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

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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.

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


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



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.

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


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback. 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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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.

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


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



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

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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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"Oh, great", the gay and lesbian readers may be thinking. "First they want in, and make us expand what we call ourselves to include them, and use this ever-expanding acronym. And now they want to kick our identity out!"

Don't worry, you've got company. "Transgender / Cisgender" is inadequate too. I'm not trans. I was assigned male at birth. I identify as male. Not trans, right? I identify as femme, as girl, gal, woman. When I was assigned male, I was also assigned boy. I'm not cis. Because I'm all sissy. I'm not a man.

I'm not kicking anyone out. I'm coming out, which means I'm coming in, and for me to be in, some of the assumptions have to go out, so get used to it, because I'm not going back in, so let me in. It's complicated. Get used to that, too!


Let's start with the simple complicated. You've seen the genderbread person and the gender unicorn posters, right? The ones that give a nice simple explanation of why sexual orientation and gender identity is so much more complicated than "are you a boy or are you a girl" and "so are you straight, gay, or bi", right?






I'm male, that's my sex; I was assigned male at birth. They assigned me that way because they saw a penis. I've never dissented with that. It's the body I was born with and it's not the problem. I'm male. Male is not my gender identity, mind you. I'm one of the girls, that's my gender.

You with me so far? You see where those answers appear on those posters?

OK, then, with that in mind, let's move on to sexual orientation. I'm attracted to female folks.

Straight, gay, or bi?

Umm... sex or gender? I'm a male girlish person. Male people attracted more or less exclusively to female people are het, right? But women loving women, those are lesbians, aren't they?

This time the posters don't clarify much. Gender Unicorn gives me the choice of "physically attracted to "women", "men", or "other genders". Well, that doesn't help. I said I was attracted to female people, I didn't say anything about their gender identities!

Let's try the other poster. Genderbread says I might be "sexuallly attracted" to "women and/or feminine and/or female" people. That's a lot of and/or. The chart also gives me the option of "men and/or masculine and/or male" people. What happens if I'm attracted to masculine female people?

Both posters also address romantic (or emotional) attraction but the options are the same. And neither of them deal with the question of gay or straight or bi. It's just as well, because those terms can't handle the complexity of what's on those charts.

And the charts oversimplify matters too much.

Someone else might be attracted to feminine people, to people whose gender identity is expressed to be "woman". They might find a masculine female person uninteresting from a sexual standpoint. They might find a feminine male person to be of erotic interest. What defines sexual orientation may differ from one person to the next.

There's something else that the charts leave out about sexual orientation. Neither of them mention how the person wishes to be sexually perceived. Both charts have a space for gender expression but that's about gender, and I'm talking about sexual orientation. I'm referring to which of a person's characteristics one wishes to be found sexy on the basis of. That, for example, someone wants to be perceived as a sexually attractive woman, to be appealing to people whose attraction is towards women. It's not necessarily the same as gender or sex. I know several cisgender women who do not like being found sexually attractive as sexy female people. It's not how they prefer to market themselves in the universe of sexual orientation. I know both intersex and trans people who are revolted at the idea of "chasers", of people who are (or would be) turned on by their physical morphology. I know others who would feel very disappointed if their partner was not turned on by their physical morphology.

In my case, I'm into female boyish people who are attracted to male girls. Yeah, try to find that option on your dating app!



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

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


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

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

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"I was born this way", he says. "I know some of you think there must have been some event, or situation or whatever that made me like this, but honestly I've always been into dicks since before I knew what sex was".

I can relate; I can recall knowing the biological facts of life about how babies get made, but not knowing diddly about sexual appetite and sexual attraction. My understanding at the time was that the only time people did this behavior was when they wanted to have a baby. I had no idea that it felt good or that there was a hunger for it.

And at that age I had definite feelings for female contours, I mean yeah specifically there where they're different from male people. Their different architecture makes everything shaped differently down there, so that when they wear pants it makes shapes that are specific to their anatomy. And I liked to look at it, I liked the way it felt when I did. And oh! *blush* Was this ever kinky and perverted or what?! I mean, that's where you pee from, so I had to keep this secret lest I be mocked mercilessly by the other kids.

So anyway, yeah, I too seem to have been born this way.




In pretty much any discussion of what floats your boat and gets your motor running, sooner or later someone's likely to say that it's shallow and wrong to have the hots for slender blond people with seductive eyelashes. Or perky green-eyes freckle-faced redheads for that matter. Someone is going to say that you should care about who the person is, not what they look like, all that superficial stuff.

And now, added to that, we sometimes encounter the notion that it's shallow and wrong (and transphobic too) to care that someone has a penis instead of a clitoris, or vice versa or some other variation on that theme. We should accept someone as being of the gender with which they identify, and that goes all the way down to not imposing binary intolerant attitudes about what body parts a person has inside their underwear.

Well, I'm not without some limited experience. I've tried participating sexually with someone who had a penis. I didn't care for it. Call me shallow if you wish, judge me and find me wrong if you must, but I seem to have my sexuality wired to the physical architecture that's traditionally dubbed female.

