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.



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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 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.

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

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Index of all Blog Posts

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.


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


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



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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

My publisher requested any final author's edits on my second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, to be sent in so they can finalize the setup in preparation for rolling it out.

I've been slower and more methodical at this stage than I was with the first book, which had been through a wide variety of shakedown cruises with agents, publishers, and editors. This one, less so. I made contact with people I was in relationships with during the timeframe covered by this book, and likewise with academic colleagues who were classmates of mine, and received invaluable feedback that I used to revamp some of the descriptive passages.

As with the first book, the most likely delay will be waiting for the Library of Congress to provide the CIP (Catalog-in-Publishing) block.

Sunstone Press also sent me a rendition of the front and back cover and spine for me to make any final modification (I did, in fact, catch a typo), and it looks gorgeous.

So I'm once again going through that "it's starting to seem real" phase!

This book is essentialy a sequel to GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, picking up shortly after I came out in 1980 and covering my endeavors to use academic feminism as a platform to say what I wanted to say to the world about gender and sissyhood and being a gender invert.


A 2022 publication date is still expected.

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


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



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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

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.

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


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



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

———————

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

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Index of all Blog Posts

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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

Stop it.



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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. 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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When you're a sissy femme male, you learn that indicating sexual interest in anyone is risky and can conjure hostility and contempt. If it happens to be male-bodied people that you like that way, you learn that not only the straight ones but the gay ones as well may regard you as creepy and pathetic and perverted and disgusting. If, on the other hand, your sexual inclination is to find female-bodied humans to be the enticing ones, you soon realize that you're expected to be boylike and to have boylike sexual priorities and attitudes, and to the extent that you don't, you're considered inferior, pathetic, creepy, and loathsomely disgusting.

You may notice a theme here.

So. I wrote a coming-out tale that details what it was like to be me, from age 13 to 21. It included a lot of pining and hoping and wishing and lusting for the possibility of a girlfriend in my life. Because, yeah, that happens to be how I was wired, I was a femme male who found female folk attractive. My narrative included a lot of confusion and frustration, because that's what it's like to be a pubescent sissy male with that attraction.

Among the reactions and feedback that I successfully solicited from people willing to review my book were comments that my sexuality was creepy.

a) "I was creeped out by how the author saw every female character as a possible sexual partner"

My last girlfriend had been back when I was in 3rd grade. It had been wonderful. We had loved each other, shared, talked, held hands, defied hostile classmates and even an occasional hostile teacher to be together. In the intervening years I'd developed a much stronger and emphatic interest in girls' bodies. Not that I hadn't felt some of that in 3rd grade but I was ignorant and thought I was a pervert back then.

You want to call me a pervert at 13, or 17? Fine. Maybe I was. I wanted a girlfriend. I was seriously into girls. It wasn't happening but I wanted it to. When I had girls who were friends or associates or colleagues, I fantasized that maybe what I wanted could develop with them.

Since it wasn't happening, hadn't happened, and I was feeling left out, I read advice columns and stuff of that nature, and several writers said I should not restrict my potential availability to the ultrahot sexiest girls but should realize that the average ordinary girl in the next row might be a good prospect if I didn't restrict myself to considering only the sexiest hottest ones that I saw. Well, nearly every female person I saw looked hot to me anyhow, but yeah I took that advice into serious consideration. It could be her. Or it could be her. Or her. I was totally girl-crazy.

Maybe that's creepy. If so, I don't think it's massively different from how a lot of adolescent girls at that age were about the boys.

b) "The author creeped me out with how much he thought he deserved sex, he sounds like an incel or something"

I never thought or wrote that I thought that I deserved sexual attention from this girl or that girl. I did admittedly think that sooner or later, someone would look upon me and think "Ooh, nice! Cute and not at all like the other boys" and would want to do me. Around me, I heard and saw that other males were being pushy about sex. I thought that was creepy.

I was a person who'd grown up thinking of myself as a boy who was like the girls. I valued their opinion and wanted their understanding now that sexual feelings were involved. I wanted to know how it was for them. I wanted it to be mutual. I wanted honesty. And yeah I expected to be a valued commodity, sooner or later, and yes I got a bit indignant when that did not seem to be happening. The pushy, sexually aggressive boys were not only experiencing sex but also having girlfriends.

I saw how the game was played. If I acted like I only wanted to have sex and had no reservations about it, the girl towards whom I acted that out could protest that she wasn't that kind of girl and we could banter. But that wasn't honest, that wasn't me, that role did not fit me, it was written for someone else.

Incels...I am not an incel. They harbor offensively sexist ideologies towards women, attitudes that are chock-full of hostility. But incels are people and some human experiences gave rise to that viewpoint, however twisted it may be. Yes, I was on that path. Feeling unfairly isolated, deprived.

When African natives were forcibly extracted from their homes in the 1600s and beyond and shoved into slavery, they felt the urge to turn to each other and sexuality inflected that, where applicable, and there was mating despite the fact that their children would have this institution of slavery inflicted upon them. That is powerful. That puts the desire to mate on a very high plane of priorities in life. So it is unfair to denigrate the desire to have that in one's life as if it were some dismissable trivial concern. It is a human thing to want, with relative degree of desperation, a connection, a love, a sexual joining.

To find one's self in a category where you don't get to have that? Yeah, there's going to be anger, resentment. The incels don't get it. They are wrong. They theorize as if female people have complete autonomy and that they, the males in this position, are controlled by that. That's ignorant and oblivious. Feminists have been writing and speaking for years and years about the coervice social pressures that control young women's sexual choices.

I grew up with feminism. I expected my female classmates to be liberated, feminist, nonsexist. I expected them to deal with me as a person who was fundamentally like they were, other than physically male. They didn't. They had expectations. They bought into beliefs. They also of course became necessarily wary and guarded and suspicious. All of that put a wall between them and me.

My sense that I was a person who was desirable? That I should logically have been a catch? Call it creepy if you must, but I found it liberating to shove aside the value judgments and the notions of what constitutes heterosexual viability.


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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

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


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


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



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

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

That's really it in a nutshell.



Here are some additional details and elaborations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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

Is it always?


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


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

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

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

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

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


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

My book, 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

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

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Podcast host Esther Lemmens maintains Fifty Shades of Gender, a series in which she interviews a different individual in each episode to do a deep dive into gender, sex, and sexuality. "Come with us on a journey of inclusion, acceptance and respect", she invites.

Esther Lemmens has a gift for asking the right questions to let her subjects introduce or explain the things most important to them. She senses areas where the person might want to elaborate or make things clearer, and probes in such a way as to give that opportunity.

I've been interviewed several times as a book author with a book being published, but often came away from them feeling less than overjoyed about how my gender identity, or my book, were being presented. But Lemmens has elicited from me the best spoken overview I've ever given.

A Conversation with Allan D. Hunter, Podcast Episode 14, 2 October 2020.


You should check out her other episodes as well.


———————

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

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


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

———————

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

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Index of all Blog Posts

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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


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


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

Does this help?



———————

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

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


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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Like most people born with a penis and testicles, I was AMAB: assigned male at birth.

I don't refer to myself as transgender because I don't seek to be perceived as a female person. And I don't tend to identify as nonbinary because I don't seek to be perceived as someone who is neither male nor female.

I identify as genderqueer and, more specifically, as a gender invert.

* * *

There are a lot of ongoing discussions, especially within the trans communities, about how you don't have to be on hormones, don't have to get an operation, to be valid as a transgender person. About how the legitimacy of one's identity as transgender does not depend on changing one's body.

The ones who do — the people conventionally designated as "male to female" or "female to male" — are nowadays often referred to as "binary transgender". And the assertion that you don't have to be binary trans in order to be authentically trans is an affirmation of nonbinary transgender identities.

The fact that there are so many posts and statements saying so is a clear sign that a lot of people think "transgender" means that if you were assigned male at birth you wish to be perceived as female, accepted as a woman, not differentiated from cisgender women, that you present as female, that you do everything at your disposal to do so successfully, that you seek to pass. And reciprocally the other way around if you were assigned female at birth.

That's what the term "transgender" means to a lot of people out there, both within the trans community itself and in the mainstream.


Hello. I am a person who could identify as a "nonbinary transgender" person.

I don't choose to do so. I don't feel like it communicates. I feel like it just confuses people. They make one set of wrong assumptions when they see me and mentally assign me as a male person. If I tell them I'm transgender they make a different set of wrong assumptions and I'm no better off.

Meanwhile, out there are a bunch of male-to-female and female-to-male transgender folks. A handful of them are "truscum" or "transmedicalist" and don't consider anyone to be authentically trans unless they seek a medical transition. Then there are quite a few more who don't have that kind of absolute judgemental definitional thing going on, but who will admit to missing the days when the only kind of trans people were binary trans. I'm not going to say they're right, especially since so many of my friends and colleagues identify as nonbinary transgender. But I have to confess, I sympathize with them and their viewpoint. Many of them have been around as long as I have. That means they lived through decades when most of society had only heard dirty jokes and porn references to trans people. And some of them feel like they did the hard work to get transgender issues in front of the social consciousness and now all these newfangled nonbinary trans people want to be a part of the phenomenon.

There's a reason why there aren't more people identifying as I do, as gender invert. It's because they haven't heard the term. Nobody offered it to them as an option to consider. So they went with "transgender". Or "nonbinary". Or "nonbinary transgender".

But what if you were assigned male at birth, you consider your body to be, in fact, male, but your gender isn't masculine, isn't man, isn't guy, isn't boy, that instead you are femme, one of the girls? Or if you were assigned female at birth, recognize your body to be female, but have never been a girl or a woman, and instead you're all man, all guy, all boy, totally a masculine individual?

If you say "transgender" and folks know you were AFAB they'll almost universally assume you identify as "male". If you say "transgender" and they understand you were AMAB, they'll assume you to identify as "female".

Specifying "nonbinary transgender" just shifts the problem. Now people are likely to assume that you don't want to be identified as any named sex or gender. That you're declaring yourself to be neither male nor female, neither man nor woman.

If what I'm saying resonates for you, you're welcome to come join me as a gender invert instead.




———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts