ahunter3 | Entries tagged with aggression

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I think I'm going to consider my audience. I have tended to think of myself as speaking (or attempting to speak) to the world at large, in general, about the things I wanted to speak of. And I did speak (some; mostly I wrote and attempted to get people to read what I'd written), I did try to communicate. The terms I used were things like "I am marginalized as a gender invert; it's a type of being genderqueer", and I tried to flesh out those terms with descriptions of who I was and how I had been treated by others. I was angry. I was quite aware that I was angry and considered it justified. How does an angry person communicate?

We associate anger with violence. I wasn't drawn towards it though; violence is not a good strategy for a marginalized individual angry at society.

It's not that anger doesn't mean I am willful and there are changes I want to make, because that's still true, but my strategy is to make sense to people. So let's look at the willful part. I am stubborn and I want things to make sense. That translates in part as I want to be understood. To communicate.

Violence theoretically offers power. Coercion.

Define power, though. I can't have what I want as an individual by using coercion to get it. I want cooperation. Unlike coercion, all the participants are voluntarily cooperating. Define voluntarily, though.

Repeat last paragraph, so that you see it as a loop. A thought-structure or attitude-tension between being willful and wanting one's way and wanting things on a voluntarily-cooperative basis; to belong and to have my way and change some things.

I know that I am at peace in my anger. I've accepted it. I've long since accepted it. I said so when I was 21, I am angry about this stuff and I want to talk about it. After awhile the anger felt like intentionality. Defining myself.

So that's who is on this side of the communication.

—————

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

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. I was going to start echoing it on Substack as well but we're not off to a good start. Anyway, please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

It's there in the part of my mind where I care the most. That's the area where I'm most likely to express my difference from you and your perspective. On any subject, I mean. It's not that I mostly think like you; or that I don't. It's that if I don't care about the difference, if it's not part of the topics where I care the most, then I'm less likely to express that there is a difference. So the stuff I emphasize, that's what's important to me. More or less by definition.

It doesn't mean I'm not interested in communication. I'll listen even if I strongly disagree. Whether I'm currently emphasizing or currently empathizing, I do want to communicate.

—————

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

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. I was going to start echoing it on Substack as well but we're not off to a good start. Anyway, please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

"We shouldn't call it 'homophobia', that's misleading", my Facebook friend writes. "It's not like those haters out there are hiding from us with their teeth chattering and worried that we're gonna get them. The word should be something like misogyny for hating women, what would that be, misgayism or misqueer, or an 'ism' word, but not a word that makes it sound like they're scared of us the way people get scared of heights or cats or something".

But although I've seen this sentiment quite a few times, there doesn't seem to be any consensus emerging about what else to call it, so 'homophobia' is still the word that's in use.

Besides, I don't think it's entirely wrong to think of it as a phobia. As being about fear.

I've got a scene in my book Within the Box where Derek is at risk of being locked up as a dangerous involuntary patient despite not having done anything threatening to anyone. He finds this bewildering.

But he's always found the anger and hostility bewildering, too. People so upset just because he has behavior patterns that are more like those of the girls, that he acts like a girl instead of acting like a boy.

But then he turns the question to a different angle:

What if they felt threatened by me? I never did anything to hurt anyone, but I broke some unspoken codes of conduct, how boy children are expected to behave, how other boys like us are supposed to be, how one’s students can be expected to act. If somebody doesn’t act the way you thought they would, you end up not having much confidence about your sense of what they might do next.

And of course if there’s a right way to be a boy child student, and we all know what it is, we’re secure in thinking we know how it’s supposed to be, but if there’s one who isn’t like that, then either he’s wrong or our thinking is wrong. Our thinking includes the notion that it matters, having everyone being the way they’re supposed to be, so there isn’t even any room for ‘he isn’t the way he’s supposed to be but it doesn’t matter’. So that’s a different kind of threat, but yeah, that too.

This is actually about sissyphobia, since the provoking behavior is gender noncompliant behavior and not same-sex attraction. Not that the hateful fearful violent people were making that distinction.

I do come to the topic of homophobia partly as an insider and partly as an outsider, being a heterosexual femme. I have had my own fears that could be considered homophobic fears, and I have been on the receiving end of the violence and hate that may be partially fear-driven too.

So what's so scary?

