Femininity in Contrast to Femaleness

Femininity and womanhood are gender identity terms, but more fundamentally than that, they are socially shared notions, and what they are notions about, historically speaking, are female people.

I have male parts (or at least the parts that led my mom's obstetrician to put "male" on my birth certificate—and for the record I call them male parts myself). But I'm definitely a femme, and I'm happy to be living in 2020 where gender identity has been somewhat split off from physical bodily architecture.

But it doesn't avail us anything to pretend that the feminine gender identities don't have diddly squat to do with physical femaleness. The socially shared concepts and roles, and the accompanying notions about a feminine person's beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes and so on, didn't originate independently and then somehow get ideologically and artificially attached to the female physical morphology. The notions were originally notions about female people. They may not have correctly or adequately described female people in general, and they certainly did not correctly or adequatly describe all female people; and because this has long been a patriarchy, this human society of ours, there may indeed have been ideological content stirred into the pot along with the generalizations. But the gender identity is social; it exists as a bundle of shared concepts, and the subject matter that the concepts were originally and historically concepts about were people who had vaginas and ovaries and fallopian tubes, the biological females of our species.

Now, even as increasing numbers of us find personal validation in gender identities that don't correspond to the physical morphology to which those identities were originally and historically attached, some of that past still haunts us.

You'll recall that I said this society has historically been a patriarchy. One thing that means is that the most established socially shared notions about pretty much anything are men's ideas. To be more specific, cisgender heterosexual men's ideas. Because the viewpoints of other people weren't being spoken in public, weren't being published. So views and attitudes that were really only the views and attitudes of these men got put out there as default views and attitudes. That applies to a lot of subjects, but at the moment let's focus on the definition of women.

Top of the list: sexual attractiveness, the desirability quotient, one's value as a sexual commodity. These days we refer to it as the "male gaze" but it used to be discussed as if women's sexual appeal was intrinsic to the women and men were just noticing it. Because "attractive to cis het men" was defaulted, universalized into "attractive". Because women's usefulness in patriarchy was largely constrained to their usefulness as mates to men.

Women may have meant more to each other, and to themselves, but their opinions weren't being enshrined. I wrote earlier of a feminine person's beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes and so on — all components of her gender identity as a woman. Those are all aspects of the self that a woman may find validation in, may take pride in, but all that has tended to be overshadowed by the focus on sexual desirability, aka sexual desirability as determined by an audience of cis het male people and their appetites.

Why is this relevant to today's gender identity discussion? Because sexual attraction often tends to be "to a body structure". (And that, too, has been culturally emphasized.) In short, sexual orientation has been geared not so much towards what we speak of as gender identity, but to the physical morphology, to shape and contour. So the most emphasized, the most underlined, aspect of what it means to be a woman is to have female curves and contours and the relevant female organs. That shoves beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes, etc, into the background.

Someone in a Facebook group posted a meme stating "It's not sex change, it's gender-affirming surgery". Well, that's wrong. It's not gender-affirming surgery, its SEX-affirming surgery. If a person's gender identity as a woman is 100% valid whether they have a penis or a vagina, then obtaining surgical services to modify their physical structure so that any visual observers will assign it "vagina" doesn't affirm their gender. It affirms their SEX, as female.

Of course, being attractive to the heterosexual male gaze really is central to some people's sense of their feminine identity. It's what's most emotionally important to them about being a woman, as opposed to singing alto arias or becoming a really good seamstress or something. Nothing wrong with that.

But not everyone who identifies as woman or femme or girl is primarily concerned with appealing to the male gaze. Of having a sexually desirable appearance as filtered through the fakely universalized male gaze.


The centrality of the whole "do you look sexy, can you compete with the sexy women of the world in sexy appearance?" question is often used to invalidate feminine people. It is used to invalidate many cis women for whom it simply isn't the end-all and be-all of their self-worth. It is used to invalidate many trans women for whom being evaluated in terms of how well they "pass" as a sexually desirable specimen gets to be old and tiresome.

Well, it is also used to invalidate the identity of people like me, who definitively do not identify as female, who do not transition, who do not attempt to present as female-bodied people, who distinguish between physical sex and gender and identify as male women, male femmes, male girls.

I get a lot of pushback about it. People who say "It's nobody's business what you got in your underpants" when what they really mean is "You've got no business having that attitude of 'yeah I'm male, so what', that's the wrong attitude about your male parts, we're all supposed to be going around saying 'it doesn't matter'". But what actually doesn't matter to me is being found sexy in that sense. Sexy to the falsely universal male gaze. I am male. Sure I want to be found sexy... to people who specifically like the male physical morphology. Since that's the morphology I've got. And I'm a male girl. My gender-atypical identity doesn't have a damn thing to do with claiming femaleness, regardless of whether yours does or not.

