Not Trans Enough?

People often post about times when they've been misgendered disrespectfully.

I, too, often have my identity disregarded in a hurtful way. Here's a taste of it. This is from one of the many Facebook groups I've joined. This particular one is specifically NOT a safe space so I think people can live with what they've said and have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

A handful of comments disappeared as people erased what they had posted but there's enough here to provide a taste of the interaction.





CONVERSATION

Allan Hunter: I'm new here. I'm genderqueer (a term I prefer instead of transgender for myself), and more specifically a gender invert. Radical feminism was the bright spotlight that let me see gender politics and to question that "how it is" is necessarily how it has to always be. Like many trans people I experienced a discrepancy between my morphological sex and the sense of identity, the sense of which people I considered to be "like me", and ended up concluding that I was a male gal. (Unlike the stereotyped life-trajectory for transgender people, I did not then reject my morphological sex. The male-ness is no more wrong than the girl-ness). I don't like to see the schism between radical feminists and transgender people and I'm not enamored of the kind of political correctness that says "we already decided what all the right answers are, so either get on board with them or be branded an oppressor". I am ponderously serious and tend to be painfully earnest and all the in-jokes go right over my head.

Kxxx O'Axxx Oh, so TLDR you’re mentally ill, good to know!

Bxxxe Hxxxxy No need to be a dick right off the bat.

Allan Hunter: How'd you know I was also a psych rights activist & all that? (checks shirt for activist slogans)

Kxxx O'Axxx You said you were GQ

Allan Hunter Indeed. I seem to qualify. The identity predates the terminology. I came out in 1980. Didn't know WTF to call myself but I had the concept down.

Kxxx O'Axxx It’s a joke. Everyone in this group is mentally ill lmfao

Allan Hunter Kxxx O'Axxx Tolja I'm humorless and earnest

Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx How does being genderqueer affect yr daily life

Allan Hunter People "altercast" other people — they assign them identities inside their heads, have expectations etc. One of the largest social determinants of how you get altercast is whether folks sort you as guy or gal, and the way THAT tends to work is that they don't distinguish between the body architecture you've got and the basket full of generalizations about personality and behavior that we all know about — hence if you're perceived male you're also expected to exhibit masculinities. Then there's a second-tier fallback set of generalizations about exceptions to the rule, which tends to invoke sexual orientation as well as some ancillary expectations (for example, in the case of sissy-femme male folks that they wish they were masculine instead but somehow can't pull it off). How being genderqueer affects me daily is that I'm constantly perpetually slamming into those expectations and assumptions crossways and find it frustrating. And at one time (like for a decade or so from 10 to 20 years old thereabouts) internalized a deep fear that there was something WRONG about me.

Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx Can you give me an example of what "slamming into expectations and assumptions" means

Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx do people call you a f*gg*t or something?

Allan Hunter Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx Yeah. Oh definitely that one, that's common. But also let's say someone female intuits that I find her fascinating or attractive — she will often tend to automatically assume that I will be forward and pushy about it which can lead to wariness (even fear) or it can lead to her waiting for me to DO something of a sort that is no more my courtship-responsibility than it is hers. Or the same behavior pattern will be perceived differently either because I'm sissy instead of masculine or because I'm male instead of female.

Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx right....


Allan Hunter Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx No, left. See, assumptions!

Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx I don't know if women being wary of you because you look like a man is like....a material condition put on genderqueer people....

Mxxx Axxxn So would you consider yourself a GNC male/man?

Allan Hunter Don't know the term GNC. I don't consider myself to be a man of any sort. Male, yes.

Mxxx Axxxn Means gender non conforming. Like a feminine Male or a tomboy for example.

Allan Hunter Mxxx Axxxn Oh! Yeah, I used the word "sissy" for a long time, by which I mean the inverse of tomboy.

Allan Hunter If I'd known this group to be THIS lively I would have waited until a time when I could hang out for hours. I sort of can't at the moment but please don't take my disappearance as evidence of my not wanting to have these conversations. Thanks to all of you for speaking your minds!

Jxxn Mxxxxy Bahana keep posting. this is how you get terfs

Exxa Rxxxxxxn That's it I'm a TERF now

Nxxi Mcxxxxxx get castrated bb, you will feel so much better.

Mxx Hxxxxxxxxx “Cut yr balls off it’ll be great” -Mahatma Gandhi, 1908

Jxxxxxa Kxxxxn i... can’t wrap my head around the mental gymnastics and instead i’ll just bring popcorn

Allan Hunter: Clarification question for Zxxx Zxxn and Yaxxxxx XN, both of whom have said that my described experiences are akin to theirs, the experiences of a person who doesn't fully match other folks' gender expectations and stereotypes, and both of whom have proclaimed me to be a cisgender man.

(I had described myself in an intro post as genderqueer, as a male gal or male femme, and not cisgender and not a man)

I'm curious to know whether you consider there to exist SOME people whose gender does not match their sex but who are not modifying their sex to match their gender (but that I do not fall into that category); or if instead you do NOT consider that there are any such people (me or anyone else).

I am familiar with the vantage point that is often called "truscum" -- and I am in partial agreement with it. Transgender people of the male-to-female and female-to-male variety spent years raising public consciousness about their situation, and it is them that people think of when they hear the term "transgender". I can readily see why they would not appreciate diluting the meaning of the term to include people like me. Hmm, that makes it sound like my reasons for not calling myself "transgender" are all altruistic or something. They're not. From my standpoint, it is misleading to refer to myself as "trans" because if I do, everyone assumes I *have* transitioned, *will* transition, or at least *want* to transition, and that my concerns and issues probably focus on access to hormones and surgery, the politics of bathroom access, and discrimination against identifiably trans people. I don't feel included in the term "transgender", I feel ERASED by it and hence do not use it.

The two of you seem to be dividing the world into cis and trans, telling me that I'm not trans, and therefore I am cis. Is that correct? Am I misrepresenting what you're saying? (I'm not doing so on purpose).

To me that's kind of like Carlos Montoya saying "I'm a brown person. I don't identify as white" and then being told "You are not black. Therefore you are white". It sort of depends on how you define the categories, if you see what I mean.

Exxxyx Hxxxx There are certainly trans people that exist who are not modifying their sex due to one reason or another. I know transwomen who don't take HRT for medical reasons, and transwomen who don't take HRT for personal reasons. These people are still trans because they experience dysphoria of some king, social or physical.

If you do not experience dysphoria of any kind and being seen as your AGAB is not distressing you are cis. End of story. You can be gender nonconforming, you can be a cis nonbinary person too. But you cannot be transgender.

"I don't feel included in the term "transgender""
Because you are not. Nor should you be. And that's ok. You can be cis and GNC and there is nothing wrong with that.

"The two of you seem to be dividing the world into cis and trans
Because the two terms together make up the entirety of human civilization. Cis people identify as the gender they were assigned at birth. Trans people do not.

Allan Hunter I'm not transgender. I don't identify as transgender. I have not said that I am transgender. I'm not. It's something else. I'm genderqueer. I could claim a form of dysphoria but if so, it is social and has nothing to do with my morphology (although it has everything to do with people's attitudes and expectations that are based on it).

Exxxyx Hxxxx Genderqueer is often synonymous with nonbinary. I'm a nonbinary trans girl, and I am taking steps to transition so that dysphoria does not have an impact on my life. I was literally suicidal every day from the start of puberty till when I came out at 25. It severely impacts my life. I know other nonbinary individuals who are not currently medically transitioning but are still trans because they present differently than their AGAB (binding, wearing "clothes of the opposite sex", using different pronouns, etc) who would also certainly count as trans.

However there are also nonbinary cis people. For instance someone who was assigned male at birth may identify as a "demi-boy" meaning they have only a faint relation to being their AGAB. Such people are still cis because they mainly identify with their AGAB and there is nothing wrong with that. It sounds like to me you are just a cis nonbinary person and that is fine!

Allan Hunter Exxxyx Hxxxx I do use "nonbinary" although I prefer genderqueer as an umbrella term. When I want to be specific I say gender invert (gender being the opposite of the expected one for my sex in the binary two-identity system). So I guess that makes me nonbinary, you can't say you're male but a femme instead of a guy within a two-options-only (binary) system. Some genderqueer people are genderfluid, some are demigirls or demiboys, some are agender, and so on; I am not any of those other things but the way that I *am* -- gender inverted -- would certainly seem to qualify as genderqueer.

Jxxx Ryxx Allan, you appear to me to be a person who is gender-nonconforming, and there is nothing wrong with that. It does not however, indicate that you suffer from gender dysphoria (although there are some who do suffer from dysphoria and are able to find a degree of relief through a non-conformist lifestyle.)

