Binary thinking is either/or thinking. In our own gender-variant subculture, when we say "nonbinary" or "binary" we're referring to the gender binary, of course--the notion that either you are male, and hence a man, or you are female, and therefore a woman.
But I've encountered a lot of rigid binary thinking among people who ought to know better, binary thinking that isn't necessarily the same familiar gender binary but still rooted in that same kind of either/or, and that's what I want to write about today.
To get started, let me relate to you a pair of conversations.
Conversation One
X: That's a nice jacket patch you've got there. 'Radical feminist'. Is that your sister's jacket you're wearing?
W: Thanks! No, it's mine.
X: Well, men can't be feminists. They can be pro-feminist, or feminist supporters but feminist voices and feminist actions and the faces of feminism, well, that has to be women, speaking for ourselves.
W: I don't identify as a man. I'm male but I'm not a man.
X: Well, that's good. Reject that identity. But you still can't speak as a feminist as a male person. Our oppression is oppression as female, and feminists need to be female. Because when a feminist opinion is represented, if a male spokesman gets to do that representing, it isn't feminism any more.
W: Across campus is Dr. Thorensen. He lectures and writes books for a living and he drives a BMW and lives in an impressively big house. He identifies as a Marxist, a socialist. I wouldn't say he's working class.
X: That may be a legitimate point, but that doesn't mean feminism has to follow that route. You are male, you are treated as male, therefore you are privileged as male.
W: Well, I'm not trying to do a chivalry thing here. Patriarchy as a social structure prohibits me from stepping outside of what it defines as masculinity. Behaviors and personality traits are demanded of me that aren't who I am, and as a person who doesn't fit that, I'm oppressed. I see what you're saying about the voice and face of feminism needing to be female, but what do we call it when I'm doing this for my own political reasons?
X: But that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. You're not oppressed as a man. Patriarchy is the oppression of women, by men.
W: Well, what am I oppressed as? A sissy femme? If I was gay I could talk about homophobia. Should I call it femmeophobia?
X: I'm saying you shouldn't call yourself a feminist.
W: When I start explaining my situation to people, I'm going to end up using concepts that feminists put into words. If I use their terms, "feminism" is what they call this perspective and this politics. If I invent my own terms, it's going to be like I'm stealing feminists' ideas and not giving them credit, isn't it?
X: You shouldn't do that either. Feminism is ours. Go find your own cause, you can be supportive of feminism but you can't really be a full-fledged participant.
W: But this is my cause.
Conversation Two
Z: That's an interesting jacket patch you've got there. 'Radical feminist'. Why would you want to have anything to do with them?
W: Radical feminists were first in challenging biological essentialist ideas about males and females being fundamentally different and having automatically built-in sex roles they were supposed to conform to.
Z: Are you kidding? They're the ones who won't let trans women into their midst. They say trans women aren't real women. If that's not biologically essentialist, what is?
W: Some of them have that attitude. Most radical feminists have a more complicated view of transgender women, though. It's not that they don't recognize that a trans woman's identity is woman, and female, it's that they're saying trans women's experience isn't the same as the experience that they're organizing around.
Z: No, they say we're not women. They say "hey everybody, we're organizing as women" and then they say "no, not you, you're not welcome".
W: Well, if they said they were organizing as people who were female at birth, would you be more OK with them saying you don't really belong at their meeting?
Z: I've always been female. When I was born I was assigned male, but that's because the cisgender world has an ideology to support. We need to get past focusing on the ideology of there being two body types that define gender. And that's what those radical feminists are doing, they're making everything be about the binary.
W: OK, so if they said they were organizing as people who were assigned female at birth, you'd be more OK with them saying you aren't really welcome at their meetings?
X: But that's personal information, and it's no one's business. There shouldn't be any distinction between whether you're trans or cis. You're a woman and that's what counts.
W: Well, aren't you organizing as transgender men and women to form support groups and hold rallies for your rights?
In both conversations, there are participants who get caught up in the notion that there is a Category and either you're in it or you're not. Either/or. Binary.
If we value being able to get past the familiar binary of gender, we should examine other binaries when we encounter them and see if we can get past that kind of either/or thinking. Rather than a person being or not being a woman or a feminist or whatever, acknowledge the ways in which a person is and the ways in which that same person isn't, accept and embrace the contradictions and the fragility of definitions.
This is a real-world concern. Just the other day, a new member joined one of the Facebook "Nonbinary and Genderqueer" groups that I participate in. This person had never come out, had never put a name to the felt sense of difference and the confusing and peculiar sense of identity, and bounced in introducing themself and asking questions: "It's like this for me, is it like that for some of you other people in here too?" This person used some terms like "heterosexual" and "lesbian" and referenced their own physical configuration to explain what they meant, and quickly a barrage of posts from the group's existing membership came in to correct them. "If you're saying a person who doesn't have that configuration isn't heterosexual you're using binary thinking and that's offensive in here and maybe you don't belong here". The new person asked questions and made additional explanations, more or less like the two conversations I recounted above, but the response continued to be "You are saying bad things, things that are wrong. You're using categories in a bad way and you need to learn better or leave". So the new person left.
Our spaces aren't the safe spaces we pretend that they are. Too often we have enshrined a set of definitions and terms and become very rigid, very binary, in how we react to other people's language and how they express themselves. Too often we aren't listening, we're just litmus-testing people to see if anything they're saying is reminiscent of a politically incorrect belief or attitude that we've already decided is unwelcome here.
I don't think that's at all a good thing. I think we need to prioritize communication, and a good way to do so is to say "There are some ways in which what you just said is problematic for people in here, but that doesn't mean there aren't ways in which it makes an important point. Let's discuss both".
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Sunday, September 2, 2018
Sunday, August 26, 2018
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,
Before long, another author answered that with
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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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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Sunday, August 19, 2018
Sexually Predatory Males, Gender Inversion, and the #MeToo Movement
The #MeToo movement has revealed a cognitive disconnect in our society between people who think sexually predatory behavior is inherently and inexcusably wrong and people who think it is only wrong when it crosses certain thresholds or boundaries.
In the latter camp are people who say that if we aren't careful, we're going to make it illegal and reprehensible and socially unacceptable to be a sexual male.
Why male? Because saying predatory male sexual aggression is mostly about as necessary and useful as specifying female menstrual supplies when discussing tampons. Because sexually aggressive predatory behavior is generally assumed to be as naturally a part of maleness and male sexuality as having periods is inherently a part of being female.
Feminist theorists have pretty much always said that this isn't so. That the connection of males to this behavior is a part of institutionalized heterosexuality, that it's not biologically built-in that way. This simultaneously means that it can't be excused on the grounds that it is inevitable and inherent in males and also that it is sexist to project this behavior onto males as if it were automatically a component of their character.
But if it isn't biologically built-in, if it is indeed a social construct, what happens when someone who thinks of himself as one of the girls ends up being attracted to them as well?
Me. On the most fundamental level, I'm what happens. It's the core of my story. Certainly there are other aspects of the tale, other areas of tension between the gendered expectations that people assumed about me and who I actually was--from interest in an ongoing connected relationship as differentiated from interest only in casual sex opportunities on down to things like how I move and sit, and so on. But if there's a central axis around which the greatest tension lies, it's around the behaviors that get called things like "sexual initiative", "sexually aggressive behavior", "putting the moves on", "making your play", "seducing" and, yes, "being sexually predatory".
Basically I'm not. It's not behavior that comes to me automatically, and since it is perceived as selfish and pushy and exploitative of women (and certainly not feminine), well, as someone who always thought of himself as one of the girls, I wasn't at all happy to be perceived this way and recoiled away from it. So that's what happens.
But that's not the only thing that happens. People like me get seen as examples of what happens when a male is not taking the initiative to put the moves on sexually attractive female people. And what doesn't happen is any kind of simple fluid coming together and connection, any discernable heterosexual success rate that makes our behavior look like a good strategy. People see that, observe that, and incorporate that into how they understand the world, that's what happens.
And there is social hostility and marginalization of feminine males, girlish males, as we all know, but more specifically to the point there is condescension and a disparaging attitude towards the prospect of us as heterosexual participants. We are pitied. The female people who might become involved with us, however briefly, are also pitied. Our sexuality is perceived as pathetic.
#MeToo voices seldom speak at any great length about males whose sexual behavior is not invasive and geared towards making sex happen, initiating sex. Their focus is on the problematic ones who do. When a different set of voices are expressing uncomplimentary opinions about nonvirile effeminate men who are unsexy for failure to grab and take, they seldom go on to discuss sexual assault and sexual harassment and rape and such things. It's almost as if no one can see both sides of the coin at the same time, or remember what's on the side opposite of what they're currently facing.
Not all male people who consider themselves atypical of the male gender or consider themselves femme or otherwise not part of the masculine construct, are opposed to taking sexual initiative. Some are quite emphatic about saying that being feminine does not mean they are sexually passive or strictly reactive to someone else's overtures. Indeed, I suppose the grab-bag of supposedly feminine traits contains enough material for someone to claim several aspects without selecting that specific one. I have to admit that I'd be interested in sitting down with other femmy males who are sexually aggressive and trying to get a better understanding of how and why this is compatible with thinking of themselves as feminine, how they handle the perception of this, how it all fits together for them. But yeah, I haven't been nominated to speak for all the sissy femme guys, and I don't. But for some of us it is not only a part of the picture but rather central to it, the behavior and the nuances of feeling and attitude towards sexuality and towards other people, the economics of sexual supply and demand and questions of self-worth and dignity, the role of tenderness and responsiveness in sexuality and the concomitant avoidance of the belligerent and the offensive crude.
Recently I have had the opportunity to pitch my book to feminist publishers who wanted a shorter and more concise query letter than what I usually use, and in the process of honing a new tighter letter that gets to the point quickly, I found myself pitching my book as a what-if: what happens when someone who thought of himself during childhood as one of the girls grows up and ends up being attracted to them as well?
———————
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In the latter camp are people who say that if we aren't careful, we're going to make it illegal and reprehensible and socially unacceptable to be a sexual male.
Why male? Because saying predatory male sexual aggression is mostly about as necessary and useful as specifying female menstrual supplies when discussing tampons. Because sexually aggressive predatory behavior is generally assumed to be as naturally a part of maleness and male sexuality as having periods is inherently a part of being female.
Feminist theorists have pretty much always said that this isn't so. That the connection of males to this behavior is a part of institutionalized heterosexuality, that it's not biologically built-in that way. This simultaneously means that it can't be excused on the grounds that it is inevitable and inherent in males and also that it is sexist to project this behavior onto males as if it were automatically a component of their character.
But if it isn't biologically built-in, if it is indeed a social construct, what happens when someone who thinks of himself as one of the girls ends up being attracted to them as well?
Me. On the most fundamental level, I'm what happens. It's the core of my story. Certainly there are other aspects of the tale, other areas of tension between the gendered expectations that people assumed about me and who I actually was--from interest in an ongoing connected relationship as differentiated from interest only in casual sex opportunities on down to things like how I move and sit, and so on. But if there's a central axis around which the greatest tension lies, it's around the behaviors that get called things like "sexual initiative", "sexually aggressive behavior", "putting the moves on", "making your play", "seducing" and, yes, "being sexually predatory".
Basically I'm not. It's not behavior that comes to me automatically, and since it is perceived as selfish and pushy and exploitative of women (and certainly not feminine), well, as someone who always thought of himself as one of the girls, I wasn't at all happy to be perceived this way and recoiled away from it. So that's what happens.
But that's not the only thing that happens. People like me get seen as examples of what happens when a male is not taking the initiative to put the moves on sexually attractive female people. And what doesn't happen is any kind of simple fluid coming together and connection, any discernable heterosexual success rate that makes our behavior look like a good strategy. People see that, observe that, and incorporate that into how they understand the world, that's what happens.
And there is social hostility and marginalization of feminine males, girlish males, as we all know, but more specifically to the point there is condescension and a disparaging attitude towards the prospect of us as heterosexual participants. We are pitied. The female people who might become involved with us, however briefly, are also pitied. Our sexuality is perceived as pathetic.
#MeToo voices seldom speak at any great length about males whose sexual behavior is not invasive and geared towards making sex happen, initiating sex. Their focus is on the problematic ones who do. When a different set of voices are expressing uncomplimentary opinions about nonvirile effeminate men who are unsexy for failure to grab and take, they seldom go on to discuss sexual assault and sexual harassment and rape and such things. It's almost as if no one can see both sides of the coin at the same time, or remember what's on the side opposite of what they're currently facing.
Not all male people who consider themselves atypical of the male gender or consider themselves femme or otherwise not part of the masculine construct, are opposed to taking sexual initiative. Some are quite emphatic about saying that being feminine does not mean they are sexually passive or strictly reactive to someone else's overtures. Indeed, I suppose the grab-bag of supposedly feminine traits contains enough material for someone to claim several aspects without selecting that specific one. I have to admit that I'd be interested in sitting down with other femmy males who are sexually aggressive and trying to get a better understanding of how and why this is compatible with thinking of themselves as feminine, how they handle the perception of this, how it all fits together for them. But yeah, I haven't been nominated to speak for all the sissy femme guys, and I don't. But for some of us it is not only a part of the picture but rather central to it, the behavior and the nuances of feeling and attitude towards sexuality and towards other people, the economics of sexual supply and demand and questions of self-worth and dignity, the role of tenderness and responsiveness in sexuality and the concomitant avoidance of the belligerent and the offensive crude.
Recently I have had the opportunity to pitch my book to feminist publishers who wanted a shorter and more concise query letter than what I usually use, and in the process of honing a new tighter letter that gets to the point quickly, I found myself pitching my book as a what-if: what happens when someone who thought of himself during childhood as one of the girls grows up and ends up being attracted to them as well?
———————
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Index of all Blog Posts
Sunday, August 12, 2018
A Lit Agent Considers My Book — LIVE!
The literary agency Redhammer is one I ran across awhile back; until recently, their page on submissions said they didn't accept unsolicited queries and then went on to say that if you're looking for a lit agency that does ... and then they supplied a rather long list of UK literary agencies.
It was a useful resource for me: the agencies that Redhammer listed on this page were agencies that I had not come across in AgentQuery or QueryTracker or the other sources I've relied on, for the most part.
Anyway, just recently the Redhammer folks changed tack and started accepting what they call "pop-up submissions": stating that most lit agents don't read much more than this much before making a decision anyhow, they ask for just 500 character's worth of query letter and the first 600 (now upped to 700) words as writing sample.
But they make their decisions live so you can listen to their evaluation and decision process.
So I opted to participate.
The whole August 5 program
Where they start reviewing my query and 1st 600 words
In general they said nice things about my writing — that it flowed easily with a natural looseness rarely found in unsolicited submissions; a couple of the participants complained that the main character wasn't as frightened (in particular) or otherwise reacting emotionally to what was happening as people began beating him up; and Pete, the primary honcho at Redhammer, said the main reason he could not represent my book is that it's not a type of book he has any experience representing and wouldn't know where to begin in trying to get a publisher for it.
I like the reassuring feedback about my writing, that's very nice to hear.
Derek's (i.e., my) reaction in the fight is a bit more complicated. The near absence of affect is realistic and intentional; years of unexpected out-of-nowhere hostility and violence is numbing, and early in the book I have Derek trying to turn to authorities for help and basically being told to just be a good sport and weather it. This is one of the tales within a tale in this book, that victims of this kind of alienating treatment learn to shut down. Obviously I can't explain that in the three pages' worth of intro, let alone in the 600 word sample that Redhammer permitted me, but I'm choosing to regard it as a feature, not a bug — that readers will see it (as one of the Redhammer reviewers suggested) as an aspect of the character, or will notice it and be curious about who this person is who experiences being beaten up in such a matter-of-fact manner. In the book as a whole, I don't explicitly say that Derek is shutting down emotionally or becoming stoic about other people being hostile, but in the best tradition of "show don't tell" I hope the sequence of events paints that for the observant reader.
And the notion that one main barrier to obtaining lit agents to represent my book is that this isn't the kind of book they're equipped to market to publishers is what I've been suspecting for quite some time now. I will continue to query lit agents but my main hopes lie with my queries to small publishers.
Incidentally, a couple people have suggested that I make YouTube videos of myself reading my blog posts. I'm seriously considering it. I could go back and do all the serious ones about gender and being a gender invert, and maybe some about writing and trying to market the book. I dont know if I'd get any more traffic on YouTube than I get here, but possibly I would.
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It was a useful resource for me: the agencies that Redhammer listed on this page were agencies that I had not come across in AgentQuery or QueryTracker or the other sources I've relied on, for the most part.
Anyway, just recently the Redhammer folks changed tack and started accepting what they call "pop-up submissions": stating that most lit agents don't read much more than this much before making a decision anyhow, they ask for just 500 character's worth of query letter and the first 600 (now upped to 700) words as writing sample.
But they make their decisions live so you can listen to their evaluation and decision process.
So I opted to participate.
The whole August 5 program
Where they start reviewing my query and 1st 600 words
In general they said nice things about my writing — that it flowed easily with a natural looseness rarely found in unsolicited submissions; a couple of the participants complained that the main character wasn't as frightened (in particular) or otherwise reacting emotionally to what was happening as people began beating him up; and Pete, the primary honcho at Redhammer, said the main reason he could not represent my book is that it's not a type of book he has any experience representing and wouldn't know where to begin in trying to get a publisher for it.
I like the reassuring feedback about my writing, that's very nice to hear.
Derek's (i.e., my) reaction in the fight is a bit more complicated. The near absence of affect is realistic and intentional; years of unexpected out-of-nowhere hostility and violence is numbing, and early in the book I have Derek trying to turn to authorities for help and basically being told to just be a good sport and weather it. This is one of the tales within a tale in this book, that victims of this kind of alienating treatment learn to shut down. Obviously I can't explain that in the three pages' worth of intro, let alone in the 600 word sample that Redhammer permitted me, but I'm choosing to regard it as a feature, not a bug — that readers will see it (as one of the Redhammer reviewers suggested) as an aspect of the character, or will notice it and be curious about who this person is who experiences being beaten up in such a matter-of-fact manner. In the book as a whole, I don't explicitly say that Derek is shutting down emotionally or becoming stoic about other people being hostile, but in the best tradition of "show don't tell" I hope the sequence of events paints that for the observant reader.
And the notion that one main barrier to obtaining lit agents to represent my book is that this isn't the kind of book they're equipped to market to publishers is what I've been suspecting for quite some time now. I will continue to query lit agents but my main hopes lie with my queries to small publishers.
Incidentally, a couple people have suggested that I make YouTube videos of myself reading my blog posts. I'm seriously considering it. I could go back and do all the serious ones about gender and being a gender invert, and maybe some about writing and trying to market the book. I dont know if I'd get any more traffic on YouTube than I get here, but possibly I would.
———————
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Sunday, August 5, 2018
More Plastic Surgery on the Book
I'd intended that splicing in a better set of scenes to describe when Derek meets the girl of his dreams in high school (recounted here) was the only real editing I was going to do. But apparently doing that kicked me into a critical editing mode. That's kind of rare for me once a written work has taken form and the first few rounds of edits have ceased: after a certain point I've gotten it the way I want it and I also cease to really see it because I already know what I've said and how I said it and that I like it.
So to find myself having a sudden unexpected rebirth of "fresh eyes" was a gift of fortune. And I took advantage of it.
Narrative Ambiguities
It's an autobiographical tale; I wrote down what happened to me and then carved out a good narrative entertaining story from that source material. But because it had its origins in my recollections, the story was originally chock-full of generalities (I often tended to do this; such-and-such periodically happened to me), most of which I later replaced with actual "scenes" (it was Monday; he said this, I did that, the bell sounded like this, the smoke smelled like that); but one form of that generalizing kind of writing persisted, in the form of short little ambiguities within my sentences:
Twigs, and Pruning
At this point, most of the scenes and scenelets in the story do something that connects with the story as a whole, and aren't just isolated events. Either they prefigure some later situations or events or they propel some aspect of the storyline forward, telling part of the tale I set out to tell. But I still found several paragraphs or descriptions that didn't do that and hence were not necessary. Stephen King famously advised authors to "kill your darlings"; I've never fully understood the advice since very few if any of the scenes and paragraphs in my story that are precious to me ("darling") are irrelevant to the story line, and the ones that were got killed off pretty early in the editing process. But these twigs, these pieces that don't presage or propel the plot or its subplots but just branch off briefly and then don't go anywhere, they weren't adding anything useful. And with my reborn case of fresh eyes, I pruned them.
Many of the paragraphs that do connect don't do so in a way that's obvious on first read. There's a scene in 9th grade where Derek stands up to a pair of boys harassing him on the school activity bus and they back down; it's not irrelevant to begin with, but it has the additional utilitarian value that Derek recalls that event when deciding to deal with a pair of guys harassing him at the Vo-Tech auto mechanics school when he's 20. And there's the account of him writing a poem in 9th grade English class in iambic pentameter and tetrameter which might not seem very necessary although it adds to the portrayal of his attitudes and interests at the time, but then at 21 in college he's in a poetry class and writing much more personal and heartfelt stuff, expressing emotional content and not just rattling off words in an established rhythm and rhyming pattern.
But other little pieces were just twigs.
The manuscript is down roughly 1500 words, bringing it from just short of 97,500 to just barely over 96,000 words. It's cleaner, tighter, and less rambly.
Oh, and I changed the working title once again. I really like The Story of Q but unfortunately so do a lot of other authors. I'm amenable to changing it back (or considering an entirely different title) based on the advice of my eventual publisher, but for now I'm fielding it as GENDERQUEER: A STORY FROM A DIFFERENT CLOSET.
———————
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So to find myself having a sudden unexpected rebirth of "fresh eyes" was a gift of fortune. And I took advantage of it.
Narrative Ambiguities
It's an autobiographical tale; I wrote down what happened to me and then carved out a good narrative entertaining story from that source material. But because it had its origins in my recollections, the story was originally chock-full of generalities (I often tended to do this; such-and-such periodically happened to me), most of which I later replaced with actual "scenes" (it was Monday; he said this, I did that, the bell sounded like this, the smoke smelled like that); but one form of that generalizing kind of writing persisted, in the form of short little ambiguities within my sentences:
She brought me back a Sprite or a 7-Up and one of those lunch sandwiches...
... I went out to fetch my sister for supper and she was giggling with Chuck or whispering to Tina...
... then he said "Whoa", or "Ho" or something like that, and the other guy relaxed...
Twigs, and Pruning
At this point, most of the scenes and scenelets in the story do something that connects with the story as a whole, and aren't just isolated events. Either they prefigure some later situations or events or they propel some aspect of the storyline forward, telling part of the tale I set out to tell. But I still found several paragraphs or descriptions that didn't do that and hence were not necessary. Stephen King famously advised authors to "kill your darlings"; I've never fully understood the advice since very few if any of the scenes and paragraphs in my story that are precious to me ("darling") are irrelevant to the story line, and the ones that were got killed off pretty early in the editing process. But these twigs, these pieces that don't presage or propel the plot or its subplots but just branch off briefly and then don't go anywhere, they weren't adding anything useful. And with my reborn case of fresh eyes, I pruned them.
Many of the paragraphs that do connect don't do so in a way that's obvious on first read. There's a scene in 9th grade where Derek stands up to a pair of boys harassing him on the school activity bus and they back down; it's not irrelevant to begin with, but it has the additional utilitarian value that Derek recalls that event when deciding to deal with a pair of guys harassing him at the Vo-Tech auto mechanics school when he's 20. And there's the account of him writing a poem in 9th grade English class in iambic pentameter and tetrameter which might not seem very necessary although it adds to the portrayal of his attitudes and interests at the time, but then at 21 in college he's in a poetry class and writing much more personal and heartfelt stuff, expressing emotional content and not just rattling off words in an established rhythm and rhyming pattern.
But other little pieces were just twigs.
The manuscript is down roughly 1500 words, bringing it from just short of 97,500 to just barely over 96,000 words. It's cleaner, tighter, and less rambly.
Oh, and I changed the working title once again. I really like The Story of Q but unfortunately so do a lot of other authors. I'm amenable to changing it back (or considering an entirely different title) based on the advice of my eventual publisher, but for now I'm fielding it as GENDERQUEER: A STORY FROM A DIFFERENT CLOSET.
———————
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Monday, July 30, 2018
Demisexual
A demisexual is a person who does not experience sexual attraction
unless they form a emotional connection. It's more commonly seen in,
but by no means confined, to romantic relationships. The term
demisexual comes from the orientation being "halfway between" sexual
and asexual.
I first encountered the term "demisexual" in online forums for genderqueer and other gender-variant people. It was as new to me as my own identifying term ("gender invert") is to most people in the LGBTQ scene. I'd heard of demigirl and demiboy (terms used by some genderqueer folks) but demisexual was one I hadn't encountered before.
DEMI means "half" or "halfway" -- so a demigirl would be someone halfway between gender-neutral and feminine, for example. When applied to sexual, though, it was less obvious to me what it would mean to be half-sexual, in addition to which the people who identified as such didn't appear to be using it to mean they were less sexual than most other people; instead they seemed to be using it to mean their sexual interests were confined to relationships in which they had a meaningful emotional connection.
It struck me as a pattern strongly associated with feminine sexuality. We have the cultural notion that women and girls want to have a relationship with a boyfriend, and within that context, to have good sex. That the sexuality of boys and men, by comparison, is considerably less constrained to situations where there's that kind of intimate connection. Female exceptions may exist, but where they do, their femininity is cast into some degree of dubiety by the fact that they are willing to jump into no-strings casual sex with the same non-demi enthusiasm as a typical male. Such women are often assumed to lack appropriate amounts of self-esteem (a suspicion less often aimed at promiscuous male people) and they are tagged with epithets and descriptors like "slut" and "wanton" and "easy" and a host of other nouns and adjectives that all underline their lack of normalcy, their deviance, the fundamental wrongness of them being that way.
It's reasonable to say that being demisexual is prescriptive for women, whether it is accurately descriptive or not. Girls and women are under a great deal of social pressure to take on the trappings of being demisexual, to give it lip service and keep up the superficial appearance of being that way.
It's also reasonable to point out that we have plenty of cultural images of women's sexuality as reactive to sexual attention, in such a way that a popular depiction of the very un-demi male sexuality takes the form of the seducer, the sexual pursuer who elicits female sexual participation not by connecting to women with an emotional bond but by circumventing her obligatory pretense of being demisexual and appealing to her rather non-demi susceptibility to sexual opportunities.
It certainly seems useful to split off the specific notion of being demisexual from the culturally conventional notion of femininity, because there are other characteristics that are also deemed to be part of femininity (and of feminine sexuality), such that a person could participate in being feminine without being demisexual. It gives us specificity; it lets us zero in on one aspect of a person's nature instead of referencing a huge library of loosely-associated characteristics.
I'm not sure I quite qualify as demisexual, myself. I've never craved sexual activity that was deliberately lacking in emotional connection, that's for sure, and I've always wanted to have a close intimate caring relationship. But that's not quite the same as saying I'm utterly without any sexual attraction to a stranger, a casual acquaintance, someone I don't have an emotional connection to. I can have such attractions, and I do. Acting on them is messy and complicated and more trouble than it's worth, and I hate that perpetual accusation that insofar as I'm a male I only care about sex and not for loving relationships. But once again, that's not the same thing as saying I'm incapable of finding someone quite enticingly appetizing, entirely delicious on visual and other superficial grounds. My disinclination to actually engage in casual sex isn't due to a lack of appetite outside of emotionally connected relationships.
That makes me wonder how many self-identified demisexual folks would say much the same thing: whether they'd say they completely do not feel any attraction outside of relationships, or would instead say that satisfying sexual experiences seem to be tied to caring connections and therefore they are uninclined to act on attractions outside of them.
And, because it's kind of one of those fabled living-room elephants, how being demisexual as a female-bodied person differs from being demisexual as a person who presents as male. Because the cultural context is going to paint them quite differently.
And as a gender invert, I'm especially curious about how demisexual male people who are attracted to female folks experience their sexual lives, their sexual orientation, and their gender identity. Because I found that being even as demisexual as I am to be entirely polarizing and gender-invalidating, and a big part of how I came to identify as a gender invert.
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Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Physical Morphology, Assigned Sex, and the Binary
The transgender community isn't quite monolithic but in general, within trans groups there's not much welcome for a lot of focus (prurient or otherwise) on a person's physical sex. Sexual morphology. Plumbing. Whatever you want to call it.
Within recent months I've been in conversations where trans (and occasionally nonbinary) folks have said:
• Sex is a social construct. The notion that it exists as something separate from gender identity is mostly bullshit. If your identity is that you are a woman, then your body is female.
• The only relevant way to designate the difference between a transgender person and a cisgender person is that in the case of a transgender person a misidentification was made, assigning them to the wrong sex instead of getting it right, back when they were born: assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth.
• Anyone who would consider another person's genital configuration a dealbreaker in dating or sex is prejudiced and all wrapped up in transphobic thinking; there's no defensible legitimate reason to make an issue of that, or to want to know their date's erogenous-zone plumbing in advance, or to express a preference.
I'm not on board with all that and sometimes I feel erased by it. This LGBTQ rainbow is supposed to accommodate variation and diversity, and some of this "party line" on physical morphology isn't accommodating me worth a shit, and I'm theoretically part of this rainbow, dammit. Can we talk?
OK, you want to talk about social constructs, let's examine the social construct of clothing, and the ubiquitous use of it. No, I don't mean dresses versus arrow shirts and suit jackets, I mean clothes period, as opposed to not wearing them. Ever been to a naturist enclave? Yeah, that's the environment formerly known as a "nudist camp". Imagine one. Lots of people, no clothings.
Let's watch some other things getting socially constructed in this environment. Starting with me, upon my arrival. And you, upon yours, if you're willing.
"Assigned male at birth" and "assigned female at birth" make it sound like all the assigning is done by an OB/GYN doctor who makes a pronouncement between clamping off the umbilical cord and recording the Apgar score, and then wraps the identifying merchandise in a diaper and from then on no one does any assigning, they just rely on the original that the doctor made in the delivery-room pronouncement.
But that's not how it works, and it's certainly not what's happening now as we step forth into the naturist preserve. One thousand sighted naturists take a glance and make an assessment. Just like folks out there in the clothed world, they assign most of the people they encounter to the category "male" or to the category "female". This isn't gender identity. This is assigned sex. They haven't asked you about your pronouns yet. They dont' know if you conceptualize yourself as a man, a woman, or something else. They're assigning you in their heads based on what they can see. Unlike the folks in the clothed world, they're relying directly on your physical morphology. Basics.
Yes it's social. Yes, they're relying on categories they learned from the society surrounding them. But their assessment relies on a generalization, and at the level of generalization a two-value categorical system works for the overwhelming majority of folks who walk in this door. Let's take a step back. How'd they get this categorical system they're using? They just soaked it up from our culture, right? Well, let's pretend they didn't, and start them off from scratch, no preconceived notions about the existence of sexes. What's going to happen?
Generalization's going to happen. It's how our minds work; we're good at it. We categorize stuff. Generalization isn't politically evil -- despicable shitty attitudes towards the exceptions to the rule are entirely optional and not an inherent part of generalizing.
I don't think it's inevitable that they'll develop a two-category system. For example, they might create a four-category system, based on the physical differences between prepubescent people and adults as well as the penis versus vagina thing, for instance. But I think a two-category system is probably more likely than anything else. After awhile the naturists are going to notice some of the exceptions, the people whose morphological configuration doesn't categorize simply and easily into either of those two groups -- and in the absense of clothing to hide it and make it stay hidden, there would come the recognition of intersex people. (Not that all intersex people are visually identifiable even in a naturist setting, but some would be).
And into this environment strolls a transgender person. A visual assessment is made and along with it an assignment. Regardless of outcome, our naturist population is not "getting it wrong" when they do this: we're talking about assigned sex, not gender identity. That which is attributed to us by others is a part of our experience, and each attributor is not merely imposing a value, they're recognizing the value most likely imposed by a huge host of other people and realizing you've been perceived as such.
A binary transgender person who pursues the stereotypical path of transitioning is a person who seeks morphological reassignment in order to obtain categorical reassignment. Such a person changes their body, which changes its visual aspects and causes the naturists to categorize them differently.
In the clothed world, there are more options for how to present in such a way as to be categorically assigned differently, but the underlying premise is the same.
So what's all this about? What's the color and shape of the axe I brought to this grinding wheel?
I'm a gender invert. Male girl person. My gender identity is entirely feminine. I wasn't a boy. I'm not a man. You can understand a lot about me simply by assuming I'm a woman and treating me accordingly. In general I would say to the world: I wish you would. But the world has not done so because the world harbors notions about what my male body means, and projects those notions onto me. They're wrong, but the fact that they've done so all my life has given me a different set of experiences. A lot of those experiences have been vividly unpleasant, which is why I would opt to talk about them, to make an issue of them, a social issue, a political issue. But I can't do that if I can only identify myself as a woman. They aren't the experiences of a woman, generally speaking. They're the specific experiences of a male woman, a person who perpetually gets assigned by others as male, because of my physical morphology. Meanwhile, they also aren't the experiences of a male, generally speaking, either. They're the specific experiences of a male woman, a femme, a sissyboy, a girlyboy, someone markedly different from the other males.
I can't talk about my stuff if I'm in a social environment where I'm not supposed to refer to my body parts, my physical morphology (and the resulting assigned sex that people foist onto me) as relevant parts of my identity and experience. I am silenced if transgender people insist that "male" is identity, not morphology, that "penis" is what you choose to designate whatever morphological part you wish to identify as such with no morphological definition to constrain it, that no one has any business rummaging around between the legs of people rhetorically and categorically because none of that is anyone's damn business. It silences me and erases me and prevents me from speaking from my own experience as a genderqueer person, an LGBTQ person with my own concerns and considerations.
I don't think intersex people find it welcoming to be told that a person's morphology isn't politically or socially relevant, either, and many of them have told me so and given me support on this, and I appreciate that. They, too, get silenced and subsumed in dialogs about gender and physical sex and operations and choice and so on. But they're probably sick and tired of people who aren't them who point to them to make a rhetorical point, as if they were an interesting concept instead of real people and so on, so I shouldn't dwell further on that aside from recommending that you listen to them too.
———————
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Within recent months I've been in conversations where trans (and occasionally nonbinary) folks have said:
• Sex is a social construct. The notion that it exists as something separate from gender identity is mostly bullshit. If your identity is that you are a woman, then your body is female.
• The only relevant way to designate the difference between a transgender person and a cisgender person is that in the case of a transgender person a misidentification was made, assigning them to the wrong sex instead of getting it right, back when they were born: assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth.
• Anyone who would consider another person's genital configuration a dealbreaker in dating or sex is prejudiced and all wrapped up in transphobic thinking; there's no defensible legitimate reason to make an issue of that, or to want to know their date's erogenous-zone plumbing in advance, or to express a preference.
I'm not on board with all that and sometimes I feel erased by it. This LGBTQ rainbow is supposed to accommodate variation and diversity, and some of this "party line" on physical morphology isn't accommodating me worth a shit, and I'm theoretically part of this rainbow, dammit. Can we talk?
OK, you want to talk about social constructs, let's examine the social construct of clothing, and the ubiquitous use of it. No, I don't mean dresses versus arrow shirts and suit jackets, I mean clothes period, as opposed to not wearing them. Ever been to a naturist enclave? Yeah, that's the environment formerly known as a "nudist camp". Imagine one. Lots of people, no clothings.
Let's watch some other things getting socially constructed in this environment. Starting with me, upon my arrival. And you, upon yours, if you're willing.
"Assigned male at birth" and "assigned female at birth" make it sound like all the assigning is done by an OB/GYN doctor who makes a pronouncement between clamping off the umbilical cord and recording the Apgar score, and then wraps the identifying merchandise in a diaper and from then on no one does any assigning, they just rely on the original that the doctor made in the delivery-room pronouncement.
But that's not how it works, and it's certainly not what's happening now as we step forth into the naturist preserve. One thousand sighted naturists take a glance and make an assessment. Just like folks out there in the clothed world, they assign most of the people they encounter to the category "male" or to the category "female". This isn't gender identity. This is assigned sex. They haven't asked you about your pronouns yet. They dont' know if you conceptualize yourself as a man, a woman, or something else. They're assigning you in their heads based on what they can see. Unlike the folks in the clothed world, they're relying directly on your physical morphology. Basics.
Yes it's social. Yes, they're relying on categories they learned from the society surrounding them. But their assessment relies on a generalization, and at the level of generalization a two-value categorical system works for the overwhelming majority of folks who walk in this door. Let's take a step back. How'd they get this categorical system they're using? They just soaked it up from our culture, right? Well, let's pretend they didn't, and start them off from scratch, no preconceived notions about the existence of sexes. What's going to happen?
Generalization's going to happen. It's how our minds work; we're good at it. We categorize stuff. Generalization isn't politically evil -- despicable shitty attitudes towards the exceptions to the rule are entirely optional and not an inherent part of generalizing.
I don't think it's inevitable that they'll develop a two-category system. For example, they might create a four-category system, based on the physical differences between prepubescent people and adults as well as the penis versus vagina thing, for instance. But I think a two-category system is probably more likely than anything else. After awhile the naturists are going to notice some of the exceptions, the people whose morphological configuration doesn't categorize simply and easily into either of those two groups -- and in the absense of clothing to hide it and make it stay hidden, there would come the recognition of intersex people. (Not that all intersex people are visually identifiable even in a naturist setting, but some would be).
And into this environment strolls a transgender person. A visual assessment is made and along with it an assignment. Regardless of outcome, our naturist population is not "getting it wrong" when they do this: we're talking about assigned sex, not gender identity. That which is attributed to us by others is a part of our experience, and each attributor is not merely imposing a value, they're recognizing the value most likely imposed by a huge host of other people and realizing you've been perceived as such.
A binary transgender person who pursues the stereotypical path of transitioning is a person who seeks morphological reassignment in order to obtain categorical reassignment. Such a person changes their body, which changes its visual aspects and causes the naturists to categorize them differently.
In the clothed world, there are more options for how to present in such a way as to be categorically assigned differently, but the underlying premise is the same.
So what's all this about? What's the color and shape of the axe I brought to this grinding wheel?
