The Tomato Manifest

I often feel like a tomato.

You know that a tomato is a fruit, yes? A fruit is a ripened flower ovary and it contains seeds. I often feel like a tomato in a world where fruits are generally sweet and vegetables are generally savory. I clearly fit in with the veggies, but my fruitness isn't invalid or wrong, I really am a fruit. It would be wrong to measure me against oranges and lemons and strawberries and say "Ewww, this tomato isn't sweet AT ALL, it completely flunks as a fruit!" because I don't aspire to those standards. I want to be measured against the potatoes and onions and kale, where you can see that I shine. But that doesn't mean I want to pass as a vegetable. I'm not ashamed of my seeds. My fruit-ness is every bit as valid as my savory-ness and dammit you folks have got to get over your attitude that fruits are sweet and veggies are savory. You have to accept specimens like me as valid in our own right.


Let's talk about dysphoria for a moment. Author Julia Serano makes an important distinction between being alienated from one's own body structure and being unhappy about other folks' social expectations:

Perhaps the best way to describe how my subconscious sex feels to me is to say that it seems as if, on some level, my brain expects my body to be female...

I am sure that some people will object to me referring to this aspect of my person as a subconscious "sex" rather than "gender.". I prefer "sex" because I have experienced it as being rather exclusively about my physical sex, and because for me this subconscious desire to be female has existed independently of the social phenomena commonly associated with the word "gender".

— Julia Serano, Whipping Girl pgs 80, 82

The common phrase is "gender dysphoria" but in light of what Serano is specifying here, I'm going to replace that term with "sex dysphoria".


Now let's talk about sexist stereotypes, and feminists, gender-critical feminists and even the feminists who nowadays get called "TERFs". They reject sexist expectations and sexist restrictions, you know that, right? Well, even the ones who don't spend their energy arguing against transgender people's identities often find it hard to understand dysphoria. "Oh, I hate to see so many people feeling like in order to be the kind of person they are, they have to reject their body", they will say. "Don't they realize that if we got rid of sexist attitudes, there wouldn't be a different set of expectations foisted off on you depending on whether your body has a penis or not?"

So their ideal world would get rid of those sexist social attitudes, which would mean that if your body was of the sort that gets designated female, you would not be expected to be alluring and seductive, nurturant and sensitive and understanding, verbal and emotional, delicate and able to be vulnerable without severe discomfort. Nor would you be expected to be decisive and authoritative, bluntly-spoken and aggressive, rationally logical and spatial, and bravely courageous in the face of frontal attacks, for that matter.

But that would not fix the dysphoria that Julia Serano is talking about. Do you see that?

So we're talking about two separate things here: sex dysphoria and sexist expectations.

Now follow me, because we're doing to dive right between them.

Check out the elementary school classroom, 4th grade.

Many girls who in 4th grade were happy with and proud of their bodies internalize a lot of social messages — from fashion magazines, diet ads, beauty contests, Instagram and Tik Tok, from their peers and their parents — that they should be skinny and slender and waiflike. And by 8th grade many of these same girls hate their bodies, consider their bodies to be *all wrong*.

From the outside we say "there is nothing wrong with this person's body, the problem is with harmful social messaging that has made her feel otherwise", but that's not how the anorexic herself sees it. We realize that and along with that we realize that we need to provide positive body-confirming alternative messages if we want to make this phenomenon dissipate; we realize that saying "Oh c'mon, girl, you are mentally ill to think that, and by going around repeating that you're too fat you are contributing to the harmful message that's got you destroying yourself" would not be productive, and surely would not be supportive.

I bet you see where I'm headed with this. This is a person who would be okay with her body if it weren't for society's messaging, but because of society's messaging is not okay with her body. And yes, this can happen with gender messaging the same way.

SOCIAL DYSPHORIA is where a person would be okay with their body if it weren't for social messaging — sexist expectations to use the feminist terms — but BECAUSE of social messaging has come to hate their body and to see it as being wrong for them.

This phenomenon definitely exists.

Saying it exists doesn't erase the realness of the kind of dysphoria that Julia Serano talks about. So it has to be okay within the trans community to recognize it, and to not see this as an attack on their trans identities.

Julia Serano ALSO wrote:

Perhaps the most underacknowledged issue with regard to the transgender community... is the fact that many...strategies and identities that trans people gravitate towards in order to relieve their gender dissonance are also shared by people who do not experience any discomfort with regards to their subconscious and physical sex....

— Julia Serano, Whipping Girl pgs 27-28


Neither the feminist community (which often tends to reject transgender people for their apparent rejection of feminist understanding of sexist expectations being the problem, not the body) nor the transgender community (which is often suspicious of any perspective that looks like it might invalidate transitioning) has provided much of a home for folks whose problem is social dysphoria.


I don't have social dysphoria myself. They didn't get to me. They didn't make me reject my body. I'm a proud tomato.


I get to be an activist. I get to tell people that YES your gender identity doesn't have to match your physical sex.

It doesn't make me a transphobic TERF and it also doesn't make me an antifeminist person who is propping up gender ideology. If what I've written upsets you on occasion, check your own privilege as a participant in a social voice that's larger than mine is.


———————

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

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


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

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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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A Couple More Reviews

My book was featured by two book bloggers this week, both of whom drew attention to the purpose for which I wrote it in the first place --


"Society has gotten better at describing and acknowledging the many differences in people where sex, gender, and sexual preferences are concerned, but I realized that I didn’t have as good a handle on some of those possibilities. LGBT, I get, but if you’re in that Q+ that gets appended by some people, what does it mean? After reading GenderQueer, I feel like I’ve got a better handle on it."

— Big Al, at Big Al's Books & Pals






"Gender has gotten to be a pretty complicated subject. Personally, I was born female and I identify as female. I know or have met many other people for whom their gender does not match their biological sex. This may result in them deciding to alter their physical form to match their gender identity, as is the case with those who are trans. However, some may not feel out of place in their given body even though it doesn’t match their gender identity. That is the case for Allan D. Hunter, or as they go by in the book, Derek.

This is what is now referred to as “gender queer.” It’s the Q in LGBTQIA...

GenderQueer is very well written. It is not just any memoir that somebody threw together. This one took years of passion and it shows."

