Review / Interview in QueerPGH!

"...the book has some problematic aspects, and may be at odds with some of our queer values today. This seems to be by design, conveying a much different world for queer people."

— Rachel Lange, Senior Editor, QueerPGH

If you were ever part of a children's classroom drama group or were in a choir or rock band as a 4th grader, you may have encountered the "review that isn't really a review". The kind where the writer discusses how adorable your group was and how earnest you all were up there on that stage, and how cute your costumes were. The names of the lead singers or the performers in the primary roles are all dutifully mentioned, and the writer will generally find some nice things to say about the precision of the delivery or how nicely all in tune you were. But you don't get scathing criticism or a pointed comment on how your group chose to stage it, because the writer figures that no one goes to those things to hear the music or watch the dramatic tale unfold.


So-called "third party" politicians often get the same treatment when they run for office. If they get interviewed and covered at all, the questions are softball questions: "Tell me about your main issues", or "What made you decide to run for office?"; the interviewer rarely probes the marginal candidate's most politically vulnerable spot to see if the candidate has a good answer, like "You say you would close the town widget factory because of the toxicity levels. Seven hundred local citizens have jobs there; what's going to happen to them? And where will the airplane industry get their greasy widgets from, won't the cost of air travel jump through the roof if you do that?" They don't ask because the writer doesn't assume it matters to the voters, because this candidate isn't going to win the election anyway so who cares?


Rachel Lange of the queer publication QueerPGH apparently takes me seriously. Not only that I have something to say to the LGBTQIA community but that people might pay attention to it, that it might have some impact. In her interview with me, she asked some of the most provocative and probing questions I've faced.

She isn't wrong in her summary statement: I wrote GenderQueer not to add my voice to the chorus of voices that were already out there, but to add a different voice. To tell a story about an identity that was not already being explained and given a name. And she's quite right—I have often found myself at odds with activists who represent some of the other shades of the queer coalition rainbow, because some of the concepts they use are injurious to the identity I'm writing about. Some of the rhetoric they like to use erases people like me. I'm not unaware of the existing social dialog, so in rising to my feet to present my tale, my dissent with them is indeed by design. Not that I'm out to antagonize or deliberately cause dissent in the community, but because that erasure of which I spoke needs to end. I'm not out to negate anyone else's identity, and I hope readers of my book will see that. But I very much appreciate the candor and seriousness of the questions.

Book Review: Gender Queer: A Story from a Different Closet

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

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


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

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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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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?



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

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


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

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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

Just

"I don't see why that makes it a different gender identity", someone asks me. (I visualize them with their arms crossed and scowling). "Why can't you just say you're a man with a lot of traits that are generally associated with women?"

OK, I'll give you your answer.

It's sitting there inside your question. You said just.

We often say "just" to mean merely, or less than: "Why do I have to mop the floor? Can't I just sweep up the crumbs and dirt with a broom?"

When you suggest I should "just" identify as a man with a bunch of feminine traits, it sounds like you're saying that the identity terms I'm using -- genderqueer, gender invert, being a male girl -- is more audacious, a stronger statement. That I'm making a bigger deal out of the difference than you think I ought to.

But it is a big deal. That's the point.


On the other hand, sometimes we say "just" to mean simpler even when it isn't less than: "It's taking forever to clip the burrs out of Blackie's fur. Why don't we just dip him in a vat of Nair and wait for his hair to grow back, it would be easier!"

You're not doing that. You're not using "just" in that way. I could, though: "Why would I want to spend my life explaining that I'm a male with a lot of traits and tastes that are more typically associated with women than with men? Why can't I just say I'm a male girl?"

The way I express my identity has a "let's cut to the chase" simplicity to it.


———————

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.

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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.


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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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Index of all Blog Posts

Identify and Identification

Just a couple decades ago, even the people at your local Stonewall Center didn't have concepts that recognized your identity. Does the LGBTQIA++ community do so now? Do you assume we've "arrived" now and know all the identities that exist?

Of course we don't. A moment's consideration of the question should tell you that. Every year there are new terms, new expressions, new explanations about gender and sexuality, so it is very much all still happening.

YOU, yes you, there, who asked "I've been thinking I was nonbinary but I was AFAB and I like to wear makeup and a skirt with lace, and I wonder if my identity is valid, what do you think?" And YOU, who administrate the Facebook group where a dozen questions like that appear every month if not every week, and always reply "Every identity is valid, you are valid, no one else gets to decide that for you". Yeah, you, too...


All those identity terms came from us. From people who had an identity that did not have a name yet, and who described how they were in detail and then put a name on it. Perhaps they linked up with others who said "Oh, you too? I never met anyone besides myself who said that. What else?", and the new term and new description got hammered out from a dialog. Perhaps they developed their statement and gave their identity a name all alone, as one voice.

All of you folks who are sorting out your identities? Please don't feel like you need to confine yourself to trying on all the existing identities until you find the one that fits.


We need your story. We need to know how it has been for you. We need to honor your experience and, if your experience makes it so that none of the existing identity-terms fits you very well, we need to understand your story and your identity, and perhaps your label for it, in order to be better prepared to understand other people like you. For the same reason that the Gay & Lesbian Centre from 1989 really needed to listen to bisexual people and transgender people and intersex people and widen their sense of who "us" is.


And about that "every identity is valid, don't worry about it" response, if I may: that's well-intentioned and warm but it can unintentionally convey the message that "oh, whatever and however you are is all fine and fabulous, so the specifics of how and who you are doesn't matter, just chill and don't fret about it".

But it does matter.

Way back in the 1970s, the people on the cutting edge of gender work were the participants in the women's liberation movement. And the people who were involved back then have said over and over again how empowering it was to have consciousness-raising groups. Where women came together and talked about how it was for them, individually. And from their discussions, from the truths that had been realized from individual people examining their own individual lives, came feminist theory, the philosophy of a movement.

Now we're the cutting edge. If we want to remain relevant, we need to continue to be a space in which individual people's experiences contribute to our understandings.

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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.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

A Bouquet of Reviews of My Book

Because I figured that my book would be of particular relevance to the college communities, both students and faculty, I solicited reviews from student newspapers. Several college newspapers have now posted reviews of GenderQueer online!



Here are some choice comments, with links to the full reviews.

"The book makes it plain that the 'Q' recently added to the LGBTQIA+ is necessary because the "T" for transgender doesn’t necessarily cover all of the individuals in the category of 'anyone whose gender is different from what people originally assumed it to be...' "

— Noah Young. The Clock — Plymouth State Univerity

"Allan Hunter’s debut book Genderqueer: A Story from a Different Closet takes a personal look at the topic of gender and the dilemma that comes from not conforming to gender norms. The book brings up an important conversation that needs to be addressed while taking a deep dive into the term genderqueer."

— Arielle Gulley. Daily Utah Chronicle — University of Utah

"This memoir is a personal journey about a person who has lived a life struggling to accept who they are based on the reactions of those around them. A lot of the book is hard to read, hearing how cruel people can be. But I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand gender and sexuality on a deeper and more intimate level."

— Never Retallack. The Western Howl — Western Oregon University

"Although the book is described as a memoir, it reads like fiction. This makes the book compelling and enjoyable to read, and it is far more effective than if the author had approached the topic as a textbook might...GenderQueer is honest, intimate and at times, uncomfortable. The protagonist is extremely vulnerable, bringing the audience into private moments and personal thoughts."

— Jaime Fields. The Whitman Wire — Whitman 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

"Derek says he came out of a different closet, but the same door. The “door” represents the struggle one faces about discovering his identity and/or his sexual orientation. The “closet” represents the harboring of one’s gender identity and/or sexual orientation, a secret that is not meant to be a secret. Derek’s decision to wear a denim wraparound skirt showcased he had come to terms with his identity and was no longer inside the closet"

— Aazan Ahmad. The Pinnacle — Berea College

"GenderQueer: A Story from a Different Closet is a coming-out and coming-of-age story of a gender non-conforming individual...the story takes place during the 1970s and 1980s, a time period in which many individuals of the LGBT community were treated with more hostility than today...





