I’ve recently read a couple books that both fall loosely under the rubric of coming-of-age / coming-out stories. Neither is a new release but they were recommended to me and sat waiting on my “to read” pile.
Will Grayson, Will Grayson, John Green and David Levithan (Penguin, 2010).
A lot of lesbian and gay lit offerings are effectively romances, and romances tend to emphasize the romantic relationship (hence the designation), and end happily ever after (HEA) or at least happily for now (HFN). Although Will Grayson, Will Grayson is in part about coming out and having that first sexual-romantic connection, it’s actually not a romance in the conventional sense. The emphasis is on friendship and loyalty among friends; the romantic relationships described in the book end up being in the background. This book portrays the tensions within an ongoing gay-straight friendship and the complexities in a formerly romantic-sexual relationship between the exes who still care for each other.
The “gimmick” of the book, if I may call it that, is that two boys of the exact same name take turns as the story’s narrator. One Will Grayson is gay but not out yet, and hasn’t had any meaningful sexual experiences as of the start of the book. The other Will Grayson is straight but similarly inexperienced (he’s rather introverted and has embraced a philosophy of never drawing attention to himself if he can avoid it). The authors handle the back-and-forth tradeoff between the two narrators by having one Will’s chapters all in lower case while the other uses normal start-of-sentence capitalization. It works.
The storyline and the two narrators revolve around central figure Tiny Cooper, “the world’s largest person who is really really gay”, also “the world’s gayest person who is really really large”. The exuberantly flamboyant Tiny is a theatrical creative. I coincidentally just now read a news article via a link within a Facebook group about how many gay men feel marginalized within the gay community over body image, especially the notion that to be successful in love and sex and socialization, a gay male needs to be neither skinny nor fat but perfectly sculpted instead. (It’s a complaint that mirrors those made by straight women about mainstream society). So it strikes me as healthy that we have here a heroic and popular extra-large gay person.
My Razzle Dazzle, Todd Peterson (iUniverse, 2015)
This is a period piece where the action takes place just a few short years before my own coming-of-age experience (and hence the events in my own book). Todd Peterson is just about the right age to have been my babysitter when I was a child. There are a lot of events and specific descriptions I can readily relate to as a consequence: the girls jumping rope on the playground and what it was like to play with them, the boys and the specific ways in which they were hostile to both girls and sissies, the “feel” of the school hallways and classrooms. Also, for that matter, the later career in software development, although I didn’t get into that as early in my own life as Todd Peterson did.
There are other elements of the story that are quite foreign to me though, in particular the phenomenon of roller derby, the experience of competitive skating on banked tracks and so on. Todd Peterson made the transit from enthusiastic fan to eventual team member of the Bombers, and his sense of accomplishment and belongingness among the skaters is as much a journey of identity and self-actualization as his coming out as a gay person. This is something that’s often not well-explained, that a marginalized identity on the basis of gender or sexual orientation tends to be a prominent factor in a person’s identity, but not to the exclusion of other things that may be developing concurrently in that same person’s life.
As with Will Grayson, My Razzle Dazzle alternates narration, this time between the current-era Todd Peterson who is reminiscing about his coming of age years, and the Todd Peterson he was as a child and young adult. The tradeoff this time is handled by having the historical reminiscent Todd Peterson written in the third person, while the modern Todd writes in the first person. And this works well too. The overall impression is that of Todd the author sitting in a comfortable armchair and discussing the events of the previous backstory chapter and their impact on his life overall. It gives him a way to theorize and make sense of those events and how they shaped him.
I do note that My Razzle Dazzle is yet another “exhibit a” for my discussion of gender inversion and sexual orientation, or, more specifically, why people identifying as gender inverts as I do are likely to be males attracted to females or vice versa. Todd Peterson doesn’t make a distinction between being, or being perceived as, feminine or sissified, on the one hand, and being gay, attracted to other males, on the other. In an early chapter he describes playing double dutch with the girls, turning the rope and doing his own jumping in turn, and then being harassed for that by the other boys. There is, of course, no reason why playing jump rope with the girls means that one is attracted to other guys, or why having sexual fantasies about other boys would make a fellow feminine. But Peterson doesn’t say this or explore this distinction. And why would he? The people around him don’t make make such a distinction! Sissy means gay to them, so in accepting himself as a gay male, Todd Peterson looks back at sissy characteristics and interprets them as traits of a gay male child. Similarly, in a later chapter, he muses about the possibility of coming out to his family and one of his friends points out that he crosses his legs “like a girl” and from this and other such cues and expressions says “they may already know”. Because of this phenomenon, the people I suspect are most likely to identify as gender inverts will be sissy-femme males whose attraction is not towards other males (because those that are continue to identify as gay guys not as gay gender inverted guys), and similarly so for butch-masculine female folks (because the butch gals who are lesbians tend to conflate their butch attributes with their lesbianism rather than seeing it as a separate component of marginalized identity).
One notable exception to that is Jacob Tobia, whose Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story is definitely a gender-inversion testimonial, a description of being femme that is definitely not conflated with sexual orientation. I reviewed Sissy last year.
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My book is scheduled to come out March 16 from Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon for pre-orders (paperback only for the moment).
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Showing posts with label exhibit a. Show all posts
Showing posts with label exhibit a. Show all posts
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Saturday, November 30, 2019
The Amazon's Brother
I've uploaded my 1982-vintage unpublished book, The Amazon's Brother, to my theory web pages.
This was my first attempt to put these ideas into writing and reach people. Have an effect on the world.
Well, actually it wasn't my first. The first attempt was handwritten and was scribbled down in excitement, much of it written in the middle of the night. It didn't go over well; the most tangible outcome of that was being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.
So it's more accurate to say that The Amazon's Brother was my first serious attempt to say these things carefully with a considered effort to make sense to people.
The first half of it, titled "Sissyhood", was -- like my current book, GenderQueer -- an attempt to use my own experiences as an "Exhibit A" example. The second half, "Patriarchy", was social theory.
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This was my first attempt to put these ideas into writing and reach people. Have an effect on the world.
Well, actually it wasn't my first. The first attempt was handwritten and was scribbled down in excitement, much of it written in the middle of the night. It didn't go over well; the most tangible outcome of that was being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.
So it's more accurate to say that The Amazon's Brother was my first serious attempt to say these things carefully with a considered effort to make sense to people.
The first half of it, titled "Sissyhood", was -- like my current book, GenderQueer -- an attempt to use my own experiences as an "Exhibit A" example. The second half, "Patriarchy", was social theory.
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Sunday, March 31, 2019
What's in a Name?