I'm a gender invert. Male girl person. My gender identity is entirely feminine. I wasn't a boy. I'm not a man. You can understand a lot about me simply by assuming I'm a woman and treating me accordingly. In general I would say to the world: I wish you would. But the world has not done so because the world harbors notions about what my male body means, and projects those notions onto me. They're wrong, but the fact that they've done so all my life has given me a different set of experiences. A lot of those experiences have been vividly unpleasant, which is why I would opt to talk about them, to make an issue of them, a social issue, a political issue. But I can't do that if I can only identify myself as a woman. They aren't the experiences of a woman, generally speaking. They're the specific experiences of a male woman, a person who perpetually gets assigned by others as male, because of my physical morphology. Meanwhile, they also aren't the experiences of a male, generally speaking, either. They're the specific experiences of a male woman, a femme, a sissyboy, a girlyboy, someone markedly different from the other males.
I can't talk about my stuff if I'm in a social environment where I'm not supposed to refer to my body parts, my physical morphology (and the resulting assigned sex that people foist onto me) as relevant parts of my identity and experience. I am silenced if transgender people insist that "male" is identity, not morphology, that "penis" is what you choose to designate whatever morphological part you wish to identify as such with no morphological definition to constrain it, that no one has any business rummaging around between the legs of people rhetorically and categorically because none of that is anyone's damn business. It silences me and erases me and prevents me from speaking from my own experience as a genderqueer person, an LGBTQ person with my own concerns and considerations.
I don't think intersex people find it welcoming to be told that a person's morphology isn't politically or socially relevant, either, and many of them have told me so and given me support on this, and I appreciate that. They, too, get silenced and subsumed in dialogs about gender and physical sex and operations and choice and so on. But they're probably sick and tired of people who aren't them who point to them to make a rhetorical point, as if they were an interesting concept instead of real people and so on, so I shouldn't dwell further on that aside from recommending that you listen to them too.
———————
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Wednesday, June 27, 2018
re: My Manuscript is in the Shop Again
I rewrote the section of my book where I (aka my "main character") meets the girl from the Massachusetts family that's vacationing out west, and falls in love. He takes her to a deserted overlook at the edge of a cliff and for a moment she thinks she may have put herself in a dangerous situation; the communications misfire leaves them shaken but that in turn gets them talking openly and honestly while they sit side by side pitching stones off the cliff.
As originally written, it was a description of the event, not a fully fleshed out scene with full dialogue and internal monologues and whatnot, and I needed it to pop a lot more, to be as emotionally moving to the readers as the event itself was to the characters.
I read the results to my authors' group, the Amateur Writers of Long Island, to favorable reception:
Now, it is a very warm and supportive group. We don't tend to tear each other down in our critiques. Even so, the feedback I'm getting from the group reinforces my sense that yes, dammit, I can write.
I actually do have a good book. One that is vivid and emotionally moving. I'm so weary of the process of trying to get it published, but it will be worth it in the long run.
Just hit a milestone, by the way:
The Story of Q — total queries to Lit Agents = 1200
Rejections: 1178
Outstanding: 22
As NonFiction—total queries = 970
Rejections: 951
Outstanding: 19
As Fiction—total queries=230
Rejections:227
Outstanding:3
The Story of Q — total queries to Publishers=41
Rejections:26
Outstanding:7
No Reply 3+ Months: 6
Pub Contract Signed, Publisher Went Out of Business:1
Pub Contract Signed, Rights Reverted (creative diffs):1
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As originally written, it was a description of the event, not a fully fleshed out scene with full dialogue and internal monologues and whatnot, and I needed it to pop a lot more, to be as emotionally moving to the readers as the event itself was to the characters.
I read the results to my authors' group, the Amateur Writers of Long Island, to favorable reception:
"Good balance of action and contemplation"
"Beautifully written. You have a wonderful flow to your writing — it seems to come so effortlessly. "
"Very honest and real."
"So glad to hear you express the boy's point of view on sexual domination."
"This is a great description of a best-on-earth sitch to be in. Well done."
" & Wow! A reversal of emotional fortunes. Cool!"
"I like their comfort with each other."
"Excellent. The pebbles were a great touch. You convey the mood, and the nature of the interaction, the internal emotions at work, all in such a gentle but real, relatable fashion. The development is so well paced. Fantastic analysis. Well told, particularly as it can be delicate subject matter. Very honest as well."
"Very revealing story, different fresh, mind altering -- thanks"
"Very genuine! Realistic, subtle."
"Great dialog, super flow. Love how you write! SO sweet!"
Now, it is a very warm and supportive group. We don't tend to tear each other down in our critiques. Even so, the feedback I'm getting from the group reinforces my sense that yes, dammit, I can write.
I actually do have a good book. One that is vivid and emotionally moving. I'm so weary of the process of trying to get it published, but it will be worth it in the long run.
Just hit a milestone, by the way:
The Story of Q — total queries to Lit Agents = 1200
Rejections: 1178
Outstanding: 22
As NonFiction—total queries = 970
Rejections: 951
Outstanding: 19
As Fiction—total queries=230
Rejections:227
Outstanding:3
The Story of Q — total queries to Publishers=41
Rejections:26
Outstanding:7
No Reply 3+ Months: 6
Pub Contract Signed, Publisher Went Out of Business:1
Pub Contract Signed, Rights Reverted (creative diffs):1
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Monday, June 18, 2018
Defining Gender Inversion
A gender invert is someone whose gender is the opposite of the gender associated with their physical sex. Male girls. Female boys. I'm a male girl and I identify as a gender invert. Hi!
The other component of being a gender invert is accepting both one's physical sex and one's unexpected gender as natural and correct.
(I just realized the other day that although I've been blogging about this stuff since 2014, I've never done a blog post specifically about the term!)
Origin
Havelock Ellis popularized the term "gender invert" back in the late 1800s. At the time, he was promoting the notion that homosexual people of either sex were essentially people who possessed a bunch of characteristics of the opposite sex. That notion got challenged and discarded. Most researchers now agree that being a feminine male, or a masculine female, is not what causes a person to be a gay male or a lesbian. 1 So the term "gender invert" was basically discarded and left to rot on the sidewalk.
I'm reclaiming it. Just because it has nothing to do with causing sexual orientation doesn't mean that gender inversion itself doesn't exist. Or that it isn't a useful term. Our society is now familiar with male-to-female and female-to-male transgender people, transitioners who address their situation by bringing their sex into compliance with their gender. "Gender invert" can refer to a similar person who continues to live a life as a male girl or a female boy, someone who embraces rather than seeks to fix the apparent disparity between sex and gender.
The Umbrella Thing
People often offer me other terms to use instead. I am told that I could refer to myself (and to people like me) as "nonbinary transgender". As opposed to the binary transgender people who transition male-to-female or female-to-male. But as a gender invert, I am operating with some binary assumptions myself, for better or worse: in order to describe a person as having "the opposite" gender from the gender that normally goes with their sex, we're sort of assuming two body types (male and female) and two genders (boy and girl), because only in a binary two-category system do you have an obvious "opposite".
I don't mean to be disrespectful to intersex people or to people whose gender identity isn't binary like that. But most of us who are alive today grew up in a world that uses a binary system for categorizing people by sex. And like most identities, the identity of gender invert exists against the backdrop of society and its existing library of categories.
Yes, I suppose "gender invert" is technically an identity that falls under the transgender umbrella, since anyone who is a gender invert would have a gender identity other than the one that other folks assume them to have. And "gender invert" also falls under the genderqueer umbrella, since anyone who is a gender invert has a gender other than the normative, expected gender, therefore is queer, gender-wise. And since you can't express "male girl" in a strict binary system where everyone is either male (and hence a man or boy) or else female (and thereby a woman or girl), "gender invert" fits under the umbrella term "nonbinary" as well.
I now have all the umbrellas I need.
What I don't have is enough specific recognition of my situation. Like lesbians who felt more erased than included by the use of the term "gay", and preferred to see the word "lesbian" to reflect an awareness of them, I want to see "gender invert" spreading as a concept and as a terminology.
What gender inversion ISN'T -- aka what not to say to a gender invert
• Being a gender invert is not another way of saying you have a masculine or feminine "side". All of me is feminine. Side, back, front, top, bottom. I'm not less feminine in my gender than some other kind of person. A gender invert is not someone halfway inbetween a person who is cisgender and a person who is transgender and getting hormones and surgeries. I find the "side" thing and the assumptions that I'm only semi-feminine to be negating and insulting.
• Obviously, since we're not living in Havelock Ellis's time, we all know that gender identity isn't the same as sexual orientation, right? Actually, weirdly enough, you know where you see these elements conflated with each other a lot? For gays and lesbians. Someone affirms a proud gay femme's identity by saying "Oh sure I always knew you were gay, totally flaming" and then describes the person's childhood femininity. Or speaks of their daughter's incipient identity as a lesbian by describing how butch she was in fourth grade. Well, I should not attempt to speak on behalf of gay or lesbian people who also identify as gender inverts, but yeah, do try to separate the two components in your mind and think before you speak. Me, I'm a sissy femme girlish male whose attraction is towards female folks. I need the term "gender invert" because we don't have a term for someone like me.
• No, this isn't about committing genderfuck or cleverly trying to "undermine gender" and I'm not an agender person and I'm not particularly genderfluid either. Some people are. Here's a respectful and sincere salute to those who are. Nope, I'm gendered. I'm differently gendered, I'm queerly gendered, but I'm genuinely gendered. I have a gender identity.
But why?
I suppose in some ways being a gender invert is a bit old-fashioned, like being bisexual instead of pansexual or something. Perhaps it appears to you like a step backwards, reaffirming those binary categories even as it tries to carve out a noncompliant gender identity from them.
I don't think it is. I think it's like coming into an ongoing argument about whether to allow limited medical marijuana use or keep it completely illegal -- and saying it should be 100% legal for all uses, recreational and otherwise.
If it had ever already been established that it's normal and healthy that some percent of female people are extremely masculine, and similarly that some portion of male folks are entirely feminine, it would be a different situation, but it hasn't been and it isn't. And since it hasn't been established that way, proclaiming the desirability of androgyny and/or a gender-free world in which individuals aren't encouraged to identify with either of those moldy old gendered identities is making that the goal post. For those supporting our side of the debate, that is. The other side maintains its goal posts in the traditional gender conformities. I've never been much of a sports fan but I'm pretty sure that means all the action is in between neutral territory and traditional territory.
I'm moving the goal posts.
But moving the goal posts isn't why I'm doing this. I'm doing this because this is who I am. The fact that I think it's progressive is just an added benefit. The fact that some may think it's regressive and old-fashioned instead is just an added burden.
I'm speaking out about it either way.
You, when speaking about the many identities covered by the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ acronym, or when compiling a list of identity flags for a pride day illustration, please make a mention of gender inverts. I'd appreciate it. I'm here, too.
1 See for example "Same-sex Sexuality and Childhood Gender Non-conformity: a spurious connection", Lorene Gottschalk, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol 12, No. 1, 2003
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The 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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Thursday, June 14, 2018
BOOK REVIEW -- If I Was Your Girl
I have a new favorite "exhibit a" book for presenting and depicting the transgender woman experience.
Meredith Russo joins an already-populated field: on my bookshelf I have Jan Morris's CONUNDRUM, Jennifer Boylan's SHE'S NOT THERE, Nicola Jane Chase's TEA AND TRANSITION, Audrey MC's LIFE SONGS, Ami Polonsky's GRACEFULLY GRAYSON, and a few others scattered about. Documenting what it means to be a transgender woman as a trans coming-out story has been done enough times that I think many authors are leery of writing something cliché, and so there's been a feeling that a good solid trans woman story needs to be "about" something other than the trajectory of "I always knew I wasn't like the other boys" / "People reacted to me being like one of the girls" / "It was my secret, I knew I was a girl despite my body" / "I sought answers and found doctors who would help me transition" / "Here's what medical transitioning was like" / "And here I am, I did it".
In If I Was Your Girl (Flatiron Books: 2017), Meredith Russo takes the tack of simplifying the narrative and making it accessible and entertaining and easy to relate to. Amanda Hardy, the main character, is a young girl, still in high school, and has already transitioned. She's a brave person, and a person used to living on the margins, not accepted by other people. Her backstory is provided in intermittent flashback chapters, but they're short; the main story arc is all in Amanda's present tense. She is happy to make friends but doesn't expect to and doesn't take it for granted; and when Grant Everett indicates he's interested in her as more than a friend, it's dream-fulfillment material but enmeshed with the delicate fears that it doesn't mean what she hopes it does, that once he gets to know her he'll be less impressed with her -- in other words, the typical everyday fears of so many adolescent girls, merely made a bit more complicated by the specific situation that Amanda is in, the specific worrisome secret that might cost her this acceptance and sense of belonging if it came out.
It does, of course. That Amanda is strong enough to cope with the situation is less surprising than the resilience of so many of her friendships and connections. Not all of them (that would not be realistic), but there's a hopeful and positive message here about how many people will accept a trans person for who she is.
If I Was Your Girl touches on one of the central aspects of being transgender that many of these narratives omit: after transitioning, a person may fit in and be perceived and accepted as an ordinary, typical member of their target gender, but they are also a person with a past; does such a person have to invent a gender-consistent backstory, does such a person have to deny their own personal history and set of experiences? And to what extent can a person ever really feel known and accepted while keeping such a centrally personal aspect of themselves secret? Unlike so many other trans narratives, this story is truly a coming-out story, and it's fundamentally an affirmative one.
What it doesn't focus on is the convoluted process of figuring out that one is, in fact, transgender, or on the details of medical transitioning. I think that is a wise choice. The reader who picks up the book and relates to the character strongly will already be on the road to contemplating their own gender identity in a sufficiently appropriate manner, and the details of such things as hormones and bottom surgery are probably a lot less important than the fundamentals of what it would be like as a person to have done so for anyone who is curious to know what being transgender is about.
Author Meredith Russo acknowledges in the postlogue of the book that this is the simplest version of the story:
I think If I Was Your Girl succeeds in exactly the ways that Russo intended it to. And where it fails, to the extent that it does so, it is due to the limitations that she acknowledges here. It is not a book that it is not, and there are stories that need to be told that are about those other trajectories of experience which are not so centrally identical to what people in general understand transgender to mean.
I want my own book to be like this. I want The Story of Q to present the story of what it is like to be male, to be one of the girls, to be attracted to them as well, and to end up being one of the gender-variant people for whom a transition to female is not the solution. I want it to be accessible the way Amanda's story is accessible.
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Meredith Russo joins an already-populated field: on my bookshelf I have Jan Morris's CONUNDRUM, Jennifer Boylan's SHE'S NOT THERE, Nicola Jane Chase's TEA AND TRANSITION, Audrey MC's LIFE SONGS, Ami Polonsky's GRACEFULLY GRAYSON, and a few others scattered about. Documenting what it means to be a transgender woman as a trans coming-out story has been done enough times that I think many authors are leery of writing something cliché, and so there's been a feeling that a good solid trans woman story needs to be "about" something other than the trajectory of "I always knew I wasn't like the other boys" / "People reacted to me being like one of the girls" / "It was my secret, I knew I was a girl despite my body" / "I sought answers and found doctors who would help me transition" / "Here's what medical transitioning was like" / "And here I am, I did it".
In If I Was Your Girl (Flatiron Books: 2017), Meredith Russo takes the tack of simplifying the narrative and making it accessible and entertaining and easy to relate to. Amanda Hardy, the main character, is a young girl, still in high school, and has already transitioned. She's a brave person, and a person used to living on the margins, not accepted by other people. Her backstory is provided in intermittent flashback chapters, but they're short; the main story arc is all in Amanda's present tense. She is happy to make friends but doesn't expect to and doesn't take it for granted; and when Grant Everett indicates he's interested in her as more than a friend, it's dream-fulfillment material but enmeshed with the delicate fears that it doesn't mean what she hopes it does, that once he gets to know her he'll be less impressed with her -- in other words, the typical everyday fears of so many adolescent girls, merely made a bit more complicated by the specific situation that Amanda is in, the specific worrisome secret that might cost her this acceptance and sense of belonging if it came out.
It does, of course. That Amanda is strong enough to cope with the situation is less surprising than the resilience of so many of her friendships and connections. Not all of them (that would not be realistic), but there's a hopeful and positive message here about how many people will accept a trans person for who she is.
If I Was Your Girl touches on one of the central aspects of being transgender that many of these narratives omit: after transitioning, a person may fit in and be perceived and accepted as an ordinary, typical member of their target gender, but they are also a person with a past; does such a person have to invent a gender-consistent backstory, does such a person have to deny their own personal history and set of experiences? And to what extent can a person ever really feel known and accepted while keeping such a centrally personal aspect of themselves secret? Unlike so many other trans narratives, this story is truly a coming-out story, and it's fundamentally an affirmative one.
What it doesn't focus on is the convoluted process of figuring out that one is, in fact, transgender, or on the details of medical transitioning. I think that is a wise choice. The reader who picks up the book and relates to the character strongly will already be on the road to contemplating their own gender identity in a sufficiently appropriate manner, and the details of such things as hormones and bottom surgery are probably a lot less important than the fundamentals of what it would be like as a person to have done so for anyone who is curious to know what being transgender is about.
Author Meredith Russo acknowledges in the postlogue of the book that this is the simplest version of the story:
I have, in some ways, cleaved to stereotypes and even bent rules to make Amanda's trans-ness as unchallenging to normative assumptions as possible. She knew from a very young age. She is exclusively attracted to boys. She is entirely feminine. She passes as a woman with little to no effort. She had a surgery that her family should not have been able to afford, and she started hormones through legitimate channels before she probably could have in the real world. I did this because I wanted you to have no possible barrier to understanding Amanda as a teenage girl with a different medical history from most other girls.
I think If I Was Your Girl succeeds in exactly the ways that Russo intended it to. And where it fails, to the extent that it does so, it is due to the limitations that she acknowledges here. It is not a book that it is not, and there are stories that need to be told that are about those other trajectories of experience which are not so centrally identical to what people in general understand transgender to mean.
I want my own book to be like this. I want The Story of Q to present the story of what it is like to be male, to be one of the girls, to be attracted to them as well, and to end up being one of the gender-variant people for whom a transition to female is not the solution. I want it to be accessible the way Amanda's story is accessible.
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Thursday, June 7, 2018
My Manuscript is in the Shop Again
It has been a very long time since I've done any rewrite in The Story of Q beyond a little superficial surgery here and there. It's mostly been a stable and complete-feeling book.
I've been contemplating some of the critical rejection notices (some of which process you saw echoed in my May 22 entry). The conclusion that I reached was that their complaints and feedback were not accurate or helpful, but that nevertheless, yes, the book has a major weakness. What should be the emotional centerpiece, or at least one of the major emotional centerpieces, was glossed over and described from a detached distant vantage point instead of being properly caught in vivid prose.
The love interest of the story is the girl from Massachusetts who shows up with her family in the summer between junior and senior year in high school. In its current form, the book covers that visit with scarcely a single actual conversation.
Not one of my beta readers or editors from lit agents or publishing houses have ever highlighted that as a problem. I don't know why. Now that I see it I can't unsee it. My book has some really vivid sections, but this event, which totally needs to be one of them, just isn't.
I know how that happened: it is painful for me to write. It is painful in part because I want to capture exactly how it was, and it's elusive for me, because I sealed up some of those memories because of how things turned out, so it is frustrating to try to evoke just what happened between us and the rhythms of how we spoke and interacted. And then it is painful because even after all this time it's still ripping scabs off. And it is painful because when I do write of it, it is inadequate. But if it is, it will still be far better than the woefully inadequate handling that these scenes received up until now.
Bloody hell. Then I have to find a way to trim some other stuff or else accept a longer word count.
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I've been contemplating some of the critical rejection notices (some of which process you saw echoed in my May 22 entry). The conclusion that I reached was that their complaints and feedback were not accurate or helpful, but that nevertheless, yes, the book has a major weakness. What should be the emotional centerpiece, or at least one of the major emotional centerpieces, was glossed over and described from a detached distant vantage point instead of being properly caught in vivid prose.
The love interest of the story is the girl from Massachusetts who shows up with her family in the summer between junior and senior year in high school. In its current form, the book covers that visit with scarcely a single actual conversation.
Not one of my beta readers or editors from lit agents or publishing houses have ever highlighted that as a problem. I don't know why. Now that I see it I can't unsee it. My book has some really vivid sections, but this event, which totally needs to be one of them, just isn't.
I know how that happened: it is painful for me to write. It is painful in part because I want to capture exactly how it was, and it's elusive for me, because I sealed up some of those memories because of how things turned out, so it is frustrating to try to evoke just what happened between us and the rhythms of how we spoke and interacted. And then it is painful because even after all this time it's still ripping scabs off. And it is painful because when I do write of it, it is inadequate. But if it is, it will still be far better than the woefully inadequate handling that these scenes received up until now.
Bloody hell. Then I have to find a way to trim some other stuff or else accept a longer word count.
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Tuesday, May 29, 2018
The Coming-Out-Genderqueer Story: It's Something Else
"That's not a very good thesis project for a sociology dissertation," the professor told me. "What you should do is select the group you study based on objective criteria, like whether they have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria or have petitioned to have their driver's license gender marker changed, and then interview them about their feelings and attitudes and intentions and beliefs and so on. But what you're trying to do, to study male subjects who identify as 'sissy' or 'feminine', there's no external marker for that so it's all intercranial, it's all inside your subjects' head, depending on self-identification, and then you want to interview them to see what ELSE they think and feel, and that's not very sociological".
* * *
Twenty five years later, defining "genderqueer" and "gender invert" appears to involve the same basic problem. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people can be readily defined by something specific that they do, which sets them apart, but there's no obvious equivalent for genderqueer people (in general) or gender inverts (specifically) --
Gay and lesbian people: have sexual relations with people of the same sex
Bisexual people: have sexual relations with people of the same sex AND with the opposite sex
Transgender people: transition from the sex they were assigned at birth to the other sex
Genderqueer people: ??
Gender inverted people: ??
Well, admittedly, no, it isn't that simple when it comes to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people either. There are sexually inexperienced gay and lesbian people, they haven't had sexual relations with people of the same sex and yet they're still gay / lesbian, right? "Oh, but, well, they, umm, want to. I mean, they feel same-sex sexual desire", backtracks the hypothetical definer. But what do we mean by that, what exactly does one feel and think that constitues "wanting to"? Is it a specific concrete desire to engage in a specific activity, an activity that constitutes sex? What about the person who finds several same-sex people breathtakingly cute and becomes obsessed with the contours of their body shapes, but doesn't formulate a specific plan of action that takes the form "I want xxxxxx to happen, you and me" -- ?? Not to mention, what is that 'xxxxxx' anyhow, what precise activities count as 'sex'? Then there's "same" versus "opposite", when here we are in a world that includes both transgender and intersex people! Is a woman with erotic feelings towards an intersex individual a lesbian, or is she straight? If she also has the hots for a transgender man, is she bi? So if in addition to that she finds herself aroused by males who identify as girls, does that bring her up to trisexual or something? Obviously the clean clinical definitions used for the other LGBT identities don't withstand close scrutiny, either!
But that doesn't solve the problem, which involves perceptions and assumptions. However fuzzy and problematic our definitions for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender may be, the fact that there's a general acknowledgment of them as identities, a general belief in the categories and their usefulness, means that a coming-out story can be written with any degree of development of the identity itself ranging from an immersive soul-examining self-searching all the way down to a simple statement like "I knew I was that way from back in childhood", and then the rest of the book can be about the person and that person's experiences and only minimally about explaining, defining, and defending the identity itself as a relevant concept.
Borrowing from the same list I used in last week's post...
Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, the prototypical lesbian coming-out story, starts off with the tale of Molly (presumably Rita herself) as a young girl with a slew of tomboyish characteristics. Then in chapter 5 she becomes romantically obsessed with Leota Bisland from her sixth grade class and proposes marriage to her. They don't get married but by the end of the chapter she and Leota have kissed and touched each other all over.
Andrew Tobias' book The Best Little Boy in the World begins with the author describing himself as a delicate child, somewhat sexually ignorant. He alludes to "hiding something" during the course of describing how he learned about masturbation from songs and jokes, and eventually on page 33 notes that his first wet dream "was about Tommy".
Mario Martino's Emergence gets to it much more quickly, with the first sentences in the author's preface stating "I am a transsexual. I have undergone sex change, crossing over from female to male".
Daphne Scholinski's The Last Time I Wore a Dress notes early on that Dad had wanted a "demure and obedient" daughter and within the first six pages explains that this "daughter" was subjected to psychiatric incarceration "as an inappropriate female" with "deep unease in my female nature" and makes reference to being harassed with lipstick, foundation, and eyeliner.
Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues opens with a letter to "Theresa" in which the author expresses "missing you... seeing you in every woman's face", then recounts a conversation in Greenwich Village with a woman who "hates society for what it's done to women like you", in other words causing them to "hate themselves so much they have to look and act like men". By page 7, she has used the term "butch" as a noun to refer to herself and the others she fits in with.
Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There opens with the author picking up a pair of girls hitchhiking; they address her as "ma'am" as they get in. She thinks maybe she recognized one of them as someone "who'd been a student of mine back when I was a man".
Now, in The Story of Q I try to do that, too, to set the stage as it were, and in the first ten pages I've explained how, in childhood, I sought to emulate the girls, whom I admired, and to distance myself from being viewed as one of the boys; and I've also given early notice that I was physically attracted to girls from early on. But I'm at a disadvantage: I can't announce an identity the way Martino does, or count on readers immediately slotting me into one as Tobias, Brown, and Boylan all can when they describe their same-sex sexual attractions or refer to a time when they manifested as a different sex.
I have to build the identity for my readers before I can inhabit it. And it's somewhat subtle; there is no hallmark behavior where I can say "I did this" and that behavior conjures up a socially recognized identity (gay, lesbian, transgender) for most people immediately.
Leslie Feinberg's book is probably the closest in that regard. To be a butch lesbian is to inhabit a less common, less familiar identity. It's different from a generic lesbian coming-of-age story, with elements that are very similar to those of the stories written by transgender men, but it is its own tale, its own concept of self, including a culture and a community. And I suspect it's no coincidence that Feinberg's book is among the longer books that I've listed here.
This is the third installment of a three-part series specifically about coming out and writing the coming-out story as a genderqueer person. On April 23, I wrote Coming Out: Genderqueer Compared to Other LGBTQIA Identities and last week (May 22) I wrote The Art of the Coming Out Story: Seeking the Sweet Point .
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* * *
Twenty five years later, defining "genderqueer" and "gender invert" appears to involve the same basic problem. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people can be readily defined by something specific that they do, which sets them apart, but there's no obvious equivalent for genderqueer people (in general) or gender inverts (specifically) --
Gay and lesbian people: have sexual relations with people of the same sex
Bisexual people: have sexual relations with people of the same sex AND with the opposite sex
Transgender people: transition from the sex they were assigned at birth to the other sex
Genderqueer people: ??
Gender inverted people: ??
Well, admittedly, no, it isn't that simple when it comes to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people either. There are sexually inexperienced gay and lesbian people, they haven't had sexual relations with people of the same sex and yet they're still gay / lesbian, right? "Oh, but, well, they, umm, want to. I mean, they feel same-sex sexual desire", backtracks the hypothetical definer. But what do we mean by that, what exactly does one feel and think that constitues "wanting to"? Is it a specific concrete desire to engage in a specific activity, an activity that constitutes sex? What about the person who finds several same-sex people breathtakingly cute and becomes obsessed with the contours of their body shapes, but doesn't formulate a specific plan of action that takes the form "I want xxxxxx to happen, you and me" -- ?? Not to mention, what is that 'xxxxxx' anyhow, what precise activities count as 'sex'? Then there's "same" versus "opposite", when here we are in a world that includes both transgender and intersex people! Is a woman with erotic feelings towards an intersex individual a lesbian, or is she straight? If she also has the hots for a transgender man, is she bi? So if in addition to that she finds herself aroused by males who identify as girls, does that bring her up to trisexual or something? Obviously the clean clinical definitions used for the other LGBT identities don't withstand close scrutiny, either!
But that doesn't solve the problem, which involves perceptions and assumptions. However fuzzy and problematic our definitions for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender may be, the fact that there's a general acknowledgment of them as identities, a general belief in the categories and their usefulness, means that a coming-out story can be written with any degree of development of the identity itself ranging from an immersive soul-examining self-searching all the way down to a simple statement like "I knew I was that way from back in childhood", and then the rest of the book can be about the person and that person's experiences and only minimally about explaining, defining, and defending the identity itself as a relevant concept.
Borrowing from the same list I used in last week's post...
Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, the prototypical lesbian coming-out story, starts off with the tale of Molly (presumably Rita herself) as a young girl with a slew of tomboyish characteristics. Then in chapter 5 she becomes romantically obsessed with Leota Bisland from her sixth grade class and proposes marriage to her. They don't get married but by the end of the chapter she and Leota have kissed and touched each other all over.
Andrew Tobias' book The Best Little Boy in the World begins with the author describing himself as a delicate child, somewhat sexually ignorant. He alludes to "hiding something" during the course of describing how he learned about masturbation from songs and jokes, and eventually on page 33 notes that his first wet dream "was about Tommy".
Mario Martino's Emergence gets to it much more quickly, with the first sentences in the author's preface stating "I am a transsexual. I have undergone sex change, crossing over from female to male".
Daphne Scholinski's The Last Time I Wore a Dress notes early on that Dad had wanted a "demure and obedient" daughter and within the first six pages explains that this "daughter" was subjected to psychiatric incarceration "as an inappropriate female" with "deep unease in my female nature" and makes reference to being harassed with lipstick, foundation, and eyeliner.
Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues opens with a letter to "Theresa" in which the author expresses "missing you... seeing you in every woman's face", then recounts a conversation in Greenwich Village with a woman who "hates society for what it's done to women like you", in other words causing them to "hate themselves so much they have to look and act like men". By page 7, she has used the term "butch" as a noun to refer to herself and the others she fits in with.
Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There opens with the author picking up a pair of girls hitchhiking; they address her as "ma'am" as they get in. She thinks maybe she recognized one of them as someone "who'd been a student of mine back when I was a man".
Now, in The Story of Q I try to do that, too, to set the stage as it were, and in the first ten pages I've explained how, in childhood, I sought to emulate the girls, whom I admired, and to distance myself from being viewed as one of the boys; and I've also given early notice that I was physically attracted to girls from early on. But I'm at a disadvantage: I can't announce an identity the way Martino does, or count on readers immediately slotting me into one as Tobias, Brown, and Boylan all can when they describe their same-sex sexual attractions or refer to a time when they manifested as a different sex.
I have to build the identity for my readers before I can inhabit it. And it's somewhat subtle; there is no hallmark behavior where I can say "I did this" and that behavior conjures up a socially recognized identity (gay, lesbian, transgender) for most people immediately.
Leslie Feinberg's book is probably the closest in that regard. To be a butch lesbian is to inhabit a less common, less familiar identity. It's different from a generic lesbian coming-of-age story, with elements that are very similar to those of the stories written by transgender men, but it is its own tale, its own concept of self, including a culture and a community. And I suspect it's no coincidence that Feinberg's book is among the longer books that I've listed here.
This is the third installment of a three-part series specifically about coming out and writing the coming-out story as a genderqueer person. On April 23, I wrote Coming Out: Genderqueer Compared to Other LGBTQIA Identities and last week (May 22) I wrote The Art of the Coming Out Story: Seeking the Sweet Point .
———————
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Tuesday, May 22, 2018
The Art of the Coming Out Story: Seeking the Sweet Point
A pair of somewhat-recent rejection slips:
-- from Black Rose, a small independent publisher
-- from Judith Weber of Sobol Weber, a literary agency
I'm not sure how I can do a better job of making the characters "come to life" and bringing the reader to the point of living events with my main character Derek while at the same time avoiding making it an even more "extreme narrative" that reads "like a diary" in which readers have to "slug through the pity".
Meanwhile, I'm continuing to participate in author's reading events at Amateur Writers of Long Island as described in this earlier blog post. I read a 1500-word excerpt from the 8th-grade chapter early in the book and the other authors gave me much more pleasant feedback than the publishers and lit agents:
Still, among the rejection letters I've received over the years, there have been two main themes (aside from form letters and short choppy "not for me" replies): that I don't have enough of a platform and that the story doesn't sufficiently grab the reader and draw them in.
Well, that kind of feedback tends to make me think of perhaps letting go of my self-imposed barriers on manuscript length. Because for any individual event, writing it as a vivid scene with dialog and main-character mental processes and feelings and sound and smells and colors and all that means taking up more words to do it. In a vintage-2014 blog post I explained why. I'm still sure that the story I'm telling is the story I want to tell (as opposed to trying to include less). So the price tag for punching it up further is, at a minimum, to stop worrying about manuscript length and just let it take as many pages (and words) as it takes, you know?
Many of the books I've enjoyed the most have been quite a bit longer than The Story of Q in its present incarnation: Marilyn French's The Women's Room at 135,700 words (526 pages), Marge Piercy's Small Changes at 171,400 words (562 pages), Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone which comes in at 116700 words (465 pages). Mine has hovered around 97,000 words which would probably take up somewhere between 320 and 375 pages. Hmm, I could include a lot more dialog in the scene where the girl from Boston comes to visit and she become the love interest I obsess about... and I could insert some scenes with Boy Scouts illustrating more about how I was sort of not fully merging and kind of holding myself back from them, maybe a scene where the other boys are telling dirty jokes or something, and maybe some scenes at pot parties where I get into philosophical conversations with some of the girls while we're stoned...
But I also looked at some of the classic coming-out stories, to compare for length within the same genre, and that's a bit scary.
Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle ("Bawdy and moving, the ultimate word-of-mouth bestseller, Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America--and living happily ever after") is only 246 pages (63,960 words).
The Best Little Boy in the World by Andrew Tobias ("The classic account of growing up gay in America. An autobiography in which he spoke of his experiences as a gay boy and young man. He published it under the pen name "John Reid" to avoid the repercussions of being openly gay") was 247 pages (64,220 words).
Jan Morris wrote Conundrum ("One of the earliest books to discuss transsexuality with honesty and without prurience, tells the story of James Morris’s hidden life and how he decided to bring it into the open, as he resolved first on a hormone treatment and, second, on risky experimental surgery that would turn him into the woman that he truly was.") in a mere 176 pages (45,760 words).
Mario Martino did Emergence ("The autobiography of a female-to-male transsexual, written as a cooperative effort by the author with a medical journalist. It is one individual's story of the transition from female to male") in 273 pages (70,890 words).
The Last Time I Wore a Dress ("At fifteen years old, Daphne Scholinski was committed to a mental institution and awarded the dubious diagnosis of "Gender Identity Disorder." She spent three years--and over a million dollars of insurance--"treating" the problem...with makeup lessons and instructions in how to walk like a girl.") was 224 pages (55,552 words).
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg ("Woman or man? This internationally acclaimed novel looks at the world through the eyes of Jess Goldberg, a masculine girl growing up in the "Ozzie and Harriet" McCarthy era and coming out as a young butch lesbian in the pre-Stonewall gay drag bars of a blue-collar town") was 308 pages (77,000 words).
And Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There ("The exuberant memoir of a man named James who became a woman named Jenny. She’s Not There is the story of a person changing genders, the story of a person bearing and finally revealing a complex secret; above all, it is a love story") ran to 352 pages (91,520 words).
None of those is quite as long as The Story of Q. Is that worrisome? Relevant? I don't know for sure, but it doesn't make me very comfortable with the notion of making my book yet longer in pursuit of more vivid scenes and paragraphs.
I had two publishers sign contracts to publish this book; I need to remember that and not blame my writing for the rejection slips I get.
I'm looking for the sweet point, where I've laid down the trajectory of experiences I went through that culminated in me deciding I had a different kind of identity than the people around me, and explained that in enough detail and enough emotional vividness to convey that.
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It is written in what I will refer to as an "extreme" narrative, i.e. it reads like a diary. The promise of an interesting read on the subject of a young man's struggle to determine his sexuality is never realized because the author lapses into a commentary on his being bullied by those who prey on the "undecided" identity seekers. One thing that makes this interesting is that although the author identifies more as a female, his orientation is clearly heterosexual. Readers may well be inclined to 'slug' through the pity in order to see how his obvious conflicts are resolved. Three stars because it is at best a 'possible."
-- from Black Rose, a small independent publisher
You’ve struck on relevancy with your premise. The story of coming-of-age trans during the 1970’s while battling a prejudice environment is compelling, but there still needs to be a gripping arc to carry the narrative. The characters didn’t come to life for me. I felt more like I was being told events, rather than living them with Derek.
-- from Judith Weber of Sobol Weber, a literary agency
I'm not sure how I can do a better job of making the characters "come to life" and bringing the reader to the point of living events with my main character Derek while at the same time avoiding making it an even more "extreme narrative" that reads "like a diary" in which readers have to "slug through the pity".
Meanwhile, I'm continuing to participate in author's reading events at Amateur Writers of Long Island as described in this earlier blog post. I read a 1500-word excerpt from the 8th-grade chapter early in the book and the other authors gave me much more pleasant feedback than the publishers and lit agents:
Your ability to express your vulnerability is amazing! It flows with ease.
Well-written, strong emotions. Sad, powerful.
Very well written and effective. Keep at it, it's near perfect.
Still, among the rejection letters I've received over the years, there have been two main themes (aside from form letters and short choppy "not for me" replies): that I don't have enough of a platform and that the story doesn't sufficiently grab the reader and draw them in.
-- Nora Long for / Susan Cohen at Writer's house
We were impressed by The Story of Q's holistic approach to the underwritten topic of growing up queer. However, we struggled to engage emotionally with Derek because of the lack of specificity in prose. For example, it was difficult to understand why, in middle school, Derek found boys' behavior to be "bad" (rather than merely displeasing or disruptive), when Derek had not expressed a desire to be "good" or why Derek was ostracized growing up without knowing how exactly he was teased in each school he attended.
I read you query with interest. Your premise is unique and definitely stands out! Unfortunately, the writing style did not draw me into your story's world as much as I would have liked.-- Johanna Hickle at Talcott Notch
Well, that kind of feedback tends to make me think of perhaps letting go of my self-imposed barriers on manuscript length. Because for any individual event, writing it as a vivid scene with dialog and main-character mental processes and feelings and sound and smells and colors and all that means taking up more words to do it. In a vintage-2014 blog post I explained why. I'm still sure that the story I'm telling is the story I want to tell (as opposed to trying to include less). So the price tag for punching it up further is, at a minimum, to stop worrying about manuscript length and just let it take as many pages (and words) as it takes, you know?
Many of the books I've enjoyed the most have been quite a bit longer than The Story of Q in its present incarnation: Marilyn French's The Women's Room at 135,700 words (526 pages), Marge Piercy's Small Changes at 171,400 words (562 pages), Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone which comes in at 116700 words (465 pages). Mine has hovered around 97,000 words which would probably take up somewhere between 320 and 375 pages. Hmm, I could include a lot more dialog in the scene where the girl from Boston comes to visit and she become the love interest I obsess about... and I could insert some scenes with Boy Scouts illustrating more about how I was sort of not fully merging and kind of holding myself back from them, maybe a scene where the other boys are telling dirty jokes or something, and maybe some scenes at pot parties where I get into philosophical conversations with some of the girls while we're stoned...
But I also looked at some of the classic coming-out stories, to compare for length within the same genre, and that's a bit scary.
Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle ("Bawdy and moving, the ultimate word-of-mouth bestseller, Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America--and living happily ever after") is only 246 pages (63,960 words).
The Best Little Boy in the World by Andrew Tobias ("The classic account of growing up gay in America. An autobiography in which he spoke of his experiences as a gay boy and young man. He published it under the pen name "John Reid" to avoid the repercussions of being openly gay") was 247 pages (64,220 words).
Jan Morris wrote Conundrum ("One of the earliest books to discuss transsexuality with honesty and without prurience, tells the story of James Morris’s hidden life and how he decided to bring it into the open, as he resolved first on a hormone treatment and, second, on risky experimental surgery that would turn him into the woman that he truly was.") in a mere 176 pages (45,760 words).
Mario Martino did Emergence ("The autobiography of a female-to-male transsexual, written as a cooperative effort by the author with a medical journalist. It is one individual's story of the transition from female to male") in 273 pages (70,890 words).
The Last Time I Wore a Dress ("At fifteen years old, Daphne Scholinski was committed to a mental institution and awarded the dubious diagnosis of "Gender Identity Disorder." She spent three years--and over a million dollars of insurance--"treating" the problem...with makeup lessons and instructions in how to walk like a girl.") was 224 pages (55,552 words).
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg ("Woman or man? This internationally acclaimed novel looks at the world through the eyes of Jess Goldberg, a masculine girl growing up in the "Ozzie and Harriet" McCarthy era and coming out as a young butch lesbian in the pre-Stonewall gay drag bars of a blue-collar town") was 308 pages (77,000 words).
And Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There ("The exuberant memoir of a man named James who became a woman named Jenny. She’s Not There is the story of a person changing genders, the story of a person bearing and finally revealing a complex secret; above all, it is a love story") ran to 352 pages (91,520 words).
None of those is quite as long as The Story of Q. Is that worrisome? Relevant? I don't know for sure, but it doesn't make me very comfortable with the notion of making my book yet longer in pursuit of more vivid scenes and paragraphs.
I had two publishers sign contracts to publish this book; I need to remember that and not blame my writing for the rejection slips I get.
I'm looking for the sweet point, where I've laid down the trajectory of experiences I went through that culminated in me deciding I had a different kind of identity than the people around me, and explained that in enough detail and enough emotional vividness to convey that.
————————
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Monday, May 14, 2018
The Complex Problem of Dealing With the Oppressors
Item: When rallying in protest against yet another incident in which the victims were blamed for their own victimization, one of the oppressed said, "I am so tired of people asking what the Victim could have done differently. It's not the Victim's behavior that caused this. It's the Perpetrator's behavior that has to change! It's the Perpetrators who are doing this, not their Victims!"
Item: When asked about a proposed support group to help privileged people realize the good that they would personally gain from ending inequality and oppression, one of the oppressed said, "I don't feel like We should be giving our energy to Them, supporting Them and nurturing Them in the changes They need to make. That's what We always do, that's always been Our role, devoting Our time and effort into helping Them cope and make Their lives better. We need to give Our energy to each other for a change instead!"
I've participated in both of those conversations, in various forms and at various different times, and I figure chances are good you have, too. In the case of the first item, it's pretty compelling that perpetrators or oppressors are ones whose behaviors are most in need of changing; they're the ones most directly perpetuating the status quo and least involved in doing things that would bring meaningful social change.
It's the second item where things get trickier. If you're like me, you're situated sometimes on the marginalized side and sometimes on the mainstream side of the various dividing lines. Maybe you're female and of a racial or ethnic minority but able-bodied and a US citizen. Or perhaps you're a diagnosed autistic-spectrum person living in an economically depressed and politically repressive nation but you're male and not of a minority sexual orientation or gender identity. So at some point in your life, because your own experiences with being marginalized and oppressed makes you personally sympathetic and politically committed to allying with other oppressed people, perhaps you too have found yourself trying to get feedback about what you should be doing and how you could be doing it better, how to be a better ally and supporter. Yeah, maybe you admit to yourself that you hope for some pats on the back or high-fives for being a relatively good person over here on your mainstream and privileged side of one of those dividing lines, as opposed to being one of the jackboot-wearing sneering oblivious ones who are mostly just part of the problem. But if that desire for approval is self-serving, the desire to check in and get some critical feedback is at least in large part motivated by wanting to do a better job at being a socially conscious and righteous person, trying to listen and stay informed, right?
But most likely you would not be here, reading this, if you had never also been on the less favored side of one of those dividing lines. So chances are good that you've been a participant in at least one or two conversations and discussions in which people on your side, the marginalized and oppressed side, have found it important, essential, and liberating to see the mainsteam established privileged folks as Them, as the Problem, as the Oppressors. Why? Because although they are largely oblivious to what they do, they do hurtful things, and they occupy positions of power that give those hurtful things destructive energy. And because you, you personally and all these other people here in the room with you, the others who share your definitional situation, you didn't start this, they othered you folks first. And so, as a group, you spent years, decades, lifetimes, feeling inferior in the face of a definition of Normal that was devised around Them. You felt apologetic and wrong and in need of changing yourself for not being like Them. Or you felt inappropriate and illegitimate any time you were caught behaving or expecting equal treatment as long as you had this Difference defining you as less than, as not entitled. How could you and your people ever rise up against that without starting off with a rebellious and self-assertive "It's us against them, and we are on our side instead of against ourselves from now on" --?
If they're treated or invoked as absolute rules, the two items are contradictory. They are mutually exclusive. If it is Their behavior that needs to change, and We are agents of social change, we can't focus our energies entirely on ourselves and expect to accomplish what we want to accomplish. We do have to affect Them. We do have to succeed in affecting Them. We do in fact have to succeed in transforming Them into people who are no longer on the opposite side of a meaningful dividing line. As no longer The Problem.
That's not to say that the most important method of having an effect on the privileged isn't, indeed, to become stronger and self-affirmed people. Nor is it to deny that oppressed people do need to turn to each other and devote their strengths to each other.
But once we have done so and have turned away, in large part, from blaming ourselves and embracing this external definition of ourselves as wrong, deviant, inferior, and undeserving of equality, we do need to affect them. And we do need to maintain a mindspace that has room for the concept of those people, the folks who are defined as Them, ceasing to be a Problem. We need to have in our heads the imagined possibility of ourselves winning, which means ceasing to be oppressed. Furthermore, we need to interact with individuals as individuals. Each person among them who is trying to detach from ongoing participation in the patterns that keep us down is a potential ally.
Each such person will continue to breathe air and walk the streets against the backdrop in which people in their majority / privileged / mainstream / oppressor category are still doing the damage, being the Problem. But that doesn't make them not allies, not at the individual level. It occasionally means that their best intentions fall short of being any kind of guarantee against egregiously wrongful individual behavior. They'll disappoint us. It will sometimes seem like a frustratingly bad return on our invested time and emotional energies.
Remember, though, that they represent the locus of change.
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Item: When asked about a proposed support group to help privileged people realize the good that they would personally gain from ending inequality and oppression, one of the oppressed said, "I don't feel like We should be giving our energy to Them, supporting Them and nurturing Them in the changes They need to make. That's what We always do, that's always been Our role, devoting Our time and effort into helping Them cope and make Their lives better. We need to give Our energy to each other for a change instead!"
I've participated in both of those conversations, in various forms and at various different times, and I figure chances are good you have, too. In the case of the first item, it's pretty compelling that perpetrators or oppressors are ones whose behaviors are most in need of changing; they're the ones most directly perpetuating the status quo and least involved in doing things that would bring meaningful social change.
It's the second item where things get trickier. If you're like me, you're situated sometimes on the marginalized side and sometimes on the mainstream side of the various dividing lines. Maybe you're female and of a racial or ethnic minority but able-bodied and a US citizen. Or perhaps you're a diagnosed autistic-spectrum person living in an economically depressed and politically repressive nation but you're male and not of a minority sexual orientation or gender identity. So at some point in your life, because your own experiences with being marginalized and oppressed makes you personally sympathetic and politically committed to allying with other oppressed people, perhaps you too have found yourself trying to get feedback about what you should be doing and how you could be doing it better, how to be a better ally and supporter. Yeah, maybe you admit to yourself that you hope for some pats on the back or high-fives for being a relatively good person over here on your mainstream and privileged side of one of those dividing lines, as opposed to being one of the jackboot-wearing sneering oblivious ones who are mostly just part of the problem. But if that desire for approval is self-serving, the desire to check in and get some critical feedback is at least in large part motivated by wanting to do a better job at being a socially conscious and righteous person, trying to listen and stay informed, right?
But most likely you would not be here, reading this, if you had never also been on the less favored side of one of those dividing lines. So chances are good that you've been a participant in at least one or two conversations and discussions in which people on your side, the marginalized and oppressed side, have found it important, essential, and liberating to see the mainsteam established privileged folks as Them, as the Problem, as the Oppressors. Why? Because although they are largely oblivious to what they do, they do hurtful things, and they occupy positions of power that give those hurtful things destructive energy. And because you, you personally and all these other people here in the room with you, the others who share your definitional situation, you didn't start this, they othered you folks first. And so, as a group, you spent years, decades, lifetimes, feeling inferior in the face of a definition of Normal that was devised around Them. You felt apologetic and wrong and in need of changing yourself for not being like Them. Or you felt inappropriate and illegitimate any time you were caught behaving or expecting equal treatment as long as you had this Difference defining you as less than, as not entitled. How could you and your people ever rise up against that without starting off with a rebellious and self-assertive "It's us against them, and we are on our side instead of against ourselves from now on" --?
If they're treated or invoked as absolute rules, the two items are contradictory. They are mutually exclusive. If it is Their behavior that needs to change, and We are agents of social change, we can't focus our energies entirely on ourselves and expect to accomplish what we want to accomplish. We do have to affect Them. We do have to succeed in affecting Them. We do in fact have to succeed in transforming Them into people who are no longer on the opposite side of a meaningful dividing line. As no longer The Problem.
That's not to say that the most important method of having an effect on the privileged isn't, indeed, to become stronger and self-affirmed people. Nor is it to deny that oppressed people do need to turn to each other and devote their strengths to each other.
But once we have done so and have turned away, in large part, from blaming ourselves and embracing this external definition of ourselves as wrong, deviant, inferior, and undeserving of equality, we do need to affect them. And we do need to maintain a mindspace that has room for the concept of those people, the folks who are defined as Them, ceasing to be a Problem. We need to have in our heads the imagined possibility of ourselves winning, which means ceasing to be oppressed. Furthermore, we need to interact with individuals as individuals. Each person among them who is trying to detach from ongoing participation in the patterns that keep us down is a potential ally.
Each such person will continue to breathe air and walk the streets against the backdrop in which people in their majority / privileged / mainstream / oppressor category are still doing the damage, being the Problem. But that doesn't make them not allies, not at the individual level. It occasionally means that their best intentions fall short of being any kind of guarantee against egregiously wrongful individual behavior. They'll disappoint us. It will sometimes seem like a frustratingly bad return on our invested time and emotional energies.
Remember, though, that they represent the locus of change.
————————
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Monday, May 7, 2018
MOVIE REVIEW — I Am Not an Easy Man
It's been done before, but rarely if ever so well: a guy deserving of a comeuppance about gender privileges gets his situation inverted and has to cope with what women have to deal with, and learns some lessons.
What makes Eléonore Pourriat's I Am Not an Easy Man outstanding is that it goes far beyond the thought-experiment level and delves into the subtle nuances of gender polarization and how we cope with them, and it includes that subtle treatment in its portrayal of how the main male character, Damien (portrayed by Pierre Benezit), copes with being dumped into the inverted world.
