Compassion and Tenderness

Part of what “femininity” means to many people, not just by association but embedded in the definition, is a capacity and an inclination to care, to be empathic, to listen and to provide supportive efforts, both of the practical variety and in the form of expressions of understanding and concern. When people are discussing male (and/or Assigned Male At Birth) people who are feminine (femmes, sissies, girls, women), the traits and expressions that they focus on may not emphasize compassion and tenderness, but at least for some of us it is it’s pretty central to why and how we think of ourselves as feminine.

“Everyone should”

In the decade after I first came out as a sissy (which was my word for it, specifically as a heterosexual sissy in order to untie the confusion between gender and sexual orientation), I mostly embraced a feminist analysis of sexist polarized gender expectations: there was no damn reason to foist onto male people all that masculine adversarial belligerence and selfishness and emotionally truncated immaturity.

One way of reading that interpretation is that all of us male people possess the same capacity and tendency to be compassionate as female people do, and that as a male feminist (or profeminist or whatever) person I was just being loud about saying so. And during this era of my life, I did tend to de-emphasize the notion that I was inherently different from other males, because I was positioning my own politics to fit within that feminist framework.

Another, more nuanced take on that is that all of us male people could be that way but that male role socialization and the conformity of typical males to those masculine expectations meant that most males did not develop those traits, whereas those of us who rejected sexist roles and rules and embraced healthy traits labeled “feminine” were far more free to develop as compassionate and tender people. That was more the approach I put into words when discussing the matter in those days.

But when I first came out, the central insight was that I was different from men in general, that how and who I was made me not one of the men but instead one of the women, and that that was why my experiences and, in particular, my frustrations with heterosexuality, were as they were. The political analysis that posited that I was actually a surviving, relatively healthy person in an unhealthy sexist world came a bit later. And now, when I am positioning my politics within queer theory and LGBTQ identity frameworks, I’ve returned to that. (If all the other males wish to say that they, too, are not correctly described by “masculinity”, that they, too, are actually far better described by the components that make up “femininity” instead, then they can certainly say so, but these days I speak for myself and, to an extent, for others who identify as I do). So here is the notion that the sissy femme is perhaps inherently inclined to be more compassionate and tender as an expression of innate femininity. I have often described the “differences between the sexes” using the Snow Cone analogy. Hurl a mango snow cone at the wall, then pick up a mint snow cone and throw it against the same wall but make the center of impact a bit to the right of where the mango cone’s center of impact was. You get a spray of colored ice with orange-colored flecks interspersed with green-colored flecks, lots of overlap, and even though as a group the entirety of the mango particles skew to the left of the mint particles, there are individual mango particles even way over on the right where the mint flecks predominate, and likewise for mint ice-flecks on the far left. So being a sissy femme is being one of the exceptions, genuinely different at least in the statistical / generalization sense, and hence, to whatever extent female people in general are innately more compassionate and tender, the feminine sissy may be feminine in exactly that way, among other ways.

Take your pick. Any way you go at it, it’s a set of character and behavioral traits that I claim to exhibit and to which I aspire and which forms a big part of my sense of who I am.

Not Just Selflessness

As with the entire basket of attributes called “femininity”, compassion and tenderness are often not seen as things that benefit the person who has them. Instead, they’re often thought of strictly in terms of the benefit that they accord other people. Feminist analysis has often pointed to how women are placed in a position of providing multiple kinds of service and support to men, and that this is among them, yet one more form of social labor for which women are exploited and from which energies they are alienated, their efforts along these lines appropriated for men’s use. But we have to be careful not to fall into the pattern of devaluing those ways of being in the world that are part of the feminine, of ratifying the patriarchal definition of them as second-tier and inferior.

We can’t really do that without taking a frank look at the benefits to the feminine person of being compassionate and tender.

I first became really and intensely aware of this from experiencing its absence as a child: I was capable of being a caring person, of being a good listener, a sympathetic and supportive friend, but as a boy (or person perceived in those terms) it felt like no one wanted it from me. I was jealous of the kind of emotional sharing and reciprocal connections I saw among girls my age and felt strongly that I could participate in that, would be good at it if given the opportunity, and felt very much left out. Over the years of thinking about this and analyzing it more fully in the years after I came out, I came to think of this flavor of emotional intimacy as something for which we have an appetite, and from which we derive personal pleasure from the connection. Conceptualizing it as some kind of selfless sacrificial service to others denies this; and it’s wrong. It’s the same kind of cognitive mistake that a person would be making if they were to think that no one gets sexual pleasure from pleasuring someone else, or has an appetite prompting them to do so. On an emotional level, we get off on being compassionate to others and making them feel loved and understood and cared for. It is seldom spoken of in this fashion, to be sure, but in order to claim it for myself and to explain that being deprived of it is indeed a deprivation, being blatantly honest about this aspect of the experience seems vital.

Then there is the ancillary social aspect of being perceived as such. It should be easy enough to see why one might wish to be thought of as a compassionate and tender caring person. Alternative gender identities are proliferating, and one fake-tolerant pseudoliberal response to it takes the form “you can identify as whatever the heck you want, hey you can identify as a pine tree if that suits you, and more power to you, as long as you realize that I don’t get it and probably never will”. The problem is that we don’t need anyone’s permission or cooperation to be who we are within the interiors of our own heads or even, to a significant extent, within our everyday behaviors; but like everyone else we receive the identitities projected onto us by everyone else who perceives us, and, again like everyone else we derive some degree of social comfort and satisfaction from being perceived in ways that are congruent with how we perceive ourselves. Cisgender males are generally perceived as men and expected to be masculine, and they are, and they get the received / perceived signals like a warm friendly thumbs-up, a confirmation of identity.

There are specific nice things that come with being seen as compassionate and tender, and woven into them, for us, the confirmation of identity in which we are vested.

Finally, going back to the notion that caregiving is a service that others do benefit from, there are transactional advantages to being the resource to whom other people turn in order to obtain it, being in demand for it. In the interpersonal economy of human interaction, it is definitely to the advantage of a person who has these traits to be appreciated for them, to be sought out for them. Just like being a good cook or being a funny person who can be counted on to tell entertaining stories and jokes, having a capacity to give people something that they benefit from brings them to you and in the resulting interaction it is something of value for which those others may give other benefits and services in exchange.

Against Trivialization

I said up above that when people think or talk about sissy femme male (or AMAB) people, compassion and tenderness isn’t typically what they will choose to emphasize. More often they make it all about lipstick and high heels, being prissy and fabulous, and behaving seductively.

Now, there’s definitely a positive good in fun, frolic and frivolity. Joy and pleasure are among the components of life that have been devalued in favor of anger and seriousness and sacrifice and all that, and I am happy to be in the tradition of Emma Goldman, who said that if she can’t dance at it, then it isn’t her revolution. So let’s not even trivilialize the playful accoutrements of femininity…

But yes, a part of the devalorization of the feminine – as attested to by Julia Serrano in Whipping Girl, among other prominent places – takes the form of treating the entire feminine package of traits as if there’s very little of real substance going on there.

You’ll get no traction from me if you devalue compassion and tenderness. There’s absolutely nothing trivial about it. These are among the most noble and important of human characteristics and I have always been proud of being a part of them and them a part of my identity, and never had any sympathy or interest in a masculine identity that seemed founded on disparaging all that, of treating it as weakness or dismissing it as less relevant than winning and triumphing over opponents and whatnot.

I am a proud sissy and I have never for a moment looked across the aisle at conventional masculine males and felt that I was in any shape way fashion or form LESS THAN.



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The Art of Talking Past Each Other

This sentence is false.

Gender discussions are often paradoxical pretzels of the same order, have you noticed? Have you been there? Does it frustrate you too?

Kim starts off talking about the requirements pushed onto male people, this thing called "masculinity", and provides several examples of what is culturally considered to be masculine, and what it is like to be judged for not measuring up or conforming to that.

Blake gets offended at the sexist notion that the items listed by Kim are somehow "masculine", because seriously, who the heck gets to dictate what is and what is not masculine? Who gets to say that it isn't masculine to be an involved caregiver, an emotionally connected relationship-tender, a gentle sensitive artist and a fine hand with a sewing needle, a peacemaker, a sensuous vulnerable individual? Clearly, Kim is the one brandishing outmoded and reductionistic notions of what is and what is not masculine!

Kim say aww c'mon, get real, are you seriously intending to deny that society does maintain all these notions of masculinity and femininity? And that people do have to contend with those notions?

Blake says what is wrong with you that you need to care so much about what other people think, just be yourself why don't you?

Kim gets exasperated and says I am most certainly not conforming to what other people expect, but you make it sound trivially easy to just not care how other people treat you and that's not realistic, but I'm not saying these are things one should conform to, I'm saying it's a social problem that these pressures and expectations exist like this.

