I've started sending out my pitch to get my second book published.
Here is my standard query letter, and below that, the parts of the formal proposal that spell out in more detail what the book is about.
Query Letter:
"When you're a fish out of water you look for the nearest ocean" — Anthony T. Hincks
THAT GUY IN OUR WOMEN'S STUDIES CLASS is a nonfiction memoir about a genderqueer sissy male, Derek, who decided that women's studies in college would be a good place to engage people in discussions about gender.
This narrative tale follows Derek down Oklahoma highways and into heroin dens in Harlem and then into the homeless shelters of 1980s New York City, as the determined but not always practical Derek pursues his dream.
Along the way, the story delves into the complexities of privilege and social identity in ways that challenge assumptions about power and marginalization—not in primary-color simplicity but by exploring privilege and deprivation along a number of different dimensions and showing it in all of its native complexity, all while still respecting a concern for empowering the voice of those left out.
"Hunter's prose explores the delicate tapestry of privilege and power... this is a deployment of 'show, not tell' I've rarely seen done... narrative social theory" — An early reader
Length: 95,962 words
From the Formal Proposal:
Elevator Statement —
In 1980, I came out as a sissy. I was reclaiming the term the same way that proud lesbians referred to themselves as "dykes" or the way that gay folks were reclaiming "queer". "Sissy" comes from the word "sister" and so it seemed like the right word: a sisterlike, i.e., feminine or girlish, male person.
We had gay rights activists back then. We even had trans activists. A lot of people didn't understand why I was using a new and different term. But I wasn't gay or trans. It was something else.
Trans women, both back then and today, tend to say "Don't see me as a trans woman. See me as a woman". That wasn't me. I didn't consider myself female. I considered myself femme. I didn't identify with the gay rights movement: my sexuality wasn't same-sex attraction and I saw a need to untangle gender from either physical sex OR sexual orientation.
The activists I identified with the most were feminists. They were the ones who said having a different behavioral standard and polarized social roles for the sexes was sexist.
So I headed off to the university to major in women's studies.
That Guy in our Women's Studies Class is a rare thing in the world of memoirs: a sequel. In March 2020, my book GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, was published by Sunstone Press (Santa Fe NM).
GenderQueer told the coming-of-age and coming-out story of realizing I had a different gender identity and of giving it a name. At the end of it, I vow to confront the world about how sissy males are treated. In That Guy in our Women's Studies Class, I set out to do exactly that, choosing the world of academic women's studies as my platform.
Elaborating on the Concept —
"When you're a fish out of water you look for the nearest ocean" — Anthony T. Hincks
As a male person very focused on the unfairness of gender expectations, I headed for the largest metropolitan center I could easily get to—New York City—figuring that even if my identity made me an exception to the exception to the rule, I'd be able to find people who were like me. And I pinned my hopes and dreams to women's studies, because the material I wanted to discuss with people would overlap with the material we'd be focusing on in the classroom.
That Guy in our Women's Studies Class illustrates the complexities of intersectionality, the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender and so forth. The main character is male, the privileged sex in the patriarchal context. Within the first few pages of the book, he has reason to worry that he's invading women's space by attending women's studies classes. At the same time, he's a minority within that space, and, as a gender-nonconforming sissy in the 1980s, a person with a gender identity that wasn't acknowledged and recognized yet, he's been somewhat marginalized by gender himself.
That's the presenting surface of a larger and even more intricate situation. To get to New York and attempt to get into college, he hitchhikes across the country and becomes a homeless person on the New York streets, eventually trading in on a history of psychiatric incarceration (he'd been placed on a locked ward shortly after coming out) to get into the better-funded assistance programs, which were earmarked for the "homeless mentally ill". A person with a psychiatric diagnosis was thus both privileged among the homeless and at the same time often stripped of basic rights because of that same status. And we follow along as the main character commutes every day from the grounds of Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital to SUNY college campus, where most of the other students are middle class suburban commuters with the advantages and privileges of that existence.
There is also the dynamic of race: although the SUNY campus is not as disproportionately black as an historically black college such as Grambling, there is a high proportion of inner city black students living in the dorms as residential students, and there's a tension between the mostly-white commuters and the majority-black resident students. The book's main character is commuting from a different majority-minority environment, the world of formerly homeless halfway-house residents. In his second year he moves into the dormitories to live among the resident students and get away from the oppressive environment of the psychiatric facility. Over and over again, he finds his attention diverted from matters of gender identity to questions of race and racial oppression.
Meanwhile, in his academic studies, he gets increasingly immersed in studying the complex tapestry of power itself, and the larger question of its desirability, which feminist theory examines as part of the patriarchal value structure.
That Guy in our Women's Studies Class is a narrative story, with characters and conversations and a compelling storyline. While real life doesn't often resemble the trajectory of a fictional novel's plot, this particular slice of life tells that kind of tale. It's an entertaining book, one that does not read like an educational treatise. It's the story of a young out-of-town person from a small village making a go of it in the big city, of a survivor coping with life on the streets while seeking employment and a place to stay, and of a fervent activist looking for his 'people', finding a place in the world, and finding a political voice.
The people and events described in this memoir were all quite real, but to streamline and optimize the narrative flow, I sometimes combined several characters into one composite character, so as to not have to develop so many characters; and on occasions I also condensed multiple similar events and described them as single events.
The names have all been changed—including my own, for consistency. As I did in GenderQueer, I refer to myself as Derek Turner throughout.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Friday, August 7, 2020
Saturday, August 1, 2020
Two New Reviews from Book Bloggers
A couple of really nice reviews of GenderQueer were posted this week by book bloggers, with any luck drawing some more attention to my book and luring more people to read it!
"In a world which is still conservative at large and prejudiced for the most part, Derek's story is agonizing despite being inspirational. I say this because it shows us just how hurtful and indifferent people can be, especially if you are trying to tell the truth about something that they'd much rather pretend doesn't exist...
No amount of research into theoretical assumptions and claims can replace the experience of reading someone's life story and knowing what they've been through. The narrative style is simple yet powerful. By the time you reach the final page, you'll feel like you've had quite the journey...
Characters: This is obviously about the main character or the author himself. I don't think its necessary to mention again how moved I was by his story. I, however, would like to talk about the brilliant way in which the others are depicted. Some characters represent a particular way of thinking. No matter what we think about stereotyping, it's true that some people share the same sort of antagonism and hatred when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community and this group appears pretty frequently in the book, needless to say. The author has merged several like minded people into a few characters because they are significant only because of their point of view. This has resulted in a story not overcrowded with characters and has left enough space for Derek to reveal himself to the reader...
Genderqueer succeeds greatly as a memoir because it excels in every sub-category."
Saradia Chatterjee (Blogger: Crazy Curious Sara) Crazy Curious Reader
"I guess I'd shot my mouth off. - First Sentence, Part One: School. At A Party: 1979
This is who I am, how I am. Get used to it! I will never again tolerate people being mean and nasty to me and acting like I deserve it because I don't act like a guy. From now on being all worried about that is gonna be their problem. - Memorable Moment, Page 166
I ...had thought to use the metaphor 'like a round peg in a square hole' but somehow that didn't feel strong enough so, abnormal, there I've said it - the author was made to feel abnormal, for the most part this wasn't comfortable reading and arguably the former portions spent on the author's early life experiences were a tad too drawn out, and yet that said ...
Not always a journey easily travelled (and especially not then) I think that not to have chronicled these events and, perhaps more importantly, the feelings they gave rise to, in such detail would have been to do a disservice to the experiences of not only Derek but also to generations of people who have rarely been represented; whose stories have never been told.
A very human story but one that provides an important insight into gender and identity."
Felicity Grace Terry (Blogger) Pen and Paper
More reviews and book purchase information available here on my author web site
In other news, I've begun querying lit agents and small publishers about my second book, That Guy in our Women's Studies Class, and next week I'm thinking I'll post the query letter than I'm using for it. On the one hand, I think it will be a more difficult sell: the topic of being genderqueer is about as hot at the moment as its ever been, whereas the second book, while still tangentially about that (the main character, i.e., me, is genderqueer, and that both informs a lot of the character's interactions with the other characters and also is the reason for majoring in women's studies in the first place), is a lot more focused on the presence of a male person (or man, or person perceived to be male or a man at any rate) within feminism and the larger questions of privilege and marginalization... and that's probably going to be perceived by lit agents and publishers as a lot more intellectual and less mainstream. On the other hand, I'll have the advantage of being a published author already this time around. The author of a book that's being nominated by the publisher as their entry for the Aspen Prize, in fact!
*preen*
So I may be able to pull it off, to get my second book published.
I'm still soliciting beta readers, by the way. It's only recently out of the oven and I want to get some folks to do taste tests, so if you're up for a novel-length nonfiction book about a sissy who hitches to New York to major in women's studies, give me a holler.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
"In a world which is still conservative at large and prejudiced for the most part, Derek's story is agonizing despite being inspirational. I say this because it shows us just how hurtful and indifferent people can be, especially if you are trying to tell the truth about something that they'd much rather pretend doesn't exist...
No amount of research into theoretical assumptions and claims can replace the experience of reading someone's life story and knowing what they've been through. The narrative style is simple yet powerful. By the time you reach the final page, you'll feel like you've had quite the journey...
Characters: This is obviously about the main character or the author himself. I don't think its necessary to mention again how moved I was by his story. I, however, would like to talk about the brilliant way in which the others are depicted. Some characters represent a particular way of thinking. No matter what we think about stereotyping, it's true that some people share the same sort of antagonism and hatred when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community and this group appears pretty frequently in the book, needless to say. The author has merged several like minded people into a few characters because they are significant only because of their point of view. This has resulted in a story not overcrowded with characters and has left enough space for Derek to reveal himself to the reader...
Genderqueer succeeds greatly as a memoir because it excels in every sub-category."
Saradia Chatterjee (Blogger: Crazy Curious Sara) Crazy Curious Reader
"I guess I'd shot my mouth off. - First Sentence, Part One: School. At A Party: 1979
This is who I am, how I am. Get used to it! I will never again tolerate people being mean and nasty to me and acting like I deserve it because I don't act like a guy. From now on being all worried about that is gonna be their problem. - Memorable Moment, Page 166
I ...had thought to use the metaphor 'like a round peg in a square hole' but somehow that didn't feel strong enough so, abnormal, there I've said it - the author was made to feel abnormal, for the most part this wasn't comfortable reading and arguably the former portions spent on the author's early life experiences were a tad too drawn out, and yet that said ...
Not always a journey easily travelled (and especially not then) I think that not to have chronicled these events and, perhaps more importantly, the feelings they gave rise to, in such detail would have been to do a disservice to the experiences of not only Derek but also to generations of people who have rarely been represented; whose stories have never been told.
A very human story but one that provides an important insight into gender and identity."
Felicity Grace Terry (Blogger) Pen and Paper
More reviews and book purchase information available here on my author web site
In other news, I've begun querying lit agents and small publishers about my second book, That Guy in our Women's Studies Class, and next week I'm thinking I'll post the query letter than I'm using for it. On the one hand, I think it will be a more difficult sell: the topic of being genderqueer is about as hot at the moment as its ever been, whereas the second book, while still tangentially about that (the main character, i.e., me, is genderqueer, and that both informs a lot of the character's interactions with the other characters and also is the reason for majoring in women's studies in the first place), is a lot more focused on the presence of a male person (or man, or person perceived to be male or a man at any rate) within feminism and the larger questions of privilege and marginalization... and that's probably going to be perceived by lit agents and publishers as a lot more intellectual and less mainstream. On the other hand, I'll have the advantage of being a published author already this time around. The author of a book that's being nominated by the publisher as their entry for the Aspen Prize, in fact!
*preen*
So I may be able to pull it off, to get my second book published.
I'm still soliciting beta readers, by the way. It's only recently out of the oven and I want to get some folks to do taste tests, so if you're up for a novel-length nonfiction book about a sissy who hitches to New York to major in women's studies, give me a holler.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Friday, July 24, 2020
Kitten Robe
I was unsure about whether I'd end up blog-posting about my robe project. Wondering if it wasn't more than a bit off-topic, you know? But then I got into a conversation with someone who'd attended the same schools as me, initially discussing shop class but that got me to thinking about how home ec was required for girls only when I was in junior high.
