Los Alamos Home Town Newspaper Reviews My Book

I have had many nice reviews printed in college newspapers and I've been reviewed in the LGBTQIA press. And I've had notices and interviews in mainstream papers that speak to the existence of the book, but which weren't actually reviews of it. But until this week I did not have an actual review of GenderQueer printed in a mainstream municipal newspaper.

So it seems utterly appropriate that the first to do so would be the Los Alamos Daily Post, the newspaper from the town where I attended junior high and high school. The newspaper from the town where most of the action in the book takes place.

Lifestyles Editor Bonne Gordon was a great interviewer; when she called me to ask questions about my book and my experiences, it was obvious that she had not only been giving the book a close read but was also familiar on a deep level with the relevant backdrop issues. We discussed gender from the standpoint of LGBTQIA experiences and feminism, and how things have changed (and how they haven't) over the forty years since the events described in the book.

Los Alamos is both a small community and a special, well-known one. It's received far more literary attention than a typical village of 12,000 inhabitants would, but not so much that the people who live there don't become interested when a book about living there goes to press. So with any luck, the article will spark some local interest in reading my book.


Putting the Q in LGBTQ: Growing Up 'Different' In Los Alamos — Bonnie Gordon, The Los Alamos Daily Post


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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, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


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

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My Book's First Review in an LGBTQIA+ Publication

From Sherri Rase, Out In Jersey:

Allan D. Hunter’s GenderQueer: A Story from a Different Closet is an eye-opening first-person account of Derek, born male, who identifies as a girl. While this hardly raises an eyebrow in the 21st century, in the 1970s, Derek had no role models and no points of reference.

If you are of a generation with Derek, give or take, you thrill with him at his first car, put wings on his heart. You feel the rush of first love, and first touch, when attraction becomes physical. You feel the pain of rejection and being misunderstood.

You may not be able to read the book in one sitting—it takes time to absorb.

"Three Great Books for LGBTQ Summer Reading"




I've had nice reviews in college newspapers and an interview in the mainstream press (Newsday), but this is my first review in an LGBTQIA-centric publication, and I'm excited about it!



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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, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


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

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Bookstores and Libraries and Community Centers, Oh My!

Having given approval to the formatted manuscript and the covers (back and front), I've now effectively switched effort-gears from "getting book published" to "getting people to read the book", even though it hasn't rolled off the Sunstone Books presses yet.

At this phase, where the book's availability is predicted but still slightly off in the future (January 2020, for benefit of the curious), the focus is on women's and gender studies programs at colleges, and LGBT community centers. I can be booked to speak at such venues even before it's possible to show up with a stack of the books on the table in front of me.

I actually did some of that in 2016-2017 when I had previously thought my book was on the verge of coming out. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Learned a lot, too. When I next have an opportunity to present, the presentation is going to be more closely focused on my specific type of gender identity and what it brings to the table. People like the "Gender 101" introductory material but I think I can encapsulate it in a much smaller portion of my talk.

Later, once the book can be purchased, I will add libraries and bookstores to the list of targets.

To be sure, a library or a bookstore, theoretically speaking, could also have a presenter or speaker before their book is available for purchase. But in the case of bookstores in particular, my research thus far indicates that they aren't much for "events", or at least not the kind of event that revolves around a gender-variant person discussing gender identity. Some of the new age and mystical / spiritual book stores do host events but they're most often focused on chakras and healing and the sale of gems and oils and other non-book substances that they market along with books on the subject. University bookstores generally don't do events at all, of any sort, and the remaining balance of independent bookstores mostly want the author's book to be available for purchase first.

Meanwhile, my publicist, John Sherman of Sherman & Company, is going to have an additional focus: getting my book reviewed. That, surprisingly enough (for me at least), is something that needs focused attention before the book's release date. Some important reviewers won't review a book once it comes out.



My day-job skills as a FileMaker database developer are again serving me well, just as they did for the querying process. For this publicity effort, I have 11614 records in my database (with many of them containing multiple contact persons to fire emails or snailmails or phone calls off to). Of those, 864 are college campus women's and/or gender studies programs; 412 are LGBT community centers, a mixture of on-campus and independent. Then I have 1552 academic libraries and a whopping 7263 public libraries, any and all of whom could theoretically acquire a copy of my book for their shelves. I have no experience pitching this possibility to libraries, but with any luck I will learn as I gain experience. Then I have 32 LGBT-focused bookstores (a declining phenomenon, unfortunately, although part of the decline may be that the subject matter is more mainstream and more often carried by mainstream bookstores), and 1351 other (generic) independent bookstores. The independent bookstores and libraries are dual-opportunity: they could book me to speak, and purchase copies of my book to stock and sell as well. Finally, I have 139 reviewers, bloggers, booktubers, and individual people who asked me to alert them when the book becomes available.