— Amanja, at Amanja Reads Too Much



Of the two of them, Big Al was stepping a bit outside his typical reading fare when he chose to read my book, whereas Amanja often reviews books with LGBTQIA themes. So it's reassuring that both reviewers got that sense of my narrated life as "Example A" of a phenomenon that still is not discussed anywhere near as clearly or as often as being transgender is.


———————

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

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


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

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Index of all Blog Posts

Sexual Dimorphism and Gender

Imagine walking down the hall and encountering this argument:


BOB: I don't know what you folks are going on about. Look, there are two sexes, male and female. If you're female, you're a woman. If you're male, you're a man.

KIM: You're wrong. Sex isn't binary. People aren't just male or female. There are intersex people. That proves that gender is a lot more complicated than what you just said. There are a lot of different genders, not just two!


If I were the one walking down the hall and hearing this, I would want to tell them that they're both wrong. First off, sex isn't gender. Sex is your physical morphology. Gender is identity and role, all that social stuff.

If you were a person who basically agreed with Bob, you most likely wouldn't be here reading my blog. So I'm not going to waste your time and mine developing the counterarguments to Bob that you've already heard and can make as well as I can.

But to Kim, I would want to say: "We don't need it to be true that there are more than two sexes in order for our nonbinary gender identities to be valid. You shouldn't even bring up physical biological sex in this argument. It just confuses the issue. I've got all the parts that caused my mom's obstetrician to mark down that I was a male baby. I'm not remotely intersex. My body fits the textbook description of male. I'm femme, though. I'm all gal. I was never into that boy stuff, I always knew I was one of the girls. Saying that the plurality of binary physical sexes is what makes nonconforming gender identities valid implies that our gender identity isn't legit otherwise".



I do get crossways with transgender activists and nonbinary activists over this physical-body stuff on occasion. They'll sometimes respond to what I said about having conventional textbook-description male parts and saying I'm a male girl or a male femme with a burst of defensive anger: "Excuse me but having a penis doesn't make you male. Biological sex IS A MYTH! You shouldn't go around saying that having your set of physical parts makes you male because then you're saying that if I have a penis that makes me male, and honey don't start that shit with me, I have never been male. I was mistakenly assigned male at birth!"

But no, biological sex is not a myth. The notion that biological sex defines gender, that is a myth. The notion that everyone is supposed to be either male or female, and that anyone who isn't is an embarrassment who needs to be corrected surgically as soon as possible, that is a myth. But it is indeed one's physical bits that defines one's sex. So we need to discuss sexual physiology, even though it's not determinant of a person's gender identity. Or maybe precisely because it is not determinant of a person's gender identity.



Despite the existence of real intersex people, we are a sexually dimorphic species. In general, like most complex animal life forms, we're either male or we're female. Our species is not a species that reproduces through the interaction of three, five, or thirty-seven different sexes doing a wide variety of reproductive behaviors. It's a species that reproduces though the interaction of two fundamental body designs, and intersex people who reproduce don't really modify that fact. Nobody alive today or at any time in recorded human history gestated in an organ that was not a uterus. Nobody ever got their chromosomes from gametes that were neither sperm nor ova. There isn't a sex that is neither male nor female that produces sex chromosomes that are Z or W instead of being X or Y and which encode the sexual possibility of developing into a specific body that isn't male or female. You could write a great science fiction tale about a species that was like that, but that's a fictional and imaginary idea of intersex, not a real one. And since real intersex people exist, we should pay real attention to them for a minute instead of just using them as a rhetorical argument about how human biological sex is nonbinary.


Some intersex people are CAH (i.e, they have Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia). These are people whose sex-encoding genes are just like those of most people whose bodies present as female, but where a variation in the adrenal gland's behavior causes them to have a lot of the type of hormones that make a person's body take on male attributes. This adrenal gland behavior is caused by their genes, but not the ones on their sex chromosomes, so the biological roulette of what sperm's codes went into the egg isn't causing this. At birth, CAH people's bodies may be designated male. More problematic, their bodies are often recognized as intersex and the doctors reach for their sharp scalpels and whack away the offending phallic clitoris. This -- and not the rhetorical flourish of discarding the entire notion that biological sex exists at all -- is probably the most significant political concern of real-life intersex activists. To get doctors to quit doing this. To let CAH babies make their own decisions about their own bodies when they are old enough to do so.

Other intersex people are CAIS (i.e., they have Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome). These are people whose sex-encoding genes are just like those of most people whose bodies present as male, but other genes of theirs (not on their sex chromosomes but elsewhere in their genetic code) make their body unresponsive to the hormones that make the body take on male structures. So their bodies at the time of their birth will nearly always be designated female. Unlike the CAH people, they aren't at high risk for being carved up by surgeons when they're still infants, but at puberty they won't get periods; the fact that they have undescended testes (usually) instead of ovaries may be discovered, and even though they are old enough to voice an opinion, doctors sometimes pick up those sharp knives and cut out their testes without asking. Or the doctors may mislead the CAIS patient (and their parents, who typically have medical authority) about the risks and consequences. This is another of the intersex activists' political concerns, fully informed consent for CAIS intersex people.


CAH and CAIS intersex people can generally reproduce. But despite being intersex, the physical architecture and the chromosomal arrangement with which they participate is going to follow either a male textbook description or a female textbook description.

But what about intersex people who are neither XX nor XY at the genetic level?

The Turner pattern, where a person has a single X instead of two, also called XO configuration, creates a female-structured body with some modified shapes (shorter, broader chest, some differences in the face, and so on). They are often infertile. They don't tend to be designated anything other than female at the time of birth. A few do not have a uterus or ovaries. If they are able to reproduce, they do so with the structures and capabilities of female people, and their genetic contributions will work within the sexually dimorphic reproductive pattern like those of female people.

The Klinefelter pattern, where a person has an XXY configuration, creates a male-structured body with some mildly modified shapes. They are almost always designated male at birth. At puberty they may not develop secondary sex characteristics, or may develop them less strongly than other males.

There is an XYY pattern as well, the Jacobs pattern. They are almost always designated male at birth. There are some mild differences in body shape but it often goes undetected.

