At a certain point in my life, I began saying something that other males around me were not saying. Something that men in general had historically not been saying. I was stating that certain things were true for me personally, and in making this statement I was contradicting a whole lot of what men in general had said about male experience, about being one, what it was like, what it meant.
Did this mean that I was different?
What if, in saying these things, I was actually speaking for all men, saying things about the male experience that never get said but which basically all men, not just me, have to confront in their lives?
Or maybe I was not speaking for all men but for a minority of males, a hitherto silent minority, a group of males who were different from the rest, a group who didn't yet have a name and a voice?
Or perhaps I was only speaking for myself and myself alone.
I didn't know. I spoke without knowing.
I've received my share of dismissive reactions. I'm a special snowflake. I'm a boringly normal hetero cis guy who desperately wants to be edgy. I have a lot of nerve using a slur term ("queer") that was hurled at other people, as if that were my right. I've been told countless times that I lack any relevant difference. Meanwhile I've only now and then been told that what I say is true for me is true for them too.
Marginalization is a word you hear bandied about quite a bit these days, especially in MOGII (aka LGBTQIA)* communities. It literally means to exist right on the margin, or edge, of things, pushed to the side.
Well, here's what marginalization is like. It's when most of the time you get treated as part of an undifferentiated group you don't consider yourself to belong to, and the rest of the time you get singled out as weird and peculiar, and treated and thought of as such, with your difference defined by other people as they see it, without any input from your own self-definition.
And yes, it is edgy.
* MOGII = Minority Orientation, Gender Identity, and Intersex. LGBTQIA = Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (etc/other) and/or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual/Agender. I like MOGII better.
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Monday, November 26, 2018
Sunday, November 18, 2018
If You Could Be...
So I was casting about for a topic to blog on. (I don't usually have difficulty coming up with something, but given that I try to pump these things out once a week I guess it's inevitable that sooner or later I'd have nothing in particular in mind when the time came, right?) I mentioned this to my partner and she joked that I could borrow a page from those silly corporate exercises and ask my readers "If you could be any animal, what animal would you be?".
Hmm, well... perhaps an appropriate variation of that.
If you could be any GENDER you wanted, which one would you be?
The conventional modern understanding of what it means to be a transgender woman is along these lines: The world consists of men and women; a transgender woman is a person who was born male but wants to be a woman, and transitions.
Trans women themselves would probably be more likely to say: Although I was born with a body that was assigned male initially by others, I *am* a woman. Transitioning is either to correct the body to make it correspond with a person's identity or else to shift the perceptions of other people.
I myself am not a transitioner, and my answer would be like this: The world consists predominantly of male men and female women, but there are also male women and female men, and folks in-between, and others. Just like transgender people, I am already the gender I want to be: a male woman
I want to change people's perceptions (i.e., I want to be seen as and treated as who I am), but I have no interest in changing myself.
What does it mean to "be a woman", though? There are all the attributes and characteristics, behaviors and roles and so on, but interspersed with that is the notion of a correspondence to some degree with the social construct called "biological femaleness" — breasts, vagina, menses, uterus, pregnancy. And it's all wrapped together as a package deal. Even among people who mentally distinguish between femininity (or "the sex role expectation of femininity", if you prefer) and biological female morphology, there are often many things that are thought of, consciously or unconsciously, as part of biological femaleness that someone else would classify differently: sexual positioning and mate selection strategies, the question of desirability or attractiveness, the gatekeeper role as the person who gives or withholds consent, and nurturance and other related manifestations of hormonal states, social interaction patterns determined by having a smaller size and less physical strength, and so on. So while it is highly useful to distinguish intellectually between sex and gender, between biological femaleness (social construct though it may be) and the complex constellation of things we call femininity, there still isn't a consensus about which is which, or which contains which elements, if you see what I mean.
What if we teased it apart into a sort of checklist, then? For those who wish to (continue to) be a woman, what do you mean when you say you are a woman? For instance (keeping in mind that for cisgender women as well as anyone else identifying as a woman, not all of these will apply)...
[ ] Demeanor and behavior, that yours matches the overall pattern exhibited by women in general
[ ] Perception and interpretation of your demeanor and behavior by others as feminine
[ ] Perception and interpretation of your body: being viewed by others as morphologically female
[ ] The experience of being a sex object, a target of the sexual appetite of those people who are of the sex and/or gender you wish to be sexy to, especially to the extent that this is a different experience for women
[ ] Having the personality and holding the priorities and values and overall perspective and viewpoints that women have more of a tendency to hold than men do
[ ] Others' perception and interpretation of you as having such a personality and being likely to hold such values and priorities etc
[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature
[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy
[ ] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life
[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life
To do this right, we'd need a fill-in-the-blank line after each item to add a comment as need be.
Now, I can readily imagine some people rejecting this sliced-up deconstruction. I've encountered that in a few discussions, in fact, the notion that something gets killed or ignored when you divide the concept up in this fashion, and that "woman" (or "man" for that matter) is an entire package and that to be what it is and retain its meaning it has to continue to be that way.
But I'm not fond of that, since that attitude erases me. It's as reductionistic as the attitude of some of the people on Facebook who post things like "If you got a dick yer a man".
I definitely need to order a la carte. Here's my own response, checks for what I would place an order for and x's for the ones that already apply:
[x] Demeanor and behavior I've got that already
[√] Perception and interpretation of my behavior as feminine Yeah, that's what I want
[ ] Perception and interpretation of my body as morphologically female No thank you
[√] The experience of being a sex object / to those of the sex or gender to which I want to be attractive well yes, actually
[x] Personality and priorities and values and overall perspective I already have that too
[√] Perceived by others as having that personality and priorities etc This is important
[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature Umm, no, I'm fine with the factory installed parts
[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy Neither need nor have any of those
[x] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life I have that, too, actually
[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life I don't have that but I'd be a different person if I had
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Hmm, well... perhaps an appropriate variation of that.
If you could be any GENDER you wanted, which one would you be?
The conventional modern understanding of what it means to be a transgender woman is along these lines: The world consists of men and women; a transgender woman is a person who was born male but wants to be a woman, and transitions.
Trans women themselves would probably be more likely to say: Although I was born with a body that was assigned male initially by others, I *am* a woman. Transitioning is either to correct the body to make it correspond with a person's identity or else to shift the perceptions of other people.
I myself am not a transitioner, and my answer would be like this: The world consists predominantly of male men and female women, but there are also male women and female men, and folks in-between, and others. Just like transgender people, I am already the gender I want to be: a male woman
I want to change people's perceptions (i.e., I want to be seen as and treated as who I am), but I have no interest in changing myself.
What does it mean to "be a woman", though? There are all the attributes and characteristics, behaviors and roles and so on, but interspersed with that is the notion of a correspondence to some degree with the social construct called "biological femaleness" — breasts, vagina, menses, uterus, pregnancy. And it's all wrapped together as a package deal. Even among people who mentally distinguish between femininity (or "the sex role expectation of femininity", if you prefer) and biological female morphology, there are often many things that are thought of, consciously or unconsciously, as part of biological femaleness that someone else would classify differently: sexual positioning and mate selection strategies, the question of desirability or attractiveness, the gatekeeper role as the person who gives or withholds consent, and nurturance and other related manifestations of hormonal states, social interaction patterns determined by having a smaller size and less physical strength, and so on. So while it is highly useful to distinguish intellectually between sex and gender, between biological femaleness (social construct though it may be) and the complex constellation of things we call femininity, there still isn't a consensus about which is which, or which contains which elements, if you see what I mean.
What if we teased it apart into a sort of checklist, then? For those who wish to (continue to) be a woman, what do you mean when you say you are a woman? For instance (keeping in mind that for cisgender women as well as anyone else identifying as a woman, not all of these will apply)...
[ ] Demeanor and behavior, that yours matches the overall pattern exhibited by women in general
[ ] Perception and interpretation of your demeanor and behavior by others as feminine
[ ] Perception and interpretation of your body: being viewed by others as morphologically female
[ ] The experience of being a sex object, a target of the sexual appetite of those people who are of the sex and/or gender you wish to be sexy to, especially to the extent that this is a different experience for women
[ ] Having the personality and holding the priorities and values and overall perspective and viewpoints that women have more of a tendency to hold than men do
[ ] Others' perception and interpretation of you as having such a personality and being likely to hold such values and priorities etc
[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature
[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy
[ ] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life
[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life
To do this right, we'd need a fill-in-the-blank line after each item to add a comment as need be.
Now, I can readily imagine some people rejecting this sliced-up deconstruction. I've encountered that in a few discussions, in fact, the notion that something gets killed or ignored when you divide the concept up in this fashion, and that "woman" (or "man" for that matter) is an entire package and that to be what it is and retain its meaning it has to continue to be that way.
But I'm not fond of that, since that attitude erases me. It's as reductionistic as the attitude of some of the people on Facebook who post things like "If you got a dick yer a man".
I definitely need to order a la carte. Here's my own response, checks for what I would place an order for and x's for the ones that already apply:
[x] Demeanor and behavior I've got that already
[√] Perception and interpretation of my behavior as feminine Yeah, that's what I want
[ ] Perception and interpretation of my body as morphologically female No thank you
[√] The experience of being a sex object / to those of the sex or gender to which I want to be attractive well yes, actually
[x] Personality and priorities and values and overall perspective I already have that too
[√] Perceived by others as having that personality and priorities etc This is important
[ ] Breasts, vagina, relative hairlessness, slender neck, smaller chin, vertical navel, hourglass figure, smaller stature Umm, no, I'm fine with the factory installed parts
[ ] Menstruation, ovulation, lactation, capacity for pregnancy Neither need nor have any of those
[x] A history of having always been a girl or woman, perceiving yourself as such consistently all your life I have that, too, actually
[ ] A history of having been perceived and treated as a girl or woman throughout your life I don't have that but I'd be a different person if I had
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Monday, November 12, 2018
Almost Quit My Job...
