Imagine walking down the hall and encountering this argument:
BOB: I don't know what you folks are going on about. Look, there are two sexes, male and female. If you're female, you're a woman. If you're male, you're a man.
KIM: You're wrong. Sex isn't binary. People aren't just male or female. There are intersex people. That proves that gender is a lot more complicated than what you just said. There are a lot of different genders, not just two!
If I were the one walking down the hall and hearing this, I would want to tell them that they're both wrong. First off, sex isn't gender. Sex is your physical morphology. Gender is identity and role, all that social stuff.
If you were a person who basically agreed with Bob, you most likely wouldn't be here reading my blog. So I'm not going to waste your time and mine developing the counterarguments to Bob that you've already heard and can make as well as I can.
But to Kim, I would want to say: "We don't need it to be true that there are more than two sexes in order for our nonbinary gender identities to be valid. You shouldn't even bring up physical biological sex in this argument. It just confuses the issue. I've got all the parts that caused my mom's obstetrician to mark down that I was a male baby. I'm not remotely intersex. My body fits the textbook description of male. I'm femme, though. I'm all gal. I was never into that boy stuff, I always knew I was one of the girls. Saying that the plurality of binary physical sexes is what makes nonconforming gender identities valid implies that our gender identity isn't legit otherwise".
I do get crossways with transgender activists and nonbinary activists over this physical-body stuff on occasion. They'll sometimes respond to what I said about having conventional textbook-description male parts and saying I'm a male girl or a male femme with a burst of defensive anger: "Excuse me but having a penis doesn't make you male. Biological sex IS A MYTH! You shouldn't go around saying that having your set of physical parts makes you male because then you're saying that if I have a penis that makes me male, and honey don't start that shit with me, I have never been male. I was mistakenly assigned male at birth!"
But no, biological sex is not a myth. The notion that biological sex defines gender, that is a myth. The notion that everyone is supposed to be either male or female, and that anyone who isn't is an embarrassment who needs to be corrected surgically as soon as possible, that is a myth. But it is indeed one's physical bits that defines one's sex. So we need to discuss sexual physiology, even though it's not determinant of a person's gender identity. Or maybe precisely because it is not determinant of a person's gender identity.
Despite the existence of real intersex people, we are a sexually dimorphic species. In general, like most complex animal life forms, we're either male or we're female. Our species is not a species that reproduces through the interaction of three, five, or thirty-seven different sexes doing a wide variety of reproductive behaviors. It's a species that reproduces though the interaction of two fundamental body designs, and intersex people who reproduce don't really modify that fact. Nobody alive today or at any time in recorded human history gestated in an organ that was not a uterus. Nobody ever got their chromosomes from gametes that were neither sperm nor ova. There isn't a sex that is neither male nor female that produces sex chromosomes that are Z or W instead of being X or Y and which encode the sexual possibility of developing into a specific body that isn't male or female. You could write a great science fiction tale about a species that was like that, but that's a fictional and imaginary idea of intersex, not a real one. And since real intersex people exist, we should pay real attention to them for a minute instead of just using them as a rhetorical argument about how human biological sex is nonbinary.
Some intersex people are CAH (i.e, they have Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia). These are people whose sex-encoding genes are just like those of most people whose bodies present as female, but where a variation in the adrenal gland's behavior causes them to have a lot of the type of hormones that make a person's body take on male attributes. This adrenal gland behavior is caused by their genes, but not the ones on their sex chromosomes, so the biological roulette of what sperm's codes went into the egg isn't causing this. At birth, CAH people's bodies may be designated male. More problematic, their bodies are often recognized as intersex and the doctors reach for their sharp scalpels and whack away the offending phallic clitoris. This -- and not the rhetorical flourish of discarding the entire notion that biological sex exists at all -- is probably the most significant political concern of real-life intersex activists. To get doctors to quit doing this. To let CAH babies make their own decisions about their own bodies when they are old enough to do so.
Other intersex people are CAIS (i.e., they have Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome). These are people whose sex-encoding genes are just like those of most people whose bodies present as male, but other genes of theirs (not on their sex chromosomes but elsewhere in their genetic code) make their body unresponsive to the hormones that make the body take on male structures. So their bodies at the time of their birth will nearly always be designated female. Unlike the CAH people, they aren't at high risk for being carved up by surgeons when they're still infants, but at puberty they won't get periods; the fact that they have undescended testes (usually) instead of ovaries may be discovered, and even though they are old enough to voice an opinion, doctors sometimes pick up those sharp knives and cut out their testes without asking. Or the doctors may mislead the CAIS patient (and their parents, who typically have medical authority) about the risks and consequences. This is another of the intersex activists' political concerns, fully informed consent for CAIS intersex people.
CAH and CAIS intersex people can generally reproduce. But despite being intersex, the physical architecture and the chromosomal arrangement with which they participate is going to follow either a male textbook description or a female textbook description.
But what about intersex people who are neither XX nor XY at the genetic level?
The Turner pattern, where a person has a single X instead of two, also called XO configuration, creates a female-structured body with some modified shapes (shorter, broader chest, some differences in the face, and so on). They are often infertile. They don't tend to be designated anything other than female at the time of birth. A few do not have a uterus or ovaries. If they are able to reproduce, they do so with the structures and capabilities of female people, and their genetic contributions will work within the sexually dimorphic reproductive pattern like those of female people.
The Klinefelter pattern, where a person has an XXY configuration, creates a male-structured body with some mildly modified shapes. They are almost always designated male at birth. At puberty they may not develop secondary sex characteristics, or may develop them less strongly than other males.
There is an XYY pattern as well, the Jacobs pattern. They are almost always designated male at birth. There are some mild differences in body shape but it often goes undetected.
There are also mosaic situations, such as XO/XY where some of a person's cells have XO and others have XY. A person with this configuration may be born with a body that presents as typical female, typical male, or ambiguously intersex. Or even more rarely, there is XX/XY, the closest to the legend of hermaphrodite, wherein, depending on which cells in which part of the body have developed according to which structural patterns, may result in both ovaries AND testes developing. There is the theoretical possibility that a person could produce both viable sperm and viable ova and could therefore participate reproductively as a source of sperm and/or as the person providing the egg, but there's no case of this on record.
I haven't said anything about the political intersex considerations for people with these forms of intersex because I'm less familiar with them. Self-determination, certainly. The right to choose whether to receive supplemental hormones (or hormone blockers), the right to fully-informed consent not muddled by the outdated attitude that any variation needs to be hidden and "fixed", the attitude that difference is shameful and inferior and wrong.
The takeaway from intersex awareness is not that sexual dimorphism is an evil lie that supports the gender binary and the "anatomy is destiny" conservative belief systems, but that people who vary should have the right to make their own decisions about their own bodies, and should be regarded as normal variations, not sick pathologies.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Showing posts with label diversity versus community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diversity versus community. Show all posts
Monday, November 9, 2020
Saturday, October 17, 2020
BOOK REVIEW: Ciel, by Sophie Labelle
When I saw that Sophie Labelle, author-cartoonist of Assigned Male Comics, had published a book, I ordered a copy. It was described as featuring a gender nonconforming main character coping with high school, and I'm addicted to stories of how people formulate their unconventional gender identities and how they experience themselves during these formative years.
I wanted to see what Labelle would do with more space to expand into, the opportunity to dive deeper into things with more nuance and complexity than a four-panel strip provides.
(Ciel is NOT a graphic novel, by the way. It's concise at 188 pages but it's made up of text, just so you know).
The early part of the book left me feeling a little bit like everything about gender and identity was still being painted in primary colors, all platitudes and overly simplified viewpoints that imply more agreement among LGBTQIA people than actually exists. Labelle's Ciel refers to "another gender...than the one the doctors gave me at birth when they looked at my genitals (which are nobody's business, by the way!)" and goes on to complain that for children in many societies, "they're designated a girl or a boy, their room are painted a certain color, and they're given certain kinds of toys to play with".
But Sophie Labelle shifts to more politically complicated territory later on in the story. Tensions are explored around questions of sexual orientation and how they collide awkwardly with nonbinary gender identities, with characters such as Frank, who is involved with Ciel's best friend Stephie, a trans girl. Frank is starting to get facial hair and unclear on whether or not Stephie, who was assigned male, will also.
"You know, she wouldn't be any less a girl if she had a beard like a Viking, or an Adam's apple, or a low voice", Ciel tells him.
"But it would be a little weird."
"Why?"
"People might think I was going out with a guy, or something."
"And that would be a real tragedy, right?"
"That's not what I mean! Some of my friends say I'm gay becasue I'm going out with Stephie, and I don't care."
"Good."
This conversation gets Ciel wondering about facial hair. Ciel doesn't identify as a boy or a girl. And although Ciel is taking puberty hormone blockers, they're not firmly committed to continuing to do so.
Over and over again, the characters in Labelle's book, in pondering their own identities and their expressions of them, find themselves considering how they are viewed by others. It's an unavoidable part of identity. Sociologists sometimes call it "altercasting" — the act of assigning identities to other people. We all do it, not always with bad intentions, not always with narrowly limited categories, but even when we are aware of all this diversity, we still tend to listen and watch and then regard a person as a trans woman or a genderfluid nonbinary person or a lesbian trans girl or whatever. And we all also spend time and energy imagining how we are perceived, and we take it into account when choosing how to interact, how to present.