Meanwhile, some folks don't much care to encounter people who find their physical morphology sexy. Or who find the combination of their physical morphology and their overall gender identity and expression sexy. "Chasers are disgusting. They have a fetish and that means they aren't interested in us as people. We want to be accepted as ordinary members of our gender. What's in my underwear is really nobody's business and I don't want to get involved with somebody who has a thing for that, that's creepy".

I don't mean to discredit that feeling or that attitude. Those who find chasers creepy shouldn't have to step back from saying so.

And there are people who don't opt for medical transitioning. And people who can't afford it. I'm totally on board with their gender identity not being any less valid.

But one size does not necessarily fit all. Some of us find the notion of being chased for the specific combo of our gendered self-expression and our physical morphology quite appealing. I do. I'm a girlish femme, of the starched crinolined variety, a good girl with only a modest naughty streak. I happen to be a male girlish sort, a person with physically male morphology. I present as male, expecting to be perceived as male, in hopes that those people who are attracted to feminine male people will take notice of me. The female folks among them are people I'm potentially going to enjoy connecting with.

There are intersex people who kind of like being appreciated, not merely tolerated in a non-judgmental way, for their variances, for the specifics of their physically unusual selves. Author Hida Viloria, for example, describes her own enjoyment of being able to penetrate her partners with her clitoris, and mentions several people who were pleased to find her to be a person with something extra to offer.

Is it shallow and venal? I don't know. I feel like I don't want someone to reward me for being a nice admirable person by handing out sexual access like a door prize. I feel like I want to be lusted after. I want someone to have the hots for my bod and appreciate that I'm a nice person. I get the hots for people because of their physical contours and I crave reciprocal hots for mine.

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My book is scheduled to come out March 16 from Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon for pre-orders (paperback only for the moment).

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“I agree! There’s no reason for all these labels! Just be who you are!” This comment was written in response to last week’s blog post, which was about retaining the authority to invent your own label instead of feeling like you have to choose from among the existing gender identities that you’ve heard about.

I feel like I’m perpetually see-sawing between these two arguments – that, on the one hand, people should not feel pressured to squeeze themselves into an identity-box if it doesn’t fit them, and yet, on the other hand, that no, that doesn’t mean labels and specifically described gender identities should be discarded.

I often get the “you don’t need labels, just be yourself” attitudes and responses, and I feel like I’m constantly explaining that I didn’t have the option to “just be myself” growing up, and while things have improved somewhat since I was a kid or a teenager, it’s still a concern – the situation has not defused yet, it’s still problematic for people coming of age. So, yes, dammit, I still see a need to draw attention to the situation, the phenomenon, the social politics of being different in this specific way, and doing so requires naming it.

I was originally going to make today’s blog post about that, and elaborate a bit on it and leave it at that, but I found myself dwelling on how I had not anticipated this “just be yourself / no labels” reply when I wrote last week’s blog post. And that, in turn, got me thinking about what replies I might get to this one. And what came to mind was someone crossing their arms argumentatively and saying “Yeah, like what? What bad shit happens to ‘people like you’ that you want to change? What horrible things happen to genderqueer sissy boys? Just what is it that you’re trying to fix?”

I could quite authentically point to physical violence and verbal abuse and ridicule. We are subjected to what most people think of as “homophobia”; one could just as viably label it “sissyphobia”. Certainly some of the violence dished out that is indeed specifically geared towards gay males because they have same-sex sexualities (for example, the Pulse shootings) but in many cases the bashers and haters have no concrete reason to harbor any beliefs or make any assumptions about who their victims prefer to fondle and frolic with; it’s “how we are”, and they assume from that “what we do”. But let’s be honest here, let’s get real and cut to the chase: the concern that make me an activist was that I was not getting laid.

(That’s an oversimplification but it works as a thumbnail summary: being sidelined and isolated from sexual interaction that others of my age and cohort were able to participate in)


And that practically qualifies as a confession. Complaining about it immediately puts me in the select company of incels, Nice Guys™, and people like Elliot Rogers and Marc Lepine. And meanwhile, there is nothing close to a social consensus that anyone has some kind of right to sexual activity per se. Which is, itself, interesting, and we should unpack that, so I will.

We do have a growing consensus that if you do things in order to satisfy your sexual urges and inclinations, it is oppressive for society to try to stamp out those venues or interfere in those behaviors, as long as they are consensual and involve adults of sound mind. Stonewall. ‘Nuff said, right? But if it isn’t a behavior for which you’re being selected and subjected to reprisals, you’re just whining if you complain that sex is not available to you. It could be that no one wants to do you because you’ve got the personality of a doorknob or the appeal of splattered roadkill; it could be your stinky underarms or your deplorable fashion sense or that perennial favorite, your failure to do what you gotta do, your failure to step up and go out there and make an effort to get what you want.

To get under a sheltering umbrella of attitudes that support the notion that perhaps it is oppressive to be denied opportunity, I’m going to borrow from the disability rights movement. It’s not a perspective that says “each citizen is guaranteed a sex life”, but it does take the stance that no barriers should interfere, including the passive barrier of simply failing to provide mechanisms that a marginalized population needs but which aren’t needed by other people -- that a reasonable degree of social facilitation is necessary and appropriate.