There are also mosaic situations, such as XO/XY where some of a person's cells have XO and others have XY. A person with this configuration may be born with a body that presents as typical female, typical male, or ambiguously intersex. Or even more rarely, there is XX/XY, the closest to the legend of hermaphrodite, wherein, depending on which cells in which part of the body have developed according to which structural patterns, may result in both ovaries AND testes developing. There is the theoretical possibility that a person could produce both viable sperm and viable ova and could therefore participate reproductively as a source of sperm and/or as the person providing the egg, but there's no case of this on record.

I haven't said anything about the political intersex considerations for people with these forms of intersex because I'm less familiar with them. Self-determination, certainly. The right to choose whether to receive supplemental hormones (or hormone blockers), the right to fully-informed consent not muddled by the outdated attitude that any variation needs to be hidden and "fixed", the attitude that difference is shameful and inferior and wrong.


The takeaway from intersex awareness is not that sexual dimorphism is an evil lie that supports the gender binary and the "anatomy is destiny" conservative belief systems, but that people who vary should have the right to make their own decisions about their own bodies, and should be regarded as normal variations, not sick pathologies.


———————

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

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


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

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

The Future (or Lack Thereof) of Gender

What do you think gender will look like in the future? Fifteen years from now? Twenty-five or fifty years?

A lot of people agree that the characteristics of a person's physical body shouldn't be used by society to attribute gender to them.

"A person's gender identity is valid", someone will say, "regardless of whether they have a penis or a vagina".

"Oh", says another person, "not just that, but whether they have a beard or not. Or breasts or no breasts. Or whether they have wide hips or wide shoulders. People shouldn't go around telling people their body isn't right for their gender identity!"

A smaller minority -- some nonbinary transgender, gender-critical feminists, genderqueer, gender-outlaw activists, etc -- explicitly want gender to utterly disappear:

"Gender doesn't exist except as harmful sexist propaganda about what it means if you have a certain kind of body", says one feminist.

An activist in a t-shirt that says FUCK GENDER says, "I don't see the point of being 'genderfluid', really. Having a gender is all about limitations, so what's the point of bouncing around from one set of limitations to another set when you can just be outside of all that?"



This question is for the rest of you, the ones who don't think gender itself is a bad thing, but don't want it to be connected to any specific physical body configuration: how do you think gender will survive being split off from an essentially physical anchor?

Let's review how gender has traditionally worked in human society. It was believed that people come in two (usually; occasionally more than two) essential types, which were different from each other in physical ways which was how you knew which type you were dealing with; and that each of these types were fundamentally different in other, less immediately visible ways. Personality differences. Differences in attitude towards what they want out of life. Different ways of behaving. Different ways of signalling what they want, both consciously and unconsciously, which meant differences in how you, the observer, should interpet behaviors. Different ways of experiencing sex and sexuality. Different values, different priorities, different obligations, different purposes in life.

So now, we're saying we're not going to attribute all that stuff to a person based on their bodies. Instead we're going to open up all those identities, and also add a bunch more that people have started identifying as, and establish throughout society that anyone can be any of these gender identities regardless of what body they were born with. So let's assume that really does happen. That people cease to see a person's physical body and mentally paste a batch of expectations of what that person is like.

Well, if it's not based on the body, what one (or three, or six) feature(s) of a person's dress or behavior determines which other expectations society ought to glue onto them?

If no expectations are being glued on from a handful of initial observations, how is that different from a world that doesn't have gender identities? If you don't have expectations from having mentally categorized a person, that person might do or be absolutely anything next. We aren't thinking of them as being "like" other people in that category and "different" from people who are in other categories.

So if you don't think gender will evaporate once we get rid of body-based stereotyped expectations, why wouldn't it? What's your theory on how gendered identities will persist? Will we preserve historically established identities, along with their roles and expected traits? Will we keep the traditional "man" and "woman"? How about the others, like "demigirl" and "demiboy" and "bigender" and "genderfluid" and so on, will we keep those too? Is there an upper limit to how many gender identities we'll believe people fit into, or will it expand to almost infinite numbers of identities?

Or maybe we won't impose expectations on others as part of understanding and accepting someone else's gender identity, but instead wait for them to explain to us how they want us to see them. But if we don't have any preformed notions in our heads, like "what it means to be a man" or "what women are like" or whatever, won't they be in the same situation they'd be in in a world without genders, where each person exists as a unique individual and as "one more person" not not as part of any divisional category?

What are your thoughts?

———————

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

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


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

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Index of all Blog Posts

I Get a Really Nice Interview! FiftyShadesOfGender!

Podcast host Esther Lemmens maintains Fifty Shades of Gender, a series in which she interviews a different individual in each episode to do a deep dive into gender, sex, and sexuality. "Come with us on a journey of inclusion, acceptance and respect", she invites.

Esther Lemmens has a gift for asking the right questions to let her subjects introduce or explain the things most important to them. She senses areas where the person might want to elaborate or make things clearer, and probes in such a way as to give that opportunity.

I've been interviewed several times as a book author with a book being published, but often came away from them feeling less than overjoyed about how my gender identity, or my book, were being presented. But Lemmens has elicited from me the best spoken overview I've ever given.

A Conversation with Allan D. Hunter, Podcast Episode 14, 2 October 2020.


You should check out her other episodes as well.


———————

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

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


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

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Gender-Critical, Transgender, Gender Inversion, & Transsexuality Conference

Hi! Want to moderate a discussion panel? Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to lead these four folks to some sort of accord, or, failing that, to moderate their debate fairly and give each one a chance to support their positions.

I'll let them introduce themselves as they deem appropriate --


Lillian: Hello, I'm Lillian. I'm a gender critical feminist. I'm 70. When I was young, I was part of the feminist second wave that attacked the notion that biology is destiny, that if you were born male you were designed to live *this* life but if you were female you were destined to live *that* life. As feminists, we indicted gender roles and gendered assumptions about people. Because they aren't necessary for the functioning of society -- except the unfair parts -- and they aren't good for us as individuals. They are restrictions! We opposed sexist double standards and sexist expectations and assumptions. Anyone might be a leader. Anyone might be a nurturant caregiver. Anyone might be a belligerent asshole. Anyone might be an empty-headed doll-person. None of that is due to whether you were born with a penis or a vagina! Sex polarization that divides us up into women and men is a tool of patriarchal oppression and it exists to the detriment of women. Women are oppressed. Now, me personally, when I was first in the women's movement, well, we were white and straight and didn't pay enough attention to other people's situation. But we've become more intersectional and we listen to black women's voices and the voices of women who come from poverty, disabled women, and other forms of additional marginalization. But first and foremost, society is a patriarchy; that's still the bottom line for me. If men don't like it, they're in charge so all they've got to do is stand down and change it and quit opposing us.


