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I've been window-shopping for a paid-for editing service, getting a set of experienced editor-eyes on my manuscript with a focus on making the leading edge of it, in particular -- the first XX pages that get requested as sample, in other words -- as marketshiny as the storyline will accommodate in hopes of getting more nibbles from lit agents.

I reached out to some editors I had prior contact with from one of my previous books. One of them got back to me after requesting and receiving my current synopsis and 1st 3 chapters, about 45 pages.

"There was enough in the storyline to keep me turning pages", I'm told. "I was sufficiently invested in wanting to see what happens next. And the solid quality of your writing kept me going. My biggest concern is that I didn't find myself reacting well to your main character. He comes across as distant and cold, someone who doesn't care about any of the people he's in contact with, and as a result I found myself pretty apathetic about the character."

insert comic timing pause

It's autobiographical.

Well, that's consistent with the story I'm telling, actually. At one point within the book I relate the tale of trying to transition from childhood to adulthood in the employment zone, only to find that...

Basically, they don’t like me. Teachers mostly did. Classmates mostly didn’t. And now that I’m an adult, employers mostly don’t. Why?

... and as a child I'd had a similar bad time of it in school, not that I never managed to have any friends but that I was so widely hated:

Jan [my sister] didn’t easily fit in everywhere. Whenever we moved, or changed school systems, I think she had to work at it to make new friends, get people to accept her, avoid being the kid that other people leave out or make fun of. I think she put some effort into tucking in any odd corners so people couldn’t see. Popularity was important to her; I don’t mean she was super popular, most popular girl in the class or anything like that, but popular enough. Accepted. But that wasn’t an option for me. I wasn’t merely some kid who was seen by some as having something about them that was a little different. I was the kid that everyone in the school heard about from the other kids before they ever saw me. I had a reputation that had stuff that people made up about me added to what was already there, and being stared at was not something I was going to be able to avoid. I remember kids from other classrooms bringing their friends with them to point me out through the open classroom door, you know, ‘See, over there, that’s him’. So I have a lifetime of training that’s made it pretty much invisible to me.

So my main character -- i.e., me -- comes across as uncaring:

Mark Raybourne [my assigned individual counselor] wants me to think about whether my tendency to not give a shit whether or not other people approve of my behavior is a tendency that has unhealthy components. Okay. You can consider it a defense mechanism, but you can also consider it the necessary attitude if you’re going to move forward. I couldn’t afford to care. I was under attack. I had to believe in me. They had to be wrong. Yes, that installs the worry that this is a coping mechanism. Yes, I’ve worried about that. That maybe my default assumption that I was right to believe in me and reject them as wrong was...incorrect, and I...for some reason...deserved this.

I definitely would not describe my main character as more tolerant than their classmates. I wasn't. I was judgmental all through the worst years, elementary and junior high school, just outnumbered very badly, so yes their intolerance was pretty nasty to deal with, but I wasn't a better person or anything.

So my main character is problematic: pushy and with a practiced "I can't afford to care, it hurts too much" attitude towards whether or not other people like me.

The editor who gave me the feedback may still have a good point. First let's make a split between whether the person I was as the main character is not a good main character or it's my painting of that me, how I'm written as that character, isn't a good representation of me. If I want to stick to the factual (regardless of whether I'm marketing it as fiction or as nonfiction) I can't retroactively fix who I was, even if that character needs fixing. But giving the editor a lot of leeway to make a reasonable point here, yeah, my book could be difficult to market because I haven't represented the character as well as I should.

To my way of thinking, it's a selling point that my book actually addresses so many of the editor's critical comments. The editor hasn't read the whole book and would not have seen that yet. I mean, yeah, they're totally relevant issues, but I've attempted to include them in the book. Trust me, I'm narcissistic. I may be vain and self-immersed, but I promise you it's not an unexamined life.

—————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

When I came out 44 years ago, I set out to follow in the footsteps of the social change agents I admired. I had a real and personal cause. Not that I'd been looking for one, I'd mostly been drawn towards social justice movements to distract me from dwelling on my personal life dissatisfactions so much; it felt good to care about someone else, and to feel drawn in to a righteous commitment, you know?

I have obsessed a lot lately with the sense of not having made any impact despite 44 years of making the attempt. I do occasionally see that this isn't an entirely fair appraisal --

a) I may have been there in various times and places where I was supportive of someone else's self-investigations or where I was perceived as some kind of role model, and then someone *else* went on to make the social ripples I never made; and

b) There's a lot of aggregate accomplishment, of changing the overall zeitgeist of our society about gender, where the same forces that made it possible for me to develop my sense of identity drew strength from me and others like me and it made an environment where yet more people could come forth with variant identities

c) Certainly, having a vision of a differently configured society has been a great and wonderful shield, protecting and insulating me from internalizing and worrying about the views of the society I actually live in. And I have a powerful distrust of Missions where one sacrifices one's personal life and personal happiness for some Higher Cause that's all about bringing about a world that one never actually gets to.

How much of it is ego? Wanting the satisfaction of having an impact, of watching the ripples become waves? Certainly some of it and probably a lot. I like to sit at the piano and smash big powerful chords down loudly. I like to craft sentences and paragraphs that make ideas resonate with people. No doubt about it, and no room to pretend otherwise. I want to rock my world.

At least some of it is a sense of responsibility and even duty, though. I promised myself as a child that if I ever figure out why it's like this, why my presence seems to bring out the mean streak in other people and they mock me and express contempt instead of receiving me warmly, I would fix it, not just for me but for anyone else like me. Whether it's a misstep that I made in understanding life and people or something that the rest of the people have gotten wrong about or whatever, that it has to be fixed.

And that's the part that is reluctant to let me rest and keeps prodding me to try to Do Something, to figure out a new and different approach that might finally work.

—————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

I did not go through a phase as a child where I resented not getting dolls as presents or where dolls represented a girl world I was cut off from. It wasn't like that. First off, I got to play with some girls I was friends with, and some of that play involved dolls. Second, when I lost that, when we all became older and I no longer had a girlfriend or a best friend who was a girl, it wasn't the playing with dolls that I missed.

I could do the thing where we say "let's pretend" except those weren't the words we used, it was more "Ok so then the Daddy comes homes, and you be..." we just made stuff up for our own entertainment. As adults we think of it as art, perhaps, when we still do it. Making stuff up. Making stuff. Being creative. As a kid, I didn't think of it as something I aspired to, or worried if I was good enough at it, if I was talented. It definitely wasn't competitive. Playing with other kids was generating our own entertainment, and it was fun in its own right, not some avenue for some other purpose, social success or whatever.

Having said that, yeah, I did see that there were a different set of superficial symbol things associated with the girls, like different clothes that they wore and makeup and playing with dolls and stuff. Boys had a different pattern, and I always found the overall sense of who we were to be unadmirable, right down to most of the superficial aesthetics. Like watching the Super Bowl right now would be a boy thing for instance. I remember as far back as third grade that it seemed ridiculous that other boys so often aspired to these things that were ascribed to us.

And yeah, I did wonder if I'd cope at least equally well if I were perceived as a female person and called girl, thought of as girl, including the superficial silly things, all the pink etc, you know? Not like "that's what makes a girl a girl" but more "Yeah well that's part of the experience, having that shit flung in your face as a definition of you".

Being defined by other people. That's what brought me to this table. I gravitated to the tables where other people had something to complain about as far as being defined by other people.

It's not about my right to wear lipstick or my desire to wear lipstick, for me, It's about thinking the lipstick expectations would have been something I could have coped with, along with much worse things. I'd have been an okay girl if those things had happened that way.

I did finally get around to watching the Barbie movie. I'm putting this up in lieu of an attempt at movie review because I don't feel particularly coherent and yet I want to discuss the movie. Lack of coherency is because... well, I was expecting either a Barbie-seizing kind of PowerPuff-Girls thingie that was assertive about Barbie power or else a sophisticated wry mockery of Barbie as per Saturday Night Live sketches. Neither is how the movie hit me.

The plot, the storyline, felt like tossed-salad randomness of childlike play-with-barbie events, initially in a dollhouse and then in accessory plastic cars but would run directly into adult conspiracy thriller involving the political and economic maneuvers of Mattel, Inc and the general "outside" society and the dollworld she came from. They asked a lot of cool questions and basically left them on the sidewalk to move on to other things, so the serious content didn't manifest to me.

I woke up the day after seeing it, with a different take on it. Something gelled while I was asleep.

I had this image of girls who were also adult women, the same self, playing with Margot Robbie... here at this moment positioning Barbie to face to other dolls and have a conversation about whether Barbie set women back fifty years, or instead that Barbie was an inspirational role model. And then second later, the girls/women playing with their Barbies drop them into a plastic car and, see, she's driving over the bridge here...

Yeah, well done. Playing with Barbies wasn't centric to my life but I do get it.

—————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

As author of autobiographical nonfiction, I'm occasionally questioned and challenged about my recall. I even once had a potential publisher tell me I could not market my book as nonfiction at all, since human memory is so unreliable!

That's an extreme position, and hence pretty easy to dismiss, but to a lesser extent the question has come up in various ways several times.

I do appear to have an unusually good recollection of events in my own life, but another factor involved here is that I've often written about things that happened to me, the events that had an impact on me at the time. That means that when I sit at my computer to write in the 2020s about something that happened to me in the 1980s, it's typically something I've written about previously. That works on two levels: the previous act of prowling through those memories and pondering them in order to write about them probably keeps them fresher than if I hadn't thought about them much in the intervening years, and in many cases I have copies of what I actually wrote at earlier points.

Within the Box has a couple pages of description of my first incarceration, in 1980, as a student at the University of New Mexico.

Here is a portion of that, followed by a snippet or two of an earlier description of the event from 2003 and one from a yet earlier description I wrote in 1982.

I dealt with Mountain View by starting my own local chapter of Mental Patients’ Liberation Front, and even though they were utterly coercive and we had no rights to speak of, I managed to get most of the patients in agreement that we should listen to each other and be mutually supportive, and try to ignore the horrible treatment the institution was subjecting us to. And I also got the support of a significant percent of the staff members, to the point that it polarized the institution and disrupted its functioning. I was making sense to a lot of people, and making their jackbooted authoritarian ways look silly and indefensible. Upper echelon clinical staff eventually decided I was a rabble raising psychiatric rights activist and booted me out, as if they’d caught me trespassing.

(from Within the Box, "Day Eleven" chapter)

So I make friends with the other mental patients. I’m thinking initially “I don’t belong here this is a mistake”, like most of you probably would, but the other mental patients here on the Seriously Disturbed Ward…umm, they don’t think they’re Napoleon and they aren’t seeing pink elephants and I can talk to them. Heck, I can even explain the stuff in my papers that got me into this place and they understand it (with varying shades of disagreement or ideas about what some things would mean that don’t overlap with my own). And I can understand the stuff that they are wrapped up in and concerned about...

After a week or so, we have started calling ourself the “patient people” instead of “patients” because to survive in this place you need to be very patient with the confrontational and abusive staff who belittle you and order you around, and patient with the situation in which you’re locked up and when not in immediate danger from the psychiatric professionals are generally bored. And we start referring to the staff when they behave at their worst as “impatient people”. We continue listening to each others’ stuff and give each other reality-checks and confirmations of the authenticity of feeling this or that based on what has happened to us here or there, and give each other pragmatic advice and sympathy and just someone to talk to about it. And pretty quickly we’re overtly saying that the only therapy in this place is what we are providing to each other. There are a couple of nurses, one in afternoon shift and another on night shift, who applaud this and say it is excellent. There are others on both of these shifts and everyone on the morning shift who regard it as inappropriate behavior and try to discourage us from talking to each other. The woman whose husband put her in there has a doctor who starts issuing instructions to the staff to stop this behavior. My doctor is mildly supportive but mostly for what he thinks it means regarding me individually. He thinks this is all my doing. At first it sort of was except that it caught on like wildfire once some of this stuff had been said out loud once or twice. There is another doctor who thinks the whole phenomenon is a great success story for “milieu therapy” which usually means “the therapeutic advantages of being surrounded by walls and barred windows” but now because we are essentially doing mutual therapy (and not assuming each other to be “sick”, by the way) we are part of each other’s “milieu” …at any rate he thinks it’s all wonderful and is instructing his patients to participate in our home-grown group sessions.

By the fourth week the staff is openly bickering, not just in the conference room behind the nurse’s station but in front of us out on the ward floor, and we’re behaving like calm patient little Zen masters. One guy hooks up the teenage couple with an attorney friend he knows and although he won’t “take their case” he gives them simple legal advice. I flirt with the married woman in front of her husband when he comes to visit and we imply to him that the two of us are having an affair in the hospital and he suddenly starts saying he’s going to talk to the doctor about her coming home. The guy with the Jesus freak parents is drawing his nightmare visions in crayons and it seems to help him cope and for crayon drawings they are pretty good.

Then one day I’m out in the barbed-wire enclosure (“yard”) where they let the patients go to smoke and get sunlight and when I come back in I find all my stuff is piled in the middle of the intake corridor and they won’t let me go onto the floor. “You aren’t crazy and you can’t stay here. You have to leave. Take your stuff and get out of here.”

(from a message board post, 2003)

...[I]nto the modern shiny psychiatric institution was tossed a stranger who had been handing out strange feminist manifestos, and he had just recently read an article about a group of psychiatric inmates calling themselves Mental Patients' Liberation Front, so when he deciced he wasn't getting what he'd come for, he decided to start a chapter right there in the hospital.

And the members of this new Mental Patients' Liberation Front wanted to talk about sex and politics and religion and love and suicide and life and death; and some of them wanted to sleep with each other while others wanted to sleep on the couches or on the floor, and they said, "So what if it it's emotionally intense, or unorderly, or different from normal? Does it hurt anything?" They complained about the godawful boredom, and some of the women put their makeup on their boyfriends while the men giggled, and the men shaved their eyebrows instead of their cheeks while the head nurse scowled from his plexiglass office.

In group therapy, the patients, now calling themselves the patient people, began discussing and redefining values. The nurses who had come to beam parentally and guide the therapy were told they could join in or listen patiently, but not to interfere impatiently with the patient people talking; after awhile, some of the nurses started talking, too.

But there were also a lot of very threatened and insecure people there who didn't like their reality tested like that, and they yelled, became violent, and insisted that personal contact was psychologically damaging to their patients' well-being. The patient people insisted otherwise, but the fearful ones lost their patience as rapidly as they were losing their patients, no matter how patient the patient people tried to be with them. Psychotropic tranquilizer drugs were ordered all around. It didn't look good for the patient people.

But some of the other therapists and an administrator or two began speaking up for the patient people, saying that these outspoken patients had an interesting set of ideas about reorganizing the care plan procedure of the institution. Some of them even went so far as to say that they didn't think the patient people were crazy at all.

Until one day a fiery MPLF radical or two found all personal possessions stacked in piles on the corridor floor after returning from weekend pass:

"You can't stay here any more. No, you can't talk with any of the other patients. Get your stuff off our floor and leave. If that stuff is still here tonight, it goes outside into the street."

(from The Amazon's Brother, unpublished, written in 1982)

—————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

I go on Facebook and encounter an image of an (apparently) male person staring in the mirror, caption says this person is trying on his mom's clothes while she's out; reflection in the mirror shows an (apparently) female person in bra and briefs staring back; thought bubble says "Wow, I look BEAUTIFUL"; caption below says "... and then she knew who she really was".

I am one of those people who were born male -- by which I mean born with the physiological equipment that tends to lead obstetricians to assign newborn infants to the male category -- who then subsequently identify with the girls and women instead of the boys and men. There is a pervasive notion that the core of identifying that way, the reason for it, the important part, is all about being a sex object, a desirable beautiful person.

And I do mean pervasive. It's everywhere. You can find this notion expressed by trans women and by trans exclusive women who mock them; you can encounter it among the socially aware who support transgender and other gender-variant people's rights and concerns but also from transphobes and social conservatives who are dismissive of us.

There's certainly some pushback, but not enough to keep me from wanting to push back against it myself. So maybe this is something you've heard several times, but maybe you need to anyway. This attitude is annoying AF and I get tired of encountering it.

* I first started thinking of myself as essentially one of the girls and only technically one of the boys when I was about eight. Third grade. There were a lot of things about being a girl that just seemed right, and superior. Being pretty wasn't an important item on that list. I'm not sure it was ever on the list at all.

* When I came out in 1980, at the age of 21, I began trying to explain that who I was inside (and who I had been for years, inside) made it appropriate to think of me the way you think of girls and women, and that I didn't aspire to be a man or have any interest in being measured by the standards associated with them, but that, outside, I was male. The male part wasn't wrong, just the man part. I never had any interest or intention of passing as a female person -- beautiful and sexy or otherwise.

* I'm not saying I never had any interest in being found sexually attractive and desirable. As a teenager and young adult, I developed a dislike for the asymmetrical situation, where the girls were being hit on and pressured and cajoled and sought after for sex, and where the boys were expected to do that hitting ond pressuring and, if they didn't, were assumed to have no such interests. You know the drill: sex as something where the female people are the commodity and the male people are the market. I didn't want to play at that table. I wanted reciprocity. I wanted to be desired in the same way that I desired, and to be no more a sexual consumer than the objects of my own desire were. So, sure, I ended up wanting those aspects of being human that are marked "female" in our society. But...

* In my particular case, the people for whom I felt sexual attraction were, in fact, female people. That meant I could not get this reciprocal and egalitarian sexual experience as easily as folks with same-sex attraction. It also meant that, although I did want to be sexually desired, the notion of literally being a sexy attractive female person myself didn't have as much appeal to me as it might have for someone who found male-bodied folks sexually interesting.

In a world where women in general are often treated like the only important thing, the only thing that matters if you're female, is to be sexually desirable to men, it should not surprise any of us that the attitude towards someone born male who says they identify as one of the women is to reduce that identification to an identification with being the sex object. And to map it directly onto the sexualized idealized female form with its idealized shapes and curves and associated apparel.

Not that there's anything wrong with wanting that, if that's what you want, but the people for whom that is true are not the only show in town. And, in the social climate where this is the pervasive default assumption about all of us born male who identify with the women and girls, you have some responsibility to avoid perpetuating that this is what it's all about.

—————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

In last week's blog post, I noted that I need to rework portions of Within the Box to include more tension between me and the staff of Elk Meadow around being gender-atypical. As it stands, I've got Derek thinking a lot about gender inside his own head, but you really have to read between the lines a lot to get any sense of Elk Meadow as sexist or heterocentric or transphobic.

This kind of falls between the cracks between nonfiction and fiction. There's a lot that I recall from the actual events of 1982 without recalling the granular details, and mostly that hasn't mattered much, but in this case I remember the folks running the place being very sure of themselves in their conventional gendered attitudes, and I need to convey that better. So although this specific conversation didn't take place, I think it's not a dishonest insertion. Things sufficiently like this occurred.

This is the start of Day Seven, which is one of the shortest chapters in the book, so it's a good target for expansion. (As originaly written, this entire scene ends with "Well, it’s better than being sneered at in derision or being informed that I’m intellectualizing"; the rest is new.

(This isn't the only insert I'm planning. Just the limits of what I've actually done so far)

-----

Day Seven

A less apologetic Dr. Barnes shows up at our unit’s morning meeting. “Derek, it is good to see your face here among us this morning. Derek has come to some important conclusions about us here at Elk Meadow, has decided he’s in the right place after all. I think we’ve all seen how someone can come to recognize important truths that may not have been apparent to them when they first arrived. So let’s all go forward with a fresh start attitude.”

I guess that’s better than being sneered at in derision or being informed that I’m intellectualizing.

“Our Mark Raybourne tells me that you don’t care if other people don’t see you as a real man”, Barnes continues. “That’s actually a healthy attitude.” He glances around the room, gathering everyone’s focused attention. “For all of us, sooner or later we have to look into the mirror and deal with the person whose opinions matter: ourself! And I think Derek has been trying to tell us that, that it’s not your opinion of him that counts, and it’s not mine, or the opinion of any of the Elk Meadow staff that counts...”

Barnes crouches down slightly, resting his hands on his knees, narrowing the focus back to me. “A real man has to live up to his own standards. He has to put down the excuses and the avoidance strategies and face up to his mistakes and his errors of judgment, and examine any patterns of self-destruction he might be stuck in. A real man can’t be satisfied with being less than what he can be, what he was born to be, and you’re right, Derek, it’s his own opinion of himself that he has to live with.”

Barnes straightens up and opens his hands, palms upward. Benign kind fatherly face in place, waiting.

“I agree with you about being honest with yourself and living up to your own standards”, I say, “but what I was talking with Mark about the other day is that I’m not into all that ‘be a man’ stuff, the standards I have for myself aren’t centered around masculinity. I do have standards and sometimes I don’t meet them and have to work on myself or, you know, try to deal somehow with my faults, but I don’t aspire to a lot of the things that were pushed at me in the name of proving I’m a man”.

“Well now, one thing I think you should examine, since you’re being honest with yourself as much as possible, is whether you’re using that as an excuse...”

Barnes steps back slightly and holds up one open palm, a stop sign. I don’t think I was reacting visibly, but it’s possible that I did. Or maybe Barnes just finds it expedient to act as if I was about to argue. “I’m not saying you are”, he continues, “but what if you’re using that as a way to set your aspirations in a way that doesn’t leave you open to failure. Just consider that. I mean, anyone could redefine their failures and disappointments as their goals, hey look, everybody, I always wanted to be an unemployed homeless guy with a drug habit, I’m a rolling stone, I’m a tumbleweed and I’m free, never wanted to pay income tax and live behind a picket fence. See how that works?”

“Well, I don’t think I conjured this attitude up to excuse what some people regard as my failures. I was a university student a couple years ago and doing okay in my courses, but I was keeping a scrapbook in my dorm room, I wrote ‘Militant Heterosexual Sissy’ on the first page, and the more I took those ideas seriously, the happier I felt about myself. I was never like the other boys and I never wanted to be. It’s not that I didn’t think I was as good as other boys. I used to think I was better than them. I don’t really think that way now, but I do think I’m different. And always have been. But to your other point, yes, I think I have things to work on, ways in which I don’t measure up to what I want of myself, and that’s why I’m here”.

—————

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

I've said before that in an intimate relationship, there is often a power inequality -- not so much because someone is seeking it or deliberately weilding it, but because intimacy creates vulnerability. To be vulnerable is to not be in control. There's no way to structure vulnerability out of intimacy, so it's there; and vulnerability is the risk being taken that makes intimacy scary as well as desirable.

Using people for sex is a behavior overwhelmingly associated with my own sex but I suspect those of you who are female people also run up against that, and it's not a comfortable feeling, this sense that one uses other people for sex. But just as not eroticizing power over other people isn't the same as sex without differences in power, so also not intentionally or comfortably using people for sex, or setting out to do so, isn't necessarily the same as not using people for sex.

It has been spoken of that some people eroticize the notion (as opposed to the actual experience) of someone else having power over us and using us for sex. I think this tends to be paper-clipped to masochism, but being the person done unto takes one off the hook for being the one doing unto others, where doing unto others is using people for sex. That's the attraction of it.

Yeah, I said "us". I'd definitely categorize myself into that second paragraph. For me, the fact that being on the using side is more associated with my sex combines with an attitude I already had about how other males were and how I was in general. Well before puberty I was not identifying with them, wishing, in fact, to distinguish myself from them, so things associated with my sex often tended to be repellent to me just because I associated them with my sex. So on top of whatever general guilt trip one gets on about using people for sex was added the notion that doing so would make me more like the men, would dump me in with them. The men with whom I don't identify.

In the specific case of using someone for sex, there are so many vulnerabilities about hurting the people you care for, and coercion is a form of hurt, an erasure of the other person's will.

Intimacy is not safe and cannot be made safe. It's inherently risky. It's fun, it's delicious and thrilling. But not safe.

Here's my arrival path to intimacy. I accept going in that there is the risk of coercion, and I take that risk with a willingness to assume the lack of deliberate intent, an openness to forgiveness. I guess that kind of makes it a BDSM arrival path, this acceptance of coercion, and I'm okay with that.

—————

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

Folks seem to think I need their acceptance, that I need them to think of me a certain way in order for my identity to be valid.

That's not really true.

Let me clear some things up for you.

I don't need you to think of me as one of the girls. I'm alerting you to the fact that I've spent a lifetime thinking of myself as one of the girls. Knowing that should make it easier for you to anticipate or understand my behaviors, which is something people have often complained about, that I'm weird and incomprehensible. If this FYI about myself makes it easier to understand me, good.

I don't need you to accept me as queer, as a genuine member of the LGBTQIA+ rainbow. The term "genderqueer" lets me explain my situation using a word you may have encountered before. So I use that terminology. If that makes it easier for you to understand me, good.

I don't wish to pass. The annoying default way of reacting to people like me is to assume we want to be viewed and accepted as ordinary boyish boys, or manly men, but we aren't pulling it off successfully and hence must be feeling like a failure at it. I'm not, and I never was. I don't need or want your acceptance of me as boy or man. But I also don't need you to embrace the notion that I'm different from them, that I'm actually more like the girls and women.

I don't seek to pass as a boy or man. I don't need to pass as a woman or girl. I don't need to pass as cisgender or genderqueer or transgender, as hetero or gay or lesbian or anything else you ever heard of.

I started speaking up because other people kept making an issue of it. Bringing it to my attention. Some being nasty and hostile about me not being right for a guy, and others being embarrassed on my behalf and trying to be supportive about me being ok and trying to reassure me that I was valid as a guy anyway. It got on my nerves and I felt like it was time I said out loud that I like how I am and I'm not trying to hide or slip under the social radar.

So now occasionally I get people telling me "just accept yourself". Or tsking about my need to get everybody's buy-in on my special snowflake identity.

But I wasn't putting it up for a vote.

—————

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.

———————

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

From Within the Box -- my third autobiographical book and current work-in-progress -- this snippet is a stream-of-consciousness monologue.

The book contains many such. After all, as a person in a "work on yourself / rehab" clinic, I'm focused at this point, both officially and in real life, on myself, and whether some portions of what's going on in my head are counterproductive & unhealthy or not. So naturally I'm self-obsessing. More than usual, I mean.

At this point in my life, I'm not much inclined to default towards "yeah I'm fucked up". I stand up for myself. I'm dubious about professional therapists and leery of their power. But I'm willing to consider that I might be defensive and hiding stuff from myself that I need to confront.

Mark Raybourne, to get you started here, is my designated individual counselor. I spend more time in group sessions of various types but I do get one-on-one sessions as well. As you'll see shortly, Mark and I haven't exactly hit it off.

------

Mark Raybourne wants me to think about whether my tendency to not give a shit whether other people approve of my behavior or not is a tendency that has unhealthy components. Okay. You can consider it a defense mechanism, but you can also consider it the necessary attitude if you’re going to move forward. I couldn’t afford to care. I was under attack. I had to believe in me. They had to be wrong. Yes, that installs the worry that this is a coping mechanism. Yes, I worried about that. That maybe my default assumption that I was right to believe in me and reject them as wrong was incorrect, and I...for some reason...deserved this.

I can’t talk with Mark about this, because he’s Mark and he’s not good at this. Yeesh. I think he means well but seriously, inept counselor-person. I don’t feel at all understood by him.

But still, back to his question.

Them. There’s a them. People not approving of me. I didn’t get why. I was a conscientious kid. I remember being in second grade and this girl in our class said something had been stolen out of her desk just now and several people in desks next to her said this one guy, who sat in front of me, that they’d seen him steal it. I knew he hadn’t done it, not in that time frame. I didn’t like him. He was nasty and he was stupid. He was one of the kids who picked on me whenever he could. He was mean. It wasn’t him. I’d have seen him do it. I’d been staring at people in my vicinity for the last ten minutes, just thinking about what would happen to each of us as we got older, became older kids. Anyway, I said so. My word didn’t carry much weight. I thought it should, because I thought everyone knew I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me.

I remember thinking that I could not care what the other people in the classroom thought. I felt like I’d done the right thing. I also felt like it was important to do what you think is the right thing. To care, and to act.

Yeah, so now at the age of twenty three, I want to reach out to them. Communicate. Share a concept, a set of thoughts, a model that they, too, might find helps them make sense of their experiences. Stuff about gender and sex and sexual orientation. Changing people’s map of the possibilities.

This is 1982. We know there are gay people. And we’ve heard them say we all should stop thinking there was something wrong with them. They liked who they were. They weren’t hurting anybody. They found how to seek out each other, and that’s who they wanted, others who were like them. So quit being all paranoid about it being a way of life that’s somehow stalking you. The lesbians in particular have explained that being on the constant never-ending receiving end of sexual interest from people you aren’t sexually interested in is not an experience that only hetero males might ever have to wade through. Yeah, fucking hell, sometimes there are people who get hot for you and you aren’t so inclined. Learn to deal with it, get used to it, unless they’re coercive it’s not the end of the world. Even the coercive ones don’t get to define our lives.

We also know there is transition. It’s in the media, part of the news. I’ve read Conundrum: From James to Jan. And also accounts written by that tennis player, Renee Richards. Oh, yes, of course I’ve thought about it. Things written by transsexual women resonate with me. A lot of them do. Some of them do not. The notion that it’s the wrong body, that does not. I often feel like I’m rejecting that notion the same way gay guys reject the notion that in order to find male people sexually attractive, they should have been female.

Yeah, it finally congealed for me. That I’m a male person, essentially one of the girls, in the same way that transsexual women know it, but in my case the male body is okay, it’s that there exists an identity of malebodied people who are girls or women, whose attraction is to female people. So they’re neither transsexuals nor gay guys. It’s something else.

And that’s who I am. I’m one of them.

So... joining other people... I’m open to advice on how to be the most open listener and still stick up for myself, and especially how to find people who would want to have this conversation.

I’m not trying to join them to have a community. I’d like that too. I’d be pickier about who I’d try that with. But for the message stuff, I want everybody I can get. I want to change your head. All you folks.

—————

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 in post-first-draft corrections and is being circulated to beta readers for feedback. Provisionally title Within the Box. 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 an internal-thoughts monologue excerpt from my work-in-progress Within the Box. Since Derek's mind and overall life-competency are being scrutinized throughout this book, there is a lot more focus on his thoughts and feelings than in the prior books.

I've selected this excerpt because it illuminates an informal but pernicious type of discrimination that exists to the detriment of feminine males.

-----

It’s frustrating being sidelined from having a respected contribution to make, though. All through my school years I figured that when I got to adulthood, I’d be snapped up for the same reasons I got good grades. I mean, I take assignments seriously and I’m smart and I dedicate myself to doing a really good job. Earn the good grade, you know?

That’s not how it’s worked out, though. I’ve mostly been yelled at by employers. And fired a lot. It isn’t because I’m too stupid to understand the work. Or because I don’t try. I don’t think I’ve fallen short of doing what was being asked of me, either. Most of the time, anyway. A couple of times it’s been because they assumed I already knew something so they didn’t bother to explain. But really, most of it has been unearned anger and criticism. Basically, they don’t like me. Teachers mostly did. Employers mostly don’t. Why?

I spent the year before my parents asked me to take care of Grandpa out in an oil field town, Rangely Colorado. I’d been told it was a place where, if you were willing to work, there was plenty of work available and a person could make some money. It was initially true, too: itinerant laborers like me occupied a public campground and lived out of tents all summer and fall, and employers would drive in with pickups and ask for any available people willing to do this or that type of work, and we’d hop on and they’d take us to the work site. While it lasted, I worked day jobs and socked away as much as a third of the price of the piano I wanted. I worked as a hardbander’s assistant, helping him weld lengths of pipe for the drilling operations — for one day, because he didn’t want me back. I worked a day as a roughneck in training, at the actual drill site, getting sprayed with oily water and handing equipment to the operator when requested, but they didn’t want me a second day either. I had better luck with the cutting crew, cutting down scrub pine and cedar with a chain saw or feeding the scraps into the chipper, a machine that turned branches and twigs into sawdust. I worked with them for two and a half weeks before the team boss said he didn’t like my attitude and fired me.

When someone says things like that keep on happening wherever they go, we’re nearly always justified in thinking the problem is their behavior, because that’s all these recurrent situations have in common, right? So I really can’t blame people for starting with the assumption that I’m probably lazy or insubordinate or don’t follow instructions.

It seems more like employers think that I have too high an opinion of myself. Just like Jake and Ronald and Dr. Barnes, they don’t like me talking like an intellectual. I learned a long time ago to keep my unsolicited opinions to myself, try to keep my head down and just do what’s asked of me. But it seems like I have mannerisms, facial expressions, stuff like that, that hit a lot of guys in a way they don’t care for.

My parents are college educated and they read all the time and always encouraged me and my sister to put a high value on thinking and understanding and absorbing facts and learning processes. When other kids acted like I was putting on airs, my parents emphasized that to be more intelligent or better educated than others meant being different from them, and therefore different was okay.

So some of it, I think, is a sort of reverse classism. I have upper middle class intellectual mannerisms and thought processes, and I seem weird and out of place in the kind of environments where I’m qualified to work, given my lack of a college degree. It certainly works in the opposite direction, where someone in a professional setting has a hard time being taken seriously if they don’t speak grammatically or they slouch or don’t have the right kind of serious attentive facial expressions. And if your family or your culture don’t perform the right behaviors, you won’t automatically pick the right ones up just by getting a professional degree or certification, so it’s class snobbery. But that’s the direction we usually think of it working, of keeping the aspiring lower classes at a disadvantage any time they poke their head into a setting occupied by people from higher classes.

I think it happens when someone from the upper middle class like my parents find themselves in a situation where they’re surrounded by the established wealthy, the genuinely rich. For example, I once followed in the wake of a program administrator trying to schmooze potential donors at a charity event, and got the sense that all the wealthy patrons knew each other and had been to the same schools, but the program administrator I was with wasn’t one of them and had a different set of tiny behaviors, gestures, ways of speaking. He didn’t get the big donation he was hoping for.

I wonder what happens when the young adult children of the rich try to have an actual profession, and all their behavioral habits mark them as trust fund leisure class prep kids. Do they come across as uncaringly lazy and arrogant and incapable, even if they’re trying hard, because of their mannerisms?

A big part of me not fitting in when I’m trying to find and keep a job is me not fitting in specifically with males. I didn’t notice that originally, or I didn’t question it that way. But the working class world is a lot more sex segregated than the office world that people like my parents inhabit.

Guys always think I’m doing something offensively wrong. Thinking I’m better than them. They do this thing, it’s hard to describe, but it’s the equivalent of that high-five that Irma has us do at the beginning of morning meetings, and I don’t engage with them the right way.

The hardbander seemed offended that I didn’t join in with his sex-word-laden metaphors for the parts he was working on. I wasn’t offended by his language, I didn’t act all huffy about it or anything like that. But he didn’t like me being polite. The roughnecks kept correcting my way of latching the clamp or handing a tool over. I should do it with more of a bang. They wanted me angrier, more emphatic. I wasn’t slow, and when I latched or attached something, it was solidly latched or attached. But still I wasn’t doing it right; the foreman said I wasn’t taking it seriously and could get them all hurt.

Back when I was in fourth grade, some boys in my class said I walk wrong. I bounce too much, and they took it upon themselves to instruct me. Walk flat and level, like this. And don’t walk around smiling, it makes you look stupid. Wear your face like this. Walk around showing that nobody better mess with me, see? It felt like they were partially doing this to get me on board, for my own good, but they were also irritated with me, annoyed with me.

They started calling me ‘Skippy’ and would prance in an exaggerated way when they saw me in the hallway, mocking me.

—————

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 in post-first-draft corrections and is being circulated to beta readers for feedback. Provisionally title Within the Box. 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

Here's a short bite from Within the Box where Derek is thinking back to some interactions with one of his LPN classmates earlier in the spring.

I like this section because it fleshes out and explains some things about Derek, including shedding some light on his current attraction to April, another patient here in the rehab facility. It also lets me insert some complicated stuff about the intersection of gender identity and sexual orientation, hopefully without it feeling like a lecture or breaking up the narrative flow

------

The ‘April and Jake’ thing prompts me to think about Marjorie for the first time in months. Marjorie Turpin. Nurses’ training school, another LPN student from my class. A class of about 35 students, me being one of only three males. A fairly warm crowd, overall. Women being themselves, in a way that you mostly only see when they vastly outnumber the male folks to the point that they don’t consider our presence very much. Teasing and banter and joking around. Our teachers, too. Ms. MacDonald and Ms. Jackson, professional and efficient but clever and amusing, down to earth, guiding the new crop of caregivers. It was a good place to be.

I fit in. I had fun there. I joined in with the teasing and joking and cleverness as well as soaking up the biomedical science and the technique of making a bed with military tautness or giving an injection. Marjorie Turpin was fun. I liked her. I don’t know when the name teasing got started... maybe when Ms. MacDonald spoke of the obsolete cough syrup called turpin hydrate. But then there was the TURP operation procedure (trans-urethral repair of the prostate). In one form or another, the syllable “turp” kept cropping up in our lessons and each time it did I’d make eye contact with her and pretend like it was named in her honor.

I liked my classmates and our cameraderie and wished for more time with them, casual time, off-the-clock time to just hang out and get closer. One day I asked a cluster of them if any wanted to go out for dinner together after Friday afternoon class finished and got a series of declines and excuses. I asked a few others separately. Penny said not this week but some other time. And Cynthia had to get back to the kids. Marjorie, however, said sure, and we agreed where we’d meet up.

I was standing out in front of the Pizza Hut we’d settled on, waiting. A friendly dark-haired fellow came over, asked if I were Derek, and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Patrick. I’m Marjorie’s husband”. Oh, okay, cool. I looked around but didn’t see anyone else following from the direction he had come.

“Where’s Marjorie?”

“Well, she’s not coming”.

I was confused. Disappointed. I asked if he wanted to order anything. He looked at me oddly then said he had to get back. He had departed by the time I got the parts to click together inside my head.

Well, yes, actually, it was like that, I mean, yes, I found her attractive, I would totally go in that direction with her if that were an option. But honestly, I hadn’t been consciously thinking of it that way. It’s like I’m one of the girls one minute, then, suddenly, no I’m not.

How do lesbians handle this? Is it a problem for them too, the same way? Where these are the people that you like, the people you want as your friends, but yeah you’re also attracted to them and you want that to happen too, some of the time? Do lesbians also not start off making a distinction, like “potential lover material, this one” or “I like her as a friend but only as”, and instead just respond open and warm and let things develop however they develop? Because that’s what seems to come natural to me.

Then there’s the militant heterosexual sissy attitude: It is not my responsibility to make things go in a sex direction just because I’m the male.

The Marjorie event wasn’t unusual for not resulting in me ending up with her as my girlfriend, or affair partner. What was unusual was her picking up on the presence of that kind of interest on my part.

So it’s another part of the communication problem. I want to broadcast to the world that there are people like me. Femme people, male people, sissy heterosexual male people, and we have these natures and these interests. Then I want to be sufficiently readable that people can pick up on me being open to possibilities, or specifically interested in them personally for that matter, without me behaving in some pushy intrusive way. Without me pretending to be someone I am not, donning male courting and flirting behaviors. Behavioral drag.

Of course I’d apparently been intrusive, maybe even creepy, from Marjorie’s vantage point. Hadn’t intended to be. I don’t tend to censor my flirtatiousness in situations where it might be inappropriate because for the most part nobody notices.

It’s all rather complicated. I long ago reached the point of being unapologetic and proud of who I was, my identity, and to talk at people about it, to come out, to insist on myself as a valid self and a valid sexuality. What I really really wanted, though, was to talk with people about it all, and finish sorting everything out.

—————

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

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.

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I have notes for a third book. I haven't been working on it. Or even them, the notes.

I admit I'm thinking about it.

Writing books is somewhat addictive on its own. I like the books I've cranked out so far, and to have a notion for a new one? Yeah, there's a certain lure to it.

The flip side, to be blunt, is that neither of the first two books obtained many readers.

That's been really disapointing. The first book (GenderQueer), in particular, was written with the sense that I was speaking for an entire identity, and I wrote it to achieve recognition for us. I mean, yes, there was some portion of my motivation that had more to do with wanting my own personal story to be told, or with my sense that my story was entertaining and should engross readers. But let's say 90% of my motivation in writing it was that I hadn't had any such book available to me as a resource when I was 14 or 17 or 21, and nobody should have to work all this mess out for themselves and feel all alone with it.

The second book (That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class) also had a socially relevant message or two, although to a larger extent than with the first book, I wrote it for personal reasons, to explain what I'd attempted and how it had gone down. And to have a platform from which to argue about specific types of feminist theory. Let's say 70% of my motivation was feeling that this content needed to be put into writing and the rest was about just telling my story and feeling like it was a a good tale to tell.

So because they both had prominent "mission statement" elements, it's been very discouraging that I didn't get more readers than I did. I don't mean I expected to get listed as a bestseller, but I admit I was hoping for maybe 15,000 copies sold, or 23,000, or 10,000. What I got was more like 100.

---

The third book is more of a thriller story. Chronologically it takes place between book 1 and book 2. I had come out as a heterosexual femme sissy male, but had not as of yet chosen to major in women's studies. My parents were worried about me.

I was convinced by my family to give psychiatric treatment a second chance. "That place you went to before was a snake pit... locked up with bars in the windows and locks on the doors and wearing hospital gowns. This place is all modern, and focused on helping clients communicate. They look at your diet, your personal hangups, your relationship with drugs [yes I know you don't think you have a drug problem, but you know your Dad and I do], your plans...please try it? If you decide it isn't for you, they promise you can just leave. You know we're all so sorry about what you went through, that wasn't right".

At that time in my life I was extremely frustrated in my attempts to become a gender activist and speak out about my situation as a social phenomenon. The word "genderqueer" didn't exist yet but I'd essentially formulated the notion and was trying to draw attention to it.

---

I want to try doing book 3 as a thriller. To make each day a chapter and give a sense of nonstop passage of time between the time I checked myself in and the time it all came to an end.

I still am not committed to doing it. Probably nobody's going to read it. It won't be as socially relevant as either of the previous two. The writing challenge will be harder for me.

—————

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.

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I've been blogging since 2014 so I do occasionally return to the same subject matter. Tonight I'm again writing about being a third grader, an eight year old, although I've already done one blog post about that.

The main reason it's blogworthy is that that's the first time I can recall feeling like I was fundamentally different from others, and it stuck with me permanently, so this is when my sense of identity, the one I write about here, originally started.

The Boys' Team

It's kind of weird that the first step towards feeling quite separate from the boys involved feeling like I was representing them as their champion. But right around this time, I became irritated by the attitude or expectation that the girls were always going to be better behaved. A teacher would occasionally say something like "I need to go down to the principal's office. Would one of you girls take notice of anyone who misbehaves while I am gone?" Some of the girls my age stepped into that role readily enough, prim and officiously proper and oh so sure that boys were inferior specimens who could only be expected to misbehave.

It wasn't just behavior, but also the associated notion that girls were more acutely sensitive to things like recognizing the beauty in music or art, or caring about someone and what they were experiencing and being sympathetic and supportive. As if boys were inherently more coarse and oblivious.

And there was classroom achievement. The girls, by and large, were the ones with the better grades. They'd win the spelling bees, they'd have the answers when called upon, they were smart. There were some smart boys who got good grades, but the girls seemed to have the edge.

So I was up for competing with the girls on all these levels, because I was as good as any of them were, in all of these different ways. And I wasn't going to tolerate the attitudes, the condescension, the expectations that since I was a boy everyone should expect less of me.

But the odd thing was that the rest of the boys weren't cheering me on. They mocked me instead, and implied that I was in some fashion beaten down into being this way and that it somehow meant I was weak, and that if I were doing what I wanted, I would be like them. Oh please, give me a break. It was difficult to care at all what they thought about anything. Meanwhile, I respected my competitors. Even if some of them were snobby about girls being superior to boys, I could at least see what they were striving for and they made sense to me.

Mrs. G and the School Hallway

I don't remember being particularly upset about being picked on by boys that year, but it was certainly happening and I guess it was visible from the outside. Meanwhile, since at least some of the girls weren't very social towards any boy, and only had girls for friends, I didn't have a whole lot of friends, although I certainly had some. My teacher saw that I was reading ahead independently and decided to insulate me from the behaviors of my classmates by letting me move my desk out into the hall during part of the day so I could be by myself.

This put me out of range of the mean-spirited bored boys but it helped to isolate me as well. I didn't mind at the time. I had my Nancy Drew books to read when I was all caught up with my homework.

Karen

I had someone to talk to during all this: Karen. She was quick to agree that most of those boys were horrible creatures, and their behavior was not to be tolerated. She said I was different. She liked being with me. We talked about other things too, of course. We were best friends. We also liked to hold hands, and I'd put my arm around her shoulders and it felt sweet and wonderful to be close like that. We'd pass each other notes sometimes when I was inside the classroom, and we went out to recess together.

I thought of her as my girlfriend. Having a girlfriend or boyfriend at that age wasn't a totally alien notion, I mean, we had that label to put on it easily enough. But it also wasn't like how it is when you're sixteen and everyone is assumed to want to have that kind of relationship. In third grade, it was something that people would make fun of, like any self-respecting boy would be ashamed of having a girlfriend. Girls would get teased about it too, although I don't think quite as much. Anyway, overall, we did get teased about it, and we talked about that too, and it felt like we were bonding, you and me against the hostile world, that sort of thing.

At the time, the option of being with Karen like this, of having this in my life, felt like the polar opposite of joining with the boys and being like them and valuing what they valued.

Culmination: That Sense-of-Self Thing

So at some point late in my third grade year, I had a rather vivid inspirational moment where all the parts kind of clicked into place and gave me a sense of purpose and identity. I was different, in a wonderfully positive and fortunate way, and I was going to hold onto that as the most important thing. I didn't really put a name to it. Didn't have to, it wasn't something I felt a need to tell anyone else about. Just a great self-awareness, a sense that I get to choose and this is my choice. You can't make me be like the boys. I am the way they should be. I pay attention to the way things should be and that is why I understand things that they don't. It's all right there if you look for it.

The most externally recognizable change was that I went totally nonviolent. It was a way to distinguish me from the boys. Boys that age don't really do much damage when they hit, and the hitting game is almost ridiculously formalized with rules about how boys are supposed to behave when they fight. You don't bite, you don't pull hair, and you aren't really supposed to drag someone down to the ground. You stand up and hit with your fists. So I found it pretty easy to just refuse to engage. The boys trying to lure me into a fight would call me names, would dare me, taunt me, then throw some punches. I'd just keep walking, let them punch me but then I'd be past them and they'd be behind me, frustrated, yelling things at my back. I didn't fight. It felt powerful. It made them juvenile, bratty little children who didn't count, and I was on my way to becoming an adult, a mature self-disciplined and socially responsible person and definitely on par with any of the girls.

—————

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. eBook version and 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.

———————

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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In the years when I attended as a grad student, only about a fifth of the students lived on campus, and the majority of those were first- and second-year undergraduate students. Graduate students, in particular, were likely to live off-campus and commute, and I did likewise, renting a room in a house shared with other grad students and buying myself a decrepit rusty old Toyota to make the daily commute.

I think that, in general, four-year colleges give the impression of existing for the frosh-through-senior student body, while universities that have graduate studies tend to convey that they do more important things than just teach people who are still working towards their bachelor's or associates' degrees. I mean, if you enroll in a four-year college and walk into the classroom, the person who will be teaching you is a professor on the faculty, but if you're a sophomore at a university, the person who greets you and grades your paper, and quite often does all the lectures as well, is likely to be a graduate student. Furthermore, the graduate student probably isn't teaching you because of a love for teaching and the aspiration to teach college classes, although some are and do. Most likely, the grad student intends to use their advanced degree to qualify for a professional career outside of academia, and part of how they pay for their own studies is to accept teaching responsibilities in some form -- teaching assistant, research assistant, or actual teacher of record for the course.

I can still recall the first graders taunting the kindergarteners in the next line over and thinking it made no sense because we'd been in kindergarten ourselves just the year before. And it makes no more sense for grad students to harbor contempt for undergraduates, but I've seen it. Many graduate students seem to think undergraduates are willfully ignorant, that they attend college to acquire credentials, not to learn, and that they're appallingly provincial and unexposed to non-mainstream thought.

Does that imply that university campuses feel like they exist for the graduate students instead, then? That's a tricky question with a complex answer. The professors are likely to consider themselves mentors to the grad students, and they do devote a substantial portion of their time to the projects and papers of their grad students. At the same time, though, the emphasis for a lot of professors is on research and the publication of papers and grant proposals and whatnot. It's not unusual for a professor to regard the teaching part of their profession as ancillary and unimportant, or to give lip service to the importance of teaching but devote their attention to their own professional endeavors. Professors don't get tenure or attain stature in their area of expertise by being good teachers.

There's also a gatekeeping function at play here. The purpose, from the standpoint of the various disciplines and professions, of graduate school is to bring in new people who will be appropriate in skill, attitude, and viewpoint, and that involves not only bringing people in but also weeding people out. And this affects the dynamic. A successful graduate student needs to be innovative and creative, with original ideas and active contributions to the field, but within narrow bounds. As with the grad students' own attitudes to the undergrads, the professors occasionally have the attitude to the grad students that their innovations and original thoughts are to be observed and assessed as signs of future potential, but not as content from which they themselves are likely to learn. To think in this fashion is to underline the difference in status between professor and grad student, and as in most hierarchies there is a tendency for some people to obtain their sense of accomplishment and expertise by doing that kind of underlining.

—————

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. eBook version and 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.

———————

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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That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class takes place predominantly in three venues: a facility for homeless people with psychiatric histories located on the grounds of Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital, a SUNY college campus in nearby Nassau County, and, later, a larger SUNY campus farther out on the island.

At the story's open, I -- via my alias in the story, Derek Turner -- am living in the facility while commuting to and from the first SUNY campus where I'm taking my courses.

My books are nonfiction and autobiographical, but I did change all the names, including my own for the sake of consistency, to protect the privacy of a small hanful of characters. I extended that to the naming of the two schools involved, which was probably kind of silly... can't hurt, but there are a limited number of likely campuses and some readers might conclude that the first one is probably SUNY College at Old Westbury.

It has historically been a progressive and experimental campus. It started out with a commitment to student authority in the design of one's own curriculum and course of study, and then later was structured around a mission to provide education for marginalized people who were often bypassed and left out of the opportunities for higher education. The Feminist Press was founded and originally located there, so the flyleaf of quite a few feminist publications were marked with the fact that they'd been printed at SUNY @ Old Westbury.

It's a fairly small college, although some other colleges in the SUNY system have yet smaller enrollments, and yet it sits anchored on a large plot of land (originally the Clark estate, if I recall correctly); students attending there are somewhat isolated and insulated from Hicksville, the nearest community of any size. Old Westbury itself -- the village -- is a world of mansions and old money, horse stables and yet more privacy and isolation, and is not socially a home to the college campus.

Architecturally, the buildings are bright and 1970s-futuristic, neither cubist modern nor self-importantly imposing; a good portion of the pedestrian travel routes take students outdoors or through glass tunnels, and it's a world of windows and walls projecting at interesting and unexpected angles.

The majority of commuter students are suburbanites from nearby communities, whereas a substantial number of the resident students were recruited from traditionally underserved populations from wtihin New York City, along with an additional sprinking of international students. Since the era covered in my book, there have been additional dormitories and additional classroom buildings built, so some of this description may be a bit dated, but I think the depiction still holds for the most part.

Much of the faculty was attracted to the site by its special missions, and then from the cameraderie of being among similar-minded educators with a shared sense of vision and purpose. To an extent that has also been mirrored by the attitudes and perspectives of the students, although mitigated by the presence of students who attend because it is affordable and conveniently located.

It is a small enough community for the students to become known to each other by experience or reputation, and, from that, to demand things of each other, to develop expectations and a sense of accountability.

—————

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. eBook version and 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.

———————

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

That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class takes place predominantly in three venues: a facility for homeless people with psychiatric histories located on the grounds of Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital, a SUNY college campus in nearby Nassau County, and, later, a larger SUNY campus farther out on the island.

At the story's open, I -- via my alias in the story, Derek Turner -- am living in the facility while commuting to and from the first SUNY campus where I'm taking my courses.

Creedmoor Hospital is a relic of the days of massive long-term (mostly permanent) institutionalization. It's not a building, it's a campus, with dozens and dozens of buildings sprawled out across Queens Village and neighboring communities in eastern Queens. The buildings look like medieval fortresses, with massive brickwork and imperiously angular faces and rooflines, bars in the windows and fences around everything.

Inside, the general design reflects a primary consideration for being able to monitor a lot of people from a minimum number of observation points: patients' living spaces tended to be aggregate, with the exception of a sprinkling of isolation rooms, and dining and day rooms were also large open areas. Professional offices were small and tended towards heavy metal doors without windows.

At one time, the institution ran its own support services such as medical and laundry and automotive and other equipment repair, perhaps even its own crematorium, operating as a separate entity from the surrounding suburban communities.

Covered walkways led from building to building, and in many cases underground tunnels connected them as well.

By the time I was placed there as a homeless person, operations had scaled back considerably, with many of these large buildings no longer in use. The east half of Building 4 was the location of the Queens Mens Shelter, where -- in contrast to most other aggregate homeless shelters in the city -- I could lay claim to a bed within a room (even if the room had no door, let alone a locking one) and leave things behind and come back and mostly depend on them still being there. There were lockers and we could store things. It was inhumane, abusive and violent, but the ability to retain some paperwork and some continuity of connection with other people gave me options I didn't have in the shelter system generically.

Meanwhile, the other side of Building 4, the west half, was being refurbished, with walls knocked down and new ones put up and everything repainted and linoleum put down on the floors, and a less prisonlike appearance attempted. This was where the Residential Care Center for Adults was being installed, and along with perhaps 70% of the other residents of the Queens Mens' Shelter I was successfully screened into the program and assigned a case worker.

We were all supposed to be enrolled in a "program", some type of scheduled activity that would theoretically rehabilitate us. My "program" was attending college.

Generally speaking, the RCCA personnel came in three broad types. There were plenty of self-important true believers who thought themselves to be doing good
things for the homeless mentally ill, and were horribly condescending to all the residents and questioned our judgment on each and every little thing, but weren’t malicious about it. There were the sadistic ones like Jerry Durst and Tony the security guard, people who got a jolt of pleasure from dehumanizing and humiliating people, who had probably gravitated toward these kind of situations because of the perpetual supply of powerless victims. And then there were people like John Fanshaw, who were mildly cynical about the world, its institutions, and the fairness of things, who enjoyed helping people where they could and didn’t see the residents as entirely different from themselves, but rather as people in a complicated and unfortunate situation or two.

One of the ongoing themes in the book is the discrepancy between an alleged commitment to client self-determination and self-governance and the realities of institutionalized care of this sort. The intersection of attitudes towards people with a psychiatric diagnosis and attitudes towards homeless people was not a comfortable place to 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. eBook version and 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.

———————

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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That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class was never a trunk novel. It's true that version 1.0 of it was written poorly enough that I rewrote from scratch instead of trying to edit the original, but I always knew the underlying story was worth telling, and that I could tell it, and I always intended to brush the dust off the project and get back to it when I could.

I did, however, once write a genuine trunk novel. One where I knew even as I was finishing it that it had no business ever seeing the light of day.

I called it Czilan and I wrote it in the latter part of 1981, the year after I came out. Like everything else I wrote in those years, it was definitely an attempt to explain the gender identity stuff and make it accessible to people. Czilan was an attempt to do so using science fiction.

The idea was to portray a parallel world that was like ours in most ways but where the gender expectations and assumptions for male and female people were mirror-image reversed from how they are in our world. I set out to develop the stories of four main characters, Kath, Bill, Amy, and Amaten (Martin). Kath was a rather butch female; Bill, a conventionally butch masculine male; Amy, a stereotypically feminine female; and Amaten a sissy femme male. They weren't four characters in the same story; rather, I set out to tell four different stories in parallel, with each of them on their own separate plot line, hopping from one person's tale to the next in consecutive order. In the story, all four of them have magically been plucked up from earth and tossed into a corresponding world called Czilan, the place where the gender roles are mirror-image. And my intent was to show how the people that in our world would be regarded as normative and gender-typical -- Bill and Amy -- would experience profound difficulties, facing hostile attitudes and constantly running into expectations that didn't mesh with who they were. Meanwhile, the folks who'd be considered gender-atypical in this world -- Kath and Amaten -- would sail through comfortably.

Overall, it wasn't a strategy unworthy of consideration. If it had worked, if it had been vivid and realistic-feeling and compelling, it could have illustrated what gender nonconforming individuals go through. Indeed, I've reviewed a very well-crafted movie, "I Am Not an Easy Man", which makes use of the same vehicle of a mirror-image gender-reversed world. So it can be done. I just didn't do it very well.

The first problem was that it was very difficult for me to conjure up the scenes and dialogues necessary to demonstrate these tensions and still have any room at all for subtlety. When I was a hundred pages in or thereabouts, it felt like I was beating my reading audience over the head with the main point in every social interaction. The characterizations of the four characters was heavy-handed and klunky and blocky in its embrace of stereotypes. There was too much repetition -- different dialog, same dynamics; different personnel, same results.

But when I tried to back away from painting the people and the situations in such primary colors, I began to realize that the alternative was to write something akin to oceans of good existing literature that already makes a good "Exhibit A" for what happens to people who run afoul of gendered expectations. Literature that already shows this...or shows it if there happens to be a reviewer or a literature teacher to point it out. But where most of the reading audience probably won't see that as the main point that the book was making, if they see it at all.

I had already noticed that phenomenon with regards to Pink Floyd's The Wall -- a narrative record album that tells the story from the vantage point of a sensitive male person who isn't compatible with the expectations of manliness and masculinity. But although that's what I saw as the takeaway from the album, most other people tended to describe it as being about the isolation of being a rock star, or as simply "the story of this guy Pink, and what happened to him in his life".

So if I'd written a viscerally gripping science fiction novel with good three-dimensional characters in it, and had crafted a vivid portrayal of folks who'd be considered normative in this world being marginalized and isolated on Czilan, and our world's gender nonconformists fitting right in, reciprocally, that doesn't necessarily mean people by and large would have gotten it. They might have, but it's a nontrivial challenge, to make the point plainly enough yet to render the characters as real-feeling and complex instead of oversimplified caricatures.

So a big lesson learned: it is hard to define, or illustrate, gender and gender expectations and the dysphoria of being subjected to expectations that don't fit who one is.

My next book, The Amazon's Brother, switched to first person narrative, and although I never got it published, I felt like it was the right formula, and it's the one I returned to for GenderQueer and Guy in Women's Studies.

When one is writing from one's own firsthand experiences, you can say "The events actually unfolded like this", as opposed to running the risk in a fictional depiction of being tagged as having asserted that, gee, it always unfolds like this.

—————

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, 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. eBook version and 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.

———————

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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So someone on Facebook posted the question WHICH CONSPIRACY WOKE YOU UP??

And people were replying with their initial confrontations with entrenched ideologies. Situations where the masks got ripped off and they saw things as they actually were and got radicalized over it.

For me, it was adulthood. I was a child. The ideology was that adults had wisdom, from being alive longer and getting more mature. We didn't know what they knew and hadn't developed mature responses yet, so therefore they had a different social status than we children did.

I was willing to buy into that, but I was also watching and observing, because that's what you do universally at that age, you know?

FIRST GRADE

Our teacher goes out of the room, telling us she'll be back in a few minutes. Another woman enters the room. Doesn't speak to us. Goes to our teacher's desk, opens the drawers, and begins rummaging in them.

"Excuse me", I say, "but that's our teacher's desk and you should not be in here".

She gets angry. "Who are you? Look, I am an adult. You do not get to question adults. We know what we're doing. You have no right to speak to an adult that way!"

I am angry too. Rules are rules. They should apply to everyone equally. Principles are principles. They want us to learn these things. To behave, to understand the meaning behind obedience. It was wrong for someone to say because they were an adult the rules were different. And it wasn't her desk.

HORIZONTAL OPPRESSION

Horizontal oppression is when some members of an oppressed group push down others in that same group, to differentiate themselves from them and claim that they're special and should not be thought of or treated like the rest of that group, instead of fighting against the whole group being thought of or treated in a disparaging manner.

I did some of that as a child. On the one hand I hated now unfairly we as a group were spoken of by adults, as if we were all thoughtless, unempathetic and unconcerned with anyone other than our individual selves, unable to grasp the importance of a social structure and the importance of rules and playing within them, short of attention span and unable to look forward to the long term consequences of our actions, and so on and so forth. I thought that was grossly unfair and untrue. But at the same time, most kids were reconciled to living as kids and mostly only measured their behavior against how other kids would respond and value it. And a lot of adult criticisms of childrens' behavior did have some validity, not enough of us were taking it all seriously. And I was, and wanted to be seen as doing so.

Since this is a gender-centric blog, let me say at this point that the girls were a lot more inclined to care about what the adults thought of us, while the boys seemed to only care what other boys thought of them. So the boys seemed to me to be more short-sighted and also to live up to the worst descriptions that the adults made of children in general. So my children's libber attitude fed into my feeling that I was not so much like the other boys and fit in better with the girls. The boys thought so too, saying derisive and hostile things about my alliance with adult authority. Teacher's pet, or various forms of intimidated weakling wimp who let the teachers push me away from doing things they didn't approve of, as if I were afraid to be like the boys instead of preferring to not be like them.

But for the moment, let's focus on children's lib issues. I wanted to be a citizen. I was willing to do my best to play within the rules, to color within the lines as it were, in order to be taken seriously and given a chance to express my opinions and cast a vote.

SIXTH GRADE

Kids were encouraged to submit an exhibit to the fair, either hard science or social science, and I did mine in social science with the subject "The Hows and Whys of School Rules" and found newspaper articles about the election candidates to the school board and what they stood for, and detailed the process. I interviewed school officials about rules and how they were established. My thinking at the time was that we, the students, should be involved in the process. But this was just my attempt to get a sense of how the structure worked.

In the same timeframe I had an issue with my Reading teacher, who was an authoritarian who rubbed me the wrong way whenever she spoke to us. Kids that age often circulated a piece of paper on which they'd write something like "Sign here if you think Karen is stupid" or "Sign here if you think we should get pizza for lunch" or whatever. I made one that was addressed to the principal of the school and said we don't like how this teacher speaks to us, she is disrespectful of us and insults us. I saw it later with a lot of signatures, but it was still being passed around at the end of class when the bell rang and I never got it back. I tried starting again from scratch and getting signatures during recess but the kids realized I was serious about actually turning it in and wouldn't sign.

A lot of school systems nowadays have, instead of PTA, PTSA, i.e., Parent Teacher Student Assocation meetings. That is as it should be, although not having been to one I don't know to what extent they take the students seriously. They should. We are coerced into being in school, so we are there involuntarily. The system is only somewhat set up for our benefit; it is also a babysitting service that lets our adult parents be in the workforce. And it is aimed at training us to fit in and be used to an organized environment such as we'll face as employees, and to get used to adjusting our expectations to the point that we just accept whatever they throw at us. And to get us used to being in a system that doesn't consult us and controls us.

HOME

I got spanked at home. My attitude when I didn't feel like it was deserved was along the lines of "I know where you sleep. I won't forget this. You want to push this and keep doing this? Lizzie Borden dealt with her parents, you know, and like I said, I know where you sleep".

I know a ridiculous number of people who were spanked as kids who go around saying things like "I got spanked as a kid and it didn't hurt me none so it's good". Maybe I'm an outlier. I never felt my parents had that right. I was always willing to discuss stuff with them, and yeah I also made mistakes but who doesn't? Adults make mistakes too. I didn't mess up upon purpose so why should I ever be punished that way?

COMPLEXITY

We can't just free the children and treat every person of any age as a sovereign citizen and proceed to a society in which every person regardless of age is regarded identically. A four month old baby can't express wants and opinions and desires on the same basis and also is significantly more dependent on other people taking care of them, and doing so successfully regardless of whether they cry at the time.

So children's lib makes us confront the limitations of a simplistic "same as" versus "oppressively different categorization" division. At the same time, most fourth graders and the overwhemling majority of 16 year olds do not benefit from the status of childhood as it limits and restricts them. So it isn't an either-or proposition, to either completely negate the notion that children are different fromn adults or else continue to treat children as we currently do.

And if there's any oppression that might be older and more fundamental even than the oppression of women in our society, and might be the model used for subsequent oppressions, it's childhood.

—————

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

———————

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

Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/89800.html

I remember when I was an early elementary-school aged child, old enough to have gotten the "where do babies come from" talk but too young to have picked up on the notion that when I got older I'd have a craving for that, an appetite for that activity. An interest in doing that for reasons other than wanting to become a parent. So we're talking a stretch of time when I was between 5 and 11 years old.

I can see where the following paragraph might be TMI, so consider yourself warned, but...well... I had a secret perversion back then, despite being a notoriously squeaky-clean prissy and prudish kind of kid. I was fascinated by where girls pee from. Their shapes, right there, where they were physically constructed differently from me. I wasn't the kind of eight-year-old who likes telling stories about bathroom functions, or making fake fart sounds with my armpits or by flowing through pieces of paper. I didn't scrawl four-letter words on bathroom stalls. So this was embarrassing to me. To find that I liked catching a glimpse of girls where I could see their anatomical shapes, like if they were wearing pants or shorts, or swim suits or ballet leotards. Or underwear. I was surreptitious about it, keeping it a total secret, never telling anyone, because although I didn't think it was hurting anyone, I sure didn't want people to know I was a kinky pervert.

I was embarrassed back then because I thought it was just me and had no idea what it meant. By the time I started attending junior high as a 7th grader, that part was no longer so. I got it. Sexual appetite, okay, that makes sense! And it was expected, and girls and boys would start dating and all that.

I'm bringing this up for a reason.

The mainstream trans and nonbinary message these days is very much about "what you've got between your legs doesn't matter and doesn't count and isn't anybody's business". You know -- because if you were born with a vagina but you're a man, the vagina part doesn't make you less of a man. Or your body came equipped with a penis, but you're one of the girls, and the penis doesn't invalidate your identity or your femininity. And so on.

But I don't feel included or taken into account by that message.

I was definitely one of the girls growing up. All during that same time frame, elementary-aged child, I liked who the girls were and admired them, and aspired to be just as good as they were in the ways that count. Being self-regulated, a mature person responsible for her own behavior. Being patient, even-tempered, being able to behave within the rules and color within the lines, to be a good student and a good citizen and not a bad rule-breaking coarse crude violent brainless jerk like the majority of the boys. I was told I acted like a girl; this was supposed to make me stop it or prove I was as "boy" as anyone, but my attitude was "yeah, so? they're doing it right!" So: femme or sissy or girl, that was me.

But skippng ahead to adolescence, once there was a prospect of actually acting on those "gee I'm fascinated by your girl parts" feelings, those sexual-appetite feelings, well, I was only going to be comfortable expressing that if it was going to be a mutual thing. The girls were pretty vocal and emphatic about finding it creepy when boys were only interested in them as sexual possibilities. That selfish boys who didn't care if the interest was mutual were annoying. I didn't want to be thought of as being like those boys -- as being different from these girls, the people that I emulated and admired -- so yeah, if these feelings were going to be openly acknowledged, they had to be mutual, and that specifically meant that my parts needed to evoke within them the same fascination and appetite that I felt for them and theirs.

Maybe as a society we're too focused on finding someone with the designated Right Set of Genitals to partner with, I'll grant that. But I don't particularly want to find someone who will like me as a person and shrug and decide she doesn't care about my physical configuration. Because I can't reconcile that with her having a craving for someone with a configuration like the one I've got. I don't mind if she also gets the hots for people of a different contour. Also find broad-chested big-jawed guys hot and cute? Sure, why not? Also get turned on by female people with perky breasts and deep throat hollows and green eyes? No problem, I can relate! But she better have an erotic response to slender wiry longhaired bearded male-bodied persons, whatever else may be appealing to her.

A lot of gay and lesbian people say it matters to them too. That their identity is not about "I don't discriminate based on people's reproductive morphology, I'll do anyone equally if I find them to be appealing people", but is instead about "in contrast to the expectation that I've the hots for the conventionally opposite sex, I totally don't and have a same-sex erogenous interest instead".

I am sorry if it hits you as transphobic, or binary, or genitally obsessed, for me to care that people know what merchandise I come with. I do understand that many people don't have a single physical design that they find sexually appealing, and I also understand that many intersex people and transgender people don't want partners who "chase" folks with their specific physiology because of a fetishistic obsession for that. I, on the other hand, do. Hope you're okay with that.

I won't rule out the possibility that I need to listen and learn things from you. But only if you're going to listen and learn from me, and maybe modify the message to make me feel less erased by it. I don't wish to fit in, indistinguishably, with the female people and to be thought of as a woman like any other woman. That's not where I'm at. I'm not a transgender woman, I'm a genderqueer sissy femme male person.

And I seem to have been born this way.

—————

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

———————

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

Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/89017.html

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Self Dissatisfaction

Of Dolls and Lipstick and High Heels and Skirts and Stuff

My First Psychiatric Incarceration, Told and Retold

Reflection in a Different Mirror

An Expanded / Revamped Scene

Using People for Sex

Self Defined

An Interior Monologue Snippet

Excerpt Snippet: Employment Discrimination

A Little Flashback Sequence

Nursery School via First Grade

Author Thoughts / Possible 3rd Book

Being Eight

SUNY @ Stony Brook: Where the Story Takes Place (Part III)

SUNY @ Old Westbury: Where the Story Takes Place (Part II)

Creedmoor Psychiatric: Where the Story Takes Place (Part I)

Trunk Novel

Being a Child, and the Politics Thereof

Anatomy and Identity

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