Sissy males who are attracted to female people are not heterosexual simply because they are male people attracted to female people. Heterosexuality is composed of roles and rules, a courtship dance with specifically gendered parts to play in the pageant, and the part written for the male participant is based on a set of assumed characteristics (including personality, priorities, goals, and behavioral nuances and patterns) that are not at all a good match for being a sissy. The assumption that is tied to us, that we must be gay fellows, is really based on the notion that a person like us could not participate in heterosexuality, that we’re not right for the part. That’s a barrier. Or, rather, both of those things are a barrier – the fact that we’re not right for the part and the fact that we are assumed not to be playing.

I have learned things that no one taught me, things that were not shown to me in movies or described to me in romance novels. I have felt good and sexy and lithe in my body, in its shape, in the way that I move. As a potential object of desire, as an attractive target. I have learned nuances of voice and gesture and the parts of speech that enable a person to indicate that they know of the possibility that you’re looking upon them in that fashion, and which let them play with that without being overt, predatory, forward, centered on their own appetite… i.e. without being masculine. Does it work the same way when a male person uses this traditionally female language in communication with a female person? Well, not often (I won’t lie) but better than any other tactic that was at my disposal. It may or may not be sexually provocative in exactly the same way so much as it speaks a message that the recipient is able to parse and recognize, and, having recognized it, to realize the implications. Or maybe I’m smokin’ hot (I could live with that).

I've been in relationships that started from there. They were different; I wasn't defined within them as "the boy". It is not that avoiding the appetite-symbol sexual initiator role guarantees you won't be cast as "the boy" for other reasons or in other ways, or that if you reach or kiss or make a pass first you don't get to have this, but it makes a good filter and it gets things started on the left foot.

The point is, I learned it in utter ignorance, tested it with no role model to emulate, and projected an identity by using it that had no name and no social identity that would enable any of the people I encountered to recognize me, to say “Oh, I get it, I’m dealing with one of those”, so their response was dependent on intuiting what it could possibly mean and what an appropriate response just might consist of.

Having to figure it all out in total darkness is quite a barrier. Having to expect my potential partners to do the same is definitely a barrier.

The label is important and necessary to draw attention to the situation; drawing attention to us, and what it is like to be us and how things work for us, is the intended fix.

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A demisexual is a person who does not experience sexual attraction
unless they form a emotional connection. It's more commonly seen in,
but by no means confined, to romantic relationships. The term
demisexual comes from the orientation being "halfway between" sexual
and asexual.

I first encountered the term "demisexual" in online forums for genderqueer and other gender-variant people. It was as new to me as my own identifying term ("gender invert") is to most people in the LGBTQ scene. I'd heard of demigirl and demiboy (terms used by some genderqueer folks) but demisexual was one I hadn't encountered before.

DEMI means "half" or "halfway" -- so a demigirl would be someone halfway between gender-neutral and feminine, for example. When applied to sexual, though, it was less obvious to me what it would mean to be half-sexual, in addition to which the people who identified as such didn't appear to be using it to mean they were less sexual than most other people; instead they seemed to be using it to mean their sexual interests were confined to relationships in which they had a meaningful emotional connection.

It struck me as a pattern strongly associated with feminine sexuality. We have the cultural notion that women and girls want to have a relationship with a boyfriend, and within that context, to have good sex. That the sexuality of boys and men, by comparison, is considerably less constrained to situations where there's that kind of intimate connection. Female exceptions may exist, but where they do, their femininity is cast into some degree of dubiety by the fact that they are willing to jump into no-strings casual sex with the same non-demi enthusiasm as a typical male. Such women are often assumed to lack appropriate amounts of self-esteem (a suspicion less often aimed at promiscuous male people) and they are tagged with epithets and descriptors like "slut" and "wanton" and "easy" and a host of other nouns and adjectives that all underline their lack of normalcy, their deviance, the fundamental wrongness of them being that way.

It's reasonable to say that being demisexual is prescriptive for women, whether it is accurately descriptive or not. Girls and women are under a great deal of social pressure to take on the trappings of being demisexual, to give it lip service and keep up the superficial appearance of being that way.

It's also reasonable to point out that we have plenty of cultural images of women's sexuality as reactive to sexual attention, in such a way that a popular depiction of the very un-demi male sexuality takes the form of the seducer, the sexual pursuer who elicits female sexual participation not by connecting to women with an emotional bond but by circumventing her obligatory pretense of being demisexual and appealing to her rather non-demi susceptibility to sexual opportunities.




It certainly seems useful to split off the specific notion of being demisexual from the culturally conventional notion of femininity, because there are other characteristics that are also deemed to be part of femininity (and of feminine sexuality), such that a person could participate in being feminine without being demisexual. It gives us specificity; it lets us zero in on one aspect of a person's nature instead of referencing a huge library of loosely-associated characteristics.

I'm not sure I quite qualify as demisexual, myself. I've never craved sexual activity that was deliberately lacking in emotional connection, that's for sure, and I've always wanted to have a close intimate caring relationship. But that's not quite the same as saying I'm utterly without any sexual attraction to a stranger, a casual acquaintance, someone I don't have an emotional connection to. I can have such attractions, and I do. Acting on them is messy and complicated and more trouble than it's worth, and I hate that perpetual accusation that insofar as I'm a male I only care about sex and not for loving relationships. But once again, that's not the same thing as saying I'm incapable of finding someone quite enticingly appetizing, entirely delicious on visual and other superficial grounds. My disinclination to actually engage in casual sex isn't due to a lack of appetite outside of emotionally connected relationships.

That makes me wonder how many self-identified demisexual folks would say much the same thing: whether they'd say they completely do not feel any attraction outside of relationships, or would instead say that satisfying sexual experiences seem to be tied to caring connections and therefore they are uninclined to act on attractions outside of them.

And, because it's kind of one of those fabled living-room elephants, how being demisexual as a female-bodied person differs from being demisexual as a person who presents as male. Because the cultural context is going to paint them quite differently.

And as a gender invert, I'm especially curious about how demisexual male people who are attracted to female folks experience their sexual lives, their sexual orientation, and their gender identity. Because I found that being even as demisexual as I am to be entirely polarizing and gender-invalidating, and a big part of how I came to identify as a gender invert.

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I have a new favorite "exhibit a" book for presenting and depicting the transgender woman experience.

Meredith Russo joins an already-populated field: on my bookshelf I have Jan Morris's CONUNDRUM, Jennifer Boylan's SHE'S NOT THERE, Nicola Jane Chase's TEA AND TRANSITION, Audrey MC's LIFE SONGS, Ami Polonsky's GRACEFULLY GRAYSON, and a few others scattered about. Documenting what it means to be a transgender woman as a trans coming-out story has been done enough times that I think many authors are leery of writing something cliché, and so there's been a feeling that a good solid trans woman story needs to be "about" something other than the trajectory of "I always knew I wasn't like the other boys" / "People reacted to me being like one of the girls" / "It was my secret, I knew I was a girl despite my body" / "I sought answers and found doctors who would help me transition" / "Here's what medical transitioning was like" / "And here I am, I did it".

In If I Was Your Girl (Flatiron Books: 2016), Meredith Russo takes the tack of simplifying the narrative and making it accessible and entertaining and easy to relate to. Amanda Hardy, the main character, is a young girl, still in high school, and has already transitioned. She's a brave person, and a person used to living on the margins, not accepted by other people. Her backstory is provided in intermittent flashback chapters, but they're short; the main story arc is all in Amanda's present tense. She is happy to make friends but doesn't expect to and doesn't take it for granted; and when Grant Everett indicates he's interested in her as more than a friend, it's dream-fulfillment material but enmeshed with the delicate fears that it doesn't mean what she hopes it does, that once he gets to know her he'll be less impressed with her -- in other words, the typical everyday fears of so many adolescent girls, merely made a bit more complicated by the specific situation that Amanda is in, the specific worrisome secret that might cost her this acceptance and sense of belonging if it came out.

It does, of course. That Amanda is strong enough to cope with the situation is less surprising than the resilience of so many of her friendships and connections. Not all of them (that would not be realistic), but there's a hopeful and positive message here about how many people will accept a trans person for who she is.

If I Was Your Girl touches on one of the central aspects of being transgender that many of these narratives omit: after transitioning, a person may fit in and be perceived and accepted as an ordinary, typical member of their target gender, but they are also a person with a past; does such a person have to invent a gender-consistent backstory, does such a person have to deny their own personal history and set of experiences? And to what extent can a person ever really feel known and accepted while keeping such a centrally personal aspect of themselves secret? Unlike so many other trans narratives, this story is truly a coming-out story, and it's fundamentally an affirmative one.

What it doesn't focus on is the convoluted process of figuring out that one is, in fact, transgender, or on the details of medical transitioning. I think that is a wise choice. The reader who picks up the book and relates to the character strongly will already be on the road to contemplating their own gender identity in a sufficiently appropriate manner, and the details of such things as hormones and bottom surgery are probably a lot less important than the fundamentals of what it would be like as a person to have done so for anyone who is curious to know what being transgender is about.

Author Meredith Russo acknowledges in the postlogue of the book that this is the simplest version of the story:

I have, in some ways, cleaved to stereotypes and even bent rules to make Amanda's trans-ness as unchallenging to normative assumptions as possible. She knew from a very young age. She is exclusively attracted to boys. She is entirely feminine. She passes as a woman with little to no effort. She had a surgery that her family should not have been able to afford, and she started hormones through legitimate channels before she probably could have in the real world. I did this because I wanted you to have no possible barrier to understanding Amanda as a teenage girl with a different medical history from most other girls.

I think If I Was Your Girl succeeds in exactly the ways that Russo intended it to. And where it fails, to the extent that it does so, it is due to the limitations that she acknowledges here. It is not a book that it is not, and there are stories that need to be told that are about those other trajectories of experience which are not so centrally identical to what people in general understand transgender to mean.