I have a temporary job working at a Montessori School. Not in the classroom but in the office, where interaction with the children isn't really an expected part of my job. But we're understaffed. The other day, the teacher in the classroom for 3 to 6 year olds needed a bathroom break and there was no teacher's assistant to cover, so I was asked to step in. Except not quite exactly step in. "Just stand at the entrance to the classroom until she gets back", the administrator told me. "I don't want to send a man in with the children, some of the parents won't like that".
I fumed while I waited there, not liking this. (The children know me from the front office; they're alert and bright and know all the adults by name from early September on. They called to me from within the classroom and asked why I didn't come on in). So I stood there doing a slow burn, and rehearsed telling my boss I was unwilling to work there any more because of this.
This, by the way, is what dysphoria is for me. For other gender-variant people, misgendering may occur when people use the wrong pronoun, or when they are referred to as "male" when they identify as "female" or vice versa. In my case, I consider myself to have both a sex and a gender, and don't have a preferred pronoun; I don't mind being referred to as male because I am male, and most of the time being referred to as a man doesn't provoke my ire, either, because in most cases the person speaking isn't using it offensively, just ignorantly. But when I get lumped in with other men, with my attributes extrapolated from what is known or thought of men in general, and distinguished from women, that's misgendering and I hate it personally and viscerally and with shocking pain, personally affronted by it.
When the teacher returned, I stalked down to the administrator's office. "You told me to wait outside the classroom because the parents would not like a man being in the classroom with their children. So you would not have said the same thing to a female office worker if she was asked to cover?" I crossed my arms, already preparing my I-quit sentence within my head.
"I am not willing to expose any of the men who work for me to the horrible attitudes of some of these parents", she replied. "Let me tell you about Brian. He was a student here, honor student, really nice boy. I had him working in my office for awhile when he was a young adult. One day the police showed up and demanded to know if I had Brian Jones working here, because they needed to arrest him on suspicion of child molestation. He would never do such a thing, everyone who knew him agreed with that. What had happened was the children were playing flag football during gym class and one of the girls lost her flag from where they tuck it in, in the back of their shorts at the waistband, you know, and she had trouble reaching back there to get it back in, so he helped her. But her mother heard that there was a man working with the children and she asked the girl if he had ever touched her and she had no idea what her mother meant by that. Anyway, I'm not willing to put you or any other man in that kind of situation".
Hmmph.
That does put a different spin on things. If she had said "I am not willing to expose my children to any risk of sexual misconduct" or "I am not willing to expose my school to the risk of such accusations", I would have been so out of there. Because my maleness doesn't make me a threat to children and I'll be damned if I'll tolerate that kind of insinuation. But she'd couched it in terms of the risk to me of being targeted by that kind of bigotry.
Oh, it's still the wrong answer. There exists what I call "The Weather Approach" to social problems. Someone addresses all the incoming women students on campus and warns them not to dress revealingly or to be out unaccompanied by themselves, because there's a risk of rape, and in doing that they are treating the behavior of the men on campus as if they were the weather--no responsibility for their own behavior, so those who might get exposed to it have all the responsibility of dressing for it and carrying an umbrella. We don't expect the weather to develop a consciousness of how it treats the people it rains on, so it makes rational sense to tell people to take the weather into account and plan accordingly. But men are not the weather. Neither are bigoted parents with sexist attitudes. So it's the wrong answer. Ideally she should have spoken to me about what I might be exposing myself to, risk-wise, but not acted so as to protect me without my having chosen to be protected.
The "Weather Approach" always tends to be complicated and convoluted. Does a parent of an oppressed and vilified raise his children to be free and untrammeled and unimpeded by societal labels, or to be savvy and wary of racists and haters?
I listened and went back to my desk, still employed there at least for now.
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I fumed while I waited there, not liking this. (The children know me from the front office; they're alert and bright and know all the adults by name from early September on. They called to me from within the classroom and asked why I didn't come on in). So I stood there doing a slow burn, and rehearsed telling my boss I was unwilling to work there any more because of this.
This, by the way, is what dysphoria is for me. For other gender-variant people, misgendering may occur when people use the wrong pronoun, or when they are referred to as "male" when they identify as "female" or vice versa. In my case, I consider myself to have both a sex and a gender, and don't have a preferred pronoun; I don't mind being referred to as male because I am male, and most of the time being referred to as a man doesn't provoke my ire, either, because in most cases the person speaking isn't using it offensively, just ignorantly. But when I get lumped in with other men, with my attributes extrapolated from what is known or thought of men in general, and distinguished from women, that's misgendering and I hate it personally and viscerally and with shocking pain, personally affronted by it.
When the teacher returned, I stalked down to the administrator's office. "You told me to wait outside the classroom because the parents would not like a man being in the classroom with their children. So you would not have said the same thing to a female office worker if she was asked to cover?" I crossed my arms, already preparing my I-quit sentence within my head.
"I am not willing to expose any of the men who work for me to the horrible attitudes of some of these parents", she replied. "Let me tell you about Brian. He was a student here, honor student, really nice boy. I had him working in my office for awhile when he was a young adult. One day the police showed up and demanded to know if I had Brian Jones working here, because they needed to arrest him on suspicion of child molestation. He would never do such a thing, everyone who knew him agreed with that. What had happened was the children were playing flag football during gym class and one of the girls lost her flag from where they tuck it in, in the back of their shorts at the waistband, you know, and she had trouble reaching back there to get it back in, so he helped her. But her mother heard that there was a man working with the children and she asked the girl if he had ever touched her and she had no idea what her mother meant by that. Anyway, I'm not willing to put you or any other man in that kind of situation".
Hmmph.
That does put a different spin on things. If she had said "I am not willing to expose my children to any risk of sexual misconduct" or "I am not willing to expose my school to the risk of such accusations", I would have been so out of there. Because my maleness doesn't make me a threat to children and I'll be damned if I'll tolerate that kind of insinuation. But she'd couched it in terms of the risk to me of being targeted by that kind of bigotry.
Oh, it's still the wrong answer. There exists what I call "The Weather Approach" to social problems. Someone addresses all the incoming women students on campus and warns them not to dress revealingly or to be out unaccompanied by themselves, because there's a risk of rape, and in doing that they are treating the behavior of the men on campus as if they were the weather--no responsibility for their own behavior, so those who might get exposed to it have all the responsibility of dressing for it and carrying an umbrella. We don't expect the weather to develop a consciousness of how it treats the people it rains on, so it makes rational sense to tell people to take the weather into account and plan accordingly. But men are not the weather. Neither are bigoted parents with sexist attitudes. So it's the wrong answer. Ideally she should have spoken to me about what I might be exposing myself to, risk-wise, but not acted so as to protect me without my having chosen to be protected.
The "Weather Approach" always tends to be complicated and convoluted. Does a parent of an oppressed and vilified raise his children to be free and untrammeled and unimpeded by societal labels, or to be savvy and wary of racists and haters?
I listened and went back to my desk, still employed there at least for now.
———————
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Monday, November 5, 2018
Summarizing a Life
As a consequence of my mother dying and an unusually high volume of other friends', relatives', and associates' lives coming to an end within the last year or so, I've heard a lot of summaries of people's lives, condensations of who those people were around some ongoing themes or primary accomplishments.
I've been doing this all my life. Or all my adult life at any rate. I started when I was 21.
Trying to explain being a person whose body is male and yet whose persona is feminine. Trying to become understood by other people in those terms. Trying to get people to add that to the list of possibilities and accept it as a valid identity.
I've had limited traction. I've put a lot of energy into it but it has mostly gone into spinning my wheels without propelling me very far forward. I've had limited effect. Perhaps I am not very good at what I set out to do; perhaps I lack the talent or the appropriate skill-set or something. I don't have a significant following of people listening or reading what I have to say on the subject.
I've occasionally seriously considered putting this down and walking away from it. I mean, the problem with being Don Quixote is that you do not merely fail to defeat your windmills, you don't even get the satisfaction of having the windmills become aware that you're making the attempt. It gets discouraging.
When I was 22, at the end of a year in which my initial efforts had caused me to be detained in a psychiatric facility and disenrolled from college, and in which attempts to "find my people" had gotten me nowhere, I began to question whether these ideas really made sense, or even if they did, whether they were anywhere near as important as they'd seemed when they first came into my head. I came out of that period of questioning convinced of two things: I didn't have to do this, it was not my duty; but yeah, they made sense of my life and they made sense of society around me, and without them there was a boiling meaningless chaos, and so I was inclined to continue to hold onto them, and in believing in them I was driven to continue to try to communicate.
Many years later, at the end of my 30s, my plans appeared to have collapsed around me with no significant progress made: I'd come to the New York area again seeking to "find my people" but the lesbian gay and bisexual scene such as it existed in Manhattan in the 1980s was just starting to open to transsexual (now called transgender) people, very few of whom were coming to participate; and I didn't find a space in which I could explain my own situation and find anyone with similar identity or experience. I'd also latched onto the idea of majoring in feminist studies: I'd write about this stuff and interact with classmates and teachers and I'd connect with people instead of just finding kindred souls within the pages of feminist theory books! But that hadn't quite panned out either, and now my graduate school career was over with no PhD or teaching position in sight. But I'd obtained an MSW in social work along the way and landed a job and figured over the years I'd make professional connections and get to inform policy makers and write grant proposals and create relevant services to bring my people together somehow. But the social work organization had disbanded and I'd been cast adrift and, finding myself unable to get a job offer in social work, had taken an office job developing database software. Lucrative but not relevant to my "mission". And I'd connected romantically with people several times only to always have them unravel, leaving me concerned that I couldn't maintain a relationship or that I wasn't a desirable partner. So I started to think of myself as someone in early retirement, a social activist driven from the field with nothing to show for it.