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Genre Variant

Originality has its limits; to make sense to people, we have to begin in familiar territory; to say something new, we must connect it with something people already know.

But the worlds of publishing and producing constrain originality far beyond that, in their expectation that books and other creative works fit into an existing genre, and that books within a genre fit narrow specifications and tick off the requisite number of anticipated elements.

The popular mystery/detective genre has its well-established requirement of Clues, Character-Suspects (among whom the perpetrator must exist), the Escalation of further perpetrations of subsequent crimes (and further clues), and the False Suspect thrown in our path to throw us off the scent, and so on. I've never written one, although like most of us I've read many over the years.

The romance genre should have the protagonists Meet Cute but initially behave more like antagonists, give us some Steam but establish reasons to defer pleasure for awhile, and insert a Setback just as things are lighting up (a misunderstanding or an unreconcilable difference) before it resolves as HEA (happily ever after) or at least HFN (happily for now). Nothing I've written qualifies as a romance novel, although I've read my share of these as well.

If an author writes within a popular genre, and writes well with an interesting twist that makes their book ever so slightly different while still mostly fitting the template, they stand a chance of finding a literary agent and landing a publishing contract as a debut author. The publishing industry knows they have a built-in audience.

There are some genres that have fallen by the wayside, styles of writing that were once written and sold in large quantities. Would you like to be a brand new author today and find yourself pitching a book set in the 1800s in the west, featuring an upright male citizen who is a bit of a loner, who rides into a town where the establishment institutions of social order aren't working, so he makes a stand, bravely facing death and being outnumbered, but with his skill with a pistol he and his sidekick, with whom he has his conversations, prevail, only to find it necessary to ride off into the sunset because the little town is ambivalent about him?

Or perhaps you'd like to be fishing for a lit agent for your debut book that features a vivacious gal who finds herself in surrounded by deceptive creeping danger, and is fraught with self-doubt and doubt about the attractive but flawed male of wealth and power who lives in near-isolation in a crumbling old mansion; he starts off hateful but she forces his reluctant admiration and shows him her mettle, then she gradually finds that beneath his compromised and ethically questionable exterior and all his characterological flaws, he's actually shiny and principled -- ?

If you're an established author with a proven track record, it might please you to put forth a book that's a clever twist on the old classic western or gothic genre, but I suspect it would be a far more difficult sell for a first-timer.

One of my favorite examples of a creative work that doesn't shoehorn nicely into existing genres is actually a film (originally a screenplay), Miracle Mile. It kicks off as a conventional romance / romantic comedy, invoking the trope of a main character reaching a misunderstanding about something that makes him believe there's a crisis afoot, resulting in him behaving in amusingly silly ways and luring others into doing likewise. Except this time it turns out that the crisis isn't the result of a miscommunication and the story becomes an apocalyptic end-of-world tragedy.

That it ever got made (without being revamped to make it fit into genre packaging better) is a testimony to screenwriter Steve De Jarnatt and his durable stubbornness. He was a graduate of American Film Institute and had credentials for prior work on Hollywood films, but even after the Miracle Mile screenplay won awards there were misgivings about proceeding with the project as written:

De Jarnatt decided to shop the script around to various Hollywood studios and was turned down several times by executives that didn’t like the downbeat ending. The filmmaker said, “I certainly could have made it a few years ago if (the hero) woke up and it was all a dream, or they saved the day.” In fact, at one point, he was approached to shoehorn Miracle Mile into Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) only with a happy ending, but he turned that offer down as well.

-- from Radiator Heaven


I hadn't anticipated as much difficulty fencing my manuscript as I encountered. Like most newbie authors probably do, I thought the writing was the primary challenge. Thousands of people crank up their word processors for NaNoWriMo every year thinking maybe they've got a novel in them, probably assuming that if they do indeed write one, and it's good, they can get it published.