———————

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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Index of all Blog Posts

I Want My Two Months Back

So I was asked to participate in a dialog involving gender-critical feminists and transgender activists.

There's a political group with chapters sprinkled all around the country. One chapter endorsed a statement from some women's group about womens' "Sex Based Rights". An LGBTQIA action group within that same political group said that by doing so, that chapter had done something transphobic and transmisogynistic and that they needed to retract their endorsement and apologize to all the transgender women who might have been offended by their endorsement, or else get kicked out of the political group.

And what were these "sex based rights"?


Content warning: Potentially inflammatory material from here on out. And serious, guaranteed-inflammatory content as you go farther down. Trigger warning issued. Trigger warning with flames and radioactive emblems. Proceed at your own risk:

Well, some of the supporters of that local chapter said this was about remedies that had been designed to address women's exclusion from various forms of political and social participation. A sort of affirmative action for women to offset the effects of patriarchy, of women's oppression. They said that including transgender women ran the risk of diluting that original intention, and that it made more sense to use language that guaranteed representation of transgender women AND transgender men but did so separately from the original remedies, which had been designed with cisgender women in mind, i.e., women who had been regarded and labeled and treated as female people for their entire lives. They also said some women's political groups wished to operate as cisgender-women only because they had always been separatist, not allowing men to participate, and the lifetime experience of transgender women was a mixture of factors making their situation different from that of the women who'd been in those groups all along.


"I can see where that's going to be a problematic position for trans people", I said. "Still, there may be a way to bridge some gaps here. They do have a point about experience and identity. As a genderqueer person who identifies as a male girl, I respect transgender people who don't want to include people like me, because they believe being trans is biologically built in, that if I'm a woman I'm female, and that the only healthy thing to do about being transgender is to transition. My situation is different from theirs. As long as they're not denying the validity of my gender issues I don't mind if they want to run groups that I'm not welcome in".

I checked in with the LGBTQIA Action Group, the LAGs. "Oh, yes", they said, "we sent those demands to the chapter that endorsed that horrible statement. We want them to take our concerns seriously. We'd love it if they'd have a dialog with us, but they refuse to respond!"

Then I went back to the local chapter supporters, the pro-discussion folks calling themselves Dialog. I told them "I got the impression the LAG folks are open to listening if the people in Dialog and the specific chapter that endorsed that statement will listen to them in turn".



Then I went off to read a copy of the original "Sex Based Rights" statement, the endorsement of which had kicked off all this. Winced a lot. Yeah, the statement has a lot of language that, if not blatantly transphobic, felt like it was chock-full of dog whistle terms and phrases. I decided I didn't like the phrase "sex-based rights" itself. In general, I think people don't have rights based on their sex. You may have remedies that have been made available to your sex on affirmative action grounds but a right is an intrinsic entitlement. Men aren't entitled to something intrinsically as a consequence of being men, or male, or both. Whatever they're entitled to is either because they're human, or human adults, or else it's situationally male or about being men because of something that they and only they experience. Are women? I could formulate some rights that all pregnant or potentially pregnant people should have, perhaps, or that all menstruating or potentially menstruating people should have, but if I did, those rights came from those situations. Whatever. I sure wouldn't have endorsed the statement I was reading. But it didn't seem so horrible that I'd demand that anyone who did be kicked out of the organization.




"I'm ready to discuss the matter with Dialog", the LAG activist said, "but I have no interest in wasting my time with TERFs who say I'm not a woman. If they want to talk with us and apologize for what they've done, hey I'm right here, but in this organization it is already an accepted principle that trans women are women. That means in any situation where we're talking about women, if they try to excluse trans women, that's a hate crime and they don't belong in our organization!"

I said, "Look, some of them seem to be trying to incorporate and accommodate an understanding of trans people. Many of them don't like the term 'cisgender' for themselves but they aren't all insisting that trans women aren't women. One person suggested the phrase 'natal women'. Do you acknowledge a reason why they might legitimately want to meet politically by themselves as 'natal women'?"

"Trans women are natal women", the LAG activist replied.

"Wait, not even all transgender people claim that being transgender means you were born that way. I know it's a popular viewpoint but you wouldn't kick someone out of a transgender group for saying they weren't born trans, would you?"

"You're wasting your time with those TERFs. If they want to apologize and retract their message of hate, I'm right here. But they won't because they're bigoted fascists".

"Listen", I said, exasperated. "you've clearly got the stronger political position. Inclusiveness is always going to look more justified than a reason to exclude someone. So I'm sure you can pressure them into saying the kinds of things you want to hear, or get the organization to boot them out if they won't. But this is also a public education opportunity. Do you want them to see the light, or do you just want them to feel the heat?"