Transgender or Genderqueer?
-- American Psychological Association
-- Wikipedia
Of the two terms "transgender" and "genderqueer", "transgender" is definitely more established at this point and is more familiar to a wider segment of society. And with the modern "umbrella" definition of what it means to be transgender, it's hard to specify and explain circumstances under which a person would be queerly gendered but not fall under the auspices of what it means to be transgender.
The meaning of a phrase or term comes from our politics. The meaning isn't just there, embedded intrinsically in the phrase itself. In the era when I came out (1980, to be precise), almost no one had ever heard the word "transgender", and so they used the older well-established term "transsexual". Nowadays there are a lot of offensive implications associated with the term "transsexual", but the people who said "transsexual" in 1980 weren't for the most part trying to imply any of those things. Similarly, someone transported from that timeframe to now might say "hermaphrodite" instead of "intersex" without intending to offend, not knowing the other term and not having heard any objections to the one they did know.
In this graph, you can see that "transsexual" was a term in widespread use long before the more modern alternatives. "Transgender" came into significant use between 1985 and 1990; the term "genderqueer" came along a bit later, establishing itself between 1990 and 1995.
Why do we differentiate between terms when an existing established term is "close enough"? Mostly because we like specificity. And we like to clarify.
And sometimes because we wish to reject some of the implications tied to an existing term. Activists in America in the 1960s rejected "negro" in favor of "black" because of cultural associations that had become embedded in "negro" that they wanted to break away from.
It's often easiest to explain what we're talking about when there's something that people are already familiar with. If your audience already knows about the color aqua or the color turquoise, that can make it easier to describe the color teal.
It can be hard to differentiate from people who use a term that you don't wish to go by without making them feel like you're planting your foot in their face. I want to apologize in advance to the transgender community for that. You are not the enemy. I hope you don't experience this blog post as an act of hostility; I don't intend it as such!
Anyway, yes, we have a very inclusive definition of transgender. It does seem to cover people like me. What does it mean to be covered? Sometimes it's like insurance: "don't worry, we've got you covered". Or it can be a cozy blanket, keeping you warm, protecting you from the cold elements. To be covered can also be like wearing a chador, which can be worn with pride but can also be experienced as negating and confining when it is imposed without consent. It can be like a mask, disguising identity. And it can simply mean that one is covered up, kept hidden, obscured from being seen.
The previous graph superimposed the rise of the three terms "transsexual", "transgender", and "genderqueer", showing each term's proliferation in our society. But that graph isn't normalized; it artificially pretends that the rate of use for each term is comparable. It's not. Here's a true graph of the deployment of the three terms:
It may come as a shock to transgender people to think of themselves as "more mainstream" than anyone else, culturally speaking. But from a genderqueer perspective, yes, you're the prevailing story against which we're hidden in the margins.
To be "covered" can elicit the attitude that "Since we've already covered what it is like to be transgender, people don't need to hear about your story, since it's included in the transgender story". Jacob Tobia, in Sissy, details the conventional stereotyped (binary) transgender story arc:
This is the narrative presented (quite excellently) in Meredith Russo's If I Was Your Girl, and classically narrated by Jan Morris in Conundrum, or as testified by by Chaz Bono in Transition. Including other people who also have gender identities that "do not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth" doesn't change the fact that this is what transgender means to most people.
What are the primary concerns of the transgender movement? The rights of transgender people in the military; the right of people to use the bathroom appropriate to their identity without hostile interference; medical insurance coverage for and uncomplicated access to medical transitional procedures; protection from hostile misgendering in the workplace, and raising people's consciousness about microagressions around expressions that gender people, etc; violence against transgender people; and public education.
Public education? The content being promoted is still pretty much the mainstream narrative discussed above. And as part and parcel of it, the agenda includes the establishment of a party line about acceptable attitudes and verbal expressions thereof about sex and gender: that the state of being transgender involves a discrepancy between the gender to which one was assigned at birth ("assigned female at birth" -- AFAB -- or "assigned male at birth" -- AMAB) and one's actual gender identity. That one's physical morphology is not relevant: "What's in my pants is none of your business"; and that social acceptance means that transgender people smoothly blend in with one's identified gender, being "women" and "men", not "transwomen" or "transmen". That except for being out in the political name of being Exhibit A for this phenomenon, there should be no difference between transgender womem and women in general, or between transgender men and men in general. That's the party line. That's what transgender activists would like us all -- transgender and cisgender alike -- to embrace and acknowledge. And in promoting this while opting to include all of us gender-variant people, they're establishing this as our agenda as well, since we're all in this together as transgender people -- ??
In actuality, most genderqueer people who aren't also transitioners in the binary transgender sense aren't directly affected by the military ban question, nor would the right to enter either of the designated binary segregated bathrooms as we saw fit fix much of anything for us; we aren't affected by medical issues related to transitioning; and no one has effectively stated what it would even mean for us to be correctly gendered in the workplace or, for that matter, anywhere else. There's a complete lack of public education about our existence, let alone our specific concerns! The mainstream transgender message discusses gender assignment "at birth", as if we didn't continue to live in a world that altercasts each and every one of us into a gender category; it does not challenge the "sex means gender" established mainsteam perspective -- the "what's in my pants is none of your business" attitude discourages us from claiming as part of our identities the morphological sex of our bodies and the fact that we've been perceived in those terms all our lives, that that is part of our experience. The transgender narrative treats the transitioning person as a model; it now extends a nonjudgmental inclusiveness to people who can't afford to transition or don't choose to for other reasons but it's an inclusiveness that's still based on the notion that "you should treat me as if my sex is in accordance with the gender that I identify as"; that's what "the contents of my pants is none of your business" really means. But that erases the identities of people who wish to identify as people born in a specific body whose gender is other than the gender normally associated with that body. It blocks us from establishing an identity that does not blend in as men or women; it assumes that transgender people all wish to do that blending in, that transgender people consist of men who wish to blend in with men in general and women who wish to blend in with women in general. When in actuality some of us wish to be recognized and understood as something different, as members of new categories: perhaps a fluid person whose gender identity varies, perhaps a person who is both genders, or neither gender, or perhaps as a person who has one sex but a gender that doesn't conventionally correspond to it.
There was once a time, I think, when transgender women in the gay/lesbian scene were accepted as "us" and yet "not us" at the same time. When the voice of the movement was mainly that of gay men, and effeminate males were considered stereotye-reinforcing embarrassments. Well, the need to explain transgender to the world did not make transgender activists homophobes. It did not mean they were antigay. But they had to push off as something different in order to explain.
We, too, are entitled to a voice and an agenda. We have butch women who still identify as women, not as transgender men. We have sissy males who don't wish to be perceived as female people.
There's a reason the argument was made in favor of expanding the LGBT acronym. Q was included. Q means a lot of things, including what we call genderqueer. Something not already covered by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Otherwise we would not have needed a separate letter. The Q implies that we have a story of our own.
(I actually prefer MOGII to the increasingly sprawling acronym LGBTQIA++ -- "marginalized orientation, gender identity, and intersex" -- but we do all need our voices to be heard)
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Transgender is an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.
-- American Psychological Association
Transgender people have a gender identity or gender expression that differs from their assigned sex
-- Wikipedia
Of the two terms "transgender" and "genderqueer", "transgender" is definitely more established at this point and is more familiar to a wider segment of society. And with the modern "umbrella" definition of what it means to be transgender, it's hard to specify and explain circumstances under which a person would be queerly gendered but not fall under the auspices of what it means to be transgender.
The meaning of a phrase or term comes from our politics. The meaning isn't just there, embedded intrinsically in the phrase itself. In the era when I came out (1980, to be precise), almost no one had ever heard the word "transgender", and so they used the older well-established term "transsexual". Nowadays there are a lot of offensive implications associated with the term "transsexual", but the people who said "transsexual" in 1980 weren't for the most part trying to imply any of those things. Similarly, someone transported from that timeframe to now might say "hermaphrodite" instead of "intersex" without intending to offend, not knowing the other term and not having heard any objections to the one they did know.
In this graph, you can see that "transsexual" was a term in widespread use long before the more modern alternatives. "Transgender" came into significant use between 1985 and 1990; the term "genderqueer" came along a bit later, establishing itself between 1990 and 1995.
Why do we differentiate between terms when an existing established term is "close enough"? Mostly because we like specificity. And we like to clarify.
And sometimes because we wish to reject some of the implications tied to an existing term. Activists in America in the 1960s rejected "negro" in favor of "black" because of cultural associations that had become embedded in "negro" that they wanted to break away from.
It's often easiest to explain what we're talking about when there's something that people are already familiar with. If your audience already knows about the color aqua or the color turquoise, that can make it easier to describe the color teal.
It can be hard to differentiate from people who use a term that you don't wish to go by without making them feel like you're planting your foot in their face. I want to apologize in advance to the transgender community for that. You are not the enemy. I hope you don't experience this blog post as an act of hostility; I don't intend it as such!
Anyway, yes, we have a very inclusive definition of transgender. It does seem to cover people like me. What does it mean to be covered? Sometimes it's like insurance: "don't worry, we've got you covered". Or it can be a cozy blanket, keeping you warm, protecting you from the cold elements. To be covered can also be like wearing a chador, which can be worn with pride but can also be experienced as negating and confining when it is imposed without consent. It can be like a mask, disguising identity. And it can simply mean that one is covered up, kept hidden, obscured from being seen.
The previous graph superimposed the rise of the three terms "transsexual", "transgender", and "genderqueer", showing each term's proliferation in our society. But that graph isn't normalized; it artificially pretends that the rate of use for each term is comparable. It's not. Here's a true graph of the deployment of the three terms:
It may come as a shock to transgender people to think of themselves as "more mainstream" than anyone else, culturally speaking. But from a genderqueer perspective, yes, you're the prevailing story against which we're hidden in the margins.
To be "covered" can elicit the attitude that "Since we've already covered what it is like to be transgender, people don't need to hear about your story, since it's included in the transgender story". Jacob Tobia, in Sissy, details the conventional stereotyped (binary) transgender story arc:
I was born in the wrong body. the doctors told my parents that I was a _____ [boy or girl], but I always knew that I was the opposite of that... I spent years hating myself, thinking something was wrong with me... That's when I decided I needed to transition. I started hormones and had a ___ [breast augmentation / reduction]. Then I did the really hard thing and got "the surgery" to make sure that my genitals aligned with my identity.
This is the narrative presented (quite excellently) in Meredith Russo's If I Was Your Girl, and classically narrated by Jan Morris in Conundrum, or as testified by by Chaz Bono in Transition. Including other people who also have gender identities that "do not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth" doesn't change the fact that this is what transgender means to most people.
What are the primary concerns of the transgender movement? The rights of transgender people in the military; the right of people to use the bathroom appropriate to their identity without hostile interference; medical insurance coverage for and uncomplicated access to medical transitional procedures; protection from hostile misgendering in the workplace, and raising people's consciousness about microagressions around expressions that gender people, etc; violence against transgender people; and public education.
Public education? The content being promoted is still pretty much the mainstream narrative discussed above. And as part and parcel of it, the agenda includes the establishment of a party line about acceptable attitudes and verbal expressions thereof about sex and gender: that the state of being transgender involves a discrepancy between the gender to which one was assigned at birth ("assigned female at birth" -- AFAB -- or "assigned male at birth" -- AMAB) and one's actual gender identity. That one's physical morphology is not relevant: "What's in my pants is none of your business"; and that social acceptance means that transgender people smoothly blend in with one's identified gender, being "women" and "men", not "transwomen" or "transmen". That except for being out in the political name of being Exhibit A for this phenomenon, there should be no difference between transgender womem and women in general, or between transgender men and men in general. That's the party line. That's what transgender activists would like us all -- transgender and cisgender alike -- to embrace and acknowledge. And in promoting this while opting to include all of us gender-variant people, they're establishing this as our agenda as well, since we're all in this together as transgender people -- ??
In actuality, most genderqueer people who aren't also transitioners in the binary transgender sense aren't directly affected by the military ban question, nor would the right to enter either of the designated binary segregated bathrooms as we saw fit fix much of anything for us; we aren't affected by medical issues related to transitioning; and no one has effectively stated what it would even mean for us to be correctly gendered in the workplace or, for that matter, anywhere else. There's a complete lack of public education about our existence, let alone our specific concerns! The mainstream transgender message discusses gender assignment "at birth", as if we didn't continue to live in a world that altercasts each and every one of us into a gender category; it does not challenge the "sex means gender" established mainsteam perspective -- the "what's in my pants is none of your business" attitude discourages us from claiming as part of our identities the morphological sex of our bodies and the fact that we've been perceived in those terms all our lives, that that is part of our experience. The transgender narrative treats the transitioning person as a model; it now extends a nonjudgmental inclusiveness to people who can't afford to transition or don't choose to for other reasons but it's an inclusiveness that's still based on the notion that "you should treat me as if my sex is in accordance with the gender that I identify as"; that's what "the contents of my pants is none of your business" really means. But that erases the identities of people who wish to identify as people born in a specific body whose gender is other than the gender normally associated with that body. It blocks us from establishing an identity that does not blend in as men or women; it assumes that transgender people all wish to do that blending in, that transgender people consist of men who wish to blend in with men in general and women who wish to blend in with women in general. When in actuality some of us wish to be recognized and understood as something different, as members of new categories: perhaps a fluid person whose gender identity varies, perhaps a person who is both genders, or neither gender, or perhaps as a person who has one sex but a gender that doesn't conventionally correspond to it.
There was once a time, I think, when transgender women in the gay/lesbian scene were accepted as "us" and yet "not us" at the same time. When the voice of the movement was mainly that of gay men, and effeminate males were considered stereotye-reinforcing embarrassments. Well, the need to explain transgender to the world did not make transgender activists homophobes. It did not mean they were antigay. But they had to push off as something different in order to explain.
We, too, are entitled to a voice and an agenda. We have butch women who still identify as women, not as transgender men. We have sissy males who don't wish to be perceived as female people.
There's a reason the argument was made in favor of expanding the LGBT acronym. Q was included. Q means a lot of things, including what we call genderqueer. Something not already covered by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Otherwise we would not have needed a separate letter. The Q implies that we have a story of our own.
(I actually prefer MOGII to the increasingly sprawling acronym LGBTQIA++ -- "marginalized orientation, gender identity, and intersex" -- but we do all need our voices to be heard)
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Saturday, March 16, 2019
BOOK REVIEW: Sissy, by Jacob Tobia
There's a brand-new genderqueer memoir out, a genderqueer coming-out and coming-of-age tale going to print, and I'm jealous. Obsessively insanely jealous. I wanted mine to be the first.
Those of you who've been reading my blog regularly are aware that I didn't have such an intense reaction when I discovered Audrey MC's Life Songs: A Genderqueer Memoir. Well, there are two reasons for that: firstly, Life Songs is basically and primarily a transgender story, a tale of transitioning to female by someone assigned and regarded from birth as male, and then very late in the book the author tacks on a throwaway line about how being a transgender lesbian is "so limiting in its binary construct" and so she now identifies as genderqueer; and, secondly, Life Songs is essentially self-published. So on balance I didn't feel authentically beaten to the punch.
SISSY: A Coming-of-Gender Story by Jacob Tobia is the genuine article. Jacob happens to be a gay male and their experiences of being a genderqueer femme were shaped by that, but this is not a gay coming-out story with a nod towards nonbinary appended. This is the real deal.
"I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am a glimmering, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, beautiful, human person, and I don't identify that way for fun. I don't identify that way because I think it makes me interesting. I don't identify that way as a hobby. I use that language to describe myself because it is fundamentally who I am."
As large as being (and coming out) gay did loom in Jacob's teenage years (and how could it not?), it's pretty much incidental to the main narrative they're telling, so yes, there's finally a book being published about what it's like to grow up genderqueer, as a sissy, a feminine male who actually embraces their identity as feminine male, one of us.
And published? Putnam, baby. G. P.-freaking-Putnam's Sons. Yeesh. I have dreams of getting my book picked up by the likes of Seal Press or Sibling Rivalry or something. Compared to that, Tobia is Cinderella in a gold carriage and I aspire to a pumpkin on a skateboard that I can push down the road and call a coach. Did I mention jealous? Jacob Tobia may be in for one seriously bitchy review here.
First, though, some of the sparkly bits. Sissy has some real gemstones.
One of my favorite takeaways is Tobia's replacement of The Closet with The Shell. That being self-protective, and not being cowardly, is the reason people aren't Out yet; that when threatened, one may retreat into one's shell and that there's no reason or excuse to belittle this as if we aren't entitled to put something between us and a hostile world. That we don't owe the world an honest testimonial to our identity, as if it were our secretive lying behavior that causes the surrounding society to make hetero cisgender dyadic normative assumptions about everyone. It's not our doing that makes that the norm that we have to push off from and differentiate ourselves from in order to come out! If we owe a coming out to anyone, we owe it to ourselves, but there's really no excuse for the community to mock people who don't do that, or haven't done so yet.
Tobia at several points talks about what it's like to be in a world that has no term and no concept for who and how we are —
As a child, I understood that my difference was beautiful, was natural, was fundamental. I knew just how special my gender was. But without a name, without language to put to what I was seeing and feeling, I had no way of sharing the importance of my difference with others.
... and later, starting college ...
The problem is that there are generally no lines written for people like me. There was no role for a gender nonconforming person at Duke, hardly even a role for a gay boy. Without realizing it, just by doing what they were used to, by following the rules suggested by the structure around them, my classmates had erased me
... and again in the vivid confrontation at Duke with their classmates and the organizers of a retreat called Common Ground. This time there is a specific conflation of sex and gender: the participants are told to sort themselves:
"Today we'll be talking about gender... we'd like to separate the room into two groups: women—sorry, female—and male participants"
Tobia pitches a totally appropriate hissy fit. It's frustrating living in a world that perpetually, obliviously insists that whosoever is biologically male is a man, that sex means gender, that dividing the room along this fracture line creates two groups each of which will contain the people who belong in it. Tobia starts with warning the organizers that the male group had better be focused on the male body, male morphology, and not about the experience of operating as a man in this world. "Because if we're talking about being men, you and I both know that I don't have much to add to that conversation."
As someone who has spent a frustrated lifetime trying to put these things into words myself, I kept on bouncing in my seat and occasionally raising my clenched fist and cheering.
The showdown with the Common Ground participants is the closing bookend to Tobia's college experiences. The opening bookend took the form of a couple weeks in the wilderness with a different campus retreat group, Project WILD, that hiked into the Appalachian mountains. In the natural setting, temporarily cut off from ongoing social reinforcements and structures, they found gender polarization withering away. "Bodies no longer signified behavior or character traits; breasts were breasts, nipples were nipples, genitals were genitals, hair was hair, none of them bearing ideological weight." It has a lasting effect on Tobia, providing a taste of how things could be different, but less so for the others who disappointingly retreat into their gendered shells once back in the school environment.
It's appropriate and consistent that these bookend-moments are events that are designed to get people in touch with themselves and each other. Tobia is active in the church in his pre-college days and despite living in the south (North Carolina) spends most of the book's trajectory in social environments that are tolerant and open in a modern sense. This is not the Bible-thumping Alabama conservatism of Jared Eamons in Boy Erased, and the issues that Jacob Tobia had to cope with are the same ones that still plague our most issue-conscious and woke societies now. Most of Tobia's story is about a person who is out and proud as a gay person but still trying to figure out how to come out as someone who is differently gendered. It's us, and it's now. Tobia gives us the much-needed "Exhibit A" to enable society to talk about genderqueer people with some understanding and familiarity.
After I came out as gay, I never officially came out as genderqueer or as nonbinary or as trans or as feminine.
I have no idea why Tobia proclaims that they never came out as genderqueer. Maybe they meant specifically to their parents?! It's a worrisome disclaimer at the time it's issued, because this is before Tobia goes off to college, and although the story up until this point includes a lot of secret femme behaviors and tastes, it seemed to me that there was still room for the story to be all about a gay guy who, now that they're writing a book, opts to identify as a sissy femme as well. But fear not, it's not so. It's a coming-out story if there ever was one. Tobia tells many people in many ways, many times. It's just more complicated because when you tell folks you're gay they don't generally get all nonplussed and stuff and ask you what that means, exactly; but coming out nonbinary or femme or genderqueer is nowhere nearly as well understood.
Now, Jacob Tobia does equivocate sometimes, and they of all people should know better! Whilst looking around for a social circle in high school that wouldn't be a badly uncomfortable fit for theirself as a still-secretly femme sissy, Tobia muses about the degree of homoerotic locker-room experiences among the jocks and compares it to the substantial amount of homoerotic anime available to the nerds. Look, hon, if you're going to write an essay about how being femme is its own thing, try not to step on the hem of your own dress. We get another misdemeanor offense like that when the college essay is being crafted — an essay about going forth in public in high heels — and Tobia refers to it as "an essay about wearing high heels and being the gayest thing on this planet." T'weren't so much as a mention in that essay of noshing on dicks or craving male sexual companionship, and just like the Common Ground people treating male as the same as man, this is a problem. Some of us sissyboy folks might like to go forth in high heels ourselves (although that's not quite my aesthetic taste) despite not also being gay guys, and we get just as erased by this conflation as by having "male" tied to being a man.
Be that as it may, gay male culture has not exactly been an unmitigated embrace of femme culture. There are scores and hordes of eligible gay guys posting personal ads and specifying "no sissies" or "no feminine nellies" or "masculine presenting only," and shrinking away from anything feminine as gross, like they think we sissies have cooties or something. There's a scene in Sissy, after Jacob has dashed across the Brooklyn Bridge in stilettos to earn money for an LGBTQ shelter where the masculine gay interviewer asks if comporting like this isn't "playing into stereotypes." So it is a politically flouncy act for a gay femme to put it out there and in your face and to underline their pride in being this way, femme, specifically as a person who is also that way, gay.
In the aftermath of Project WILD, Jacob Tobia finds themself back on a campus in the midst of fraternity and sorority rush (ugh!) and the intense gender normativity and polarization drives them away from the connections made with classmates in the Appalachians.
"In the vacuum that was left, I did what came most naturally: I started hanging out with the queers... within about a month, I'd cemented msyelf as the first-year activist queer, attending every meeting of Blue Devils United, our undergrad LGBTQ student organization… .
Yeah, well, convenient for you. To have a structure like that in place where a person like you would fit in on the basis of sexual orientation (which is almost always going to be the majority identity that brings participants in; you get a roomful of gay guys, a smattering of lesbians, a couple token transgender folks of the conventional transitioning variety, right?). I did promise bitchy, didn't I? You got a platform from this. You made social political connections where you could start off recognized as an activist gay student, something people could comprehend, and over time, even if they didn't fully get that your issues as a femme person were something other or more than an expression of gay male concerns, you could push those too, get them out there, explain them to people who started off believing you were in this group for your own legitimate reasons, marginalized for being gay.
Aww fuck, I can't win with this whine, can I? It's not exactly going to fly for me to try to claim that hetero sissies are more oppressed or that gay sissies are privileged in comparison. Well, Jacob Tobia, one thing you reinforced for me is that if I feel the need to bitch and whine, I should go ahead and be proud of being a sore loser, I should refuse to be classy even if the people I'm jealous of, who seem to have advantages I don't have, are good people with more than a compensating amount of situational detrimental oppressions to offset all that.
I aspired to this; I went to college to be an activist about this peculiar sense of identity and I tried to connect and to become part of a community. I rode into downtown New York City and hung out at Identity House and marched in parades and tried to connect there too. But mostly I met gay guys who came to such groups or events in order to meet other gay guys, or trans women who wanted to talk about surgery, hormones and passing. I even attended a bisexual support group for awhile, thinking/hoping that even though "this wasn't it," that the mindset of people in such a group would be more conducive to someone espousing sissy lib and socially interested in connecting with a butch or gender nonconforming female person who found sissy femmes attractive. No such luck: the bisexual gals tended to interact with males in a conventionally gendered way, according to the heterosexuality script I was trying to avoid. And one consequence of all that is that I didn't become a part of an environment where I could be a spokesperson. (I had similar problems when trying to hang with the feminists, by the way; they didn't regard gender issues as my issues, and saw me as a supporter only).
I suppose it's fair to say that heterosexually inclined sissies get bought off. We're not as often in situations where our queerness can't be ignored; our sissyhood doesn't get us found in bed with a same-sex partner at the motel or in the dormitory, and we don't get seen holding hands with a same-sex partner while walking down the sidewalk. We don't go to designated social scenes that would draw attention to our identities, the way the patrons at Pulse in Orlando did. So it's easier for our difference to be tucked and bound and hidden. And so far there hasn't been an "out game" for us to join so there's been no counter-temptation to offset that.
Hey world, you still need my book, too. Buy Jacob Tobia's, yes, buy it now. It's powerful. Buy it and tell everyone about it, spread the word. But an author in Tobia's situation can't directly attack and dismantle society's equation of sissy with gay. When someone comes out as a gay sissy, it corroborates the stereotype that sissies are gay and gay males are sissies, and because of that, a heterosexually inclined young sissy boy reading Sissy or watching someone like Jacob Tobia in a television interview may not feel very reassured that who they are is someone that it is okay and possible to be. Furthermore, all the gay sissies in the world, along with all the lesbian butch women, can't fully dismantle the gender-polarized scripting that constitutes heterosexual flirting and coupling behavior. Oh, they threaten it: whenever gay or lesbian people connect, it challenges the notion that sexuality requires the participants to be rigidly assigned to a sexual role by their biology. Even in a gay or lesbian relationship where one person is the butch and the other person is the femme, you don’t start out where each person is automatically assigned to being the butch or the femme because of what sex they are. It may be a negotiation between the two people, or perhaps a person comes to feel that the butch role or the femme role is the one that fits them best. And of course lots of relationships don’t use butch and femme at all. But the real challenge has to come from genderqueer people who participate in biologically heterosexual encounters, finally making it so that heterosexuality itself is no longer dependent on those binary polarized oppositional roles.
Well, also history. I came of age and came out in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The entire community of marginalized orientation, gender identity and intersex people (MOGII **) has an interest in learning how being gay or being trans etc. was and has been over time and in different settings. In particular, being genderqueer/nonbinary is often seen and spoken of as if it's an affectation, something that no one would come up with on their own if it wasn't already out there, trending and looking edgy and stuff. So hearing stories from people like me who came to a genderqueer sense of identity before there was such a term (trendy or otherwise) should help retaliate against that attitude.
Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Google, Kobo, and most other likely venues. Support gender-variant authors and buy a copy!
* Tobia's preferred pronouns are they, them, theirs
** As an alternative to the ever-expanding LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA, LGBTTQQIAAP acronym, MOGII is becoming a popular way of designating the community. We're together in this because our sexual orientation, our gender identity, or our physical body is different from the mainstream.
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Thursday, June 14, 2018
BOOK REVIEW -- If I Was Your Girl
I have a new favorite "exhibit a" book for presenting and depicting the transgender woman experience.
Meredith Russo joins an already-populated field: on my bookshelf I have Jan Morris's CONUNDRUM, Jennifer Boylan's SHE'S NOT THERE, Nicola Jane Chase's TEA AND TRANSITION, Audrey MC's LIFE SONGS, Ami Polonsky's GRACEFULLY GRAYSON, and a few others scattered about. Documenting what it means to be a transgender woman as a trans coming-out story has been done enough times that I think many authors are leery of writing something cliché, and so there's been a feeling that a good solid trans woman story needs to be "about" something other than the trajectory of "I always knew I wasn't like the other boys" / "People reacted to me being like one of the girls" / "It was my secret, I knew I was a girl despite my body" / "I sought answers and found doctors who would help me transition" / "Here's what medical transitioning was like" / "And here I am, I did it".
In If I Was Your Girl (Flatiron Books: 2017), Meredith Russo takes the tack of simplifying the narrative and making it accessible and entertaining and easy to relate to. Amanda Hardy, the main character, is a young girl, still in high school, and has already transitioned. She's a brave person, and a person used to living on the margins, not accepted by other people. Her backstory is provided in intermittent flashback chapters, but they're short; the main story arc is all in Amanda's present tense. She is happy to make friends but doesn't expect to and doesn't take it for granted; and when Grant Everett indicates he's interested in her as more than a friend, it's dream-fulfillment material but enmeshed with the delicate fears that it doesn't mean what she hopes it does, that once he gets to know her he'll be less impressed with her -- in other words, the typical everyday fears of so many adolescent girls, merely made a bit more complicated by the specific situation that Amanda is in, the specific worrisome secret that might cost her this acceptance and sense of belonging if it came out.
It does, of course. That Amanda is strong enough to cope with the situation is less surprising than the resilience of so many of her friendships and connections. Not all of them (that would not be realistic), but there's a hopeful and positive message here about how many people will accept a trans person for who she is.
If I Was Your Girl touches on one of the central aspects of being transgender that many of these narratives omit: after transitioning, a person may fit in and be perceived and accepted as an ordinary, typical member of their target gender, but they are also a person with a past; does such a person have to invent a gender-consistent backstory, does such a person have to deny their own personal history and set of experiences? And to what extent can a person ever really feel known and accepted while keeping such a centrally personal aspect of themselves secret? Unlike so many other trans narratives, this story is truly a coming-out story, and it's fundamentally an affirmative one.
What it doesn't focus on is the convoluted process of figuring out that one is, in fact, transgender, or on the details of medical transitioning. I think that is a wise choice. The reader who picks up the book and relates to the character strongly will already be on the road to contemplating their own gender identity in a sufficiently appropriate manner, and the details of such things as hormones and bottom surgery are probably a lot less important than the fundamentals of what it would be like as a person to have done so for anyone who is curious to know what being transgender is about.
Author Meredith Russo acknowledges in the postlogue of the book that this is the simplest version of the story:
I think If I Was Your Girl succeeds in exactly the ways that Russo intended it to. And where it fails, to the extent that it does so, it is due to the limitations that she acknowledges here. It is not a book that it is not, and there are stories that need to be told that are about those other trajectories of experience which are not so centrally identical to what people in general understand transgender to mean.
I want my own book to be like this. I want The Story of Q to present the story of what it is like to be male, to be one of the girls, to be attracted to them as well, and to end up being one of the gender-variant people for whom a transition to female is not the solution. I want it to be accessible the way Amanda's story is accessible.
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Meredith Russo joins an already-populated field: on my bookshelf I have Jan Morris's CONUNDRUM, Jennifer Boylan's SHE'S NOT THERE, Nicola Jane Chase's TEA AND TRANSITION, Audrey MC's LIFE SONGS, Ami Polonsky's GRACEFULLY GRAYSON, and a few others scattered about. Documenting what it means to be a transgender woman as a trans coming-out story has been done enough times that I think many authors are leery of writing something cliché, and so there's been a feeling that a good solid trans woman story needs to be "about" something other than the trajectory of "I always knew I wasn't like the other boys" / "People reacted to me being like one of the girls" / "It was my secret, I knew I was a girl despite my body" / "I sought answers and found doctors who would help me transition" / "Here's what medical transitioning was like" / "And here I am, I did it".
In If I Was Your Girl (Flatiron Books: 2017), Meredith Russo takes the tack of simplifying the narrative and making it accessible and entertaining and easy to relate to. Amanda Hardy, the main character, is a young girl, still in high school, and has already transitioned. She's a brave person, and a person used to living on the margins, not accepted by other people. Her backstory is provided in intermittent flashback chapters, but they're short; the main story arc is all in Amanda's present tense. She is happy to make friends but doesn't expect to and doesn't take it for granted; and when Grant Everett indicates he's interested in her as more than a friend, it's dream-fulfillment material but enmeshed with the delicate fears that it doesn't mean what she hopes it does, that once he gets to know her he'll be less impressed with her -- in other words, the typical everyday fears of so many adolescent girls, merely made a bit more complicated by the specific situation that Amanda is in, the specific worrisome secret that might cost her this acceptance and sense of belonging if it came out.
It does, of course. That Amanda is strong enough to cope with the situation is less surprising than the resilience of so many of her friendships and connections. Not all of them (that would not be realistic), but there's a hopeful and positive message here about how many people will accept a trans person for who she is.
If I Was Your Girl touches on one of the central aspects of being transgender that many of these narratives omit: after transitioning, a person may fit in and be perceived and accepted as an ordinary, typical member of their target gender, but they are also a person with a past; does such a person have to invent a gender-consistent backstory, does such a person have to deny their own personal history and set of experiences? And to what extent can a person ever really feel known and accepted while keeping such a centrally personal aspect of themselves secret? Unlike so many other trans narratives, this story is truly a coming-out story, and it's fundamentally an affirmative one.
What it doesn't focus on is the convoluted process of figuring out that one is, in fact, transgender, or on the details of medical transitioning. I think that is a wise choice. The reader who picks up the book and relates to the character strongly will already be on the road to contemplating their own gender identity in a sufficiently appropriate manner, and the details of such things as hormones and bottom surgery are probably a lot less important than the fundamentals of what it would be like as a person to have done so for anyone who is curious to know what being transgender is about.
Author Meredith Russo acknowledges in the postlogue of the book that this is the simplest version of the story:
I have, in some ways, cleaved to stereotypes and even bent rules to make Amanda's trans-ness as unchallenging to normative assumptions as possible. She knew from a very young age. She is exclusively attracted to boys. She is entirely feminine. She passes as a woman with little to no effort. She had a surgery that her family should not have been able to afford, and she started hormones through legitimate channels before she probably could have in the real world. I did this because I wanted you to have no possible barrier to understanding Amanda as a teenage girl with a different medical history from most other girls.
I think If I Was Your Girl succeeds in exactly the ways that Russo intended it to. And where it fails, to the extent that it does so, it is due to the limitations that she acknowledges here. It is not a book that it is not, and there are stories that need to be told that are about those other trajectories of experience which are not so centrally identical to what people in general understand transgender to mean.
I want my own book to be like this. I want The Story of Q to present the story of what it is like to be male, to be one of the girls, to be attracted to them as well, and to end up being one of the gender-variant people for whom a transition to female is not the solution. I want it to be accessible the way Amanda's story is accessible.
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Tuesday, May 29, 2018
The Coming-Out-Genderqueer Story: It's Something Else
"That's not a very good thesis project for a sociology dissertation," the professor told me. "What you should do is select the group you study based on objective criteria, like whether they have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria or have petitioned to have their driver's license gender marker changed, and then interview them about their feelings and attitudes and intentions and beliefs and so on. But what you're trying to do, to study male subjects who identify as 'sissy' or 'feminine', there's no external marker for that so it's all intercranial, it's all inside your subjects' head, depending on self-identification, and then you want to interview them to see what ELSE they think and feel, and that's not very sociological".
* * *
Twenty five years later, defining "genderqueer" and "gender invert" appears to involve the same basic problem. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people can be readily defined by something specific that they do, which sets them apart, but there's no obvious equivalent for genderqueer people (in general) or gender inverts (specifically) --
Gay and lesbian people: have sexual relations with people of the same sex
Bisexual people: have sexual relations with people of the same sex AND with the opposite sex
Transgender people: transition from the sex they were assigned at birth to the other sex
Genderqueer people: ??
Gender inverted people: ??
Well, admittedly, no, it isn't that simple when it comes to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people either. There are sexually inexperienced gay and lesbian people, they haven't had sexual relations with people of the same sex and yet they're still gay / lesbian, right? "Oh, but, well, they, umm, want to. I mean, they feel same-sex sexual desire", backtracks the hypothetical definer. But what do we mean by that, what exactly does one feel and think that constitues "wanting to"? Is it a specific concrete desire to engage in a specific activity, an activity that constitutes sex? What about the person who finds several same-sex people breathtakingly cute and becomes obsessed with the contours of their body shapes, but doesn't formulate a specific plan of action that takes the form "I want xxxxxx to happen, you and me" -- ?? Not to mention, what is that 'xxxxxx' anyhow, what precise activities count as 'sex'? Then there's "same" versus "opposite", when here we are in a world that includes both transgender and intersex people! Is a woman with erotic feelings towards an intersex individual a lesbian, or is she straight? If she also has the hots for a transgender man, is she bi? So if in addition to that she finds herself aroused by males who identify as girls, does that bring her up to trisexual or something? Obviously the clean clinical definitions used for the other LGBT identities don't withstand close scrutiny, either!
But that doesn't solve the problem, which involves perceptions and assumptions. However fuzzy and problematic our definitions for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender may be, the fact that there's a general acknowledgment of them as identities, a general belief in the categories and their usefulness, means that a coming-out story can be written with any degree of development of the identity itself ranging from an immersive soul-examining self-searching all the way down to a simple statement like "I knew I was that way from back in childhood", and then the rest of the book can be about the person and that person's experiences and only minimally about explaining, defining, and defending the identity itself as a relevant concept.
Borrowing from the same list I used in last week's post...
Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, the prototypical lesbian coming-out story, starts off with the tale of Molly (presumably Rita herself) as a young girl with a slew of tomboyish characteristics. Then in chapter 5 she becomes romantically obsessed with Leota Bisland from her sixth grade class and proposes marriage to her. They don't get married but by the end of the chapter she and Leota have kissed and touched each other all over.
Andrew Tobias' book The Best Little Boy in the World begins with the author describing himself as a delicate child, somewhat sexually ignorant. He alludes to "hiding something" during the course of describing how he learned about masturbation from songs and jokes, and eventually on page 33 notes that his first wet dream "was about Tommy".
Mario Martino's Emergence gets to it much more quickly, with the first sentences in the author's preface stating "I am a transsexual. I have undergone sex change, crossing over from female to male".
Daphne Scholinski's The Last Time I Wore a Dress notes early on that Dad had wanted a "demure and obedient" daughter and within the first six pages explains that this "daughter" was subjected to psychiatric incarceration "as an inappropriate female" with "deep unease in my female nature" and makes reference to being harassed with lipstick, foundation, and eyeliner.
Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues opens with a letter to "Theresa" in which the author expresses "missing you... seeing you in every woman's face", then recounts a conversation in Greenwich Village with a woman who "hates society for what it's done to women like you", in other words causing them to "hate themselves so much they have to look and act like men". By page 7, she has used the term "butch" as a noun to refer to herself and the others she fits in with.
Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There opens with the author picking up a pair of girls hitchhiking; they address her as "ma'am" as they get in. She thinks maybe she recognized one of them as someone "who'd been a student of mine back when I was a man".
Now, in The Story of Q I try to do that, too, to set the stage as it were, and in the first ten pages I've explained how, in childhood, I sought to emulate the girls, whom I admired, and to distance myself from being viewed as one of the boys; and I've also given early notice that I was physically attracted to girls from early on. But I'm at a disadvantage: I can't announce an identity the way Martino does, or count on readers immediately slotting me into one as Tobias, Brown, and Boylan all can when they describe their same-sex sexual attractions or refer to a time when they manifested as a different sex.
I have to build the identity for my readers before I can inhabit it. And it's somewhat subtle; there is no hallmark behavior where I can say "I did this" and that behavior conjures up a socially recognized identity (gay, lesbian, transgender) for most people immediately.
Leslie Feinberg's book is probably the closest in that regard. To be a butch lesbian is to inhabit a less common, less familiar identity. It's different from a generic lesbian coming-of-age story, with elements that are very similar to those of the stories written by transgender men, but it is its own tale, its own concept of self, including a culture and a community. And I suspect it's no coincidence that Feinberg's book is among the longer books that I've listed here.
This is the third installment of a three-part series specifically about coming out and writing the coming-out story as a genderqueer person. On April 23, I wrote Coming Out: Genderqueer Compared to Other LGBTQIA Identities and last week (May 22) I wrote The Art of the Coming Out Story: Seeking the Sweet Point .
———————
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* * *
Twenty five years later, defining "genderqueer" and "gender invert" appears to involve the same basic problem. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people can be readily defined by something specific that they do, which sets them apart, but there's no obvious equivalent for genderqueer people (in general) or gender inverts (specifically) --
Gay and lesbian people: have sexual relations with people of the same sex
Bisexual people: have sexual relations with people of the same sex AND with the opposite sex
Transgender people: transition from the sex they were assigned at birth to the other sex
Genderqueer people: ??
Gender inverted people: ??
Well, admittedly, no, it isn't that simple when it comes to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people either. There are sexually inexperienced gay and lesbian people, they haven't had sexual relations with people of the same sex and yet they're still gay / lesbian, right? "Oh, but, well, they, umm, want to. I mean, they feel same-sex sexual desire", backtracks the hypothetical definer. But what do we mean by that, what exactly does one feel and think that constitues "wanting to"? Is it a specific concrete desire to engage in a specific activity, an activity that constitutes sex? What about the person who finds several same-sex people breathtakingly cute and becomes obsessed with the contours of their body shapes, but doesn't formulate a specific plan of action that takes the form "I want xxxxxx to happen, you and me" -- ?? Not to mention, what is that 'xxxxxx' anyhow, what precise activities count as 'sex'? Then there's "same" versus "opposite", when here we are in a world that includes both transgender and intersex people! Is a woman with erotic feelings towards an intersex individual a lesbian, or is she straight? If she also has the hots for a transgender man, is she bi? So if in addition to that she finds herself aroused by males who identify as girls, does that bring her up to trisexual or something? Obviously the clean clinical definitions used for the other LGBT identities don't withstand close scrutiny, either!
But that doesn't solve the problem, which involves perceptions and assumptions. However fuzzy and problematic our definitions for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender may be, the fact that there's a general acknowledgment of them as identities, a general belief in the categories and their usefulness, means that a coming-out story can be written with any degree of development of the identity itself ranging from an immersive soul-examining self-searching all the way down to a simple statement like "I knew I was that way from back in childhood", and then the rest of the book can be about the person and that person's experiences and only minimally about explaining, defining, and defending the identity itself as a relevant concept.
Borrowing from the same list I used in last week's post...
Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, the prototypical lesbian coming-out story, starts off with the tale of Molly (presumably Rita herself) as a young girl with a slew of tomboyish characteristics. Then in chapter 5 she becomes romantically obsessed with Leota Bisland from her sixth grade class and proposes marriage to her. They don't get married but by the end of the chapter she and Leota have kissed and touched each other all over.
Andrew Tobias' book The Best Little Boy in the World begins with the author describing himself as a delicate child, somewhat sexually ignorant. He alludes to "hiding something" during the course of describing how he learned about masturbation from songs and jokes, and eventually on page 33 notes that his first wet dream "was about Tommy".
Mario Martino's Emergence gets to it much more quickly, with the first sentences in the author's preface stating "I am a transsexual. I have undergone sex change, crossing over from female to male".
Daphne Scholinski's The Last Time I Wore a Dress notes early on that Dad had wanted a "demure and obedient" daughter and within the first six pages explains that this "daughter" was subjected to psychiatric incarceration "as an inappropriate female" with "deep unease in my female nature" and makes reference to being harassed with lipstick, foundation, and eyeliner.
Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues opens with a letter to "Theresa" in which the author expresses "missing you... seeing you in every woman's face", then recounts a conversation in Greenwich Village with a woman who "hates society for what it's done to women like you", in other words causing them to "hate themselves so much they have to look and act like men". By page 7, she has used the term "butch" as a noun to refer to herself and the others she fits in with.
Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There opens with the author picking up a pair of girls hitchhiking; they address her as "ma'am" as they get in. She thinks maybe she recognized one of them as someone "who'd been a student of mine back when I was a man".
Now, in The Story of Q I try to do that, too, to set the stage as it were, and in the first ten pages I've explained how, in childhood, I sought to emulate the girls, whom I admired, and to distance myself from being viewed as one of the boys; and I've also given early notice that I was physically attracted to girls from early on. But I'm at a disadvantage: I can't announce an identity the way Martino does, or count on readers immediately slotting me into one as Tobias, Brown, and Boylan all can when they describe their same-sex sexual attractions or refer to a time when they manifested as a different sex.
I have to build the identity for my readers before I can inhabit it. And it's somewhat subtle; there is no hallmark behavior where I can say "I did this" and that behavior conjures up a socially recognized identity (gay, lesbian, transgender) for most people immediately.
Leslie Feinberg's book is probably the closest in that regard. To be a butch lesbian is to inhabit a less common, less familiar identity. It's different from a generic lesbian coming-of-age story, with elements that are very similar to those of the stories written by transgender men, but it is its own tale, its own concept of self, including a culture and a community. And I suspect it's no coincidence that Feinberg's book is among the longer books that I've listed here.
This is the third installment of a three-part series specifically about coming out and writing the coming-out story as a genderqueer person. On April 23, I wrote Coming Out: Genderqueer Compared to Other LGBTQIA Identities and last week (May 22) I wrote The Art of the Coming Out Story: Seeking the Sweet Point .
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