So I do a vanity search one day on YouTube, being too lazy to just go to my profile account and click on "videos". And up pops:

This video review of GenderQueer

... from somebody named "Novelzilla".


Which got me quite excited, because I seldom get unsolicited reviews. Naturally I'm curious to see whether they liked it and what critical observations they had to make about it, and how they saw it tie in (or fail to tie in) with the existing perspectives within the LGBTQIA community and so on.

First observation: it's being read by a text-to-speech application. Not one of the good ones. The expression and emphasis do not fit the sentences, and the cadence and rhythm aren't as good as the voice in our car's GPS.

But, okay, some people can't speak for themselves because of various impairments, and some people really don't like their own voice and prefer to have the computer read what they've written. I'm in an authors' group and some of the authors have software read their selections instead of reading it out loud themselves. Novelzilla should have consulted them -- they have better ones that they're using!

Well... then Novelzilla gets to the second sentence and informs people that "Through a combination of personal narratives, interviews, and cultural analysis, the author sheds light on the challenges and triumphs of those who exist outside traditional gender norms". Which is disconcerting, because there are no interviews in GenderQueer. I wouldn't describe it as having "personal narratives" either... just the one personal narrative, my own story.

I am told that my approach is "deeply compassionate and respectful" and that I treat genderqueer identities as "valid and worthy of understanding". That would be compassionate towards and respectful of myself, since I'm my own subject matter, and if I didn't think my identity was valid and worthy of understanding, why would I have written my story?

"Hunter highlights the journey of individuals", continues the narration. Umm, no, just the journey of one individual.

Deeper into the review, Novelzilla states that I "incorporate critical analysis of cultural representations of genderqueer individuals". That would be an interesting project: I'd be inclined to say there were no cultural representations of genderqueer individuals in the 70s when the story took place, since the word "genderqueer" wasn't in use yet. That was the point of the book! To show what the experience is like when there's no widely shared identity for such a person, no word and no concept, just a lot of inaccurate and inadequate misidentifications.

If my book has been assigned as reading for a course somewhere, I could believe some student had taken the time to write a review of a book they hadn't bothered to read, to fake their way to a passing course grade. But since it isn't, I'm quite bewildered.

My best guess is that someone is playing with an artificial intelligence program and dropping some keywords in and seeing what it comes up with for various books. The "review" is mostly generalities that would probably apply to nearly any published book about being genderqueer, including mine, but the algorithm isn't distinguishing between someone writing social-political theory and someone writing memoir, so that's where it's tripping up.

Novelzilla has other videos up, all reviews of various books, mostly nonfiction and imbued with social commentary in some sense. I see there's a review of Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man, for instance. From a brief peek, it looks like the AI is getting better; it seems more accurate in its specifics than it was for mine, although it's possible that Norah Vincent would notice things that are overly general or outright incorrect.

Maybe Novelzilla is an aspiring writer itself, and reviewing books is how Novelzilla is learning the craft. Keep an eye out for any new titles such as Sentient Software: Another Identity Like and Yet Unlike Your own, or of such ilk as that.

If they get publishing contracts, and hence payment for their work, AI's can use their earnings to buy books and hence will become a part of the market, and perhaps in a few years the bookracks will be stocked with books written by and for AI's.


—————


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

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

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

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

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

-----

Day Seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————


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


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

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






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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

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

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




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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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


—————


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


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



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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I'm straddling a fence, with one foot hanging down on either side.

When gender-critical feminists say that people with XY chromosomes and penises who match the social definition of "feminine" should not have to transition socially or medically and present as female in order for their identities to be valid, they are right. And they are right in saying that rhetoric from transgender activists tends to say otherwise, they're right about that too.

But when they say that such people can't transition because they aren't and cannot be female, and that they're propping up gender stereotypes not challenging them, I stand with my transgender feminist sisters. They are right in saying transgender excluding feminists are fundamentally in the wrong, and when they claim that there is outright bigotry involved, I agree with them there also.

If you are in either camp, and feel strong emphatic hostility towards the other, you really need to read this, because *both* of you groups of people are stomping on my toes and it needs to stop.


"Should Not Have To"

In their outward-facing messaging to the general public, transgender people have explained that there are people who were assigned female at birth (AFAB) but who are actually men, and deserve to be evaluated by the same standards as other men, to be thought of as indistinguishable from men who were considered male since birth. And that, similarly, there are people assigned male a birth (AMAB) who are actually women, and who are entitled to be thought of and considered women, indistinguishable from the women who were perceived as female since birth. This is what the general public has been hearing since the 1970s when I was a teenager and it is still the message that the average person understands about trans people.

This message celebrates transition -- in the social sense if not necessarily in the medical sense as well -- as the end-all and be-all of wonderful self-affirming possibility for people whose identity is at odds with the expectations that are attached to their physiological body type.

It is not so much that trans voices are saying that a person in that situation has to transition; it's more that they are saying loudly and often that they can and have the right to and that a caring loving world would support them in doing so. And their numbers, and established voices, make their message a loud shout when compared to the voices of other gender-atypical people who opt for a different approach and walk a different self-affirming path.

When you add in the fact that they inclusively define "transgender" as applying to anyone whose gender identity is different from the sex they were assigned at birth, this single narrative and the lack of any loudly spoken narrative that goes a different direction comes across as "anyone whose gender isn't what it was expected to be on the basis of their assigned sex is one of us, and we transition".

