We use the concept of "out", and of "coming out", to mean several closely related things. For some of us, that means we end up coming out three or more times, for each of the sub-meanings we've compressed into that one term.

There's that moment when you realize for the first time that yeah, "this is how I am", and it shifts how you think of yourself from then on. Prior to that, perhaps one was utterly clueless, or perhaps one was in denial and resistant to the idea. Or had occasionally looked at yourself that way, but hadn't reached any definitive conclusions before.

In my autobiographical book GenderQueer, I recall several times in the years immediately after high school where people -- with varying degrees of patience -- were trying to be supportive while waiting for me to realize what they thought they knew about me, waiting for me to come out to myself.

I came out to myself in this sense of coming out in December of 1979... the word "genderqueer" wasn't in use yet and I didn't know what to call it, but I had this sudden very clear understanding of this as a fundamental and central part of who I am.

So after that is the time when you first say it to others, letting the people who know you know this about you. This is the classic sense of being out of the closet. No longer knowing it but keeping it hidden.

Even here, this version of coming out subdivides: one may come out to one's sister, or one's best friend, or to one's immediate associates, without necessarily being out to one's employer, the neighbors, or Grandma Theresa who wouldn't understand. Or, in contrast, perhaps one makes posts about it in public-facing Facebook entries, where everyone can see.

I came out to my parents first, I think, since I was at home for Christmas break at the time, it was on my mind, and I dropped that on them when it seemed to fit the moment's conversation. Unlike people whose parents rejected them or accepted and continued to love them, I had parents who were mostly bewildered and uncomfortable with the subject matter. Our conventional model of what coming out is like is drawn from gay folks coming out. Most parents in 1979, and definitely today, aren't unfamiliar with the concept of being gay, regardless of what they think about it. That's far less true for being genderqueer. Especially before there was a word for it.

I've been pretty public and open-book about it, as well as other pariah-tagged aspects of my personal history and claimed identities and views, such as being a psychiatric survivor or being an anarchist or a nonestablishment form of theistic / spiritual. I had all of that on a personal web site in the 1990s. I once had an employer ask about my ideas for a project and my email program somehow stripped out all the email body I'd composed and only sent my signature -- which had a link to my web site. Next work day, my employers very cautiously asked what it was I was trying to suggest or propose to them about me being an escaped schizophrenic, a self-declared sissy, radical feminist, non-man male, etc! A couple years later, the person I'd met for dating on OKCupid wanted to know more about me and I referred her to my web site. Yeah, out.

Then there's the act of successfully coming out in such a way that one establishes an identity that everyone you encounter thinks about you in this way, it's your externally-facing identity for people to accept or reject.

This goes beyond merely being unhidden and uncloseted and requires an active public relations campaign. Because otherwise, people will tend to be introduced to you because of other aspects of who you are in life -- your role at work, the fact that you're a registered voter in their political party, your volunteer work with the stage crew of the local theatrical ensemble, or the fact that they're in the process of giving you a speeding ticket.

Embroidering or sewing on rainbow flags and a recognizable symbol or a pin or two, some bumper stickers and so forth, can go a long way to extending out to this kind of level. For some of us, personal presentation can also accomplish a lot of this.

I only have a modicum of this kind of "out presence" despite decades of trying to be a recognized activist about it. There are only recently such things as genderqueer flags and their recognition by the general public is still pretty limited, in addition to which (as I've often said) "genderqueer" is, itself, an umbrella term that doesn't really identify me or my situation anywhere near as fully as I wish to be out about it. It's like saying "et cetera". Vague wave of the hand in the general direction of trans, "and other ways of being gender atypical, whatever those may be". I invented my own symbol, and wore it on my denim jacket by 1981, but it didn't convey anything until I explained it.

So I'm still working on out.


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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.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in early 2022. Stay tuned for further details.



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page

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My radical feminist colleagues sometimes wonder why, since I'm claiming to be one of them, I use so much of the rhetoric of the gender activists, especially laying claim to a gender other than "man" for myself.

It's not how they are doing feminism. They reject a bucketload of gendered assumptions, roles, stereotypes, etc that are projected onto women in this society, but they still identify as women. Why, they ask, am I not approaching the matter the way they do?

Oh, and before anyone on my gender boards asks why I concern myself with the views of transgender-exclusive people at all, let me clarify that this question comes up among radical feminist women who are not opposed to the recognition of transgender people -- they just don't see the act, or the fact, of being transgender as being a feminist behavior in and of itself. Any more than it's an anti-racist or a disabilities-rights act.



Overall, I think women are much better at realizing how the world appears from a male perspective, and knowing a lot of the particulars of male experience, than men tend to be about incorporating women's views. This is true because the male experience is amplified and projected, and because women's safety and survival has often depended on understanding men. But be all that as it may, this is one area where those parameters don't apply. I haven't found feminist women to have much understanding of how the feminism terrain looks when you're approaching it as a male person.

