accept them (and also less freedom from still being treated like a deviant as the payoff for accepting one of these identities).

But still, it's at least partially like that situation. You were willful enough and self-affirming enough to reject what didn't fit. I'm suggesting you hold onto that attitude and don't feel obliged to pick from any of the identities you encounter until and unless it fits.

Taste test identities

Somehow, having been a tomboy had taught me that the other side of "not fitting in" is a subtle subversive energy -- the power of difference

p 182, Marianne Dresser, in "Confessions of an Unrepentant Tomboy" / Yamaguchi & Barber, Editors, TOMBOYS



Gender is full of "shouldn'ts" and restrictions; if a gender identity is a net positive and not a net negative, it has to empower. I think it's NOT like a chemist trying to identify the elements in a sample. First and foremost, recognize that the absence of a gender identity is the absence of those gendered restrictions. Recognize also that all gender identities are social constructs: someone made them up and then continued to use them because they felt comfortable wearing them. Find what resonates for you. And if you don't find it out there, find it within yourself and give it a new name.

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Seventh Grade

My book effectively starts with eighth grade, but I covered my earlier life in my initial autobiography, the tome from which my book was taken. I've done blog posts about earlier segments in my life -- third grade; sixth grade.

I've been reminiscing about seventh grade lately. It was the year just before our family moved to Los Alamos NM. In an odd way, it's like the stump or stub of a life I might have had if we hadn't moved. Mostly, that's not a life that I wish I'd had; if anything, I've been more inclined to think about that with a shudder. The venue was Valdosta GA, the timeframe 1971-72.

Seventh grade was my one and only year at Valdosta Junior High School. It was quite different from the elementary school experience I was used to. In elementary school we had been treated as children, which included not just condescension but also tolerance for a certain amount of roughhousing and bullying and loud disruptive behaviors. In junior high, for the first time, we were being treated as large dangerous unruly threats to the public order. I think part of the underlying issue was the sheer size of the institution: Valdosta had a dozen or more elementary schools, but everyone was funneled into the same single junior high when we passed from sixth to seventh grade. Grades 7, 8, and 9 for the whole town were taught there. That also meant racial integration: the elementary schools had de facto segregation because they were neighborhood schools and the neighborhoods were fairly segregated. I had had black kids in my classrooms in elementary school, but they were a distinct minority; other elementary schools had ranged from almost exclusively white to almost exclusively black. And now at the ages of 12-15 we were all being placed together, and whether there was an actual history of racial tension or just worried adults, I think that played a role in how we were treated.

The place was run like a military boot camp. No nonsense. Get out of line and there'll be hell to pay, so behave! The line was a literal line much of the time: in the school's hallways, all students were to walk single file, on the right side, no talking. They meant it: male teachers armed with heavy wooden paddles would enforce it physically. Being in the hallway at all except between bells would earn a student the same fate.

It may seem odd to you that I partly liked it that way. Especially since I mentioned thinking about the place with a visceral shudder. But, you see, I'd been bullied and harassed and picked on by other kids (mostly boys) for several years prior to this, and all this rigid discipline gave me protection. Yes, if the adults took students' misbehaviors seriously, if infractions actually got punished severely enough to shut them down, I was a beneficiary. "It's about time", I said to myself. "They should not be allowed to get away with that stuff, and now they can't! Good!" The problem was, I was not perceived by the authoritarian adults as a nice well-behaved good boy, a person whose obedience to the rules and the spirit thereof earned me respect as a colleague. Nope, they glared at me suspiciously, convinced that each and every one of us kids (especially us male-bodied kids) would misbehave and act up if given the opportunity. They treated all of us as if even when we were not directly incurring their wrath, the only reason that was so was that they had intimidated us into compliance. I resented that, resented their attitude, and my resentment was something they could see on my face. And I occasionally ended up in trouble with them myself because they made arbitrary calls and issued orders that contradicted what we'd been told previously. In short, I was ambivalent.

