When I saw that Sophie Labelle, author-cartoonist of Assigned Male Comics, had published a book, I ordered a copy. It was described as featuring a gender nonconforming main character coping with high school, and I'm addicted to stories of how people formulate their unconventional gender identities and how they experience themselves during these formative years.
I wanted to see what Labelle would do with more space to expand into, the opportunity to dive deeper into things with more nuance and complexity than a four-panel strip provides.
(Ciel is NOT a graphic novel, by the way. It's concise at 188 pages but it's made up of text, just so you know).
The early part of the book left me feeling a little bit like everything about gender and identity was still being painted in primary colors, all platitudes and overly simplified viewpoints that imply more agreement among LGBTQIA people than actually exists. Labelle's Ciel refers to "another gender...than the one the doctors gave me at birth when they looked at my genitals (which are nobody's business, by the way!)" and goes on to complain that for children in many societies, "they're designated a girl or a boy, their room are painted a certain color, and they're given certain kinds of toys to play with".
But Sophie Labelle shifts to more politically complicated territory later on in the story. Tensions are explored around questions of sexual orientation and how they collide awkwardly with nonbinary gender identities, with characters such as Frank, who is involved with Ciel's best friend Stephie, a trans girl. Frank is starting to get facial hair and unclear on whether or not Stephie, who was assigned male, will also.
"You know, she wouldn't be any less a girl if she had a beard like a Viking, or an Adam's apple, or a low voice", Ciel tells him.
"But it would be a little weird."
"Why?"
"People might think I was going out with a guy, or something."
"And that would be a real tragedy, right?"
"That's not what I mean! Some of my friends say I'm gay becasue I'm going out with Stephie, and I don't care."
"Good."
This conversation gets Ciel wondering about facial hair. Ciel doesn't identify as a boy or a girl. And although Ciel is taking puberty hormone blockers, they're not firmly committed to continuing to do so.
Over and over again, the characters in Labelle's book, in pondering their own identities and their expressions of them, find themselves considering how they are viewed by others. It's an unavoidable part of identity. Sociologists sometimes call it "altercasting" — the act of assigning identities to other people. We all do it, not always with bad intentions, not always with narrowly limited categories, but even when we are aware of all this diversity, we still tend to listen and watch and then regard a person as a trans woman or a genderfluid nonbinary person or a lesbian trans girl or whatever. And we all also spend time and energy imagining how we are perceived, and we take it into account when choosing how to interact, how to present.
In Ciel's case, there is the matter of what name to use. The school's records have Ciel's proper name down as "Alessandro". Ciel is somewhat awkward about asking to be referred to as "Alessandra" instead, more comfortable about asking ahead of time than correcting a teacher who started using the other name. Ciel is even more open and out on their YouTube channel, where videos openly explore what it is like to be trans and gender-nonconforming.
That provokes the most polarized and antagonistically hostile reaction that Ciel experiences in the book — from another transgender person. A video blogger named Bettie Bobbie posts: "Hi everyboy! Today I watched a video that made me want to puke, about a gay boy who invented a gender for himself by saying he's neither a boy nor a girl...if you ask me, this video harms real trans people like me."
Sophie Labelle shows us that the world of LGBTQIA identities is intricate and that we struggle with identification and expression, and that there are hurt feelings and resentments and anger sometimes. This is honest and fair.
Through Ciel's tale, Labelle does a slow exploration of presentation by a gender nonconforming person (I would describe Ciel as genderfluid, myself, but the term isn't embraced in this story). Ciel's choice of clothing is presented as an internal dialog, facing the closet several mornings and deciding against the ostentatiously colorful apparel they're drawn to and instead putting on more drab and mundane garments. Only towards the end of the book does Labelle pull back and let us see that choice against the backdrop of Ciel's expectation of their classmates' attitudes and reactions.
Ciel, by Sophie Labelle, Second Story Press 2020 Toronto CA
https://secondstorypress.ca/kids/ciel
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Showing posts with label altercasting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label altercasting. Show all posts
Saturday, October 17, 2020
Saturday, May 9, 2020
Diminishing Returns
My transgender woman friend is replying to a comment that she finds annoying. Somebody has said that they have nothing against transgender women, "but why do you embrace all of the most phony and stereotypical trappings of restrictive femininity? It's all pink lipstick and false eyelashes and nylons and pointy shoes with you. Don't you see how that comes across to us cis women? It's like you think that's what being a woman is all about!"
My friend finds the comment annoying because she feels like she keeps answering it over and over, it's a reoccurring theme and she's tired of it. She writes, "We don't like being misgendered. I happen to be tall for a woman, with more narrow hips and a more angular jaw. I grew up before puberty blockers. Many of us need to send as many signals as possible or we run the risk of being addressed as 'sir' or 'mister'. Why is that hard for you to understand?"
She uses socially recognized indicators of gender. Things that men don't do, things that men don't wear. That only works as long as men, in general, don't do those things, don't wear those items.
Meanwhile, we cheer when we hear stories of boys in preschool who aren't chased away from the fairy princess costumes. We celebrate the decline in rigid notions of what boys can do, what girls can do. We agree that the body with which one is born should not artificially limit one's choices, that people should have the maximum freedom to be and do any of the things that other people get to be and do in our society.
Many nonbinary and agender people say they would be glad to see gender disappear entirely: just treat people for who they are, don't categorize people as genders at all. But at the same time, many of them continue to be assigned to a gender by the people who encounter them. The assignment tends to be the same assignment they were given at birth--not because of actual genitalia, necessarily, but assorted visibly discernable physical characteristics that are the product of our sex hormones and the effects they have on our bodies. The same things that my transgender friend has to work against to avoid being misgendered. So it happens with nonbinary and agender people, too, they get misgendered and to try to keep that from happening, they, too, make use of garments and grooming styles to "look more masc" or "look more femme", to offset those traits.
I could identify as transgender or as nonbinary, but mostly I don't. I don't seek to be perceived as a female person, and I don't seek to be perceived as someone who is neither male nor female. I most often call myself genderqueer instead, and explain to people that I am a gender invert, a male girl (or male femme if you prefer), that I have a body and I have a personality, a sex and a gender, and what makes me genderqueer is that they are a mixed bag, an apparent mismatch.
Like the transgender and the nonbinary people, I, too, use some signals to convey visually a bit of who I am. I wear my hair long, I wear some jewelry that's not typical for males to wear, and I wear some apparel that isn't considered men's clothes (especially skirts). Since I present (nevertheless) as a male person (the facial hair being a pretty distinctive marker, and a prominent male larynx also makes that statement), it's a mixed signal, which is more or less as good as I can accomplish in the absense of a widespread social expectation that there are such people as male girls out there.
If there were a lot of other male people doing that, though, using items that socially symbolize femininity without attempting to be perceived as physically female, wouldn't it just dilute and eventually erase the perception of those items as feminine? Or is there a way to create the identity "male girl" and be recognized as a feminine male instead of being seen as a longhaired man in a skirt?
And is it a problem anyway? If the world had not insisted on a bunch of rigid notions about how girls and boys are supposed to be different from each other, would I have ever pushed away from the "boy" identity and decided I was more like one of the girls?
Maybe. Maybe not. I think the answer to that depends on whether males in general have different traits (other than the physical, I mean) from females in general. If there are such differences at the generalization level, I might still have come to see myself as an exception, even without the excessively rigid and proscriptive attitudes I grew up with.
People might want to hold on to artificial signals, signals that have historically said "feminine" or "masculine", not to gild the lily of their body's own physical manifestations but to signal where on the spectrum of masculinity to femininity they consider themselves to belong. There's no innate reason for most of these markers to convey the meaning that they currently convey, but that's true of the sounds that constitute our language and yet we continue to use language to communicate.
But if, on the other hand, there are no real non-physical-body differences between the sexes, it does seem like gender would disappear if there were no ideology propping it up. So notions of "masculinity" and "femininity" might fade away, along with any possible signals to convey them.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
My friend finds the comment annoying because she feels like she keeps answering it over and over, it's a reoccurring theme and she's tired of it. She writes, "We don't like being misgendered. I happen to be tall for a woman, with more narrow hips and a more angular jaw. I grew up before puberty blockers. Many of us need to send as many signals as possible or we run the risk of being addressed as 'sir' or 'mister'. Why is that hard for you to understand?"
She uses socially recognized indicators of gender. Things that men don't do, things that men don't wear. That only works as long as men, in general, don't do those things, don't wear those items.
Meanwhile, we cheer when we hear stories of boys in preschool who aren't chased away from the fairy princess costumes. We celebrate the decline in rigid notions of what boys can do, what girls can do. We agree that the body with which one is born should not artificially limit one's choices, that people should have the maximum freedom to be and do any of the things that other people get to be and do in our society.