• For individual males, there is no significant movement of like-minded males for us to join. I can readily imagine Mary Daly observing that this is a bit like saying the courts should have been lenient and sympathetic with OJ Simpson at his murder trial because, after all, he just lost his wife. Nevertheless, I'm going to cycle back to this point in a minute.

• Power: it's patriarchy after all, and people tend to comprehend women rising up against it, even if they think they shouldn't, even if they think the different roles and spheres of the sexes (etc) is naturally or divinely ordained or whatever. It's less obvious to many people why any male person has a vested interest in dismantling patriarchy or opposing it. So our motives are unclear -- to people in general and specifically to the feminists with whom we might seek to ally ourselves. Will our endeavors still leave us in power? If so, then this male version of "feminism" looks like it's just a parlor game, some superficial gloss. Kind of like lip gloss, you could say.

• Ladies and Women and Men: I think it was either Robin Morgan or Gloria Steinem, relating the story of having a sit-down with a newspaper or magazine's editorial policy board, and explaining why they didn't like them referring to adult female people as "girls" when the equivalent males were always designated as "men".

"So what would you prefer? 'Ladies'?", the editor asked them.

"We practically held our noses and winced. No, definitely not that. That term was polluted with notions of screening out those who aren't ladylike, and notions of narrowly defined behaviors, all that 'act like a lady' crap, you know? 'WOMEN', we told him."

Women was a preferable term because it was inclusive and pretty much stripped down to the biological: one was a woman whether one was a homemaker, a politician, a police officer; a lesbian, an asexual person, a hetersexually active person; maiden, crone, or mom. The matter of including transgender women wasn't on the map at the time of this conversation, but at the moment it seemed like a pretty universal term that would unify all the people that feminists wanted to unify.

The word "Man" does not function as the male equivalent of "Woman", however much the dictionary may say otherwise. It correlates far more closely to the way that "Lady" is used. There is the notion that not all people with the male biological merchandise qualify as men. Instead there are those males who are men and then there are the ones that fall short of that. It's a status to which all members of the relevant sex are assumed to aspire, and success is not so rare that only an elite handful make the grade (although there's some social ambivalence about how many "real men" exist), so everyone is supposed to be caught up in trying to be recognized as one, or to pass as one.


• The Generic: Feminists have long pointed out that "man" is the generic sex in our society, that the male experience is falsely universalized as if it applied to everyone, and that whenever the generic human is posited, that human is automatically sexed as a man. One consequence of this is that feminists could push away the special marked status of being treated as a woman and demand to be regarded as a generic human, with human rights and human privileges (and get accused of trying to be men when they did). But a male person cannot reciprocally push away the gendered assumptions about male people by embracing the generic human, because as males we're already assumed to be the generic human AND because since the special attributes associated with female people are attached only to the special marked value of Woman, they don't get applied along with male-associated characteristics when a male person lays claim to a generic ungendered identity.



My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, will be released later this year by Sunstone Press, and it describes my experience of setting out to be a women's studies major as a means of joining the feminists.

In the years that followed the period covered in that story, I shifted to the LGBTQIA platform, having already tried to speak as a participant in the feminist platform -- but found that it was not my platform to use. There was space for me to be a supporter, an ally, but not an activist in my own right, speaking for my own reasons and from my own interests and voicing my own political concerns.

Lacking a movement to join as a male person who'd been identified and treated as a non-masculine (i.e., sissy, femme, non-man) male, identity politics by its very nature lets me speak as me without having to speak "for all the guys". Other male people are welcome to join and say "me too" or they can remain Men if they feel correctly and accurately described by the generalizations and social notions thereof. I'm not telling them or the world at large that all of us male folks are unfairly and unpleasantly constrained by the pressures to be masculine and that we all want to be free of it. Instead, I'm establishing a proud and self-affirming identity as one male person who has chosen to embrace what I've been called, because that was my reaction from the start: "Yes, I am like one of the girls, and so? The girls are doing it right, they make sense to me and I don't want to be like you and the other boys!"



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Do you counsel young people trying to sort out their gender identity? You should read my book! It's going to add a new entry to your map of possibilities when you interact with your clients!

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.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer Stay tuned for further details.



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page

———————

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Index of all Blog Posts

I post in a lot of Facebook groups -- transgender groups, genderqueer groups, feminists groups, generic LGBT groups.

In one of the feminist groups, a participant took exception to me using transgender terms and transgender rhetoric. I replied that I'm just trying to communicate and I can lay things out using other words. I proceeded to explain a lot of the same things deriving my points from radical feminist theory, concepts and notions well-established as part of feminism.

"Ooooh", this person answered back. "So now you're going to mansplain feminism to us".




