Feminists and, for that matter, other women of a certain age, fondly recall the concept of the "tomboy" and are sometimes inclined to reflect on their "tomboy" heroes. The author points out that it's a concept largely in decline, and this book is a contemplation of that notion and what might be lost if it disappears.



I myself am on several Facebook discussion groups that examine gender, and among those (to the dismay of some of my trans colleagues) I participate in a group devoted to dialogue between "gender critical" feminists and folks who ascribe to gender politics such as LGBTQIA+ concepts. The dismay is because a lot of trans folks regard the gender-critical contingent as being so closeminded that they are not worth the effort, and I will admit that the group is definitely dominated by "gender bad, feminism good" anti-trans people. These are people who would celebrate femininity-rejecting females who still call themselves women but see trans men as jumping the fence instead of helping to dismantle the fence, and their views of trans women are hostile, seeing them as invasive males pushing into womens' spaces where, as far as they're concerned, they totally don't belong.

This book, Tomboy, does not come from that perspective. But many gender-critical feminists will find themselves nodding in agreement with Davis when they read. And I'm inclined to think that they should pay attention to how she's positioned her arguments in this book: she's reaching a wider audience.



Both Sides, Now

Lisa Selin David, the author, very openly embraces the general concept of "the more options, the better" as far as how to deal with gender, and she is quite emphatically not anti-trans. But her viewpoint is not rooted in transgender experience. She's approaching gender from a non-trans tomboy vantage point.

I believe we should see representation of trans kids, non-binary folks, and masculine cisgender girls in the media, and that we have the knowledge and infrastructure to make room for them all

She conjures up the notion of a person who conceives of themself in a way that sticks up a hand and holds off cultural-social notions about how someone of their morphological sex ought to be: "I'm a girl and I like playing ball or with boys so those things must be okay for girls"

Davis celebrates the world in which being trans is an option, where it's a path away from simply being told "you are doing it wrong" based on the physiological equipment you were born with. But she mourns the decline of the concept of the tomboy, as an identity one could claim, be seen as, live within.

Davis early on dives into the question of built-in versus socially created differences, and identities, including male versus female in general and then the notion that trans people's gender difference is built in. In contrast to the many authors who stake out a turf in favor of "it's all biological" or "it's all social", Davis is cautious and even-handed, exhorting us to consider all the possibilities. She does point out that we should consider the social conditioning of any researchers evaluating these matters, since their own sociallly-supported assumptions can play a substantial role in how research is designed and how the results are interpreted. But just as one might be on the verge of deciding that this author is really on the side of social causation for all such observations and apparent differences, she declares pretty emphatically that there are, indeed, compelling reasons to believe there are built-in differences, drawing on Debra Soh's research.

Davis oscillates: she provides a set of studies and evidence about biological differentiation, natal hormones and brain structure and whathot, then after a couple paragraphs devoted to that, introduces other studies that appear to contradict those findings, and then gives consideration to how the variables are operationalized and defined — what constitutes "masculine" as an outcome and how is it not also socially determined? As a technique, it drives home that we aren't really in a position to lay claim to any certainty.

Davis describes "tomboy" as an identity embraced and often praised in childhood but with the expectation that the girl will grow out of it. A big part of this, for both external observers such as parent and for those who are the tomboys themselves, is the inferior status of girls and of femininity — that it is less than what the boys exhibit and who they are. Those gender-critical feminists I mentioned above, they tend to perceive femininity as imposed, artificial, composed of slave stuff, how to be a person who is useful and supportive to the people who matter, at her own expense.

Davis acknowledges the existence of sissies — males who are the mirror-image of tomboys — and acknowledges that we have it harder. "There is no positive term for a boy version of a tomboy, not sissy (derived from sister) or Nancy boy" The ambivalent acceptance of tomboys versus the near-universal hostility towards sissies is, in fact, exactly what drove me to conclude that I was not cisgender. Not that I wanted to transition. Not that I should have been female. Not that I wished to be perceived as female. But that as a sissy, who I was was so socially unacceptable for a male person that it ended up constituting an entirely separate gender identity, that I am totally not a man, was not a boy, that despite being male (which I do not reject in any way) who I am has very little to do with my anatomy and everything to do with how and who I am, which situated me among the girls growing up, and in a more complicated way with the women now.

Davis describes the 1990s and the rise of a different approach to gender: a very gender-polarized world but one in which the girls had serious Girl Power, as represented by the PowerPuff Girls, a world in which embracing pink and unicorns and sparkles could be combined with having power and being heroes and being decisive and emphatic and having one's way. This was different from being a tomboy, and Davis spends a lot of time questioning the embrace of things considered masculine as the pathway to female empowerment, since it embraces the notion that anything considered feminine is inferior and anything masculine superior.

This is the anti-tomboy form of girl power, and it raises the additional complicated question: if power isn't dependent on being boy-like, what is the attraction of boy stuff for those female people who find themselves oriented to it? It's different in situations and cultures where there are (still) no mechanisms or routes for people considered and viewed as female to possess power. David describes girls in Afghanistan and the occasional possible role of being dressed as, and behaving as, a boy, in that culture if one's family had had no boy, so as to dis-embarrass the family for not having a boy child. The attraction of the role here is more clearly power, opportunities utterly unavailable to those perceived and treated as girls.

This is, of course, how those gender-critical feminists view transgender men. That they are doing it solely to attain social power denied to people viewed as women.

Ultimately, David outlines the same perspective that I've embraced for quite some time: that there may be (and probably are) differences between male people and female people, in our brains and in our behavioral patterns, but to the extent that there are, there is more variation within each sex than the amount of variation between the sexes, so there are a whole lot of outliers for each sex who more closely resemble the descriptions appended to the opposite sex.

There is a sort of social funnel, which both Davis and I myself have spoken of: a sense that a person in society learns "this is how a person like you should assert your identity", not limited to the baseline starting identity of "I am a boy" or "I am a girl" but with a ready script available for those who think "I am a boy who is not like the other boys" or "I am a girl who is not like the other girls", complete with a prescription for what one is supposed to do about it. In 1796, being a sissy or a tomboy didn't come with even the remote possibility of a medical transition, so that was not on the table as an option. In the hypergendered 1990s, on the other hand, there was no model for being a tomboy that one could embrace readily; but there was a model for being a transgender man and a set of options for how one could transition.

Davis focuses a lot on dress, the social signaling device that informs the world of which category one falls into, and discusses how tomboys often dressed as boys. Oddly, she doesn't tend to discuss hair, in a world where cutting one's hair above one's ear and otherwise short and close to the skull has for a long time been likely to cause one, especially as a child, to be categorized as a boy and not as a girl. And when Davis does get around to mentioning hair, it receives equal billing with shoe choices!



If They Go Against the Flow, Must Be Built-in...Right?

We may see PFD [Pink Frilly Dresses] as a gender constraint imposed upon children but see the rejection of it, in favor of tomboyism, as something that comes from within. But we don't know if tomboys are doing their own thing or conforming to the stereotypical expectations of a different sex

At the core of oh so many online arguments about LGBTQ identities is the matter of whether or not our difference is built-in. So many people believe that it is. Some of them appear to me to be embracing that notion based on the (in my opinion misguided) belief that if everyone sees our differences as built-in, they will have to accept them, and therefore us, whereas if they think any degree of choice is involved — and they tend to subsume "social" into "choice" — people could say we chose this and therefore deserve what we get. My recurrent reaction is to invoke the Nazis and the US Southern racists, who definitely believe that the people they hate (or hated) have built-in differences, and it totally didn't keep them from, or is currently keeping them from, being hateful and murderous.

But, yes, on many a message board or forum, I have encountered people saying "It must be built-in, being trans, because there's no social pressure to be trans, there is only social pressure to be normal for your sex."

That's not true, on so many levels.

First off, as Davis points out, the very act of identification is an act of selective autoconformity. To identify as one of the girls is to embrace every factor or observed tendency that tends to reinforce one's identification with the girls, whereas any factor or tendency that seems to make one other than one of the girls becomes something that one wishes to avoid. Likewise, and reciprocally, for one who identifies as one of the boys.

That totally fits my own experience: I was not free of gender, I totally fence-hopped, not wanting to be seen and thought of as one of those boy people, so any ancillary or peripheral thing I did that seemed to slot me in with boys, if it didn't matter to me one way or the other, I'd avoid it. Whereas any similarly trivial thing that provoked the observation that girls did that or that I did that like a girl, yeah, I'd embrace that. So that's social. I was responding to social cues, not biological ones. Davis points out that nonconforming people — whether trans or cis-but-GNC like tomboys — are all doing that, as part of asserting their/our identities.

I think it is useful and important to realize that the overwhelming vast majority of the concepts and thoughts and notions that are inside our heads are not formulated by ourselves as individuals. We aren't puppets mindlessly absorbing social instructions, but what we actually do is choose from an array of socially shared ideas that other people also understand when we pick them and express them. Only a tiny handful of our own ideas are literally our own, never before expressed (as far as we know, at any rate), never before given a name, and thus requiring us to name them and then describe them. And even then, on the rare occasions when we do that, we still have to tie these new ideas to existing ideas, and most likely that's how we formulated them to begin with. If that were not so, we'd find it spectacularly difficult to express them to anyone, ever.

Our species is mulling over gender, thinking it over, and that mulling-over process is taking place in our individuals minds and lives and expressions, and it is something very much still in process.

Tomboy, Lisa Selin Davis, NY: Legacy 2020


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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.

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.

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Index of all Blog Posts

"We shouldn't call it 'homophobia', that's misleading", my Facebook friend writes. "It's not like those haters out there are hiding from us with their teeth chattering and worried that we're gonna get them. The word should be something like misogyny for hating women, what would that be, misgayism or misqueer, or an 'ism' word, but not a word that makes it sound like they're scared of us the way people get scared of heights or cats or something".

But although I've seen this sentiment quite a few times, there doesn't seem to be any consensus emerging about what else to call it, so 'homophobia' is still the word that's in use.

Besides, I don't think it's entirely wrong to think of it as a phobia. As being about fear.

I've got a scene in my book Within the Box where Derek is at risk of being locked up as a dangerous involuntary patient despite not having done anything threatening to anyone. He finds this bewildering.

But he's always found the anger and hostility bewildering, too. People so upset just because he has behavior patterns that are more like those of the girls, that he acts like a girl instead of acting like a boy.

But then he turns the question to a different angle:

What if they felt threatened by me? I never did anything to hurt anyone, but I broke some unspoken codes of conduct, how boy children are expected to behave, how other boys like us are supposed to be, how one’s students can be expected to act. If somebody doesn’t act the way you thought they would, you end up not having much confidence about your sense of what they might do next.

And of course if there’s a right way to be a boy child student, and we all know what it is, we’re secure in thinking we know how it’s supposed to be, but if there’s one who isn’t like that, then either he’s wrong or our thinking is wrong. Our thinking includes the notion that it matters, having everyone being the way they’re supposed to be, so there isn’t even any room for ‘he isn’t the way he’s supposed to be but it doesn’t matter’. So that’s a different kind of threat, but yeah, that too.

This is actually about sissyphobia, since the provoking behavior is gender noncompliant behavior and not same-sex attraction. Not that the hateful fearful violent people were making that distinction.

I do come to the topic of homophobia partly as an insider and partly as an outsider, being a heterosexual femme. I have had my own fears that could be considered homophobic fears, and I have been on the receiving end of the violence and hate that may be partially fear-driven too.

So what's so scary?

Girls and women have a significant excuse for heterophobia. Decade after decade they've gone on marches and addressed classrooms, trying to get a cultural consensus that "no means no". That it is not tolerable that just because someone is interested in having sexual contact with you, they might impose it on your whether you want it or not.

If there were a similar significant risk of gay people pushing their sexual attentions onto people who didn't want to have sex with them, violating their "no", sexually assaulting them, I could clearly see that that would be a legitimate source of homophobia. But I've never had anything like that happen to me, I've never had any of my friends or colleagues tell me it's happened to them, and the overwhelming majority of the cases where same-sex sexual contact has been imposed has been ostensibly heterosexual male people calling another male homosexual and making intrusive sexual contact while angrily yelling that this is what the victim of the violence obviously wants. I had variations on that theme take place in junior high and high school but mostly it was confined to threats and verbal assaults and the destruction of personal property like books and clothing and whatnot.


Then there's the specter of somehow being stalked by "being gay", as if the sexual orientation itself were somehow predatory and involved in chasing people down and converting them against their will. This is something that needs to be distinguished from the notion of a person crossing the line and imposing themself sexually. It's usually painted as a threat due to the difficulty of negotiating a good heterosexual situation. Sort of like hungry people at a restaurant being barred from getting the food they want, so they're threatened with the prospect of settling for something else that's more readily available.

The cisgender version of heterosexuality has very polarized rules and roles. Obtaining a string of heterosexual encounters with a wide range of different partners is something that is perceived and treated very differently when one is female than when one is male. Sex is portrayed as a conquest, as something that the male person makes happen and the female person says "yes" or "no" to, and to say "yes" too often or too easily obtains for her a set of unpleasant labels and epithets. So sex is set up as an adversarial contest of wills and he wins if he makes sex happen. Therefore it is against that backdrop that same-sex opportunities are positioned as a threat: "You're such a loser that you can't conquer any female partners, therefore this is all that's available to you".

That's a pretty hollow threat though. One might face the prospect of being a loser and failing to secure heterosexual contact with any female people, but unlike the hungry person in the restaurant, sexual appetite isn't the kind of imperative that one dies from absence, and there's autoerotic release available and nonsexual friendship and companionship.

But another form it takes is the fear of being perceived as gay. What's interesting about that is that the most emphatic and noisiest homophobes are nearly always males, but as I just discussed, the ensconced roles and rules of cisgender heterosexuality cast it as the boy-role to make sex happen. So why would it matter particularly if a lot of female people were to perceive one as gay? The suspicion here is that it's actually mostly a concern about what other male people think that's the driving force in this fear.


Of my own fears, my own homophobic responses and hangups, the one that it would be most logical for me to have would be the fear of being perceived as gay and harassed and violently attacked for it. That's certainly happened a lot in my life! But my reaction has been indignation and outrage, and I haven't been much inclined to modify my appearance or behavior to make the queer-bashers less likely to think I'm an appropriate target.

I have at times in my life worried that female people in general might dismiss me from consideration due to thinking I'm gay. That's in part because I'm not cisgender. I'm femme. I'm girl. And I'm very alienated by that whole cisgender heterosexual expectation that as the male person I'm the one who's supposed to be trying to make sex happen and wear down a female person's resistance and reluctance and all that. That totally doesn't fit who I am or how I want to be with someone in a sexual or romantic relationship or encounter. Through most of my life, I've held onto the hope that women would find me interesting and sexually fascinating and would do things to make sex happen between us, that they'd choose me and communicate that to me.

But in the long run, faced with what was painted as a pretty binary choice between being thought of as femme and gay or being thought of as masculine and cis and straight, I decided of the two, being considered a typical boy creature was the worse of the alternatives. When my article "Same Door, Different Closet" was being considered for publication back in the early 1990s, one of the academic reviewers said my model of heterosexuality "didn't depend on a committed effort to avoid sexual feelings and experiences with men". Or perhaps more to the point, wasn't anchored in the need to avoid appearing gay to others.

The world doesn't get to dispose of me or decide for me what my sexual orientation is. Thousands of people thinking of me in a certain way doesn't conjure it up as my reality. And as far as the prospect of other males having a sexual interest in me and misreading the signals, well, as one of my lesbian friends pointed out, it's hardly just heterosexual males who occasionally have to cope with someone being sexually interested in you and you don't reciprocate, and it's not exactly the end of the world. No big deal. Get over it.


To get back to the role of fear in this hatred and violence, though, I'll end with this additional snippet from Within the Box:

You try to get a handle on why people would be hateful and oppressive and you just end up finding them guilty of being horrible people with no justification, and there’s no understanding for that. But I can understand scared. I don’t know what to do about it, but it’s a starting point.

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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.

My third book is deep in tertiary drafts, 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

This is an internal-thoughts monologue excerpt from my work-in-progress Within the Box. Since Derek's mind and overall life-competency are being scrutinized throughout this book, there is a lot more focus on his thoughts and feelings than in the prior books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


My third book is 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

In the matter of being a gender nonconforming person, I've heard it said that we need to rally to make it okay for boys (or males) to cry and be soft and wear pink, to wear earrings and skirts and dance ballet.

But mostly that's never been an issue for me. I could already cry: who was going to stop me? I bought my first skirt at a thrift store; there may have been many people who didn't think male people should wear skirts but short of them tackling me and beating me up and taking it off my body, it's not like there was a lot they could do about it. I don't mean to belittle the real occurrences of violence towards gender transgressors. I've been assaulted a few times during my life. But in general, broadly speaking, I don't need other folks' cooperation in order for me to do things that are considered feminine. Instead, the disapproving factions would need my cooperation in order to have things their way.

The place where I found myself vulnerable to the impressions and opinions of others was sexuality. Sexuality is a need, a hunger for a participation. To have access to another person's body, to be found attractive and to be wanted, to play and fondle and nibble and hug... all this requires the active cooperation of others.

As I left childhood behind and came into adolescence, I suddenly needed for there to be a pattern change in the world. Among the delightful sea of attractive and interesting female people, I needed there to be some who would find a sissy femme male person like me to be attractive and interesting in return.

The conventionally masculine boys tended to have that. Some individuals more than others, of course, but in general they could look around and see attractive girls who seemed to be attracted to boys who were similar to themselves, and this would encourage them to think this would happen for them personally.

Me, I looked around and was faced with the sense that what I wanted, what I hoped for, just wasn't done. Wasn't how it was.

And that is how it came to be that I started to think I shared a situation with gay and lesbian people. My gender being different meant my sexuality was different. I was still male and still hetero but none of the observable patterns of heterosexuality matched up with me being a sissy femme kind of male.

Like gay and lesbian people learning that they probably won't find what they crave until they look beyond the conventional looking-places and outside of the conventional flirting behavior patterns, I came to realize I was different, I was queer, and I had to approach this all differently from what I saw other people doing.


You hear people saying over and over that sexual orientation and gender identity are two entirely different things. Yes and no. What people usually mean by that is that being femme, as a male, is not the same thing as being gay. Or that being a transgender woman if you were designated male when you were born is not the same thing as being a gay male. And mirror-image for the lesbians and gender-atypical female people. That being butch isn't identical to being a lesbian, and neither is being a transgender man. All that is true.

But where having an atypical gender identity for a person of my sex has made all the difference has been in the world of courting and kissing and flirting, the world of trying to meet possible partners.

Because all I need in order to wear my hair long and put in earrings and so on is that you refrain from physical attacks on me, and most people, even the disapproving sort, aren't predisposed to do that. But the coupling-up stuff intrinsically requires a lot more from people. It won't work if I'm not understood. It won't work if I'm not seen and recognized. It won't work if my identity is invisible to people and they've never imagined any such person.

And understanding is a much larger ask than "just leave me alone", if you see what I mean.



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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, hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



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

———————

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

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We use the concept of "out", and of "coming out", to mean several closely related things. For some of us, that means we end up coming out three or more times, for each of the sub-meanings we've compressed into that one term.

There's that moment when you realize for the first time that yeah, "this is how I am", and it shifts how you think of yourself from then on. Prior to that, perhaps one was utterly clueless, or perhaps one was in denial and resistant to the idea. Or had occasionally looked at yourself that way, but hadn't reached any definitive conclusions before.

In my autobiographical book GenderQueer, I recall several times in the years immediately after high school where people -- with varying degrees of patience -- were trying to be supportive while waiting for me to realize what they thought they knew about me, waiting for me to come out to myself.

I came out to myself in this sense of coming out in December of 1979... the word "genderqueer" wasn't in use yet and I didn't know what to call it, but I had this sudden very clear understanding of this as a fundamental and central part of who I am.

So after that is the time when you first say it to others, letting the people who know you know this about you. This is the classic sense of being out of the closet. No longer knowing it but keeping it hidden.

Even here, this version of coming out subdivides: one may come out to one's sister, or one's best friend, or to one's immediate associates, without necessarily being out to one's employer, the neighbors, or Grandma Theresa who wouldn't understand. Or, in contrast, perhaps one makes posts about it in public-facing Facebook entries, where everyone can see.

I came out to my parents first, I think, since I was at home for Christmas break at the time, it was on my mind, and I dropped that on them when it seemed to fit the moment's conversation. Unlike people whose parents rejected them or accepted and continued to love them, I had parents who were mostly bewildered and uncomfortable with the subject matter. Our conventional model of what coming out is like is drawn from gay folks coming out. Most parents in 1979, and definitely today, aren't unfamiliar with the concept of being gay, regardless of what they think about it. That's far less true for being genderqueer. Especially before there was a word for it.

I've been pretty public and open-book about it, as well as other pariah-tagged aspects of my personal history and claimed identities and views, such as being a psychiatric survivor or being an anarchist or a nonestablishment form of theistic / spiritual. I had all of that on a personal web site in the 1990s. I once had an employer ask about my ideas for a project and my email program somehow stripped out all the email body I'd composed and only sent my signature -- which had a link to my web site. Next work day, my employers very cautiously asked what it was I was trying to suggest or propose to them about me being an escaped schizophrenic, a self-declared sissy, radical feminist, non-man male, etc! A couple years later, the person I'd met for dating on OKCupid wanted to know more about me and I referred her to my web site. Yeah, out.

Then there's the act of successfully coming out in such a way that one establishes an identity that everyone you encounter thinks about you in this way, it's your externally-facing identity for people to accept or reject.

This goes beyond merely being unhidden and uncloseted and requires an active public relations campaign. Because otherwise, people will tend to be introduced to you because of other aspects of who you are in life -- your role at work, the fact that you're a registered voter in their political party, your volunteer work with the stage crew of the local theatrical ensemble, or the fact that they're in the process of giving you a speeding ticket.

Embroidering or sewing on rainbow flags and a recognizable symbol or a pin or two, some bumper stickers and so forth, can go a long way to extending out to this kind of level. For some of us, personal presentation can also accomplish a lot of this.

I only have a modicum of this kind of "out presence" despite decades of trying to be a recognized activist about it. There are only recently such things as genderqueer flags and their recognition by the general public is still pretty limited, in addition to which (as I've often said) "genderqueer" is, itself, an umbrella term that doesn't really identify me or my situation anywhere near as fully as I wish to be out about it. It's like saying "et cetera". Vague wave of the hand in the general direction of trans, "and other ways of being gender atypical, whatever those may be". I invented my own symbol, and wore it on my denim jacket by 1981, but it didn't convey anything until I explained it.

So I'm still working on out.


———————


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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Sometimes people ask me what it was like to come out genderqueer in 1980, when there was no term for that.

Most often, these questions take one of the following forms:

"How is that possible? I don't understand. You came out as something you'd never heard of, that didn't exist yet? Isn't that just refusing to be put into any box and saying you're an individual?"

or, mostly from people who've read the book --

"Well, in your book, it's like you know who you are, but you're still going around unsure, and you keep figuring it out whenever something new happens, but it takes, like, forever before you believe it. What made it finally click?"


So let me tell you about this really vivid image that came to me when I was right on the verge of coming out.

CW: Dark imagery with self-harm activities

I was on a bus, and it was circling through neighborhoods, different parts of town, you know, to let people off where they belong.

For a long time, different types of straight people were getting off, all excited and chattering away with each other. Sometimes couples holding hands, sometimes in clusters. On this block would be athletic guys and cheerleaders, let's say. Then at the next stop it would be educated-sounding people with briefcases, flirting the way people do in offices. There were different ethnic parts of town, where the cultural differences in dress and behavior were different from the previous stops. I don't mean people were being delivered to ethnic barrios and ghettos but rather that they were getting off to join in cultural expressions that called to them, and where they would be accepted. Then it's like there were different sexual attitudes or viewpoints, like a stop where everyone was dressed in leather and carrying paddles and whips, then one where everyone was holding Bibles and dressed in Sunday suits, and one where the people were accusing each other of cheating and were all angry and yanking on someone's hand or trying to hit each other, but still getting off together.

Then we seemed to come to the gay section of town. Nice dressed guys with an earring and a bandanna sticking out of a pocket, saying clever things as they got off at one stop, then the next stop had muscular guys in skimpy clothes, and at the next stop several guys in drag vamping and sashaying, then some couples holding hands and being sweet to each other.

Then lesbians for a few stops, a cluster of cute perky women with pool sticks high-fiving each other and laughing at some kind of in-jokes, then some menacingly tough gals slouching their way to the door, a handful of academic women in serious conversation...

All this time I'm happy for all these other people as they get off, because they're at home and going to events and situations that make them happy, and we all get to have that, right? and life is good, diversity is good, you know?

And the bus starts letting off trans people, in my head somehow I know that's who they are, people who have transitioned or are in the middle of transitioning, going out... not into trans neighborhoods, but transphoric ones, where they'll be accepted and meet nice new partners and friends and associates.

By the time the bus has finished making those stops, some with louder partying people and some with quieter, more serious folks, the bus doesn't have many people left on it, and I'm getting uneasy and wishing we'd hurry up and get to my stop, the place where people like me get off.

Because, before, there were bright lights, streetlights and storefronts and traffic lights and lit up businesses and people's houses and all, but now it's mostly dark out there. The bus stops and some people shuffle to the front, talking to themselves and gesturing with abrupt jerky motions. We go around the corner and there's barbed wire and broken glass everywhere, it's some kind of industrial part of town, like old warehouses, big buildings with no windows. At the next stop someone all hunched over and bent goes down the aisle, rubbing at their crotch with one hand, masturbating in public, and holding an open bottle of vodka in the other. I watch out the bus window to see someone else getting off the bus who suddenly takes out a handgun and shoots themself in the head as the bus pulls away.



Clearly, this is all wrong, I must have missed my stop, I have to start over.


So it's like instant replay. I look longingly at some of the nice hetero groups as they get off, but no, even though I'm a male person and my attraction is to female people, I'm not like them. I grew up being one of the girls. One of the churchy girls makes eye contact and smiles kind of regretfully. I watch some of the femme gay guys and how they seem comfortable and confident. Being femme, being sissy, means I've been targeted by homophobia along with them, but I don't belong there either. I'd really like to follow the lesbian pool player with the jaunty denim jacket and the little leather cap, but she shakes her head.

I watch the trans people at the next few stops, seeing them descend the stairs. I wish I could follow them. They've been riding the bus for a long time and they're celebrating. But this isn't a neighborhood I can live in either.


Yes, I know how I am, but I don't know what it makes me. I could put it in words. Watch. I don't even have to say anything out loud, it's as if people can hear what I'm thinking, and I can hear them the same way. Simplifies things. "Wait", I 'say' to the last group of well-dressed trans women. "I was always one of the girls too. Never wanted to be like the boys. I just want a girlfriend, but I don't want to be a boy".

"Well you look like a boy. We could give you some tips if you want."

"But I'm not female, I'm a male girl"

The trans woman glances at her friends and they slowly shake their heads. "Nobody in these parts is gonna get that". They get off together.


I could put it into words, but there's nobody to say "Oh, yeah, I get it, that makes sense to me", let alone "Yeah, welcome home, you're one of us".

There's almost nobody left on the bus once again, and the ones who are, they don't look so good, and there's no lights outside, and I don't like this... what's going to happen to me?



It wasn't easy to believe I should get off the damn bus in the middle of nowhere, in the dark. With no community. It wasn't easy to stop going back and rehashing all the identities that didn't fit, the stops where I didn't belong, in hopes that I'd somehow missed something, somewhere.

But eventually I had to.

That's what it was like.




———————


Do you want a broader sense of what it was like?

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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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.

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"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.


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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

I was in fifth grade in 1970 and so I came of age alongside of feminism. Feminism said it was sexist to have a different yardstick for measuring the behavior of people depending on their sex. That was a good message for me, since from about 2nd grade onwards, people brought to my attention that I acted like a girl instead of like a boy. I don't know what that conjures up for you, but it seemed to have something to do with being goody two shoes and prim about language and being crude and dirty for its own sake. Feminism backed me up when my reaction was "Yeah, so? The girls are doing it right, what's wrong with you and the other boys?"


The message of feminism was that if a way of being, the roles and behaviors and so on, was who or how you were, that was more important than what sex you were. If you were brave, you were a brave person and it meant the same thing whether you were a girl who was brave or a boy who was brave.

I have had people listen while I recounted my expriences and then tell me "well, fine, but that did not mean you were a girl".

We have phrases in the English language. "For all practical purposes". "For all intents and purposes". I understood "girl" to be a role, a way of being thought of, a set of expectations, a pattern. I didn't specifically think I "was a girl". It was more that I realized that for all intents and purposes I was one of them because how I was, my patterns, made me fit in among them and not among the people I shared a physical sex with. I knew I was male and had no problem with that, it just didn't seem terribly important for defining who I was.


The feminist message was a unisex message, a gender-neutral message. You could even say it was a gender-neutralizing message. A lot of feminists say that should be enough. I once thought so too.

But male has been the default sex. We had the word "man" meaning human and yet also meaning male human. It was more than nomenclatural and linguistic, there was and still is a deep-seated tendency to see the generic condition of the species as male. Female is the special condition, the exception. It means that male traits are projected as human traits, but traits marked as female are not. They don't apply to males and they don't apply to generic humans, only to female humans. So when feminists demanded that female humans be seen as people first, not as special exceptional cases, they were accused right and left of wanting to be men.

Feminists were actually doing a transgender thing. They weren't calling themselves men in the sense of male, but the generic human was marked male and feminists were now claiming that generic human for themselves.

It just doesn't work the same way when a male person does it. Claiming unisex or asking for unisex human expectations instead of gendered ones does not invoke any of the associations and notions that are attached to female people. Because those traits aren't unisex. They're tagged as special, exceptional, belonging to women only.



———————

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.

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You've seen the gender unicorn and the similar posters that break down elements of sex and gender and sexual orientation and so on?

Today I want to write about one of the ones that often falls through the cracks: PRESENTATION.

It isn't gender identity. It isn't physical morphology. It isn't sexual orientation. It's how you market yourself, appearance-wise, to the rest of the human community, to be seen as a certain gender. It's also your success or failure in doing so: how you are perceived by others, largely as a consequence of your presentation.


I happen to be wearing a skirt tonight. No particular reason. I own skirts, I like them. This one is a Talbots, denim, in my size (15), and I am fond of it because it has back pockets and belt loops. For a person who wears jeans a lot, having skirts that accommodate the same pocket and belt paraphernalia is a plus.

And I do wear jeans a lot. I am femme, I am gal, and I look good in jeans. I patch my jeans when they age and make an art project of them. I don't cease to be femme or cease to be gal when I'm in jeans. Cisgender gals are still gals when they're in jeans, so why shouldn't I?

I have facial hair. I didn't grow any until I was 15, but then my body's hormones made them. They were soft and natural and I liked them. I have no issue with my body. It's the one I was born in. It makes hairs in places where most girl-people don't get hairs. Yeah, look: I'm not required to try to pass as a cisgender woman in order to qualify for my gender identity. If the majority of women grew hairs here and it was the boys who didn't, they'd cultive them, they'd adorn them, they'd make sure you saw that the had them. My body grown hairs here.

I'm femme, or girl, or gal. I don't owe you or anyone else physical femaleness. Any more than I owe you XX chromosomes.


There are two parts of the presentation phenomenon:

a) My efforts, and how I think of them, to elicit from you and the rest of the world a gender assignment that comes close to the truth; and

b) How it goes over, how it is perceived.

Both of these belong on the gender unicorn. They are a part of what makes us us. They're different from our gender identity itself, although they're usually affected by it. They're not necessarily the same value as what we were assigned by birth, although they could be, for those of us who are cisgender.

Presentation is social. It's like marketing. How one brands one's self. Look, see, I have physical male characteristics that I could choose to get rid of, but I also choose garments and adornments that most people who identify as "men" would not wear. My selections are made with an awareness of other folks' possible perceptions.

We're all limited by the possibilities that are in other people's heads, although we can riff on themes that people are familiar with. None of us is 100% free from the matrix of gendered expectations and the array of gender identities that people think you and I might have.


———————

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