So yeah, learning how to sew from a pattern on a sewing machine is gendered. Sure, there are tailors and other male-bodied folks who sew, but you could make that case for any activity, including vamping in sexy lingerie. And people in my gender-atypical FB groups often post selfies showing themselves modeling or posing. So why not?
Also, there's a scene in my book where my mom teaches me how to make a shirt from a pattern when I'm 18, and I make this brilliant red-and-gold paisley shirt, and then about a year later I'm wearing that shirt at a party and get beaten up, with a lot of references to me being sissy and probably queer and therefore that I'd had it coming. And I hadn't really ever gone back to sew from a pattern since then, not until now.
I wore out my old summer bathrobe (it was hanging in tatters) and what with me being at home due to Covid / unemployment, it made sense to do a creative project, so my partner (who is quite adept on the sewing machine) proposed that I make my own. So I picked out a fabric and she helped me select a sewing pattern and I was soon ensconced in chair, pinning and cutting and turning that pile of cloth into a garment.
The fabric arrives:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2617_sm.jpg
Separating the pattern pieces:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2620_sm.jpg
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2618_sm.jpg
Our dining room table repurposed as a working surface:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2625_sm.jpg
Cutting the fabric as per the pattern pieces:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2629_sm.jpg
Stacking the cut pieces on the back of the couch until needed:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2630_sm.jpg
Pockets: the goal here is to have the print pattern on the pockets merge exactly with the underlying print on the robe front:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2633_sm.jpg
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2634_sm.jpg
Pinning in preparation for sewing the pocket down:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2648_sm.jpg
Belt Loops:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2652_sm.jpg
The sewing machine: not fancy but portable and functional:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2653_sm.jpg
Now just lay down a stitch in a straight line...
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2657_sm.jpg
Not too bad!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2664_sm.jpg
Finished seams:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2661_sm.jpg
It's starting to be a robe!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2662_sm.jpg
Close to the edge...
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2669_sm.jpg
Sleeve!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2677_sm.jpg
Finished product!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2678_sm.jpg
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2680_sm.jpg
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
So yeah, learning how to sew from a pattern on a sewing machine is gendered. Sure, there are tailors and other male-bodied folks who sew, but you could make that case for any activity, including vamping in sexy lingerie. And people in my gender-atypical FB groups often post selfies showing themselves modeling or posing. So why not?
Also, there's a scene in my book where my mom teaches me how to make a shirt from a pattern when I'm 18, and I make this brilliant red-and-gold paisley shirt, and then about a year later I'm wearing that shirt at a party and get beaten up, with a lot of references to me being sissy and probably queer and therefore that I'd had it coming. And I hadn't really ever gone back to sew from a pattern since then, not until now.
I wore out my old summer bathrobe (it was hanging in tatters) and what with me being at home due to Covid / unemployment, it made sense to do a creative project, so my partner (who is quite adept on the sewing machine) proposed that I make my own. So I picked out a fabric and she helped me select a sewing pattern and I was soon ensconced in chair, pinning and cutting and turning that pile of cloth into a garment.
The fabric arrives:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2617_sm.jpg
Separating the pattern pieces:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2620_sm.jpg
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2618_sm.jpg
Our dining room table repurposed as a working surface:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2625_sm.jpg
Cutting the fabric as per the pattern pieces:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2629_sm.jpg
Stacking the cut pieces on the back of the couch until needed:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2630_sm.jpg
Pockets: the goal here is to have the print pattern on the pockets merge exactly with the underlying print on the robe front:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2633_sm.jpg
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2634_sm.jpg
Pinning in preparation for sewing the pocket down:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2648_sm.jpg
Belt Loops:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2652_sm.jpg
The sewing machine: not fancy but portable and functional:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2653_sm.jpg
Now just lay down a stitch in a straight line...
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2657_sm.jpg
Not too bad!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2664_sm.jpg
Finished seams:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2661_sm.jpg
It's starting to be a robe!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2662_sm.jpg
Close to the edge...
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2669_sm.jpg
Sleeve!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2677_sm.jpg
Finished product!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2678_sm.jpg
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2680_sm.jpg
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Friday, July 17, 2020
Hey, Sister...
Hey, sister, got a moment? Any chance we can reconcile?
You find it bewildering that as a femme-identifying person, I refer to myself as male. You find it appalling and maybe even transphobic when I explain that what I mean when I say I'm "male" is that I was born with a set of physical equipment that, in our culture, has historically been designated "male", although many other people (perhaps including you) may have this same set of bodily components and call those physical structures something other than "male".
You say "Why can't you just call it a penis? A penis isn't male. It's just a penis! Girls can have a penis. Boys can have a vulva".
Well, yeah, I know girls can have a penis. I'm a girl and I've got one. Are we both cool and totally down with the notion that having a penis doesn't define our gender? Can we please have a little moment of peace and solidarity and not be quick to hate on each other for using language a bit differently, and for coming at this situation from different angles?
You identify as transgender. I don't. That means you're a part of a subculture, a community; and you folks, collectively, you got your own way of expressing things, and you also got your own history. Let's talk about the history thing for a sec.
I'm 61; forty years ago, when I was 21 and first coming out, trans people explained the situation to the larger surrounding culture like this: trans people realized at some point in their life that their gender was the gender typically found in the other type of body, and so they'd ideally get hormones and surgery and transition, so that their body would match their gender. And what they said they wanted from the surrounding world was to be accepted as a normal and ordinary person of that gender and that sex. And most trans people wanted to "pass" — they didn't want to receive social acceptance only from a handful of people who heard their life story and learned about transsexuals and all that, but instead they wanted to look and otherwise present in such a way that strangers who didn't know them would just automatically treat them as the gender that they were.
Fast forward to the more-or-less present era. Trans activists interact with lots of transgender people who can't afford hormones and surgery even if they want them, and lots of people who are blocked from having access to the medical interventions they want because doctors and insurance companies are playing gatekeeper. They also interact with a lot of transgender people who don't want the whole package of medical options for a variety of reasons. There's a risk of significant loss of sensation and function when doctors rearrange biological tissue, and there are systemic repercussions to hormones with risk factors and so on and so forth.
Well, it's really fundamentally a human rights issue that the body you inhabit should not detract from the legitimacy of your gender identity. So the social message changed, to become a lot more inclusive. You were valid as a trans person (woman or man) whether you passed or did not pass, and, in fact, fuck "pass". Identities are what are valid; your body doesn't matter! And they didn't use "male" and "female" to refer to bodily architecture because that can imply to some trans people that they've got the wrong body for their gender identity.
I apologize if I've misrepresented the transgender movement and its history in that short summary. I'm writing from the outside. I try to learn and listen but if I've distorted things, I'm sorry, but I hope I mostly got it right.
I'm not trans. I heard the 40-years-ago version of what trans was, gave it some thought, decided nope, that's not me. It's something else. I haven't been a part of your community these 40 years.
So I've got a different history, with different understandings and stuff. I'm hoping you'll be compassionate and interested in a story that's different from yours, so you can see how I got to my viewpoint, ok?
I came out in 1980 as a sissy. A person in a male body whose personality and behavior were a mismatch for what's expected of male people, but a good match for the expectations for female people. I did not want to be perceived as an ordinary typical female person any more than I wanted to be perceived as an ordinary male person. I wanted to be perceived as what I'd been harassed about and accused of all my life: an effeminate sissy girlish male person. The world apparently thought I should be ashamed of that, but I was proud of it. And I was finally angry about it and ready to take a stand. To be in your face about it. Yeah, I'm male, and I'm one of the girls. Get used to it. Deal.
My attitude is that until the world nods in agreement that yeah, male girls exist and no, it's not a damn affliction or an embarrassment, a failure to be sufficiently manly... until then, there's always going to be this notion that if you're perceived and recognized as a male-bodied person, you'll be regarded as less of a man than a masculine man and less of a woman than a physically female-structured person who has boobs and vag and all that.
Not only don't I want to pass, I want to "anti-pass". I want, as I said, to be up in people's face about the lack of correspondence between my body and my gender identity. You've got a male girl here. Flying pride flags about it, no less, got that?
So... you don't use "male" to refer to physical stuff like testicles and penis. You basically use "male" to mean the same thing as "man" and "boy" and so on. I, on the other hand, do use it to mean the physical stuff. My attitude is we've already got plenty of gender words ("man", "boy", "masculine", "feminine", "guy", "dude", "gal", etc), and the word "male" is historically about the raw physical architecture (including other species and also things like hose couplings and electrical plugs), so why can't we keep that word for sex and use existing gender words for gender? This isn't about invalidating anybody's gender identity, it's really not. Yeesh, do I sound like J. K. fucking Rowling here? Seriously?
You ask "Well, why can't you just call it a penis, why do you have to say male?". I say "I want a goddam adjective. An already-recognized adjective to describe me as a person-with-penis-and-associated-bits. I don't want to use a long klunky phrase like 'person with a penis and testicles and adam's apple and absence of a vulva and clitoris and breasts, person who happens to be dyadic or endosex as opposed to intersex and most likely has XY chromosomes and doesn't have a period and has spermatotrophic hormone and a vas deferens'".
If I don't specify that when I say "male" I'm talking about my plumbing and not my personality and inclinations, people often assume I'm saying I have a "male side and a female side", like genderfluid or bigender people. Which isn't it at all. I'm not less feminine than you are. I'm not less male than a rooster. I'm not in-between, either sexually (as intersex people may consider themselves to be) or genderwise. I'm solidly male and utterly feminine.
I'm talking about mine. MY parts. I'm not calling your parts male. I'm calling my parts male.
Not everybody is either male or female, just as not everybody who is male is a man and not everybody who is female is a woman. But the fact that sex isn't binary doesn't mean sex doesn't exist. By the way, intersex people can't talk about being intersex — and distinguish intersex from being nonbinary or intergender or genderfluid or whatever — if they can't talk about bodies and why their atypical body has marked them as different and marginalized them. Most of the intersex activists I know really want to distinguish sex from gender. Because otherwise they get erased.
In a similar way, I can't do the political activity of getting in people's face about being a male girl if I can't say "male girl" and can't talk about the body that caused my girlness to be perceived as something wrong and in need of fixing, or as reason to provoke dismissive contempt.
I personally identify as genderqueer and, more specifically, as a gender invert. I'm a speaker, a blogger, and an author. I just got a book published (and BTW you should read it if you have any appetite for coming-of-age / coming-out stories). I'm not going to go away or shut up.
Does this help?
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
You find it bewildering that as a femme-identifying person, I refer to myself as male. You find it appalling and maybe even transphobic when I explain that what I mean when I say I'm "male" is that I was born with a set of physical equipment that, in our culture, has historically been designated "male", although many other people (perhaps including you) may have this same set of bodily components and call those physical structures something other than "male".
You say "Why can't you just call it a penis? A penis isn't male. It's just a penis! Girls can have a penis. Boys can have a vulva".
Well, yeah, I know girls can have a penis. I'm a girl and I've got one. Are we both cool and totally down with the notion that having a penis doesn't define our gender? Can we please have a little moment of peace and solidarity and not be quick to hate on each other for using language a bit differently, and for coming at this situation from different angles?
You identify as transgender. I don't. That means you're a part of a subculture, a community; and you folks, collectively, you got your own way of expressing things, and you also got your own history. Let's talk about the history thing for a sec.
I'm 61; forty years ago, when I was 21 and first coming out, trans people explained the situation to the larger surrounding culture like this: trans people realized at some point in their life that their gender was the gender typically found in the other type of body, and so they'd ideally get hormones and surgery and transition, so that their body would match their gender. And what they said they wanted from the surrounding world was to be accepted as a normal and ordinary person of that gender and that sex. And most trans people wanted to "pass" — they didn't want to receive social acceptance only from a handful of people who heard their life story and learned about transsexuals and all that, but instead they wanted to look and otherwise present in such a way that strangers who didn't know them would just automatically treat them as the gender that they were.
Fast forward to the more-or-less present era. Trans activists interact with lots of transgender people who can't afford hormones and surgery even if they want them, and lots of people who are blocked from having access to the medical interventions they want because doctors and insurance companies are playing gatekeeper. They also interact with a lot of transgender people who don't want the whole package of medical options for a variety of reasons. There's a risk of significant loss of sensation and function when doctors rearrange biological tissue, and there are systemic repercussions to hormones with risk factors and so on and so forth.