There's a reason I am mostly positioning what I have to say as part of the LGBTQIA dialog about gender these days. It's not that I am more fervently in agreement with what transgender activists have to say about gender. I have a lot of dissents with them, too, in fact. Been kicked out of a few when having a dissenting opinion was upsetting to people: the Trans, Enby & Genderqueer Network booted me to the curb, as did Transgender Support 30+, Non-Binary Gender Pride, Nonbinary Femmes, and GenderQueers+ ... so it is not as if feminists have a monopoly on "if you aren't saying exactly what we already agree with, you must be one of THOSE people, the wrong people, and we don't want you here".

But I'm less easily stripped of the authority to have an opinion in the first place. I identify as a genderqueer femme who is male. It isn't orthodox for transgender and it isn't exactly typical of what nonbinary and genderqueer people tend to say when they identify, but in general the rainbow has enough diversity and rhetoric about inclusiveness that it's hard for people to say I don't qualify or get to identify as I do. Individual lesbian, gay, trans, bi, genderqueer, or nonbinary people may take issue with what I say, but they've got less of a structured mission statement to point to that says I don't belong there.

But within feminism, as a person calling myself male, I am not regarded as a person for whom the platform exists.


My second book, *That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class*, comes out later this year. It explores the limitations of participation for a male person with political gender issues. Feminism was a beacon of light at the time I came out.

Some people ask why I bother to post in the feminist areas, especially the ones that don't condemn TERFs. It's feminist theory. The LGBTQIA world still has nothing to compare to it. It's the single most important political perspective to emerge from the 20th century. It has brilliant insights and develops a world-view that's coherent from top to bottom, individual behavioral nuance to ensconced political structure. And I'm a student and a participant, even if some of the world's feminists are not inclined to acknowledge me as a feminist.

But I can't effectively use it as my platform.



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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

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In 2020, I blogged a lot about my first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, which was released in March, and about gender issues and identity. The book is focused on my own life from 8th grade through early adulthood, culminating in me coming out, and with my book on my mind a lot, the perspective that I brought to gender was strongly shaped by tying things to what I'd been through and how I thought of it during those critical years.

I'm expecting my second book -- That Guy in our Women's Studies Class -- to come out in 2021, and I'll probably be focusing a lot more on that and less on the first book.


The second book picks up shortly after the first book ends, but it represents a pivot from one way of looking at the issue to a different way of framing it. During the months when things first clicked into place for me -- winter vacation break of 1979-1980 through mid-spring 1980 -- I primarily thought of myself as a different kind of male person, as different as gay guys were different, as different as trans people who transitioned to female were different, but different from either of those two identities as well: I was femme, in the same sense that a lot of gay guys were, in the same sense that our culture's stereotype about gay guys tended to project onto gay guys in general, but I was a heterosexual femme instead; and like the male-to-female transitioners, the person I was, my essential self, made a lot more sense when thought of and recognized as one of the girls or women, but unlike them I didn't wish to change my body or to cause people to assume I had a female body, so I was different from the transsexual people as well. There wasn't a word for a person like that, there wasn't a social concept of such a person, but thinking of myself in that fashion made everything make sense to me.

But trying to come out, trying to explain myself to other people that way? I wasn't making much sense to anyone except me.

When you spend some time trying to make sense to people, you end up focusing on the things that people already understand and using that as a starting point, and then moving from there.

In 1980, when there was no movement or concept of anything like "genderqueer" or "nonbinary" (or even the larger-umbrella notion of "transgender") to latch onto, the existing viewpoint that seemed like the easiest starting point was feminism. Feminists were the main people who didn't take it for granted that the way things generally were and historically had been, as far as what it did or did not mean to have the specific sexed body-type that you'd been born with, was simply how it was. They said it was sexist to say male people were supposed to be this way and female people were supposed to be this other way.

So I made that pivot -- instead of trying to explain myself as a fundamentally different kind of male person, a different identity, I started my conversations with references to the unfairness of being measured against a different set of expectations than I'd be measured against if I'd been born female.

I would weave into the discussion the fact that it affected me more than it might affect a male who more closely matched the expectations, but it affected all of us to some extent. It's a different argument. Instead of identity politics, where you're arguing that you are in a category that needs accommodation because it is currently mistreated, it's a system politics kind of argument, the same way that arguing for the right to free speech is -- if you've been arrested for saying something that's been banned from public discourse, you may argue that everyone should have freedom to speak, rather than arguing that you're in a category of silenced people. You can make both arguments (that lack of freeom of speech has a disproportionate affect on people in your category) but if you choose to frame it first and foremost as "everyone should have freedom of speech", you're positioning it as a system politics issue instead of primarily as an identity politics issue.

Of course, feminism was also an identity politics movement itself: it was centrally about women's historical oppression, and the unfairness towards female people of the system politics issues that feminism was raising. And most people thought of the feminist movement more as identity politics than as system politics.

Would I be able to express my issues and explain my situation from a starting point of feminist understandings, or would people disregard what I was trying to say because feminism was supposed to be about women's situation and not mine?

I didn't know, but it seemed like my best opportunity to engage people and communicate, so I set forth to find out.



———————

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 and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts