For an organization's position paper, I was asked to come up with definitions for "sex" and "gender".
SEX is whatever biological built-in differences distinguish people as being male, female, or in some cases a different value from either of those two.
GENDER is any and all notions about differences between the sexes that are not directly based on things biologically built in.
I've written about it pretty extensively over the years. The distinction between my identity and situation and that of the mainstream narrative describing transgender people is that whereas they transition visually (and perhaps medically) so as to be perceived as the sex that matches their gender, I present to the world as a person with a mismatched sex and gender and press for acceptance as such. So the distinction between sex and gender has been useful to me. I've blogged about it often, for example here, here, and here. But like most people discussing such things, I've seldom defined the terms and instead have described them, like listing a batch of individual characteristics and saying "etc" at the end and saying "that's sex" and doing the same for gender.
Here's what I like about the definition at the top of this page: it leaves plenty of room for people to dissent about what things belong in each box.
A person with traditional, socially conservative views, for example, might believe that the socially shared and historically established views about the respective natures of men and women reflect how they really are. For them, gender is an example of an "empty set" -- you remember empty sets from that math class we were in back in school, right?
A person who considers the belief in the biological differentiation of male and female to be all ideological hype, and says sex is a social construct the same as gender and says that real science disproves that there's any clear distinction or division into two sex categories... that person basically views sex as an empty set, it's all gender.
Transgender men and women often speak of having something biologicallly different in their brains that makes them inherently trans, that they were born this way, and hence all the matrix of behaviors and desires and nuances and personality characteristics that they share in common with cisgender people of the same gender are built in for them. If it's built in, it's sex. The bodies with which they were born have other physical characteristics, making for an inconsistency, an apparently contradiction, but that's natural -- there are people with XY chromosomes who have androgen insensitivity and hence the morphology of the female body, which is also an inconsistency. Nature does that. Sex isn't binary except as a generalization.
Gender is a word that often followed by the word "role". I've tended to wince at the reduction of gender to social roles, as in "Joe goes to the office to work and Sue stays home watches the kids and cleans the house, those are gender roles". But there's a less klunky way to think of the term "role" -- movie and stage and television acting, where the actor brings a role to life.
We see a professional actor on the screen or stage rendering a character. He's sardonic, world-weary, casual in a mildly insulting way, easily familiar and a whiff dismissive, yet caring when he can be effectively caring without making himself vulnerable. He evinces wry amusement. He saunters when he walks. The actor's portrayal fits in with our prior experience of such people and resonates for us if the portrayal is done well, and some of us identify with that character and think he's like us; we may carry that performance around in our heads afterwards and aspire to be more like him, even, seeing in that role a model for how we want to be.
In that sense of the word, then, yes, gender includes and is largely composed of roles, a great many of them, ways of being a woman or a man that are embued with their own forms of dignity and strength, vulnerability and concerns, sexiness and spark, and forms of expression thereof. Our gender identities are significantly composed of juxtaposing our self-image against the backdrop of these and embracing the ones that validate us and inspire us as, well, role models.
Gender also is about being perceived. In other words it's not limited to the interior world of self. Other people gender us, they see us the same way we see the actors on the stage, looking from the outside at our performance and from it attributing characteristics to us, believing things about us, that may or may not match up well with the self-image we carry around inside us.
In our society, one of the very first people attribute to us when they encounter us is a sex category. Transgender people often speak of being assigned female at birth (AFAB) or assigned male at birth (AMAB); this is that same process although it's not "at birth", it's "at first encounter" and people do it to us generally while we're fully clothed, and it relies on social cues and clues (such as a given garment being considered women's clothes or mens' clothes, or the style of one's haircut being considered men's or women's hair style), so the act of attribution is at best only partially on the basis of biological characteristics. But the belief that they are forming is a belief about biological body structure nonetheless, so let's call it a sex attribution.
In our society what happens along with that is a gender attribution, of course, the projection of whatever that person tends to think about the sex they just assigned us that isn't necessarily built-in as part of our biology.
And therein lies the social problem. To whatever extent the people "sexing" us are also "gendering" us with a large batch of beliefs and attitudes that interpret our performance of ourself through the lens of a role we aren't considering ourselves to be playing, that's misgendering.
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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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Index of all Blog Posts
Showing posts with label roles & rules. Show all posts
Showing posts with label roles & rules. Show all posts
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Friday, May 24, 2019
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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
“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.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, April 27, 2019
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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This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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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Sunday, March 24, 2019
Workplace Acceptance
I get to show up at work in a skirt when I feel like it. I've been hired to do data entry at NYC's Department of Health. It's a job I'm eminently qualified for (I'm fast at typing and data entry). The option of working skirted isn't due to my proficiency (although it contributes to my confidence in exercising the option), it's because it's DOH, and that's just how they are. There are required new-hire orientation videos in which gender and sexual orientation variations are explained, complete with video footage of people discussing their identity or that of their child. The new employee is taught that it is an offense that can get you dismissed from your job to question or challenge whether someone's presence in the bathroom is appropriate for their gender. People include their pronouns of choice in their email signatures. There are gender neutral bathrooms on some floors and prominent signs directing people to them.
There's a similar orientation about race and ethnicity and why it is wrong to have a set of standards for things like hair style and clothing that are derived from white eurocentric culture but promote them for everyone in the name of "professionalism".
DOH is committed to being in the forefront of efforts to address racism and heterosexism and other institutional systems of oppression, and they focus on it internally. I've already attended two workshops where I was being paid on company time to discuss such matters with my coworkers. (I like this job. Does it show?)
I've had a skirt or two in my wardrobe ever since I plucked up the first one in a Salvation Army thrift store 30-someodd years ago. I've worn them out and about on the sidewalks of the city, to grocery stores in the suburbs, on mass transit, on college campus as student and as a grad student teaching the class, but until now not to the workplace as an employee.
It makes more difference than you might think. There's nothing intrinsically feminine about a skirt; it's a piece of apparel that fits and functions well on bodies male and female alike, and is only designated as female apparel for cultural and historical reasons; in other cultures and at other times, garments that were essentially skirts have been worn by male people. And so when I say I was born a girl, I certainly don't mean I was born with a need to wear this item (or paint my nails or wear shoes with pointy tips or whatever).
But they are signifiers, tools of communication, precisely because they convey a femininity message in this particular society. I like skirts in part because I just do (in a way that I don't like, for example, those pointy-tipped high heeled dress shoes), but I've embraced them because of their symbolic value. I don't have to wear one every day; being seen in one once or twice can have a permanent impact on people. It shapes how I'm seen and reacted to.
In previous places of employment, I've often been out about being differently gendered. I've brought it into conversations and talked to coworkers and employers about it whenever the topic seemed to come up. But long abstract complicated conversations are often less effective than a good visual, you know?
I was introduced to a new colleague by my supervisor on Friday, and the supervisor used "their" and "they" in reference to me. (Those are not pronouns that I've chosen for myself but that's entirely OK. It reflects the perception that I'm differently gendered. I don't need the details to be precisely accurate; just noting that there's a difference here is sufficient to keep people from making the usual assumptions!)
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There's a similar orientation about race and ethnicity and why it is wrong to have a set of standards for things like hair style and clothing that are derived from white eurocentric culture but promote them for everyone in the name of "professionalism".
DOH is committed to being in the forefront of efforts to address racism and heterosexism and other institutional systems of oppression, and they focus on it internally. I've already attended two workshops where I was being paid on company time to discuss such matters with my coworkers. (I like this job. Does it show?)
I've had a skirt or two in my wardrobe ever since I plucked up the first one in a Salvation Army thrift store 30-someodd years ago. I've worn them out and about on the sidewalks of the city, to grocery stores in the suburbs, on mass transit, on college campus as student and as a grad student teaching the class, but until now not to the workplace as an employee.
It makes more difference than you might think. There's nothing intrinsically feminine about a skirt; it's a piece of apparel that fits and functions well on bodies male and female alike, and is only designated as female apparel for cultural and historical reasons; in other cultures and at other times, garments that were essentially skirts have been worn by male people. And so when I say I was born a girl, I certainly don't mean I was born with a need to wear this item (or paint my nails or wear shoes with pointy tips or whatever).
But they are signifiers, tools of communication, precisely because they convey a femininity message in this particular society. I like skirts in part because I just do (in a way that I don't like, for example, those pointy-tipped high heeled dress shoes), but I've embraced them because of their symbolic value. I don't have to wear one every day; being seen in one once or twice can have a permanent impact on people. It shapes how I'm seen and reacted to.
In previous places of employment, I've often been out about being differently gendered. I've brought it into conversations and talked to coworkers and employers about it whenever the topic seemed to come up. But long abstract complicated conversations are often less effective than a good visual, you know?
I was introduced to a new colleague by my supervisor on Friday, and the supervisor used "their" and "they" in reference to me. (Those are not pronouns that I've chosen for myself but that's entirely OK. It reflects the perception that I'm differently gendered. I don't need the details to be precisely accurate; just noting that there's a difference here is sufficient to keep people from making the usual assumptions!)
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Saturday, March 16, 2019
BOOK REVIEW: Sissy, by Jacob Tobia
There's a brand-new genderqueer memoir out, a genderqueer coming-out and coming-of-age tale going to print, and I'm jealous. Obsessively insanely jealous. I wanted mine to be the first.
Those of you who've been reading my blog regularly are aware that I didn't have such an intense reaction when I discovered Audrey MC's Life Songs: A Genderqueer Memoir. Well, there are two reasons for that: firstly, Life Songs is basically and primarily a transgender story, a tale of transitioning to female by someone assigned and regarded from birth as male, and then very late in the book the author tacks on a throwaway line about how being a transgender lesbian is "so limiting in its binary construct" and so she now identifies as genderqueer; and, secondly, Life Songs is essentially self-published. So on balance I didn't feel authentically beaten to the punch.
SISSY: A Coming-of-Gender Story by Jacob Tobia is the genuine article. Jacob happens to be a gay male and their experiences of being a genderqueer femme were shaped by that, but this is not a gay coming-out story with a nod towards nonbinary appended. This is the real deal.
"I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am a glimmering, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, beautiful, human person, and I don't identify that way for fun. I don't identify that way because I think it makes me interesting. I don't identify that way as a hobby. I use that language to describe myself because it is fundamentally who I am."
As large as being (and coming out) gay did loom in Jacob's teenage years (and how could it not?), it's pretty much incidental to the main narrative they're telling, so yes, there's finally a book being published about what it's like to grow up genderqueer, as a sissy, a feminine male who actually embraces their identity as feminine male, one of us.
And published? Putnam, baby. G. P.-freaking-Putnam's Sons. Yeesh. I have dreams of getting my book picked up by the likes of Seal Press or Sibling Rivalry or something. Compared to that, Tobia is Cinderella in a gold carriage and I aspire to a pumpkin on a skateboard that I can push down the road and call a coach. Did I mention jealous? Jacob Tobia may be in for one seriously bitchy review here.
First, though, some of the sparkly bits. Sissy has some real gemstones.
One of my favorite takeaways is Tobia's replacement of The Closet with The Shell. That being self-protective, and not being cowardly, is the reason people aren't Out yet; that when threatened, one may retreat into one's shell and that there's no reason or excuse to belittle this as if we aren't entitled to put something between us and a hostile world. That we don't owe the world an honest testimonial to our identity, as if it were our secretive lying behavior that causes the surrounding society to make hetero cisgender dyadic normative assumptions about everyone. It's not our doing that makes that the norm that we have to push off from and differentiate ourselves from in order to come out! If we owe a coming out to anyone, we owe it to ourselves, but there's really no excuse for the community to mock people who don't do that, or haven't done so yet.
