I understand that you think what I should be saying is that sex-specific expectations of male people are sexist, limiting, and harmful. And that I should leave it at that and not be embracing a bunch of gender-positive rhetoric and going on and on about having a marginalized gender identity.

Well, that's actually where I started, embracing the basic feminist "sauce for the gander" concept like it was a get out of jail free card as long ago as when I was in sixth grade. I grew up with feminism as my defender, a shield against the attitudes that if you were a male you were supposed to be a certain way that wasn't expected of your female classmates and friend.

It wasn't sufficient. If it had been, I would not have ended up coming out and claiming an unorthodox identity.

I don't expect you to say "Oh, well, gee, in that case of course you're correct" or anything like that, but give me a chance to explain. I like to be understood even by people who don't end up agreeing with me.


Androgyny and the Male-Default-Identity Thing

Feminists saw that as women they were perceived as Other, disqualified from a lot of what was granted to adult humans. A lot of this special Other treatment was wrapped as veneration and adoration, even while a lot more of it was unadorned dismissive contempt for the lack of necessary male attributes, without which female people couldn't be allowed or expected to do a wide range of things. Feminists called it all limiting and wrong and demanded it all be discarded; they demanded to be perceived and evaluated simply as generic people. The generic person, though, was male; a cartoon stick figure without a skirt or lipstick would be considered male; our species was 'mankind', and 'he' was a generic pronoun that just happened to also be male.

So when feminists opted for women to be thought of as generic people, they were accused of wanting to be men. They were told that they were discarding the Special Other status that was women's privilege to wear, and that this was very sad and would ruin the family and so on and so forth.

I surely didn't just tell you anything you didn't already know, but now let's look at a bunch of hypothetical male people who want to opt out of gendered assumptions about male people. It's not a mirror-image situation because the generic undifferentiated human is already male-by-default. To say "view us as generic people and not as 'men' per se" doesn't invoke any of the notions about how women are or what the strengths of womanhood include, because those are marked-off special as only applicable to the Other.


Gender is Installed Deep, Exceptions Included

The pattern of behaviors and interpretations and perspectives that makes up gender isn't kin to a simple blocked-out behavior like wearing pants. You can decide on Tuesday that because of the weather and the planned activities everyone should wear pants. Instead, it's more like the behavior of using Spanish as your language. If that's the language you were exposed to throughout your life, you converse in it, you can read it, write it, speak it, and within your head, you think in it, even to yourself. But if you grew up exposed to English instead, and then on Tuesday it becomes apparent that it would make more sense if we all used Spanish -- perhaps because today we will be in Spain, let's say -- switching this behavior isn't at all a simple matter of deciding you're going to do so.

Gender is deep. We have roles in our head and we've learned them all our lives, and those roles are gendered. I don't mean the klunky Tinker-toy sense of roles, like she's the Mommy and housewife and he's the breadwinner, but more fleshed-out examples, role models, archetypes of how to be a woman or a man, a whole library of contrasting roles that we know, that we admire and emulate.

You probably have heroes, feminist heroes you look towards as inspirational and as celebratory of an alternative identity for women; they may not be public figures that other folks have heard of (although they might be); they may be brave stubborn passionate brilliant fiery individuals that you happened to have encountered at some point. People who are admirable women and are the antithesis of the Barbie and the subservient helpmeet and the dainty proper lady and the other prescriptivist examples that the world tried to spoon-feed you as models to emulate.

These alternative role models may represent a pathway out of the original imposed gender, but one thing they are not is genderless. Not unless you have to stop and ponder for a moment to even come up with what sex they are, wondering as you do so why it matters and why it's relevant.


The Significance of an Alternative

Robin Morgan once wrote -- confessionally -- about being an early feminist in the days when feminism was just dividing from the male left, and speaking dismissively about sex role conforming women who were doing and being what society told women they should be and do. Some hostile and judgmental things were said about stay-at-home moms and trophy wives and beauty queens and whatnot. But really it didn't take long for the women's movement to swing away from that kind of divisiveness. Feminists needed to be on all women's side, and perhaps more to the point here, they needed to create options and alternatives; if the old conventional roles were demeaning and unfilfilling and limiting, then just making it so that women had other options should be sufficient.

When I came out in 1980 as a sissy, a femme, a male person whose deep behavioral patterns were mapped onto the girl model rather than the boy model, I did not make any serious attempt to condemn the man identity that had been shoved down my throat and which most male people embraced as their own. It was certainly an identity that I did not want for myself, but I didn't feel like I was linked elbow-in-elbow with a mighty groundswell of male people who felt the same way. Far from it.

I'd spent most of my life disapproving of them, these boys and men and their way of being in the world. Just as they disapproved of me and called me things that indicated they regarded me as acting and thinking like a girl.

Coming out was actually about letting go of a lot of that. I didn't need to negate and replace their definition of how to be a male person properly. What I needed was to establish an alternative.


Trans Women and All That

I understand that you aren't at all comfortable with the transgender model, because hopping over the fence between sexes because the grass looks greener on the other side leaves the fence intact. Instead of dismantling sexist expectations, it seems to reinforce them, spreading the notion that if you exhibit characteristics associated with the other sex, that is who you are and you should disavow the tension between sexist expectations and how you are in this world by transitioning. You say that presenting as, and being seen as, a member of the sex they fit in with better, means embracing, not discarding, the notions that a person of that sex should have these behaviors and these personality characteristics and these priorities and values and so forth.

Well, I can see how that could be a valid worry and concern if transitioning were to be the only alternative to conforming to the expectations originally imposed on you.

But once again it isn't necessary to condemn and disapprove of other folks' way of coping with the expectation-tension. What's important is to establish an alternative that functions differently.


Conditioning and Inverting

As we're growing up, our identities take the form "I am a person who". How we think about ourselves, how we position ourselves against the backdrop of others, how we regard ourselves as fitting in, or not, among these established identities and roles.

Those of us who -- for various reasons -- gravitated towards sticking our tongues out at sexist gender expectations developed an "I am a person who" self-image that included "I am a person who doesn't try to be like they say people of my sex ought to be". And usually, because we get accused over and over of being more like a member of the other sex than of our own, our self-image ends up including "I am a person who is like a person of the other sex (and so what?)".