Even the exceptions aren't much of an exception. I just saw a meme on Facebook that asserted "TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN. TRANS MEN ARE MEN. NONBINARY PEOPLE ARE VALID". Well, there, you might be thinking, see, they are including other possibilities after all! But not so much. There is a complete lack of any detail, any specifics, about the nonbinary folks. Consider: the meme could have just said "TRANS AND NONBINARY PEOPLE ARE VALID" and left it at that. But by restating again that trans women are women, we're reminded that, oh yeah, the point is to not distinguish them from other women. Likewise for the trans men being men. Then when we get to the nonbinary people, saying "are valid" has the general effect of a vague wave of the hand: "And them, whatever the hell it is that they consider themselves to be, which we're not bothering to learn about or describe, they're cool too, okay?"

What you hardly ever see is a message from the transgender community stating "MEN WHOSE BODIES WOULD BE CONSIDERED FEMALE ARE VALID MEN WHETHER THEY DRESS TO FIT EXPECTATIONS OF MEN OR NOT. THEY DON'T NEED TO TRANSITION TO BE VALID". Or that "YOU DON'T HAVE TO CHANGE YOURSELF TO MATCH SEX EXPECTATIONS, AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO CHANGE YOUR SEX TO MATCH YOUR GENDER EITHER". And when you do see such messages, they were usually written by us, the minority of people who do not fit the widely shared social concept of transgender any more than we fit the expectations that describe cisgender people.

There is a lot of passive acceptance of us within the wide trans community, but there's also some real hostility. Our situation is different so we describe it differently, making different points than those that trans people in general tend to repeat, and that alone can get a person labeled "transphobe" and evicted from a support group.

Some people are blunt and coarse in their opposition, saying "You're not doing it right, if you're a trans woman you are female, and if you're still calling yourself male then you aren't trans".

But there is more fully thought out opposition too. One trans woman told me, "What happens to those of us who actually worked hard to transition? What happens to those of us who have nearly been brought to bankruptcy because we have felt the disconnect, have suffered through, had gone through the torment of society making us suffer for it, and worked hard to make the suffering cease? If your ideologies are to be a new 'norm', that would render all of our hard work meaningless."

Gender critical feminists look at the mainstream transgender message, the one about transitioning as the solution, the one that describes people assigned female at birth as "TRANS MEN ARE MEN", and people assigned male at birth as "TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN", and what they see is people hopping over the fence instead of helping them tear the fence down. They say that this leaves all the societal expectations of female people fully intact -- the transitioners who were born female will be regarded as men, hence not contradicting the stereotypes about female. And that the voice advocating this as a solution is shouting down the voice that was saying "WOMEN WHO DON'T DO FEMININITY AND DON'T CONFORM TO YOUR EXPECTATIONS OF FEMALES ARE WOMEN". And advising such people to become men instead.

"Can't"


The flip side, though, is the position that gender critical feminists take when they opt to declare that trans women aren't women. "Having a surgeon rearrange your body tissues into the approximate shape of a female body doesn't make you a woman. Dressing in high heels and a bra and putting on makeup doesn't make you a woman."

Feminists have for years and years said that our socially shared notions of how a man should be are an embrace of toxic and destructive traits. And that actual male people, in pursuing that ideal, have wrought pain and destruction and violence. They have refused to excuse the guys, rejecting the notion that "boys will be boys", and said, "No, this is political. Males aren't the freaking weather, something that simply is the way that it is and everyone has to just adjust to it. No, males should be held responsible for their behavior, for their entire way of being in the world."

Feminists have, of course, been accused of hating men. For daring to criticize them. For calling them out on their destructive and sadistic behavior. For holding males accountable.

In response, feminists have generally tended to say they don't hate male people for being male. They hate the way these male people manifest in the world, their entire way of thinking, feeling, their priorities and values, their behaviors and even the things commonly regarded as personality traits, these are all interlaced and interrelated. And as a whole, they are oppressive and oppositional and hateful and fundamentally a social problem, the world's largest and most central social problem, the social problem from which all of the others stem. Patriarchy from the structure of corporations and nation-states all the way down to the way a five year old boy learns to handle social interactions. How men are.

So if the goal is to change that, end that, shift away from that pattern, and along come some male people who say "We're bailing out on that, we don't want that identity", you'd perhaps think they'd view this as a positive development, or at least to contain some important positive elements.

But gender critical feminists, the primary modern inheritors of the mantle of radical feminism as it existed in the 70s and 80s, have made very little effort to examine male efforts and voices, or to engage any of us in deliberate dialog. It's mostly been a combination of "Nope, you aren't women. We're women. You aren't us" and "Fixing men's problem with what society expects of males is not our job".

If the existence of men -- that toxic, lethally destructive bundle of traits and behaviors, that interwoven and fully integrated patriarchal identity -- is a problem that needs to be addressed and brought to an end, then either males need to have a different identity available to us or else there needs to cease to be males.

When a group's collective traits are persistently described and defined as horrible, and it is also asserted that these traits are fundamental to who the people of that group are, the word for that is "hate".

Not all feminists hate men, and in my experience the overwhelming majority do not, but within the feminist community when an individual woman shows up, angry about women's situation and what has been done to women, and she not only hates how men have behaved but also believes males are intrinsically and naturally like this, that male people are inherently oppressive and violent and adversarial and have, built into us from the Y chromosome onward, all these horrendous traits... when the individual woman shows up and says so, her feminist sisters do not tell her "Ooh, sorry, we don't really want that attitude here, we can't go around viewing the male as being The Enemy innately". Of course not. They understand how the fury can lead to feeling that way, and solidarity among women is more important than litmus-testing something as relatively harmless as having a bigoted bias against males as inherently morally inferior beings -- especially given how many male people harbor bigoted attitudes about the intrinsic inferiority of females!

