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


—————


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

So imagine that you're having a conversation with a male who identifies as a feminist. He sees patriarchy as a male alliance and his fervent disavowal of patriarchy as a breaking of that alliance. He's not with the men, he's a feminist.

Now let's have a different conversation, this time with an AMAB person, an assigned male at birth person in other words, who identifies as a woman. She doesn't talk about patriarchy but rather emphasizes that who she is, and hence who she sees as "the people like me", are women, not men. She's not with the men, either, she's a woman.

With me so far?

But now let's talk about the male bonding that neither of those people are a part of, the connections between men. Norah Vincent, author of Self-Made Man, and Anna Akana, creator of YouTube video "How Trans Men Expose Female Privilege" about Zac, a trans man, both emphasize the same point: that men don't have much of any kind of bonding with each other, that they live their lives pretty isolated, really.

How do you distinguish yourself from a population that others may have viewed you as a member of -- that you have been altercast or miscategorized as -- if among that population's main characteristics is the fact that its members push away from each other and don't bond?

If that's just one characteristic in a mosaic of many, I suppose we could say we have that in common with the men we don't consider ourselves a part of, but that we're still different in important ways that make us not a part of them.

If it's definitive, though... the more important this particular characteristic is in considering what a man is, the more our doing it too means we're just like the rest of men.



I get a lot of responses to my assertions of my gender identity that are dismissive. One message board participant informed me,

"I would consider Trans people as the Gender they feel they are, whether they've had surgery or not. That isn't at all relelvant to your case because YOU AREN'T TRANS! Transgendered people try to live as their preferred gender to the best their social and financial circumstances permit. If they can, they will fully transition, though sadly that isn't possible for a lot of people. You aren't doing that...

All I'm seeing is a straight male who doesn't conform to certain dubious stereotypes of straight maleness and who caught a lot of unfortunate shit in high school because of it. Having gotten some of that myself, I certainly sympathize, but it doesn't make you anything more than a non-conformist."

Predictably, I found that annoying; it angered me, I felt erased. But that doesn't make him wrong, and I should be willing to explore that, whether it pisses me off or not.

What if it is entirely normative for male people (at least heterosexual male poeple) to consider ourselves different from male people in general, to reject an identity-in-common with other males, to consider ourselves more like one of the women, and to only seek connections with people we think of as people like ourselves from among our female acquaintances? I've certainly heard from some of my female intimates and friends and colleagues that they get the sense that women are the only people that a lot of men open up to and share their innermost thoughts with.

It would be very disconcerting to wake up one day and realize that instead of having an identity different from that of most males, the notion of being different from most males is exactly what most men have in common?!?


But no, I don't think that's an accurate read of things. I believe there is a meaningful difference between not really sharing or letting other males know what you're feeling and thinking, but hiding that with a veneer of conformity and endorsement of a bunch of mainstream notions of what all men have in common, on the one hand, and being pretty open and honest (to other males and to non-male people as well) about what one feels and thinks about personal matters, especially these expectations and suppositions and how far they stray from our personal experience and interests and desires, and yet not finding much resonance from most other male people when we do so, on the other hand.

I would actually like to truly compare notes with other male people about what it's like for them and for me. Not just other self-identifying atypical males, genderqueer or otherwise...but any and all of them. It might or might not increase a sense of identity-in-common. We don't have to all be the same in order to not be hostile to those who differ. That's something that can be difficult to understand when you're in sixth grade, that someone else could look upon you and express "I am not like you and I sure wouldn't want to be" without it being a judgment, a derogatory assessment.

I encountered genuine hostility, with violence and hate and disgust, but to be fair I reacted to their expression of "I am not like you and wouldn't want to be" as a hostile expression, and was expressing the same back at them in return.

But if every male wants out of the identity foisted upon us, before we can bond over that we have to talk about it.

And if you don't ever want to talk about it, I have to assume you don't experience it as a problem, and that does make us different.

—————


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


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

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






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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I understand that you think what I should be saying is that sex-specific expectations of male people are sexist, limiting, and harmful. And that I should leave it at that and not be embracing a bunch of gender-positive rhetoric and going on and on about having a marginalized gender identity.

Well, that's actually where I started, embracing the basic feminist "sauce for the gander" concept like it was a get out of jail free card as long ago as when I was in sixth grade. I grew up with feminism as my defender, a shield against the attitudes that if you were a male you were supposed to be a certain way that wasn't expected of your female classmates and friend.

It wasn't sufficient. If it had been, I would not have ended up coming out and claiming an unorthodox identity.

I don't expect you to say "Oh, well, gee, in that case of course you're correct" or anything like that, but give me a chance to explain. I like to be understood even by people who don't end up agreeing with me.


Androgyny and the Male-Default-Identity Thing

Feminists saw that as women they were perceived as Other, disqualified from a lot of what was granted to adult humans. A lot of this special Other treatment was wrapped as veneration and adoration, even while a lot more of it was unadorned dismissive contempt for the lack of necessary male attributes, without which female people couldn't be allowed or expected to do a wide range of things. Feminists called it all limiting and wrong and demanded it all be discarded; they demanded to be perceived and evaluated simply as generic people. The generic person, though, was male; a cartoon stick figure without a skirt or lipstick would be considered male; our species was 'mankind', and 'he' was a generic pronoun that just happened to also be male.

So when feminists opted for women to be thought of as generic people, they were accused of wanting to be men. They were told that they were discarding the Special Other status that was women's privilege to wear, and that this was very sad and would ruin the family and so on and so forth.

I surely didn't just tell you anything you didn't already know, but now let's look at a bunch of hypothetical male people who want to opt out of gendered assumptions about male people. It's not a mirror-image situation because the generic undifferentiated human is already male-by-default. To say "view us as generic people and not as 'men' per se" doesn't invoke any of the notions about how women are or what the strengths of womanhood include, because those are marked-off special as only applicable to the Other.


Gender is Installed Deep, Exceptions Included

The pattern of behaviors and interpretations and perspectives that makes up gender isn't kin to a simple blocked-out behavior like wearing pants. You can decide on Tuesday that because of the weather and the planned activities everyone should wear pants. Instead, it's more like the behavior of using Spanish as your language. If that's the language you were exposed to throughout your life, you converse in it, you can read it, write it, speak it, and within your head, you think in it, even to yourself. But if you grew up exposed to English instead, and then on Tuesday it becomes apparent that it would make more sense if we all used Spanish -- perhaps because today we will be in Spain, let's say -- switching this behavior isn't at all a simple matter of deciding you're going to do so.

Gender is deep. We have roles in our head and we've learned them all our lives, and those roles are gendered. I don't mean the klunky Tinker-toy sense of roles, like she's the Mommy and housewife and he's the breadwinner, but more fleshed-out examples, role models, archetypes of how to be a woman or a man, a whole library of contrasting roles that we know, that we admire and emulate.

You probably have heroes, feminist heroes you look towards as inspirational and as celebratory of an alternative identity for women; they may not be public figures that other folks have heard of (although they might be); they may be brave stubborn passionate brilliant fiery individuals that you happened to have encountered at some point. People who are admirable women and are the antithesis of the Barbie and the subservient helpmeet and the dainty proper lady and the other prescriptivist examples that the world tried to spoon-feed you as models to emulate.

These alternative role models may represent a pathway out of the original imposed gender, but one thing they are not is genderless. Not unless you have to stop and ponder for a moment to even come up with what sex they are, wondering as you do so why it matters and why it's relevant.


The Significance of an Alternative

Robin Morgan once wrote -- confessionally -- about being an early feminist in the days when feminism was just dividing from the male left, and speaking dismissively about sex role conforming women who were doing and being what society told women they should be and do. Some hostile and judgmental things were said about stay-at-home moms and trophy wives and beauty queens and whatnot. But really it didn't take long for the women's movement to swing away from that kind of divisiveness. Feminists needed to be on all women's side, and perhaps more to the point here, they needed to create options and alternatives; if the old conventional roles were demeaning and unfilfilling and limiting, then just making it so that women had other options should be sufficient.

When I came out in 1980 as a sissy, a femme, a male person whose deep behavioral patterns were mapped onto the girl model rather than the boy model, I did not make any serious attempt to condemn the man identity that had been shoved down my throat and which most male people embraced as their own. It was certainly an identity that I did not want for myself, but I didn't feel like I was linked elbow-in-elbow with a mighty groundswell of male people who felt the same way. Far from it.

I'd spent most of my life disapproving of them, these boys and men and their way of being in the world. Just as they disapproved of me and called me things that indicated they regarded me as acting and thinking like a girl.

Coming out was actually about letting go of a lot of that. I didn't need to negate and replace their definition of how to be a male person properly. What I needed was to establish an alternative.


Trans Women and All That

I understand that you aren't at all comfortable with the transgender model, because hopping over the fence between sexes because the grass looks greener on the other side leaves the fence intact. Instead of dismantling sexist expectations, it seems to reinforce them, spreading the notion that if you exhibit characteristics associated with the other sex, that is who you are and you should disavow the tension between sexist expectations and how you are in this world by transitioning. You say that presenting as, and being seen as, a member of the sex they fit in with better, means embracing, not discarding, the notions that a person of that sex should have these behaviors and these personality characteristics and these priorities and values and so forth.

Well, I can see how that could be a valid worry and concern if transitioning were to be the only alternative to conforming to the expectations originally imposed on you.

But once again it isn't necessary to condemn and disapprove of other folks' way of coping with the expectation-tension. What's important is to establish an alternative that functions differently.


Conditioning and Inverting

As we're growing up, our identities take the form "I am a person who". How we think about ourselves, how we position ourselves against the backdrop of others, how we regard ourselves as fitting in, or not, among these established identities and roles.

Those of us who -- for various reasons -- gravitated towards sticking our tongues out at sexist gender expectations developed an "I am a person who" self-image that included "I am a person who doesn't try to be like they say people of my sex ought to be". And usually, because we get accused over and over of being more like a member of the other sex than of our own, our self-image ends up including "I am a person who is like a person of the other sex (and so what?)".

There may sometimes be a carefully nuanced person who grows up evaluating each and every one of these gendered expectations (and counter-expectations) and meticulously selects each characteristic with total disregard for whether it is associated with their own sex or with the other -- or we can at least toss that notion in as a hypothetical way of growing up -- but a lot of what actually happens for a lot of us is a kind of inversion. We -- unlike the other kids -- decide we are comfortable with the notion that we're like the other sex. And the more that the conventional expectations are shoved at us with judgmental hostility, the more we may push back against the demand that we personify the expected patterns for our sex by thinking of ourselves as "not like that at all".

Does this make us just as much a prisoner of gender as the conforming kids, just on the other side of the fence? Generally no, I think: we're less likely to internalize the most dehumanizing portions of the conventional expectations, because they're unpalatable to everyone, conformist and nonconformist alike, but unlike the conformist kids, we're not being pushed to embrace these. So the male nonconforming folks are less likely to internalize the most constricting aspects of "dainty", and butch women don't tend to internalize the most toxic parts of masculinity either.

But this inverted reaction is still gendered. It's a formulation in reaction to something. It should not be confused with a magical immunity to gender socialization.

I think a lot of feminist women do not always realize this phenomenon takes place, perhaps in themselves personally or perhaps instead in their butch friends and colleagues and associates. Feminism describes women's oppression, and the imposed content of femininity as part of that, so the entire content of femininity as conventionally enshrined in the role model is suspect, something to push away from in the name of being fully human instead of constrained by oppression. So the traits that lie outside it are often viewed as normal-in-the-absence-of rahter than being perceived as gendered masculine stuff.


Positioning and Joining

Feminism does contain threads of analysis about how patriarchy is inimical to male happiness and male well-being. That the set of sexist expectations and roles that constitute masculinity are bad for male people, and that feminism is therefore good for us too.

I sought them out, and found them, and rejoiced in them. But they aren't the most repeated and the most recognized parts of feminist analysis. I meet feminists online all the time who don't see male people as having any affirmative stake in feminism's success. Many more would agree that what feminism is about most certainly isn't the rescue of male people from what's imposed on us by patriarchy as males.

So although I found validation and recognition within feminism, I mostly found people unable to see what I could have to complain about.

I could not really contribute to what was being said, either. Inserting a contribution and having it become a part of what people understand to be feminism would first require that I have the authority to criticize it for what it lacks. And I don't. It isn't my movement. I don't get to set its priorities. Most people familiar with feminism, if asked about the male relationship to it, would say adversarial.

When I looked around for where else I could say what I needed to say, I found that I could speak as part of the gendered rainbow, that I could participate as a genderqueer person and try to establish that alternative identity. A non-transitioning male identity for male kids who grew up thinking "I am a person who is like one of the girls, not the boys". An identity that does not conflate sex with gender but embraces the apparent mismatch.

I haven't been welcomed with enthusiasm across the board, to be sure. I am occasionally perceived as a threat. I am often seen as violating ideological standards, and it sometimes offends other gender-atypical people who tell me I am not saying the things I'm supposed to be saying, that I am saying other things I really should not be saying.

But there's no fundamental barrier that renders me an illegitimate participant as completely as being male bars me from participating in feminism as a feminist.

Thank you for your time.



—————


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


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


My third book is about go to into second draft, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Contact me if you're interested.






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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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


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


—————


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


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



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

—————


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


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



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

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

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




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

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

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

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






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

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

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


—————


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


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



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I started this blog in 2014. I'd recently finished my first book, the one eventually titled GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, at that time being pitched as The Story of Q: A GenderQueer Tale. Lit agents who gave personal responses to my queries often said "Your problem as a nonfiction author is that you have no platform. Nonfiction authors need a platform, a ready-made audience of people who are already listening to them".

So I started blogging, in an attempt to create that platform.

After a couple of years of random interval posting, I settled down to a more disciplined routine of cranking out a weekly blog post. And pretty early in, my blog posts began to resemble lesson plans and lecture presentation points.

TEACHER

I was supposed to be an academic, you know. A college professor somewhere, with a classroom of students, a professor who also wrote articles and made presentations at conferences and all that stuff. (My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, which should come out later this year, goes into how that didn't happen as planned). I guess the weekly blog posts became a type of make-believe exercise for me, of creating a curriculum, a weekly installment of professor Allan Hunter's course in genderqueer politics and experience.

I was supposed to be not only an academic but also a provocative social presence, a maker of big ripples. The kind of thing where people talking or writing about gender issues would respond in part to what I'd said. Where the things I'd said had become ideas that people would feel the need to react to, whether they agreed with me or not. Where the things I'd said changed the dialog. Modified the conversation and inserted new ideas into the discussion.

I wanted to provide a way of looking at these things that would make some things click into place for a lot of people, would make some things suddenly make a lot more sense to people. I've had people tell me that did happen, so I got to have some of that experience, if not quite as much of it as I'd hoped for.

I wanted to find my people, to be the person who created an IDENTITY that other folks would claim as their own, people for whom the things I said really clicked; I wanted to someday be in a room entirely filled with gender inverts, both male and female, heterosexual males who were femme, whose personae were like girls or women but who didn't wish to present as if they were female, and heterosexual female people who were masc or butch, where who they were as people make them 'one of the boys', but who didn't opt to wrap themselves as male. I daydreamed of conferences attended by gender inverts, and bars and other businesses that catered primarily to gender inverts, and even entire parts of town that were known to be the gender invert sections, you know? Well that didn't happen. To a limited extent I occasionally "found my people" -- where someone would comment that I had put into words some experiences and notions that they'd never seen in words before and that something I said totally captured how it was for them -- but not often enough or with enough people to make a movement like that.

More often, I got some likes on my posts and some dissents. I received replies and responses that gave me some indication that I had made sense, and other reactions that made it clear that I hadn't, that I was just confusing people, and overall a sense that most people had only understood a part of what I'd said.

Which is how it would have been if I'd been a college professor. I mean, that's pretty standard. You do your lectures, you provide some readings and you lead some discussions, and you see that some students get part of it and others are a lot less clear on it, and it's rare that a lot of students fully understand all of what you've presented.


THE RIPPLE MAKING THING

The way I view society, after decades of studying it pretty intensely and trying to inject my ideas into the social conversation, is that most people find a cluster of people where they're comfortable. A social environment. And they embrace and absorb the worldview that is shared as part of what defines that social environment.

If that sounds snotty, like I'm putting folks down for not doing their own thinking, well, even my most radical gender concepts and ideas are just a subtle departure from a body of thought that's already out there. I have some specific original content -- the specifics of being a gender invert and how that's different from being transgender, and how it's similar and yet different from feminist women's rejection of rigid sex roles and sexist expectations and all that -- but the original stuff fits on top of an established set of thoughts about gender and sex and identity and variation from the social norm. And that's a really good thing, because otherwise it would be impossible to explain.

We aren't just mindless puppets who passively soak up ideas from the social world around us and then parrot them. It often seems that way, to me and to other frustrated individuals, but new thinking does get stirred in, and those new notions and concepts get introduced somehow. Perhaps there are ideas "whose time has come" and a lot of people begin putting the same notions into words at the same time and that's when they get some traction.

I suspect there's a talent for being a ripple maker. I suspect it's akin to the talent some people have for being able to go to a party and make a splash, to be different and yet to have one's difference make one stand out all new and shiny and interesting, instead of one's difference making one not fit in and just look wrong and out of place to everyone else. It's the kind of talent that lets one person's YouTube channel or their tweets get millions of views. Whatever it is that comprises such talents, I don't appear to have them. I never have.

My second book will soon be out, but in contrast to the first one it's less centrally on-topic. It explains why my first book is wrapped and positioned as LGBTQ and not as a radical feminist male's political coming-out, but it was the first book that really sets out to explain being a heterosexual sissy, a gender inverted male. It could be that, nevertheless, the second book catches fire and draws attention to me as a person speaking important ideas that are worthy of social attention, but it seems unlikely.


MOVING FORWARD

I've been doing this for a long time, and it is crossing my mind (not for the first time by any means) that I don't have to keep doing this. I can put it down. I can move on to other interests and let my life have a different focus.

I may not do that -- when I've contemplated that in the past, I ended up circling back to it, unable to leave these issues alone for long. Still driven to push them, to speak up about them, because it needed to happen. And because I had a right to speak.

But it's personally important to me to remind myself that I don't have to do this any more. It's not an obligation. Even if it needs doing, I don't seem to be spectacularly talented at doing it, and I do get to live my own life, in whatever way seems likely to bring me satisfaction.


—————


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

Replying to last week's blog post, my feminist colleague Emma wrote: "Perhaps you could ask a question pertinent to your point and then use the answers to develop what you want to say. For example, are you trying to talk about the idea that feminists have critiqued masculinity but then, when some men have rejected masculinity, critiqued that too?"

Yes, thank you.

Can I elaborate a little first? I'll try to keep it brief.

a) When feminists critiqued femininity, they did not say "we are not women". Quite the contrary. What they did say was "We are people, we are humans, we deserve to be evaluated by human standards, not special standards that only apply to women." For which they were accused of rejecting their womanhood and trying to become men, if you'll recall.

There's a reasons for that (I think): the masculine experience was artificially designated as the default. As in "The race of man", and "early man", and "mankind" and all that. So when women embrace a non-gendered neutral human identity, it bounces back socially as switching genders, because the neutral is the man-identity. I'm not pointing anything out to you that you hadn't previously pointed out to me, right?

Please keep that in mind when considering WHY ON EARTH some male who wants to reject masculinity doesn't just embrace the non-gendered neutrality of unisex human, not man. Saying "consider me unisex, not manly" doesn't invoke or conjure all the "special" traits marked as feminine. Because they're exceptions. The male is already the model for society's preconceived notion of the unisex generic human.


b) As a male, I don't get to say my stuff "as a feminist". It's not my platform. I don't get to use it.


c) The gender platform, including but not limited to transgender folks, can be my platform. It exists, it has concepts and terms, and I can speak to people as a person with a gender-atypical identity of some sort. It gives me a starting point.


d) Please, please, consider honestly for a moment what you would do, if you had been born male and rejected the identity foisted onto you by patriarchal society. Not for chivalrous concern-for-women reasons but for your own selfish reasons, that the MAN identity and all its priorities and traits and behaviors and ways of being in the world, totally wasn't for you because it's toxic and the opposite of being a self-realized life form and all that.

Do you think I'm going about it wrong?

—————


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

Around the middle of the 20th century, a psychologist named Madison Bentley wanted to discuss the socially shared notions about sex apart from the actual biology, and is typically cited as the first person to use the word "gender" in this fashion, defining it as the "socialized obverse of sex". An obverse is a front, the outward-facing or presenting surface of a thing.

Other folks (psychologists, feminists, sociologists, "sexologists") found it useful to make that distinction. They could talk about how having the biology wasn't enough to satisfy expectations -- as a person moved beyond infancy, they were expected to learn what the world considered appropriate for a person of their biology, and to aspire to match those descriptions and measure themselves against them as a standard.

Or they could discuss how some people deviated from the norms of sexual practice -- by developing an outward presentation that would lead others to classify them inside their heads as being of the other sex, they could signal their interest in performing that role within sexual activity.

Or they could analyze the unfairness of the expectations and roles, pointing out that, contrary to popular belief, they did not inevitably or directly result from the facts of biology, but constituted a type of propaganda about how people of that sex had to behave, in order to keep them in line.

It would be hard to have any of those discussions using language that used the same words to refer to the physical facts of biology and also to the social expectations and beliefs about how people of that physical configuration were, or how they ought to be.

Also present around the middle of the 20th century was Christine Jorgensen, who was the first prominently public trans person in American culture. Jorgensen was born with the physical configuration designated "male" but felt that the person she was, the self that she was, did not mesh with that and transitioned medically and socially to female, and in doing so and being the public face for this phenomenon, gave us our first social understanding of what it means to be trans: that some people are born in one type of body but that who they are inside makes them actually a member of the other group, and so they get what, at that time, was called a "sex change operation", and such a person, in that era, was called a "transsexual".

The use of language and terminology has not always been consistent, but the concepts of sex being one thing and gender being another are fundamental to explaining how a person can have the biological construction of one sex but that "who they are" is a different identity, one not defined by their physical parts.

Some words and phrases in our language get challenged and become regarded as problematic not because they designate things wrongly but because the way people have started to use them gives offense. In the early part of the 21st century, it is often considered offensive to use the terms "transsexual" or "sex change operation", the preferred terms being "gender reassignment surgery" (or even "gender confirmation surgery") and "transgender" instead.

But why is "sex" -- and any precise effort to speak of the physical, the biological, the anatomically structural -- so quickly marked as offensive?

Using the separate terms "sex" and "gender" as the psychologists and feminists originally did, Christine Jorgensen had a gender that was not the one expected or socially affiliated with her sex. She did not change her gender. She changed her sex. Her gender may have been transgressive, her experiences may have been "trans" (i.e., crossing the lines of) gender, but she did not transition from one gender to another. She transitioned from one sex to another. The medical interventions she opted for did not reassign her gender, they changed her sex and brought it into alignment with her gender identity. The old terms, in other words, are more accurate, less confusing, less misleading, and it is highly unfortunate that the trend has been to shy away from using them.

One thing that the social narrative about being trans in Christine Jorgensen's era did not explain well to the general public was that a person's gender identity is valid regardless of their body.

What I mean is that many people accepted the concept that some people are born in a body of one sex but that "who they are" inside means they need to transition... but their acceptance was partly tied to the explanation that such people would, indeed, transition. This would make a person who had not as of yet obtained a medical transition as somehow "incomplete". It would make a person who could not afford to obtain a medical transition some sort of "trans wannabe", someone who aspires to be trans but hasn't "done it yet". It would make a person who simply does not choose to, or wish to, obtain a medical transition -- perhaps because of the limitations of the medical science, perhaps because they don't feel like their body needs any modification and they're fine with it as it is -- but who presents appearance-wise as a typical person of their gender as some kind of "fake" or "trap". And it would make a person who neither seeks a medical transition nor configures their visual presentation to match expectations of their gender, but who nevertheless claims that gender identity despite their sex, into some kind of "transtrender" or "special snowflake".

I fall into that latter category. Using the nomenclature of Madison Bentley and those who followed, I am male, that's my sex; my gender was not "boy" growing up and did not develop into "man" when I became an adult, but instead has always been femme, that "who I am inside", my gender, has always made me one of girls, but my body isn't wrong and in need of fixing nor do I wish or need to be mentally assigned by observers to the "female" category, since I'm not female. I'm a male girlish person. And yes, definitely received my share of "transtrender" and "special snowflake" and "fake" and other dismissive epithets.

I call myself a gender invert, and I prefer genderqueer to transgender because of the still-omnipresent expectation that trans people transition, socially if not medically. I'm not a transitioner. I have a sex and a gender. Both are valid.

Resisting any mention of sex, as distinguished from gender, is not the way to prevent folks from invalidating a person's gender identity. Christine Jorgensen's gender identity was valid both before and after she obtained medical transitioning. Referring to her anatomy before medical transition as "male" does not invalidate her gender identity. If our gender identities do not depend on having the physical equipment that matches up with the anticipated value for our gender, then, by definition, our gender identities are not invalidated by having our physical anatomy perceived and recognized.

———————


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

"All I've taken away from your long-winded blatherings is that you are a straight, cisgender male that has feminine qualities", says Thomas. "Why can't you just embrace that, instead of needing a special word and claiming it's your identity? As far as I can tell, all this makes you... a straight cis male. You're like the male equivalent of a tomboy. Hey, most of us don't fit every stereotype, you know!"


Actually, "sissy" -- the male equivalent of a tomboy, as Thomas says -- was indeed one of the first "special words" I tried using to describe my situation.

So, sure, I can sit myself down and listen. I don't have to be all "you are wrong" and argumentative. I can consider you to be pitching an alternative formulation for me to consider. There are several communities of people I wish would do me the same favor, instead of telling me I am wrong if I say things differently than what they've decided is their truth.

Thomas -- who is totally on-board with gay and lesbian issues, and the concerns of transgender people who actually transition -- is echoing the sentiments of a lot of my gender-critical feminist colleagues. They, as you may know, are questioning the current social concepts about transgender people who transition.

Unlike Thomas, who sees me as very definitely not transgender, the gender critical feminists tend to conflate my situation and everything I say about it with the transgender phenomenon.

But where Thomas (and others who think like him) and the gender critical feminists tend to agree is: what I'm saying, and what I'm claiming as my identity, isn't valid or doesn't make sense.

Great. I'm a unifier.

Both the gender-critical feminists and Thomas keep telling me I should consider billing myself as a feminine male man.

Let's consider that.

I grew up with my childhood in the 1960s and my puberty, adolescence and early adulthood in the 1970s. That means I came of age alongside of feminism, and the voice of feminism told me double standards were unfair -- that if it was okay for girls and women to be feminine, it had to be okay for boys and men to be feminine. That it was sexist to have one set of traits, behaviors, characteristics, etc expected or required from one sex and a different set from the other. Which is in large part what the gender-critical feminists and Thomas and his ilk are offering me as an alternative formulation to how I present my gender identity these days.

I embraced those feminist ideas. They said I was valid. They said the people calling me names and telling me I wasn't "doing boy" correctly were not valid.

I embraced those ideas but they were insufficient. They didn't dive deep enough into the situation I would be in as a sissy feminine male person attracted to the female folks. That's mostly because feminism is about female liberation, and female experience. So the specifics were all about the aspects of female existence where sexist double standards impacted female people. Without specifics, just rejecting the notion of sexist double standards can be a lot like saying, As Anatole France did, that "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread".

Feminism dove into an immense number of situations to untangle how unequal priorities and treatments and expectations affected women. I didn't have access to a similar library of analyses of the situations I found myself in as a heterosexual sissy male in patriarchal society.

Queer theory emerged in the 80s as gay males started making this kind of systematic examination of the situations of non-heterosexual people. A lot of those observations were accepted, embraced, and incorporated by feminists as part of an expanded understanding of patriarchy. But transgender women and radical feminists had gotten off to a bad start and have never been on speaking terms, and don't tend to listen to each others' concepts and ideas. So as queer theory also started incorporating the experiences of transgender people, feminist theory and the nascent queer theory pushed off from each other somewhat, leaving lesbian feminists occasionally stranded or pulled on from both camps.

Me too. As I said, I grew up with feminism and found validation from it. But it wasn't examining my situation and neither were the new truths and assertions from transgender activism addressing it or speaking for me or giving me anything to hold onto.

The simple feminist "erase all gender expectations and have a unisex world" prescription, as voiced by Thomas and the gender critical feminists as described above, has shortcomings which I've addressed in these previous blog posts:

Androgyny & Unisex vs Being Differently Gendered

To Oppose Patriarchy: It's Different For Men

The people calling me names and telling me I wasn't "doing boy" correctly did not understand that I'd lost interest in "doing boy". The identity being shoved at me was social, not biological, and I declined it. I wasn't doing boy differently via being feminine and seeking acceptance as such; I reached the point where I had no interest in being accepted as a boy of any sort.

If we cannot use the word "oppression" to describe men's plight, how can we speak of it? That, of course, is the point: we cannot. Because patriarchy does not recognize the ultimate destructiveness of tyranny to tyrants, the fathers have no word-and therefore no concept-for the kind of dehumanization, the severe characterological damage, done to men by their use of violence of all kinds to dominate women and all "others". Men who are becoming conscious must find their own language for their experience.

-- Sonia Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: the Metaphysics of Liberation

That is exactly what I sought out to do in the 1980s as a women's studies major (a tale which will be made available when my next book, That Guy in our Women's Studies Class, comes out next year), and what I am continuing to do now in writing these blog posts.

I can't do so "as a feminist", within feminism, as a part of the feminist community. Feminism, as I said, exists for the purpose of female liberation, and speaks from female experience; I can't really modify any part of it or add to it without being perceived as an interloper and an invader, at least by some, and while some people in the LGBTQIA world often also see and regard me as a hostile invasive force, it's constituted around multiple variant identities instead of one primary identity, which affords me more room to say "me too, move over". But that does mean finding ways of expressing my situation in terms and within concepts that are in use there.

It isn't phony: when I first came out in 1980, I specifically conceptualized myself as a fundamentally different identity from straight guys, gay guys, or transsexual women. I didn't see my concerns as the concerns of men within patriarchy but as the concerns of heterosexual sissies within patriarchy. So I'm not barging in to use the LGBTQIA voice for expediency reasons.

But I speak with my own voice. You should consider it, listen to it, regardless of your embrace (or lack of it) of either the transgender people's theories or the theories of feminism, and don't be in such a hurry to conflate everything that doesn't seem to come from your own camp with whatever you don't like about the perspectives you currently disagree with.

———————



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