Over the course of my 40s I retraced my steps, mental ones and actual physical locations, trying to get a clear sense of what had happened in my life and whether or not this was still something I wanted to do, and if so how I was going to proceed. It took awhile but increasingly as I looked back on who I had been and what I'd attempted, I saw it as worthwhile and began to think about what to do next.
From the self-examination activity there came an autobiography, and at it took form I began to think "this is what to do next; show people what it is like, don't theorize about it, show them!" And from the autobiography came the distilled and augmented story that I'm trying to market as GENDERQUEER: A STORY FROM A DIFFERENT CLOSET. My memoir and coming-out and coming-of-age story.
Five years into the process of trying to get it into print, I still don't have much to point to except a massive pile of rejection slips (mostly digital, and hence a virtual pile in an email program's folder). It continues to be frustrating.
I've had an occasional success though! Firstly, back when I was a grad student I got an article printed in an academic journal, and it has generated discussion and affected some of the people who've read it over the years. It's some of my best writing and I'm quite proud of it. Same Door, Different Closet: A Heterosexual Sissy's Coming-out Party
Secondly, I've twice had signed contracts with publishers who were promising to publish this book. It didn't happen, but that's a different situation than if I'd been querying for five years and never gotten a serious nibble.
I blog and I post into Facebook groups for genderqueer and other gender-variant groups and/or LGBTQ-in-general groups. I don't have the audience I wish that I had, with a multitude of followers subscribing and commenting. But I reach a few people.
And I've had the opportunity to speak to some LGBT groups and to college women's studies / gender studies classes on campus and in some other venues (including BDSM lifestyle conventions, interestingly enough) and although my audiences have not been huge, I've had people come up to me later and say how relevant my presentation was, and that they've never had those thoughts or feelings validated in that way before.
Anyway, I am now on the cusp of turning 60. It seems increasingly likely that yes, this is going to be "what I did with my life". My life's work. My primary lifetime project.
So... if you encounter someone like me -- perhaps someone who wanders into your Facebook group and says "I don't know what to call myself... I was thinking maybe genderqueer, or perhaps nonbinary... my body is male and I don't think it is wrong, and I don't want people to think of me as a female person, I'm not... but who I am, my identity, is feminine or femme or like basically I'm one of the girls or women" -- do me a favor and tell them about me. Tell them I call it being a "gender invert". Refer them to some of these blog posts. And if my book is published by then, tell them to read my book.
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I've been doing this all my life. Or all my adult life at any rate. I started when I was 21.
Trying to explain being a person whose body is male and yet whose persona is feminine. Trying to become understood by other people in those terms. Trying to get people to add that to the list of possibilities and accept it as a valid identity.
I've had limited traction. I've put a lot of energy into it but it has mostly gone into spinning my wheels without propelling me very far forward. I've had limited effect. Perhaps I am not very good at what I set out to do; perhaps I lack the talent or the appropriate skill-set or something. I don't have a significant following of people listening or reading what I have to say on the subject.
I've occasionally seriously considered putting this down and walking away from it. I mean, the problem with being Don Quixote is that you do not merely fail to defeat your windmills, you don't even get the satisfaction of having the windmills become aware that you're making the attempt. It gets discouraging.
When I was 22, at the end of a year in which my initial efforts had caused me to be detained in a psychiatric facility and disenrolled from college, and in which attempts to "find my people" had gotten me nowhere, I began to question whether these ideas really made sense, or even if they did, whether they were anywhere near as important as they'd seemed when they first came into my head. I came out of that period of questioning convinced of two things: I didn't have to do this, it was not my duty; but yeah, they made sense of my life and they made sense of society around me, and without them there was a boiling meaningless chaos, and so I was inclined to continue to hold onto them, and in believing in them I was driven to continue to try to communicate.
Many years later, at the end of my 30s, my plans appeared to have collapsed around me with no significant progress made: I'd come to the New York area again seeking to "find my people" but the lesbian gay and bisexual scene such as it existed in Manhattan in the 1980s was just starting to open to transsexual (now called transgender) people, very few of whom were coming to participate; and I didn't find a space in which I could explain my own situation and find anyone with similar identity or experience. I'd also latched onto the idea of majoring in feminist studies: I'd write about this stuff and interact with classmates and teachers and I'd connect with people instead of just finding kindred souls within the pages of feminist theory books! But that hadn't quite panned out either, and now my graduate school career was over with no PhD or teaching position in sight. But I'd obtained an MSW in social work along the way and landed a job and figured over the years I'd make professional connections and get to inform policy makers and write grant proposals and create relevant services to bring my people together somehow. But the social work organization had disbanded and I'd been cast adrift and, finding myself unable to get a job offer in social work, had taken an office job developing database software. Lucrative but not relevant to my "mission". And I'd connected romantically with people several times only to always have them unravel, leaving me concerned that I couldn't maintain a relationship or that I wasn't a desirable partner. So I started to think of myself as someone in early retirement, a social activist driven from the field with nothing to show for it.
Over the course of my 40s I retraced my steps, mental ones and actual physical locations, trying to get a clear sense of what had happened in my life and whether or not this was still something I wanted to do, and if so how I was going to proceed. It took awhile but increasingly as I looked back on who I had been and what I'd attempted, I saw it as worthwhile and began to think about what to do next.
From the self-examination activity there came an autobiography, and at it took form I began to think "this is what to do next; show people what it is like, don't theorize about it, show them!" And from the autobiography came the distilled and augmented story that I'm trying to market as GENDERQUEER: A STORY FROM A DIFFERENT CLOSET. My memoir and coming-out and coming-of-age story.
Five years into the process of trying to get it into print, I still don't have much to point to except a massive pile of rejection slips (mostly digital, and hence a virtual pile in an email program's folder). It continues to be frustrating.
I've had an occasional success though! Firstly, back when I was a grad student I got an article printed in an academic journal, and it has generated discussion and affected some of the people who've read it over the years. It's some of my best writing and I'm quite proud of it. Same Door, Different Closet: A Heterosexual Sissy's Coming-out Party
Secondly, I've twice had signed contracts with publishers who were promising to publish this book. It didn't happen, but that's a different situation than if I'd been querying for five years and never gotten a serious nibble.
I blog and I post into Facebook groups for genderqueer and other gender-variant groups and/or LGBTQ-in-general groups. I don't have the audience I wish that I had, with a multitude of followers subscribing and commenting. But I reach a few people.
And I've had the opportunity to speak to some LGBT groups and to college women's studies / gender studies classes on campus and in some other venues (including BDSM lifestyle conventions, interestingly enough) and although my audiences have not been huge, I've had people come up to me later and say how relevant my presentation was, and that they've never had those thoughts or feelings validated in that way before.
Anyway, I am now on the cusp of turning 60. It seems increasingly likely that yes, this is going to be "what I did with my life". My life's work. My primary lifetime project.
So... if you encounter someone like me -- perhaps someone who wanders into your Facebook group and says "I don't know what to call myself... I was thinking maybe genderqueer, or perhaps nonbinary... my body is male and I don't think it is wrong, and I don't want people to think of me as a female person, I'm not... but who I am, my identity, is feminine or femme or like basically I'm one of the girls or women" -- do me a favor and tell them about me. Tell them I call it being a "gender invert". Refer them to some of these blog posts. And if my book is published by then, tell them to read my book.
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Tuesday, October 30, 2018
My Mom
My mother took an obvious delight in us as young children, introducing us to nursery rhymes and songs. But if my presence was a source of delight in her life, it was also a source of dismay and frustration, such as when I'd come home from kindergarten without my umbrella or my coat yet again, for the third time this week. I think there were times she despaired of me ever becoming mature enough to function independently and responsibly.
And that was an important part of mothering for her. She wanted her children equipped to be self-reliant and competent individuals, to send us out into the world with confidence. In my case, I soon had teachers and other adults fawning over my brilliance and my verbal fluency. Mama credited that too but remained concerned about pragmatic things: having a clever tongue wasn't going to make up for being absent-minded and irresponsible; I was still in danger of needing a keeper!
The pragmatic approach was typical of my Mom. She was never much inclined to make a fancy statement or to outline her viewpoints as derived from general principles. She just did what she considered important, right, or necessary.
Wnen I was about 8, she became concerned about young poor children not receiving a good early education and therefore not getting a fair chance in life. She worked with Head Start for awhile and then became a public school teacher, teaching 1st grade. No one visiting our home or speaking with her in church ever found themselves on the receiving end of passionate lectures about racism and poverty, and she didn't hang posters on our walls or anything. She just recognized a social problem that needed cleaning up and went to work on it the same way she'd address a pile of laundry or a stack of dirty dishes in the sink.
Her own parents valued fitting in, not sticking out, and at a superficial level a person would probably have gotten that same impression about Mama. In her case, it was misleading. In the 1960s in Valdosta Georgia she had her own reasons -- practical and pragmatic ones, of course -- to have on a pantsuit on an early Sunday afternoon, and she chose to wear it to church instead of making it necessary to come home and change. Not long after that, a pair of church women were overheard to say "Well if Joyce Hunter can wear a pantsuit to services, I guess I can too".
Years later she was the first woman to work in the previously all-male ceramics and metallurgy sciences group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This integration didn't take place without some resistance. There were men there who didn't think she belonged. This was the late 1970s, a time when women's equality and their right to work in the professions of their choosing was a current hot topic of discussion. My mom's reason for being there was that her employer wanted to place here there, she had the skillset and talents needed for the job, and it sounded interesting. She showed up, did her job, won awards for the quality of her work, and outlasted her critics, and so in her own quiet way, with no trumpets blaring, she was a pioneer.