The 1991 movie Switch, featuring Ellen Barkin, is the kind of fare I'm more used to seeing in this genre: the chauvinist male wakes up abruptly transformed to female, freaks out, and spends the first half of the movie trying to wrench reality back to how it oughta be by force of sheer denial. A whole lot of sight gags to point out how funny and inappropriate it looks when a woman (or person who appears to everyone to be a woman) behaves the way men typically do. A main character whose initial horror gives way to some clever ideas about how this could actually work to his advantage, only to find that any beliefs he'd ever harbored about how this or that would be so much easier if he were a woman are actually all wrong or that it doesn't work the way he'd expected. Very binary and overstated gender expectations and behaviors abound, caricatured in order to be sure to drive the point home. And then — usually around the halfway mark in the movie — acceptance, with the main character getting with the program and adjusting to the situation by becoming a good girl and, whether it's because biology is destiny or because you can't fight city hall (or a universally gendered world), becoming obedient to the new set of expectations and demands.
That's admittedly not entirely fair to Switch but it's a good overview of how I felt about it when I saw it on the screen. Great premise, disappointing for all that it didn't attempt to do.
I Am Not an Easy Man starts off with what looks like the same trajectory. It uses the more difficult inversion of having the man remain a man but finding himself transferred abruptly into world where everyone else is gender inverted, making him the exceptional case. (This means that instead of one actor giving us inverted gender behavior, everyone else in the entire cast is doing so). But again, Damien starts off trying to be who he has always been, while staring around in disbelief and becoming shocked and dismayed.
But after awhile he gets it, just as we in the audience do, although he remains mystified (of course) about how this could have happened. And he begins to adjust.
Some of the adjustment is opportunistic: some things weren't available to him in his familiar world, or weren't possibilities he'd ever considered for himself, but we watch him consider and them avail himself of them and they generally work for him. He learns to dress attractively, develops closer and more intimate emotional-content-sharing same-sex friendships, and finds televised dramas (with gender patterns aligned with this new world he's in of course) to be moving and cathartic.
Some of the adjustment is merely expedient: if he wants to date, and the women find his unmodified hairy chest to be a dealbreaker, he's going to have to wax. Well, if that's the way it is, it isn't pleasant but it isn't worth the price tag to balk at it.
And there are ways in which he doesn't conform but decides to fight back. A world in which people of his gender are dismissed as non-serious people? That's a dealbreaker for him. The unfairness, the inequality, this is intolerable. So he joins the masculinists and attends support groups and marches and rallies with his brethren.
The core of the story revolves around his relationship with writer Alexandra (Marie-Sophie Ferdane). Damien has a lifetime history of approaching women with the sexually enthusiastic and forward behaviors that work for him in his native world. In this new world, obtaining access to sexual activity isn't difficult—he gets propositioned (not to mention catcalled on the street and stared at by random women as a visual treat when walking through the business office) and he does partake. When his parents (same people, now gender-inverted) express a bit too much concern about him ever finding a suitable relationship, he flings into their face the fact that he has sex with many women, as readily as they do, and scarcely remembers their name, it's as fleeting and transient a delight for him as for them, and not a reason to settle down.
But therein lies the problem. Once he does meet someone (Alexandra) with whom he wants more, wants the relationship he has with her to continue, now it starts to matter strategically that he's in a world where expressing that is going to be tricky. This is a world where the male folks pursue the ongoing relationships and it's the female ones who tend to fuck-and-discard, so trying to hold on to what he's got with her runs the risk of coming across as clingy and vulnerable. And so we watch as he discovers firsthand the careful balance of wanting passion and sex but needing to protect himself from being regarded and treated as a mere outlet. Of not being sufficiently respected and valued.
Alexandra has her own arc of understanding-growth. In a nod to a classic cliché (see Roman Holiday), she starts off pretending and manipulating, while keeping her real agenda, of cashing in on the experience by writing about it, hidden; but then gradually falls in love with her subject Damien, and bails on the planned betrayal but the clues to what she's done are available to Damien who discovers them and decides she's a horrid cad who never cared for him. So just as Alexandra is regretting any intention of hurting Damien, Damien comes to see her as a callous and cruel person and she's suddenly at risk of losing him just as she realizes she absolutely can't let that happen. It's been done before but seldom with the bad girl becoming undone this way.
Ferdane is suave and confident and walks a good balance between arrogant and sensitive, between tough and broodingly lonely. She's not butch in a Joe-the-plumber way (in fact, we get a painter complete with plumber's crack just for the juxtaposition) so much as she's Bogart or James Dean. We want to get to her, evoke her human side, care for her.
I Am Not an Easy Man is delightful in its exquisite attention to detail and the believability of its inverted depictions. It would be easy to stick in a male erotic dancer that would prompt a giggle and a nod about sexual visual objectification, but it takes more skill to present us with a believable male pole dancer that you could readily imagine as delicious eye candy to bar patrons. And comedians from Roseanne Barr to Amy Schumer have done up the belching, open-legged, stained-shirt unself-conscious leering men shtick. But in the poker scene in this movie it doesn't come across as caricature. You believe the women around the table are real. The nuances of posture and facial expression and gesture are spot-on. And as a result, it hits harder.
Having mentioned Switch, I'll make note of a couple other gender-inverty offerings to flesh out the backdrop. There have been pieces that are done with serious intent, as illustrations of gender polarization and not just for the burlesque value of inversion as entertainment. Ella Fields became a YouTube / Facebook sensation when she gave us this one last year, for instance. When our 13 year olds still feel that they are up against this kind of rigid sex role expectation system, it's powerful to see it expressed in this kind of thought experiment; six and a half minutes doesn't give one room to explore the complex nuances though, and unfortunately some people rejected its message because they considered it overstated and that it ignored how things aren't actually so rigid in the modern world.
Not all depictions of gender reversal contain a lot of sympathy for critics of existing gender polarization. If (as I implied) some of the plot trajectories seem to end up promoting gender conformity even after doing a sendup of pompous (male) privileged certainties, there are also tales of gender inversion that never move beyond dismay and a conveyed sense of male humiliation except when someone manages to revert things to their natural state. I remember plucking a copy of Regiment of Women from the paperback stand when I was in High School and giving myself a headache from so much eye-rolling.
I Am Not an Easy Man is available on Netflix as an original Netflix movie.
————————
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Index of all Blog Posts
What makes Eléonore Pourriat's I Am Not an Easy Man outstanding is that it goes far beyond the thought-experiment level and delves into the subtle nuances of gender polarization and how we cope with them, and it includes that subtle treatment in its portrayal of how the main male character, Damien (portrayed by Pierre Benezit), copes with being dumped into the inverted world.
The 1991 movie Switch, featuring Ellen Barkin, is the kind of fare I'm more used to seeing in this genre: the chauvinist male wakes up abruptly transformed to female, freaks out, and spends the first half of the movie trying to wrench reality back to how it oughta be by force of sheer denial. A whole lot of sight gags to point out how funny and inappropriate it looks when a woman (or person who appears to everyone to be a woman) behaves the way men typically do. A main character whose initial horror gives way to some clever ideas about how this could actually work to his advantage, only to find that any beliefs he'd ever harbored about how this or that would be so much easier if he were a woman are actually all wrong or that it doesn't work the way he'd expected. Very binary and overstated gender expectations and behaviors abound, caricatured in order to be sure to drive the point home. And then — usually around the halfway mark in the movie — acceptance, with the main character getting with the program and adjusting to the situation by becoming a good girl and, whether it's because biology is destiny or because you can't fight city hall (or a universally gendered world), becoming obedient to the new set of expectations and demands.
That's admittedly not entirely fair to Switch but it's a good overview of how I felt about it when I saw it on the screen. Great premise, disappointing for all that it didn't attempt to do.
I Am Not an Easy Man starts off with what looks like the same trajectory. It uses the more difficult inversion of having the man remain a man but finding himself transferred abruptly into world where everyone else is gender inverted, making him the exceptional case. (This means that instead of one actor giving us inverted gender behavior, everyone else in the entire cast is doing so). But again, Damien starts off trying to be who he has always been, while staring around in disbelief and becoming shocked and dismayed.
But after awhile he gets it, just as we in the audience do, although he remains mystified (of course) about how this could have happened. And he begins to adjust.
Some of the adjustment is opportunistic: some things weren't available to him in his familiar world, or weren't possibilities he'd ever considered for himself, but we watch him consider and them avail himself of them and they generally work for him. He learns to dress attractively, develops closer and more intimate emotional-content-sharing same-sex friendships, and finds televised dramas (with gender patterns aligned with this new world he's in of course) to be moving and cathartic.
Some of the adjustment is merely expedient: if he wants to date, and the women find his unmodified hairy chest to be a dealbreaker, he's going to have to wax. Well, if that's the way it is, it isn't pleasant but it isn't worth the price tag to balk at it.
And there are ways in which he doesn't conform but decides to fight back. A world in which people of his gender are dismissed as non-serious people? That's a dealbreaker for him. The unfairness, the inequality, this is intolerable. So he joins the masculinists and attends support groups and marches and rallies with his brethren.
The core of the story revolves around his relationship with writer Alexandra (Marie-Sophie Ferdane). Damien has a lifetime history of approaching women with the sexually enthusiastic and forward behaviors that work for him in his native world. In this new world, obtaining access to sexual activity isn't difficult—he gets propositioned (not to mention catcalled on the street and stared at by random women as a visual treat when walking through the business office) and he does partake. When his parents (same people, now gender-inverted) express a bit too much concern about him ever finding a suitable relationship, he flings into their face the fact that he has sex with many women, as readily as they do, and scarcely remembers their name, it's as fleeting and transient a delight for him as for them, and not a reason to settle down.
But therein lies the problem. Once he does meet someone (Alexandra) with whom he wants more, wants the relationship he has with her to continue, now it starts to matter strategically that he's in a world where expressing that is going to be tricky. This is a world where the male folks pursue the ongoing relationships and it's the female ones who tend to fuck-and-discard, so trying to hold on to what he's got with her runs the risk of coming across as clingy and vulnerable. And so we watch as he discovers firsthand the careful balance of wanting passion and sex but needing to protect himself from being regarded and treated as a mere outlet. Of not being sufficiently respected and valued.
Alexandra has her own arc of understanding-growth. In a nod to a classic cliché (see Roman Holiday), she starts off pretending and manipulating, while keeping her real agenda, of cashing in on the experience by writing about it, hidden; but then gradually falls in love with her subject Damien, and bails on the planned betrayal but the clues to what she's done are available to Damien who discovers them and decides she's a horrid cad who never cared for him. So just as Alexandra is regretting any intention of hurting Damien, Damien comes to see her as a callous and cruel person and she's suddenly at risk of losing him just as she realizes she absolutely can't let that happen. It's been done before but seldom with the bad girl becoming undone this way.
Ferdane is suave and confident and walks a good balance between arrogant and sensitive, between tough and broodingly lonely. She's not butch in a Joe-the-plumber way (in fact, we get a painter complete with plumber's crack just for the juxtaposition) so much as she's Bogart or James Dean. We want to get to her, evoke her human side, care for her.
I Am Not an Easy Man is delightful in its exquisite attention to detail and the believability of its inverted depictions. It would be easy to stick in a male erotic dancer that would prompt a giggle and a nod about sexual visual objectification, but it takes more skill to present us with a believable male pole dancer that you could readily imagine as delicious eye candy to bar patrons. And comedians from Roseanne Barr to Amy Schumer have done up the belching, open-legged, stained-shirt unself-conscious leering men shtick. But in the poker scene in this movie it doesn't come across as caricature. You believe the women around the table are real. The nuances of posture and facial expression and gesture are spot-on. And as a result, it hits harder.
Having mentioned Switch, I'll make note of a couple other gender-inverty offerings to flesh out the backdrop. There have been pieces that are done with serious intent, as illustrations of gender polarization and not just for the burlesque value of inversion as entertainment. Ella Fields became a YouTube / Facebook sensation when she gave us this one last year, for instance. When our 13 year olds still feel that they are up against this kind of rigid sex role expectation system, it's powerful to see it expressed in this kind of thought experiment; six and a half minutes doesn't give one room to explore the complex nuances though, and unfortunately some people rejected its message because they considered it overstated and that it ignored how things aren't actually so rigid in the modern world.
Not all depictions of gender reversal contain a lot of sympathy for critics of existing gender polarization. If (as I implied) some of the plot trajectories seem to end up promoting gender conformity even after doing a sendup of pompous (male) privileged certainties, there are also tales of gender inversion that never move beyond dismay and a conveyed sense of male humiliation except when someone manages to revert things to their natural state. I remember plucking a copy of Regiment of Women from the paperback stand when I was in High School and giving myself a headache from so much eye-rolling.
I Am Not an Easy Man is available on Netflix as an original Netflix movie.
————————
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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