Personally, I am willing to call you transgender if you like, but the definition of that term is really so vague today to have lost any real meaning. Many of us have re-claimed the term transsexual because the term transgender no longer has any real relevance to our experience.

Allan Hunter I'd rather NOT be referred to as transgender because I think it is misleading. I do have social-political issues ... whether you call me genderqueer or nonconforming cis or whatever is far less relevant than understanding that my life was made miserable by the mismatch between folks' expectations and how I actually was. As for presentation, I wear garments and adornments that symbolize femininity but which aren't directly anchored in being designed for a female body architecture. In other words skirts yes, brassieres no.

Jxxx Ryxx Well then it seems that we are "on the same page." I do think that you are unusual today in your desire to NOT be referred to as transgender. Many in the genderqueer/NB community seem to have similar/the same social-political issues with gender (and seemingly no gender dysphoria) yet demand to be referred to as trans.

Allan Hunter Jxxx Ryxx Yeah I've seen that too. Also a lot of transgender activists are quite welcoming and keep pronouncing me transgender whether I like it or not. I hate to seem ungrateful, I think their intentions are sincere, but unless we go back to using "transsexual" to refer to M2F and F2M, it seems kind of silly to turn "transgender" into this Big Tent thing that means every conceivable way of being gender variant, from cross-dresser to gay femme to butch dyke to god-knows-what.

Zxxx Zxxn Just to clarify Allan Hunter, what you call yourself is up to you, and I have no desire to "proclaim" you anything. I am personally skeptical of the entire notion of "genderqueer", because I think it rests on essentialized notions about gender. That's just my opinion, and not an indication that I want to change you.


Allan Hunter OK I'm cool with that. Folks who can be skeptical but not dismissive are the best listeners; they aren't going to "believe" stuff until and unless they understand it. And I don't need people who are ready to accept that I'm a pine tree if I say that I'm a pine tree, you know?

Nxxi Mcxxxxxx I don't understand what makes you not a man.

Nxxi Mcxxxxxx its ok to be a feminine man.

Nxxi Mcxxxxxx admirable even

Axyx Mxxx-Gxxxbn some of us view manhood as a state of mind and maleness as sex characteristics

Nxxi Mcxxxxxx if you live as a man, and society treats you as a man, you a man.

Axyx Mxxx-Gxxxbn No lies detected!

Mxxxxxxe Axxxx You can be cis or you can be trans. There is no gap left by the definitions of cis and trans for anyone else. Either your gender identity aligns with your birth sex or it doesn't.

You say it doesn't but you don't want to change anything about yourself, neither your appearance or your identity and you want the rest of the world to throw out everything they think, all of the helpful stereotypes that allow them to navigate the world every day so they can take you at your word that you're actually a little girl.

You're delusional.

Lxxxa Hxxxxn It’s pretty entitled to state that:::

A:
a heterosexual male uses a gay slur to ID. Aka **queer

B:
gender oppresses women and girls, so gender isn’t breaking down or dismantling the male hierarchy BY males who benefit from it.

C:
Cis is a misnomer for women and girls.

ANY woman or girl, heterosexual,
bisexual and lesbian,
reading, short hair, not wanting children, using BIRTH control, abortion, driving, wearing jeans, OR even VOTING.... etc.

Is already gender non-conforming in many societal cultures AND theological beliefs.

What exactly are YOU doing that IS gender non-conforming as a male?

What makes any man...
“Less” male?

Lxxxxe Lxxxxxxe I didn't take the time to read everything you posted cuz admitelly it's a lot, but I do think your usage of the term "genderqu**r" is offensive.

Lxxxa Hxxxxn Bored heterosexuals wanna seem WOKE by looking “Queer”.

Allan Hunter Lxxxxe Lxxxxxxe I'm offended by your offense at the use of "genderqu**r". Which I didn't use. I used "genderqueer". Get those damn asterisks out of my identityword.

Mxxxxxxe Axxxx Allan Hunter you're a straight man calling yourself a gay slur. If you get knocked the fuck out for using a slur against homosexuals it isn't oppression against men who identify as little girls. You just fucking deserve it.

Lxxxxe Lxxxxxxe That's it, I'm screenshotting

Allan Hunter Mxxxxxxe Axxxx I've been called "queer" all my life. Been queerbashed for it too. I didn't have to prove an attraction to males in order to get in on the homophobic action. I'm as entitled to reclaim slurs as you are.

Mxxxxxxe Axxxx I'm not entitled to reclaim gay slurs. I've been called the t slur my whole life. Doesn't give me the right to reclaim it. It's not mine to reclaim and the q slur isn't yours.

Allan Hunter Tell me about being called the t slur your whole life. Genuine curiosity. When I was growing up I never heard any kid call any other kid by what I presume is the word you call the t word. Could be generational; I don't think we were aware of it.

(no answer)

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Different Strokes

I'm with my Mom in her hospital room. Her body flung a bunch of clots into her circulatory system; one of them wiped out some brain functioning, mostly motor and sensory stuff but some cognitive functions are messed up too; the worst of them plugged up her femoral artery and it cost her most of her left leg, so she's in bed with no knee or anything below it on that side; yet another tried its best to claim her other leg as well, but the surgeons sliced deep into her calf muscle and removed the clot, and after a few iffy days she had enough circulation in that foot that they stopped saying they might have to remove her right leg as well.

It's a huge insult to body integrity; it's almost impossible for me to be here without identifying with her situation and recoiling from it in horror, thinking life would not be worth living, that I wouldn't want to continue like that, and of course she does feel and express a lot of that (to everyone else's dismay). But she wants out of the hospital and to regain control of her life, since dying doesn't seem imminent. She sent me downstairs for a grilled cheese sandwich, bypassing the hospital dietician's tasteless pablum (and ate half of it, which is more than she's been eating off the hospital trays), and then asked me to help her sit up and swing her legs over the side of the bed (this is something physical therapy has been working towards, but my Mom is pushing the issue; she wants maximum mobility and she wants it now).


She and my Dad both fall into that difficult-to-explain middle space when it comes to understanding and accepting me as genderqueer. On the one hand, they've never rejected or made an issue of my femininities. Didn't seem bothered by my lack of interest in sports or my preference for girl playmates when I was a little boy. Didn't join their voices to those of other adults — relatives, neighbors' parents, people from church and school — in questioning why I wasn't more like other boys. And there's no way it wasn't brought to their attention, so they had to have dismissed these concerns as immaterial and irrelevant. The way I was was fine with them. They even suggested a career in nursing back when I was in my early 20s.

On the other hand, I've been out and have tried to be vocal about it since 1980, taking a public stand as a male feminine person, explaining it as a social issue, but their reaction has consistently been "Why do you want to talk about that? That's a personal matter, it's private and nobody else's business and it isn't polite to bring it up". In short, they're OK with me being a male person who happens to have some feminine traits or to have made some choices and decisions that are viewed as appropriate for women and girls, but not so OK with me defining who I am in those terms. They don't like me distinguishing myself from other identities, from straight, from cisgender, from transgender, from gay, in order to explain that my identity is different, that it's something else.


My reading material this week has been Hida Viloria's Born Both, an intersex memoir. Once again I'm finding the thoughts and experiences of intersex activists to be very topical and relevant to my own even though I'm not intersex myself. A great deal of the focus of Born Both is the distinction between viewing one's self as an (otherwise) ordinary man or woman with a physical (medical) intersex condition, or viewing one's self as an intersex person, a person whose body is intersex (not male or female) and whose gender is hermaphrodite (not man or woman). That definitely resonates with me, kin as it is to the distinction between viewing myself as an (otherwise) ordinary male guy who has some feminine traits and behaviors or instead as a gender invert, a male girl or male femme.

Late in the book Viloria writes about her discomfort with the formulation "cisgender": it is a term that sometimes been defined as that state where one's gender matches one's birth sex, and sometimes instead as that state where one's gender is consistent with the gender assigned to one at birth. The problem for Viloria (and for intersex people) is that in the case of the first definition for cisgender, a person who identifies as intersex would be cisgender (the birth sex is intersex and so is the gender identity), which is misleading, and in the case of the second definition, intersex people would be labeled transgender instead because virtually no one is assigned "intersex" — but that's misleading too. The possibility of "intersex" gets erased by binary assumptions that are built into transgender versus cisgender definitions.