Many nonbinary and agender people say they would be glad to see gender disappear entirely: just treat people for who they are, don't categorize people as genders at all. But at the same time, many of them continue to be assigned to a gender by the people who encounter them. The assignment tends to be the same assignment they were given at birth--not because of actual genitalia, necessarily, but assorted visibly discernable physical characteristics that are the product of our sex hormones and the effects they have on our bodies. The same things that my transgender friend has to work against to avoid being misgendered. So it happens with nonbinary and agender people, too, they get misgendered and to try to keep that from happening, they, too, make use of garments and grooming styles to "look more masc" or "look more femme", to offset those traits.
I could identify as transgender or as nonbinary, but mostly I don't. I don't seek to be perceived as a female person, and I don't seek to be perceived as someone who is neither male nor female. I most often call myself genderqueer instead, and explain to people that I am a gender invert, a male girl (or male femme if you prefer), that I have a body and I have a personality, a sex and a gender, and what makes me genderqueer is that they are a mixed bag, an apparent mismatch.
Like the transgender and the nonbinary people, I, too, use some signals to convey visually a bit of who I am. I wear my hair long, I wear some jewelry that's not typical for males to wear, and I wear some apparel that isn't considered men's clothes (especially skirts). Since I present (nevertheless) as a male person (the facial hair being a pretty distinctive marker, and a prominent male larynx also makes that statement), it's a mixed signal, which is more or less as good as I can accomplish in the absense of a widespread social expectation that there are such people as male girls out there.
If there were a lot of other male people doing that, though, using items that socially symbolize femininity without attempting to be perceived as physically female, wouldn't it just dilute and eventually erase the perception of those items as feminine? Or is there a way to create the identity "male girl" and be recognized as a feminine male instead of being seen as a longhaired man in a skirt?
And is it a problem anyway? If the world had not insisted on a bunch of rigid notions about how girls and boys are supposed to be different from each other, would I have ever pushed away from the "boy" identity and decided I was more like one of the girls?
Maybe. Maybe not. I think the answer to that depends on whether males in general have different traits (other than the physical, I mean) from females in general. If there are such differences at the generalization level, I might still have come to see myself as an exception, even without the excessively rigid and proscriptive attitudes I grew up with.
People might want to hold on to artificial signals, signals that have historically said "feminine" or "masculine", not to gild the lily of their body's own physical manifestations but to signal where on the spectrum of masculinity to femininity they consider themselves to belong. There's no innate reason for most of these markers to convey the meaning that they currently convey, but that's true of the sounds that constitute our language and yet we continue to use language to communicate.
But if, on the other hand, there are no real non-physical-body differences between the sexes, it does seem like gender would disappear if there were no ideology propping it up. So notions of "masculinity" and "femininity" might fade away, along with any possible signals to convey them.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Sex vs Gender: A Working Definition?
For an organization's position paper, I was asked to come up with definitions for "sex" and "gender".
SEX is whatever biological built-in differences distinguish people as being male, female, or in some cases a different value from either of those two.
GENDER is any and all notions about differences between the sexes that are not directly based on things biologically built in.
I've written about it pretty extensively over the years. The distinction between my identity and situation and that of the mainstream narrative describing transgender people is that whereas they transition visually (and perhaps medically) so as to be perceived as the sex that matches their gender, I present to the world as a person with a mismatched sex and gender and press for acceptance as such. So the distinction between sex and gender has been useful to me. I've blogged about it often, for example here, here, and here. But like most people discussing such things, I've seldom defined the terms and instead have described them, like listing a batch of individual characteristics and saying "etc" at the end and saying "that's sex" and doing the same for gender.
Here's what I like about the definition at the top of this page: it leaves plenty of room for people to dissent about what things belong in each box.
A person with traditional, socially conservative views, for example, might believe that the socially shared and historically established views about the respective natures of men and women reflect how they really are. For them, gender is an example of an "empty set" -- you remember empty sets from that math class we were in back in school, right?
A person who considers the belief in the biological differentiation of male and female to be all ideological hype, and says sex is a social construct the same as gender and says that real science disproves that there's any clear distinction or division into two sex categories... that person basically views sex as an empty set, it's all gender.
Transgender men and women often speak of having something biologicallly different in their brains that makes them inherently trans, that they were born this way, and hence all the matrix of behaviors and desires and nuances and personality characteristics that they share in common with cisgender people of the same gender are built in for them. If it's built in, it's sex. The bodies with which they were born have other physical characteristics, making for an inconsistency, an apparently contradiction, but that's natural -- there are people with XY chromosomes who have androgen insensitivity and hence the morphology of the female body, which is also an inconsistency. Nature does that. Sex isn't binary except as a generalization.
Gender is a word that often followed by the word "role". I've tended to wince at the reduction of gender to social roles, as in "Joe goes to the office to work and Sue stays home watches the kids and cleans the house, those are gender roles". But there's a less klunky way to think of the term "role" -- movie and stage and television acting, where the actor brings a role to life.
We see a professional actor on the screen or stage rendering a character. He's sardonic, world-weary, casual in a mildly insulting way, easily familiar and a whiff dismissive, yet caring when he can be effectively caring without making himself vulnerable. He evinces wry amusement. He saunters when he walks. The actor's portrayal fits in with our prior experience of such people and resonates for us if the portrayal is done well, and some of us identify with that character and think he's like us; we may carry that performance around in our heads afterwards and aspire to be more like him, even, seeing in that role a model for how we want to be.
In that sense of the word, then, yes, gender includes and is largely composed of roles, a great many of them, ways of being a woman or a man that are embued with their own forms of dignity and strength, vulnerability and concerns, sexiness and spark, and forms of expression thereof. Our gender identities are significantly composed of juxtaposing our self-image against the backdrop of these and embracing the ones that validate us and inspire us as, well, role models.
Gender also is about being perceived. In other words it's not limited to the interior world of self. Other people gender us, they see us the same way we see the actors on the stage, looking from the outside at our performance and from it attributing characteristics to us, believing things about us, that may or may not match up well with the self-image we carry around inside us.
In our society, one of the very first people attribute to us when they encounter us is a sex category. Transgender people often speak of being assigned female at birth (AFAB) or assigned male at birth (AMAB); this is that same process although it's not "at birth", it's "at first encounter" and people do it to us generally while we're fully clothed, and it relies on social cues and clues (such as a given garment being considered women's clothes or mens' clothes, or the style of one's haircut being considered men's or women's hair style), so the act of attribution is at best only partially on the basis of biological characteristics. But the belief that they are forming is a belief about biological body structure nonetheless, so let's call it a sex attribution.
In our society what happens along with that is a gender attribution, of course, the projection of whatever that person tends to think about the sex they just assigned us that isn't necessarily built-in as part of our biology.
And therein lies the social problem. To whatever extent the people "sexing" us are also "gendering" us with a large batch of beliefs and attitudes that interpret our performance of ourself through the lens of a role we aren't considering ourselves to be playing, that's misgendering.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
SEX is whatever biological built-in differences distinguish people as being male, female, or in some cases a different value from either of those two.
GENDER is any and all notions about differences between the sexes that are not directly based on things biologically built in.
I've written about it pretty extensively over the years. The distinction between my identity and situation and that of the mainstream narrative describing transgender people is that whereas they transition visually (and perhaps medically) so as to be perceived as the sex that matches their gender, I present to the world as a person with a mismatched sex and gender and press for acceptance as such. So the distinction between sex and gender has been useful to me. I've blogged about it often, for example here, here, and here. But like most people discussing such things, I've seldom defined the terms and instead have described them, like listing a batch of individual characteristics and saying "etc" at the end and saying "that's sex" and doing the same for gender.
Here's what I like about the definition at the top of this page: it leaves plenty of room for people to dissent about what things belong in each box.
A person with traditional, socially conservative views, for example, might believe that the socially shared and historically established views about the respective natures of men and women reflect how they really are. For them, gender is an example of an "empty set" -- you remember empty sets from that math class we were in back in school, right?
A person who considers the belief in the biological differentiation of male and female to be all ideological hype, and says sex is a social construct the same as gender and says that real science disproves that there's any clear distinction or division into two sex categories... that person basically views sex as an empty set, it's all gender.
Transgender men and women often speak of having something biologicallly different in their brains that makes them inherently trans, that they were born this way, and hence all the matrix of behaviors and desires and nuances and personality characteristics that they share in common with cisgender people of the same gender are built in for them. If it's built in, it's sex. The bodies with which they were born have other physical characteristics, making for an inconsistency, an apparently contradiction, but that's natural -- there are people with XY chromosomes who have androgen insensitivity and hence the morphology of the female body, which is also an inconsistency. Nature does that. Sex isn't binary except as a generalization.
Gender is a word that often followed by the word "role". I've tended to wince at the reduction of gender to social roles, as in "Joe goes to the office to work and Sue stays home watches the kids and cleans the house, those are gender roles". But there's a less klunky way to think of the term "role" -- movie and stage and television acting, where the actor brings a role to life.
We see a professional actor on the screen or stage rendering a character. He's sardonic, world-weary, casual in a mildly insulting way, easily familiar and a whiff dismissive, yet caring when he can be effectively caring without making himself vulnerable. He evinces wry amusement. He saunters when he walks. The actor's portrayal fits in with our prior experience of such people and resonates for us if the portrayal is done well, and some of us identify with that character and think he's like us; we may carry that performance around in our heads afterwards and aspire to be more like him, even, seeing in that role a model for how we want to be.
In that sense of the word, then, yes, gender includes and is largely composed of roles, a great many of them, ways of being a woman or a man that are embued with their own forms of dignity and strength, vulnerability and concerns, sexiness and spark, and forms of expression thereof. Our gender identities are significantly composed of juxtaposing our self-image against the backdrop of these and embracing the ones that validate us and inspire us as, well, role models.
Gender also is about being perceived. In other words it's not limited to the interior world of self. Other people gender us, they see us the same way we see the actors on the stage, looking from the outside at our performance and from it attributing characteristics to us, believing things about us, that may or may not match up well with the self-image we carry around inside us.
In our society, one of the very first people attribute to us when they encounter us is a sex category. Transgender people often speak of being assigned female at birth (AFAB) or assigned male at birth (AMAB); this is that same process although it's not "at birth", it's "at first encounter" and people do it to us generally while we're fully clothed, and it relies on social cues and clues (such as a given garment being considered women's clothes or mens' clothes, or the style of one's haircut being considered men's or women's hair style), so the act of attribution is at best only partially on the basis of biological characteristics. But the belief that they are forming is a belief about biological body structure nonetheless, so let's call it a sex attribution.
In our society what happens along with that is a gender attribution, of course, the projection of whatever that person tends to think about the sex they just assigned us that isn't necessarily built-in as part of our biology.
And therein lies the social problem. To whatever extent the people "sexing" us are also "gendering" us with a large batch of beliefs and attitudes that interpret our performance of ourself through the lens of a role we aren't considering ourselves to be playing, that's misgendering.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, March 28, 2020
Anatomy of a Review: Karen Bernard's LAKESIDE
Event: Salon: Karen Bernard's LAKESIDE
Date: February 06, 2020 8:00 PM
Douglas Dunn's Studio
541 Broadway
New York, NY 10012
My friend and I share our guilty secret: we prefer narrative forms of dance and performance art, where there is a message or a plot line. It's akin to admitting you mostly like representational art when you're coming back from a show of abstract oil paintings. It tends to brand one as less sophisticated.
I find that the lack of a defined meaning creates a challenge for someone seeking to do a review. One could restrict one's self to how the performer moved, their talent and grace on stage. But that dismisses the performance itself as exercise. The problem is that my mind wants the piece to be "about something" and so it seizes on a message, a "something" that may originate entirely in my own head, making any review more about me and what I made out of this Rorschach choreography than about the performance that anyone else may have seen.
Hence the title "Anatomy of a Review".
I bring with me to the audience member seat a pair of tools, if you will, my main everyday obsessions: feminist theory and gender theory. When the only tool you own is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, they say. Well, here's what I saw:
A garment is in view in front of a kneeling performer (K. Bernard) under a tightly focused light. She and it. She stays that way for a prolonged duration, and doesn't react. Then very very slowly extends her hand, until the elbow is completely straightened, the arm as distant from the core of her body as she can make it, before she slowly pinches the fabric between fingertips and with agonizing slowness lifts it towards her.
Do I see a facial expression, or am I imagining it? I interpret something repellent, a displeasure, that makes the slow approach shot through with reluctance.
The outfit turns out to be a skirt and blouse. I see: gendered clothing. It has pastel colors, lacy ruffles, and once she (slowly) dons it, I see it is cut in a style that draws visual attention to legs and breasts, curve of torso, neck, and arms.
Once she's finally in the thing, she strikes poses and begins to move in it. I see: mockery, revulsion. I see: mincing and prancing, acting out in overstated compliance that which is expected of her. I see: resistance to femininization, trivialization, sexual fetishism and objectification. Her costume is a garment that renders one as an object for others' visual consumption, and it's not designed primarily for the wearer's convenience and comfort. These aren't, I think, interpretations that the clothing in and of itself would conjure for me, but by her body language as she interacted with it.
Due to my gender identity activities, I'm quick to attach the extreme reluctance and disgust that I see to the act of being misgendered. An expression not so much of resentment towards the costume per se as towards the package of feelings and attitudes towards anyone who would wear it, a rejection of femme. "Yes, that's it", I nod affirmatively in my seat. I imagine the cartoon thought-balloons over her head: "I don't want to wear this girly-girl thing, this so is not me. I'm supposed to be in this and prance around like this and pretend I'm eye candy and shit. Fuck this, gimme a goddam suit and a tie and a fedora, willya?"
The piece was presented without program notes, and was not followed by one of those "talkbacks" where the audience or a panel of people discuss the piece and what they got out of it, so we made our exit with only each other to consult.
We agreed that the dancing, the timing, the expressiveness were superb. She creates suspense and delivers an almost nerve-wracking intensity at times in her performance.
Had I seen anything that the artist had intended? Had the things that I did see reside at all in the performance piece, or strictly within my head as a gender-variant person and a feminist theory junkie?
"I saw an earlier version", my companion told me. "There were things she took out. I always thought it was about a murder. But that could have just been me, that's what I thought the piece was about, and she took out the parts that made me think so, so who knows?
Now to be fair, we do that to everyday life. The events of the real world aren't written with a plot, a clear storyline. We weren't handed a program explaining what the life we're about to experience is supposed to be about.
(Or, for those of us who were, we came to doubt the authority of the ushers who handed it to us). Some of us embraced a viewpoint, a political social theory about what's going on in life. We have come to use concepts of gender and identity and narrow confining gender-boxes that people are imprisoned in and struggle with. We embraced the concepts because they explained a lot to us, they clicked into place inside our heads and caused a lot of what we saw on the stage called World to make sense to us.
I believe in theory. I believe in the process of analyzing things. For the record, I don't think it leads to seeing things that your theoretical model say are there when it really all comes from you, the person observing life, inventing meaning where none actually exists. We share these analyses as communities of people who believe these explanations fit well, that they make sense of life. If they didn't offer us much explanatory power, it wouldn't be very satisfying to use them and we'd switch to one that did.
But I do think a lot of it is involves filling in a lot of everyday blank spots with what our theory says is going on. We see a behavior and without access to the thoughts in the behaving person's head, we make assumptions about their attitudes and intentions.
Being self-aware means reminding ourselves occasionally that we do that.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Date: February 06, 2020 8:00 PM
Douglas Dunn's Studio
541 Broadway
New York, NY 10012
My friend and I share our guilty secret: we prefer narrative forms of dance and performance art, where there is a message or a plot line. It's akin to admitting you mostly like representational art when you're coming back from a show of abstract oil paintings. It tends to brand one as less sophisticated.
I find that the lack of a defined meaning creates a challenge for someone seeking to do a review. One could restrict one's self to how the performer moved, their talent and grace on stage. But that dismisses the performance itself as exercise. The problem is that my mind wants the piece to be "about something" and so it seizes on a message, a "something" that may originate entirely in my own head, making any review more about me and what I made out of this Rorschach choreography than about the performance that anyone else may have seen.
Hence the title "Anatomy of a Review".
I bring with me to the audience member seat a pair of tools, if you will, my main everyday obsessions: feminist theory and gender theory. When the only tool you own is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, they say. Well, here's what I saw:
A garment is in view in front of a kneeling performer (K. Bernard) under a tightly focused light. She and it. She stays that way for a prolonged duration, and doesn't react. Then very very slowly extends her hand, until the elbow is completely straightened, the arm as distant from the core of her body as she can make it, before she slowly pinches the fabric between fingertips and with agonizing slowness lifts it towards her.
Do I see a facial expression, or am I imagining it? I interpret something repellent, a displeasure, that makes the slow approach shot through with reluctance.
The outfit turns out to be a skirt and blouse. I see: gendered clothing. It has pastel colors, lacy ruffles, and once she (slowly) dons it, I see it is cut in a style that draws visual attention to legs and breasts, curve of torso, neck, and arms.
Once she's finally in the thing, she strikes poses and begins to move in it. I see: mockery, revulsion. I see: mincing and prancing, acting out in overstated compliance that which is expected of her. I see: resistance to femininization, trivialization, sexual fetishism and objectification. Her costume is a garment that renders one as an object for others' visual consumption, and it's not designed primarily for the wearer's convenience and comfort. These aren't, I think, interpretations that the clothing in and of itself would conjure for me, but by her body language as she interacted with it.
Due to my gender identity activities, I'm quick to attach the extreme reluctance and disgust that I see to the act of being misgendered. An expression not so much of resentment towards the costume per se as towards the package of feelings and attitudes towards anyone who would wear it, a rejection of femme. "Yes, that's it", I nod affirmatively in my seat. I imagine the cartoon thought-balloons over her head: "I don't want to wear this girly-girl thing, this so is not me. I'm supposed to be in this and prance around like this and pretend I'm eye candy and shit. Fuck this, gimme a goddam suit and a tie and a fedora, willya?"
The piece was presented without program notes, and was not followed by one of those "talkbacks" where the audience or a panel of people discuss the piece and what they got out of it, so we made our exit with only each other to consult.
We agreed that the dancing, the timing, the expressiveness were superb. She creates suspense and delivers an almost nerve-wracking intensity at times in her performance.
Had I seen anything that the artist had intended? Had the things that I did see reside at all in the performance piece, or strictly within my head as a gender-variant person and a feminist theory junkie?
"I saw an earlier version", my companion told me. "There were things she took out. I always thought it was about a murder. But that could have just been me, that's what I thought the piece was about, and she took out the parts that made me think so, so who knows?
Now to be fair, we do that to everyday life. The events of the real world aren't written with a plot, a clear storyline. We weren't handed a program explaining what the life we're about to experience is supposed to be about.
(Or, for those of us who were, we came to doubt the authority of the ushers who handed it to us). Some of us embraced a viewpoint, a political social theory about what's going on in life. We have come to use concepts of gender and identity and narrow confining gender-boxes that people are imprisoned in and struggle with. We embraced the concepts because they explained a lot to us, they clicked into place inside our heads and caused a lot of what we saw on the stage called World to make sense to us.
I believe in theory. I believe in the process of analyzing things. For the record, I don't think it leads to seeing things that your theoretical model say are there when it really all comes from you, the person observing life, inventing meaning where none actually exists. We share these analyses as communities of people who believe these explanations fit well, that they make sense of life. If they didn't offer us much explanatory power, it wouldn't be very satisfying to use them and we'd switch to one that did.
But I do think a lot of it is involves filling in a lot of everyday blank spots with what our theory says is going on. We see a behavior and without access to the thoughts in the behaving person's head, we make assumptions about their attitudes and intentions.
Being self-aware means reminding ourselves occasionally that we do that.
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You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
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Saturday, September 21, 2019
Transition is a Transitive Verb
On one of the Facebook transgender boards, someone writes:
That's the classic model of transgender, often called "binary transgender".
On a different transgender board, someone else complains:
It's complicated. Part of what complicates it is that sex isn't the same thing as gender. And yet I often see transgender defined as "when a person's GENDER identity differs from the SEX they were assigned at birth". But the definition doesn't directly speak to whether being transgender can mean you have a GENDER that differs from the SEX you are assigned now and every day whenever people see you, or a GENDER that differs from the SEX that you consider *yourself*, for that matter.
Do you need to present as the SEX that corresponds to your GENDER in order to be transgender? Do you need to "pass"? What if you are fine with the SEX to which you were assigned at birth but your GENDER happens to not have the same value and you happen to be perfectly fine with that mismatch? (Even if the rest of the world is a lot less fine with that?)
I have chosen NOT to identify as transgender, preferring genderqueer, but most of my transgender allies acknowledge that that is my choice and that they'd accept me as transgender if I did choose to call myself that.
I encounter people denying my identity, too. I've had socially liberal educated people who accept gay, lesbian, and transgendered people dismiss me.
And I've had transgender people tell me, as they've told the person who identifies as "nonbinary transgender", that we don't count:
... and other transgender people have informed me that I am seeking the impossible or even that I'm a threat:
When I go to give lectures and make presentations, one of my storyboards is a sign that says It's something else. I am sorry that people in the transgender community sometimes feel like I (and other people trying to explain new identities) are picking a fight with them. The process of differentiating can sometimes come across that way. Any group trying to explain themselves to the world at large is likely to start off with a group that the world is already familiar with, and then explains how their identity is different. Didn't trans people themselves have to do some of that a few years ago? --
People used to say and think things like this (CONTENT WARNING: DISMISSIVE AND INTOLERANT LANGUAGE):
So transgender people had to explain that being transgender is about gender, not sexual orientation. They had to differentiate themselves from gay and lesbian people. And some of the people they had to explain this to were people in the gay and lesbian community, so they spent a fair amount of time saying "I am not like you. I'm like this instead".
Now you're on the receiving end. And we're pushing off against you.
But we could not have done this without you. Your prior success makes this possible.
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Does transgender mean you want to transition from your birth gender to the gender you identify with, like MtF or FtM? And you have to have gender dysphoria to be transgender?
That's the classic model of transgender, often called "binary transgender".
On a different transgender board, someone else complains:
I just love it when people tell me I can't identify as trans. As if nonbinary people aren't trans.
It's complicated. Part of what complicates it is that sex isn't the same thing as gender. And yet I often see transgender defined as "when a person's GENDER identity differs from the SEX they were assigned at birth". But the definition doesn't directly speak to whether being transgender can mean you have a GENDER that differs from the SEX you are assigned now and every day whenever people see you, or a GENDER that differs from the SEX that you consider *yourself*, for that matter.
Do you need to present as the SEX that corresponds to your GENDER in order to be transgender? Do you need to "pass"? What if you are fine with the SEX to which you were assigned at birth but your GENDER happens to not have the same value and you happen to be perfectly fine with that mismatch? (Even if the rest of the world is a lot less fine with that?)
I have chosen NOT to identify as transgender, preferring genderqueer, but most of my transgender allies acknowledge that that is my choice and that they'd accept me as transgender if I did choose to call myself that.
I encounter people denying my identity, too. I've had socially liberal educated people who accept gay, lesbian, and transgendered people dismiss me.
"I consider Trans people as the Gender they feel they are, whether they've had surgery or not. That isn't at all relelvant to your case because YOU AREN"T TRANS!"
And I've had transgender people tell me, as they've told the person who identifies as "nonbinary transgender", that we don't count:
since you strongly believe you're a woman...then you need to transition. There's no such thing as a male woman you're confused or you're a troll
... and other transgender people have informed me that I am seeking the impossible or even that I'm a threat:
if you mean to say that a 'woman' (trans or cis) can be 'male' in that they can have facial hair, a deep voice - any of those trappings that categorise them in the mind of the masses by default as 'men' rather than as 'women', there we have a problem...
We are a collective society, and thus our actions, decisions, and ideations have to, at one way or another, be corroborated by, or rebuked by, the collective society we are a part of. If you present outwardly as 'male' but you identify as a woman, one cannot ever expect the collective to acknowledge the latter while the former exists. You cannot push the fabric of society so far to breaking point and expect any sort of acceptance...
What happens to those of us who actually worked hard to transition? What happens to those of us who have nearly been brought to bankruptcy because we have felt the disconnect, have suffered through, had gone through the torment of society making us suffer for it, and worked hard to make the suffering cease? If your ideologies are to be a new 'norm', that would render all of our hard work meaningless.
When I go to give lectures and make presentations, one of my storyboards is a sign that says It's something else. I am sorry that people in the transgender community sometimes feel like I (and other people trying to explain new identities) are picking a fight with them. The process of differentiating can sometimes come across that way. Any group trying to explain themselves to the world at large is likely to start off with a group that the world is already familiar with, and then explains how their identity is different. Didn't trans people themselves have to do some of that a few years ago? --
People used to say and think things like this (CONTENT WARNING: DISMISSIVE AND INTOLERANT LANGUAGE):
Oh yeah, the transsexuals and tranvestites. They're the gay guys who dress as women and call each other 'girl' and call each other 'she' and stuff. It's a subcommunity within the gay world.
OR
Transgender people... it's like it's more socially acceptable to be a straight woman than to be a gay man, and more acceptable to be a straight guy than to be a lesbian. So that's why they do it.
NOT TO MENTION...
So let me get this right... she was a he, she was born male, and then transitioned and became a woman, but she likes girls, so she's a lesbian? I'm sorry that's all fucked up. What's the purpose of transitioning to female if you're attracted to women? This dude needs a psychiatrist!
So transgender people had to explain that being transgender is about gender, not sexual orientation. They had to differentiate themselves from gay and lesbian people. And some of the people they had to explain this to were people in the gay and lesbian community, so they spent a fair amount of time saying "I am not like you. I'm like this instead".
Now you're on the receiving end. And we're pushing off against you.
But we could not have done this without you. Your prior success makes this possible.
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Thursday, August 8, 2019
To Gender or Not To Gender?
Do we want to rid the world of gender, that evil conformity-demanding set of constraints, or do we like gender, as long as we don’t get the wrong one shoved down our throats? This is a recurrent discussion within my Facebook groups and other support environments. Some of us have gone to a lot of trouble and expense to package our presentation so as to receive the altercast gender-identity from others that matches how we think of ourselves; others among us have gone to a similar degree of effort and hassle to get out of the gender-cage that we’ve felt trapped in.
I’m not neutral in this debate, although I try to remain open-minded. I’m a gendered person. I have a gender atypical for my physical sex, but it’s a real gender and not just the lack of the typical, expected one. I’m a femme, one of the girlish sort; I spent my life seeking approval of, competing with, and otherwise evaluating myself against the girls and, later, women that I saw as people who were like me.
Some people contest my identification of myself as genderqueer, stating that “genderqueer” is for people who want to subvert and undermine the world’s evil gender system, throwing their metaphorical sabots into the cultural gender-machinery. Is gender inherently evil?
Gender is social, not biological. But that doesn’t mean gender was arbitrarily invented or that it’s entirely capricious and meaningless. I think of gender as having two components: generalization and ideology. At the level of generalization, gender is that set of descriptions and attributes that, in general, are more true of one sex than the other, and hence are associated with it. Then, stirred into the mixture, there’s ideology, a sort of propaganda that isn’t about how people actually are but instead is prescriptive, how the system wants people to be. The system in question is patriarchy, and therefore a lot of the ideological part of gender has to do with how a patriarchal system “wants” people to behave a certain way. For example, the patriarchal system wants men to have authority over women, so servility gets built into femininity for propaganda reasons.
The handling of exceptions to the general rule is also tainted by ideology. A generalization by itself doesn’t become prescriptive; if we generalize that roses are red, that by itself doesn’t lead us to go around chopping down rosebushes that sprout yellow or white or purple roses instead. We may in fact prize the exceptions for their rarity and regard them as special. But our social system positions the sexes against each other, perhaps so that they’ll expend lots and lots of energy trying to gain the upper hand instead of joining forces, or perhaps that’s the invariable result of inequality. But it does polarize the two identities into opposites, exaggerating differences and encouraging us to think of the other category as other and foreign and very different. And that creates an ideological hostility towards the exceptions.
What world will we be able to have if we successfully dismantle the ideology? If it is no longer socially unacceptable for the male-bodied people to exhibit the traits and behaviors associated with the female folks and vice versa, will we end up with a world that has no notion of “feminine” and “masculine”, no notion of gender remaining? Or will there continue to be a sense of general differences?
In the 1970s, the mainstream feminism of the times created the notion of “unisex”, a humanistic and egalitarian belief that everyone should be treated with identical expectations instead of sexist different standards. Nowadays you mostly only see the word “unisex” in the windows of hair salons. Meanwhile, we’ve come to recognize that the sex of one’s birth should not and does not define one’s gender, and we speak of transgender as well as cisgender women, transgender as well as cisgender men. Will gender itself wither away and die, so that in years to come no one will be either trans or cis, feminine or masculine?
I don’t know. Give us fairness and social flexibility to be the selves that we find most affirming and I guess we’ll find out!
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I’m not neutral in this debate, although I try to remain open-minded. I’m a gendered person. I have a gender atypical for my physical sex, but it’s a real gender and not just the lack of the typical, expected one. I’m a femme, one of the girlish sort; I spent my life seeking approval of, competing with, and otherwise evaluating myself against the girls and, later, women that I saw as people who were like me.
Some people contest my identification of myself as genderqueer, stating that “genderqueer” is for people who want to subvert and undermine the world’s evil gender system, throwing their metaphorical sabots into the cultural gender-machinery. Is gender inherently evil?
Gender is social, not biological. But that doesn’t mean gender was arbitrarily invented or that it’s entirely capricious and meaningless. I think of gender as having two components: generalization and ideology. At the level of generalization, gender is that set of descriptions and attributes that, in general, are more true of one sex than the other, and hence are associated with it. Then, stirred into the mixture, there’s ideology, a sort of propaganda that isn’t about how people actually are but instead is prescriptive, how the system wants people to be. The system in question is patriarchy, and therefore a lot of the ideological part of gender has to do with how a patriarchal system “wants” people to behave a certain way. For example, the patriarchal system wants men to have authority over women, so servility gets built into femininity for propaganda reasons.
The handling of exceptions to the general rule is also tainted by ideology. A generalization by itself doesn’t become prescriptive; if we generalize that roses are red, that by itself doesn’t lead us to go around chopping down rosebushes that sprout yellow or white or purple roses instead. We may in fact prize the exceptions for their rarity and regard them as special. But our social system positions the sexes against each other, perhaps so that they’ll expend lots and lots of energy trying to gain the upper hand instead of joining forces, or perhaps that’s the invariable result of inequality. But it does polarize the two identities into opposites, exaggerating differences and encouraging us to think of the other category as other and foreign and very different. And that creates an ideological hostility towards the exceptions.
What world will we be able to have if we successfully dismantle the ideology? If it is no longer socially unacceptable for the male-bodied people to exhibit the traits and behaviors associated with the female folks and vice versa, will we end up with a world that has no notion of “feminine” and “masculine”, no notion of gender remaining? Or will there continue to be a sense of general differences?
In the 1970s, the mainstream feminism of the times created the notion of “unisex”, a humanistic and egalitarian belief that everyone should be treated with identical expectations instead of sexist different standards. Nowadays you mostly only see the word “unisex” in the windows of hair salons. Meanwhile, we’ve come to recognize that the sex of one’s birth should not and does not define one’s gender, and we speak of transgender as well as cisgender women, transgender as well as cisgender men. Will gender itself wither away and die, so that in years to come no one will be either trans or cis, feminine or masculine?
I don’t know. Give us fairness and social flexibility to be the selves that we find most affirming and I guess we’ll find out!
———————
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Saturday, June 8, 2019
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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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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Friday, May 24, 2019
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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
“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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, May 4, 2019
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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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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Saturday, April 20, 2019
My Pronouns
They ask me what my pronouns are. It's a respectful and appropriate question. I have no easy answers.
I was born with a physical configuration that was assigned the value 'male', and I've always been one of the girls from as far back as I can remember. I was pressured to adopt and embrace masculinity, to become one of the boys, all throughout childhood, but I wasn't so inclined. Later, I was repeatedly invited to transition or to present as female, so that I would not get misgendered, but the price of not getting misgendered was to be mis-SEXED. You see, the body I was born in isn't wrong, and the historical fact of being perceived and treated by others as a male is a lifelong part of who I am, and I have no wish to discard it. I'm not female, I'm a girl. Gender isn't sex. I'm a male girl. Get used to it.
So, pronouns, huh? You want the pronouns that would appropriately reference my gender, or the pronouns that would designate my sex?
Yeah, exactly. Here we are, all woke and conscious and liberated from the gender binary and all that it evokes, and yet we still posit that one syllable is sufficient to designate our sex and our gender, regardless of the combination thereof. What's the pronoun most commonly used for a male girl?
I do get misappraised quite often. People treat me as a brother, a guy, one of the boys, another man, the identity that (normally) goes with a male body. In my case, that's misgendering. Occasionally people get my gender correct -- most often when I'm on the phone and they start calling me "ma'am" and assuming me to be feminine; it also happens sometimes when I'm approached from behind, especially if I'm at a table with other women, and they see the long hair and hear my voice and make assumptions. Problem is, they also assume female along with feminine person, and thus they mis-sex me. So I'm used to being gotten wrong. Doesn't mean I like it.
Pronouns are not among the most egregious of the aspects of misassignments like these. Think about it. If they're addressing me directly, they're going to use the pronoun you. The gender-specific pronouns are pretty much limited to third-person references, when someone is talking to a second person and says something about me. He, him, his; or she, her, hers. I don't spend a lot of my day overhearing people refer to me in the third person. So why (you may ask) do gender activists make such a big deal about pronouns? Because it's an opportunity to do public education. It's a learning moment. Getting people to rethink how they think of us. The pronouns themselves are a symptom of that thinking, but it's the thinking that the activists want to change.
We care how other people think about us. It affects how they treat us. It shapes their behavior towards us, ranging from big conscious stuff to tiny subtle subliminal stuff that they may not be aware of.
Conceptualizing me as "she" doesn't really fix any more problems for me than it causes.
In my case I don't particularly crave having people think of me as female. In particular, I do not crave the sexual attentions of people whose attraction is towards female people. I would think that would make compelling common everyday sense to people, insofar as I do not in fact have female morphology, and also because people whose attraction is towards folks with male morphology would also be assuming me to be female and would therefore not be giving me attention.
Upon expressing this, I have on a couple occasions been informed that I've expressed a homophobic attitude. Seriously? Gay males are attracted to males, why would presenting as female (or being altercast by other people as a female person) expose me to uncomfortable gay male attention? I've also been told that this attitude on my part is somehow transphobic. I don't see that either. I don't wish to be taken for a binary transitioning transgender woman, that's true, but not because that would be insulting or anything. Just that it isn't accurate in my case.
Back to the pronouns. I could reasonably tell people "Please use he/his/him when you're thinking in terms of my physical structure, and use she/her/hers when you're dwelling on my gender". Use them situationally, you know?
I could embrace "they/their/them" of course. Why don't I? Well, there's no specificity. The use of that pronoun indicates that I'm non-mainstream, but it doesn't elaborate on how. It definitely doesn't say "male girl" to people. Admittedly that's true of "genderqueer" as well, and I've embraced that term.
Well, OK, I could also come up with my own pronouns, I suppose. Other people do. "Hi, my pronouns are 'nee, ner, ners'. I've decided that that's the pronoun for a male gender invert".
But if my intent is to do consciousness-raising and public education, I think anywhere that people are savvy enough to ask about my pronouns is a place where I can accomplish more public education by saying "none of the above, they're all wrong", and explaining why.
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I was born with a physical configuration that was assigned the value 'male', and I've always been one of the girls from as far back as I can remember. I was pressured to adopt and embrace masculinity, to become one of the boys, all throughout childhood, but I wasn't so inclined. Later, I was repeatedly invited to transition or to present as female, so that I would not get misgendered, but the price of not getting misgendered was to be mis-SEXED. You see, the body I was born in isn't wrong, and the historical fact of being perceived and treated by others as a male is a lifelong part of who I am, and I have no wish to discard it. I'm not female, I'm a girl. Gender isn't sex. I'm a male girl. Get used to it.
So, pronouns, huh? You want the pronouns that would appropriately reference my gender, or the pronouns that would designate my sex?
Yeah, exactly. Here we are, all woke and conscious and liberated from the gender binary and all that it evokes, and yet we still posit that one syllable is sufficient to designate our sex and our gender, regardless of the combination thereof. What's the pronoun most commonly used for a male girl?
I do get misappraised quite often. People treat me as a brother, a guy, one of the boys, another man, the identity that (normally) goes with a male body. In my case, that's misgendering. Occasionally people get my gender correct -- most often when I'm on the phone and they start calling me "ma'am" and assuming me to be feminine; it also happens sometimes when I'm approached from behind, especially if I'm at a table with other women, and they see the long hair and hear my voice and make assumptions. Problem is, they also assume female along with feminine person, and thus they mis-sex me. So I'm used to being gotten wrong. Doesn't mean I like it.
Pronouns are not among the most egregious of the aspects of misassignments like these. Think about it. If they're addressing me directly, they're going to use the pronoun you. The gender-specific pronouns are pretty much limited to third-person references, when someone is talking to a second person and says something about me. He, him, his; or she, her, hers. I don't spend a lot of my day overhearing people refer to me in the third person. So why (you may ask) do gender activists make such a big deal about pronouns? Because it's an opportunity to do public education. It's a learning moment. Getting people to rethink how they think of us. The pronouns themselves are a symptom of that thinking, but it's the thinking that the activists want to change.
We care how other people think about us. It affects how they treat us. It shapes their behavior towards us, ranging from big conscious stuff to tiny subtle subliminal stuff that they may not be aware of.
Conceptualizing me as "she" doesn't really fix any more problems for me than it causes.
In my case I don't particularly crave having people think of me as female. In particular, I do not crave the sexual attentions of people whose attraction is towards female people. I would think that would make compelling common everyday sense to people, insofar as I do not in fact have female morphology, and also because people whose attraction is towards folks with male morphology would also be assuming me to be female and would therefore not be giving me attention.
Upon expressing this, I have on a couple occasions been informed that I've expressed a homophobic attitude. Seriously? Gay males are attracted to males, why would presenting as female (or being altercast by other people as a female person) expose me to uncomfortable gay male attention? I've also been told that this attitude on my part is somehow transphobic. I don't see that either. I don't wish to be taken for a binary transitioning transgender woman, that's true, but not because that would be insulting or anything. Just that it isn't accurate in my case.
Back to the pronouns. I could reasonably tell people "Please use he/his/him when you're thinking in terms of my physical structure, and use she/her/hers when you're dwelling on my gender". Use them situationally, you know?
I could embrace "they/their/them" of course. Why don't I? Well, there's no specificity. The use of that pronoun indicates that I'm non-mainstream, but it doesn't elaborate on how. It definitely doesn't say "male girl" to people. Admittedly that's true of "genderqueer" as well, and I've embraced that term.
Well, OK, I could also come up with my own pronouns, I suppose. Other people do. "Hi, my pronouns are 'nee, ner, ners'. I've decided that that's the pronoun for a male gender invert".
But if my intent is to do consciousness-raising and public education, I think anywhere that people are savvy enough to ask about my pronouns is a place where I can accomplish more public education by saying "none of the above, they're all wrong", and explaining why.
———————
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Sunday, March 31, 2019
What's in a Name?
Transgender or Genderqueer?
-- American Psychological Association
-- Wikipedia
Of the two terms "transgender" and "genderqueer", "transgender" is definitely more established at this point and is more familiar to a wider segment of society. And with the modern "umbrella" definition of what it means to be transgender, it's hard to specify and explain circumstances under which a person would be queerly gendered but not fall under the auspices of what it means to be transgender.
The meaning of a phrase or term comes from our politics. The meaning isn't just there, embedded intrinsically in the phrase itself. In the era when I came out (1980, to be precise), almost no one had ever heard the word "transgender", and so they used the older well-established term "transsexual". Nowadays there are a lot of offensive implications associated with the term "transsexual", but the people who said "transsexual" in 1980 weren't for the most part trying to imply any of those things. Similarly, someone transported from that timeframe to now might say "hermaphrodite" instead of "intersex" without intending to offend, not knowing the other term and not having heard any objections to the one they did know.
In this graph, you can see that "transsexual" was a term in widespread use long before the more modern alternatives. "Transgender" came into significant use between 1985 and 1990; the term "genderqueer" came along a bit later, establishing itself between 1990 and 1995.
Why do we differentiate between terms when an existing established term is "close enough"? Mostly because we like specificity. And we like to clarify.
And sometimes because we wish to reject some of the implications tied to an existing term. Activists in America in the 1960s rejected "negro" in favor of "black" because of cultural associations that had become embedded in "negro" that they wanted to break away from.
It's often easiest to explain what we're talking about when there's something that people are already familiar with. If your audience already knows about the color aqua or the color turquoise, that can make it easier to describe the color teal.
It can be hard to differentiate from people who use a term that you don't wish to go by without making them feel like you're planting your foot in their face. I want to apologize in advance to the transgender community for that. You are not the enemy. I hope you don't experience this blog post as an act of hostility; I don't intend it as such!
Anyway, yes, we have a very inclusive definition of transgender. It does seem to cover people like me. What does it mean to be covered? Sometimes it's like insurance: "don't worry, we've got you covered". Or it can be a cozy blanket, keeping you warm, protecting you from the cold elements. To be covered can also be like wearing a chador, which can be worn with pride but can also be experienced as negating and confining when it is imposed without consent. It can be like a mask, disguising identity. And it can simply mean that one is covered up, kept hidden, obscured from being seen.
The previous graph superimposed the rise of the three terms "transsexual", "transgender", and "genderqueer", showing each term's proliferation in our society. But that graph isn't normalized; it artificially pretends that the rate of use for each term is comparable. It's not. Here's a true graph of the deployment of the three terms:
It may come as a shock to transgender people to think of themselves as "more mainstream" than anyone else, culturally speaking. But from a genderqueer perspective, yes, you're the prevailing story against which we're hidden in the margins.
To be "covered" can elicit the attitude that "Since we've already covered what it is like to be transgender, people don't need to hear about your story, since it's included in the transgender story". Jacob Tobia, in Sissy, details the conventional stereotyped (binary) transgender story arc:
This is the narrative presented (quite excellently) in Meredith Russo's If I Was Your Girl, and classically narrated by Jan Morris in Conundrum, or as testified by by Chaz Bono in Transition. Including other people who also have gender identities that "do not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth" doesn't change the fact that this is what transgender means to most people.
What are the primary concerns of the transgender movement? The rights of transgender people in the military; the right of people to use the bathroom appropriate to their identity without hostile interference; medical insurance coverage for and uncomplicated access to medical transitional procedures; protection from hostile misgendering in the workplace, and raising people's consciousness about microagressions around expressions that gender people, etc; violence against transgender people; and public education.
Public education? The content being promoted is still pretty much the mainstream narrative discussed above. And as part and parcel of it, the agenda includes the establishment of a party line about acceptable attitudes and verbal expressions thereof about sex and gender: that the state of being transgender involves a discrepancy between the gender to which one was assigned at birth ("assigned female at birth" -- AFAB -- or "assigned male at birth" -- AMAB) and one's actual gender identity. That one's physical morphology is not relevant: "What's in my pants is none of your business"; and that social acceptance means that transgender people smoothly blend in with one's identified gender, being "women" and "men", not "transwomen" or "transmen". That except for being out in the political name of being Exhibit A for this phenomenon, there should be no difference between transgender womem and women in general, or between transgender men and men in general. That's the party line. That's what transgender activists would like us all -- transgender and cisgender alike -- to embrace and acknowledge. And in promoting this while opting to include all of us gender-variant people, they're establishing this as our agenda as well, since we're all in this together as transgender people -- ??
In actuality, most genderqueer people who aren't also transitioners in the binary transgender sense aren't directly affected by the military ban question, nor would the right to enter either of the designated binary segregated bathrooms as we saw fit fix much of anything for us; we aren't affected by medical issues related to transitioning; and no one has effectively stated what it would even mean for us to be correctly gendered in the workplace or, for that matter, anywhere else. There's a complete lack of public education about our existence, let alone our specific concerns! The mainstream transgender message discusses gender assignment "at birth", as if we didn't continue to live in a world that altercasts each and every one of us into a gender category; it does not challenge the "sex means gender" established mainsteam perspective -- the "what's in my pants is none of your business" attitude discourages us from claiming as part of our identities the morphological sex of our bodies and the fact that we've been perceived in those terms all our lives, that that is part of our experience. The transgender narrative treats the transitioning person as a model; it now extends a nonjudgmental inclusiveness to people who can't afford to transition or don't choose to for other reasons but it's an inclusiveness that's still based on the notion that "you should treat me as if my sex is in accordance with the gender that I identify as"; that's what "the contents of my pants is none of your business" really means. But that erases the identities of people who wish to identify as people born in a specific body whose gender is other than the gender normally associated with that body. It blocks us from establishing an identity that does not blend in as men or women; it assumes that transgender people all wish to do that blending in, that transgender people consist of men who wish to blend in with men in general and women who wish to blend in with women in general. When in actuality some of us wish to be recognized and understood as something different, as members of new categories: perhaps a fluid person whose gender identity varies, perhaps a person who is both genders, or neither gender, or perhaps as a person who has one sex but a gender that doesn't conventionally correspond to it.