There may sometimes be a carefully nuanced person who grows up evaluating each and every one of these gendered expectations (and counter-expectations) and meticulously selects each characteristic with total disregard for whether it is associated with their own sex or with the other -- or we can at least toss that notion in as a hypothetical way of growing up -- but a lot of what actually happens for a lot of us is a kind of inversion. We -- unlike the other kids -- decide we are comfortable with the notion that we're like the other sex. And the more that the conventional expectations are shoved at us with judgmental hostility, the more we may push back against the demand that we personify the expected patterns for our sex by thinking of ourselves as "not like that at all".

Does this make us just as much a prisoner of gender as the conforming kids, just on the other side of the fence? Generally no, I think: we're less likely to internalize the most dehumanizing portions of the conventional expectations, because they're unpalatable to everyone, conformist and nonconformist alike, but unlike the conformist kids, we're not being pushed to embrace these. So the male nonconforming folks are less likely to internalize the most constricting aspects of "dainty", and butch women don't tend to internalize the most toxic parts of masculinity either.

But this inverted reaction is still gendered. It's a formulation in reaction to something. It should not be confused with a magical immunity to gender socialization.

I think a lot of feminist women do not always realize this phenomenon takes place, perhaps in themselves personally or perhaps instead in their butch friends and colleagues and associates. Feminism describes women's oppression, and the imposed content of femininity as part of that, so the entire content of femininity as conventionally enshrined in the role model is suspect, something to push away from in the name of being fully human instead of constrained by oppression. So the traits that lie outside it are often viewed as normal-in-the-absence-of rahter than being perceived as gendered masculine stuff.


Positioning and Joining

Feminism does contain threads of analysis about how patriarchy is inimical to male happiness and male well-being. That the set of sexist expectations and roles that constitute masculinity are bad for male people, and that feminism is therefore good for us too.

I sought them out, and found them, and rejoiced in them. But they aren't the most repeated and the most recognized parts of feminist analysis. I meet feminists online all the time who don't see male people as having any affirmative stake in feminism's success. Many more would agree that what feminism is about most certainly isn't the rescue of male people from what's imposed on us by patriarchy as males.

So although I found validation and recognition within feminism, I mostly found people unable to see what I could have to complain about.

I could not really contribute to what was being said, either. Inserting a contribution and having it become a part of what people understand to be feminism would first require that I have the authority to criticize it for what it lacks. And I don't. It isn't my movement. I don't get to set its priorities. Most people familiar with feminism, if asked about the male relationship to it, would say adversarial.

When I looked around for where else I could say what I needed to say, I found that I could speak as part of the gendered rainbow, that I could participate as a genderqueer person and try to establish that alternative identity. A non-transitioning male identity for male kids who grew up thinking "I am a person who is like one of the girls, not the boys". An identity that does not conflate sex with gender but embraces the apparent mismatch.

I haven't been welcomed with enthusiasm across the board, to be sure. I am occasionally perceived as a threat. I am often seen as violating ideological standards, and it sometimes offends other gender-atypical people who tell me I am not saying the things I'm supposed to be saying, that I am saying other things I really should not be saying.

But there's no fundamental barrier that renders me an illegitimate participant as completely as being male bars me from participating in feminism as a feminist.

Thank you for your time.



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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, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.


My third book is about go to into second draft, 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. Contact me if you're interested.






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

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"All I've taken away from your long-winded blatherings is that you are a straight, cisgender male that has feminine qualities", says Thomas. "Why can't you just embrace that, instead of needing a special word and claiming it's your identity? As far as I can tell, all this makes you... a straight cis male. You're like the male equivalent of a tomboy. Hey, most of us don't fit every stereotype, you know!"


Actually, "sissy" -- the male equivalent of a tomboy, as Thomas says -- was indeed one of the first "special words" I tried using to describe my situation.

So, sure, I can sit myself down and listen. I don't have to be all "you are wrong" and argumentative. I can consider you to be pitching an alternative formulation for me to consider. There are several communities of people I wish would do me the same favor, instead of telling me I am wrong if I say things differently than what they've decided is their truth.

Thomas -- who is totally on-board with gay and lesbian issues, and the concerns of transgender people who actually transition -- is echoing the sentiments of a lot of my gender-critical feminist colleagues. They, as you may know, are questioning the current social concepts about transgender people who transition.

Unlike Thomas, who sees me as very definitely not transgender, the gender critical feminists tend to conflate my situation and everything I say about it with the transgender phenomenon.

But where Thomas (and others who think like him) and the gender critical feminists tend to agree is: what I'm saying, and what I'm claiming as my identity, isn't valid or doesn't make sense.

Great. I'm a unifier.

Both the gender-critical feminists and Thomas keep telling me I should consider billing myself as a feminine male man.

Let's consider that.

I grew up with my childhood in the 1960s and my puberty, adolescence and early adulthood in the 1970s. That means I came of age alongside of feminism, and the voice of feminism told me double standards were unfair -- that if it was okay for girls and women to be feminine, it had to be okay for boys and men to be feminine. That it was sexist to have one set of traits, behaviors, characteristics, etc expected or required from one sex and a different set from the other. Which is in large part what the gender-critical feminists and Thomas and his ilk are offering me as an alternative formulation to how I present my gender identity these days.

I embraced those feminist ideas. They said I was valid. They said the people calling me names and telling me I wasn't "doing boy" correctly were not valid.

I embraced those ideas but they were insufficient. They didn't dive deep enough into the situation I would be in as a sissy feminine male person attracted to the female folks. That's mostly because feminism is about female liberation, and female experience. So the specifics were all about the aspects of female existence where sexist double standards impacted female people. Without specifics, just rejecting the notion of sexist double standards can be a lot like saying, As Anatole France did, that "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread".

Feminism dove into an immense number of situations to untangle how unequal priorities and treatments and expectations affected women. I didn't have access to a similar library of analyses of the situations I found myself in as a heterosexual sissy male in patriarchal society.