And again I find myself nodding with recognition, because I often feel erased by the same definitions. In my case, I have a body, which is male, which was assigned male when I was born, and which continues to be assigned male by anyone who views it. So my sex is cisgender, right? Well, I have a gender too: girl, or femme — definitely not guy or boy or man. Yet my assigned gender, both at birth and as an ongoing act of assignment-by-others, is perennially boy, guy, man. So my gender is trans. The problem for me is that there is a very lazy distinction between sex and gender in the definitions of cisgender and transgender. Those definitions erase the possibility of someone having a current sex that does not "match" their current gender. In other words, they erase me.


Viloria also identifies as a "hermaphrodyke". Her gender is hermaphrodite, her sexual orientation is towards women, and she thinks of herself as a lesbian, not as a straight guy. She of all people would not be inclined to box in everyone as either male or female, and hence as objects of attraction to her as either one orientation or the other; but although in her book she describes times when straight women were attracted to her as a straight guy, and gay men to her as a gay guy, her own appetite seems linked to those set of morphological characteristics that make up classical female body structure. That is true for me as well. There do exist viewpoints among people within the LGBTQIA communities to the effect that no one should have a morphological preference. That it is transphobic or chauvinistically binary to go around requiring that the people to whom one is attracted be in possession of a standard-issue penis or that they own a conventionally defined vagina or whatever. Reciprocally, there is a suspicious mistrust for people whose sexual interests are expressed specifically towards transgender people. Trans women and trans men often find it creepy and objectifying in a fetishy and dehumanizing way to encounter folks who want to become sexually involved with a trans woman (or man) when they themselves identify as women and men, not as trans women or trans men.

But among nonbinary people there has emerged the term skoliosexual, i.e., "to be attracted to transgender or non-binary/genderqueer people". Not all non-cisgender people are people whose identify is anchored in the binary identity opposite to the one they were born into (or assigned to at birth), and as a consequence some of us actively prefer to connect with people who are affirmatively attracted to us as we are, for what we are, for our configuration. Viloria proudly described partners who found her intersex body intrinsically attractive and relays similar tales and experiences from other intersex people she's compared notes with.


My mom is an attractive woman. She has nice curves, nice female shapes even at 82. I'm seeing a lot more of it than I'm accustomed to — hospitals are like that in general, and in her case she keeps feeling so hot that she can't get comfortable, so she's almost become a naturist here. There's a first-tier reaction of turning away from it, embarrassed by proxy. She's from an era and a culture where you kept yourself covered up, especially if you were a woman. But being attactive, being perceived as attractive, is a part of her identity, part of how she thinks of herself: she brushes her hair here, and puts on makeup: blusher, powder, lipstick. She isn't seeking to be attractive in order to prompt active sexual behavior from anyone (she's got that situation handled; she's got my Dad), but because it is woven into her concept of who she is. For me to find her so, on the other hand, is inappropriate, disturbingly so to most people. It's supposed to be so taboo that it would be impossible for me to see those contours in sexual terms. We've put a lot of energy into supposed to when it comes to sexuality. As a culture we invest in shoulds and should nots and leave little room for people to feel what they feel, alleged sexual revolutions beside the point. Poke at this particular one and you'll see that under it is the hidden notion that male people can't help acting on any sexual feeling that they experience. The #metoo movement says that's bullshit. I do too. The attraction is there because my mom is female. Not because I'm imposing a litmus test that says I can only find someone attractive if they're female. I'm pretty sure I'm not imposing much in the way of shoulds here if you see what I mean. I can also state with confidence that finding her attractive doesn't make it likely that I'm going to climb into her hospital bed and commit acts of sexual assault. People don't recoil in quite the same way at the notion of a daughter seeing her Dad as a sexually attractive man. But that's because there's a preconceived notion about what male sexuality is like, one that lots of folks hold in their heads without being fully conscious of it.


The difference between being a guy who has some feminine attributes and being a male girl is the same as the difference between being a woman (or man) with some sexually ambiguous characteristics and being an intersex person. It's the difference between noun and adjective, it's the declaration of a phenomenon, a thang. Before 1980 I knew myself to be a male person who had more in common with the girls than with the other boys; I was aware that that made me subject to being classified as a fag, a sissy queerboy, which wasn't right but neither was it right to say that no, I was a regular guy, a straight boy. After 1980 I knew myself to have an entirely separate gender or sexual identity, something just as different as being gay, but not that, and not being male-to-female transgender either. Something else. Something folks hadn't heard about yet, weren't talking about, had no awareness of. It was a sense of identity instead of a box of attributes. It converted the attributes into normative aspects for a male girl instead of peculiar aspects for a guy. It explained my experiences in political terms instead of implying that character defects on my part had brought my experiences upon me. It made a huge difference in my self-esteem.

