On one of the Facebook transgender boards, someone writes:

Does transgender mean you want to transition from your birth gender to the gender you identify with, like MtF or FtM? And you have to have gender dysphoria to be transgender?

That's the classic model of transgender, often called "binary transgender".

On a different transgender board, someone else complains:

I just love it when people tell me I can't identify as trans. As if nonbinary people aren't trans.

It's complicated. Part of what complicates it is that sex isn't the same thing as gender. And yet I often see transgender defined as "when a person's GENDER identity differs from the SEX they were assigned at birth". But the definition doesn't directly speak to whether being transgender can mean you have a GENDER that differs from the SEX you are assigned now and every day whenever people see you, or a GENDER that differs from the SEX that you consider *yourself*, for that matter.

Do you need to present as the SEX that corresponds to your GENDER in order to be transgender? Do you need to "pass"? What if you are fine with the SEX to which you were assigned at birth but your GENDER happens to not have the same value and you happen to be perfectly fine with that mismatch? (Even if the rest of the world is a lot less fine with that?)

I have chosen NOT to identify as transgender, preferring genderqueer, but most of my transgender allies acknowledge that that is my choice and that they'd accept me as transgender if I did choose to call myself that.



I encounter people denying my identity, too. I've had socially liberal educated people who accept gay, lesbian, and transgendered people dismiss me.

"I consider Trans people as the Gender they feel they are, whether they've had surgery or not. That isn't at all relelvant to your case because YOU AREN"T TRANS!"

And I've had transgender people tell me, as they've told the person who identifies as "nonbinary transgender", that we don't count:

since you strongly believe you're a woman...then you need to transition. There's no such thing as a male woman you're confused or you're a troll

... and other transgender people have informed me that I am seeking the impossible or even that I'm a threat:

if you mean to say that a 'woman' (trans or cis) can be 'male' in that they can have facial hair, a deep voice - any of those trappings that categorise them in the mind of the masses by default as 'men' rather than as 'women', there we have a problem...

We are a collective society, and thus our actions, decisions, and ideations have to, at one way or another, be corroborated by, or rebuked by, the collective society we are a part of. If you present outwardly as 'male' but you identify as a woman, one cannot ever expect the collective to acknowledge the latter while the former exists. You cannot push the fabric of society so far to breaking point and expect any sort of acceptance...

What happens to those of us who actually worked hard to transition? What happens to those of us who have nearly been brought to bankruptcy because we have felt the disconnect, have suffered through, had gone through the torment of society making us suffer for it, and worked hard to make the suffering cease? If your ideologies are to be a new 'norm', that would render all of our hard work meaningless.

When I go to give lectures and make presentations, one of my storyboards is a sign that says It's something else. I am sorry that people in the transgender community sometimes feel like I (and other people trying to explain new identities) are picking a fight with them. The process of differentiating can sometimes come across that way. Any group trying to explain themselves to the world at large is likely to start off with a group that the world is already familiar with, and then explains how their identity is different. Didn't trans people themselves have to do some of that a few years ago? --

People used to say and think things like this (CONTENT WARNING: DISMISSIVE AND INTOLERANT LANGUAGE):

Oh yeah, the transsexuals and tranvestites. They're the gay guys who dress as women and call each other 'girl' and call each other 'she' and stuff. It's a subcommunity within the gay world.

OR

Transgender people... it's like it's more socially acceptable to be a straight woman than to be a gay man, and more acceptable to be a straight guy than to be a lesbian. So that's why they do it.

NOT TO MENTION...

So let me get this right... she was a he, she was born male, and then transitioned and became a woman, but she likes girls, so she's a lesbian? I'm sorry that's all fucked up. What's the purpose of transitioning to female if you're attracted to women? This dude needs a psychiatrist!

So transgender people had to explain that being transgender is about gender, not sexual orientation. They had to differentiate themselves from gay and lesbian people. And some of the people they had to explain this to were people in the gay and lesbian community, so they spent a fair amount of time saying "I am not like you. I'm like this instead".

Now you're on the receiving end. And we're pushing off against you.

But we could not have done this without you. Your prior success makes this possible.

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This sentence is false.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

... and later, starting college ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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


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



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

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

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Marie, a transgender woman, does not like my distinction between sex and gender.

I identify as a person who has both a sex and a gender, the first of which ("male") I explain as my physiological or morphological physical structure and the second ("sissy" or "femme" or "girl") is who I am as a person, which isn't defined by my body or its parts.

Marie objects to the way I speak about physiological sex. She considers herself to be both wholly a woman and fully female, but has not sought out bottom surgery and says that if I establish that my sex is male on the basis of having physical male parts, that language could be used to say that she is male because she has a penis.

Is there room for us both?


"Biological sex is ALSO a social construct"

Marie says that "biological sex" is a social construct, just as gender is. She brings up the existence of intersex people to illustrate how the notion that there are two biological sexes is not an empirical physical fact at all. She says all this as a prelude to dismissing sex as different from gender: if they're both social constructs, and gender is defined as social, sex isn't a different thing, it's all gender. (And hers, she says, is all female; she goes on to state that I sound confused about what I am; I don't consider myself confused at all though).

What does it mean when we say something is a social construct? It means that we are relying on definitions that we've learned socially in order to interpret the thing, whatever the thing may be, so our interpretations have those socially learned definitions stirred into them, they aren't just inherently there in the "thing in itself". The implication of saying that something is a "social construct" is that it could be constructed differently — that whatever inherent characteristics may be attached to the "thing in itself" could be interpreted different if we had different socially learned definitions to apply to that thing.

In the 1950s our culture had many shared beliefs about gender differences that by 1970 had been brought into question, most centrally by the feminist movement. So here we have elements of femininity (and masculinity) that were originally seen as built-in but later seen as socially constructed, and the possibility that they could be constructed quite differently was widely recognized.

Are our notions of "biological sex" as loosely tied to anything that isn't similarly flexible and arbitrary?

I personally don't think so. I can't know for sure, since I can't magically get my head outside of socially learned concepts, and this is an important point, this lack of certaintly, but my strong suspicion is that if we could indeed magically "reset" social beliefs about sex over and over again in random ways and then have the resulting culture try to describe human bodies, we'd end up with descriptions that we would recognize as "male" and "female", with the changes mostly around the handling of variations and exceptions. In other words, I do think our culture's insistent shoehorning of people into two categories and denying variations and exceptions is a social construct, but I don't think it's likely that any of those alternative-reality resets would fail to come up with the observation that for the most part people tend to fall into two primary categories based exclusively on their physical morphology.

The descriptions and terms might be different but we'd still recognize them as descriptions of the human body and the sexes that we know about. Perhaps they would speak of whether the urethra comes down the barrel of the tingly erogenous tissue or instead comes to a separate opening farther below, and with that as the initial distinction they would note that most (although not all) of the people with the separate urethral opening have a comparatively small tingly-erogenous-tissue organ with much of it embedded below the surface of the pelvic muscles, and that most (but not all) of the people with the urethra-down-the-barrel configuration have two glandular masses at the base surrounded by a loose envelope of tissue, whereas the majority (albeit not all) of those with the separate opening have similar glandular masses internally located and significantly higher up, and so on and so forth.

Scientists often use what they call a "double blind" test, which means neither the researchers nor the participants know how previous participants have categorized or classified something. I believe that, within the limitations of different words and terms being used or created, human observers stripped of all our current cultural beliefs about what the sexes are would describe two (not five, not fourteen) primary structural configurations as the main pattern, plus a double handful of variations and exceptions. And those two primary patterns would be quite recognizable to us as what we call "sex".

Gender is different. Almost any component of gender is arguble as to whether it would reliably show up again and again if we did these magic "resets": aggression and adversarial tendencies? nurturing and caregiving behaviors? attention span differences? verbal fluency? math skills? social awareness and facilitation of the social peace? visual-spatial skills? visual sexual erotic responsiveness? We don't know whether these would necessarily be observed to be sex-linked differences or if our culture's beliefs about them have more to do with history and various ideologies and prescriptive attitudes. That is why we call these things gender and distinguish them from sex, which is the "thing" to which they are attached by social definition and connotation and so forth.



The Female Penis

I do see why Marie wouldn't appreciate being told that insofar as her body includes a penis, it is a male body. Marie says she is female, therefore this is a female penis. "There have been enough gatekeepers going around saying I don't count as trans unless I intend to have bottom surgery, and I don't see how all that gatekeeping is making things better for anyone", she says.

Suzanne interrupts to explain that she is the proud owner of a clitoris, not a penis. It was incorrectly described as a penis when she was born, and some people might still call it that if they didn't know any better, but it's a clitoris; it's hers and she's female. She has a friend, Malcolm, a transgender man, who has a mangina. "The identity of a person's body parts is a matter for the person to decide. Defining something as a vagina or a penis or whatever, that's socially constructed along with everything else, OK?"

It does seem like it would be useful when considering questions like "what sex is this person?" or "what organ is that?" to ask the question "according to whom?" That would enable me to say that I am male, not because my body is inherently male but because I have classified it that way myself, without imposing an unwanted definition on Marie, who is female, who classifies her body in that fashion.

It also lets us reference altercasting, of which I have spoken before. Altercasting is the assignment of identity by other people. Transgender people tend to speak in terms of having been "assigned male at birth" (AMAB) or "assigned female at birth" (AFAB). That's actually not a process that occurs just once (when someone is born); instead people continue to assign other people to a sex (and to other identity-factors). When some (or most) other people tend to altercast a person in a way that contradicts the identity that they claim for themselves, that creates a tension, usually an unpleasant one, whether we designate it as "dysphoria" or not, whether we identify as "transgender" or not.

Intersex people have tended to get altercast as one of the two binary sexes, and then their physical divergence or variations from the norm for that sex become treated as something wrong and in need of fixing. This coercive and invasive practice destroys physically healthy tissue for the sake of imposing an altercast physical identity on people without their consent, perhaps the ultimate form of this tension. But any of us may have reason to interpret our physical morphology in a way different from how others have done. I'm not trying to take that away from any of us.

The tension I experienced in my lifetime has not been because I disputed the categorization of my body as male, but because I was at odds with the additional meanings that are culturally associated with maleness. Gender. I was being misgendered but without being mis-sexed.


A New Color in the Spectrum

I don't identify as transgender. I don't consider myself to be a female person who was incorrectly identified as a male person. I consider myself to be a male person who has correctly been recognized as a male person.

But there is a huge component of characteristics, behaviors, personality attributes, priorities and choices and stuff, that are assumed about a person who is perceived as male. These were wrong. My constellation of attributes and characteristics were recognized by others as being more like what tends to be assumed about people who are classified as female. They said so. I saw it myself, I clearly fit in with the girls, not the boys. These traits had far more to do with who I was, as a person, than my biological plumbing did. Other people made an issue of it, it wasn't "normal". Meanwhile, whenever I was treated as self-evidently one of the boys, I experienced it as being misgendered, that's not who I was. So I, too, made an issue of my difference.

It's not the same situation that Marie is in. Similar, but not the same. It's something else. I'm a gender invert. I'm an authentic person. I have authentic political and social concerns. They are different concerns than those of Marie and other transgender women, although we have things in common and should be supportive of each other. Clearly we're in the greater LGBTQIA (or MOGII *) spectrum together and should be allies.

But I will not be silenced as the price of Marie's comfort level.


* MOGII = "minority orientation, gender identity, and intersex"


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= A =

I'm amazed at how often someone introduces themselves as having a specific identity and goes on to explain in more detail how life has been for them and what their experience has been, only to have people immediately contradicting their identity: "Well I think that makes you this other thing, not what you are calling yourself", or "You shouldn't use that term, it doesn't belong to you, only people who fit such-and-suchg other description should call themselves that", or even "You're just a mainstream person with no relevant differentiated identity to speak of, and you should quit calling yourself by any identity-label".

It happens within generic LGBTQIA community groups, it happens within highly specific support groups organized around one or more solitary letters from that acronym, and it happens within the larger surrounding society as well. "I reject all of what you're saying about yourself -- because you're calling yourself something that you're not".

It's a special form of not listening. I mean, any time a person uses a label for themself, it's a form of shorthand, like a book title or the title of a term paper or something. It's never going to express the entire thought process, but it's their chosen starting point. Then they go on to elaborate and explain about themselves and how they fit in (or fail to fit in) against this backdrop and that backdrop and how they have come to understand themselves as a person.

Now, it's one thing for someone to give a long thoughtful reply to the other person's entire narrative and offer comments and show understandings of that person's experiences, and to then mention along with all that other stuff that they think maybe this or that other term might be more appropriate or more useful. But to give a reply where the entire focus of the response is "you're not what you just called yourself"? That ignores the person's story and puts all the focus on the label as if the correctness of the label were the only important thing being said here.

It's the equivalent of writing a movie review of Sixth Sense that contained nothing except "This isn't about the sixth sense. The sixth sense is extra-sensory perception, like when you know what is going to happen before it happens. This Bruce Willis flick is just a ghost story, give it a pass". Or reviewing Boy Meets Girl by writing "Robby already knew Ricky at the beginning of this movie so it has nothing to do with 'Boy Meets Girl', don't bother".

People in narrowly defined groups sometimes do this as a gatekeeping function: "You tell a nice story but you aren't one of us and you shouldn't really be here in our space". People in broader LGBTQIA groups often do it as a form of shoehorning: "I divide the queer world up into these categories and excuse me but you belong in this category". People in the broad mainsteam culture do it fairly regularly as a way of denying the legitimacy of a marginalized identity: "You say you're that specific kind of person but really you're just a normal person who is trying to explain away your behavior or the outcome of it".

In all cases, it erases the full detailed story that the individual is trying to tell, by refusing to acknowledge that it has meaning aside from functioning as an example of a piece of terminology.


= B =

This is not just a case of people being dense or of getting caught up in little things that don't matter. It's political. They're rejecting what is being said because they don't like it, they feel threatened by it, they don't want a wider awareness of this kind of experience or understanding to catch on and they want to shut it down.

A person's choice of their own labels is also political, of course. To label our experience in the first place, in this manner, is to assert that it is part of a larger pattern, and that what we've been through has been the way it has been because of stuff that we have in common with other people who share the same identity-factor, that it is categorical, that it's an aggregate identity and not just our own personal narrative or our own unique personal quirks and traits.

There's always a backdrop, too. One chooses one identity as a way to push away some other identity, a default identity of some sort, that is otherwise constantly being foisted upon one. For example, if there were not a heteronormative expectation no one would need to come out as gay or lesbian. In the absense of being able to identify as gay and be recognized and understood as such, an individual's behavior, if still seen through heteronormative assumptions, looks strange: "Eww, you are so sex-obsessed and so unpicky that you would do perverted things like have erotic experiences with people of the same sex, which is clearly less desirable, so you are therefore a sex maniac and a threat to public decency!" Asserting the different identity (gay) shifts perception by establishing a different norm, a different set of expectations and values for understanding those same behaviors: "Oh, so for you, erotic experiences with the same sex are the desirable ones, so when you're sexually interested at all, that's where it will occur and it doesn't mean you're more sex-obsessed or less picky, you're different".


= C =


Our backdrop includes a world of existing labels, too. But they may not be useful to us, especially because labels that describe people so often bundle together a whole batch of meanings and implications that the person trying to explain their identity needs to untie and separate from each other.

Imagine a female person, perhaps from a previous century, who wants to designate herself as an expert in her field. The male people in her world call themselves "masters" of their subject areas. But "master" is a term that in her time is reserved exclusively for male people. The corresponding term for female use was "mistress". But the two terms have very different connotations, and she finds that saying she is a "Mistress of Science" doesn't convey at all what she wants to express. Perhaps she chooses to refer to herself as a "Master of Science" only to be contradicted by people who tell her that it is inappropriate for her to use the word "master" because it means she is male, and she isn't. The problem is that mastery, in the relevant sense, has been regarded as male, and yet she is. A person possessing mastery. Her choice of the term "Master of Science" is political. It is controversial (or was, once upon a time) because it is political. The people rejecting her entire claim on the basis of not liking her term for herself, that is also political, and their rejection of the entirety of what she's trying to say by focusing exclusively on her choice of term, that's also political: the politics of Not Listening.


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On an authors' message board someone started a thread asking if we authors were perhaps an arrogant lot.

I replied,

Damn right I'm arrogant. I have a story to tell. I'd prefer that folks fork over the cover price and voluntarily submit themselves to my thoroughly entertaining written word, but I would strongly consider chaining each and every member of my species to a convenient chair and prying their eyelids open with toothpicks and reading it out loud to them. I haven't worked out the logistics of that yet but morally and intellectually I have no intervening compunctions. (You have been forewarned). Hmm, now if I just went after the literary agents, maybe...

Before long, another author answered that with

Yeah..... admirable confidence. I can't help but want to applaud it.

But... nah... we don't all deserve to be read. We are not entitled. I hope you understand. We all have our causes.

Now, my instinctive initial reaction to that is to respond that this isn't about being an author, an artist, a creative person wanting to share an artistic work; it's about being a marginalized mistreated person, a victim of a systemic wrong that needs to be righted, and that yes, dammit it is too my right to speak and to insist that I be heard. The ethics of social justice says I have the right to rise up and do what I must. And so forth.

But like so many other things, that, too, is an oversimplification. And because indulging in that oversimplification really is a bit arrogant, it's appropriate and occasionally necessary to embrace a little self-doubt now and then. Come along with me, if you will...

* Authority — There's a built-in claim in my social justice assertions, that the way I see things is damned well the way things actually are. That sissy femme males are unjustly treated by society in general, that it does make sense to think of us (or to think of ourselves) in the specific manner that I'm advocating, as differently gendered people who aren't wrong or inferior, that society as a whole becomes better in its entirety if it changes so as to accommodate our existence and begin accepting us on our own terms, and so forth. Well, yeah, I do think exactly that, I do believe those things. But there are plenty of people who think otherwise. Some of them think that the things I'm making a big deal about are no big deal. Some of them think I'm as silly and my arguments as useless as someone screaming that gravity is unfair and should be repealed because skinned knees hurt. Some of them question the authenticity of my conscious motives ("You're trying to jump onto the LGBTQ bandwagon because you're a boring white hetero cis male who desperately wants to be edgy") or the coherence of my mind ("You admit you were diagnosed with a mental illness for spouting this stuff so pardon me if I don't take you seriously"). From what source other than unadorned arrogance does someone like me derive the confidence that right is on my side?

* Objective Meaning — Then there's the bandying about of these aggregate terms and the assignment to them of social meaning and significance, as if they existed and have always existed objectively, just like I describe them, whether people at any given time recognized them that way or not. The notion that in human society there exists a bunch of male people who are essentially girls, who have the same gender polarity as the girls have, and that this category exists independent of physical sex or from sexual orientation, and that I'm shining my spotlight on this phenomenon so that everyone will see it and realize it and recognize us and start thinking of us in a different manner. Yeah, so what's wrong with that? I mean, yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. What's wrong with it is that it assumes that human experiences have a meaning in and of themselves. And that isn't true. Human experiences have meaning to someone or else they don't have that meaning at all. Meaning in general is "to an observer", not divorced from interaction and embedded in things apart from people. And that is all the more important, as philosophical truths go, when the subject matter is our own human experience. If there are no sissy femme male people who think of ourselves as being of girlish gender yet male of physical body, then it isn't that we exist but think of ourselves wrongly or inaccurately, is it, so much as we don't exist as described in the first place?

You probably suspect that I have an answer to that. That I'm not really engaging in a bunch of self-doubt and purpose-questioning, and that I'm actually tossing all that out there in order to pontificate intellectually?

Of course I am. Wait, no I'm not. Um, well... the self-doubt is real, and questioning my arrogant self is genuinely important. But no, I'm not paralyzed by self-doubt and derailed from being able to continue. I said certain things were an oversimplification. I didn't say they were fundamentally wrong. Oversimplifications tend to contain quite a bit of truth. I think these do. That's why I continue to embrace them and behave as if they were entirely the truth (most of the time). Sometimes a simplified understanding of something is more useful than the fully accurate version. Earlier tonight I drove to and from the village of Huntington, behaving as if I were on the surface of a more or less flat and motionless terrain. I know the earth is round and is plummeting around the sun as well as spinning around its own axis, but it's just easier to drive when I bracket that stuff off as irrelevant to what I'm doing. You get what I'm saying?

So here's a somewhat less oversimplified notion of the social activism thing:

* How people think of themselves and their experience and identity is not limited to concepts that they could put into words and stick labels onto. Most people, at some point in their lives, recognize themselves in a description that they hear. Prior to hearing that description, they might not have thought of themselves in quite those terms, or seen the same connections, but the fact that they do recognize themselves in the description means that it resonates with what they understand about themselves emotionally or connects up a lot of little pieces that they understand about themselves cognitively. So there's no need to make it an either/or proposition. Yes, meaning is "to a subject", especially the meaning of human experiences themselves, but meaning is not the same as a specific verbal description.

* Verbal description is an art, not a precision science. There is not an exact set of verbal terms lying in a box, each one corresponding to a specific human experience. So none of the attempts to explain human experience are "objectively correct" but all of them echo something truthful and accurate, and the better ones resonate with people as truly significant expressions of what our lives are like.

* It is still arrogant to be so insistent about expressing my verbal description on the theory that it will, in fact, resonate with people. That it will shed light on the human condition, that it can change things. Arrogance is a form of being pushy, less than fully delicate with other people's sensitivities and perhaps their disinterest in considering a set of ideas that seem foreign and strange to them. I have often described my coming out to myself in 1980 as an act of permanently losing my temper about the whole gender situation. I act fueled by anger, by a constant glowing rage that makes me willing and able to be pushy in that fashion. That a marginalized and ostracized person would feel and react with anger and stand up for herself is predictable and natural. And socially healthy. It's not practical for me to chain people to their chairs and force-feed them my thoughts, so the social world surrounding me is not at risk from my anger — I can't attain my objectives coercively whether I'm arrogant enough to consider myself entitled to do so or not. And that's true of others in my position, specifically or generally.

As a practical matter, our fury reconciles as determination. Or stubbornness if you prefer.

The arrogance is something you're just going to have to live with.

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A gender invert is someone whose gender is the opposite of the gender associated with their physical sex. Male girls. Female boys. I'm a male girl and I identify as a gender invert. Hi!

The other component of being a gender invert is accepting both one's physical sex and one's unexpected gender as natural and correct.

(I just realized the other day that although I've been blogging about this stuff since 2014, I've never done a blog post specifically about the term!)

Origin

Havelock Ellis popularized the term "gender invert" back in the late 1800s. At the time, he was promoting the notion that homosexual people of either sex were essentially people who possessed a bunch of characteristics of the opposite sex. That notion got challenged and discarded. Most researchers now agree that being a feminine male, or a masculine female, is not what causes a person to be a gay male or a lesbian. ₁ So the term "gender invert" was basically discarded and left to rot on the sidewalk.

I'm reclaiming it. Just because it has nothing to do with causing sexual orientation doesn't mean that gender inversion itself doesn't exist. Or that it isn't a useful term. Our society is now familiar with male-to-female and female-to-male transgender people, transitioners who address their situation by bringing their sex into compliance with their gender. "Gender invert" can refer to a similar person who continues to live a life as a male girl or a female boy, someone who embraces rather than seeks to fix the apparent disparity between sex and gender.


The Umbrella Thing

People often offer me other terms to use instead. I am told that I could refer to myself (and to people like me) as "nonbinary transgender". As opposed to the binary transgender people who transition male-to-female or female-to-male. But as a gender invert, I am operating with some binary assumptions myself, for better or worse: in order to describe a person as having "the opposite" gender from the gender that normally goes with their sex, we're sort of assuming two body types (male and female) and two genders (boy and girl), because only in a binary two-category system do you have an obvious "opposite".

I don't mean to be disrespectful to intersex people or to people whose gender identity isn't binary like that. But most of us who are alive today grew up in a world that uses a binary system for categorizing people by sex. And like most identities, the identity of gender invert exists against the backdrop of society and its existing library of categories.

Yes, I suppose "gender invert" is technically an identity that falls under the transgender umbrella, since anyone who is a gender invert would have a gender identity other than the one that other folks assume them to have. And "gender invert" also falls under the genderqueer umbrella, since anyone who is a gender invert has a gender other than the normative, expected gender, therefore is queer, gender-wise. And since you can't express "male girl" in a strict binary system where everyone is either male (and hence a man or boy) or else female (and thereby a woman or girl), "gender invert" fits under the umbrella term "nonbinary" as well.

I now have all the umbrellas I need.

What I don't have is enough specific recognition of my situation. Like lesbians who felt more erased than included by the use of the term "gay", and preferred to see the word "lesbian" to reflect an awareness of them, I want to see "gender invert" spreading as a concept and as a terminology.


What gender inversion ISN'T -- aka what not to say to a gender invert

• Being a gender invert is not another way of saying you have a masculine or feminine "side". All of me is feminine. Side, back, front, top, bottom. I'm not less feminine in my gender than some other kind of person. A gender invert is not someone halfway inbetween a person who is cisgender and a person who is transgender and getting hormones and surgeries. I find the "side" thing and the assumptions that I'm only semi-feminine to be negating and insulting.

• Obviously, since we're not living in Havelock Ellis's time, we all know that gender identity isn't the same as sexual orientation, right? Actually, weirdly enough, you know where you see these elements conflated with each other a lot? For gays and lesbians. Someone affirms a proud gay femme's identity by saying "Oh sure I always knew you were gay, totally flaming" and then describes the person's childhood femininity. Or speaks of their daughter's incipient identity as a lesbian by describing how butch she was in fourth grade. Well, I should not attempt to speak on behalf of gay or lesbian people who also identify as gender inverts, but yeah, do try to separate the two components in your mind and think before you speak. Me, I'm a sissy femme girlish male whose attraction is towards female folks. I need the term "gender invert" because we don't have a term for someone like me.

• No, this isn't about committing genderfuck or cleverly trying to "undermine gender" and I'm not an agender person and I'm not particularly genderfluid either. Some people are. Here's a respectful and sincere salute to those who are. Nope, I'm gendered. I'm differently gendered, I'm queerly gendered, but I'm genuinely gendered. I have a gender identity.


But why?

I suppose in some ways being a gender invert is a bit old-fashioned, like being bisexual instead of pansexual or something. Perhaps it appears to you like a step backwards, reaffirming those binary categories even as it tries to carve out a noncompliant gender identity from them.

I don't think it is. I think it's like coming into an ongoing argument about whether to allow limited medical marijuana use or keep it completely illegal -- and saying it should be 100% legal for all uses, recreational and otherwise.

If it had ever already been established that it's normal and healthy that some percent of female people are extremely masculine, and similarly that some portion of male folks are entirely feminine, it would be a different situation, but it hasn't been and it isn't. And since it hasn't been established that way, proclaiming the desirability of androgyny and/or a gender-free world in which individuals aren't encouraged to identify with either of those moldy old gendered identities is making that the goal post. For those supporting our side of the debate, that is. The other side maintains its goal posts in the traditional gender conformities. I've never been much of a sports fan but I'm pretty sure that means all the action is in between neutral territory and traditional territory.

I'm moving the goal posts.

But moving the goal posts isn't why I'm doing this. I'm doing this because this is who I am. The fact that I think it's progressive is just an added benefit. The fact that some may think it's regressive and old-fashioned instead is just an added burden.

I'm speaking out about it either way.


You, when speaking about the many identities covered by the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ acronym, or when compiling a list of identity flags for a pride day illustration, please make a mention of gender inverts. I'd appreciate it. I'm here, too.



₁ See for example "Same-sex Sexuality and Childhood Gender Non-conformity: a spurious connection", Lorene Gottschalk, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol 12, No. 1, 2003



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This was something new, a phenomenon for which there was no name.

Galileo saw that the small "stars" surrounding Jupiter were MOVING, following Jupiter in the sky and, furthermore, shifting in their relative locations. They were orbiting Jupiter. Jupiter had objects of its own that were like the earth's moon!

"Moon", at that time, was a term that specifically meant THE Moon, the one and only. Galileo did not, in fact originally refer to them as "moons"; in his first distributed description of his discovery, he called them "Medicean stars" (allegedly hoping this would please the powerful de Medici family).

That term didn't stick. From our vantage point, it's easy to see that calling them "stars" was a poor long-range choice, as they aren't stars and don't have much in common with stars aside from being points of light in the sky. And yet, even so, the rocky little objects orbiting between Mars and Jupiter are still called "asteroids", which is almost as much of a misnomer, so it's possible that "Medicean stars" could have hung on as the new term.

We could have given them entirely new names, of course, without repurposing any existing terms (with or without modifiers like "Medicean"). Or we could have said they were objects that were LIKE the Moon, although that doesn't give them a name.

We call them "moons". The original understanding of the word "moon" was modified, expanded from referencing only the ghostly galleon that illuminates the earthly sky so as to include these similar bodies that orbit other planets.

As you'll recall from your English homework, calling the Moon a "ghostly galleon" is "using a metaphor". Calling the objects orbiting Jupiter "stars" is also a sort of metaphor, and in the context where "Moon" specifically meant our moon, calling them "moons" is an application of language use that is cousin to the metaphor. Our own moon is not literally a galleon (or ghostly) nor are the objects orbiting Jupiter literally stars; a moon orbiting Jupiter is also not identically the same thing as the moon that folks in Galileo's time already knew, and to some people it might have seemed wrong to extend the meaning of "moon" to the new objects.

The success of a literary metaphor depends on the reader's or audience's tendency to embrace the compelling significance of what the compared items have in common. There's always a certain tension between the "wrongness" of asserting an identity that the object doesn't quite literally have, on the one hand, and the "rightness" of the observed similarity that makes us nod in recognition.

Successfully expanding the definition of a word--like "moon" to embrace the new Galilean objects--also involves a tension between the fact that the word's original meaning did not include them versus the compelling similarities that makes such an expanded use resonate with us as sensible and appropriate.

Stating, on the other hand, that the Galilean objects surrounding Jupiter are like the Moon is "using a simile". A simile avoids that tension; it doesn't have that level on which it is using a word to mean something beyond the zone in which it has been applied before. Linguistically, it is a weaker formulation, because it comes with an implicit "except for", a gesture towards the dissimilarities that may exist whether they are specifically laid out or not.

Suppose a feminine male person chooses to say "I am LIKE a girl" or "I am LIKE one of the women". It is, on the one hand, a formulation less likely to provoke a response of "No you're not" than the statements "I am one of the women" or "I'm a girl". On the other hand, it's weaker; hovering around it is an invisible codicil that says "except for these ways in which I'm not". And it also doesn't give a name to the speaker of the statement.

That doesn't mean I haven't used it, myself. In fact I've often said something to the effect of "I am a male who is like a girl or woman except for having a male body". And because that doesn't provide an identity-name (because, as I said, similes don't), I've called myself various NEW things like "invert" or attempted to seize on other existing terms like "sissy". But at a certain point in my life, a partner of mine listened at great length to my descriptions and my backstory and she nodded and said "Oh, I get it, you're a girl!"

I liked it. It had a definite "cut to the chase" directness to it and it emphasized exactly the connection I wanted people to realize in their heads.

I do get those "no you're not" responses from people. There are a lot of folks who resist the expanded word use, the claimed identity--some because they only consider people born female with XX chromosomes to be girls & women, some because they only consider people who are morphologically female to be girls & women, and some because they only consider people who represent themselves to other people as physically female to be girls & women.

Such attitudes are not exactly uncommon. Check out these opinions, in which folks reject anything other than a "two genders maximum" world, even among some who accept the validity of transgender people.

On the other side of things--our side of this argument--there is a lot of resentment among gender atypical, nonbinary, etc people about having our identities refused, our self-definitions rejected. I'm familiar with that firsthand: when someone does the "no you're not" thing in response to my self-identification, yeah, it's intrusively arrogant and sure as hell not reassuring when they attempt to explain to me who I am instead. But the goal, for me, isn't really to get everyone to use my terminology. Well, OK, I do recognize that appearances may be to the contrary... I do have some ego investment and a fondness for the order and pattern I choose, so yeah I PREFER that folks use my terminology! It makes me angry when they refuse to! But even so, I'll say it again: my primary goal isn't to get everyone to use my terminology.

In your schema, in your way of seeing the world and categorizing things and so on, maybe my maleness is of more categorical importance to you than my femininity. If you prefer to conceptualize me as a "guy who is like a girl" in ways other than the physical, I don't reject that formulation, even though I resent being contradicted. I suppose we do all tend to altercast other people within the privacy of our own heads, categorizing them into the identities we perceive them as.

But do not say I am just a guy who is like a girl. Do not say I am merely a male who has feminine characteristics. There's no "just" or "merely" about it. In stating my identity I am making a big deal of it and saying this is a Difference, something that sets me and my experience apart. On that one, do me the courtesy of not rejecting that claim, at least not until you've taken time to hear my story.

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Many folks in the transgender community speak or write about having a sort of schematic diagram in the brain, one that told them that despite the morphological body they were born with, they were SUPPOSED to have a different sex of parts. Trans feminist author Julia Serano (Whipping Girl) is one good example.

Note that no reference is being made to the complex bucket of personality attributes, priorities, behaviors and behavioral nuances, tastes, expressions, or any of the rest of the nonphysical characteristics that tend to be thought of as part of gender.

In fact, if we agree that gender and sex are not one and the same, this phenomenon isn't even about gender. And it isn't about society, or, if it is, it is limited to wanting to be perceived as the correct sex based on how one is able to present when visiting the nude beach. Or in one's bedroom, to one's partner.

I don't have that. I have never felt anything akin to a wiring diagram in my brain that insisted I was supposed to have female parts. That experience is utterly foreign to me.



I think most folks, when they think of transgender people, picture someone like Caitlin Jenner or Chaz Bono, someone who was born one sex but who at some point came to realize they were trans, and they began dressing and presenting as that other sex and they obtained sexual reassignment surgery and hormonal treatments, and now they dress as and behave as the new sex to which they transitioned.

It is not unreasonable for them to do so. The various online and in-person transgender communities and support groups not only contain many such people, they also tend to be places where the people in attendance also think of transgender people in those terms.

But let's backtrack to the schematic-diagram thing. Let's split apart some concepts. Picture someone totally masculine in all the traditional ways, and attracted to feminine women, an extremely conventional kind of guy. Except that Joan isn't a guy. Joan says this male body is just wrong. It has the wrong parts. So she is transitioning to female, at which point she will be a very masculine person with conventionally male interests, but female, and she will live her life as a lesbian.

I haven't met Joan (she's a hypothetical person) but I've described her and had people reassure me that there are indeed such people.

Joan might have a difficult time explaining her situation to the support group. People in the support group often conflate gender and sex as much as mainstream people out on the sidewalk. People describe themselves as children and say things like "I always knew I was female" There's a reason for this: medical interventions for transgender people are expensive, and some people are not convinced of the merits of what medical science is able to do for them. And the transgender community surely does not want to reject people who are planning to transition but haven't the resources to do so yet, or to make such people feel relegated to second-class trans citizens. Besides that, there's an understandable resentment at being treated like sideshow spectacles and asked to lower their pants, verbally or literally, and show folks the merchandise.

But Joan would be facing special barriers in addition to the ones that trans people in general face. Dealing with the gatekeeper-doctors, no picnic for any trans person trying to get cleared for medical treatments, would be a nightmare. (They tend to want all male-to-female transitioners to be utter Barbie dolls and they are inclined to question the psychological readiness of any transitioner who seems to still express the traits of their birth-sex). It might be difficult for Joan to explain her situation to the group as something a bit different from the hassles experienced by other transitioning women.

And think about the current "transgender people in bathrooms" issue. Joan's experience of that is going to be markedly different from that of trans people who adopt and embrace a lot of signature items to convey their target identity. A post-transition Joan would face the same hostilities and challenges as any other extremely butch dyke. How does she explain to other trans women how her issues are not entirely identical to their own?

Intersex people also find it frustrating sometimes to discuss gender and body. "What's inside my underwear does *NOT* define my gender", asserts an intersex friend and ally whom I met on the boards. He isn't opposed to trans people being able to get the surgeries that they seek, but often finds the trans community oblivious and unaware of how unwanted surgeries imposed on intersex people without their consent are regarded by intersex people. "I am a man. That is my gender. A medical doctor decided I should be female and wanted to remove offending parts of me to produce a female. I am not a freak show and I don't have to display my genital configuration in order to prove my gender."

I identify as a gender invert, myself. I tell people I'm a girl, or woman. What makes me a gender invert is that my body is male. What's within my clothing doesn't define my gender either. On the other hand, neither is it wrong and in need of fixing. Just like my intersex friend, I have no wish to modify my morphology to fit other people's notions of what bodyparts ought to accompany my gender identity.

You'd perhaps think, with so many of us on the same page as far as "what I have between my legs is not the same thing as my gender", that we'd see eye to eye on how to talk about these things in ways that don't insult or negate each other's experience. I suppose trying to insist that "sex", and the sex terms "male" and "female", ought to be reserved for physical body and that "gender", and gender identity terms such as "man" and "woman" and "boy" and "girl" and so forth, apply to the other, nonphysiological, factors, isn't going to get me anywhere. Not with so many in the transgender community using the terms differently.

It would make things easier if that "schematic diagram" thing inside the head had its own term. Julia Serano uses the term "subconscious sex".

Perhaps the best way to describe how my subconscious sex feels to me is to say that it seems as if, on some level, my brain expects my body to be female...

I am sure that some people will object to me referring to this aspect of my person as a subconscious "sex" rather than "gender.". I prefer "sex" because I have experienced it as being rather exclusively about my physical sex, and because for me this subconscious desire to be female has existed independently of the social phenomena commonly associated with the word "gender".

— Julia Serano, Whipping Girl pgs 80, 82

If we could go with that extra terminology, transgender people could express that (for example) their subconscious sex identity is female, their born sex was male, their gender is girl or woman. My intersex colleague could say he is a man, that doctors wanted to perform unwanted surgery because he was born intersex and they wanted to make him biologically female. And I could say I am a girl or woman whose biological sex is male.


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