The LAG activist shrugged. "It's a settled issue. If they're going to be doing hate crimes I want them kicked out, simple as that".




"Frankly", declared the Dialog member, "I don't care what their viewpoint is. Not while they're calling us 'TERFs'. That's a slur. It's used to discredit us. They call us that while they're beating us, there was a women's march in London, did you hear about that? These men, calling themselves transgender women, barged in and chased women down side streets, attacking them. And the police did nothing!"

"So you don't like being called 'TERF'. You don't like the word that they use for you", I said. "You see the irony in that, don't you?"

"Transgenders are trying to invade our women's spaces and take away our rights as women. They want to erase women's identities. They aren't women. They're men. They're male. The correct word for adult male people is 'men'. Not 'women'. They want to invade women's prisons with their penises and rape women. They want to hide in women's bathroom stalls and molest little girls. And we're not gonna put up with it!"



"Okay, Dialog folks", I said, addressing the group. "Even if you don't think the LAG people are genuinely open to listening to anything they don't already agree with, you need to care about public opinion. You need to care about how the rest of the organization is going to view you. And although the LAG folks sound inflexible, you are managing to sound even more so and it's not a good look".





I picked up my old battered copy of The Women's Room, the book cover that has "LADIES" crossed out and "WOMEN'S" inked in over it. "I understand why you value the word 'women'. I think it was either Robin Morgan or Gloria Steinem, relating the story of having a sit-down with the newspaper editor, and explaining why they didn't like the newspaper referring to adult female people as 'girls' since adult males were always designated as 'men'.

"And the editor said, 'So what would you prefer...ladies?'. And the feminist women practically held their noses and winced. That term, 'ladies', was polluted with notions of screening out those who aren't ladylike, all that 'act like a lady' crap, you know? They wanted the newspaper to use the term 'women', they told him.

"The word 'woman' was nearly entirely associated with the physical body. In our society, girls become women not by 'proving' you are one, the way boys 'become' men, but by going through biological puberty. Even the creepier social associations, like 'Has he made a woman out of you yet' — like being heterosexually active 'makes you a woman' — even those had mostly biological meanings, more than social attributes. So by choosing the word 'woman', it wouldn't look like feminists wanted to be the new arbiters of which adult females get to qualify.

"I get that. Why you liked the word. And I get that it's been in political use by feminists since then.

"But you aren't going to convince anybody, anywhere, that you're being anything other than bigoted and biased by saying transgender women are factually wrong about being women. I'd think feminist women more than anyone would understand that word use is politically loaded. Think back to how 'man' was supposed to mean 'any human being' but it excluded women, and how 'he' and 'him' were used to mean any person. The dictionary said that was correct. But feminists said word use changes when society changes. And the feminists made our language change. You also sound pretty silly saying biology is destiny, by the way."




LAG people: "But trans women were not born with male organs. If she is a woman those are her organs so they're female organs. And those Dialog...persons... they are TERFs. It means Trans Exclusive Radical Feminists. That's what they are. I don't see why they don't like being called what they actually are".

Dialog people: "No one is denying their right to exist. They have a right to dress and behave however they want. They can see themselves however they like and have any understanding of themselves they feel comfortable with, but they have no right to impose their ideas on others or claim rights that were originally based on addressing the historical denial of women's rights as a sex".

LAG people: "See, we told you. Hateful transphobes. Kick them out. I don't have time for this shit"

Dialog people: "Words have meanings. Male people are men. Men are male people. A person with a penis is male. These men calling themselves transgender women are mentally ill. Men are not women. Males are not women. A person with a penis is not a woman. See, we told you, hateful patriarchal misogynists. You can't make us agree with their bullshit".

LAG people: "See, they're bad. Bad people are bad. Which is bad. Which makes them bad. The things they are saying are defined as bad. Sure, we're open to a dialog. A dialog about how they are bad".

Dialog people: "Four legs good. Two legs bad. Four legs good. Two legs bad..."



I want my two months back. I'm particularly disgusted with some of the Dialog folks, who seemed determined to live up to the worst things said about them by the LAG contingent seeking to have them kicked out. But both sides had some participants who originally seemed to be trying to find language that the other side would accept, at least long enough to have a conversation. People who were making the attempt in good faith. And there were other people trying to speak to activists on both sides, I wasn't the only one doing this diplomacy act. But our louder and more insistent colleagues shouted us down on both sides.

They should all be glad I'm not God. Because you know what I'd do if I were? You know those cruise ships that are languishing out in the ocean because of coronavirus? I'd like to put everyone from both groups onto those ships, and I'd confine one Dialog member and one LAG member to each cabin and quarantine them there together. They deserve each other.