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Fitting In, or Not

Hi, I'm an Yshkovwschkvitk! My pronouns are dvv, dvvke, dvvxze'oe in the nominative, dvvesh, dvvkei'sh, dvvze'oesh in the dative. Possessives take the 'mmsh at the end.

No I don't expect you to memorize that and use it. Meanwhile, sincere apologies to everyone who does specify a set of pronouns: I respect you and I promise I'm not mocking you. I will use yours as per your preference as soon as I'm made aware of your terminologies. This isn't about mocking you. It's about me not fitting in. I always feel like a Martian. My identity never seems to mesh with anything already established, so that I could say "I'm one of THOSE folks", however marginalized and minority-ized they may be. I wish it wasn't so. I have always yearned for a recognizable label, a part of town, a stereotype, an Us-hood I could be a part of, a commonality of experience.

I've confronted the possibility of being a regular cis het boy, of being a gay fellow, of being a transgender male-to-female person, of being bisexual, of being genderfluid, of being agender, and always I keep coming back to the same mantra: "No, that's not it. No, that's STILL not it. It's something else".

I do identify as genderqueer. My identity doesn't seem so outlandishly strange to ME, really: My body is male, who I have always been is one of the girls or women, and I'm attracted to the female folks 'cuz I like their body configurations. I'm a sissy, a femme, a male who is attracted to female folk, a femme who likes both butches and femme female people, a male who is attracted to female folk, a sex role nonconformist who likes feminist theory, a dyke tyke, a neohippie embracing nonmasculine nonaggressive modes of how to be a male person, etc etc. All seems unremarkably commonplace to me except that somehow I ended up alone in this endeavor. The hippie malefolk weren't as centered on abandoning masculinity and were often into male confrontational macho aggressive shit, the sissy femme folk were most often lusting for male sexual attention and weren't good conversational political company for a femme guy into girlish bodied folks instead, the feminist activists weren't very interested in males trying to participate for their own non-chivalrous reasons, and the dykes weren't into folks in male bodies.

Do I need an aggregate identity? Can I just be my own weird self and enjoy that? Well, I don't need a vote of approval, that's for certain. Don't need your endorsement in order to feel legitimate in my identity, you know? But I'm lonely, politically speaking. I say politically speaking 'cuz I've had the good fortune to establish personal solutions, yummy loving people with yummy skins who like who I am and like the body I'm equipped with and have the body I like to touch and be next to and all that. Which is, incidentally, relevant: yeah, lots of gender-variant peoples' coming-out is a mating call, which doesn't make it NOT political because as feminists taught us the personal IS political, and damn right it's political to make an issue about the social difficulty of establishing a personal solution. But even after the personal sitch is appropriately handled the political doesn't go away, OK?

I never thought about pronouns. It wasn't a thing in 1980, nor was the possibility of identifying as genderqueer. People see me, they say "he" and "him". People hear me on the phone they say "she" and "ma'am" and "miss". None of it is right. I like the lack of consistency but I don't have preferred pronouns really.

I'm not joining up. I mean yeah, I join the Facebook groups for transgender and genderqueer and nonbinary folk and gender nonconformist and so on, and participate, but I'm not window-shopping for some other folks' sense of self that I can embrace. Or... OK yes I am, I just haven't found it yet dammit. Yes I am. I want that sense of belonging, who am I kidding?? But I'm willing to continue to be a misfit among misfits up until I really find people whose tales and self-forged identities resonate with me. So far, that hasn't happened. I think there's an "us" but we aren't collected under a label yet.

OK, or alternatively maybe I just dislike the social politics of aggregate identity. We've decided who We are. We've chosen the following terms, and picked the following existing descriptions to find offensive, in order to raise social consciousness about us and realize what we go through. Yeah, that stuff. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's illegitimate or anything, I just don't want to join into an aggregate voice unless I feel like it is saying exactly what I'd say on my own, or else where I feel listened to and included and somewhat understood in the groups.

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Beyond the OTHER Binary

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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The Arrogance of Claiming to Be a Social Change Activist

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

I replied,

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

Before long, another author answered that with

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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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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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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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:

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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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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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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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:

"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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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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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 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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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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