Well, it's really fundamentally a human rights issue that the body you inhabit should not detract from the legitimacy of your gender identity. So the social message changed, to become a lot more inclusive. You were valid as a trans person (woman or man) whether you passed or did not pass, and, in fact, fuck "pass". Identities are what are valid; your body doesn't matter! And they didn't use "male" and "female" to refer to bodily architecture because that can imply to some trans people that they've got the wrong body for their gender identity.
I apologize if I've misrepresented the transgender movement and its history in that short summary. I'm writing from the outside. I try to learn and listen but if I've distorted things, I'm sorry, but I hope I mostly got it right.
I'm not trans. I heard the 40-years-ago version of what trans was, gave it some thought, decided nope, that's not me. It's something else. I haven't been a part of your community these 40 years.
So I've got a different history, with different understandings and stuff. I'm hoping you'll be compassionate and interested in a story that's different from yours, so you can see how I got to my viewpoint, ok?
I came out in 1980 as a sissy. A person in a male body whose personality and behavior were a mismatch for what's expected of male people, but a good match for the expectations for female people. I did not want to be perceived as an ordinary typical female person any more than I wanted to be perceived as an ordinary male person. I wanted to be perceived as what I'd been harassed about and accused of all my life: an effeminate sissy girlish male person. The world apparently thought I should be ashamed of that, but I was proud of it. And I was finally angry about it and ready to take a stand. To be in your face about it. Yeah, I'm male, and I'm one of the girls. Get used to it. Deal.
My attitude is that until the world nods in agreement that yeah, male girls exist and no, it's not a damn affliction or an embarrassment, a failure to be sufficiently manly... until then, there's always going to be this notion that if you're perceived and recognized as a male-bodied person, you'll be regarded as less of a man than a masculine man and less of a woman than a physically female-structured person who has boobs and vag and all that.
Not only don't I want to pass, I want to "anti-pass". I want, as I said, to be up in people's face about the lack of correspondence between my body and my gender identity. You've got a male girl here. Flying pride flags about it, no less, got that?
So... you don't use "male" to refer to physical stuff like testicles and penis. You basically use "male" to mean the same thing as "man" and "boy" and so on. I, on the other hand, do use it to mean the physical stuff. My attitude is we've already got plenty of gender words ("man", "boy", "masculine", "feminine", "guy", "dude", "gal", etc), and the word "male" is historically about the raw physical architecture (including other species and also things like hose couplings and electrical plugs), so why can't we keep that word for sex and use existing gender words for gender? This isn't about invalidating anybody's gender identity, it's really not. Yeesh, do I sound like J. K. fucking Rowling here? Seriously?
You ask "Well, why can't you just call it a penis, why do you have to say male?". I say "I want a goddam adjective. An already-recognized adjective to describe me as a person-with-penis-and-associated-bits. I don't want to use a long klunky phrase like 'person with a penis and testicles and adam's apple and absence of a vulva and clitoris and breasts, person who happens to be dyadic or endosex as opposed to intersex and most likely has XY chromosomes and doesn't have a period and has spermatotrophic hormone and a vas deferens'".
If I don't specify that when I say "male" I'm talking about my plumbing and not my personality and inclinations, people often assume I'm saying I have a "male side and a female side", like genderfluid or bigender people. Which isn't it at all. I'm not less feminine than you are. I'm not less male than a rooster. I'm not in-between, either sexually (as intersex people may consider themselves to be) or genderwise. I'm solidly male and utterly feminine.
I'm talking about mine. MY parts. I'm not calling your parts male. I'm calling my parts male.
Not everybody is either male or female, just as not everybody who is male is a man and not everybody who is female is a woman. But the fact that sex isn't binary doesn't mean sex doesn't exist. By the way, intersex people can't talk about being intersex — and distinguish intersex from being nonbinary or intergender or genderfluid or whatever — if they can't talk about bodies and why their atypical body has marked them as different and marginalized them. Most of the intersex activists I know really want to distinguish sex from gender. Because otherwise they get erased.
In a similar way, I can't do the political activity of getting in people's face about being a male girl if I can't say "male girl" and can't talk about the body that caused my girlness to be perceived as something wrong and in need of fixing, or as reason to provoke dismissive contempt.
I personally identify as genderqueer and, more specifically, as a gender invert. I'm a speaker, a blogger, and an author. I just got a book published (and BTW you should read it if you have any appetite for coming-of-age / coming-out stories). I'm not going to go away or shut up.
Does this help?
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, July 11, 2020
Diversity Versus Community
Content warning: discussion of body parts (mostly in the abstract)
I called them "boy parts" when I was little. We were in kindergarten, first grade. To be honest we kids were kind of obsessed with sexual difference. We talked about it a lot. But I was one of the girls. I was a girl with boy parts. I wasn't entirely unique. One of the people I played with during recess, Clea, was a boy with girl parts.
If we showed up in your Facebook group and introduced ourselves the way we understood ourselves back then, would you embrace us, or would you attack us for being insensitive to people who don't consider those parts to be "boy parts" or "girl parts" and invalidating other people's identities, and not using the phrases that have been embraced as the most appropriate and least offensive ones and so forth?
Last week I put up a blog post: femininity versus femaleness. It generated mixed feedback, with lots of Facebook "likes" and a handful of people posting praise for what I'd said, saying that they'd been trying to put those sentiments into words for a long long time, or explaining how their personal experiences meshed with what I was saying. But with a lot of other people saying they found it transphobic, insulting, binary in a reductionistic sense, oppressive.
I was *kicked out* of one Facebook group, as if I'd planted a post that was so offensive that it demanded banning me. Nonbinary Femmes. A group I've been a part of for six years, posting at least one a week. In another group, my post was locked to further comments and I was afraid I was about to be banned there as well, although in the long run they only demanded that I place a content warning.
Honestly, what was more disturbing to me was how many people in groups I've been an ongoing participant in were so quick to respond with short and judgmental dismissals:
"No".
"TERF puke"
"What a load of internalized transphobia"
and of course: "Why hasn't a moderator done something about this shit?"
Considering how long I've been posting and participating, I'm stung that so many people wouldn't give me the benefit of the doubt, not necessarily agreeing with me but at least not being quick to believe that I'm a biased hate-monger!
I don't think we've created safe spaces. That may have been our intention, but we've become so quick to trigger when someone uses a phrase or term that the general consensus has shifted against using that one person's need to be kept safe from being upset becomes another person's feeling that they have to walk on eggshells.
The problem with general consensus is that we aren't all alike. We come here from different experiences. Some of us call ourselves "transgender"; some say "nonbinary"; some "genderqueer"; we also have intersex and gay and lesbian and bisexual and pansexual and other kinds of queer folks here. We value diversity, yeah? Well, then, we can't be going around with an attitude like "This is the party line, everyone in here has to have this opinion on this issue, that opinion on that issue, has to believe this, has to agree with this other thing, or you don't belong in here!". Because sometimes some of those established consensus beliefs conflict with the needs of some of our identities.
The centerpoint in this case was whether or not body parts (however you refer to them) and gender are, or are not, two different things, and how to talk about them separately. Yeah, I know a lot of transgender people in particular have had their gender identity invalidated by people emphasizing genitals. Yeah, I know that not everyone wishes to transition, and that not everyone who'd like to can afford it anyway, and that it's important not to make people feel like they are less authentic if they don't.
But there are other people in here, in our community, who find it necessary to distinguish between sex and gender and sometimes we are going to refer to our own body parts in the course of explaining our marginalized queer identities.
Some of us are intersex people. Me, I'm a gender invert. If you don't understand our reasons for drawing attention to our genital configurations, that shows how much teaching we still need to do.
If you think there is an LGBTQIA consensus that nobody gets to say that sex isn't the same thing as gender—or that there should be—consider yourself notified that consensus on that issue has not been reached and some of us are not on board with that.
Diversity has to include diversity of viewpoint.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I called them "boy parts" when I was little. We were in kindergarten, first grade. To be honest we kids were kind of obsessed with sexual difference. We talked about it a lot. But I was one of the girls. I was a girl with boy parts. I wasn't entirely unique. One of the people I played with during recess, Clea, was a boy with girl parts.
If we showed up in your Facebook group and introduced ourselves the way we understood ourselves back then, would you embrace us, or would you attack us for being insensitive to people who don't consider those parts to be "boy parts" or "girl parts" and invalidating other people's identities, and not using the phrases that have been embraced as the most appropriate and least offensive ones and so forth?
Last week I put up a blog post: femininity versus femaleness. It generated mixed feedback, with lots of Facebook "likes" and a handful of people posting praise for what I'd said, saying that they'd been trying to put those sentiments into words for a long long time, or explaining how their personal experiences meshed with what I was saying. But with a lot of other people saying they found it transphobic, insulting, binary in a reductionistic sense, oppressive.
I was *kicked out* of one Facebook group, as if I'd planted a post that was so offensive that it demanded banning me. Nonbinary Femmes. A group I've been a part of for six years, posting at least one a week. In another group, my post was locked to further comments and I was afraid I was about to be banned there as well, although in the long run they only demanded that I place a content warning.
Honestly, what was more disturbing to me was how many people in groups I've been an ongoing participant in were so quick to respond with short and judgmental dismissals:
"No".
"TERF puke"
"What a load of internalized transphobia"
and of course: "Why hasn't a moderator done something about this shit?"
Considering how long I've been posting and participating, I'm stung that so many people wouldn't give me the benefit of the doubt, not necessarily agreeing with me but at least not being quick to believe that I'm a biased hate-monger!
I don't think we've created safe spaces. That may have been our intention, but we've become so quick to trigger when someone uses a phrase or term that the general consensus has shifted against using that one person's need to be kept safe from being upset becomes another person's feeling that they have to walk on eggshells.
The problem with general consensus is that we aren't all alike. We come here from different experiences. Some of us call ourselves "transgender"; some say "nonbinary"; some "genderqueer"; we also have intersex and gay and lesbian and bisexual and pansexual and other kinds of queer folks here. We value diversity, yeah? Well, then, we can't be going around with an attitude like "This is the party line, everyone in here has to have this opinion on this issue, that opinion on that issue, has to believe this, has to agree with this other thing, or you don't belong in here!". Because sometimes some of those established consensus beliefs conflict with the needs of some of our identities.
The centerpoint in this case was whether or not body parts (however you refer to them) and gender are, or are not, two different things, and how to talk about them separately. Yeah, I know a lot of transgender people in particular have had their gender identity invalidated by people emphasizing genitals. Yeah, I know that not everyone wishes to transition, and that not everyone who'd like to can afford it anyway, and that it's important not to make people feel like they are less authentic if they don't.
But there are other people in here, in our community, who find it necessary to distinguish between sex and gender and sometimes we are going to refer to our own body parts in the course of explaining our marginalized queer identities.
Some of us are intersex people. Me, I'm a gender invert. If you don't understand our reasons for drawing attention to our genital configurations, that shows how much teaching we still need to do.
If you think there is an LGBTQIA consensus that nobody gets to say that sex isn't the same thing as gender—or that there should be—consider yourself notified that consensus on that issue has not been reached and some of us are not on board with that.
Diversity has to include diversity of viewpoint.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, July 4, 2020
Femininity in Contrast to Femaleness
Femininity and womanhood are gender identity terms, but more fundamentally than that, they are socially shared notions, and what they are notions about, historically speaking, are female people.
I have male parts (or at least the parts that led my mom's obstetrician to put "male" on my birth certificate—and for the record I call them male parts myself). But I'm definitely a femme, and I'm happy to be living in 2020 where gender identity has been somewhat split off from physical bodily architecture.
But it doesn't avail us anything to pretend that the feminine gender identities don't have diddly squat to do with physical femaleness. The socially shared concepts and roles, and the accompanying notions about a feminine person's beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes and so on, didn't originate independently and then somehow get ideologically and artificially attached to the female physical morphology. The notions were originally notions about female people. They may not have correctly or adequately described female people in general, and they certainly did not correctly or adequatly describe all female people; and because this has long been a patriarchy, this human society of ours, there may indeed have been ideological content stirred into the pot along with the generalizations. But the gender identity is social; it exists as a bundle of shared concepts, and the subject matter that the concepts were originally and historically concepts about were people who had vaginas and ovaries and fallopian tubes, the biological females of our species.