There was once a time, I think, when transgender women in the gay/lesbian scene were accepted as "us" and yet "not us" at the same time. When the voice of the movement was mainly that of gay men, and effeminate males were considered stereotye-reinforcing embarrassments. Well, the need to explain transgender to the world did not make transgender activists homophobes. It did not mean they were antigay. But they had to push off as something different in order to explain.
We, too, are entitled to a voice and an agenda. We have butch women who still identify as women, not as transgender men. We have sissy males who don't wish to be perceived as female people.
There's a reason the argument was made in favor of expanding the LGBT acronym. Q was included. Q means a lot of things, including what we call genderqueer. Something not already covered by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Otherwise we would not have needed a separate letter. The Q implies that we have a story of our own.
(I actually prefer MOGII to the increasingly sprawling acronym LGBTQIA++ -- "marginalized orientation, gender identity, and intersex" -- but we do all need our voices to be heard)
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Transgender is an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.
-- American Psychological Association
Transgender people have a gender identity or gender expression that differs from their assigned sex
-- Wikipedia
Of the two terms "transgender" and "genderqueer", "transgender" is definitely more established at this point and is more familiar to a wider segment of society. And with the modern "umbrella" definition of what it means to be transgender, it's hard to specify and explain circumstances under which a person would be queerly gendered but not fall under the auspices of what it means to be transgender.
The meaning of a phrase or term comes from our politics. The meaning isn't just there, embedded intrinsically in the phrase itself. In the era when I came out (1980, to be precise), almost no one had ever heard the word "transgender", and so they used the older well-established term "transsexual". Nowadays there are a lot of offensive implications associated with the term "transsexual", but the people who said "transsexual" in 1980 weren't for the most part trying to imply any of those things. Similarly, someone transported from that timeframe to now might say "hermaphrodite" instead of "intersex" without intending to offend, not knowing the other term and not having heard any objections to the one they did know.
In this graph, you can see that "transsexual" was a term in widespread use long before the more modern alternatives. "Transgender" came into significant use between 1985 and 1990; the term "genderqueer" came along a bit later, establishing itself between 1990 and 1995.
Why do we differentiate between terms when an existing established term is "close enough"? Mostly because we like specificity. And we like to clarify.
And sometimes because we wish to reject some of the implications tied to an existing term. Activists in America in the 1960s rejected "negro" in favor of "black" because of cultural associations that had become embedded in "negro" that they wanted to break away from.
It's often easiest to explain what we're talking about when there's something that people are already familiar with. If your audience already knows about the color aqua or the color turquoise, that can make it easier to describe the color teal.
It can be hard to differentiate from people who use a term that you don't wish to go by without making them feel like you're planting your foot in their face. I want to apologize in advance to the transgender community for that. You are not the enemy. I hope you don't experience this blog post as an act of hostility; I don't intend it as such!
Anyway, yes, we have a very inclusive definition of transgender. It does seem to cover people like me. What does it mean to be covered? Sometimes it's like insurance: "don't worry, we've got you covered". Or it can be a cozy blanket, keeping you warm, protecting you from the cold elements. To be covered can also be like wearing a chador, which can be worn with pride but can also be experienced as negating and confining when it is imposed without consent. It can be like a mask, disguising identity. And it can simply mean that one is covered up, kept hidden, obscured from being seen.
The previous graph superimposed the rise of the three terms "transsexual", "transgender", and "genderqueer", showing each term's proliferation in our society. But that graph isn't normalized; it artificially pretends that the rate of use for each term is comparable. It's not. Here's a true graph of the deployment of the three terms:
It may come as a shock to transgender people to think of themselves as "more mainstream" than anyone else, culturally speaking. But from a genderqueer perspective, yes, you're the prevailing story against which we're hidden in the margins.
To be "covered" can elicit the attitude that "Since we've already covered what it is like to be transgender, people don't need to hear about your story, since it's included in the transgender story". Jacob Tobia, in Sissy, details the conventional stereotyped (binary) transgender story arc:
I was born in the wrong body. the doctors told my parents that I was a _____ [boy or girl], but I always knew that I was the opposite of that... I spent years hating myself, thinking something was wrong with me... That's when I decided I needed to transition. I started hormones and had a ___ [breast augmentation / reduction]. Then I did the really hard thing and got "the surgery" to make sure that my genitals aligned with my identity.
This is the narrative presented (quite excellently) in Meredith Russo's If I Was Your Girl, and classically narrated by Jan Morris in Conundrum, or as testified by by Chaz Bono in Transition. Including other people who also have gender identities that "do not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth" doesn't change the fact that this is what transgender means to most people.
What are the primary concerns of the transgender movement? The rights of transgender people in the military; the right of people to use the bathroom appropriate to their identity without hostile interference; medical insurance coverage for and uncomplicated access to medical transitional procedures; protection from hostile misgendering in the workplace, and raising people's consciousness about microagressions around expressions that gender people, etc; violence against transgender people; and public education.
Public education? The content being promoted is still pretty much the mainstream narrative discussed above. And as part and parcel of it, the agenda includes the establishment of a party line about acceptable attitudes and verbal expressions thereof about sex and gender: that the state of being transgender involves a discrepancy between the gender to which one was assigned at birth ("assigned female at birth" -- AFAB -- or "assigned male at birth" -- AMAB) and one's actual gender identity. That one's physical morphology is not relevant: "What's in my pants is none of your business"; and that social acceptance means that transgender people smoothly blend in with one's identified gender, being "women" and "men", not "transwomen" or "transmen". That except for being out in the political name of being Exhibit A for this phenomenon, there should be no difference between transgender womem and women in general, or between transgender men and men in general. That's the party line. That's what transgender activists would like us all -- transgender and cisgender alike -- to embrace and acknowledge. And in promoting this while opting to include all of us gender-variant people, they're establishing this as our agenda as well, since we're all in this together as transgender people -- ??
In actuality, most genderqueer people who aren't also transitioners in the binary transgender sense aren't directly affected by the military ban question, nor would the right to enter either of the designated binary segregated bathrooms as we saw fit fix much of anything for us; we aren't affected by medical issues related to transitioning; and no one has effectively stated what it would even mean for us to be correctly gendered in the workplace or, for that matter, anywhere else. There's a complete lack of public education about our existence, let alone our specific concerns! The mainstream transgender message discusses gender assignment "at birth", as if we didn't continue to live in a world that altercasts each and every one of us into a gender category; it does not challenge the "sex means gender" established mainsteam perspective -- the "what's in my pants is none of your business" attitude discourages us from claiming as part of our identities the morphological sex of our bodies and the fact that we've been perceived in those terms all our lives, that that is part of our experience. The transgender narrative treats the transitioning person as a model; it now extends a nonjudgmental inclusiveness to people who can't afford to transition or don't choose to for other reasons but it's an inclusiveness that's still based on the notion that "you should treat me as if my sex is in accordance with the gender that I identify as"; that's what "the contents of my pants is none of your business" really means. But that erases the identities of people who wish to identify as people born in a specific body whose gender is other than the gender normally associated with that body. It blocks us from establishing an identity that does not blend in as men or women; it assumes that transgender people all wish to do that blending in, that transgender people consist of men who wish to blend in with men in general and women who wish to blend in with women in general. When in actuality some of us wish to be recognized and understood as something different, as members of new categories: perhaps a fluid person whose gender identity varies, perhaps a person who is both genders, or neither gender, or perhaps as a person who has one sex but a gender that doesn't conventionally correspond to it.
There was once a time, I think, when transgender women in the gay/lesbian scene were accepted as "us" and yet "not us" at the same time. When the voice of the movement was mainly that of gay men, and effeminate males were considered stereotye-reinforcing embarrassments. Well, the need to explain transgender to the world did not make transgender activists homophobes. It did not mean they were antigay. But they had to push off as something different in order to explain.
We, too, are entitled to a voice and an agenda. We have butch women who still identify as women, not as transgender men. We have sissy males who don't wish to be perceived as female people.
There's a reason the argument was made in favor of expanding the LGBT acronym. Q was included. Q means a lot of things, including what we call genderqueer. Something not already covered by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Otherwise we would not have needed a separate letter. The Q implies that we have a story of our own.