In Ciel's case, there is the matter of what name to use. The school's records have Ciel's proper name down as "Alessandro". Ciel is somewhat awkward about asking to be referred to as "Alessandra" instead, more comfortable about asking ahead of time than correcting a teacher who started using the other name. Ciel is even more open and out on their YouTube channel, where videos openly explore what it is like to be trans and gender-nonconforming.
That provokes the most polarized and antagonistically hostile reaction that Ciel experiences in the book — from another transgender person. A video blogger named Bettie Bobbie posts: "Hi everyboy! Today I watched a video that made me want to puke, about a gay boy who invented a gender for himself by saying he's neither a boy nor a girl...if you ask me, this video harms real trans people like me."
Sophie Labelle shows us that the world of LGBTQIA identities is intricate and that we struggle with identification and expression, and that there are hurt feelings and resentments and anger sometimes. This is honest and fair.
Through Ciel's tale, Labelle does a slow exploration of presentation by a gender nonconforming person (I would describe Ciel as genderfluid, myself, but the term isn't embraced in this story). Ciel's choice of clothing is presented as an internal dialog, facing the closet several mornings and deciding against the ostentatiously colorful apparel they're drawn to and instead putting on more drab and mundane garments. Only towards the end of the book does Labelle pull back and let us see that choice against the backdrop of Ciel's expectation of their classmates' attitudes and reactions.
Ciel, by Sophie Labelle, Second Story Press 2020 Toronto CA
https://secondstorypress.ca/kids/ciel
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I wanted to see what Labelle would do with more space to expand into, the opportunity to dive deeper into things with more nuance and complexity than a four-panel strip provides.
(Ciel is NOT a graphic novel, by the way. It's concise at 188 pages but it's made up of text, just so you know).
The early part of the book left me feeling a little bit like everything about gender and identity was still being painted in primary colors, all platitudes and overly simplified viewpoints that imply more agreement among LGBTQIA people than actually exists. Labelle's Ciel refers to "another gender...than the one the doctors gave me at birth when they looked at my genitals (which are nobody's business, by the way!)" and goes on to complain that for children in many societies, "they're designated a girl or a boy, their room are painted a certain color, and they're given certain kinds of toys to play with".
But Sophie Labelle shifts to more politically complicated territory later on in the story. Tensions are explored around questions of sexual orientation and how they collide awkwardly with nonbinary gender identities, with characters such as Frank, who is involved with Ciel's best friend Stephie, a trans girl. Frank is starting to get facial hair and unclear on whether or not Stephie, who was assigned male, will also.
"You know, she wouldn't be any less a girl if she had a beard like a Viking, or an Adam's apple, or a low voice", Ciel tells him.
"But it would be a little weird."
"Why?"
"People might think I was going out with a guy, or something."
"And that would be a real tragedy, right?"
"That's not what I mean! Some of my friends say I'm gay becasue I'm going out with Stephie, and I don't care."
"Good."
This conversation gets Ciel wondering about facial hair. Ciel doesn't identify as a boy or a girl. And although Ciel is taking puberty hormone blockers, they're not firmly committed to continuing to do so.
Over and over again, the characters in Labelle's book, in pondering their own identities and their expressions of them, find themselves considering how they are viewed by others. It's an unavoidable part of identity. Sociologists sometimes call it "altercasting" — the act of assigning identities to other people. We all do it, not always with bad intentions, not always with narrowly limited categories, but even when we are aware of all this diversity, we still tend to listen and watch and then regard a person as a trans woman or a genderfluid nonbinary person or a lesbian trans girl or whatever. And we all also spend time and energy imagining how we are perceived, and we take it into account when choosing how to interact, how to present.
In Ciel's case, there is the matter of what name to use. The school's records have Ciel's proper name down as "Alessandro". Ciel is somewhat awkward about asking to be referred to as "Alessandra" instead, more comfortable about asking ahead of time than correcting a teacher who started using the other name. Ciel is even more open and out on their YouTube channel, where videos openly explore what it is like to be trans and gender-nonconforming.
That provokes the most polarized and antagonistically hostile reaction that Ciel experiences in the book — from another transgender person. A video blogger named Bettie Bobbie posts: "Hi everyboy! Today I watched a video that made me want to puke, about a gay boy who invented a gender for himself by saying he's neither a boy nor a girl...if you ask me, this video harms real trans people like me."
Sophie Labelle shows us that the world of LGBTQIA identities is intricate and that we struggle with identification and expression, and that there are hurt feelings and resentments and anger sometimes. This is honest and fair.
Through Ciel's tale, Labelle does a slow exploration of presentation by a gender nonconforming person (I would describe Ciel as genderfluid, myself, but the term isn't embraced in this story). Ciel's choice of clothing is presented as an internal dialog, facing the closet several mornings and deciding against the ostentatiously colorful apparel they're drawn to and instead putting on more drab and mundane garments. Only towards the end of the book does Labelle pull back and let us see that choice against the backdrop of Ciel's expectation of their classmates' attitudes and reactions.
Ciel, by Sophie Labelle, Second Story Press 2020 Toronto CA
https://secondstorypress.ca/kids/ciel
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Monday, October 5, 2020
Gender-Critical, Transgender, Gender Inversion, & Transsexuality Conference
Hi! Want to moderate a discussion panel? Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to lead these four folks to some sort of accord, or, failing that, to moderate their debate fairly and give each one a chance to support their positions.
I'll let them introduce themselves as they deem appropriate --
Lillian: Hello, I'm Lillian. I'm a gender critical feminist. I'm 70. When I was young, I was part of the feminist second wave that attacked the notion that biology is destiny, that if you were born male you were designed to live *this* life but if you were female you were destined to live *that* life. As feminists, we indicted gender roles and gendered assumptions about people. Because they aren't necessary for the functioning of society -- except the unfair parts -- and they aren't good for us as individuals. They are restrictions! We opposed sexist double standards and sexist expectations and assumptions. Anyone might be a leader. Anyone might be a nurturant caregiver. Anyone might be a belligerent asshole. Anyone might be an empty-headed doll-person. None of that is due to whether you were born with a penis or a vagina! Sex polarization that divides us up into women and men is a tool of patriarchal oppression and it exists to the detriment of women. Women are oppressed. Now, me personally, when I was first in the women's movement, well, we were white and straight and didn't pay enough attention to other people's situation. But we've become more intersectional and we listen to black women's voices and the voices of women who come from poverty, disabled women, and other forms of additional marginalization. But first and foremost, society is a patriarchy; that's still the bottom line for me. If men don't like it, they're in charge so all they've got to do is stand down and change it and quit opposing us.
Sylvia: Well, I guess you could say I was also involved in attacking that 'biology is destiny' thing. Hey, everybody, I'm Sylvia. I am trans. Back when I was figuring that out, the word was 'transsexual', and that's still what I prefer to use, but I don't want to offend anybody. I had gender dysphoria, the body I was born with was not my destiny. It wasn't right for me, and I knew it from pretty much the time I was old enough to understand the difference between boys and girls. I know some of you younger folks say things differently, you'd say I was assigned male at birth. Well, I had to get myself unassigned, because my gender didn't match that assignment at all. I changed my body to match my gender. Now, I understand the notion that we ought to have equal attitudes to a person no matter if their body is male or female. Or whether it came with a penis on the front of it or a vagina instead, if you like that language better. I understand saying that what your body is like shouldn't matter and we shouldn't have sexist beliefs. But that's not the world I got to live in. Maybe someday society will be that way but not in my lifetime. Not in yours either, probably. Getting sex reassignment surgery was something I could get within a few years, and I did, and it has made it possible for me to live my life with people seeing me and treating me like who I am -- a woman -- and I don't see why anybody's got any cause for having a problem with that.
Jesse: My name's Jesse and my pronouns are he, him, his. I was assigned male at birth. When I was younger, there was an attitude that what you were supposed to do if your gender didn't match your designation was to go out and get hormones and surgery, and if you did that and you could *pass*, then you were authentically trans. Well, some of those surgeries are expensive and not everyone can afford them, and there's medical issues with procedures, and hormones too, and during my generation we pushed back against that elitist attitude. Because you don't need to have anything specific done to you to make your gender identity valid, okay? It's fine to get gender confirmation surgery if that's what you *want*, and you can afford it and it's safe for you and all that. What is *not* fine is to go around telling people they aren't trans enough if they don't, you hear what I'm saying? And I am a man. Trans men are men. Trans women are women. You body is not 'who you really are', so yeah count me in as well on kicking that 'biology is destiny' off the map. What's up with people deciding they get to decide who you are based on what's inside your underwear? That's creepy. Anyone with that attitude, go perv on someone else, all right? Meanwhile, I hear what you're saying about gender being confining, but it can also be liberating and you ought to think about that. There are strong notions about how to be a man that go beyond being an okay person, it's heroic and inspiring to connect with that. Women, too, womanhood is a powerful notion. I got nothing against people who want to be agender or whatever, but I like being a man.