Now, even as increasing numbers of us find personal validation in gender identities that don't correspond to the physical morphology to which those identities were originally and historically attached, some of that past still haunts us.
You'll recall that I said this society has historically been a patriarchy. One thing that means is that the most established socially shared notions about pretty much anything are men's ideas. To be more specific, cisgender heterosexual men's ideas. Because the viewpoints of other people weren't being spoken in public, weren't being published. So views and attitudes that were really only the views and attitudes of these men got put out there as default views and attitudes. That applies to a lot of subjects, but at the moment let's focus on the definition of women.
Top of the list: sexual attractiveness, the desirability quotient, one's value as a sexual commodity. These days we refer to it as the "male gaze" but it used to be discussed as if women's sexual appeal was intrinsic to the women and men were just noticing it. Because "attractive to cis het men" was defaulted, universalized into "attractive". Because women's usefulness in patriarchy was largely constrained to their usefulness as mates to men.
Women may have meant more to each other, and to themselves, but their opinions weren't being enshrined. I wrote earlier of a feminine person's beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes and so on — all components of her gender identity as a woman. Those are all aspects of the self that a woman may find validation in, may take pride in, but all that has tended to be overshadowed by the focus on sexual desirability, aka sexual desirability as determined by an audience of cis het male people and their appetites.
Why is this relevant to today's gender identity discussion? Because sexual attraction often tends to be "to a body structure". (And that, too, has been culturally emphasized.) In short, sexual orientation has been geared not so much towards what we speak of as gender identity, but to the physical morphology, to shape and contour. So the most emphasized, the most underlined, aspect of what it means to be a woman is to have female curves and contours and the relevant female organs. That shoves beliefs and attitudes and priorities, personality and behavioral nuances and tastes, etc, into the background.
Someone in a Facebook group posted a meme stating "It's not sex change, it's gender-affirming surgery". Well, that's wrong. It's not gender-affirming surgery, its SEX-affirming surgery. If a person's gender identity as a woman is 100% valid whether they have a penis or a vagina, then obtaining surgical services to modify their physical structure so that any visual observers will assign it "vagina" doesn't affirm their gender. It affirms their SEX, as female.
Of course, being attractive to the heterosexual male gaze really is central to some people's sense of their feminine identity. It's what's most emotionally important to them about being a woman, as opposed to singing alto arias or becoming a really good seamstress or something. Nothing wrong with that.
But not everyone who identifies as woman or femme or girl is primarily concerned with appealing to the male gaze. Of having a sexually desirable appearance as filtered through the fakely universalized male gaze.
The centrality of the whole "do you look sexy, can you compete with the sexy women of the world in sexy appearance?" question is often used to invalidate feminine people. It is used to invalidate many cis women for whom it simply isn't the end-all and be-all of their self-worth. It is used to invalidate many trans women for whom being evaluated in terms of how well they "pass" as a sexually desirable specimen gets to be old and tiresome.
Well, it is also used to invalidate the identity of people like me, who definitively do not identify as female, who do not transition, who do not attempt to present as female-bodied people, who distinguish between physical sex and gender and identify as male women, male femmes, male girls.
I get a lot of pushback about it. People who say "It's nobody's business what you got in your underpants" when what they really mean is "You've got no business having that attitude of 'yeah I'm male, so what', that's the wrong attitude about your male parts, we're all supposed to be going around saying 'it doesn't matter'". But what actually doesn't matter to me is being found sexy in that sense. Sexy to the falsely universal male gaze. I am male. Sure I want to be found sexy... to people who specifically like the male physical morphology. Since that's the morphology I've got. And I'm a male girl. My gender-atypical identity doesn't have a damn thing to do with claiming femaleness, regardless of whether yours does or not.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, June 27, 2020
I've Finished Book Two! That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class!
Well, I've finished rewriting it from scratch from the ground up at any rate. It's still a rough draft, and at the same time I didn't just compose it, either.
It existed previously. The raw material text for both GenderQueer and for That Guy in our Women's Studies Class was generated as part of my autobiographical tome that I wrote between 2010 and 2013. I extracted and edited and named That Guy in our Women's Studies Class as long ago as 2014. I even sent out some query letters!
But honestly it just wasn't a very good book. Whereas I would proofread and edit GenderQueer with pride, Guy in WS kept making me wince. And at some point I recognized that it belonged in a trunk, perhaps to be revised and redone at some future point, and I focused on getting GenderQueer published.
I came back to it in May of 2019. At the time, I was mired down in my efforts with the main book, and I needed a project, something to give me a sense of progress and accomplishment.
In my writer's group, Amateur Writers of Long Island, I quit bringing in excerpts from GenderQueer, which I considered to be a finished book, and began bringing in my work in progress, Guy in WS, the way the other authors were doing, so that I'd get feedback on what I was currently focusing on as a writer.
GenderQueer was accepted for publication in September and for a lot of the following four months I was pretty narrowly focused on that. But during the Coronavirus era, with my book out but no prospect for addressing audiences as a guest speaker, I dove back into it.
That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class (second beta version)
95,000 words in three large units. Chapter divisions to be created later. A mostly autobiographical account of my years in college trying to utilize women's studies as a means to speak and write about my different gender / experience with society's notions about what it means to be male / being a sissy, etc.
It's not quite as absolutely nonfictional as GenderQueer is. In broad strokes, it is, but I took more liberties with moving conversations and discussions into contexts where they made a more interesting story line. Where GenderQueer is about 98 % truth (or as much so as I'm capable of remembering it), Guy in WS is around 85 %.
If you have any interest in being a beta reader of what is still really a work in progress, shoot me a personal message or email and let me know.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
It existed previously. The raw material text for both GenderQueer and for That Guy in our Women's Studies Class was generated as part of my autobiographical tome that I wrote between 2010 and 2013. I extracted and edited and named That Guy in our Women's Studies Class as long ago as 2014. I even sent out some query letters!
But honestly it just wasn't a very good book. Whereas I would proofread and edit GenderQueer with pride, Guy in WS kept making me wince. And at some point I recognized that it belonged in a trunk, perhaps to be revised and redone at some future point, and I focused on getting GenderQueer published.
I came back to it in May of 2019. At the time, I was mired down in my efforts with the main book, and I needed a project, something to give me a sense of progress and accomplishment.
In my writer's group, Amateur Writers of Long Island, I quit bringing in excerpts from GenderQueer, which I considered to be a finished book, and began bringing in my work in progress, Guy in WS, the way the other authors were doing, so that I'd get feedback on what I was currently focusing on as a writer.
GenderQueer was accepted for publication in September and for a lot of the following four months I was pretty narrowly focused on that. But during the Coronavirus era, with my book out but no prospect for addressing audiences as a guest speaker, I dove back into it.
That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class (second beta version)
95,000 words in three large units. Chapter divisions to be created later. A mostly autobiographical account of my years in college trying to utilize women's studies as a means to speak and write about my different gender / experience with society's notions about what it means to be male / being a sissy, etc.
It's not quite as absolutely nonfictional as GenderQueer is. In broad strokes, it is, but I took more liberties with moving conversations and discussions into contexts where they made a more interesting story line. Where GenderQueer is about 98 % truth (or as much so as I'm capable of remembering it), Guy in WS is around 85 %.
If you have any interest in being a beta reader of what is still really a work in progress, shoot me a personal message or email and let me know.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, June 20, 2020
Just
"I don't see why that makes it a different gender identity", someone asks me. (I visualize them with their arms crossed and scowling). "Why can't you just say you're a man with a lot of traits that are generally associated with women?"
OK, I'll give you your answer.
It's sitting there inside your question. You said just.
We often say "just" to mean merely, or less than: "Why do I have to mop the floor? Can't I just sweep up the crumbs and dirt with a broom?"
When you suggest I should "just" identify as a man with a bunch of feminine traits, it sounds like you're saying that the identity terms I'm using -- genderqueer, gender invert, being a male girl -- is more audacious, a stronger statement. That I'm making a bigger deal out of the difference than you think I ought to.
But it is a big deal. That's the point.
On the other hand, sometimes we say "just" to mean simpler even when it isn't less than: "It's taking forever to clip the burrs out of Blackie's fur. Why don't we just dip him in a vat of Nair and wait for his hair to grow back, it would be easier!"
You're not doing that. You're not using "just" in that way. I could, though: "Why would I want to spend my life explaining that I'm a male with a lot of traits and tastes that are more typically associated with women than with men? Why can't I just say I'm a male girl?"
The way I express my identity has a "let's cut to the chase" simplicity to it.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
OK, I'll give you your answer.
It's sitting there inside your question. You said just.
We often say "just" to mean merely, or less than: "Why do I have to mop the floor? Can't I just sweep up the crumbs and dirt with a broom?"
When you suggest I should "just" identify as a man with a bunch of feminine traits, it sounds like you're saying that the identity terms I'm using -- genderqueer, gender invert, being a male girl -- is more audacious, a stronger statement. That I'm making a bigger deal out of the difference than you think I ought to.
But it is a big deal. That's the point.
On the other hand, sometimes we say "just" to mean simpler even when it isn't less than: "It's taking forever to clip the burrs out of Blackie's fur. Why don't we just dip him in a vat of Nair and wait for his hair to grow back, it would be easier!"
You're not doing that. You're not using "just" in that way. I could, though: "Why would I want to spend my life explaining that I'm a male with a lot of traits and tastes that are more typically associated with women than with men? Why can't I just say I'm a male girl?"
The way I express my identity has a "let's cut to the chase" simplicity to it.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Friday, June 12, 2020
My Book's First Review in an LGBTQIA+ Publication
From Sherri Rase, Out In Jersey:
"Three Great Books for LGBTQ Summer Reading"
I've had nice reviews in college newspapers and an interview in the mainstream press (Newsday), but this is my first review in an LGBTQIA-centric publication, and I'm excited about it!
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Allan D. Hunter’s GenderQueer: A Story from a Different Closet is an eye-opening first-person account of Derek, born male, who identifies as a girl. While this hardly raises an eyebrow in the 21st century, in the 1970s, Derek had no role models and no points of reference.
If you are of a generation with Derek, give or take, you thrill with him at his first car, put wings on his heart. You feel the rush of first love, and first touch, when attraction becomes physical. You feel the pain of rejection and being misunderstood.
You may not be able to read the book in one sitting—it takes time to absorb.
"Three Great Books for LGBTQ Summer Reading"
I've had nice reviews in college newspapers and an interview in the mainstream press (Newsday), but this is my first review in an LGBTQIA-centric publication, and I'm excited about it!
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, June 6, 2020
Gender Invert, or Nonbinary Trans?
Like most people born with a penis and testicles, I was AMAB: assigned male at birth.
I don't refer to myself as transgender because I don't seek to be perceived as a female person. And I don't tend to identify as nonbinary because I don't seek to be perceived as someone who is neither male nor female.
I identify as genderqueer and, more specifically, as a gender invert.
* * *
There are a lot of ongoing discussions, especially within the trans communities, about how you don't have to be on hormones, don't have to get an operation, to be valid as a transgender person. About how the legitimacy of one's identity as transgender does not depend on changing one's body.
The ones who do — the people conventionally designated as "male to female" or "female to male" — are nowadays often referred to as "binary transgender". And the assertion that you don't have to be binary trans in order to be authentically trans is an affirmation of nonbinary transgender identities.
The fact that there are so many posts and statements saying so is a clear sign that a lot of people think "transgender" means that if you were assigned male at birth you wish to be perceived as female, accepted as a woman, not differentiated from cisgender women, that you present as female, that you do everything at your disposal to do so successfully, that you seek to pass. And reciprocally the other way around if you were assigned female at birth.
That's what the term "transgender" means to a lot of people out there, both within the trans community itself and in the mainstream.
Hello. I am a person who could identify as a "nonbinary transgender" person.
I don't choose to do so. I don't feel like it communicates. I feel like it just confuses people. They make one set of wrong assumptions when they see me and mentally assign me as a male person. If I tell them I'm transgender they make a different set of wrong assumptions and I'm no better off.
