Last Thursday's author reading, lecture, and Q & A is now available on YouTube.
It was quite well-attended with forty people joining the Zoom session, and I had a good time.
———————
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 androgyny. Show all posts
Showing posts with label androgyny. Show all posts
Sunday, November 22, 2020
Monday, October 5, 2020
Gender-Critical, Transgender, Gender Inversion, & Transsexuality Conference
Hi! Want to moderate a discussion panel? Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to lead these four folks to some sort of accord, or, failing that, to moderate their debate fairly and give each one a chance to support their positions.
I'll let them introduce themselves as they deem appropriate --
Lillian: Hello, I'm Lillian. I'm a gender critical feminist. I'm 70. When I was young, I was part of the feminist second wave that attacked the notion that biology is destiny, that if you were born male you were designed to live *this* life but if you were female you were destined to live *that* life. As feminists, we indicted gender roles and gendered assumptions about people. Because they aren't necessary for the functioning of society -- except the unfair parts -- and they aren't good for us as individuals. They are restrictions! We opposed sexist double standards and sexist expectations and assumptions. Anyone might be a leader. Anyone might be a nurturant caregiver. Anyone might be a belligerent asshole. Anyone might be an empty-headed doll-person. None of that is due to whether you were born with a penis or a vagina! Sex polarization that divides us up into women and men is a tool of patriarchal oppression and it exists to the detriment of women. Women are oppressed. Now, me personally, when I was first in the women's movement, well, we were white and straight and didn't pay enough attention to other people's situation. But we've become more intersectional and we listen to black women's voices and the voices of women who come from poverty, disabled women, and other forms of additional marginalization. But first and foremost, society is a patriarchy; that's still the bottom line for me. If men don't like it, they're in charge so all they've got to do is stand down and change it and quit opposing us.
Sylvia: Well, I guess you could say I was also involved in attacking that 'biology is destiny' thing. Hey, everybody, I'm Sylvia. I am trans. Back when I was figuring that out, the word was 'transsexual', and that's still what I prefer to use, but I don't want to offend anybody. I had gender dysphoria, the body I was born with was not my destiny. It wasn't right for me, and I knew it from pretty much the time I was old enough to understand the difference between boys and girls. I know some of you younger folks say things differently, you'd say I was assigned male at birth. Well, I had to get myself unassigned, because my gender didn't match that assignment at all. I changed my body to match my gender. Now, I understand the notion that we ought to have equal attitudes to a person no matter if their body is male or female. Or whether it came with a penis on the front of it or a vagina instead, if you like that language better. I understand saying that what your body is like shouldn't matter and we shouldn't have sexist beliefs. But that's not the world I got to live in. Maybe someday society will be that way but not in my lifetime. Not in yours either, probably. Getting sex reassignment surgery was something I could get within a few years, and I did, and it has made it possible for me to live my life with people seeing me and treating me like who I am -- a woman -- and I don't see why anybody's got any cause for having a problem with that.
Jesse: My name's Jesse and my pronouns are he, him, his. I was assigned male at birth. When I was younger, there was an attitude that what you were supposed to do if your gender didn't match your designation was to go out and get hormones and surgery, and if you did that and you could *pass*, then you were authentically trans. Well, some of those surgeries are expensive and not everyone can afford them, and there's medical issues with procedures, and hormones too, and during my generation we pushed back against that elitist attitude. Because you don't need to have anything specific done to you to make your gender identity valid, okay? It's fine to get gender confirmation surgery if that's what you *want*, and you can afford it and it's safe for you and all that. What is *not* fine is to go around telling people they aren't trans enough if they don't, you hear what I'm saying? And I am a man. Trans men are men. Trans women are women. You body is not 'who you really are', so yeah count me in as well on kicking that 'biology is destiny' off the map. What's up with people deciding they get to decide who you are based on what's inside your underwear? That's creepy. Anyone with that attitude, go perv on someone else, all right? Meanwhile, I hear what you're saying about gender being confining, but it can also be liberating and you ought to think about that. There are strong notions about how to be a man that go beyond being an okay person, it's heroic and inspiring to connect with that. Women, too, womanhood is a powerful notion. I got nothing against people who want to be agender or whatever, but I like being a man.
Allan (me): I'm Allan. I never bought into all the junk that gets glued onto a male, beliefs and assumptions and all that, because I didn't get issued all that stuff along with the body in which I was born. I grew up with messages about what it means to be a man, and also messages about what it means if your body is male and you don't match that description. Feminism told me that was sexist and I could ignore it, so I did. Until I couldn't. The world was too much in my face about it to ignore. So I became an activist. And yeah, biology isn't destiny. I agree that gender has its positive uses. Androgyny means expecting everyone to be in the middle, like beige or something. I'm not androgynous, I'm femme. Meanwhile I understand about it being easier to change your body, or to just change your presentation, how you look to the world, to get folks to think of your body as the body that goes with your gender, so that they'll get your gender correct. But the world got in my face and I'm returning the favor, I don't want to pass, I want to take the fact that I am male but also feminine and shove that at people. My body is not the problem, it's people's notion that if your body is male that makes you a man, a masculine person. That's what's got to change. We don't change that by converting male people to female people so they can be correctly regarded as women. Damn right our gender identity is valid regardless of our body. That means I get to walk down the nude beach with my flat chest and facial hair and my penis bouncing against my testicles and that doesn't make me a man. I want to be accepted as femme without lipstick, corset, boobs, or tucking. And patriarchy is in my way. I don't care if you want to call me a feminist or what, but I'm in the struggle against patriarchal oppression for my own damn reasons. And, yeah, I get to call my body male. I don't need to believe that I'm female in order to validate my gender identity. That's the whole point. It's *not*, and yet I'm still as femme as anybody.
———————
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
I'll let them introduce themselves as they deem appropriate --
Lillian: Hello, I'm Lillian. I'm a gender critical feminist. I'm 70. When I was young, I was part of the feminist second wave that attacked the notion that biology is destiny, that if you were born male you were designed to live *this* life but if you were female you were destined to live *that* life. As feminists, we indicted gender roles and gendered assumptions about people. Because they aren't necessary for the functioning of society -- except the unfair parts -- and they aren't good for us as individuals. They are restrictions! We opposed sexist double standards and sexist expectations and assumptions. Anyone might be a leader. Anyone might be a nurturant caregiver. Anyone might be a belligerent asshole. Anyone might be an empty-headed doll-person. None of that is due to whether you were born with a penis or a vagina! Sex polarization that divides us up into women and men is a tool of patriarchal oppression and it exists to the detriment of women. Women are oppressed. Now, me personally, when I was first in the women's movement, well, we were white and straight and didn't pay enough attention to other people's situation. But we've become more intersectional and we listen to black women's voices and the voices of women who come from poverty, disabled women, and other forms of additional marginalization. But first and foremost, society is a patriarchy; that's still the bottom line for me. If men don't like it, they're in charge so all they've got to do is stand down and change it and quit opposing us.
Sylvia: Well, I guess you could say I was also involved in attacking that 'biology is destiny' thing. Hey, everybody, I'm Sylvia. I am trans. Back when I was figuring that out, the word was 'transsexual', and that's still what I prefer to use, but I don't want to offend anybody. I had gender dysphoria, the body I was born with was not my destiny. It wasn't right for me, and I knew it from pretty much the time I was old enough to understand the difference between boys and girls. I know some of you younger folks say things differently, you'd say I was assigned male at birth. Well, I had to get myself unassigned, because my gender didn't match that assignment at all. I changed my body to match my gender. Now, I understand the notion that we ought to have equal attitudes to a person no matter if their body is male or female. Or whether it came with a penis on the front of it or a vagina instead, if you like that language better. I understand saying that what your body is like shouldn't matter and we shouldn't have sexist beliefs. But that's not the world I got to live in. Maybe someday society will be that way but not in my lifetime. Not in yours either, probably. Getting sex reassignment surgery was something I could get within a few years, and I did, and it has made it possible for me to live my life with people seeing me and treating me like who I am -- a woman -- and I don't see why anybody's got any cause for having a problem with that.
Jesse: My name's Jesse and my pronouns are he, him, his. I was assigned male at birth. When I was younger, there was an attitude that what you were supposed to do if your gender didn't match your designation was to go out and get hormones and surgery, and if you did that and you could *pass*, then you were authentically trans. Well, some of those surgeries are expensive and not everyone can afford them, and there's medical issues with procedures, and hormones too, and during my generation we pushed back against that elitist attitude. Because you don't need to have anything specific done to you to make your gender identity valid, okay? It's fine to get gender confirmation surgery if that's what you *want*, and you can afford it and it's safe for you and all that. What is *not* fine is to go around telling people they aren't trans enough if they don't, you hear what I'm saying? And I am a man. Trans men are men. Trans women are women. You body is not 'who you really are', so yeah count me in as well on kicking that 'biology is destiny' off the map. What's up with people deciding they get to decide who you are based on what's inside your underwear? That's creepy. Anyone with that attitude, go perv on someone else, all right? Meanwhile, I hear what you're saying about gender being confining, but it can also be liberating and you ought to think about that. There are strong notions about how to be a man that go beyond being an okay person, it's heroic and inspiring to connect with that. Women, too, womanhood is a powerful notion. I got nothing against people who want to be agender or whatever, but I like being a man.
Allan (me): I'm Allan. I never bought into all the junk that gets glued onto a male, beliefs and assumptions and all that, because I didn't get issued all that stuff along with the body in which I was born. I grew up with messages about what it means to be a man, and also messages about what it means if your body is male and you don't match that description. Feminism told me that was sexist and I could ignore it, so I did. Until I couldn't. The world was too much in my face about it to ignore. So I became an activist. And yeah, biology isn't destiny. I agree that gender has its positive uses. Androgyny means expecting everyone to be in the middle, like beige or something. I'm not androgynous, I'm femme. Meanwhile I understand about it being easier to change your body, or to just change your presentation, how you look to the world, to get folks to think of your body as the body that goes with your gender, so that they'll get your gender correct. But the world got in my face and I'm returning the favor, I don't want to pass, I want to take the fact that I am male but also feminine and shove that at people. My body is not the problem, it's people's notion that if your body is male that makes you a man, a masculine person. That's what's got to change. We don't change that by converting male people to female people so they can be correctly regarded as women. Damn right our gender identity is valid regardless of our body. That means I get to walk down the nude beach with my flat chest and facial hair and my penis bouncing against my testicles and that doesn't make me a man. I want to be accepted as femme without lipstick, corset, boobs, or tucking. And patriarchy is in my way. I don't care if you want to call me a feminist or what, but I'm in the struggle against patriarchal oppression for my own damn reasons. And, yeah, I get to call my body male. I don't need to believe that I'm female in order to validate my gender identity. That's the whole point. It's *not*, and yet I'm still as femme as anybody.
———————
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
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
Friday, March 20, 2020
Binary 2.0
Gender used to be narrowly restrictive and inflexible: you were born with a penis or with a vagina, and that determined your identity. Many folks think that except for the stodgy dinosaurs holding on to those older notions, we're past all that, enlightened. Mostly, we're not. We're immersed in what I refer to as Binary 2.0. It's larger and wider than the 1.0 version and yes, there's more room in it, it feels less constrained--but it's still confining.
Superficially, yes, our mainstream media touts the existence of genderqueer and nonbinary celebrities and celebrates their attractiveness and marketability.
But at the local level, the support groups and safe spaces for nonbinary and gender nonconforming people are chock-full of people who were assigned as something at birth; and they've been treated and regarded as either boys or girls for most of their lives. The problem for them is that the assignment they were given at birth wasn't random and arbitrary. If I saw them on the nude beach I could guess with better than 99% accuracy what designation their mom's obstetrician jotted down on their birth certificate. Yes, physical sex is a social construct. But we are part of the society that does the constructing, and we know the criteria, we've learned it well and we know how it works whether we choose to opt out of it or not. So the young genderqueer and nonbinary folks keep posting selfies and asking whether they look sufficiently other than their at-birth sex designations.
There's a determined pushing-away from those body-based identities, with a lot of adopting of the adornments and stylings associated with the opposite sex. Because since sex is, as stated, a social construct, there's still an opposite sex. The primary manifestation of nonbinary identity is one form or another of "between the two", and it is still anchored in those two.
The spaces for young transgender people are rife with their version of the same issue. Medical transitioning is complicated and expensive and although puberty blockers and hormones can be located, there are a lot of people participating whose physical morphology still matches up with the socially constructed pattern that corresponds with how they were designated at birth. In recognition of this, and not wanting to invalidate trans people's identities by implying that they are less valid than for folks who have done a medical transition, we focus on people's gender identities and we refer to their sex, if we do so at all, by considering it to match their gender. The plumbing inside someone's underwear is nobody's business. So sex is the same as gender (yet again, or still) since sex is assumed to match gender (whereas the assumption used to work the other way around, that gender matches physical sex).
Transgender women tend to feel obliged to do makeup and hair and to wear a lot of designated-female apparel, in order to signal that they wish to be perceived and recognized as female, as women. Meanwhile most cisgender women, born with the contours and configurations that our society relies on to designate a person female, can wear jeans and a t-shirt, cut their hair short, and go makekup-free without much concern about the possibility of being misgendered.
To say "misgendered" should cause us to realize that gender is a verb, that we get "gendered" by other people all the time -- "mis" or otherwise. We still gender people based on perceptions anchored in binary sex, so we're still in the shadows of assumptions about what our bodies mean.
My colleague Annunaki Ray Marquez, an intersex activist, points out that the terms "cisgender" and "transgender" contain assumptions. An intersex person isn't likely to have been assigned intersex at birth, but to conflate the situation of intersex people with that of transgender people is to erase them, especially since one of the central issues for intersex people is genital surgery done without their consent as infants or children, whereas medical transitioning is generally seen as a positive solution -- one for which medical insurance coverage is a political objective -- within the transgender community. ""Not all intersex people assigned wrong at birth will be comfortable being called 'transgender', although some will", says Marquez.
What made me nonbinary was that I ran into a two-options conundrum, either I was male and a boy (or man) which was not true; or that I was female and a girl (or woman) which was also not true. I was male and yet one of the girls. I encountered the socially-recognized physical configuration that got me designated male any time I saw my body. I didn't have any dysphoria about it, it wasn't wrong.
I want to be accepted as a male femme, a male gal. I should not have to present as female in order to be known as one of the girls. I should not have to push away from maleness in order to assert girlness. my maleness and the experiences that come from being a male girl are part of my identity. I am NOT a cisgender female person; being seen and thought of as such would NOT recognize me. It's not who I am. I'm a male girl.
I should be able to go to the nude beach and be who I am, a girl. I should be able to go the nude beach without obtaining medical intervention to transition by body and be accepted for who I am, a male girl.
My transgender sister should be able to go to the nude beach -- with or without medical intervention -- and accepted for who she is as well. She considers herself female and woman. She shouldn't have to "pass". She shouldn't have to adorn herself and fix up her appearance in order to elicit our approval of her identity. She shouldn't have to keep her body under wraps if she can't afford or hasn't opted for medical transitioning.
Neither should my intersex brother. His body is intersex. His gender identity isn't a consequence of either of the two conventional physical sex constructs. He also needs to be able to walk here on this beach.
Until we can do that, until acceptance of gender identity isn't dependent on having the "right" body, until acceptance of gender identity doesn't depend on erasing the body either, we're still stuck in Binary 2.0.
———————
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 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
Superficially, yes, our mainstream media touts the existence of genderqueer and nonbinary celebrities and celebrates their attractiveness and marketability.