Kim goes on to say it is a revolutionary thing when males bail out on the idea of being "men".

Blake says what do you mean they aren't men? Are you saying they have to be belligerent and emotionally stunted or they don't quality as men? That is so sexist of you!

Kim describes what is considered in our culture to be "a man" and how it is projected and imposed on males, and why it is therefore important to be able to get out from under that.

Blake says a male person should just be a man and not let someone else define what it means to be a man and push them out of the definition. Why surrender the definition to a bunch of knuckle-dragging troglodytes? You're advising people to think of themselves as inadequate or insufficient to be a man just because they don't subscribe to your reductionistic notion of what it means to be one!



I'm not a neutral nonpartisan observer on the sidelines, to be honest. There is no real Kim or Blake (they're fictional characters, albeit based on lots of real-life folks I've encountered); Kim and Blake represent factions I've encountered in these conversations and debates often enough to caricature them, but if truth be told my allegiances are with Kim's perspective. In my opinion they aren't equally valid viewpoints, not really; Blake's gender-blind approach is very reminiscent of people who claim to "not see race" -- very convenient if you're in a situation where the social situation doesn't directly affect you, personally, but for most people that's not realistic when it comes to gender. It's one thing to go forth unbothered by what other people think, but you can't get a job with an employer, go on a date, or deal with the police and the neighbors and the school psychiatrist without having to concern yourself with what other people think, because you do have to deal with those other people.

Having said that, yeah, there are positive take-aways from the Blake perspective. It is empowering to bracket off other people's opinions and reactions and emphasize your own, to be brave and self-defined enough to do that. I do recommend that attitude. It's just that it has its limits. Society is still there and it, along with its entrenched attitudes, is still something we all have to contend with. And so we need to be able to refer to those entrenched attitudes, to generalize about them.


If you wish to see a real-life discussion of the Kim vs Blake variety, I offer you " 'Toxic masculinity' and 'toxic femininity'. Real things or sexist mumbo-jumbo.", a currently active message board thread on the Straight Dope Message Board. Although, honestly, in doing so I feel like I've pointed out a dandelion. These conversations recur everywhere, don't they?


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Church and Sunday School

You’d think a place associated with being nice (kind, sweet, gentle, good) would be appealing to sissy femme males. Their mascot sported long hair in an era when males in general did not. But no, I didn’t find it so.



In my book, woven into the section about growing up, I describe how I tried to fit in and find friends and acceptance among three cliques or groups – Boy Scouts, the choir, and the countercultural mellow potheads. I mention church in passing, as a place through which I’d met this or that person or as the sponsor of this or that event, but I don’t develop a story-theme about trying to find friends and fit in among the others in the church congregation where we attended. That’s mostly because it would have been redundant, wouldn’t have added much to the story. (Three examples are enough).

But I have sometimes thought (and blogged) about the possible affinities between the clergy and the phenomenon of being a feminine male, so lately I’ve been musing about what church was, and wasn’t, to me growing up.

First of all, church wasn’t a place where boys and girls of a certain interest or disposition chose to go, so that those were the kinds of people your own age that you’d encounter there. Instead, church was a place to which children were taken – dragged, if necessary – by their parents. My childhood prior to 8th grade was mostly in south Georgia, and starting with 8th grade (which is when the book’s story gets underway) we lived in Los Alamos, a small and insular community that was also very churchy, populated as it was with scientists recruited from small and often conservative towns. So it was something that people of my parents’ generation did – you took your family to church on Sundays. To whatever extent your children didn’t seem enthusiastic, it was thought to be true to at least that same extent that they therefore needed it all the more. That meant that the other children my age were often there under duress or, at a minimum, would not have picked this as the place to be on one of their weekend days.

For the long span of years from early elementary to junior high, the boys I encountered in our church’s Sunday school classes were full of misbehaviors, being rambunctious, destructive of materials, noisy, crude, and belligerent. Sunday school – for the benefit of any who weren’t raised in a Protestant Christian churchgoing family – is an hour’s worth of time before the church service, and is divided up and, at least for children, age-specific (so it parallels the kind of divisions that define elementary school classrooms); adult classes might be focused on some theme or general topic of discussion, while children’s classes were taught by an adult Sunday school teacher who would come in armed with lesson plans and songs and construction paper and crayons and scissors and whatnot. The adult leaders teaching us (usually women) tended towards condescension and our classes were geared towards absorbing and regurgitating religious-content facts or memorizing verses or learning lots of trite children’s religious songs.

As usual, the girls were better behaved and were generally more willing to get immersed in the purpose of whatever lesson was being dumped on us, and their interaction with each other was nicer and I respected them more for that. There were girls I liked that I saw there and encountered in classes over the years, but since Sunday school wasn’t a discussion format for us, this wasn’t really a place where I made many friends with them either.

I liked the church service better, with its formality and ritual, and the quiet and serious solemnity. Reintegrated with the adults, I wasn’t forced to be among boys my age. I liked the hymns and I particularly liked the choir.

But I was happy when it was over and the rest of the day was available to me. Part of it was the damn clothes. Since I’m a sissy femme, that may seem odd, that I didn’t care for dressing up in the fanciness of Sunday clothes. Was it because, like the rest of the experience, it was imposed on me and not something I chose for myself? I’m not sure, but I hated the suit coat and the collared shirt and the tie, and the cut of the dress pants. Everything had a way of hanging on the body like a set of curtains, loose in places I preferred clothes to be tight yet bunched up and distracting in other places where I preferred to be unencumbered. Little boy dresswear is adult male dressware scaled down to size and I think maybe it just doesn’t fit as well because it wasn’t designed with a child’s body in mind in the first place. Part of it may also have been the gender disparity of it all, too, although I wasn’t conscious of being annoyed by it at that point. People made a fuss over the cuteness of the girls and the prettiness of their Sunday dresses, and the girls seemed to enjoy their garments a lot more. Certainly what they were wearing was quite different from what I was wearing. That wasn’t so true for everyday wear – I would go to elementary school in pants not particularly different from girls’ pants (and they did wear pants as often as they wore skirts and dresses), shirts not particularly different from girls’ shirts. Male formal wear is far more of a costume, all composed of clothes quite different from our everyday clothes but the same for every male except for minor variations in cut and color. It was a uniform. I hated it and wanted out of it as soon as possible.

In later years, in New Mexico as an older kid, the Sunday experience continued to involve the same nasty bullying classmates I was already at odds with from school. There did start to be a shift towards discussion of moral issues and socially relevant topics, and I liked that, at least. I think the church scene could have ended up being an outlet for me. Yet, by sheer luck of the draw, our church congregation consisted of a lot of boys my age but no girls, and a similar concentration of girls a few years younger who were therefore in a different youth group. I do make reference in my book to some church-sponsored activities that gave me opportunities to socialize and mingle, or to discuss important things like sexuality and the possibility of having a girlfriend and being able to date.

But mostly the church scene was not much of a resource for me.

For the purposes of the book, I had a better example with the Boy Scouts; it, too, was an organization that was affiliated with the notion of Doing Right and Being A Good Boy; and although there was considerably more self-selection and I did make better connections there, it, too, was eventually a venue where I didn't have enough in common to keep me from feeling like an outsider. I placed a scene in the book where the Scouts are telling dirty jokes that become increasingly crude about sex and misogynistic towards women. I think it makes my point sufficiently.

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Skirting the Issue

Let me describe what I like to call the "skirt trick".

An author named Ami Polonsky wrote a Young Adults book titled Gracefully Grayson about a tween-aged boy who, in essence, is one of the girls. To illustrate and convey to us, the readers, that Grayson is like this, she describes how the character wears an overly-long nightshirt and spins in it and imagines that it's a skirt or a dress and wishing for the opportunity to wear a real one.

Just this spring, Jacob Tobia came out with Sissy, a book that mine will probably be compared to quite a bit, since Sissy is the first real genderqueer coming-out / coming-of-age story. Jacob, too, presents the fact that despite being male they were "one of the girls" by recounting how they would dress in their mom's clothes and put on her makeup in secret and wish they could go forth into the world adorned that way.

The problem with using the skirt trick is that whatever the heck it may mean to "be a girl" or to "be feminine", it doesn't mean your brain is somehow hardwired to make you want to wear a skirt (or high heels or put on makeup, etc). Trust me, there is no shortage of cisgender women who have never had the faintest interest in adorning themselves in ankle-torturing high-heeled devices, Revlon and Avon gels and creams and powders, or nylon hosiery, and considerably more who don’t necessary hate the stuff but resent having it imposed on them as part of gender-specific “office standards”. Skirts and dresses blow up in the breeze and threaten to show your underpants to the world, often lack sufficient pockets for your keys and wallet and lip balm, and catch on the velvet ropes when you try to step over them at the bank instead of zigzagging your way back and forth down empty lanes during non-busy banking hours – and many women recall, unfondly, having them imposed at a young age and finding them a hindrance to riding bikes and climbing trees *.