Girls and women have a significant excuse for heterophobia. Decade after decade they've gone on marches and addressed classrooms, trying to get a cultural consensus that "no means no". That it is not tolerable that just because someone is interested in having sexual contact with you, they might impose it on your whether you want it or not.

If there were a similar significant risk of gay people pushing their sexual attentions onto people who didn't want to have sex with them, violating their "no", sexually assaulting them, I could clearly see that that would be a legitimate source of homophobia. But I've never had anything like that happen to me, I've never had any of my friends or colleagues tell me it's happened to them, and the overwhelming majority of the cases where same-sex sexual contact has been imposed has been ostensibly heterosexual male people calling another male homosexual and making intrusive sexual contact while angrily yelling that this is what the victim of the violence obviously wants. I had variations on that theme take place in junior high and high school but mostly it was confined to threats and verbal assaults and the destruction of personal property like books and clothing and whatnot.

Then there's the specter of somehow being stalked by "being gay", as if the sexual orientation itself were somehow predatory and involved in chasing people down and converting them against their will. This is something that needs to be distinguished from the notion of a person crossing the line and imposing themself sexually. It's usually painted as a threat due to the difficulty of negotiating a good heterosexual situation. Sort of like hungry people at a restaurant being barred from getting the food they want, so they're threatened with the prospect of settling for something else that's more readily available.

The cisgender version of heterosexuality has very polarized rules and roles. Obtaining a string of heterosexual encounters with a wide range of different partners is something that is perceived and treated very differently when one is female than when one is male. Sex is portrayed as a conquest, as something that the male person makes happen and the female person says "yes" or "no" to, and to say "yes" too often or too easily obtains for her a set of unpleasant labels and epithets. So sex is set up as an adversarial contest of wills and he wins if he makes sex happen. Therefore it is against that backdrop that same-sex opportunities are positioned as a threat: "You're such a loser that you can't conquer any female partners, therefore this is all that's available to you".

That's a pretty hollow threat though. One might face the prospect of being a loser and failing to secure heterosexual contact with any female people, but unlike the hungry person in the restaurant, sexual appetite isn't the kind of imperative that one dies from absence, and there's autoerotic release available and nonsexual friendship and companionship.

But another form it takes is the fear of being perceived as gay. What's interesting about that is that the most emphatic and noisiest homophobes are nearly always males, but as I just discussed, the ensconced roles and rules of cisgender heterosexuality cast it as the boy-role to make sex happen. So why would it matter particularly if a lot of female people were to perceive one as gay? The suspicion here is that it's actually mostly a concern about what other male people think that's the driving force in this fear.

Of my own fears, my own homophobic responses and hangups, the one that it would be most logical for me to have would be the fear of being perceived as gay and harassed and violently attacked for it. That's certainly happened a lot in my life! But my reaction has been indignation and outrage, and I haven't been much inclined to modify my appearance or behavior to make the queer-bashers less likely to think I'm an appropriate target.

I have at times in my life worried that female people in general might dismiss me from consideration due to thinking I'm gay. That's in part because I'm not cisgender. I'm femme. I'm girl. And I'm very alienated by that whole cisgender heterosexual expectation that as the male person I'm the one who's supposed to be trying to make sex happen and wear down a female person's resistance and reluctance and all that. That totally doesn't fit who I am or how I want to be with someone in a sexual or romantic relationship or encounter. Through most of my life, I've held onto the hope that women would find me interesting and sexually fascinating and would do things to make sex happen between us, that they'd choose me and communicate that to me.

But in the long run, faced with what was painted as a pretty binary choice between being thought of as femme and gay or being thought of as masculine and cis and straight, I decided of the two, being considered a typical boy creature was the worse of the alternatives. When my article "Same Door, Different Closet" was being considered for publication back in the early 1990s, one of the academic reviewers said my model of heterosexuality "didn't depend on a committed effort to avoid sexual feelings and experiences with men". Or perhaps more to the point, wasn't anchored in the need to avoid appearing gay to others.

The world doesn't get to dispose of me or decide for me what my sexual orientation is. Thousands of people thinking of me in a certain way doesn't conjure it up as my reality. And as far as the prospect of other males having a sexual interest in me and misreading the signals, well, as one of my lesbian friends pointed out, it's hardly just heterosexual males who occasionally have to cope with someone being sexually interested in you and you don't reciprocate, and it's not exactly the end of the world. No big deal. Get over it.

To get back to the role of fear in this hatred and violence, though, I'll end with this additional snippet from Within the Box:

You try to get a handle on why people would be hateful and oppressive and you just end up finding them guilty of being horrible people with no justification, and there’s no understanding for that. But I can understand scared. I don’t know what to do about it, but it’s a starting point.

—————

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

My third book is deep in tertiary drafts, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

This is me, a first grader, and I want to write about something very important.

First, pretend I'm you when you were a first grader, because the person who actually is me might not remember this, or I wouldn't need to write it down now and it's important.

---

I remember being four, so maybe there's no reason to think you won't remember being seven. Let's talk about being four. Nursery school. Sitting around a ring to hear the story being read. Little rows of kids, some in front, some behind them, up close. You're already worrying that this is going to get pedophilic. Yes I knew the word pedophilic when I was in first grade. I thought it was a totally creepy concept and of course I memorized how to spell it. No, this isn't that stuff. I didn't know the word when I was four but I felt the concern and got the general notion, minus the specifics, so back when I was already that much aware of the notion, this other thing happened, or was happening, around that time, and I wanted to write about that.

---

Bodies had dirty parts. No they didn't that's too simple. Parts that could have something to do with dirty. Diaper parts, potty parts. Don't put your hands in it, it's dirty. Don't talk about it, talking about it is dirty. That's too simple too but I bet you know what I'm talking about don't you.

Then something that people act as if it is kind of dirty but kind of not. There are parts that the girls have and parts that the boys have. It's described like if you are a girl you get these parts, like being a girl is first and then you get the parts. And boys. They have different parts. Boy parts. It makes you different. Well then it's having these parts, that's what makes you a girl, you weren't a girl and then got these parts. No. Well then having these parts doesn't make you different.

Liking the way they look. Pee from there, it's down there, it's dirty. Not to talk about not to think about but we think about it they call this dirty and it's liking the way they look. Oh I assumed. I didn't know some liked the way themselves looked. Oh I hadn't thought about. What if people with girl parts like me, the way I like theirs, and they're nice I like them anyway. But what if?

Yeah, little rows of kids, some in front some behind them, up close. Someone, somewhere, is playing with the waistpants band of the person in front of them, the latter someone being me. This unknown person wanted to slide a thumb under the edge of my underpants. I wasn't horrified, nor was I elated. I knew it was in that argued-about "dirty" territory. I could stop it. It felt like I was doing the unknown person a favor by not stopping it, and I liked that feeling and I was curious. Content warning update: that's as bad as it gets, we were four. As for the sensations themselves... nothing I saw any lure for. Although I found that I liked the idea that this person had been one of the tomboyish girls in our class and she'd done this to me.

We were defining our boundaries, and our sense of being in control of them, and we were experiencing ourselves as our own curators, granting or denying access, and we were doing that at four.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be an unfair situation if a five year old or a six year old started it, because they're bigger and more advanced, but you aren't protecting us by pretending all that stuff didn't come onto the scene until we were sprouting boobs and whiskers. Just because we're not sexless doesn't make it okay to do stuff to us like we're sex toys. Point is, we were *not* sexless. Or we were not sexuality-less and we were also not necessarily genderless (although some of us certainly might have been).

You're never going to understand it if you keep pretending it wasn't there all along.

—————

My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, 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, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both books.

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

[warning: multiples forms of hostile & derogatory language]

There's a form of knuckle-dragging stubborn refusal to consider other folks' social situations that pretends to be common-sensical and harmless. And tries to portray anyone making a complaint about common widespread behaviors as rigid and rule-oriented, judgmental and humorless.

The problem with intolerance is not limited to the proud jerks who brag about how intolerant they are and who say deliberabely confrontational things to rile people up and make us angry.

But let's start with them anyway. One problem with folks like that nowadays is that such statements are so freaking outrageous that you feel stupid taking them seriously. Someone starts a discussion about how people like their coffee and one of these loud cheerful folks says "Just like my women: black, hot, chained to my bed, and whipped twice a day". Or "Strong and manly, don't pour me none of that faggy fairy flavored stuff, it was probably Evian water before it transitioned and I don't want none of that tranny stuff". They count on you feeling awkward about getting indignant in front of everyone present and saying "THAT WASN'T FUNNY, you asshole". They count on people accepting that it was to be taken as a joke. If confronted, he's going to spread his arms wide, shrug, and say "Yeesh, you don't think I'm being serious, lighten up willya?"

That's a problem if what is being "joked" about is just an extreme form of things said in all seriousness right there in the same social context.

I've been at a dinner table where some people who did beat their kids would say funny things like "I brung you into this world and if you don't watch it I can take you right the hell back out" or "Yeah of course I'm taking him with me when we go out swamp fishin' this Sattiddy... just the right size for trolling for alligators". See, it sets a tone where it sounds huffy and indignant and self-important if you later object to "I'm gonna raise a knot on your head if you interrupt me once more" or the obviously dead-serious affirmation that "A kid DOES need a good lickin' now and then. That's just good parenting. Nobody ever got anything but properly straightened out by a close familiarity with their Daddy's belt".

The bigger problem, though, is the weather people.

Do you know and understand about the weather people? Those are the ones who accept some forms of people-behavior as being Just How Things Are, just like the weather. Complaining about the weather never did make it change, now did it? What you do with the weather is, you adjust, you accept, and you COPE. Anyone who seriously snivels and whines about it is not being an ADULT.

But people are not storm clouds. Storm clouds are not going to listen to your complaints. It would be irrational to expect the storm cloud to ever change its behaviors in response to you. But people have a personal responsibility for their behaviors. So when a behavior is truly egregious and is something you should not have to tolerate, it does not MATTER that the behavior is long established and not likely to go away the first time you complain. It does not MATTER that people will defend such tradition-honored asshole behaviors and argue against you and get annoyed with you for attacking them. If you're pretty solidly sure of your ground and feel strongly enough about it, this is how it's done. They don't have to like it. But they have the capacity to change, and whether by patient explanation or angry call-downs or any other tactic of communication, it is appropriate to make those challenges to those ensconced behavioral patterns.

But here come the weather people, acting all reasonable, saying "OH well it's not that you're WRONG, but c'mon, they always do that, and you're making too big a fuss, and they do not MEAN ANYTHING BAD by it, the most outrageous ones are just being ridiculous and funny and the serious ones aren't saying anything that's all that horrid. I tell you what, let's just lighten up. You can have your opinion and it is OK that you said it out loud, but since no one was intending you any hurt you need to do something about that angry TONE of yours"

Weather people at beer bashes and parties twenty years ago were saying "Yeah so people shouldn't drive home all drunk and stuff, but they're going to do it anyway and you should not be bringing everyone down being all dead serious, and they're grownups and most of them aren't all that drunk so give it a rest, willya?"

And thus it becomes rare and difficult to actually SAY anything about our social issues. No one wants to be tagged as the wet blanket, the ponderously-serious social misfit who doesn't get how inappropriate it is to lecture folks and so on.

But hey, are all these same people going to sit down in a circle tomorrow afternoon and be part of an honest talking and listening space, and we should bring it up with them then instead?

No?

So if it's going to be said at all, it has to be said in the spaces where the offenses occur.

—————

My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, 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, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both books.

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

It is important to be aware of one's privileges and to try to maintain some awareness of what life is like for people who don't have them.

Sometimes our social situations can seem paradoxical or complicated, where one type of identity can look privileged when compared to another in one aspect, but then it looks to be the other way around when you look at a different aspect. That's not a good reason to avoid trying to expand our awareness, though.

I am not a cisgender person; my gender identity is something other than what people tend to assume it to be. To use the conventional language, it's a different value than what my mom's obstetrician scribbled down on my birth certificate, where I was assigned male at birth.

Almost nobody I interact with has seen my birth certificate, of course. They are reacting to visual cues and interpreting those as indications of a specific physical morphology, the same physical morphology that led the doctor to write "male" on my birth certificate. There are ways to modify one's visual presentation and provide different cues so that people are less likely to assign the same value that got put down on one's birth certificate -- and many transgender people make use of these techniques, to present as their real gender.

In a world that still very much regards sex and gender as the same thing, the way one presents as one's true gender is to present as the sex that causes people to assume you are that gender.

I don't do that. I identify as genderqueer, not as transgender; what I want of the world is to be regarded and accepted as sharing a gender with the girls and women, but specifically as a male person, not as a female person. This is a different attitude and a different expectation than wanting to be regarded and accepted as a woman, period, full stop. Not all transgender women are transitioners, people who transition from male to female, people who present to the world so as to be regarded and classified and treated as indistinguishable from any other women. But that's the most widely shared understanding in our society of what it means to be transgender.