Allan (me): I'm Allan. I never bought into all the junk that gets glued onto a male, beliefs and assumptions and all that, because I didn't get issued all that stuff along with the body in which I was born. I grew up with messages about what it means to be a man, and also messages about what it means if your body is male and you don't match that description. Feminism told me that was sexist and I could ignore it, so I did. Until I couldn't. The world was too much in my face about it to ignore. So I became an activist. And yeah, biology isn't destiny. I agree that gender has its positive uses. Androgyny means expecting everyone to be in the middle, like beige or something. I'm not androgynous, I'm femme. Meanwhile I understand about it being easier to change your body, or to just change your presentation, how you look to the world, to get folks to think of your body as the body that goes with your gender, so that they'll get your gender correct. But the world got in my face and I'm returning the favor, I don't want to pass, I want to take the fact that I am male but also feminine and shove that at people. My body is not the problem, it's people's notion that if your body is male that makes you a man, a masculine person. That's what's got to change. We don't change that by converting male people to female people so they can be correctly regarded as women. Damn right our gender identity is valid regardless of our body. That means I get to walk down the nude beach with my flat chest and facial hair and my penis bouncing against my testicles and that doesn't make me a man. I want to be accepted as femme without lipstick, corset, boobs, or tucking. And patriarchy is in my way. I don't care if you want to call me a feminist or what, but I'm in the struggle against patriarchal oppression for my own damn reasons. And, yeah, I get to call my body male. I don't need to believe that I'm female in order to validate my gender identity. That's the whole point. It's *not*, and yet I'm still as femme as anybody.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I'll let them introduce themselves as they deem appropriate --
Lillian: Hello, I'm Lillian. I'm a gender critical feminist. I'm 70. When I was young, I was part of the feminist second wave that attacked the notion that biology is destiny, that if you were born male you were designed to live *this* life but if you were female you were destined to live *that* life. As feminists, we indicted gender roles and gendered assumptions about people. Because they aren't necessary for the functioning of society -- except the unfair parts -- and they aren't good for us as individuals. They are restrictions! We opposed sexist double standards and sexist expectations and assumptions. Anyone might be a leader. Anyone might be a nurturant caregiver. Anyone might be a belligerent asshole. Anyone might be an empty-headed doll-person. None of that is due to whether you were born with a penis or a vagina! Sex polarization that divides us up into women and men is a tool of patriarchal oppression and it exists to the detriment of women. Women are oppressed. Now, me personally, when I was first in the women's movement, well, we were white and straight and didn't pay enough attention to other people's situation. But we've become more intersectional and we listen to black women's voices and the voices of women who come from poverty, disabled women, and other forms of additional marginalization. But first and foremost, society is a patriarchy; that's still the bottom line for me. If men don't like it, they're in charge so all they've got to do is stand down and change it and quit opposing us.
Sylvia: Well, I guess you could say I was also involved in attacking that 'biology is destiny' thing. Hey, everybody, I'm Sylvia. I am trans. Back when I was figuring that out, the word was 'transsexual', and that's still what I prefer to use, but I don't want to offend anybody. I had gender dysphoria, the body I was born with was not my destiny. It wasn't right for me, and I knew it from pretty much the time I was old enough to understand the difference between boys and girls. I know some of you younger folks say things differently, you'd say I was assigned male at birth. Well, I had to get myself unassigned, because my gender didn't match that assignment at all. I changed my body to match my gender. Now, I understand the notion that we ought to have equal attitudes to a person no matter if their body is male or female. Or whether it came with a penis on the front of it or a vagina instead, if you like that language better. I understand saying that what your body is like shouldn't matter and we shouldn't have sexist beliefs. But that's not the world I got to live in. Maybe someday society will be that way but not in my lifetime. Not in yours either, probably. Getting sex reassignment surgery was something I could get within a few years, and I did, and it has made it possible for me to live my life with people seeing me and treating me like who I am -- a woman -- and I don't see why anybody's got any cause for having a problem with that.
Jesse: My name's Jesse and my pronouns are he, him, his. I was assigned male at birth. When I was younger, there was an attitude that what you were supposed to do if your gender didn't match your designation was to go out and get hormones and surgery, and if you did that and you could *pass*, then you were authentically trans. Well, some of those surgeries are expensive and not everyone can afford them, and there's medical issues with procedures, and hormones too, and during my generation we pushed back against that elitist attitude. Because you don't need to have anything specific done to you to make your gender identity valid, okay? It's fine to get gender confirmation surgery if that's what you *want*, and you can afford it and it's safe for you and all that. What is *not* fine is to go around telling people they aren't trans enough if they don't, you hear what I'm saying? And I am a man. Trans men are men. Trans women are women. You body is not 'who you really are', so yeah count me in as well on kicking that 'biology is destiny' off the map. What's up with people deciding they get to decide who you are based on what's inside your underwear? That's creepy. Anyone with that attitude, go perv on someone else, all right? Meanwhile, I hear what you're saying about gender being confining, but it can also be liberating and you ought to think about that. There are strong notions about how to be a man that go beyond being an okay person, it's heroic and inspiring to connect with that. Women, too, womanhood is a powerful notion. I got nothing against people who want to be agender or whatever, but I like being a man.
Allan (me): I'm Allan. I never bought into all the junk that gets glued onto a male, beliefs and assumptions and all that, because I didn't get issued all that stuff along with the body in which I was born. I grew up with messages about what it means to be a man, and also messages about what it means if your body is male and you don't match that description. Feminism told me that was sexist and I could ignore it, so I did. Until I couldn't. The world was too much in my face about it to ignore. So I became an activist. And yeah, biology isn't destiny. I agree that gender has its positive uses. Androgyny means expecting everyone to be in the middle, like beige or something. I'm not androgynous, I'm femme. Meanwhile I understand about it being easier to change your body, or to just change your presentation, how you look to the world, to get folks to think of your body as the body that goes with your gender, so that they'll get your gender correct. But the world got in my face and I'm returning the favor, I don't want to pass, I want to take the fact that I am male but also feminine and shove that at people. My body is not the problem, it's people's notion that if your body is male that makes you a man, a masculine person. That's what's got to change. We don't change that by converting male people to female people so they can be correctly regarded as women. Damn right our gender identity is valid regardless of our body. That means I get to walk down the nude beach with my flat chest and facial hair and my penis bouncing against my testicles and that doesn't make me a man. I want to be accepted as femme without lipstick, corset, boobs, or tucking. And patriarchy is in my way. I don't care if you want to call me a feminist or what, but I'm in the struggle against patriarchal oppression for my own damn reasons. And, yeah, I get to call my body male. I don't need to believe that I'm female in order to validate my gender identity. That's the whole point. It's *not*, and yet I'm still as femme as anybody.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, September 12, 2020
Review / Interview in QueerPGH!
"...the book has some problematic aspects, and may be at odds with some of our queer values today. This seems to be by design, conveying a much different world for queer people."
— Rachel Lange, Senior Editor, QueerPGH
If you were ever part of a children's classroom drama group or were in a choir or rock band as a 4th grader, you may have encountered the "review that isn't really a review". The kind where the writer discusses how adorable your group was and how earnest you all were up there on that stage, and how cute your costumes were. The names of the lead singers or the performers in the primary roles are all dutifully mentioned, and the writer will generally find some nice things to say about the precision of the delivery or how nicely all in tune you were. But you don't get scathing criticism or a pointed comment on how your group chose to stage it, because the writer figures that no one goes to those things to hear the music or watch the dramatic tale unfold.
So-called "third party" politicians often get the same treatment when they run for office. If they get interviewed and covered at all, the questions are softball questions: "Tell me about your main issues", or "What made you decide to run for office?"; the interviewer rarely probes the marginal candidate's most politically vulnerable spot to see if the candidate has a good answer, like "You say you would close the town widget factory because of the toxicity levels. Seven hundred local citizens have jobs there; what's going to happen to them? And where will the airplane industry get their greasy widgets from, won't the cost of air travel jump through the roof if you do that?" They don't ask because the writer doesn't assume it matters to the voters, because this candidate isn't going to win the election anyway so who cares?
Rachel Lange of the queer publication QueerPGH apparently takes me seriously. Not only that I have something to say to the LGBTQIA community but that people might pay attention to it, that it might have some impact. In her interview with me, she asked some of the most provocative and probing questions I've faced.
She isn't wrong in her summary statement: I wrote GenderQueer not to add my voice to the chorus of voices that were already out there, but to add a different voice. To tell a story about an identity that was not already being explained and given a name. And she's quite right—I have often found myself at odds with activists who represent some of the other shades of the queer coalition rainbow, because some of the concepts they use are injurious to the identity I'm writing about. Some of the rhetoric they like to use erases people like me. I'm not unaware of the existing social dialog, so in rising to my feet to present my tale, my dissent with them is indeed by design. Not that I'm out to antagonize or deliberately cause dissent in the community, but because that erasure of which I spoke needs to end. I'm not out to negate anyone else's identity, and I hope readers of my book will see that. But I very much appreciate the candor and seriousness of the questions.
Book Review: Gender Queer: A Story from a Different Closet
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, September 5, 2020
Umbrella
Several times in several different groups somebody has asked about the difference between "transgender" and "genderqueer" and "nonbinary" and then somebody else has posted something like this:
I don't like that illustration.
So what's my problem with it?
I identify as genderqueer and I do not identify as transgender, and that umbrella diagram sticks me into that category whether I like it or not. That diagram creates a hierarchy in which all genderqueer people are transgender (but not vice versa). That means that any statement that transgender people make on behalf of all trans people is going to be considered to apply to me and other people like me. Because we're defined as being under that umbrella.