Tobia at several points talks about what it's like to be in a world that has no term and no concept for who and how we are —
As a child, I understood that my difference was beautiful, was natural, was fundamental. I knew just how special my gender was. But without a name, without language to put to what I was seeing and feeling, I had no way of sharing the importance of my difference with others.
... and later, starting college ...
The problem is that there are generally no lines written for people like me. There was no role for a gender nonconforming person at Duke, hardly even a role for a gay boy. Without realizing it, just by doing what they were used to, by following the rules suggested by the structure around them, my classmates had erased me
... and again in the vivid confrontation at Duke with their classmates and the organizers of a retreat called Common Ground. This time there is a specific conflation of sex and gender: the participants are told to sort themselves:
"Today we'll be talking about gender... we'd like to separate the room into two groups: women—sorry, female—and male participants"
Tobia pitches a totally appropriate hissy fit. It's frustrating living in a world that perpetually, obliviously insists that whosoever is biologically male is a man, that sex means gender, that dividing the room along this fracture line creates two groups each of which will contain the people who belong in it. Tobia starts with warning the organizers that the male group had better be focused on the male body, male morphology, and not about the experience of operating as a man in this world. "Because if we're talking about being men, you and I both know that I don't have much to add to that conversation."
As someone who has spent a frustrated lifetime trying to put these things into words myself, I kept on bouncing in my seat and occasionally raising my clenched fist and cheering.
The showdown with the Common Ground participants is the closing bookend to Tobia's college experiences. The opening bookend took the form of a couple weeks in the wilderness with a different campus retreat group, Project WILD, that hiked into the Appalachian mountains. In the natural setting, temporarily cut off from ongoing social reinforcements and structures, they found gender polarization withering away. "Bodies no longer signified behavior or character traits; breasts were breasts, nipples were nipples, genitals were genitals, hair was hair, none of them bearing ideological weight." It has a lasting effect on Tobia, providing a taste of how things could be different, but less so for the others who disappointingly retreat into their gendered shells once back in the school environment.
It's appropriate and consistent that these bookend-moments are events that are designed to get people in touch with themselves and each other. Tobia is active in the church in his pre-college days and despite living in the south (North Carolina) spends most of the book's trajectory in social environments that are tolerant and open in a modern sense. This is not the Bible-thumping Alabama conservatism of Jared Eamons in Boy Erased, and the issues that Jacob Tobia had to cope with are the same ones that still plague our most issue-conscious and woke societies now. Most of Tobia's story is about a person who is out and proud as a gay person but still trying to figure out how to come out as someone who is differently gendered. It's us, and it's now. Tobia gives us the much-needed "Exhibit A" to enable society to talk about genderqueer people with some understanding and familiarity.
After I came out as gay, I never officially came out as genderqueer or as nonbinary or as trans or as feminine.
I have no idea why Tobia proclaims that they never came out as genderqueer. Maybe they meant specifically to their parents?! It's a worrisome disclaimer at the time it's issued, because this is before Tobia goes off to college, and although the story up until this point includes a lot of secret femme behaviors and tastes, it seemed to me that there was still room for the story to be all about a gay guy who, now that they're writing a book, opts to identify as a sissy femme as well. But fear not, it's not so. It's a coming-out story if there ever was one. Tobia tells many people in many ways, many times. It's just more complicated because when you tell folks you're gay they don't generally get all nonplussed and stuff and ask you what that means, exactly; but coming out nonbinary or femme or genderqueer is nowhere nearly as well understood.
Now, Jacob Tobia does equivocate sometimes, and they of all people should know better! Whilst looking around for a social circle in high school that wouldn't be a badly uncomfortable fit for theirself as a still-secretly femme sissy, Tobia muses about the degree of homoerotic locker-room experiences among the jocks and compares it to the substantial amount of homoerotic anime available to the nerds. Look, hon, if you're going to write an essay about how being femme is its own thing, try not to step on the hem of your own dress. We get another misdemeanor offense like that when the college essay is being crafted — an essay about going forth in public in high heels — and Tobia refers to it as "an essay about wearing high heels and being the gayest thing on this planet." T'weren't so much as a mention in that essay of noshing on dicks or craving male sexual companionship, and just like the Common Ground people treating male as the same as man, this is a problem. Some of us sissyboy folks might like to go forth in high heels ourselves (although that's not quite my aesthetic taste) despite not also being gay guys, and we get just as erased by this conflation as by having "male" tied to being a man.
Be that as it may, gay male culture has not exactly been an unmitigated embrace of femme culture. There are scores and hordes of eligible gay guys posting personal ads and specifying "no sissies" or "no feminine nellies" or "masculine presenting only," and shrinking away from anything feminine as gross, like they think we sissies have cooties or something. There's a scene in Sissy, after Jacob has dashed across the Brooklyn Bridge in stilettos to earn money for an LGBTQ shelter where the masculine gay interviewer asks if comporting like this isn't "playing into stereotypes." So it is a politically flouncy act for a gay femme to put it out there and in your face and to underline their pride in being this way, femme, specifically as a person who is also that way, gay.
In the aftermath of Project WILD, Jacob Tobia finds themself back on a campus in the midst of fraternity and sorority rush (ugh!) and the intense gender normativity and polarization drives them away from the connections made with classmates in the Appalachians.
"In the vacuum that was left, I did what came most naturally: I started hanging out with the queers... within about a month, I'd cemented msyelf as the first-year activist queer, attending every meeting of Blue Devils United, our undergrad LGBTQ student organization… .
Yeah, well, convenient for you. To have a structure like that in place where a person like you would fit in on the basis of sexual orientation (which is almost always going to be the majority identity that brings participants in; you get a roomful of gay guys, a smattering of lesbians, a couple token transgender folks of the conventional transitioning variety, right?). I did promise bitchy, didn't I? You got a platform from this. You made social political connections where you could start off recognized as an activist gay student, something people could comprehend, and over time, even if they didn't fully get that your issues as a femme person were something other or more than an expression of gay male concerns, you could push those too, get them out there, explain them to people who started off believing you were in this group for your own legitimate reasons, marginalized for being gay.
Aww fuck, I can't win with this whine, can I? It's not exactly going to fly for me to try to claim that hetero sissies are more oppressed or that gay sissies are privileged in comparison. Well, Jacob Tobia, one thing you reinforced for me is that if I feel the need to bitch and whine, I should go ahead and be proud of being a sore loser, I should refuse to be classy even if the people I'm jealous of, who seem to have advantages I don't have, are good people with more than a compensating amount of situational detrimental oppressions to offset all that.
I aspired to this; I went to college to be an activist about this peculiar sense of identity and I tried to connect and to become part of a community. I rode into downtown New York City and hung out at Identity House and marched in parades and tried to connect there too. But mostly I met gay guys who came to such groups or events in order to meet other gay guys, or trans women who wanted to talk about surgery, hormones and passing. I even attended a bisexual support group for awhile, thinking/hoping that even though "this wasn't it," that the mindset of people in such a group would be more conducive to someone espousing sissy lib and socially interested in connecting with a butch or gender nonconforming female person who found sissy femmes attractive. No such luck: the bisexual gals tended to interact with males in a conventionally gendered way, according to the heterosexuality script I was trying to avoid. And one consequence of all that is that I didn't become a part of an environment where I could be a spokesperson. (I had similar problems when trying to hang with the feminists, by the way; they didn't regard gender issues as my issues, and saw me as a supporter only).
I suppose it's fair to say that heterosexually inclined sissies get bought off. We're not as often in situations where our queerness can't be ignored; our sissyhood doesn't get us found in bed with a same-sex partner at the motel or in the dormitory, and we don't get seen holding hands with a same-sex partner while walking down the sidewalk. We don't go to designated social scenes that would draw attention to our identities, the way the patrons at Pulse in Orlando did. So it's easier for our difference to be tucked and bound and hidden. And so far there hasn't been an "out game" for us to join so there's been no counter-temptation to offset that.
Hey world, you still need my book, too. Buy Jacob Tobia's, yes, buy it now. It's powerful. Buy it and tell everyone about it, spread the word. But an author in Tobia's situation can't directly attack and dismantle society's equation of sissy with gay. When someone comes out as a gay sissy, it corroborates the stereotype that sissies are gay and gay males are sissies, and because of that, a heterosexually inclined young sissy boy reading Sissy or watching someone like Jacob Tobia in a television interview may not feel very reassured that who they are is someone that it is okay and possible to be. Furthermore, all the gay sissies in the world, along with all the lesbian butch women, can't fully dismantle the gender-polarized scripting that constitutes heterosexual flirting and coupling behavior. Oh, they threaten it: whenever gay or lesbian people connect, it challenges the notion that sexuality requires the participants to be rigidly assigned to a sexual role by their biology. Even in a gay or lesbian relationship where one person is the butch and the other person is the femme, you don’t start out where each person is automatically assigned to being the butch or the femme because of what sex they are. It may be a negotiation between the two people, or perhaps a person comes to feel that the butch role or the femme role is the one that fits them best. And of course lots of relationships don’t use butch and femme at all. But the real challenge has to come from genderqueer people who participate in biologically heterosexual encounters, finally making it so that heterosexuality itself is no longer dependent on those binary polarized oppositional roles.
Well, also history. I came of age and came out in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The entire community of marginalized orientation, gender identity and intersex people (MOGII **) has an interest in learning how being gay or being trans etc. was and has been over time and in different settings. In particular, being genderqueer/nonbinary is often seen and spoken of as if it's an affectation, something that no one would come up with on their own if it wasn't already out there, trending and looking edgy and stuff. So hearing stories from people like me who came to a genderqueer sense of identity before there was such a term (trendy or otherwise) should help retaliate against that attitude.
Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Google, Kobo, and most other likely venues. Support gender-variant authors and buy a copy!
* Tobia's preferred pronouns are they, them, theirs
** As an alternative to the ever-expanding LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA, LGBTTQQIAAP acronym, MOGII is becoming a popular way of designating the community. We're together in this because our sexual orientation, our gender identity, or our physical body is different from the mainstream.
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Wednesday, January 2, 2019
In a Southern Small-Engine Repair Shop
Went with my Dad. The gasoline-powered log splitter wouldn't crank up. I was down visiting family for the Christmas season. I helped him hook it to the trailer hitch on the pickup and then rode along.
"Hey there Earl. Doing as well as could be expected, thank you. Oh, because it's my first Christmas without my wife of 60 years. Yes it's hard. I keep thinking it will get easier but not so far."
"Sorry to hear that, Ray. I lost my own wife three 'n a half years ago and even now I hear something and think it's her in the next room. Yeah, exactly. Hurts fresh each time. So, you got anyone come by to spend Christmas with? It's not good to be by yourself all alone."
"This is my son Allan from New York, he came down and has been with me. And my daughter and her husband, and her daughter with her husband and children, they all came for Christmas, and I fixed a baked ham and tried my hand at biscuits, but I just can't get them to come out the way she could."
The proprietor and a couple of his workers and the previous customer all continued to catch up with my Dad, discussing the weather, the commercialization of Christmas, and whether their respective cable channels were going to cover the Clemson v Notre Dame bowl game and whether the suspended players would make a difference.
All this before explaining what brought us here: "I pulled and pulled on the starter cord, got the choke set and the fuel line turned on, but not so much as a cough out of it. Now, Earl, you do know if you go out there and give it a yank and it goes 'pucka pucka pucka' and starts right up, I'm gonna have to say a few words that the preacher wouldn't approve of."
I gave a nod and a wave when mentioned, but throughout the conversation I was feeling aware that I could not have done this. I don't mean I couldn't have brought in a piece of equipment and asked to have them look at it, but I would have approached them politely and they'd have politely listened to my description and jotted down a work ticket.
It's not that I'm a snob or that I'm unwilling to open up and talk. It's also not really accurate that these fellows were doing some kind of competitive "manly men" contest and actively trying to disqualify guys who don't measure up. If anything, during all the times in my life when I've entered all-male social environments like this, they WANT me to belong, they're squirmy and uncomfortable if I DON'T fit in; they would welcome me if possible, but they would be waiting expectantly for me to send the appropriate signals, the boy shorthand that somehow reassures them that I'm like them, that I'm one of them and don't think of myself as different.
Except of course that I do. There's some male expression of being knowledgable and confident and competent in a certain way, and a willingness to pretend to more of that than you actually have, an amusing pretense that usually isn't done seriously, a pretense that's sort of an in-joke where you let the other guys see through it; there's a rhythm and a meter to it, and I've never been good at it, never learned how to play. I often see myself reflected back as they tend to see me, prissy and standoffish, moderately oblivious, awkward and perhaps hostile or more often / more likely just not companionably at ease with them.
There's a lifetime history of feeling uncomfortable in groups of males, of not understanding what is being asked of me. I think it's better now because I have my own confidence and they do like confidence. But they don't find my behavioral nuances reassuring and comforting. I'm haunted by that lifetime history, too. I step into rooms like these and immediately think "Here we go again".
My Dad always engaged with me on a different channel. He's never excluded me for not being one of the boys. When he is in this kind of context himself, it always sounds to my ears like he's speaking a second language, with impressive fluency, but it's not really who he is natively either. I've found it difficult to get him to talk about fitting or not fitting in among males. When he discusses it at all, he sees in in terms of class and education, of himself the guy with the physics doctorate not being a pompous intellectual. I can't get him talking about whether he felt isolated growing up or whether diving into an intense college curriculum felt like an escape from a world he was never going to really fit into or if he actually identified with the boys and the brainy stuff was an extra, an add-on element rather than a fundamental difference that set him apart either to himself or to the other kids.
Unlike my Mom, he never read my book. I think he read some earlier writings I created back in my 20s, but he associates all that with a "bad time in my life" and I think he views the whole subject matter as an unhealthy obsession I had, or even a breakdown. (Well, to be sure, I did get detained in a psychiatric facility during the season when I first came out).
His current line on the book is that he isn't interested in reading it because it contains "profanity". I'm toying with the idea of doing a global search and replace on every occurrence of "shit" and "fuck" and any other four-letter terms and printing the results as a special Dad-edition. I dont know... this could just be a convenient excuse and it's actually the subject matter that makes him uncomfortable. Still, my mom's death last fall underlines the non-permanence of opportunity.
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"Hey there Earl. Doing as well as could be expected, thank you. Oh, because it's my first Christmas without my wife of 60 years. Yes it's hard. I keep thinking it will get easier but not so far."
"Sorry to hear that, Ray. I lost my own wife three 'n a half years ago and even now I hear something and think it's her in the next room. Yeah, exactly. Hurts fresh each time. So, you got anyone come by to spend Christmas with? It's not good to be by yourself all alone."
"This is my son Allan from New York, he came down and has been with me. And my daughter and her husband, and her daughter with her husband and children, they all came for Christmas, and I fixed a baked ham and tried my hand at biscuits, but I just can't get them to come out the way she could."
The proprietor and a couple of his workers and the previous customer all continued to catch up with my Dad, discussing the weather, the commercialization of Christmas, and whether their respective cable channels were going to cover the Clemson v Notre Dame bowl game and whether the suspended players would make a difference.
All this before explaining what brought us here: "I pulled and pulled on the starter cord, got the choke set and the fuel line turned on, but not so much as a cough out of it. Now, Earl, you do know if you go out there and give it a yank and it goes 'pucka pucka pucka' and starts right up, I'm gonna have to say a few words that the preacher wouldn't approve of."
I gave a nod and a wave when mentioned, but throughout the conversation I was feeling aware that I could not have done this. I don't mean I couldn't have brought in a piece of equipment and asked to have them look at it, but I would have approached them politely and they'd have politely listened to my description and jotted down a work ticket.
It's not that I'm a snob or that I'm unwilling to open up and talk. It's also not really accurate that these fellows were doing some kind of competitive "manly men" contest and actively trying to disqualify guys who don't measure up. If anything, during all the times in my life when I've entered all-male social environments like this, they WANT me to belong, they're squirmy and uncomfortable if I DON'T fit in; they would welcome me if possible, but they would be waiting expectantly for me to send the appropriate signals, the boy shorthand that somehow reassures them that I'm like them, that I'm one of them and don't think of myself as different.
Except of course that I do. There's some male expression of being knowledgable and confident and competent in a certain way, and a willingness to pretend to more of that than you actually have, an amusing pretense that usually isn't done seriously, a pretense that's sort of an in-joke where you let the other guys see through it; there's a rhythm and a meter to it, and I've never been good at it, never learned how to play. I often see myself reflected back as they tend to see me, prissy and standoffish, moderately oblivious, awkward and perhaps hostile or more often / more likely just not companionably at ease with them.
There's a lifetime history of feeling uncomfortable in groups of males, of not understanding what is being asked of me. I think it's better now because I have my own confidence and they do like confidence. But they don't find my behavioral nuances reassuring and comforting. I'm haunted by that lifetime history, too. I step into rooms like these and immediately think "Here we go again".
My Dad always engaged with me on a different channel. He's never excluded me for not being one of the boys. When he is in this kind of context himself, it always sounds to my ears like he's speaking a second language, with impressive fluency, but it's not really who he is natively either. I've found it difficult to get him to talk about fitting or not fitting in among males. When he discusses it at all, he sees in in terms of class and education, of himself the guy with the physics doctorate not being a pompous intellectual. I can't get him talking about whether he felt isolated growing up or whether diving into an intense college curriculum felt like an escape from a world he was never going to really fit into or if he actually identified with the boys and the brainy stuff was an extra, an add-on element rather than a fundamental difference that set him apart either to himself or to the other kids.
Unlike my Mom, he never read my book. I think he read some earlier writings I created back in my 20s, but he associates all that with a "bad time in my life" and I think he views the whole subject matter as an unhealthy obsession I had, or even a breakdown. (Well, to be sure, I did get detained in a psychiatric facility during the season when I first came out).
His current line on the book is that he isn't interested in reading it because it contains "profanity". I'm toying with the idea of doing a global search and replace on every occurrence of "shit" and "fuck" and any other four-letter terms and printing the results as a special Dad-edition. I dont know... this could just be a convenient excuse and it's actually the subject matter that makes him uncomfortable. Still, my mom's death last fall underlines the non-permanence of opportunity.
———————
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Sunday, November 18, 2018
If You Could Be...
So I was casting about for a topic to blog on. (I don't usually have difficulty coming up with something, but given that I try to pump these things out once a week I guess it's inevitable that sooner or later I'd have nothing in particular in mind when the time came, right?) I mentioned this to my partner and she joked that I could borrow a page from those silly corporate exercises and ask my readers "If you could be any animal, what animal would you be?".
Hmm, well... perhaps an appropriate variation of that.
If you could be any GENDER you wanted, which one would you be?
The conventional modern understanding of what it means to be a transgender woman is along these lines: The world consists of men and women; a transgender woman is a person who was born male but wants to be a woman, and transitions.
Trans women themselves would probably be more likely to say: Although I was born with a body that was assigned male initially by others, I *am* a woman. Transitioning is either to correct the body to make it correspond with a person's identity or else to shift the perceptions of other people.
I myself am not a transitioner, and my answer would be like this: The world consists predominantly of male men and female women, but there are also male women and female men, and folks in-between, and others. Just like transgender people, I am already the gender I want to be: a male woman
I want to change people's perceptions (i.e., I want to be seen as and treated as who I am), but I have no interest in changing myself.
What does it mean to "be a woman", though? There are all the attributes and characteristics, behaviors and roles and so on, but interspersed with that is the notion of a correspondence to some degree with the social construct called "biological femaleness" — breasts, vagina, menses, uterus, pregnancy. And it's all wrapped together as a package deal. Even among people who mentally distinguish between femininity (or "the sex role expectation of femininity", if you prefer) and biological female morphology, there are often many things that are thought of, consciously or unconsciously, as part of biological femaleness that someone else would classify differently: sexual positioning and mate selection strategies, the question of desirability or attractiveness, the gatekeeper role as the person who gives or withholds consent, and nurturance and other related manifestations of hormonal states, social interaction patterns determined by having a smaller size and less physical strength, and so on. So while it is highly useful to distinguish intellectually between sex and gender, between biological femaleness (social construct though it may be) and the complex constellation of things we call femininity, there still isn't a consensus about which is which, or which contains which elements, if you see what I mean.
What if we teased it apart into a sort of checklist, then? For those who wish to (continue to) be a woman, what do you mean when you say you are a woman? For instance (keeping in mind that for cisgender women as well as anyone else identifying as a woman, not all of these will apply)...
[ ] Demeanor and behavior, that yours matches the overall pattern exhibited by women in general
[ ] Perception and interpretation of your demeanor and behavior by others as feminine
[ ] Perception and interpretation of your body: being viewed by others as morphologically female
[ ] The experience of being a sex object, a target of the sexual appetite of those people who are of the sex and/or gender you wish to be sexy to, especially to the extent that this is a different experience for women
[ ] Having the personality and holding the priorities and values and overall perspective and viewpoints that women have more of a tendency to hold than men do
[ ] Others' perception and interpretation of you as having such a personality and being likely to hold such values and priorities etc
[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature
[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy
[ ] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life
[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life
To do this right, we'd need a fill-in-the-blank line after each item to add a comment as need be.
Now, I can readily imagine some people rejecting this sliced-up deconstruction. I've encountered that in a few discussions, in fact, the notion that something gets killed or ignored when you divide the concept up in this fashion, and that "woman" (or "man" for that matter) is an entire package and that to be what it is and retain its meaning it has to continue to be that way.
But I'm not fond of that, since that attitude erases me. It's as reductionistic as the attitude of some of the people on Facebook who post things like "If you got a dick yer a man".
I definitely need to order a la carte. Here's my own response, checks for what I would place an order for and x's for the ones that already apply:
[x] Demeanor and behavior I've got that already
[√] Perception and interpretation of my behavior as feminine Yeah, that's what I want
[ ] Perception and interpretation of my body as morphologically female No thank you
[√] The experience of being a sex object / to those of the sex or gender to which I want to be attractive well yes, actually
[x] Personality and priorities and values and overall perspective I already have that too
[√] Perceived by others as having that personality and priorities etc This is important
[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature Umm, no, I'm fine with the factory installed parts
[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy Neither need nor have any of those
[x] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life I have that, too, actually
[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life I don't have that but I'd be a different person if I had
———————
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————————
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Hmm, well... perhaps an appropriate variation of that.
If you could be any GENDER you wanted, which one would you be?
The conventional modern understanding of what it means to be a transgender woman is along these lines: The world consists of men and women; a transgender woman is a person who was born male but wants to be a woman, and transitions.
Trans women themselves would probably be more likely to say: Although I was born with a body that was assigned male initially by others, I *am* a woman. Transitioning is either to correct the body to make it correspond with a person's identity or else to shift the perceptions of other people.
I myself am not a transitioner, and my answer would be like this: The world consists predominantly of male men and female women, but there are also male women and female men, and folks in-between, and others. Just like transgender people, I am already the gender I want to be: a male woman
I want to change people's perceptions (i.e., I want to be seen as and treated as who I am), but I have no interest in changing myself.
What does it mean to "be a woman", though? There are all the attributes and characteristics, behaviors and roles and so on, but interspersed with that is the notion of a correspondence to some degree with the social construct called "biological femaleness" — breasts, vagina, menses, uterus, pregnancy. And it's all wrapped together as a package deal. Even among people who mentally distinguish between femininity (or "the sex role expectation of femininity", if you prefer) and biological female morphology, there are often many things that are thought of, consciously or unconsciously, as part of biological femaleness that someone else would classify differently: sexual positioning and mate selection strategies, the question of desirability or attractiveness, the gatekeeper role as the person who gives or withholds consent, and nurturance and other related manifestations of hormonal states, social interaction patterns determined by having a smaller size and less physical strength, and so on. So while it is highly useful to distinguish intellectually between sex and gender, between biological femaleness (social construct though it may be) and the complex constellation of things we call femininity, there still isn't a consensus about which is which, or which contains which elements, if you see what I mean.
What if we teased it apart into a sort of checklist, then? For those who wish to (continue to) be a woman, what do you mean when you say you are a woman? For instance (keeping in mind that for cisgender women as well as anyone else identifying as a woman, not all of these will apply)...
[ ] Demeanor and behavior, that yours matches the overall pattern exhibited by women in general
[ ] Perception and interpretation of your demeanor and behavior by others as feminine
[ ] Perception and interpretation of your body: being viewed by others as morphologically female
[ ] The experience of being a sex object, a target of the sexual appetite of those people who are of the sex and/or gender you wish to be sexy to, especially to the extent that this is a different experience for women
[ ] Having the personality and holding the priorities and values and overall perspective and viewpoints that women have more of a tendency to hold than men do
[ ] Others' perception and interpretation of you as having such a personality and being likely to hold such values and priorities etc
[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature
[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy
[ ] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life
[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life
To do this right, we'd need a fill-in-the-blank line after each item to add a comment as need be.
Now, I can readily imagine some people rejecting this sliced-up deconstruction. I've encountered that in a few discussions, in fact, the notion that something gets killed or ignored when you divide the concept up in this fashion, and that "woman" (or "man" for that matter) is an entire package and that to be what it is and retain its meaning it has to continue to be that way.
But I'm not fond of that, since that attitude erases me. It's as reductionistic as the attitude of some of the people on Facebook who post things like "If you got a dick yer a man".
I definitely need to order a la carte. Here's my own response, checks for what I would place an order for and x's for the ones that already apply:
[x] Demeanor and behavior I've got that already
[√] Perception and interpretation of my behavior as feminine Yeah, that's what I want
[ ] Perception and interpretation of my body as morphologically female No thank you
[√] The experience of being a sex object / to those of the sex or gender to which I want to be attractive well yes, actually
[x] Personality and priorities and values and overall perspective I already have that too
[√] Perceived by others as having that personality and priorities etc This is important
[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature Umm, no, I'm fine with the factory installed parts
[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy Neither need nor have any of those
[x] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life I have that, too, actually
[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life I don't have that but I'd be a different person if I had
———————
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Sunday, October 7, 2018
Gender and Sex and Cognitive Dissonance
Do you notice this inconsistency?
People in our society so often insist that each sex has a rigid set of characteristics, and any and all efforts to make either sex more like the other is bound to fail, like trying to repeal the law of gravity. That there are two sexes and that they are different, and different in specific ways, making them opposites.
Then people expend so much effort making sure that this gets emphasized, lest anyone miss it. Encoding additional cues and clues that we're all supposed to use to make sure everyone knows what sex any given person is at all times. Pink for girls and blue for boys. Girls pushing little strollers, boys toting miniature sports equipment. Scotch-taping a little bow onto an infant girl's forehead.
I mean, after awhile it's kind of like someone insisting that something is so obvious and self-explanatory that you can't miss it, and then they keep explaining it and pointing it out and creating billboards and posters to draw your attention to it and eventually even passing laws to make it mandatory that you say that you see it, too.
After awhile it begins to dawn on you: these people don't believe what they're saying! They may wish it were so, they may want it to be so, but their actions show that they are afraid that it isn't. I mean, if you believe that night and day are so compellingly different from each other that you go around comparing other things to it ("as different as night and day"), you don't generally find it necessary to go around complaining about evil streetlights or telling children it isn't appropriate to draw a moon in the daytime sky lest people think it's night.
No, their defensive actions betray that as much as they insist that these differences are as they describe them, and inevitable, they secretly fear that if effort isn't taken to maintain things this way, it will all crumble away and there'll be no getting it back.
Once folks see that defensiveness, I think it is easier for them to understand it as an ideology. Now let's look again at some of the stuff that the ideology insists upon:
• TWO sexes — why so insistent on denying that variations exist? Because they've created a polarized situation, defining the sexes as opposite, like up versus down. It has to remain an either/or binary choice at all times to be consistent with that polarization. Intersex people are a threat.
• KNOWING — why do all the lilies have to be gilded, overemphasized and underlined? Because the systematic way of treating people different based on their sex is dependent on knowing at all times which sex a person is. Indeterminacy is a threat.
• GENDER — first time this word has appeared in this blog post, have you noticed? Gender is the assortment of traits and assumptions and meanings that get attached to the sex identification of the person. People are treated different, and their behaviors interpreted differently, according to which sex they are perceived to be. All that different-treatment stuff, that's the assignment of gender.
• INEVITABILITY — The insistence that these traits invariably attach to the corresponding sex, the insistence that they follow inevitably, hides the fact that gender isn't sex itself, it's a socially maintained set of beliefs and assumptions that we attach to sex. Screw around with any of the previous bricks that this structure is built from (that there are exactly TWO sexes, that you always KNOW which sex you're dealing with, and that the sexual differences in traits that we've all had drilled into us will be duly present) and you start to see that gendering is occurring as a verb. But when all of those illusions are successfully maintained, the inevitability of gender is maintained too. The ongoing act of gendering becomes invisible.
• SEXUAL ORIENTATION — The fear of getting sex and gender wrong gets turned into a sexual threat. Sexual appetite has been mapped onto conformity to gender. You won't be heterosexually eligible if you deviate. But that in turn makes non-heterosexual people a threat to the system. Since the system is mobilizing fear here, a threat can be useful though: something that people are given a fear of being or becoming if they don't conform.
• ENEMIES — Opposite sex, polarized sex differences, diametrically divided traits and characteristics... what is this all aimed at? Keeping in place an adversarial hostility. Sexuality tends to forge intimacies, have you noticed? But the system (let's give it a name: patriarchy) is based on inequality. Real intimacy is a threat to maintaining inequality. But if the overwhelming majority of people deal with the folks they're sexually attracted to by treating them as utterly foreign creatures that you have to treat according to rules instead of treating them the way you yourself want to be treated, and if they interact with them like enemies trying to negotiate a truce and don't really trust each other easily, intimacy is kept to a minimum despite the barrier-breaking potential of human sexuality.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
People in our society so often insist that each sex has a rigid set of characteristics, and any and all efforts to make either sex more like the other is bound to fail, like trying to repeal the law of gravity. That there are two sexes and that they are different, and different in specific ways, making them opposites.
Then people expend so much effort making sure that this gets emphasized, lest anyone miss it. Encoding additional cues and clues that we're all supposed to use to make sure everyone knows what sex any given person is at all times. Pink for girls and blue for boys. Girls pushing little strollers, boys toting miniature sports equipment. Scotch-taping a little bow onto an infant girl's forehead.
I mean, after awhile it's kind of like someone insisting that something is so obvious and self-explanatory that you can't miss it, and then they keep explaining it and pointing it out and creating billboards and posters to draw your attention to it and eventually even passing laws to make it mandatory that you say that you see it, too.
After awhile it begins to dawn on you: these people don't believe what they're saying! They may wish it were so, they may want it to be so, but their actions show that they are afraid that it isn't. I mean, if you believe that night and day are so compellingly different from each other that you go around comparing other things to it ("as different as night and day"), you don't generally find it necessary to go around complaining about evil streetlights or telling children it isn't appropriate to draw a moon in the daytime sky lest people think it's night.
No, their defensive actions betray that as much as they insist that these differences are as they describe them, and inevitable, they secretly fear that if effort isn't taken to maintain things this way, it will all crumble away and there'll be no getting it back.
Once folks see that defensiveness, I think it is easier for them to understand it as an ideology. Now let's look again at some of the stuff that the ideology insists upon:
• TWO sexes — why so insistent on denying that variations exist? Because they've created a polarized situation, defining the sexes as opposite, like up versus down. It has to remain an either/or binary choice at all times to be consistent with that polarization. Intersex people are a threat.
• KNOWING — why do all the lilies have to be gilded, overemphasized and underlined? Because the systematic way of treating people different based on their sex is dependent on knowing at all times which sex a person is. Indeterminacy is a threat.
• GENDER — first time this word has appeared in this blog post, have you noticed? Gender is the assortment of traits and assumptions and meanings that get attached to the sex identification of the person. People are treated different, and their behaviors interpreted differently, according to which sex they are perceived to be. All that different-treatment stuff, that's the assignment of gender.
• INEVITABILITY — The insistence that these traits invariably attach to the corresponding sex, the insistence that they follow inevitably, hides the fact that gender isn't sex itself, it's a socially maintained set of beliefs and assumptions that we attach to sex. Screw around with any of the previous bricks that this structure is built from (that there are exactly TWO sexes, that you always KNOW which sex you're dealing with, and that the sexual differences in traits that we've all had drilled into us will be duly present) and you start to see that gendering is occurring as a verb. But when all of those illusions are successfully maintained, the inevitability of gender is maintained too. The ongoing act of gendering becomes invisible.
• SEXUAL ORIENTATION — The fear of getting sex and gender wrong gets turned into a sexual threat. Sexual appetite has been mapped onto conformity to gender. You won't be heterosexually eligible if you deviate. But that in turn makes non-heterosexual people a threat to the system. Since the system is mobilizing fear here, a threat can be useful though: something that people are given a fear of being or becoming if they don't conform.
• ENEMIES — Opposite sex, polarized sex differences, diametrically divided traits and characteristics... what is this all aimed at? Keeping in place an adversarial hostility. Sexuality tends to forge intimacies, have you noticed? But the system (let's give it a name: patriarchy) is based on inequality. Real intimacy is a threat to maintaining inequality. But if the overwhelming majority of people deal with the folks they're sexually attracted to by treating them as utterly foreign creatures that you have to treat according to rules instead of treating them the way you yourself want to be treated, and if they interact with them like enemies trying to negotiate a truce and don't really trust each other easily, intimacy is kept to a minimum despite the barrier-breaking potential of human sexuality.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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