[One] group that was not necessarily included was the genderqueer community, now commonly symbolized as the “Q” in LGBTQ, and this is precisely what this book focuses on. Many people are not familiar with the genderqueer identity and this book gives a first-hand account of what someone with this identity experiences. Hunter delves into serious and intimate topics throughout the book, making it very realistic and raw, which was overwhelming at times...despite the fact it may make some of us uncomfortable, it is crucial to aiding our understanding of Hunter’s experience "

— Maryam Javed The Lake Forest Stentor — Lake Forest College





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There are also a handful of reviews on GoodReads and Amazon as well.







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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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Index of all Blog Posts

That's Not Very Nice

One of the early reviews of GenderQueer noted that my thoughts and attitudes during my later teenage years in my book reminded her of the Nice Guys™.

It's an accurate call. When I first encountered the send-up of Nice Guys and their behaviors, I winced in recognition. Yes, I was definitely on that trajectory for awhile. The Nice Guys overtones in my book are acknowledged as intentional. In my own personal life, I didn't descend very far into blaming women, or considering the gender-polarized dating environment to be women's fault, but I had a lot of frustration and irritation; and in one important scene in the book you can see me expressing those feelings internally as resentment towards girls, and experimenting with the kind of behavior that is often advocated by so-called pickup artists.

I'm about to do something that many folks would say is ill-advised. I'm going to defend the Nice Guys (god help me). Well, sort of. I'm not about to make a positive case for being a men's rights advocate or explain why it really is all the fault of the women. But all the material about the Nice Guys describes them with eye-rolling dismissive contempt for exhibiting behaviors that we're encouraged to think of as manifestations of character flaws. I'm going to challenge you to perceive them (well, us, actually, since I'm reluctantly claiming the mantle) as people whose behaviors take place in a context, and look at the context long enough to see how it elicits those behaviors.


We are considered creepy. Creepy because we often have a hidden agenda of wanting sex. Creepy because we allegedly act nice thinking that we'll get sex as a reward for being nice. Creepy because our reasons for behaving "nice" are all about obtaining sex. Creepy because we think that by being nice, we somehow deserve sex.

So let's examine all that -- removing any gendered double standards in order to do that exam. I may be projecting my own experiences onto the Nice Guy™ debate, but it's not like there's an organized body of Nice Guys™ with a spokesperson and a position paper -- it's an identity largely created from the outside by folks who were tired of the Nice Guy shtick, and I confess that I recognize myself in a lot of the description so I may as well wear it.



a) Is it OK to want sex? Is it OK to expect or anticipate that someone would want to have sex with you?

This is a question that many a nice girl has found it necessary to contend with, so let's not dismiss it too quickly. Female people have often encountered judgmental hostility if it were thought that they wanted sex. They have often found themselves laughed at with derisive contempt connected to the idea that they did. And they've been told that if it were true, it meant they were not nice.

Now what (you may be asking) does that have to do with Nice Guys™, who, as males, would presumably not be facing those attitudes? Well, yeah, the boys are indeed sort of expected to want sex and to seek sex. But that confirms that they are Bad Boys™, not Nice Guys™.

Bad, bad, bad, bad boys
Make me feel so gooood...

-- Miami Sound Machine

Bad Boys aren't Nice Guys™. The fact that there isn't a massive social pressure on males to be Nice Guys™ instead of Bad Boys™ is particularly relevant -- somehow these particular male folks embraced an identity as Nice Guys anyhow, and overtly wanting sex isn't compatible with that. Displaying interest in sex would get the girls, the Nice Girls™, kicked out of the Nice category. Being overtly focused on the chance of sex happening is, in fact, a central part of what affirms a male person as a Bad Boy™.

That's not to say that interest in sex is entirely incompatible with Niceness, whether as manifested in Nice Girls™ or in Nice Guys™. In sitcom TV shows and romcom movies as well as in real life, we often hear the female characters complain that they'd really like to meet some guys who aren't married and aren't gay. There's no real reason for them to care whether interesting guys are single or to be concerned with their sexual orientation unless they wish to have sex take place in their lives occasionally, if you see what I mean.

