As I've commented in the past, there is a definite contingent among the LGBTQIA readership that has clamored for books that don't centralize a character's awareness of being gay or lesbian or trans or whatever, but instead just happen to feature us within a storyline like any other ordinary character.

I'm not really among them — I like the narratives where people come to grips with their identities as marginalized, different people.

I'm perhaps also not the ideal reader for a mystery story. It's not that I've never read and enjoyed one, but I'm not the mystery-story afficionado that my parents both are. They dive into mystery stories hoping to recognize the clues. They watch how the unsolved mystery is presented and they match wits with the author, trying to discern from the tidbits of information left behind for the reader what the truth of the matter is, whodunnit, and why they dunnit, and how they dunnit, before the author does the reveal at the end.

And I don't. I read mystery stories, when I read them at all, to be entertained. Not to try to outwit the author. I'm all like "Tell me an entertaining narrative. Ooh, that happened, what's next?" I have read mystery stories where the author deliberately has set a lot of misleading cues and clues, only to have somebody behave in an uncharacteristic way for some far-fetched reason that is revealed at the end, and instead of being impressed with how the author prevented me from preguessing the culprit and reason and mechanism, I'm generally left resenting the lack of consistent characterization and how unlikely it is that that's how it would turn out to be.

Uncommon Sons spans the division of genre, being neither a coming-of-age / coming-out story nor a mainstream detective tale that just happens to feature some gay folks in it, by setting the events in the 1930s when any person with same-sex sexual orientation would be battling against the same identity issues that a kid in middle school would be dealing with in the modern era, and Bruce Bishop gives us characters who wrestle with this accordingly.

In Uncommon Sons, Bishop hands us two primary non-cishet characters, one, Marc, who is in the upper echelons of hotel management and the other, Ian, his employee, to whom he is attracted, and who takes the more forward and assertive role in pursuing their mutual interest. Interwoven throughout their interactions are the dynamics of coming to terms with this as an identity. We predominantly see Marc contemplating this as who he is, rather than a failure to tamp down inappropriate interests, but with Ian also we see a group self-hatred and a need to distance himself identity-wise from his sexuality, not just limited to his existing marriage and family but an overarching need to condemn what he is ready to label as "fairy", some kind of inferior marginal identity to which he holds himself superior and thinks Marc should also.

There is a languid unhurried buildup to the critical events that evoke police scrutiny and the definition of a crime in need of solving, and within that space Bishop gives us real three-dimensional characters, and even aside from having LGBTQIA folks embedded amongst the cast, this keeps it from being formulaic genre mystery tale, and because of this additional headroom, my itch for seeing people in the process of sorting out their identity is largey scratched.

I won't give you spoilers, in case you're of the type who do like to solve the enigram before the reveal, but I will say that I did not find the characters as developed to be inconsistent with what we eventually find out did transpire.

Bishop takes his time to set up the critical events in the tale, some of which will slide beneath your perceptual radar in the earlier character-establishment portions. At the same time, Bishop is knitting together characters who were featured in earlier novels or will appear in later ones. You should get to know these people. You should interact with them perhaps to understand their life stories in case you end up reading other connected tales, or perhaps because understanding them is conducive to following the plot. Does it matter which? Bishop sketches three-dimensional participants and leaves us wanting to know them all in more detail.


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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. It's expected to be released in late 2021. Stay tuned for further details.



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

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In gender outlaw and other LGBTQIA Facebook groups and internet forums, someone will occasionally ask "What songs really reached out to you and made you feel recognized and understood?"

I need to remember to nominate Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" the next time someone asks.

It may not have a giant billboard sign on it proclaiming it to be relevant to gender inversion and being genderqueer, but that's where my head went when I first heard it, and how I interpret any time I've heard it since. "If only I could", Kate sings, "I'd make a deal with God and I'd get him to swap our places". Many of my trans friends, who have often plaintively wished that the transgender women who didn't want their penises could donate them to the transgender men who did, and receive a uterus and fallopian tubes and vagina in exchange, should be able to relate.

But that's not quite how Kate came to wish for the exchange of positions, to be sure. Her angle of approach has more to do with a concern specific to sexuality of the non-same-sex variety: "It doesn't hurt me; do you want to feel how it feels? Do you want to know that it doesn't hurt me?" Not every listener seems to immediately think that the "it" she speaks of is sex, but that's totally where my head went. She's conversing with a male lover who is concerned about how this is for her. Because he doesn't know, never having been female.

My feminist women friends are ready to hoot in derision. "Men don't spend much time worrying about whether any sex practice hurts women. They think that's what we're there for. And that whatever gets done to us must be hot for us if they find it hot, whether it's the joy of gagging on a dick or being raped and choked or just the everyday joy of being objectified and catcalled to by strangers, men never try to put themselves in our position and imagine what it must be like to be us. Or if they do, they have pathetically impaired imaginations!"

But not everyone who is male of body is a man, and not all sexuality involving a male person and a female person is heterosexuality. Because heterosexuality is an institution, one that is defined by and depends on seeing the sexual partner as Other, as utterly alien, one whose feelings and thoughts can't be approached by imagining what it would be like, because, well, because It's Different For Them. Because They're Different. And reciprocally, for people whose interactions and attractions are not defined around that alienating difference, there is likely to be that fervent wish to understand, to know what it's like.

"Let's exchange the experience", Kate says. That's intimacy. It's empathy.

Our current social politics often teaches us that empathy isn't real, that it's illusory. "Don't speak for them. You aren't them and you don't know what it's like". It is entirely valid to say "You should not speak for people when they can speak for themselves, especially if they've been kept voiceless by their marginalization". I agree with that. But some go on to say "Don't think that you know what it's like. You don't. You can't. It is arrogant of you to think that you do. You aren't them". It's not a nuanced position, as stated; and if it discourages people from thinking it possible to know what it's like, it can turn away their inclination to try. To imagine, to wonder, to watch from the outside and attempt to conjure up an awareness of what it must be like from the inside.

We can't even identify as part of a group without empathy. Transgender feminist author Julia Serano acknowledges the legitimacy of the statement that some have made to her: "How do you know you are 'a woman'? How do you know that who you are is the person that women are? You've never been one, you've only been yourself!" Serano agrees that she's never been anyone but herself, but, well, that's true for the person directing the question. How does a cisgender woman know she's a woman in the sense of having an identity in common with other women? She's never been any of those other women either, how does she know what it's like to be any of them, and to claim a commonality of identity? Only by observation from the outside. Which is how Serano knows the same thing. It's how I know I'm a femme; it's how I knew I was one of the girls (despite being male) when I was in grade school. It's empathy. The power to look across the divide and bridge the gaps and recognize and relate.

"We both matter, don't we?", Kate Bush asks.

Yeah, we do.


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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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After months and months of getting nice reviews in college newspapers and, at a lower volume, LGBTQIA press publications, I'm finally getting some reviews published in mainstream newspapers. Two weeks ago I made the Los Alamos Daily Post and now, extending my coverage in the New Mexican press, I'm in the Taos News.

Taos, like Los Alamos, is an eclectic little village, with a diverse and culturally savvy population and many farflung former residents who may still subscribe to the local paper.

"When Derek Hunter moves to Los Alamos from Valdosta, Georgia, in eighth grade, he is bullied mercilessly. A tall, thin boy with glasses, who likes to wear stovepipe pants and slicked-back hair instead of bell-bottoms and long tresses (this is 1974), he embraces nonconformism mostly because he has nothing in common with boys his age.

What he knows about boys is "ribald and crude" and a "constant undercurrent of threat." He favors the company of girls, who are more accepting and physically attractive. Boys he begins to think of as "them," as the enemy. And they return the favor in terms of verbal and physical bullying.

In this tortured litany of harassment mostly set in Northern New Mexico, author Hunter, who lived in New Mexico until the mid-1980s, before moving to New York to become an activist in gender theory, presents a coming-of-age novel of ambivalent identity that the protagonist ultimately figures out on his own."

— María Dolores Gonzales, Taos News https://www.taosnews.com/tempo/dont-forget-we-are-mexican/article_0b71eca2-1303-5733-b2b1-3d5a2c5151e1.html

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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

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Well, I've finished rewriting it from scratch from the ground up at any rate. It's still a rough draft, and at the same time I didn't just compose it, either.


It existed previously. The raw material text for both GenderQueer and for That Guy in our Women's Studies Class was generated as part of my autobiographical tome that I wrote between 2010 and 2013. I extracted and edited and named That Guy in our Women's Studies Class as long ago as 2014. I even sent out some query letters!

But honestly it just wasn't a very good book. Whereas I would proofread and edit GenderQueer with pride, Guy in WS kept making me wince. And at some point I recognized that it belonged in a trunk, perhaps to be revised and redone at some future point, and I focused on getting GenderQueer published.

I came back to it in May of 2019. At the time, I was mired down in my efforts with the main book, and I needed a project, something to give me a sense of progress and accomplishment.

In my writer's group, Amateur Writers of Long Island, I quit bringing in excerpts from GenderQueer, which I considered to be a finished book, and began bringing in my work in progress, Guy in WS, the way the other authors were doing, so that I'd get feedback on what I was currently focusing on as a writer.

GenderQueer was accepted for publication in September and for a lot of the following four months I was pretty narrowly focused on that. But during the Coronavirus era, with my book out but no prospect for addressing audiences as a guest speaker, I dove back into it.


That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class (second beta version)

95,000 words in three large units. Chapter divisions to be created later. A mostly autobiographical account of my years in college trying to utilize women's studies as a means to speak and write about my different gender / experience with society's notions about what it means to be male / being a sissy, etc.

It's not quite as absolutely nonfictional as GenderQueer is. In broad strokes, it is, but I took more liberties with moving conversations and discussions into contexts where they made a more interesting story line. Where GenderQueer is about 98 % truth (or as much so as I'm capable of remembering it), Guy in WS is around 85 %.

If you have any interest in being a beta reader of what is still really a work in progress, shoot me a personal message or email and let me know.


———————

You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!

My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


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

———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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These are the ladies who lunch and strategize about intersex policy changes. Kimberley Zeiselman writes as a person who is aware of her generally privileged social location; she describes a life in which she's been at ease to move comfortably from Boston to Manhattan and back, and to journey with her husband to China and stay for a month in order to adopt children. I think sometimes the juxtaposition, of a life otherwise unencumbered with stress, against the specific experience of a marginalized identity, can make it easier to focus on the difference that having such an experience makes in a life.

Zeiselman is intersex. She is an example of CAIS, where the body's structure is completely impervious to the androgen hormones that, for most people with XY chromosomes, causes their body to develop with male morphology. She was regarded and raised as a girl, perceived as a female person with no questions raised by doctors, parents, or herself until the day when a persistent abdominal pain led to a poorly-explained operation. An operation where the particulars of what the surgeon was going to do were cloaked in euphemisms and lies.

Our culture has oscillated back and forth between an attitude that doctors know best so we should trust their judgment and a respect for patient self-determination and the importance of doctors explaining the options and letting the patient decide. In June of 1983, when Kimberley Zeiselman and her parents were asked to consent to abdominal surgery, the pendulum was strongly towards fully informed consent. But the fifteen-year old Kimberley and her family were told that she was at risk for cancer and that her ovaries needed to be removed for her health and safety.

But those weren't ovaries. Nor, as Zeiselman points out in a later chapter, was the risk of medical complications anywhere near as clear-cut as that. The surgeons removed Kimberley's undescended testicles, and put her on a lifetime regimen of hormone treatments. Why? Because it's what doctors thought they should do in cases like this. Eek, oh how embarrassing, got to get rid of those at once, hide this shameful fact so no one can find out. Cloak everything in lies and silence.

Kimberley Zeiselman learned the classic Yankee emotional inscrutability as part of her cultural inheritance. It was a world where internal turmoils aren't expected to be shared, just endured. The scene in the book where she discovers what had been done to her, and the fact of her difference, is stark and cold. The doctor writes her a prescription for anti-anxiety medication, then suggests "maybe it's time we dig out your old medical records so that you can better understand the surgery performed and put your fears of cancer to rest". Then the doctor leaves her alone in the room to read the account of how her testes were removed and found to be healthy and with no signs of malignancy.


We often learn shame by being protected from shame. When people whisper to us and wait until there's no one to overhear, the need for secrecy and the fear of exposure are taught to us. Zeiselman struggles with the shadow of inferiority and inadequacy. So much of her experience is expressed in the negative, in the things she doesn't participate in. In the years before the medical procedure, her best friends got their menarche but she was left behind wondering why she never got her period. After the operation, still not knowing anything about her intersex condition, she knows she will not be able to get pregnant and give birth.

Zeiselman's emotional habits carry over into her writing. She often skitters away from immersing the reader fully in what she was feeling at the time. She often summarizes events in places where, as reader, I wanted fully fleshed-out scenes, a more immersive experience. When her intersex condition is first revealed to her, Zeiselman gives us glimpses of the shock, and the intensity of her curiosity and being haunted about the impact of her stunning discovery. Tellingly, she wants the news to be shocking to the other people in her life, for them to react as if a bombshell had gone off in their midst, as if unless someone is willing to scream on her behalf there can be no screaming.


Kimberley Zeiselman becomes a policy activist, leveraging her connections in society to make a difference for intersex children. Sometimes the weariness of policy defeats and fighting the same battles recurrently make it sound like Sisyphus rolling his boulders. The medical policy on clitoris reductions for CAH intersex babies is the most formidable boulder. CAH — Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia — is a phenomenon affecting XX people in which the adrenal gland releases high levels of hormones that prompt the body to develop male attributes. The tissue that constitutes a clitoris tends to be larger, anywhere on a continuum from typical clitoris size to the size of a penis. And as Zeiselman added her voice to that of other intersex activists to outlaw nonconsensual surgery and leave the decision in the hands of the patients, she found the medical establishment insistent on their right to pare down or remove this tissue in the name of normalizaton.

Kimberley Zeiselman learned advocacy of behalf of others from raising her children, fighting for their right to a tailored and appropriate course of education. She took her skills and experience into the intersex rights fray, fighting her own fight, only to eventually end up largely immersed in a specific battle that centrally affects CAH intersex children. The identity called intersex is actually a constellation of several different situations, and enunciating the identity intersex is not only a rejection of the medical terminoligy that calls these conditions disorders, it's also a commitment to solidarity. Not all intersex people are identically situated but they can be unified politically as a marginalized community of people finally demanding a voice.

XOXY: A Memoir, Kimberly M. Zeiselman. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2020. Available from Amazon and other retailers; Facebook author's page



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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 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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This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Because I figured that my book would be of particular relevance to the college communities, both students and faculty, I solicited reviews from student newspapers. Several college newspapers have now posted reviews of GenderQueer online!

Here are some choice comments, with links to the full reviews.

"The book makes it plain that the 'Q' recently added to the LGBTQIA+ is necessary because the "T" for transgender doesn’t necessarily cover all of the individuals in the category of 'anyone whose gender is different from what people originally assumed it to be...' "

— Noah Young. The Clock — Plymouth State Univerity

"Allan Hunter’s debut book Genderqueer: A Story from a Different Closet takes a personal look at the topic of gender and the dilemma that comes from not conforming to gender norms. The book brings up an important conversation that needs to be addressed while taking a deep dive into the term genderqueer."

— Arielle Gulley. Daily Utah Chronicle — University of Utah

"This memoir is a personal journey about a person who has lived a life struggling to accept who they are based on the reactions of those around them. A lot of the book is hard to read, hearing how cruel people can be. But I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand gender and sexuality on a deeper and more intimate level."

— Never Retallack. The Western Howl — Western Oregon University

"Although the book is described as a memoir, it reads like fiction. This makes the book compelling and enjoyable to read, and it is far more effective than if the author had approached the topic as a textbook might...GenderQueer is honest, intimate and at times, uncomfortable. The protagonist is extremely vulnerable, bringing the audience into private moments and personal thoughts."

— Jaime Fields. The Whitman Wire — Whitman College

"The discussion around gender identity and sexual orientation has progressed exponentially in the past decade. Same-sex marriage became legal nationwide only five years ago, and the LGBTQ community continues to fight for equal rights. With this constant push for change, some can only imagine the struggles of coming to terms with your gender identity during the late 1960s and 1970s.



GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet offers an eye-opening view into the upbringing of a gender-nonconforming person in an era when many people didn’t know such an identity existed..."

— Camryn DeLuca. The Diamondback — University of Maryland

"Derek says he came out of a different closet, but the same door. The “door” represents the struggle one faces about discovering his identity and/or his sexual orientation. The “closet” represents the harboring of one’s gender identity and/or sexual orientation, a secret that is not meant to be a secret. Derek’s decision to wear a denim wraparound skirt showcased he had come to terms with his identity and was no longer inside the closet"

— Aazan Ahmad. The Pinnacle — Berea College

"GenderQueer: A Story from a Different Closet is a coming-out and coming-of-age story of a gender non-conforming individual...the story takes place during the 1970s and 1980s, a time period in which many individuals of the LGBT community were treated with more hostility than today...



[One] group that was not necessarily included was the genderqueer community, now commonly symbolized as the “Q” in LGBTQ, and this is precisely what this book focuses on. Many people are not familiar with the genderqueer identity and this book gives a first-hand account of what someone with this identity experiences. Hunter delves into serious and intimate topics throughout the book, making it very realistic and raw, which was overwhelming at times...despite the fact it may make some of us uncomfortable, it is crucial to aiding our understanding of Hunter’s experience "

— Maryam Javed The Lake Forest Stentor — Lake Forest College



--

There are also a handful of reviews on GoodReads and Amazon as well.



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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 has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


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

———————

This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Index of all Blog Posts

I work in a large organization so there are a lot of personnel; there are also presentations and trainings and the official LGBTQ coordinators here have presented material on gender and sexuality. They’ve never approached me to talk about queer issues and identity, although I show up for work wearing a skirt fairly often and several people know I have a book on the subject of being genderqueer coming out soon.

The material that they present to the organization doesn’t include much info on the experiences of a person like me. No surprise there. I could help with that.

So I decide to write, to introduce myself formallly, although I’ve spoken at these presentations as an attendee and assume they know me at least in passing.

Hello!

I write that much then can’t figure out what to say next. I start a second sentence several times then erase it. Finally, I decide to simply admit to that. To tell them I’m having a hard time getting this letter started:

*** several minutes later still staring at a single-word email body ***

Damn this is hard. I can so easily deal with people when I'm positioning myself as a "Them", for them to either accept or not. So much scarier to risk being accepted as an "us". Or rejected dismissively at that level.

I didn't grow up feeling a part of the queer community and never had that later in life either, really.

I know you've encountered me at the trainings and meetings. I'm sorry I haven't been more friendly and introduced myself in a meaningful way.

In one of the Facebook support groups I'm in, some of the nonbinary trans folks call it "imposter syndrome". They're usually talking about not being regarded as genuinely trans by the conventional binary transgender men and women. I've had that w/regards to the entire LGBTQ world, and also to the feminist community. I've got a lot of privilege as a person who is altercast by the world as a man and often as a straight man at that; I don't get overtly systematically discriminated against or deal with the medical system like transitioning people have to, so I worry a lot about reaching out and being pushed back and told I'm a pretentious jerk or something.

I don’t know specifically what kind of response I was expecting. Some kind of reply acknowledging their own uncertainties and awkwardnesses when they first tried to participate in the LGBTQ community? Some kind of personal welcome and some friendly curiosity, maybe?

What I received wasn’t unfriendly or dismissive or anything.

We have been glad to see you in attendance at the meetings. We hope you feel welcomed and able to participate fully as your authentic self, both at these meetings and at the organization in general.

It can be hard to reach out to new people, but if there’s anything specific you wanted to discuss with us, feel free to let us know.

Why was I disappointed to receive that? What caused me to read that and somehow turn it into an excuse to feel brushed off?

It’s so damn easy to become hypersensitive, to the point that other people’s behaviors can feel like microaggressions when all they’ve done is fail to guess exactly what would make me feel understood and accepted.

Want another example? We have a few “any gender” toilets, single person facilities. I was waiting for one to become available and someone informed me that if I did not wish to wait, I could use the men’s room down the hall. I’m sure this person did not intend this piece of information to come across as questioning why the hell I would be waiting for the special facilities, or to imply that I was viewed as a cisgender male and therefore not the intended beneficiary of this policy. But I still managed to feel that way at the time.

Another? Someone started a poll in one of the gender nonbinary FB groups about how often and how deeply do you feel dysphoria about your body. When I answered that I don’t, someone replied that I was the first and only non-cisgender person they’d ever encountered who didn’t. It wasn’t said in an even remotely hostile fashion but it immediately conjured up a whole slew of “I don’t fit in, I don’t belong in here” feelings.



I have never felt like the LGBTQ community was my home. That I would be recognized and the doors opened to me, that my concerns and experiences would be validated there. I’ve hoped that would be the case, I’ve prepared to argue that I qualify and that therefore it should be that way, but I haven’t ever escaped the fear that I’d be dismissed with contempt and ridicule. Because I don’t hear or read stories like mine from other people in the community. Similar, yes, but fundamentally different.

It’s easy for me to deal with being an outsider. I’m used to it; I’m good at it. It’s scary to ask to be allowed in, to be an insider. I feel vulnerable and my feelings and sensibilities are way too easy to hurt.


I'll accept that I'm hypersensitive at times like these. At the same time, I think it's fair to ask that people who occupy a position of leadership within the LGBTQ community keep in mind that even if they were always pretty sure of their identity and fit into the community like a hand into a glove, that's not going to be true for a lot of other people; and that's probably especially true for the less common identities.

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If you have sometimes called someone a TERF (Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist), do me a favor: list some non trans-exclusive radical feminist activists, radical feminist writings and books, etc. Describe the radical feminist insights and concepts you find most inspiring. Tell me which radical feminists you respect the most.

If you can’t – if you only use the phrase “radical feminist” as part of the larger phrase “trans exclusive radical feminist” – you’re trolling. You could have just said “transphobes” and left it at that, without throwing hostility vibes at radical feminism.

If you encountered a person of color who was heavily involved in racial justice politics, and you discovered they had transphobic attitudes and didn’t want trans people participating, would you call such a person a “Trans Exclusive Race Activist”? If you went to a discussion of economic stratification and found the socialists in attendance there to be hostile to transgender people and inclined to bar them, would you launch a tirade about “Trans Exclusive Marxist Socialists”?

Yes, I’m fully aware that gender is a central concern for radical feminists: unlike racial justice activists and marxist socialists, they are specifically organized as women, speaking about gender inequality and patriarchal oppression. And therefore that excluding transgender women is specifically about excluding transgender women from the definition of “women” around which radical feminists define themselves. So, fine: if you want to be a part of that, say some affirmative things about the feminist actions, insights, accomplishments that make you want to be a part of it.

You should want to celebrate radical feminism. We all should. I tend to view patriarchy deniers as being as out of touch with reality as holocaust deniers. Patriarchy is our past and defined a great many of our ways of understanding things, including our mores and moral values and beliefs and assumptions about many things. We're coming out of it but that is something that is still in process. And the vanguard of social change-makers who showed us how to think in those terms and see beyond our entrenched patriarchal world-view, they were radical feminists.



Now, meanwhile... radical feminists have effectively indicted male people for the spectrum of behavior and priorities and worldview called masculinity, in other words for being MEN. They have said that no, this is not males expressing their innate built-in bio characteristics, this is political. So radical feminists are hardly in a good position to object to males coming forth and bailing on the identity “man”.

Let’s take a moment to acknowledge that in any social movement, there’s a tendency to embrace the participation of people who come to the same conclusion for different reasons. This is especially true if the different reasons don’t appear to divide the people into groups who disagree about important goals and objectives. For instance, let’s say there were some inner city residents who were motivated by a desire for social and economic equality, and there were other inner city residents who wanted the best possible outcome for people living in the inner city. For as long as the inner city area is an economically depressed area with a lot of socially marginalized people, there’s no reason to pit these two factions against each other, not when they’re pretty obviously going to be working towards the same immediate objectives, right? But now suppose over a long course of time the inner city becomes gentrified, schools improve, services get vastly better, safety is excellent, and wealthier people and socially successful people move in. Now there’s a lot more opportunity for real conflict of interest between those who want whatever is best for the inner city and whose who want social and economic fairness overall.

Feminism – including radical feminism – has included two overlapping contingents, both of them very much aligned with the same values and purposes for the most part (with many women, I suspect, not inclined to see any meaning in making this distinction): those who wish to bring the social system called patriarchy to an end and eliminate the oppositional polarization of the sexes, and those who want the best possible outcome for women and to promote women’s issues, eliminating sexist barriers to women’s activity. Now, patriarchy is no gentrified inner city by any means – it most certainly has not become the case that to be a woman is to be in a privileged class. (In other words, that's not where I was going with that analogy). But there has always been the potential for individual issues where women’s situation as women might not be directly improved by a specific dismantling of a sexually polarized distinction.

Mostly—to feminism’s overall credit—feminists have supported gender parity even on issues such as child custody and alimony and the military draft, recognizing that even when sexist laws or policies appeared to protect or benefit women, differential treatment as a whole did not.

But the question of who gets to speak as a feminist, to participate in defining what is or is not a feminist issue—that one spirals down into a paradox. Radical feminists have long believed that women’s experience gives women a vantage point from which to see matters in a way that even a well-intentioned man who ostensibly believes in sexual equality would not be so able to. And they know from history and experience that it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that if “being a feminist” were a social role equally available to men, it could become the accepted conventional wisdom that the best feminists are men. It happened with gynecologists, didn’t it? It’s a frightening prospect, that the quoted voices representing feminism might be male, that the published works of feminist theory could be male-authored. What protection would they have against political taxidermy, of feminism being killed from within by being taken over by men, who would start as participants then become obsessed with being leaders, and end up being deferred to as the best and most leaderly leaders by a still-patriarchal general public?


I do think there is space in our definitions for radical feminists to organize and define themselves as those people who have had that lifetime experience, the experience of being, and being perceived as, and being treated as, girls and women. Such a definition does not, in fact, automatically include transgender women, but nor does it exclude them by misgendering them as non-women.

But radical feminism has been a home not only for women who think of men and masculinity as an outcome of social processing, an outcome of socialization that patriarchy nourishes in males; it has also been a home for women who tend to think of the “man” identity and of masculinity as males expressing themselves to a self-satisfied conclusion either because they can (that they are privileged, that they have the opportunity to become that way) or because it is intrinsically a part of their nature, that males are just like that. I’ll remind you of what I just said about movements not tending to divide their membership for as long as the difference doesn’t make a difference. In the absense of large hordes of males rising up to say “patriarchy has to go!” and declaring it their number one political priority, in the absence of people who were born, assigned, treated, and regarded as male saying they wanted nothing to do with this “manhood” thing, it was a distinction that didn’t matter much internally.

Well, now it does.


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I'm still plugging away on the second book to be extracted from my autobiographical tome. This is a complete rewrite; the original text of the autobio is not directly usable, unlike the portion I used for the first book, so I just reference it for notes and reminders. With the scene that I wrote yesterday, I'm up to 96 pages, which should come out to be roughly a third of the final manuscript.

I'm a participant in an author's group where we bring up to 1800 words' worth of our work-in-progress and read it out loud to get feedback. That's helping immensely, not just for the direct advice but for the overall sense of connecting to an audience and hearing that yes, they find the story entertaining and engrossing.

Plotwise, I'm at a point where my main character (that's me, of course) is in the first year of women's studies classes, a college freshman, successfully making an impact with professors and connecting with some of the other students, but hasn't yet been able to explain the whole "male sissy" thing in such a way that people understand what these social issues are all about.

In the second year I will show him (i.e., me) getting established on campus as an outspoken political type, with a reputation mostly associated with militancy about pyschiatric rights and homelessness, and known for being that guy who is into feminism. He (i.e., me) also gets a romantic interest! The second and third year together should be no more than another third of the book; the first year section is longer because it has a long retrospective backstory portion and has to do a lot more initial setup.

The big challenge all along was whether I could manage a sufficient balance between complex intellectual ideas versus interactive personal stuff with conversations and characters and all that. So far so good, I think.



By the time of the events in this story begin, I had come out in 1980 as a heterosexual sissy, a person with an identity that was different in the same general way that gay & lesbian and transsexual (see next paragraph) people were understood to be different, but, well, different from those identities. I had even written a book by 1982, The Amazon's Brother. But I was very isolated; I wasn't connecting with anybody who understood WTF I was talking about and I had no one reading what I'd written. I hadn't succeeded in getting a publisher interested.

The scene that would later be called the "LGBT" community did not include gender variance back then, not really. It was all gay rights. I viewed gay people as allies (particularly lesbians who were likely to be feminists) but not really comrades in the same cause. Transsexual people -- yes, that was the word in use back then, nobody was saying "transgender" yet -- were people who transitioned by getting operations and taking hormones, and there was no sense of other kinds of trans people who didn't want to align their physical sex with their gender identity, so I didn't see myself as fitting in with them either, aside from which their presence in the community was mostly just hypothetical. They were so thin on the ground number-wise that a person did not actually encounter them at community centers and so on; officially there was probably starting to be some inclusiveness, some mention on fliers about them as part of what gay and lesbian centric organizations were about, but really it was all gay and lesbian, and mostly gay guys for that matter.

I hitched to New York to become a women's studies major in college. (The book's backstory section covers how I made the decision to do that, and my adventures getting there). I figured that the things I wanted to talk about -- that the expectations for people of a given sex were socially created, not built-in natural, and that the intolerance for people who were different was sexist -- would be right on topic for the women's studies classroom.

And besides, my head was deeply into feminist theory by this point anyway. I felt like the whole way society is set up, its overall values and structures, is a direct consequence of how gender is set up, that society is a machine and it runs differently depending on how gender gets configured. And feminist theory, especially radical feminist theory, made the same claim, that this was the political axis around which all social issues revolved. Not class, like the socialists believed. Not race, like the 60s activists had mostly believed. This. And that insight, incidentally, is something I still find missing from most gender discussions even to this day -- we do a lot of identity politics about who is marginalized and oppressed and unfairly treated, but not so much discussion about whether global warming, the military confrontations and economic deprivations, or the buildup of religious intolerances and so forth are all the way they are as an outcome of how gender is socially organized on this planet.

The trajectory of this book will bring my main character (i.e., me) to the limits of the role that a guy can authentically play in women's studies and in feminism, just as he's getting an academic article published and burning his final bridges with the graduate school department and leaving without a PhD to go figure out some other way of approaching all this.



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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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