But that means that yes, in and amongst feminists are some individuals that feel the male is intrinsically inferior -- and when you start with that premise, your attitude to any of those who say they consider themselves women and wish to be regarded and accepted as such is about what you'd expect.

My transgender sisters are right. The response of gender critical feminists has taken the form of a lot of bigoted hate. For the most part, those feminists who don't feel that way about it aren't ready or willing to contradict those who do.


Some will continue to reassure themselves that it's just that fence-jumping behavior they're objecting to -- that instead of tearing down gender, the trans people are just hopping over to the other side. Well, in the 1970s, early 2nd wave feminism was often hostile and condescending about women who were wives and mothers or otherwise conformed to society's expectations of female people instead of being the resistance to that, being gender nonconformists. But they outgrew that, and came to the realization that all women are in this together and need to be allies whether they are compliant with expectations or openly rebellious. Robin Morgan, for instance, apologized for some of the things she'd said about femininity-track women. With that in mind, back to the trans people. We are all in this together and we cope at the individual level as best we can. Some of us are in a position to stand out as noncompliant nonconforming people who violate gender expectations. Others need to find a safe place to escape the penalties for being anything of the sort, and a modicum of compassion for those who seek gender asylum is not inappropriate here.


———————


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

She's a TERF. That's not my judgment on her, she calls herself that, proudly. And I discuss things with her because, a), I'm interested in having an impact on anyone willing to engage with me, and b), because she's intelligent.

(But yeah, content warning and all that, consider yourself forewarned, mmkay?)


So she says, "It's not about the rightness or wrongness of how they think of themselves. He, I mean I guess I would be offending by saying 'he', this person born with cock and balls, this person can say 'I am a woman', and I am not saying to...them... that no, you can't call yourself that in your head. What I'm talking about is whether or not I need to regard this person as my sister. That's my perception, not his...theirs. We see things differently, and I'm not saying only one way is right. But when I speak of women, I mean something that doesn't include that person. When she speaks to say she is a woman, she doesn't get to tell me I have to agree that she is in the way that I use language. This is a person who feels... that who they are is feminine, that they are woman. That doesn't mean, however, that this person has had our experience. I was born female. The other women I talk with in our feminist group, they were born female. We were treated and regarded in a different way than anyone born with cock and balls. It's a different experience. And she...they... the person of whom I'm speaking, does not have that experience. That's all I'm saying".


I nod, because this makes sense. I have always had male privileges due to being perceived as a male person, even if that's been often massively attenuated by being perceived as a sissy femme pansy fruity effeminate male. I would walk into a new situation and eyeballs would recognize me as a male person even if the male people in my cohort did not regard me as one of them, and I myself didn't ever want to be. That much is true.

"But you hate the ways boys grow up needing to prove that they're not you", I tell her. Which is also true. She and her feminist sisters have examined how young boys growing up are methodically taught, under patriarchy, to recognize any behavior, any value judgment, any tiny little nuace, as feminine, and to push away from it. Among these things are emotional processing things, feelings, sensitivities. Why do feminists consider men to be damaged goods (and not, I might add, without good reason)? Because they distance themselves from a wide range of emotional reactions to things. They start doing this when they are in elementary school. They shut down to a certain range of feelings. And years tick by and that has an effect on how they grow up. It shapes them. It affects their awareness. It affects their sense of priorities. So many years later, if this or that male person says they embrace feminism, and is totally on board with it, that doesn't mean they aren't still largely shaped by the identity that they embraced, back when they were children, trying to measure up to being a boy, being a man, and all that means that their head is in a different space and despite their embrace of feminist politics they can't be fully trusted to think like the rest of us who do so, they're still male, and they'll behave differently and have different priorities that creep in and whatnot.

So for the second time in two consecutive blog posts, I am telling feminists: you can't have it both ways.


If someone born with the "cock and balls" configuration decides pretty early on that the people that are "we" in a relevant sense happen to be the girls, that person is going to spend year after year in situations where they're informed that this or that choice, this or that behavior, this or that priority, is one that the girls would normally make, and that boys generally don't. And they'd embrace the girl side. And that would shape us. It would shift our thinking and our awarenesses and our sensitivities. Whether we at some point announced our identities as "transgender woman" or as "nonbinary demigirl" or as "male femmes" (as I do), or as something else, we are departures from the very same toxic identity that as feminists you keep saying you want to see males move away from.

We did. We are not, of course, doing it for you. We're doing it for us. We aren't necessarily doing it quite as you'd envisioned it. But we're doing it. And we bloody well deserve a bit more respect than you're currently giving us.


Yeah. You have certain experiences as female folk designated as such and treated as such since birth. That we don't have. Fine.

That has limited trajectory as an argument. It doesn't cover all the disinclusiveness that you've promoted.

I never identified as female. I did, however, identify as radical feminist. Some of you said I couldn't. So I'm coming at this from a different angle than the transgender women but we have stuff in common: you're Othering us.

Stop it.



———————


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

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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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"You must be so happy to see how far things have come since your own teenage years", people often say. "Back then, nobody was talking about being gender variant, it was all either you're gay or else you're straight. Now the kids are free to just be however they are and gender isn't an issue!"

Well, there's definitely been progress, but we haven't exactly Arrived yet.

Have you watched any movies lately or read any good novels that feature femmy males who fall in love with the female heroes of the storyline, and don't masculinize themselves to become heterosexually viable?

Who are the role models to whom a girlish, definitely non-masculine male would turn if they want to see an example, perhaps somebody to emulate?

I think there are more boxes now, but people still want to put you in one of the boxes, and I don't see a box that would fit me. Or would fit the person I was at fifteen, at nineteen, at thirteen.