But if you try to write a book where you're introducing a character and stating "this person is male but how he is, who he is, the way he is, is more like one of the girls than it's like the other boys", you’re expected to show, not tell, your reading audience that this is true; but no matter what specific behavior you describe, no matter what thinking processes you reveal your character engaging in, you run the significant risk of people saying “Aww, c’mon, that doesn’t make this fellow a girl, I’m not like that, my daughter is not like that” or “How does that make this dude any different from me and a million other guys, lots of boys have feelings like that”.

There is no single behavior that all the girls engage in and none of the other boys do; and if there was, then our main character could not be engaging in it, by definition, unless he was absolutely the only one like that, in which case his story would be the story of an anomaly, not a representative story that explains what it's like to be one of those boys who is essentially a girl despite being male. To complicate matters, the female population has among them some gender-variant individuals too, whose existence dilutes the universality of what girls do and what girls are like. So on the one hand the author needs to show the reader that this character is basically a girl, but on the other, there's no obvious and compelling way to do that.

The difficulty of navigating that complexity and still bringing the reader along, accepting and not contradicting my premise, is a challenge that makes me grudgingly appreciate the skirt trick. But my tale is a memoir, a work of nonfiction, and I did not, in fact, spend my childhood and teenage years donning dresses and skirts and stockings and lace, or applying cosmetics to my face.

There is no single vegetable, meat, or spice that all by itself makes a dish a part of Italian cuisine or Mexican or German or Indian. But I still know the difference between them. I recognize it when I taste it, when I smell it. There’s no single note, chord, or chord progression that is unique to Baroque music, but it sounds a certain way, has a certain feel to it. I think gender is like that, too – we grew up in a social backdrop and absorbed the component notions of it. To borrow the famous aphorism of Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it. People also know when they don’t see what they expect to encounter, which is why outliers, gender-variant exceptions, are so often noticeable to other people and not just aware of it themselves. I didn’t have to wear a sign that said I was a sissy femme in order for the kids in eighth grade to start calling me out for it.

In my book, I’m trying to put a feast of samples in front of the reader, little vignettes and selected events, some mental processes and interior dialogs that I recall, some choices that I made, some behaviors and whatnot. The book has a blatant title and it has an explicit three-page flyover of my early childhood, both of which promise the reader that this book is going to feature a genderqueer person, specifically a boy who is basically one of the girls. But once the book gets started, I’m depending on the reader to react to the samples provided and to reach their own realizations without me pointing to each occurrence and saying “See? See? A conventional boy would not have done that. See? Just like a girl would have!” None of the individual scenes or events is definitive in and of itself, and I don’t lay down any definitions to start with (to the annoyance of at least a couple potential publishers, who insisted that readers are as dumb as a box of rocks and need that).

Ultimately, to make this work, I have to rely on the readers’ independent perception. I’m not going to be able to argue them into seeing it. The experiences are going to have to speak for themselves.

But I’m confident that I’m a pretty damn good cook and that I've prepared some evocative morsels.



* Skirts are so much more comfortable than pants on a humid or hot day, there's something fun about the way they swish around when you move, and you can find them with usable pockets and with belt loops as well. And they take up less room in your suitcase than pants. And unlike pants they don't chafe or bind on you when you're sitting down. Also, they're great if you have nice legs and consider them among your best features and don't want to keep them covered up all the time.

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Why I'm Not a Lesbian

"If it's 'transgender' and not 'transsexual' now, why isn't it 'heterogender' instead of 'heterosexual'?"

This was on a message board post and I wasn't sure if the person who posted it was serious or trolling. The people posting replies so far seemed to be treating it as the latter.

But I'm often inclined to consider an idea even when I don't much care for the person who spoke it, and I think this is actually a useful and thought-provoking question.

The difference between gender and sex is usually explained more or less like this: sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears; sex is the physical body, your plumbing, whereas gender is your identity; sex is biological, gender is social.

It's an oversimplification of sorts, because in order for sex to be perceived, it has to be recognized, and that recognition invokes social processes too.

Still, it's a useful starting point and the distinction is a useful one as well. Sex is whatever is embedded in our (mostly) dimorphic physiology as either male or female (or the variants that don't fit the dimorphic dyadic categories), whether we are able to perceive sex without social constructs interfering in our perception or not; and gender is the complex set of concepts, ideas, expectations, roles, rules, behaviors, priorities, personality characteristics, beliefs, and affiliated paraphernalia like clothing and segregated activities and whatnot, all the social stuff that we attach to sex but which isn't intrinsicallly really built in to sex -- whether we can successfully isolate gender from sex or not.

In order to comprehend that a person could have the kind of physical morphology that would cause everyone else to categorize them as "female" but could have an identity as "boy" or "man", and not deem that person factually wrong, we had to recognize gender and realize it wasn't identical to sex.

Not that transgender people were the first or the only people to have this awareness: feminists pointed out that an immense amount of social baggage is attached to the biological sexes, and that nearly all of it is artificially confining, restricting behaviors and expressions of self to narrowly channelled masculinity and femininity, and that it is unfair, in particular stripping women of human self-determination and the opportunities for self-realization, subordinating women to men as an inferior class. That's gender. Feminist analysis gave us an awareness of sexism and patriarchy and male chauvinism and stuck a pry bar between sex and gender. Anything that was OK for one sex should be OK for the other; all double standards were now suspect.

People originally said "transsexual" because of the focus on surgical modification of the body; most people's first encounter with the notion of a person whose body had been categorized as male but who identified as a woman involved solving that discrepancy by modifying the body to bring it into agreement with the gender identity. "Transsexual" was coined from "trans" in the sense of crossing from one thing to another (as in "transfer" or "translate") and "sexual" referring not to sexuality but to the sex of the body. The move towards the more modern term "transgender" took the focus off the sex and emphasized that there had been a discrepancy between the gender that a person was socially categorized and perceived as and the actual gender that that same person had as their identity. Such a person could indeed choose to deal with the situation by opting for surgery, but now we were using an identity term that focused on identity instead of one that reiterated the bond between identity and body.

(It also enabled a wider inclusiveness, reaching out to people who cannot afford a surgical transition, or are quite satisfied with presenting to the world in such a way as to be perceived as the sex they desire to be perceived as without a medical procedure, or whose medical interventions of choice do not involve surgery, or indeed anyone who was originally considered to be of a sex that does not correspond to their current gender identity).

But, as with pronouns (discussed in last week's blog post), our cultural discussions about being transgender continue to treat sex and gender in ways that reduce them to being one and the same. We've shifted the location of that "same" far more to the social and away from the biological in how we conceive of it, but we retain the notion that a person's sex should correspond to their gender. If the individual person is not in error and in need of correction, it must be the surrounding observers, but correspondence is assumed to be the intrinsically desirable outcome. And if we've rejected the reductionist notion that "if you got a dick yer a man, if you have a vag instead yer a woman, end of story", we've supplanted it with "if you identify as a man, you're male, if you identify as a woman, you're female, anything else is misgendering". Not so much because we're philosophically opposed to someone identify as a woman while considering themselves male but more because it hasn't been put out there as a proposition. People just assume they should correspond.

(This is something that I'm in a position to see clearly. I am that person. My physical body is male. My gender identity is girl or woman. I'm a gender invert. My sex and gender are not one of the the expected combinations. This is a concept that has proven intractably difficult to explain to people, despite being very simple at its core).

So what does all this have to do with being--or not being--a lesbian?

Our vocabulary for sexual orientations is, like everything else, rooted in the notion that sex and gender will correspond. Lesbians are women loving women. But by women we mean female people. That's what it has always meant up until now when we say "women" because we assume sex and gender correspond. It's only when they are unbolted from each other and each can vary independent of the other that we are faced with the question: is being a lesbian about attraction on the basis of gender or is it all about attraction on the basis of physical sex?

The same problem, of course, occurs for "heterosexual". A heterosexual male has always been a man who is attracted to women, by which we mean female women of course. Because once again, correspondence between sex and gender is assumed. I'm male but I'm one of the girls. I'm not a man who is attracted to women. It's not just nomenclature, it works completely differently; the mating dance of heterosexuality is an extremely gendered interaction, a game composed of boy moves and girl moves, densely overlaid with gendered assumptions about what he wants and what she wants, what it means if he does this or she says that. This entire mating dance is as far as you can get from gender-blind or gender-neutral. It was, in fact, my failure to successfully negotiate heterosexuality that eventually provoked my coming out as a differently gendered male.

The prospect of a lesbian flirting and courting and dating opportunity certainly has its attractions: to be able to interact with female women who are potentially sexually interested in me and not have to have, imposed on either of us, any assumptions whatsoever about who does what or that it means something different if she does it or I do it based on gender because, hey, we are of the same gender.