Meanwhile, out there are a bunch of male-to-female and female-to-male transgender folks. A handful of them are "truscum" or "transmedicalist" and don't consider anyone to be authentically trans unless they seek a medical transition. Then there are quite a few more who don't have that kind of absolute judgemental definitional thing going on, but who will admit to missing the days when the only kind of trans people were binary trans. I'm not going to say they're right, especially since so many of my friends and colleagues identify as nonbinary transgender. But I have to confess, I sympathize with them and their viewpoint. Many of them have been around as long as I have. That means they lived through decades when most of society had only heard dirty jokes and porn references to trans people. And some of them feel like they did the hard work to get transgender issues in front of the social consciousness and now all these newfangled nonbinary trans people want to be a part of the phenomenon.
There's a reason why there aren't more people identifying as I do, as gender invert. It's because they haven't heard the term. Nobody offered it to them as an option to consider. So they went with "transgender". Or "nonbinary". Or "nonbinary transgender".
But what if you were assigned male at birth, you consider your body to be, in fact, male, but your gender isn't masculine, isn't man, isn't guy, isn't boy, that instead you are femme, one of the girls? Or if you were assigned female at birth, recognize your body to be female, but have never been a girl or a woman, and instead you're all man, all guy, all boy, totally a masculine individual?
If you say "transgender" and folks know you were AFAB they'll almost universally assume you identify as "male". If you say "transgender" and they understand you were AMAB, they'll assume you to identify as "female".
Specifying "nonbinary transgender" just shifts the problem. Now people are likely to assume that you don't want to be identified as any named sex or gender. That you're declaring yourself to be neither male nor female, neither man nor woman.
If what I'm saying resonates for you, you're welcome to come join me as a gender invert instead.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I don't refer to myself as transgender because I don't seek to be perceived as a female person. And I don't tend to identify as nonbinary because I don't seek to be perceived as someone who is neither male nor female.
I identify as genderqueer and, more specifically, as a gender invert.
* * *
There are a lot of ongoing discussions, especially within the trans communities, about how you don't have to be on hormones, don't have to get an operation, to be valid as a transgender person. About how the legitimacy of one's identity as transgender does not depend on changing one's body.
The ones who do — the people conventionally designated as "male to female" or "female to male" — are nowadays often referred to as "binary transgender". And the assertion that you don't have to be binary trans in order to be authentically trans is an affirmation of nonbinary transgender identities.
The fact that there are so many posts and statements saying so is a clear sign that a lot of people think "transgender" means that if you were assigned male at birth you wish to be perceived as female, accepted as a woman, not differentiated from cisgender women, that you present as female, that you do everything at your disposal to do so successfully, that you seek to pass. And reciprocally the other way around if you were assigned female at birth.
That's what the term "transgender" means to a lot of people out there, both within the trans community itself and in the mainstream.
Hello. I am a person who could identify as a "nonbinary transgender" person.
I don't choose to do so. I don't feel like it communicates. I feel like it just confuses people. They make one set of wrong assumptions when they see me and mentally assign me as a male person. If I tell them I'm transgender they make a different set of wrong assumptions and I'm no better off.
Meanwhile, out there are a bunch of male-to-female and female-to-male transgender folks. A handful of them are "truscum" or "transmedicalist" and don't consider anyone to be authentically trans unless they seek a medical transition. Then there are quite a few more who don't have that kind of absolute judgemental definitional thing going on, but who will admit to missing the days when the only kind of trans people were binary trans. I'm not going to say they're right, especially since so many of my friends and colleagues identify as nonbinary transgender. But I have to confess, I sympathize with them and their viewpoint. Many of them have been around as long as I have. That means they lived through decades when most of society had only heard dirty jokes and porn references to trans people. And some of them feel like they did the hard work to get transgender issues in front of the social consciousness and now all these newfangled nonbinary trans people want to be a part of the phenomenon.
There's a reason why there aren't more people identifying as I do, as gender invert. It's because they haven't heard the term. Nobody offered it to them as an option to consider. So they went with "transgender". Or "nonbinary". Or "nonbinary transgender".
But what if you were assigned male at birth, you consider your body to be, in fact, male, but your gender isn't masculine, isn't man, isn't guy, isn't boy, that instead you are femme, one of the girls? Or if you were assigned female at birth, recognize your body to be female, but have never been a girl or a woman, and instead you're all man, all guy, all boy, totally a masculine individual?
If you say "transgender" and folks know you were AFAB they'll almost universally assume you identify as "male". If you say "transgender" and they understand you were AMAB, they'll assume you to identify as "female".
Specifying "nonbinary transgender" just shifts the problem. Now people are likely to assume that you don't want to be identified as any named sex or gender. That you're declaring yourself to be neither male nor female, neither man nor woman.
If what I'm saying resonates for you, you're welcome to come join me as a gender invert instead.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Friday, May 29, 2020
Interviewed for a PodCast — Off The Cuffs
On May 20, I was invited back to Off The Cuffs, a Kink and BDSM Podcast, to talk about my book and about gender identity and being genderqueer.
I say "invited back" because this was a reinterview. Back in 2016, during the interval between signing a contract with Ellora's Cave and Ellora's Cave going bankrupt and cancelling all outstanding contracts, I had made arrangements to be the guest on Off The Cuffs. But by the December episode date, my book's fate was back in limbo. As it turned out, that was the least of the difficulties with my appearance on their show: the recording equipment or the software, one or the other, misbehaved and the sound file from that evening was unusable.
The episode this time sprawled out somewhat, in part because the hosts, Dick and Max, knew me and had already discussed the book and its subject matter with me once before and had had time to think about it since then, and in part because there were some really good questions posed by audience members which prompted long discussions of their own. So the occasion was split into two consecutive Podcasts:
212 – We Have To Go Back
by Off the Cuffs: a Kink & BDSM Podcast | May 20, 2020 | Podcast
This week we sat down with Allan Hunter for part one of our discussion about the journey of coming out as gender queer in the 80s, long before the concept was in the cultural conversation.
213 – Jump to Conclusions
by Off the Cuffs: a Kink & BDSM Podcast | May 27, 2020 | Podcast
This week we continue our chat with Allan Hunter in part two of our discussion about the journey of coming out as gender queer in the 80s. We have some questions from our listeners...
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I say "invited back" because this was a reinterview. Back in 2016, during the interval between signing a contract with Ellora's Cave and Ellora's Cave going bankrupt and cancelling all outstanding contracts, I had made arrangements to be the guest on Off The Cuffs. But by the December episode date, my book's fate was back in limbo. As it turned out, that was the least of the difficulties with my appearance on their show: the recording equipment or the software, one or the other, misbehaved and the sound file from that evening was unusable.
The episode this time sprawled out somewhat, in part because the hosts, Dick and Max, knew me and had already discussed the book and its subject matter with me once before and had had time to think about it since then, and in part because there were some really good questions posed by audience members which prompted long discussions of their own. So the occasion was split into two consecutive Podcasts:
212 – We Have To Go Back
by Off the Cuffs: a Kink & BDSM Podcast | May 20, 2020 | Podcast
This week we sat down with Allan Hunter for part one of our discussion about the journey of coming out as gender queer in the 80s, long before the concept was in the cultural conversation.
Dick: "Allan, when we did this before...I kind of remember not understanding where you were coming from and I think just with... learning from other people and about gender identities and such, I remember from things I said back then. I feel like I'm more prepared to have a conversation with you than I was four year ago. Just in the past few years as a society we've been coming to this, but Allan, this was in the 1980s... the only ideas back then was like if you were transgender and wanting to change from one body to another ..."
Max: "Or things like men who like to wear women's clothing..."
Dick: "Yeah, it was a time when there wasn't even a glimpse of the language that we have to describe these things now."
213 – Jump to Conclusions
by Off the Cuffs: a Kink & BDSM Podcast | May 27, 2020 | Podcast
This week we continue our chat with Allan Hunter in part two of our discussion about the journey of coming out as gender queer in the 80s. We have some questions from our listeners...
Two questions -- first, as you began your journey of self discovery to genderqueer sometime ago, have you found attitudes have changed much in how other gender nonconforming people respond to you? It seems at times very human for people to become attached to very dogmatic veiws on what a word means especially when attached to how they identify themselves, to the point that people trying to find a space for themselves within a identy word can try to reject others trying to do the same with a different perspective on the same word? If that has been in your experience it would be interesting to know how that changed over time. Secondly, have you found any conversation tools to help change the focus from the word someone identifies with to the lived experience of each individual?
Do you feel it is your responsibility to educate people on your gender identity, or on the gender spectrum in general, due to your divergence from what's considered the norm? How much is up to the public to self educate and much is up to us to spread awareness about our own existence throughout history?
How can people buy your book?
Do you feel that since gender queer identities are more normal nowadays, that your experiences with folks in regards to "I'm queer" conversations are different from when you first came out? How so?
What do you, or could one, do to help present better as gender-queer?
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, May 23, 2020
BOOK REVIEW: XOXY by Kimberley Zeiselman
These are the ladies who lunch and strategize about intersex policy changes. Kimberley Zeiselman writes as a person who is aware of her generally privileged social location; she describes a life in which she's been at ease to move comfortably from Boston to Manhattan and back, and to journey with her husband to China and stay for a month in order to adopt children. I think sometimes the juxtaposition, of a life otherwise unencumbered with stress, against the specific experience of a marginalized identity, can make it easier to focus on the difference that having such an experience makes in a life.
Zeiselman is intersex. She is an example of CAIS, where the body's structure is completely impervious to the androgen hormones that, for most people with XY chromosomes, causes their body to develop with male morphology. She was regarded and raised as a girl, perceived as a female person with no questions raised by doctors, parents, or herself until the day when a persistent abdominal pain led to a poorly-explained operation. An operation where the particulars of what the surgeon was going to do were cloaked in euphemisms and lies.
Our culture has oscillated back and forth between an attitude that doctors know best so we should trust their judgment and a respect for patient self-determination and the importance of doctors explaining the options and letting the patient decide. In June of 1983, when Kimberley Zeiselman and her parents were asked to consent to abdominal surgery, the pendulum was strongly towards fully informed consent. But the fifteen-year old Kimberley and her family were told that she was at risk for cancer and that her ovaries needed to be removed for her health and safety.
But those weren't ovaries. Nor, as Zeiselman points out in a later chapter, was the risk of medical complications anywhere near as clear-cut as that. The surgeons removed Kimberley's undescended testicles, and put her on a lifetime regimen of hormone treatments. Why? Because it's what doctors thought they should do in cases like this. Eek, oh how embarrassing, got to get rid of those at once, hide this shameful fact so no one can find out. Cloak everything in lies and silence.
Kimberley Zeiselman learned the classic Yankee emotional inscrutability as part of her cultural inheritance. It was a world where internal turmoils aren't expected to be shared, just endured. The scene in the book where she discovers what had been done to her, and the fact of her difference, is stark and cold. The doctor writes her a prescription for anti-anxiety medication, then suggests "maybe it's time we dig out your old medical records so that you can better understand the surgery performed and put your fears of cancer to rest". Then the doctor leaves her alone in the room to read the account of how her testes were removed and found to be healthy and with no signs of malignancy.
We often learn shame by being protected from shame. When people whisper to us and wait until there's no one to overhear, the need for secrecy and the fear of exposure are taught to us. Zeiselman struggles with the shadow of inferiority and inadequacy. So much of her experience is expressed in the negative, in the things she doesn't participate in. In the years before the medical procedure, her best friends got their menarche but she was left behind wondering why she never got her period. After the operation, still not knowing anything about her intersex condition, she knows she will not be able to get pregnant and give birth.
Zeiselman's emotional habits carry over into her writing. She often skitters away from immersing the reader fully in what she was feeling at the time. She often summarizes events in places where, as reader, I wanted fully fleshed-out scenes, a more immersive experience. When her intersex condition is first revealed to her, Zeiselman gives us glimpses of the shock, and the intensity of her curiosity and being haunted about the impact of her stunning discovery. Tellingly, she wants the news to be shocking to the other people in her life, for them to react as if a bombshell had gone off in their midst, as if unless someone is willing to scream on her behalf there can be no screaming.