Let's look at some of the broad all-inclusive statements that many transgender people have made, shall we?
a) A person's gender identity is valid regardless of their physical anatomy. You don't have to have a medical transition in order for your gender identity to be valid. You don't have to "pass" in order for your gender identity to be valid
Well, that one is wonderful, I'm totally on-board with that! It used to be that society's understanding of what it meant to be trans was that you went out and got yourself a medical transition to make your physical anatomy correspond with your gender identity. And that certainly didn't describe me! So this is a good change, a good shift. The problem is with additional assumptions and assertions that they very often attach to that, such as
b) A person's physical anatomy is not a polite topic of consideration. Anatomy is utterly irrelevant to identity and nobody's business. It's totally inappropriate to be identifying a person on the basis of what's inside their underpants
and...
c) You should not use any anatomy-based terms except to refer to the binary sex assignment that our society coercively attributes people to at birth. If someone identifies as a woman or girl, you would be misgendering them if you did not consider them female; if someone identifies as a man or boy, to not regard them as fully male is transphobic and misgendering also
and...
d) Any insistence that sex and gender are two different things is politically offensive and based on wrong out-of-date science that is now disproven. There's no such thing as "biological sex" because intersex people exist and there are multitudes of body variation from chromosomes to organ structures, so the binary is just a social construct and there is no physical sex.
Well, let's unpack some of that. (Because we don't all wear the same packers in here, okay?) In reverse order, my intersex-activist buddies do want to make a distinction between sex and gender. It's important to them and they're tired of "intersex" being used as an argument for why "biological sex doesn't exist" and otherwise ignored. Intersex people have bodies. They have bodies that other people found embarrassingly different. So embarrassing that they often coercively assigned their bodies to male or female with a surgeon's knife, without their consent. Intersex people can't discuss the fact that their body differed at birth from the body of either male people or female people if "male" refers to gender identity instead of physical sex. Intersex people can't identify themselves if people in society are confused and say things like "Oh me too, I've always had a female side, I wanted to dance ballet instead of play baseball". I'm not intersex myself, but I can't even explain that I'm not intersex if the language doesn't let me explain that although I was never a boy or man, my physical configuration wasn't unusual for male people. That it's my gender that's queer, that my sex falls into normative classifications.
I identify as a femme or girl. But unlike Teresa, my transgender sister, I would not be misgendered if you called me male. Teresa would be; she'd find it insulting and demeaning. She identifies as a woman and definitely female. But I'm not Teresa. I identify as male. I identify as femme or girl. My sex and my gender don't match. I'm genderqueer. And if you're going to raise a giant umbrella over my head and say we're all transgender, you can't go around making blanket statements that support Teresa's identity but erase mine.
If it is no longer necessary to "pass", to look like a typical cisgender person of your same gender, then it should not matter if people do make some guesses about what's inside my underwear. Because no matter what's in there, we already agreed that it doesn't invalidate my gender identity, right? So it doesn't have to be kept a shameful secret. I've got the anatomy that most directly caused my mom's obstetrician to designate me as "male". It's an unfortunate social fact that the same anatomy also caused my birth announcements to incorrectly tell everyone "It's a boy!", but the "male" part wasn't wrong and I have no reason to hide it. I was a male girl. Perfectly queer and not typical, and quite healthy and happy with that, thank you.
I propose this umbrella instead:
Notice that under this umbrella, several terms appear in multiple places. Because some genderqueer people do identify as transgender, whereas some do not; similarly some nonbinary people identify as transgender and others do not, and some nonbinary people consider themselves genderqueer while others do not, and vice versa and so on.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I don't like that illustration.
So what's my problem with it?
I identify as genderqueer and I do not identify as transgender, and that umbrella diagram sticks me into that category whether I like it or not. That diagram creates a hierarchy in which all genderqueer people are transgender (but not vice versa). That means that any statement that transgender people make on behalf of all trans people is going to be considered to apply to me and other people like me. Because we're defined as being under that umbrella.
Let's look at some of the broad all-inclusive statements that many transgender people have made, shall we?
a) A person's gender identity is valid regardless of their physical anatomy. You don't have to have a medical transition in order for your gender identity to be valid. You don't have to "pass" in order for your gender identity to be valid
Well, that one is wonderful, I'm totally on-board with that! It used to be that society's understanding of what it meant to be trans was that you went out and got yourself a medical transition to make your physical anatomy correspond with your gender identity. And that certainly didn't describe me! So this is a good change, a good shift. The problem is with additional assumptions and assertions that they very often attach to that, such as
b) A person's physical anatomy is not a polite topic of consideration. Anatomy is utterly irrelevant to identity and nobody's business. It's totally inappropriate to be identifying a person on the basis of what's inside their underpants
and...
c) You should not use any anatomy-based terms except to refer to the binary sex assignment that our society coercively attributes people to at birth. If someone identifies as a woman or girl, you would be misgendering them if you did not consider them female; if someone identifies as a man or boy, to not regard them as fully male is transphobic and misgendering also
and...
d) Any insistence that sex and gender are two different things is politically offensive and based on wrong out-of-date science that is now disproven. There's no such thing as "biological sex" because intersex people exist and there are multitudes of body variation from chromosomes to organ structures, so the binary is just a social construct and there is no physical sex.
Well, let's unpack some of that. (Because we don't all wear the same packers in here, okay?) In reverse order, my intersex-activist buddies do want to make a distinction between sex and gender. It's important to them and they're tired of "intersex" being used as an argument for why "biological sex doesn't exist" and otherwise ignored. Intersex people have bodies. They have bodies that other people found embarrassingly different. So embarrassing that they often coercively assigned their bodies to male or female with a surgeon's knife, without their consent. Intersex people can't discuss the fact that their body differed at birth from the body of either male people or female people if "male" refers to gender identity instead of physical sex. Intersex people can't identify themselves if people in society are confused and say things like "Oh me too, I've always had a female side, I wanted to dance ballet instead of play baseball". I'm not intersex myself, but I can't even explain that I'm not intersex if the language doesn't let me explain that although I was never a boy or man, my physical configuration wasn't unusual for male people. That it's my gender that's queer, that my sex falls into normative classifications.
I identify as a femme or girl. But unlike Teresa, my transgender sister, I would not be misgendered if you called me male. Teresa would be; she'd find it insulting and demeaning. She identifies as a woman and definitely female. But I'm not Teresa. I identify as male. I identify as femme or girl. My sex and my gender don't match. I'm genderqueer. And if you're going to raise a giant umbrella over my head and say we're all transgender, you can't go around making blanket statements that support Teresa's identity but erase mine.
If it is no longer necessary to "pass", to look like a typical cisgender person of your same gender, then it should not matter if people do make some guesses about what's inside my underwear. Because no matter what's in there, we already agreed that it doesn't invalidate my gender identity, right? So it doesn't have to be kept a shameful secret. I've got the anatomy that most directly caused my mom's obstetrician to designate me as "male". It's an unfortunate social fact that the same anatomy also caused my birth announcements to incorrectly tell everyone "It's a boy!", but the "male" part wasn't wrong and I have no reason to hide it. I was a male girl. Perfectly queer and not typical, and quite healthy and happy with that, thank you.
I propose this umbrella instead:
Notice that under this umbrella, several terms appear in multiple places. Because some genderqueer people do identify as transgender, whereas some do not; similarly some nonbinary people identify as transgender and others do not, and some nonbinary people consider themselves genderqueer while others do not, and vice versa and so on.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Friday, July 17, 2020
Hey, Sister...
Hey, sister, got a moment? Any chance we can reconcile?
You find it bewildering that as a femme-identifying person, I refer to myself as male. You find it appalling and maybe even transphobic when I explain that what I mean when I say I'm "male" is that I was born with a set of physical equipment that, in our culture, has historically been designated "male", although many other people (perhaps including you) may have this same set of bodily components and call those physical structures something other than "male".
You say "Why can't you just call it a penis? A penis isn't male. It's just a penis! Girls can have a penis. Boys can have a vulva".
Well, yeah, I know girls can have a penis. I'm a girl and I've got one. Are we both cool and totally down with the notion that having a penis doesn't define our gender? Can we please have a little moment of peace and solidarity and not be quick to hate on each other for using language a bit differently, and for coming at this situation from different angles?
You identify as transgender. I don't. That means you're a part of a subculture, a community; and you folks, collectively, you got your own way of expressing things, and you also got your own history. Let's talk about the history thing for a sec.
I'm 61; forty years ago, when I was 21 and first coming out, trans people explained the situation to the larger surrounding culture like this: trans people realized at some point in their life that their gender was the gender typically found in the other type of body, and so they'd ideally get hormones and surgery and transition, so that their body would match their gender. And what they said they wanted from the surrounding world was to be accepted as a normal and ordinary person of that gender and that sex. And most trans people wanted to "pass" — they didn't want to receive social acceptance only from a handful of people who heard their life story and learned about transsexuals and all that, but instead they wanted to look and otherwise present in such a way that strangers who didn't know them would just automatically treat them as the gender that they were.
Fast forward to the more-or-less present era. Trans activists interact with lots of transgender people who can't afford hormones and surgery even if they want them, and lots of people who are blocked from having access to the medical interventions they want because doctors and insurance companies are playing gatekeeper. They also interact with a lot of transgender people who don't want the whole package of medical options for a variety of reasons. There's a risk of significant loss of sensation and function when doctors rearrange biological tissue, and there are systemic repercussions to hormones with risk factors and so on and so forth.
Well, it's really fundamentally a human rights issue that the body you inhabit should not detract from the legitimacy of your gender identity. So the social message changed, to become a lot more inclusive. You were valid as a trans person (woman or man) whether you passed or did not pass, and, in fact, fuck "pass". Identities are what are valid; your body doesn't matter! And they didn't use "male" and "female" to refer to bodily architecture because that can imply to some trans people that they've got the wrong body for their gender identity.
I apologize if I've misrepresented the transgender movement and its history in that short summary. I'm writing from the outside. I try to learn and listen but if I've distorted things, I'm sorry, but I hope I mostly got it right.