But as the poet Robert Frost once said, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Lesbians do not take me in. They wish for female people to date and court and connect with. I can hardly complain about the unfairness and injustice of that when I am attracted exclusively to female people myself. I'm not heterogender, sexually attracted to women on the basis of their gender identity; I'm heterosexual, if by heterosexual we mean the attaction is on the basis of physical morphology. As a matter of fact, I have a bit of a preference for female people whose gender characteristics would get them considered masculine or butch at times.


Neither "lesbian" nor "heterosexual" works for me as an identifier in this world because of the correspondence issue though. Instead, I'm left reiterating what has become my slogan: "It's something else".


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My Pronouns

They ask me what my pronouns are. It's a respectful and appropriate question. I have no easy answers.

I was born with a physical configuration that was assigned the value 'male', and I've always been one of the girls from as far back as I can remember. I was pressured to adopt and embrace masculinity, to become one of the boys, all throughout childhood, but I wasn't so inclined. Later, I was repeatedly invited to transition or to present as female, so that I would not get misgendered, but the price of not getting misgendered was to be mis-SEXED. You see, the body I was born in isn't wrong, and the historical fact of being perceived and treated by others as a male is a lifelong part of who I am, and I have no wish to discard it. I'm not female, I'm a girl. Gender isn't sex. I'm a male girl. Get used to it.

So, pronouns, huh? You want the pronouns that would appropriately reference my gender, or the pronouns that would designate my sex?

Yeah, exactly. Here we are, all woke and conscious and liberated from the gender binary and all that it evokes, and yet we still posit that one syllable is sufficient to designate our sex and our gender, regardless of the combination thereof. What's the pronoun most commonly used for a male girl?


I do get misappraised quite often. People treat me as a brother, a guy, one of the boys, another man, the identity that (normally) goes with a male body. In my case, that's misgendering. Occasionally people get my gender correct -- most often when I'm on the phone and they start calling me "ma'am" and assuming me to be feminine; it also happens sometimes when I'm approached from behind, especially if I'm at a table with other women, and they see the long hair and hear my voice and make assumptions. Problem is, they also assume female along with feminine person, and thus they mis-sex me. So I'm used to being gotten wrong. Doesn't mean I like it.

Pronouns are not among the most egregious of the aspects of misassignments like these. Think about it. If they're addressing me directly, they're going to use the pronoun you. The gender-specific pronouns are pretty much limited to third-person references, when someone is talking to a second person and says something about me. He, him, his; or she, her, hers. I don't spend a lot of my day overhearing people refer to me in the third person. So why (you may ask) do gender activists make such a big deal about pronouns? Because it's an opportunity to do public education. It's a learning moment. Getting people to rethink how they think of us. The pronouns themselves are a symptom of that thinking, but it's the thinking that the activists want to change.

We care how other people think about us. It affects how they treat us. It shapes their behavior towards us, ranging from big conscious stuff to tiny subtle subliminal stuff that they may not be aware of.

Conceptualizing me as "she" doesn't really fix any more problems for me than it causes.

In my case I don't particularly crave having people think of me as female. In particular, I do not crave the sexual attentions of people whose attraction is towards female people. I would think that would make compelling common everyday sense to people, insofar as I do not in fact have female morphology, and also because people whose attraction is towards folks with male morphology would also be assuming me to be female and would therefore not be giving me attention.

Upon expressing this, I have on a couple occasions been informed that I've expressed a homophobic attitude. Seriously? Gay males are attracted to males, why would presenting as female (or being altercast by other people as a female person) expose me to uncomfortable gay male attention? I've also been told that this attitude on my part is somehow transphobic. I don't see that either. I don't wish to be taken for a binary transitioning transgender woman, that's true, but not because that would be insulting or anything. Just that it isn't accurate in my case.


Back to the pronouns. I could reasonably tell people "Please use he/his/him when you're thinking in terms of my physical structure, and use she/her/hers when you're dwelling on my gender". Use them situationally, you know?

I could embrace "they/their/them" of course. Why don't I? Well, there's no specificity. The use of that pronoun indicates that I'm non-mainstream, but it doesn't elaborate on how. It definitely doesn't say "male girl" to people. Admittedly that's true of "genderqueer" as well, and I've embraced that term.

Well, OK, I could also come up with my own pronouns, I suppose. Other people do. "Hi, my pronouns are 'nee, ner, ners'. I've decided that that's the pronoun for a male gender invert".

But if my intent is to do consciousness-raising and public education, I think anywhere that people are savvy enough to ask about my pronouns is a place where I can accomplish more public education by saying "none of the above, they're all wrong", and explaining why.


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REVIEW -- Britten & Crozier's ALBERT HERRING, performed by Utopia Opera

The premise of this opera lured me to think it might have edgy things to say about gender. A small town wants to anoint a May Queen but has issues with the lax morals of the female residents who would otherwise be the candidates for the position, and they decide to select a chaste and virginal male and dub him May King instead.

The tale is based on "Le Rosier de Madame Husson" by Guy de Maupassant, and the opera itself was written in 1947, which is generally not an era from which sharp-edged points on the subject of gender inequities and unduly gendered assumptions tended to emanate, but I was still curious.

I regretfully have to report that the tale tends to bolster and recapitulate traditional views on gender considerably more than it brings them into question. The eponymous Albert Herring [Cory Gross], the beforementioned chaste and virginal fellow, turns out to be an object of pity and condescending scorn from the more sexually experienced people of his age within the village (represented by Sid [Luke MacMillan], the butcher's son and Nancy [Stephanie Feigenbaum], who works at the bakery, who are in the process of flirting and fooling around a bit) and the village's children (in the form of Emmie, Cis, and Harry [Hannah Madeline Goodman, Zoe Marie Hart, and Jen Wu, respectively], who are prone to singing mocking children's songs about Albert within earshot). The doyenne of Loxford, Lady Billows [Marie Masters Webb], admires him, as does her housemaid Florence Pike [Caroline Tye], but they themselves are more than a little bit set up within the opera as targets for our ridicule. Somewhere in the middle are the various village leaders and authorities (Miss Wordsworth, schoolteacher [Rebecca Richardson], Mayor Upfold [Ethan Fran], Vicar Gedge [Glenn Friedman], and Police Superintendent Budd [Jonathan Harris] who do not dare to contradict Lady Billows in any affair but may or may not share her perspective on all things until they learn what her perspective is. They suggest one female candidate after another, for instance, before bowing to her assessment that none of them is suitable.

Basically the upshot of the plot is that Sid and Nancy (no resemblance to any latter-day punk rockers, just a coincidence) decide it would be cute to impinge a bit upon Albert's spotless moral fibre by slipping some rum into his beverage at the acceptance dinner, and once inebriated by it Albert rebels and, fortified by his drunkenness, goes into the town to revel, perchance to fornicate. This frees him from the apron strings of his domineering controlling Freudian mommy, Mrs Herring [Sarah Marvel Bleasdale], whose strict control, rather than any intrinsic moral backbone, is the real reason that Albert is as pure as he is. The experience permanently changes him and empowers him to seek his own course, while offending and dismaying Lady Billows and Mrs. Herring and Florence Pike.

In short, as is so often the case where males exhibiting characteristics more commonly associated with females are depicted at all, Albert is presented to us as pathetic and controlled by emasculating female people, and the remedy is a big dose of coarse crude masculinity to cure him of his feminine maladies.

A prolonged glance at Nancy gives us--if not the play itself--some perspective. If you examine Nancy's own attitudes, behaviors and feelings, especially drawing on the timeframe when she's feeling remorseful about her role in setting up Albert (which, incidentally, consisted entirely of going along with Sid's initiative) and combining that with her behavior when Sid is trying to kiss her while she demurs because "the windows have eyes," you end up with a Nancy who has a whole lot in common with Albert; both of them would be virginal and pure except that Nancy has Sid in her life, and Sid (as Albert himself later observed) gets what he wants by being direct and going after what he wants. Sid pressures Nancy and doesn't readily take "no" for an answer (he gets the kiss he seeks, windows and their eyes be damned). So Nancy is neither blessed nor cursed by the spectre (or mantle) of the chastity for which Albert is being recognized by Lady Billows and taunted and pranked by Sid, Nancy herself, and the children.

The opera isn't actually titled "The Deflowering of Albert Herring," nor is it explicitly stated that he comes home a nonvirgin. This garners points from me, albeit reluctantly, on the basis of accuracy, insofar as I once wanted to loosen up and let nice naughty things happen as they would, and to that end did attend parties and consume intoxicants, only to find that just as behaving more or less like Nancy doesn't result in a Nancy-like fate when you're male, going forth and consuming substances that lower inhibitions doesn't conjure up the people who would take advantage of your uninhibited receptivities. But if the tale doesn't say so, it equivocates and presents an overall message that if Albert is to loosen up and avail himself of less corseted ways of being in the world, sexual favors as well as the gutter of drunkenness will, in some undisclosed fashion, be his. The crown of flowers with which he is coronated is found before he is, trammeled and abandoned during the course of his escapades, leaving the villagers to think he's dead. You can't symbolize defloration much more directly than that.