I thought of my book as fitting into a genre: the LGBTQ coming-out story. I figured it would fit on the same shelf as Conundrum: From James to Jan and Rubyfruit Jungle and The Best Little Boy in the World and Stone Butch Blues and Emergence and so forth.

Unfortunately, as with the western and the gothic romance, the LTBTQ coming-out tale is treated as an "old genre". As I wrote in my various query-letter incarnations, there have been such stories for lesbian coming-out, gay male coming-of-age, and transgender (in both of the conventional transitional directions) stories *, but nothing addressing that "Q" that sits there at the end of the acronym; nothing that explains genderqueer -- or gender variance by any other name -- that doesn't overlap with the previous four letters. Well, that may have been part of the problem: the people I was trying to sell on the story's concept didn't see any unaddressed need there, because they, too, didn't have a notion of any remaining category for which we didn't already know the story.

Aside from that, "need" isn't the operative word by which the publishing industry makes its assessment. They think in terms of "market", not "need". They consider manuscripts in terms of their potential audience, the people already poised to go out and buy such a book. Genre, in other words.

Instead of being conceptualized as a part of an LGBTQ coming-out genre, my book was typically seen as either an LGBT book or as a memoir. The LGBT genre is mostly fiction, and mostly erotica-romance at that, with an occasional literary fiction piece from an established author. The memoir genre is occupied by the personal narrative by someone we've already heard of, a celebrity or a person who made the news and attracted our attention, and hence has a "platform".


Submission Stats as of October 2019:

Total Queries to Lit Agents: 1453
Rejections: 1441
Still Outstanding: 12

Total Queries Directly to Small Publishers: 117
Rejections: 58
Still Outstanding: 43
Pub Contract Signed (then went out of business): 1
Pub Contract Signed (rights reverted, creative diffs): 1
Pub Contract Signed (publication pending): 1



* to be fair, there aren't many bisexual coming-of-age / coming-out stories either. As with so many things pertaining to bisexual people, I think there's an attitude that if we have lesbian and gay equivalents covered, the story / concerns / situation of bisexual people won't be meaningfully different so we dont need to bother.



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Transition is a Transitive Verb

On one of the Facebook transgender boards, someone writes:

Does transgender mean you want to transition from your birth gender to the gender you identify with, like MtF or FtM? And you have to have gender dysphoria to be transgender?

That's the classic model of transgender, often called "binary transgender".

On a different transgender board, someone else complains:

I just love it when people tell me I can't identify as trans. As if nonbinary people aren't trans.

It's complicated. Part of what complicates it is that sex isn't the same thing as gender. And yet I often see transgender defined as "when a person's GENDER identity differs from the SEX they were assigned at birth". But the definition doesn't directly speak to whether being transgender can mean you have a GENDER that differs from the SEX you are assigned now and every day whenever people see you, or a GENDER that differs from the SEX that you consider *yourself*, for that matter.

Do you need to present as the SEX that corresponds to your GENDER in order to be transgender? Do you need to "pass"? What if you are fine with the SEX to which you were assigned at birth but your GENDER happens to not have the same value and you happen to be perfectly fine with that mismatch? (Even if the rest of the world is a lot less fine with that?)

I have chosen NOT to identify as transgender, preferring genderqueer, but most of my transgender allies acknowledge that that is my choice and that they'd accept me as transgender if I did choose to call myself that.



I encounter people denying my identity, too. I've had socially liberal educated people who accept gay, lesbian, and transgendered people dismiss me.

"I consider Trans people as the Gender they feel they are, whether they've had surgery or not. That isn't at all relelvant to your case because YOU AREN"T TRANS!"

And I've had transgender people tell me, as they've told the person who identifies as "nonbinary transgender", that we don't count:

since you strongly believe you're a woman...then you need to transition. There's no such thing as a male woman you're confused or you're a troll

... and other transgender people have informed me that I am seeking the impossible or even that I'm a threat:

if you mean to say that a 'woman' (trans or cis) can be 'male' in that they can have facial hair, a deep voice - any of those trappings that categorise them in the mind of the masses by default as 'men' rather than as 'women', there we have a problem...

We are a collective society, and thus our actions, decisions, and ideations have to, at one way or another, be corroborated by, or rebuked by, the collective society we are a part of. If you present outwardly as 'male' but you identify as a woman, one cannot ever expect the collective to acknowledge the latter while the former exists. You cannot push the fabric of society so far to breaking point and expect any sort of acceptance...

