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MetaNostalgia is that state you get into by looking down at your pot pipe and remembering, nostalgically, one of the first times you got high on pot and how it gave you this burst of nostalgic memories.

I've always been nostalgic. I'm always backwards-looking, continuing to react to things. Processing in my head what I think of this event and that ongoing phenomenon and still being in that moment.

This is not a confession. I mean, you do you; maybe being like this wouldn't work for you, and I'm not trying to prescribe it for you. But I like it, and it works for me.

Do I sound defensive? That's fair. There's a lot of propaganda that favors the forward-looking. I'm not saying you're a part of that, just that it's loudly out there as an attitude. That if you're looking backwards, you aren't watching where you're going. That it means you aren't a planner. That, from a healthy psychology point of view, you aren't living in the present moment. And that, from a psychology point of view that's watching for pathology, that you're traumatized or haunted or imprinted upon by your past and therefore can't move on, as if your past were one thing and who you are is another thing, victimized by it. Does any of this sound familiar? You've heard it too then?

So yeah, here's the deal. I'm here in the here and now. I act and choose and make the same efforts to shape my life as you probably do, I'm not ignoring the present moment.

The past is how I make sense of the present. It's not a different reality, one that has expired. Now is Then, later. I'm continuing to look at all things, as they have been and on up until now when they're continuing to happen. I don't really know for sure if those of you with this present-moment attitude are doing the exact same thing I'm doing and we're just using different words, or if you folks think differently.

I'm not done with the past. I reminisce, I replay, I continue to learn from. Much of it is abstracting, seeing patterns that reoccur from time to time as part of events. That includes my own emotional and cognitive reactions at the time, what I was going through and what I was doing in those situations.

And yes, I replay in my head pondering what if had done this instead, all that second-guessing and trying on regrets like garments from the dress-up box, playing the scene out different inside my head. Of course I do that.

I am who I have always been. I never stopped knowing the me that I was when I had only recently acquired a language to think in. Maybe before then, too, it's just that I can't think back to my thoughts I was thinking because they weren't in words yet. Only some of them ever are, of course. But you can remember patches of the other stuff if you have the verbal-memory framework to anchor them to.

It hasn't been all pleasant. Or easy. The tendency is that I'm marked as Other, and marginalized, but I'm a participant in that marginalization too, pulling away from others. The problem isn't that I don't want connection and community. The problem is that other people want me to be more like them, and I want other people to be more like me; they, in general, are over there in that direction, in other words I'm different in a direction. There's tension, sometimes frustration; communication is a recurrent concern. So I'm not saying I've found Zen or sublime peaceful acceptance or whatever.

But I'm also not messed up, either by my past or by the ways in which I'm different. It hasn't been a miserable life so much as a struggly life. I'm passionate and intense even though I'm also mellow and sweet.

—————

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 my November 16 post (the "Transgender Lack of Awareness" post), I returned to a recurrent theme: that the mainstream transgender message doesn't make me feel included and recognized. Quite the opposite. Even when there's an effort to mention nonbinary trans folks and emphasize that a person's gender is valid regardless of their body, I feel left out, omitted.

Well, I'm currently reading several books that are likely candidates for what are called "comps" in the world of querying lit agents and publishers: books that your own book can be compared to because of similarities. One such book is A Year Without a Name by Cyrus Dunham.

Dunham refuses a lot of blocky klunky binary either-ors and dives straight into the gooey ambivalent conflicted territory he had to transit, and shoves it back at us, demanding that we consider it. He opens with a preface in which he indicates that his testimony of gender identity being a complex and nuanced thing without certainty could be seized upon as evidence that transgender identities are being embraced by people who will get buyer's remorse later and wish to de-transition.

And that's a big part of why so many trans people embrace the mainstream narrative. "I always knew I was born in the wrong body and was actually a [person of the opposite sex's gender], that's a solid irrevocable fact", goes the narrative. "I had to transition and get a new name and new pronouns because that's how you do it, and to do otherwise would make me horriby disphoric and suicidal, whereas transitioning totally makes me whole and comfortable in my own skin and validated". If you don't say it that way, the world looks back at you with dubiety and tells you "You don't seem like [that gender] to me, and since you aren't sure yourself..." and suggests that you're disturbed in the head, that these weird notions are obviously delusions brought on by the stress and so on and so forth.

But Cyrus Dunham appears to recognize that there's a problem with that: if young people contemplating these matters are led to feel that authentic trans people have that kind of absolute certainty, where everything is quite clear, where the correct identities and the correct courses of action are obvious and compelling, ...but that isn't how the young people going through it feel at all.. isn't that, itself, telling them that their identity isn't real and valid?

It takes a special courage to step forward and say "My identity and understanding is not clear and sharp and plain. But that doesn't mean it's less important than yours or doesn't count for as much". And to testify directly about the ambivalences, the worries about compromises, the contemplation of alternatives, and the presence of conflicting feelings and attitudes and inconsistencies in thought.

Dunham doesn't tell us that each gender identity exists objectively and that a person comes to recognize which one is authentically theirs. "The more I suspected people thought I was a liar, the more impossible it seemed to tell the 'truth'. There were so many truths; I didn't know how to locate one. Lying was embedded in every gesture, every statement, every interaction; every time I reaffirmed the presumption that I was female, which was constantly. I resigned myself to being incapable of not lying...I hesitate to call the exhausing day-to-day of embodiment 'dysphoria', that catchall for the pain of having a body that doesn't align with one's sense of self. What was a sense of self, after all: a delusion; mental illness...And if I admitted I was dysphoric, I'd have to deal with the fallout. I'd have to decide whether to do something about it".

He also asks the complicated question "Why do I need this?" rather than positing it as self-explanatory, rather than embracing "this is what you do if you realize you are trans". He writes:

"My story isn't resolved enough for me to believe that I have an unquestionable right to my own gender-confirmation surgery. I do believe it, in one part of myself. At the very least, because I know I should. Because it's my body, and I have to live in, with, and as it. Let me pilot it.

But it's not that simple for me. My brain monologue sounds like this, spoken in a cacaphony, not a linear progression of ideas: My breasts have felt invasive since they started to grow; every time I remember they are there, which is constantly, I am defeated; I have the right to augment my body in order to make it livable; the only reason I need the surgery in the first place is because the tyrannical gender binary has made me believe that my breasts are incompatible with my felt gender".

Cyrus Dunham accepts the turmoil as a legitimate part of identity and does not set out to vanquish it in the name of certainty. At least not internally. When he decides to proceed with top surgery, he -- like so many other trans people in his situation -- finds it necessary to oversimply for the moment, to package his situation in terms that the world is prepared to understand:

My confession of utter transness sacrificed nuance for legibility. I defaulted to the trope that I was born in the wrong body. That I had the soul of a man. Which implied that I believed in such a thing as a man in the first place. Which implies that I believed that, were I to live as a man, I would finally be okay.

But I didn't have time to be rigorous. I just needed them to believe me...

The week before the surgery, I got a letter from my insurance provider:

A request has been made for coverage of "top" surgery to help with your change from female to male gender. We are unable to approve at this time. We require that you must have a desire to live and be accepted as a member of opposite sex for at least six months. The letter from your therapist indicates only "recent months". Therefor [sic], you don't meet our requirements that you desire to live and be accepted as male for at least six month [sic].

Cyrus Dunham's willingness to show his actual unedited internal processing in all its vulnerable uncertain state allows for a rare thing: he describes someone like me as a hypothetical possibility in his writing:

If I was truly transgressive I would be able to tolerate the simultaneity of my breasts and masculinity and see them as co-morbid rather than contradictory

I do like to feel truly transgressive, it's a confident brave look, but in truth I've spent my life unsure. Unsure if I were embracing this 'explanation' because I so badly needed an explanation, not because it was the right one. Unsure if claiming an identity that had no specific external objective characteristic had any substance at all to it. (My sociology research professor once told me gay men could be studied because you operationalize them as men who have sex with men; crossdressers because you operationalize them as men who dress in clothing designed and sold as women's clothing; but you can't operationalize 'thinks of himself as one of the girls and not one of the boys' because that only takes place inside his head). But yeah, I have a sex (male), I have a gender (girl, femme, woman, sissy), and my transgression is to insist that neither one is wrong, neither one needs to be changed. I'm not a transitioner.

So -- interestingly -- Dunham's openness creates a space for me to feel included, whereas the conventional/mainstream narrative about what it means to be trans, with the litany of officially sanctioned viewpoints, never has.

It was my intention from the start that in Within the Box I was going to put my own internal processes, including self-doubts, on display. So that makes A Year Without a Name a very good choice for the comparable lit section of my forthcoming query letters.

—————

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 a third book, Within the Box, which isn't published yet, 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

This is Transgender Awareness Week, Nov 13-Nov 19, culminating in the Day of Remembrance. Transgender is nowadays defined as follows (courtesy of Wikipedia): "A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth." By that definition, I'm transgender.

There's a good chance you know all that, or I probably wouldn't be popping up on your feed, but let's pretend you didn't, and the above paragraph was a learning experience for you. Are you glad on my behalf, that my peculiar and marginalized identity is now being recognized and celebrated and authenticated instead of shoved into the shadows?

I wish I felt that way.

I am still lurking in the shadows, not because I want to be, but because the transgender umbrella is covering me -- not so much protecting me as blocking me from being seen. The awareness that the Awareness Week celebrates doesn't include me or people like me, while at the same time the definition, which does, makes it easier to dismiss us with a faux-inclusive wave of the hand: "and them too".

In the public imagination and in the shared social comprehension of what being transgender is all about, transitioning occupies the central space. That's the act of presenting to the world with the cues and signals that would position one as a member of the gender not typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth, and living as such, using the pronouns that go with that gender and having other people do so as well, as part of being accepted as a normative person of that gender.

When we ask "Wait, what about the rest of us?", a large percent of the people who constitute our social world will quickly say, "Hey, you are valid as a member of your gender with or without a medical transition. Lots of trans people go with a hormonal transition only, and many don't even do that. So, hey, you're totally included! What's inside your underwear is nobody's business but your own, lots of trans men have a vagina and lots of trans women own a penis, no big deal."

But just as being transgender isn't defined as modifying one's body, neither is transitioning. With or without any sort of medical process, there is still the pervasive assumption that a transgender person is one who presents to the world as, and wishes to be viewed as, a member of the gender not typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.

So now that we've cleared that up, we ask again "So, what about the rest of us?". And a smaller chorus of the enlightened and socially aware say, "Hey, there aren't just two genders. There are dozens, maybe thousands. You could be trans and identify as nonbinary, as genderfluid, or bigender. Not everybody falls into either male or female and we recognize that. What, have you been hiding under a rock somewhere, you didn't notice the whole thing about 'they' being some people's pronoun?"

That's still a problem though. That still combines "gender identify differing from what's typically associated with sex assigned at birth" with "pushing away from the sex assigned at birth". Rejecting that sex. Not wanting to be perceived as that sex. Hey, if being male doesn't force me to be a member of the gender typically associated with it, why do I need to reject that sex? So, once more, with feeling: what about the rest of us?

People who were assigned a sex at birth and who agree with that assignment. But whose gender identity is other than the gender typically associated with it. People who don't wish to disguise or distance themselves from the sex they were assigned at birth but who want to proclaim their atypical gender.

The transgender umbrella defines us as included in "transgender" but nobody talks about it this way. We aren't transitioners. We're doing something different.

If you're going to cover us, give us some coverage, instead of covering us up by claiming you've already included us.

Real-world fallout: in several socially-aware communities that are strongly accepting of transgender issues and rights, I've been contemptuously dismissed. "You're not trans, since you're perfectly fine with being male, so stop being a special snowflake!" And in several political and social communities for LGBTQIA+ people to join together, I've been silenced or ignored: "He's said a lot of things that are at odds with our queer values today". Loose translation in both cases: "You're not doing it right". In other words, the same attitude that transgender people in general have gotten from the mainstream.

I could definitely use an increase in awareness 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

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

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

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Reviews for my second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, continue to come in at a slow trickle. I missed this one when it first came out in January, and discovered it while doing a vanity search on Google just the other day.

Margaret Adelle provided a review in both video and written (Goodreads) form.

It's not exactly a round of applause for the book.

I tend to think it is bad form for an author or other artist to react or respond to negative reviews, because it tends to come across as resentment that anyone would be anything other than impressed with the piece and makes one look thin-skinned and unable to tolerate criticism. I'm going to risk it this time because Margaret Adelle brings up some salient points, even if I don't agree with them all fully.

There's one central aspect of Margaret Adelle's commentary that I want to react to in particular: she sees me, or at least the "me" represented as Derek in my book, as intruding into women's space, and doing so rather arrogantly and cluelessly.

There exists an attitude: that, hey, if I identify as a woman or a female or as femme or girl or whatever, I therefore get to go into any place that is earmarked and designated for them and their use. Or, rather, us and OUR use. That if that's my identity, it would be blatant bigotry for anyone to question my presence and participation there.

Well, sometimes that is arrogant. I know many of my trans sisters and brothers will be appalled to hear me say so, but I do say so. It is sometimes even true even if your marginalization or oppression is worse than what cisgender women face. (Or you think it is). Not that your -- or my -- presence in such spaces is always inappropriate, just that oversimplified "answered it for all situations and for all time so I don't need to even think about it" types of answers are indeed arrogant. In the board game Monopoly, you can acquire a Get Out of Jail Free card, but when it comes to marginalization and intersectional oppression nobody gets a "Gee I'm Oppressed So I'm Automatically On the Right Side" card.

Margaret Adelle finds me (or, rather, the me that I was in 1985) arrogant in assuming that because I was marginalized as a sissy femme, I have every right to use academic women's studies as a springboard for trying to make a social movement for sissy femmes like me come into existence. That I was entitled to go into those classrooms and start speaking as an authority. That I was entitled to get credentials in women's studies and start speaking from within feminism itself as a self-designated spokesperson (spokes-sissy?) for these concerns.

As she points out, the story arc concludes with me realizing that I can't. That feminism is not my movement, and that I need to find a different way to have a voice in society. But she has limited patience with my process of getting there.

Is there not a middle ground for acknowledging that as a person with no social place at all to go, I had some latitude for taking my issues into the spaces where I took them, while also seeing that at least in some cases I was intruding into spaces that were not where I belonged?

Among the other concerns that are a part of the axe I brought to grind are matters of courting and flirting and pursuing sexual relationships. Here, too, I was approaching these matters as a femme, evaluating my thoughts and deeds as if I were a girl like any other girl in my priorities and needs, but in the passages where I've written of such things -- the trajectory of my attempts to have a girlfriend in my life -- this critique evaluates me as a man who expresses an indignant sense of entitlement, a man who clearly thinks intimacy ought to be coming my way because I'm oh so feminist and sensitive and stuff. Creepy.

Some similar comments were elicited by some other reviewers when they were reviewing my first book, GenderQueer, as exemplified by the January 2021 panel discussion hosted at Kramer's Bookstore.

The conceptual space in which the romantic interests and behaviors of girls might be assessed by others isn't exactly the same kind of "women's space" that is entailed by a classroom or an activist movement, but undeniably I was doing my best to lay claim to it, asking that my behaviors and priorities be evaluated in the same way that those of a female person of the same age would be looked at, but this, too, is perceived by some as arrogant: those same behaviors are turned and examined instead as the behaviors of a male person who protests that since he is such a sensitive feminist kind of fellow, he is owed some romantic outcomes that aren't happening, and he's all bitter about it, and it's not a good look.

At least some of that is a fair cop. I am indeed headstrong, and I have spent most of my life focused on my stuff, defining it as a social cause, but undeniably it is all about me. That is part of what the book's about: that being marginalized doesn't give a person (in this case, me) carte blanche.

I dared to think of myself as one of the girls, and to evaluate my own self accordingly. Some of the outcome of that may have been intrusive and arrogant, but I think on balance it was liberating for me at a no-more-than-reasonable cost to the rest of society.

The burden is on me to make the case for it, of course.

—————

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

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

My third book is deep in 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. 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

Here's what happens: we come together because of what we have in common, the ways we're regarded as Different, the ways we're badly treated, the ways we don't get included and the ways in which we have to live in a world not designed around people like us.

And out of that comes a narrative, a story that we tell the rest of the world to explain who we are. But the narrative always oversimplifies. It leaves out some of us, those whose experiences and identities are a bit unusual even among the misfits we've connected with.

Let's pretend for a moment that we could see identities and experiences as if they were visible shapes. The constellation of all the people with gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual morphology variations making us exceptions to the rule, might look like this, let's say:

But the description of us that the LGBTQIA+ community asks people to embrace and become more tolerant of and supportive of ends up looking more like this:

Some individual stories are out there, accessible, but the ones most likely to get promoted and retold as representative of "us" are the ones that fit into the big general boxes, where a small handful of identities are represented to the world as "what it's like to be one of us".

Just for the sake of illustration and discussion, let's say that the big red box at the top is labeled "gay and lesbian", and it contains a bunch of widely publicized notions about how gay men and lesbian women are different from hetero people. As you can see from the smaller red figures that the big red box encloses, this description does directly include and accurately describe a lot of actual real-life gay and lesbian people. So the things that the world is told about what they feel, what they believe, what's important to them, what it's like to be them, those fit a lot of people and makes them feel recognized and supported and promoted. But you'll notice some smaller squares in that vicinity that are partway or entirely outside of the description. In one way or another, those people's felt experiences or their viewpoint or understanding of what it means to be gay, etc, aren't being included in the overall LGBTQIA+ rainbow message to the world about what it means to be gay or lesbian.

We can make the big red box at the bottom the transgender box, a similar set of generalized descriptions and narratives that stands in for the real-life people, and again it speaks truthfully and accurately for many but is a bit of a misrepresentation for some of the others.

And the smallest of the "large" boxes can be the public face of being intersex, although this diagram probably makes their voice in our society look larger in proportion than it really is. Once again, it gets some of the individuals pretty accurately but misses the boat for others.

I want to address the entire LGBTQIA+ community about what it feels like to be one of those smaller points that doesn't fit the big public description of us very closely. Trans people whose actual experience and attitudes don't correspond to the public presentation of what being trans is all about -- including some who prefer not to be called "transgender" for precisely that reason. And bixesual and pansexual and orientation-fluid people who don't feel very well-defined by the generally publicized notion of what it is to be lesbian or gay. And all the rest.

How it feels, a good portion of the time, is that we aren't truly included. That the loud voices of LGBTQIA+ social activism aren't talking about us. That We're once again being left out, the same way the mainstream world was leaving all of out of consideration.

Then, to add additional insult to the injuries, when we try to speak up and dissent just a little bit from the one-size-fits-all messaging that's being promoted all over the internet and airwaves, we're often corrected. Oh no, what you just said is wrong, because it contradicts the party line we're trying to establish. So get with the program, don't be saying Wrong Things like that. Yeah, how do you think that feels?

—————

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

I've been waiting for an idea to inspire me. What to blog about. Then I started reading the current book assignment for a book club I'm in. It happens to be Demystifying Disability by Emily Ladau, and it is not about gender identity, sexual orientation, sex vs gender, or LGBTQIA+ issues. It is about identity politics, though, and it starts off by doing something that annoys me, which makes the matter a good thing to blog about.

The fact that it isn't about gender or related matters makes it a good detached "exhibit A" for discussing the annoying stuff. Because it annoys me when I encounter it within our environment, and I definitely do, quite often.

I should state for the record that I'm only through the first chapter of Ladau's book and the remainder of it may be provocative and informative.

The annoying practice

Ladau kicks the book off with a tour of vocabulary and why you should use these words and phrases and why you should not use these other ones. The explanations are short and choppy and don't provide much analysis: "The way we talk shapes how we think, and the way we think shapes how we talk", she informs us. This term is outdated, hence bad, don't use it. This term is reductionistic, hence bad, don't use it. Sometimes the reasons are more personal: "It makes my skin craw", or "I don't like euphemisms".

She declares herself not to be one of those judgmental people who have no tolerance of someone who uses the wrong words: "It's totally normal to worry that you'll mess up on what to say...if you get it wrong, just apologize, move on, and try to do better in the future".

But when you spend the first 25 pages on nomenclature, and only provide superficial explanations for why saying things with these words and not those words is important, and to whom, it still looms in significance and emphasis.

The real reasons

Whenever an out group begins to stand up for itself as an identity, having a different vocabulary to describe the differences than what the mainstream majority uses helps to do these social tasks:

• It underlines group identity and polarization from those who are not us. We do this; they do that. It signals one's allegiance, much like the wearing of berets or khaki or jeans have sometimes done for people at various times. It's likewise similar to the wearing of one's hair a certain way. It reminds everyone which group we're in.

• The lack of explanation itself serves a purpose: it emphasizes embrace of the group over retaining individual nitpicky differences in perception. It puts a higher priority on group loyalty than on respect for individual dissent.

Why I dislike it

• First off, I do my own thinking and I can follow yours if you bother to share it. Don't treat me like I'm too stupid to consider the real thought process. And if you didn't engage in any real thought process and you're just handing down "because everyone in the group all says so" wisdom you absorbed when you joined up, you shouldn't be writing as if from a position of leadership on the topic.

• Visualize the mainstream folks for a moment. Think about the ones whose initial response is to be dismissive of ideas they aren't familiar with, but who are willing to listen. They're following along with the culture's ongoing dialogs at home. Well, when you come out with a bunch of "is" declarations that lay out what is right and what is wrong, and don't unpack any of your thinking, you haven't given the mainstreamers any reason to consider your viewpoint. In fact, you've given them ammunition to be contemptuous of us.

• Then there's litmus testing. Other people whose situations put them into the same camp with us may arrive at a sense of identity from having analyzed their own situation. That means they may not be camp followers who have absorbed the appropriate vocabulary lesson when they first show up and attempt to communicate. The mindless thoughtless and arbitrary "never say this, always say that" approach often causes people to label them as enemy, as wrong-thinking outsider, instead of listening and recognizing that they're us.

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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.

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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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Index of all Blog Posts

Safe spaces exist so that those of us who are marginalized minorities can be with each other, speak and listen to each other, in an environment where we won't be mocked, belittled, or harassed by people who don't share our experience. They exist so that we can find words to express and explain our situation, in a world that previously only had derogatory, judgmental, pathology-labeling words for our difference.

Separatism is similar, but more political in scope: that oppressed marginalized people can come together with those who share that specific situation, to unify and decide collectively what to do about their oppression, without the interfering presence of people who are not in that same situation. Separatism is deliberate and positive identity politics, the position that our political interests require a polarization of ourselves against those who are not us, so that we can assert ourselves on our own behalf.

In both cases, they define a negative space, the "people that we are not". The Other. The ones who don't belong here.

Since the act of Othering a bunch of people so quickly conjures up images of prejudicial bias against some category of people in the worst and most blindly hateful sense, we tend to be quick to distinguish between Othering people for factors that are built-in and biological or essential to their being, and Othering people for their attitudes and viewpoints and behaviors and perspectives, which we can politicize without being haters. And yet we often do Other people on the basis of essentials anyway! The argument is that if a person's inborn characteristics in this social context mean that they invariably have a different social experience, and hence a different perspective and world-view, then we aren't really Othering them because of their skin color or their sex characteristics or the pattern of their sexual attractions, we're Othering them for the privileged and oppressive mindset that invariably comes as part of the experience of owning those identities in this society.

That's not to say that we don't sometimes Other people strictly on the basis of what they think and believe and how they behave, and would accept anyone as one of us regardless of any of their biological innate identity characteristics. Because we do that a lot, too.

Othering people and tying it to one of their innate categories, in pure form -- regarding them as permanently, always Other -- creates a situation that can't be readily fixed by any kind of political activism. If they are as they are because their experience (as a cisgender heterosexual white male, for example) invariably means they will have a mindset that you and your colleagues must oppose, then you've just defined an enemy that, by your own definition, you can't change. So your problems with them will persist for as long as they do.

Othering on the basis of views and perspectives, meanwhile, looks a lot less malignant on the surface. "We don't hate anybody, but we hate the following views and beliefs and attitudes". On the one hand, it's entirely reasonable that we get sick and tired of rehashing the same points over and over again, so we create the safe spaces or the separatist environments so we don't have to.

But Othering on the basis of views and perspectives, in pure form -- regarding the matter of these toxic beliefs and viewpoints as fully and permanently settled, that they are wrong and evil and totally not up for discussion ever again -- is eventually problematic, too. It creates a litmus test where anything voiced that has even the superficial appearance of belonging to one of the banned viewponts is considered sufficient evidence of being wrong and not up for any consideration. Since the banned-as-wrong views never get discussed, they become undefined and not clearly understood by the people who fervently refuse to give them any consideration. This breeds increasing intransigence and refusal to listen, and an ever-broadening scope of "wrong thinking" that we, as the good people in this safe space or separatist enclave, need to avoid.

Feminist author Lisa Weil and I connected in the course of corresponding about each other's books (hers: In Search of Pure Lust; mine: That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class). She said her book has often been celebrated for preserving a crucial part of lesbian feminist history, but that people have generally avoided addressing one of her central points -- she views her book as "a critical reflection, specifically on the polarizations of identity politics and performative allyship and all the resulting damage and waste".

I have spoken of these types of Othering in their "pure form" for a reason. They aren't toxic and can be quite beneficial when deployed as tactics. As temporary or partial approaches. As strategies rather than absolutes.

My employer, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, is seeking feedback from "WSW" -- women who have sex with women -- to get a better sense of any health inequities affecting that population. I am a femme, albeit a male one; I don't tend to refer to myself as "a woman" but other people who were also identified at birth as male, including some who still refer to themselves as such, sometimes do identify as women. I could, if I thought that what this inquiry was trying to get at was something that really ought to include me, take the position that for purposes of this survey I am a WSW insofar as I am a person whose relationships and attractions are indeed towards women.

But I don't have to defend my option of doing so by taking the position that every single time the word "woman" is used, it always includes me. And in this particular instance I don't think that it does.

Meanwhile, on Facebook, there are several groups defined as being for lesbian feminists. They are having discussions that I'd like to participate in. The questions that are required to apply to join make it plain that they would not regard me as an appropriate participant.

If they formed other groups in which they didn't exclude me, it would be a tactic, a strategy. There are no doubt ways in which my experience as a person seen and regarded male all my life does mean my presence would be disruptive and divisive some of the time. But to the extent that they only discuss the things they discuss in groups I can't join, they make it an absolute. I suspect most of them would find that my views and perspectives actually mesh with theirs and that I have some interesting contributions precisely because of my different viewing angle. Things that might help with the larger project of contending with the world's shared toxic world-views and changing them in a life-affirming direction. But they aren't going to ever know that.

I think safe spaces and separatism are useful and necessary as long as some of the time you come out from behind that wall and communicate with the people who are on the outside of it. With the Others.

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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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My initial reaction to this book, formed when I was less than a third of the way into it, was that it's rare for someone to speak or write about a political affiliation of the social-change-seeking variety that centralizes the passion of the connection to the others instead of the intellectually reasoned rationales for embracing the principles. And Lise Weil does so.

Even among feminists -- the people who have "the personal is political" emblazoned on their t-shirts -- I think there's still the attitude that to have a commitment of this sort because of how belonging to the movement makes you feel is doing it for illegitimate or infantile reasons. So it is radical, and brave, to do this as Weil does here, and without an apologetic preface at that.

Some would say I am in no position to write a review of this book. It's very specifically about lesbianism and lesbian feminism, the loving of women on every level, giving one's energies and all of one's focus to women as a woman who loves women.

I am not a lesbian; I am not female. That doesn't mean I've never had my nose pressed to that window. I'm a sissy femme and I grew up admiring and emulating the girls in my class, and -- in contrast to conventional legend and expectation -- I also found myself attracted to them. So...people who love women as one of the same, and who find women's form erotic and desirable? Mutuality and mirror?

There do exist other people much like myself, people whose mom's obstetricians also marked down "male" when filling out their birth certificates, but who, unlike me, do consider themselves female. Some of them do identify as lesbians.

If there's a second theme that perhaps eventually looms larger than the first, it's the divisiveness and polarization of identity politics. Not that Weil is saying that the politics of identity necessarily has to be that way, but there are perennially recurrent "you are either with us or against us" attitudes that she finds so frustrating and hurtful. The "whose side are you on anyway" antagonism and the polarization into warring camps. All that either-or stuff. In Search of Pure Lust isn't a screed or a polemic about divisiveness. It's a personal testimonial about how it feels, when you love the participants on all sides of these divides and hate to see the division.

I nodded; I know that one firsthand, too. Lise Weil's colleagues Mary Daly and Jan Raymond would probably agree that I don't belong at a Cris Williamson concert. My transgender sisters would be appalled that I'd be willing to attend one. And I'm left sad and crying that we can't transcend long enough to have a conversation even if we subsequently walk out of the truce tent in separate directions.

Closely kin to the divisiveness issue is the notion that anything has a single inevitable meaning. Weil describes how it was decided that Daly's book Gyn/Ecology was racist and therfore did not deserve to be read by feminists who care about racial equality. Discussion over, end of story, as if all the important and relevant people had weighed in on the subject and you would now be recognized as a racist yourself if you were to see matters differently.

Maybe we all need to retain some sympathy for people who need absolutes and simple answers and certainty. I'm not entirely a stranger to embracing an ideology as if it were a light that could shine into every corner and make utter sense of the world. Lise Weil takes us along with her on the winding path of actual experience and how real life -- and its real politics -- is messy and complicated and entwined with nuance.

Love and desire and ideological commitment, it turns out, may be necessary preconditions or acceleratives that make a relationship of the purest and lustiest variety possible, but they may not be sufficient. Not unto themselves.

Weil describes the vulnerability that comes with involvements of this intensity, and how power enters in whether one is seeking it and rejoicing in having it, or instead is trying to forge relationships where its oppressive presence isn't intruding. The frighteningly short path that sometimes links ecstatic devotion and pathetic dependency and neediness. The agony of needing, the threatening coerciveness of being needed.

When we define ourselves as only doing respectful equal consensual and mutual it can be difficult to speak of the ways in which that is not always how it actually is. Whips and chains are overt about unequal power but when one lover is more desperately craving more from the relationship than the other, who feels trapped or unable to give what is demanded, that's unequal too.

Against the everyday-life backdrop of the rising and falling fortunes of passionate relationships, Weil talks about the division between the sex-positive feminists who were inclined to accept and embrace S & M and the feminists appalled at the patriarchal presence of dominance and submission in what was supposed to be an egalitarian lesbian community. Again, the divisions and the polarization and the "whose side are you on" questions.

I do not feel gleeful that the ones I have envied have to work at it too. A little relief, perhaps. We all bring ourselves to every interaction and so to some extent the resulting experience is our experience of ourselves and not just our experience of what we love. Real passion is chaotic and doesn't color inside the lines. The ideals and clear visionary understandings are important and real as well -- they are part of what we're passionate about, after all -- but if we were the children of patriarchy yesterday we are still children today and we will stumble and fumble as we learn, and need to be able to do so, to be in the process and not to declare ourselves to have already arrived at the solution.

In Search of Pure Lust, Lise Weil, SheWrites Press 2018 (with purchase links)

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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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Dear NeuroDiverse Comrade:

I'm sorry you found what I posted to be offensive. I totally respect your right to speak out and fight back against the marginalization you get subjected to in our difference-intolerant society. You're tired of the attitudes that get doled out to people who have a mental illness diagnosis. I get that.

But -- speaking as a person who has received enough official psychiatric diagnoses to collect them like postage stamps, including bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic, and borderline -- we need to have the right to decide for ourselves whether our difference is a pathology. And while I don't mean to dismiss whatever efficacy you've gotten from the treatments your doctors have provided, we do get to critique the medical-model interventions that have been pushed at us, sometimes without our having the option of refusing.

Let's backtrack in history just a bit, shall we?

GAY PEOPLE were considered not only immoral and perverted, but mentally ill. Being gay was a pathology, a wrongness of how the mind worked, messed up if not necessarily willfully deficient in morals.

WOMEN, straight as well as lesbian, were often told that if they had any issue with fitting themselves in to the patriarchal society and its expectations and limitations, well, the problem was within them.

TRANS people, of course, were long thought to be suffering from a pathological "gender identity dysphoria", and regardless of whether our society's approach to accommodating their condition involves helping them transition or instead trying to reprogram them, we start with defining them as mentally disordered for thinking of themselves as a gender that doesn't match their body.

And GENDERQUEER and NONBINARY and GENDER NONCONFORMING people have had both forms, too, sometimes having our very existence defined as a pathology and at other times our reaction to how we're treated and regarded defined as a pathology.

Designating us as mentally ill has long been a part of dealing with the inconvenient and problematic. It pinpoints the location of all social problems that involve us as being inside us. It says we aren't oppressed, nor are we understandably traumatized by our social situation . It says nobody is going to understand us any better by listening to us and empathizing with what we have experienced, because we don't make sense, our brains themselves are messed up and full of misbehaving neurons.

It's a belief that grew out of the desire for a disease model for all human suffering. We had become very good, very effective, at dealing with infections and physical maladies, things that could be studied by reducing things to symptoms and causes within the body's own processes. It was hoped that all human pain and suffering would turn out to boil down to that model.

It's also cheaper, a concern of insurance companies and public policy makers who have budgets and cost containment to consider. Pills are a lot cheaper than open-ended counseling, let alone the prospect of social upheaval and structural social change.

But you wish to lump me in with people who blame you for failure to achieve milestones of success. "Oh, you don't understand that I have a mental disability. Since you question the legitimacy of mental health treatment, you clearly think we're all fakers and malingerers and we should just dust off our asses and get over it. Well shut up, we have no time for your privileged hateful cluelessness. You need to quit spouting your bullshit about how it's all just capitalism or patriarchy or whatever, because you're just victim blaming even if you're too dense to see it!"

You're particularly upset that I challenge the claims that the mental health industry makes about its pills. You don't want to hear that studies show that the brain compensates for psychiatric pharmaceuticals if you keep taking them over a long period -- that the drugs that inhibit reuptake of neurotranmitter chemicals cause the brain to maintain fewer receptors or to produce less of the chemical, and the drugs that try to limit certain chemical reactions tend to cause the brain to increase its sensitivity to those chemicals. Which makes the drugs have less effect while creating a physical dependency on the drug that can make it difficult to withdraw from it.

Well, statistics can't tell us that that's necessarily how your body is reacting to what you take. Statistics don't work that way. Research can show that a tendency exists but not that it will happen for everyone the same way. Perhaps psychiatric medication does wonders for you. I'm no one to question what anyone else finds useful or helpful in their search for ways to cope with their situation.

But we are opposed to involuntary modification of how people's minds work, and that means not only opposing direct forced treatment but also misrepresentation of the medical facts. Medical consent has to be fully informed consent. And despite decades of claiming that mentally ill people have a chemical imbalance in our brains that their perfect pills fix, the way that insulin fixes diabetics' inability to produce their own insulin or the way that people without working thyroid glands need to take synthetic thyroid, it just isn't so. Schizophrenia is not a olanzapine deficiency disease. Bipolar is not a lithium deficiency disease. Depression is not a zoloft deficiency disease.

That doesn't mean they don't help you or that you should not take them if they do, but drug companies and doctors lie to patients -- they oversimplify and they misrepresent, and they do not trust patients to make their own medical decisions -- and nowhere is that a more prevalent pattern than in the specific area of mental health.

So no, I am not going to simply let you classify me as a privileged non-disabled asshole, and I'm not going to hide in the corner and stop representing the concerns of activist psychiatrized people.

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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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In today's author's group, one of the participating authors read a piece about the process of choosing words, and how picking this way of saying things would send your mind down a somewhat different track than if you'd picked this other possible way of expressing the same thought, so that the whole way the story goes ends up taking a different form.

That really resonated with me, because I very much feel like all my attempts to express my gender situation in words is like artwork, not precision science. That I have found a way of sketching out my experience and my identity, but not that it's inevitably the only way. And in contrast to that, it feels like most of the people I interact with, on gender discussion boards and in feminist groups and within LGBTQIA political groups and so on, think of these things as if there were an Objectively Right Answer and hey, we happen to have found it and it has to be expressed in these terms or else it is Wrong.

It's a difficult concept to address and explain. But it's important. Bear with me.

You ever seen Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night" painting? It's not a literal rendition of how the stars in the sky look, but it captures something that photographs of the night sky don't -- it expresses how it feels to be outdoors at night when the stars are out. It does it compellingly, excellently, which is why we like it. But when we discuss art, we don't go around discussing "Starry Night" as if there were a precise true "Starry Night" waiting for someone to get around to painting it, and that there's no other possible way of capturing on a canvas what it feels like to be outdoors under the canopy of stars. I think we realize and recognize that someone else could paint a painting that would also express that -- but differently. We even realize that Vincent Van Gogh, in a different painting session, perhaps at a different time, might paint a different expression of the same underlying notion.

But when we discuss social issues and politics, and talk about "how things are" or "how it is", we so often act as if the words and concepts in which we've wrapped our understandings are sacrosanct.

Alcoholism and alcohol abuse, wherein people had previously been thought of as weak-willed immoral people who indulged and ruined themselves, was rethought of in medical terms. As a disease. Other addictions were thought of in a similar fashion because it was a useful way of reframing the situation. But does that mean no other model could have been formulated that would have also reshaped our thinking about alcohol and other addictions? To call something a "disease" requires familiarity with the medical model, most of which revolves around infectious organisms or physical failures of physical organs. It's a good way to frame things, but it's poetry in a way; it relies on metaphors and extensions of existing meanings to embrace additional territory, and to be blunt, it could have been put into words, and concepts, differently.

Being gay is another example. It was once perceived as an immoral behavior, something that a person who was so obsessed with sex would be reduced to, as if the person who sought same-sex sexual experiences were no different from anyone else except for the lack of restraint. Recasting it as a different way of being sexually oriented, that one was born with a built-in same-sex attraction, created a wellspring of understanding and compassion from large segments of society, so it was a very successful reframing of how to think about something. But now, of course, we treat that as doctrine, as "how it actually is", as if there were no other way to frame (or reframe) the matter. And yet it is said that under at least some circumstances nearly everyone is capable of finding a consideration of a body of the same sex to be an erotic one, even if limited to identifying with that body and imagining that what they see happening to it is happening to themself. It is possible that in an alternative social world someone would have formulated an affirmative proud description of being gay that still viewed it as a behavior that some people engage in, and challenged the judgment that those behaviors are somehow bad, and then we'd have an array of concepts and terms that would be different from the ones we have now. And that doesn't mean they'd be wrong and we are right.

My own situation, as I've often said, is that I came out in 1980 as a male-bodied person who had historically been one of the girls, always emulating them and internalizing their value systems and measuring myself against them. That, in and of itself, is something that could have gone another way. I could have conceptualized it differently as it was happening. But this was my reality as I lived it and thinking of myself in these terms shaped my sense of identity, you know? But it didn't involve rejecting my physiology, my maleness, the fact that I didn't have a clitoris and vulva and vagina and instead had a penis and testicles. That wasn't wrong, I was a male person who was one of the girls. And when I came out at the age of 21 in 1980, I explained all that, but it didn't mesh with the identities that were available.

Still doesn't.

People cling tightly to specific identity-descriptions of being transgender, in particular, but also how to be genderqueer, or nonbinary. And when my narrative doesn't mesh, some people say "You are saying that wrong. That is offensive. You are contradicting how it IS. You sound like you could be nonbinary. Or you are a transgender woman and should embrace that. You are valid, but not in the words you're using, because they aren't the right words, okay hon?"

It's all modeling clay. It's oil painting. Not just the words but the concepts. They are attempts to make an experience real. When they resonate with other people -- the way "Starry Night" resonates for so many of us -- that still doesn't make it the only possible way of rendering that experience.

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DreamWidth and LiveJournal are not on speaking terms at the moment. The corresponging LJ entry is here: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/90878.html

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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

———————

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 am neither trans nor cis.

That's been a recurrent theme in my blog posts, along with the sense that my identity often gets erased whenever someone tries to divide the world up into either trans or cis.

Why?

Because I'm definitely not cis, but the mainstream narrative about what it means to be trans does not include people like me.

Many people like to declare that transgender is an umbrella term that includes everyone who isn't cis, regardless of how our gender identity may be different from what it was assumed to be originally. But that doesn't work if you then go around and make statements and assertions about how things are for trans people, and how the rest of the world should think of trans people and how it should treat trans people, if you don't keep people like us in mind when you make those kinds of statements.

And, mostly, we aren't included. We aren't covered. Except in the sense of being covered up by that kind of thinking.

Meet Cindy. She's a transgender woman. She wants to be seen and treated as a woman, and to live as a woman, and not to be regarded and treated as different from the other women. Sound familiar? That's what I call the "conventional trans narrative". It's how we're told to think of trans women.

Keep in mind that we're also told that if you're not a man, and you're not a cis woman, this must be you, that you're a trans woman and that this is how it must be for you.

Cindy posts memes on Facebook, to explain to the world how things are for trans women. One of them says "I wasn't born in a boy's body. I'm a girl. This is the body I was born in so it's always been a girl's body".

Another meme says "Don't deadname transgender people". Cindy explains that she picked a name that is considered a girl's name, so she could blend in, instead of being constantly jarred by being called a name that is considered a boy's name.

A third meme that she has posted says "It's creepy to focus on what's in someone else's underpants. It's none of your business".

The things that Cindy needs, politically and socially, are real and valid and worthwhile, and I support her and I try my best to be her ally in all this, but my situation is not Cindy's situation, and her memes aren't about me or anyone else like me, and yet that's what the world understands "transgender" to be.

I don't want to be under that umbrella. That's not me.

I have no interest in passing. I'm not female. I'm femme. I was born with the physical configuration that our world calls "male". I call it "male", too. That's my body. I'm not ashamed of it. Not only do I not need surgery or hormones, I also don't need you and the rest of the world to think of me as female. Because I'm not. I'm femme. I'm one of the girls, always have been. Never wanted to be a boy, never felt ashamed that I didn't fit in with the boys, and therefore I am not cisgender. I'm a male femme. I'm genderqueer. My gender is queer, unusual, unexpected, different from the norm.

Not all of us want to blend in with the cisgender people of our gender. Not all of us want the world to avoid noticing that our bodies are different from those of most folks of our gender. We aren't all like Cindy.

So if you want to include us, and not erase us, you need to keep that in mind when you say things as if you're speaking for all transgender people -- at least if you're then going to claim that "transgender" includes everyone who isn't cis.

Personally, it's a label I choose not to wear. I don't call myself trans and I'd rather you didn't either. I'm genderqueer, not transgender.

If you're a proud transgender activist, and you want to speak out on behalf of transgender men and women, go for it. If you want to include all of us who aren't cisgender when you speak up, sure, I can use all the help I can get, but if you're going to be inclusive, you have to actually include.

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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

———————

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

Everyone need to explore that question on occasion. In my case, I've spent the last 10 years disagreeing with the transgender "party line" that has developed around sex versus gender -- that gender (how one identifies) matters, whereas sex, if it even exists (instead of just being binary reductionistic rhetoric), is unimportant and nobody's business. "Trans women are women", goes the party line; "trans men are men; and what someone has inside their underpants isn't any concern of yours".

I have dissented with that, saying that, first off, I identify as a male girl, or male femme, and I'd feel just as erased if people started treating me as indistinguishable from cisgender women as I do when people treat me as the same as cisgender men. My lifetime experiences and the specifics of my situation that make me who I am involve not just my sex and not just my gender but the unorthodox atypical combo of the two.

I have said that the mainstream transgender attitude -- although it superficially says that your physical sexual morphology does not matter and shouldn't be the focus of anyone's attention -- it's actually expressing the fear that if someone happens to be woman or femme but their physiology is of the sort that a crowd of random strangers on a nude beach would call "male", then their gender is less valid than if they had the physical configuration that those same strangers would describe as "female". So we should be polite and not pay any attention to the physical structure.

I've said that attitude is fearful and actually sexually conservative, and that what I'm doing is more progressive and radical. I'm demanding acceptance as a femme and being in-your-face about being male of body, not seeking to present as female.

So... about the possibility of being wrong...

What if the route to true sexual equality, and attaining a world where the physical parts you were born with do not matter as far as determining who you get to be, lies with the species as a whole learning to ignore sexual physiology?

What if the route I'm proposing doesn't work -- either because people won't let go of gendered expectations if they take notice of a person's physiological construction or because with an observable difference they'll make generalizations, and even if they aren't the same generalizations we'll be reinventing gender all over again?

Whenever I think about a world where people don't know or don't notice a person's sexual configuration, and are forced to set aside their gendered expectations and just deal with the person as a generic person, I am reminded of the Ms. Magazine story from the 1970s, X: A Fabulous Child's Story by Lois Gould. I regarded it as an adorably cute what-if sort of tale to get folks thinking about sexist expectations and all that, but I have also said that in real life it would mean putting everyone inside burquas and chadors and making the body something that one should never see, and that didn't seem like a healthy situation.

But the transgender activists I'm referring to aren't saying "the body is not to be seen" but rather "the body is not to be acknowledged". That's an important difference. They're saying learn how a person identifies and treat them accordingly and tune out any awareness you might have about the person's physiology.

Is that possible?

I think it's definitely possible at the individual level, possible that this one person or that one person could do so. We learn what is and what is not significant. We live in a culture where it isn't of very huge significance whether one is redheaded or blonde or brown-haired. I can easily believe that someone who doesn't have any better visual memory than I do might be unable to recall whether a person they saw had this hair color or that.

There's a mental process of categorization, in which we encounter a stranger and make some snap judgments so as to have something to go on as far as interpreting them. This describes the worst of stereotyping but it is also, less egregiously, a reliance upon our human skill of pattern recognition. It isn't all bad. Even recognizing a living organism as another human depends on this process. Interacting with someone as an undifferentiated human isn't terribly practical, not when we can narrow it down, not when we're prepared to reevaluate our snap categorization if it doesn't seem to apply after all. Age is important to some extent, as is culture and the possibility of a different language being spoken and a host of other such things. Could we learn to suspend expectations based on sex and enter into each such interaction fresh, with no generalizations?

Perhaps that's not so different from what I'm asking. The trans activists are saying people should learn to not assign anything on the basis of so-called sex, which may not be as apparent and as perceived anyhow. I am saying people should learn of the possibility of gender identities other than the most common for a given sex -- that if they encounter a male person, they may expect masculine, they may expect a man, but should be prepared to re-evaluate if subsequent experience indicates that that may not be the case, and they should know of the other, less common possibilities.

Maybe I'm just splitting hairs unnecessarily with this disagreement. Undeniably, transgender social rhetoric has changed the world, and I benefit. I live in suburbia -- in a northern and socially progressive state to be sure, but in an area that has its share of Republican voters and Catholic (in particular) socially conservative citizens. Yet I go out in public in a skirt and no one says anything.

Is the world substantially safer for a kid such as I was as a kid growing up today? Do I need to establish the specific identity that I conjured up for myself in 1980?

I'm still inclined to think that I do. I don't think that the me that I was at 13, 15, 16, 19, would ever have identified as transgender. Perhaps as nonbinary but that's not sufficiently out there, any more than genderqueer is. And the mainstream transgender approach just strikes me as...fragile. Incapable of withstanding the contempt of common-sense evaluation. I think my approach is considerably less so.

But it's a useful exercise to consider that maybe I'm making too much of a minor distinction in how to express an idea. I'll give it more thought.

———————

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

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

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in late 2021. Stay tuned for further details.

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

———————

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/84460.html

"Hello", the direct message begins. "I am a senior administrator of the 'Transgender Safe Spaces'* Facebook group. Unfortunately, I need to let you know that your post from yesterday has been reported. Reported AGAIN, I should say. Whenever you post here, I get several reports on it.

"We need to have a conversation. I absolutely do NOT wish to censor you. I value alternative perspectives and ideologies because they provide me with an opening out of the bubble that social media has become. Frankly, I think your posts are well thought out and intelligently planned. I can't even say I disagree with you after reading some of your posts. But we're getting report after report from our members".

I click into the chat bubble and write back: "Hi! So what's the next step? You agree that I have something relevant to say, even though some percent of the people in the group find what I've said problematic."

The group admin replies, "I don't think we should all be hearing nothing but echoes of the things we want to hear and believe. It is good to be exposed to things that may or may not fit our own perspective. But unfortunately, not everyone agrees with that. We tend to unfriend people when they say something that contradicts our own feelings and we boot people from groups when they don't echo the group mentality. So I'm in a bit of a predicament as an administrator. You see things differently than others do. The biggest thing I see is that people aren't expecting it. People want an echo, not a controversy. They want to feel like it is a safe space, one that reflects themselves. So someone comes along with a thought that doesn't fit and they react negatively as if their safe space has been compromised".

"So far", I answer, "you've been making my points for me. I don't know what I can do that I'm not already doing. I am open to suggestions for how to modify what I say to make it more palatable, but I already feel like I expend a lot of effort trying to reach people where they are at and bring them to the perceptions that I'm trying to share with them. It's not like I can go to some other group where I'd fit in better. I don't fit in anywhere, exactly. Transgender people promise it's a big umbrella, that if your gender identity is any different from what other people assigned you as at birth, then HEY you're one of us! But apparently I'm not quite so welcome if I think thoughts that aren't like everyone else's and express them because I'm tired of being silenced and my peculiar form of gender identity denied. I'm tired of being spoken OF but not getting a chance to speak FOR MYSELF"

"I don't want to censor you", the admin repeated. "This has become a group that values selfies of transgender peple asking if they pass, or stories about abuse and trauma, or questions about hormone shot placement. I don't think there is anything wrong with your posting, but I'm afraid this is the wrong audience. I think you need to find a better place to post, where conversations and long-format posts are more embraced. I'd like to keep you around but I also need to help people feel like the group is a safe space".

But it isn't a safe space.

It clearly isn't a safe space for a minority individual who isn't like the others. Such as me. It isn't a safe space for individuals who do not fit in.

The people it is "safe" for are the most normative participants, who are being kept "safe" from the horrible threat of having to be aware of someone who is different, whose experience is different. Someone weird. Peculiar. QUEER, you could say.

This is not a cute little irony to be spoken of with a wry smile. This is a catastrophic falure of the entire purpose and mission statement of LGBTQIA+.

Trans communities are becoming unsafe spaces for queer folks.

Watch your eggshells.

I will be walking on them.

* The actual name of the Facebook group has been changed at the administrator's request.

———————

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

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

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in late 2021. Stay tuned for further details.

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

———————

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/84154.html

Another brave child steps through a door. Seanan McGuire's "Wayward Children" series revolves around the notion that doors present themselves to children who -- for various reasons -- don't fit in this world, offering them an opportunity to live for awhile in one or another alternative world where the principles and rules of physics and society and anything else you can imagine may be quite different.

These are stories for kids who feel like space aliens here. I just answered a query on one of my Facebook groups, a meme that read "Sometimes I feel I am not from this world. The gender binary is a myth. Why do you feel like a visiting alien?" McGuire's "Wayward Children" series is not just for those of us whose Difference is about gender, but yeah, most of us know that 'space aliens who belong somewhere else, not here' feeling quite well, don't we?

Across the Green Grass Fields breaks some of the patterns set by the previous books in the series. For one thing, this book is less dark, overall. In this one, no one is dying with their hands chopped off or their eyes surgically removed while they were still alive and conscious; none of the main characters has to experience their lover and companion being killed by their sister, and there are no animated corpses plodding along without their animating spirit. Another thing setting this book apart is that there's no mention of the school, the refuge in the world that we know for all the kids to retreat into when they lose access to their alternative worlds. Be all that as it may, this latest installment fits in nonetheless -- those of us who've read the other books see how this one continues the larger pattern. Regan will end up at the school after the events told in this story.

Regan, the main character, happens to be intersex. Complete Androgen Insensitivy Syndrome (CAIS). XY chromosomes, like a boy, but without a boy's conventional external parts, with the parts that cause one to be classified as a girl instead. She doesn't know this until she becomes concerned that her body isn't changing like that of her friends and expresses this to her parents. From their behavior, she realizes they're keeping something from her, and after some initial relucance they tell her. This is all new and startling information, and she shares it with her best friend, but her best friend is freaked out by it and rejects her.

But the story as a whole is not Regan being intersex. The story is about a girl who ends up in a world populated by centaurs and minotaurs and other variations. It's just a story in which the main character happens to be intersex.

An often-stated wish of LGBTQIA+ readers is for more books where we can read about characters who are like us, not books that are about coming to terms with that difference and coming out and so forth, but ordinary adventures and romances and mysteries and science fiction and fantasy stories where we have people like us appearing in them. Just normalize us into characterhood! Author Seanan McGuire has previously given us lesbian characters (Jack from the first three tales) and a transgender character (Kade) and didn't make the stories About Being a Lesbian (etc), but that's fairly commonplace now. To have an intersex main character in the same sense is considerably less so.

Like all of the books in this series, Across the Green Grass Fields is delightfully whimsical, conjures up a world we can believe in and might want to visit, and lets us follow the tale of a brave hero from the middle school age range. It's written to be appropriate and enticing to readers of that age but to still be fascinating and entertaining to an adult audience as well, and it succeeds in both instances, and I do recommend it.

Now, in the spirit of "a word from our sponsors", a comment about LGBTQIA+ and all that --

Inclusion means, or should mean, more than "Yeah, okay, those people can march with us too, sure, why not, give them a rainbow t-shirt to wear". It means learning about how it is and has been for people whose identifying letter in that acronym are something other than your own.

I'm not intersex myself, but I try to do that, to read and learn about all the different identities and situations that fall into the LGBTQIA+ cluster.

It means including the other folks' situation in your own thoughts and statements. And that, in turn, means more than simply remembering to use the letter "I" as well as "L", "G", "B", and "T". It means undersanding how the issues may look different to them. In the case of intersex, since that's the identity highlighted by this book, for instance, they often hear other people mentioning intersex to counter arguments about physical sex -- as in "well, intersex people exist, so attempting to speak of physical sex, like what makes you female is having a vagina, is factually wrong, physical sex doesn't really exist". Intersex people themselves don't tend to make that kind of statement. And in fact most of the intersex people I've known do not like it when sex and gender are confused! It erases their situation when people think they're the same thing as transgender, or genderqueer or bigender or genderfluid. Because it is their physical sex that sets them apart as different, as being neither male nor female in their body structure. Most of them are not happy if your main takeaway from hearing about the existence of intersex people is that sex -- as distinguished from gender -- doesn't exist!

That's just an example. I could make similar points about bisexuality. That it brings viewpoints and experiences to the table that are different from what lesbians and gay people go through. Think of the Chasing Amy experience -- being rejected by one's lesbian friends as "one of us" for becoming involved with a guy.

At a minimum, we should put the same expectations on ourselves that we put on people who say they are our cisgender / straight allies. We expect the latter to educate themselves. We expect them to go a bit beyond refraining from running around saying transgender and homosexual people are sinful and perverted.

In the name of inclusion, we need to do that for each other.

———————

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

———————

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

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

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in late 2021. Stay tuned for further details.

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

———————

Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/83958.html

"It's surprising to me that you aren't sure the trans community will accept gender queer people who don't transition", my friend writes in response to something I had posted. "Many such people do identify as trans and are active in the community, particularly in specifically non-binary spaces".

Yeah, let me explain and unpack that a bit.

Early this week, in another, very different space, someone else had posted something dismissive about trans people -- there was a photo of a bathroom door with all kinds of alternatives to the conventional male and female bathroom silhouettes along with the notice "We don't care, just don't pee on the seat" or something to that effect; the person posting it had then written a screed about how fragile and self-immersed and pathetic these kids these days are, etc.

So I wrote some descriptions of the shit I'd had to put up with from my classmates, the sissyphobia and homophobia and misogyny bundle, you know? What it had been like being harassed for being sissy and femme. And how since they had made an issue of it and acted like it was my secret shame, I damn well had the right to make an issue of it myself to say I was proud of my identity.

I got some likes and some supportive comments but I also got people saying that this shouldn't make it necessary to transition because I'm just as entitled to walk around in the body I was born in as those bullies were. So I explained that I am not a transitioner, that I don't present as female, that I identify as femme but also as physically male.

"Oh", they said. "Well, that makes more sense. But these pathetic people we're talking about, they don't do that. They have to change their name and their pronouns and put on a dress and tell us we have to accept their identity".

So these transphobes are seizing on nonbinary people like me who don't transition and using us as a weapon to attack our trans sisters and brothers.

That happens. It isn't rare. It's a thing.

Now, let's consider the kind of things I myself say. I'm not merely a genderqueer person who does not transition. I'm a loud and pushy genderqueer person who is tired of feeling erased so I make a lot of noise about having an identity that is different from the type of trans identities that comprise the main cultural narrative about being trans. I'm constantly mouthing off about not being a transitioner. I'm often challenging language used and generalizations made in transgender / genderqueer groups when it doesn't leave room for people who consider themselves women or femme but don't present as female.

My behavior reminds a lot of trans people of those transphobes. Because identities like mine have been weaponized against them. Used to attack the legitimacy of their identities.

We should not let them divide us that way. Those nasty creepazoids don't legitimately accept my identity. They use the word "just". As in "See, you can just be nonmasculine and still be male". They trivialize my experience and my identity. They will go on to say I don't have a separate gender identity, I'm just a man who likes to eat quiche and watch chick flicks or something. They plug their ears about how polarizing it is to be perceived as male but to be (and to be perceived as being) a person with the priorities and tastes, behaviors and attitudes that are expected of girls and women and not the ones associated with boys and men. They pretend they are fine with that as long as I don't transition and ask them to accept me as female. They pretend they aren't participating in the problem, that it wasn't them calling me names and exhibiting attitude and dropping insinuendos about what's wrong with me.

My trans sisters and brothers who transition are my kin. What works for me does not work for them. They have the right to be, to exist socially without being misgendered or condescended to. Nobody has any justification for questioning the route they have taken, which validates their identity and lets them stand proud. They need a supportive medical community and insurance coverage, they need to be allowed to pee without people questioning or challenging their gender identity, they need to be able to walk down the sidewalk in peace and in safety. And they need to not have identities like mine thrown in their faces like gender was some kind of One Size Fits All boutique and cisgender bigots are suddenly the fashion aribrators.

You do not have my consent to use me as a goddam weapon.

———————

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

———————

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

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

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

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

———————

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/82815.html

Our local Green Party chapter recently had Cynthia BrianKate, a transgender and intersex activist, as a presenter / guest speaker.

In the weeks before her appearance, she expressed dismay that last fall I had signed a petition favoring "dialog, not expulsion" of the Georgia chapter of the Green Party. Cynthia BrianKate joins many other trans activists and supporters within the Greens in thinking that the Georgia chapter is unapologetically transphobic and full of TERFs and TERF sympathizers and should get booted to the curb, so why was I supporting these folks who were running to their aid?

I owe Cynthia, the Lavender Caucus of the Green Party, and transgender activists in general an explanation, perhaps an apology. Let's start with explanation.

The Georgia chapter of the Green Party signed or endorsed a statement about women's sex-based rights. I read it. I would not have signed it myself. I felt like it contained language that was insensitive to trans women at best and denied the legitimacy of their identity at worst, depending on one's tendency to interpret dog whistles.

But I'm not a fan of "You said something wrong! You are bad and must be punished! I am absolutely right and you are absolutely wrong and there's no room for discussion" types of stances. So when I was approached and asked if I would support -- literally -- dialog with the Greens, as the next step, not expulsion of them -- I agreed. And (perhaps foolishly) thought I could bridge communication gaps between the parties involved.

That's really it in a nutshell.

Here are some additional details and elaborations.

Why (you might be wondering) would I think I was in a position to mediate between these parties?

I was born male. I’d place the timeframe as between first grade (when I don’t recall any awareness of it) and second grade (when I do) as when I became conscious of being at odds with gender expectations. Specifically that who I was was more akin to being one of the girls. And I was proud of that.

But I never felt dysphoria about my body. I was okay with being a male person, a person in a male body, who was one of the girls and not one of the boys.

And to drop this timeframe into a larger context, I graduated high school in 1977 and came out in 1980. How I identified would nowadays be called "nonbinary" or "nonbinary trans" or "genderqueer", but there was no such word and no so such concept back then; and although I recognized that my situation had stuff in common with the situation of gay folks and also with trans people, I did not find a social home in that community. What community? Trans people themselves weren't really very included with the gay and lesbian folks yet. No one was saying LGBT in the 70s, let alone LGBTQ.

The political people who were saying the most relevant things were the feminists. That double standards, where the same behavior or trait is valued differently depending on whether you're male or female, or where people have different standards of how you're supposed to be and behave, were sexist and wrong. That the attribution of masculinity to male people and femininity to female people was social, not built-in.

So I went to the university and majored in women's studies. Essentially I ran off to join the feminists.

I can't claim that I was fully accepted and understood in that community either, but it's important for people like the Lavender Caucus folks to understand that for most of my life the LGBTQ community wasn't an "us" that I belonged to. It wasn't a place where I was understood and my identity embraced.

Trans people back then didn't include people who didn't transition (or at least want to). At a minimum, if you identified as a woman, you were supposed to want to be perceived and thought of as female-bodied. You were supposed to want to pass.

Nowadays, the "big tent / umbrella" definition of transgender includes people like me, but because of concern for people who can't or don't do a medical transition, the attitude from the tent feels like our genital parts are an embarrassing thing that should be ignored lest they make our gender identity less valid. That makes it still not a completely warm and welcoming home for me, if you see what I mean. I'm not a cis woman, I'm male not female, and my tendency is to be in your face about being both a femme girl and a physically male person.

In my previous blog post, I wrote about how feminists tend to see gender as chains, as constraints. They believe that if we could get rid of sexist expectations and sexist notions, there would be no gender, because being male or female of body would have no social implications as far as how people think of you, or how you would think of yourself. (Interestingly, some of the people who commented on that post dissented to say that only TERFs would believe that, that real feminists embrace gender).

I don't fully agree with this "gender is just bad let's erase it" view, whether it is or isn't a typical feminist belief. I say "not fully" because I agree with it somewhat. Where I dissent is that we -- you and I and all of us -- we live in this world, this social world, and we are affected by gender; there may come a day when gender no longer exists, but before that can happen there first needs to be a world where you can be any physical sex and it doesn't determine your gender, and before we can get to neutral no-gendered-expectations we've got to create some social space for inverts. You can't move directly from a world where male people are boys and female people are girls to a world where being male isn't associated with being boyish and being female isn't tied to being girlish. You first have to confront some male girls and female boys and get to the point of recognizing them as okay people.

Mainstream trans rhetoric may seem at first glance to be there, but it's really not. Instead of saying "There are male girls and female boys and they can be proud of that", it says "If you say you're a girl, you're a girl; if you say you're a boy, you're a boy, and it's not polite to conjecture about what's in people's underpants". And lurking in the shadows of the hidden physical attributes that you're not supposed to conjecture about is the remaining fear that if you have male bits down there you aren't as girl as someone with female parts, and vice versa for the boyish folks.

TERF, of course, means trans EXCLUSIVE. As in "excluding trans women from what we mean when we say 'women'". And this exclusion plays right into that area of sensitivity, making an issue of whether a person was born with a vulva and clitoris or born with a penis and testicles instead. Hardly a surpise that trans activists perceive it as an assault on trans identities.

Is it always?

Trans women are women, period. But is it ever okay to exclude them?

Feminist women often consider people who were viewed and treated as female since their birth to be in a different social situation than people who were initially perceived and treated as male. The latter, they say, have been beneficiaries of male privilege even if they identify as women and are now perceived and treated as women. And, they sometimes also say, we want to organize as the former, as people who have always been in the social situation of being regarded and treated as female in a patriarchal society.

I am open to that argument even if many transgender activists are most vehemently not.

I have to say, though, that in any plural convocation of people who were taking that position, I have found at least a handful of genuinely bigoted intolerant hateful folks. Women who believe people who were born with penis and testicles were also born with a violent nature, a desire to dominate, a predisposition to destroy and kill and subjugate. An evil nature. Women who believe that patriarchy is male people expressing themselves and their natural built-in traits, and that males are the problem. Other feminists in their midst don't call them on it. And they won't embrace me as a feminist nor my trans sisters as women, because of it.

But because I was open to an argument that treats sex as one thing and gender as another -- because I treat them as separate components of my own identity -- I could see some possible merit to the "sex based rights" position, even if it is often voiced by trans-misogynist hateful people.

So for that reason I signed in support of having an actual dialog, and to find out where the Georgia Greens were actually coming from.

———————

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

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

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

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal 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/79061.html

How it was, historically, is that one had a genital configuration, and that determined your social role, your gender.

Feminists and trans folks agree: that's restrictive and it stunts and impairs people, so we say NO to that. Your genital configuration shall NOT define your identity, and we shall be free to be, you and me.

So we're on the same page and we're together on this? Well, no. We're at each other's throats. How'd that happen?

Well, feminists tend to look at gender and see nothing but chains. Gender is that mishmosh of sexist expectations and attitudes and double standards. Gender is where you get treated differently depending on whether you've been classified as a woman or a man; so that's what we're against, right?

But the LGBTQIA community, supporting its transgender component, embraces gender. Gender is your identity, whether you identify as a man or a woman or neither or something different, or perhaps one of those on some days and a different one on other days. The important thing is that it is not defined by your genital configuration, it's how you identify that defines your gender, got it?

Many feminists shake their head at that. If your physical sexual morphology no longer defines you as being this kind of person or that kind of person, why would we continue to harbor notions of "this kind of person" versus "that kind of person" as concrete separate identities? So somehow for these transgender folks, gender still exists, but not anchored to genitals. Genital-free gender. Well, if it isn't composed entirely of the social attitudes and expectations that we're overthrowing, what's it made up of?

Outspoken trans people tell their tales, what it was like. Gender is real for them, important. I was expected to be playing football, cussing, sitting with my legs open wide, hitting on girls, but just hitting boys, and that was all wrong for me. I wanted to wear skirts and sparkly things, and have long hair and be flirty, and I wanted to dance.

The feminists glance at each other and shake their heads, because in a world without gender roles and expectations, you wouldn't be expected to play football or wear sparkly things. That, they say, is the whole point. We want to tear down the fence that keeps people on one side or the other side of the gender pasture, and you trans folks just want to hop over the fence in order to be confined to the other side!

So, communications breakdown.

Trans people, and the LGBTQIA world of which they are a part, do tend to talk about gender as if it is self-explanatory and as if, except for emphasizing that it doesn't have anything to do with what's between your legs, it's all self-explanatory and quite real. And feminists, meanwhile, talk about gender as if it consists entirely of things you can't do or ways in which other people don't see you and your traits and accomplishments; they see it as entirely composed of social beliefs and not real, just ideology.

I don't agree with either side.

First off, I think gender is composed of social beliefs, but social beliefs are real things. We have to deal with them, we are social creatures.

Second, they consist of more than restrictions and chains. Let me elaborate on that. When people talk about "gender roles" the examples are often broad klunky things like "the man was expected to go to work and earn money, the woman was supposed to stay home and raise children and cook and clean house". But when people talk about roles in a movie or a stage play, they describe characters and personalities, behaviors in a fully fleshed out way. It's like the difference between talking about the role of king and the role of King Lear. The first is a social office but the second is a sort of archetype of a way of being in the world. We can establish a chartered egalitarian representative democracy and not have a king, and say that anyone who thinks they are a king is delusional and anyone who aspires to be one is politically reactionary. But if someone finds strength and inspiration by channelling the character of King Richard the Lion-hearted, (perhaps as portrayed onscreen or onstage by their favorite actor), they're doing a different thing; they're drawing upon a library of behavioral nuances and expressions, attitudes and charisma, examples of how to behave in various situations, ways of conducting one's self socially.

And we all use those. We are social creatures. We learned how to be who we are in social interaction by borrowing and emulating bits and pieces of how we saw others being, bits that resonated with us. Like assembling a wardrobe of clothing from borrowed apparel, we try on things to see if they fit us, and what we keep, over time, is what fits best and expresses who we are.

Gender is like that.

Yes, over time, after a few generations of people not harboring and embracing rigid notions of how folks with a clitoris and vulva are quite different from folks with a penis and testicles, these available libraries of roles should diverge from being anchored, erotically or otherwise, in one sex or the other. But the ones we grew up with mostly are sex-specific, aren't they? Rather than showing us a way of being in the world, they mostly exhibit to us examples of how to be a man (this kind of man, that kind of man, this other kind of man) or how to be a woman (lots of diversity here too but a very different library of how-to-be than the man library, yes?).

So, transgender (and genderqueer and etc) people. People who find it empowering to draw heavily on the library that has historically been marked as gendered for people of a different physical body than the one they've got.

Can you see how that's different from "hugging one's own chains"?

Next episode: remedial laws and policies anchored in one's physical sex, not gender, and how that has pitted transgender women and feminists against each other

———————

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

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

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

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal 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/78623.html

Watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXzNyCf4aI

THE PANELISTS

Esther Lemmens -- Esther is the founder of the Fifty Shades of Gender podcast, where she gets curious about all things gender, sex and sexuality, exploring stories from gender-diverse folks with inclusion, acceptance and respect.

https://www.fiftyshadesofgender.com/

———

Ann Menasche -- Ann is a radical lesbian-feminist and socialist activist and a founding member of the radical feminist organization, Feminists in Struggle.

https://feministstruggle.org/

———

Rachel Lange -- Rachel Lange is the editor of QueerPGH, and a freelance writer and editor. They live in Pittsburgh, PA.

https://www.queerpgh.com/

———

Moderator: Cassandra Lems

———————

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

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

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

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal 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/78538.html

Imagine walking down the hall and encountering this argument:

BOB: I don't know what you folks are going on about. Look, there are two sexes, male and female. If you're female, you're a woman. If you're male, you're a man.

KIM: You're wrong. Sex isn't binary. People aren't just male or female. There are intersex people. That proves that gender is a lot more complicated than what you just said. There are a lot of different genders, not just two!

If I were the one walking down the hall and hearing this, I would want to tell them that they're both wrong. First off, sex isn't gender. Sex is your physical morphology. Gender is identity and role, all that social stuff.

If you were a person who basically agreed with Bob, you most likely wouldn't be here reading my blog. So I'm not going to waste your time and mine developing the counterarguments to Bob that you've already heard and can make as well as I can.

But to Kim, I would want to say: "We don't need it to be true that there are more than two sexes in order for our nonbinary gender identities to be valid. You shouldn't even bring up physical biological sex in this argument. It just confuses the issue. I've got all the parts that caused my mom's obstetrician to mark down that I was a male baby. I'm not remotely intersex. My body fits the textbook description of male. I'm femme, though. I'm all gal. I was never into that boy stuff, I always knew I was one of the girls. Saying that the plurality of binary physical sexes is what makes nonconforming gender identities valid implies that our gender identity isn't legit otherwise".

I do get crossways with transgender activists and nonbinary activists over this physical-body stuff on occasion. They'll sometimes respond to what I said about having conventional textbook-description male parts and saying I'm a male girl or a male femme with a burst of defensive anger: "Excuse me but having a penis doesn't make you male. Biological sex IS A MYTH! You shouldn't go around saying that having your set of physical parts makes you male because then you're saying that if I have a penis that makes me male, and honey don't start that shit with me, I have never been male. I was mistakenly assigned male at birth!"

But no, biological sex is not a myth. The notion that biological sex defines gender, that is a myth. The notion that everyone is supposed to be either male or female, and that anyone who isn't is an embarrassment who needs to be corrected surgically as soon as possible, that is a myth. But it is indeed one's physical bits that defines one's sex. So we need to discuss sexual physiology, even though it's not determinant of a person's gender identity. Or maybe precisely because it is not determinant of a person's gender identity.

Despite the existence of real intersex people, we are a sexually dimorphic species. In general, like most complex animal life forms, we're either male or we're female. Our species is not a species that reproduces through the interaction of three, five, or thirty-seven different sexes doing a wide variety of reproductive behaviors. It's a species that reproduces though the interaction of two fundamental body designs, and intersex people who reproduce don't really modify that fact. Nobody alive today or at any time in recorded human history gestated in an organ that was not a uterus. Nobody ever got their chromosomes from gametes that were neither sperm nor ova. There isn't a sex that is neither male nor female that produces sex chromosomes that are Z or W instead of being X or Y and which encode the sexual possibility of developing into a specific body that isn't male or female. You could write a great science fiction tale about a species that was like that, but that's a fictional and imaginary idea of intersex, not a real one. And since real intersex people exist, we should pay real attention to them for a minute instead of just using them as a rhetorical argument about how human biological sex is nonbinary.

Some intersex people are CAH (i.e, they have Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia). These are people whose sex-encoding genes are just like those of most people whose bodies present as female, but where a variation in the adrenal gland's behavior causes them to have a lot of the type of hormones that make a person's body take on male attributes. This adrenal gland behavior is caused by their genes, but not the ones on their sex chromosomes, so the biological roulette of what sperm's codes went into the egg isn't causing this. At birth, CAH people's bodies may be designated male. More problematic, their bodies are often recognized as intersex and the doctors reach for their sharp scalpels and whack away the offending phallic clitoris. This -- and not the rhetorical flourish of discarding the entire notion that biological sex exists at all -- is probably the most significant political concern of real-life intersex activists. To get doctors to quit doing this. To let CAH babies make their own decisions about their own bodies when they are old enough to do so.

Other intersex people are CAIS (i.e., they have Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome). These are people whose sex-encoding genes are just like those of most people whose bodies present as male, but other genes of theirs (not on their sex chromosomes but elsewhere in their genetic code) make their body unresponsive to the hormones that make the body take on male structures. So their bodies at the time of their birth will nearly always be designated female. Unlike the CAH people, they aren't at high risk for being carved up by surgeons when they're still infants, but at puberty they won't get periods; the fact that they have undescended testes (usually) instead of ovaries may be discovered, and even though they are old enough to voice an opinion, doctors sometimes pick up those sharp knives and cut out their testes without asking. Or the doctors may mislead the CAIS patient (and their parents, who typically have medical authority) about the risks and consequences. This is another of the intersex activists' political concerns, fully informed consent for CAIS intersex people.

CAH and CAIS intersex people can generally reproduce. But despite being intersex, the physical architecture and the chromosomal arrangement with which they participate is going to follow either a male textbook description or a female textbook description.

But what about intersex people who are neither XX nor XY at the genetic level?

The Turner pattern, where a person has a single X instead of two, also called XO configuration, creates a female-structured body with some modified shapes (shorter, broader chest, some differences in the face, and so on). They are often infertile. They don't tend to be designated anything other than female at the time of birth. A few do not have a uterus or ovaries. If they are able to reproduce, they do so with the structures and capabilities of female people, and their genetic contributions will work within the sexually dimorphic reproductive pattern like those of female people.

The Klinefelter pattern, where a person has an XXY configuration, creates a male-structured body with some mildly modified shapes. They are almost always designated male at birth. At puberty they may not develop secondary sex characteristics, or may develop them less strongly than other males.

There is an XYY pattern as well, the Jacobs pattern. They are almost always designated male at birth. There are some mild differences in body shape but it often goes undetected.

There are also mosaic situations, such as XO/XY where some of a person's cells have XO and others have XY. A person with this configuration may be born with a body that presents as typical female, typical male, or ambiguously intersex. Or even more rarely, there is XX/XY, the closest to the legend of hermaphrodite, wherein, depending on which cells in which part of the body have developed according to which structural patterns, may result in both ovaries AND testes developing. There is the theoretical possibility that a person could produce both viable sperm and viable ova and could therefore participate reproductively as a source of sperm and/or as the person providing the egg, but there's no case of this on record.

I haven't said anything about the political intersex considerations for people with these forms of intersex because I'm less familiar with them. Self-determination, certainly. The right to choose whether to receive supplemental hormones (or hormone blockers), the right to fully-informed consent not muddled by the outdated attitude that any variation needs to be hidden and "fixed", the attitude that difference is shameful and inferior and wrong.

The takeaway from intersex awareness is not that sexual dimorphism is an evil lie that supports the gender binary and the "anatomy is destiny" conservative belief systems, but that people who vary should have the right to make their own decisions about their own bodies, and should be regarded as normal variations, not sick pathologies.

———————

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/76075.html

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ahunter3

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June 2025

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Page Summary

MetaNostalgia
REVIEW: Cyrus Dunham's *A YEAR WITHOUT A NAME* — A Nuanced and Eloquent Trans Narrative
Transgender Lack of Awareness Week
My Tendency to Dissent
'A Lack of Self-Awareness' -- *Guy in WS Gets Reviewed*
The Coarseness of Our Accommodations
The Words That We Use
Separatism, Safe Spaces, and The Other
BOOK REVIEW -- In Search of Pure Lust by Lise Weil
Dear NeuroDiverse Comrade:
Identity, Words, and Concepts
Passing Phase
What If I'm Wrong?
Unsafe Spaces
BOOK REVIEW: *Across the Green Grass Fields* by Seanan McGuire
Being Weaponized
TERF Wars: Feminists Against Gender and Transgender Warriors Against TERFs, Conclusion (for the mome
TERF Wars: Feminists Against Gender and Transgender Warriors Against TERFs
Panel Discussion of GenderQueer! (on YouTube)
Sexual Dimorphism and Gender

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Style: Ivory Alcea for Mobility by branchandroot
Resources: Mitsuba Aoi

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Entries tagged with diversity versus community

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MetaNostalgia

REVIEW: Cyrus Dunham's A YEAR WITHOUT A NAME — A Nuanced and Eloquent Trans Narrative

Transgender Lack of Awareness Week

My Tendency to Dissent

'A Lack of Self-Awareness' -- Guy in WS Gets Reviewed

The Coarseness of Our Accommodations

The Words That We Use

Separatism, Safe Spaces, and The Other

BOOK REVIEW -- In Search of Pure Lust by Lise Weil

Dear NeuroDiverse Comrade:

Identity, Words, and Concepts

Passing Phase

What If I'm Wrong?

Unsafe Spaces

BOOK REVIEW: Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

Being Weaponized

TERF Wars: Feminists Against Gender and Transgender Warriors Against TERFs, Conclusion (for the mome

TERF Wars: Feminists Against Gender and Transgender Warriors Against TERFs

Panel Discussion of GenderQueer! (on YouTube)

Sexual Dimorphism and Gender

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June 2025

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