• Portrayals of male people who are asexual or aren't sexually attracted and don't crave a romantic and sexual relationship would not be good models. I was, and at that age it was intense and complicating my life.

• Portrayals of male people who aren't uncomfortable with the assumptions and projections that people make about male people -- people expecting masculinity, expecting a set of priorities and behaviors that are associated with boys and men, especially sexual prorities and behaviors -- would not be good models. I had related to the girls, not the boys, all through elementary school. The whole 'boy thing' was foreign to me, something I wanted nothing to do with.

• Portrayals of male people whose sexual and romantic fascinations were for and towards other male people would not be good models. I had been taunted and harassed and threatened around the assumption that males who were feminine or acted in any way like one of the girls were gay and wanted male sexual attention. I didn't have those feelings, and existing cultural icons who were male, femmy, and gay didn't represent to me someone who was like me, because sexual orientation had been made an issue for me as a sissy femme person.

• Portrayals of trans gals who transitioned from being someone perceived as male to someone who presented as female were a mixed prospect as role models, because although it was a way of saying "see, being male doesn't keep this person from finding a valid identity as a feminine person", it also tended to underline the notion that the maleness was wrong. I didn't have dysphoria about my body and didn't want to be accepted and regarded as a girl or woman just like the others, as a cisgender woman in other words. I wanted the sexual attractions and romantic hungers I felt to be mutual, and since mine involved attraction for female people, to be mutual I would need to be with someone female who had a reciprocal appetite for someone who was male. If I presented as female and got involved with someone whose attraction was towards female folks, I was going to be a disappointment. Even if they were willing to settle for me because they were attracted to me as a person, I didn't want to be settled for; and I wasn't ashamed of my body and thought someone could find it cute and sexually appealing. I wasn't going to find someone who did if I was going around presenting as female.


The correct box isn't out there yet. Some kid who resembles the person I was as a teenager, coming along now, is going to be miscategorized as transgender, or as femme gay, or as generically nonbinary and asexual, for lack of a better box.

(And yeah, I can hear those of you who are just itching to say "People shouldn't be put in boxes, just be yourself, all this stereotyping is bad, think outside the box dude" and so forth. You are right but you are wrong. People wish to be understood. First-tier understanding tends to begin with generalizing, with categorizing folks and treating them as a typical member of that category. That is NOT a bad thing -- it's only bad when people don't move past that and learn the unique things about the specific person. It's only bad when they continue to treat the person as the box, as the stereotype. You get stereotyped by strangers, whether you realize it or not. It serves you well. You package yourself to be taken at first glance as something reasonable close to who you actually are. You don't know what it's like to not have that available to you unless you have had to live with no appropriate role or notion to wear as a default identity, no stereotype to play to as a starting point. You'd have a less dismissive take on these boxes if you had to walk around without one for a few years. In other words, you might want to check your privilege).



———————

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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———————


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

Hi! Want to moderate a discussion panel? Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to lead these four folks to some sort of accord, or, failing that, to moderate their debate fairly and give each one a chance to support their positions.

I'll let them introduce themselves as they deem appropriate --


Lillian: Hello, I'm Lillian. I'm a gender critical feminist. I'm 70. When I was young, I was part of the feminist second wave that attacked the notion that biology is destiny, that if you were born male you were designed to live *this* life but if you were female you were destined to live *that* life. As feminists, we indicted gender roles and gendered assumptions about people. Because they aren't necessary for the functioning of society -- except the unfair parts -- and they aren't good for us as individuals. They are restrictions! We opposed sexist double standards and sexist expectations and assumptions. Anyone might be a leader. Anyone might be a nurturant caregiver. Anyone might be a belligerent asshole. Anyone might be an empty-headed doll-person. None of that is due to whether you were born with a penis or a vagina! Sex polarization that divides us up into women and men is a tool of patriarchal oppression and it exists to the detriment of women. Women are oppressed. Now, me personally, when I was first in the women's movement, well, we were white and straight and didn't pay enough attention to other people's situation. But we've become more intersectional and we listen to black women's voices and the voices of women who come from poverty, disabled women, and other forms of additional marginalization. But first and foremost, society is a patriarchy; that's still the bottom line for me. If men don't like it, they're in charge so all they've got to do is stand down and change it and quit opposing us.


Sylvia: Well, I guess you could say I was also involved in attacking that 'biology is destiny' thing. Hey, everybody, I'm Sylvia. I am trans. Back when I was figuring that out, the word was 'transsexual', and that's still what I prefer to use, but I don't want to offend anybody. I had gender dysphoria, the body I was born with was not my destiny. It wasn't right for me, and I knew it from pretty much the time I was old enough to understand the difference between boys and girls. I know some of you younger folks say things differently, you'd say I was assigned male at birth. Well, I had to get myself unassigned, because my gender didn't match that assignment at all. I changed my body to match my gender. Now, I understand the notion that we ought to have equal attitudes to a person no matter if their body is male or female. Or whether it came with a penis on the front of it or a vagina instead, if you like that language better. I understand saying that what your body is like shouldn't matter and we shouldn't have sexist beliefs. But that's not the world I got to live in. Maybe someday society will be that way but not in my lifetime. Not in yours either, probably. Getting sex reassignment surgery was something I could get within a few years, and I did, and it has made it possible for me to live my life with people seeing me and treating me like who I am -- a woman -- and I don't see why anybody's got any cause for having a problem with that.