But at the local level, the support groups and safe spaces for nonbinary and gender nonconforming people are chock-full of people who were assigned as something at birth; and they've been treated and regarded as either boys or girls for most of their lives. The problem for them is that the assignment they were given at birth wasn't random and arbitrary. If I saw them on the nude beach I could guess with better than 99% accuracy what designation their mom's obstetrician jotted down on their birth certificate. Yes, physical sex is a social construct. But we are part of the society that does the constructing, and we know the criteria, we've learned it well and we know how it works whether we choose to opt out of it or not. So the young genderqueer and nonbinary folks keep posting selfies and asking whether they look sufficiently other than their at-birth sex designations.
There's a determined pushing-away from those body-based identities, with a lot of adopting of the adornments and stylings associated with the opposite sex. Because since sex is, as stated, a social construct, there's still an opposite sex. The primary manifestation of nonbinary identity is one form or another of "between the two", and it is still anchored in those two.
The spaces for young transgender people are rife with their version of the same issue. Medical transitioning is complicated and expensive and although puberty blockers and hormones can be located, there are a lot of people participating whose physical morphology still matches up with the socially constructed pattern that corresponds with how they were designated at birth. In recognition of this, and not wanting to invalidate trans people's identities by implying that they are less valid than for folks who have done a medical transition, we focus on people's gender identities and we refer to their sex, if we do so at all, by considering it to match their gender. The plumbing inside someone's underwear is nobody's business. So sex is the same as gender (yet again, or still) since sex is assumed to match gender (whereas the assumption used to work the other way around, that gender matches physical sex).
Transgender women tend to feel obliged to do makeup and hair and to wear a lot of designated-female apparel, in order to signal that they wish to be perceived and recognized as female, as women. Meanwhile most cisgender women, born with the contours and configurations that our society relies on to designate a person female, can wear jeans and a t-shirt, cut their hair short, and go makekup-free without much concern about the possibility of being misgendered.
To say "misgendered" should cause us to realize that gender is a verb, that we get "gendered" by other people all the time -- "mis" or otherwise. We still gender people based on perceptions anchored in binary sex, so we're still in the shadows of assumptions about what our bodies mean.
My colleague Annunaki Ray Marquez, an intersex activist, points out that the terms "cisgender" and "transgender" contain assumptions. An intersex person isn't likely to have been assigned intersex at birth, but to conflate the situation of intersex people with that of transgender people is to erase them, especially since one of the central issues for intersex people is genital surgery done without their consent as infants or children, whereas medical transitioning is generally seen as a positive solution -- one for which medical insurance coverage is a political objective -- within the transgender community. ""Not all intersex people assigned wrong at birth will be comfortable being called 'transgender', although some will", says Marquez.
What made me nonbinary was that I ran into a two-options conundrum, either I was male and a boy (or man) which was not true; or that I was female and a girl (or woman) which was also not true. I was male and yet one of the girls. I encountered the socially-recognized physical configuration that got me designated male any time I saw my body. I didn't have any dysphoria about it, it wasn't wrong.
I want to be accepted as a male femme, a male gal. I should not have to present as female in order to be known as one of the girls. I should not have to push away from maleness in order to assert girlness. my maleness and the experiences that come from being a male girl are part of my identity. I am NOT a cisgender female person; being seen and thought of as such would NOT recognize me. It's not who I am. I'm a male girl.
I should be able to go to the nude beach and be who I am, a girl. I should be able to go the nude beach without obtaining medical intervention to transition by body and be accepted for who I am, a male girl.
My transgender sister should be able to go to the nude beach -- with or without medical intervention -- and accepted for who she is as well. She considers herself female and woman. She shouldn't have to "pass". She shouldn't have to adorn herself and fix up her appearance in order to elicit our approval of her identity. She shouldn't have to keep her body under wraps if she can't afford or hasn't opted for medical transitioning.
Neither should my intersex brother. His body is intersex. His gender identity isn't a consequence of either of the two conventional physical sex constructs. He also needs to be able to walk here on this beach.
Until we can do that, until acceptance of gender identity isn't dependent on having the "right" body, until acceptance of gender identity doesn't depend on erasing the body either, we're still stuck in Binary 2.0.
———————
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 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, February 22, 2020
Androgyny & Unisex vs Being Differently Gendered
Many older feminists on my Facebook feed and elsewhere are annoyed that so many younger tomboyish / butch women now identify as men. "Why can't they just reject the sexist imposed girly-girl pink 'n pretty bullshit and be proud of being women?", they write. "We need to stick together as women. Feminism has always rejected all that 'biology is destiny' stuff, but to us that meant that if you were born female it didn't mean you had to be feminine, you could play rugby and be an astronaut and be assertive and ambitious at the conference table". They express their dismay at the current thinking and attitudes about gender and gender expression and identity: "This looks like a step backwards. Young women are believing that if they're going to be aggressive and rowdy and blunt and heroic, they have to turn their backs of being women and call themselves boys or men".
Feminist thinking split gender apart from sex. Sex was your physical plumbing, your morphological configuration. Gender was all the socially constructed beliefs and roles and assumed attributes, and included things like "Women's place is in the home" as well as "Women can't be doctors, they don't have the detached analytical mind that it takes" and "Girls' way of flirting is to draw the eyes of boys and react to boys hitting on them" and so forth. Separating gender from sex meant separating what you were given at birth from what it was assumed to mean, so that those assumptions could more easily be challenged.
I grew up with the women's liberation movement getting enough media coverage and mainstream acknowledgment for it to form a part of my backdrop. And because of it, I grew up with my own attitude, that just because I was born male didn't mean I needed to emulate all that belligerent noisy competitive disruptive behavior, and didn't mean there was something wrong with me for valuing the same things the girls valued. It meant I could reject double standards. If any characteristic or trait was acceptable or admirable when a girl had it, then it was sexist and unfair for it not to be acceptable and admirable in me if I had it.
So why wasn't that enough? Why couldn't I just continue to be a guy who happened to dismiss all that sexist stereotyping and remain confident of my legitimacy in an androgynous unisex modern society?
I've tried to answer that before, but I don't think I said it very clearly. Let me try again...
Let's say you happen to be a male person whose attributes and behavioral patterns and whatnot overlap a whole lot better with the ones assumed and attributed to female people than with the ones assumed of male folks.
And let's say you happen to live in a world where some, but not all, of the people agree that it is sexist stereotyping to expect male people to be one way and female people to be a different way.
The other people, who also inhabit your world, believe that those so-called sexist stereotypes are actually legitimate accurate descriptions about the differences between the sexes.
The male children who grow up disbelieving in sexist stereotypes are obviously less likely to hold themselves up against those stereotypes and aspire to them and conform to them, so on average they're probably going to be pretty androgynous. The male children who grow up embracing those sex polarized notions, on the other hand, are most likely to put some effort into manifesting "masculinity".
So imagine that there's a roomful of people, some with one set of expectations and beliefs and some with the other attitudes. And they know about each other of course. And into this room walks a male person, a stranger that none of them know yet. What expectations and anticipations get projected onto this male stranger? It's a blend, right? The ones who don't consider the traditional beliefs to be stereotypes will expect somewhat conventional masculine behavior. Oh, they may also have some space in their head for anticipating more androgynous behavior, because they're aware of those other folks, the ones who discount that stuff as sexist stereotyping, so whether they approve of it or not they may at least anticipate that this guy who just walked in might be one of those metrosexual androgynous types you see so often these days.
How about the people in the room who don't ascribe to sexist assumptions? They're going to anticipate fairly neutral behavior from this male stranger, not materially different from what they'd anticipate if it were a female stranger, because they're not sexist jerks, right? Well, except that they're well aware of the continued existence of people who still subscribe to that stuff and believe it to be true, so whether they approve of it or not, they have some room within their expectations that the guy walking in may be one of those, and hence may exhibit a lot of internalized prescribed masculine signals and gender-conformist attributes.
Well, if you average all that mess out, you get a midpoint sort of halfway between conventionally stereotypically masculine and androgynously unisex.
And if this male stranger just so happens, in fact, to mostly have traits that overlap with the expectations and beliefs foisted onto female people, that collective expectation is going to be rather wrong. Significantly wrong.
What is gained by asserting an identity as femme, as a male girl, as a feminine, not merely androgynously unisex male?
It's a political act. It puts an entirely new expectation on the board.
If we can establish an awareness on the part of those people in that room that I described -- an awareness that some male people exhibit feminine traits, think of themselves as being feminine, embrace that, express that -- then whether the people in that room approve of it or not, the fact that the possibility of us has been planted in their minds means their expections, projected onto that male stranger, will be shifted.
Shifted in our direction.
———————
My book is scheduled to come out March 16 from Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon for pre-orders (paperback only for the moment).
———————
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.
————————
Feminist thinking split gender apart from sex. Sex was your physical plumbing, your morphological configuration. Gender was all the socially constructed beliefs and roles and assumed attributes, and included things like "Women's place is in the home" as well as "Women can't be doctors, they don't have the detached analytical mind that it takes" and "Girls' way of flirting is to draw the eyes of boys and react to boys hitting on them" and so forth. Separating gender from sex meant separating what you were given at birth from what it was assumed to mean, so that those assumptions could more easily be challenged.
I grew up with the women's liberation movement getting enough media coverage and mainstream acknowledgment for it to form a part of my backdrop. And because of it, I grew up with my own attitude, that just because I was born male didn't mean I needed to emulate all that belligerent noisy competitive disruptive behavior, and didn't mean there was something wrong with me for valuing the same things the girls valued. It meant I could reject double standards. If any characteristic or trait was acceptable or admirable when a girl had it, then it was sexist and unfair for it not to be acceptable and admirable in me if I had it.
So why wasn't that enough? Why couldn't I just continue to be a guy who happened to dismiss all that sexist stereotyping and remain confident of my legitimacy in an androgynous unisex modern society?
I've tried to answer that before, but I don't think I said it very clearly. Let me try again...
Let's say you happen to be a male person whose attributes and behavioral patterns and whatnot overlap a whole lot better with the ones assumed and attributed to female people than with the ones assumed of male folks.
And let's say you happen to live in a world where some, but not all, of the people agree that it is sexist stereotyping to expect male people to be one way and female people to be a different way.
The other people, who also inhabit your world, believe that those so-called sexist stereotypes are actually legitimate accurate descriptions about the differences between the sexes.
The male children who grow up disbelieving in sexist stereotypes are obviously less likely to hold themselves up against those stereotypes and aspire to them and conform to them, so on average they're probably going to be pretty androgynous. The male children who grow up embracing those sex polarized notions, on the other hand, are most likely to put some effort into manifesting "masculinity".
So imagine that there's a roomful of people, some with one set of expectations and beliefs and some with the other attitudes. And they know about each other of course. And into this room walks a male person, a stranger that none of them know yet. What expectations and anticipations get projected onto this male stranger? It's a blend, right? The ones who don't consider the traditional beliefs to be stereotypes will expect somewhat conventional masculine behavior. Oh, they may also have some space in their head for anticipating more androgynous behavior, because they're aware of those other folks, the ones who discount that stuff as sexist stereotyping, so whether they approve of it or not they may at least anticipate that this guy who just walked in might be one of those metrosexual androgynous types you see so often these days.
How about the people in the room who don't ascribe to sexist assumptions? They're going to anticipate fairly neutral behavior from this male stranger, not materially different from what they'd anticipate if it were a female stranger, because they're not sexist jerks, right? Well, except that they're well aware of the continued existence of people who still subscribe to that stuff and believe it to be true, so whether they approve of it or not, they have some room within their expectations that the guy walking in may be one of those, and hence may exhibit a lot of internalized prescribed masculine signals and gender-conformist attributes.
Well, if you average all that mess out, you get a midpoint sort of halfway between conventionally stereotypically masculine and androgynously unisex.
And if this male stranger just so happens, in fact, to mostly have traits that overlap with the expectations and beliefs foisted onto female people, that collective expectation is going to be rather wrong. Significantly wrong.
What is gained by asserting an identity as femme, as a male girl, as a feminine, not merely androgynously unisex male?
It's a political act. It puts an entirely new expectation on the board.
If we can establish an awareness on the part of those people in that room that I described -- an awareness that some male people exhibit feminine traits, think of themselves as being feminine, embrace that, express that -- then whether the people in that room approve of it or not, the fact that the possibility of us has been planted in their minds means their expections, projected onto that male stranger, will be shifted.
Shifted in our direction.
———————
My book is scheduled to come out March 16 from Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon for pre-orders (paperback only for the moment).
———————
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.
————————
Monday, June 18, 2018
Defining Gender Inversion
A gender invert is someone whose gender is the opposite of the gender associated with their physical sex. Male girls. Female boys. I'm a male girl and I identify as a gender invert. Hi!
The other component of being a gender invert is accepting both one's physical sex and one's unexpected gender as natural and correct.
(I just realized the other day that although I've been blogging about this stuff since 2014, I've never done a blog post specifically about the term!)
Origin
Havelock Ellis popularized the term "gender invert" back in the late 1800s. At the time, he was promoting the notion that homosexual people of either sex were essentially people who possessed a bunch of characteristics of the opposite sex. That notion got challenged and discarded. Most researchers now agree that being a feminine male, or a masculine female, is not what causes a person to be a gay male or a lesbian. 1 So the term "gender invert" was basically discarded and left to rot on the sidewalk.
I'm reclaiming it. Just because it has nothing to do with causing sexual orientation doesn't mean that gender inversion itself doesn't exist. Or that it isn't a useful term. Our society is now familiar with male-to-female and female-to-male transgender people, transitioners who address their situation by bringing their sex into compliance with their gender. "Gender invert" can refer to a similar person who continues to live a life as a male girl or a female boy, someone who embraces rather than seeks to fix the apparent disparity between sex and gender.
The Umbrella Thing
People often offer me other terms to use instead. I am told that I could refer to myself (and to people like me) as "nonbinary transgender". As opposed to the binary transgender people who transition male-to-female or female-to-male. But as a gender invert, I am operating with some binary assumptions myself, for better or worse: in order to describe a person as having "the opposite" gender from the gender that normally goes with their sex, we're sort of assuming two body types (male and female) and two genders (boy and girl), because only in a binary two-category system do you have an obvious "opposite".
I don't mean to be disrespectful to intersex people or to people whose gender identity isn't binary like that. But most of us who are alive today grew up in a world that uses a binary system for categorizing people by sex. And like most identities, the identity of gender invert exists against the backdrop of society and its existing library of categories.
Yes, I suppose "gender invert" is technically an identity that falls under the transgender umbrella, since anyone who is a gender invert would have a gender identity other than the one that other folks assume them to have. And "gender invert" also falls under the genderqueer umbrella, since anyone who is a gender invert has a gender other than the normative, expected gender, therefore is queer, gender-wise. And since you can't express "male girl" in a strict binary system where everyone is either male (and hence a man or boy) or else female (and thereby a woman or girl), "gender invert" fits under the umbrella term "nonbinary" as well.
I now have all the umbrellas I need.
What I don't have is enough specific recognition of my situation. Like lesbians who felt more erased than included by the use of the term "gay", and preferred to see the word "lesbian" to reflect an awareness of them, I want to see "gender invert" spreading as a concept and as a terminology.
What gender inversion ISN'T -- aka what not to say to a gender invert
• Being a gender invert is not another way of saying you have a masculine or feminine "side". All of me is feminine. Side, back, front, top, bottom. I'm not less feminine in my gender than some other kind of person. A gender invert is not someone halfway inbetween a person who is cisgender and a person who is transgender and getting hormones and surgeries. I find the "side" thing and the assumptions that I'm only semi-feminine to be negating and insulting.
• Obviously, since we're not living in Havelock Ellis's time, we all know that gender identity isn't the same as sexual orientation, right? Actually, weirdly enough, you know where you see these elements conflated with each other a lot? For gays and lesbians. Someone affirms a proud gay femme's identity by saying "Oh sure I always knew you were gay, totally flaming" and then describes the person's childhood femininity. Or speaks of their daughter's incipient identity as a lesbian by describing how butch she was in fourth grade. Well, I should not attempt to speak on behalf of gay or lesbian people who also identify as gender inverts, but yeah, do try to separate the two components in your mind and think before you speak. Me, I'm a sissy femme girlish male whose attraction is towards female folks. I need the term "gender invert" because we don't have a term for someone like me.
• No, this isn't about committing genderfuck or cleverly trying to "undermine gender" and I'm not an agender person and I'm not particularly genderfluid either. Some people are. Here's a respectful and sincere salute to those who are. Nope, I'm gendered. I'm differently gendered, I'm queerly gendered, but I'm genuinely gendered. I have a gender identity.
But why?
I suppose in some ways being a gender invert is a bit old-fashioned, like being bisexual instead of pansexual or something. Perhaps it appears to you like a step backwards, reaffirming those binary categories even as it tries to carve out a noncompliant gender identity from them.
I don't think it is. I think it's like coming into an ongoing argument about whether to allow limited medical marijuana use or keep it completely illegal -- and saying it should be 100% legal for all uses, recreational and otherwise.
If it had ever already been established that it's normal and healthy that some percent of female people are extremely masculine, and similarly that some portion of male folks are entirely feminine, it would be a different situation, but it hasn't been and it isn't. And since it hasn't been established that way, proclaiming the desirability of androgyny and/or a gender-free world in which individuals aren't encouraged to identify with either of those moldy old gendered identities is making that the goal post. For those supporting our side of the debate, that is. The other side maintains its goal posts in the traditional gender conformities. I've never been much of a sports fan but I'm pretty sure that means all the action is in between neutral territory and traditional territory.
I'm moving the goal posts.
But moving the goal posts isn't why I'm doing this. I'm doing this because this is who I am. The fact that I think it's progressive is just an added benefit. The fact that some may think it's regressive and old-fashioned instead is just an added burden.
I'm speaking out about it either way.
You, when speaking about the many identities covered by the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ acronym, or when compiling a list of identity flags for a pride day illustration, please make a mention of gender inverts. I'd appreciate it. I'm here, too.
1 See for example "Same-sex Sexuality and Childhood Gender Non-conformity: a spurious connection", Lorene Gottschalk, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol 12, No. 1, 2003
———————
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
The other component of being a gender invert is accepting both one's physical sex and one's unexpected gender as natural and correct.
(I just realized the other day that although I've been blogging about this stuff since 2014, I've never done a blog post specifically about the term!)
Origin
Havelock Ellis popularized the term "gender invert" back in the late 1800s. At the time, he was promoting the notion that homosexual people of either sex were essentially people who possessed a bunch of characteristics of the opposite sex. That notion got challenged and discarded. Most researchers now agree that being a feminine male, or a masculine female, is not what causes a person to be a gay male or a lesbian. 1 So the term "gender invert" was basically discarded and left to rot on the sidewalk.
I'm reclaiming it. Just because it has nothing to do with causing sexual orientation doesn't mean that gender inversion itself doesn't exist. Or that it isn't a useful term. Our society is now familiar with male-to-female and female-to-male transgender people, transitioners who address their situation by bringing their sex into compliance with their gender. "Gender invert" can refer to a similar person who continues to live a life as a male girl or a female boy, someone who embraces rather than seeks to fix the apparent disparity between sex and gender.
The Umbrella Thing
People often offer me other terms to use instead. I am told that I could refer to myself (and to people like me) as "nonbinary transgender". As opposed to the binary transgender people who transition male-to-female or female-to-male. But as a gender invert, I am operating with some binary assumptions myself, for better or worse: in order to describe a person as having "the opposite" gender from the gender that normally goes with their sex, we're sort of assuming two body types (male and female) and two genders (boy and girl), because only in a binary two-category system do you have an obvious "opposite".
I don't mean to be disrespectful to intersex people or to people whose gender identity isn't binary like that. But most of us who are alive today grew up in a world that uses a binary system for categorizing people by sex. And like most identities, the identity of gender invert exists against the backdrop of society and its existing library of categories.
Yes, I suppose "gender invert" is technically an identity that falls under the transgender umbrella, since anyone who is a gender invert would have a gender identity other than the one that other folks assume them to have. And "gender invert" also falls under the genderqueer umbrella, since anyone who is a gender invert has a gender other than the normative, expected gender, therefore is queer, gender-wise. And since you can't express "male girl" in a strict binary system where everyone is either male (and hence a man or boy) or else female (and thereby a woman or girl), "gender invert" fits under the umbrella term "nonbinary" as well.
I now have all the umbrellas I need.
What I don't have is enough specific recognition of my situation. Like lesbians who felt more erased than included by the use of the term "gay", and preferred to see the word "lesbian" to reflect an awareness of them, I want to see "gender invert" spreading as a concept and as a terminology.
What gender inversion ISN'T -- aka what not to say to a gender invert
• Being a gender invert is not another way of saying you have a masculine or feminine "side". All of me is feminine. Side, back, front, top, bottom. I'm not less feminine in my gender than some other kind of person. A gender invert is not someone halfway inbetween a person who is cisgender and a person who is transgender and getting hormones and surgeries. I find the "side" thing and the assumptions that I'm only semi-feminine to be negating and insulting.
• Obviously, since we're not living in Havelock Ellis's time, we all know that gender identity isn't the same as sexual orientation, right? Actually, weirdly enough, you know where you see these elements conflated with each other a lot? For gays and lesbians. Someone affirms a proud gay femme's identity by saying "Oh sure I always knew you were gay, totally flaming" and then describes the person's childhood femininity. Or speaks of their daughter's incipient identity as a lesbian by describing how butch she was in fourth grade. Well, I should not attempt to speak on behalf of gay or lesbian people who also identify as gender inverts, but yeah, do try to separate the two components in your mind and think before you speak. Me, I'm a sissy femme girlish male whose attraction is towards female folks. I need the term "gender invert" because we don't have a term for someone like me.
• No, this isn't about committing genderfuck or cleverly trying to "undermine gender" and I'm not an agender person and I'm not particularly genderfluid either. Some people are. Here's a respectful and sincere salute to those who are. Nope, I'm gendered. I'm differently gendered, I'm queerly gendered, but I'm genuinely gendered. I have a gender identity.
But why?
I suppose in some ways being a gender invert is a bit old-fashioned, like being bisexual instead of pansexual or something. Perhaps it appears to you like a step backwards, reaffirming those binary categories even as it tries to carve out a noncompliant gender identity from them.
I don't think it is. I think it's like coming into an ongoing argument about whether to allow limited medical marijuana use or keep it completely illegal -- and saying it should be 100% legal for all uses, recreational and otherwise.
If it had ever already been established that it's normal and healthy that some percent of female people are extremely masculine, and similarly that some portion of male folks are entirely feminine, it would be a different situation, but it hasn't been and it isn't. And since it hasn't been established that way, proclaiming the desirability of androgyny and/or a gender-free world in which individuals aren't encouraged to identify with either of those moldy old gendered identities is making that the goal post. For those supporting our side of the debate, that is. The other side maintains its goal posts in the traditional gender conformities. I've never been much of a sports fan but I'm pretty sure that means all the action is in between neutral territory and traditional territory.
I'm moving the goal posts.
But moving the goal posts isn't why I'm doing this. I'm doing this because this is who I am. The fact that I think it's progressive is just an added benefit. The fact that some may think it's regressive and old-fashioned instead is just an added burden.
I'm speaking out about it either way.
You, when speaking about the many identities covered by the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ acronym, or when compiling a list of identity flags for a pride day illustration, please make a mention of gender inverts. I'd appreciate it. I'm here, too.
1 See for example "Same-sex Sexuality and Childhood Gender Non-conformity: a spurious connection", Lorene Gottschalk, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol 12, No. 1, 2003
———————
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
Sunday, April 29, 2018
Gender Fluidity
I don't identify as genderfluid myself. It's one more in a long list of terms that technically might apply, depending on how they're interpreted, but which would be misleading because of how they're more generally used.
If there's a widely shared notion of what "genderfluid" means, a cartoon caricature sort of simplification, it's the person who has "girl days" and "boy days", a person who oscillates between the two conventional genders at some oscillation-frequency. Like alternating current, or the progression of night and day, first one and then the other and repeat.
There really are people whose gender fluidity matches that description pretty closely. (And there is nothing wrong with society having a simplified cartoon caricature understanding of something complex, and certainly nothing wrong with individuals fitting the stereotype). A double handful of people in my online genderqueer Facebook groups have written specifically about their experiences on days when they were feeling femme or conversations they had with their mom on one of their masc days, and I recall one person saying they would realize who what gender they were each day when they stepped to their closet and looked at the girl clothes on the left and the boy clothes on the right side and felt which side called to them.
But there are also a lot of people whose identity as genderfluid has to do with squirming out of the confinement of any rigid gender identity because of its limitations. If you visualize the whole range of possible human experience and human behavior and personality and character attributes, a lot of what gender is about is a litany of shouldn'ts. Constraints. Boys don't cry. A lady wouldn't sit with her knees apart. A man ought not to let his fear show. Girls don't, boys don't, shouldn't shouldn't shouldn't. Many a genderfluid person attains escape from that by not feeling confined to any specific gender, and therefore not subject to those barriers.
That raises the question that my agender and neutrois associates might raise: "Then why have a gender at all, fluid or otherwise? If they're all about constraints, wouldn't it be more freeing to bail out on the whole gender thing entirely?"
But gender isn't solely about constraints. For any given gender, we have role models, heroes, social icons who have demonstrated a capability or attained something, and these can be powerful to draw upon. Gender can be about strengths, about what a person of a given gender can do, sometimes things that seem to step beyond the limitations of what we think a generic person is able to do. Or a way of being in the world, a set of characteristics that are most easily comprehended by referencing their widely-shared popularization as associated with a specific kind of person of a specific gender. A genderfluid person may embrace these libraries of potentials and strengths and other admirable traits, with all their previously-expressed nuances, as elements of a gender that they participate in.
Perhaps a neutral genderless notion of a person should not be scoured of these images and portrayals, but if our myths and stories and the portrayals of characters in books and films are embedded in a gendered world (as indeed they tend almost invariably to be), trying to evoke them without evoking the gender with which they are most associated can be like trying to think about how rose petals feel without conjuring up memories of how roses look and smell. It's just easier when you include the associated experiences.
A lot of people say that their gender fluidity is less like a binary either/or condition that flips from girl to boy and more like the progression of seasons. They may have times in their lives when they feel strongly anchored in one gender and other times when they are rather prominently rooted in another, but they may also have a lot of time spent neither strongly this nor that but with elements of both, or neither, or some of this and some of that intertwined.
The poles of a genderfluid person's variances may not be the two conventional ones of woman versus man. Some genderfluid people say that they vary between femme and agender; some explain that their fluidity ranges from demigirl to tomboy. There is a sense in which any given gender terms carries with it an assortment of positive and negative attributes, woven together to create an overall feeling or taste. A person exploring their gender identity may be observed to be trying on several of these in turn, trying to see which notion resonates with them best and feels like the most accurate description. (The various gender qroups I'm in are always well-populated with posts from people posing such questions as "Do you think I am nonbinary, or am I more demiboy?" and then describing what they like or don't like about the "fit" of each term). A genderfluid person is sometimes a person who decides that instead of needing to finally select the perfect term and stick with it, they can treat gender identities like items in their wardrobe, and populate their gender wardrobe with gender identities that look nice on them and fit pretty well and which they feel comfortable in. We have more than one outfit in our clothes closet, why not more than one gender? And why not more than two, for that matter. Not all genderfluid people have only two components that they vary between. There can be more.
I myself don't oscillate, really. Oscillating back and forth between two (or more) specified gender expressions or identities is not a specific requirement for being genderfluid, but it's what the term "genderfluid" brings to mind for most people who know the term at all, and that's the main reason I don't identify as genderfluid.
I haven't been immutably rooted in a single lifelong gender identity for myself, either, though. When I look back, what I see in my life is a long single curve that appears to have landed at a final stable destination. When I was a young kid, around 7 or 8, I saw myself as being a person who was like the girls were. I was in the inverse situation of a tomboy — I was male and unapologetically so, but very much out to show the girls that I deserved their respect as an equal, measured on their terms. And didn't want to be associated with or thought of as one of the boys. Then, in junior high and high school, as a consequence of being sexually attracted to girls, I slowly shifted towards a boy gender identity: the countercultural mellow hippie male, a variant type of male identity that didn't seem so horrible and foreign but which was also associated with sexuality and sexual liberation, especially with a form of sexuality that wasn't as laden with conquest and exploitation and was, itself, more mellow and loving. And then, in early adulthood, my path of my gender identity curved back again as I found the "countercultural guy" ultimately not a very good fit for me and came to realize that in an important sense I was still who I had been as a young kid, essentially one of the girls and proud of it.
I identify as genderqueer, and as a gender invert.
————————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
If there's a widely shared notion of what "genderfluid" means, a cartoon caricature sort of simplification, it's the person who has "girl days" and "boy days", a person who oscillates between the two conventional genders at some oscillation-frequency. Like alternating current, or the progression of night and day, first one and then the other and repeat.
There really are people whose gender fluidity matches that description pretty closely. (And there is nothing wrong with society having a simplified cartoon caricature understanding of something complex, and certainly nothing wrong with individuals fitting the stereotype). A double handful of people in my online genderqueer Facebook groups have written specifically about their experiences on days when they were feeling femme or conversations they had with their mom on one of their masc days, and I recall one person saying they would realize who what gender they were each day when they stepped to their closet and looked at the girl clothes on the left and the boy clothes on the right side and felt which side called to them.
But there are also a lot of people whose identity as genderfluid has to do with squirming out of the confinement of any rigid gender identity because of its limitations. If you visualize the whole range of possible human experience and human behavior and personality and character attributes, a lot of what gender is about is a litany of shouldn'ts. Constraints. Boys don't cry. A lady wouldn't sit with her knees apart. A man ought not to let his fear show. Girls don't, boys don't, shouldn't shouldn't shouldn't. Many a genderfluid person attains escape from that by not feeling confined to any specific gender, and therefore not subject to those barriers.
That raises the question that my agender and neutrois associates might raise: "Then why have a gender at all, fluid or otherwise? If they're all about constraints, wouldn't it be more freeing to bail out on the whole gender thing entirely?"
But gender isn't solely about constraints. For any given gender, we have role models, heroes, social icons who have demonstrated a capability or attained something, and these can be powerful to draw upon. Gender can be about strengths, about what a person of a given gender can do, sometimes things that seem to step beyond the limitations of what we think a generic person is able to do. Or a way of being in the world, a set of characteristics that are most easily comprehended by referencing their widely-shared popularization as associated with a specific kind of person of a specific gender. A genderfluid person may embrace these libraries of potentials and strengths and other admirable traits, with all their previously-expressed nuances, as elements of a gender that they participate in.
Perhaps a neutral genderless notion of a person should not be scoured of these images and portrayals, but if our myths and stories and the portrayals of characters in books and films are embedded in a gendered world (as indeed they tend almost invariably to be), trying to evoke them without evoking the gender with which they are most associated can be like trying to think about how rose petals feel without conjuring up memories of how roses look and smell. It's just easier when you include the associated experiences.
A lot of people say that their gender fluidity is less like a binary either/or condition that flips from girl to boy and more like the progression of seasons. They may have times in their lives when they feel strongly anchored in one gender and other times when they are rather prominently rooted in another, but they may also have a lot of time spent neither strongly this nor that but with elements of both, or neither, or some of this and some of that intertwined.
The poles of a genderfluid person's variances may not be the two conventional ones of woman versus man. Some genderfluid people say that they vary between femme and agender; some explain that their fluidity ranges from demigirl to tomboy. There is a sense in which any given gender terms carries with it an assortment of positive and negative attributes, woven together to create an overall feeling or taste. A person exploring their gender identity may be observed to be trying on several of these in turn, trying to see which notion resonates with them best and feels like the most accurate description. (The various gender qroups I'm in are always well-populated with posts from people posing such questions as "Do you think I am nonbinary, or am I more demiboy?" and then describing what they like or don't like about the "fit" of each term). A genderfluid person is sometimes a person who decides that instead of needing to finally select the perfect term and stick with it, they can treat gender identities like items in their wardrobe, and populate their gender wardrobe with gender identities that look nice on them and fit pretty well and which they feel comfortable in. We have more than one outfit in our clothes closet, why not more than one gender? And why not more than two, for that matter. Not all genderfluid people have only two components that they vary between. There can be more.
I myself don't oscillate, really. Oscillating back and forth between two (or more) specified gender expressions or identities is not a specific requirement for being genderfluid, but it's what the term "genderfluid" brings to mind for most people who know the term at all, and that's the main reason I don't identify as genderfluid.
I haven't been immutably rooted in a single lifelong gender identity for myself, either, though. When I look back, what I see in my life is a long single curve that appears to have landed at a final stable destination. When I was a young kid, around 7 or 8, I saw myself as being a person who was like the girls were. I was in the inverse situation of a tomboy — I was male and unapologetically so, but very much out to show the girls that I deserved their respect as an equal, measured on their terms. And didn't want to be associated with or thought of as one of the boys. Then, in junior high and high school, as a consequence of being sexually attracted to girls, I slowly shifted towards a boy gender identity: the countercultural mellow hippie male, a variant type of male identity that didn't seem so horrible and foreign but which was also associated with sexuality and sexual liberation, especially with a form of sexuality that wasn't as laden with conquest and exploitation and was, itself, more mellow and loving. And then, in early adulthood, my path of my gender identity curved back again as I found the "countercultural guy" ultimately not a very good fit for me and came to realize that in an important sense I was still who I had been as a young kid, essentially one of the girls and proud of it.
I identify as genderqueer, and as a gender invert.
————————
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
Sunday, April 15, 2018
Theybies
"Is it possible to raise your child entirely without gender from birth?"
The question is the title of an article by Alex Morris, a contributing editor for New York Magazine and Rolling Stone. It's not a question of his own posing, though; he's reporting on the fact that some parents have been contemplating that question, and how they're approaching the matter.
It's not a brand-new notion. I remember reading a reprint of Lois Gould's "X: A Fabulous Child's Story" when I was in my 20s and it was already nearly ten years old by then. Of course, that was fiction. The parents described in Morris's article aren't fictional.
In the actual world, parents who have worried about the effects of sex role socialization on their children have mostly tried to raise their children in a cheerfully agender "Free to Be You and Me" permissive world that didn't include a bunch of insistences that boys had to play with boy toys and wear boy clothes and display boy personality-characteristics while girls were pushed towards playing with girl toys and girl clothes and feminine attributes.
The parents in Morris's article decided that as long as people knew the children's sex, they would still project expectations upon them even when they were trying not to, and that many people would not see any problem with having gendered expectations or with treating kids differently based on what sex they were —
... and they decided to go the full Lois Gould / Baby X route and keep the sex of their children a secret. These are the so-called "theybies parents" (author Morris's term).
There is, of course, a predictable loud outcry of critical people who say this is bad, an irresponsibly destructive piece of social experimentation that not only won't work as hoped for but will do damage to the children involved. You can see some of these replies in the comments below Morris's article and you can find others if you do an internet search on "Morris" + "raise your child entirely without gender".
The critics' argument isn't a single argument, though, so much as it's a set of different arguments that all end up in the same conclusion-area. Even if we end up dismissing all of those arguments, I think it's worth looking at them in clusters (if not necessarily on a one at a time basis) and giving them separate consideration.
There are some people who are opposed to what the "theybies parents" are doing because they think it is natural and important for children to get gendered — to be treated as either boys or girls and to learn what it means to be a boy or a girl. The people making this argument are taking the diametrically opposite viewpoint from the "theybies parents". They're defending the gender binary as something critical to healthy development, and I don't see any difference between them and the people who would be horrified if their son were to wear a skirt. I'm dismissing them from further consideration.
But there are also people who are opposed to this because they visualize a few children being kept ignorant of their own biological classification, growing up in a world where other children are not having this information kept from them. In other words "we know what's best for you, your ignorance is a blessing, so we're going to keep you uninformed about gender for your own good".
I can see where that would be a matter of some concern if that was in fact what the "theybies parents" were proposing. But it doesn't seem to be:
The parents do not appear to be trying to keep their children from being aware of their own biological equipment. It's slightly less clear whether they intend on informing their children that most people fit into one or the other of two primary biological sex categories. It would, actually, be a more accurate and more truthful explanation if they were told that some people do not, in fact, fit into either of those physical categories.
The main focus of the parents' intent appears to be running some interference with how other people will perceive and treat their children. In a social/cultural context where there are a boatload of assumptions and interpretations foisted onto people based on their biological sexual equipment, where people altercast other people into identities based on their perceived sex, then the only obvious way to avoid that unwanted foisting is to keep the biological sex unknown.
Some critics point out that the whole rejection of biological essentialism kind of revolves around it not mattering what you've got betwixt your legs. If it doesn't matter, then it need not be kept a secret. But there's a gap between what matters in and of itself and what makes a difference in a social context. Keeping the children's sex secret is sort of like affirmative action: it's a patch, a temporary fix that only makes sense in the context of something already, historically, being wrong.
Finally, though, there are people who are concerned about children being raised this way because they visualize a few children being kept ignorant and unexposed to the social fact that most people are indeed treated differently depending on their sex. This is a more complicated and nuanced area than trying to keep kids oblivious about their biological classification.
It reminds me of the question of whether minority parents should raise their kids as blissfully unaware of racism and bigotry as possible, so that they aren't tainted by it, or if they should raise their kids to be savvy of the world's racist bigoted nastiness so that they aren't caught unprepared and vulnerable when they finally have to confront it.
Would we be setting up the children for a rude awakening? Would they feel they had been lied to, in the form of lies of omission, if they were not warned that the world tends to believe in sexual differences and has different expectations and treatments of people based on whether they're male or female in body?
I totally approve of the motives of the parents. I understand what they're trying to do here. And I loved "X: A Fabulous Child's Story" and thought it was totally cute. But I notice that both the situation described in the Morris article and the situation described in the Lois Gould short story all involve babies and very young children. When I do a fast-forward in my own mind and imagine older children, I see the control of whether or not to let the surrounding world know their sex shifting from the parents to the children themselves. If they were to continue to preserve that state of affairs, doing so would depend on a lot of body coverage. I mean, you can't do this and also live in a naturist community, if you see what I mean. In fact, you'd end up needing gunnysacks and burqas. It would be difficult to keep the project from being tainted by body-shame and the notion that this physical secret was somehow sinful or socially unmentionable or taboo.
I said earlier that keeping the children's sex secret in this manner is a patch, a fix to a social problem. I think it is also fair to say that doing this is a tactic. It's not a goal in and of itself. The goal behind all this is to someday have a world in which people knowing the sex of your children (or of you, yourself for that matter) would make no difference in how folks behaved towards them, would have no influence in expectations or how your behavior gets interpreted, any of that. But as a tactic, keeping the biological sex a secret works better as a thought experiment than as an actual endeavor, in my opinion. Secrecy is seldom a liberating experience.
I am not a parent and I suppose it is easy to say "Well if I were a parent I would do such-and-such" when you don't have to put your money where your mouth is, so to speak. But if I were, I would attempt to teach my children...
• That most (but not all) people fall into one of two biological sex categories, male and female;
• That people have ideas and notions about what it means to be male or female, and these ideas have been around for a long long time, and lots of people don't like those ideas;
• That some of those ideas and notions do seem to be true in general, but there are exceptions to the rule and always have been, and that there have been particularly mean and nasty attitudes about the people who are the exceptions, but it's changing, it's getting better;
• That it is brave to be and do what comes natural to you instead of letting other people's attitudes and expectations shape you from the outside;
• That the body they were born with is beautiful and good as it is, regardless of anything else, and that no one has to have a certain kind of body in order to be a certain kind of person.
————————
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
The question is the title of an article by Alex Morris, a contributing editor for New York Magazine and Rolling Stone. It's not a question of his own posing, though; he's reporting on the fact that some parents have been contemplating that question, and how they're approaching the matter.
It's not a brand-new notion. I remember reading a reprint of Lois Gould's "X: A Fabulous Child's Story" when I was in my 20s and it was already nearly ten years old by then. Of course, that was fiction. The parents described in Morris's article aren't fictional.
In the actual world, parents who have worried about the effects of sex role socialization on their children have mostly tried to raise their children in a cheerfully agender "Free to Be You and Me" permissive world that didn't include a bunch of insistences that boys had to play with boy toys and wear boy clothes and display boy personality-characteristics while girls were pushed towards playing with girl toys and girl clothes and feminine attributes.
The parents in Morris's article decided that as long as people knew the children's sex, they would still project expectations upon them even when they were trying not to, and that many people would not see any problem with having gendered expectations or with treating kids differently based on what sex they were —
...society’s gender troubles cannot be solved by giving all children dolls and trucks to play with or dressing them all in the color beige
... and they decided to go the full Lois Gould / Baby X route and keep the sex of their children a secret. These are the so-called "theybies parents" (author Morris's term).
There is, of course, a predictable loud outcry of critical people who say this is bad, an irresponsibly destructive piece of social experimentation that not only won't work as hoped for but will do damage to the children involved. You can see some of these replies in the comments below Morris's article and you can find others if you do an internet search on "Morris" + "raise your child entirely without gender".
The critics' argument isn't a single argument, though, so much as it's a set of different arguments that all end up in the same conclusion-area. Even if we end up dismissing all of those arguments, I think it's worth looking at them in clusters (if not necessarily on a one at a time basis) and giving them separate consideration.
There are some people who are opposed to what the "theybies parents" are doing because they think it is natural and important for children to get gendered — to be treated as either boys or girls and to learn what it means to be a boy or a girl. The people making this argument are taking the diametrically opposite viewpoint from the "theybies parents". They're defending the gender binary as something critical to healthy development, and I don't see any difference between them and the people who would be horrified if their son were to wear a skirt. I'm dismissing them from further consideration.
But there are also people who are opposed to this because they visualize a few children being kept ignorant of their own biological classification, growing up in a world where other children are not having this information kept from them. In other words "we know what's best for you, your ignorance is a blessing, so we're going to keep you uninformed about gender for your own good".
I can see where that would be a matter of some concern if that was in fact what the "theybies parents" were proposing. But it doesn't seem to be:
Parents do not shy away from describing body parts, but are quick to let children know that “some people with penises aren’t boys, and some people with vaginas aren’t girls,” as one mom told me.
The parents do not appear to be trying to keep their children from being aware of their own biological equipment. It's slightly less clear whether they intend on informing their children that most people fit into one or the other of two primary biological sex categories. It would, actually, be a more accurate and more truthful explanation if they were told that some people do not, in fact, fit into either of those physical categories.
The main focus of the parents' intent appears to be running some interference with how other people will perceive and treat their children. In a social/cultural context where there are a boatload of assumptions and interpretations foisted onto people based on their biological sexual equipment, where people altercast other people into identities based on their perceived sex, then the only obvious way to avoid that unwanted foisting is to keep the biological sex unknown.
Some critics point out that the whole rejection of biological essentialism kind of revolves around it not mattering what you've got betwixt your legs. If it doesn't matter, then it need not be kept a secret. But there's a gap between what matters in and of itself and what makes a difference in a social context. Keeping the children's sex secret is sort of like affirmative action: it's a patch, a temporary fix that only makes sense in the context of something already, historically, being wrong.
Finally, though, there are people who are concerned about children being raised this way because they visualize a few children being kept ignorant and unexposed to the social fact that most people are indeed treated differently depending on their sex. This is a more complicated and nuanced area than trying to keep kids oblivious about their biological classification.
It reminds me of the question of whether minority parents should raise their kids as blissfully unaware of racism and bigotry as possible, so that they aren't tainted by it, or if they should raise their kids to be savvy of the world's racist bigoted nastiness so that they aren't caught unprepared and vulnerable when they finally have to confront it.
Would we be setting up the children for a rude awakening? Would they feel they had been lied to, in the form of lies of omission, if they were not warned that the world tends to believe in sexual differences and has different expectations and treatments of people based on whether they're male or female in body?
I totally approve of the motives of the parents. I understand what they're trying to do here. And I loved "X: A Fabulous Child's Story" and thought it was totally cute. But I notice that both the situation described in the Morris article and the situation described in the Lois Gould short story all involve babies and very young children. When I do a fast-forward in my own mind and imagine older children, I see the control of whether or not to let the surrounding world know their sex shifting from the parents to the children themselves. If they were to continue to preserve that state of affairs, doing so would depend on a lot of body coverage. I mean, you can't do this and also live in a naturist community, if you see what I mean. In fact, you'd end up needing gunnysacks and burqas. It would be difficult to keep the project from being tainted by body-shame and the notion that this physical secret was somehow sinful or socially unmentionable or taboo.
I said earlier that keeping the children's sex secret in this manner is a patch, a fix to a social problem. I think it is also fair to say that doing this is a tactic. It's not a goal in and of itself. The goal behind all this is to someday have a world in which people knowing the sex of your children (or of you, yourself for that matter) would make no difference in how folks behaved towards them, would have no influence in expectations or how your behavior gets interpreted, any of that. But as a tactic, keeping the biological sex a secret works better as a thought experiment than as an actual endeavor, in my opinion. Secrecy is seldom a liberating experience.
I am not a parent and I suppose it is easy to say "Well if I were a parent I would do such-and-such" when you don't have to put your money where your mouth is, so to speak. But if I were, I would attempt to teach my children...
• That most (but not all) people fall into one of two biological sex categories, male and female;
• That people have ideas and notions about what it means to be male or female, and these ideas have been around for a long long time, and lots of people don't like those ideas;
• That some of those ideas and notions do seem to be true in general, but there are exceptions to the rule and always have been, and that there have been particularly mean and nasty attitudes about the people who are the exceptions, but it's changing, it's getting better;
• That it is brave to be and do what comes natural to you instead of letting other people's attitudes and expectations shape you from the outside;
• That the body they were born with is beautiful and good as it is, regardless of anything else, and that no one has to have a certain kind of body in order to be a certain kind of person.
————————
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)