Clarifying Gender Inversion

I participate on a message board where I've been variously characterized as an attention-seeking special snowflake, a "transtrender" wishing to be edgy, and dismissed repeatedly. But recently, I posted a response that, for reasons I still don't entirely comprehend, seems to have gotten through and made sense to people who previously said I was a pretentious jerk.

So, on the offchance that I said something more brilliantly than I yet realize, I'll repeat it here.



[ I am replying to this: ]

I think I said this before in one of Ahunter's threads, but I fear that by starting too many catagories and boxes you run the risk of them losing all meaning.

And on one hand, I hate to sound like I'm "gatekeeping", but surely there has to be SOME kind of criteria to actually count as LGBT, not simply just claim to be one, without actually having ANY sort of trait of such.

(This would probably be for another thread)

I'm reminded of Person A, and her whole, "I'm an asexual non-binary furry who's into BDSM" schtick.[

/end of what I'm replying to]

A whole bunch of gender identities (that "stargender" thing, "alien" genders, altgenders that invoke animal personae, etc) fall into the broader heading of genderfuck —*the notion that gender is a social notion with no redeeming features so we should fling our sabots into it and make it break down.

I respect the people who think gender in its entirety is a fucked-up notion and that we should deep-six it. I'm not entirely on board with it though.

I think on a biological basis there are two sexes, and a handful of variations that we can dump into "intersex", like Kleinfelder's and androgen insensitivity and plain old variances like having a 3" long clitoris and so forth. That's the physical.

We pay attention because sexuality hardwires a significant percent of us to have sexual attraction to the opposite (of the two conventional) sexes for reproductive evolutionary purposes. And because we pay such attention it becomes an important part of how we classify people.

GENDER is a sociologist's notion, the batch of concepts and expectations and nuanced interpretations that we have come to attach to those two sexes. (One such notion is that there are indeed just two sexes — we ignore the handful of intersex variations and hide them, surgically shoehorning them into conformity to a two-sex schema, and they are now actively resisting that politically). GENDER is often acknowledged and rejected as a bunch of stultifying old-fashioned bullshit notions about differences between the sexes, because WTF, we all grew up with feminism and we're so past that bullshit, right?

But if you peruse our message board (a good example of a decently educated community with a somewhat progressive worldview) you still see a plethora of posts popping up in which differences between the sexes are taken for granted. And if they proliferate there, one can readily believe such notions persist elsewhere, such as in one's hometown, school, or office.

If there are still a batch of persistent notions and expectations and interpretations etc, then the experience of coming up against them is still real. That's GENDER.

I dunno...maybe the genderfuck folk have the right of it, but I'm not that enlightened; I formed a reaction that's shaped like "No, I don't fit over here, I fit over THERE ", and having done so I lived decades with that understanding-of-self in my head.

Lots of trans folks (of the normal mainstream variety, M2F and F2M) did that too.

I may finally be getting my fucking book published. I say "may" because this is the third time I've had a signed contract and the other two times didn't put any books on Amazon's site or otherwise for sale anywhere, and I could manage to fuck this one up too. I'm not M2F. I don't think my body needs fixifications and I don't seek to be perceived as a female-bodied person (because I'm not). [b]Guin[/b] and others see me as seeking special snowflake status * and/or complicating up the map of reasonable identities. I don't. If anything, I think mine is simpler than what the conventional trans people wish you to comprehend:

M2F person: "I was born with a body that the hospital folks printed 'male' on my birth certificate. But who I am is a woman. And I am female, either with or without a medical transition, and you should regard and treat me as such"

Me: "I was born male. But just like the M2F people, I'm not the person my social environment assumes I am on the basis of my maleness, I'm a far better fit for the person my social environment assumes of people who are female. That makes me a sissy, or a male girl, or a tomboy-in-reverse, or whatever you wanna call it, but either way my body ain't the problem."

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responses:

[Person B]I think that post is worthy of a thread in its own right, either here on or the other board. It's interesting information and would make an interesting discussion.

[Person C]Hey there. I will confess to having been confused and irritated at times with your many posts and threads about gender.I pretty much gave up on reading them. Today I read your post in the Behind Your Back snark thread, and it was so well-written that it broke through my ignorance and prejudice. It clarified some of the things I have been confused about, and it really clarified your particular case. Thanks for posting it.

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Tréjà Vu — I Have a Publisher for my Book!

I'm happy to report that I have a contract with Sunstone Books for the publication of GENDERQUEER: A Story from a Different Closet. Sunstone is a Santa Fe NM based publisher, which I'm happy about since the action in the book takes place in New Mexico. I don't have a formal release date yet but I expect it to come out in the general vicinity of January 2020.

GENDERQUEER is the coming-out and coming-of-age story of a gender nonconforming male. Set in the late 1970s, it's a work of nonfiction and highlights the realness of an identity that is not gay, bisexual, lesbian, or transgender, but isn't cisgender and heterosexual either -- "it's something else".

It's a work of nonfiction. It's my story.

GENDERQUEER is a 96,000 word tale with real people, characters and dialogue, that is intended to make some fairly complex social concepts accessible to people who aren't regular readers of political and social theory.

It will be my first published commercial piece. So I'm a debut author.



I don't feel like a debut author. I feel like an old and rather weary traveler plodding across the damn desert.

That probably has something to do with the fact that this is the third time I've had a contract to get this book published.

Ellora's Cave was going to publish it in 2016 but they went out of business.

Original Announcement
Retraction

Then, in 2017, StarNine Press said they would publish it, if I worked with the editor to shorten and tighten the first third of the book. It turned out that by "tighten" they meant "discard", and we were unable to reach a mutually satisfactory understanding and publication was cancelled at my request.

Original Announcement
Retraction


I sent out nearly 1500 queries to literary agents about this book and never succeeded in getting a lit agent. Eventually I began querying small independent publishers and at this point the tally of those is 117 queries to publishers, resulting in three signed contracts.

The third of which had jolly well better be the proverbial charm.

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Polyamory and the Self-Actualized Sissy

Occasionally it comes out in conversation that I am polyamorous and have had multiple simultaneous partners. This is a fact that often gets misconstrued:

Jake: Whoo, well, sissy or no, I see we have some stuff in common. Rock on! You may not be in to all that masculinity be-a-man stuff but when it comes down to the important things you know how to get what you need, huh?

Maud: Is this like a compensation thing, to make up for being left out and pushed to the sidelines while the manly men were getting all the girls?

Now, I like occasionally having a moment of solidarity and experience-in-common with the non-hostile incarnations of the conventional male, and it may in fact have some element of compensatory pleasure or “making up for lost time” associated with it, I suppose, but I feel like most folks miss an important connection between being poly and being sissy.

Polarization versus Unification

The conventional portrait of sexuality, gender, and companionship looks something like this. I’ll work from the cis hetero male model since I am male and perceived as male and hence compared to this more often, regardless of how I identify. Ready? He has a cluster of same-sex friends, his “group” or his “buddies”, his “crowd”, and some are closer friends than others; these are easy informal relationships, without definitional structures. They are certainly multiple in nature and he may become closer to one friend over time or more distant with another, all without any need to redefine the relationships (since they don’t have formal definitions anyhow). Meanwhile, entirely separate from that, he has erotic interests in women, and is predisposed to form long-term pair-bonding with one if there is a sufficiently strong emotional attachment formed. Outside (or prior to) such a pair-bond, he may pursue sexual activity with multiple different partners, and may in fact behave in such a way as to preserve this sexual freedom by doing things to postpone or reduce the likelihood of pair-bond emotional passions forming. But it is still assumed that eventually he wants that to occur and that when it does he will be sexually exclusive. Even if not, it is assumed that he will not form similar deep emotionally connected pair-bonds with someone else, that the pair-bond relationship is at least exclusive in its own domain.

I am not going to critique this model for its inherent healthiness or desirability, at least not at the moment. Instead, let’s just toss this masculine model out of the way and bring myself in, a sissy male, and examine what changes from that alone. Well, first of all, instead of all my friends being same-sex, I tend to form friendships with women. Second, in contrast to some notion of a separate “friend zone” versus a “romantic possibility” classification, it’s not a separate phenomenon for me: the people I like as friends, being of the sex that I’m attracted to, are the people with whom there’s a potential for a sexual connection, a romantic connection. At the time that the connections are forming, I don’t know where they’re headed. Sexuality isn’t something foreign to friendship for me. Thirdly, just as the cis hetero guy’s friendships change over time, with him getting closer to some and farther apart from others, my relationships shift, and those shifts include into and out of sexual and romantic expression and feelings. So not only do I not know where they’re headed when they’re starting up, they may change.

That’s what it means, what it’s like, to be a person who is “like” rather than heterodifferent from the sex to whom I feel sexual attraction. It doesn’t make sense to “break up” with someone or to attempt sexual exclusivity or to expect or request it of someone else.

Works for Me


When I describe this to people, they sometimes say that it's a sad and inferior version of sexuality. They also sometimes say that it's a sad and creepy version of friendship. For my part, I think it would be sad and kind of pathological to be unable to be friends with someone you're strongly sexually attracted to. To be unable to feel that attraction without erupting into sexual aggression, sexual harassment, rape, molestation, sexual intrusiveness, etc; to find it necessary to attain that person sexually or else to run for the hills, to get away from them. I don't have that problem. I mean, yeah, I want sex and romantic love to be in my life, with someone, at least now and then; I need to experience that, and it's quite painful to be completely isolated from it. But as long as that's happening now and then in my life, I don't need it to be happening with this particular person, and it's OK to find them exquisitely delicious and not have anything develop out of that. And also, I don't think of sexual feelings as some kind of filthy things that are going to pollute a friendship.




There are people who practice a narrowly constrained form of pseudo-polyamory, wherein a person (nearly always male) is OK with his partner(s) having other partners of their own but only partners that are not of his sex. In other words, a “one penis policy”. In essence, he is isn’t seeing other female partners of his partners as competitive threats, but would see another male as such.

I don’t think I’m particularly inclined to see the sexual realm of life as all about competition, although I suppose some competitive aspects may be inevitable. But there’s another factor there for me, which is that I don’t tend to see other male partners of my partners as direct competition. Female partners either, for that matter. If there’s one flip side to sissyhood as a marginalized and rarefied identity, a structural advantage for a change, it’s the sense of veritable uniqueness. If someone likes being with me, they may also like being with other male people or other femme people but neither of those categories is going to be a snap-in replacement for me, so anyone with a taste for someone like me is going to be inclined to keep me around! I guess the closest approximation to a “one penis policy” in my case would be a “one SISSY policy”, but hey, we don’t exactly grow like weeds, with sissy suitors lurking around every corner, so I’ve never felt the need for that kind of protection either.

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A Diagnosis of Dysphoria

When I was 38, my girlfriend broke up with me. She indicated that her life had become too complicated to maintain a relationship – too many other demands on her time and energy. And Iw as obviously just casually involved, enjoying the connection for the sex and fun. She knew it wasn’t serious for me because I hadn’t tried to restrict her from dating other guys and, besides, I was a guy. Things are different for guys, she said. It might hurt now but within a month or so I’d be dating someone else.

The combination of this characterization and the horrifying prospect of trying to flirt and date again kept me sidelined for over a year in hurt and anger, and then drove me into a more specific despair. I felt alien, unknowable.

I had come to New York City 12 years earlier, to find support and understanding and community as a male who felt and thought differently than other males; I’d come to New York as a would-be activist heterosexual sissy. But I hadn’t found others like me or an identity-community to be an activist within.

Since I had counseling services covered by my employer-issued health plan, I made some calls, wanting someone to talk to.

“Oh, yes, there’s term for that now, and a lot of literature about it, it’s called gender identity dysphoria. Can I schedule you for next Tuesday?”

That snapped-in, over-the-phone diagnosis was partially correct. I was in serious distress, I was feeling very poorly understood in all my available social environments; I felt trapped and imprisoned within the set of beliefs and assumptions that I was a Man. But the diagnosis was partially incorrect as well: I did not have any issue with my body or with how my body per se was categorized by the people around me.

My real complaint lies not with the specific inaccuracy of the diagnosis, but with the mindset behind it, the tendency to medicalize differences, to define them as pathological. I was, as I said, in distress, but my difference was not and is not an ailment. Even if the distress would not have been occurring if it weren’t for my difference, the difference wasn’t and isn’t the location of the malady.

This was not the worst offense of this nature that I’ve experienced. In 1979, I had gone to the university medical clinic’s walk-in therapy facility to talk about feeling like I was more of a girl than I was kin to the other boys, only to be told “We know what causes that now” and prescribed Stelazine, an antipsychotic neuroleptic drug.

Medicalizing, or “psychiatrizing”, people’s differences – such as being gender-atypical – defines the problem as residing in the suffering person’s own self, when in cases like these the problem actually resides in society and its shared systems of beliefs and understandings. Or lack of understandings, if you prefer.

This mindset, this clinical behavior on the part of therapists and therapeutic practices, is an outgrowth of our western medical tradition, where patients are subdivided up into systems and organs and thought of as ailments to which the correct medical intervention merely needs to be applied. The right pill, the appropriate intervention. The tendency is exacerbated by the insurance companies, which pay for the treatment of ailments (“please provide the diagnostic code on line 7”), and medical malpractice law, which sees culpability for anything going wrong when a specific medical malady is not addressed with the established protocol.

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The Sissy and the Stigma of Sexual Interest

I was so painfully self-conscious.

In the book I’m working on, I’m writing about dropping in at Identity House, circa 1986. So I’m conjuring up the memories. Coming up the stairs and opening the doors and then being afraid to make eye contact with anyone.

“Hey there, welcome”, said a thirty-esque guy with wire-frame glasses.
“Hi”, I nodded back at him. I broke eye contact and glanced around. A woman with spiky styled blue-tipped hair and wearing snug dark blue jeans was sitting on the arm of a couch, watching a red-haired girl stapling paper to a large green sheet of construction paper. A black guy with large oval earrings was singing softly along with his radio over in the other direction.

I felt awkward, as I often did in gay and lesbian environments. Didn’t want to display overt interest in the attractive girl; lesbians presumably don’t come to gay and lesbian centers to be stared at by guys. Didn’t want to focus attention on any of the guys, lest they get the wrong idea. Stupid social clumsiness. Like they’re going to think anything faintly approaching friendliness from me is an act of sexual aggression. Yeesh.

Do you want to know where that came from, that overwhelming fear of being perceived as person with [gasp!] sexual lusts and interests and appetite? Here’s what that has to do with being a sissy –

Let’s start with the boys. As a sissy I was periodically accused of harboring sexual interest towards my male classmates and other acquaintances. I’m using the word “accused” advisedly – the notion that I had any such feelings was addressed with significant hostility, contempt, outright hatred. If I had indeed felt such feelings, these attitudes would have made it difficult for me to feel comfortable with my identity and my nature, and I would have had to wrestle with that, I think. In my case, I didn’t; if I had ever been inclined to find males sexually attractive, any such signal was rapidly drowned in the noise of being accused of it, mocked for it, having my face rubbed in it, so to speak. After a few years of that, I was less likely to be friendly, to be curious or interested, to expect to be included or welcomed. Standoffish and snobbish elicited their own forms of the same basic hostility, so I was trained to a mild and non-judgmental presence, neither recoiling from them nor paying any attention aside from getting out of their way.

Well, that left the girls. Here’s the situation with the girls: they made observations about unwanted and intrusive sexual attention from boys, observations that were the precursors of #metoo, that lots of boys were sexually creepy, with “hands problem”, selfishly pushy about sex. And also that, within relationships or on dates, boys would press for sexual activity, not caring about the girl as a person, and what self-respecting girl would want to get close to that? I, as a self-respecting sissy, most assuredly didn’t want the girls thinking of me that way. I wanted the girls to respect me as they respected themselves. Oh, I wanted sex, all right, no question about that, but I wanted it to mean something. I wanted a girlfriend. I wasn’t opposed to the idea of casual sex, but if it was going to be casual sex it had to be mutual, and it had to take place in such a way that both of us felt OK about our participation, and not like we’d been throw down into the sewer.

I go through life walking on eggshells terrified that someone’s going to think I’m sexually interested in them. That’s part of my experience as a sissy male, that people react to the possibility of me being interested in them with disgust and irritation.

In an LGBTQ context, like Identity House, you might think it would be easier, right? But although I was for once not in a context where males having sexual interest in other males would be stigmatized as something disgusting, I was walking into that situation with a lot of unease and lack of general comfort about people thinking I had sexual interest in them. I was afraid the boys, if they misread me and got the wrong idea, would later think I was being judgmental or prudish or rude; I didn’t have a well-developed repertoire for turning aside sexually interested people gracefully. Then there were the girls, of course. It was easier, to be in a situation where they’d be less likely to assume any guy they encounter was likely to be on the verge of expressing unwanted sexual interest. But on the other hand, most of them would be lesbians and I was afraid that it might be especially annoying to a lesbian to encounter some guy in a place like Identity House and pick up on him being attracted, because presumably she isn’t hanging out at gay and lesbian centers in order to be stared at or focused upon by males.


This was the situation in which I found myself as a young adult. It was very much an empowering insight to rethink that situation, for the first time, by comparing it to that of women my age. They were widely considered (and expected) to be, to varying degrees, wary and cautious about expressing their sexual interests and appetites. It was socially understood that even when they did, in fact, feel sexual interest towards a person, they might have ambivalent attitudes and feelings about acting on it, including the act of letting that interest be known and perceived. (Admittedly, they seemed to do a far better job of coping with unwanted attentions, but perhaps that came with practice)

Here was a model for accepting this kind of hesitant and uncertain sexuality without regarding it as pathetic, damaged, unhealthy. In fact, being aware of one’s own complex feelings about sexuality was often portrayed as a sign of a good healthy respect for one’s self, in contrast to which enthusiastically availing one’s self of sexual experiences whenever the opportunity held some degree of appetizing attraction was seen as a possible sign of lacking sufficient standards or appropriate boundaries. In my case, it was liberating to be able to view myself as a non-pathological sexual creature, ambivalences and wariness about my own sexual interests included. Maybe it wasn’t a very practical way to be in the world if one were male, but when I considered it this way, it looked like I would be not so far outside the normal if I had been female. Or if I considered myself to be the same kind of person that they were.

And it meshed with the rest of how I saw myself. It immediately fit. I’d always emulated the girls, admired them, measured myself against them as my role models.

I stopped feeling ashamed and stopped worrying that I was sexually broken, some kind of basket case. I liked who I was and now that could see my sexual nature from this vantage point, I liked my sexuality as it was. And I realized I wasn’t going to find a suitable expression of it within any of the behavioral models offered to men. If I were going to make it work, I would do so by looking at how women, the people who were most like me, had made a successful go of it.

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To Gender or Not To Gender?

Do we want to rid the world of gender, that evil conformity-demanding set of constraints, or do we like gender, as long as we don’t get the wrong one shoved down our throats? This is a recurrent discussion within my Facebook groups and other support environments. Some of us have gone to a lot of trouble and expense to package our presentation so as to receive the altercast gender-identity from others that matches how we think of ourselves; others among us have gone to a similar degree of effort and hassle to get out of the gender-cage that we’ve felt trapped in.

I’m not neutral in this debate, although I try to remain open-minded. I’m a gendered person. I have a gender atypical for my physical sex, but it’s a real gender and not just the lack of the typical, expected one. I’m a femme, one of the girlish sort; I spent my life seeking approval of, competing with, and otherwise evaluating myself against the girls and, later, women that I saw as people who were like me.

Some people contest my identification of myself as genderqueer, stating that “genderqueer” is for people who want to subvert and undermine the world’s evil gender system, throwing their metaphorical sabots into the cultural gender-machinery. Is gender inherently evil?


Gender is social, not biological. But that doesn’t mean gender was arbitrarily invented or that it’s entirely capricious and meaningless. I think of gender as having two components: generalization and ideology. At the level of generalization, gender is that set of descriptions and attributes that, in general, are more true of one sex than the other, and hence are associated with it. Then, stirred into the mixture, there’s ideology, a sort of propaganda that isn’t about how people actually are but instead is prescriptive, how the system wants people to be. The system in question is patriarchy, and therefore a lot of the ideological part of gender has to do with how a patriarchal system “wants” people to behave a certain way. For example, the patriarchal system wants men to have authority over women, so servility gets built into femininity for propaganda reasons.

The handling of exceptions to the general rule is also tainted by ideology. A generalization by itself doesn’t become prescriptive; if we generalize that roses are red, that by itself doesn’t lead us to go around chopping down rosebushes that sprout yellow or white or purple roses instead. We may in fact prize the exceptions for their rarity and regard them as special. But our social system positions the sexes against each other, perhaps so that they’ll expend lots and lots of energy trying to gain the upper hand instead of joining forces, or perhaps that’s the invariable result of inequality. But it does polarize the two identities into opposites, exaggerating differences and encouraging us to think of the other category as other and foreign and very different. And that creates an ideological hostility towards the exceptions.


What world will we be able to have if we successfully dismantle the ideology? If it is no longer socially unacceptable for the male-bodied people to exhibit the traits and behaviors associated with the female folks and vice versa, will we end up with a world that has no notion of “feminine” and “masculine”, no notion of gender remaining? Or will there continue to be a sense of general differences?

In the 1970s, the mainstream feminism of the times created the notion of “unisex”, a humanistic and egalitarian belief that everyone should be treated with identical expectations instead of sexist different standards. Nowadays you mostly only see the word “unisex” in the windows of hair salons. Meanwhile, we’ve come to recognize that the sex of one’s birth should not and does not define one’s gender, and we speak of transgender as well as cisgender women, transgender as well as cisgender men. Will gender itself wither away and die, so that in years to come no one will be either trans or cis, feminine or masculine?

I don’t know. Give us fairness and social flexibility to be the selves that we find most affirming and I guess we’ll find out!

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Tomboys

"I think you have a misconception", my women's studies professor told me. "Feminism is not 'for women who step away from traditional feminine expectations and roles'", she said, making air quotes. "Feminism is for all women. We want to support women's freedom to choose their own options, and that includes being a mother, or a receptionist. It even includes being a sex object". She paused and sighed. "In my day we were trying to get away from that, but now lots of women are seeking it. Anyway, my point is, feminism isn't about telling women how they're supposed to be. It's fine to not conform to the expectations that are projected onto women but it's also fine if you do, if it's what you want for yourself".


I understood her point, but it was still nevertheless true that lots of women who were not traditionally feminine had felt a special resonance with feminism. Feminism told them it was okay to be the way they were, in a world where everyone else was saying otherwise, so of course they had a special interest in it!

I just finished rereading Tomboys!, a collection of short reminiscences edited by Lynne Yamagushi and Karen Barber. The subtitle is "Tales of Dyke Derring-Do". It is specifically about the experience of growing up unfeminine, or masculine if you prefer. Tomboyish, hoydenish, boisterous and forward and irrepressible, physical, nervy, athletic, competitive, immodest and not demurely amenable. Hell on wheels.

The women writing the pieces were definitely seeing themselves as revolutionary insurrectionists, and they saw it as specifically feminist bravery. How could they not?

Anyway, I'm reading these stories again, and, not for the first time, wishing for a similarly compiled collection from tomboyish women whose sexual orientation was towards male people. In particular, I'd be interested in reading how they negotiated a sexuality that didn't require betraying their personalities and behavioral patterns as tomboys in order to be sexual participants with male partners. And how they structured their relationships.

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Masculine

It’s a well-worn trope, an ancient meme: masculine guys are a problem for us sissies. They bully us, they oppress us, they’re hateful to us, and so forth.

I said “masculine guys” rather than “cis het males” because I’m not really focusing on how they identify but rather how they come across. I’m talking about masculinity as that set of personality and behavioral traits that are historically and conventionally associated with males; they’re presumed heterosexual and most of them probably are, although some are not.

Certainly some of the problem is homophobia – or, more precisely, sissyphobia – on their part. But even when you bracket that off, there is a tension there.

I know because I feel it. They set my teeth on edge sometimes. It can be like chewing on a strip of aluminum foil even when they aren’t bigoted sissyphobic assholes. And I suspect I have the same effect on them.

I don’t personally happen to be sexually attracted to the male morphology – it’s just not a set of shapes and contours that does anything for me. As for them, the masculine guys, some of them find males sexy but it isn’t the norm. But I exhibit characteristics of personality and behavior that are more commonly present in the people they are attracted to – female people – which is why those characteristics are called “feminine”. And for me? Well, it’s an oversimplification to describe the women I’m attracted to as being the same people as these masculine guys except expressed in female form, but yeah, they’re usually women who have been told over and over that they behave like guys, so it’s an oversimplification that works here.

I find it jarring to be around the masculine guys. The tension is sexual whether either of us experience it as sexy or not. Have you ever heard women complaining about feeling groped or undressed just from the speech and look of guys they encounter, of being leered at, spoken to in a jocular familiar tone with a wink in the voice and face even when it’s not a literal overt wink, something that’s subtle enough that nothing has been said or done that one can really object to. I’ve heard those descriptions, and along with them the assessment that sometimes it’s like swimming in sewage whenever you’re out and about. And I’ve nodded because I know the feeling.

Meanwhile, the masculine guys apparently find it jarring to be around people like me. I can’t say for sure what they’re feeling because I haven’t been directly inside their brains, but they often complain that sissy guys, by resembling women in various little unsettling ways, are teasing or provoking them, and it tends to make them angry.

Neither one of us may actually be doing anything to cause this feeling in the other. I didn’t start off with that charitable attitude though. I totally thought it was them and that they were being contemptuous and amused and invasively disrespectful of my dignity, broadcasting it as a threat. I disapproved of them and broadcasted back my resentment. If they weren’t actually doing anything, aside from simply being who they are, you could say I was bigoted and biased against them for being different. I definitely felt like I was “doing it right” and they were not being the way people are supposed to be. If this is true, then the only sense in which I can say they oppress me is that they significantly outnumber people like me, so their disapproval becomes a surrounding environment.

Interestingly, I became a lot more tolerant of people with masculine characteristics when I became aware that a lot of the women I found fascinating were expressing those traits. Doesn’t make sense to only hate them in guys. Especially while complaining that I’m being put down for exhibiting the same traits that are celebrated in female folks, does it?

None of this excuses hostile homophobia / sissyphobia, etc. But I don't think I'm an inherently better person than they are.


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Progress on THAT GUY IN OUR WOMEN'S STUDIES CLASS (Book II)

I'm still plugging away on the second book to be extracted from my autobiographical tome. This is a complete rewrite; the original text of the autobio is not directly usable, unlike the portion I used for the first book, so I just reference it for notes and reminders. With the scene that I wrote yesterday, I'm up to 96 pages, which should come out to be roughly a third of the final manuscript.

I'm a participant in an author's group where we bring up to 1800 words' worth of our work-in-progress and read it out loud to get feedback. That's helping immensely, not just for the direct advice but for the overall sense of connecting to an audience and hearing that yes, they find the story entertaining and engrossing.

Plotwise, I'm at a point where my main character (that's me, of course) is in the first year of women's studies classes, a college freshman, successfully making an impact with professors and connecting with some of the other students, but hasn't yet been able to explain the whole "male sissy" thing in such a way that people understand what these social issues are all about.

In the second year I will show him (i.e., me) getting established on campus as an outspoken political type, with a reputation mostly associated with militancy about pyschiatric rights and homelessness, and known for being that guy who is into feminism. He (i.e., me) also gets a romantic interest! The second and third year together should be no more than another third of the book; the first year section is longer because it has a long retrospective backstory portion and has to do a lot more initial setup.

The big challenge all along was whether I could manage a sufficient balance between complex intellectual ideas versus interactive personal stuff with conversations and characters and all that. So far so good, I think.



By the time of the events in this story begin, I had come out in 1980 as a heterosexual sissy, a person with an identity that was different in the same general way that gay & lesbian and transsexual (see next paragraph) people were understood to be different, but, well, different from those identities. I had even written a book by 1982, The Amazon's Brother. But I was very isolated; I wasn't connecting with anybody who understood WTF I was talking about and I had no one reading what I'd written. I hadn't succeeded in getting a publisher interested.

The scene that would later be called the "LGBT" community did not include gender variance back then, not really. It was all gay rights. I viewed gay people as allies (particularly lesbians who were likely to be feminists) but not really comrades in the same cause. Transsexual people -- yes, that was the word in use back then, nobody was saying "transgender" yet -- were people who transitioned by getting operations and taking hormones, and there was no sense of other kinds of trans people who didn't want to align their physical sex with their gender identity, so I didn't see myself as fitting in with them either, aside from which their presence in the community was mostly just hypothetical. They were so thin on the ground number-wise that a person did not actually encounter them at community centers and so on; officially there was probably starting to be some inclusiveness, some mention on fliers about them as part of what gay and lesbian centric organizations were about, but really it was all gay and lesbian, and mostly gay guys for that matter.

I hitched to New York to become a women's studies major in college. (The book's backstory section covers how I made the decision to do that, and my adventures getting there). I figured that the things I wanted to talk about -- that the expectations for people of a given sex were socially created, not built-in natural, and that the intolerance for people who were different was sexist -- would be right on topic for the women's studies classroom.

And besides, my head was deeply into feminist theory by this point anyway. I felt like the whole way society is set up, its overall values and structures, is a direct consequence of how gender is set up, that society is a machine and it runs differently depending on how gender gets configured. And feminist theory, especially radical feminist theory, made the same claim, that this was the political axis around which all social issues revolved. Not class, like the socialists believed. Not race, like the 60s activists had mostly believed. This. And that insight, incidentally, is something I still find missing from most gender discussions even to this day -- we do a lot of identity politics about who is marginalized and oppressed and unfairly treated, but not so much discussion about whether global warming, the military confrontations and economic deprivations, or the buildup of religious intolerances and so forth are all the way they are as an outcome of how gender is socially organized on this planet.

The trajectory of this book will bring my main character (i.e., me) to the limits of the role that a guy can authentically play in women's studies and in feminism, just as he's getting an academic article published and burning his final bridges with the graduate school department and leaving without a PhD to go figure out some other way of approaching all this.



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Sex, sex, sex, sex!

“I agree! There’s no reason for all these labels! Just be who you are!” This comment was written in response to last week’s blog post, which was about retaining the authority to invent your own label instead of feeling like you have to choose from among the existing gender identities that you’ve heard about.

I feel like I’m perpetually see-sawing between these two arguments – that, on the one hand, people should not feel pressured to squeeze themselves into an identity-box if it doesn’t fit them, and yet, on the other hand, that no, that doesn’t mean labels and specifically described gender identities should be discarded.

I often get the “you don’t need labels, just be yourself” attitudes and responses, and I feel like I’m constantly explaining that I didn’t have the option to “just be myself” growing up, and while things have improved somewhat since I was a kid or a teenager, it’s still a concern – the situation has not defused yet, it’s still problematic for people coming of age. So, yes, dammit, I still see a need to draw attention to the situation, the phenomenon, the social politics of being different in this specific way, and doing so requires naming it.

I was originally going to make today’s blog post about that, and elaborate a bit on it and leave it at that, but I found myself dwelling on how I had not anticipated this “just be yourself / no labels” reply when I wrote last week’s blog post. And that, in turn, got me thinking about what replies I might get to this one. And what came to mind was someone crossing their arms argumentatively and saying “Yeah, like what? What bad shit happens to ‘people like you’ that you want to change? What horrible things happen to genderqueer sissy boys? Just what is it that you’re trying to fix?”

I could quite authentically point to physical violence and verbal abuse and ridicule. We are subjected to what most people think of as “homophobia”; one could just as viably label it “sissyphobia”. Certainly some of the violence dished out that is indeed specifically geared towards gay males because they have same-sex sexualities (for example, the Pulse shootings) but in many cases the bashers and haters have no concrete reason to harbor any beliefs or make any assumptions about who their victims prefer to fondle and frolic with; it’s “how we are”, and they assume from that “what we do”. But let’s be honest here, let’s get real and cut to the chase: the concern that make me an activist was that I was not getting laid.

(That’s an oversimplification but it works as a thumbnail summary: being sidelined and isolated from sexual interaction that others of my age and cohort were able to participate in)

And that practically qualifies as a confession. Complaining about it immediately puts me in the select company of incels, Nice Guys™, and people like Elliot Rogers and Marc Lepine. And meanwhile, there is nothing close to a social consensus that anyone has some kind of right to sexual activity per se. Which is, itself, interesting, and we should unpack that, so I will.

We do have a growing consensus that if you do things in order to satisfy your sexual urges and inclinations, it is oppressive for society to try to stamp out those venues or interfere in those behaviors, as long as they are consensual and involve adults of sound mind. Stonewall. ‘Nuff said, right? But if it isn’t a behavior for which you’re being selected and subjected to reprisals, you’re just whining if you complain that sex is not available to you. It could be that no one wants to do you because you’ve got the personality of a doorknob or the appeal of splattered roadkill; it could be your stinky underarms or your deplorable fashion sense or that perennial favorite, your failure to do what you gotta do, your failure to step up and go out there and make an effort to get what you want.

To get under a sheltering umbrella of attitudes that support the notion that perhaps it is oppressive to be denied opportunity, I’m going to borrow from the disability rights movement. It’s not a perspective that says “each citizen is guaranteed a sex life”, but it does take the stance that no barriers should interfere, including the passive barrier of simply failing to provide mechanisms that a marginalized population needs but which aren’t needed by other people -- that a reasonable degree of social facilitation is necessary and appropriate.

Sissy males who are attracted to female people are not heterosexual simply because they are male people attracted to female people. Heterosexuality is composed of roles and rules, a courtship dance with specifically gendered parts to play in the pageant, and the part written for the male participant is based on a set of assumed characteristics (including personality, priorities, goals, and behavioral nuances and patterns) that are not at all a good match for being a sissy. The assumption that is tied to us, that we must be gay fellows, is really based on the notion that a person like us could not participate in heterosexuality, that we’re not right for the part. That’s a barrier. Or, rather, both of those things are a barrier – the fact that we’re not right for the part and the fact that we are assumed not to be playing.

I have learned things that no one taught me, things that were not shown to me in movies or described to me in romance novels. I have felt good and sexy and lithe in my body, in its shape, in the way that I move. As a potential object of desire, as an attractive target. I have learned nuances of voice and gesture and the parts of speech that enable a person to indicate that they know of the possibility that you’re looking upon them in that fashion, and which let them play with that without being overt, predatory, forward, centered on their own appetite… i.e. without being masculine. Does it work the same way when a male person uses this traditionally female language in communication with a female person? Well, not often (I won’t lie) but better than any other tactic that was at my disposal. It may or may not be sexually provocative in exactly the same way so much as it speaks a message that the recipient is able to parse and recognize, and, having recognized it, to realize the implications. Or maybe I’m smokin’ hot (I could live with that).

I've been in relationships that started from there. They were different; I wasn't defined within them as "the boy". It is not that avoiding the appetite-symbol sexual initiator role guarantees you won't be cast as "the boy" for other reasons or in other ways, or that if you reach or kiss or make a pass first you don't get to have this, but it makes a good filter and it gets things started on the left foot.

The point is, I learned it in utter ignorance, tested it with no role model to emulate, and projected an identity by using it that had no name and no social identity that would enable any of the people I encountered to recognize me, to say “Oh, I get it, I’m dealing with one of those”, so their response was dependent on intuiting what it could possibly mean and what an appropriate response just might consist of.

Having to figure it all out in total darkness is quite a barrier. Having to expect my potential partners to do the same is definitely a barrier.

The label is important and necessary to draw attention to the situation; drawing attention to us, and what it is like to be us and how things work for us, is the intended fix.

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"Do you think I'm a Demigirl, or more BiGender?" (etc)

You may not intend your question as it sounds to me.

And I get that -- I mean, I could be reading into your question a bunch of stuff that's coming from me, stuff I'm projecting onto it, and not what you meant or how you said it.

But here I am in GenderQueer Support & Talk, and a dozen or so other gender-variant themed Facebook groups, and I see so many of these questions --

"Hey, peeps, what do you think? I have my days when I'm not male or female but it's weird to be called 'he' or 'sir' and there are other days when I put on makeup, so do you think I could be a demigirl? I've been calling myself 'bigender' but lately I've been wondering if I might actually be a demigirl..."

-- (not an actual quote, but that kind of thing...)

... and when I read that it sounds like a chemist in the laboratory, trying to determine if Core Sample A contains potassium or silicon, bismuth or antimony. Like there's an absolute empirically correct answer. And like they're asking "Would one of my esteemed gender scientist colleagues help me decide how to test my sample and determine its composition?"


Connections

Does it annoy you when some old fart quotes some dusty-ass lyric from some song from before you were born and acts like because it was in this song that makes it profound or something?

Yeah, sorry about that, but I am sixty and sometimes I act like it...

I'd gather everyone together for a day
And when we gathered
I'll pass buttons out that say
Beautiful people
Then you'd never have to be alone
'Cause there'll always be someone
With the same button on as you

( -- Melanie, “Beautiful People”, circa 1971, obligatory YouTube link) cf: the sense of belonging, of not having to be alone because you have a shared identity with other people.

I do get that when a person is saying something like “I’m not sure if I’m a demigirl or if I’m more bigender” or whatever, part of what they’re often saying is “I might fit in with the other people who identify that way”. And believe me, I know what it feels like to be cut off from feeling like you fit in anywhere; I know what it's like to wish for a sense of belonging, to have a place where you fit in after a lifetime of sticking out as weird and different.


But let’s go back to the beginning of the journey. There was a social norm -- heterosexual and cisgender -- and that norm did not fit for you, did not work for you, it was incorrect and inadequate, it was wrong, and it was confining, right?

OK, I want to suggest to you, to all of you, that it is important for you to approach gender identity with the attitude that maybe no one out there has ever described your identity, that it has never been given a name. Don't get me wrong, I'm not wishing that on you, that you should have to create for yourself an identity and name it and explain it to everyone. But that you should hold it in your mind and heart as a possibility. That it is OK for you to walk away from "demigirl" and "bigender" and "genderfluid" and all of the others you encounter out there, saying (if it happens to be true) "NO, THAT'S NOT IT... NO, THAT'S STILL NOT IT... NO, NOT THAT EITHER..."

Why? Because otherwise -- if you haven't given yourself permission to do that -- you're confining yourself to slot yourself into one of these pre-existing identities. That makes it similar to just conforming to the cisgender hetero identity that was being foisted on you originally, something that doesn't fit but which you're allowing to define you instead of defining yourself. Oh, OK, it's only sort-of similar because there are a lot more choices instead of just one, and there's less focused pressure to accept them (and also less freedom from still being treated like a deviant as the payoff for accepting one of these identities).

But still, it's at least partially like that situation. You were willful enough and self-affirming enough to reject what didn't fit. I'm suggesting you hold onto that attitude and don't feel obliged to pick from any of the identities you encounter until and unless it fits.

Taste test identities

Somehow, having been a tomboy had taught me that the other side of "not fitting in" is a subtle subversive energy -- the power of difference

p 182, Marianne Dresser, in "Confessions of an Unrepentant Tomboy" / Yamaguchi & Barber, Editors, TOMBOYS



Gender is full of "shouldn'ts" and restrictions; if a gender identity is a net positive and not a net negative, it has to empower. I think it's NOT like a chemist trying to identify the elements in a sample. First and foremost, recognize that the absence of a gender identity is the absence of those gendered restrictions. Recognize also that all gender identities are social constructs: someone made them up and then continued to use them because they felt comfortable wearing them. Find what resonates for you. And if you don't find it out there, find it within yourself and give it a new name.

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Seventh Grade

My book effectively starts with eighth grade, but I covered my earlier life in my initial autobiography, the tome from which my book was taken. I've done blog posts about earlier segments in my life -- third grade; sixth grade.

I've been reminiscing about seventh grade lately. It was the year just before our family moved to Los Alamos NM. In an odd way, it's like the stump or stub of a life I might have had if we hadn't moved. Mostly, that's not a life that I wish I'd had; if anything, I've been more inclined to think about that with a shudder. The venue was Valdosta GA, the timeframe 1971-72.

Seventh grade was my one and only year at Valdosta Junior High School. It was quite different from the elementary school experience I was used to. In elementary school we had been treated as children, which included not just condescension but also tolerance for a certain amount of roughhousing and bullying and loud disruptive behaviors. In junior high, for the first time, we were being treated as large dangerous unruly threats to the public order. I think part of the underlying issue was the sheer size of the institution: Valdosta had a dozen or more elementary schools, but everyone was funneled into the same single junior high when we passed from sixth to seventh grade. Grades 7, 8, and 9 for the whole town were taught there. That also meant racial integration: the elementary schools had de facto segregation because they were neighborhood schools and the neighborhoods were fairly segregated. I had had black kids in my classrooms in elementary school, but they were a distinct minority; other elementary schools had ranged from almost exclusively white to almost exclusively black. And now at the ages of 12-15 we were all being placed together, and whether there was an actual history of racial tension or just worried adults, I think that played a role in how we were treated.

The place was run like a military boot camp. No nonsense. Get out of line and there'll be hell to pay, so behave! The line was a literal line much of the time: in the school's hallways, all students were to walk single file, on the right side, no talking. They meant it: male teachers armed with heavy wooden paddles would enforce it physically. Being in the hallway at all except between bells would earn a student the same fate.

It may seem odd to you that I partly liked it that way. Especially since I mentioned thinking about the place with a visceral shudder. But, you see, I'd been bullied and harassed and picked on by other kids (mostly boys) for several years prior to this, and all this rigid discipline gave me protection. Yes, if the adults took students' misbehaviors seriously, if infractions actually got punished severely enough to shut them down, I was a beneficiary. "It's about time", I said to myself. "They should not be allowed to get away with that stuff, and now they can't! Good!" The problem was, I was not perceived by the authoritarian adults as a nice well-behaved good boy, a person whose obedience to the rules and the spirit thereof earned me respect as a colleague. Nope, they glared at me suspiciously, convinced that each and every one of us kids (especially us male-bodied kids) would misbehave and act up if given the opportunity. They treated all of us as if even when we were not directly incurring their wrath, the only reason that was so was that they had intimidated us into compliance. I resented that, resented their attitude, and my resentment was something they could see on my face. And I occasionally ended up in trouble with them myself because they made arbitrary calls and issued orders that contradicted what we'd been told previously. In short, I was ambivalent.

Against that backdrop, please understand that I was a very sexually naive kid. It was an earlier era, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I was exceptionally naive compared to other kids my own age at the time. I had only as early as the summer after fifth grade learned that people had sex because they had an appetite for it, as opposed to doing it for the purpose of making babies (and that that is what the word "fuck" referred to). And in the wake of that revelation, I was still, at this point, knitting together my own feelings and sensations and experiences with this new awareness. I was trying to figure out how much of what I did and felt was this, the sexual feelings that apparently everyone had, and not something unique to me. And so it was that when a handful of us were standing outside the band room, awaiting the beginning of band class, one of the girls who played oboe was talking with some other band members and tossed out the fact that she knew what 'masturbation' was. I didn't know the word (I wasn't uniquely ignorant; she hinted that it had to do with sexual biology) so I looked it up later in the dictionary. And then spent a lot of time wondering if that thing that I do is this and, if so, oh, so other people do that too? and the ramifications of that if it were indeed the case.

Also taking place this year was my first experience with the existence of gay people and the concept of homosexuality. The boy's name was Malcolm, and he knew me from seeing me in church on Sundays. He was one of the small handful of people I hung out with at school, going out onto the playgrounds after lunch. I was pretty cut off and didn't have many friends, so it was quite nice to have someone interested in spending time with me, laughing and talking and telling interesting stories.

"Who do you like from class?" he asked me. "Are there girls who you want to be with?"

"I've always like Betsy Johnson. I've been in class with her on and off since fourth grade, and she's really smart, and pretty and cute. And I like Tess Minton and Carol Slocumb from McLaurin's English class too. They're really nice".

"Do you ever try to look up their dresses or skirts and see their underwear? Do you wish you could get your hand inside their underwear and maybe take it off and see them naked?"

That wasn't how I thought of Betsy and the others, and I told him so. I wasn't interested in humiliating them or erasing their dignity. (And I had kept a secret of my fascination with girls' shapes and even if it was true I would never tell them so and creep them out. And the way Malcom spoke about it was too much like how boys were always obsessing about farts and stuff, so it was like he was accusing me of being disgusting).

"She would do that, you know. She does do it. She lets boys touch her there, she lets them look and see her there".

I didn't believe it, it didn't at all mesh with my sense of her and how she behaved in general.

"Do you ever think about sex with another guy?"

I scowled at him, perpexed, and stuck out my left and right index fingers and bounced the tips off each other. "You can't put one inside the other other! How would that work?"

"One of them puts his dick in the other one's butt hole"

"Eww"

"Or you could also lick or suck it. That feels really good. Would you want to do that?"

"Umm no, yuck"

"Would you like someone to do it to you? I would, if you think you want to try it".

"Umm, no, no thanks".

After that, we continued to hang out and spend time together during lunch break and the topic was never discussed again.


I was not close friends with Betsy Johnson and Tess and Carol and other girls I liked. I think we had some degree of mutual respect, but I could not call it friendship. I hadn't had a girlfriend since Karen moved away from Valdosta in third grade, and the girls that I had been just "friend friends" with were also a part of the past.

I was shy and sort of shut down socially. People in general didn't just tend to like me and include me, and when I had tried to be more outgoing, to be more of a character, a class clown in my own way, it had backfired, back in fifth grade. Trying to be exaggerated in my expressions and responses and behaviors in the classroom, to draw attention to myself, had not gotten people to laugh with me, only to laugh at me, and not in a good way. For some sissy guys, being silly and humorous apparently worked well for them when they were younger, but for me, when I tried it it only generated ridicule and offenses to my dignity; it wasn't my thing.

The shudders and the dread I feel when I look back at Valdosta, and imagine what it would have been like if our family had remained there, mostly have to do with the spaces in between anything that actually happened. Sooner or later I suspect there would have been incidents, outside of the protected hallways, away from the heavily disciplined school. Sooner or later I would have been subjected to hostile mockery about all the things I didn't know and understand. I think it's likely that I would have encountered sudden unanticipated violence, including sexually invasive violence, and I would not have been ready for it, would not have had the necessary coping skill to deal with it.

Los Alamos was a shock for me when we moved there. I was quickly exposed to a lot of overt homophobic hostility, and a lot of my sexual ignorance was stripped way in a barrage of contempt and mockery and teasing. But most of that was verbal and the culture I'd been moved to was less given over to violent hidden assaults that get laminated over and never spoken of. I think I was better off with things as they actually happened.


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A JunePride Mea Culpa: My Homophobia

I'm constantly blogging and posting to be recognized, included, understood as a genderqueer person. But acceptance within the MOGII community is a two-way street and I haven't always been the ideal poster child for good and non-judgmental attitudes. I think I am long beyond harboring nasty feelings and thoughts towards gay people but in the interests of fairness I thought it might be appropriate to 'fess up about my past.



First off, you've got to realize I didn't grow up hearing about "LGBTQ" or "MOGII" or any other sense that there was a diverse community of gender-and-sexuality misfits. It was just gay people. That's who "they" were, and who I was widely thought to be. I did not, in fact, have same-sex sexual attraction, and so, yes, "they", and not "we", seemed to be the correct formulation. Gay guys were definitely a category of "them", and not a sense of identity I thought I shared in.

You'd think that wouldn't be much of a big deal -- I mean, I'm also not Russian, or a blue-eyed blonde, or a Muslim or a grandparent. Lots of identities out there that aren't mine, and I don't generally find it important or necessary to define myself as not one of them in conjunction to them. But people weren't assuming I was any of those other things.

And part of the problem was who I actually was -- a feminine sissy boy. This was a problem because people's definition of what it meant to be a gay guy were weirdly twisted up: if you asked for a literal definition you'd probably get "two people of the same sex who have sex with each other instead of with the opposite sex" or some similar formulation, but their behavior towards any mention of sissy-femme characteristics in a male showed how deeply they believed that this, also, meant that the person was gay. That's called equivocation, when more than one meaning is built into a word or phrase and treated as if those two meanings were really the same thing.

Being erroneously thought to be a gay guy didn't work the same way as being incorrectly assumed to be right-handed. People often did assume I was right-handed, but their reaction to being told otherwise, or to seeing me pick up a pen with my left hand and begin writing, was to say "oh!" and make a mental adjustment and that would be the end of it. In contrast to that, I found that trying to convey to people that I was a heterosexual sissy was like explaining that East West Main Street is down up from here, go directly behind in front of you and turn left right at the first last intersection.

I developed hostile and derogatory attitudes against the identity that I was pushing off from. When people said or hinted that they thought I was probably gay, I would express revulsion. Eww, yuck! That's disgusting! No, I'd say, I'm not like them at all, they're crudely promiscuous and they're not interested in forming attachment relationships, if anything they're like typical masculine hetero guys except even more so, they just want to stick it into something and pump. I repeated the most condescending and negative of stereotypes and emphasized how totally and utterly this was not my identity. Not just "nope, you've miscategorized me" but out-and-out hateful stuff. If some bigoted Bible-pounding zealot expressed the opinion that no one is naturally homosexual, that engaging in same-sex erotic behavior is against anyone's nature, I'd nod and agree that it seemed weird and twisted to me too.

With as much reason as I'd had in my life to question any widespread rejection of the Different, I was nevertheless cheerfully joining in with the hate chorus. I was so focused on establishing and defending my own peculiar sense of identity that it didn't occur to me that the things I was saying might be hurtful to the people I was pushing off from.

I came out in 1980, finally recognizing that who I was, how I was, was Different in the same general kind of way that being gay was Different. That even if there wasn't a name for the category, I was in a different identity-category than heterosexual guys were. And that meant that gay guys were potentially my allies.

My relationship with gay guys -- both in the abstract as a topic of discussion and real live ones that I actually encountered, in political discussions of gender and sexuality minority identities and in other contexts -- did not instantaneously clear up and become companionable and smooth. I was clear in my head about my identity, but explaining it, and explaining why it needed to be established in people's heads as an available identity, was complicated and problematic. Lots of gay activists at the time were promoting the position that no one should be going around denying that they were gay, that it was not an identity that their allies needed to be running away from as if it were something horrible. But from my vantage point, my identity was being socially erased by the conflation of sissyhood with homosexuality, and although I was now ashamed of how hatefully I had repulsed gay identity, I still wanted to be seen and recognized for who I was. I had to learn how to explain my situation in ways that weren't experienced as abrasive and politically objectionable to the gay activists I wanted to ally with. (It eventually helped that some gay male activists did not much appreciate being thought of as feminine, and that others, who were, thought the masculine gay guys were looking down on them and regarding them as stereotype-reinforcing. This opened a dialog that I could participate in; we could agree that it was useful and necessary to uncouple the equivocation between being gay and being feminine, and to discuss the political connections between homophobia and sissyphobia).

When I first started hanging around Identity House in Manhattan and attending my first Pride March in 1985, I found it frustrating that I wasn't encountering any similarly-identifying, similar-minded gender activists to speak with. It seemed to me that the mostly male, mostly gay participants were coming to meetings to flirt and connect with potential dating partners, which wasn't entirely untrue, but I could have made more of an effort to communicate, to talk issues and bridge gaps, and to listen and learn and be a better ally myself. I was by then mostly past the worst of my homophobic attitudes but I was still pretty selfishly immersed in my own identity politics. Most of us were, I suppose, and I felt like the people I was encountering mostly only cared about their own identity-situation, and that not much of what they were concerned about applied to me, and there was some truth to that assessment, but that was a description I could have applied to myself just as accurately.

It wasn't until I first encountered the acronym with the "Q" added -- LGBTQ -- that I stopped thinking of the community as potential allies (but still "them") and instead tentatively began to consider the community as "us". GenderQueer was a term I had been introduced to and I read the description and it fit, even if it wasn't highly specific to my circumstances.



We do need to come together, to listen to each other and be supportive of each others' struggles. I will acknowledge that I have not been a model citizen in the LGBTQ-munity, but I recognize the need to consider my own behaviors and the ways in which I have not been a good listener or a sufficiently reliable ally. I will try to do better.

"Community" is simple when it equates to "people who are just like me"; it takes more effort to extend it to "people who are different but with whom I have stuff in common". I invite you to read and listen to folks who occupy a different letter in the acronym. Read the words of bisexual activists, and intersex activists. Pick up something penned by somebody nonbinary. Learn about the experiences of folks of minority gender and orientation identities that you don't have much familiarity with. I will, too.


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Split Identity

I suggest we split what we call "identity" into two components. I apologize if I’m repeating myself; my thoughts keep returning to this notion the way a tongue seeks out a sore tooth. I’m talking about a simple split here – not like the myriad aspects of identity portrayed in the Genderbread Person and other such formulations (useful though they may also be at times). I’m suggesting the usefulness of distinguishing simply, between self-chosen identity and identity that is assigned to us by others (which I refer to as altercast identity). I have my reasons for proposing this, which I’d like to go into. You see what you think, OK?



A Lesson from the Workplace



I’m currently working at the NYC Dept of Health, assisting in the coding of data from survey forms that track Naloxone distribution. So on a day-in, day-out basis I’m staring at a lot of survey forms, and one of the questions asked of respondents is their race. Respondents are asked to tick off any categories that apply (they can select multiple answers): White, Black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native, Don’t Know, or Other. Or that was the original set of choices; "Hispanic or Latino/a" was added to later editions of the form. Why? Well, originally, "Hispanic" (yes/no) was a separate question from race. But enormous numbers of respondents were checking the "Other" box on race and writing in "Latino" or "Hispanic". Clearly, they experienced being Hispanic as a race, something that (more often than not) they identified as instead of white or black, not in addition to it.

But it doesn’t stop there. On both the old forms and the new forms, people check "Other" and identify as "Puerto Rican", "Dominican", "Cuban", "Mexican", "Salvadorean", "Chilean". Nor is this trend by any means confined to folks from Spanish-language cultures. People are selecting "Other" and self-identifying their race as "Irish", "Czech", "Russian", "Iranian", "Mixteca", "Filipino", "Ethiopian", "Jewish", and so on.

On the one hand, -- hey that’s interesting, the social construct of "race" appears to be converging with what we would have called "ethnicity" or even "country of origin", and given the lethally poisonous history of the ideology of race, that could be viewed as a healthy and positive development.

On the other hand, the original thinking behind asking people their race included a concern for whether or not our services were reaching populations that have historically been underserved. And when you look at it in that light, the intention is not so much "how do you identify yourself, race-wise?" but more "how would other people most often categorize you and regard you?" – because the latter is the factor that most directly shapes how people are treated (or mistreated or neglected in the offering of treatment and so forth).



Why I am Not a Lesbian – the Reprise



A few weeks ago I posted a blog post titled "Why I am Not a Lesbian". It was controversial; it upset several people, most commonly transgender women who identify as lesbians. In retrospect, perhaps I should have titled the post "Why I am Not a Lesbian and Also Not a Heterosexual Man". I kind of thought the latter portion of that was sufficiently well-developed in the essay, but I guess I didn’t give it as much emphasis. I did state that being in possession of a penis and associated physical structures does not define me as a man and therefore doesn’t define my attraction to female people as heterosexuality.

But the part that lit the controversy-fire was saying that my identification as a femme, a feminine person, a girl, does not define my attraction to female people as lesbianism either. I was talking about myself, about my identity, but my assertion was taken as if I were saying that what is true for me should be considered true of anyone else who has the kind of physical plumbing that is traditionally and typically considered male. In other words, as if I had said "I am not a lesbian because although I have a woman or girl gender identity, I have a male body, and hey, you over there, you aren’t a lesbian either, you silly AMAB!"

(I found this frustrating; I thought I had been quite clear that the problem is that "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are insufficient terms, because they assume that sex and gender are the same thing or have the same value, and so they don’t have a socket for someone who identifies as a male girl, as I do)

I present as male, or, at least, make no effort to change my presentation so as to elicit an altercast categorization by other people as female, and so I am viewed as male. In this culture that is coterminous with being viewed as a man. I don’t really make an effort to package my appearance so as to be viewed as a male, but I have a physical body such that, were I to go to a nude beach and be seen from a distance by a thousand complete strangers who know nothing of how I identify, I would be overwhelmingly categorized as a male person. If I show up at the local lesbian bar, I will be perceived there also as a male person. And not as a lesbian. And that is significantly a part of my identity experience.



An Exploration of Comparative TERFitude



I have a respected acquaintance and political ally who, if someone were to call her a TERF ("Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist"), isn’t a person on whose metaphorical feet I could honestly say the shoe does not fit. She reads this blog. I am not going to defend all of her positions, and indeed I’m about to attack some of them. But not all of them.

I do think it is relevant to organize around social experience that people have in common. When feminists come together politically, they often wish to join with other people who have also had a lifetime, ongoing experience of being seen as, viewed as, treated as a woman. As with the intention behind the race question on the surveys, this isn’t about how one self-identifies. It’s about how other people have altercast one, how other people have categorized one with or without one’s concurrence or dissent from those assumptions.

Raise your hand if you remember Rachel Dolezal. Is there anything inherently wrong with identifying as a black person if you happen to be the pale-skinned descendant of European ancestors? I think not; I certainly don’t take issue with it (although it's not my call to make). But Rachel Dolezal occupied a position that was intended to be staffed by a person who had the relevant political social experience, the experience of being perceived as and treated as black, and that was not, in fact, her experience. And that is why we regard her has having done a Bad Thing. For purposes of evaluating her appropriateness for that position, it’s not about her self-chosen identity as black, it’s about having been (or not having been) on the receiving end of being altercast by others as black and treated accordingly.

Some lesbians are "political lesbians", not in the sense of being lesbians who are also political people, or even who are also political about being lesbians, but in the specific sense of choosing to constrain their sexuality so as to express it only with other people who have been in the political situation of being altercast all their lives as girls and women. I’m not saying they do not also find the female form to be physically attractive, or to find the womanly character traits and personality attributes to be romantically desirable in and of themselves, but a fundamental reason to them for being lesbians is to not give their erotic energies over to anyone except other people who have been in that political situation, the altercast identity of being female and woman in a patriarchal society.

In light of their existence within the larger lesbian community, I personally would find it arrogant and inappropriate for me to identify as a lesbian. Your mileage may vary. I do not speak for you. But whether I like it or not, whether I prefer it or abhor it, I am perceived as a male, a man, and treated accordingly, and as a consequence of that I do not have their experience, the one they define themselves by. I would like it if they were to listen to me for who I am, and for the experiences that I have had as a sissy male who rejected masculinity and was proud of being a sissy male, because my story is also relevant to patriarchy and feminism; and I would like to be with female people who do not wish or need their interactions with male-bodied people to revolve around assumed differences. Around me "being a man". I’m not one. I’d like lesbians to understand that. But I do not opt to call myself a lesbian, nonetheless.

My colleague has a reprehensible habit of referring to transgender women only in the dismissive, not listening to anything they might have to say aside from their identification of themselves as women, and she rejects that. She doesn’t reject it with nuance and she does not carefully split the matter of identity and then explain the ways in which a transgender woman isn’t what she means when she says "woman". It is hostile and it is contemptuous, what she is doing, and it is wrong, and I may have to part company with her over it. Splitting identity factors as I am suggesting here would be a useful tactical tool for her, and she could do so and thereby cease negating the identity of transgender women as women while still being able to say "we do not, however, welcome you at our separatist feminist enclave, which is for women who have been treated as girls or women for a lifetime". She could do so and then also participate in (or even host) other meetings which do not exclude transgender women. And which could, incidentally, include me as well.

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Depression

I'm in a dismal mood.

Doesn't happen very often. I'm seldom depressed. When I first obtained a clear sense of my variant identity, I received along with it a political explanation for why I felt pushed aside, why I was so often reviled and hated when I hadn't done anything to hurt anybody, why I didn't make friends, was perennially unpopular, and so on. It was also a political analysis that explained a lot of the worrisome aspects of the larger world to me, things like tyranny and oppression, poverty and inequality, even morality and spiritual meaning in life. So it was very empowering, and gave me optimism, courage, even some modicum of patience.

And you can sort of see why having that kind of understanding in my head made me want to share it, figuring it would offer those things to a lot of other people as well. And why wanting to share it gave me a mission and a purpose in life.

But I do get discouraged and trammeled down sometimes and it's been like that these last couple weeks.


I had a publisher on the line. I had a contract in my hands. There were problems and concerns -- I never quite felt that the editor I was interacting with had a clear understanding of the gender identity thing, either mine or MOGII* identities in general, beyond the average person's mainstream popularized shorthand stuff, and he didn't seem curious or sufficiently intellectually engaged to see what it was that I was trying to say to the world. It was more like "Hey, you write well, this could be an interesting entertaining book with a bit of effort".

I thought maybe I could work with that but the lack of any sense of being on the same channel worried me. He also gave every sign of wanting to be heavy-handed about changes. "I think you should add a scene where you muse about this, and then a scene where you blast out of town and flip off the city limits sign as you drive into the sunset... and I'd get rid of these scenes in this next section..." I got mixed messages about how much of these editorial suggestions I could veto and still have them publish the book. On the one hand, he stipulated that the publisher would not make any changes that the author did not approve, and when I did a preliminary round of edits , adding some scenes he suggested but not deleting material that I wanted to keep, he replied (somewhat sourly, I thought), "Well, do it your way, it's your book, and we don't want you to look back after publication and wish you'd never heard of us". Alongside of these ambivalent-sounding reassurances about my authorial authority, I received periodic comments about how the publisher could not afford to put a book out there that had so many flaws and weaknesses that it simply would not sell, or that would be an embarrassment to the publishing company.

I was sent a document to review and sign, titled "draft contract", and I wanted to modify some clauses to safeguard that the book would come out my way (final word on the book's cover, title, back-cover blurbs, publicity descriptions or synopsis, etc) and also push for a better deal in some places (better % royalties beyond the 2500th copy, because I'd be financing most of the publicity efforts, as tends to be the case with small publishers) -- I figured it did say draft proposal, after all, and that they might say "nope, you can't have that" and if so we'd negotiate to a compromise and then I'd sign and they'd sign and I'd hold my breath and hope we could work together on the edits, right?

Uh uh. I got a reply email stating that the publisher had decided they had too many projects going on and had decided not to publish my book after all, best of luck with it elsewhere, etc. After a day to cool off I wrote a letter of inquiry (and of hubris-acknowledgment). He confirmed that yeah, it was because I'd given them pushback instead of just signing the contract as is. And nope, no room at this point for continuing the discussion, sorry. So that was that.


What are your symptoms when you get down and despondent and mopey?

For me, it's like this:


* I get mad at myself and start blaming myself for the outcome, even though I'm still capable of an intellectual analysis that tells me I didn't do self-destructive things here. I blew it. I had a contract in my hands and managed to drive away the publisher. I must not really want to get my book published, I sabotage myself. Heck, I probably sabotage myself right and left every day, finding ways to not network or communicate, so that I can be a fucking dilettante and keep pretending to be an "activist" or a gender "revolutionary" when I'm really just Walter Mitty and none of this is real.

* I question my beliefs and understandings. Intellectually, I could tell you that it is good for anyone to question what they purport to believe; it makes the beliefs that withstand such questions more valid and sound, and it makes the person who subscribes to them less defensive and more genuinely confident and all that -- but in this mood, the belief-questioning is very dark and takes this form: "My difference probably isn't that I'm differently gendered. That's just an excuse. I'm inferior, there's something fundamentally wrong with me. People mocked and harassed me as a kid because I was pathetic, not because I was a sissy. I have had problems making friends and getting accepted socially because I'm not fun, not friendly, don't remember what is important to other people, and in particular because I don't properly soak up how to be, the little memes and clues, so I am not a part of things. I'm probably impaired neurologically or psychologically. Maybe I'm autistic, or I have some personality deficit so that I'm capable of doing mechanical things like dress myself or do data entry or write term papers for college classes but my brain isn't wired correctly to do people-interaction. Yeah, there's something wrong with me.

* The dark stuff isn't all of the self-blame variety. I have other forms of gloom to wallow in. Why have I gotten so little traction out of forty years of trying to share and explain these ideas? Well it's because I belong to a sexually dimorphic species, and I'm a sissy male, a feminine male, hence a minority and marginalized because of that; and I can try to call that "political" and make an "issue" of it all I want, but my species isn't buying it, there are evolutionary forces that select against it becoming okay for males like me to be accepted and embraced by society. Or (brain switches channels to a different gloomy perspective) it's a conspiracy of sorts, my set of theories and explanations is a potential meme that conflicts in parts with the predominant rising body of thought, which at the moment is the mainstream transgender narrative, What I am saying or trying to say is rejected because the popular social dialog only has room for a few prevailing ideas to proliferate. My notions are no doubt seen as transphobic, or at least they’re seen as incorrect and inaccurate when people compare them with the established transgender explanations. And back in the earlier years, before transgender viewpoints were established, my ideas were probably worrisome to gay people and their supporters, and were perceived as homophobic. So, you see, communication between an individual and the rest of their surrounding culture isn't free exchange; ideas that are not the ones chosen by the consensus get pinched off and blocked because they introduce too much noise, and mine are noise, not the memes that have been embraced and selected for wider audiences. Or (switching channels to one with even less light in it)…

* Ha, so silly to dwell on how poorly I fit as a male, when I should take note of how poorly I fit as a human being. I am not doing this "being a person" thing very well. I was born to a species whose tasks of life and patterns of behavior and interaction and challenges and so forth are a bad fit for me, and not much fun. I am tired of this. Not in the sense of wanting to be dead, not in the sense of craving non-consciousness and non-existence, but, yeesh, if I die and get to come back, I really hope I can come back on some other planet as some other species with a different nature, different characteristics. Or I could come back as a kitty cat, and live in back alleys and prey on mice and if I'm lucky get adopted and taken indoors. Or I could try my hand at being a sycamore tree, or bread mold or something. But this "being a human being" thing doesn't seem to be shaping up to anything like a passing grade. I'm just no damn good at it.


Meh. My way of coping with depression is to ride it out, and to wallow in it self-indulgently and immersively, until I get annoyed and angry and break out of it. I don't think I'm very pleasant company for the duration of these moods (I get even more self-immersed than I usually am, which is admittedly a rather narcissistic threshold to start with); I only listen to the loved ones and important associates and colleagues in my life in a sporadic and distracted way, and I get very forgetful (more spacy than usual, and again I have an embarrassingly bad baseline to start with). And I'm awake much of the time I should be sleeping and dozing off when I should be alert and awake.

But it's not like I don't understand why I would be feeling depressed. I got sufficient reason. So it's normal and natural and part of life for me.

I'll bounce back.


* MOGII = "minority orientations, gender identities, and intersex" -- an alternative to the ever-expanding LGBTQIAA++ acronym


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