There's a lot of stuff I don't have to endure that transitioning people have to deal with, and I am aware that being insulated from this constitutes a privilege for me.

a) BATHROOMS -- As an adult I hardly ever face any harassment or discomfort related to people thinking I'm in the wrong bathroom. I'm not targeted by the hostile anti-trans laws and policies that have been enacted in certain places. My presence is hardly ever perceived by anyone else in a bathroom as a potential threat or as a deviant behavior.

I'm not completely unable to relate to the situation I've heard others describe, though. I had a lot more trouble with being in the boys' bathroom as a child, as an elementary school student. Young boys can be intrusive and uninclined to respect any semblance of boundaries, the communal bathrooms were a space of relative insulation from adult behavioral monitoring, and children can be particularly intolerant of differences and inclined to label and target those they regard as weird. Or queer, you could say.

I didn't like being in there with them. They made it plain that they thought there was something wrong with me, that I wasn't normal for a boy, and I didn't feel safe there. They were also very crude, scatological, obscenely nasty in their talk about bathroom functions and body parts. They were occasionally violent or physically intrusive.

But I really don't experience any of that as an adult.

b) MEDICAL -- Not all transitioning people participate in a medical transition, one that involves hormones or surgery or hormone blockers or other physical interventions. But those that do have to contend with the vagaries of insurance coverage and the possibility of doctors acting as medical gatekeepers and creating hoops to jump through, qualifying criteria that one must meet.

Medical transitioning can also be extremely expensive, requires recovery and recuperation time, and as with all medical procedures has risk factors, the possibility of complications or unwanted side effects and so on.

My gender identity has never exposed me to any of that. It's not something I've ever had to cope with.

c) HOMOPHOBIC CIS HETERO DATING-SCENARIO HOSTILITY -- Awkwardly titled, but what I mean is the reaction of cisgender hetero people to the existence of people of the sex they're attracted to who happen to be transgender people who have transitioned, and their equation of them (and to the possibility of sexualized behavior that would involve them) to homosexuality.

This is primarily an issue for transgender women targeted for homophobic hostility by cis het men. Such men often consider female people to have engaged in a sexually provocative behavior merely by being female and daring to have an appearance. Instead of attributing responsibility for their attraction to their own sexuality, they will often attribute it to the women to whom they are attracted. So in a similar, parallel fashion they regard transgender women as either enticing them or attempting to do so. Add in their homophobic concern about possibly having a sexual interest in someone who was born with a physical morphology that was designated male and it takes the form of accusing transgender women of doing a perverted and invasive form of sexual aggression just for existing and presenting as female in public.

Since I don't present to the world as female, you'd think I'd be completely immune to this. I actually haven't been -- my behaviors have often been treated and regarded as the equivalent of presenting as female, with the same attribution of attempted enticement, and I've had the furious anger expressed to me, and on some occasions violence as well.

But I don't tend to experience much of it as an adult interacting with strangers and casual acquaintances. When it has occurred, it has mostly been a reaction from people who have had opportunity to perceive me over time and form an opinion or belief about me. And, as with the bathroom hostility, it was far more of an issue when I was younger, although more from the older end of primary school years, puberty and adolescence rather than elementary school.

d) MISGENDERING / WRONG PRONOUNS, ETC -- I'm constantly misgendered and I'm so used to it I can scarcely imagine a life in which people correctly gendered me. I'm not, however, constantly seeking to be altercast by other people as an identity that that they already know and recognize (and altercast other people into on a regular basis), and I think that's relevant. There's an investment in the possibility of acceptance that creates a vulnerability.

I'm not sure my situation is safer from microaggressions or less fraught with daily emotional wear and tear, but at a minimum it is different.

We've all been in an occasional social situation where any kind of acceptance as "one of us" was completely out of the question, and we've all had at least a few occasions where it was not beyond the bounds of hope that people would. Rejection and hostility and mockery tend to hurt more sharply in the latter situation.

The main reciprocal side of all this is that transgender people who are transitioners occupy an identity that, at this point in our culture, is known and recognized. Some of the people who know or recognize it are hostile to it and don't regard it as authentic or legitimate, but they've been exposed to the concept.

I don't have that. There is still almost zero social awareness of people who seek to be recognized as having a gender that doesn't match their sex, and to have that hybrid mismatched combination authenticated. This means that the loud social voices that promote understanding and acceptance do not include people like me. It means that allies and thoughtful conscientious people remain unaware of our experiences and have no idea how to accommodate our feelings. It means that structured organizations to promote the equality and social well-being of gender-atypical people are not "us" to people like me -- they are, at best, potential allies, hypothetical groups to which we would logically belong if we could make them aware of us and get them to move over and make room.

I do often feel more marginalized (rather than more oppressed) than conventional transitioning trangender people. But I have societal advantages, too.

I pledge to be the best ally to my transgender brothers and sisters that I can be.

—————

My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, 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, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both books.

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

The assault on abortion rights was never about abortion per se, it's been all about returning us to patriarchy, pre-feminism. And all the Otherisms like racism that are part and parcel of it.

Whenever feminists made that claim, many folks said "You're pontificating. You're making it into a bigger thing than it really is. Seriously, the world is not all about women's oppression. I don't mean it doesn't matter or isn't important but it's just a part of the picture".

But the radical feminists said "This is the big picture. The entire history of social politics is whether there is sexual equality or there is not. All the other stuff is a subset of it. Patriarchy means old men got young men by the balls by first controlling women, hence sex, as a commodity. Patriarchy means controlling reproduction too, anchoring it to individual means of supporting the children. Patriarchy is a departure from tribal / communal responsibility for the children in a general sense. It isn't done just to divest general responsibility for children, though; it is done because it diverts so much individual young people's energy into channels so that their lives are obsessed with finding a relevant mating opportunity once those channels have been significantly narrowed and all sexuality officially pinned to one model. It also makes women and men adversaries, necessarily fearful of each other's motivations. However much she loves and cares for you, her social situation means she has to find a socially and financially stable partner because children. Perhaps he finds you fascinating and attractive but he is not wanting to be roped into supporting children just in order to get close to you.

Birth control and abortion meant it didn't have to be that way. They shifted the social possibilities. Or, if you prefer, the shift in social possibilities made room for making birth control and abortion services available.

I'd like to point out that pre-patriarchy there was tribal responsibility for the children. And there was no complex property to hand down. Pre-patriarchy was largely pre-agriculture.

What we know is that we, as a species, can exist multiple ways, can configure ourselves multiple ways. We adjust. It's not all hard-wiring. There are some hard-wired things but they can be rendered in a lot of different ways.

Patriarchy is one way. Feminism and associated social movements for equality were in the process of giving us a different world. Some folks don't like this historic shift at all and they're doing their last-stand best to return us to the previous world. The current chapter in American politics should be titled "Episode V: The Patriarchy Strikes Back". The long-term odds are against them but they're scaring me to the core to be honest about it.

The Kalahari desert San people, one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies, obtain everything they need with an average of 7 hours work per week from each person. And they're doing this in one of the areas of the planet that nobody wanted because it's a freaking desert.

Humans didn't switch from simply wandering around plucking what was growing (and hunting down an occasional critter) to staying put and tending stuff in the ground, keeping animals penned up and having to feed them, and defending all that from the other humans who were still wandering around -- until the alternative was starvation.

Agrarian civilization is a stupendous amount of work, it's a precarious existence with a lot that can go wrong.

All evidence shows it first took off in small fertile areas surrounded by deserts. Dense populations with too many people to obtain their food from the desert. Dense populations that depleted the resources in the fertile area where they originated.

The focus of patriarchy, as pointed out by Marilyn French, is control, obedience, personal sacrifice for the greater good, authoritarianism, fear of other groups. If you think of an entire society with the mindset that individuals have when they are in danger and feel threatened, that's the shared mindset of patriarchal society. It's us in scarcity mode. It's contagious (it entrenches and expands and drives out hunter-gatherer groups). And other than survival there's nothing good about it. It's also rigid and extremely tradition-bound and resistant to change, hence it lingers long after there us sufficient abundance to not need it. It isn't EEEEVIL incarnate or anything, as if there's a Devil and this is his agenda, but patriarchy isn't particularly praiseworthy and it sure as hell isn't pleasant.

And not only do we no longer need it, it's toxic for us in our modern circumstances. Our survival now depends on flexibility, cooperation, and coexistence, not rigidity and intractable adversarial competition.

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Preemptive reply to any mention of "mansplaining patriarchy": This is no time for silence, I neither present this as all my own independent thinking nor attribute it all to others, I'm not into the whole "man" thing, and I won't shut up.

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, 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, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.

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