Against that backdrop, please understand that I was a very sexually naive kid. It was an earlier era, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I was exceptionally naive compared to other kids my own age at the time. I had only as early as the summer after fifth grade learned that people had sex because they had an appetite for it, as opposed to doing it for the purpose of making babies (and that that is what the word "fuck" referred to). And in the wake of that revelation, I was still, at this point, knitting together my own feelings and sensations and experiences with this new awareness. I was trying to figure out how much of what I did and felt was this, the sexual feelings that apparently everyone had, and not something unique to me. And so it was that when a handful of us were standing outside the band room, awaiting the beginning of band class, one of the girls who played oboe was talking with some other band members and tossed out the fact that she knew what 'masturbation' was. I didn't know the word (I wasn't uniquely ignorant; she hinted that it had to do with sexual biology) so I looked it up later in the dictionary. And then spent a lot of time wondering if that thing that I do is this and, if so, oh, so other people do that too? and the ramifications of that if it were indeed the case.

Also taking place this year was my first experience with the existence of gay people and the concept of homosexuality. The boy's name was Malcolm, and he knew me from seeing me in church on Sundays. He was one of the small handful of people I hung out with at school, going out onto the playgrounds after lunch. I was pretty cut off and didn't have many friends, so it was quite nice to have someone interested in spending time with me, laughing and talking and telling interesting stories.

"Who do you like from class?" he asked me. "Are there girls who you want to be with?"

"I've always like Betsy Johnson. I've been in class with her on and off since fourth grade, and she's really smart, and pretty and cute. And I like Tess Minton and Carol Slocumb from McLaurin's English class too. They're really nice".

"Do you ever try to look up their dresses or skirts and see their underwear? Do you wish you could get your hand inside their underwear and maybe take it off and see them naked?"

That wasn't how I thought of Betsy and the others, and I told him so. I wasn't interested in humiliating them or erasing their dignity. (And I had kept a secret of my fascination with girls' shapes and even if it was true I would never tell them so and creep them out. And the way Malcom spoke about it was too much like how boys were always obsessing about farts and stuff, so it was like he was accusing me of being disgusting).

"She would do that, you know. She does do it. She lets boys touch her there, she lets them look and see her there".

I didn't believe it, it didn't at all mesh with my sense of her and how she behaved in general.

"Do you ever think about sex with another guy?"

I scowled at him, perpexed, and stuck out my left and right index fingers and bounced the tips off each other. "You can't put one inside the other other! How would that work?"

"One of them puts his dick in the other one's butt hole"

"Eww"

"Or you could also lick or suck it. That feels really good. Would you want to do that?"

"Umm no, yuck"

"Would you like someone to do it to you? I would, if you think you want to try it".

"Umm, no, no thanks".

After that, we continued to hang out and spend time together during lunch break and the topic was never discussed again.


I was not close friends with Betsy Johnson and Tess and Carol and other girls I liked. I think we had some degree of mutual respect, but I could not call it friendship. I hadn't had a girlfriend since Karen moved away from Valdosta in third grade, and the girls that I had been just "friend friends" with were also a part of the past.

I was shy and sort of shut down socially. People in general didn't just tend to like me and include me, and when I had tried to be more outgoing, to be more of a character, a class clown in my own way, it had backfired, back in fifth grade. Trying to be exaggerated in my expressions and responses and behaviors in the classroom, to draw attention to myself, had not gotten people to laugh with me, only to laugh at me, and not in a good way. For some sissy guys, being silly and humorous apparently worked well for them when they were younger, but for me, when I tried it it only generated ridicule and offenses to my dignity; it wasn't my thing.

The shudders and the dread I feel when I look back at Valdosta, and imagine what it would have been like if our family had remained there, mostly have to do with the spaces in between anything that actually happened. Sooner or later I suspect there would have been incidents, outside of the protected hallways, away from the heavily disciplined school. Sooner or later I would have been subjected to hostile mockery about all the things I didn't know and understand. I think it's likely that I would have encountered sudden unanticipated violence, including sexually invasive violence, and I would not have been ready for it, would not have had the necessary coping skill to deal with it.

Los Alamos was a shock for me when we moved there. I was quickly exposed to a lot of overt homophobic hostility, and a lot of my sexual ignorance was stripped way in a barrage of contempt and mockery and teasing. But most of that was verbal and the culture I'd been moved to was less given over to violent hidden assaults that get laminated over and never spoken of. I think I was better off with things as they actually happened.


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A JunePride Mea Culpa: My Homophobia

I'm constantly blogging and posting to be recognized, included, understood as a genderqueer person. But acceptance within the MOGII community is a two-way street and I haven't always been the ideal poster child for good and non-judgmental attitudes. I think I am long beyond harboring nasty feelings and thoughts towards gay people but in the interests of fairness I thought it might be appropriate to 'fess up about my past.



First off, you've got to realize I didn't grow up hearing about "LGBTQ" or "MOGII" or any other sense that there was a diverse community of gender-and-sexuality misfits. It was just gay people. That's who "they" were, and who I was widely thought to be. I did not, in fact, have same-sex sexual attraction, and so, yes, "they", and not "we", seemed to be the correct formulation. Gay guys were definitely a category of "them", and not a sense of identity I thought I shared in.

You'd think that wouldn't be much of a big deal -- I mean, I'm also not Russian, or a blue-eyed blonde, or a Muslim or a grandparent. Lots of identities out there that aren't mine, and I don't generally find it important or necessary to define myself as not one of them in conjunction to them. But people weren't assuming I was any of those other things.

And part of the problem was who I actually was -- a feminine sissy boy. This was a problem because people's definition of what it meant to be a gay guy were weirdly twisted up: if you asked for a literal definition you'd probably get "two people of the same sex who have sex with each other instead of with the opposite sex" or some similar formulation, but their behavior towards any mention of sissy-femme characteristics in a male showed how deeply they believed that this, also, meant that the person was gay. That's called equivocation, when more than one meaning is built into a word or phrase and treated as if those two meanings were really the same thing.

Being erroneously thought to be a gay guy didn't work the same way as being incorrectly assumed to be right-handed. People often did assume I was right-handed, but their reaction to being told otherwise, or to seeing me pick up a pen with my left hand and begin writing, was to say "oh!" and make a mental adjustment and that would be the end of it. In contrast to that, I found that trying to convey to people that I was a heterosexual sissy was like explaining that East West Main Street is down up from here, go directly behind in front of you and turn left right at the first last intersection.

I developed hostile and derogatory attitudes against the identity that I was pushing off from. When people said or hinted that they thought I was probably gay, I would express revulsion. Eww, yuck! That's disgusting! No, I'd say, I'm not like them at all, they're crudely promiscuous and they're not interested in forming attachment relationships, if anything they're like typical masculine hetero guys except even more so, they just want to stick it into something and pump. I repeated the most condescending and negative of stereotypes and emphasized how totally and utterly this was not my identity. Not just "nope, you've miscategorized me" but out-and-out hateful stuff. If some bigoted Bible-pounding zealot expressed the opinion that no one is naturally homosexual, that engaging in same-sex erotic behavior is against anyone's nature, I'd nod and agree that it seemed weird and twisted to me too.

With as much reason as I'd had in my life to question any widespread rejection of the Different, I was nevertheless cheerfully joining in with the hate chorus. I was so focused on establishing and defending my own peculiar sense of identity that it didn't occur to me that the things I was saying might be hurtful to the people I was pushing off from.

I came out in 1980, finally recognizing that who I was, how I was, was Different in the same general kind of way that being gay was Different. That even if there wasn't a name for the category, I was in a different identity-category than heterosexual guys were. And that meant that gay guys were potentially my allies.

My relationship with gay guys -- both in the abstract as a topic of discussion and real live ones that I actually encountered, in political discussions of gender and sexuality minority identities and in other contexts -- did not instantaneously clear up and become companionable and smooth. I was clear in my head about my identity, but explaining it, and explaining why it needed to be established in people's heads as an available identity, was complicated and problematic. Lots of gay activists at the time were promoting the position that no one should be going around denying that they were gay, that it was not an identity that their allies needed to be running away from as if it were something horrible. But from my vantage point, my identity was being socially erased by the conflation of sissyhood with homosexuality, and although I was now ashamed of how hatefully I had repulsed gay identity, I still wanted to be seen and recognized for who I was. I had to learn how to explain my situation in ways that weren't experienced as abrasive and politically objectionable to the gay activists I wanted to ally with. (It eventually helped that some gay male activists did not much appreciate being thought of as feminine, and that others, who were, thought the masculine gay guys were looking down on them and regarding them as stereotype-reinforcing. This opened a dialog that I could participate in; we could agree that it was useful and necessary to uncouple the equivocation between being gay and being feminine, and to discuss the political connections between homophobia and sissyphobia).