———————

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

My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Diminishing Returns

My transgender woman friend is replying to a comment that she finds annoying. Somebody has said that they have nothing against transgender women, "but why do you embrace all of the most phony and stereotypical trappings of restrictive femininity? It's all pink lipstick and false eyelashes and nylons and pointy shoes with you. Don't you see how that comes across to us cis women? It's like you think that's what being a woman is all about!"

My friend finds the comment annoying because she feels like she keeps answering it over and over, it's a reoccurring theme and she's tired of it. She writes, "We don't like being misgendered. I happen to be tall for a woman, with more narrow hips and a more angular jaw. I grew up before puberty blockers. Many of us need to send as many signals as possible or we run the risk of being addressed as 'sir' or 'mister'. Why is that hard for you to understand?"

She uses socially recognized indicators of gender. Things that men don't do, things that men don't wear. That only works as long as men, in general, don't do those things, don't wear those items.

Meanwhile, we cheer when we hear stories of boys in preschool who aren't chased away from the fairy princess costumes. We celebrate the decline in rigid notions of what boys can do, what girls can do. We agree that the body with which one is born should not artificially limit one's choices, that people should have the maximum freedom to be and do any of the things that other people get to be and do in our society.

Many nonbinary and agender people say they would be glad to see gender disappear entirely: just treat people for who they are, don't categorize people as genders at all. But at the same time, many of them continue to be assigned to a gender by the people who encounter them. The assignment tends to be the same assignment they were given at birth--not because of actual genitalia, necessarily, but assorted visibly discernable physical characteristics that are the product of our sex hormones and the effects they have on our bodies. The same things that my transgender friend has to work against to avoid being misgendered. So it happens with nonbinary and agender people, too, they get misgendered and to try to keep that from happening, they, too, make use of garments and grooming styles to "look more masc" or "look more femme", to offset those traits.

I could identify as transgender or as nonbinary, but mostly I don't. I don't seek to be perceived as a female person, and I don't seek to be perceived as someone who is neither male nor female. I most often call myself genderqueer instead, and explain to people that I am a gender invert, a male girl (or male femme if you prefer), that I have a body and I have a personality, a sex and a gender, and what makes me genderqueer is that they are a mixed bag, an apparent mismatch.

Like the transgender and the nonbinary people, I, too, use some signals to convey visually a bit of who I am. I wear my hair long, I wear some jewelry that's not typical for males to wear, and I wear some apparel that isn't considered men's clothes (especially skirts). Since I present (nevertheless) as a male person (the facial hair being a pretty distinctive marker, and a prominent male larynx also makes that statement), it's a mixed signal, which is more or less as good as I can accomplish in the absense of a widespread social expectation that there are such people as male girls out there.

If there were a lot of other male people doing that, though, using items that socially symbolize femininity without attempting to be perceived as physically female, wouldn't it just dilute and eventually erase the perception of those items as feminine? Or is there a way to create the identity "male girl" and be recognized as a feminine male instead of being seen as a longhaired man in a skirt?

And is it a problem anyway? If the world had not insisted on a bunch of rigid notions about how girls and boys are supposed to be different from each other, would I have ever pushed away from the "boy" identity and decided I was more like one of the girls?

Maybe. Maybe not. I think the answer to that depends on whether males in general have different traits (other than the physical, I mean) from females in general. If there are such differences at the generalization level, I might still have come to see myself as an exception, even without the excessively rigid and proscriptive attitudes I grew up with.

People might want to hold on to artificial signals, signals that have historically said "feminine" or "masculine", not to gild the lily of their body's own physical manifestations but to signal where on the spectrum of masculinity to femininity they consider themselves to belong. There's no innate reason for most of these markers to convey the meaning that they currently convey, but that's true of the sounds that constitute our language and yet we continue to use language to communicate.

But if, on the other hand, there are no real non-physical-body differences between the sexes, it does seem like gender would disappear if there were no ideology propping it up. So notions of "masculinity" and "femininity" might fade away, along with any possible signals to convey them.


———————

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

My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

The Inadequacy of Straight / Gay / Bi

"Oh, great", the gay and lesbian readers may be thinking. "First they want in, and make us expand what we call ourselves to include them, and use this ever-expanding acronym. And now they want to kick our identity out!"

Don't worry, you've got company. "Transgender / Cisgender" is inadequate too. I'm not trans. I was assigned male at birth. I identify as male. Not trans, right? I identify as femme, as girl, gal, woman. When I was assigned male, I was also assigned boy. I'm not cis. Because I'm all sissy. I'm not a man.

I'm not kicking anyone out. I'm coming out, which means I'm coming in, and for me to be in, some of the assumptions have to go out, so get used to it, because I'm not going back in, so let me in. It's complicated. Get used to that, too!