Kimberley Zeiselman becomes a policy activist, leveraging her connections in society to make a difference for intersex children. Sometimes the weariness of policy defeats and fighting the same battles recurrently make it sound like Sisyphus rolling his boulders. The medical policy on clitoris reductions for CAH intersex babies is the most formidable boulder. CAH — Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia — is a phenomenon affecting XX people in which the adrenal gland releases high levels of hormones that prompt the body to develop male attributes. The tissue that constitutes a clitoris tends to be larger, anywhere on a continuum from typical clitoris size to the size of a penis. And as Zeiselman added her voice to that of other intersex activists to outlaw nonconsensual surgery and leave the decision in the hands of the patients, she found the medical establishment insistent on their right to pare down or remove this tissue in the name of normalizaton.
Kimberley Zeiselman learned advocacy of behalf of others from raising her children, fighting for their right to a tailored and appropriate course of education. She took her skills and experience into the intersex rights fray, fighting her own fight, only to eventually end up largely immersed in a specific battle that centrally affects CAH intersex children. The identity called intersex is actually a constellation of several different situations, and enunciating the identity intersex is not only a rejection of the medical terminoligy that calls these conditions disorders, it's also a commitment to solidarity. Not all intersex people are identically situated but they can be unified politically as a marginalized community of people finally demanding a voice.
XOXY: A Memoir, Kimberly M. Zeiselman. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2020. Available from Amazon and other retailers; Facebook author's page
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Zeiselman is intersex. She is an example of CAIS, where the body's structure is completely impervious to the androgen hormones that, for most people with XY chromosomes, causes their body to develop with male morphology. She was regarded and raised as a girl, perceived as a female person with no questions raised by doctors, parents, or herself until the day when a persistent abdominal pain led to a poorly-explained operation. An operation where the particulars of what the surgeon was going to do were cloaked in euphemisms and lies.
Our culture has oscillated back and forth between an attitude that doctors know best so we should trust their judgment and a respect for patient self-determination and the importance of doctors explaining the options and letting the patient decide. In June of 1983, when Kimberley Zeiselman and her parents were asked to consent to abdominal surgery, the pendulum was strongly towards fully informed consent. But the fifteen-year old Kimberley and her family were told that she was at risk for cancer and that her ovaries needed to be removed for her health and safety.
But those weren't ovaries. Nor, as Zeiselman points out in a later chapter, was the risk of medical complications anywhere near as clear-cut as that. The surgeons removed Kimberley's undescended testicles, and put her on a lifetime regimen of hormone treatments. Why? Because it's what doctors thought they should do in cases like this. Eek, oh how embarrassing, got to get rid of those at once, hide this shameful fact so no one can find out. Cloak everything in lies and silence.
Kimberley Zeiselman learned the classic Yankee emotional inscrutability as part of her cultural inheritance. It was a world where internal turmoils aren't expected to be shared, just endured. The scene in the book where she discovers what had been done to her, and the fact of her difference, is stark and cold. The doctor writes her a prescription for anti-anxiety medication, then suggests "maybe it's time we dig out your old medical records so that you can better understand the surgery performed and put your fears of cancer to rest". Then the doctor leaves her alone in the room to read the account of how her testes were removed and found to be healthy and with no signs of malignancy.
We often learn shame by being protected from shame. When people whisper to us and wait until there's no one to overhear, the need for secrecy and the fear of exposure are taught to us. Zeiselman struggles with the shadow of inferiority and inadequacy. So much of her experience is expressed in the negative, in the things she doesn't participate in. In the years before the medical procedure, her best friends got their menarche but she was left behind wondering why she never got her period. After the operation, still not knowing anything about her intersex condition, she knows she will not be able to get pregnant and give birth.
Zeiselman's emotional habits carry over into her writing. She often skitters away from immersing the reader fully in what she was feeling at the time. She often summarizes events in places where, as reader, I wanted fully fleshed-out scenes, a more immersive experience. When her intersex condition is first revealed to her, Zeiselman gives us glimpses of the shock, and the intensity of her curiosity and being haunted about the impact of her stunning discovery. Tellingly, she wants the news to be shocking to the other people in her life, for them to react as if a bombshell had gone off in their midst, as if unless someone is willing to scream on her behalf there can be no screaming.
Kimberley Zeiselman becomes a policy activist, leveraging her connections in society to make a difference for intersex children. Sometimes the weariness of policy defeats and fighting the same battles recurrently make it sound like Sisyphus rolling his boulders. The medical policy on clitoris reductions for CAH intersex babies is the most formidable boulder. CAH — Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia — is a phenomenon affecting XX people in which the adrenal gland releases high levels of hormones that prompt the body to develop male attributes. The tissue that constitutes a clitoris tends to be larger, anywhere on a continuum from typical clitoris size to the size of a penis. And as Zeiselman added her voice to that of other intersex activists to outlaw nonconsensual surgery and leave the decision in the hands of the patients, she found the medical establishment insistent on their right to pare down or remove this tissue in the name of normalizaton.
Kimberley Zeiselman learned advocacy of behalf of others from raising her children, fighting for their right to a tailored and appropriate course of education. She took her skills and experience into the intersex rights fray, fighting her own fight, only to eventually end up largely immersed in a specific battle that centrally affects CAH intersex children. The identity called intersex is actually a constellation of several different situations, and enunciating the identity intersex is not only a rejection of the medical terminoligy that calls these conditions disorders, it's also a commitment to solidarity. Not all intersex people are identically situated but they can be unified politically as a marginalized community of people finally demanding a voice.
XOXY: A Memoir, Kimberly M. Zeiselman. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2020. Available from Amazon and other retailers; Facebook author's page
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Friday, May 15, 2020
I Want My Two Months Back
So I was asked to participate in a dialog involving gender-critical feminists and transgender activists.
There's a political group with chapters sprinkled all around the country. One chapter endorsed a statement from some women's group about womens' "Sex Based Rights". An LGBTQIA action group within that same political group said that by doing so, that chapter had done something transphobic and transmisogynistic and that they needed to retract their endorsement and apologize to all the transgender women who might have been offended by their endorsement, or else get kicked out of the political group.
And what were these "sex based rights"?
Content warning: Potentially inflammatory material from here on out. And serious, guaranteed-inflammatory content as you go farther down. Trigger warning issued. Trigger warning with flames and radioactive emblems. Proceed at your own risk:
Well, some of the supporters of that local chapter said this was about remedies that had been designed to address women's exclusion from various forms of political and social participation. A sort of affirmative action for women to offset the effects of patriarchy, of women's oppression. They said that including transgender women ran the risk of diluting that original intention, and that it made more sense to use language that guaranteed representation of transgender women AND transgender men but did so separately from the original remedies, which had been designed with cisgender women in mind, i.e., women who had been regarded and labeled and treated as female people for their entire lives. They also said some women's political groups wished to operate as cisgender-women only because they had always been separatist, not allowing men to participate, and the lifetime experience of transgender women was a mixture of factors making their situation different from that of the women who'd been in those groups all along.
"I can see where that's going to be a problematic position for trans people", I said. "Still, there may be a way to bridge some gaps here. They do have a point about experience and identity. As a genderqueer person who identifies as a male girl, I respect transgender people who don't want to include people like me, because they believe being trans is biologically built in, that if I'm a woman I'm female, and that the only healthy thing to do about being transgender is to transition. My situation is different from theirs. As long as they're not denying the validity of my gender issues I don't mind if they want to run groups that I'm not welcome in".
I checked in with the LGBTQIA Action Group, the LAGs. "Oh, yes", they said, "we sent those demands to the chapter that endorsed that horrible statement. We want them to take our concerns seriously. We'd love it if they'd have a dialog with us, but they refuse to respond!"
Then I went back to the local chapter supporters, the pro-discussion folks calling themselves Dialog. I told them "I got the impression the LAG folks are open to listening if the people in Dialog and the specific chapter that endorsed that statement will listen to them in turn".
Then I went off to read a copy of the original "Sex Based Rights" statement, the endorsement of which had kicked off all this. Winced a lot. Yeah, the statement has a lot of language that, if not blatantly transphobic, felt like it was chock-full of dog whistle terms and phrases. I decided I didn't like the phrase "sex-based rights" itself. In general, I think people don't have rights based on their sex. You may have remedies that have been made available to your sex on affirmative action grounds but a right is an intrinsic entitlement. Men aren't entitled to something intrinsically as a consequence of being men, or male, or both. Whatever they're entitled to is either because they're human, or human adults, or else it's situationally male or about being men because of something that they and only they experience. Are women? I could formulate some rights that all pregnant or potentially pregnant people should have, perhaps, or that all menstruating or potentially menstruating people should have, but if I did, those rights came from those situations. Whatever. I sure wouldn't have endorsed the statement I was reading. But it didn't seem so horrible that I'd demand that anyone who did be kicked out of the organization.
"I'm ready to discuss the matter with Dialog", the LAG activist said, "but I have no interest in wasting my time with TERFs who say I'm not a woman. If they want to talk with us and apologize for what they've done, hey I'm right here, but in this organization it is already an accepted principle that trans women are women. That means in any situation where we're talking about women, if they try to excluse trans women, that's a hate crime and they don't belong in our organization!"
I said, "Look, some of them seem to be trying to incorporate and accommodate an understanding of trans people. Many of them don't like the term 'cisgender' for themselves but they aren't all insisting that trans women aren't women. One person suggested the phrase 'natal women'. Do you acknowledge a reason why they might legitimately want to meet politically by themselves as 'natal women'?"
"Trans women are natal women", the LAG activist replied.
"Wait, not even all transgender people claim that being transgender means you were born that way. I know it's a popular viewpoint but you wouldn't kick someone out of a transgender group for saying they weren't born trans, would you?"
"You're wasting your time with those TERFs. If they want to apologize and retract their message of hate, I'm right here. But they won't because they're bigoted fascists".
"Listen", I said, exasperated. "you've clearly got the stronger political position. Inclusiveness is always going to look more justified than a reason to exclude someone. So I'm sure you can pressure them into saying the kinds of things you want to hear, or get the organization to boot them out if they won't. But this is also a public education opportunity. Do you want them to see the light, or do you just want them to feel the heat?"
The LAG activist shrugged. "It's a settled issue. If they're going to be doing hate crimes I want them kicked out, simple as that".
"Frankly", declared the Dialog member, "I don't care what their viewpoint is. Not while they're calling us 'TERFs'. That's a slur. It's used to discredit us. They call us that while they're beating us, there was a women's march in London, did you hear about that? These men, calling themselves transgender women, barged in and chased women down side streets, attacking them. And the police did nothing!"
"So you don't like being called 'TERF'. You don't like the word that they use for you", I said. "You see the irony in that, don't you?"
"Transgenders are trying to invade our women's spaces and take away our rights as women. They want to erase women's identities. They aren't women. They're men. They're male. The correct word for adult male people is 'men'. Not 'women'. They want to invade women's prisons with their penises and rape women. They want to hide in women's bathroom stalls and molest little girls. And we're not gonna put up with it!"
"Okay, Dialog folks", I said, addressing the group. "Even if you don't think the LAG people are genuinely open to listening to anything they don't already agree with, you need to care about public opinion. You need to care about how the rest of the organization is going to view you. And although the LAG folks sound inflexible, you are managing to sound even more so and it's not a good look".
I picked up my old battered copy of The Women's Room, the book cover that has "LADIES" crossed out and "WOMEN'S" inked in over it. "I understand why you value the word 'women'. I think it was either Robin Morgan or Gloria Steinem, relating the story of having a sit-down with the newspaper editor, and explaining why they didn't like the newspaper referring to adult female people as 'girls' since adult males were always designated as 'men'.
"And the editor said, 'So what would you prefer...ladies?'. And the feminist women practically held their noses and winced. That term, 'ladies', was polluted with notions of screening out those who aren't ladylike, all that 'act like a lady' crap, you know? They wanted the newspaper to use the term 'women', they told him.
"The word 'woman' was nearly entirely associated with the physical body. In our society, girls become women not by 'proving' you are one, the way boys 'become' men, but by going through biological puberty. Even the creepier social associations, like 'Has he made a woman out of you yet' — like being heterosexually active 'makes you a woman' — even those had mostly biological meanings, more than social attributes. So by choosing the word 'woman', it wouldn't look like feminists wanted to be the new arbiters of which adult females get to qualify.
"I get that. Why you liked the word. And I get that it's been in political use by feminists since then.