When I first started hanging around Identity House in Manhattan and attending my first Pride March in 1985, I found it frustrating that I wasn't encountering any similarly-identifying, similar-minded gender activists to speak with. It seemed to me that the mostly male, mostly gay participants were coming to meetings to flirt and connect with potential dating partners, which wasn't entirely untrue, but I could have made more of an effort to communicate, to talk issues and bridge gaps, and to listen and learn and be a better ally myself. I was by then mostly past the worst of my homophobic attitudes but I was still pretty selfishly immersed in my own identity politics. Most of us were, I suppose, and I felt like the people I was encountering mostly only cared about their own identity-situation, and that not much of what they were concerned about applied to me, and there was some truth to that assessment, but that was a description I could have applied to myself just as accurately.

It wasn't until I first encountered the acronym with the "Q" added -- LGBTQ -- that I stopped thinking of the community as potential allies (but still "them") and instead tentatively began to consider the community as "us". GenderQueer was a term I had been introduced to and I read the description and it fit, even if it wasn't highly specific to my circumstances.



We do need to come together, to listen to each other and be supportive of each others' struggles. I will acknowledge that I have not been a model citizen in the LGBTQ-munity, but I recognize the need to consider my own behaviors and the ways in which I have not been a good listener or a sufficiently reliable ally. I will try to do better.

"Community" is simple when it equates to "people who are just like me"; it takes more effort to extend it to "people who are different but with whom I have stuff in common". I invite you to read and listen to folks who occupy a different letter in the acronym. Read the words of bisexual activists, and intersex activists. Pick up something penned by somebody nonbinary. Learn about the experiences of folks of minority gender and orientation identities that you don't have much familiarity with. I will, too.


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Split Identity

I suggest we split what we call "identity" into two components. I apologize if I’m repeating myself; my thoughts keep returning to this notion the way a tongue seeks out a sore tooth. I’m talking about a simple split here – not like the myriad aspects of identity portrayed in the Genderbread Person and other such formulations (useful though they may also be at times). I’m suggesting the usefulness of distinguishing simply, between self-chosen identity and identity that is assigned to us by others (which I refer to as altercast identity). I have my reasons for proposing this, which I’d like to go into. You see what you think, OK?



A Lesson from the Workplace



I’m currently working at the NYC Dept of Health, assisting in the coding of data from survey forms that track Naloxone distribution. So on a day-in, day-out basis I’m staring at a lot of survey forms, and one of the questions asked of respondents is their race. Respondents are asked to tick off any categories that apply (they can select multiple answers): White, Black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native, Don’t Know, or Other. Or that was the original set of choices; "Hispanic or Latino/a" was added to later editions of the form. Why? Well, originally, "Hispanic" (yes/no) was a separate question from race. But enormous numbers of respondents were checking the "Other" box on race and writing in "Latino" or "Hispanic". Clearly, they experienced being Hispanic as a race, something that (more often than not) they identified as instead of white or black, not in addition to it.

But it doesn’t stop there. On both the old forms and the new forms, people check "Other" and identify as "Puerto Rican", "Dominican", "Cuban", "Mexican", "Salvadorean", "Chilean". Nor is this trend by any means confined to folks from Spanish-language cultures. People are selecting "Other" and self-identifying their race as "Irish", "Czech", "Russian", "Iranian", "Mixteca", "Filipino", "Ethiopian", "Jewish", and so on.

On the one hand, -- hey that’s interesting, the social construct of "race" appears to be converging with what we would have called "ethnicity" or even "country of origin", and given the lethally poisonous history of the ideology of race, that could be viewed as a healthy and positive development.

On the other hand, the original thinking behind asking people their race included a concern for whether or not our services were reaching populations that have historically been underserved. And when you look at it in that light, the intention is not so much "how do you identify yourself, race-wise?" but more "how would other people most often categorize you and regard you?" – because the latter is the factor that most directly shapes how people are treated (or mistreated or neglected in the offering of treatment and so forth).



Why I am Not a Lesbian – the Reprise



A few weeks ago I posted a blog post titled "Why I am Not a Lesbian". It was controversial; it upset several people, most commonly transgender women who identify as lesbians. In retrospect, perhaps I should have titled the post "Why I am Not a Lesbian and Also Not a Heterosexual Man". I kind of thought the latter portion of that was sufficiently well-developed in the essay, but I guess I didn’t give it as much emphasis. I did state that being in possession of a penis and associated physical structures does not define me as a man and therefore doesn’t define my attraction to female people as heterosexuality.

But the part that lit the controversy-fire was saying that my identification as a femme, a feminine person, a girl, does not define my attraction to female people as lesbianism either. I was talking about myself, about my identity, but my assertion was taken as if I were saying that what is true for me should be considered true of anyone else who has the kind of physical plumbing that is traditionally and typically considered male. In other words, as if I had said "I am not a lesbian because although I have a woman or girl gender identity, I have a male body, and hey, you over there, you aren’t a lesbian either, you silly AMAB!"

(I found this frustrating; I thought I had been quite clear that the problem is that "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are insufficient terms, because they assume that sex and gender are the same thing or have the same value, and so they don’t have a socket for someone who identifies as a male girl, as I do)

I present as male, or, at least, make no effort to change my presentation so as to elicit an altercast categorization by other people as female, and so I am viewed as male. In this culture that is coterminous with being viewed as a man. I don’t really make an effort to package my appearance so as to be viewed as a male, but I have a physical body such that, were I to go to a nude beach and be seen from a distance by a thousand complete strangers who know nothing of how I identify, I would be overwhelmingly categorized as a male person. If I show up at the local lesbian bar, I will be perceived there also as a male person. And not as a lesbian. And that is significantly a part of my identity experience.



An Exploration of Comparative TERFitude



I have a respected acquaintance and political ally who, if someone were to call her a TERF ("Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist"), isn’t a person on whose metaphorical feet I could honestly say the shoe does not fit. She reads this blog. I am not going to defend all of her positions, and indeed I’m about to attack some of them. But not all of them.

I do think it is relevant to organize around social experience that people have in common. When feminists come together politically, they often wish to join with other people who have also had a lifetime, ongoing experience of being seen as, viewed as, treated as a woman. As with the intention behind the race question on the surveys, this isn’t about how one self-identifies. It’s about how other people have altercast one, how other people have categorized one with or without one’s concurrence or dissent from those assumptions.

Raise your hand if you remember Rachel Dolezal. Is there anything inherently wrong with identifying as a black person if you happen to be the pale-skinned descendant of European ancestors? I think not; I certainly don’t take issue with it (although it's not my call to make). But Rachel Dolezal occupied a position that was intended to be staffed by a person who had the relevant political social experience, the experience of being perceived as and treated as black, and that was not, in fact, her experience. And that is why we regard her has having done a Bad Thing. For purposes of evaluating her appropriateness for that position, it’s not about her self-chosen identity as black, it’s about having been (or not having been) on the receiving end of being altercast by others as black and treated accordingly.

Some lesbians are "political lesbians", not in the sense of being lesbians who are also political people, or even who are also political about being lesbians, but in the specific sense of choosing to constrain their sexuality so as to express it only with other people who have been in the political situation of being altercast all their lives as girls and women. I’m not saying they do not also find the female form to be physically attractive, or to find the womanly character traits and personality attributes to be romantically desirable in and of themselves, but a fundamental reason to them for being lesbians is to not give their erotic energies over to anyone except other people who have been in that political situation, the altercast identity of being female and woman in a patriarchal society.

In light of their existence within the larger lesbian community, I personally would find it arrogant and inappropriate for me to identify as a lesbian. Your mileage may vary. I do not speak for you. But whether I like it or not, whether I prefer it or abhor it, I am perceived as a male, a man, and treated accordingly, and as a consequence of that I do not have their experience, the one they define themselves by. I would like it if they were to listen to me for who I am, and for the experiences that I have had as a sissy male who rejected masculinity and was proud of being a sissy male, because my story is also relevant to patriarchy and feminism; and I would like to be with female people who do not wish or need their interactions with male-bodied people to revolve around assumed differences. Around me "being a man". I’m not one. I’d like lesbians to understand that. But I do not opt to call myself a lesbian, nonetheless.

My colleague has a reprehensible habit of referring to transgender women only in the dismissive, not listening to anything they might have to say aside from their identification of themselves as women, and she rejects that. She doesn’t reject it with nuance and she does not carefully split the matter of identity and then explain the ways in which a transgender woman isn’t what she means when she says "woman". It is hostile and it is contemptuous, what she is doing, and it is wrong, and I may have to part company with her over it. Splitting identity factors as I am suggesting here would be a useful tactical tool for her, and she could do so and thereby cease negating the identity of transgender women as women while still being able to say "we do not, however, welcome you at our separatist feminist enclave, which is for women who have been treated as girls or women for a lifetime". She could do so and then also participate in (or even host) other meetings which do not exclude transgender women. And which could, incidentally, include me as well.

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Depression

I'm in a dismal mood.

Doesn't happen very often. I'm seldom depressed. When I first obtained a clear sense of my variant identity, I received along with it a political explanation for why I felt pushed aside, why I was so often reviled and hated when I hadn't done anything to hurt anybody, why I didn't make friends, was perennially unpopular, and so on. It was also a political analysis that explained a lot of the worrisome aspects of the larger world to me, things like tyranny and oppression, poverty and inequality, even morality and spiritual meaning in life. So it was very empowering, and gave me optimism, courage, even some modicum of patience.

And you can sort of see why having that kind of understanding in my head made me want to share it, figuring it would offer those things to a lot of other people as well. And why wanting to share it gave me a mission and a purpose in life.

But I do get discouraged and trammeled down sometimes and it's been like that these last couple weeks.


I had a publisher on the line. I had a contract in my hands. There were problems and concerns -- I never quite felt that the editor I was interacting with had a clear understanding of the gender identity thing, either mine or MOGII* identities in general, beyond the average person's mainstream popularized shorthand stuff, and he didn't seem curious or sufficiently intellectually engaged to see what it was that I was trying to say to the world. It was more like "Hey, you write well, this could be an interesting entertaining book with a bit of effort".

I thought maybe I could work with that but the lack of any sense of being on the same channel worried me. He also gave every sign of wanting to be heavy-handed about changes. "I think you should add a scene where you muse about this, and then a scene where you blast out of town and flip off the city limits sign as you drive into the sunset... and I'd get rid of these scenes in this next section..." I got mixed messages about how much of these editorial suggestions I could veto and still have them publish the book. On the one hand, he stipulated that the publisher would not make any changes that the author did not approve, and when I did a preliminary round of edits , adding some scenes he suggested but not deleting material that I wanted to keep, he replied (somewhat sourly, I thought), "Well, do it your way, it's your book, and we don't want you to look back after publication and wish you'd never heard of us". Alongside of these ambivalent-sounding reassurances about my authorial authority, I received periodic comments about how the publisher could not afford to put a book out there that had so many flaws and weaknesses that it simply would not sell, or that would be an embarrassment to the publishing company.

I was sent a document to review and sign, titled "draft contract", and I wanted to modify some clauses to safeguard that the book would come out my way (final word on the book's cover, title, back-cover blurbs, publicity descriptions or synopsis, etc) and also push for a better deal in some places (better % royalties beyond the 2500th copy, because I'd be financing most of the publicity efforts, as tends to be the case with small publishers) -- I figured it did say draft proposal, after all, and that they might say "nope, you can't have that" and if so we'd negotiate to a compromise and then I'd sign and they'd sign and I'd hold my breath and hope we could work together on the edits, right?

Uh uh. I got a reply email stating that the publisher had decided they had too many projects going on and had decided not to publish my book after all, best of luck with it elsewhere, etc. After a day to cool off I wrote a letter of inquiry (and of hubris-acknowledgment). He confirmed that yeah, it was because I'd given them pushback instead of just signing the contract as is. And nope, no room at this point for continuing the discussion, sorry. So that was that.


What are your symptoms when you get down and despondent and mopey?