I want my own book to be like this. I want The Story of Q to present the story of what it is like to be male, to be one of the girls, to be attracted to them as well, and to end up being one of the gender-variant people for whom a transition to female is not the solution. I want it to be accessible the way Amanda's story is accessible.

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It's been done before, but rarely if ever so well: a guy deserving of a comeuppance about gender privileges gets his situation inverted and has to cope with what women have to deal with, and learns some lessons.

What makes Eléonore Pourriat's I Am Not an Easy Man outstanding is that it goes far beyond the thought-experiment level and delves into the subtle nuances of gender polarization and how we cope with them, and it includes that subtle treatment in its portrayal of how the main male character, Damien (portrayed by Pierre Benezit), copes with being dumped into the inverted world.

The 1991 movie Switch, featuring Ellen Barkin, is the kind of fare I'm more used to seeing in this genre: the chauvinist male wakes up abruptly transformed to female, freaks out, and spends the first half of the movie trying to wrench reality back to how it oughta be by force of sheer denial. A whole lot of sight gags to point out how funny and inappropriate it looks when a woman (or person who appears to everyone to be a woman) behaves the way men typically do. A main character whose initial horror gives way to some clever ideas about how this could actually work to his advantage, only to find that any beliefs he'd ever harbored about how this or that would be so much easier if he were a woman are actually all wrong or that it doesn't work the way he'd expected. Very binary and overstated gender expectations and behaviors abound, caricatured in order to be sure to drive the point home. And then — usually around the halfway mark in the movie — acceptance, with the main character getting with the program and adjusting to the situation by becoming a good girl and, whether it's because biology is destiny or because you can't fight city hall (or a universally gendered world), becoming obedient to the new set of expectations and demands.

That's admittedly not entirely fair to Switch but it's a good overview of how I felt about it when I saw it on the screen. Great premise, disappointing for all that it didn't attempt to do.

I Am Not an Easy Man starts off with what looks like the same trajectory. It uses the more difficult inversion of having the man remain a man but finding himself transferred abruptly into world where everyone else is gender inverted, making him the exceptional case. (This means that instead of one actor giving us inverted gender behavior, everyone else in the entire cast is doing so). But again, Damien starts off trying to be who he has always been, while staring around in disbelief and becoming shocked and dismayed.

But after awhile he gets it, just as we in the audience do, although he remains mystified (of course) about how this could have happened. And he begins to adjust.

Some of the adjustment is opportunistic: some things weren't available to him in his familiar world, or weren't possibilities he'd ever considered for himself, but we watch him consider and them avail himself of them and they generally work for him. He learns to dress attractively, develops closer and more intimate emotional-content-sharing same-sex friendships, and finds televised dramas (with gender patterns aligned with this new world he's in of course) to be moving and cathartic.

Some of the adjustment is merely expedient: if he wants to date, and the women find his unmodified hairy chest to be a dealbreaker, he's going to have to wax. Well, if that's the way it is, it isn't pleasant but it isn't worth the price tag to balk at it.

And there are ways in which he doesn't conform but decides to fight back. A world in which people of his gender are dismissed as non-serious people? That's a dealbreaker for him. The unfairness, the inequality, this is intolerable. So he joins the masculinists and attends support groups and marches and rallies with his brethren.

The core of the story revolves around his relationship with writer Alexandra (Marie-Sophie Ferdane). Damien has a lifetime history of approaching women with the sexually enthusiastic and forward behaviors that work for him in his native world. In this new world, obtaining access to sexual activity isn't difficult—he gets propositioned (not to mention catcalled on the street and stared at by random women as a visual treat when walking through the business office) and he does partake. When his parents (same people, now gender-inverted) express a bit too much concern about him ever finding a suitable relationship, he flings into their face the fact that he has sex with many women, as readily as they do, and scarcely remembers their name, it's as fleeting and transient a delight for him as for them, and not a reason to settle down.

But therein lies the problem. Once he does meet someone (Alexandra) with whom he wants more, wants the relationship he has with her to continue, now it starts to matter strategically that he's in a world where expressing that is going to be tricky. This is a world where the male folks pursue the ongoing relationships and it's the female ones who tend to fuck-and-discard, so trying to hold on to what he's got with her runs the risk of coming across as clingy and vulnerable. And so we watch as he discovers firsthand the careful balance of wanting passion and sex but needing to protect himself from being regarded and treated as a mere outlet. Of not being sufficiently respected and valued.

Alexandra has her own arc of understanding-growth. In a nod to a classic cliché (see Roman Holiday), she starts off pretending and manipulating, while keeping her real agenda, of cashing in on the experience by writing about it, hidden; but then gradually falls in love with her subject Damien, and bails on the planned betrayal but the clues to what she's done are available to Damien who discovers them and decides she's a horrid cad who never cared for him. So just as Alexandra is regretting any intention of hurting Damien, Damien comes to see her as a callous and cruel person and she's suddenly at risk of losing him just as she realizes she absolutely can't let that happen. It's been done before but seldom with the bad girl becoming undone this way.

Ferdane is suave and confident and walks a good balance between arrogant and sensitive, between tough and broodingly lonely. She's not butch in a Joe-the-plumber way (in fact, we get a painter complete with plumber's crack just for the juxtaposition) so much as she's Bogart or James Dean. We want to get to her, evoke her human side, care for her.


I Am Not an Easy Man is delightful in its exquisite attention to detail and the believability of its inverted depictions. It would be easy to stick in a male erotic dancer that would prompt a giggle and a nod about sexual visual objectification, but it takes more skill to present us with a believable male pole dancer that you could readily imagine as delicious eye candy to bar patrons. And comedians from Roseanne Barr to Amy Schumer have done up the belching, open-legged, stained-shirt unself-conscious leering men shtick. But in the poker scene in this movie it doesn't come across as caricature. You believe the women around the table are real. The nuances of posture and facial expression and gesture are spot-on. And as a result, it hits harder.



Having mentioned Switch, I'll make note of a couple other gender-inverty offerings to flesh out the backdrop. There have been pieces that are done with serious intent, as illustrations of gender polarization and not just for the burlesque value of inversion as entertainment. Ella Fields became a YouTube / Facebook sensation when she gave us this one last year, for instance. When our 13 year olds still feel that they are up against this kind of rigid sex role expectation system, it's powerful to see it expressed in this kind of thought experiment; six and a half minutes doesn't give one room to explore the complex nuances though, and unfortunately some people rejected its message because they considered it overstated and that it ignored how things aren't actually so rigid in the modern world.

Not all depictions of gender reversal contain a lot of sympathy for critics of existing gender polarization. If (as I implied) some of the plot trajectories seem to end up promoting gender conformity even after doing a sendup of pompous (male) privileged certainties, there are also tales of gender inversion that never move beyond dismay and a conveyed sense of male humiliation except when someone manages to revert things to their natural state. I remember plucking a copy of Regiment of Women from the paperback stand when I was in High School and giving myself a headache from so much eye-rolling.



I Am Not an Easy Man is available on Netflix as an original Netflix movie.


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A SHORT REVIEW SESSION

I've written previously about sexual aggression and sexual predation and how they are gendered as expected male behaviors. About the image our culture holds of sex in the teenage years as something where boys try to do things to girls, who consent or don't consent and often get pressured into it anyway.

I've written about becoming a teenager and hearing girls complain that boys are only after one thing, saying that boys who make passes at girls are disrespectful and that it means they don't value her as a person. I've written about the notion that girls want an ongoing relationship, to have a boyfriend, whereas boys want to "fuck and run".

I've talked about how identifying with the girls — seeing them as my main friends and potential friends — meant needing things to be equal, needing to be wanted, whether we're talking about being invited to someone's skating party or invited into someone's pants, that a certain degree of pride requires that it feels mutual. There's a sort of polyamorous polymorphous thing that may happen when girls are the people you want as friends and also the people you want as lovers: wanting them as colleagues, as friends, as people-like-me to hang out with, and also as hot cute delicious people for whom you feel sexual appetite. As opposed to the notion of treating people different from the beginning based on whether you think of them in the friend zone or as dating potential.

I've written about how gay people (gay guys and lesbians alike) are mostly free, in a revolutionary way, from this gender-polarized thing, but that if you're a femmy male and your attraction is towards female-bodied people you have to negotiate your way out of that trap, and that the perceptions of you as male and the expectations accompanying that will all be set against you.


A COUPLE DISTINCTIONS I WANT TO MAKE

I write about being a male femme, feminine male, sissy male, male girl, male woman, etc...

There are plenty of male people who dress, behave, and/or identify as femme or feminine or women, for whom the relative absence of sexual aggressive tendencies is not a defining characteristic of their femininity. That is, they may be no less inclined to make overt passes at people than males in general tend to be.

There's also a difference between overtly taking the initiative at the communications level—expressing sexual interest in someone in such a way that they realize they've been asked if they want to have sex—and being a sexual top, the more actively aggressive sex partner once the activity begins. There are male people who identify as femme (etc) who are quite forward about offering the opportunity to experience them sexually, but who are not at all toppy or dominant or physically aggressive, and other male femmy people who are sexually assertive pleasure-givers and pleasure-takers who strongly prefer to be approached and asked, and yet other male feminine folks who are both or neither of those things.

There are also plenty of feminine people of any sex who aren't hesitant to ask someone on a date if the other person hasn't done so yet. But there's nearly always been some flirting beforehand, so this doesn't obviate the relevance of flirting.

This blog entry is specifically about the process of establishing that yes, you and the other person are indeed interested in maybe having sex with each other. Not about "inviting someone to spend time together" or doing specific things once you're naked in bed together. For me it's a central way in which I don't seem to conform to the gender expectations for male-bodied persons, and because flirting and courting and dating and all that are scripted and choreographed behaviors, with gendered expectations and interpretations at all points, this is about doing that differently, not in the prescribed sexually aggressive masculine style but as a femme.



THE CO-REACTIVE DANCE

This isn't about sitting there passively like the proverbial bump on a log and waiting for a cute cavewoman to bop you on the head and drag you off to her lair to have her way with you. This is about interacting and negotiating without being the sexual aggressor as mandated in the orthodox social guidelines to How To Be a Guy. There's a bridge and you want to meet up with the women who fascinate you, somewhere in the middle, coming together, and you can move in her direction and yet still decline to go farther than 49% of the distance across it.

So, yes, this involves having behaviors. Not just the absence of behaviors.

That may sound really basic, insultingly so, even, but no one taught me how to flirt, and it wasn't at all obvious to me as a teenager and young adult how to indicate sexual interest without doing so overtly, so basics it is.

Let's talk about "overt". Overt is when sexual interest has been expressed clearly enough that the other person realizes they've been asked if they want to have sex. It puts them in the position of consenting or agreeing or else saying no to it, and as for you, it gives you no plausible deniability. You've made a pass.

And let's talk about being a nuisance: making an overt pass is not identical to making a nuisance of yourself. This blog entry is about not doing it overtly, but I'm not saying everyone who makes an overt expression of sexual interest is being annoying, only that it's a modality that doesn't mesh well with everyone's style, and that happens to be true for me. More to the point, though, you can make a nuisance of yourself without making an overt pass, and it's important to realize that not being overt doesn't get you off the hook for being annoying. Oh yeah, it's definitely possible to do that. If you're sending signals and dropping hints, none of which go beyond plausible deniability, but you keep expressing that, that can get really annoying. It can be worse than making a blatant pass at someone. I know, because I've been on the receiving end of it and it can be seriously skin-crawlingly creepy.

Non-overt doesn't equal absence of being sexually aggressive.

The model I like to use is what I call the "co-reactive dance". You may initiate this with a non-overt behavior to signal some interest; then, having done so, you take the attitude that "it's your turn" and you wait for a sign of reciprocity. If you've done it right, what you've conveyed to her is "he might be". If she hasn't tended to think of you in that way, she may miss it. And that's OK. We haven't done anything intrusive. If she has, now the ball is in her court and it's her serve.


STEALING FROM THE MIRROR

Details, details, what the heck are these mysterious non-overt behaviors and signals? Yeah, I know, as I said, no one ever taught me how to flirt. There may or may not be good models on TV and in movies of suave sophisticated debonaire males but when you identify with women and girls all your life you'd be less likely to model yourself on those, even if they're out there to be learned from.

Me, I turned to the source from which I learned so much else: I watched how the girls and women did it. And if you've spent a lifetime being girl-identified you'll realize pretty quickly that you're aware of the repertoire; like the decision to acquire and put on a skirt, deciding to speak these languages involves breaking a little barrier, risking being a clown, risking looking quite ridiculous*. Use that bit of worry to your advantage: go subtle.

Eye contact, and how you use it. You can express a lot in how you look at someone, and how you look away from someone. There is openness and interest that you want your eyes to speak of, but also a tentative quality, hesitancy, something inherent in the asking of a question, because you're asking a question here. Hair is expressive, if you have it. You can choose where it falls, how it moves. If you have long hair you're probably already aware that women like long hair on males and like to look at it and ideally want to touch it. You can touch your own, reposition it, fiddle with it. Your hands, of course, are expressive. People watch hands. The very act of touching anything conveys the act of touch, and you can do it expressively. Then there's the body overall. People contemplating sex with someone may not be making their evaluations primarily on the basis of how hot and cute one's body is, but it's rarely a nonfactor; more to the point, inviting someone to survey the territory gets the other person in the more immediate frame of mind of imagining what it would be like, and conveys that you're thinking of such things; there are ways of presenting your own body that seem to invite a scan, an assessment.

All of this gets coupled with checking for reactions, watching to see if she's taking it in.

So all this is stolen from the girl-repertoire of flirting and we're mirroring it back, speaking this language as male-bodied people. Does it work on women? Well, first and foremost, it's a language, and it's a language they're likely to be somewhat fluent in. Does it convey the message?

Then there's the other sense of mirroring, too: so much of this is about reciprocity. You can match and reply to gestures and signals with gestures and signals of your own, get a nonverbal conversation going.

I'm making this sound more mechanical than it actually is. It's really just becoming comfortable letting your body language express what you feel and realizing that that is communicating. One of my current partners says she thinks I do a lot of things I'm not even fully aware of myself. She's probably right.

Meanwhile, on the verbal level, there's a whole world of complicated embedded meanings to play with, ranging from double entendres and hints to more challenging insinuendos and queries and inquisitives, all of which can be non-overt expressions. (I don't tend to start interactions on this frequency because there's too great an opportunity for being a non-overt creepy jerk, but I stand prepared to receive and respond). Not all of what gets conveyed is arrayed directly around "do you wanna?"; in my experience a lot of women begin investigating on the verbal level to find out "am I correct in interpreting what's going on here?", often with a statement or comment that's open to multiple possible interpretations of its own, and to which you can reply with something that can be taken as a confirmation or as an "au contraire".



And this works? Well, here's what tends to happen, and I am of course limited to my own subjectivities as well as my own attractiveness and other such factors, so anyone else's mileage may vary considerably...

Firstly, there's a whole lot of non-reaction. And we're treating non-reaction as a "no thank you" here ("the ball is in her court and it's her serve") so it's fair and reasonable to believe a lot of that non-reaction is indeed a "no" reaction and not just a "no reaction". Some of it is probably cluelessness though. I've heard lesbian women telling other lesbian women "Hey she was hitting on you" and the person being told indicating "I had no idea", so it's reasonable that it happens in this circumstance as well. Add to that the likelihood that women don't encounter a lot of males exhibiting these behaviors, and hence not necessarily being tuned in to the possibility and you've got a case for some of it being "had no idea you thought you were sending signals".

Secondly, when there is a reaction, it may take many forms, and the communication proceeds from there, but where it proceeds to will vary all over the map. Some of the insinuations and inquisitives will be "am I correct in assessing you to be a gay guy?" and these will often be virtually indistinguishable from "so I gather you consider yourself to be one of us girlish people?" so you get the opportunity to play with ambivalence and finding ways of hinting "yes but no" or "mm, not quite" and other subtexts. The important thing there is whether there's amusement and interest and curiosity.

Some is going to contain exasperation or confusion: "Oh seriously?" or "I don't know how to respond to this" or "You've got to be kidding", hinted at or expressed in various ways. Again, it's all about whether you can evoke enough curiosity and fascination or if it's just annoyance. Backing off can provoke more pokes and questions or it can simply constitute backing way, and is often the best test.

Mirroring can allow proximity and touch, and then the dance involves physical contact and the continuation of the signals dance. Or interaction can extend forward with invitations and future occasions and continuations of the process without having established what you've got established.

Basically if you get a nibble, you're in teasing territory. Will we, won't we, do we, don't we. It's a lot of fun for its own sake and when it's stirred into enough of your interactions with enough people in your life, well, sometimes it does, and you do.

As often as not, conversation eventually goes into gender itself. Some of the hinting around and probing may give rise to a direct discussion of men and women and different behaviors and dating and courting and all that and the next thing you know it's all out in the open. A great many women find the barrel of expectations and assumptions and interpretations that they have to deal with tiresome and frustrating and if they find they're with someone who has bailed on the conventional model and is trying to go at it differently, that can open the floor for both of you sharing your experiences and talking about your feelings very honestly, and it can be really nice when that happens.



THIS WOULDN'T CUT IT AS A GUIDE TO HOW TO PICK UP GIRLS

It's not a recipe that I'd anticipate would constitute good advice for everyone. I mean, for me, any attempt to try to follow the conventional advice about how male folks should behave to express interest in attractive women just resulted in frustration and failure; not only did I not do it well, but I did it with annoyance and resentment and that means on some level I wasn't actually doing what works for a lot of guys, I was instead doing something different. My experience is limited to my experience (talk about your axiomatic truisms!) but my guess is that anyone who is male who is comfortably able to make use of the advice that others have given, advice that is more generically "out there and available" for guys, should make use of it because it's more likely to be successful. You should walk on that side of the road if you can, because things are a lot more sparse over here.

But if you're over here, this kind of approach does work. I'm shy about being this specific and explicit because I don't consider myself phenomenally successful with it or anything, but on the other hand it's not like the shelves are lined with other offerings along these lines.


GENDER INVERSION

This is the area of life where it was not sufficient to have a "yeah, so??" attitude about not being a gender conformist.

Ever since I came out in 1980, there have always been people saying "Yeesh, just be who you are. The rest of us aren't going around being slaves to our gender role and conforming to rigid outdated sexist expectations! But we don't find it necessary to go around telling people we're 'male women' (or 'female men'). You have a really rigid attitude yourself, you think that because you aren't a Marlboro man with a deep bass voice who likes to watch football, that means you aren't a 'real man' ..."

Of course that's exactly what my own attitude was for years and years: Yeah, I'm more like girls than I am like other boys, so what? What's it to you? People don't all have to be the same. There's nothing wrong with it and I sure as hell don't need your permission, so go stick it in a pencil sharpener and crank on it.

But the dating and courting and flirting thing made everything different. It made it matter. My dismissive attitude about gender expectations had not worked and I was left out in the cold. I didn't have the right personality to be a charming sexually pushy initiator but just trying to be friends with girls and hoping something "would eventually just happen" hadn't borne any results either.

And no one had ever taught me how to flirt.

So instead of merely finding gender expectations annoying and confining, and rejecting their limitations, I found a need to have others recognize me and understand my own array of sexual interest and feelings.


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* To speak of it, as I'm doing here, also invites additional opportunities to feel clownish and ridiculous: perhaps a barrage of men will chime in to say "That's what every man does, we all learn this, what makes you think you're doing anything unusual or different?" All I can say is, if all guys learn this and do this, there sure is an odd dearth of anyone talking about it!

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