Let's start with the simple complicated. You've seen the genderbread person and the gender unicorn posters, right? The ones that give a nice simple explanation of why sexual orientation and gender identity is so much more complicated than "are you a boy or are you a girl" and "so are you straight, gay, or bi", right?





I'm male, that's my sex; I was assigned male at birth. They assigned me that way because they saw a penis. I've never dissented with that. It's the body I was born with and it's not the problem. I'm male. Male is not my gender identity, mind you. I'm one of the girls, that's my gender.

You with me so far? You see where those answers appear on those posters?

OK, then, with that in mind, let's move on to sexual orientation. I'm attracted to female folks.

Straight, gay, or bi?

Umm... sex or gender? I'm a male girlish person. Male people attracted more or less exclusively to female people are het, right? But women loving women, those are lesbians, aren't they?

This time the posters don't clarify much. Gender Unicorn gives me the choice of "physically attracted to "women", "men", or "other genders". Well, that doesn't help. I said I was attracted to female people, I didn't say anything about their gender identities!

Let's try the other poster. Genderbread says I might be "sexuallly attracted" to "women and/or feminine and/or female" people. That's a lot of and/or. The chart also gives me the option of "men and/or masculine and/or male" people. What happens if I'm attracted to masculine female people?

Both posters also address romantic (or emotional) attraction but the options are the same. And neither of them deal with the question of gay or straight or bi. It's just as well, because those terms can't handle the complexity of what's on those charts.

And the charts oversimplify matters too much.

Someone else might be attracted to feminine people, to people whose gender identity is expressed to be "woman". They might find a masculine female person uninteresting from a sexual standpoint. They might find a feminine male person to be of erotic interest. What defines sexual orientation may differ from one person to the next.

There's something else that the charts leave out about sexual orientation. Neither of them mention how the person wishes to be sexually perceived. Both charts have a space for gender expression but that's about gender, and I'm talking about sexual orientation. I'm referring to which of a person's characteristics one wishes to be found sexy on the basis of. That, for example, someone wants to be perceived as a sexually attractive woman, to be appealing to people whose attraction is towards women. It's not necessarily the same as gender or sex. I know several cisgender women who do not like being found sexually attractive as sexy female people. It's not how they prefer to market themselves in the universe of sexual orientation. I know both intersex and trans people who are revolted at the idea of "chasers", of people who are (or would be) turned on by their physical morphology. I know others who would feel very disappointed if their partner was not turned on by their physical morphology.

In my case, I'm into female boyish people who are attracted to male girls. Yeah, try to find that option on your dating app!



———————

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

My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Binary 2.0

Gender used to be narrowly restrictive and inflexible: you were born with a penis or with a vagina, and that determined your identity. Many folks think that except for the stodgy dinosaurs holding on to those older notions, we're past all that, enlightened. Mostly, we're not. We're immersed in what I refer to as Binary 2.0. It's larger and wider than the 1.0 version and yes, there's more room in it, it feels less constrained--but it's still confining.

Superficially, yes, our mainstream media touts the existence of genderqueer and nonbinary celebrities and celebrates their attractiveness and marketability.

But at the local level, the support groups and safe spaces for nonbinary and gender nonconforming people are chock-full of people who were assigned as something at birth; and they've been treated and regarded as either boys or girls for most of their lives. The problem for them is that the assignment they were given at birth wasn't random and arbitrary. If I saw them on the nude beach I could guess with better than 99% accuracy what designation their mom's obstetrician jotted down on their birth certificate. Yes, physical sex is a social construct. But we are part of the society that does the constructing, and we know the criteria, we've learned it well and we know how it works whether we choose to opt out of it or not. So the young genderqueer and nonbinary folks keep posting selfies and asking whether they look sufficiently other than their at-birth sex designations.

There's a determined pushing-away from those body-based identities, with a lot of adopting of the adornments and stylings associated with the opposite sex. Because since sex is, as stated, a social construct, there's still an opposite sex. The primary manifestation of nonbinary identity is one form or another of "between the two", and it is still anchored in those two.

The spaces for young transgender people are rife with their version of the same issue. Medical transitioning is complicated and expensive and although puberty blockers and hormones can be located, there are a lot of people participating whose physical morphology still matches up with the socially constructed pattern that corresponds with how they were designated at birth. In recognition of this, and not wanting to invalidate trans people's identities by implying that they are less valid than for folks who have done a medical transition, we focus on people's gender identities and we refer to their sex, if we do so at all, by considering it to match their gender. The plumbing inside someone's underwear is nobody's business. So sex is the same as gender (yet again, or still) since sex is assumed to match gender (whereas the assumption used to work the other way around, that gender matches physical sex).

Transgender women tend to feel obliged to do makeup and hair and to wear a lot of designated-female apparel, in order to signal that they wish to be perceived and recognized as female, as women. Meanwhile most cisgender women, born with the contours and configurations that our society relies on to designate a person female, can wear jeans and a t-shirt, cut their hair short, and go makekup-free without much concern about the possibility of being misgendered.

To say "misgendered" should cause us to realize that gender is a verb, that we get "gendered" by other people all the time -- "mis" or otherwise. We still gender people based on perceptions anchored in binary sex, so we're still in the shadows of assumptions about what our bodies mean.

My colleague Annunaki Ray Marquez, an intersex activist, points out that the terms "cisgender" and "transgender" contain assumptions. An intersex person isn't likely to have been assigned intersex at birth, but to conflate the situation of intersex people with that of transgender people is to erase them, especially since one of the central issues for intersex people is genital surgery done without their consent as infants or children, whereas medical transitioning is generally seen as a positive solution -- one for which medical insurance coverage is a political objective -- within the transgender community. ""Not all intersex people assigned wrong at birth will be comfortable being called 'transgender', although some will", says Marquez.


What made me nonbinary was that I ran into a two-options conundrum, either I was male and a boy (or man) which was not true; or that I was female and a girl (or woman) which was also not true. I was male and yet one of the girls. I encountered the socially-recognized physical configuration that got me designated male any time I saw my body. I didn't have any dysphoria about it, it wasn't wrong.

I want to be accepted as a male femme, a male gal. I should not have to present as female in order to be known as one of the girls. I should not have to push away from maleness in order to assert girlness. my maleness and the experiences that come from being a male girl are part of my identity. I am NOT a cisgender female person; being seen and thought of as such would NOT recognize me. It's not who I am. I'm a male girl.

I should be able to go to the nude beach and be who I am, a girl. I should be able to go the nude beach without obtaining medical intervention to transition by body and be accepted for who I am, a male girl.

My transgender sister should be able to go to the nude beach -- with or without medical intervention -- and accepted for who she is as well. She considers herself female and woman. She shouldn't have to "pass". She shouldn't have to adorn herself and fix up her appearance in order to elicit our approval of her identity. She shouldn't have to keep her body under wraps if she can't afford or hasn't opted for medical transitioning.

Neither should my intersex brother. His body is intersex. His gender identity isn't a consequence of either of the two conventional physical sex constructs. He also needs to be able to walk here on this beach.

Until we can do that, until acceptance of gender identity isn't dependent on having the "right" body, until acceptance of gender identity doesn't depend on erasing the body either, we're still stuck in Binary 2.0.

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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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Unintentional Gatekeeping

I work in a large organization so there are a lot of personnel; there are also presentations and trainings and the official LGBTQ coordinators here have presented material on gender and sexuality. They’ve never approached me to talk about queer issues and identity, although I show up for work wearing a skirt fairly often and several people know I have a book on the subject of being genderqueer coming out soon.

The material that they present to the organization doesn’t include much info on the experiences of a person like me. No surprise there. I could help with that.

So I decide to write, to introduce myself formallly, although I’ve spoken at these presentations as an attendee and assume they know me at least in passing.

Hello!

I write that much then can’t figure out what to say next. I start a second sentence several times then erase it. Finally, I decide to simply admit to that. To tell them I’m having a hard time getting this letter started:

*** several minutes later still staring at a single-word email body ***

Damn this is hard. I can so easily deal with people when I'm positioning myself as a "Them", for them to either accept or not. So much scarier to risk being accepted as an "us". Or rejected dismissively at that level.

I didn't grow up feeling a part of the queer community and never had that later in life either, really.

I know you've encountered me at the trainings and meetings. I'm sorry I haven't been more friendly and introduced myself in a meaningful way.

In one of the Facebook support groups I'm in, some of the nonbinary trans folks call it "imposter syndrome". They're usually talking about not being regarded as genuinely trans by the conventional binary transgender men and women. I've had that w/regards to the entire LGBTQ world, and also to the feminist community. I've got a lot of privilege as a person who is altercast by the world as a man and often as a straight man at that; I don't get overtly systematically discriminated against or deal with the medical system like transitioning people have to, so I worry a lot about reaching out and being pushed back and told I'm a pretentious jerk or something.

I don’t know specifically what kind of response I was expecting. Some kind of reply acknowledging their own uncertainties and awkwardnesses when they first tried to participate in the LGBTQ community? Some kind of personal welcome and some friendly curiosity, maybe?

What I received wasn’t unfriendly or dismissive or anything.

We have been glad to see you in attendance at the meetings. We hope you feel welcomed and able to participate fully as your authentic self, both at these meetings and at the organization in general.

It can be hard to reach out to new people, but if there’s anything specific you wanted to discuss with us, feel free to let us know.

Why was I disappointed to receive that? What caused me to read that and somehow turn it into an excuse to feel brushed off?

It’s so damn easy to become hypersensitive, to the point that other people’s behaviors can feel like microaggressions when all they’ve done is fail to guess exactly what would make me feel understood and accepted.

Want another example? We have a few “any gender” toilets, single person facilities. I was waiting for one to become available and someone informed me that if I did not wish to wait, I could use the men’s room down the hall. I’m sure this person did not intend this piece of information to come across as questioning why the hell I would be waiting for the special facilities, or to imply that I was viewed as a cisgender male and therefore not the intended beneficiary of this policy. But I still managed to feel that way at the time.

Another? Someone started a poll in one of the gender nonbinary FB groups about how often and how deeply do you feel dysphoria about your body. When I answered that I don’t, someone replied that I was the first and only non-cisgender person they’d ever encountered who didn’t. It wasn’t said in an even remotely hostile fashion but it immediately conjured up a whole slew of “I don’t fit in, I don’t belong in here” feelings.



I have never felt like the LGBTQ community was my home. That I would be recognized and the doors opened to me, that my concerns and experiences would be validated there. I’ve hoped that would be the case, I’ve prepared to argue that I qualify and that therefore it should be that way, but I haven’t ever escaped the fear that I’d be dismissed with contempt and ridicule. Because I don’t hear or read stories like mine from other people in the community. Similar, yes, but fundamentally different.

It’s easy for me to deal with being an outsider. I’m used to it; I’m good at it. It’s scary to ask to be allowed in, to be an insider. I feel vulnerable and my feelings and sensibilities are way too easy to hurt.


I'll accept that I'm hypersensitive at times like these. At the same time, I think it's fair to ask that people who occupy a position of leadership within the LGBTQ community keep in mind that even if they were always pretty sure of their identity and fit into the community like a hand into a glove, that's not going to be true for a lot of other people; and that's probably especially true for the less common identities.

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Reality and the Physical Sex Binary Thing

To explain the difference between sex and gender, I often say that as a generalization, there are two sexes, male and female, plus an assortment of exceptions that are largely ignored and erased; and that further generalizations are made about the personality, behavior, nuances, priorities, etc of those two sexes, and some non-factual stuff imposed on it as well for ideological purposes, and those generalizations (distortions included) are what gender is.

I wrote something along those lines two weeks ago in my blog post titled "Clarifying Gender Inversion".

And, as I often do, I received responses from some people denying that, even as a generalization, we can be said to fall into two sexual categories. For instance, eroticawriter wrote this comment on LiveJournal:

While I agree with a lot of what you've said here, you're wrong that "on a biological basis there are two sexes, and a handful of variations that we can dump into 'intersex'". When it comes to sex, gender, sexuality, etc. there is no binary except the cultural constructs imposed by patriarchy and colonialism.

"There's nothing oppressive about making a generalization", I often reply; "the problem comes when the exceptions are treated like there's something wrong with them! Believe me, as a sissy feminine male I'm fully acquainted with the experience of being treated like there's something wrong with me for being an exception to the rule, I've been told that I'm not the way boys or men are supposed to be all my damn life. Legitimacy doesn't require numbers and numbers don't convey legitimacy; cisgender normative people outnumber us but that doesn't make their way of being in the world correct and ours incorrect or sick or wrong".

But my critics are adamant: no, "the binary" is an oppressive ideology, our sexes do not divide up into two categories even as a generalization, and I need to get with the program. (eroticawriter was not the only person to make such a comment; someone within one of the Facebook groups I belong to did likewise, and then later deleted their post and, along with it, my reply to it, perhaps because they did not like the way the discussion was playing out)

I consider them to be wrong about this. More about this below, I promise.

But first, I want to talk about the larger phenomenon I think this is a part of: the notion that there's not a "real" reality in life or nature; instead there's the white male cis hetero able-bodied English-speaking privileged reality... and then there are different, equally legitimate, realities for the rest of us.

That is technically true, 100% true, but in a truly vast number of situations it's irrelevantly true. Let me explain.

Point to the North Star, would you? If it's not visible for you at the moment, wait until it is. Every one of us occupies a different position, so the direction of the North Star is going to be different for each and every one of us. That's 100% true. But if you drew a perfect straight line from every single one of our pointing fingers to the center of the North Star, you'd end up with almost the exact same thing as what you'd get if you just drew a line from the center of our sun to the center of the North Star. All our differences are so minor in comparison to what we have in common that we can ignore them. Even having some of us do our pointing in midwinter while others aim their fingers on the summer solstice, when the earth is on the opposite side of the sun, just doesn't make enough difference to count. And that's the usefulness of the notion of objectivity — not that things really do have a single meaning regardless of the viewer to whom they have meaning, but that many things, perhaps most things, have so little variance in what they mean that we can safely ignore the differences in our social and physical locations.