For me, it's like this:


* I get mad at myself and start blaming myself for the outcome, even though I'm still capable of an intellectual analysis that tells me I didn't do self-destructive things here. I blew it. I had a contract in my hands and managed to drive away the publisher. I must not really want to get my book published, I sabotage myself. Heck, I probably sabotage myself right and left every day, finding ways to not network or communicate, so that I can be a fucking dilettante and keep pretending to be an "activist" or a gender "revolutionary" when I'm really just Walter Mitty and none of this is real.

* I question my beliefs and understandings. Intellectually, I could tell you that it is good for anyone to question what they purport to believe; it makes the beliefs that withstand such questions more valid and sound, and it makes the person who subscribes to them less defensive and more genuinely confident and all that -- but in this mood, the belief-questioning is very dark and takes this form: "My difference probably isn't that I'm differently gendered. That's just an excuse. I'm inferior, there's something fundamentally wrong with me. People mocked and harassed me as a kid because I was pathetic, not because I was a sissy. I have had problems making friends and getting accepted socially because I'm not fun, not friendly, don't remember what is important to other people, and in particular because I don't properly soak up how to be, the little memes and clues, so I am not a part of things. I'm probably impaired neurologically or psychologically. Maybe I'm autistic, or I have some personality deficit so that I'm capable of doing mechanical things like dress myself or do data entry or write term papers for college classes but my brain isn't wired correctly to do people-interaction. Yeah, there's something wrong with me.

* The dark stuff isn't all of the self-blame variety. I have other forms of gloom to wallow in. Why have I gotten so little traction out of forty years of trying to share and explain these ideas? Well it's because I belong to a sexually dimorphic species, and I'm a sissy male, a feminine male, hence a minority and marginalized because of that; and I can try to call that "political" and make an "issue" of it all I want, but my species isn't buying it, there are evolutionary forces that select against it becoming okay for males like me to be accepted and embraced by society. Or (brain switches channels to a different gloomy perspective) it's a conspiracy of sorts, my set of theories and explanations is a potential meme that conflicts in parts with the predominant rising body of thought, which at the moment is the mainstream transgender narrative, What I am saying or trying to say is rejected because the popular social dialog only has room for a few prevailing ideas to proliferate. My notions are no doubt seen as transphobic, or at least they’re seen as incorrect and inaccurate when people compare them with the established transgender explanations. And back in the earlier years, before transgender viewpoints were established, my ideas were probably worrisome to gay people and their supporters, and were perceived as homophobic. So, you see, communication between an individual and the rest of their surrounding culture isn't free exchange; ideas that are not the ones chosen by the consensus get pinched off and blocked because they introduce too much noise, and mine are noise, not the memes that have been embraced and selected for wider audiences. Or (switching channels to one with even less light in it)…

* Ha, so silly to dwell on how poorly I fit as a male, when I should take note of how poorly I fit as a human being. I am not doing this "being a person" thing very well. I was born to a species whose tasks of life and patterns of behavior and interaction and challenges and so forth are a bad fit for me, and not much fun. I am tired of this. Not in the sense of wanting to be dead, not in the sense of craving non-consciousness and non-existence, but, yeesh, if I die and get to come back, I really hope I can come back on some other planet as some other species with a different nature, different characteristics. Or I could come back as a kitty cat, and live in back alleys and prey on mice and if I'm lucky get adopted and taken indoors. Or I could try my hand at being a sycamore tree, or bread mold or something. But this "being a human being" thing doesn't seem to be shaping up to anything like a passing grade. I'm just no damn good at it.


Meh. My way of coping with depression is to ride it out, and to wallow in it self-indulgently and immersively, until I get annoyed and angry and break out of it. I don't think I'm very pleasant company for the duration of these moods (I get even more self-immersed than I usually am, which is admittedly a rather narcissistic threshold to start with); I only listen to the loved ones and important associates and colleagues in my life in a sporadic and distracted way, and I get very forgetful (more spacy than usual, and again I have an embarrassingly bad baseline to start with). And I'm awake much of the time I should be sleeping and dozing off when I should be alert and awake.

But it's not like I don't understand why I would be feeling depressed. I got sufficient reason. So it's normal and natural and part of life for me.

I'll bounce back.


* MOGII = "minority orientations, gender identities, and intersex" -- an alternative to the ever-expanding LGBTQIAA++ acronym


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