What happens to those of us who actually worked hard to transition? What happens to those of us who have nearly been brought to bankruptcy because we have felt the disconnect, have suffered through, had gone through the torment of society making us suffer for it, and worked hard to make the suffering cease? If your ideologies are to be a new 'norm', that would render all of our hard work meaningless.

When I go to give lectures and make presentations, one of my storyboards is a sign that says It's something else. I am sorry that people in the transgender community sometimes feel like I (and other people trying to explain new identities) are picking a fight with them. The process of differentiating can sometimes come across that way. Any group trying to explain themselves to the world at large is likely to start off with a group that the world is already familiar with, and then explains how their identity is different. Didn't trans people themselves have to do some of that a few years ago? --

People used to say and think things like this (CONTENT WARNING: DISMISSIVE AND INTOLERANT LANGUAGE):

Oh yeah, the transsexuals and tranvestites. They're the gay guys who dress as women and call each other 'girl' and call each other 'she' and stuff. It's a subcommunity within the gay world.

OR

Transgender people... it's like it's more socially acceptable to be a straight woman than to be a gay man, and more acceptable to be a straight guy than to be a lesbian. So that's why they do it.

NOT TO MENTION...

So let me get this right... she was a he, she was born male, and then transitioned and became a woman, but she likes girls, so she's a lesbian? I'm sorry that's all fucked up. What's the purpose of transitioning to female if you're attracted to women? This dude needs a psychiatrist!

So transgender people had to explain that being transgender is about gender, not sexual orientation. They had to differentiate themselves from gay and lesbian people. And some of the people they had to explain this to were people in the gay and lesbian community, so they spent a fair amount of time saying "I am not like you. I'm like this instead".

Now you're on the receiving end. And we're pushing off against you.

But we could not have done this without you. Your prior success makes this possible.

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Compassion and Tenderness

Part of what “femininity” means to many people, not just by association but embedded in the definition, is a capacity and an inclination to care, to be empathic, to listen and to provide supportive efforts, both of the practical variety and in the form of expressions of understanding and concern. When people are discussing male (and/or Assigned Male At Birth) people who are feminine (femmes, sissies, girls, women), the traits and expressions that they focus on may not emphasize compassion and tenderness, but at least for some of us it is it’s pretty central to why and how we think of ourselves as feminine.

“Everyone should”

In the decade after I first came out as a sissy (which was my word for it, specifically as a heterosexual sissy in order to untie the confusion between gender and sexual orientation), I mostly embraced a feminist analysis of sexist polarized gender expectations: there was no damn reason to foist onto male people all that masculine adversarial belligerence and selfishness and emotionally truncated immaturity.

One way of reading that interpretation is that all of us male people possess the same capacity and tendency to be compassionate as female people do, and that as a male feminist (or profeminist or whatever) person I was just being loud about saying so. And during this era of my life, I did tend to de-emphasize the notion that I was inherently different from other males, because I was positioning my own politics to fit within that feminist framework.

Another, more nuanced take on that is that all of us male people could be that way but that male role socialization and the conformity of typical males to those masculine expectations meant that most males did not develop those traits, whereas those of us who rejected sexist roles and rules and embraced healthy traits labeled “feminine” were far more free to develop as compassionate and tender people. That was more the approach I put into words when discussing the matter in those days.

But when I first came out, the central insight was that I was different from men in general, that how and who I was made me not one of the men but instead one of the women, and that that was why my experiences and, in particular, my frustrations with heterosexuality, were as they were. The political analysis that posited that I was actually a surviving, relatively healthy person in an unhealthy sexist world came a bit later. And now, when I am positioning my politics within queer theory and LGBTQ identity frameworks, I’ve returned to that. (If all the other males wish to say that they, too, are not correctly described by “masculinity”, that they, too, are actually far better described by the components that make up “femininity” instead, then they can certainly say so, but these days I speak for myself and, to an extent, for others who identify as I do). So here is the notion that the sissy femme is perhaps inherently inclined to be more compassionate and tender as an expression of innate femininity. I have often described the “differences between the sexes” using the Snow Cone analogy. Hurl a mango snow cone at the wall, then pick up a mint snow cone and throw it against the same wall but make the center of impact a bit to the right of where the mango cone’s center of impact was. You get a spray of colored ice with orange-colored flecks interspersed with green-colored flecks, lots of overlap, and even though as a group the entirety of the mango particles skew to the left of the mint particles, there are individual mango particles even way over on the right where the mint flecks predominate, and likewise for mint ice-flecks on the far left. So being a sissy femme is being one of the exceptions, genuinely different at least in the statistical / generalization sense, and hence, to whatever extent female people in general are innately more compassionate and tender, the feminine sissy may be feminine in exactly that way, among other ways.