But those female characters don't move around proclaiming to likely prospects that they want sex. That would not be considered Nice™.

How do the Nice Girls™ conventionally handle it? By bundling sex into a larger constellation of experiences and opting to partake of the bundle. To want a romantic relationship. To want a personal and emotional connection and within that context to be sexually active. Not otherwise.

Obviously you and I may not be at all inclined to sign on to the notion that female people should be shoehorned into this notion, this social construct that we call Nice Girls™, but you aren't unaware of the historical presence of this notion. You aren't unaware that it still has some social clout even in 2020. That even now, even after all the questionings and discardings of sexist and gender-polarized notions about how female folks should behave, a girl growing up in a randomly-selected American town is likely to have an easier time of it socially within the parameters of Nice Girl™ than she would if she were to utterly disregard it.


b) Well, is it OK to put on a "nice act" in order to get sex? Is it OK to go around thinking that because you're nice you somehow deserve sex?

I have to question the assumptions on that first one. The common derisive attitude towards Nice Guys™ accuses us of adopting a fake "nice" persona as a means of getting sex, but we are as we are -- this thing called "nice" -- despite a cultural push to be more of a Bad Boy™ and very little pressure on us as males to be Nice™ -- and we deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is who, and how, we are. We may expect things (including sex) as acknowledgment or reward for being Nice™, expectations that folks may have contempt for (and more on that shortly), but that doesn't make the "being nice" some kind of phony act.

Let's again glance across the aisle at the Nice Girls™. People don't tend to assume that they are being Nice™ in order to get sex to happen. People don't tend to assume that they are putting on a "nice act".

There is a belief about Nice Girls™ that is worth bringing up, though. They are often believed to have a high opinion of themselves, a high opinion that leads them to think and say hostile and disparaging things about boys who would rather devote their attention to considerably less-nice girls. The Nice Girls™ also may be expected to occasionally say uncomplimentary things about the not-so-nice girls themselves.

The Nice Girls™, in other words, regard themselves as a "catch", as worthy of admiration and value as potential partners. This is part of the understanding that people have of Nice Girls™, that they may tend to have this attitude about themselves.

Note that this is not characterized as them thinking that they "deserve sex". As I said before, the Nice Girls™ are taught to bundle sex along with emotional connection and think in terms of romantic relationship. So it's not that they think they "deserve sex" for being Nice Girls™, it is that they think they deserve consideration as good girlfriends for being Nice Girls™.

But as we've also already discussed, yeah, that formulation does include sex.

I think Nice Guys™ are basically doing the same thing. We tend to think we shoud be regarded as good romantic prospects. We start off putting a lot of energy into being good companions, connecting with the female people who are in our lives, thinking that sooner or later one of them will find the interactions enticing, will appreciate our value as potential boyfriend material, and if they also happen to find us physically attractive, then hey, things should progress from there, shouldn't they? It's not a materially different expectation than what the Nice Girls™ expect.

But in this gender-polarized world, we operate in a different context than they do.

Incidentally, no, I don't think we (Nice™ people of either sex) are intrinsically better than other people. It's just how we identify, how we think of ourselves and comport ourselves in the world. I'm proud of how and who I am. It's in the face of a lot of disapproval and so I don't feel apologetic about that.


c) So is it somehow OK to go moping around and getting all pissy and hostile because the girls don't appreciate your virtue as a Nice Guy™ and don't find you such a hot prospect? And WTF is with the Nice Guys™ bitterly pursuing an aggressive Pickup Artist approach and treating women like garbage while continuing to complain about things?

No it isn't OK. It isn't appropriate, it isn't politically legitimate, and, incidentally, it also isn't Nice™.

So why does it occur? I mean, look across the aisle again: the Nice Girls™ aren't doing anything equivalent to that, and I've spend the last few paragraphs comparing Nice Guys™ to Nice Girls™ to shed light on other Nice Guy™ behavior. So what's up with this bitter hostility?

