![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahunter3I'm a girl, that's my gender; I'm male, that's my sex; I'm attracted to females, that's my orientation.
I don't feel as if I were born in the wrong body.
In 1980 there was no book I could find by anyone like that. Still isn't. I've written a 95,000-word coming-out memoir, THE STORY OF Q: A GENDERQUEER TALE.
As a child, I admired the girls so I emulated them and competed with them and played with them. By puberty I was being called "faggot" and "queerbait" and beaten up for my presumed sexual preference.
By the age of 21 I was under a lot of pressure to identify myself as something, but there was no term for it at the time. When I did try to come out, the result was incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.
Newly confident that I was OK, I started a mental patients' uprising and was kicked out for disrupting the facility. I went on to get a college degree in Women's Studies, where same ideas that got me locked up were published in peer-reviewed journals as feminist theory articles.
This story will appeal to fans of Leslie Feinberg's STONE BUTCH BLUES, Daphne Scholinski's THE LAST TIME I WORE A DRESS, and Chaz Bono's BECOMING CHAZ, and it will be a resource for anyone exploring questions of identity and questioning their own sexuality.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I don't feel as if I were born in the wrong body.
In 1980 there was no book I could find by anyone like that. Still isn't. I've written a 95,000-word coming-out memoir, THE STORY OF Q: A GENDERQUEER TALE.
As a child, I admired the girls so I emulated them and competed with them and played with them. By puberty I was being called "faggot" and "queerbait" and beaten up for my presumed sexual preference.
By the age of 21 I was under a lot of pressure to identify myself as something, but there was no term for it at the time. When I did try to come out, the result was incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.
Newly confident that I was OK, I started a mental patients' uprising and was kicked out for disrupting the facility. I went on to get a college degree in Women's Studies, where same ideas that got me locked up were published in peer-reviewed journals as feminist theory articles.
This story will appeal to fans of Leslie Feinberg's STONE BUTCH BLUES, Daphne Scholinski's THE LAST TIME I WORE A DRESS, and Chaz Bono's BECOMING CHAZ, and it will be a resource for anyone exploring questions of identity and questioning their own sexuality.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-05-01 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-01 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-01 07:46 pm (UTC)I've been confusing people for years!
no subject
Date: 2014-05-02 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-02 02:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-02 01:12 am (UTC)You had to be gay or straight! If you dressed female well then you must like men...it's so hetero oriented when you think of it!
Well of course there were bi people.And now there are so many people who don't fit into the ridiculous margins people tried to
squeeze them into.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-02 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-02 12:14 pm (UTC)So good to see your name here!
no subject
Date: 2014-05-02 10:25 am (UTC)I'd argue that you are transexual in its deeper, and exact meaning: you identify as a woman who is attracted to women.
For a variety of reasons to do with growing awareness of alternate sexuality, transexual is kind of hot right now in certain media. Trans actors are getting a chance to act. Trans characters are showing up in TV scripts. Trans stories are being told in wider media.
Pitch an article on growing up trans to a magazine. Or to the Guardian, which has decent coverage of alternate sexuality. Or to Huffington Post, which also covers that beat.
Pitch them your pitch above - I like it. Pitch it for an article that is a condensed version of your book. Use that as a springboard to finding a book publisher.
Also: do some research Look to see who is publishing transexual books to the larger market. Pitch those publishers. And look for agents who have worked with writers of alternate sexuality.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-02 12:18 pm (UTC)I don't tend to refer to myself as "trans" primarily because it is so linked in everyone's mind to the notion that you wish or intend to change your body, that you were born in the wrong body, etc.; but yeah, their experiences, the way they've written of them, about growing up trans and so forth, are extremely akin to my own.
And yeah, I like the idea of doing a condensed version for a magazine, and I've been focusing on agents who have a track record of publishing in alt sexualities.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-03 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-06 08:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-07 02:16 am (UTC)Highly embarrassing. You know the drill: fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. I still can't believe I signed myself into another bin just two years later. But my parents swore up and down that it wasn't "a snake pit like that horrid place you were in before... no one in this facility believes in drugs, they won't try to put you on drugs... everyone dresses in ordinary street clothes, doctors and patients alike... very modern, using biofeedback and dietary considerations and if as you say your main problem is communication they'll help you with that... and if you want out they will let you out at any point".
It's what they told ME, too, when I arrived. But ultimately it was still a locked ward. And ultimately when I had had my fill of the place and said I would like to leave now, they strapped me down in 6-way restraints and stuck me in seclusion in a private holding cell. Dr J___ B__ told me he plays golf with the judge who handles the involuntary commitment hearings and he never loses them. And yes they did TOO want to put me on psych drugs. Not everyone. Just me.
It wasn't a steak knife, just an ordinary table knife. I used it as a screwdriver and removed the little tab thingie that holds one side of a double door to the ceiling. And I escaped.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-07 02:22 am (UTC)The one time I didn't thoroughly read a form at a shrink's office, it turned out to be a voluntary commitment form. They said I could leave at any time- but first they had to evaluate if I was a threat to myself or others. If they decided that, I would spend a mandatory 30 days in a locked down ward they made sound very unpleasant.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-07 02:32 am (UTC)I do see the potential for mining the autobio for more excerpts of publishable size :)
First things first though.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-24 11:26 am (UTC)zgx4t003
Date: 2017-01-26 06:21 am (UTC)