Sylvia: Well, I guess you could say I was also involved in attacking that 'biology is destiny' thing. Hey, everybody, I'm Sylvia. I am trans. Back when I was figuring that out, the word was 'transsexual', and that's still what I prefer to use, but I don't want to offend anybody. I had gender dysphoria, the body I was born with was not my destiny. It wasn't right for me, and I knew it from pretty much the time I was old enough to understand the difference between boys and girls. I know some of you younger folks say things differently, you'd say I was assigned male at birth. Well, I had to get myself unassigned, because my gender didn't match that assignment at all. I changed my body to match my gender. Now, I understand the notion that we ought to have equal attitudes to a person no matter if their body is male or female. Or whether it came with a penis on the front of it or a vagina instead, if you like that language better. I understand saying that what your body is like shouldn't matter and we shouldn't have sexist beliefs. But that's not the world I got to live in. Maybe someday society will be that way but not in my lifetime. Not in yours either, probably. Getting sex reassignment surgery was something I could get within a few years, and I did, and it has made it possible for me to live my life with people seeing me and treating me like who I am -- a woman -- and I don't see why anybody's got any cause for having a problem with that.


Jesse: My name's Jesse and my pronouns are he, him, his. I was assigned male at birth. When I was younger, there was an attitude that what you were supposed to do if your gender didn't match your designation was to go out and get hormones and surgery, and if you did that and you could *pass*, then you were authentically trans. Well, some of those surgeries are expensive and not everyone can afford them, and there's medical issues with procedures, and hormones too, and during my generation we pushed back against that elitist attitude. Because you don't need to have anything specific done to you to make your gender identity valid, okay? It's fine to get gender confirmation surgery if that's what you *want*, and you can afford it and it's safe for you and all that. What is *not* fine is to go around telling people they aren't trans enough if they don't, you hear what I'm saying? And I am a man. Trans men are men. Trans women are women. You body is not 'who you really are', so yeah count me in as well on kicking that 'biology is destiny' off the map. What's up with people deciding they get to decide who you are based on what's inside your underwear? That's creepy. Anyone with that attitude, go perv on someone else, all right? Meanwhile, I hear what you're saying about gender being confining, but it can also be liberating and you ought to think about that. There are strong notions about how to be a man that go beyond being an okay person, it's heroic and inspiring to connect with that. Women, too, womanhood is a powerful notion. I got nothing against people who want to be agender or whatever, but I like being a man.


Allan (me): I'm Allan. I never bought into all the junk that gets glued onto a male, beliefs and assumptions and all that, because I didn't get issued all that stuff along with the body in which I was born. I grew up with messages about what it means to be a man, and also messages about what it means if your body is male and you don't match that description. Feminism told me that was sexist and I could ignore it, so I did. Until I couldn't. The world was too much in my face about it to ignore. So I became an activist. And yeah, biology isn't destiny. I agree that gender has its positive uses. Androgyny means expecting everyone to be in the middle, like beige or something. I'm not androgynous, I'm femme. Meanwhile I understand about it being easier to change your body, or to just change your presentation, how you look to the world, to get folks to think of your body as the body that goes with your gender, so that they'll get your gender correct. But the world got in my face and I'm returning the favor, I don't want to pass, I want to take the fact that I am male but also feminine and shove that at people. My body is not the problem, it's people's notion that if your body is male that makes you a man, a masculine person. That's what's got to change. We don't change that by converting male people to female people so they can be correctly regarded as women. Damn right our gender identity is valid regardless of our body. That means I get to walk down the nude beach with my flat chest and facial hair and my penis bouncing against my testicles and that doesn't make me a man. I want to be accepted as femme without lipstick, corset, boobs, or tucking. And patriarchy is in my way. I don't care if you want to call me a feminist or what, but I'm in the struggle against patriarchal oppression for my own damn reasons. And, yeah, I get to call my body male. I don't need to believe that I'm female in order to validate my gender identity. That's the whole point. It's *not*, and yet I'm still as femme as anybody.


———————

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

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


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

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Umbrella

Several times in several different groups somebody has asked about the difference between "transgender" and "genderqueer" and "nonbinary" and then somebody else has posted something like this:



I don't like that illustration.

So what's my problem with it?

I identify as genderqueer and I do not identify as transgender, and that umbrella diagram sticks me into that category whether I like it or not. That diagram creates a hierarchy in which all genderqueer people are transgender (but not vice versa). That means that any statement that transgender people make on behalf of all trans people is going to be considered to apply to me and other people like me. Because we're defined as being under that umbrella.

Let's look at some of the broad all-inclusive statements that many transgender people have made, shall we?

a) A person's gender identity is valid regardless of their physical anatomy. You don't have to have a medical transition in order for your gender identity to be valid. You don't have to "pass" in order for your gender identity to be valid

Well, that one is wonderful, I'm totally on-board with that! It used to be that society's understanding of what it meant to be trans was that you went out and got yourself a medical transition to make your physical anatomy correspond with your gender identity. And that certainly didn't describe me! So this is a good change, a good shift. The problem is with additional assumptions and assertions that they very often attach to that, such as

b) A person's physical anatomy is not a polite topic of consideration. Anatomy is utterly irrelevant to identity and nobody's business. It's totally inappropriate to be identifying a person on the basis of what's inside their underpants

and...

c) You should not use any anatomy-based terms except to refer to the binary sex assignment that our society coercively attributes people to at birth. If someone identifies as a woman or girl, you would be misgendering them if you did not consider them female; if someone identifies as a man or boy, to not regard them as fully male is transphobic and misgendering also

and...

d) Any insistence that sex and gender are two different things is politically offensive and based on wrong out-of-date science that is now disproven. There's no such thing as "biological sex" because intersex people exist and there are multitudes of body variation from chromosomes to organ structures, so the binary is just a social construct and there is no physical sex.

Well, let's unpack some of that. (Because we don't all wear the same packers in here, okay?) In reverse order, my intersex-activist buddies do want to make a distinction between sex and gender. It's important to them and they're tired of "intersex" being used as an argument for why "biological sex doesn't exist" and otherwise ignored. Intersex people have bodies. They have bodies that other people found embarrassingly different. So embarrassing that they often coercively assigned their bodies to male or female with a surgeon's knife, without their consent. Intersex people can't discuss the fact that their body differed at birth from the body of either male people or female people if "male" refers to gender identity instead of physical sex. Intersex people can't identify themselves if people in society are confused and say things like "Oh me too, I've always had a female side, I wanted to dance ballet instead of play baseball". I'm not intersex myself, but I can't even explain that I'm not intersex if the language doesn't let me explain that although I was never a boy or man, my physical configuration wasn't unusual for male people. That it's my gender that's queer, that my sex falls into normative classifications.

I identify as a femme or girl. But unlike Teresa, my transgender sister, I would not be misgendered if you called me male. Teresa would be; she'd find it insulting and demeaning. She identifies as a woman and definitely female. But I'm not Teresa. I identify as male. I identify as femme or girl. My sex and my gender don't match. I'm genderqueer. And if you're going to raise a giant umbrella over my head and say we're all transgender, you can't go around making blanket statements that support Teresa's identity but erase mine.

If it is no longer necessary to "pass", to look like a typical cisgender person of your same gender, then it should not matter if people do make some guesses about what's inside my underwear. Because no matter what's in there, we already agreed that it doesn't invalidate my gender identity, right? So it doesn't have to be kept a shameful secret. I've got the anatomy that most directly caused my mom's obstetrician to designate me as "male". It's an unfortunate social fact that the same anatomy also caused my birth announcements to incorrectly tell everyone "It's a boy!", but the "male" part wasn't wrong and I have no reason to hide it. I was a male girl. Perfectly queer and not typical, and quite healthy and happy with that, thank you.

I propose this umbrella instead:



Notice that under this umbrella, several terms appear in multiple places. Because some genderqueer people do identify as transgender, whereas some do not; similarly some nonbinary people identify as transgender and others do not, and some nonbinary people consider themselves genderqueer while others do not, and vice versa and so on.


———————

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

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


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

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Hey, Sister...

Hey, sister, got a moment? Any chance we can reconcile?

You find it bewildering that as a femme-identifying person, I refer to myself as male. You find it appalling and maybe even transphobic when I explain that what I mean when I say I'm "male" is that I was born with a set of physical equipment that, in our culture, has historically been designated "male", although many other people (perhaps including you) may have this same set of bodily components and call those physical structures something other than "male".

You say "Why can't you just call it a penis? A penis isn't male. It's just a penis! Girls can have a penis. Boys can have a vulva".

Well, yeah, I know girls can have a penis. I'm a girl and I've got one. Are we both cool and totally down with the notion that having a penis doesn't define our gender? Can we please have a little moment of peace and solidarity and not be quick to hate on each other for using language a bit differently, and for coming at this situation from different angles?

You identify as transgender. I don't. That means you're a part of a subculture, a community; and you folks, collectively, you got your own way of expressing things, and you also got your own history. Let's talk about the history thing for a sec.

I'm 61; forty years ago, when I was 21 and first coming out, trans people explained the situation to the larger surrounding culture like this: trans people realized at some point in their life that their gender was the gender typically found in the other type of body, and so they'd ideally get hormones and surgery and transition, so that their body would match their gender. And what they said they wanted from the surrounding world was to be accepted as a normal and ordinary person of that gender and that sex. And most trans people wanted to "pass" — they didn't want to receive social acceptance only from a handful of people who heard their life story and learned about transsexuals and all that, but instead they wanted to look and otherwise present in such a way that strangers who didn't know them would just automatically treat them as the gender that they were.

Fast forward to the more-or-less present era. Trans activists interact with lots of transgender people who can't afford hormones and surgery even if they want them, and lots of people who are blocked from having access to the medical interventions they want because doctors and insurance companies are playing gatekeeper. They also interact with a lot of transgender people who don't want the whole package of medical options for a variety of reasons. There's a risk of significant loss of sensation and function when doctors rearrange biological tissue, and there are systemic repercussions to hormones with risk factors and so on and so forth.

Well, it's really fundamentally a human rights issue that the body you inhabit should not detract from the legitimacy of your gender identity. So the social message changed, to become a lot more inclusive. You were valid as a trans person (woman or man) whether you passed or did not pass, and, in fact, fuck "pass". Identities are what are valid; your body doesn't matter! And they didn't use "male" and "female" to refer to bodily architecture because that can imply to some trans people that they've got the wrong body for their gender identity.



I apologize if I've misrepresented the transgender movement and its history in that short summary. I'm writing from the outside. I try to learn and listen but if I've distorted things, I'm sorry, but I hope I mostly got it right.



I'm not trans. I heard the 40-years-ago version of what trans was, gave it some thought, decided nope, that's not me. It's something else. I haven't been a part of your community these 40 years.

So I've got a different history, with different understandings and stuff. I'm hoping you'll be compassionate and interested in a story that's different from yours, so you can see how I got to my viewpoint, ok?

I came out in 1980 as a sissy. A person in a male body whose personality and behavior were a mismatch for what's expected of male people, but a good match for the expectations for female people. I did not want to be perceived as an ordinary typical female person any more than I wanted to be perceived as an ordinary male person. I wanted to be perceived as what I'd been harassed about and accused of all my life: an effeminate sissy girlish male person. The world apparently thought I should be ashamed of that, but I was proud of it. And I was finally angry about it and ready to take a stand. To be in your face about it. Yeah, I'm male, and I'm one of the girls. Get used to it. Deal.

My attitude is that until the world nods in agreement that yeah, male girls exist and no, it's not a damn affliction or an embarrassment, a failure to be sufficiently manly... until then, there's always going to be this notion that if you're perceived and recognized as a male-bodied person, you'll be regarded as less of a man than a masculine man and less of a woman than a physically female-structured person who has boobs and vag and all that.

Not only don't I want to pass, I want to "anti-pass". I want, as I said, to be up in people's face about the lack of correspondence between my body and my gender identity. You've got a male girl here. Flying pride flags about it, no less, got that?


So... you don't use "male" to refer to physical stuff like testicles and penis. You basically use "male" to mean the same thing as "man" and "boy" and so on. I, on the other hand, do use it to mean the physical stuff. My attitude is we've already got plenty of gender words ("man", "boy", "masculine", "feminine", "guy", "dude", "gal", etc), and the word "male" is historically about the raw physical architecture (including other species and also things like hose couplings and electrical plugs), so why can't we keep that word for sex and use existing gender words for gender? This isn't about invalidating anybody's gender identity, it's really not. Yeesh, do I sound like J. K. fucking Rowling here? Seriously?


You ask "Well, why can't you just call it a penis, why do you have to say male?". I say "I want a goddam adjective. An already-recognized adjective to describe me as a person-with-penis-and-associated-bits. I don't want to use a long klunky phrase like 'person with a penis and testicles and adam's apple and absence of a vulva and clitoris and breasts, person who happens to be dyadic or endosex as opposed to intersex and most likely has XY chromosomes and doesn't have a period and has spermatotrophic hormone and a vas deferens'".

If I don't specify that when I say "male" I'm talking about my plumbing and not my personality and inclinations, people often assume I'm saying I have a "male side and a female side", like genderfluid or bigender people. Which isn't it at all. I'm not less feminine than you are. I'm not less male than a rooster. I'm not in-between, either sexually (as intersex people may consider themselves to be) or genderwise. I'm solidly male and utterly feminine.

I'm talking about mine. MY parts. I'm not calling your parts male. I'm calling my parts male.

Not everybody is either male or female, just as not everybody who is male is a man and not everybody who is female is a woman. But the fact that sex isn't binary doesn't mean sex doesn't exist. By the way, intersex people can't talk about being intersex — and distinguish intersex from being nonbinary or intergender or genderfluid or whatever — if they can't talk about bodies and why their atypical body has marked them as different and marginalized them. Most of the intersex activists I know really want to distinguish sex from gender. Because otherwise they get erased.


In a similar way, I can't do the political activity of getting in people's face about being a male girl if I can't say "male girl" and can't talk about the body that caused my girlness to be perceived as something wrong and in need of fixing, or as reason to provoke dismissive contempt.


I personally identify as genderqueer and, more specifically, as a gender invert. I'm a speaker, a blogger, and an author. I just got a book published (and BTW you should read it if you have any appetite for coming-of-age / coming-out stories). I'm not going to go away or shut up.

Does this help?



———————

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

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


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

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Diversity Versus Community

Content warning: discussion of body parts (mostly in the abstract)

I called them "boy parts" when I was little. We were in kindergarten, first grade. To be honest we kids were kind of obsessed with sexual difference. We talked about it a lot. But I was one of the girls. I was a girl with boy parts. I wasn't entirely unique. One of the people I played with during recess, Clea, was a boy with girl parts.

If we showed up in your Facebook group and introduced ourselves the way we understood ourselves back then, would you embrace us, or would you attack us for being insensitive to people who don't consider those parts to be "boy parts" or "girl parts" and invalidating other people's identities, and not using the phrases that have been embraced as the most appropriate and least offensive ones and so forth?

Last week I put up a blog post: femininity versus femaleness. It generated mixed feedback, with lots of Facebook "likes" and a handful of people posting praise for what I'd said, saying that they'd been trying to put those sentiments into words for a long long time, or explaining how their personal experiences meshed with what I was saying. But with a lot of other people saying they found it transphobic, insulting, binary in a reductionistic sense, oppressive.

I was *kicked out* of one Facebook group, as if I'd planted a post that was so offensive that it demanded banning me. Nonbinary Femmes. A group I've been a part of for six years, posting at least one a week. In another group, my post was locked to further comments and I was afraid I was about to be banned there as well, although in the long run they only demanded that I place a content warning.

Honestly, what was more disturbing to me was how many people in groups I've been an ongoing participant in were so quick to respond with short and judgmental dismissals:

"No".

"TERF puke"

"What a load of internalized transphobia"

and of course: "Why hasn't a moderator done something about this shit?"


Considering how long I've been posting and participating, I'm stung that so many people wouldn't give me the benefit of the doubt, not necessarily agreeing with me but at least not being quick to believe that I'm a biased hate-monger!

I don't think we've created safe spaces. That may have been our intention, but we've become so quick to trigger when someone uses a phrase or term that the general consensus has shifted against using that one person's need to be kept safe from being upset becomes another person's feeling that they have to walk on eggshells.

The problem with general consensus is that we aren't all alike. We come here from different experiences. Some of us call ourselves "transgender"; some say "nonbinary"; some "genderqueer"; we also have intersex and gay and lesbian and bisexual and pansexual and other kinds of queer folks here. We value diversity, yeah? Well, then, we can't be going around with an attitude like "This is the party line, everyone in here has to have this opinion on this issue, that opinion on that issue, has to believe this, has to agree with this other thing, or you don't belong in here!". Because sometimes some of those established consensus beliefs conflict with the needs of some of our identities.

The centerpoint in this case was whether or not body parts (however you refer to them) and gender are, or are not, two different things, and how to talk about them separately. Yeah, I know a lot of transgender people in particular have had their gender identity invalidated by people emphasizing genitals. Yeah, I know that not everyone wishes to transition, and that not everyone who'd like to can afford it anyway, and that it's important not to make people feel like they are less authentic if they don't.

But there are other people in here, in our community, who find it necessary to distinguish between sex and gender and sometimes we are going to refer to our own body parts in the course of explaining our marginalized queer identities.

Some of us are intersex people. Me, I'm a gender invert. If you don't understand our reasons for drawing attention to our genital configurations, that shows how much teaching we still need to do.

If you think there is an LGBTQIA consensus that nobody gets to say that sex isn't the same thing as gender—or that there should be—consider yourself notified that consensus on that issue has not been reached and some of us are not on board with that.

Diversity has to include diversity of viewpoint.



———————

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

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


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

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Femininity in Contrast to Femaleness

Femininity and womanhood are gender identity terms, but more fundamentally than that, they are socially shared notions, and what they are notions about, historically speaking, are female people.

I have male parts (or at least the parts that led my mom's obstetrician to put "male" on my birth certificate—and for the record I call them male parts myself). But I'm definitely a femme, and I'm happy to be living in 2020 where gender identity has been somewhat split off from physical bodily architecture.

But it doesn't avail us anything to pretend that the feminine gender identities don't have diddly squat to do with physical femaleness. The socially shared concepts and roles, and the accompanying notions about a feminine person's beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes and so on, didn't originate independently and then somehow get ideologically and artificially attached to the female physical morphology. The notions were originally notions about female people. They may not have correctly or adequately described female people in general, and they certainly did not correctly or adequatly describe all female people; and because this has long been a patriarchy, this human society of ours, there may indeed have been ideological content stirred into the pot along with the generalizations. But the gender identity is social; it exists as a bundle of shared concepts, and the subject matter that the concepts were originally and historically concepts about were people who had vaginas and ovaries and fallopian tubes, the biological females of our species.

Now, even as increasing numbers of us find personal validation in gender identities that don't correspond to the physical morphology to which those identities were originally and historically attached, some of that past still haunts us.

You'll recall that I said this society has historically been a patriarchy. One thing that means is that the most established socially shared notions about pretty much anything are men's ideas. To be more specific, cisgender heterosexual men's ideas. Because the viewpoints of other people weren't being spoken in public, weren't being published. So views and attitudes that were really only the views and attitudes of these men got put out there as default views and attitudes. That applies to a lot of subjects, but at the moment let's focus on the definition of women.

Top of the list: sexual attractiveness, the desirability quotient, one's value as a sexual commodity. These days we refer to it as the "male gaze" but it used to be discussed as if women's sexual appeal was intrinsic to the women and men were just noticing it. Because "attractive to cis het men" was defaulted, universalized into "attractive". Because women's usefulness in patriarchy was largely constrained to their usefulness as mates to men.

Women may have meant more to each other, and to themselves, but their opinions weren't being enshrined. I wrote earlier of a feminine person's beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes and so on — all components of her gender identity as a woman. Those are all aspects of the self that a woman may find validation in, may take pride in, but all that has tended to be overshadowed by the focus on sexual desirability, aka sexual desirability as determined by an audience of cis het male people and their appetites.

Why is this relevant to today's gender identity discussion? Because sexual attraction often tends to be "to a body structure". (And that, too, has been culturally emphasized.) In short, sexual orientation has been geared not so much towards what we speak of as gender identity, but to the physical morphology, to shape and contour. So the most emphasized, the most underlined, aspect of what it means to be a woman is to have female curves and contours and the relevant female organs. That shoves beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes, etc, into the background.

Someone in a Facebook group posted a meme stating "It's not sex change, it's gender-affirming surgery". Well, that's wrong. It's not gender-affirming surgery, its SEX-affirming surgery. If a person's gender identity as a woman is 100% valid whether they have a penis or a vagina, then obtaining surgical services to modify their physical structure so that any visual observers will assign it "vagina" doesn't affirm their gender. It affirms their SEX, as female.

Of course, being attractive to the heterosexual male gaze really is central to some people's sense of their feminine identity. It's what's most emotionally important to them about being a woman, as opposed to singing alto arias or becoming a really good seamstress or something. Nothing wrong with that.

But not everyone who identifies as woman or femme or girl is primarily concerned with appealing to the male gaze. Of having a sexually desirable appearance as filtered through the fakely universalized male gaze.


The centrality of the whole "do you look sexy, can you compete with the sexy women of the world in sexy appearance?" question is often used to invalidate feminine people. It is used to invalidate many cis women for whom it simply isn't the end-all and be-all of their self-worth. It is used to invalidate many trans women for whom being evaluated in terms of how well they "pass" as a sexually desirable specimen gets to be old and tiresome.

Well, it is also used to invalidate the identity of people like me, who definitively do not identify as female, who do not transition, who do not attempt to present as female-bodied people, who distinguish between physical sex and gender and identify as male women, male femmes, male girls.

I get a lot of pushback about it. People who say "It's nobody's business what you got in your underpants" when what they really mean is "You've got no business having that attitude of 'yeah I'm male, so what', that's the wrong attitude about your male parts, we're all supposed to be going around saying 'it doesn't matter'". But what actually doesn't matter to me is being found sexy in that sense. Sexy to the falsely universal male gaze. I am male. Sure I want to be found sexy... to people who specifically like the male physical morphology. Since that's the morphology I've got. And I'm a male girl. My gender-atypical identity doesn't have a damn thing to do with claiming femaleness, regardless of whether yours does or not.

———————

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

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


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

———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Gender Invert, or Nonbinary Trans?

Like most people born with a penis and testicles, I was AMAB: assigned male at birth.

I don't refer to myself as transgender because I don't seek to be perceived as a female person. And I don't tend to identify as nonbinary because I don't seek to be perceived as someone who is neither male nor female.

I identify as genderqueer and, more specifically, as a gender invert.

* * *

There are a lot of ongoing discussions, especially within the trans communities, about how you don't have to be on hormones, don't have to get an operation, to be valid as a transgender person. About how the legitimacy of one's identity as transgender does not depend on changing one's body.

The ones who do — the people conventionally designated as "male to female" or "female to male" — are nowadays often referred to as "binary transgender". And the assertion that you don't have to be binary trans in order to be authentically trans is an affirmation of nonbinary transgender identities.

The fact that there are so many posts and statements saying so is a clear sign that a lot of people think "transgender" means that if you were assigned male at birth you wish to be perceived as female, accepted as a woman, not differentiated from cisgender women, that you present as female, that you do everything at your disposal to do so successfully, that you seek to pass. And reciprocally the other way around if you were assigned female at birth.

That's what the term "transgender" means to a lot of people out there, both within the trans community itself and in the mainstream.


Hello. I am a person who could identify as a "nonbinary transgender" person.

I don't choose to do so. I don't feel like it communicates. I feel like it just confuses people. They make one set of wrong assumptions when they see me and mentally assign me as a male person. If I tell them I'm transgender they make a different set of wrong assumptions and I'm no better off.

Meanwhile, out there are a bunch of male-to-female and female-to-male transgender folks. A handful of them are "truscum" or "transmedicalist" and don't consider anyone to be authentically trans unless they seek a medical transition. Then there are quite a few more who don't have that kind of absolute judgemental definitional thing going on, but who will admit to missing the days when the only kind of trans people were binary trans. I'm not going to say they're right, especially since so many of my friends and colleagues identify as nonbinary transgender. But I have to confess, I sympathize with them and their viewpoint. Many of them have been around as long as I have. That means they lived through decades when most of society had only heard dirty jokes and porn references to trans people. And some of them feel like they did the hard work to get transgender issues in front of the social consciousness and now all these newfangled nonbinary trans people want to be a part of the phenomenon.


There's a reason why there aren't more people identifying as I do, as gender invert. It's because they haven't heard the term. Nobody offered it to them as an option to consider. So they went with "transgender". Or "nonbinary". Or "nonbinary transgender".

But what if you were assigned male at birth, you consider your body to be, in fact, male, but your gender isn't masculine, isn't man, isn't guy, isn't boy, that instead you are femme, one of the girls? Or if you were assigned female at birth, recognize your body to be female, but have never been a girl or a woman, and instead you're all man, all guy, all boy, totally a masculine individual?

If you say "transgender" and folks know you were AFAB they'll almost universally assume you identify as "male". If you say "transgender" and they understand you were AMAB, they'll assume you to identify as "female".

Specifying "nonbinary transgender" just shifts the problem. Now people are likely to assume that you don't want to be identified as any named sex or gender. That you're declaring yourself to be neither male nor female, neither man nor woman.

If what I'm saying resonates for you, you're welcome to come join me as a gender invert instead.




———————

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

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


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

———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I'm in Newsday! (aka Mainstream Press Coverage); + More Reviews

Newsday, Long Island's primary newspaper, Sunday circulation 495,000, is featuring an interview with me as the lead in Arts & Entertainment section of tomorrow's (Sunday May 3) issue. Author: Brian Alessandro, literary critic

Link goes to the online copy of the article, but it's behind a paywall which will put it out of reach for most people who aren't subscribers of Newsday or one of its partners.

It's not a review of the book. The questions were about my motivations as an author and the political situation of genderqueer people within LGBTQIA and how I feel about putting such personal information about the events in my life out there for public consumption -- most of which I've discussed at length in these blog posts.

Getting a spread in Newsday is excellent publicity and I hope it will direct a significant amount of local and regional attention to my book. Public awareness is very much a snowball phenomenon. When people think something is happening that other people in their community are paying attention to, they want to be at least somewhat acquainted with it and what it's about in case someone asks them.


Meanwhile, I'm continuing to get college newspaper reviews. The corona virus has of course delayed many such endeavors so they are being spread out over the course of months instead of being more closely packed together. That has the beneficial effect of lengthening the time when I'm popping up in print and affecting search engines and whatnot. That works in my favor, ameliorating the effect of being unable to make guest-speaker appearances and do book signings etc.

Here are the reviews that have come in since my April 3 post:

"First and foremost, what this book does really well is testify to the importance of the 'Q' in LGBTQ. When many people furrowed their eyebrows at the addition to another letter in the acronym, people like this author were fighting to show how necessary it was. Derek’s story takes place in a time way before the 'Q' was introduced, way before most began to understand or care about gender issues.



However, even though Genderqueer takes place in the 70s, there are many parallels to today’s world that will make the story resonate with today’s LGBTQ youth. Derek’s confusion and desperation to understand who he is is so palpable that anyone who has gone through anything similar, or is currently going through anything similar, will be able to relate. With this story, Alan D. Hunter sheds light on a gender identity that is relatively unknown to the general public while also giving others who share a similar story to him validation that there is nothing wrong with who they are."

— Anna Vanseveran. St. Norbert Times — St. Norbert College

"The discussion around gender identity and sexual orientation has progressed exponentially in the past decade. Same-sex marriage became legal nationwide only five years ago, and the LGBTQ community continues to fight for equal rights. With this constant push for change, some can only imagine the struggles of coming to terms with your gender identity during the late 1960s and 1970s.



GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet offers an eye-opening view into the upbringing of a gender-nonconforming person in an era when many people didn’t know such an identity existed..."

— Camryn DeLuca. The Diamondback — University of Maryland

"This is a novel that is bracingly raw and personal, yet always feels authentic in its sense of place and voice. Its visibility gives an insight into a point of view that doesn’t live in the “traditional” gender boxes...




It is in the last half of the book, when Derek starts to realize the whole person he is inside where the book reaches its peak...it is incredibly satisfying to see Derek hit his stride and finally find his sense of place and belonging in the world. "

— Josh Rittberg The Snapper — Millersville University

"...it’s clear from the beginning of the novel where the story is heading. Hunter introduces their ideas of gender at the start of the novel when they talk about their personality as a child – how they don’t identify with the rough behavior usually prescribed to the male gender – and these thoughts stay with them and influence their growing up.



When the revelation is made, it’s not something that comes out of left field. Because of course it’s not – these things don’t just appear one day like a magic trick. It’s always there, even if it’s not super obvious at first."

— Celia Brockert The Times-Delphic — Drake University

"...a treacherous and often realistic tale that’s packed with frustration, desperation and yearning. Hunter does an amazing job of captivating the raw emotions of a person seeking their own truths in a world where everyone else seems to know who they are and what their place is in the world...



We see Derek from a very young age get picked on and beat up. He tries time and time again not to let the bullies get into his head, but it proves more and more difficult. All the while he starts to believe the things they say about him. He seeks out answers in both healthy and unhealthy ways, often getting him in all sorts of trouble...



Overall this book is very eye-opening. It puts into words a story for people that are almost never represented. It shakes its metaphoric fist in the face of erasure, saying, 'I’m here and I will not be forgotten.'"

— Zarqua Ansari The Beacon — Wilkes University



I've also gradually accumulated reviews on GoodReads, with eight readers leaving review comments behind.


———————

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

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


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

———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


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Sex vs Gender: A Working Definition?

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

———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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The Inadequacy of Straight / Gay / Bi

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

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

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


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





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

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

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

Straight, gay, or bi?

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

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

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

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

And the charts oversimplify matters too much.

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

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

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



———————

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

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


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

———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

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