(I actually prefer MOGII to the increasingly sprawling acronym LGBTQIA++ -- "marginalized orientation, gender identity, and intersex" -- but we do all need our voices to be heard)
———————
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Wednesday, January 9, 2019
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"
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I 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"
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
Altercasting and Presenting
ALTERCASTING is the act of assigning an identity to someone else. That may seem at first glance like an intrusive act: shouldn't the assignment of identities be reserved for the people themselves? But we do it all the time. Those of us with the most fervent commitment to people's authority to define their own identity may work hard at not stereotyping people and trying to be open to multiple possibilities, but in the absence of being able to literally read other people's minds, we still do it. We formulate in our own minds a sense of who each other person is, in order to be able to interact with them, in order to be able to even think about them. At a minimum we tend to think of them as humans, and the moment we do that we altercast them in the role of human as we define and understand human. And we usually don't stop with only perceiving a person as an undifferentiated human. We notice things, clues to a person's identity, we make some educated guesses based on our own experience of people and society.
We care about other people's altercasting of us, it matters to us. If it did not, there would not exist any such thing as misgendering. If it did not, if we truly didn't care how others perceived us, we would also have to not care how others behaved towards us, how they treated us, because their interactive behaviors towards us are a direct outcome of how they perceive us.
This is why a person's identity is not composed entirely of who that person is to themselves, how they choose to identify. We may wish it to be that way or want it to be that way, particularly as a vehicle towards empowering them to self-define, but the real fact of the matter is that a person's identity is always the subject of dialogue between that person and all of the other people who perceive them and interact with them. A person's identity is always in a state of negotiation.
PRESENTING is the act of soliciting an ideal altercasted identity from other people, of getting them to altercast us with an assigned identity that pleases us, and often that will be at least a close approximation of our self-defined identity. Not always: the concept of being in the closet is about presenting so as to disguise one's identity instead of presenting so as to be seen and recognized. But as people who are out, as people who are political about our identity, we tend to devote a lot of energy into presenting our identity to the world, attempting to get people to altercast us the same way that we cast our own identities in our own minds.
It doesn't work if the people that we interact with do not have the necessary concepts to be able to think of us in the same way that we think of ourselves. If one happens to have a visible appearance that is culturally understood as a representation of one gender or sex (and in our culture's mainstream and in our culture's history, gender and sex have been one and the same), but also exhibits other signals (behaviors, et al) that are culturally understood as representative of the other, this is a presentation that could elicit an altercasting as gay, could evoke an altercasting as transgender or nonbinary or otherwise gender-atypical, but if the other people that one is interacting with have in their heads no interpretation of this combination except that it is wrong and pathological, it is instead going to inspire an altercasting as sick, twisted, wrong. And so we educate. We teach. We describe and defend and elaborate and we tell our experiences and outline how we think of ourselves, and we do all this in order to create in other people's head-space the possibility of seeing us more the way we wish to be seen.
Some of our PRESENTATION is a deliberate oversimplification; although our orientation or gender identity labels are not the entirety of our identity, any more than our age or our ethnicity is, the complex entirety of who we are is certainly not something that random strangers and casual acquaintances already have inside their heads to categorize us as. And so although we don't want to be reduced to a label or two in perpetuity and never known by anyone beyond a couple of general categories, most of us do position ourselves for easy recognition and categorization by the labels that let most people jump to some fairly decent first-tier approximations. Most cisgender heterosexual men present as men; most cisgender heterosexual women present as women; it is a cultural imperative that one should be clearly recognized and categorized by gender and treated accordingly. It is not that these individuals do not wish to ever be seen for the complex and unique people that they are, but that having folks react to them with these starting points is far more comfortable to them than for them to not do so. In fact, it is quite often a person's discovery that they themselves are uncomfortable with that altercasting that leads to a person's awareness of themselves as gender-atypical!
At any rate, we use a lot of shorthand when we present. We use the equivalent of a logo and a slogan on an everyday basis because we only occasionally get the opportunity to provide people with the equivalent of an article, let alone a novel.
Part of the price tag of marginalization is that all of this--the act of presentation and the successful result, an appropriate altercasting by the other people we encounter--is much more complicated and difficult. I said above that most cisgender heterosexual men present as men. A cisgender gay man who does not wish to be altercast as a heterosexual male is likely to attempt to present as a specifically gay man. He has to encode more information in his shorthand, still conveying that he is a man but due to being an exception to the rule, a marginalized variant, he has to convey additional information to avoid being altercast as something he is not, see? And his success (an appropriate altercasting by other people as a gay man) depends on them having that possibility in their head, that when they think of people they are aware of that possibility and that they recognize the shorthand cues and clues that he uses. If this individual were a nonbinary pansexual demiboy, their situation is quantum leaps more difficult and the likelihood of provoking a successfully correct altercasting from other people is extremely attenuated. The signals and cues have to convey a lot more information (they're not merely an exception to the rule but an exception to the exception to the exception) and the likelihood of the typical person they interact with being aware of the possibility of their identity is vanishingly small, and on top of that the people interacting with them would need to recognize the shorthand, which is even less likely than having heard of it or read about it.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
We care about other people's altercasting of us, it matters to us. If it did not, there would not exist any such thing as misgendering. If it did not, if we truly didn't care how others perceived us, we would also have to not care how others behaved towards us, how they treated us, because their interactive behaviors towards us are a direct outcome of how they perceive us.
This is why a person's identity is not composed entirely of who that person is to themselves, how they choose to identify. We may wish it to be that way or want it to be that way, particularly as a vehicle towards empowering them to self-define, but the real fact of the matter is that a person's identity is always the subject of dialogue between that person and all of the other people who perceive them and interact with them. A person's identity is always in a state of negotiation.
PRESENTING is the act of soliciting an ideal altercasted identity from other people, of getting them to altercast us with an assigned identity that pleases us, and often that will be at least a close approximation of our self-defined identity. Not always: the concept of being in the closet is about presenting so as to disguise one's identity instead of presenting so as to be seen and recognized. But as people who are out, as people who are political about our identity, we tend to devote a lot of energy into presenting our identity to the world, attempting to get people to altercast us the same way that we cast our own identities in our own minds.
It doesn't work if the people that we interact with do not have the necessary concepts to be able to think of us in the same way that we think of ourselves. If one happens to have a visible appearance that is culturally understood as a representation of one gender or sex (and in our culture's mainstream and in our culture's history, gender and sex have been one and the same), but also exhibits other signals (behaviors, et al) that are culturally understood as representative of the other, this is a presentation that could elicit an altercasting as gay, could evoke an altercasting as transgender or nonbinary or otherwise gender-atypical, but if the other people that one is interacting with have in their heads no interpretation of this combination except that it is wrong and pathological, it is instead going to inspire an altercasting as sick, twisted, wrong. And so we educate. We teach. We describe and defend and elaborate and we tell our experiences and outline how we think of ourselves, and we do all this in order to create in other people's head-space the possibility of seeing us more the way we wish to be seen.
Some of our PRESENTATION is a deliberate oversimplification; although our orientation or gender identity labels are not the entirety of our identity, any more than our age or our ethnicity is, the complex entirety of who we are is certainly not something that random strangers and casual acquaintances already have inside their heads to categorize us as. And so although we don't want to be reduced to a label or two in perpetuity and never known by anyone beyond a couple of general categories, most of us do position ourselves for easy recognition and categorization by the labels that let most people jump to some fairly decent first-tier approximations. Most cisgender heterosexual men present as men; most cisgender heterosexual women present as women; it is a cultural imperative that one should be clearly recognized and categorized by gender and treated accordingly. It is not that these individuals do not wish to ever be seen for the complex and unique people that they are, but that having folks react to them with these starting points is far more comfortable to them than for them to not do so. In fact, it is quite often a person's discovery that they themselves are uncomfortable with that altercasting that leads to a person's awareness of themselves as gender-atypical!
At any rate, we use a lot of shorthand when we present. We use the equivalent of a logo and a slogan on an everyday basis because we only occasionally get the opportunity to provide people with the equivalent of an article, let alone a novel.
Part of the price tag of marginalization is that all of this--the act of presentation and the successful result, an appropriate altercasting by the other people we encounter--is much more complicated and difficult. I said above that most cisgender heterosexual men present as men. A cisgender gay man who does not wish to be altercast as a heterosexual male is likely to attempt to present as a specifically gay man. He has to encode more information in his shorthand, still conveying that he is a man but due to being an exception to the rule, a marginalized variant, he has to convey additional information to avoid being altercast as something he is not, see? And his success (an appropriate altercasting by other people as a gay man) depends on them having that possibility in their head, that when they think of people they are aware of that possibility and that they recognize the shorthand cues and clues that he uses. If this individual were a nonbinary pansexual demiboy, their situation is quantum leaps more difficult and the likelihood of provoking a successfully correct altercasting from other people is extremely attenuated. The signals and cues have to convey a lot more information (they're not merely an exception to the rule but an exception to the exception to the exception) and the likelihood of the typical person they interact with being aware of the possibility of their identity is vanishingly small, and on top of that the people interacting with them would need to recognize the shorthand, which is even less likely than having heard of it or read about it.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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