We all operate in a social context, the Nice Girls™ and the Bad Boys™ and the Nice Guys™ and everyone else. There is a courtship dance established, and it has a role for the Bad Boys™ and it has a role for the Nice Girls™. The courtship dance calls for the Bad Boys™ to try to make sex happen and the Nice Girls™ to decline that and assert that they don't do that kind of thing outside of the context of an emotional connection and the prospect of an ongoing romantic relationship -- the "bundle" of which I spoke earlier -- and the dance goes on from there. They each know their lines and they anticipate the behavior of the other. But there's no courtship-dance role for the Nice Guy™. He isn't doing the Bad Boy™ dance steps that the Nice Girl™ expects and knows how to respond to. Whether she finds him physically attractive or not, whether she finds herself liking him as a person or not, whether she appreciates his personal qualities (Niceness included) or not, her own role instructions don't give her any lines or provide her with any dance steps that would make it easy for her to act on that interest if it were to occur.

Not that he, the Nice Boy™, has a clearer idea of what he should be doing. His bitter accusations are all focused on the Bad Boy™ stuff that he is not doing, Bad Boy™ stuff that the Nice Girls™ vocally complain about. He says that despite their complaints that's still where things progress, whereas affairs with the girls don't progress with a Nice Guy™ like him, and (he says) "that's unfair!"

Fair or unfair, his observations are accurate: the dance calls for the Nice Girl™ to protest the unbridled raw male expression of sexual interest as crude and demeaning and for her to assert her lack of interest in that. The dance sets them up as opponents, adversaries, with him trying to make sex happen and her disdaining that but seeing if perhaps he seriously likes her as a person and not just a sexual possibility; with him seeing if he can get past her defenses by studying her reactions and tuning into her thoughts and concerns and paying stragetic attention to her feelings. Maybe proximity and time causes him to develop real feelings for her. Maybe proximity and time causes her sexual appetite to kick into overdrive and she consents to doing more and more sexual stuff. They each have lines and dance steps and they know them. They know them the same way you know them. We all do. We've been to the movies, we've read the books, we've listened to the songs, we've heard and sometimes laughed at the jokes. Many folks dance very loosely instead of being rigidly bound to the dance steps, but the known pattern of the established dance still forms a structure.

But not for us.

Nice Guys™ are a type of gender misfit. Because Niceness is gendered and the males are the wrong sex to be embodying Nice. Nice Guys™ may not conceptualize themselves as feminine, as sissy, as trans, as nonbinary, as gender inverted people. In fact, I think they mostly don't. But in a nutshell their complaints do boil down to saying that they approached the whole sex-and-romance thing the same way girls do but that the world didn't play nice with them and left them out in the cold, with no girlfriend, no romance, no sex.

And if and when a Nice Guy™ decides to emulate the Bad Boys™ because the Bad Boys™ seem to be getting all the action he's missing out on, he may do so with contempt and hostility and bitter resentment. You want to know where else I've seen that emotional combination? Certain women who have observed "what works" with guys and have adopted the expected behaviors with scornful hate that they should have to do such demeaning and dishonest things. Yeah, hello.


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Androgyny & Unisex vs Being Differently Gendered

Many older feminists on my Facebook feed and elsewhere are annoyed that so many younger tomboyish / butch women now identify as men. "Why can't they just reject the sexist imposed girly-girl pink 'n pretty bullshit and be proud of being women?", they write. "We need to stick together as women. Feminism has always rejected all that 'biology is destiny' stuff, but to us that meant that if you were born female it didn't mean you had to be feminine, you could play rugby and be an astronaut and be assertive and ambitious at the conference table". They express their dismay at the current thinking and attitudes about gender and gender expression and identity: "This looks like a step backwards. Young women are believing that if they're going to be aggressive and rowdy and blunt and heroic, they have to turn their backs of being women and call themselves boys or men".

