I Get a Really Nice Interview! FiftyShadesOfGender!

Podcast host Esther Lemmens maintains Fifty Shades of Gender, a series in which she interviews a different individual in each episode to do a deep dive into gender, sex, and sexuality. "Come with us on a journey of inclusion, acceptance and respect", she invites.

Esther Lemmens has a gift for asking the right questions to let her subjects introduce or explain the things most important to them. She senses areas where the person might want to elaborate or make things clearer, and probes in such a way as to give that opportunity.

I've been interviewed several times as a book author with a book being published, but often came away from them feeling less than overjoyed about how my gender identity, or my book, were being presented. But Lemmens has elicited from me the best spoken overview I've ever given.

A Conversation with Allan D. Hunter, Podcast Episode 14, 2 October 2020.


You should check out her other episodes as well.


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You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!

My book, 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

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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.

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Kitten Robe

I was unsure about whether I'd end up blog-posting about my robe project. Wondering if it wasn't more than a bit off-topic, you know? But then I got into a conversation with someone who'd attended the same schools as me, initially discussing shop class but that got me to thinking about how home ec was required for girls only when I was in junior high.

So yeah, learning how to sew from a pattern on a sewing machine is gendered. Sure, there are tailors and other male-bodied folks who sew, but you could make that case for any activity, including vamping in sexy lingerie. And people in my gender-atypical FB groups often post selfies showing themselves modeling or posing. So why not?

Also, there's a scene in my book where my mom teaches me how to make a shirt from a pattern when I'm 18, and I make this brilliant red-and-gold paisley shirt, and then about a year later I'm wearing that shirt at a party and get beaten up, with a lot of references to me being sissy and probably queer and therefore that I'd had it coming. And I hadn't really ever gone back to sew from a pattern since then, not until now.

I wore out my old summer bathrobe (it was hanging in tatters) and what with me being at home due to Covid / unemployment, it made sense to do a creative project, so my partner (who is quite adept on the sewing machine) proposed that I make my own. So I picked out a fabric and she helped me select a sewing pattern and I was soon ensconced in chair, pinning and cutting and turning that pile of cloth into a garment.


The fabric arrives:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2617_sm.jpg

Separating the pattern pieces:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2620_sm.jpg

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2618_sm.jpg

Our dining room table repurposed as a working surface:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2625_sm.jpg

Cutting the fabric as per the pattern pieces:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2629_sm.jpg

Stacking the cut pieces on the back of the couch until needed:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2630_sm.jpg

Pockets: the goal here is to have the print pattern on the pockets merge exactly with the underlying print on the robe front:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2633_sm.jpg

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2634_sm.jpg

Pinning in preparation for sewing the pocket down:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2648_sm.jpg

Belt Loops:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2652_sm.jpg

The sewing machine: not fancy but portable and functional:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2653_sm.jpg

Now just lay down a stitch in a straight line...
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2657_sm.jpg

Not too bad!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2664_sm.jpg

Finished seams:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2661_sm.jpg

It's starting to be a robe!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2662_sm.jpg

Close to the edge...
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2669_sm.jpg

Sleeve!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2677_sm.jpg

Finished product!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2678_sm.jpg

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2680_sm.jpg


———————

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.

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Hey, Sister...

Hey, sister, got a moment? Any chance we can reconcile?

You find it bewildering that as a femme-identifying person, I refer to myself as male. You find it appalling and maybe even transphobic when I explain that what I mean when I say I'm "male" is that I was born with a set of physical equipment that, in our culture, has historically been designated "male", although many other people (perhaps including you) may have this same set of bodily components and call those physical structures something other than "male".

You say "Why can't you just call it a penis? A penis isn't male. It's just a penis! Girls can have a penis. Boys can have a vulva".

Well, yeah, I know girls can have a penis. I'm a girl and I've got one. Are we both cool and totally down with the notion that having a penis doesn't define our gender? Can we please have a little moment of peace and solidarity and not be quick to hate on each other for using language a bit differently, and for coming at this situation from different angles?

You identify as transgender. I don't. That means you're a part of a subculture, a community; and you folks, collectively, you got your own way of expressing things, and you also got your own history. Let's talk about the history thing for a sec.

I'm 61; forty years ago, when I was 21 and first coming out, trans people explained the situation to the larger surrounding culture like this: trans people realized at some point in their life that their gender was the gender typically found in the other type of body, and so they'd ideally get hormones and surgery and transition, so that their body would match their gender. And what they said they wanted from the surrounding world was to be accepted as a normal and ordinary person of that gender and that sex. And most trans people wanted to "pass" — they didn't want to receive social acceptance only from a handful of people who heard their life story and learned about transsexuals and all that, but instead they wanted to look and otherwise present in such a way that strangers who didn't know them would just automatically treat them as the gender that they were.

Fast forward to the more-or-less present era. Trans activists interact with lots of transgender people who can't afford hormones and surgery even if they want them, and lots of people who are blocked from having access to the medical interventions they want because doctors and insurance companies are playing gatekeeper. They also interact with a lot of transgender people who don't want the whole package of medical options for a variety of reasons. There's a risk of significant loss of sensation and function when doctors rearrange biological tissue, and there are systemic repercussions to hormones with risk factors and so on and so forth.

Well, it's really fundamentally a human rights issue that the body you inhabit should not detract from the legitimacy of your gender identity. So the social message changed, to become a lot more inclusive. You were valid as a trans person (woman or man) whether you passed or did not pass, and, in fact, fuck "pass". Identities are what are valid; your body doesn't matter! And they didn't use "male" and "female" to refer to bodily architecture because that can imply to some trans people that they've got the wrong body for their gender identity.



I apologize if I've misrepresented the transgender movement and its history in that short summary. I'm writing from the outside. I try to learn and listen but if I've distorted things, I'm sorry, but I hope I mostly got it right.



I'm not trans. I heard the 40-years-ago version of what trans was, gave it some thought, decided nope, that's not me. It's something else. I haven't been a part of your community these 40 years.

So I've got a different history, with different understandings and stuff. I'm hoping you'll be compassionate and interested in a story that's different from yours, so you can see how I got to my viewpoint, ok?

I came out in 1980 as a sissy. A person in a male body whose personality and behavior were a mismatch for what's expected of male people, but a good match for the expectations for female people. I did not want to be perceived as an ordinary typical female person any more than I wanted to be perceived as an ordinary male person. I wanted to be perceived as what I'd been harassed about and accused of all my life: an effeminate sissy girlish male person. The world apparently thought I should be ashamed of that, but I was proud of it. And I was finally angry about it and ready to take a stand. To be in your face about it. Yeah, I'm male, and I'm one of the girls. Get used to it. Deal.

My attitude is that until the world nods in agreement that yeah, male girls exist and no, it's not a damn affliction or an embarrassment, a failure to be sufficiently manly... until then, there's always going to be this notion that if you're perceived and recognized as a male-bodied person, you'll be regarded as less of a man than a masculine man and less of a woman than a physically female-structured person who has boobs and vag and all that.

Not only don't I want to pass, I want to "anti-pass". I want, as I said, to be up in people's face about the lack of correspondence between my body and my gender identity. You've got a male girl here. Flying pride flags about it, no less, got that?


So... you don't use "male" to refer to physical stuff like testicles and penis. You basically use "male" to mean the same thing as "man" and "boy" and so on. I, on the other hand, do use it to mean the physical stuff. My attitude is we've already got plenty of gender words ("man", "boy", "masculine", "feminine", "guy", "dude", "gal", etc), and the word "male" is historically about the raw physical architecture (including other species and also things like hose couplings and electrical plugs), so why can't we keep that word for sex and use existing gender words for gender? This isn't about invalidating anybody's gender identity, it's really not. Yeesh, do I sound like J. K. fucking Rowling here? Seriously?


You ask "Well, why can't you just call it a penis, why do you have to say male?". I say "I want a goddam adjective. An already-recognized adjective to describe me as a person-with-penis-and-associated-bits. I don't want to use a long klunky phrase like 'person with a penis and testicles and adam's apple and absence of a vulva and clitoris and breasts, person who happens to be dyadic or endosex as opposed to intersex and most likely has XY chromosomes and doesn't have a period and has spermatotrophic hormone and a vas deferens'".

If I don't specify that when I say "male" I'm talking about my plumbing and not my personality and inclinations, people often assume I'm saying I have a "male side and a female side", like genderfluid or bigender people. Which isn't it at all. I'm not less feminine than you are. I'm not less male than a rooster. I'm not in-between, either sexually (as intersex people may consider themselves to be) or genderwise. I'm solidly male and utterly feminine.

I'm talking about mine. MY parts. I'm not calling your parts male. I'm calling my parts male.

Not everybody is either male or female, just as not everybody who is male is a man and not everybody who is female is a woman. But the fact that sex isn't binary doesn't mean sex doesn't exist. By the way, intersex people can't talk about being intersex — and distinguish intersex from being nonbinary or intergender or genderfluid or whatever — if they can't talk about bodies and why their atypical body has marked them as different and marginalized them. Most of the intersex activists I know really want to distinguish sex from gender. Because otherwise they get erased.


In a similar way, I can't do the political activity of getting in people's face about being a male girl if I can't say "male girl" and can't talk about the body that caused my girlness to be perceived as something wrong and in need of fixing, or as reason to provoke dismissive contempt.


I personally identify as genderqueer and, more specifically, as a gender invert. I'm a speaker, a blogger, and an author. I just got a book published (and BTW you should read it if you have any appetite for coming-of-age / coming-out stories). I'm not going to go away or shut up.

Does this help?



———————

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

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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.

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I've Finished Book Two! That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class!

Well, I've finished rewriting it from scratch from the ground up at any rate. It's still a rough draft, and at the same time I didn't just compose it, either.


It existed previously. The raw material text for both GenderQueer and for That Guy in our Women's Studies Class was generated as part of my autobiographical tome that I wrote between 2010 and 2013. I extracted and edited and named That Guy in our Women's Studies Class as long ago as 2014. I even sent out some query letters!

But honestly it just wasn't a very good book. Whereas I would proofread and edit GenderQueer with pride, Guy in WS kept making me wince. And at some point I recognized that it belonged in a trunk, perhaps to be revised and redone at some future point, and I focused on getting GenderQueer published.

I came back to it in May of 2019. At the time, I was mired down in my efforts with the main book, and I needed a project, something to give me a sense of progress and accomplishment.

In my writer's group, Amateur Writers of Long Island, I quit bringing in excerpts from GenderQueer, which I considered to be a finished book, and began bringing in my work in progress, Guy in WS, the way the other authors were doing, so that I'd get feedback on what I was currently focusing on as a writer.

GenderQueer was accepted for publication in September and for a lot of the following four months I was pretty narrowly focused on that. But during the Coronavirus era, with my book out but no prospect for addressing audiences as a guest speaker, I dove back into it.


That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class (second beta version)

95,000 words in three large units. Chapter divisions to be created later. A mostly autobiographical account of my years in college trying to utilize women's studies as a means to speak and write about my different gender / experience with society's notions about what it means to be male / being a sissy, etc.

It's not quite as absolutely nonfictional as GenderQueer is. In broad strokes, it is, but I took more liberties with moving conversations and discussions into contexts where they made a more interesting story line. Where GenderQueer is about 98 % truth (or as much so as I'm capable of remembering it), Guy in WS is around 85 %.

If you have any interest in being a beta reader of what is still really a work in progress, shoot me a personal message or email and let me know.


———————

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 LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Now It's Real: I'm in Print!!

There's nothing quite like holding the actual physical printed book. Finally! I'm a published author now.

Showing my age, I suppose, but somehow having an eBook to send out as an Advance Review Copy (ARC) doesn't seem much different from just printing the book out to PDF and mailing it to a potential publisher or lit agent.

It is utterly gorgeous. Kudos to Sunstone Press. High quality physical materials, really nice cover, good paper, solid-feeling construction. It feels like something that will survive on library shelves and hold up to being tossed into backpacks and knapsacks and whatnot.



Ten years ago I began writing what would eventually become GenderQueer. (I started trying to get it published in 2013)

Forty years ago I came out on UNM campus — the climactic event in the book. Long before there was any such term as "genderqueer" I described to people how the person I was inside was basically the same persona as what's more typical of girls and women, that this made me different in the same general way that gay and lesbian folks were different, but that it was something else. Not trans, either (I was physiologically male, and that wasn't the problem). I invented my own terms, created my own symbols, wrote my own manifestos and began dealing with the insinuations and innuendos and hints by dropping my own coy allusions and double-entendres into conversations, unworried about whether people could parse them or not, confident, finally, of who I was, what I was, how I was. Let other people be uncomfortable with it if they must, but I'm done with that.



I've been reviewed in a handful of college newspapers with more promised to come, and a couple have been entered on GoodReads. Amazon isn't allowing reviews to be posted until the official release date (I guess?) (3/16/20) and I don't yet have any reviews in commercial or LGBTQ publications but expect those to start appearing as well. Haven't placed any ads yet (aside from a blog tour package) but we're designing them and I do have an ad budget.

I've heard it said that this is a good time for folks to stay indoors and avoid the crowds and curl up with a good book. Read mine! Then, if you liked it, recommend it to your friends.

It's a different story than any you're likely to have read, and I want folks to hear it.



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My book is being published by Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon and now on Barnes & Noble

(paperback only for the moment).

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Sexual Attraction and BodyShapes

"I was born this way", he says. "I know some of you think there must have been some event, or situation or whatever that made me like this, but honestly I've always been into dicks since before I knew what sex was".

I can relate; I can recall knowing the biological facts of life about how babies get made, but not knowing diddly about sexual appetite and sexual attraction. My understanding at the time was that the only time people did this behavior was when they wanted to have a baby. I had no idea that it felt good or that there was a hunger for it.

And at that age I had definite feelings for female contours, I mean yeah specifically there where they're different from male people. Their different architecture makes everything shaped differently down there, so that when they wear pants it makes shapes that are specific to their anatomy. And I liked to look at it, I liked the way it felt when I did. And oh! *blush* Was this ever kinky and perverted or what?! I mean, that's where you pee from, so I had to keep this secret lest I be mocked mercilessly by the other kids.

So anyway, yeah, I too seem to have been born this way.




In pretty much any discussion of what floats your boat and gets your motor running, sooner or later someone's likely to say that it's shallow and wrong to have the hots for slender blond people with seductive eyelashes. Or perky green-eyes freckle-faced redheads for that matter. Someone is going to say that you should care about who the person is, not what they look like, all that superficial stuff.

And now, added to that, we sometimes encounter the notion that it's shallow and wrong (and transphobic too) to care that someone has a penis instead of a clitoris, or vice versa or some other variation on that theme. We should accept someone as being of the gender with which they identify, and that goes all the way down to not imposing binary intolerant attitudes about what body parts a person has inside their underwear.

Well, I'm not without some limited experience. I've tried participating sexually with someone who had a penis. I didn't care for it. Call me shallow if you wish, judge me and find me wrong if you must, but I seem to have my sexuality wired to the physical architecture that's traditionally dubbed female.

Meanwhile, some folks don't much care to encounter people who find their physical morphology sexy. Or who find the combination of their physical morphology and their overall gender identity and expression sexy. "Chasers are disgusting. They have a fetish and that means they aren't interested in us as people. We want to be accepted as ordinary members of our gender. What's in my underwear is really nobody's business and I don't want to get involved with somebody who has a thing for that, that's creepy".

I don't mean to discredit that feeling or that attitude. Those who find chasers creepy shouldn't have to step back from saying so.

And there are people who don't opt for medical transitioning. And people who can't afford it. I'm totally on board with their gender identity not being any less valid.

But one size does not necessarily fit all. Some of us find the notion of being chased for the specific combo of our gendered self-expression and our physical morphology quite appealing. I do. I'm a girlish femme, of the starched crinolined variety, a good girl with only a modest naughty streak. I happen to be a male girlish sort, a person with physically male morphology. I present as male, expecting to be perceived as male, in hopes that those people who are attracted to feminine male people will take notice of me. The female folks among them are people I'm potentially going to enjoy connecting with.

There are intersex people who kind of like being appreciated, not merely tolerated in a non-judgmental way, for their variances, for the specifics of their physically unusual selves. Author Hida Viloria, for example, describes her own enjoyment of being able to penetrate her partners with her clitoris, and mentions several people who were pleased to find her to be a person with something extra to offer.

Is it shallow and venal? I don't know. I feel like I don't want someone to reward me for being a nice admirable person by handing out sexual access like a door prize. I feel like I want to be lusted after. I want someone to have the hots for my bod and appreciate that I'm a nice person. I get the hots for people because of their physical contours and I crave reciprocal hots for mine.

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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).

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Accommodations

1970, the start of a new decade. I was in fifth grade, attending Sallas-Mahone Elementary in Valdosta GA.

We weren't exactly forbidden to use the bathrooms during classroom hours, but you couldn't just rise from your seat and go when you felt like it. You had to raise your hand and ask. Even without the possibility of the teacher asking "Can't you just hold it?" or "Why didn't you go during break?", the necessity of making a request was probably enough to ensure that we mostly used the facilities in the mornings before classes, after classes, or during lunch break.

What that meant was that you were going to be in the bathroom at the same time as a handful of the kids from your classroom. To be more precise, other male kids from your classroom, if you were designated male. As I was.

I've never cared for the expression "assigned male at birth". It always seems to me to imply that my mom's obstetrician said "it's a boy" when I was born, and everyone else just went with that. That he did the assigning and no one else did, they just deferred to his judgment. That's not how it was. The same set of physiological characteristics that led the physician attending my birth to declare me male were intermittently referenced as sufficient reason to assign me male throughout my life, and when they weren't directly being observed, they were assumed from other cues and clues. When I lowered my underwear to pee, the evidence was right there in front of me, and I didn't question it: I was male.

But I did not like being in there, in the boys' bathroom. I wasn't like them, the boys, and I knew it, and they knew it. I didn't like having to go in there with THEM and being exposed.

Do you recall fifth grade? Well, do you perhaps recall Beavis and Butthead? The very epitome of being potty-mouthed rests with fifth grade boys. Everything pertaining to bathroom functions, the body parts involved in those functions, and half-understood sexual matters that also involve the same body parts, were the most interesting and prurient source material possible for the raunchiest and crudest storytelling and discussions, often called "jokes" although I rarely understood what the humorous portion was supposed to be.

Those boys were invasive. Peering, commenting, using filthy language about all this stuff.

They found me prim and hilariously prissy and so I became a focus for their attention when I was in there.



I myself identify as a gender invert, not as a transgender transitioning (and/or presenting) as female. I'm not directly affected by the laws and policies and social discussions about sex segregated bathrooms and the presence of transgender people in them. A law or policy saying I can utlize the women's bathroom instead doesn't really address any of my current issues or social situations. I manifest and present as a male-bodied person and any greater comfort I might otherwise feel to not be in the men's toilets would be offset by worrying that my presence would be disturbing to women in the women's room. And I'm used to it, to using the men's room, and aside from that, adult men aren't as awful as a batch of fifth graders, so not only am I used to it, I've been through far worse than what I currently experience in there.


But yeah, I can relate.

It's not just symbolic. It's not just wanting to be regarded and treated like the rest of the folks of the gender with which one identifies. It's also direct and real. Being in the wrong segregated space can be severely uncomfortable.

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Memes and Message Themes

Meme (n.) -- an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.


When I first came out as an identity not yet on people’s maps, I was intrigued by the rapid spread of popular snippets, little ideas that raced through communities as trendy notions you were supposed to know about if you were cognizant. “Hey”, I said to myself, “if I could figure out what makes an idea catch on and take off like that, I could leverage that to get the word out, to spread awareness of people like me existing in the world!”

And although I was not particularly witty and clever nor anything akin to popular, I watched people’s behavior to see what caused them to latch on to one thing instead of another as an item to pass on as if it were the Most Brilliant Thing Ever.

Eventually I decided that there was no identifying characteristic that was making the phenomenon happen around any specific morsel of an idea. If anything, the near-emptiness in content made it slightly more likely to become the newest trend, rather than any element of profundity or exceptionally clever twist. What I saw were people listening to the crowd and trying to discern early on what was being embraced so they could embrace it a little bit before other people, who would then copy them by embracing it themselves.

That’s not strictly 100% true (some appreciation of quirkiness does seem to play a role), but by and large these trendy ideas were being popularized because they were popular. People were competing to see who could jump on the next bandwagon before it became fully crowded, and would jump to the next one when they could sense it, but it was bandwagon behavior at the root. People weren’t adopting these memes because they agreed with them or thought they were insightful or cute. They were adopting them because they were catching on.



One of my friends, a performance artist, ends one of her pieces with the final line “If you live long enough, you become relevant”. After 40 years of trying to come out as a sissy-esque femme who accepts his nature and his physically male body, I may have lived long enough to attain relevancy, as genderqueer is trending. It isn’t all specifically my version of genderqueer, but yes, there are more and more people pushing away from the expectation of transgender “passing”, of asserting the vlable identity of their gender independent of their physiology or their presentation.


I spend a lot of time and energy complaining that MOGII / gender-variant communities are too much geared towards a kind of groupthink, where there is hostility and condemnation for anyone who doesn’t use the right words or echo the sentiments and viewpoints that have been embraced as the Right Way to Think of It. I shouldn’t let it surprise me. People within communities – any type of communities – tend to engage in the bandwagon-hopping because it is how human networks operate, it’s how the collective self, the “us” that forms a community, does its thinking. But I do, I grouse and snarl and complain about it, expecting all the individuals to examine ideas carefully and to be ready and willing to dissent from those around them and offer a different perspective at least a dozen times per week, and to quit chasing the bandwagons.

That may seem natural to me simply because I’ve been a loner for so long, a social hermit without a group. Like so many other MOGII kids, I was a misfit growing up. But in my case, coming out didn’t provide me with entry into a group of like-minded misfits. I sought it, fervently and desperately, wishing to belong. But because it didn’t happen for me, I suppose I developed less of the interactional patterns that lend themselves to bandwagon-jumping.

Which (I should keep in mind) means I’m not necessarily “a more independent thinker” so much as my tendency to independence has been an accident of not having found a place to fit in.


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Progress on THAT GUY IN OUR WOMEN'S STUDIES CLASS (Book II)

I'm still plugging away on the second book to be extracted from my autobiographical tome. This is a complete rewrite; the original text of the autobio is not directly usable, unlike the portion I used for the first book, so I just reference it for notes and reminders. With the scene that I wrote yesterday, I'm up to 96 pages, which should come out to be roughly a third of the final manuscript.

I'm a participant in an author's group where we bring up to 1800 words' worth of our work-in-progress and read it out loud to get feedback. That's helping immensely, not just for the direct advice but for the overall sense of connecting to an audience and hearing that yes, they find the story entertaining and engrossing.

Plotwise, I'm at a point where my main character (that's me, of course) is in the first year of women's studies classes, a college freshman, successfully making an impact with professors and connecting with some of the other students, but hasn't yet been able to explain the whole "male sissy" thing in such a way that people understand what these social issues are all about.

In the second year I will show him (i.e., me) getting established on campus as an outspoken political type, with a reputation mostly associated with militancy about pyschiatric rights and homelessness, and known for being that guy who is into feminism. He (i.e., me) also gets a romantic interest! The second and third year together should be no more than another third of the book; the first year section is longer because it has a long retrospective backstory portion and has to do a lot more initial setup.

The big challenge all along was whether I could manage a sufficient balance between complex intellectual ideas versus interactive personal stuff with conversations and characters and all that. So far so good, I think.



By the time of the events in this story begin, I had come out in 1980 as a heterosexual sissy, a person with an identity that was different in the same general way that gay & lesbian and transsexual (see next paragraph) people were understood to be different, but, well, different from those identities. I had even written a book by 1982, The Amazon's Brother. But I was very isolated; I wasn't connecting with anybody who understood WTF I was talking about and I had no one reading what I'd written. I hadn't succeeded in getting a publisher interested.

The scene that would later be called the "LGBT" community did not include gender variance back then, not really. It was all gay rights. I viewed gay people as allies (particularly lesbians who were likely to be feminists) but not really comrades in the same cause. Transsexual people -- yes, that was the word in use back then, nobody was saying "transgender" yet -- were people who transitioned by getting operations and taking hormones, and there was no sense of other kinds of trans people who didn't want to align their physical sex with their gender identity, so I didn't see myself as fitting in with them either, aside from which their presence in the community was mostly just hypothetical. They were so thin on the ground number-wise that a person did not actually encounter them at community centers and so on; officially there was probably starting to be some inclusiveness, some mention on fliers about them as part of what gay and lesbian centric organizations were about, but really it was all gay and lesbian, and mostly gay guys for that matter.

I hitched to New York to become a women's studies major in college. (The book's backstory section covers how I made the decision to do that, and my adventures getting there). I figured that the things I wanted to talk about -- that the expectations for people of a given sex were socially created, not built-in natural, and that the intolerance for people who were different was sexist -- would be right on topic for the women's studies classroom.

And besides, my head was deeply into feminist theory by this point anyway. I felt like the whole way society is set up, its overall values and structures, is a direct consequence of how gender is set up, that society is a machine and it runs differently depending on how gender gets configured. And feminist theory, especially radical feminist theory, made the same claim, that this was the political axis around which all social issues revolved. Not class, like the socialists believed. Not race, like the 60s activists had mostly believed. This. And that insight, incidentally, is something I still find missing from most gender discussions even to this day -- we do a lot of identity politics about who is marginalized and oppressed and unfairly treated, but not so much discussion about whether global warming, the military confrontations and economic deprivations, or the buildup of religious intolerances and so forth are all the way they are as an outcome of how gender is socially organized on this planet.

The trajectory of this book will bring my main character (i.e., me) to the limits of the role that a guy can authentically play in women's studies and in feminism, just as he's getting an academic article published and burning his final bridges with the graduate school department and leaving without a PhD to go figure out some other way of approaching all this.



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Seventh Grade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Eww"

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

"Umm no, yuck"

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

"Umm, no, no thanks".

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


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

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

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

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


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A JunePride Mea Culpa: My Homophobia

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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


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Compassion and Tenderness

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

“Everyone should”

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

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

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

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

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

Not Just Selflessness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Against Trivialization

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

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

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

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

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



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Church and Sunday School

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Revisiting the Wydens: The Assault on Sissyhood

"Many of these ["prehomosexual"] boys tend to be overpolite and obedient, anxious to please adults, to be charming and witty and cute...

"In Tommy's case, his teacher decided to employ her full talents and sympathies at once, right on the first day of school...only Betty J.[the teacher] came to know...that he was a prehomosexual child...

When regular classes started the day after the open house, Miss J. thought that Tommy would find the separation very difficult. Nothing of the kind proved to be true...Tommy left her side quickly and without fussing. Miss J. was delighted. In amazement she wondered whether Tommy was perhaps less of a 'Mama's boy' than he had seemed to be the day before...however, his prehomosexual orientation quickly asserted itself.

"Clearly and pleasantly, Tommy chatted with the new teacher about his age and where he lived. He did not seem the least unsure of himself. But just as soon as he was invited to join one of the groups of other children, or to take part in class activities, he refused -- in the same careful, polite tone...

"When he did strike up a friendship, it was with one of the girls...He used a crayon and chalk, but just as soon as he finished he did something no normal boy would dream of doing: he washed his hands.

'His excessive daintyness reminded me of the fastidiously kept apartments of adult homosexuals...', Miss J. told us..."

-- Peter and Barbara Wyden,
Growing Up Straight, What Every Thoughtful Parent Should Know
(Stein and Day), 1969, pgs 104, 116-117, 119

The Wydens might find themselves criticized these days for openly giving advice on how to keep their children from contracting homosexuality as if it were leprosy or something, because a quasiliberal tolerance of gays and lesbians is "in" right now, but there is still a widespread social acceptance of a direct correlation between sex role nonconformity (which the Wydens would probably call "gender-inappropriate conduct") and homosexual orientation. In Tommy's case, the "prehomosexual" label was applied not because Tommy was known or thought to have eventually grown up gay, but solely on the basis of his "unmasculine" conduct as a kindergartener. I chose this example because it is so unsubtle, but it is quite common for adults to claim to know who is gay on the basis of similarly sexually-unrelated observations.

This is prevalent enough to double-define the term through usage, much as fuck has come to simultaneously mean both sex and destruction. What is gay? Is it the way you are, or something you do?

And what do you do if you are, but don't? The question of heterosexual viability, which caused me to wonder if the orientation I was accused of was the only thing available for me, tries to work as a self-fulfilling prophecy.




* * *


All of the above is a "guest post" -- from my 22 year old self. It comes from chapter 8 of The Amazon's Brother, my first serious attempt to write about these issues, which I wrote in 1982. The chapter title was "That Peculiar Sense of Identity". (Yes, I have been doing this for a long time) (Yes, I am that old) (No, I was never able to get it published)



When I first read the Wydens' book, I immediately and strongly identified with their description. It was definitely me they were talking about!

The boys in my classroom mocked me for refusing to use what we called "dirty words", and for not joining in with them in their obsessing about bathroom functions, and especially for openly disapproving of them for doing so. And I, too, preferred the company of girls, and definitely put a great deal of effort and energy into getting adult approval.

So the Wydens were totally talking about me and they made it sound like being who I was was something very bad. They had the sheer effrontery to disparage something as intrinsically good as the way I was!

And all because it supposedly meant I would turn out gay... or was it?



Let's begin with the obvious: it is blatantly homophobic to express such hostility to the idea of being a femme sissy by saying boys like that grow up to be gay men, as if that outcome were so self-apparently horrible that the prosecution can rest their case, sissyhood is bad. And it is a powerful act when sissy femme gay males reclaim their identity with pride and reply "Yeah, and? Your point being?"

But I think there's more to the issue of conflating the two things.

I'm not authorized to complain on behalf of gay guys, I guess, but the notion that a person is femme in order to attract the attention of males seems to me to be insulting to gay males. Think about it. It conjures up the notion that the males who are attracted to feminine gay guys are basically really stupid heterosexual males, stupid enough to be attracted to other male people if those male people appear to be like female people. Attracted to femininity in appearance and expression and nuance but too oblivious to realize or too horny and unpicky to care that the person in question is actually male. And if we shift our attention to the feminine gay guys themselves, we see the notion that they aren't interested in each other, that they abhor gay guys, feminine guys, that they want those beforementioned stupid heterosexual men. There's a lack of mutuality and equality, and a lack of pride.

Meanwhile, as long as being a sissy femme male is thought of as coterminous with being gay, the sissy femme identity is erased. We aren't thought of as a gender. The fact that this is our identity is masked and hidden because people interpret it all as an expression of gay sexual orientation. We get reduced to a set of mannerisms.



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Betwixt the Clergy and the Sissy-Femme Males

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

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

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


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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Skirt

I purchased and wore my first skirt not for transgender reasons but for feminist reasons. It's sexist to designate a garment as only for one sex when there's nothing about it's physical design that makes it accommodate one body structure and not the other. I liked skirts, they looked more comfortable than pants in the summer, and they looked fun to wear. And there was no reason I shouldn't wear a skirt if I wanted to, so I did. I wanted to flaunt my attitude towards sexist expectations.

There also were what could be called transgender reasons as well, though. The entire reason I had such a vested interest in challenging sexist expectations was that I'd been one of the girls as a child, growing up, and had retained that history and sense of self up through junior high and never fully stepped away from it.

Being a girl didn't mean wanting to wear skirts or needing to do so in order to feel fulfilled or appropriate. It meant being the way I was; what I wore and what my body was like had nothing to do with it. Girls were more mature than boys as children, more social, less antagonistic and violent, more patient, far more self-disciplined and able to hold themselves up to an internal standard, smarter, better at classwork, more sensitive, and more elegant overall. And I was competing with them, keeping up, proudly their equal. And the boys were an embarrassment, pathetic disgusting creatures for the most part, and I didn't want to be thought of as one of them.

I never sought to be perceived as female. I was proud of being a girl as good as any other girl despite being male. So I didn't crave a purse of my own to take to school or yearn for my own pair of oxford patent leather shoes.

Years later, the skirt thing was a way for me to be back-in-your-face to a world that had gradually managed to make me feel like maybe something was badly wrong with me.

None of this is entirely alien to a 2018 transgender community's view of being transgender. But it was pretty foreign to the 1980-vintage understanding of what it meant to be transsexual. And unlike a person in similar circumstances who did want to present as female, to be thought of as female, to transition to female, my experience mapped pretty comfortably to 1980-vintage feminism. I saw it as a feminist issue and framed it accordingly.

These days I frame my issues as those of a genderqueer activist doing identity politics, so I've had feet in both camps.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * *

There is political tension between some feminists and some transgender activists. I want to look at that in more detail today.

If you are transgender or are more familiar with a transgender perspective, come along with me for a view from a different window. The way transgender people talk about sexual polarization and the assignment of traits and roles to the two binary sexes is worrisome and problematic to many feminists, because it erases gender inequality (as if men and women were equal, just different) and instead stresses the inequality between cis and trans people (as if cisgender female and cisgender male people were equally privileged, whereas transgender people are at a social disadvantage compared to them, with less power).

Feminists also tend to be uncomfortable with what they see as a certain type of gender essentialism from transgender people. Feminism argues against the notion that there are all these built-in, inherent differences between men and women, whether it be a built-in appropriateness for the wearing of a skirt or a set of behavioral characteristics like being accommodating or flirty or whatever. Transgender spokespersons often embrace the notion that men and women are quite different, that they are different types of people with different ways of being in the world--it's just that some people's physical configuration got them misclassified as one of those two identities when in reality they belonged in the other category. Or, to put it another way, feminists see themselves as trying to tear down the political fence between the sexes, and they perceive the transgender phenomenon as consisting of people who consider the grass to be greener on the other side of the fence, and tunnel under it to get to the other side, leaving the fence fully intact. Transgender paints the world pink and blue. Transgender people appear to celebrate the liberation of the skirt not because guys as well as gals should be able to wear them but because it's trans-affirmative for AMAB people to wear one.

Now let's switch. If you are a feminist, or are more familiar with a feminist perspective on gender issues, let's examine how feminist political behavior often looks to transgender people.

First off, for a person who (like I myself) considers that who they is one of the girls or women despite being male (or being in a body classified by other people as male at any rate), the presenting edge of feminism is the declaration that the female experience is less desirable, although for social-political reasons, not because being female is itself a less desirable condition. Still, that paints transgender women as a political "man bites dog" (or a "cat chases dog") phenomenon: if women are oppressed by men, and the situation female (in all its social aspects) therefore a less desirable situation, why are there people who clearly qualify to be considered as and treated as male doing their best to opt out of it and seeking to be accepted and regarded as women? Well, there are answers to that within feminist perspectives and feminist thought, answers that don't disparage the males (or "people assigned male at birth" if you prefer) who do not wish to continue to be subjected to the situation male; but those aren't the answers that many transgender people encounter when they hear feminists speak about transgender women. Instead, they hear feminists get defensive about this very question, as if transgender people had said to them that there is no women's oppression--see, here are people who could have lived their lives as men but they opt to be women instead. Transgender men, meanwhile, embody what so many people think lots of women would want--not out of penis envy but male-privilege envy. Transgender men, in fact, are often welcome in feminist circles, where they are viewed as female-born people who have chosen a transgender pathway as a coping mechanism for escaping the femininity cage imposed on women. But transgender people don't see this acceptance as a counter to feminist's suspicion and dubiety towards transgender women, perhaps because it is a quiet and low-key acceptance.

Feminists appear to many transgender activists as rigidly committed to binary ideas of power: that the only relevant unfair distinction within the polarization of men versus women is that of power, that it and only it is desirable, that men have it over women, period, end of story, and that therefore no male person or person perceived as and categorized as male can have any legitimate complaint about gender and how gender is set up in our society.

I'll confess that I have found it difficult to enunciate within a feminist context why I have a personal stake in this, why masculinity is toxic to me as a male and why and how it is in my personal political best interests to resist it, as opposed to doing so for chivalrous pro-women reasons. I will tell you that I have found within radical feminism a strong strand of thought that overturns the desirability of power over other people, itself, as a patriarchal notion, but I will also tell you that ordinary everyday feminism as one may encounter it is more likely to come from the more binary "who benefits / who suffers?" kind of analysis, the "culprit theory of oppression", and it does indeed leave no point of entry from which to be a sissy femme male activist against patriarchy.


I don't know if the conflict and friction between feminists and transgender activists is merely receiving more press coverage or if it is indeed worsening. It certainly seems to me to be intensifying. Transgender activists have more social power now than they did decades go when Jan Raymond flug down the gauntlet with The Transsexual Empire; they have labeled feminists who do not regard transgender women as real women TERFS (trans-exclusive radical feminists) and with considerable success have painted them as hateful bigots who need to be shut down, as people who have nothing positive to contribute to the dialog, as people against whom physical violence is deemed appropriate.

I'm not much disposed towards physical violence myself but I find this sufficiently frustrating that I will admit to fantasies of grabbing transgender activists in one hand and feminists in the other and smacking their heads together. Stop it!! We should be listening to each other, all of us. The stakes are high, and this is counterproductive infighting that benefits the status quo. Quit trying to trump each other's victim card. If social liberation is only an acceptable goal for whoever happens to be the most oppressed, we're never going to make any progress. Read each other's material. (And mine, dammit. You can learn from perspectives that differ from your own, and I come to you explicitly as an ally of both but member of neither of your two camps, with my own vantage point).

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