I'm not trans. I heard the 40-years-ago version of what trans was, gave it some thought, decided nope, that's not me. It's something else. I haven't been a part of your community these 40 years.
So I've got a different history, with different understandings and stuff. I'm hoping you'll be compassionate and interested in a story that's different from yours, so you can see how I got to my viewpoint, ok?
I came out in 1980 as a sissy. A person in a male body whose personality and behavior were a mismatch for what's expected of male people, but a good match for the expectations for female people. I did not want to be perceived as an ordinary typical female person any more than I wanted to be perceived as an ordinary male person. I wanted to be perceived as what I'd been harassed about and accused of all my life: an effeminate sissy girlish male person. The world apparently thought I should be ashamed of that, but I was proud of it. And I was finally angry about it and ready to take a stand. To be in your face about it. Yeah, I'm male, and I'm one of the girls. Get used to it. Deal.
My attitude is that until the world nods in agreement that yeah, male girls exist and no, it's not a damn affliction or an embarrassment, a failure to be sufficiently manly... until then, there's always going to be this notion that if you're perceived and recognized as a male-bodied person, you'll be regarded as less of a man than a masculine man and less of a woman than a physically female-structured person who has boobs and vag and all that.
Not only don't I want to pass, I want to "anti-pass". I want, as I said, to be up in people's face about the lack of correspondence between my body and my gender identity. You've got a male girl here. Flying pride flags about it, no less, got that?
So... you don't use "male" to refer to physical stuff like testicles and penis. You basically use "male" to mean the same thing as "man" and "boy" and so on. I, on the other hand, do use it to mean the physical stuff. My attitude is we've already got plenty of gender words ("man", "boy", "masculine", "feminine", "guy", "dude", "gal", etc), and the word "male" is historically about the raw physical architecture (including other species and also things like hose couplings and electrical plugs), so why can't we keep that word for sex and use existing gender words for gender? This isn't about invalidating anybody's gender identity, it's really not. Yeesh, do I sound like J. K. fucking Rowling here? Seriously?
You ask "Well, why can't you just call it a penis, why do you have to say male?". I say "I want a goddam adjective. An already-recognized adjective to describe me as a person-with-penis-and-associated-bits. I don't want to use a long klunky phrase like 'person with a penis and testicles and adam's apple and absence of a vulva and clitoris and breasts, person who happens to be dyadic or endosex as opposed to intersex and most likely has XY chromosomes and doesn't have a period and has spermatotrophic hormone and a vas deferens'".
If I don't specify that when I say "male" I'm talking about my plumbing and not my personality and inclinations, people often assume I'm saying I have a "male side and a female side", like genderfluid or bigender people. Which isn't it at all. I'm not less feminine than you are. I'm not less male than a rooster. I'm not in-between, either sexually (as intersex people may consider themselves to be) or genderwise. I'm solidly male and utterly feminine.
I'm talking about mine. MY parts. I'm not calling your parts male. I'm calling my parts male.
Not everybody is either male or female, just as not everybody who is male is a man and not everybody who is female is a woman. But the fact that sex isn't binary doesn't mean sex doesn't exist. By the way, intersex people can't talk about being intersex — and distinguish intersex from being nonbinary or intergender or genderfluid or whatever — if they can't talk about bodies and why their atypical body has marked them as different and marginalized them. Most of the intersex activists I know really want to distinguish sex from gender. Because otherwise they get erased.
In a similar way, I can't do the political activity of getting in people's face about being a male girl if I can't say "male girl" and can't talk about the body that caused my girlness to be perceived as something wrong and in need of fixing, or as reason to provoke dismissive contempt.
I personally identify as genderqueer and, more specifically, as a gender invert. I'm a speaker, a blogger, and an author. I just got a book published (and BTW you should read it if you have any appetite for coming-of-age / coming-out stories). I'm not going to go away or shut up.
Does this help?
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
You find it bewildering that as a femme-identifying person, I refer to myself as male. You find it appalling and maybe even transphobic when I explain that what I mean when I say I'm "male" is that I was born with a set of physical equipment that, in our culture, has historically been designated "male", although many other people (perhaps including you) may have this same set of bodily components and call those physical structures something other than "male".
You say "Why can't you just call it a penis? A penis isn't male. It's just a penis! Girls can have a penis. Boys can have a vulva".
Well, yeah, I know girls can have a penis. I'm a girl and I've got one. Are we both cool and totally down with the notion that having a penis doesn't define our gender? Can we please have a little moment of peace and solidarity and not be quick to hate on each other for using language a bit differently, and for coming at this situation from different angles?
You identify as transgender. I don't. That means you're a part of a subculture, a community; and you folks, collectively, you got your own way of expressing things, and you also got your own history. Let's talk about the history thing for a sec.
I'm 61; forty years ago, when I was 21 and first coming out, trans people explained the situation to the larger surrounding culture like this: trans people realized at some point in their life that their gender was the gender typically found in the other type of body, and so they'd ideally get hormones and surgery and transition, so that their body would match their gender. And what they said they wanted from the surrounding world was to be accepted as a normal and ordinary person of that gender and that sex. And most trans people wanted to "pass" — they didn't want to receive social acceptance only from a handful of people who heard their life story and learned about transsexuals and all that, but instead they wanted to look and otherwise present in such a way that strangers who didn't know them would just automatically treat them as the gender that they were.
Fast forward to the more-or-less present era. Trans activists interact with lots of transgender people who can't afford hormones and surgery even if they want them, and lots of people who are blocked from having access to the medical interventions they want because doctors and insurance companies are playing gatekeeper. They also interact with a lot of transgender people who don't want the whole package of medical options for a variety of reasons. There's a risk of significant loss of sensation and function when doctors rearrange biological tissue, and there are systemic repercussions to hormones with risk factors and so on and so forth.
Well, it's really fundamentally a human rights issue that the body you inhabit should not detract from the legitimacy of your gender identity. So the social message changed, to become a lot more inclusive. You were valid as a trans person (woman or man) whether you passed or did not pass, and, in fact, fuck "pass". Identities are what are valid; your body doesn't matter! And they didn't use "male" and "female" to refer to bodily architecture because that can imply to some trans people that they've got the wrong body for their gender identity.
I apologize if I've misrepresented the transgender movement and its history in that short summary. I'm writing from the outside. I try to learn and listen but if I've distorted things, I'm sorry, but I hope I mostly got it right.
I'm not trans. I heard the 40-years-ago version of what trans was, gave it some thought, decided nope, that's not me. It's something else. I haven't been a part of your community these 40 years.
So I've got a different history, with different understandings and stuff. I'm hoping you'll be compassionate and interested in a story that's different from yours, so you can see how I got to my viewpoint, ok?
I came out in 1980 as a sissy. A person in a male body whose personality and behavior were a mismatch for what's expected of male people, but a good match for the expectations for female people. I did not want to be perceived as an ordinary typical female person any more than I wanted to be perceived as an ordinary male person. I wanted to be perceived as what I'd been harassed about and accused of all my life: an effeminate sissy girlish male person. The world apparently thought I should be ashamed of that, but I was proud of it. And I was finally angry about it and ready to take a stand. To be in your face about it. Yeah, I'm male, and I'm one of the girls. Get used to it. Deal.
My attitude is that until the world nods in agreement that yeah, male girls exist and no, it's not a damn affliction or an embarrassment, a failure to be sufficiently manly... until then, there's always going to be this notion that if you're perceived and recognized as a male-bodied person, you'll be regarded as less of a man than a masculine man and less of a woman than a physically female-structured person who has boobs and vag and all that.
Not only don't I want to pass, I want to "anti-pass". I want, as I said, to be up in people's face about the lack of correspondence between my body and my gender identity. You've got a male girl here. Flying pride flags about it, no less, got that?
So... you don't use "male" to refer to physical stuff like testicles and penis. You basically use "male" to mean the same thing as "man" and "boy" and so on. I, on the other hand, do use it to mean the physical stuff. My attitude is we've already got plenty of gender words ("man", "boy", "masculine", "feminine", "guy", "dude", "gal", etc), and the word "male" is historically about the raw physical architecture (including other species and also things like hose couplings and electrical plugs), so why can't we keep that word for sex and use existing gender words for gender? This isn't about invalidating anybody's gender identity, it's really not. Yeesh, do I sound like J. K. fucking Rowling here? Seriously?
You ask "Well, why can't you just call it a penis, why do you have to say male?". I say "I want a goddam adjective. An already-recognized adjective to describe me as a person-with-penis-and-associated-bits. I don't want to use a long klunky phrase like 'person with a penis and testicles and adam's apple and absence of a vulva and clitoris and breasts, person who happens to be dyadic or endosex as opposed to intersex and most likely has XY chromosomes and doesn't have a period and has spermatotrophic hormone and a vas deferens'".
If I don't specify that when I say "male" I'm talking about my plumbing and not my personality and inclinations, people often assume I'm saying I have a "male side and a female side", like genderfluid or bigender people. Which isn't it at all. I'm not less feminine than you are. I'm not less male than a rooster. I'm not in-between, either sexually (as intersex people may consider themselves to be) or genderwise. I'm solidly male and utterly feminine.
I'm talking about mine. MY parts. I'm not calling your parts male. I'm calling my parts male.
Not everybody is either male or female, just as not everybody who is male is a man and not everybody who is female is a woman. But the fact that sex isn't binary doesn't mean sex doesn't exist. By the way, intersex people can't talk about being intersex — and distinguish intersex from being nonbinary or intergender or genderfluid or whatever — if they can't talk about bodies and why their atypical body has marked them as different and marginalized them. Most of the intersex activists I know really want to distinguish sex from gender. Because otherwise they get erased.
In a similar way, I can't do the political activity of getting in people's face about being a male girl if I can't say "male girl" and can't talk about the body that caused my girlness to be perceived as something wrong and in need of fixing, or as reason to provoke dismissive contempt.
I personally identify as genderqueer and, more specifically, as a gender invert. I'm a speaker, a blogger, and an author. I just got a book published (and BTW you should read it if you have any appetite for coming-of-age / coming-out stories). I'm not going to go away or shut up.
Does this help?
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, July 11, 2020
Diversity Versus Community
Content warning: discussion of body parts (mostly in the abstract)
I called them "boy parts" when I was little. We were in kindergarten, first grade. To be honest we kids were kind of obsessed with sexual difference. We talked about it a lot. But I was one of the girls. I was a girl with boy parts. I wasn't entirely unique. One of the people I played with during recess, Clea, was a boy with girl parts.
If we showed up in your Facebook group and introduced ourselves the way we understood ourselves back then, would you embrace us, or would you attack us for being insensitive to people who don't consider those parts to be "boy parts" or "girl parts" and invalidating other people's identities, and not using the phrases that have been embraced as the most appropriate and least offensive ones and so forth?
Last week I put up a blog post: femininity versus femaleness. It generated mixed feedback, with lots of Facebook "likes" and a handful of people posting praise for what I'd said, saying that they'd been trying to put those sentiments into words for a long long time, or explaining how their personal experiences meshed with what I was saying. But with a lot of other people saying they found it transphobic, insulting, binary in a reductionistic sense, oppressive.
I was *kicked out* of one Facebook group, as if I'd planted a post that was so offensive that it demanded banning me. Nonbinary Femmes. A group I've been a part of for six years, posting at least one a week. In another group, my post was locked to further comments and I was afraid I was about to be banned there as well, although in the long run they only demanded that I place a content warning.
Honestly, what was more disturbing to me was how many people in groups I've been an ongoing participant in were so quick to respond with short and judgmental dismissals:
"No".
"TERF puke"
"What a load of internalized transphobia"
and of course: "Why hasn't a moderator done something about this shit?"
Considering how long I've been posting and participating, I'm stung that so many people wouldn't give me the benefit of the doubt, not necessarily agreeing with me but at least not being quick to believe that I'm a biased hate-monger!
I don't think we've created safe spaces. That may have been our intention, but we've become so quick to trigger when someone uses a phrase or term that the general consensus has shifted against using that one person's need to be kept safe from being upset becomes another person's feeling that they have to walk on eggshells.
The problem with general consensus is that we aren't all alike. We come here from different experiences. Some of us call ourselves "transgender"; some say "nonbinary"; some "genderqueer"; we also have intersex and gay and lesbian and bisexual and pansexual and other kinds of queer folks here. We value diversity, yeah? Well, then, we can't be going around with an attitude like "This is the party line, everyone in here has to have this opinion on this issue, that opinion on that issue, has to believe this, has to agree with this other thing, or you don't belong in here!". Because sometimes some of those established consensus beliefs conflict with the needs of some of our identities.
The centerpoint in this case was whether or not body parts (however you refer to them) and gender are, or are not, two different things, and how to talk about them separately. Yeah, I know a lot of transgender people in particular have had their gender identity invalidated by people emphasizing genitals. Yeah, I know that not everyone wishes to transition, and that not everyone who'd like to can afford it anyway, and that it's important not to make people feel like they are less authentic if they don't.
But there are other people in here, in our community, who find it necessary to distinguish between sex and gender and sometimes we are going to refer to our own body parts in the course of explaining our marginalized queer identities.
Some of us are intersex people. Me, I'm a gender invert. If you don't understand our reasons for drawing attention to our genital configurations, that shows how much teaching we still need to do.
If you think there is an LGBTQIA consensus that nobody gets to say that sex isn't the same thing as gender—or that there should be—consider yourself notified that consensus on that issue has not been reached and some of us are not on board with that.
Diversity has to include diversity of viewpoint.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I called them "boy parts" when I was little. We were in kindergarten, first grade. To be honest we kids were kind of obsessed with sexual difference. We talked about it a lot. But I was one of the girls. I was a girl with boy parts. I wasn't entirely unique. One of the people I played with during recess, Clea, was a boy with girl parts.
If we showed up in your Facebook group and introduced ourselves the way we understood ourselves back then, would you embrace us, or would you attack us for being insensitive to people who don't consider those parts to be "boy parts" or "girl parts" and invalidating other people's identities, and not using the phrases that have been embraced as the most appropriate and least offensive ones and so forth?
Last week I put up a blog post: femininity versus femaleness. It generated mixed feedback, with lots of Facebook "likes" and a handful of people posting praise for what I'd said, saying that they'd been trying to put those sentiments into words for a long long time, or explaining how their personal experiences meshed with what I was saying. But with a lot of other people saying they found it transphobic, insulting, binary in a reductionistic sense, oppressive.
I was *kicked out* of one Facebook group, as if I'd planted a post that was so offensive that it demanded banning me. Nonbinary Femmes. A group I've been a part of for six years, posting at least one a week. In another group, my post was locked to further comments and I was afraid I was about to be banned there as well, although in the long run they only demanded that I place a content warning.
Honestly, what was more disturbing to me was how many people in groups I've been an ongoing participant in were so quick to respond with short and judgmental dismissals:
"No".
"TERF puke"
"What a load of internalized transphobia"
and of course: "Why hasn't a moderator done something about this shit?"
Considering how long I've been posting and participating, I'm stung that so many people wouldn't give me the benefit of the doubt, not necessarily agreeing with me but at least not being quick to believe that I'm a biased hate-monger!
I don't think we've created safe spaces. That may have been our intention, but we've become so quick to trigger when someone uses a phrase or term that the general consensus has shifted against using that one person's need to be kept safe from being upset becomes another person's feeling that they have to walk on eggshells.
The problem with general consensus is that we aren't all alike. We come here from different experiences. Some of us call ourselves "transgender"; some say "nonbinary"; some "genderqueer"; we also have intersex and gay and lesbian and bisexual and pansexual and other kinds of queer folks here. We value diversity, yeah? Well, then, we can't be going around with an attitude like "This is the party line, everyone in here has to have this opinion on this issue, that opinion on that issue, has to believe this, has to agree with this other thing, or you don't belong in here!". Because sometimes some of those established consensus beliefs conflict with the needs of some of our identities.
The centerpoint in this case was whether or not body parts (however you refer to them) and gender are, or are not, two different things, and how to talk about them separately. Yeah, I know a lot of transgender people in particular have had their gender identity invalidated by people emphasizing genitals. Yeah, I know that not everyone wishes to transition, and that not everyone who'd like to can afford it anyway, and that it's important not to make people feel like they are less authentic if they don't.
But there are other people in here, in our community, who find it necessary to distinguish between sex and gender and sometimes we are going to refer to our own body parts in the course of explaining our marginalized queer identities.
Some of us are intersex people. Me, I'm a gender invert. If you don't understand our reasons for drawing attention to our genital configurations, that shows how much teaching we still need to do.
If you think there is an LGBTQIA consensus that nobody gets to say that sex isn't the same thing as gender—or that there should be—consider yourself notified that consensus on that issue has not been reached and some of us are not on board with that.
Diversity has to include diversity of viewpoint.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, July 4, 2020
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
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, April 18, 2020
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
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
Saturday, April 11, 2020
Identify and Identification
Just a couple decades ago, even the people at your local Stonewall Center didn't have concepts that recognized your identity. Does the LGBTQIA++ community do so now? Do you assume we've "arrived" now and know all the identities that exist?
Of course we don't. A moment's consideration of the question should tell you that. Every year there are new terms, new expressions, new explanations about gender and sexuality, so it is very much all still happening.
YOU, yes you, there, who asked "I've been thinking I was nonbinary but I was AFAB and I like to wear makeup and a skirt with lace, and I wonder if my identity is valid, what do you think?" And YOU, who administrate the Facebook group where a dozen questions like that appear every month if not every week, and always reply "Every identity is valid, you are valid, no one else gets to decide that for you". Yeah, you, too...
All those identity terms came from us. From people who had an identity that did not have a name yet, and who described how they were in detail and then put a name on it. Perhaps they linked up with others who said "Oh, you too? I never met anyone besides myself who said that. What else?", and the new term and new description got hammered out from a dialog. Perhaps they developed their statement and gave their identity a name all alone, as one voice.
All of you folks who are sorting out your identities? Please don't feel like you need to confine yourself to trying on all the existing identities until you find the one that fits.
We need your story. We need to know how it has been for you. We need to honor your experience and, if your experience makes it so that none of the existing identity-terms fits you very well, we need to understand your story and your identity, and perhaps your label for it, in order to be better prepared to understand other people like you. For the same reason that the Gay & Lesbian Centre from 1989 really needed to listen to bisexual people and transgender people and intersex people and widen their sense of who "us" is.
And about that "every identity is valid, don't worry about it" response, if I may: that's well-intentioned and warm but it can unintentionally convey the message that "oh, whatever and however you are is all fine and fabulous, so the specifics of how and who you are doesn't matter, just chill and don't fret about it".
But it does matter.
Way back in the 1970s, the people on the cutting edge of gender work were the participants in the women's liberation movement. And the people who were involved back then have said over and over again how empowering it was to have consciousness-raising groups. Where women came together and talked about how it was for them, individually. And from their discussions, from the truths that had been realized from individual people examining their own individual lives, came feminist theory, the philosophy of a movement.
