![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A bit of backstory
May. 2nd, 2014 09:02 pmAs I mention in my query letter (see previous post), my first attempt to come out to people got me locked up in the nuthouse. That was mostly just miscommunication: I'd done such a piss-poor job of putting things into words that personnel at the university thought I was either threatening folks or coming unraveled. So with that as a baseline, any future attempts to explain this mess were likely to be an improvement.
But (you may well be wondering), why was I bothering to explain myself to other people in the first place? That's a fair enough question. The thing is, for the first two decades of my life, it was not me who was making a big deal about me being a girl, or being girl-like, or not appropriately boy-like. And it was not me who was making a big deal about who I wanted to have sex with. Nope, I was getting an earful on those subjects, some of it very hostile and some of it liberally tolerant, and nearly all of it based on assumptions that didn't link up very closely with how I felt inside.
So when I figured myself out in 1980, I was all full of enthusiasm and relief and joy as well as more than a little righteous anger, because understanding myself also meant understanding the prejudices and expectations that I'd been up against all that time.
My first serious attempt to get something in writing and out there where it could be read was in 1982. I had a short book that was a combination of personal experiences and my own brand of gender and feminist theory and tried to find a publisher, but got nowhere with it.
After a couple of years, I got the idea of going back to college and majoring in women's studies, where this kind of thing would fit right in as relevant subject matter, and where my professors would maybe be interested in what I was trying to say. I did well as an undergraduate this time around, getting my BA in women's studies in 3 years, but the materials we studied in class were more at the introductory level and it wasn't really appropriate for me to make the classroom experience about me; as for my professors, they were supportive and wrote warmly encouraging comments on my papers and suggested that I go on to graduate school to pursue my interests, but they didn't exactly take up my cause as their own or anything.
Grad school didn't go as smoothly. I went into the Sociology department as a self-labeled radical feminist theorist, still seething with my own ideas and wanting to use theory and academia as my platform (aha! I'm using the word myself now!). I expected some caution and some friction from feminist women, and I expected the mainstream Sociology department to be somewhat resistant to a student espousing radical feminist perspectives, but I thought I'd prevail. I didn't. I was still looking for someone to care about my experiences and help me express them, and instead graduate school was more about professionalizing us and getting us to follow in the academic footsteps of our faculty advisors.
I did, however, finally get into print with my central ideas, in an academic journal article, "Same Door, Different Closet: A Heterosexual Sissy's Coming-out Party", printed in 1992. Not long after that, though, I ran out of funding and had burned too many bridges; I had to find a job and didn't have a good working relationship with anyone on faculty, so I never finished up.
I haven't done much with the idea of explaining this material to the world since then, until this new book.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
But (you may well be wondering), why was I bothering to explain myself to other people in the first place? That's a fair enough question. The thing is, for the first two decades of my life, it was not me who was making a big deal about me being a girl, or being girl-like, or not appropriately boy-like. And it was not me who was making a big deal about who I wanted to have sex with. Nope, I was getting an earful on those subjects, some of it very hostile and some of it liberally tolerant, and nearly all of it based on assumptions that didn't link up very closely with how I felt inside.
So when I figured myself out in 1980, I was all full of enthusiasm and relief and joy as well as more than a little righteous anger, because understanding myself also meant understanding the prejudices and expectations that I'd been up against all that time.
My first serious attempt to get something in writing and out there where it could be read was in 1982. I had a short book that was a combination of personal experiences and my own brand of gender and feminist theory and tried to find a publisher, but got nowhere with it.
After a couple of years, I got the idea of going back to college and majoring in women's studies, where this kind of thing would fit right in as relevant subject matter, and where my professors would maybe be interested in what I was trying to say. I did well as an undergraduate this time around, getting my BA in women's studies in 3 years, but the materials we studied in class were more at the introductory level and it wasn't really appropriate for me to make the classroom experience about me; as for my professors, they were supportive and wrote warmly encouraging comments on my papers and suggested that I go on to graduate school to pursue my interests, but they didn't exactly take up my cause as their own or anything.
Grad school didn't go as smoothly. I went into the Sociology department as a self-labeled radical feminist theorist, still seething with my own ideas and wanting to use theory and academia as my platform (aha! I'm using the word myself now!). I expected some caution and some friction from feminist women, and I expected the mainstream Sociology department to be somewhat resistant to a student espousing radical feminist perspectives, but I thought I'd prevail. I didn't. I was still looking for someone to care about my experiences and help me express them, and instead graduate school was more about professionalizing us and getting us to follow in the academic footsteps of our faculty advisors.
I did, however, finally get into print with my central ideas, in an academic journal article, "Same Door, Different Closet: A Heterosexual Sissy's Coming-out Party", printed in 1992. Not long after that, though, I ran out of funding and had burned too many bridges; I had to find a job and didn't have a good working relationship with anyone on faculty, so I never finished up.
I haven't done much with the idea of explaining this material to the world since then, until this new book.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