And it's politically dangerous to discard the notion that anything has actual real meaning. If oppression is all a matter of perspective, then gee, develop a new perspective and get over it. Or at least quit complaining about it because to me (or so says the clever social conservative, at any rate), you're not oppressed and hey, that's my reality and you just went on record as saying there's no objective reality just your reality and my reality and his reality and her reality and so on. (See the problem?)

Like the story of the blind folks and the elephant, we may each only have a partial picture of the truth, and we should keep that in mind when we communicate, but we should also remember that there was a real elephant with a real elephant-reality and elephant-truth about its self whether any individual blind guy had a comprehension of it or not.

OK, back to the physical sex binary, as I promised. Let's posit, for the sake of discussion only, that my critics are right and that I'm wrong. That the majority of human being do not, in fact, fall into the two categories "male" and "female" and instead there are a multiplicity of varied sexes about which no generalizatons can be made that would divide them up neatly into two camps like that, even with the exceptions left over as a minority. What if that's true?

* Well, that makes cisgender people a minority, for starters. Most people were assigned either male or female at birth. But we just posited that it's NOT true that male and female people are a majority. That means most people's actual sex is something other than what they were assigned at birth.

* Defining heterosexuality becomes complicated. There's no coherent meaning to the notion of "opposite" sex if we're not in a two-sexes-generally-speaking kind of world. I suppose we could say that a person is heterosexual if they are attracted to any of the multiple sexes that differ from their own. But heterosexuality the institution -- the structure of expectations and interlocking behavioral dance steps, the courting and flirting and other romantic and sexual behaviors that assume two opposite sexes? That becomes divorced from any underlying pair of sex categories to which the majority of people have ever belonged. It's a restrictive ideology without any visible anchor and it's going to require some explaining to show how it could have gotten there.

* It's unlikely that we would have a single broad category called "intersex" to describe all the people who are neither male nor female. That's not how people tend to generalize. Remember that the people we now call "intersex" are not a single sex that differs from male and from female, a third sex, but are instead a plethora of multi-varied sexes. Here's a person with XY chromosomes who has a vagina and labia, and testicles inside her labia. Here's a person with a four inch clitoris who penetrates his female partners during sex and uses tampons when he gets his period. Here's someone with a vagina but no uterus and who has never developed breast tissue and who has a full dense mass of facial hair. All those people exist in the world that I recognize as reality, of course, but in the world that we are positing, the world in which male and female people are not a majority, all these people we're describing would not be regarded as an exception to the rule, because we have no general rule, remember? Instead, I suspect we would have a name for each of the ten or fifteen most common sexes. Perhaps we'd have some kind of "etcetera" category for the smallest minorities left over. We don't have that, though; we have a situation where we have categories male, female, and, just barely acknowledged in a whisper, intersex, the "etcetera" category into which we cast all the exceptions. If the males and females together don't constitute the majority, indeed the overwhelming majority, this needs explaining, just like the ideology of heterosexuality.

* Insofar as most people identify as either "male" or "female", in order for it to be true that the majority of people are not either male or female, we're saying that most people Insofar as most people identify as either "male" or "female", in order for it to be true that the majority of people are not either male or female, we're saying that most people do not correctly know their own sex.. And that is a rather pompous assertion that certainly needs some explaining! Oh, it's possible, I suppose... we could say people have "false consciousness", that the notion of a sexual binary has been imposed on us all and we've been socialized and brainwashed into believing in it, even though it doesn't really exist in the real world. But who is responsible for this illusion? The cisgender people? They're a minority within this supposition, remember!? And while minorities can sometimes oppress the majority, they don't tend to do so by making the majority believe everyone has the same identity as the oppressive minority; instead, they usually establish their own identity as a privileged special identity that justifies their position over the others, an identity that they can lord over the others.

It's possible but I don't see a compelling case for it, and all my experience has been to the contrary. I've been to the nude beach and I've been inside locker rooms and I've been in a neonatal nursery full of newborns. I'm not going to pretend that I am not socialized into awareness of categories used by my culture, but I don't seem to have to shoehorn a huge bunch of not-really-either people into categories they don't fit into in order for a two-sex categorical system to work for the overwhelming majority of human beings.

If you wish to put forth a theory that explains how an ideology supporting a completely fictitional belief in a physical sexual binary was created and is maintained against the evidence of a non-matching physical reality, feel welcome to do so, but I regard that as an extraordinary claim, one that is not necessary in order to acknowledge the existence, dignity, and self-determination of intersex people, or the similar legitimate existence of people who do not fit general patterns that describe the two primary sexes, such as gender inverts and genderfluid people and agender folks and demiboys and demigirls and so on.


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