She taught me and my sister how to swim and drilled us on our strokes and technique until we qualified to be certified by the Red Cross first as Beginning swimmers, then Intermediate, and finally Advanced. When I was in Boy Scouts I decided to obtain the Mile Swim badge, and went to the most experienced long-distance swimmer I knew: my mother. A Boy Scout leader questioned this later: I wasn't in Cub Scouts, why the heck was I going to my MOMMY to get certified for my mile swim? I looked at this silly man and shook my head. Mama wasn't one of those flamboyant speed racer swimmers like Michael Phelps. When you saw her in the water swimming in her lane you didn't notice anything spectacular happening. But she was one of those people who could swim across the English Channel if she had enough time, she could go forever. She probably swam farther each month than he had in his entire life.
During my 30s I took pride in telling my friends that my middle-aged Mom had taken up scuba diving and was off exploring coral reefs in the Caribbean. She and my Dad went forth in a series of excursions and saw the world, and I enjoyed visualizing them as adventurers, peeking over new horizons and seeing new sights. Neither of them opted to spend their retirement quietly rocking back and forth in rocking chairs.
I was loved unconditionally and with joy, and launched with optimism and confidence to go out and live life to the fullest, to be a good person and to always do what I thought was right.
I don't think my gender identification stemmed from affirmatively wanting to be like her while actively trying to avoid being like my Dad or anything like that. For me, it mostly had to do with the larger world, the world that defines and describes what it is to be a girl or a boy. I'm not a Freudian; I don't think children get their sense of what the sexes mean exclusively or primarily from their parents. Parents are Other in a fundamental way: they're grownups! What is normal for them isn't normal for us and vice versa. I got the sense of what the genders meant from the neighborhood and from school. From people my own age. I made generalizations, the other kids made generalizations. And then we began treating each other differently on the basis of sex. The teachers did too. It's not the kind of thing you necessarily notice that strongly coming from your own parents, at least not unless you see them around enough children to see a pattern forming. You do see it in classrooms because you've got a box of children, about half girls and half boys, and if there's different treatment you see it. And if there's a persistent pattern you see it because over time you see several adults doing it, and you see the kids themselves doing it as well.
Home was a safe place and my mom certainly was a big part of why that was true. If she was exasperated with me it was because I didn't do my homework or forgot my umbrella at the library. Never because I wasn't out in the neighbor's yard playing football with the other boys on our street.
She didn't realize what my daily life was like, at least not while it was happening. "Just laugh and show them you're a good sport. When they see that teasing you doesn't get you riled up, the bullies will lose interest and the others will see that you're a pleasant person. Just don't let them get to you".
Later, she had a better sense of what I was up against, but she couldn't fix things for me. She couldn't defend me against them because she wouldn't always be there. She would have if she could. She told me so as we talked at length in her final days, knowing it was our last chance to have discussions. She was sorry my childhood had been so awful and that I'd been alone in dealing with the more complicated stuff as a young adult, sorting things out. I told her about how I'd been taught that I was worthy of love and given the courage to believe that no, I didn't deserve the treatment that was meted out to me. I told her that I've had a good life. It's been a life based on choices she would not have made, would have found absolutely off-limits, incomprehensible. Often did, since she knew of some of them. But that I've had good connections with people, a sense of purpose and engagement with projects, and that I've had adventures. That I have lived life to the fullest on my own terms.
"What do you think about a person who wants to end their life?", she asked. "Do you think it is immoral?" At 82 she had been an athlete still, doing her daily laps in the pool that she and my Dad built as part of their dreamhouse, when her body misbehaved and flung clots. Some lodged in the brain and messed up motor and sensory, a little bit of cognitive, all of which she'll probably bounce back from. One lodged in her right calf muscle and they had to make two parallel slices and weren't at all sure she could keep the limb, although eventually they detected enough pulse in the foot that they stopped threatening to remove it. Unfortunately the remaining clot blocked the femoral artery in the other leg and a good chunk of that leg turned into the equiv of raw pot roast, and they had to take it off at the knee.
She had never been very inclined to ruminate about philosophical questions. This was pragmatic. A practical consideration. I acknowledged that anyone in her situation would think about that. At the time, like the rest of my family, I hoped she would decide that insofar as she was still here, she might as well make the best of it or at least explore what she could do within her new limitations.
"What's that drug that people die from that's in the news so much? Heroin? And the legal version that they give you in hospitals, that's...morphine?" Yeah, pragmatic and practical.
She negotiated a discharge from the hospital and then from the rehab center they sent her to. It wasn't easy and there were setbacks but she succeeded in situating herself back in her own home, in a hospital bed set up for that purpose.
She ate well and seemed to be in good spirits and interacted with people. I spoke with her on the phone briefly.
Next day, apparently, she began to withdraw. Didn't want to eat, and ... the way my Dad put it was that talking to her was like calling an office and getting the answering machine. She'd answer questions put to her but wasn't really tuning in. Then when they were turning her to change the sheets she just...quit. No breath, no heartbeat.
Mama
1935-2018
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And that was an important part of mothering for her. She wanted her children equipped to be self-reliant and competent individuals, to send us out into the world with confidence. In my case, I soon had teachers and other adults fawning over my brilliance and my verbal fluency. Mama credited that too but remained concerned about pragmatic things: having a clever tongue wasn't going to make up for being absent-minded and irresponsible; I was still in danger of needing a keeper!
The pragmatic approach was typical of my Mom. She was never much inclined to make a fancy statement or to outline her viewpoints as derived from general principles. She just did what she considered important, right, or necessary.
Wnen I was about 8, she became concerned about young poor children not receiving a good early education and therefore not getting a fair chance in life. She worked with Head Start for awhile and then became a public school teacher, teaching 1st grade. No one visiting our home or speaking with her in church ever found themselves on the receiving end of passionate lectures about racism and poverty, and she didn't hang posters on our walls or anything. She just recognized a social problem that needed cleaning up and went to work on it the same way she'd address a pile of laundry or a stack of dirty dishes in the sink.
Her own parents valued fitting in, not sticking out, and at a superficial level a person would probably have gotten that same impression about Mama. In her case, it was misleading. In the 1960s in Valdosta Georgia she had her own reasons -- practical and pragmatic ones, of course -- to have on a pantsuit on an early Sunday afternoon, and she chose to wear it to church instead of making it necessary to come home and change. Not long after that, a pair of church women were overheard to say "Well if Joyce Hunter can wear a pantsuit to services, I guess I can too".
Years later she was the first woman to work in the previously all-male ceramics and metallurgy sciences group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This integration didn't take place without some resistance. There were men there who didn't think she belonged. This was the late 1970s, a time when women's equality and their right to work in the professions of their choosing was a current hot topic of discussion. My mom's reason for being there was that her employer wanted to place here there, she had the skillset and talents needed for the job, and it sounded interesting. She showed up, did her job, won awards for the quality of her work, and outlasted her critics, and so in her own quiet way, with no trumpets blaring, she was a pioneer.
She taught me and my sister how to swim and drilled us on our strokes and technique until we qualified to be certified by the Red Cross first as Beginning swimmers, then Intermediate, and finally Advanced. When I was in Boy Scouts I decided to obtain the Mile Swim badge, and went to the most experienced long-distance swimmer I knew: my mother. A Boy Scout leader questioned this later: I wasn't in Cub Scouts, why the heck was I going to my MOMMY to get certified for my mile swim? I looked at this silly man and shook my head. Mama wasn't one of those flamboyant speed racer swimmers like Michael Phelps. When you saw her in the water swimming in her lane you didn't notice anything spectacular happening. But she was one of those people who could swim across the English Channel if she had enough time, she could go forever. She probably swam farther each month than he had in his entire life.
During my 30s I took pride in telling my friends that my middle-aged Mom had taken up scuba diving and was off exploring coral reefs in the Caribbean. She and my Dad went forth in a series of excursions and saw the world, and I enjoyed visualizing them as adventurers, peeking over new horizons and seeing new sights. Neither of them opted to spend their retirement quietly rocking back and forth in rocking chairs.
I was loved unconditionally and with joy, and launched with optimism and confidence to go out and live life to the fullest, to be a good person and to always do what I thought was right.
I don't think my gender identification stemmed from affirmatively wanting to be like her while actively trying to avoid being like my Dad or anything like that. For me, it mostly had to do with the larger world, the world that defines and describes what it is to be a girl or a boy. I'm not a Freudian; I don't think children get their sense of what the sexes mean exclusively or primarily from their parents. Parents are Other in a fundamental way: they're grownups! What is normal for them isn't normal for us and vice versa. I got the sense of what the genders meant from the neighborhood and from school. From people my own age. I made generalizations, the other kids made generalizations. And then we began treating each other differently on the basis of sex. The teachers did too. It's not the kind of thing you necessarily notice that strongly coming from your own parents, at least not unless you see them around enough children to see a pattern forming. You do see it in classrooms because you've got a box of children, about half girls and half boys, and if there's different treatment you see it. And if there's a persistent pattern you see it because over time you see several adults doing it, and you see the kids themselves doing it as well.
Home was a safe place and my mom certainly was a big part of why that was true. If she was exasperated with me it was because I didn't do my homework or forgot my umbrella at the library. Never because I wasn't out in the neighbor's yard playing football with the other boys on our street.
She didn't realize what my daily life was like, at least not while it was happening. "Just laugh and show them you're a good sport. When they see that teasing you doesn't get you riled up, the bullies will lose interest and the others will see that you're a pleasant person. Just don't let them get to you".
Later, she had a better sense of what I was up against, but she couldn't fix things for me. She couldn't defend me against them because she wouldn't always be there. She would have if she could. She told me so as we talked at length in her final days, knowing it was our last chance to have discussions. She was sorry my childhood had been so awful and that I'd been alone in dealing with the more complicated stuff as a young adult, sorting things out. I told her about how I'd been taught that I was worthy of love and given the courage to believe that no, I didn't deserve the treatment that was meted out to me. I told her that I've had a good life. It's been a life based on choices she would not have made, would have found absolutely off-limits, incomprehensible. Often did, since she knew of some of them. But that I've had good connections with people, a sense of purpose and engagement with projects, and that I've had adventures. That I have lived life to the fullest on my own terms.