Jesse: My name's Jesse and my pronouns are he, him, his. I was assigned male at birth. When I was younger, there was an attitude that what you were supposed to do if your gender didn't match your designation was to go out and get hormones and surgery, and if you did that and you could *pass*, then you were authentically trans. Well, some of those surgeries are expensive and not everyone can afford them, and there's medical issues with procedures, and hormones too, and during my generation we pushed back against that elitist attitude. Because you don't need to have anything specific done to you to make your gender identity valid, okay? It's fine to get gender confirmation surgery if that's what you *want*, and you can afford it and it's safe for you and all that. What is *not* fine is to go around telling people they aren't trans enough if they don't, you hear what I'm saying? And I am a man. Trans men are men. Trans women are women. You body is not 'who you really are', so yeah count me in as well on kicking that 'biology is destiny' off the map. What's up with people deciding they get to decide who you are based on what's inside your underwear? That's creepy. Anyone with that attitude, go perv on someone else, all right? Meanwhile, I hear what you're saying about gender being confining, but it can also be liberating and you ought to think about that. There are strong notions about how to be a man that go beyond being an okay person, it's heroic and inspiring to connect with that. Women, too, womanhood is a powerful notion. I got nothing against people who want to be agender or whatever, but I like being a man.


Allan (me): I'm Allan. I never bought into all the junk that gets glued onto a male, beliefs and assumptions and all that, because I didn't get issued all that stuff along with the body in which I was born. I grew up with messages about what it means to be a man, and also messages about what it means if your body is male and you don't match that description. Feminism told me that was sexist and I could ignore it, so I did. Until I couldn't. The world was too much in my face about it to ignore. So I became an activist. And yeah, biology isn't destiny. I agree that gender has its positive uses. Androgyny means expecting everyone to be in the middle, like beige or something. I'm not androgynous, I'm femme. Meanwhile I understand about it being easier to change your body, or to just change your presentation, how you look to the world, to get folks to think of your body as the body that goes with your gender, so that they'll get your gender correct. But the world got in my face and I'm returning the favor, I don't want to pass, I want to take the fact that I am male but also feminine and shove that at people. My body is not the problem, it's people's notion that if your body is male that makes you a man, a masculine person. That's what's got to change. We don't change that by converting male people to female people so they can be correctly regarded as women. Damn right our gender identity is valid regardless of our body. That means I get to walk down the nude beach with my flat chest and facial hair and my penis bouncing against my testicles and that doesn't make me a man. I want to be accepted as femme without lipstick, corset, boobs, or tucking. And patriarchy is in my way. I don't care if you want to call me a feminist or what, but I'm in the struggle against patriarchal oppression for my own damn reasons. And, yeah, I get to call my body male. I don't need to believe that I'm female in order to validate my gender identity. That's the whole point. It's *not*, and yet I'm still as femme as anybody.


———————

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

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


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

———————

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

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Hey, sister, got a moment? Any chance we can reconcile?


You find it bewildering that as a femme-identifying person, I refer to myself as male. You find it appalling and maybe even transphobic when I explain that what I mean when I say I'm "male" is that I was born with a set of physical equipment that, in our culture, has historically been designated "male", although many other people (perhaps including you) may have this same set of bodily components and call those physical structures something other than "male".

You say "Why can't you just call it a penis? A penis isn't male. It's just a penis! Girls can have a penis. Boys can have a vulva".

Well, yeah, I know girls can have a penis. I'm a girl and I've got one. Are we both cool and totally down with the notion that having a penis doesn't define our gender? Can we please have a little moment of peace and solidarity and not be quick to hate on each other for using language a bit differently, and for coming at this situation from different angles?

You identify as transgender. I don't. That means you're a part of a subculture, a community; and you folks, collectively, you got your own way of expressing things, and you also got your own history. Let's talk about the history thing for a sec.

I'm 61; forty years ago, when I was 21 and first coming out, trans people explained the situation to the larger surrounding culture like this: trans people realized at some point in their life that their gender was the gender typically found in the other type of body, and so they'd ideally get hormones and surgery and transition, so that their body would match their gender. And what they said they wanted from the surrounding world was to be accepted as a normal and ordinary person of that gender and that sex. And most trans people wanted to "pass" — they didn't want to receive social acceptance only from a handful of people who heard their life story and learned about transsexuals and all that, but instead they wanted to look and otherwise present in such a way that strangers who didn't know them would just automatically treat them as the gender that they were.

Fast forward to the more-or-less present era. Trans activists interact with lots of transgender people who can't afford hormones and surgery even if they want them, and lots of people who are blocked from having access to the medical interventions they want because doctors and insurance companies are playing gatekeeper. They also interact with a lot of transgender people who don't want the whole package of medical options for a variety of reasons. There's a risk of significant loss of sensation and function when doctors rearrange biological tissue, and there are systemic repercussions to hormones with risk factors and so on and so forth.

Well, it's really fundamentally a human rights issue that the body you inhabit should not detract from the legitimacy of your gender identity. So the social message changed, to become a lot more inclusive. You were valid as a trans person (woman or man) whether you passed or did not pass, and, in fact, fuck "pass". Identities are what are valid; your body doesn't matter! And they didn't use "male" and "female" to refer to bodily architecture because that can imply to some trans people that they've got the wrong body for their gender identity.



I apologize if I've misrepresented the transgender movement and its history in that short summary. I'm writing from the outside. I try to learn and listen but if I've distorted things, I'm sorry, but I hope I mostly got it right.



I'm not trans. I heard the 40-years-ago version of what trans was, gave it some thought, decided nope, that's not me. It's something else. I haven't been a part of your community these 40 years.

So I've got a different history, with different understandings and stuff. I'm hoping you'll be compassionate and interested in a story that's different from yours, so you can see how I got to my viewpoint, ok?