Take your pick. Any way you go at it, it’s a set of character and behavioral traits that I claim to exhibit and to which I aspire and which forms a big part of my sense of who I am.

Not Just Selflessness

As with the entire basket of attributes called “femininity”, compassion and tenderness are often not seen as things that benefit the person who has them. Instead, they’re often thought of strictly in terms of the benefit that they accord other people. Feminist analysis has often pointed to how women are placed in a position of providing multiple kinds of service and support to men, and that this is among them, yet one more form of social labor for which women are exploited and from which energies they are alienated, their efforts along these lines appropriated for men’s use. But we have to be careful not to fall into the pattern of devaluing those ways of being in the world that are part of the feminine, of ratifying the patriarchal definition of them as second-tier and inferior.

We can’t really do that without taking a frank look at the benefits to the feminine person of being compassionate and tender.

I first became really and intensely aware of this from experiencing its absence as a child: I was capable of being a caring person, of being a good listener, a sympathetic and supportive friend, but as a boy (or person perceived in those terms) it felt like no one wanted it from me. I was jealous of the kind of emotional sharing and reciprocal connections I saw among girls my age and felt strongly that I could participate in that, would be good at it if given the opportunity, and felt very much left out. Over the years of thinking about this and analyzing it more fully in the years after I came out, I came to think of this flavor of emotional intimacy as something for which we have an appetite, and from which we derive personal pleasure from the connection. Conceptualizing it as some kind of selfless sacrificial service to others denies this; and it’s wrong. It’s the same kind of cognitive mistake that a person would be making if they were to think that no one gets sexual pleasure from pleasuring someone else, or has an appetite prompting them to do so. On an emotional level, we get off on being compassionate to others and making them feel loved and understood and cared for. It is seldom spoken of in this fashion, to be sure, but in order to claim it for myself and to explain that being deprived of it is indeed a deprivation, being blatantly honest about this aspect of the experience seems vital.

Then there is the ancillary social aspect of being perceived as such. It should be easy enough to see why one might wish to be thought of as a compassionate and tender caring person. Alternative gender identities are proliferating, and one fake-tolerant pseudoliberal response to it takes the form “you can identify as whatever the heck you want, hey you can identify as a pine tree if that suits you, and more power to you, as long as you realize that I don’t get it and probably never will”. The problem is that we don’t need anyone’s permission or cooperation to be who we are within the interiors of our own heads or even, to a significant extent, within our everyday behaviors; but like everyone else we receive the identitities projected onto us by everyone else who perceives us, and, again like everyone else we derive some degree of social comfort and satisfaction from being perceived in ways that are congruent with how we perceive ourselves. Cisgender males are generally perceived as men and expected to be masculine, and they are, and they get the received / perceived signals like a warm friendly thumbs-up, a confirmation of identity.

There are specific nice things that come with being seen as compassionate and tender, and woven into them, for us, the confirmation of identity in which we are vested.

Finally, going back to the notion that caregiving is a service that others do benefit from, there are transactional advantages to being the resource to whom other people turn in order to obtain it, being in demand for it. In the interpersonal economy of human interaction, it is definitely to the advantage of a person who has these traits to be appreciated for them, to be sought out for them. Just like being a good cook or being a funny person who can be counted on to tell entertaining stories and jokes, having a capacity to give people something that they benefit from brings them to you and in the resulting interaction it is something of value for which those others may give other benefits and services in exchange.

Against Trivialization

I said up above that when people think or talk about sissy femme male (or AMAB) people, compassion and tenderness isn’t typically what they will choose to emphasize. More often they make it all about lipstick and high heels, being prissy and fabulous, and behaving seductively.

Now, there’s definitely a positive good in fun, frolic and frivolity. Joy and pleasure are among the components of life that have been devalued in favor of anger and seriousness and sacrifice and all that, and I am happy to be in the tradition of Emma Goldman, who said that if she can’t dance at it, then it isn’t her revolution. So let’s not even trivilialize the playful accoutrements of femininity…

But yes, a part of the devalorization of the feminine – as attested to by Julia Serrano in Whipping Girl, among other prominent places – takes the form of treating the entire feminine package of traits as if there’s very little of real substance going on there.

You’ll get no traction from me if you devalue compassion and tenderness. There’s absolutely nothing trivial about it. These are among the most noble and important of human characteristics and I have always been proud of being a part of them and them a part of my identity, and never had any sympathy or interest in a masculine identity that seemed founded on disparaging all that, of treating it as weakness or dismissing it as less relevant than winning and triumphing over opponents and whatnot.

I am a proud sissy and I have never for a moment looked across the aisle at conventional masculine males and felt that I was in any shape way fashion or form LESS THAN.



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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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Physical Morphology, Assigned Sex, and the Binary

The transgender community isn't quite monolithic but in general, within trans groups there's not much welcome for a lot of focus (prurient or otherwise) on a person's physical sex. Sexual morphology. Plumbing. Whatever you want to call it.

Within recent months I've been in conversations where trans (and occasionally nonbinary) folks have said:

• Sex is a social construct. The notion that it exists as something separate from gender identity is mostly bullshit. If your identity is that you are a woman, then your body is female.

• The only relevant way to designate the difference between a transgender person and a cisgender person is that in the case of a transgender person a misidentification was made, assigning them to the wrong sex instead of getting it right, back when they were born: assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth.

• Anyone who would consider another person's genital configuration a dealbreaker in dating or sex is prejudiced and all wrapped up in transphobic thinking; there's no defensible legitimate reason to make an issue of that, or to want to know their date's erogenous-zone plumbing in advance, or to express a preference.

I'm not on board with all that and sometimes I feel erased by it. This LGBTQ rainbow is supposed to accommodate variation and diversity, and some of this "party line" on physical morphology isn't accommodating me worth a shit, and I'm theoretically part of this rainbow, dammit. Can we talk?

OK, you want to talk about social constructs, let's examine the social construct of clothing, and the ubiquitous use of it. No, I don't mean dresses versus arrow shirts and suit jackets, I mean clothes period, as opposed to not wearing them. Ever been to a naturist enclave? Yeah, that's the environment formerly known as a "nudist camp". Imagine one. Lots of people, no clothings.

Let's watch some other things getting socially constructed in this environment. Starting with me, upon my arrival. And you, upon yours, if you're willing.

"Assigned male at birth" and "assigned female at birth" make it sound like all the assigning is done by an OB/GYN doctor who makes a pronouncement between clamping off the umbilical cord and recording the Apgar score, and then wraps the identifying merchandise in a diaper and from then on no one does any assigning, they just rely on the original that the doctor made in the delivery-room pronouncement.

But that's not how it works, and it's certainly not what's happening now as we step forth into the naturist preserve. One thousand sighted naturists take a glance and make an assessment. Just like folks out there in the clothed world, they assign most of the people they encounter to the category "male" or to the category "female". This isn't gender identity. This is assigned sex. They haven't asked you about your pronouns yet. They dont' know if you conceptualize yourself as a man, a woman, or something else. They're assigning you in their heads based on what they can see. Unlike the folks in the clothed world, they're relying directly on your physical morphology. Basics.

Yes it's social. Yes, they're relying on categories they learned from the society surrounding them. But their assessment relies on a generalization, and at the level of generalization a two-value categorical system works for the overwhelming majority of folks who walk in this door. Let's take a step back. How'd they get this categorical system they're using? They just soaked it up from our culture, right? Well, let's pretend they didn't, and start them off from scratch, no preconceived notions about the existence of sexes. What's going to happen?

Generalization's going to happen. It's how our minds work; we're good at it. We categorize stuff. Generalization isn't politically evil -- despicable shitty attitudes towards the exceptions to the rule are entirely optional and not an inherent part of generalizing.

I don't think it's inevitable that they'll develop a two-category system. For example, they might create a four-category system, based on the physical differences between prepubescent people and adults as well as the penis versus vagina thing, for instance. But I think a two-category system is probably more likely than anything else. After awhile the naturists are going to notice some of the exceptions, the people whose morphological configuration doesn't categorize simply and easily into either of those two groups -- and in the absense of clothing to hide it and make it stay hidden, there would come the recognition of intersex people. (Not that all intersex people are visually identifiable even in a naturist setting, but some would be).

And into this environment strolls a transgender person. A visual assessment is made and along with it an assignment. Regardless of outcome, our naturist population is not "getting it wrong" when they do this: we're talking about assigned sex, not gender identity. That which is attributed to us by others is a part of our experience, and each attributor is not merely imposing a value, they're recognizing the value most likely imposed by a huge host of other people and realizing you've been perceived as such.

A binary transgender person who pursues the stereotypical path of transitioning is a person who seeks morphological reassignment in order to obtain categorical reassignment. Such a person changes their body, which changes its visual aspects and causes the naturists to categorize them differently.

In the clothed world, there are more options for how to present in such a way as to be categorically assigned differently, but the underlying premise is the same.

So what's all this about? What's the color and shape of the axe I brought to this grinding wheel?

I'm a gender invert. Male girl person. My gender identity is entirely feminine. I wasn't a boy. I'm not a man. You can understand a lot about me simply by assuming I'm a woman and treating me accordingly. In general I would say to the world: I wish you would. But the world has not done so because the world harbors notions about what my male body means, and projects those notions onto me. They're wrong, but the fact that they've done so all my life has given me a different set of experiences. A lot of those experiences have been vividly unpleasant, which is why I would opt to talk about them, to make an issue of them, a social issue, a political issue. But I can't do that if I can only identify myself as a woman. They aren't the experiences of a woman, generally speaking. They're the specific experiences of a male woman, a person who perpetually gets assigned by others as male, because of my physical morphology. Meanwhile, they also aren't the experiences of a male, generally speaking, either. They're the specific experiences of a male woman, a femme, a sissyboy, a girlyboy, someone markedly different from the other males.

I can't talk about my stuff if I'm in a social environment where I'm not supposed to refer to my body parts, my physical morphology (and the resulting assigned sex that people foist onto me) as relevant parts of my identity and experience. I am silenced if transgender people insist that "male" is identity, not morphology, that "penis" is what you choose to designate whatever morphological part you wish to identify as such with no morphological definition to constrain it, that no one has any business rummaging around between the legs of people rhetorically and categorically because none of that is anyone's damn business. It silences me and erases me and prevents me from speaking from my own experience as a genderqueer person, an LGBTQ person with my own concerns and considerations.

I don't think intersex people find it welcoming to be told that a person's morphology isn't politically or socially relevant, either, and many of them have told me so and given me support on this, and I appreciate that. They, too, get silenced and subsumed in dialogs about gender and physical sex and operations and choice and so on. But they're probably sick and tired of people who aren't them who point to them to make a rhetorical point, as if they were an interesting concept instead of real people and so on, so I shouldn't dwell further on that aside from recommending that you listen to them too.

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Defining Gender Inversion

A gender invert is someone whose gender is the opposite of the gender associated with their physical sex. Male girls. Female boys. I'm a male girl and I identify as a gender invert. Hi!

The other component of being a gender invert is accepting both one's physical sex and one's unexpected gender as natural and correct.

(I just realized the other day that although I've been blogging about this stuff since 2014, I've never done a blog post specifically about the term!)

Origin

Havelock Ellis popularized the term "gender invert" back in the late 1800s. At the time, he was promoting the notion that homosexual people of either sex were essentially people who possessed a bunch of characteristics of the opposite sex. That notion got challenged and discarded. Most researchers now agree that being a feminine male, or a masculine female, is not what causes a person to be a gay male or a lesbian. ₁ So the term "gender invert" was basically discarded and left to rot on the sidewalk.

I'm reclaiming it. Just because it has nothing to do with causing sexual orientation doesn't mean that gender inversion itself doesn't exist. Or that it isn't a useful term. Our society is now familiar with male-to-female and female-to-male transgender people, transitioners who address their situation by bringing their sex into compliance with their gender. "Gender invert" can refer to a similar person who continues to live a life as a male girl or a female boy, someone who embraces rather than seeks to fix the apparent disparity between sex and gender.


The Umbrella Thing

People often offer me other terms to use instead. I am told that I could refer to myself (and to people like me) as "nonbinary transgender". As opposed to the binary transgender people who transition male-to-female or female-to-male. But as a gender invert, I am operating with some binary assumptions myself, for better or worse: in order to describe a person as having "the opposite" gender from the gender that normally goes with their sex, we're sort of assuming two body types (male and female) and two genders (boy and girl), because only in a binary two-category system do you have an obvious "opposite".

I don't mean to be disrespectful to intersex people or to people whose gender identity isn't binary like that. But most of us who are alive today grew up in a world that uses a binary system for categorizing people by sex. And like most identities, the identity of gender invert exists against the backdrop of society and its existing library of categories.

Yes, I suppose "gender invert" is technically an identity that falls under the transgender umbrella, since anyone who is a gender invert would have a gender identity other than the one that other folks assume them to have. And "gender invert" also falls under the genderqueer umbrella, since anyone who is a gender invert has a gender other than the normative, expected gender, therefore is queer, gender-wise. And since you can't express "male girl" in a strict binary system where everyone is either male (and hence a man or boy) or else female (and thereby a woman or girl), "gender invert" fits under the umbrella term "nonbinary" as well.

I now have all the umbrellas I need.

What I don't have is enough specific recognition of my situation. Like lesbians who felt more erased than included by the use of the term "gay", and preferred to see the word "lesbian" to reflect an awareness of them, I want to see "gender invert" spreading as a concept and as a terminology.


What gender inversion ISN'T -- aka what not to say to a gender invert

• Being a gender invert is not another way of saying you have a masculine or feminine "side". All of me is feminine. Side, back, front, top, bottom. I'm not less feminine in my gender than some other kind of person. A gender invert is not someone halfway inbetween a person who is cisgender and a person who is transgender and getting hormones and surgeries. I find the "side" thing and the assumptions that I'm only semi-feminine to be negating and insulting.

• Obviously, since we're not living in Havelock Ellis's time, we all know that gender identity isn't the same as sexual orientation, right? Actually, weirdly enough, you know where you see these elements conflated with each other a lot? For gays and lesbians. Someone affirms a proud gay femme's identity by saying "Oh sure I always knew you were gay, totally flaming" and then describes the person's childhood femininity. Or speaks of their daughter's incipient identity as a lesbian by describing how butch she was in fourth grade. Well, I should not attempt to speak on behalf of gay or lesbian people who also identify as gender inverts, but yeah, do try to separate the two components in your mind and think before you speak. Me, I'm a sissy femme girlish male whose attraction is towards female folks. I need the term "gender invert" because we don't have a term for someone like me.

• No, this isn't about committing genderfuck or cleverly trying to "undermine gender" and I'm not an agender person and I'm not particularly genderfluid either. Some people are. Here's a respectful and sincere salute to those who are. Nope, I'm gendered. I'm differently gendered, I'm queerly gendered, but I'm genuinely gendered. I have a gender identity.


But why?

I suppose in some ways being a gender invert is a bit old-fashioned, like being bisexual instead of pansexual or something. Perhaps it appears to you like a step backwards, reaffirming those binary categories even as it tries to carve out a noncompliant gender identity from them.

I don't think it is. I think it's like coming into an ongoing argument about whether to allow limited medical marijuana use or keep it completely illegal -- and saying it should be 100% legal for all uses, recreational and otherwise.

If it had ever already been established that it's normal and healthy that some percent of female people are extremely masculine, and similarly that some portion of male folks are entirely feminine, it would be a different situation, but it hasn't been and it isn't. And since it hasn't been established that way, proclaiming the desirability of androgyny and/or a gender-free world in which individuals aren't encouraged to identify with either of those moldy old gendered identities is making that the goal post. For those supporting our side of the debate, that is. The other side maintains its goal posts in the traditional gender conformities. I've never been much of a sports fan but I'm pretty sure that means all the action is in between neutral territory and traditional territory.

I'm moving the goal posts.

But moving the goal posts isn't why I'm doing this. I'm doing this because this is who I am. The fact that I think it's progressive is just an added benefit. The fact that some may think it's regressive and old-fashioned instead is just an added burden.

I'm speaking out about it either way.


You, when speaking about the many identities covered by the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ acronym, or when compiling a list of identity flags for a pride day illustration, please make a mention of gender inverts. I'd appreciate it. I'm here, too.


₁ See for example "Same-sex Sexuality and Childhood Gender Non-conformity: a spurious connection", Lorene Gottschalk, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol 12, No. 1, 2003

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

Part One: The Sense of Community


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

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

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

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



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

POLL for Traditionally Transitional (M2F and F2M) Transgender People

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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