Feminist thinking split gender apart from sex. Sex was your physical plumbing, your morphological configuration. Gender was all the socially constructed beliefs and roles and assumed attributes, and included things like "Women's place is in the home" as well as "Women can't be doctors, they don't have the detached analytical mind that it takes" and "Girls' way of flirting is to draw the eyes of boys and react to boys hitting on them" and so forth. Separating gender from sex meant separating what you were given at birth from what it was assumed to mean, so that those assumptions could more easily be challenged.

I grew up with the women's liberation movement getting enough media coverage and mainstream acknowledgment for it to form a part of my backdrop. And because of it, I grew up with my own attitude, that just because I was born male didn't mean I needed to emulate all that belligerent noisy competitive disruptive behavior, and didn't mean there was something wrong with me for valuing the same things the girls valued. It meant I could reject double standards. If any characteristic or trait was acceptable or admirable when a girl had it, then it was sexist and unfair for it not to be acceptable and admirable in me if I had it.

So why wasn't that enough? Why couldn't I just continue to be a guy who happened to dismiss all that sexist stereotyping and remain confident of my legitimacy in an androgynous unisex modern society?

I've tried to answer that before, but I don't think I said it very clearly. Let me try again...




Let's say you happen to be a male person whose attributes and behavioral patterns and whatnot overlap a whole lot better with the ones assumed and attributed to female people than with the ones assumed of male folks.

And let's say you happen to live in a world where some, but not all, of the people agree that it is sexist stereotyping to expect male people to be one way and female people to be a different way.

The other people, who also inhabit your world, believe that those so-called sexist stereotypes are actually legitimate accurate descriptions about the differences between the sexes.

The male children who grow up disbelieving in sexist stereotypes are obviously less likely to hold themselves up against those stereotypes and aspire to them and conform to them, so on average they're probably going to be pretty androgynous. The male children who grow up embracing those sex polarized notions, on the other hand, are most likely to put some effort into manifesting "masculinity".

So imagine that there's a roomful of people, some with one set of expectations and beliefs and some with the other attitudes. And they know about each other of course. And into this room walks a male person, a stranger that none of them know yet. What expectations and anticipations get projected onto this male stranger? It's a blend, right? The ones who don't consider the traditional beliefs to be stereotypes will expect somewhat conventional masculine behavior. Oh, they may also have some space in their head for anticipating more androgynous behavior, because they're aware of those other folks, the ones who discount that stuff as sexist stereotyping, so whether they approve of it or not they may at least anticipate that this guy who just walked in might be one of those metrosexual androgynous types you see so often these days.

How about the people in the room who don't ascribe to sexist assumptions? They're going to anticipate fairly neutral behavior from this male stranger, not materially different from what they'd anticipate if it were a female stranger, because they're not sexist jerks, right? Well, except that they're well aware of the continued existence of people who still subscribe to that stuff and believe it to be true, so whether they approve of it or not, they have some room within their expectations that the guy walking in may be one of those, and hence may exhibit a lot of internalized prescribed masculine signals and gender-conformist attributes.

Well, if you average all that mess out, you get a midpoint sort of halfway between conventionally stereotypically masculine and androgynously unisex.

And if this male stranger just so happens, in fact, to mostly have traits that overlap with the expectations and beliefs foisted onto female people, that collective expectation is going to be rather wrong. Significantly wrong.

What is gained by asserting an identity as femme, as a male girl, as a feminine, not merely androgynously unisex male?

It's a political act. It puts an entirely new expectation on the board.

If we can establish an awareness on the part of those people in that room that I described -- an awareness that some male people exhibit feminine traits, think of themselves as being feminine, embrace that, express that -- then whether the people in that room approve of it or not, the fact that the possibility of us has been planted in their minds means their expections, projected onto that male stranger, will be shifted.


Shifted in our direction.


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Singing the Sissy Femme Blues

This song could get me in trouble.



I've occasionally mentioned that at the time I was coming to the realization of my gender identity, and outed myself on campus and to the world (to the extent that I could), I was a music major at the University of New Mexico, hoping to hone my skills as a composer, songwriter, pianist, and singer.