I came out in 1980 as a sissy. A person in a male body whose personality and behavior were a mismatch for what's expected of male people, but a good match for the expectations for female people. I did not want to be perceived as an ordinary typical female person any more than I wanted to be perceived as an ordinary male person. I wanted to be perceived as what I'd been harassed about and accused of all my life: an effeminate sissy girlish male person. The world apparently thought I should be ashamed of that, but I was proud of it. And I was finally angry about it and ready to take a stand. To be in your face about it. Yeah, I'm male, and I'm one of the girls. Get used to it. Deal.

My attitude is that until the world nods in agreement that yeah, male girls exist and no, it's not a damn affliction or an embarrassment, a failure to be sufficiently manly... until then, there's always going to be this notion that if you're perceived and recognized as a male-bodied person, you'll be regarded as less of a man than a masculine man and less of a woman than a physically female-structured person who has boobs and vag and all that.

Not only don't I want to pass, I want to "anti-pass". I want, as I said, to be up in people's face about the lack of correspondence between my body and my gender identity. You've got a male girl here. Flying pride flags about it, no less, got that?


So... you don't use "male" to refer to physical stuff like testicles and penis. You basically use "male" to mean the same thing as "man" and "boy" and so on. I, on the other hand, do use it to mean the physical stuff. My attitude is we've already got plenty of gender words ("man", "boy", "masculine", "feminine", "guy", "dude", "gal", etc), and the word "male" is historically about the raw physical architecture (including other species and also things like hose couplings and electrical plugs), so why can't we keep that word for sex and use existing gender words for gender? This isn't about invalidating anybody's gender identity, it's really not. Yeesh, do I sound like J. K. fucking Rowling here? Seriously?


You ask "Well, why can't you just call it a penis, why do you have to say male?". I say "I want a goddam adjective. An already-recognized adjective to describe me as a person-with-penis-and-associated-bits. I don't want to use a long klunky phrase like 'person with a penis and testicles and adam's apple and absence of a vulva and clitoris and breasts, person who happens to be dyadic or endosex as opposed to intersex and most likely has XY chromosomes and doesn't have a period and has spermatotrophic hormone and a vas deferens'".

If I don't specify that when I say "male" I'm talking about my plumbing and not my personality and inclinations, people often assume I'm saying I have a "male side and a female side", like genderfluid or bigender people. Which isn't it at all. I'm no less feminine than you are. I'm not less male than a rooster. I'm not in-between, either sexually (as intersex people may consider themselves to be) or genderwise. I'm solidly male and utterly feminine.

I'm talking about mine. MY parts. I'm not calling your parts male. I'm calling my parts male.

Not everybody is either male or female, just as not everybody who is male is a man and not everybody who is female is a woman. But the fact that sex isn't binary doesn't mean sex doesn't exist. By the way, intersex people can't talk about being intersex — and distinguish intersex from being nonbinary or intergender or genderfluid or whatever — if they can't talk about bodies and why their atypical body has marked them as different and marginalized them. Most of the intersex activists I know really want to distinguish sex from gender. Because otherwise they get erased.


In a similar way, I can't do the political activity of getting in people's face about being a male girl if I can't say "male girl" and can't talk about the body that caused my girlness to be perceived as something wrong and in need of fixing, or as reason to provoke dismissive contempt.


I personally identify as genderqueer and, more specifically, as a gender invert. I'm a speaker, a blogger, and an author. I just got a book published (and BTW you should read it if you have any appetite for coming-of-age / coming-out stories). I'm not going to go away or shut up.

Does this help?



———————

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

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


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

———————

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

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Index of all Blog Posts

So I was asked to participate in a dialog involving gender-critical feminists and transgender activists.

There's a political group with chapters sprinkled all around the country. One chapter endorsed a statement from some women's group about womens' "Sex Based Rights". An LGBTQIA action group within that same political group said that by doing so, that chapter had done something transphobic and transmisogynistic and that they needed to retract their endorsement and apologize to all the transgender women who might have been offended by their endorsement, or else get kicked out of the political group.

And what were these "sex based rights"?


Content warning: Potentially inflammatory material from here on out. And serious, guaranteed-inflammatory content as you go farther down. Trigger warning issued. Trigger warning with flames and radioactive emblems. Proceed at your own risk:

Well, some of the supporters of that local chapter said this was about remedies that had been designed to address women's exclusion from various forms of political and social participation. A sort of affirmative action for women to offset the effects of patriarchy, of women's oppression. They said that including transgender women ran the risk of diluting that original intention, and that it made more sense to use language that guaranteed representation of transgender women AND transgender men but did so separately from the original remedies, which had been designed with cisgender women in mind, i.e., women who had been regarded and labeled and treated as female people for their entire lives. They also said some women's political groups wished to operate as cisgender-women only because they had always been separatist, not allowing men to participate, and the lifetime experience of transgender women was a mixture of factors making their situation different from that of the women who'd been in those groups all along.


"I can see where that's going to be a problematic position for trans people", I said. "Still, there may be a way to bridge some gaps here. They do have a point about experience and identity. As a genderqueer person who identifies as a male girl, I respect transgender people who don't want to include people like me, because they believe being trans is biologically built in, that if I'm a woman I'm female, and that the only healthy thing to do about being transgender is to transition. My situation is different from theirs. As long as they're not denying the validity of my gender issues I don't mind if they want to run groups that I'm not welcome in".

I checked in with the LGBTQIA Action Group, the LAGs. "Oh, yes", they said, "we sent those demands to the chapter that endorsed that horrible statement. We want them to take our concerns seriously. We'd love it if they'd have a dialog with us, but they refuse to respond!"

Then I went back to the local chapter supporters, the pro-discussion folks calling themselves Dialog. I told them "I got the impression the LAG folks are open to listening if the people in Dialog and the specific chapter that endorsed that statement will listen to them in turn".



Then I went off to read a copy of the original "Sex Based Rights" statement, the endorsement of which had kicked off all this. Winced a lot. Yeah, the statement has a lot of language that, if not blatantly transphobic, felt like it was chock-full of dog whistle terms and phrases. I decided I didn't like the phrase "sex-based rights" itself. In general, I think people don't have rights based on their sex. You may have remedies that have been made available to your sex on affirmative action grounds but a right is an intrinsic entitlement. Men aren't entitled to something intrinsically as a consequence of being men, or male, or both. Whatever they're entitled to is either because they're human, or human adults, or else it's situationally male or about being men because of something that they and only they experience. Are women? I could formulate some rights that all pregnant or potentially pregnant people should have, perhaps, or that all menstruating or potentially menstruating people should have, but if I did, those rights came from those situations. Whatever. I sure wouldn't have endorsed the statement I was reading. But it didn't seem so horrible that I'd demand that anyone who did be kicked out of the organization.




"I'm ready to discuss the matter with Dialog", the LAG activist said, "but I have no interest in wasting my time with TERFs who say I'm not a woman. If they want to talk with us and apologize for what they've done, hey I'm right here, but in this organization it is already an accepted principle that trans women are women. That means in any situation where we're talking about women, if they try to excluse trans women, that's a hate crime and they don't belong in our organization!"

I said, "Look, some of them seem to be trying to incorporate and accommodate an understanding of trans people. Many of them don't like the term 'cisgender' for themselves but they aren't all insisting that trans women aren't women. One person suggested the phrase 'natal women'. Do you acknowledge a reason why they might legitimately want to meet politically by themselves as 'natal women'?"

"Trans women are natal women", the LAG activist replied.

"Wait, not even all transgender people claim that being transgender means you were born that way. I know it's a popular viewpoint but you wouldn't kick someone out of a transgender group for saying they weren't born trans, would you?"

"You're wasting your time with those TERFs. If they want to apologize and retract their message of hate, I'm right here. But they won't because they're bigoted fascists".

"Listen", I said, exasperated. "you've clearly got the stronger political position. Inclusiveness is always going to look more justified than a reason to exclude someone. So I'm sure you can pressure them into saying the kinds of things you want to hear, or get the organization to boot them out if they won't. But this is also a public education opportunity. Do you want them to see the light, or do you just want them to feel the heat?"

The LAG activist shrugged. "It's a settled issue. If they're going to be doing hate crimes I want them kicked out, simple as that".




"Frankly", declared the Dialog member, "I don't care what their viewpoint is. Not while they're calling us 'TERFs'. That's a slur. It's used to discredit us. They call us that while they're beating us, there was a women's march in London, did you hear about that? These men, calling themselves transgender women, barged in and chased women down side streets, attacking them. And the police did nothing!"

"So you don't like being called 'TERF'. You don't like the word that they use for you", I said. "You see the irony in that, don't you?"

"Transgenders are trying to invade our women's spaces and take away our rights as women. They want to erase women's identities. They aren't women. They're men. They're male. The correct word for adult male people is 'men'. Not 'women'. They want to invade women's prisons with their penises and rape women. They want to hide in women's bathroom stalls and molest little girls. And we're not gonna put up with it!"



"Okay, Dialog folks", I said, addressing the group. "Even if you don't think the LAG people are genuinely open to listening to anything they don't already agree with, you need to care about public opinion. You need to care about how the rest of the organization is going to view you. And although the LAG folks sound inflexible, you are managing to sound even more so and it's not a good look".




I picked up my old battered copy of The Women's Room, the book cover that has "LADIES" crossed out and "WOMEN'S" inked in over it. "I understand why you value the word 'women'. I think it was either Robin Morgan or Gloria Steinem, relating the story of having a sit-down with the newspaper editor, and explaining why they didn't like the newspaper referring to adult female people as 'girls' since adult males were always designated as 'men'.

"And the editor said, 'So what would you prefer...ladies?'. And the feminist women practically held their noses and winced. That term, 'ladies', was polluted with notions of screening out those who aren't ladylike, all that 'act like a lady' crap, you know? They wanted the newspaper to use the term 'women', they told him.

"The word 'woman' was nearly entirely associated with the physical body. In our society, girls become women not by 'proving' you are one, the way boys 'become' men, but by going through biological puberty. Even the creepier social associations, like 'Has he made a woman out of you yet' — like being heterosexually active 'makes you a woman' — even those had mostly biological meanings, more than social attributes. So by choosing the word 'woman', it wouldn't look like feminists wanted to be the new arbiters of which adult females get to qualify.

"I get that. Why you liked the word. And I get that it's been in political use by feminists since then.

"But you aren't going to convince anybody, anywhere, that you're being anything other than bigoted and biased by saying transgender women are factually wrong about being women. I'd think feminist women more than anyone would understand that word use is politically loaded. Think back to how 'man' was supposed to mean 'any human being' but it excluded women, and how 'he' and 'him' were used to mean any person. The dictionary said that was correct. But feminists said word use changes when society changes. And the feminists made our language change. You also sound pretty silly saying biology is destiny, by the way."




LAG people: "But trans women were not born with male organs. If she is a woman those are her organs so they're female organs. And those Dialog...persons... they are TERFs. It means Trans Exclusive Radical Feminists. That's what they are. I don't see why they don't like being called what they actually are".

Dialog people: "No one is denying their right to exist. They have a right to dress and behave however they want. They can see themselves however they like and have any understanding of themselves they feel comfortable with, but they have no right to impose their ideas on others or claim rights that were originally based on addressing the historical denial of women's rights as a sex".

LAG people: "See, we told you. Hateful transphobes. Kick them out. I don't have time for this shit"

Dialog people: "Words have meanings. Male people are men. Men are male people. A person with a penis is male. These men calling themselves transgender women are mentally ill. Men are not women. Males are not women. A person with a penis is not a woman. See, we told you, hateful patriarchal misogynists. You can't make us agree with their bullshit".

LAG people: "See, they're bad. Bad people are bad. Which is bad. Which makes them bad. The things they are saying are defined as bad. Sure, we're open to a dialog. A dialog about how they are bad".

Dialog people: "Four legs good. Two legs bad. Four legs good. Two legs bad..."



I want my two months back. I'm particularly disgusted with some of the Dialog folks, who seemed determined to live up to the worst things said about them by the LAG contingent seeking to have them kicked out. But both sides had some participants who originally seemed to be trying to find language that the other side would accept, at least long enough to have a conversation. People who were making the attempt in good faith. And there were other people trying to speak to activists on both sides, I wasn't the only one doing this diplomacy act. But our louder and more insistent colleagues shouted us down on both sides.

They should all be glad I'm not God. Because you know what I'd do if I were? You know those cruise ships that are languishing out in the ocean because of coronavirus? I'd like to put everyone from both groups onto those ships, and I'd confine one Dialog member and one LAG member to each cabin and quarantine them there together. They deserve each other.

———————

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

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


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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

For an organization's position paper, I was asked to come up with definitions for "sex" and "gender".


SEX is whatever biological built-in differences distinguish people as being male, female, or in some cases a different value from either of those two.

GENDER is any and all notions about differences between the sexes that are not directly based on things biologically built in.




I've written about it pretty extensively over the years. The distinction between my identity and situation and that of the mainstream narrative describing transgender people is that whereas they transition visually (and perhaps medically) so as to be perceived as the sex that matches their gender, I present to the world as a person with a mismatched sex and gender and press for acceptance as such. So the distinction between sex and gender has been useful to me. I've blogged about it often, for example here, here, and here. But like most people discussing such things, I've seldom defined the terms and instead have described them, like listing a batch of individual characteristics and saying "etc" at the end and saying "that's sex" and doing the same for gender.


Here's what I like about the definition at the top of this page: it leaves plenty of room for people to dissent about what things belong in each box.

A person with traditional, socially conservative views, for example, might believe that the socially shared and historically established views about the respective natures of men and women reflect how they really are. For them, gender is an example of an "empty set" -- you remember empty sets from that math class we were in back in school, right?

A person who considers the belief in the biological differentiation of male and female to be all ideological hype, and says sex is a social construct the same as gender and says that real science disproves that there's any clear distinction or division into two sex categories... that person basically views sex as an empty set, it's all gender.

Transgender men and women often speak of having something biologicallly different in their brains that makes them inherently trans, that they were born this way, and hence all the matrix of behaviors and desires and nuances and personality characteristics that they share in common with cisgender people of the same gender are built in for them. If it's built in, it's sex. The bodies with which they were born have other physical characteristics, making for an inconsistency, an apparently contradiction, but that's natural -- there are people with XY chromosomes who have androgen insensitivity and hence the morphology of the female body, which is also an inconsistency. Nature does that. Sex isn't binary except as a generalization.

Gender is a word that often followed by the word "role". I've tended to wince at the reduction of gender to social roles, as in "Joe goes to the office to work and Sue stays home watches the kids and cleans the house, those are gender roles". But there's a less klunky way to think of the term "role" -- movie and stage and television acting, where the actor brings a role to life.

We see a professional actor on the screen or stage rendering a character. He's sardonic, world-weary, casual in a mildly insulting way, easily familiar and a whiff dismissive, yet caring when he can be effectively caring without making himself vulnerable. He evinces wry amusement. He saunters when he walks. The actor's portrayal fits in with our prior experience of such people and resonates for us if the portrayal is done well, and some of us identify with that character and think he's like us; we may carry that performance around in our heads afterwards and aspire to be more like him, even, seeing in that role a model for how we want to be.

In that sense of the word, then, yes, gender includes and is largely composed of roles, a great many of them, ways of being a woman or a man that are embued with their own forms of dignity and strength, vulnerability and concerns, sexiness and spark, and forms of expression thereof. Our gender identities are significantly composed of juxtaposing our self-image against the backdrop of these and embracing the ones that validate us and inspire us as, well, role models.

Gender also is about being perceived. In other words it's not limited to the interior world of self. Other people gender us, they see us the same way we see the actors on the stage, looking from the outside at our performance and from it attributing characteristics to us, believing things about us, that may or may not match up well with the self-image we carry around inside us.

In our society, one of the very first people attribute to us when they encounter us is a sex category. Transgender people often speak of being assigned female at birth (AFAB) or assigned male at birth (AMAB); this is that same process although it's not "at birth", it's "at first encounter" and people do it to us generally while we're fully clothed, and it relies on social cues and clues (such as a given garment being considered women's clothes or mens' clothes, or the style of one's haircut being considered men's or women's hair style), so the act of attribution is at best only partially on the basis of biological characteristics. But the belief that they are forming is a belief about biological body structure nonetheless, so let's call it a sex attribution.

In our society what happens along with that is a gender attribution, of course, the projection of whatever that person tends to think about the sex they just assigned us that isn't necessarily built-in as part of our biology.

And therein lies the social problem. To whatever extent the people "sexing" us are also "gendering" us with a large batch of beliefs and attitudes that interpret our performance of ourself through the lens of a role we aren't considering ourselves to be playing, that's misgendering.


———————

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

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


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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts