The Inadequacy of Straight / Gay / Bi

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

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

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


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





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

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

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

Straight, gay, or bi?

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

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

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

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

And the charts oversimplify matters too much.

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

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

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



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

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


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

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The Sissy and the Stigma of Sexual Interest

I was so painfully self-conscious.

In the book I’m working on, I’m writing about dropping in at Identity House, circa 1986. So I’m conjuring up the memories. Coming up the stairs and opening the doors and then being afraid to make eye contact with anyone.

“Hey there, welcome”, said a thirty-esque guy with wire-frame glasses.
“Hi”, I nodded back at him. I broke eye contact and glanced around. A woman with spiky styled blue-tipped hair and wearing snug dark blue jeans was sitting on the arm of a couch, watching a red-haired girl stapling paper to a large green sheet of construction paper. A black guy with large oval earrings was singing softly along with his radio over in the other direction.

I felt awkward, as I often did in gay and lesbian environments. Didn’t want to display overt interest in the attractive girl; lesbians presumably don’t come to gay and lesbian centers to be stared at by guys. Didn’t want to focus attention on any of the guys, lest they get the wrong idea. Stupid social clumsiness. Like they’re going to think anything faintly approaching friendliness from me is an act of sexual aggression. Yeesh.

Do you want to know where that came from, that overwhelming fear of being perceived as person with [gasp!] sexual lusts and interests and appetite? Here’s what that has to do with being a sissy –

Let’s start with the boys. As a sissy I was periodically accused of harboring sexual interest towards my male classmates and other acquaintances. I’m using the word “accused” advisedly – the notion that I had any such feelings was addressed with significant hostility, contempt, outright hatred. If I had indeed felt such feelings, these attitudes would have made it difficult for me to feel comfortable with my identity and my nature, and I would have had to wrestle with that, I think. In my case, I didn’t; if I had ever been inclined to find males sexually attractive, any such signal was rapidly drowned in the noise of being accused of it, mocked for it, having my face rubbed in it, so to speak. After a few years of that, I was less likely to be friendly, to be curious or interested, to expect to be included or welcomed. Standoffish and snobbish elicited their own forms of the same basic hostility, so I was trained to a mild and non-judgmental presence, neither recoiling from them nor paying any attention aside from getting out of their way.

Well, that left the girls. Here’s the situation with the girls: they made observations about unwanted and intrusive sexual attention from boys, observations that were the precursors of #metoo, that lots of boys were sexually creepy, with “hands problem”, selfishly pushy about sex. And also that, within relationships or on dates, boys would press for sexual activity, not caring about the girl as a person, and what self-respecting girl would want to get close to that? I, as a self-respecting sissy, most assuredly didn’t want the girls thinking of me that way. I wanted the girls to respect me as they respected themselves. Oh, I wanted sex, all right, no question about that, but I wanted it to mean something. I wanted a girlfriend. I wasn’t opposed to the idea of casual sex, but if it was going to be casual sex it had to be mutual, and it had to take place in such a way that both of us felt OK about our participation, and not like we’d been throw down into the sewer.

I go through life walking on eggshells terrified that someone’s going to think I’m sexually interested in them. That’s part of my experience as a sissy male, that people react to the possibility of me being interested in them with disgust and irritation.

In an LGBTQ context, like Identity House, you might think it would be easier, right? But although I was for once not in a context where males having sexual interest in other males would be stigmatized as something disgusting, I was walking into that situation with a lot of unease and lack of general comfort about people thinking I had sexual interest in them. I was afraid the boys, if they misread me and got the wrong idea, would later think I was being judgmental or prudish or rude; I didn’t have a well-developed repertoire for turning aside sexually interested people gracefully. Then there were the girls, of course. It was easier, to be in a situation where they’d be less likely to assume any guy they encounter was likely to be on the verge of expressing unwanted sexual interest. But on the other hand, most of them would be lesbians and I was afraid that it might be especially annoying to a lesbian to encounter some guy in a place like Identity House and pick up on him being attracted, because presumably she isn’t hanging out at gay and lesbian centers in order to be stared at or focused upon by males.


This was the situation in which I found myself as a young adult. It was very much an empowering insight to rethink that situation, for the first time, by comparing it to that of women my age. They were widely considered (and expected) to be, to varying degrees, wary and cautious about expressing their sexual interests and appetites. It was socially understood that even when they did, in fact, feel sexual interest towards a person, they might have ambivalent attitudes and feelings about acting on it, including the act of letting that interest be known and perceived. (Admittedly, they seemed to do a far better job of coping with unwanted attentions, but perhaps that came with practice)

Here was a model for accepting this kind of hesitant and uncertain sexuality without regarding it as pathetic, damaged, unhealthy. In fact, being aware of one’s own complex feelings about sexuality was often portrayed as a sign of a good healthy respect for one’s self, in contrast to which enthusiastically availing one’s self of sexual experiences whenever the opportunity held some degree of appetizing attraction was seen as a possible sign of lacking sufficient standards or appropriate boundaries. In my case, it was liberating to be able to view myself as a non-pathological sexual creature, ambivalences and wariness about my own sexual interests included. Maybe it wasn’t a very practical way to be in the world if one were male, but when I considered it this way, it looked like I would be not so far outside the normal if I had been female. Or if I considered myself to be the same kind of person that they were.

And it meshed with the rest of how I saw myself. It immediately fit. I’d always emulated the girls, admired them, measured myself against them as my role models.

I stopped feeling ashamed and stopped worrying that I was sexually broken, some kind of basket case. I liked who I was and now that could see my sexual nature from this vantage point, I liked my sexuality as it was. And I realized I wasn’t going to find a suitable expression of it within any of the behavioral models offered to men. If I were going to make it work, I would do so by looking at how women, the people who were most like me, had made a successful go of it.

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Tomboys

"I think you have a misconception", my women's studies professor told me. "Feminism is not 'for women who step away from traditional feminine expectations and roles'", she said, making air quotes. "Feminism is for all women. We want to support women's freedom to choose their own options, and that includes being a mother, or a receptionist. It even includes being a sex object". She paused and sighed. "In my day we were trying to get away from that, but now lots of women are seeking it. Anyway, my point is, feminism isn't about telling women how they're supposed to be. It's fine to not conform to the expectations that are projected onto women but it's also fine if you do, if it's what you want for yourself".


I understood her point, but it was still nevertheless true that lots of women who were not traditionally feminine had felt a special resonance with feminism. Feminism told them it was okay to be the way they were, in a world where everyone else was saying otherwise, so of course they had a special interest in it!

I just finished rereading Tomboys!, a collection of short reminiscences edited by Lynne Yamagushi and Karen Barber. The subtitle is "Tales of Dyke Derring-Do". It is specifically about the experience of growing up unfeminine, or masculine if you prefer. Tomboyish, hoydenish, boisterous and forward and irrepressible, physical, nervy, athletic, competitive, immodest and not demurely amenable. Hell on wheels.

The women writing the pieces were definitely seeing themselves as revolutionary insurrectionists, and they saw it as specifically feminist bravery. How could they not?

Anyway, I'm reading these stories again, and, not for the first time, wishing for a similarly compiled collection from tomboyish women whose sexual orientation was towards male people. In particular, I'd be interested in reading how they negotiated a sexuality that didn't require betraying their personalities and behavioral patterns as tomboys in order to be sexual participants with male partners. And how they structured their relationships.

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Split Identity

I suggest we split what we call "identity" into two components. I apologize if I’m repeating myself; my thoughts keep returning to this notion the way a tongue seeks out a sore tooth. I’m talking about a simple split here – not like the myriad aspects of identity portrayed in the Genderbread Person and other such formulations (useful though they may also be at times). I’m suggesting the usefulness of distinguishing simply, between self-chosen identity and identity that is assigned to us by others (which I refer to as altercast identity). I have my reasons for proposing this, which I’d like to go into. You see what you think, OK?



A Lesson from the Workplace



I’m currently working at the NYC Dept of Health, assisting in the coding of data from survey forms that track Naloxone distribution. So on a day-in, day-out basis I’m staring at a lot of survey forms, and one of the questions asked of respondents is their race. Respondents are asked to tick off any categories that apply (they can select multiple answers): White, Black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native, Don’t Know, or Other. Or that was the original set of choices; "Hispanic or Latino/a" was added to later editions of the form. Why? Well, originally, "Hispanic" (yes/no) was a separate question from race. But enormous numbers of respondents were checking the "Other" box on race and writing in "Latino" or "Hispanic". Clearly, they experienced being Hispanic as a race, something that (more often than not) they identified as instead of white or black, not in addition to it.

But it doesn’t stop there. On both the old forms and the new forms, people check "Other" and identify as "Puerto Rican", "Dominican", "Cuban", "Mexican", "Salvadorean", "Chilean". Nor is this trend by any means confined to folks from Spanish-language cultures. People are selecting "Other" and self-identifying their race as "Irish", "Czech", "Russian", "Iranian", "Mixteca", "Filipino", "Ethiopian", "Jewish", and so on.

On the one hand, -- hey that’s interesting, the social construct of "race" appears to be converging with what we would have called "ethnicity" or even "country of origin", and given the lethally poisonous history of the ideology of race, that could be viewed as a healthy and positive development.

On the other hand, the original thinking behind asking people their race included a concern for whether or not our services were reaching populations that have historically been underserved. And when you look at it in that light, the intention is not so much "how do you identify yourself, race-wise?" but more "how would other people most often categorize you and regard you?" – because the latter is the factor that most directly shapes how people are treated (or mistreated or neglected in the offering of treatment and so forth).



Why I am Not a Lesbian – the Reprise



A few weeks ago I posted a blog post titled "Why I am Not a Lesbian". It was controversial; it upset several people, most commonly transgender women who identify as lesbians. In retrospect, perhaps I should have titled the post "Why I am Not a Lesbian and Also Not a Heterosexual Man". I kind of thought the latter portion of that was sufficiently well-developed in the essay, but I guess I didn’t give it as much emphasis. I did state that being in possession of a penis and associated physical structures does not define me as a man and therefore doesn’t define my attraction to female people as heterosexuality.

But the part that lit the controversy-fire was saying that my identification as a femme, a feminine person, a girl, does not define my attraction to female people as lesbianism either. I was talking about myself, about my identity, but my assertion was taken as if I were saying that what is true for me should be considered true of anyone else who has the kind of physical plumbing that is traditionally and typically considered male. In other words, as if I had said "I am not a lesbian because although I have a woman or girl gender identity, I have a male body, and hey, you over there, you aren’t a lesbian either, you silly AMAB!"

(I found this frustrating; I thought I had been quite clear that the problem is that "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are insufficient terms, because they assume that sex and gender are the same thing or have the same value, and so they don’t have a socket for someone who identifies as a male girl, as I do)

I present as male, or, at least, make no effort to change my presentation so as to elicit an altercast categorization by other people as female, and so I am viewed as male. In this culture that is coterminous with being viewed as a man. I don’t really make an effort to package my appearance so as to be viewed as a male, but I have a physical body such that, were I to go to a nude beach and be seen from a distance by a thousand complete strangers who know nothing of how I identify, I would be overwhelmingly categorized as a male person. If I show up at the local lesbian bar, I will be perceived there also as a male person. And not as a lesbian. And that is significantly a part of my identity experience.



An Exploration of Comparative TERFitude



I have a respected acquaintance and political ally who, if someone were to call her a TERF ("Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist"), isn’t a person on whose metaphorical feet I could honestly say the shoe does not fit. She reads this blog. I am not going to defend all of her positions, and indeed I’m about to attack some of them. But not all of them.

I do think it is relevant to organize around social experience that people have in common. When feminists come together politically, they often wish to join with other people who have also had a lifetime, ongoing experience of being seen as, viewed as, treated as a woman. As with the intention behind the race question on the surveys, this isn’t about how one self-identifies. It’s about how other people have altercast one, how other people have categorized one with or without one’s concurrence or dissent from those assumptions.

Raise your hand if you remember Rachel Dolezal. Is there anything inherently wrong with identifying as a black person if you happen to be the pale-skinned descendant of European ancestors? I think not; I certainly don’t take issue with it (although it's not my call to make). But Rachel Dolezal occupied a position that was intended to be staffed by a person who had the relevant political social experience, the experience of being perceived as and treated as black, and that was not, in fact, her experience. And that is why we regard her has having done a Bad Thing. For purposes of evaluating her appropriateness for that position, it’s not about her self-chosen identity as black, it’s about having been (or not having been) on the receiving end of being altercast by others as black and treated accordingly.

Some lesbians are "political lesbians", not in the sense of being lesbians who are also political people, or even who are also political about being lesbians, but in the specific sense of choosing to constrain their sexuality so as to express it only with other people who have been in the political situation of being altercast all their lives as girls and women. I’m not saying they do not also find the female form to be physically attractive, or to find the womanly character traits and personality attributes to be romantically desirable in and of themselves, but a fundamental reason to them for being lesbians is to not give their erotic energies over to anyone except other people who have been in that political situation, the altercast identity of being female and woman in a patriarchal society.

In light of their existence within the larger lesbian community, I personally would find it arrogant and inappropriate for me to identify as a lesbian. Your mileage may vary. I do not speak for you. But whether I like it or not, whether I prefer it or abhor it, I am perceived as a male, a man, and treated accordingly, and as a consequence of that I do not have their experience, the one they define themselves by. I would like it if they were to listen to me for who I am, and for the experiences that I have had as a sissy male who rejected masculinity and was proud of being a sissy male, because my story is also relevant to patriarchy and feminism; and I would like to be with female people who do not wish or need their interactions with male-bodied people to revolve around assumed differences. Around me "being a man". I’m not one. I’d like lesbians to understand that. But I do not opt to call myself a lesbian, nonetheless.

My colleague has a reprehensible habit of referring to transgender women only in the dismissive, not listening to anything they might have to say aside from their identification of themselves as women, and she rejects that. She doesn’t reject it with nuance and she does not carefully split the matter of identity and then explain the ways in which a transgender woman isn’t what she means when she says "woman". It is hostile and it is contemptuous, what she is doing, and it is wrong, and I may have to part company with her over it. Splitting identity factors as I am suggesting here would be a useful tactical tool for her, and she could do so and thereby cease negating the identity of transgender women as women while still being able to say "we do not, however, welcome you at our separatist feminist enclave, which is for women who have been treated as girls or women for a lifetime". She could do so and then also participate in (or even host) other meetings which do not exclude transgender women. And which could, incidentally, include me as well.

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Why I'm Not a Lesbian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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