There I was, wanting to explain being a gender invert, wanting to educate the world, wanting to communicate. So, with music among my available tools, I started writing songs about it.

This song is straight out of the blues tradition, a howl, or a whine if you prefer, bewailing what it's like to be male, femme, and attracted to women.

It's an easy target for accusations of insensitive and unwoke political incorrectness: the singer apparently wants to be congratulated for not treating women as sex objects like so many other males do (yeesh, like according women the minimal courtesy of treating them as humans instead of sex toys should win him some kind of prize?), while using objectifying language about female anatomy to do so (yeah, folks, content warning), and he dares to criticize women for reacting to male people in general based on the behavior of males as a class, as if that were somehow unreasonable.

Yeah, well that's a big part of why singing songs about it isn't the ideal mechanism. Too much of this gender situation requires careful and precisely nuanced explanation. I soon realized I needed to write about this, that I was best off depending on my skills as a writer.

I am, of course, well aware that the behaviors of both women and men are structured by the social situation, that none of us behave in a vaccuum but instead face penalties for behaviors that depart from the imposed pattern. I am, of course, complaining about those same kinds of patterns as they get imposed on male people, the whole gender polarization thing.

It's hard to express complex political analysis within the lyrics to a song.

But the blues are not about justifying the reasons for having the blues. The blues are about howling, saying that this is how it feels. And that's something people should know. Analyses of who is entitled to feel this or think that, or theories about blame and causality and so on certainly have their place, but if you want to understand social phenomena, you need to get a sense of how the people in various identities and social locations feel.


Without further ado... Another One © Allan Hunter 1981



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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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The Arrogance of Claiming to Be a Social Change Activist

On an authors' message board someone started a thread asking if we authors were perhaps an arrogant lot.

I replied,

Damn right I'm arrogant. I have a story to tell. I'd prefer that folks fork over the cover price and voluntarily submit themselves to my thoroughly entertaining written word, but I would strongly consider chaining each and every member of my species to a convenient chair and prying their eyelids open with toothpicks and reading it out loud to them. I haven't worked out the logistics of that yet but morally and intellectually I have no intervening compunctions. (You have been forewarned). Hmm, now if I just went after the literary agents, maybe...

Before long, another author answered that with

Yeah..... admirable confidence. I can't help but want to applaud it.

But... nah... we don't all deserve to be read. We are not entitled. I hope you understand. We all have our causes.

Now, my instinctive initial reaction to that is to respond that this isn't about being an author, an artist, a creative person wanting to share an artistic work; it's about being a marginalized mistreated person, a victim of a systemic wrong that needs to be righted, and that yes, dammit it is too my right to speak and to insist that I be heard. The ethics of social justice says I have the right to rise up and do what I must. And so forth.

But like so many other things, that, too, is an oversimplification. And because indulging in that oversimplification really is a bit arrogant, it's appropriate and occasionally necessary to embrace a little self-doubt now and then. Come along with me, if you will...

* Authority — There's a built-in claim in my social justice assertions, that the way I see things is damned well the way things actually are. That sissy femme males are unjustly treated by society in general, that it does make sense to think of us (or to think of ourselves) in the specific manner that I'm advocating, as differently gendered people who aren't wrong or inferior, that society as a whole becomes better in its entirety if it changes so as to accommodate our existence and begin accepting us on our own terms, and so forth. Well, yeah, I do think exactly that, I do believe those things. But there are plenty of people who think otherwise. Some of them think that the things I'm making a big deal about are no big deal. Some of them think I'm as silly and my arguments as useless as someone screaming that gravity is unfair and should be repealed because skinned knees hurt. Some of them question the authenticity of my conscious motives ("You're trying to jump onto the LGBTQ bandwagon because you're a boring white hetero cis male who desperately wants to be edgy") or the coherence of my mind ("You admit you were diagnosed with a mental illness for spouting this stuff so pardon me if I don't take you seriously"). From what source other than unadorned arrogance does someone like me derive the confidence that right is on my side?

* Objective Meaning — Then there's the bandying about of these aggregate terms and the assignment to them of social meaning and significance, as if they existed and have always existed objectively, just like I describe them, whether people at any given time recognized them that way or not. The notion that in human society there exists a bunch of male people who are essentially girls, who have the same gender polarity as the girls have, and that this category exists independent of physical sex or from sexual orientation, and that I'm shining my spotlight on this phenomenon so that everyone will see it and realize it and recognize us and start thinking of us in a different manner. Yeah, so what's wrong with that? I mean, yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. What's wrong with it is that it assumes that human experiences have a meaning in and of themselves. And that isn't true. Human experiences have meaning to someone or else they don't have that meaning at all. Meaning in general is "to an observer", not divorced from interaction and embedded in things apart from people. And that is all the more important, as philosophical truths go, when the subject matter is our own human experience. If there are no sissy femme male people who think of ourselves as being of girlish gender yet male of physical body, then it isn't that we exist but think of ourselves wrongly or inaccurately, is it, so much as we don't exist as described in the first place?

You probably suspect that I have an answer to that. That I'm not really engaging in a bunch of self-doubt and purpose-questioning, and that I'm actually tossing all that out there in order to pontificate intellectually?

Of course I am. Wait, no I'm not. Um, well... the self-doubt is real, and questioning my arrogant self is genuinely important. But no, I'm not paralyzed by self-doubt and derailed from being able to continue. I said certain things were an oversimplification. I didn't say they were fundamentally wrong. Oversimplifications tend to contain quite a bit of truth. I think these do. That's why I continue to embrace them and behave as if they were entirely the truth (most of the time). Sometimes a simplified understanding of something is more useful than the fully accurate version. Earlier tonight I drove to and from the village of Huntington, behaving as if I were on the surface of a more or less flat and motionless terrain. I know the earth is round and is plummeting around the sun as well as spinning around its own axis, but it's just easier to drive when I bracket that stuff off as irrelevant to what I'm doing. You get what I'm saying?

So here's a somewhat less oversimplified notion of the social activism thing:

* How people think of themselves and their experience and identity is not limited to concepts that they could put into words and stick labels onto. Most people, at some point in their lives, recognize themselves in a description that they hear. Prior to hearing that description, they might not have thought of themselves in quite those terms, or seen the same connections, but the fact that they do recognize themselves in the description means that it resonates with what they understand about themselves emotionally or connects up a lot of little pieces that they understand about themselves cognitively. So there's no need to make it an either/or proposition. Yes, meaning is "to a subject", especially the meaning of human experiences themselves, but meaning is not the same as a specific verbal description.

* Verbal description is an art, not a precision science. There is not an exact set of verbal terms lying in a box, each one corresponding to a specific human experience. So none of the attempts to explain human experience are "objectively correct" but all of them echo something truthful and accurate, and the better ones resonate with people as truly significant expressions of what our lives are like.

* It is still arrogant to be so insistent about expressing my verbal description on the theory that it will, in fact, resonate with people. That it will shed light on the human condition, that it can change things. Arrogance is a form of being pushy, less than fully delicate with other people's sensitivities and perhaps their disinterest in considering a set of ideas that seem foreign and strange to them. I have often described my coming out to myself in 1980 as an act of permanently losing my temper about the whole gender situation. I act fueled by anger, by a constant glowing rage that makes me willing and able to be pushy in that fashion. That a marginalized and ostracized person would feel and react with anger and stand up for herself is predictable and natural. And socially healthy. It's not practical for me to chain people to their chairs and force-feed them my thoughts, so the social world surrounding me is not at risk from my anger — I can't attain my objectives coercively whether I'm arrogant enough to consider myself entitled to do so or not. And that's true of others in my position, specifically or generally.

As a practical matter, our fury reconciles as determination. Or stubbornness if you prefer.

The arrogance is something you're just going to have to live with.


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Defining Gender Inversion

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

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

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

Origin

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

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


The Umbrella Thing

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

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

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

I now have all the umbrellas I need.

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


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

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

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

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


But why?

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

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

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

I'm moving the goal posts.

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

I'm speaking out about it either way.


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


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

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