"But you aren't going to convince anybody, anywhere, that you're being anything other than bigoted and biased by saying transgender women are factually wrong about being women. I'd think feminist women more than anyone would understand that word use is politically loaded. Think back to how 'man' was supposed to mean 'any human being' but it excluded women, and how 'he' and 'him' were used to mean any person. The dictionary said that was correct. But feminists said word use changes when society changes. And the feminists made our language change. You also sound pretty silly saying biology is destiny, by the way."
LAG people: "But trans women were not born with male organs. If she is a woman those are her organs so they're female organs. And those Dialog...persons... they are TERFs. It means Trans Exclusive Radical Feminists. That's what they are. I don't see why they don't like being called what they actually are".
Dialog people: "No one is denying their right to exist. They have a right to dress and behave however they want. They can see themselves however they like and have any understanding of themselves they feel comfortable with, but they have no right to impose their ideas on others or claim rights that were originally based on addressing the historical denial of women's rights as a sex".
LAG people: "See, we told you. Hateful transphobes. Kick them out. I don't have time for this shit"
Dialog people: "Words have meanings. Male people are men. Men are male people. A person with a penis is male. These men calling themselves transgender women are mentally ill. Men are not women. Males are not women. A person with a penis is not a woman. See, we told you, hateful patriarchal misogynists. You can't make us agree with their bullshit".
LAG people: "See, they're bad. Bad people are bad. Which is bad. Which makes them bad. The things they are saying are defined as bad. Sure, we're open to a dialog. A dialog about how they are bad".
Dialog people: "Four legs good. Two legs bad. Four legs good. Two legs bad..."
I want my two months back. I'm particularly disgusted with some of the Dialog folks, who seemed determined to live up to the worst things said about them by the LAG contingent seeking to have them kicked out. But both sides had some participants who originally seemed to be trying to find language that the other side would accept, at least long enough to have a conversation. People who were making the attempt in good faith. And there were other people trying to speak to activists on both sides, I wasn't the only one doing this diplomacy act. But our louder and more insistent colleagues shouted us down on both sides.
They should all be glad I'm not God. Because you know what I'd do if I were? You know those cruise ships that are languishing out in the ocean because of coronavirus? I'd like to put everyone from both groups onto those ships, and I'd confine one Dialog member and one LAG member to each cabin and quarantine them there together. They deserve each other.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine yourself, come to think of it, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
There's a political group with chapters sprinkled all around the country. One chapter endorsed a statement from some women's group about womens' "Sex Based Rights". An LGBTQIA action group within that same political group said that by doing so, that chapter had done something transphobic and transmisogynistic and that they needed to retract their endorsement and apologize to all the transgender women who might have been offended by their endorsement, or else get kicked out of the political group.
And what were these "sex based rights"?
Content warning: Potentially inflammatory material from here on out. And serious, guaranteed-inflammatory content as you go farther down. Trigger warning issued. Trigger warning with flames and radioactive emblems. Proceed at your own risk:
Well, some of the supporters of that local chapter said this was about remedies that had been designed to address women's exclusion from various forms of political and social participation. A sort of affirmative action for women to offset the effects of patriarchy, of women's oppression. They said that including transgender women ran the risk of diluting that original intention, and that it made more sense to use language that guaranteed representation of transgender women AND transgender men but did so separately from the original remedies, which had been designed with cisgender women in mind, i.e., women who had been regarded and labeled and treated as female people for their entire lives. They also said some women's political groups wished to operate as cisgender-women only because they had always been separatist, not allowing men to participate, and the lifetime experience of transgender women was a mixture of factors making their situation different from that of the women who'd been in those groups all along.
"I can see where that's going to be a problematic position for trans people", I said. "Still, there may be a way to bridge some gaps here. They do have a point about experience and identity. As a genderqueer person who identifies as a male girl, I respect transgender people who don't want to include people like me, because they believe being trans is biologically built in, that if I'm a woman I'm female, and that the only healthy thing to do about being transgender is to transition. My situation is different from theirs. As long as they're not denying the validity of my gender issues I don't mind if they want to run groups that I'm not welcome in".
I checked in with the LGBTQIA Action Group, the LAGs. "Oh, yes", they said, "we sent those demands to the chapter that endorsed that horrible statement. We want them to take our concerns seriously. We'd love it if they'd have a dialog with us, but they refuse to respond!"
Then I went back to the local chapter supporters, the pro-discussion folks calling themselves Dialog. I told them "I got the impression the LAG folks are open to listening if the people in Dialog and the specific chapter that endorsed that statement will listen to them in turn".
Then I went off to read a copy of the original "Sex Based Rights" statement, the endorsement of which had kicked off all this. Winced a lot. Yeah, the statement has a lot of language that, if not blatantly transphobic, felt like it was chock-full of dog whistle terms and phrases. I decided I didn't like the phrase "sex-based rights" itself. In general, I think people don't have rights based on their sex. You may have remedies that have been made available to your sex on affirmative action grounds but a right is an intrinsic entitlement. Men aren't entitled to something intrinsically as a consequence of being men, or male, or both. Whatever they're entitled to is either because they're human, or human adults, or else it's situationally male or about being men because of something that they and only they experience. Are women? I could formulate some rights that all pregnant or potentially pregnant people should have, perhaps, or that all menstruating or potentially menstruating people should have, but if I did, those rights came from those situations. Whatever. I sure wouldn't have endorsed the statement I was reading. But it didn't seem so horrible that I'd demand that anyone who did be kicked out of the organization.
"I'm ready to discuss the matter with Dialog", the LAG activist said, "but I have no interest in wasting my time with TERFs who say I'm not a woman. If they want to talk with us and apologize for what they've done, hey I'm right here, but in this organization it is already an accepted principle that trans women are women. That means in any situation where we're talking about women, if they try to excluse trans women, that's a hate crime and they don't belong in our organization!"
I said, "Look, some of them seem to be trying to incorporate and accommodate an understanding of trans people. Many of them don't like the term 'cisgender' for themselves but they aren't all insisting that trans women aren't women. One person suggested the phrase 'natal women'. Do you acknowledge a reason why they might legitimately want to meet politically by themselves as 'natal women'?"
"Trans women are natal women", the LAG activist replied.
"Wait, not even all transgender people claim that being transgender means you were born that way. I know it's a popular viewpoint but you wouldn't kick someone out of a transgender group for saying they weren't born trans, would you?"
"You're wasting your time with those TERFs. If they want to apologize and retract their message of hate, I'm right here. But they won't because they're bigoted fascists".
"Listen", I said, exasperated. "you've clearly got the stronger political position. Inclusiveness is always going to look more justified than a reason to exclude someone. So I'm sure you can pressure them into saying the kinds of things you want to hear, or get the organization to boot them out if they won't. But this is also a public education opportunity. Do you want them to see the light, or do you just want them to feel the heat?"
The LAG activist shrugged. "It's a settled issue. If they're going to be doing hate crimes I want them kicked out, simple as that".
"Frankly", declared the Dialog member, "I don't care what their viewpoint is. Not while they're calling us 'TERFs'. That's a slur. It's used to discredit us. They call us that while they're beating us, there was a women's march in London, did you hear about that? These men, calling themselves transgender women, barged in and chased women down side streets, attacking them. And the police did nothing!"
"So you don't like being called 'TERF'. You don't like the word that they use for you", I said. "You see the irony in that, don't you?"
"Transgenders are trying to invade our women's spaces and take away our rights as women. They want to erase women's identities. They aren't women. They're men. They're male. The correct word for adult male people is 'men'. Not 'women'. They want to invade women's prisons with their penises and rape women. They want to hide in women's bathroom stalls and molest little girls. And we're not gonna put up with it!"
"Okay, Dialog folks", I said, addressing the group. "Even if you don't think the LAG people are genuinely open to listening to anything they don't already agree with, you need to care about public opinion. You need to care about how the rest of the organization is going to view you. And although the LAG folks sound inflexible, you are managing to sound even more so and it's not a good look".
I picked up my old battered copy of The Women's Room, the book cover that has "LADIES" crossed out and "WOMEN'S" inked in over it. "I understand why you value the word 'women'. I think it was either Robin Morgan or Gloria Steinem, relating the story of having a sit-down with the newspaper editor, and explaining why they didn't like the newspaper referring to adult female people as 'girls' since adult males were always designated as 'men'.
"And the editor said, 'So what would you prefer...ladies?'. And the feminist women practically held their noses and winced. That term, 'ladies', was polluted with notions of screening out those who aren't ladylike, all that 'act like a lady' crap, you know? They wanted the newspaper to use the term 'women', they told him.
"The word 'woman' was nearly entirely associated with the physical body. In our society, girls become women not by 'proving' you are one, the way boys 'become' men, but by going through biological puberty. Even the creepier social associations, like 'Has he made a woman out of you yet' — like being heterosexually active 'makes you a woman' — even those had mostly biological meanings, more than social attributes. So by choosing the word 'woman', it wouldn't look like feminists wanted to be the new arbiters of which adult females get to qualify.
"I get that. Why you liked the word. And I get that it's been in political use by feminists since then.
"But you aren't going to convince anybody, anywhere, that you're being anything other than bigoted and biased by saying transgender women are factually wrong about being women. I'd think feminist women more than anyone would understand that word use is politically loaded. Think back to how 'man' was supposed to mean 'any human being' but it excluded women, and how 'he' and 'him' were used to mean any person. The dictionary said that was correct. But feminists said word use changes when society changes. And the feminists made our language change. You also sound pretty silly saying biology is destiny, by the way."
LAG people: "But trans women were not born with male organs. If she is a woman those are her organs so they're female organs. And those Dialog...persons... they are TERFs. It means Trans Exclusive Radical Feminists. That's what they are. I don't see why they don't like being called what they actually are".
Dialog people: "No one is denying their right to exist. They have a right to dress and behave however they want. They can see themselves however they like and have any understanding of themselves they feel comfortable with, but they have no right to impose their ideas on others or claim rights that were originally based on addressing the historical denial of women's rights as a sex".
LAG people: "See, we told you. Hateful transphobes. Kick them out. I don't have time for this shit"
Dialog people: "Words have meanings. Male people are men. Men are male people. A person with a penis is male. These men calling themselves transgender women are mentally ill. Men are not women. Males are not women. A person with a penis is not a woman. See, we told you, hateful patriarchal misogynists. You can't make us agree with their bullshit".
LAG people: "See, they're bad. Bad people are bad. Which is bad. Which makes them bad. The things they are saying are defined as bad. Sure, we're open to a dialog. A dialog about how they are bad".
Dialog people: "Four legs good. Two legs bad. Four legs good. Two legs bad..."
I want my two months back. I'm particularly disgusted with some of the Dialog folks, who seemed determined to live up to the worst things said about them by the LAG contingent seeking to have them kicked out. But both sides had some participants who originally seemed to be trying to find language that the other side would accept, at least long enough to have a conversation. People who were making the attempt in good faith. And there were other people trying to speak to activists on both sides, I wasn't the only one doing this diplomacy act. But our louder and more insistent colleagues shouted us down on both sides.
They should all be glad I'm not God. Because you know what I'd do if I were? You know those cruise ships that are languishing out in the ocean because of coronavirus? I'd like to put everyone from both groups onto those ships, and I'd confine one Dialog member and one LAG member to each cabin and quarantine them there together. They deserve each other.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine yourself, come to think of it, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, May 9, 2020
Diminishing Returns
My transgender woman friend is replying to a comment that she finds annoying. Somebody has said that they have nothing against transgender women, "but why do you embrace all of the most phony and stereotypical trappings of restrictive femininity? It's all pink lipstick and false eyelashes and nylons and pointy shoes with you. Don't you see how that comes across to us cis women? It's like you think that's what being a woman is all about!"
My friend finds the comment annoying because she feels like she keeps answering it over and over, it's a reoccurring theme and she's tired of it. She writes, "We don't like being misgendered. I happen to be tall for a woman, with more narrow hips and a more angular jaw. I grew up before puberty blockers. Many of us need to send as many signals as possible or we run the risk of being addressed as 'sir' or 'mister'. Why is that hard for you to understand?"
She uses socially recognized indicators of gender. Things that men don't do, things that men don't wear. That only works as long as men, in general, don't do those things, don't wear those items.
Meanwhile, we cheer when we hear stories of boys in preschool who aren't chased away from the fairy princess costumes. We celebrate the decline in rigid notions of what boys can do, what girls can do. We agree that the body with which one is born should not artificially limit one's choices, that people should have the maximum freedom to be and do any of the things that other people get to be and do in our society.
Many nonbinary and agender people say they would be glad to see gender disappear entirely: just treat people for who they are, don't categorize people as genders at all. But at the same time, many of them continue to be assigned to a gender by the people who encounter them. The assignment tends to be the same assignment they were given at birth--not because of actual genitalia, necessarily, but assorted visibly discernable physical characteristics that are the product of our sex hormones and the effects they have on our bodies. The same things that my transgender friend has to work against to avoid being misgendered. So it happens with nonbinary and agender people, too, they get misgendered and to try to keep that from happening, they, too, make use of garments and grooming styles to "look more masc" or "look more femme", to offset those traits.
I could identify as transgender or as nonbinary, but mostly I don't. I don't seek to be perceived as a female person, and I don't seek to be perceived as someone who is neither male nor female. I most often call myself genderqueer instead, and explain to people that I am a gender invert, a male girl (or male femme if you prefer), that I have a body and I have a personality, a sex and a gender, and what makes me genderqueer is that they are a mixed bag, an apparent mismatch.
Like the transgender and the nonbinary people, I, too, use some signals to convey visually a bit of who I am. I wear my hair long, I wear some jewelry that's not typical for males to wear, and I wear some apparel that isn't considered men's clothes (especially skirts). Since I present (nevertheless) as a male person (the facial hair being a pretty distinctive marker, and a prominent male larynx also makes that statement), it's a mixed signal, which is more or less as good as I can accomplish in the absense of a widespread social expectation that there are such people as male girls out there.
If there were a lot of other male people doing that, though, using items that socially symbolize femininity without attempting to be perceived as physically female, wouldn't it just dilute and eventually erase the perception of those items as feminine? Or is there a way to create the identity "male girl" and be recognized as a feminine male instead of being seen as a longhaired man in a skirt?
And is it a problem anyway? If the world had not insisted on a bunch of rigid notions about how girls and boys are supposed to be different from each other, would I have ever pushed away from the "boy" identity and decided I was more like one of the girls?
Maybe. Maybe not. I think the answer to that depends on whether males in general have different traits (other than the physical, I mean) from females in general. If there are such differences at the generalization level, I might still have come to see myself as an exception, even without the excessively rigid and proscriptive attitudes I grew up with.
People might want to hold on to artificial signals, signals that have historically said "feminine" or "masculine", not to gild the lily of their body's own physical manifestations but to signal where on the spectrum of masculinity to femininity they consider themselves to belong. There's no innate reason for most of these markers to convey the meaning that they currently convey, but that's true of the sounds that constitute our language and yet we continue to use language to communicate.
But if, on the other hand, there are no real non-physical-body differences between the sexes, it does seem like gender would disappear if there were no ideology propping it up. So notions of "masculinity" and "femininity" might fade away, along with any possible signals to convey them.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
My friend finds the comment annoying because she feels like she keeps answering it over and over, it's a reoccurring theme and she's tired of it. She writes, "We don't like being misgendered. I happen to be tall for a woman, with more narrow hips and a more angular jaw. I grew up before puberty blockers. Many of us need to send as many signals as possible or we run the risk of being addressed as 'sir' or 'mister'. Why is that hard for you to understand?"
She uses socially recognized indicators of gender. Things that men don't do, things that men don't wear. That only works as long as men, in general, don't do those things, don't wear those items.
Meanwhile, we cheer when we hear stories of boys in preschool who aren't chased away from the fairy princess costumes. We celebrate the decline in rigid notions of what boys can do, what girls can do. We agree that the body with which one is born should not artificially limit one's choices, that people should have the maximum freedom to be and do any of the things that other people get to be and do in our society.
Many nonbinary and agender people say they would be glad to see gender disappear entirely: just treat people for who they are, don't categorize people as genders at all. But at the same time, many of them continue to be assigned to a gender by the people who encounter them. The assignment tends to be the same assignment they were given at birth--not because of actual genitalia, necessarily, but assorted visibly discernable physical characteristics that are the product of our sex hormones and the effects they have on our bodies. The same things that my transgender friend has to work against to avoid being misgendered. So it happens with nonbinary and agender people, too, they get misgendered and to try to keep that from happening, they, too, make use of garments and grooming styles to "look more masc" or "look more femme", to offset those traits.
I could identify as transgender or as nonbinary, but mostly I don't. I don't seek to be perceived as a female person, and I don't seek to be perceived as someone who is neither male nor female. I most often call myself genderqueer instead, and explain to people that I am a gender invert, a male girl (or male femme if you prefer), that I have a body and I have a personality, a sex and a gender, and what makes me genderqueer is that they are a mixed bag, an apparent mismatch.
Like the transgender and the nonbinary people, I, too, use some signals to convey visually a bit of who I am. I wear my hair long, I wear some jewelry that's not typical for males to wear, and I wear some apparel that isn't considered men's clothes (especially skirts). Since I present (nevertheless) as a male person (the facial hair being a pretty distinctive marker, and a prominent male larynx also makes that statement), it's a mixed signal, which is more or less as good as I can accomplish in the absense of a widespread social expectation that there are such people as male girls out there.
If there were a lot of other male people doing that, though, using items that socially symbolize femininity without attempting to be perceived as physically female, wouldn't it just dilute and eventually erase the perception of those items as feminine? Or is there a way to create the identity "male girl" and be recognized as a feminine male instead of being seen as a longhaired man in a skirt?
And is it a problem anyway? If the world had not insisted on a bunch of rigid notions about how girls and boys are supposed to be different from each other, would I have ever pushed away from the "boy" identity and decided I was more like one of the girls?
Maybe. Maybe not. I think the answer to that depends on whether males in general have different traits (other than the physical, I mean) from females in general. If there are such differences at the generalization level, I might still have come to see myself as an exception, even without the excessively rigid and proscriptive attitudes I grew up with.
People might want to hold on to artificial signals, signals that have historically said "feminine" or "masculine", not to gild the lily of their body's own physical manifestations but to signal where on the spectrum of masculinity to femininity they consider themselves to belong. There's no innate reason for most of these markers to convey the meaning that they currently convey, but that's true of the sounds that constitute our language and yet we continue to use language to communicate.
But if, on the other hand, there are no real non-physical-body differences between the sexes, it does seem like gender would disappear if there were no ideology propping it up. So notions of "masculinity" and "femininity" might fade away, along with any possible signals to convey them.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Saturday, May 2, 2020
I'm in Newsday! (aka Mainstream Press Coverage); + More Reviews
Newsday, Long Island's primary newspaper, Sunday circulation 495,000, is featuring an interview with me as the lead in Arts & Entertainment section of tomorrow's (Sunday May 3) issue. Author: Brian Alessandro, literary critic
Link goes to the online copy of the article, but it's behind a paywall which will put it out of reach for most people who aren't subscribers of Newsday or one of its partners.
It's not a review of the book. The questions were about my motivations as an author and the political situation of genderqueer people within LGBTQIA and how I feel about putting such personal information about the events in my life out there for public consumption -- most of which I've discussed at length in these blog posts.
Getting a spread in Newsday is excellent publicity and I hope it will direct a significant amount of local and regional attention to my book. Public awareness is very much a snowball phenomenon. When people think something is happening that other people in their community are paying attention to, they want to be at least somewhat acquainted with it and what it's about in case someone asks them.
Meanwhile, I'm continuing to get college newspaper reviews. The corona virus has of course delayed many such endeavors so they are being spread out over the course of months instead of being more closely packed together. That has the beneficial effect of lengthening the time when I'm popping up in print and affecting search engines and whatnot. That works in my favor, ameliorating the effect of being unable to make guest-speaker appearances and do book signings etc.
Here are the reviews that have come in since my April 3 post:
— Anna Vanseveran. St. Norbert Times — St. Norbert College
— Camryn DeLuca. The Diamondback — University of Maryland
— Josh Rittberg The Snapper — Millersville University
— Celia Brockert The Times-Delphic — Drake University
— Zarqua Ansari The Beacon — Wilkes University
I've also gradually accumulated reviews on GoodReads, with eight readers leaving review comments behind.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Link goes to the online copy of the article, but it's behind a paywall which will put it out of reach for most people who aren't subscribers of Newsday or one of its partners.
It's not a review of the book. The questions were about my motivations as an author and the political situation of genderqueer people within LGBTQIA and how I feel about putting such personal information about the events in my life out there for public consumption -- most of which I've discussed at length in these blog posts.
Getting a spread in Newsday is excellent publicity and I hope it will direct a significant amount of local and regional attention to my book. Public awareness is very much a snowball phenomenon. When people think something is happening that other people in their community are paying attention to, they want to be at least somewhat acquainted with it and what it's about in case someone asks them.
Meanwhile, I'm continuing to get college newspaper reviews. The corona virus has of course delayed many such endeavors so they are being spread out over the course of months instead of being more closely packed together. That has the beneficial effect of lengthening the time when I'm popping up in print and affecting search engines and whatnot. That works in my favor, ameliorating the effect of being unable to make guest-speaker appearances and do book signings etc.
Here are the reviews that have come in since my April 3 post:
"First and foremost, what this book does really well is testify to the importance of the 'Q' in LGBTQ. When many people furrowed their eyebrows at the addition to another letter in the acronym, people like this author were fighting to show how necessary it was. Derek’s story takes place in a time way before the 'Q' was introduced, way before most began to understand or care about gender issues.
However, even though Genderqueer takes place in the 70s, there are many parallels to today’s world that will make the story resonate with today’s LGBTQ youth. Derek’s confusion and desperation to understand who he is is so palpable that anyone who has gone through anything similar, or is currently going through anything similar, will be able to relate. With this story, Alan D. Hunter sheds light on a gender identity that is relatively unknown to the general public while also giving others who share a similar story to him validation that there is nothing wrong with who they are."
— Anna Vanseveran. St. Norbert Times — St. Norbert College
"The discussion around gender identity and sexual orientation has progressed exponentially in the past decade. Same-sex marriage became legal nationwide only five years ago, and the LGBTQ community continues to fight for equal rights. With this constant push for change, some can only imagine the struggles of coming to terms with your gender identity during the late 1960s and 1970s.
GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet offers an eye-opening view into the upbringing of a gender-nonconforming person in an era when many people didn’t know such an identity existed..."
— Camryn DeLuca. The Diamondback — University of Maryland
"This is a novel that is bracingly raw and personal, yet always feels authentic in its sense of place and voice. Its visibility gives an insight into a point of view that doesn’t live in the “traditional” gender boxes...
It is in the last half of the book, when Derek starts to realize the whole person he is inside where the book reaches its peak...it is incredibly satisfying to see Derek hit his stride and finally find his sense of place and belonging in the world. "
— Josh Rittberg The Snapper — Millersville University
"...it’s clear from the beginning of the novel where the story is heading. Hunter introduces their ideas of gender at the start of the novel when they talk about their personality as a child – how they don’t identify with the rough behavior usually prescribed to the male gender – and these thoughts stay with them and influence their growing up.
When the revelation is made, it’s not something that comes out of left field. Because of course it’s not – these things don’t just appear one day like a magic trick. It’s always there, even if it’s not super obvious at first."
— Celia Brockert The Times-Delphic — Drake University
"...a treacherous and often realistic tale that’s packed with frustration, desperation and yearning. Hunter does an amazing job of captivating the raw emotions of a person seeking their own truths in a world where everyone else seems to know who they are and what their place is in the world...
We see Derek from a very young age get picked on and beat up. He tries time and time again not to let the bullies get into his head, but it proves more and more difficult. All the while he starts to believe the things they say about him. He seeks out answers in both healthy and unhealthy ways, often getting him in all sorts of trouble...
Overall this book is very eye-opening. It puts into words a story for people that are almost never represented. It shakes its metaphoric fist in the face of erasure, saying, 'I’m here and I will not be forgotten.'"
— Zarqua Ansari The Beacon — Wilkes University
I've also gradually accumulated reviews on GoodReads, with eight readers leaving review comments behind.
———————
You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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