Queer theory emerged in the 80s as gay males started making this kind of systematic examination of the situations of non-heterosexual people. A lot of those observations were accepted, embraced, and incorporated by feminists as part of an expanded understanding of patriarchy. But transgender women and radical feminists had gotten off to a bad start and have never been on speaking terms, and don't tend to listen to each others' concepts and ideas. So as queer theory also started incorporating the experiences of transgender people, feminist theory and the nascent queer theory pushed off from each other somewhat, leaving lesbian feminists occasionally stranded or pulled on from both camps.

Me too. As I said, I grew up with feminism and found validation from it. But it wasn't examining my situation and neither were the new truths and assertions from transgender activism addressing it or speaking for me or giving me anything to hold onto.

The simple feminist "erase all gender expectations and have a unisex world" prescription, as voiced by Thomas and the gender critical feminists as described above, has shortcomings which I've addressed in these previous blog posts:

Androgyny & Unisex vs Being Differently Gendered

To Oppose Patriarchy: It's Different For Men

The people calling me names and telling me I wasn't "doing boy" correctly did not understand that I'd lost interest in "doing boy". The identity being shoved at me was social, not biological, and I declined it. I wasn't doing boy differently via being feminine and seeking acceptance as such; I reached the point where I had no interest in being accepted as a boy of any sort.

If we cannot use the word "oppression" to describe men's plight, how can we speak of it? That, of course, is the point: we cannot. Because patriarchy does not recognize the ultimate destructiveness of tyranny to tyrants, the fathers have no word-and therefore no concept-for the kind of dehumanization, the severe characterological damage, done to men by their use of violence of all kinds to dominate women and all "others". Men who are becoming conscious must find their own language for their experience.

-- Sonia Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: the Metaphysics of Liberation

That is exactly what I sought out to do in the 1980s as a women's studies major (a tale which will be made available when my next book, That Guy in our Women's Studies Class, comes out next year), and what I am continuing to do now in writing these blog posts.

I can't do so "as a feminist", within feminism, as a part of the feminist community. Feminism, as I said, exists for the purpose of female liberation, and speaks from female experience; I can't really modify any part of it or add to it without being perceived as an interloper and an invader, at least by some, and while some people in the LGBTQIA world often also see and regard me as a hostile invasive force, it's constituted around multiple variant identities instead of one primary identity, which affords me more room to say "me too, move over". But that does mean finding ways of expressing my situation in terms and within concepts that are in use there.

It isn't phony: when I first came out in 1980, I specifically conceptualized myself as a fundamentally different identity from straight guys, gay guys, or transsexual women. I didn't see my concerns as the concerns of men within patriarchy but as the concerns of heterosexual sissies within patriarchy. So I'm not barging in to use the LGBTQIA voice for expediency reasons.

But I speak with my own voice. You should consider it, listen to it, regardless of your embrace (or lack of it) of either the transgender people's theories or the theories of feminism, and don't be in such a hurry to conflate everything that doesn't seem to come from your own camp with whatever you don't like about the perspectives you currently disagree with.

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


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



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

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Let me describe a couple people from one of the support groups.

Kim wears dresses and skirts and puts on cosmetics just because he likes doing so. "Nothing should be regarded as gender atypical, really. That's my attitude".

Sky wears a skirt and puts on makeup precisely because it is gender atypical. Sky is nonbinary and wants to convey being more femme. So they're using this to send a visual signal. "Well, also, I feel more feminine when I'm dressed that way, so it's for me, too".

So last week someone posted a meme about how young male children should be supported if they want to wear a ballet tutu and carry a doll. Sky put a like on it and a reply saying we need to cheer when we see that. Kim said something similar and I gave it a thumbs up myself.

But inside my head I was thinking about saying to Sky: "But you do realize that if a ballet tutu is no longer off-limits or risque for males to wear, it loses some of its strength as a gender signal, right?"


Let's be blunt: the provocative nature of anything you own, its power as something that you wear that previously only some other gender ever wore, that impact all goes to hell once it is established that boys and girls alike can wear these things.

Putting on a pair of blue jeans when you're a female person doesn't establish you as a drag king and won't signal that you're butch. It could have a century ago, but now wearing pants doesn't carry a gender message.

If you need to be offset from the cisgender world, your ability to do so on the basis of what you wear is limited to the rigidities of the mainstream world. Think about it.



I am not quite like Sky but I'm not exactly like Kim either. I did start wearing skirts to send a social signal. Since early childhood, other people had outed me to myself and to their friends, pointing out that I was like a girl, that I wasn't normal for a boy, that I wasn't a real man. And it had been held out to me that I would never have a girlfriend or be sexually active with women because of this. They acted like they'd found my hidden secret, my great shame. So putting on the skirt was a way of saying "I'm not in hiding, I know who I am and I'm proud of it".

I do also wear them because they're more comfortable in the hot sticky summer weather and I like the way I look in them because I have great legs.



My friend and colleague Naki Ray, an intersex activist, is constantly reminding people "Please, stop conflating sex with gender or sex traits with gender identity!" It's an important distinction for me, too. There's definitely a difference, for me, between being perceived as femme and being perceived as female. Whereas Sky wants to go forth into the world being neither regarded as male nor as female, I am definitely male. It was my personality characteristics and my behaviors and my whole way of being in the world that caused the other kids to regard me as being like a girl. But they would not have had reason to single me out and harass me for being like a girl if I had not been male. That is who I am and that is who I get to be proud of being, a male person who is like this, who is in the world this way and not the masculine boyish way expected of me.

Kim would be happy to wake up in a world where there is absolutely nothing remaining that signals gender to anyone. Where gender is dead. Where there isn't a single notion about what male people do or wear or act like, as opposed to how female people do those things, or intersex folks for that matter. It would be a world where there are no nonbinary people. No butch people. No femme people. No boys, no girls, no men, no women. There might still be classifications by sex -- people might notice whether you have a conventional male body structure or a classic female body structure or something else. This might seem regressive to trans people who have fought hard to split identity away from what you've got inside your underpants, but remember, people would not associate it with anything else, either. This would be a society that would not regard you any differently no matter what your sexual morphology. Kim would regard this as the ideal world.