The show displays Utopia Opera's usual strengths: there's no wasted investment in glitzy state-of-the-art pyrotechnics of the stage (they've been known to use flashlights with colored cellophane for some special effects); what you get instead is an assortment of spectacular voices singing at you from such close range that if you had a bouquet in hand to present to one of the singers, you could throw it from where you sit in the audience and whack the performer in the head. They convey an exuberant delight at what they're doing, along with a somewhat conspiratorial sense of fun, a company of outstanding opera singers who clearly enjoy doing what they're doing. William Remmers, the person who makes all this happen, is a show unto himself, great entertainment as a conductor and master of ceremonies. The pocket-sized orchestra is very impressive; I'd buy solo albums from either last night's french horn or bassoon player.

A true review of the operatic delivery of the Utopia Opera cast is beyond my level of sufficiently educated assessment. They deserve one and I hope someone better situated than I am will provide it. Benjamin Britten's score does not give the performers equal opportunity to show off their vocal acumen, but, having said that, I'll attest to the rafter-bending power exhibited by Marie Masters Webb as Lady Billows, as well as that of Caroline Tye in her role as housemaid Florence Pike, and Hannah Madeleine Goodman gets off some impressive prolonged shouts as the juvenile Emmie.

There's a nine-part complex vocal tableaux late in the piece, in Act III, that's just mind-blowing. Benjamin Britten is one of those composers who don't stay confined to the conventional restrictions of major and minor and augmented seventh and whatnot, while at the same time managing not to sound like pretentious random clashy white noise; his harmonies and entertwined melodies and countermelodies have a history and a destination, a sense of direction and resolution that one's ears can follow and appreciate, but the individual intervals and chords represent significant obstacles. This ensemble performance would challenge any vocal group.

The show has lots of delightful lighter moments that are well-carried by the Utopia team. You don't want to miss the three schoolchildren being tutored on their choral arrangement by Miss Wordsworth during a rehearsal; Florence the maid practically steals the show with a repertoire of small funny deadpan behaviors; and you'll love the mayor as he takes the opportunity, while ostensibly praising Albert at the award ceremony, to remind us all of his own civic accomplishments.

The pacing and delivery overall is spot-on, as is typical of Utopia's offerings. They know how to tell a tale and keep you involved.


Utopia Opera presents Albert Herring, an opera by Benjamin Britten & Eric Crozier, at Ida K. Lang Recital Hall, Hunter College, 695 Park Ave, NY

(the south side of Park Ave between Park and Lex, 4th floor).

Remaining performances April 12th and 13th, 2019.

Tickets and other inquiries: info@utopiaopera.org

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Sexual Feelings, and How They Affect Interaction

Today I want to talk about sexual feelings. Surprisingly, we don't do that often. We discuss sexual orientation, and gender identity; but our thoughts and attitudes about sexuality itself are often the same as the ones held by the prevailing culture and we're prone to repeating them, unexamined.

Consider this paragraph:

The habit of using women as sex objects may explain why seeing other men with long hair used to make, or still makes, some men so irrationally angry... Why was it so important for those men to be able to tell at a glance the boys from the girls? One reason may be that only in this way could they be sure with whom they might be free to have fantasy sex. Otherwise they might be daydreaming about having a great time in bed with some girl only to find out suddenly that "she" was a boy.

-- John Holt p 71-72, Escape from Childhood (Dutton 1974)


We immediately giggle about the fragile defensiveness of the homophobic guys getting all upset at having momentarily entertained a fantasy of this nature, and we're all quite familiar with the notion that the loudest and most emphatically heterosexual males are the ones least secure in their sexual orientation. But quite aside from all that, why is it or why should it be so disconcerting to make a cognitive or behavioral error that involves our sexuality? It isn't solely due to the historically disparaged status of gay sexuality, although that certainly plays a role in this example.

Consider a woman on the subway and a passenger with a camera on an extension stick who photographs her body from under her skirt, and then masturbates later to the image. If she were aware of it at the time it was happening, it's obvious why that would be experienced as creepy and invasive, but what's interesting is to pose the question to women about how they'd feel about it if they did not realize it at the time and that it wasn't made public in any fashion, so no one else would ever know about it either, but that it did in fact occur and they somehow learned of it later. People I've asked say it's still horribly invasive, a violation of their boundaries, one that makes them angry and creeped out to contemplate.

We can mistake a stranger on the sidewalk for a friend or colleague and generally not offend, even if during our confusion we interact with them physically and/or say things of a personal nature out loud -- as long as none of it has sexual overtones. We can slip into a packed elevator and end up brushing up against body parts and the question of whether or not it's offensive hinges mostly on whether or not there's an interpretaton of sexual intention in it. So it's not a matter of boundaries per se, so much as it's that boundaries work differently when it comes to sexual interaction, we tend to be a lot more sensitive and triggery about it than most other matters. I doubt that I'm saying anything you don't already know, but we don't tend to theorize about that and what it means; we tend instead to discuss sexual interaction as if all reasonable attitudes and thoughts about it could be derived from general principles of human interaction and autonomy.

If a man stares at the crotch of a nude statue or painting, or at the breast of a woman during a social interaction... the image becomes stolen. Notice that stolen images come in two forms: looking at something one is not authorized to look at and looking lustfully at what one is authorized to look at...

Stealing images of women's bodies is a troubled activity that pervades many heterosexual men's adolescent and postadolescent social experience...

-- Timothy Beneke, Proving Manhood: Reflections on Men and Sexism

Ignoring the heterocentricity of Beneke's language (he himself acknowledges it) -- I am reminded of thoughts I've had about butch people, as a person who is not butch, that in part what I think of as butch is a openness and confidence about their sexual lusts, that who they are to themselves and to the world at large is a person who sexually covets people, who do not avoid the perception that they are sexually predatory (for better or worse, with or without a leavening of some degree of respect for others' boundaries). Now, I think those things as a non-butch person, and perhaps am obliviously opaque to what butch experiences are truly like. What I know more about are the feelings of many people who are not butch in this sense, who, however post-prudish we may be in our current lives, still have residual carryover fears that whenever we are perceived as sexual, as having sexual desires, we will be thought invasive, dirty, even disgusting:

Gather on a hill of wildflowers
A certain kind of piney tree
Hot sweet piney tea
Oh Gather Me
And on a hill of wildflowers
Oh Gather Me
A writer who's in need of sleep
A lady who's in loving need
Don't hold the sprout against the seed
Don't hold this need against me

Melanie, from the inside cover of the album Gather Me


Another locus where we see the vulnerability of sexual feelings on display is the matter of sexual exclusivity and monogamy. I myself am polyamorous and hence I don't take it for granted as inherently normative and natural, but it's certainly a trend and perhaps not entirely attributable to the history of patriarchal marriage and property and inheritance, although once again, yeah, those matters do play a role here. Polyamorous people often point out to other folks that we form friendships and don't feel a need to require our friend to not have any other friends; people who are parents can love multiple children and not feel like they're being unfaithful. But sexual-romantic love is probably more frightening, its attractiveness being part of what makes it so frightening, and that high-stakes high-vulnerability situation is probably also a factor in why so many people feel safer if they are their partner's only partner. Or think they do, at any rate.

A corollary of that much vulnerability is the possibility of great power, of having a form of emotional dominion over the other person's vulnerability. The kink scene (BDSM) is one where power play is recognized as a factor and overtly played with, negotiated, discussed. It's obvious when it's on display in the form of bondage restraints and punitive devices like whips and floggers or reflected in the language of domme and submissive, sadist and masochist, master and slave; but whether it is out in front like that and recognized as a component of intimacy or not, power inequities are present in intimacies that involve so much vulnerability. It need not be permanently ensconced in such a way that one partner always hold power over the other, or in such a way that the player identified by sex or gender or role is always the one in whom the balance of power is vested -- in fact, the spark of excitement in a sexual relationship may depend quite a bit on the vulnerability shifting and trading. But that's a different thing than a hypothetical situation in which the participants are never invasive, always consenting, balanced in autonomy and self-determined authority at every second. And that's part of what frightens us. It's risky and there's a threat of being deprived of our agency and our sense of integrity and personal balance. To the devoted advocate of total equality and the elimination of all oppression, as well as to the fearful conqueror who needs to always be the winner, love is not a safe endeavor.

We do try to hammer out some rules for boundaries, and establish them so that we share the same notions of them, so that we can expect of each other that these notions have been established and agreed upon:

• No one gets the right to have sex with someone. You aren't intrinsically entitled to it. The intensity of your lust for it doesn't entitle you to it. People get to say no and you don't get to smash through that.

• No one gets the right to be found attractive by someone either, though. You aren't entitled to be flirted with, not by someone who has been observed to flirt with someone else, not by someone you wish would notice you.

• Everyone does have the right to like who you like, sexually speaking, though. It may be long lanky freckled longhaired guys with long curly eyelashes, or women with big butts and plump faces and wide shoulders. You have the right to be attracted to people in part because they have a penis, or a clitoris. Or skin of a certain hue. That's not to say that our sexual tastes are 100% free of being politically and socially problematic, mind you; we may harbor biases and we may have eroticized certain things as an outcome of contextual discriminations or ongoing oppressions, and perhaps we would all benefit from challenging those things within ourselves, especially when our sexual tastes appear to reinforce and mimic existing social stratifications. But be that as it may, this is not a venue in which "should" gets to intrude and supplant our inclinations. We don't tolerate being told that we aren't allowed to like what we like.

• It's not a meritocracy, where you get rewarded for your socially desirable good-citizen / good-person characteristics. You don't get to earn a high sexual desirability score by getting checkmarks on a list of admirable traits. I say this as an actual Nice Guy™. You don't get to earn sex.

Sexuality is historically something we've regulated maybe more than anything else in human life, maybe even more than reproduction. At the same time, we don't trust regulating it and rebel almost immediately against any attempt to restrict and channel it. But we fear unregulated sexuality too.

There has been pushback against structuring consent into a formal and overtly spoken package, and there have been people who have spoken or written fondly of how much more "natural" and less clinically oppressive "animal" sex was or would have been before we tried to tame it and shame it and channel it with our institutions and regulations. I myself vividly remember being very unhappy at the age of 19 when it seemed to me that I was attending the university to get a degree and become economically successful in order to qualify for a female partner who "would then let me do it to her", and wanting very much instead to be found desirable for who I was. I also remember reading a description of a commune in California which was attempting to unravel middle-class sexual mores and create something egalitarian, and their approach was to set up a sleeping-with schedule in which all the women would rotate through all the men, a different one each night. I could readily imagine a group of people who knew each other and loved each other deciding to embrace a group marriage that worked that way, but to walk in and join up as an interested stranger? Being assigned by schedule to a sequence of beds felt instantly oppressive, invasive, degrading. If some people wanted that kind of system, and consented to that, fine for them, but if such a thing were imposed on people? Hell no!

I knew a self-identified witch, a woman of indeterminate middle age back when I was barely out of my teens, who once told me "The problem a lot of people have is that they believe that they are their minds and that they have a sexuality. The truth is, you are a sexuality and you have a mind." I've come to see the wisdom of that viewpoint. We tend to have a very limited and nastily derogatory notion of sexuality. Gutter crude and selfish and focused on immediate nerve endings and their satiation and all that. But if that's all sexuality was, we'd simply masturbate and be done with it, why involve other people? Whereas suppose that what the sexual urge really leads us to do is not merely to get our rocks off, or even find someone cute and sexy with whom to get our rocks off, but instead to seek out and find, or if necessary create, the truly ideal context in which to connect, get our rocks off, and raise the resulting children, all with safety and comfort and with the maximum integration of all that we wish to bring into that intimacy. When you start thinking of it that way, it starts looking vibrant and noble and socially progressive; and if that is who we are, and our highly intelligent human minds tools of that, hey, that's a pretty good deal, yes?


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What's in a Name?

Transgender or Genderqueer?

Transgender is an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.

-- American Psychological Association

Transgender people have a gender identity or gender expression that differs from their assigned sex

-- Wikipedia


Of the two terms "transgender" and "genderqueer", "transgender" is definitely more established at this point and is more familiar to a wider segment of society. And with the modern "umbrella" definition of what it means to be transgender, it's hard to specify and explain circumstances under which a person would be queerly gendered but not fall under the auspices of what it means to be transgender.

The meaning of a phrase or term comes from our politics. The meaning isn't just there, embedded intrinsically in the phrase itself. In the era when I came out (1980, to be precise), almost no one had ever heard the word "transgender", and so they used the older well-established term "transsexual". Nowadays there are a lot of offensive implications associated with the term "transsexual", but the people who said "transsexual" in 1980 weren't for the most part trying to imply any of those things. Similarly, someone transported from that timeframe to now might say "hermaphrodite" instead of "intersex" without intending to offend, not knowing the other term and not having heard any objections to the one they did know.



In this graph, you can see that "transsexual" was a term in widespread use long before the more modern alternatives. "Transgender" came into significant use between 1985 and 1990; the term "genderqueer" came along a bit later, establishing itself between 1990 and 1995.

Why do we differentiate between terms when an existing established term is "close enough"? Mostly because we like specificity. And we like to clarify.

And sometimes because we wish to reject some of the implications tied to an existing term. Activists in America in the 1960s rejected "negro" in favor of "black" because of cultural associations that had become embedded in "negro" that they wanted to break away from.


It's often easiest to explain what we're talking about when there's something that people are already familiar with. If your audience already knows about the color aqua or the color turquoise, that can make it easier to describe the color teal.


It can be hard to differentiate from people who use a term that you don't wish to go by without making them feel like you're planting your foot in their face. I want to apologize in advance to the transgender community for that. You are not the enemy. I hope you don't experience this blog post as an act of hostility; I don't intend it as such!

Anyway, yes, we have a very inclusive definition of transgender. It does seem to cover people like me. What does it mean to be covered? Sometimes it's like insurance: "don't worry, we've got you covered". Or it can be a cozy blanket, keeping you warm, protecting you from the cold elements. To be covered can also be like wearing a chador, which can be worn with pride but can also be experienced as negating and confining when it is imposed without consent. It can be like a mask, disguising identity. And it can simply mean that one is covered up, kept hidden, obscured from being seen.

The previous graph superimposed the rise of the three terms "transsexual", "transgender", and "genderqueer", showing each term's proliferation in our society. But that graph isn't normalized; it artificially pretends that the rate of use for each term is comparable. It's not. Here's a true graph of the deployment of the three terms:






It may come as a shock to transgender people to think of themselves as "more mainstream" than anyone else, culturally speaking. But from a genderqueer perspective, yes, you're the prevailing story against which we're hidden in the margins.

To be "covered" can elicit the attitude that "Since we've already covered what it is like to be transgender, people don't need to hear about your story, since it's included in the transgender story". Jacob Tobia, in Sissy, details the conventional stereotyped (binary) transgender story arc:

I was born in the wrong body. the doctors told my parents that I was a _____ [boy or girl], but I always knew that I was the opposite of that... I spent years hating myself, thinking something was wrong with me... That's when I decided I needed to transition. I started hormones and had a ___ [breast augmentation / reduction]. Then I did the really hard thing and got "the surgery" to make sure that my genitals aligned with my identity.

This is the narrative presented (quite excellently) in Meredith Russo's If I Was Your Girl, and classically narrated by Jan Morris in Conundrum, or as testified by by Chaz Bono in Transition. Including other people who also have gender identities that "do not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth" doesn't change the fact that this is what transgender means to most people.

What are the primary concerns of the transgender movement? The rights of transgender people in the military; the right of people to use the bathroom appropriate to their identity without hostile interference; medical insurance coverage for and uncomplicated access to medical transitional procedures; protection from hostile misgendering in the workplace, and raising people's consciousness about microagressions around expressions that gender people, etc; violence against transgender people; and public education.

Public education? The content being promoted is still pretty much the mainstream narrative discussed above. And as part and parcel of it, the agenda includes the establishment of a party line about acceptable attitudes and verbal expressions thereof about sex and gender: that the state of being transgender involves a discrepancy between the gender to which one was assigned at birth ("assigned female at birth" -- AFAB -- or "assigned male at birth" -- AMAB) and one's actual gender identity. That one's physical morphology is not relevant: "What's in my pants is none of your business"; and that social acceptance means that transgender people smoothly blend in with one's identified gender, being "women" and "men", not "transwomen" or "transmen". That except for being out in the political name of being Exhibit A for this phenomenon, there should be no difference between transgender womem and women in general, or between transgender men and men in general. That's the party line. That's what transgender activists would like us all -- transgender and cisgender alike -- to embrace and acknowledge. And in promoting this while opting to include all of us gender-variant people, they're establishing this as our agenda as well, since we're all in this together as transgender people -- ??

In actuality, most genderqueer people who aren't also transitioners in the binary transgender sense aren't directly affected by the military ban question, nor would the right to enter either of the designated binary segregated bathrooms as we saw fit fix much of anything for us; we aren't affected by medical issues related to transitioning; and no one has effectively stated what it would even mean for us to be correctly gendered in the workplace or, for that matter, anywhere else. There's a complete lack of public education about our existence, let alone our specific concerns! The mainstream transgender message discusses gender assignment "at birth", as if we didn't continue to live in a world that altercasts each and every one of us into a gender category; it does not challenge the "sex means gender" established mainsteam perspective -- the "what's in my pants is none of your business" attitude discourages us from claiming as part of our identities the morphological sex of our bodies and the fact that we've been perceived in those terms all our lives, that that is part of our experience. The transgender narrative treats the transitioning person as a model; it now extends a nonjudgmental inclusiveness to people who can't afford to transition or don't choose to for other reasons but it's an inclusiveness that's still based on the notion that "you should treat me as if my sex is in accordance with the gender that I identify as"; that's what "the contents of my pants is none of your business" really means. But that erases the identities of people who wish to identify as people born in a specific body whose gender is other than the gender normally associated with that body. It blocks us from establishing an identity that does not blend in as men or women; it assumes that transgender people all wish to do that blending in, that transgender people consist of men who wish to blend in with men in general and women who wish to blend in with women in general. When in actuality some of us wish to be recognized and understood as something different, as members of new categories: perhaps a fluid person whose gender identity varies, perhaps a person who is both genders, or neither gender, or perhaps as a person who has one sex but a gender that doesn't conventionally correspond to it.

There was once a time, I think, when transgender women in the gay/lesbian scene were accepted as "us" and yet "not us" at the same time. When the voice of the movement was mainly that of gay men, and effeminate males were considered stereotye-reinforcing embarrassments. Well, the need to explain transgender to the world did not make transgender activists homophobes. It did not mean they were antigay. But they had to push off as something different in order to explain.

We, too, are entitled to a voice and an agenda. We have butch women who still identify as women, not as transgender men. We have sissy males who don't wish to be perceived as female people.

There's a reason the argument was made in favor of expanding the LGBT acronym. Q was included. Q means a lot of things, including what we call genderqueer. Something not already covered by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Otherwise we would not have needed a separate letter. The Q implies that we have a story of our own.


(I actually prefer MOGII to the increasingly sprawling acronym LGBTQIA++ -- "marginalized orientation, gender identity, and intersex" -- but we do all need our voices to be heard)


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Workplace Acceptance

I get to show up at work in a skirt when I feel like it. I've been hired to do data entry at NYC's Department of Health. It's a job I'm eminently qualified for (I'm fast at typing and data entry). The option of working skirted isn't due to my proficiency (although it contributes to my confidence in exercising the option), it's because it's DOH, and that's just how they are. There are required new-hire orientation videos in which gender and sexual orientation variations are explained, complete with video footage of people discussing their identity or that of their child. The new employee is taught that it is an offense that can get you dismissed from your job to question or challenge whether someone's presence in the bathroom is appropriate for their gender. People include their pronouns of choice in their email signatures. There are gender neutral bathrooms on some floors and prominent signs directing people to them.

There's a similar orientation about race and ethnicity and why it is wrong to have a set of standards for things like hair style and clothing that are derived from white eurocentric culture but promote them for everyone in the name of "professionalism".

DOH is committed to being in the forefront of efforts to address racism and heterosexism and other institutional systems of oppression, and they focus on it internally. I've already attended two workshops where I was being paid on company time to discuss such matters with my coworkers. (I like this job. Does it show?)



I've had a skirt or two in my wardrobe ever since I plucked up the first one in a Salvation Army thrift store 30-someodd years ago. I've worn them out and about on the sidewalks of the city, to grocery stores in the suburbs, on mass transit, on college campus as student and as a grad student teaching the class, but until now not to the workplace as an employee.

It makes more difference than you might think. There's nothing intrinsically feminine about a skirt; it's a piece of apparel that fits and functions well on bodies male and female alike, and is only designated as female apparel for cultural and historical reasons; in other cultures and at other times, garments that were essentially skirts have been worn by male people. And so when I say I was born a girl, I certainly don't mean I was born with a need to wear this item (or paint my nails or wear shoes with pointy tips or whatever).

But they are signifiers, tools of communication, precisely because they convey a femininity message in this particular society. I like skirts in part because I just do (in a way that I don't like, for example, those pointy-tipped high heeled dress shoes), but I've embraced them because of their symbolic value. I don't have to wear one every day; being seen in one once or twice can have a permanent impact on people. It shapes how I'm seen and reacted to.

In previous places of employment, I've often been out about being differently gendered. I've brought it into conversations and talked to coworkers and employers about it whenever the topic seemed to come up. But long abstract complicated conversations are often less effective than a good visual, you know?

I was introduced to a new colleague by my supervisor on Friday, and the supervisor used "their" and "they" in reference to me. (Those are not pronouns that I've chosen for myself but that's entirely OK. It reflects the perception that I'm differently gendered. I don't need the details to be precisely accurate; just noting that there's a difference here is sufficient to keep people from making the usual assumptions!)

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BOOK REVIEW: Sissy, by Jacob Tobia

There's a brand-new genderqueer memoir out, a genderqueer coming-out and coming-of-age tale going to print, and I'm jealous. Obsessively insanely jealous. I wanted mine to be the first.

Those of you who've been reading my blog regularly are aware that I didn't have such an intense reaction when I discovered Audrey MC's Life Songs: A Genderqueer Memoir. Well, there are two reasons for that: firstly, Life Songs is basically and primarily a transgender story, a tale of transitioning to female by someone assigned and regarded from birth as male, and then very late in the book the author tacks on a throwaway line about how being a transgender lesbian is "so limiting in its binary construct" and so she now identifies as genderqueer; and, secondly, Life Songs is essentially self-published. So on balance I didn't feel authentically beaten to the punch.

SISSY: A Coming-of-Gender Story by Jacob Tobia is the genuine article. Jacob happens to be a gay male and their experiences of being a genderqueer femme were shaped by that, but this is not a gay coming-out story with a nod towards nonbinary appended. This is the real deal.

"I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am a glimmering, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, beautiful, human person, and I don't identify that way for fun. I don't identify that way because I think it makes me interesting. I don't identify that way as a hobby. I use that language to describe myself because it is fundamentally who I am."

As large as being (and coming out) gay did loom in Jacob's teenage years (and how could it not?), it's pretty much incidental to the main narrative they're telling, so yes, there's finally a book being published about what it's like to grow up genderqueer, as a sissy, a feminine male who actually embraces their identity as feminine male, one of us.

And published? Putnam, baby. G. P.-freaking-Putnam's Sons. Yeesh. I have dreams of getting my book picked up by the likes of Seal Press or Sibling Rivalry or something. Compared to that, Tobia is Cinderella in a gold carriage and I aspire to a pumpkin on a skateboard that I can push down the road and call a coach. Did I mention jealous? Jacob Tobia may be in for one seriously bitchy review here.



First, though, some of the sparkly bits. Sissy has some real gemstones.

One of my favorite takeaways is Tobia's replacement of The Closet with The Shell. That being self-protective, and not being cowardly, is the reason people aren't Out yet; that when threatened, one may retreat into one's shell and that there's no reason or excuse to belittle this as if we aren't entitled to put something between us and a hostile world. That we don't owe the world an honest testimonial to our identity, as if it were our secretive lying behavior that causes the surrounding society to make hetero cisgender dyadic normative assumptions about everyone. It's not our doing that makes that the norm that we have to push off from and differentiate ourselves from in order to come out! If we owe a coming out to anyone, we owe it to ourselves, but there's really no excuse for the community to mock people who don't do that, or haven't done so yet.

Tobia at several points talks about what it's like to be in a world that has no term and no concept for who and how we are —

As a child, I understood that my difference was beautiful, was natural, was fundamental. I knew just how special my gender was. But without a name, without language to put to what I was seeing and feeling, I had no way of sharing the importance of my difference with others.

... and later, starting college ...

The problem is that there are generally no lines written for people like me. There was no role for a gender nonconforming person at Duke, hardly even a role for a gay boy. Without realizing it, just by doing what they were used to, by following the rules suggested by the structure around them, my classmates had erased me

... and again in the vivid confrontation at Duke with their classmates and the organizers of a retreat called Common Ground. This time there is a specific conflation of sex and gender: the participants are told to sort themselves:

"Today we'll be talking about gender... we'd like to separate the room into two groups: women—sorry, female—and male participants"

Tobia pitches a totally appropriate hissy fit. It's frustrating living in a world that perpetually, obliviously insists that whosoever is biologically male is a man, that sex means gender, that dividing the room along this fracture line creates two groups each of which will contain the people who belong in it. Tobia starts with warning the organizers that the male group had better be focused on the male body, male morphology, and not about the experience of operating as a man in this world. "Because if we're talking about being men, you and I both know that I don't have much to add to that conversation."

As someone who has spent a frustrated lifetime trying to put these things into words myself, I kept on bouncing in my seat and occasionally raising my clenched fist and cheering.

The showdown with the Common Ground participants is the closing bookend to Tobia's college experiences. The opening bookend took the form of a couple weeks in the wilderness with a different campus retreat group, Project WILD, that hiked into the Appalachian mountains. In the natural setting, temporarily cut off from ongoing social reinforcements and structures, they found gender polarization withering away. "Bodies no longer signified behavior or character traits; breasts were breasts, nipples were nipples, genitals were genitals, hair was hair, none of them bearing ideological weight." It has a lasting effect on Tobia, providing a taste of how things could be different, but less so for the others who disappointingly retreat into their gendered shells once back in the school environment.

It's appropriate and consistent that these bookend-moments are events that are designed to get people in touch with themselves and each other. Tobia is active in the church in his pre-college days and despite living in the south (North Carolina) spends most of the book's trajectory in social environments that are tolerant and open in a modern sense. This is not the Bible-thumping Alabama conservatism of Jared Eamons in Boy Erased, and the issues that Jacob Tobia had to cope with are the same ones that still plague our most issue-conscious and woke societies now. Most of Tobia's story is about a person who is out and proud as a gay person but still trying to figure out how to come out as someone who is differently gendered. It's us, and it's now. Tobia gives us the much-needed "Exhibit A" to enable society to talk about genderqueer people with some understanding and familiarity.

After I came out as gay, I never officially came out as genderqueer or as nonbinary or as trans or as feminine.

I have no idea why Tobia proclaims that they never came out as genderqueer. Maybe they meant specifically to their parents?! It's a worrisome disclaimer at the time it's issued, because this is before Tobia goes off to college, and although the story up until this point includes a lot of secret femme behaviors and tastes, it seemed to me that there was still room for the story to be all about a gay guy who, now that they're writing a book, opts to identify as a sissy femme as well. But fear not, it's not so. It's a coming-out story if there ever was one. Tobia tells many people in many ways, many times. It's just more complicated because when you tell folks you're gay they don't generally get all nonplussed and stuff and ask you what that means, exactly; but coming out nonbinary or femme or genderqueer is nowhere nearly as well understood.

Now, Jacob Tobia does equivocate sometimes, and they of all people should know better! Whilst looking around for a social circle in high school that wouldn't be a badly uncomfortable fit for theirself as a still-secretly femme sissy, Tobia muses about the degree of homoerotic locker-room experiences among the jocks and compares it to the substantial amount of homoerotic anime available to the nerds. Look, hon, if you're going to write an essay about how being femme is its own thing, try not to step on the hem of your own dress. We get another misdemeanor offense like that when the college essay is being crafted — an essay about going forth in public in high heels — and Tobia refers to it as "an essay about wearing high heels and being the gayest thing on this planet." T'weren't so much as a mention in that essay of noshing on dicks or craving male sexual companionship, and just like the Common Ground people treating male as the same as man, this is a problem. Some of us sissyboy folks might like to go forth in high heels ourselves (although that's not quite my aesthetic taste) despite not also being gay guys, and we get just as erased by this conflation as by having "male" tied to being a man.

Be that as it may, gay male culture has not exactly been an unmitigated embrace of femme culture. There are scores and hordes of eligible gay guys posting personal ads and specifying "no sissies" or "no feminine nellies" or "masculine presenting only," and shrinking away from anything feminine as gross, like they think we sissies have cooties or something. There's a scene in Sissy, after Jacob has dashed across the Brooklyn Bridge in stilettos to earn money for an LGBTQ shelter where the masculine gay interviewer asks if comporting like this isn't "playing into stereotypes." So it is a politically flouncy act for a gay femme to put it out there and in your face and to underline their pride in being this way, femme, specifically as a person who is also that way, gay.


In the aftermath of Project WILD, Jacob Tobia finds themself back on a campus in the midst of fraternity and sorority rush (ugh!) and the intense gender normativity and polarization drives them away from the connections made with classmates in the Appalachians.

"In the vacuum that was left, I did what came most naturally: I started hanging out with the queers... within about a month, I'd cemented msyelf as the first-year activist queer, attending every meeting of Blue Devils United, our undergrad LGBTQ student organization… .

Yeah, well, convenient for you. To have a structure like that in place where a person like you would fit in on the basis of sexual orientation (which is almost always going to be the majority identity that brings participants in; you get a roomful of gay guys, a smattering of lesbians, a couple token transgender folks of the conventional transitioning variety, right?). I did promise bitchy, didn't I? You got a platform from this. You made social political connections where you could start off recognized as an activist gay student, something people could comprehend, and over time, even if they didn't fully get that your issues as a femme person were something other or more than an expression of gay male concerns, you could push those too, get them out there, explain them to people who started off believing you were in this group for your own legitimate reasons, marginalized for being gay.

Aww fuck, I can't win with this whine, can I? It's not exactly going to fly for me to try to claim that hetero sissies are more oppressed or that gay sissies are privileged in comparison. Well, Jacob Tobia, one thing you reinforced for me is that if I feel the need to bitch and whine, I should go ahead and be proud of being a sore loser, I should refuse to be classy even if the people I'm jealous of, who seem to have advantages I don't have, are good people with more than a compensating amount of situational detrimental oppressions to offset all that.

I aspired to this; I went to college to be an activist about this peculiar sense of identity and I tried to connect and to become part of a community. I rode into downtown New York City and hung out at Identity House and marched in parades and tried to connect there too. But mostly I met gay guys who came to such groups or events in order to meet other gay guys, or trans women who wanted to talk about surgery, hormones and passing. I even attended a bisexual support group for awhile, thinking/hoping that even though "this wasn't it," that the mindset of people in such a group would be more conducive to someone espousing sissy lib and socially interested in connecting with a butch or gender nonconforming female person who found sissy femmes attractive. No such luck: the bisexual gals tended to interact with males in a conventionally gendered way, according to the heterosexuality script I was trying to avoid. And one consequence of all that is that I didn't become a part of an environment where I could be a spokesperson. (I had similar problems when trying to hang with the feminists, by the way; they didn't regard gender issues as my issues, and saw me as a supporter only).

I suppose it's fair to say that heterosexually inclined sissies get bought off. We're not as often in situations where our queerness can't be ignored; our sissyhood doesn't get us found in bed with a same-sex partner at the motel or in the dormitory, and we don't get seen holding hands with a same-sex partner while walking down the sidewalk. We don't go to designated social scenes that would draw attention to our identities, the way the patrons at Pulse in Orlando did. So it's easier for our difference to be tucked and bound and hidden. And so far there hasn't been an "out game" for us to join so there's been no counter-temptation to offset that.



Hey world, you still need my book, too. Buy Jacob Tobia's, yes, buy it now. It's powerful. Buy it and tell everyone about it, spread the word. But an author in Tobia's situation can't directly attack and dismantle society's equation of sissy with gay. When someone comes out as a gay sissy, it corroborates the stereotype that sissies are gay and gay males are sissies, and because of that, a heterosexually inclined young sissy boy reading Sissy or watching someone like Jacob Tobia in a television interview may not feel very reassured that who they are is someone that it is okay and possible to be. Furthermore, all the gay sissies in the world, along with all the lesbian butch women, can't fully dismantle the gender-polarized scripting that constitutes heterosexual flirting and coupling behavior. Oh, they threaten it: whenever gay or lesbian people connect, it challenges the notion that sexuality requires the participants to be rigidly assigned to a sexual role by their biology. Even in a gay or lesbian relationship where one person is the butch and the other person is the femme, you don’t start out where each person is automatically assigned to being the butch or the femme because of what sex they are. It may be a negotiation between the two people, or perhaps a person comes to feel that the butch role or the femme role is the one that fits them best. And of course lots of relationships don’t use butch and femme at all. But the real challenge has to come from genderqueer people who participate in biologically heterosexual encounters, finally making it so that heterosexuality itself is no longer dependent on those binary polarized oppositional roles.

Well, also history. I came of age and came out in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The entire community of marginalized orientation, gender identity and intersex people (MOGII **) has an interest in learning how being gay or being trans etc. was and has been over time and in different settings. In particular, being genderqueer/nonbinary is often seen and spoken of as if it's an affectation, something that no one would come up with on their own if it wasn't already out there, trending and looking edgy and stuff. So hearing stories from people like me who came to a genderqueer sense of identity before there was such a term (trendy or otherwise) should help retaliate against that attitude.


Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Google, Kobo, and most other likely venues. Support gender-variant authors and buy a copy!



* Tobia's preferred pronouns are they, them, theirs

** As an alternative to the ever-expanding LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA, LGBTTQQIAAP acronym, MOGII is becoming a popular way of designating the community. We're together in this because our sexual orientation, our gender identity, or our physical body is different from the mainstream.

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