"What do you think about a person who wants to end their life?", she asked. "Do you think it is immoral?" At 82 she had been an athlete still, doing her daily laps in the pool that she and my Dad built as part of their dreamhouse, when her body misbehaved and flung clots. Some lodged in the brain and messed up motor and sensory, a little bit of cognitive, all of which she'll probably bounce back from. One lodged in her right calf muscle and they had to make two parallel slices and weren't at all sure she could keep the limb, although eventually they detected enough pulse in the foot that they stopped threatening to remove it. Unfortunately the remaining clot blocked the femoral artery in the other leg and a good chunk of that leg turned into the equiv of raw pot roast, and they had to take it off at the knee.
She had never been very inclined to ruminate about philosophical questions. This was pragmatic. A practical consideration. I acknowledged that anyone in her situation would think about that. At the time, like the rest of my family, I hoped she would decide that insofar as she was still here, she might as well make the best of it or at least explore what she could do within her new limitations.
"What's that drug that people die from that's in the news so much? Heroin? And the legal version that they give you in hospitals, that's...morphine?" Yeah, pragmatic and practical.
She negotiated a discharge from the hospital and then from the rehab center they sent her to. It wasn't easy and there were setbacks but she succeeded in situating herself back in her own home, in a hospital bed set up for that purpose.
She ate well and seemed to be in good spirits and interacted with people. I spoke with her on the phone briefly.
Next day, apparently, she began to withdraw. Didn't want to eat, and ... the way my Dad put it was that talking to her was like calling an office and getting the answering machine. She'd answer questions put to her but wasn't really tuning in. Then when they were turning her to change the sheets she just...quit. No breath, no heartbeat.
Mama
1935-2018
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Sunday, October 21, 2018
About the Whining Thing...
As a sissy femme male, I'm quite qualified to talk about the whining thing. When males complain about masculinity being imposed on us, it's always seen as whining. Compare to female people speaking about how femininity is foisted upon them: anger is among those things femininity denies to women, and to step outside of feminity as they do is to be seen as erupting in furious anger. But anger isn't outside of masculinity. Whimpering and asking for sympathy solace and understanding is. And so it is inevitable that we're perceived as whiners.
But to an extent everyone who raises their voices to complain about a social issue is viewed as whining. Around us are always people enduring the same thing but not making noise about it, and around us is an entire society in which the social issues we speak of are not new. If others can endure it and it's been endured for decades or centuries, who are we to expect it to change on our behalf?
I've had various friends who grew up in Jewish or Black households telling me about how it was for them growing up. A common occurrence was being put in their place by their parents, being told that they had a lot of nerve complaining about whatever they were complaining about at the time, when their life was so easy compared to the life of great-aunt Rachel or your grandpa's uncle Raphael. He was born a slave and made to work in the hot sun and shipped in chains to the market when he was 12. She was marked for extermination and hid from soldiers and eventually caught and sent to the concentration camp and starved and then gassed to death in the showers. Admittedly, my friends' complaints to their parents were often about being required to clean their rooms and being denied permission to attend a weekend party with their friends, but if you extend the logic of their parents, people are just whining if they complain about racism or antisemitism today because they aren't property in chains or the target of an explicit genocidal pogrom. That's ludicrous.
Social justice discussions shouldn't be about whose oppression-scars are ugliest and most traumatic and dismissing the insufficiently injured people's complaints as unjustified whining.
We do admire the tough survivors. The woman who shouldered her way into a men-only world and always had to prove herself better to be perceived half as good, and outlasted them and thrived there. The middle-class suburbanite confronted by a would-be mugger who upsides him with her purse and whacks him with her cane resulting in him yelling for help. The fifh grader who knees her would-be abductor in the balls and calls 911 while he writhes on the ground. The lesbian in graduate school who describes crossing campus at 1 AM and approaching a cluster of young men gathered close to her car, only to see them scatter as she strides close, exuding "don't fuck with me" confidence. The gay femme on the subway who responds to threats and harassment with a loud and entertaining ridicule that has the whole car applauding and the belligerent harassers slinking away.
But the fact that some people do indeed go up against pervasive unequal treatment and don't let it stop them doesn't mean we as a culture don't need to stop the unfair unequal treatment. Presumably no one responds to the story about the brave fifth grader by saying "Oh, we don't need to protect children from sexual predators and abductors and abusers, they should be able to handle themselves like that girl did".
When I'm accusing of being a whiner, I'm often reminded by my accusers of my various social privileges. I'm not perceived as female and I can safely walk with no real fear of assault, threat, or harassment. I'm not exiting gay bars in sight of bigots weilding crowbars. I'm not put in a position where I can't pee in any available public bathroom without someone calling the police. What has a sissy male like me to complain about?
Well, let's see, I do get let in on the homophobic violence. It's mostly better the older I get but as recently as last month I had a pair of young male belligerents asking me if I were a boy or a girl and then calling me faggot. Then there's the social isolation, that's always a big one. My existence is tolerated but I never quite fit in. Like so many other Different people this is at the core of my experience. In particular it has been a problem throughout my life to negotiate sexual interaction, courting and dating and finding someone to be in a relationship with and all that. Oh, and I do face discrimination in hiring and promotion and similar differential treatment. Not because I am directly perceived as a gender invert and discriminated against for being in that category, that's true, but because I am perceived as pathological, as impaired or otherwise not normal.
Some people would reply to that list by saying that the gay bashing is something I should be protected from, but that the world does not owe me dates or sex, and that I'm not socially entitled to a sexual relationship. Yet for me, it's the latter that was the dealbreaker as far as just silently and stoically coping with what the world deals out to me. I was able to come to terms with the intermittent violence and random hate. It was like bad weather; I tried to be prepared and if I got caught, well I'd dealt with it before and survived. But being left out in the cold and never have the connection that I craved? Devastating. Go figure. Each person has their own scale of tolerable versus intolerable offenses. We should listen to each other and put down those litmus tests for deciding who has a legitimate social issue and who is just whining.
———————
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But to an extent everyone who raises their voices to complain about a social issue is viewed as whining. Around us are always people enduring the same thing but not making noise about it, and around us is an entire society in which the social issues we speak of are not new. If others can endure it and it's been endured for decades or centuries, who are we to expect it to change on our behalf?
I've had various friends who grew up in Jewish or Black households telling me about how it was for them growing up. A common occurrence was being put in their place by their parents, being told that they had a lot of nerve complaining about whatever they were complaining about at the time, when their life was so easy compared to the life of great-aunt Rachel or your grandpa's uncle Raphael. He was born a slave and made to work in the hot sun and shipped in chains to the market when he was 12. She was marked for extermination and hid from soldiers and eventually caught and sent to the concentration camp and starved and then gassed to death in the showers. Admittedly, my friends' complaints to their parents were often about being required to clean their rooms and being denied permission to attend a weekend party with their friends, but if you extend the logic of their parents, people are just whining if they complain about racism or antisemitism today because they aren't property in chains or the target of an explicit genocidal pogrom. That's ludicrous.
Social justice discussions shouldn't be about whose oppression-scars are ugliest and most traumatic and dismissing the insufficiently injured people's complaints as unjustified whining.
We do admire the tough survivors. The woman who shouldered her way into a men-only world and always had to prove herself better to be perceived half as good, and outlasted them and thrived there. The middle-class suburbanite confronted by a would-be mugger who upsides him with her purse and whacks him with her cane resulting in him yelling for help. The fifh grader who knees her would-be abductor in the balls and calls 911 while he writhes on the ground. The lesbian in graduate school who describes crossing campus at 1 AM and approaching a cluster of young men gathered close to her car, only to see them scatter as she strides close, exuding "don't fuck with me" confidence. The gay femme on the subway who responds to threats and harassment with a loud and entertaining ridicule that has the whole car applauding and the belligerent harassers slinking away.
But the fact that some people do indeed go up against pervasive unequal treatment and don't let it stop them doesn't mean we as a culture don't need to stop the unfair unequal treatment. Presumably no one responds to the story about the brave fifth grader by saying "Oh, we don't need to protect children from sexual predators and abductors and abusers, they should be able to handle themselves like that girl did".
When I'm accusing of being a whiner, I'm often reminded by my accusers of my various social privileges. I'm not perceived as female and I can safely walk with no real fear of assault, threat, or harassment. I'm not exiting gay bars in sight of bigots weilding crowbars. I'm not put in a position where I can't pee in any available public bathroom without someone calling the police. What has a sissy male like me to complain about?
Well, let's see, I do get let in on the homophobic violence. It's mostly better the older I get but as recently as last month I had a pair of young male belligerents asking me if I were a boy or a girl and then calling me faggot. Then there's the social isolation, that's always a big one. My existence is tolerated but I never quite fit in. Like so many other Different people this is at the core of my experience. In particular it has been a problem throughout my life to negotiate sexual interaction, courting and dating and finding someone to be in a relationship with and all that. Oh, and I do face discrimination in hiring and promotion and similar differential treatment. Not because I am directly perceived as a gender invert and discriminated against for being in that category, that's true, but because I am perceived as pathological, as impaired or otherwise not normal.
Some people would reply to that list by saying that the gay bashing is something I should be protected from, but that the world does not owe me dates or sex, and that I'm not socially entitled to a sexual relationship. Yet for me, it's the latter that was the dealbreaker as far as just silently and stoically coping with what the world deals out to me. I was able to come to terms with the intermittent violence and random hate. It was like bad weather; I tried to be prepared and if I got caught, well I'd dealt with it before and survived. But being left out in the cold and never have the connection that I craved? Devastating. Go figure. Each person has their own scale of tolerable versus intolerable offenses. We should listen to each other and put down those litmus tests for deciding who has a legitimate social issue and who is just whining.
———————
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Sunday, October 14, 2018
Arguing Against Someone's Identity-Label is a Form of NOT LISTENING
= A =
I'm amazed at how often someone introduces themselves as having a specific identity and goes on to explain in more detail how life has been for them and what their experience has been, only to have people immediately contradicting their identity: "Well I think that makes you this other thing, not what you are calling yourself", or "You shouldn't use that term, it doesn't belong to you, only people who fit such-and-suchg other description should call themselves that", or even "You're just a mainstream person with no relevant differentiated identity to speak of, and you should quit calling yourself by any identity-label".
It happens within generic LGBTQIA community groups, it happens within highly specific support groups organized around one or more solitary letters from that acronym, and it happens within the larger surrounding society as well. "I reject all of what you're saying about yourself -- because you're calling yourself something that you're not".
It's a special form of not listening. I mean, any time a person uses a label for themself, it's a form of shorthand, like a book title or the title of a term paper or something. It's never going to express the entire thought process, but it's their chosen starting point. Then they go on to elaborate and explain about themselves and how they fit in (or fail to fit in) against this backdrop and that backdrop and how they have come to understand themselves as a person.
Now, it's one thing for someone to give a long thoughtful reply to the other person's entire narrative and offer comments and show understandings of that person's experiences, and to then mention along with all that other stuff that they think maybe this or that other term might be more appropriate or more useful. But to give a reply where the entire focus of the response is "you're not what you just called yourself"? That ignores the person's story and puts all the focus on the label as if the correctness of the label were the only important thing being said here.
It's the equivalent of writing a movie review of Sixth Sense that contained nothing except "This isn't about the sixth sense. The sixth sense is extra-sensory perception, like when you know what is going to happen before it happens. This Bruce Willis flick is just a ghost story, give it a pass". Or reviewing Boy Meets Girl by writing "Robby already knew Ricky at the beginning of this movie so it has nothing to do with 'Boy Meets Girl', don't bother".
People in narrowly defined groups sometimes do this as a gatekeeping function: "You tell a nice story but you aren't one of us and you shouldn't really be here in our space". People in broader LGBTQIA groups often do it as a form of shoehorning: "I divide the queer world up into these categories and excuse me but you belong in this category". People in the broad mainsteam culture do it fairly regularly as a way of denying the legitimacy of a marginalized identity: "You say you're that specific kind of person but really you're just a normal person who is trying to explain away your behavior or the outcome of it".
In all cases, it erases the full detailed story that the individual is trying to tell, by refusing to acknowledge that it has meaning aside from functioning as an example of a piece of terminology.
= B =
This is not just a case of people being dense or of getting caught up in little things that don't matter. It's political. They're rejecting what is being said because they don't like it, they feel threatened by it, they don't want a wider awareness of this kind of experience or understanding to catch on and they want to shut it down.
A person's choice of their own labels is also political, of course. To label our experience in the first place, in this manner, is to assert that it is part of a larger pattern, and that what we've been through has been the way it has been because of stuff that we have in common with other people who share the same identity-factor, that it is categorical, that it's an aggregate identity and not just our own personal narrative or our own unique personal quirks and traits.
There's always a backdrop, too. One chooses one identity as a way to push away some other identity, a default identity of some sort, that is otherwise constantly being foisted upon one. For example, if there were not a heteronormative expectation no one would need to come out as gay or lesbian. In the absense of being able to identify as gay and be recognized and understood as such, an individual's behavior, if still seen through heteronormative assumptions, looks strange: "Eww, you are so sex-obsessed and so unpicky that you would do perverted things like have erotic experiences with people of the same sex, which is clearly less desirable, so you are therefore a sex maniac and a threat to public decency!" Asserting the different identity (gay) shifts perception by establishing a different norm, a different set of expectations and values for understanding those same behaviors: "Oh, so for you, erotic experiences with the same sex are the desirable ones, so when you're sexually interested at all, that's where it will occur and it doesn't mean you're more sex-obsessed or less picky, you're different".
= C =
Our backdrop includes a world of existing labels, too. But they may not be useful to us, especially because labels that describe people so often bundle together a whole batch of meanings and implications that the person trying to explain their identity needs to untie and separate from each other.
Imagine a female person, perhaps from a previous century, who wants to designate herself as an expert in her field. The male people in her world call themselves "masters" of their subject areas. But "master" is a term that in her time is reserved exclusively for male people. The corresponding term for female use was "mistress". But the two terms have very different connotations, and she finds that saying she is a "Mistress of Science" doesn't convey at all what she wants to express. Perhaps she chooses to refer to herself as a "Master of Science" only to be contradicted by people who tell her that it is inappropriate for her to use the word "master" because it means she is male, and she isn't. The problem is that mastery, in the relevant sense, has been regarded as male, and yet she is. A person possessing mastery. Her choice of the term "Master of Science" is political. It is controversial (or was, once upon a time) because it is political. The people rejecting her entire claim on the basis of not liking her term for herself, that is also political, and their rejection of the entirety of what she's trying to say by focusing exclusively on her choice of term, that's also political: the politics of Not Listening.
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I'm amazed at how often someone introduces themselves as having a specific identity and goes on to explain in more detail how life has been for them and what their experience has been, only to have people immediately contradicting their identity: "Well I think that makes you this other thing, not what you are calling yourself", or "You shouldn't use that term, it doesn't belong to you, only people who fit such-and-suchg other description should call themselves that", or even "You're just a mainstream person with no relevant differentiated identity to speak of, and you should quit calling yourself by any identity-label".
It happens within generic LGBTQIA community groups, it happens within highly specific support groups organized around one or more solitary letters from that acronym, and it happens within the larger surrounding society as well. "I reject all of what you're saying about yourself -- because you're calling yourself something that you're not".
It's a special form of not listening. I mean, any time a person uses a label for themself, it's a form of shorthand, like a book title or the title of a term paper or something. It's never going to express the entire thought process, but it's their chosen starting point. Then they go on to elaborate and explain about themselves and how they fit in (or fail to fit in) against this backdrop and that backdrop and how they have come to understand themselves as a person.
Now, it's one thing for someone to give a long thoughtful reply to the other person's entire narrative and offer comments and show understandings of that person's experiences, and to then mention along with all that other stuff that they think maybe this or that other term might be more appropriate or more useful. But to give a reply where the entire focus of the response is "you're not what you just called yourself"? That ignores the person's story and puts all the focus on the label as if the correctness of the label were the only important thing being said here.
It's the equivalent of writing a movie review of Sixth Sense that contained nothing except "This isn't about the sixth sense. The sixth sense is extra-sensory perception, like when you know what is going to happen before it happens. This Bruce Willis flick is just a ghost story, give it a pass". Or reviewing Boy Meets Girl by writing "Robby already knew Ricky at the beginning of this movie so it has nothing to do with 'Boy Meets Girl', don't bother".
People in narrowly defined groups sometimes do this as a gatekeeping function: "You tell a nice story but you aren't one of us and you shouldn't really be here in our space". People in broader LGBTQIA groups often do it as a form of shoehorning: "I divide the queer world up into these categories and excuse me but you belong in this category". People in the broad mainsteam culture do it fairly regularly as a way of denying the legitimacy of a marginalized identity: "You say you're that specific kind of person but really you're just a normal person who is trying to explain away your behavior or the outcome of it".
In all cases, it erases the full detailed story that the individual is trying to tell, by refusing to acknowledge that it has meaning aside from functioning as an example of a piece of terminology.
= B =
This is not just a case of people being dense or of getting caught up in little things that don't matter. It's political. They're rejecting what is being said because they don't like it, they feel threatened by it, they don't want a wider awareness of this kind of experience or understanding to catch on and they want to shut it down.
A person's choice of their own labels is also political, of course. To label our experience in the first place, in this manner, is to assert that it is part of a larger pattern, and that what we've been through has been the way it has been because of stuff that we have in common with other people who share the same identity-factor, that it is categorical, that it's an aggregate identity and not just our own personal narrative or our own unique personal quirks and traits.
There's always a backdrop, too. One chooses one identity as a way to push away some other identity, a default identity of some sort, that is otherwise constantly being foisted upon one. For example, if there were not a heteronormative expectation no one would need to come out as gay or lesbian. In the absense of being able to identify as gay and be recognized and understood as such, an individual's behavior, if still seen through heteronormative assumptions, looks strange: "Eww, you are so sex-obsessed and so unpicky that you would do perverted things like have erotic experiences with people of the same sex, which is clearly less desirable, so you are therefore a sex maniac and a threat to public decency!" Asserting the different identity (gay) shifts perception by establishing a different norm, a different set of expectations and values for understanding those same behaviors: "Oh, so for you, erotic experiences with the same sex are the desirable ones, so when you're sexually interested at all, that's where it will occur and it doesn't mean you're more sex-obsessed or less picky, you're different".
= C =
Our backdrop includes a world of existing labels, too. But they may not be useful to us, especially because labels that describe people so often bundle together a whole batch of meanings and implications that the person trying to explain their identity needs to untie and separate from each other.
Imagine a female person, perhaps from a previous century, who wants to designate herself as an expert in her field. The male people in her world call themselves "masters" of their subject areas. But "master" is a term that in her time is reserved exclusively for male people. The corresponding term for female use was "mistress". But the two terms have very different connotations, and she finds that saying she is a "Mistress of Science" doesn't convey at all what she wants to express. Perhaps she chooses to refer to herself as a "Master of Science" only to be contradicted by people who tell her that it is inappropriate for her to use the word "master" because it means she is male, and she isn't. The problem is that mastery, in the relevant sense, has been regarded as male, and yet she is. A person possessing mastery. Her choice of the term "Master of Science" is political. It is controversial (or was, once upon a time) because it is political. The people rejecting her entire claim on the basis of not liking her term for herself, that is also political, and their rejection of the entirety of what she's trying to say by focusing exclusively on her choice of term, that's also political: the politics of Not Listening.