Would I? It's complicated. My identity is embedded in my history. I didn't grow up in that kind of world. Our internal identities take the form "I am the person who...", don't they? Well, I am the person who was seen as a male who acted and behaved and apparently thought like one of the girls. I like to think I am doing things that move us towards Kim's ideal world, but if you plucked me up and dropped me into it tomorrow morning? No one in such a world would understand easily what I had been up against during my lifetime. Not that many people grasp that in today's world, to be fair -- you seen any movies lately or read any good novels featuring femmy males who fall in love with the female heroes of the storyline and don't masculinize themselves to become heterosexually viable?


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

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


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



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

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

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Last Thursday's author reading, lecture, and Q & A is now available on YouTube.

It was quite well-attended with forty people joining the Zoom session, and I had a good time.



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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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Index of all Blog Posts

My transgender woman friend is replying to a comment that she finds annoying. Somebody has said that they have nothing against transgender women, "but why do you embrace all of the most phony and stereotypical trappings of restrictive femininity? It's all pink lipstick and false eyelashes and nylons and pointy shoes with you. Don't you see how that comes across to us cis women? It's like you think that's what being a woman is all about!"

My friend finds the comment annoying because she feels like she keeps answering it over and over, it's a reoccurring theme and she's tired of it. She writes, "We don't like being misgendered. I happen to be tall for a woman, with more narrow hips and a more angular jaw. I grew up before puberty blockers. Many of us need to send as many signals as possible or we run the risk of being addressed as 'sir' or 'mister'. Why is that hard for you to understand?"

She uses socially recognized indicators of gender. Things that men don't do, things that men don't wear. That only works as long as men, in general, don't do those things, don't wear those items.

Meanwhile, we cheer when we hear stories of boys in preschool who aren't chased away from the fairy princess costumes. We celebrate the decline in rigid notions of what boys can do, what girls can do. We agree that the body with which one is born should not artificially limit one's choices, that people should have the maximum freedom to be and do any of the things that other people get to be and do in our society.

Many nonbinary and agender people say they would be glad to see gender disappear entirely: just treat people for who they are, don't categorize people as genders at all. But at the same time, many of them continue to be assigned to a gender by the people who encounter them. The assignment tends to be the same assignment they were given at birth--not because of actual genitalia, necessarily, but assorted visibly discernable physical characteristics that are the product of our sex hormones and the effects they have on our bodies. The same things that my transgender friend has to work against to avoid being misgendered. So it happens with nonbinary and agender people, too, they get misgendered and to try to keep that from happening, they, too, make use of garments and grooming styles to "look more masc" or "look more femme", to offset those traits.

I could identify as transgender or as nonbinary, but mostly I don't. I don't seek to be perceived as a female person, and I don't seek to be perceived as someone who is neither male nor female. I most often call myself genderqueer instead, and explain to people that I am a gender invert, a male girl (or male femme if you prefer), that I have a body and I have a personality, a sex and a gender, and what makes me genderqueer is that they are a mixed bag, an apparent mismatch.

Like the transgender and the nonbinary people, I, too, use some signals to convey visually a bit of who I am. I wear my hair long, I wear some jewelry that's not typical for males to wear, and I wear some apparel that isn't considered men's clothes (especially skirts). Since I present (nevertheless) as a male person (the facial hair being a pretty distinctive marker, and a prominent male larynx also makes that statement), it's a mixed signal, which is more or less as good as I can accomplish in the absense of a widespread social expectation that there are such people as male girls out there.

If there were a lot of other male people doing that, though, using items that socially symbolize femininity without attempting to be perceived as physically female, wouldn't it just dilute and eventually erase the perception of those items as feminine? Or is there a way to create the identity "male girl" and be recognized as a feminine male instead of being seen as a longhaired man in a skirt?

And is it a problem anyway? If the world had not insisted on a bunch of rigid notions about how girls and boys are supposed to be different from each other, would I have ever pushed away from the "boy" identity and decided I was more like one of the girls?

Maybe. Maybe not. I think the answer to that depends on whether males in general have different traits (other than the physical, I mean) from females in general. If there are such differences at the generalization level, I might still have come to see myself as an exception, even without the excessively rigid and proscriptive attitudes I grew up with.

People might want to hold on to artificial signals, signals that have historically said "feminine" or "masculine", not to gild the lily of their body's own physical manifestations but to signal where on the spectrum of masculinity to femininity they consider themselves to belong. There's no innate reason for most of these markers to convey the meaning that they currently convey, but that's true of the sounds that constitute our language and yet we continue to use language to communicate.

But if, on the other hand, there are no real non-physical-body differences between the sexes, it does seem like gender would disappear if there were no ideology propping it up. So notions of "masculinity" and "femininity" might fade away, along with any possible signals to convey them.


———————

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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Index of all Blog Posts

Many older feminists on my Facebook feed and elsewhere are annoyed that so many younger tomboyish / butch women now identify as men. "Why can't they just reject the sexist imposed girly-girl pink 'n pretty bullshit and be proud of being women?", they write. "We need to stick together as women. Feminism has always rejected all that 'biology is destiny' stuff, but to us that meant that if you were born female it didn't mean you had to be feminine, you could play rugby and be an astronaut and be assertive and ambitious at the conference table". They express their dismay at the current thinking and attitudes about gender and gender expression and identity: "This looks like a step backwards. Young women are believing that if they're going to be aggressive and rowdy and blunt and heroic, they have to turn their backs of being women and call themselves boys or men".

Feminist thinking split gender apart from sex. Sex was your physical plumbing, your morphological configuration. Gender was all the socially constructed beliefs and roles and assumed attributes, and included things like "Women's place is in the home" as well as "Women can't be doctors, they don't have the detached analytical mind that it takes" and "Girls' way of flirting is to draw the eyes of boys and react to boys hitting on them" and so forth. Separating gender from sex meant separating what you were given at birth from what it was assumed to mean, so that those assumptions could more easily be challenged.