Now we're the cutting edge. If we want to remain relevant, we need to continue to be a space in which individual people's experiences contribute to our understandings.
———————
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
Of course we don't. A moment's consideration of the question should tell you that. Every year there are new terms, new expressions, new explanations about gender and sexuality, so it is very much all still happening.
YOU, yes you, there, who asked "I've been thinking I was nonbinary but I was AFAB and I like to wear makeup and a skirt with lace, and I wonder if my identity is valid, what do you think?" And YOU, who administrate the Facebook group where a dozen questions like that appear every month if not every week, and always reply "Every identity is valid, you are valid, no one else gets to decide that for you". Yeah, you, too...
All those identity terms came from us. From people who had an identity that did not have a name yet, and who described how they were in detail and then put a name on it. Perhaps they linked up with others who said "Oh, you too? I never met anyone besides myself who said that. What else?", and the new term and new description got hammered out from a dialog. Perhaps they developed their statement and gave their identity a name all alone, as one voice.
All of you folks who are sorting out your identities? Please don't feel like you need to confine yourself to trying on all the existing identities until you find the one that fits.
We need your story. We need to know how it has been for you. We need to honor your experience and, if your experience makes it so that none of the existing identity-terms fits you very well, we need to understand your story and your identity, and perhaps your label for it, in order to be better prepared to understand other people like you. For the same reason that the Gay & Lesbian Centre from 1989 really needed to listen to bisexual people and transgender people and intersex people and widen their sense of who "us" is.
And about that "every identity is valid, don't worry about it" response, if I may: that's well-intentioned and warm but it can unintentionally convey the message that "oh, whatever and however you are is all fine and fabulous, so the specifics of how and who you are doesn't matter, just chill and don't fret about it".
But it does matter.
Way back in the 1970s, the people on the cutting edge of gender work were the participants in the women's liberation movement. And the people who were involved back then have said over and over again how empowering it was to have consciousness-raising groups. Where women came together and talked about how it was for them, individually. And from their discussions, from the truths that had been realized from individual people examining their own individual lives, came feminist theory, the philosophy of a movement.
Now we're the cutting edge. If we want to remain relevant, we need to continue to be a space in which individual people's experiences contribute to our understandings.
———————
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
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
Polarized Echo Chambers
My facebook feed served me up a feminist group's post that mocked transitioners for allegedly having an attitude of "Hey, did you know that if you think being a girl would be a fun little upgrade, you can transition and be a girl? Lots of people start transitioning not because they think they 'need' to, but because they think it would improve their life and be more enjoyable".
The original post was followed by a long string of caustic comments about how these transitioners will never know what it was actually like to grow up as girls or are attempting to identify out of being oppressors, or think that a change of costume is all that gender identity is about. And several making fun of the use of "girl" instead of women.
I tried to engage with them with the following post, which wasn't moderated or piled onto, but was completely ignored. Not a single 'like'. No comment pro or con.
It's a shame, because I'd really like to have a dialog with them. (I hope you can see that from the tone and content of my post. It's not like I went in there yelling at them and calling them 'TERFs'!). But I guess they just prefer to preach to the choir.
--------- posted ---------
I'm certainly familiar with the notion that the male adults are often called "men" while the female adults are still being spoken of as "girls". But I'd call into question the logic by which the designation-terms used for males becomes the standard. I'm not a fundamentally different person than I was at eight, and the "adultist" notions within our culture teach us to turn our backs on who we originally were and embrace an adult identity that is often more constrained -- don't you think so? For me, the person I was at eight looked around the 2nd grade classroom and decided the people I admired and whose approval mattered to me were the girls. I valued what they valued. And *feminism* told me I wasn't "doing it wrong", that it was the double standard which was wrong, and if I valued "girl things" and "girl ways" that was entirely OK.
Feminism also has said that although there's nothing wrong with biological maleness, biological maleness is also NO EXCUSE for exhibiting the behaviors and embodying the values we characterize as 'masculine'. That the identity "MAN" is a political problem, that the personal is political, that the PERSONALITY is political, with its behavioral nuances and values and priorities and so on. Well, if there is to be a global feminist success, it kind of *has to involve male people pushing away from that "man" identity*, now doesn't it?
I'm sorry if the ways in which some of us approach that are insulting or cooptive of your identities, but we're thrashing about trying to find a language and a set of concepts that let us be self-affirming. We're not a unified lot of males (nor do all us identify ourselves AS males -- although I do, it's the bod I was born with and it's not the problem). I'm so sad to see the polarization and lack of dialog. You feminists are my role models, heroes, and inspiration.
———————
And yes, my book is supposed to come out this month from Sunstone Press, but I have no concrete news to report yet. Stay tuned!
———————
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
Home Page
The original post was followed by a long string of caustic comments about how these transitioners will never know what it was actually like to grow up as girls or are attempting to identify out of being oppressors, or think that a change of costume is all that gender identity is about. And several making fun of the use of "girl" instead of women.
I tried to engage with them with the following post, which wasn't moderated or piled onto, but was completely ignored. Not a single 'like'. No comment pro or con.
It's a shame, because I'd really like to have a dialog with them. (I hope you can see that from the tone and content of my post. It's not like I went in there yelling at them and calling them 'TERFs'!). But I guess they just prefer to preach to the choir.
--------- posted ---------
I'm certainly familiar with the notion that the male adults are often called "men" while the female adults are still being spoken of as "girls". But I'd call into question the logic by which the designation-terms used for males becomes the standard. I'm not a fundamentally different person than I was at eight, and the "adultist" notions within our culture teach us to turn our backs on who we originally were and embrace an adult identity that is often more constrained -- don't you think so? For me, the person I was at eight looked around the 2nd grade classroom and decided the people I admired and whose approval mattered to me were the girls. I valued what they valued. And *feminism* told me I wasn't "doing it wrong", that it was the double standard which was wrong, and if I valued "girl things" and "girl ways" that was entirely OK.
Feminism also has said that although there's nothing wrong with biological maleness, biological maleness is also NO EXCUSE for exhibiting the behaviors and embodying the values we characterize as 'masculine'. That the identity "MAN" is a political problem, that the personal is political, that the PERSONALITY is political, with its behavioral nuances and values and priorities and so on. Well, if there is to be a global feminist success, it kind of *has to involve male people pushing away from that "man" identity*, now doesn't it?
I'm sorry if the ways in which some of us approach that are insulting or cooptive of your identities, but we're thrashing about trying to find a language and a set of concepts that let us be self-affirming. We're not a unified lot of males (nor do all us identify ourselves AS males -- although I do, it's the bod I was born with and it's not the problem). I'm so sad to see the polarization and lack of dialog. You feminists are my role models, heroes, and inspiration.
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And yes, my book is supposed to come out this month from Sunstone Press, but I have no concrete news to report yet. Stay tuned!
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Saturday, December 21, 2019
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.
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:
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.
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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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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Saturday, December 14, 2019
Memes and Message Themes
Meme (n.) -- an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.
When I first came out as an identity not yet on people’s maps, I was intrigued by the rapid spread of popular snippets, little ideas that raced through communities as trendy notions you were supposed to know about if you were cognizant. “Hey”, I said to myself, “if I could figure out what makes an idea catch on and take off like that, I could leverage that to get the word out, to spread awareness of people like me existing in the world!”
And although I was not particularly witty and clever nor anything akin to popular, I watched people’s behavior to see what caused them to latch on to one thing instead of another as an item to pass on as if it were the Most Brilliant Thing Ever.
Eventually I decided that there was no identifying characteristic that was making the phenomenon happen around any specific morsel of an idea. If anything, the near-emptiness in content made it slightly more likely to become the newest trend, rather than any element of profundity or exceptionally clever twist. What I saw were people listening to the crowd and trying to discern early on what was being embraced so they could embrace it a little bit before other people, who would then copy them by embracing it themselves.
That’s not strictly 100% true (some appreciation of quirkiness does seem to play a role), but by and large these trendy ideas were being popularized because they were popular. People were competing to see who could jump on the next bandwagon before it became fully crowded, and would jump to the next one when they could sense it, but it was bandwagon behavior at the root. People weren’t adopting these memes because they agreed with them or thought they were insightful or cute. They were adopting them because they were catching on.
One of my friends, a performance artist, ends one of her pieces with the final line “If you live long enough, you become relevant”. After 40 years of trying to come out as a sissy-esque femme who accepts his nature and his physically male body, I may have lived long enough to attain relevancy, as genderqueer is trending. It isn’t all specifically my version of genderqueer, but yes, there are more and more people pushing away from the expectation of transgender “passing”, of asserting the vlable identity of their gender independent of their physiology or their presentation.
I spend a lot of time and energy complaining that MOGII / gender-variant communities are too much geared towards a kind of groupthink, where there is hostility and condemnation for anyone who doesn’t use the right words or echo the sentiments and viewpoints that have been embraced as the Right Way to Think of It. I shouldn’t let it surprise me. People within communities – any type of communities – tend to engage in the bandwagon-hopping because it is how human networks operate, it’s how the collective self, the “us” that forms a community, does its thinking. But I do, I grouse and snarl and complain about it, expecting all the individuals to examine ideas carefully and to be ready and willing to dissent from those around them and offer a different perspective at least a dozen times per week, and to quit chasing the bandwagons.
That may seem natural to me simply because I’ve been a loner for so long, a social hermit without a group. Like so many other MOGII kids, I was a misfit growing up. But in my case, coming out didn’t provide me with entry into a group of like-minded misfits. I sought it, fervently and desperately, wishing to belong. But because it didn’t happen for me, I suppose I developed less of the interactional patterns that lend themselves to bandwagon-jumping.
Which (I should keep in mind) means I’m not necessarily “a more independent thinker” so much as my tendency to independence has been an accident of not having found a place to fit in.
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When I first came out as an identity not yet on people’s maps, I was intrigued by the rapid spread of popular snippets, little ideas that raced through communities as trendy notions you were supposed to know about if you were cognizant. “Hey”, I said to myself, “if I could figure out what makes an idea catch on and take off like that, I could leverage that to get the word out, to spread awareness of people like me existing in the world!”
And although I was not particularly witty and clever nor anything akin to popular, I watched people’s behavior to see what caused them to latch on to one thing instead of another as an item to pass on as if it were the Most Brilliant Thing Ever.
Eventually I decided that there was no identifying characteristic that was making the phenomenon happen around any specific morsel of an idea. If anything, the near-emptiness in content made it slightly more likely to become the newest trend, rather than any element of profundity or exceptionally clever twist. What I saw were people listening to the crowd and trying to discern early on what was being embraced so they could embrace it a little bit before other people, who would then copy them by embracing it themselves.
That’s not strictly 100% true (some appreciation of quirkiness does seem to play a role), but by and large these trendy ideas were being popularized because they were popular. People were competing to see who could jump on the next bandwagon before it became fully crowded, and would jump to the next one when they could sense it, but it was bandwagon behavior at the root. People weren’t adopting these memes because they agreed with them or thought they were insightful or cute. They were adopting them because they were catching on.
One of my friends, a performance artist, ends one of her pieces with the final line “If you live long enough, you become relevant”. After 40 years of trying to come out as a sissy-esque femme who accepts his nature and his physically male body, I may have lived long enough to attain relevancy, as genderqueer is trending. It isn’t all specifically my version of genderqueer, but yes, there are more and more people pushing away from the expectation of transgender “passing”, of asserting the vlable identity of their gender independent of their physiology or their presentation.
I spend a lot of time and energy complaining that MOGII / gender-variant communities are too much geared towards a kind of groupthink, where there is hostility and condemnation for anyone who doesn’t use the right words or echo the sentiments and viewpoints that have been embraced as the Right Way to Think of It. I shouldn’t let it surprise me. People within communities – any type of communities – tend to engage in the bandwagon-hopping because it is how human networks operate, it’s how the collective self, the “us” that forms a community, does its thinking. But I do, I grouse and snarl and complain about it, expecting all the individuals to examine ideas carefully and to be ready and willing to dissent from those around them and offer a different perspective at least a dozen times per week, and to quit chasing the bandwagons.
That may seem natural to me simply because I’ve been a loner for so long, a social hermit without a group. Like so many other MOGII kids, I was a misfit growing up. But in my case, coming out didn’t provide me with entry into a group of like-minded misfits. I sought it, fervently and desperately, wishing to belong. But because it didn’t happen for me, I suppose I developed less of the interactional patterns that lend themselves to bandwagon-jumping.
Which (I should keep in mind) means I’m not necessarily “a more independent thinker” so much as my tendency to independence has been an accident of not having found a place to fit in.
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Saturday, September 28, 2019
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:
"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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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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Saturday, September 21, 2019
Transition is a Transitive Verb
On one of the Facebook transgender boards, someone writes:
That's the classic model of transgender, often called "binary transgender".
On a different transgender board, someone else complains:
It's complicated. Part of what complicates it is that sex isn't the same thing as gender. And yet I often see transgender defined as "when a person's GENDER identity differs from the SEX they were assigned at birth". But the definition doesn't directly speak to whether being transgender can mean you have a GENDER that differs from the SEX you are assigned now and every day whenever people see you, or a GENDER that differs from the SEX that you consider *yourself*, for that matter.
Do you need to present as the SEX that corresponds to your GENDER in order to be transgender? Do you need to "pass"? What if you are fine with the SEX to which you were assigned at birth but your GENDER happens to not have the same value and you happen to be perfectly fine with that mismatch? (Even if the rest of the world is a lot less fine with that?)
I have chosen NOT to identify as transgender, preferring genderqueer, but most of my transgender allies acknowledge that that is my choice and that they'd accept me as transgender if I did choose to call myself that.
I encounter people denying my identity, too. I've had socially liberal educated people who accept gay, lesbian, and transgendered people dismiss me.
And I've had transgender people tell me, as they've told the person who identifies as "nonbinary transgender", that we don't count:
... and other transgender people have informed me that I am seeking the impossible or even that I'm a threat:
When I go to give lectures and make presentations, one of my storyboards is a sign that says It's something else. I am sorry that people in the transgender community sometimes feel like I (and other people trying to explain new identities) are picking a fight with them. The process of differentiating can sometimes come across that way. Any group trying to explain themselves to the world at large is likely to start off with a group that the world is already familiar with, and then explains how their identity is different. Didn't trans people themselves have to do some of that a few years ago? --
People used to say and think things like this (CONTENT WARNING: DISMISSIVE AND INTOLERANT LANGUAGE):
So transgender people had to explain that being transgender is about gender, not sexual orientation. They had to differentiate themselves from gay and lesbian people. And some of the people they had to explain this to were people in the gay and lesbian community, so they spent a fair amount of time saying "I am not like you. I'm like this instead".
Now you're on the receiving end. And we're pushing off against you.
But we could not have done this without you. Your prior success makes this possible.
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Does transgender mean you want to transition from your birth gender to the gender you identify with, like MtF or FtM? And you have to have gender dysphoria to be transgender?
That's the classic model of transgender, often called "binary transgender".
On a different transgender board, someone else complains:
I just love it when people tell me I can't identify as trans. As if nonbinary people aren't trans.
It's complicated. Part of what complicates it is that sex isn't the same thing as gender. And yet I often see transgender defined as "when a person's GENDER identity differs from the SEX they were assigned at birth". But the definition doesn't directly speak to whether being transgender can mean you have a GENDER that differs from the SEX you are assigned now and every day whenever people see you, or a GENDER that differs from the SEX that you consider *yourself*, for that matter.
Do you need to present as the SEX that corresponds to your GENDER in order to be transgender? Do you need to "pass"? What if you are fine with the SEX to which you were assigned at birth but your GENDER happens to not have the same value and you happen to be perfectly fine with that mismatch? (Even if the rest of the world is a lot less fine with that?)
I have chosen NOT to identify as transgender, preferring genderqueer, but most of my transgender allies acknowledge that that is my choice and that they'd accept me as transgender if I did choose to call myself that.
I encounter people denying my identity, too. I've had socially liberal educated people who accept gay, lesbian, and transgendered people dismiss me.
"I consider Trans people as the Gender they feel they are, whether they've had surgery or not. That isn't at all relelvant to your case because YOU AREN"T TRANS!"
And I've had transgender people tell me, as they've told the person who identifies as "nonbinary transgender", that we don't count:
since you strongly believe you're a woman...then you need to transition. There's no such thing as a male woman you're confused or you're a troll
... and other transgender people have informed me that I am seeking the impossible or even that I'm a threat:
if you mean to say that a 'woman' (trans or cis) can be 'male' in that they can have facial hair, a deep voice - any of those trappings that categorise them in the mind of the masses by default as 'men' rather than as 'women', there we have a problem...
We are a collective society, and thus our actions, decisions, and ideations have to, at one way or another, be corroborated by, or rebuked by, the collective society we are a part of. If you present outwardly as 'male' but you identify as a woman, one cannot ever expect the collective to acknowledge the latter while the former exists. You cannot push the fabric of society so far to breaking point and expect any sort of acceptance...
What happens to those of us who actually worked hard to transition? What happens to those of us who have nearly been brought to bankruptcy because we have felt the disconnect, have suffered through, had gone through the torment of society making us suffer for it, and worked hard to make the suffering cease? If your ideologies are to be a new 'norm', that would render all of our hard work meaningless.
When I go to give lectures and make presentations, one of my storyboards is a sign that says It's something else. I am sorry that people in the transgender community sometimes feel like I (and other people trying to explain new identities) are picking a fight with them. The process of differentiating can sometimes come across that way. Any group trying to explain themselves to the world at large is likely to start off with a group that the world is already familiar with, and then explains how their identity is different. Didn't trans people themselves have to do some of that a few years ago? --
People used to say and think things like this (CONTENT WARNING: DISMISSIVE AND INTOLERANT LANGUAGE):
Oh yeah, the transsexuals and tranvestites. They're the gay guys who dress as women and call each other 'girl' and call each other 'she' and stuff. It's a subcommunity within the gay world.
OR
Transgender people... it's like it's more socially acceptable to be a straight woman than to be a gay man, and more acceptable to be a straight guy than to be a lesbian. So that's why they do it.
NOT TO MENTION...
So let me get this right... she was a he, she was born male, and then transitioned and became a woman, but she likes girls, so she's a lesbian? I'm sorry that's all fucked up. What's the purpose of transitioning to female if you're attracted to women? This dude needs a psychiatrist!
So transgender people had to explain that being transgender is about gender, not sexual orientation. They had to differentiate themselves from gay and lesbian people. And some of the people they had to explain this to were people in the gay and lesbian community, so they spent a fair amount of time saying "I am not like you. I'm like this instead".
Now you're on the receiving end. And we're pushing off against you.
But we could not have done this without you. Your prior success makes this possible.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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