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!



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

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


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

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That's Not Very Nice

One of the early reviews of GenderQueer noted that my thoughts and attitudes during my later teenage years in my book reminded her of the Nice Guys™.

It's an accurate call. When I first encountered the send-up of Nice Guys and their behaviors, I winced in recognition. Yes, I was definitely on that trajectory for awhile. The Nice Guys overtones in my book are acknowledged as intentional. In my own personal life, I didn't descend very far into blaming women, or considering the gender-polarized dating environment to be women's fault, but I had a lot of frustration and irritation; and in one important scene in the book you can see me expressing those feelings internally as resentment towards girls, and experimenting with the kind of behavior that is often advocated by so-called pickup artists.

I'm about to do something that many folks would say is ill-advised. I'm going to defend the Nice Guys (god help me). Well, sort of. I'm not about to make a positive case for being a men's rights advocate or explain why it really is all the fault of the women. But all the material about the Nice Guys describes them with eye-rolling dismissive contempt for exhibiting behaviors that we're encouraged to think of as manifestations of character flaws. I'm going to challenge you to perceive them (well, us, actually, since I'm reluctantly claiming the mantle) as people whose behaviors take place in a context, and look at the context long enough to see how it elicits those behaviors.


We are considered creepy. Creepy because we often have a hidden agenda of wanting sex. Creepy because we allegedly act nice thinking that we'll get sex as a reward for being nice. Creepy because our reasons for behaving "nice" are all about obtaining sex. Creepy because we think that by being nice, we somehow deserve sex.

So let's examine all that -- removing any gendered double standards in order to do that exam. I may be projecting my own experiences onto the Nice Guy™ debate, but it's not like there's an organized body of Nice Guys™ with a spokesperson and a position paper -- it's an identity largely created from the outside by folks who were tired of the Nice Guy shtick, and I confess that I recognize myself in a lot of the description so I may as well wear it.



a) Is it OK to want sex? Is it OK to expect or anticipate that someone would want to have sex with you?

This is a question that many a nice girl has found it necessary to contend with, so let's not dismiss it too quickly. Female people have often encountered judgmental hostility if it were thought that they wanted sex. They have often found themselves laughed at with derisive contempt connected to the idea that they did. And they've been told that if it were true, it meant they were not nice.

Now what (you may be asking) does that have to do with Nice Guys™, who, as males, would presumably not be facing those attitudes? Well, yeah, the boys are indeed sort of expected to want sex and to seek sex. But that confirms that they are Bad Boys™, not Nice Guys™.

Bad, bad, bad, bad boys
Make me feel so gooood...

-- Miami Sound Machine

Bad Boys aren't Nice Guys™. The fact that there isn't a massive social pressure on males to be Nice Guys™ instead of Bad Boys™ is particularly relevant -- somehow these particular male folks embraced an identity as Nice Guys anyhow, and overtly wanting sex isn't compatible with that. Displaying interest in sex would get the girls, the Nice Girls™, kicked out of the Nice category. Being overtly focused on the chance of sex happening is, in fact, a central part of what affirms a male person as a Bad Boy™.

That's not to say that interest in sex is entirely incompatible with Niceness, whether as manifested in Nice Girls™ or in Nice Guys™. In sitcom TV shows and romcom movies as well as in real life, we often hear the female characters complain that they'd really like to meet some guys who aren't married and aren't gay. There's no real reason for them to care whether interesting guys are single or to be concerned with their sexual orientation unless they wish to have sex take place in their lives occasionally, if you see what I mean.

But those female characters don't move around proclaiming to likely prospects that they want sex. That would not be considered Nice™.

How do the Nice Girls™ conventionally handle it? By bundling sex into a larger constellation of experiences and opting to partake of the bundle. To want a romantic relationship. To want a personal and emotional connection and within that context to be sexually active. Not otherwise.

Obviously you and I may not be at all inclined to sign on to the notion that female people should be shoehorned into this notion, this social construct that we call Nice Girls™, but you aren't unaware of the historical presence of this notion. You aren't unaware that it still has some social clout even in 2020. That even now, even after all the questionings and discardings of sexist and gender-polarized notions about how female folks should behave, a girl growing up in a randomly-selected American town is likely to have an easier time of it socially within the parameters of Nice Girl™ than she would if she were to utterly disregard it.


b) Well, is it OK to put on a "nice act" in order to get sex? Is it OK to go around thinking that because you're nice you somehow deserve sex?

I have to question the assumptions on that first one. The common derisive attitude towards Nice Guys™ accuses us of adopting a fake "nice" persona as a means of getting sex, but we are as we are -- this thing called "nice" -- despite a cultural push to be more of a Bad Boy™ and very little pressure on us as males to be Nice™ -- and we deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is who, and how, we are. We may expect things (including sex) as acknowledgment or reward for being Nice™, expectations that folks may have contempt for (and more on that shortly), but that doesn't make the "being nice" some kind of phony act.

Let's again glance across the aisle at the Nice Girls™. People don't tend to assume that they are being Nice™ in order to get sex to happen. People don't tend to assume that they are putting on a "nice act".

There is a belief about Nice Girls™ that is worth bringing up, though. They are often believed to have a high opinion of themselves, a high opinion that leads them to think and say hostile and disparaging things about boys who would rather devote their attention to considerably less-nice girls. The Nice Girls™ also may be expected to occasionally say uncomplimentary things about the not-so-nice girls themselves.

The Nice Girls™, in other words, regard themselves as a "catch", as worthy of admiration and value as potential partners. This is part of the understanding that people have of Nice Girls™, that they may tend to have this attitude about themselves.

Note that this is not characterized as them thinking that they "deserve sex". As I said before, the Nice Girls™ are taught to bundle sex along with emotional connection and think in terms of romantic relationship. So it's not that they think they "deserve sex" for being Nice Girls™, it is that they think they deserve consideration as good girlfriends for being Nice Girls™.

But as we've also already discussed, yeah, that formulation does include sex.

I think Nice Guys™ are basically doing the same thing. We tend to think we shoud be regarded as good romantic prospects. We start off putting a lot of energy into being good companions, connecting with the female people who are in our lives, thinking that sooner or later one of them will find the interactions enticing, will appreciate our value as potential boyfriend material, and if they also happen to find us physically attractive, then hey, things should progress from there, shouldn't they? It's not a materially different expectation than what the Nice Girls™ expect.

But in this gender-polarized world, we operate in a different context than they do.

Incidentally, no, I don't think we (Nice™ people of either sex) are intrinsically better than other people. It's just how we identify, how we think of ourselves and comport ourselves in the world. I'm proud of how and who I am. It's in the face of a lot of disapproval and so I don't feel apologetic about that.


c) So is it somehow OK to go moping around and getting all pissy and hostile because the girls don't appreciate your virtue as a Nice Guy™ and don't find you such a hot prospect? And WTF is with the Nice Guys™ bitterly pursuing an aggressive Pickup Artist approach and treating women like garbage while continuing to complain about things?

No it isn't OK. It isn't appropriate, it isn't politically legitimate, and, incidentally, it also isn't Nice™.

So why does it occur? I mean, look across the aisle again: the Nice Girls™ aren't doing anything equivalent to that, and I've spend the last few paragraphs comparing Nice Guys™ to Nice Girls™ to shed light on other Nice Guy™ behavior. So what's up with this bitter hostility?

We all operate in a social context, the Nice Girls™ and the Bad Boys™ and the Nice Guys™ and everyone else. There is a courtship dance established, and it has a role for the Bad Boys™ and it has a role for the Nice Girls™. The courtship dance calls for the Bad Boys™ to try to make sex happen and the Nice Girls™ to decline that and assert that they don't do that kind of thing outside of the context of an emotional connection and the prospect of an ongoing romantic relationship -- the "bundle" of which I spoke earlier -- and the dance goes on from there. They each know their lines and they anticipate the behavior of the other. But there's no courtship-dance role for the Nice Guy™. He isn't doing the Bad Boy™ dance steps that the Nice Girl™ expects and knows how to respond to. Whether she finds him physically attractive or not, whether she finds herself liking him as a person or not, whether she appreciates his personal qualities (Niceness included) or not, her own role instructions don't give her any lines or provide her with any dance steps that would make it easy for her to act on that interest if it were to occur.

Not that he, the Nice Boy™, has a clearer idea of what he should be doing. His bitter accusations are all focused on the Bad Boy™ stuff that he is not doing, Bad Boy™ stuff that the Nice Girls™ vocally complain about. He says that despite their complaints that's still where things progress, whereas affairs with the girls don't progress with a Nice Guy™ like him, and (he says) "that's unfair!"

Fair or unfair, his observations are accurate: the dance calls for the Nice Girl™ to protest the unbridled raw male expression of sexual interest as crude and demeaning and for her to assert her lack of interest in that. The dance sets them up as opponents, adversaries, with him trying to make sex happen and her disdaining that but seeing if perhaps he seriously likes her as a person and not just a sexual possibility; with him seeing if he can get past her defenses by studying her reactions and tuning into her thoughts and concerns and paying stragetic attention to her feelings. Maybe proximity and time causes him to develop real feelings for her. Maybe proximity and time causes her sexual appetite to kick into overdrive and she consents to doing more and more sexual stuff. They each have lines and dance steps and they know them. They know them the same way you know them. We all do. We've been to the movies, we've read the books, we've listened to the songs, we've heard and sometimes laughed at the jokes. Many folks dance very loosely instead of being rigidly bound to the dance steps, but the known pattern of the established dance still forms a structure.

But not for us.

Nice Guys™ are a type of gender misfit. Because Niceness is gendered and the males are the wrong sex to be embodying Nice. Nice Guys™ may not conceptualize themselves as feminine, as sissy, as trans, as nonbinary, as gender inverted people. In fact, I think they mostly don't. But in a nutshell their complaints do boil down to saying that they approached the whole sex-and-romance thing the same way girls do but that the world didn't play nice with them and left them out in the cold, with no girlfriend, no romance, no sex.

And if and when a Nice Guy™ decides to emulate the Bad Boys™ because the Bad Boys™ seem to be getting all the action he's missing out on, he may do so with contempt and hostility and bitter resentment. You want to know where else I've seen that emotional combination? Certain women who have observed "what works" with guys and have adopted the expected behaviors with scornful hate that they should have to do such demeaning and dishonest things. Yeah, hello.


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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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Polyamory and the Self-Actualized Sissy

Occasionally it comes out in conversation that I am polyamorous and have had multiple simultaneous partners. This is a fact that often gets misconstrued:

Jake: Whoo, well, sissy or no, I see we have some stuff in common. Rock on! You may not be in to all that masculinity be-a-man stuff but when it comes down to the important things you know how to get what you need, huh?

Maud: Is this like a compensation thing, to make up for being left out and pushed to the sidelines while the manly men were getting all the girls?

Now, I like occasionally having a moment of solidarity and experience-in-common with the non-hostile incarnations of the conventional male, and it may in fact have some element of compensatory pleasure or “making up for lost time” associated with it, I suppose, but I feel like most folks miss an important connection between being poly and being sissy.

Polarization versus Unification

The conventional portrait of sexuality, gender, and companionship looks something like this. I’ll work from the cis hetero male model since I am male and perceived as male and hence compared to this more often, regardless of how I identify. Ready? He has a cluster of same-sex friends, his “group” or his “buddies”, his “crowd”, and some are closer friends than others; these are easy informal relationships, without definitional structures. They are certainly multiple in nature and he may become closer to one friend over time or more distant with another, all without any need to redefine the relationships (since they don’t have formal definitions anyhow). Meanwhile, entirely separate from that, he has erotic interests in women, and is predisposed to form long-term pair-bonding with one if there is a sufficiently strong emotional attachment formed. Outside (or prior to) such a pair-bond, he may pursue sexual activity with multiple different partners, and may in fact behave in such a way as to preserve this sexual freedom by doing things to postpone or reduce the likelihood of pair-bond emotional passions forming. But it is still assumed that eventually he wants that to occur and that when it does he will be sexually exclusive. Even if not, it is assumed that he will not form similar deep emotionally connected pair-bonds with someone else, that the pair-bond relationship is at least exclusive in its own domain.

I am not going to critique this model for its inherent healthiness or desirability, at least not at the moment. Instead, let’s just toss this masculine model out of the way and bring myself in, a sissy male, and examine what changes from that alone. Well, first of all, instead of all my friends being same-sex, I tend to form friendships with women. Second, in contrast to some notion of a separate “friend zone” versus a “romantic possibility” classification, it’s not a separate phenomenon for me: the people I like as friends, being of the sex that I’m attracted to, are the people with whom there’s a potential for a sexual connection, a romantic connection. At the time that the connections are forming, I don’t know where they’re headed. Sexuality isn’t something foreign to friendship for me. Thirdly, just as the cis hetero guy’s friendships change over time, with him getting closer to some and farther apart from others, my relationships shift, and those shifts include into and out of sexual and romantic expression and feelings. So not only do I not know where they’re headed when they’re starting up, they may change.

That’s what it means, what it’s like, to be a person who is “like” rather than heterodifferent from the sex to whom I feel sexual attraction. It doesn’t make sense to “break up” with someone or to attempt sexual exclusivity or to expect or request it of someone else.

Works for Me


When I describe this to people, they sometimes say that it's a sad and inferior version of sexuality. They also sometimes say that it's a sad and creepy version of friendship. For my part, I think it would be sad and kind of pathological to be unable to be friends with someone you're strongly sexually attracted to. To be unable to feel that attraction without erupting into sexual aggression, sexual harassment, rape, molestation, sexual intrusiveness, etc; to find it necessary to attain that person sexually or else to run for the hills, to get away from them. I don't have that problem. I mean, yeah, I want sex and romantic love to be in my life, with someone, at least now and then; I need to experience that, and it's quite painful to be completely isolated from it. But as long as that's happening now and then in my life, I don't need it to be happening with this particular person, and it's OK to find them exquisitely delicious and not have anything develop out of that. And also, I don't think of sexual feelings as some kind of filthy things that are going to pollute a friendship.




There are people who practice a narrowly constrained form of pseudo-polyamory, wherein a person (nearly always male) is OK with his partner(s) having other partners of their own but only partners that are not of his sex. In other words, a “one penis policy”. In essence, he is isn’t seeing other female partners of his partners as competitive threats, but would see another male as such.

I don’t think I’m particularly inclined to see the sexual realm of life as all about competition, although I suppose some competitive aspects may be inevitable. But there’s another factor there for me, which is that I don’t tend to see other male partners of my partners as direct competition. Female partners either, for that matter. If there’s one flip side to sissyhood as a marginalized and rarefied identity, a structural advantage for a change, it’s the sense of veritable uniqueness. If someone likes being with me, they may also like being with other male people or other femme people but neither of those categories is going to be a snap-in replacement for me, so anyone with a taste for someone like me is going to be inclined to keep me around! I guess the closest approximation to a “one penis policy” in my case would be a “one SISSY policy”, but hey, we don’t exactly grow like weeds, with sissy suitors lurking around every corner, so I’ve never felt the need for that kind of protection either.

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Sex, sex, sex, sex!

“I agree! There’s no reason for all these labels! Just be who you are!” This comment was written in response to last week’s blog post, which was about retaining the authority to invent your own label instead of feeling like you have to choose from among the existing gender identities that you’ve heard about.

I feel like I’m perpetually see-sawing between these two arguments – that, on the one hand, people should not feel pressured to squeeze themselves into an identity-box if it doesn’t fit them, and yet, on the other hand, that no, that doesn’t mean labels and specifically described gender identities should be discarded.

I often get the “you don’t need labels, just be yourself” attitudes and responses, and I feel like I’m constantly explaining that I didn’t have the option to “just be myself” growing up, and while things have improved somewhat since I was a kid or a teenager, it’s still a concern – the situation has not defused yet, it’s still problematic for people coming of age. So, yes, dammit, I still see a need to draw attention to the situation, the phenomenon, the social politics of being different in this specific way, and doing so requires naming it.

I was originally going to make today’s blog post about that, and elaborate a bit on it and leave it at that, but I found myself dwelling on how I had not anticipated this “just be yourself / no labels” reply when I wrote last week’s blog post. And that, in turn, got me thinking about what replies I might get to this one. And what came to mind was someone crossing their arms argumentatively and saying “Yeah, like what? What bad shit happens to ‘people like you’ that you want to change? What horrible things happen to genderqueer sissy boys? Just what is it that you’re trying to fix?”

I could quite authentically point to physical violence and verbal abuse and ridicule. We are subjected to what most people think of as “homophobia”; one could just as viably label it “sissyphobia”. Certainly some of the violence dished out that is indeed specifically geared towards gay males because they have same-sex sexualities (for example, the Pulse shootings) but in many cases the bashers and haters have no concrete reason to harbor any beliefs or make any assumptions about who their victims prefer to fondle and frolic with; it’s “how we are”, and they assume from that “what we do”. But let’s be honest here, let’s get real and cut to the chase: the concern that make me an activist was that I was not getting laid.

(That’s an oversimplification but it works as a thumbnail summary: being sidelined and isolated from sexual interaction that others of my age and cohort were able to participate in)

And that practically qualifies as a confession. Complaining about it immediately puts me in the select company of incels, Nice Guys™, and people like Elliot Rogers and Marc Lepine. And meanwhile, there is nothing close to a social consensus that anyone has some kind of right to sexual activity per se. Which is, itself, interesting, and we should unpack that, so I will.

We do have a growing consensus that if you do things in order to satisfy your sexual urges and inclinations, it is oppressive for society to try to stamp out those venues or interfere in those behaviors, as long as they are consensual and involve adults of sound mind. Stonewall. ‘Nuff said, right? But if it isn’t a behavior for which you’re being selected and subjected to reprisals, you’re just whining if you complain that sex is not available to you. It could be that no one wants to do you because you’ve got the personality of a doorknob or the appeal of splattered roadkill; it could be your stinky underarms or your deplorable fashion sense or that perennial favorite, your failure to do what you gotta do, your failure to step up and go out there and make an effort to get what you want.

To get under a sheltering umbrella of attitudes that support the notion that perhaps it is oppressive to be denied opportunity, I’m going to borrow from the disability rights movement. It’s not a perspective that says “each citizen is guaranteed a sex life”, but it does take the stance that no barriers should interfere, including the passive barrier of simply failing to provide mechanisms that a marginalized population needs but which aren’t needed by other people -- that a reasonable degree of social facilitation is necessary and appropriate.

Sissy males who are attracted to female people are not heterosexual simply because they are male people attracted to female people. Heterosexuality is composed of roles and rules, a courtship dance with specifically gendered parts to play in the pageant, and the part written for the male participant is based on a set of assumed characteristics (including personality, priorities, goals, and behavioral nuances and patterns) that are not at all a good match for being a sissy. The assumption that is tied to us, that we must be gay fellows, is really based on the notion that a person like us could not participate in heterosexuality, that we’re not right for the part. That’s a barrier. Or, rather, both of those things are a barrier – the fact that we’re not right for the part and the fact that we are assumed not to be playing.

I have learned things that no one taught me, things that were not shown to me in movies or described to me in romance novels. I have felt good and sexy and lithe in my body, in its shape, in the way that I move. As a potential object of desire, as an attractive target. I have learned nuances of voice and gesture and the parts of speech that enable a person to indicate that they know of the possibility that you’re looking upon them in that fashion, and which let them play with that without being overt, predatory, forward, centered on their own appetite… i.e. without being masculine. Does it work the same way when a male person uses this traditionally female language in communication with a female person? Well, not often (I won’t lie) but better than any other tactic that was at my disposal. It may or may not be sexually provocative in exactly the same way so much as it speaks a message that the recipient is able to parse and recognize, and, having recognized it, to realize the implications. Or maybe I’m smokin’ hot (I could live with that).

I've been in relationships that started from there. They were different; I wasn't defined within them as "the boy". It is not that avoiding the appetite-symbol sexual initiator role guarantees you won't be cast as "the boy" for other reasons or in other ways, or that if you reach or kiss or make a pass first you don't get to have this, but it makes a good filter and it gets things started on the left foot.

The point is, I learned it in utter ignorance, tested it with no role model to emulate, and projected an identity by using it that had no name and no social identity that would enable any of the people I encountered to recognize me, to say “Oh, I get it, I’m dealing with one of those”, so their response was dependent on intuiting what it could possibly mean and what an appropriate response just might consist of.

Having to figure it all out in total darkness is quite a barrier. Having to expect my potential partners to do the same is definitely a barrier.

The label is important and necessary to draw attention to the situation; drawing attention to us, and what it is like to be us and how things work for us, is the intended fix.

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Why I'm Not a Lesbian

"If it's 'transgender' and not 'transsexual' now, why isn't it 'heterogender' instead of 'heterosexual'?"

This was on a message board post and I wasn't sure if the person who posted it was serious or trolling. The people posting replies so far seemed to be treating it as the latter.

But I'm often inclined to consider an idea even when I don't much care for the person who spoke it, and I think this is actually a useful and thought-provoking question.

The difference between gender and sex is usually explained more or less like this: sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears; sex is the physical body, your plumbing, whereas gender is your identity; sex is biological, gender is social.

It's an oversimplification of sorts, because in order for sex to be perceived, it has to be recognized, and that recognition invokes social processes too.

Still, it's a useful starting point and the distinction is a useful one as well. Sex is whatever is embedded in our (mostly) dimorphic physiology as either male or female (or the variants that don't fit the dimorphic dyadic categories), whether we are able to perceive sex without social constructs interfering in our perception or not; and gender is the complex set of concepts, ideas, expectations, roles, rules, behaviors, priorities, personality characteristics, beliefs, and affiliated paraphernalia like clothing and segregated activities and whatnot, all the social stuff that we attach to sex but which isn't intrinsicallly really built in to sex -- whether we can successfully isolate gender from sex or not.

In order to comprehend that a person could have the kind of physical morphology that would cause everyone else to categorize them as "female" but could have an identity as "boy" or "man", and not deem that person factually wrong, we had to recognize gender and realize it wasn't identical to sex.

Not that transgender people were the first or the only people to have this awareness: feminists pointed out that an immense amount of social baggage is attached to the biological sexes, and that nearly all of it is artificially confining, restricting behaviors and expressions of self to narrowly channelled masculinity and femininity, and that it is unfair, in particular stripping women of human self-determination and the opportunities for self-realization, subordinating women to men as an inferior class. That's gender. Feminist analysis gave us an awareness of sexism and patriarchy and male chauvinism and stuck a pry bar between sex and gender. Anything that was OK for one sex should be OK for the other; all double standards were now suspect.

People originally said "transsexual" because of the focus on surgical modification of the body; most people's first encounter with the notion of a person whose body had been categorized as male but who identified as a woman involved solving that discrepancy by modifying the body to bring it into agreement with the gender identity. "Transsexual" was coined from "trans" in the sense of crossing from one thing to another (as in "transfer" or "translate") and "sexual" referring not to sexuality but to the sex of the body. The move towards the more modern term "transgender" took the focus off the sex and emphasized that there had been a discrepancy between the gender that a person was socially categorized and perceived as and the actual gender that that same person had as their identity. Such a person could indeed choose to deal with the situation by opting for surgery, but now we were using an identity term that focused on identity instead of one that reiterated the bond between identity and body.

(It also enabled a wider inclusiveness, reaching out to people who cannot afford a surgical transition, or are quite satisfied with presenting to the world in such a way as to be perceived as the sex they desire to be perceived as without a medical procedure, or whose medical interventions of choice do not involve surgery, or indeed anyone who was originally considered to be of a sex that does not correspond to their current gender identity).

But, as with pronouns (discussed in last week's blog post), our cultural discussions about being transgender continue to treat sex and gender in ways that reduce them to being one and the same. We've shifted the location of that "same" far more to the social and away from the biological in how we conceive of it, but we retain the notion that a person's sex should correspond to their gender. If the individual person is not in error and in need of correction, it must be the surrounding observers, but correspondence is assumed to be the intrinsically desirable outcome. And if we've rejected the reductionist notion that "if you got a dick yer a man, if you have a vag instead yer a woman, end of story", we've supplanted it with "if you identify as a man, you're male, if you identify as a woman, you're female, anything else is misgendering". Not so much because we're philosophically opposed to someone identify as a woman while considering themselves male but more because it hasn't been put out there as a proposition. People just assume they should correspond.

(This is something that I'm in a position to see clearly. I am that person. My physical body is male. My gender identity is girl or woman. I'm a gender invert. My sex and gender are not one of the the expected combinations. This is a concept that has proven intractably difficult to explain to people, despite being very simple at its core).

So what does all this have to do with being--or not being--a lesbian?

Our vocabulary for sexual orientations is, like everything else, rooted in the notion that sex and gender will correspond. Lesbians are women loving women. But by women we mean female people. That's what it has always meant up until now when we say "women" because we assume sex and gender correspond. It's only when they are unbolted from each other and each can vary independent of the other that we are faced with the question: is being a lesbian about attraction on the basis of gender or is it all about attraction on the basis of physical sex?

The same problem, of course, occurs for "heterosexual". A heterosexual male has always been a man who is attracted to women, by which we mean female women of course. Because once again, correspondence between sex and gender is assumed. I'm male but I'm one of the girls. I'm not a man who is attracted to women. It's not just nomenclature, it works completely differently; the mating dance of heterosexuality is an extremely gendered interaction, a game composed of boy moves and girl moves, densely overlaid with gendered assumptions about what he wants and what she wants, what it means if he does this or she says that. This entire mating dance is as far as you can get from gender-blind or gender-neutral. It was, in fact, my failure to successfully negotiate heterosexuality that eventually provoked my coming out as a differently gendered male.

The prospect of a lesbian flirting and courting and dating opportunity certainly has its attractions: to be able to interact with female women who are potentially sexually interested in me and not have to have, imposed on either of us, any assumptions whatsoever about who does what or that it means something different if she does it or I do it based on gender because, hey, we are of the same gender.

But as the poet Robert Frost once said, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Lesbians do not take me in. They wish for female people to date and court and connect with. I can hardly complain about the unfairness and injustice of that when I am attracted exclusively to female people myself. I'm not heterogender, sexually attracted to women on the basis of their gender identity; I'm heterosexual, if by heterosexual we mean the attaction is on the basis of physical morphology. As a matter of fact, I have a bit of a preference for female people whose gender characteristics would get them considered masculine or butch at times.


Neither "lesbian" nor "heterosexual" works for me as an identifier in this world because of the correspondence issue though. Instead, I'm left reiterating what has become my slogan: "It's something else".


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Demisexual

A demisexual is a person who does not experience sexual attraction
unless they form a emotional connection. It's more commonly seen in,
but by no means confined, to romantic relationships. The term
demisexual comes from the orientation being "halfway between" sexual
and asexual.

I first encountered the term "demisexual" in online forums for genderqueer and other gender-variant people. It was as new to me as my own identifying term ("gender invert") is to most people in the LGBTQ scene. I'd heard of demigirl and demiboy (terms used by some genderqueer folks) but demisexual was one I hadn't encountered before.

DEMI means "half" or "halfway" -- so a demigirl would be someone halfway between gender-neutral and feminine, for example. When applied to sexual, though, it was less obvious to me what it would mean to be half-sexual, in addition to which the people who identified as such didn't appear to be using it to mean they were less sexual than most other people; instead they seemed to be using it to mean their sexual interests were confined to relationships in which they had a meaningful emotional connection.

It struck me as a pattern strongly associated with feminine sexuality. We have the cultural notion that women and girls want to have a relationship with a boyfriend, and within that context, to have good sex. That the sexuality of boys and men, by comparison, is considerably less constrained to situations where there's that kind of intimate connection. Female exceptions may exist, but where they do, their femininity is cast into some degree of dubiety by the fact that they are willing to jump into no-strings casual sex with the same non-demi enthusiasm as a typical male. Such women are often assumed to lack appropriate amounts of self-esteem (a suspicion less often aimed at promiscuous male people) and they are tagged with epithets and descriptors like "slut" and "wanton" and "easy" and a host of other nouns and adjectives that all underline their lack of normalcy, their deviance, the fundamental wrongness of them being that way.

It's reasonable to say that being demisexual is prescriptive for women, whether it is accurately descriptive or not. Girls and women are under a great deal of social pressure to take on the trappings of being demisexual, to give it lip service and keep up the superficial appearance of being that way.

It's also reasonable to point out that we have plenty of cultural images of women's sexuality as reactive to sexual attention, in such a way that a popular depiction of the very un-demi male sexuality takes the form of the seducer, the sexual pursuer who elicits female sexual participation not by connecting to women with an emotional bond but by circumventing her obligatory pretense of being demisexual and appealing to her rather non-demi susceptibility to sexual opportunities.




It certainly seems useful to split off the specific notion of being demisexual from the culturally conventional notion of femininity, because there are other characteristics that are also deemed to be part of femininity (and of feminine sexuality), such that a person could participate in being feminine without being demisexual. It gives us specificity; it lets us zero in on one aspect of a person's nature instead of referencing a huge library of loosely-associated characteristics.

I'm not sure I quite qualify as demisexual, myself. I've never craved sexual activity that was deliberately lacking in emotional connection, that's for sure, and I've always wanted to have a close intimate caring relationship. But that's not quite the same as saying I'm utterly without any sexual attraction to a stranger, a casual acquaintance, someone I don't have an emotional connection to. I can have such attractions, and I do. Acting on them is messy and complicated and more trouble than it's worth, and I hate that perpetual accusation that insofar as I'm a male I only care about sex and not for loving relationships. But once again, that's not the same thing as saying I'm incapable of finding someone quite enticingly appetizing, entirely delicious on visual and other superficial grounds. My disinclination to actually engage in casual sex isn't due to a lack of appetite outside of emotionally connected relationships.

That makes me wonder how many self-identified demisexual folks would say much the same thing: whether they'd say they completely do not feel any attraction outside of relationships, or would instead say that satisfying sexual experiences seem to be tied to caring connections and therefore they are uninclined to act on attractions outside of them.

And, because it's kind of one of those fabled living-room elephants, how being demisexual as a female-bodied person differs from being demisexual as a person who presents as male. Because the cultural context is going to paint them quite differently.

And as a gender invert, I'm especially curious about how demisexual male people who are attracted to female folks experience their sexual lives, their sexual orientation, and their gender identity. Because I found that being even as demisexual as I am to be entirely polarizing and gender-invalidating, and a big part of how I came to identify as a gender invert.

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re: My Manuscript is in the Shop Again

I rewrote the section of my book where I (aka my "main character") meets the girl from the Massachusetts family that's vacationing out west, and falls in love. He takes her to a deserted overlook at the edge of a cliff and for a moment she thinks she may have put herself in a dangerous situation; the communications misfire leaves them shaken but that in turn gets them talking openly and honestly while they sit side by side pitching stones off the cliff.

As originally written, it was a description of the event, not a fully fleshed out scene with full dialogue and internal monologues and whatnot, and I needed it to pop a lot more, to be as emotionally moving to the readers as the event itself was to the characters.

I read the results to my authors' group, the Amateur Writers of Long Island, to favorable reception:

"Good balance of action and contemplation"

"Beautifully written. You have a wonderful flow to your writing — it seems to come so effortlessly. "
"Very honest and real."

"So glad to hear you express the boy's point of view on sexual domination."

"This is a great description of a best-on-earth sitch to be in. Well done."
" & Wow! A reversal of emotional fortunes. Cool!"

"I like their comfort with each other."

"Excellent. The pebbles were a great touch. You convey the mood, and the nature of the interaction, the internal emotions at work, all in such a gentle but real, relatable fashion. The development is so well paced. Fantastic analysis. Well told, particularly as it can be delicate subject matter. Very honest as well."

"Very revealing story, different fresh, mind altering -- thanks"

"Very genuine! Realistic, subtle."

"Great dialog, super flow. Love how you write! SO sweet!"

Now, it is a very warm and supportive group. We don't tend to tear each other down in our critiques. Even so, the feedback I'm getting from the group reinforces my sense that yes, dammit, I can write.

I actually do have a good book. One that is vivid and emotionally moving. I'm so weary of the process of trying to get it published, but it will be worth it in the long run.


Just hit a milestone, by the way:



The Story of Q — total queries to Lit Agents = 1200
Rejections: 1178
Outstanding: 22

As NonFiction—total queries = 970
Rejections: 951
Outstanding: 19

As Fiction—total queries=230
Rejections:227
Outstanding:3

The Story of Q — total queries to Publishers=41
Rejections:26
Outstanding:7
No Reply 3+ Months: 6
Pub Contract Signed, Publisher Went Out of Business:1
Pub Contract Signed, Rights Reverted (creative diffs):1

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BOOK REVIEW -- If I Was Your Girl

I have a new favorite "exhibit a" book for presenting and depicting the transgender woman experience.

Meredith Russo joins an already-populated field: on my bookshelf I have Jan Morris's CONUNDRUM, Jennifer Boylan's SHE'S NOT THERE, Nicola Jane Chase's TEA AND TRANSITION, Audrey MC's LIFE SONGS, Ami Polonsky's GRACEFULLY GRAYSON, and a few others scattered about. Documenting what it means to be a transgender woman as a trans coming-out story has been done enough times that I think many authors are leery of writing something cliché, and so there's been a feeling that a good solid trans woman story needs to be "about" something other than the trajectory of "I always knew I wasn't like the other boys" / "People reacted to me being like one of the girls" / "It was my secret, I knew I was a girl despite my body" / "I sought answers and found doctors who would help me transition" / "Here's what medical transitioning was like" / "And here I am, I did it".

In If I Was Your Girl (Flatiron Books: 2017), Meredith Russo takes the tack of simplifying the narrative and making it accessible and entertaining and easy to relate to. Amanda Hardy, the main character, is a young girl, still in high school, and has already transitioned. She's a brave person, and a person used to living on the margins, not accepted by other people. Her backstory is provided in intermittent flashback chapters, but they're short; the main story arc is all in Amanda's present tense. She is happy to make friends but doesn't expect to and doesn't take it for granted; and when Grant Everett indicates he's interested in her as more than a friend, it's dream-fulfillment material but enmeshed with the delicate fears that it doesn't mean what she hopes it does, that once he gets to know her he'll be less impressed with her -- in other words, the typical everyday fears of so many adolescent girls, merely made a bit more complicated by the specific situation that Amanda is in, the specific worrisome secret that might cost her this acceptance and sense of belonging if it came out.

It does, of course. That Amanda is strong enough to cope with the situation is less surprising than the resilience of so many of her friendships and connections. Not all of them (that would not be realistic), but there's a hopeful and positive message here about how many people will accept a trans person for who she is.

If I Was Your Girl touches on one of the central aspects of being transgender that many of these narratives omit: after transitioning, a person may fit in and be perceived and accepted as an ordinary, typical member of their target gender, but they are also a person with a past; does such a person have to invent a gender-consistent backstory, does such a person have to deny their own personal history and set of experiences? And to what extent can a person ever really feel known and accepted while keeping such a centrally personal aspect of themselves secret? Unlike so many other trans narratives, this story is truly a coming-out story, and it's fundamentally an affirmative one.

What it doesn't focus on is the convoluted process of figuring out that one is, in fact, transgender, or on the details of medical transitioning. I think that is a wise choice. The reader who picks up the book and relates to the character strongly will already be on the road to contemplating their own gender identity in a sufficiently appropriate manner, and the details of such things as hormones and bottom surgery are probably a lot less important than the fundamentals of what it would be like as a person to have done so for anyone who is curious to know what being transgender is about.

Author Meredith Russo acknowledges in the postlogue of the book that this is the simplest version of the story:

I have, in some ways, cleaved to stereotypes and even bent rules to make Amanda's trans-ness as unchallenging to normative assumptions as possible. She knew from a very young age. She is exclusively attracted to boys. She is entirely feminine. She passes as a woman with little to no effort. She had a surgery that her family should not have been able to afford, and she started hormones through legitimate channels before she probably could have in the real world. I did this because I wanted you to have no possible barrier to understanding Amanda as a teenage girl with a different medical history from most other girls.

I think If I Was Your Girl succeeds in exactly the ways that Russo intended it to. And where it fails, to the extent that it does so, it is due to the limitations that she acknowledges here. It is not a book that it is not, and there are stories that need to be told that are about those other trajectories of experience which are not so centrally identical to what people in general understand transgender to mean.



I want my own book to be like this. I want The Story of Q to present the story of what it is like to be male, to be one of the girls, to be attracted to them as well, and to end up being one of the gender-variant people for whom a transition to female is not the solution. I want it to be accessible the way Amanda's story is accessible.

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My Manuscript is in the Shop Again

It has been a very long time since I've done any rewrite in The Story of Q beyond a little superficial surgery here and there. It's mostly been a stable and complete-feeling book.

I've been contemplating some of the critical rejection notices (some of which process you saw echoed in my May 22 entry). The conclusion that I reached was that their complaints and feedback were not accurate or helpful, but that nevertheless, yes, the book has a major weakness. What should be the emotional centerpiece, or at least one of the major emotional centerpieces, was glossed over and described from a detached distant vantage point instead of being properly caught in vivid prose.

The love interest of the story is the girl from Massachusetts who shows up with her family in the summer between junior and senior year in high school. In its current form, the book covers that visit with scarcely a single actual conversation.

Not one of my beta readers or editors from lit agents or publishing houses have ever highlighted that as a problem. I don't know why. Now that I see it I can't unsee it. My book has some really vivid sections, but this event, which totally needs to be one of them, just isn't.

I know how that happened: it is painful for me to write. It is painful in part because I want to capture exactly how it was, and it's elusive for me, because I sealed up some of those memories because of how things turned out, so it is frustrating to try to evoke just what happened between us and the rhythms of how we spoke and interacted. And then it is painful because even after all this time it's still ripping scabs off. And it is painful because when I do write of it, it is inadequate. But if it is, it will still be far better than the woefully inadequate handling that these scenes received up until now.


Bloody hell. Then I have to find a way to trim some other stuff or else accept a longer word count.


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MOVIE REVIEW — I Am Not an Easy Man

It's been done before, but rarely if ever so well: a guy deserving of a comeuppance about gender privileges gets his situation inverted and has to cope with what women have to deal with, and learns some lessons.

What makes Eléonore Pourriat's I Am Not an Easy Man outstanding is that it goes far beyond the thought-experiment level and delves into the subtle nuances of gender polarization and how we cope with them, and it includes that subtle treatment in its portrayal of how the main male character, Damien (portrayed by Pierre Benezit), copes with being dumped into the inverted world.

The 1991 movie Switch, featuring Ellen Barkin, is the kind of fare I'm more used to seeing in this genre: the chauvinist male wakes up abruptly transformed to female, freaks out, and spends the first half of the movie trying to wrench reality back to how it oughta be by force of sheer denial. A whole lot of sight gags to point out how funny and inappropriate it looks when a woman (or person who appears to everyone to be a woman) behaves the way men typically do. A main character whose initial horror gives way to some clever ideas about how this could actually work to his advantage, only to find that any beliefs he'd ever harbored about how this or that would be so much easier if he were a woman are actually all wrong or that it doesn't work the way he'd expected. Very binary and overstated gender expectations and behaviors abound, caricatured in order to be sure to drive the point home. And then — usually around the halfway mark in the movie — acceptance, with the main character getting with the program and adjusting to the situation by becoming a good girl and, whether it's because biology is destiny or because you can't fight city hall (or a universally gendered world), becoming obedient to the new set of expectations and demands.

That's admittedly not entirely fair to Switch but it's a good overview of how I felt about it when I saw it on the screen. Great premise, disappointing for all that it didn't attempt to do.

I Am Not an Easy Man starts off with what looks like the same trajectory. It uses the more difficult inversion of having the man remain a man but finding himself transferred abruptly into world where everyone else is gender inverted, making him the exceptional case. (This means that instead of one actor giving us inverted gender behavior, everyone else in the entire cast is doing so). But again, Damien starts off trying to be who he has always been, while staring around in disbelief and becoming shocked and dismayed.

But after awhile he gets it, just as we in the audience do, although he remains mystified (of course) about how this could have happened. And he begins to adjust.

Some of the adjustment is opportunistic: some things weren't available to him in his familiar world, or weren't possibilities he'd ever considered for himself, but we watch him consider and them avail himself of them and they generally work for him. He learns to dress attractively, develops closer and more intimate emotional-content-sharing same-sex friendships, and finds televised dramas (with gender patterns aligned with this new world he's in of course) to be moving and cathartic.

Some of the adjustment is merely expedient: if he wants to date, and the women find his unmodified hairy chest to be a dealbreaker, he's going to have to wax. Well, if that's the way it is, it isn't pleasant but it isn't worth the price tag to balk at it.

And there are ways in which he doesn't conform but decides to fight back. A world in which people of his gender are dismissed as non-serious people? That's a dealbreaker for him. The unfairness, the inequality, this is intolerable. So he joins the masculinists and attends support groups and marches and rallies with his brethren.

The core of the story revolves around his relationship with writer Alexandra (Marie-Sophie Ferdane). Damien has a lifetime history of approaching women with the sexually enthusiastic and forward behaviors that work for him in his native world. In this new world, obtaining access to sexual activity isn't difficult—he gets propositioned (not to mention catcalled on the street and stared at by random women as a visual treat when walking through the business office) and he does partake. When his parents (same people, now gender-inverted) express a bit too much concern about him ever finding a suitable relationship, he flings into their face the fact that he has sex with many women, as readily as they do, and scarcely remembers their name, it's as fleeting and transient a delight for him as for them, and not a reason to settle down.

But therein lies the problem. Once he does meet someone (Alexandra) with whom he wants more, wants the relationship he has with her to continue, now it starts to matter strategically that he's in a world where expressing that is going to be tricky. This is a world where the male folks pursue the ongoing relationships and it's the female ones who tend to fuck-and-discard, so trying to hold on to what he's got with her runs the risk of coming across as clingy and vulnerable. And so we watch as he discovers firsthand the careful balance of wanting passion and sex but needing to protect himself from being regarded and treated as a mere outlet. Of not being sufficiently respected and valued.

Alexandra has her own arc of understanding-growth. In a nod to a classic cliché (see Roman Holiday), she starts off pretending and manipulating, while keeping her real agenda, of cashing in on the experience by writing about it, hidden; but then gradually falls in love with her subject Damien, and bails on the planned betrayal but the clues to what she's done are available to Damien who discovers them and decides she's a horrid cad who never cared for him. So just as Alexandra is regretting any intention of hurting Damien, Damien comes to see her as a callous and cruel person and she's suddenly at risk of losing him just as she realizes she absolutely can't let that happen. It's been done before but seldom with the bad girl becoming undone this way.

Ferdane is suave and confident and walks a good balance between arrogant and sensitive, between tough and broodingly lonely. She's not butch in a Joe-the-plumber way (in fact, we get a painter complete with plumber's crack just for the juxtaposition) so much as she's Bogart or James Dean. We want to get to her, evoke her human side, care for her.


I Am Not an Easy Man is delightful in its exquisite attention to detail and the believability of its inverted depictions. It would be easy to stick in a male erotic dancer that would prompt a giggle and a nod about sexual visual objectification, but it takes more skill to present us with a believable male pole dancer that you could readily imagine as delicious eye candy to bar patrons. And comedians from Roseanne Barr to Amy Schumer have done up the belching, open-legged, stained-shirt unself-conscious leering men shtick. But in the poker scene in this movie it doesn't come across as caricature. You believe the women around the table are real. The nuances of posture and facial expression and gesture are spot-on. And as a result, it hits harder.



Having mentioned Switch, I'll make note of a couple other gender-inverty offerings to flesh out the backdrop. There have been pieces that are done with serious intent, as illustrations of gender polarization and not just for the burlesque value of inversion as entertainment. Ella Fields became a YouTube / Facebook sensation when she gave us this one last year, for instance. When our 13 year olds still feel that they are up against this kind of rigid sex role expectation system, it's powerful to see it expressed in this kind of thought experiment; six and a half minutes doesn't give one room to explore the complex nuances though, and unfortunately some people rejected its message because they considered it overstated and that it ignored how things aren't actually so rigid in the modern world.

Not all depictions of gender reversal contain a lot of sympathy for critics of existing gender polarization. If (as I implied) some of the plot trajectories seem to end up promoting gender conformity even after doing a sendup of pompous (male) privileged certainties, there are also tales of gender inversion that never move beyond dismay and a conveyed sense of male humiliation except when someone manages to revert things to their natural state. I remember plucking a copy of Regiment of Women from the paperback stand when I was in High School and giving myself a headache from so much eye-rolling.



I Am Not an Easy Man is available on Netflix as an original Netflix movie.


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Finding Your People / Coming Out: Genderqueer Compared to Other LGBTQIA Identities

Part One: The Sense of Community


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When gay and lesbian people embrace their identities, they typically have the option of being part of a community of similarly-identified people. Maybe there are gay bars, or eating establishments that cater so significantly to gay and lesbian patrons that it's thought of as a gay or lesbian dining spot. There may even be a "gay part of town" where people can go, places where gay and lesbian folks are sufficiently concentrated that they are not in the minority. There are gay cruises on cruise ships, dances for gay folks, and other such opportunities.

I'm sure it's not quite as available when one is a lesbian or gay guy in Miles City, Montana or Hahira, Georgia, and attending such venues can leave one vulnerable to attack, but still, the opportunity is there in a generic sort of way.

And for gay and lesbian folks it has the dual purpose of networking with your allies and mixing and mingling with your potential partners.

I think the ways in which this is different for other people of minority orientation, gender identity, and intersex identities is worth looking at, because it shapes what coming out is like, and because since gay and lesbian people's experiences are more socially established, it is likely that some people extrapolate from what they know about gay and lesbian people's experiences as "out" and assume it's the same for the rest of us, if only because they hadn't given it much thought.



I had some preformed ideas about what it was like to be a male-to-female or female-to-male transgender person — that they didn't particularly want to be a part of some kind of transgender community (except for political networking and activism), they wanted to blend in with the larger world of ordinary men and women; that they wanted to be seen and accepted as men and women, not as transgender men and women. But I didn't want to rely on these and end up making statements about people that weren't necessarily accurate, so I did some informal polling in some Facebook groups for trans people.

POLL for Traditionally Transitional (M2F and F2M) Transgender People

• Under ideal circumstances, would you wish to be a part of a community where you were known to be transgender? If there were trans-centric cruise ship vacations and transgender eating establishments and a transgender part of town and so forth, in the same sense that there are for gay and lesbian people, is that something you'd want to be a part of? Or would you mostly want to live your life as a man (if you're a trans man) or woman (for trans women) and not call attention to being transgender, that transgender isn't your identity, it's just your circumstance, etc?

• Mainstream impressions and media depictions portray trans people as not wanting to be perceived as "male to female" but simply as female, (or not as "female to male" but just as male for trans men) -- that a person's experience and history as a transgender individual is personal, no one's business; or, as some put it, to "pass". (A somewhat loaded term that some folks find laden with mainstream value judgments, but we've all heard it). Certainly some memoirs and coming-out stories have said this as well: "I don't want to be thought of as a transgender man, just as a man, period". Do you think this is a misrepresentation or out of date, or is it reasonably accurate and valid?

The answers partially confirmed what I thought: that it is important to most binary trans people to be perceived as men and women, not as transgender people. One respondent wrote "the whole point of transitioning is to no longer be associated with the gender I was assigned at birth", and to be seen as transgender is to be reminded of that. Or, as another person put it, "that would defeat the whole purpose".

And yet, at the same time, a significant number of respondents said that they enjoy having safe spaces, places to socialize with other transgender people where they can talk about experiences specific to being trans. Most of those spaces are formal support groups but some said "hey, if there were trans cruises or a trans part of town, I'd totally check it out... I pass and I like being part of mainstream society and accepted without question as a woman, but I am not ashamed of being trans and it is part of who I am".

Several transgender respondends stressed that they were proud of their identities and did not want to leave the impression that they were slinking around shamefully trying to hide it. Many said they needed to connect to other trans people even if only for political purposes, to provide or receive support, and others said they'd like more social opportunities to be with other transgender people as well. But this was "in addition to", not instead of having the opportunity to pursue their lives as non-differentiated men and women; they didn't want to be confined to a transgender ghetto, because being trans was not their gender identity, being a man or a woman was.

A couple people said they weren't sure what would happen in a hypothetical trans bar or trans part of town: "I can see the need for 'gay districts', since gay people need to find other people they are physically attracted to, but I don't think trans people have that same need".



I also polled people who identify as genderqueer and/or as nonbinary, in several Facebook groups that specifically include us:

• Are you now, or have you been, part of a genderqueer/nb community where you meet face to face and hang out in person?

• If you answered "Y" to question 1, was it an organized group with official meeting times and places, like a meetup group or a support group, or did you also have informal connections?

• Is there anything like a "genderqueer/nb part of town" you can go to and expect the people on the sidewalks and in the local businesses to be other genderqueer/enbies like you?

• Do you know of any genderqueer/enby bars, clubs, or places to eat where nonbinary or genderqueer people go to hang out?

• Do you interact in person face to face with other people who identify as you do? Or mostly only on the internet?

I wanted to rule out the possibility that, on the cusp of turning 60, my own experiences were not exemplary of what genderqueer / binary people go through, and that I was pretty isolated from the contemporary experience of coming out genderqueer, you know? Because for me, there's never been anything akin to a sense of community except in these online forums. And for most of my "out" life I have craved being in a space where my variation was normative, and not only for political / networking purposes but also for reasons akin to what gay and lesbian people get from it: to be in a space where I'd stand a better chance of meeting people who wanted to get romantically or sexually involved with someone like me.

In general, almost none of my genderqueer respondents said they were part of a face to face community aside from support groups, and only a few people had been in face-to-face support groups dedicated to genderqueer / nonbinary people. Several respondents reported having been in generic LGBT, LGBTQ, or LGBTQIA support groups where they felt accepted and could identify as part of the larger community.

That was likewise true for anything approximating a "genderqueer/nb part of town". People often gravitated towards the lesbian or gay clubs or areas, and were often made to feel welcome, but seldom felt recognized and understood as nonbinary or genderqueer — when people perceived them as having a variance from mainstream gender expression, their reaction was "oh you're gay like me, like the rest of us here". That was an improvement over "oh, you're one of those people" but it still meant not being perceived accurately.

Only one person mentioned anything akin to a genderqueer or enby bar, and that was to remonstrate against alcohol-based establishments as ideal places to flirt and date. When some other people inquired further to ask where this enby bar was, no specifics were given, and the reply may have been about generic gay/lesbian bars since the main focus of the reply was to advise people to not turn to drinking establishments for this purpose. Alcoholism and drug abuse are a concern for many people in the LGBTQIA world.

There was a lot of curiosity and interest in the possibility of such a thing, a genderqueer social scene. Apparently I'm not alone in feeling like this would be a wonderful thing, nor am I alone in the impression that we don't have it yet.



Gay and lesbian people, as I said, benefit from the existence of a gay/lesbian social environment because they can meet people they are physically attracted to who are attracted to them in turn. How is that similar or dissimilar for genderqueer / nonbinary folks? Well...

• It is reasonable to assume that the people that lesbian women are attracted to are other lesbian women, and that gay males's attraction is towards other gay males. It's a lot less inevitable that genderqueer people are primarily or exclusively attracted to — or are attractive to — other genderqueer people.

• But it isn't highly unusual either. Skoliosexuality is a neologistic term for people whose sexual orientation is to "transgender or nonbinary/genderqueer people". That's a complicated and problematic "or", insofar as many transgender people do not particularly want to be the target of someone's sexual interest on the basis of them being trans. The specific link I just referenced includes the additional bit "See also: transfan, tranny chaser, chaser". Be that as it may, genderqueer / nonbinary people are far less likely to oppose or resist the idea of people being specifically attracted to us for being the way we are. (Hence, it would be nice if a term were to evolve that pertains to being attracted to genderqueer folks without it simultaneously being tied to tranny chasing and objectifying trans people sexually).

• Genderqueer and nonbinary people are not a homogenous group with a single uniform preference. I know that, for myself, it was crucially important that I be perceived as a male very different from the typical generic males, specifically that I was a femme, a person with interests and tendencies and sexual nature and romantic inclinations akin to the girls and women... and that this not only be tolerated but found attractive, hot, that it be affirmatively found desirable. So for lack of a better term, I've always wanted to be surrounded by skoliosexual women.

• ...Or skoliosexual female people, at any rate. While I am not exclusively attracted to female people whose own gender identity is variant and atypical, it's an affirmative attraction for me if they are. I very much respond to women (no question about that); I haven't had anywhere near as much direct firsthand dating experience with female people whose gender identity is not "woman", but if there were opportunities to meet more such people and an appreciable number of them were at ease and comfortable with being female bodied and had a sexual attraction to the male body, and found the idea of being the boy to my girl, I've always sensed that the chemistry there would be powerful.

• Gay and lesbian people's variation from the typical is specifically defined as consisting of same-sex attraction. Genderqueer / nonbinary people are not defined in terms of sexual orientation at all. Some genderqueer people's sexual attraction is not anchored in a sexual preference for one body type or another; other genderqueer people do have a sexual orientation that takes that into account, for instance, as one nb wrote, "I am attracted to female people, women or people on the masculine spectrum as long as they are not AMAB (assigned male at birth)". So a community of genderqueer / nb people would not constitute in its entirety of people who fall into the general category of folks to whom genderqueer /nb people are sexually attracted. On the other hand, being a gay guy doesn't mean every gay guy is attractive to you (or vice versa) either.

• Reciprocally, meanwhile, it is rare to nonexistent that a genderqueer or nb person expresses a sexual orientation that disprefers other genderqueer or nb people. There is no equivalent to a (traditional binary) transgender person's preference to "pass" in the cis world and be accepted there.


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