I grew up with the women's liberation movement getting enough media coverage and mainstream acknowledgment for it to form a part of my backdrop. And because of it, I grew up with my own attitude, that just because I was born male didn't mean I needed to emulate all that belligerent noisy competitive disruptive behavior, and didn't mean there was something wrong with me for valuing the same things the girls valued. It meant I could reject double standards. If any characteristic or trait was acceptable or admirable when a girl had it, then it was sexist and unfair for it not to be acceptable and admirable in me if I had it.

So why wasn't that enough? Why couldn't I just continue to be a guy who happened to dismiss all that sexist stereotyping and remain confident of my legitimacy in an androgynous unisex modern society?

I've tried to answer that before, but I don't think I said it very clearly. Let me try again...




Let's say you happen to be a male person whose attributes and behavioral patterns and whatnot overlap a whole lot better with the ones assumed and attributed to female people than with the ones assumed of male folks.

And let's say you happen to live in a world where some, but not all, of the people agree that it is sexist stereotyping to expect male people to be one way and female people to be a different way.

The other people, who also inhabit your world, believe that those so-called sexist stereotypes are actually legitimate accurate descriptions about the differences between the sexes.

The male children who grow up disbelieving in sexist stereotypes are obviously less likely to hold themselves up against those stereotypes and aspire to them and conform to them, so on average they're probably going to be pretty androgynous. The male children who grow up embracing those sex polarized notions, on the other hand, are most likely to put some effort into manifesting "masculinity".

So imagine that there's a roomful of people, some with one set of expectations and beliefs and some with the other attitudes. And they know about each other of course. And into this room walks a male person, a stranger that none of them know yet. What expectations and anticipations get projected onto this male stranger? It's a blend, right? The ones who don't consider the traditional beliefs to be stereotypes will expect somewhat conventional masculine behavior. Oh, they may also have some space in their head for anticipating more androgynous behavior, because they're aware of those other folks, the ones who discount that stuff as sexist stereotyping, so whether they approve of it or not they may at least anticipate that this guy who just walked in might be one of those metrosexual androgynous types you see so often these days.

How about the people in the room who don't ascribe to sexist assumptions? They're going to anticipate fairly neutral behavior from this male stranger, not materially different from what they'd anticipate if it were a female stranger, because they're not sexist jerks, right? Well, except that they're well aware of the continued existence of people who still subscribe to that stuff and believe it to be true, so whether they approve of it or not, they have some room within their expectations that the guy walking in may be one of those, and hence may exhibit a lot of internalized prescribed masculine signals and gender-conformist attributes.

Well, if you average all that mess out, you get a midpoint sort of halfway between conventionally stereotypically masculine and androgynously unisex.

And if this male stranger just so happens, in fact, to mostly have traits that overlap with the expectations and beliefs foisted onto female people, that collective expectation is going to be rather wrong. Significantly wrong.

What is gained by asserting an identity as femme, as a male girl, as a feminine, not merely androgynously unisex male?

It's a political act. It puts an entirely new expectation on the board.

If we can establish an awareness on the part of those people in that room that I described -- an awareness that some male people exhibit feminine traits, think of themselves as being feminine, embrace that, express that -- then whether the people in that room approve of it or not, the fact that the possibility of us has been planted in their minds means their expections, projected onto that male stranger, will be shifted.


Shifted in our direction.


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I don't identify as genderfluid myself. It's one more in a long list of terms that technically might apply, depending on how they're interpreted, but which would be misleading because of how they're more generally used.

If there's a widely shared notion of what "genderfluid" means, a cartoon caricature sort of simplification, it's the person who has "girl days" and "boy days", a person who oscillates between the two conventional genders at some oscillation-frequency. Like alternating current, or the progression of night and day, first one and then the other and repeat.

There really are people whose gender fluidity matches that description pretty closely. (And there is nothing wrong with society having a simplified cartoon caricature understanding of something complex, and certainly nothing wrong with individuals fitting the stereotype). A double handful of people in my online genderqueer Facebook groups have written specifically about their experiences on days when they were feeling femme or conversations they had with their mom on one of their masc days, and I recall one person saying they would realize who what gender they were each day when they stepped to their closet and looked at the girl clothes on the left and the boy clothes on the right side and felt which side called to them.

But there are also a lot of people whose identity as genderfluid has to do with squirming out of the confinement of any rigid gender identity because of its limitations. If you visualize the whole range of possible human experience and human behavior and personality and character attributes, a lot of what gender is about is a litany of shouldn'ts. Constraints. Boys don't cry. A lady wouldn't sit with her knees apart. A man ought not to let his fear show. Girls don't, boys don't, shouldn't shouldn't shouldn't. Many a genderfluid person attains escape from that by not feeling confined to any specific gender, and therefore not subject to those barriers.

That raises the question that my agender and neutrois associates might raise: "Then why have a gender at all, fluid or otherwise? If they're all about constraints, wouldn't it be more freeing to bail out on the whole gender thing entirely?"

But gender isn't solely about constraints. For any given gender, we have role models, heroes, social icons who have demonstrated a capability or attained something, and these can be powerful to draw upon. Gender can be about strengths, about what a person of a given gender can do, sometimes things that seem to step beyond the limitations of what we think a generic person is able to do. Or a way of being in the world, a set of characteristics that are most easily comprehended by referencing their widely-shared popularization as associated with a specific kind of person of a specific gender. A genderfluid person may embrace these libraries of potentials and strengths and other admirable traits, with all their previously-expressed nuances, as elements of a gender that they participate in.

Perhaps a neutral genderless notion of a person should not be scoured of these images and portrayals, but if our myths and stories and the portrayals of characters in books and films are embedded in a gendered world (as indeed they tend almost invariably to be), trying to evoke them without evoking the gender with which they are most associated can be like trying to think about how rose petals feel without conjuring up memories of how roses look and smell. It's just easier when you include the associated experiences.

A lot of people say that their gender fluidity is less like a binary either/or condition that flips from girl to boy and more like the progression of seasons. They may have times in their lives when they feel strongly anchored in one gender and other times when they are rather prominently rooted in another, but they may also have a lot of time spent neither strongly this nor that but with elements of both, or neither, or some of this and some of that intertwined.

The poles of a genderfluid person's variances may not be the two conventional ones of woman versus man. Some genderfluid people say that they vary between femme and agender; some explain that their fluidity ranges from demigirl to tomboy. There is a sense in which any given gender terms carries with it an assortment of positive and negative attributes, woven together to create an overall feeling or taste. A person exploring their gender identity may be observed to be trying on several of these in turn, trying to see which notion resonates with them best and feels like the most accurate description. (The various gender qroups I'm in are always well-populated with posts from people posing such questions as "Do you think I am nonbinary, or am I more demiboy?" and then describing what they like or don't like about the "fit" of each term). A genderfluid person is sometimes a person who decides that instead of needing to finally select the perfect term and stick with it, they can treat gender identities like items in their wardrobe, and populate their gender wardrobe with gender identities that look nice on them and fit pretty well and which they feel comfortable in. We have more than one outfit in our clothes closet, why not more than one gender? And why not more than two, for that matter. Not all genderfluid people have only two components that they vary between. There can be more.



I myself don't oscillate, really. Oscillating back and forth between two (or more) specified gender expressions or identities is not a specific requirement for being genderfluid, but it's what the term "genderfluid" brings to mind for most people who know the term at all, and that's the main reason I don't identify as genderfluid.

I haven't been immutably rooted in a single lifelong gender identity for myself, either, though. When I look back, what I see in my life is a long single curve that appears to have landed at a final stable destination. When I was a young kid, around 7 or 8, I saw myself as being a person who was like the girls were. I was in the inverse situation of a tomboy — I was male and unapologetically so, but very much out to show the girls that I deserved their respect as an equal, measured on their terms. And didn't want to be associated with or thought of as one of the boys. Then, in junior high and high school, as a consequence of being sexually attracted to girls, I slowly shifted towards a boy gender identity: the countercultural mellow hippie male, a variant type of male identity that didn't seem so horrible and foreign but which was also associated with sexuality and sexual liberation, especially with a form of sexuality that wasn't as laden with conquest and exploitation and was, itself, more mellow and loving. And then, in early adulthood, my path of my gender identity curved back again as I found the "countercultural guy" ultimately not a very good fit for me and came to realize that in an important sense I was still who I had been as a young kid, essentially one of the girls and proud of it.

I identify as genderqueer, and as a gender invert.

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Nowadays on LGBTQIA group chats and in leftist social discussions, the phrase "radical feminism" most often appears in a pejorative mention -- TERFS ("trans exclusive radical feminists") being castigated for their intransigence about female-spectrum transgender people, or disparaged for being anti-sex and anti-free-speech as exemplified by the MacKinnon-Dworkin pornography ordinance from a few decades ago, or accused of lying about data and making up statistics and being these vindictively hateful people who just want to blame males for everything.

Not that any of that would be a major surprise for the radical feminists I read throughout the 70s 80s and 90s. They knew they were hitting a nerve and were accustomed to receiving bad press and misrepresentation. I am sad to see them undercredited and disregarded by those who benefit from their insights though.

To review the basics, feminism in a broad general sense was a beacon of hope for me growing up, because its overall attitude towards gender was "hey, if it's sauce for the goose, it's sauce for the gander" -- that, regardless of whether men and women were different or were just regarded as different, it wasn't defensible to use a different yardstick of acceptable behavior. They pointed out the inconsistencies and folks recognized the unfairness. For me, as a gender invert, an exception to society's general rules about males and their personality and behavior, this translated as "hey, if it's OK for girls, it's OK for me; and if it's not OK for girls, then it's not right for the boys and hence it's not right to pressure me to be that way".

Now, RADICAL feminism, specifically, came to people's attention as it began to pinpoint topics that more mainstream feminism in the 70s shied away from: specifically sexuality, both in the sense of sexual orientation (yes, lesbian pride) but also more analytically in the sense of analyzing sexual politics, the politics of sexuality and sexual behaviors. Kate Millett taking contemporary depictions of sex and sexuality and holding them up for us to see how much they were about sex as an act of conquest and hostility, and about the eroticism of men having power over women. Susan Brownmiller writing about rape not as a horrifyingly deviant act but as a horrifyingly normative extension of how things otherwise were between the sexes, and as part and parcel of that overall situation. By going there, by having the courage and nerve to speak of such things as if they could perhaps be otherwise, and daring to condemn these situations instead of accepting them as a shameful but permanent part of human nature, radical feminism was the core from which central feminist tenets and understandings came in the 80s.

Catherine MacKinnon observed in 1987 (Feminism Unmodified), "...our subordination is eroticized in and as female; in fact, we get off on it to a degree, if nowhere near as much as men do. This is our stake in this sytem that is not in our interest, our stake in this system that is killing us. I'm saying femininity as we know it is how we come to want male dominance, which most emphatically is not in our interest."

Adrienne Rich, Jill Johnston and others questioned the "natural" centrality of heterosexuality, positing a different sexuality -- a sexuality between women but specifically different because, unlike heterosexuality as it existed and tended to define sexuality altogether, it could be mutually affirming, sensuous, not violent, an alternative to a conventional model of sexuality in which women's role was that of "natural sexual prey" (Rich) to men.

For me, that resonated powerfully: as a kid, I considered myself to be akin to the girls, regarding them and respecting them as colleagues and seeking them as friends, and now as a sexually adult person I wanted that mutually affirming sharing form of sex and wanted nothing to do with the adversarial and predatory model that was predominant in all understandings and portrayals of "wild uncivilized sex".

Nor did I find much to interest me in the non-wild, tamed, civilized version of sex, for that matter. Here there was a disparagement of sex itself as suspect, as something people should abstain from for a prolonged period after attaining the age of feeling the full appetite for it, and even after that should only engage in sex within very narrowly defined permissible channels. Here, perhaps, was a model for engaging in sex (eventually) without embracing all that adversarial and predatory hostility, yeah, sure, but it was basically saying that yes, sex IS like that, it's just that being like that is bad and naughty so sex is bad and naughty and we will therefore put sex in a cage. And even in this context, sexuality was not going to be mutually affirming, not as far as I could see: the nice girls had to preserve their reputations and also refrain from tempting the boys, and the boys were to suppress their desires and not sully the chastity of the girls, and then when he could adequately support a family he could get married and then she'd let him do it to her. The sexuality inside the cage was the same sexuality; the notions and understandings of it were still polarized and painted a picture of male sexuality that I wanted no part of.

Radical feminists tended to see sex as insurrection; they observed that even though it was politically dangerous to women in the current context, putting women in the position of sleeping with the enemy and eroticizing male domination, it was treated as dangerous by the patriarchy as well, and for good reason. The same intimacy that threatened women with too much identification and connection with their oppressor was a threat to the patriarchal system and its requirement that women be perceived as other.

Jan Raymond and Mary Daly, among other radical feminists, have indeed been hostile to any acceptance of transgender women. Those who have expressed such sentiments are not the entirety of radical feminism, though. Buried among the more publicized nasty sentiments, though, have been radical feminist voices whose concerns about the transgender phenomenon mirror, almost exactly, the concerns now being voiced by nonbinary activists: that jumping the fence, as it were, is not a radical solution to the fence between the genders, insofar as it leaves the fence intact. Neither the radical feminists nor the current wave of nonbinary genderqueer folks have a sufficient excuse for being as intolerant as they've often been towards people who simply feel that they personally will be happier when transitioned so as to be treated and perceived as the persons that they are. But it is a gross oversimplification to portray radical feminism as intrinsically opposed to transgender people.

Radical feminists spoke of the centrality of gender polarization. They said the political dynamics between the sexes was the central keystone issue in our society, and that the sexual dynamics as made erotic within patriarchal heterosexuality was the fundamental building block around which our political power arrangements were patterned. It wasn't the first time that one social factor had been pinpointed as the central core of all politics -- Marxism had done it with labor and the ownership of the means of production -- but it was the first to come along in a century and it took some common-place everyday understandings and inverted them to make sense of them in new ways: it wasn't that the awful world of competitive social and economic posturing tended to invade and corrupt the intimacy of sexuality and sexual relationships but that the corrupted form of sexuality and sexual relationships eroticized and rendered irresistible those forms of interaction and made them present everywhere that people interacted.

Society as we know it, as many of us conceptualize as human nature, is sexual subject-object polarized adversarial dynamics, writ large. Robin Morgan wrote about feminism as the "larger context":


For almost two decades, I've written about, lectured on, and
organized for the ideas and politics of feminism for the sake of
women ...as a matter of simple justice. If, in fact, these
were the sole reasons for and goals of the movement and
consciousness we call feminism, they would be quite
sufficient...nor is it necessary to apologize for feminism's
concerning itself 'merely" with women, or to justify feminism on
the "please, may I" ground that it's good for men too... In the
long run, it will be good for men, but even were it
permanently to prove as discomfiting for men as it seems to be in
the short run, that wouldn't make women's needs and demands any the
less just. So the fact that I place feminism in a "larger
context" is neither an apology nor a justification. It is simply
to show, once and for all, that feminism is the larger
context... The "Otherizing" of women is the oldest oppression
known to our species, and it's the model, the template, for all
other oppressions. Until and unless this division is
healed, we continue putting Band-Aids on our most mortal wound.

— The Anatomy of Freedom


Marilyn French wrote about power as the central patriarchal obsession, and taught us to recognize power by its own central imperative: the possession of control. Everywhere, she said, we see the sacrifices made in the name of obtaining and retaining control, as if it were an intrinsic good and a necessity in and of itself. And here again is the eroticized sexual imperative, the attempt to seize and make things happen according to one's own will and without concern for the will of that which is being controlled except as a possible impediment to be conquered.

Within the pages of lesbian radical feminism, as lesbian feminists sought to explain why this was important beyond the expressed choice of who to have sex with, came the growing recognition that in both gay and lesbian sexuality the people involved are not anchored by the body in which they were born to a preordained scripted role -- you weren't tied to being butch or femme, to being the man or the woman, on the basis of your bodily sex; and that that was, itself, radical. It wasn't how patriarchal heterosexuality was constructed and hence it was a threat, which went a long way towards explaining the hostility reserved for gay and lesbian people.

To say "patriarchal heterosexuality" was, and still is, somewhat akin to speaking of "women's lingerie" or "earthly lifeform" -- our conventional understanding of the category completely eliminates any need for the adjectives because those are the only forms we have tended to encounter.

Genderqueer sexual politics is radical sexual politics, and especially so the specific formulation of gender inversion: whether we refer to it as "heterosexual" or choose not to, to posit sexual relationships between male people and female people in which the participants are not gendered as men and women, respectively, elaborates on the radical departure from subject-object adversarial dynamics spoken of by the lesbian feminists; specifically, it extends it to where it is needed the most, directly dismantling what we've been describing as the core of the whole system. Untying male-female sexual possibilities from heterosexuality as we know it.

"Why", you may ask, "is it necessary to embrace gender inversion? Isn't it more useful to discard gender and embrace absolute gender equality instead? And if the female role is and has been on the receiving end of patriarchal oppression, of what conceivable value is it to issue a loud political hurrah for males styling themselves as feminine and wanting to be the girl in their relationships? Isn't that just making a fetish of the accoutrements of being one of the oppressed?"

Firstly, let's consider the limits of "let's just be equal shall we" optimistic idealism against the backdrop of the current eroticized 'devil boy chase angel girl' polarization. We go bravely forth (or we send forth the subsequent generation, all consciousness-raised and socially aware) into a social world that knows there may be sexually egalitarian people. It also knows to expect the continued existence of people in the traditional mold. The social milieu of expectations therefore is newly open to equality while still entirely familiar with the orthodox which is gender-specific. Anyone who has had to spend an evening doing arithmetic homework knows that when you do averages, the average that you obtain is less than the higher number, so when you average out the expectations of sexually egalitarian and sexually orthodox, your result is going to be sexually orthodox by some amount.

Secondly, yes, I can understand the misgivings about a set of traits and behaviors marked as submissive and subservient and offering them to males as a desirable experience and identity. But it is the subject-object adversarial worldview that tends to see things only in terms of power over and of domination or submission. Exactly WHAT is it that males are deprived of in a patriarchal context? Does it not strike you as odd that a patriarchy, a system of male power and privilege, should deny freedoms to its males with such intensity as it denies variant gender expression? The answer is that power is not a substance owned by the powerful. Power is instead a relationship that defines all parties involved, the powerful and the oppressed alike.

It's not about seeking subserviency or making a fetish of being dominated; there is and has always been an encoding of traits as feminine as part and parcel of encoding power as male, AND no, the boys don't get all the good ones. You're never going to understand this if you don't understand that some things are more desirable than power. But yes it is not a desire to be oppressed (by women or anyone else). I share Robin Morgan's and Marilyn French's radical feminist vision of a world no longer anchored by the obsession with controlling others.

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In my Jan 16 blog-entry ("The Limits of Radical Androgyny") I promised to cycle back to an interesting subset of people in society, the folks who dissent from what we gender activists say — but not for the usual reasons. Instead, these are the ones who say that of course gender variance should be socially acceptable, but they claim that they don't see any sign that it isn't now or hasn't been so, and that we make mountains out of molehills, that there's just no social problem there to speak of.

Oh, if you give examples, they may concede that there some background attitude that we have to contend with, but they'll say it's no worse than, say, the pressure on people to be right-handed. Easy to ignore.

I'll have to admit I've often found such folks frustrating to deal with. What's up with these infuriating people, who say that the social forces we've struggled against all our lives are no big deal? In contrast, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the mindset of the conservative gender-orthodox, the unapologetic prescriptivists with all their fears of horrible things happening if we don't maintain and shore up gender norms and keep men men and women women and so on.

Well, after listening to some of the dismissive people over the course of 35 years of gender activism, I think I've noticed some patterns that may help to explain them a bit, although, as ever, these are reductive generalizations that may not apply to everyone.


PATTERN ONE: Defensive Denial

I've never been in the military and have not spent much time being shot at, but I am told that if you are part of a combat detail and have to attain some objective while people are shooting at you, the best thing to do is to tune it out as best you can and do whatever tasks you have to do with your full attention on them.

In graduate school, my friend Vivian spoke once about crossing a dark campus parking lot at night and how no one ever bothers her the way many female students reported being accosted and harassed. She doesn't move the way a person moves when they are wary and worried about something happening; she moves with complete self-assured confidence, a middle-aged butch lesbian that nobody is going to mess with. Of course, being a middle-aged butch lesbian is no guarantee against unwanted creepy attention in a parking lot, but because her image of herself is so thoroughly that of a no-nonsense person who would not tolerate such things, she broadcasts that self-image, it is manifest in the way she walks, the way she looks at people, the way she holds bags and car keys and so on.

I've deployed a similar technique in a different setting myself, especially in my younger and more volatile days. I would be determined to sit across from some damn school official or organizational bureaucrat and have a conversation, and I discovered fairly early on that if I presented myself to the receptionist and waited to be given permission to go on back, I'd be waiting a long time or would be told that the person in question was not willing or interested in meeting with me. But if I strode past as if I worked there myself and was very busy with whatever mission-task occupied my attention, that would often work to get me past the gatekeeper and would nearly always suffice once I was in the corridors I didn't properly belong in. There is a lot of authority conveyed simply by acting like you know what you're doing and that you belong where you're at.

This is all defensive denial, in various forms. The tricky part can be remaining aware on a detached intellectual level that the risk really does exist, but without dwelling on it and becoming functionally aware of it.

Gender socialization pressures are abstract and complex, and for all of us they are a constant unmitigated backdrop. Defensive denial, which is a great coping mechanism especially for anyone who is somewhat gender-atypical, can become an unconscious habit that I think some people engage in without any awareness, a sort of second-tier defensive denial in which it erases its own tracks from the mind.


PATTERN TWO: Signal Lost Amidst the Noise

If you step out your front door tomorrow morning and find yourself face to face with a grizzly bear, you may make a number of pertinent observations in the first couple moments, but none of them is likely to be the bear's sex.

That's a facile example, in large part because we aren't sexually turned on by bears. Well most of us aren't. At least not actual genuine non-human ursine bears at any rate. We take notice of each other's sex and make a big deal of it in our heads, generally speaking, because sexuality and sexual attraction is a big deal to us, and, for most people's sexuality, the sex of other people is a highly relevant consideration.

But to a less extreme degree, a person who tends to tick off other people's awareness of oddity and atypicality in assorted other ways may have an effect on them where they don't notice or care that that person is also gender atypical. There are many patterns of expected behavior, especially socially interactive behavior, and one interesting effect of being in violation of one or more of those expected patterns is that observers, having already seen and assessed the individual as peculiar in this way and perhaps that other way, take less notice of yet more departures from normative patterns. Or they conflate them into their mental impression of that person's already-perceived oddities.

A person from a foreign culture that isn't often encountered in some environment is seen as foreign and exotic; if that person is also exhibiting atypical gender behavior, the atypical gender behavior is often perceived as part of that person's foreign exotic ways and not as a phenomenon unto itself.

So such a person — a person who is experienced by others as atypical in a variety of other ways — may indeed not experience much social pressure about conforming to gender norms.


PATTERN THREE: Obsequious Denial

Some people who cave to social pressures to be a certain way pretend to themselves and to others that they have not, in fact, allowed social pressures dictate to them how they should be, and then deny that the social pressures amount to much of anything, since by denying the latter they can more easily deny the former as well.

This is also a pattern I've seen from time to time. A resident of the Bible Belt attends church despite having been an agnostic before moving there, and denies having been made to feel that they won't be accepted among their work colleagues and that the neighbor's kids won't be allowed to socialize with his children. He has some reason or rationale for why he has decided to go to church on Sundays, but it isn't social pressure, nope, haven't experienced any of that down here, really. I could stay at home and work on my lawn or watch TV, nothing to prevent me from doing so, I just decided it's kind of peaceful to get away from my daily routine and the stained glass windows are pretty...

When it comes to gender variance, the people I've seen evincing this behavior are most often folks who aren't very far-flung from the official gender norm for their sex, just variant enough that they may have to conform a bit more than they wish to in order to be spared the remarks and glances and other reactions that gender-variant behavior tends to elicit.

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