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Sunday, October 7, 2018
Gender and Sex and Cognitive Dissonance
Do you notice this inconsistency?
People in our society so often insist that each sex has a rigid set of characteristics, and any and all efforts to make either sex more like the other is bound to fail, like trying to repeal the law of gravity. That there are two sexes and that they are different, and different in specific ways, making them opposites.
Then people expend so much effort making sure that this gets emphasized, lest anyone miss it. Encoding additional cues and clues that we're all supposed to use to make sure everyone knows what sex any given person is at all times. Pink for girls and blue for boys. Girls pushing little strollers, boys toting miniature sports equipment. Scotch-taping a little bow onto an infant girl's forehead.
I mean, after awhile it's kind of like someone insisting that something is so obvious and self-explanatory that you can't miss it, and then they keep explaining it and pointing it out and creating billboards and posters to draw your attention to it and eventually even passing laws to make it mandatory that you say that you see it, too.
After awhile it begins to dawn on you: these people don't believe what they're saying! They may wish it were so, they may want it to be so, but their actions show that they are afraid that it isn't. I mean, if you believe that night and day are so compellingly different from each other that you go around comparing other things to it ("as different as night and day"), you don't generally find it necessary to go around complaining about evil streetlights or telling children it isn't appropriate to draw a moon in the daytime sky lest people think it's night.
No, their defensive actions betray that as much as they insist that these differences are as they describe them, and inevitable, they secretly fear that if effort isn't taken to maintain things this way, it will all crumble away and there'll be no getting it back.
Once folks see that defensiveness, I think it is easier for them to understand it as an ideology. Now let's look again at some of the stuff that the ideology insists upon:
• TWO sexes — why so insistent on denying that variations exist? Because they've created a polarized situation, defining the sexes as opposite, like up versus down. It has to remain an either/or binary choice at all times to be consistent with that polarization. Intersex people are a threat.
• KNOWING — why do all the lilies have to be gilded, overemphasized and underlined? Because the systematic way of treating people different based on their sex is dependent on knowing at all times which sex a person is. Indeterminacy is a threat.
• GENDER — first time this word has appeared in this blog post, have you noticed? Gender is the assortment of traits and assumptions and meanings that get attached to the sex identification of the person. People are treated different, and their behaviors interpreted differently, according to which sex they are perceived to be. All that different-treatment stuff, that's the assignment of gender.
• INEVITABILITY — The insistence that these traits invariably attach to the corresponding sex, the insistence that they follow inevitably, hides the fact that gender isn't sex itself, it's a socially maintained set of beliefs and assumptions that we attach to sex. Screw around with any of the previous bricks that this structure is built from (that there are exactly TWO sexes, that you always KNOW which sex you're dealing with, and that the sexual differences in traits that we've all had drilled into us will be duly present) and you start to see that gendering is occurring as a verb. But when all of those illusions are successfully maintained, the inevitability of gender is maintained too. The ongoing act of gendering becomes invisible.
• SEXUAL ORIENTATION — The fear of getting sex and gender wrong gets turned into a sexual threat. Sexual appetite has been mapped onto conformity to gender. You won't be heterosexually eligible if you deviate. But that in turn makes non-heterosexual people a threat to the system. Since the system is mobilizing fear here, a threat can be useful though: something that people are given a fear of being or becoming if they don't conform.
• ENEMIES — Opposite sex, polarized sex differences, diametrically divided traits and characteristics... what is this all aimed at? Keeping in place an adversarial hostility. Sexuality tends to forge intimacies, have you noticed? But the system (let's give it a name: patriarchy) is based on inequality. Real intimacy is a threat to maintaining inequality. But if the overwhelming majority of people deal with the folks they're sexually attracted to by treating them as utterly foreign creatures that you have to treat according to rules instead of treating them the way you yourself want to be treated, and if they interact with them like enemies trying to negotiate a truce and don't really trust each other easily, intimacy is kept to a minimum despite the barrier-breaking potential of human sexuality.
———————
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People in our society so often insist that each sex has a rigid set of characteristics, and any and all efforts to make either sex more like the other is bound to fail, like trying to repeal the law of gravity. That there are two sexes and that they are different, and different in specific ways, making them opposites.
Then people expend so much effort making sure that this gets emphasized, lest anyone miss it. Encoding additional cues and clues that we're all supposed to use to make sure everyone knows what sex any given person is at all times. Pink for girls and blue for boys. Girls pushing little strollers, boys toting miniature sports equipment. Scotch-taping a little bow onto an infant girl's forehead.
I mean, after awhile it's kind of like someone insisting that something is so obvious and self-explanatory that you can't miss it, and then they keep explaining it and pointing it out and creating billboards and posters to draw your attention to it and eventually even passing laws to make it mandatory that you say that you see it, too.
After awhile it begins to dawn on you: these people don't believe what they're saying! They may wish it were so, they may want it to be so, but their actions show that they are afraid that it isn't. I mean, if you believe that night and day are so compellingly different from each other that you go around comparing other things to it ("as different as night and day"), you don't generally find it necessary to go around complaining about evil streetlights or telling children it isn't appropriate to draw a moon in the daytime sky lest people think it's night.
No, their defensive actions betray that as much as they insist that these differences are as they describe them, and inevitable, they secretly fear that if effort isn't taken to maintain things this way, it will all crumble away and there'll be no getting it back.
Once folks see that defensiveness, I think it is easier for them to understand it as an ideology. Now let's look again at some of the stuff that the ideology insists upon:
• TWO sexes — why so insistent on denying that variations exist? Because they've created a polarized situation, defining the sexes as opposite, like up versus down. It has to remain an either/or binary choice at all times to be consistent with that polarization. Intersex people are a threat.
• KNOWING — why do all the lilies have to be gilded, overemphasized and underlined? Because the systematic way of treating people different based on their sex is dependent on knowing at all times which sex a person is. Indeterminacy is a threat.
• GENDER — first time this word has appeared in this blog post, have you noticed? Gender is the assortment of traits and assumptions and meanings that get attached to the sex identification of the person. People are treated different, and their behaviors interpreted differently, according to which sex they are perceived to be. All that different-treatment stuff, that's the assignment of gender.
• INEVITABILITY — The insistence that these traits invariably attach to the corresponding sex, the insistence that they follow inevitably, hides the fact that gender isn't sex itself, it's a socially maintained set of beliefs and assumptions that we attach to sex. Screw around with any of the previous bricks that this structure is built from (that there are exactly TWO sexes, that you always KNOW which sex you're dealing with, and that the sexual differences in traits that we've all had drilled into us will be duly present) and you start to see that gendering is occurring as a verb. But when all of those illusions are successfully maintained, the inevitability of gender is maintained too. The ongoing act of gendering becomes invisible.
• SEXUAL ORIENTATION — The fear of getting sex and gender wrong gets turned into a sexual threat. Sexual appetite has been mapped onto conformity to gender. You won't be heterosexually eligible if you deviate. But that in turn makes non-heterosexual people a threat to the system. Since the system is mobilizing fear here, a threat can be useful though: something that people are given a fear of being or becoming if they don't conform.
• ENEMIES — Opposite sex, polarized sex differences, diametrically divided traits and characteristics... what is this all aimed at? Keeping in place an adversarial hostility. Sexuality tends to forge intimacies, have you noticed? But the system (let's give it a name: patriarchy) is based on inequality. Real intimacy is a threat to maintaining inequality. But if the overwhelming majority of people deal with the folks they're sexually attracted to by treating them as utterly foreign creatures that you have to treat according to rules instead of treating them the way you yourself want to be treated, and if they interact with them like enemies trying to negotiate a truce and don't really trust each other easily, intimacy is kept to a minimum despite the barrier-breaking potential of human sexuality.
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Saturday, September 29, 2018
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.
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.
Nxxi Mcxxxxxx I don't understand what makes you not a man.
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.
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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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Tuesday, September 18, 2018
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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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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Thursday, September 13, 2018
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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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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Sunday, September 2, 2018
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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————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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".
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Sunday, August 26, 2018
The Arrogance of Claiming to Be a Social Change Activist
On an authors' message board someone started a thread asking if we authors were perhaps an arrogant lot.
I replied,
Before long, another author answered that with
Now, my instinctive initial reaction to that is to respond that this isn't about being an author, an artist, a creative person wanting to share an artistic work; it's about being a marginalized mistreated person, a victim of a systemic wrong that needs to be righted, and that yes, dammit it is too my right to speak and to insist that I be heard. The ethics of social justice says I have the right to rise up and do what I must. And so forth.
But like so many other things, that, too, is an oversimplification. And because indulging in that oversimplification really is a bit arrogant, it's appropriate and occasionally necessary to embrace a little self-doubt now and then. Come along with me, if you will...
* Authority — There's a built-in claim in my social justice assertions, that the way I see things is damned well the way things actually are. That sissy femme males are unjustly treated by society in general, that it does make sense to think of us (or to think of ourselves) in the specific manner that I'm advocating, as differently gendered people who aren't wrong or inferior, that society as a whole becomes better in its entirety if it changes so as to accommodate our existence and begin accepting us on our own terms, and so forth. Well, yeah, I do think exactly that, I do believe those things. But there are plenty of people who think otherwise. Some of them think that the things I'm making a big deal about are no big deal. Some of them think I'm as silly and my arguments as useless as someone screaming that gravity is unfair and should be repealed because skinned knees hurt. Some of them question the authenticity of my conscious motives ("You're trying to jump onto the LGBTQ bandwagon because you're a boring white hetero cis male who desperately wants to be edgy") or the coherence of my mind ("You admit you were diagnosed with a mental illness for spouting this stuff so pardon me if I don't take you seriously"). From what source other than unadorned arrogance does someone like me derive the confidence that right is on my side?
* Objective Meaning — Then there's the bandying about of these aggregate terms and the assignment to them of social meaning and significance, as if they existed and have always existed objectively, just like I describe them, whether people at any given time recognized them that way or not. The notion that in human society there exists a bunch of male people who are essentially girls, who have the same gender polarity as the girls have, and that this category exists independent of physical sex or from sexual orientation, and that I'm shining my spotlight on this phenomenon so that everyone will see it and realize it and recognize us and start thinking of us in a different manner. Yeah, so what's wrong with that? I mean, yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. What's wrong with it is that it assumes that human experiences have a meaning in and of themselves. And that isn't true. Human experiences have meaning to someone or else they don't have that meaning at all. Meaning in general is "to an observer", not divorced from interaction and embedded in things apart from people. And that is all the more important, as philosophical truths go, when the subject matter is our own human experience. If there are no sissy femme male people who think of ourselves as being of girlish gender yet male of physical body, then it isn't that we exist but think of ourselves wrongly or inaccurately, is it, so much as we don't exist as described in the first place?
You probably suspect that I have an answer to that. That I'm not really engaging in a bunch of self-doubt and purpose-questioning, and that I'm actually tossing all that out there in order to pontificate intellectually?
Of course I am. Wait, no I'm not. Um, well... the self-doubt is real, and questioning my arrogant self is genuinely important. But no, I'm not paralyzed by self-doubt and derailed from being able to continue. I said certain things were an oversimplification. I didn't say they were fundamentally wrong. Oversimplifications tend to contain quite a bit of truth. I think these do. That's why I continue to embrace them and behave as if they were entirely the truth (most of the time). Sometimes a simplified understanding of something is more useful than the fully accurate version. Earlier tonight I drove to and from the village of Huntington, behaving as if I were on the surface of a more or less flat and motionless terrain. I know the earth is round and is plummeting around the sun as well as spinning around its own axis, but it's just easier to drive when I bracket that stuff off as irrelevant to what I'm doing. You get what I'm saying?
So here's a somewhat less oversimplified notion of the social activism thing:
* How people think of themselves and their experience and identity is not limited to concepts that they could put into words and stick labels onto. Most people, at some point in their lives, recognize themselves in a description that they hear. Prior to hearing that description, they might not have thought of themselves in quite those terms, or seen the same connections, but the fact that they do recognize themselves in the description means that it resonates with what they understand about themselves emotionally or connects up a lot of little pieces that they understand about themselves cognitively. So there's no need to make it an either/or proposition. Yes, meaning is "to a subject", especially the meaning of human experiences themselves, but meaning is not the same as a specific verbal description.
* Verbal description is an art, not a precision science. There is not an exact set of verbal terms lying in a box, each one corresponding to a specific human experience. So none of the attempts to explain human experience are "objectively correct" but all of them echo something truthful and accurate, and the better ones resonate with people as truly significant expressions of what our lives are like.
* It is still arrogant to be so insistent about expressing my verbal description on the theory that it will, in fact, resonate with people. That it will shed light on the human condition, that it can change things. Arrogance is a form of being pushy, less than fully delicate with other people's sensitivities and perhaps their disinterest in considering a set of ideas that seem foreign and strange to them. I have often described my coming out to myself in 1980 as an act of permanently losing my temper about the whole gender situation. I act fueled by anger, by a constant glowing rage that makes me willing and able to be pushy in that fashion. That a marginalized and ostracized person would feel and react with anger and stand up for herself is predictable and natural. And socially healthy. It's not practical for me to chain people to their chairs and force-feed them my thoughts, so the social world surrounding me is not at risk from my anger — I can't attain my objectives coercively whether I'm arrogant enough to consider myself entitled to do so or not. And that's true of others in my position, specifically or generally.
As a practical matter, our fury reconciles as determination. Or stubbornness if you prefer.
The arrogance is something you're just going to have to live with.
———————
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I replied,
Damn right I'm arrogant. I have a story to tell. I'd prefer that folks fork over the cover price and voluntarily submit themselves to my thoroughly entertaining written word, but I would strongly consider chaining each and every member of my species to a convenient chair and prying their eyelids open with toothpicks and reading it out loud to them. I haven't worked out the logistics of that yet but morally and intellectually I have no intervening compunctions. (You have been forewarned). Hmm, now if I just went after the literary agents, maybe...
Before long, another author answered that with
Yeah..... admirable confidence. I can't help but want to applaud it.
But... nah... we don't all deserve to be read. We are not entitled. I hope you understand. We all have our causes.
Now, my instinctive initial reaction to that is to respond that this isn't about being an author, an artist, a creative person wanting to share an artistic work; it's about being a marginalized mistreated person, a victim of a systemic wrong that needs to be righted, and that yes, dammit it is too my right to speak and to insist that I be heard. The ethics of social justice says I have the right to rise up and do what I must. And so forth.
But like so many other things, that, too, is an oversimplification. And because indulging in that oversimplification really is a bit arrogant, it's appropriate and occasionally necessary to embrace a little self-doubt now and then. Come along with me, if you will...
* Authority — There's a built-in claim in my social justice assertions, that the way I see things is damned well the way things actually are. That sissy femme males are unjustly treated by society in general, that it does make sense to think of us (or to think of ourselves) in the specific manner that I'm advocating, as differently gendered people who aren't wrong or inferior, that society as a whole becomes better in its entirety if it changes so as to accommodate our existence and begin accepting us on our own terms, and so forth. Well, yeah, I do think exactly that, I do believe those things. But there are plenty of people who think otherwise. Some of them think that the things I'm making a big deal about are no big deal. Some of them think I'm as silly and my arguments as useless as someone screaming that gravity is unfair and should be repealed because skinned knees hurt. Some of them question the authenticity of my conscious motives ("You're trying to jump onto the LGBTQ bandwagon because you're a boring white hetero cis male who desperately wants to be edgy") or the coherence of my mind ("You admit you were diagnosed with a mental illness for spouting this stuff so pardon me if I don't take you seriously"). From what source other than unadorned arrogance does someone like me derive the confidence that right is on my side?
* Objective Meaning — Then there's the bandying about of these aggregate terms and the assignment to them of social meaning and significance, as if they existed and have always existed objectively, just like I describe them, whether people at any given time recognized them that way or not. The notion that in human society there exists a bunch of male people who are essentially girls, who have the same gender polarity as the girls have, and that this category exists independent of physical sex or from sexual orientation, and that I'm shining my spotlight on this phenomenon so that everyone will see it and realize it and recognize us and start thinking of us in a different manner. Yeah, so what's wrong with that? I mean, yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. What's wrong with it is that it assumes that human experiences have a meaning in and of themselves. And that isn't true. Human experiences have meaning to someone or else they don't have that meaning at all. Meaning in general is "to an observer", not divorced from interaction and embedded in things apart from people. And that is all the more important, as philosophical truths go, when the subject matter is our own human experience. If there are no sissy femme male people who think of ourselves as being of girlish gender yet male of physical body, then it isn't that we exist but think of ourselves wrongly or inaccurately, is it, so much as we don't exist as described in the first place?
You probably suspect that I have an answer to that. That I'm not really engaging in a bunch of self-doubt and purpose-questioning, and that I'm actually tossing all that out there in order to pontificate intellectually?
Of course I am. Wait, no I'm not. Um, well... the self-doubt is real, and questioning my arrogant self is genuinely important. But no, I'm not paralyzed by self-doubt and derailed from being able to continue. I said certain things were an oversimplification. I didn't say they were fundamentally wrong. Oversimplifications tend to contain quite a bit of truth. I think these do. That's why I continue to embrace them and behave as if they were entirely the truth (most of the time). Sometimes a simplified understanding of something is more useful than the fully accurate version. Earlier tonight I drove to and from the village of Huntington, behaving as if I were on the surface of a more or less flat and motionless terrain. I know the earth is round and is plummeting around the sun as well as spinning around its own axis, but it's just easier to drive when I bracket that stuff off as irrelevant to what I'm doing. You get what I'm saying?
So here's a somewhat less oversimplified notion of the social activism thing:
* How people think of themselves and their experience and identity is not limited to concepts that they could put into words and stick labels onto. Most people, at some point in their lives, recognize themselves in a description that they hear. Prior to hearing that description, they might not have thought of themselves in quite those terms, or seen the same connections, but the fact that they do recognize themselves in the description means that it resonates with what they understand about themselves emotionally or connects up a lot of little pieces that they understand about themselves cognitively. So there's no need to make it an either/or proposition. Yes, meaning is "to a subject", especially the meaning of human experiences themselves, but meaning is not the same as a specific verbal description.
* Verbal description is an art, not a precision science. There is not an exact set of verbal terms lying in a box, each one corresponding to a specific human experience. So none of the attempts to explain human experience are "objectively correct" but all of them echo something truthful and accurate, and the better ones resonate with people as truly significant expressions of what our lives are like.
* It is still arrogant to be so insistent about expressing my verbal description on the theory that it will, in fact, resonate with people. That it will shed light on the human condition, that it can change things. Arrogance is a form of being pushy, less than fully delicate with other people's sensitivities and perhaps their disinterest in considering a set of ideas that seem foreign and strange to them. I have often described my coming out to myself in 1980 as an act of permanently losing my temper about the whole gender situation. I act fueled by anger, by a constant glowing rage that makes me willing and able to be pushy in that fashion. That a marginalized and ostracized person would feel and react with anger and stand up for herself is predictable and natural. And socially healthy. It's not practical for me to chain people to their chairs and force-feed them my thoughts, so the social world surrounding me is not at risk from my anger — I can't attain my objectives coercively whether I'm arrogant enough to consider myself entitled to do so or not. And that's true of others in my position, specifically or generally.
As a practical matter, our fury reconciles as determination. Or stubbornness if you prefer.
The arrogance is something you're just going to have to live with.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
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