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I've been window-shopping for a paid-for editing service, getting a set of experienced editor-eyes on my manuscript with a focus on making the leading edge of it, in particular -- the first XX pages that get requested as sample, in other words -- as marketshiny as the storyline will accommodate in hopes of getting more nibbles from lit agents.

I reached out to some editors I had prior contact with from one of my previous books. One of them got back to me after requesting and receiving my current synopsis and 1st 3 chapters, about 45 pages.

"There was enough in the storyline to keep me turning pages", I'm told. "I was sufficiently invested in wanting to see what happens next. And the solid quality of your writing kept me going. My biggest concern is that I didn't find myself reacting well to your main character. He comes across as distant and cold, someone who doesn't care about any of the people he's in contact with, and as a result I found myself pretty apathetic about the character."

insert comic timing pause

It's autobiographical.

Well, that's consistent with the story I'm telling, actually. At one point within the book I relate the tale of trying to transition from childhood to adulthood in the employment zone, only to find that...

Basically, they don’t like me. Teachers mostly did. Classmates mostly didn’t. And now that I’m an adult, employers mostly don’t. Why?

... and as a child I'd had a similar bad time of it in school, not that I never managed to have any friends but that I was so widely hated:

Jan [my sister] didn’t easily fit in everywhere. Whenever we moved, or changed school systems, I think she had to work at it to make new friends, get people to accept her, avoid being the kid that other people leave out or make fun of. I think she put some effort into tucking in any odd corners so people couldn’t see. Popularity was important to her; I don’t mean she was super popular, most popular girl in the class or anything like that, but popular enough. Accepted. But that wasn’t an option for me. I wasn’t merely some kid who was seen by some as having something about them that was a little different. I was the kid that everyone in the school heard about from the other kids before they ever saw me. I had a reputation that had stuff that people made up about me added to what was already there, and being stared at was not something I was going to be able to avoid. I remember kids from other classrooms bringing their friends with them to point me out through the open classroom door, you know, ‘See, over there, that’s him’. So I have a lifetime of training that’s made it pretty much invisible to me.

So my main character -- i.e., me -- comes across as uncaring:

Mark Raybourne [my assigned individual counselor] wants me to think about whether my tendency to not give a shit whether or not other people approve of my behavior is a tendency that has unhealthy components. Okay. You can consider it a defense mechanism, but you can also consider it the necessary attitude if you’re going to move forward. I couldn’t afford to care. I was under attack. I had to believe in me. They had to be wrong. Yes, that installs the worry that this is a coping mechanism. Yes, I’ve worried about that. That maybe my default assumption that I was right to believe in me and reject them as wrong was...incorrect, and I...for some reason...deserved this.

I definitely would not describe my main character as more tolerant than their classmates. I wasn't. I was judgmental all through the worst years, elementary and junior high school, just outnumbered very badly, so yes their intolerance was pretty nasty to deal with, but I wasn't a better person or anything.

So my main character is problematic: pushy and with a practiced "I can't afford to care, it hurts too much" attitude towards whether or not other people like me.

The editor who gave me the feedback may still have a good point. First let's make a split between whether the person I was as the main character is not a good main character or it's my painting of that me, how I'm written as that character, isn't a good representation of me. If I want to stick to the factual (regardless of whether I'm marketing it as fiction or as nonfiction) I can't retroactively fix who I was, even if that character needs fixing. But giving the editor a lot of leeway to make a reasonable point here, yeah, my book could be difficult to market because I haven't represented the character as well as I should.

To my way of thinking, it's a selling point that my book actually addresses so many of the editor's critical comments. The editor hasn't read the whole book and would not have seen that yet. I mean, yeah, they're totally relevant issues, but I've attempted to include them in the book. Trust me, I'm narcissistic. I may be vain and self-immersed, but I promise you it's not an unexamined life.

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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

This video review of GenderQueer

... from somebody named "Novelzilla".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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

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

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

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

-----

Day Seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

I've paused querying my third book Within the Box.

As I've mentioned, I hate querying. Well, lately I've come to realize that when I have a task that I hate, my default way of handing it is to take a deep breath, scrunch my face up tight, and then go at it with single-minded determination, blocking out everything else, and just blast ahead it until it's done, thinking "let's get this over with!".

And that's often effective and efficient, but there's also a price tag. For example, one of the things I detest is getting rained on. I hate the feeling of cold wet clothes and wet feet in squishy socks and wet hair in front of my fogged-up glasses and the slipperiness of the wet ground and getting chilled from it and everything about it. But when my attention focuses so narrowly on just getting to a covered destination, I block out awareness of obstacles, the terrain, and other moving objects like cars and other pedestrians. My intense dislike for the sensations means I'm trying to not pay attention to how anything feels. So I have dashed out in front of cars on occasion, I've bowled over people with umbrellas. I once twisted the hell out of my ankle trying to round a corner on a wet cobblestone. I'm a menace to myself and other people when I'm being rained on.

So with that in mind, I've realized I shouldn't approach querying my book with that attitude. I have grudgingly sought feedback on my query letter from people in a forum I dislike almost as much as the rain, and before I got banned for not being sufficiently grateful and appreciative, I acquired enough comments and observations to let me (after I cooled off somewhat) shorten and tighten it.

They made me realize how inadequate and inappropriate my comparable literature list was -- it's nearly all fiction, and my book isn't! And the titles that weren't were mostly published over a decade ago. "None of that should matter", I mutter, annoyed with the industry. "My tale has more in common with these fiction books, and who cares when the damn book was published, that should tell them what my book is like!". Yeah. Uh huh. I dash through the rain because I don't like to be rained on and I'm just trying to get out of it. When it comes to querying, I don't like it that lit agents want titles that are in the same genre as the book being queried, and of recent publication. I don't like it that they expect me, the author, to tell them about where my book would fit into the current publishing market.

Meanwhile, I have also belatedly realized my book is weak in one area that it shouldn't be, an area I'd like to tout in my short descriptions of it as one of its feature strenghts: Derek is not just a patient being subjected to violations of patient self-determination in Elk Meadow facility, he's also specifically a genderqueer individual being viewed through a homophobic and sissyphobic lens. I need that tension to be there. But although I've got Derek's own internal musings about gender well-documented in the tale, he's keeping that so much to himself that the gender-identity tension between him and the institution isn't very well illustrated! So perhaps I will rewrite some of the internal dialog spots as conversational dialog, ideally within a group therapy scene and maybe followed by informal continuation with other patients around the cafetaria table. Or perhaps I will write entirely new scenes to handle this.

Also meanwhile, I continue to read from the book in its current form to my bi-monthly author's circle, and so I continue to make little changes in response to the feedback I get from the other authors.

All total, I need to stop approaching the selling of my book to a lit agent as a necessary chore to dash through. I need to wait until the book is in its best form, and I need to hone my querying tools patiently instead of trying to jam some words on a page and get it over and done with.

—————

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 many of us crave a world where it doesn't matter. "It" meaning our difference, the thing that, in this world, has set us apart. Marginalized us. Sexual orientation. Race. Gender identity. Whatever.

Raise your hand if you've run into people who have told you "Well, then, quit making an issue of it, why don't you? Just be you! Don't be so quick to stick a label on yourself. Why does it matter what sex you are, or if you like boys or girls or both, or any of that stuff? Let's all just be people!"

What do you tell them?

I totally get the inclination to roll one's eyes and sigh and say "You just don't get it", believe me. But rolling my eyes at them and telling them they don't get it isn't likely to expand their understanding.

From the snippet of Within the Box I'm reading to my author's group on Sunday:

“I don’t think none of us really knows what it’s like to be in another person’s skin”, George says. “But it’s not just because of pride that I’m always aware of being a Black man. World ain’t gonna let me forget it. We all have our own shit we have to sort out, but I don’t think it’s right to make out like seeing people with racial attitudes is hostile when this happens all the time.”

We can't draw attention to ways in which we're prevented from "just being people" and make an attempt to change that unless we can describe the pattern and, yes, stick a label on it. Something to call the phenomenon.

But yes, to those of you who don't see why "it" should matter, yeah, it shouldn't, and glad to hear that to you it doesn't make any difference, that actually is a good thing, even if you're annoyingly oblivious about the ways in which the world won't let us forget about it yet.

I've often found it useful to compare being genderqueer to being lefthanded.

In today's world, being lefthanded does not marginalize me. I can "just be people" despite being lefthanded. The world does not make an issue of it and draw my attention to it. I've never been treated substantially differently from how other people are treated because of being lefthanded.

I do still live in a world where being righthanded is the default, the standard assumption. Sign-in sheets at meetings have the pen glued to the wrong side of the clipboard, and I have to stretch the cord awkwardly to write my name on the form. Desks with the little table attached have the tables on the right instead of the left. But you know, these are trivial things; the truth is that it's simply not a "difference that makes a difference". Kids in elementary school didn't invent an array of hostile mean-spirited things to call me because of it. I didn't grow up hearing hateful epithets that meant "lefthanded person". I haven't faced discrimination in employment or housing or banking. Or singled out for special treatment by the police. Politicians aren't telling voters I'm a threat to their way of life and things need to be done about people like me.

But guess what? It wasn't always like that. Did you know? If I'd been born in the 1800s I might have had the back of my left hand hit with a ruler if my teacher saw me writing with it. It was considered to be the wrong hand. There was judgmental hostility. And if we go back even further, there was a time when it was associated with the devil. Not just wrong in the sense of incorrect, but wrong in the sense of evil. I might have been considered by the community to be morally depraved. It could have affected my ability to work and live and basically "be a person". It could even have played a role in getting me burned at the stake as a witch!

So if I'd been alive back then, it would have been fair to describe myself as a marginalized person for being lefthanded. It would have been legitimate for me to make a political issue of it, to point out that this was unfair and unreasonable.

Moving back to the present era, yes, I hope that having an atypical gender identity will someday be no more problematic than being lefthanded is. Maybe people will still make cisgender assumptions about people by default, but it will be no more oppressive than those signature clipboards and desks.

But a big part of the process of getting there is drawing attention to how that is not so yet, and testifying to what it's been like and why it's unfair and so on.

—————

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

I approach the topic of maleness from a different angle than most people. It isn't irrelevant to who I am; I do identify as a male person. But it means different things to me than it apparently means to most male people, or, for that matter, to most non-male people.

I'm a sissyfemme, one of the girl people, someone whose gender is queer instead of the expected value for male folks. Most of them grew up internalizing a lot of beliefs and attitudes about how a boy or a man ought to be, a lot of notions about how to compare themselves to other males and how to assess themselves.

For me, it was more like having been issued something, like a vehicle or an office or an identification number or something. I didn't choose it but nobody else did either. "Here, this is the morphology from which you'll be living this life", you know? Or at least once I came to be of an age where I observed myself to be more like one of the girls than one of the boys, that's the way I ended up thinking about maleness. It didn't contradict me being more like the girls. It also wasn't wrong. They simply didn't have much to do with each other.

I'm certainly not the only person for whom maleness and man-ness aren't coterminous:

"Yes of course, I have a male body. But why does that mean I have to go with the other males? Are we only going to be talking about our bodies? Are we only going to be talking about our dicks and beards and how weird it is when you start to grow hair around your nipples?", I asked quizzically. "Or are we going to be talking about being men? Because if we're talking about being men, you and I both know that I don't have much to add to that conversation".

-- Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story, pg 276

...Reactions from Grindr and OkCupid users enlightened me. I either have to be a drag queen, transsexual, or woman for my identity to make sense to some people. I am a cisgender male who occasionally wears makeup and might dress in drag three or four times a year. I am not a drag queen because I am not in possession of that fierceness. I am not a transsexual because I was assigned male at birth and I identify as male. I am not a woman because I am not a woman. Some women do have penises and they are still women. My penis is a man’s because I am a man. Can I make this any clearer? I urinate standing up.

-- Waldell Goode, Queen Called Bitch, pg 134

It's a fine enough morphology, and overall I have few complaints. At puberty, I gained a lot of strength without having to do anything, that was kind of cool. In general I like the aesthetic design of narrowness. Growing dark hairs in all kinds of places that either previously didn't have hairs or only had pale soft nearly-invisible ones didn't immediately rock my world, but I became fond of them pretty soon. I almost immediately resisted the expectation that I was going to start scraping them off my face with a razor: "Why, what's wrong with them? I kind of like it!"; getting a swollen bulge in my larynx was a bit offputting, to be honest, as I was a narrow skinny teenager and now looked like I'd tried to swallow something I shouldn't have with unfortunate results, but I liked the new baritone voice.

I was brought up with a somewhat puritanical set of adult teachings about the body and the parts that we were supposed to always keep hidden, the private parts of the anatomy. Less an emphatic "that's dirty" than an awkward embarrassed adult self-consciousness combined with anger and disapproval when some kid was being exhibitionist. The body parts in question were referenced mostly in terms of body-waste disposal, both by the various adults and by the other children, with a far less recurrent and far more veiled reference to the reproductive and erotic functionalities, so it was like pee/poop/{sex}.

Having a main part among these covered-up bits be extrusive and hanging out instead of tucked away didn't seem like a great design feature in a world where everyone either stammered and blushed or busted out in coarse crude vulgarity if they had reason to discuss such things.

I didn't have any direct experience of the primary alternative morphology, of course. Like everyone else, I got the version I was issued without any option of test-driving them both first. I was somewhat curious about what it was like, I suppose. I liked girls in general and thought they were cool so I didn't associate their form factor with anything negative, but there were areas of life in which I was in competition with them -- to be perceived as mature, self-controlled, on the road towards adulthood and responsibility -- and in that competition I was definitely a male who was keeping up and giving them a run for their money, beating them at their own game, the inverse of what the tomboy gals were doing on the playground.

Jack and Jill Magazine came in the mail once a month. I remember the story and the illustration: "I'm tired of being peanut butter", the girl's thought-bubble proclaimed -- she being the middle kid and feeling like the middle of a sandwich where the youngest and oldest kids got more attention. I found her cute, as drawn. Attractive. I had discovered touching myself, "tickling" private parts in a way that felt good, and it somehow got connected with looking. Yeah, first kink, I was such a pervert, a pretty non-uptight pervert who didn't worry I was doing anything wrong but at the same time I sure didn't want anybody to know.

At any rate, the erotic was pretty quickly linked to fascination with female morphology, looking at it, thinking about it. And soon enough this prompted some perplexed thoughts about what it meant to be female, insofar as the place I was "tickling" was specifically the place they didn't have. By early adolescence, I had learned that they "have one" too -- that in the analogous area they had a place that made the same kind of sensations and felt that way.

What was less obvious, less discernable, was whether or not they liked thinking about male bodies if and when they did that to themselves. Or whether looking at us gave them the same feelings I got from watching girls in their female shapes, taut jeans and dance leotards and swim suits and other apparel where you could see their shapes, especially right there where they were different.

Just as most of what is socially packaged as attractively masculine is irrelevant and foreign to me, most of the small array of presentations of male anatomy as visually erotic and desirable hits me as pretty hilarious and impossible to take seriously. Underpants with hot dogs or bananas depicted on them, that sort of thing. Or the associations with weaponry and the obsession with size. That all feels like it has more to do with the whole masculine thingie about being an adversary and conqueror than with the body contour itself being something that could evoke erotic appreciation. Oh well, I've read things written by female authors expressing a combination of mirth and dismay about wedgies-r-us bottoms (swimwear and underwear), "boob tray" tops that contort breasts into silly shapes, and other processes that convert the female body into something utterly without dignity. Still, the relative lack of cultural awareness of how people who desire the male body experience it as an object of desire creates a certain dubiety about any attempt to package it as such.

Not being someone who has wished to be female rather than male, I'm not a central candidate for being accused of autogynephilia, although yes, that has happened. I don't tend to view my identification with the women and girls as having anything much to do with my fascination for their physical architecture, and certainly not with any visualizing of myself as a person in possession of that architecture, since those are two entirely different things. But be that as it may, I have imagined being female and that imagining was definitely erotic in nature. But how can you act upon someone else's nerve endings without some notion of how that would feel? Reciprocally, being on the receiving end of someone else's tactile attentions is nowhere near as much fun in the absence of imagining the pleasure they're getting from it. We all do that, don't we? I don't think erotic emotional experiences are intrinsically gendered, but they may be sexed, even if only as a consequence of the architectural differences.

Maleness is one thing; being a man is something else. To echo what Jacob Tobia and Waldell Goode said, I don't have anything to add to the latter except from the outside, but maleness itself is part of my experience and identity.

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

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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.

————————

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Folks seem to think I need their acceptance, that I need them to think of me a certain way in order for my identity to be valid.

That's not really true.

Let me clear some things up for you.

I don't need you to think of me as one of the girls. I'm alerting you to the fact that I've spent a lifetime thinking of myself as one of the girls. Knowing that should make it easier for you to anticipate or understand my behaviors, which is something people have often complained about, that I'm weird and incomprehensible. If this FYI about myself makes it easier to understand me, good.

I don't need you to accept me as queer, as a genuine member of the LGBTQIA+ rainbow. The term "genderqueer" lets me explain my situation using a word you may have encountered before. So I use that terminology. If that makes it easier for you to understand me, good.

I don't wish to pass. The annoying default way of reacting to people like me is to assume we want to be viewed and accepted as ordinary boyish boys, or manly men, but we aren't pulling it off successfully and hence must be feeling like a failure at it. I'm not, and I never was. I don't need or want your acceptance of me as boy or man. But I also don't need you to embrace the notion that I'm different from them, that I'm actually more like the girls and women.

I don't seek to pass as a boy or man. I don't need to pass as a woman or girl. I don't need to pass as cisgender or genderqueer or transgender, as hetero or gay or lesbian or anything else you ever heard of.

I started speaking up because other people kept making an issue of it. Bringing it to my attention. Some being nasty and hostile about me not being right for a guy, and others being embarrassed on my behalf and trying to be supportive about me being ok and trying to reassure me that I was valid as a guy anyway. It got on my nerves and I felt like it was time I said out loud that I like how I am and I'm not trying to hide or slip under the social radar.

So now occasionally I get people telling me "just accept yourself". Or tsking about my need to get everybody's buy-in on my special snowflake identity.

But I wasn't putting it up for a vote.

—————

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.

————————

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This spring, my second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, went to press.

I had the distant vague hope that, unlikely as it seemed, maybe this book would catch fire and then draw attention to my first book. But that was not to be. As I'd more realistically expected, the tale of a male student majoring in women's studies was less topical and less engaging than the tale of a genderqueer person's coming-out.

I won't deny that it's been frustrating and disappointing. I made effort and I stuck money into the effort. I could probably have obtained more readers if I'd stood in Central Park with a pile of my books and offered folks $20 if they'd be willing to read and review my book. Every now and then, someone does something and it attracts attention and goes viral and at a certain point people want to know all about not not for its own sake but in order to not be left out of what everyone else is paying attention to. But either it is utterly random or I don't have the skillset and intuition to make that happen. Even the more trendy and topical book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, never made the social ripples I wanted to make.

But you know what? I have a good life. I get to have a wonderful partner, and to be a participant in a continually fulfilling relationship, which is, when you stop and think about it, what the first book was all aimed at: that people like me are generally deprived of that opportunity. I figured enough stuff out to understand how to seek it and recognize it when I found it; I did have a learning curve (same as everyone else does, really: how to be a good partner, how to balance my own individual needs with what a relationship needs) but my understandings and realizations let me step up and participate on the same general basis as anyone else despite being rather differently configured.

I'm sorry I wasn't better able to share it and make a social presence of this sense of identity, but it works, it's real, and I personally do get to reap the benefits.

I just sent out a little batch of "well, well?" follow-up notices to various people who had indicated they'd review my (second) book if I sent them a copy, but who didn't follow through. I would like to harvest at least a few more reviews for my web page.

I am definitely glad I wrote the books, not just for whatever good they do other people, but also to stave off any sense of regret I might have otherwise felt that I didn't try hard enough, didn't really do anything with my life. I set out to make sending this message to society my mission in life and I've made a credible effort, and I don't owe the world any ongoing self-sacrificial obsessive attempts. Doesn't mean I won't make further attempts, mind you, I can if I feel so inclined, but overall I feel pretty good about having stood up and defined myself and lived the life I've lived.

—————

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

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

My third book is in post-first-draft corrections and is being circulated to beta readers for feedback. Provisionally title Within the Box. Contact me if you're interested.

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

A handful of my friends and associates have told me they bought copies of my book but for various reasons (visual impairment, dyslexia, etc) they find it difficult to read anything book-length. "Is it available as an audiobook?", they've asked.

My publisher, Sunstone Press, has never discussed the possibility of either of my books being released in audio format, but I've read selections out loud at several author's presentations (discussion groups, book clubs, library featured author events, etc) and I got to thinking -- I have decent recording software available to me (I'm a musician after all), so I could record myself reading my own books out loud easily enough.

I decided to proceed with that. I figured I'd get feedback from the friends who had told me reading my book was a problem for them, and if they say my voice is sufficiently clear and easy to understand, I'll contact the publisher and see if they're interested.

That puts the audiobook format of the book only into the hands of people who already bought the paperback, so they shouldn't object, and they might wish to make it officially available for others who'd prefer an audio copy.

I'm using Sound Studio, a basic but reliable shareware product from Felt Tip that reminds me of the old Macromedia SoundEdit 16 I used back in the 1990s. Designate the input source (I use the Logitech USB headphones that I use for Zoom and softphone purposes, it has a good microphone optimized for speech purposes), click the Record button, and begin narrating.

Now and then I stumble. I make a mushy inarticulate rendering of a word, or I accidentally skip a line or insert a word that doesn't belong or leave one out... I hit the stop button. The sound wave patterns of what's been recorded up until then are on the screen in front of me, and although I can't look at the wave patterns and discern exactly what sounds they represent, I've learned the basics. I can tell where a phrase or sentence likely begins, highlight it, and play it back to be certain, verify that yep, as I thought, I made an utter hash of that, then open a new window, record just that little bit, copy, switch to the main window, delete what I've got selected, paste, then go back and replay it to make sure I've done it better the second time.

The book I'm working on is the first, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet. Typical chapters are 30-45 minutes, although it starts off with a couple short ones and will end with a short one.

I save as I go, in full-quality uncompressed AIFF format. Then I do a playback, listening through the headphones, stopping whenever some section seems lacking in enunciation and clarity, and again re-recording the snippet and pasting in a better replacement.

Sound Studio lets me fill in MP3 tags (track title, artist, track number out of how many total tracks, album name), so I do all that (using book name for album name, author name for artist, etc) and then do a Save As and save the file in MP3 format.

It took me a long time to appreciate my speaking voice. Nobody's voice sounds to them on a recording the way their voice sounds inside their head when they're speaking. The resonances you hear from within your skull aren't the same as the resonances that go out into the room. My recorded voice always sounds more hesitant and less clear, and thinner, than I think I sound. To me, when I'm listening to recordings of myself speaking, I sound like all the words run together as a sound puddle asifIwasn'tproperlypausingoremphasizingwhereonewordstopsandthenextwordbegins. Fortunately, that part, at least, is better when I'm reading from something that's written down, including my own work. I also had a challenge getting used to the tone of my recorded voice. The timbre of it is strange. My trans women friends are jealous, because I get ma'amed on the phone by default and I've never made any effort in that direction, it's just how people gender my voice when they hear it and don't have the visual of the bearded tall person with a prominent larynx in front of them to offset that impression.

I've done the first seven chapters, with ten more to go.

—————

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

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

My third book is in post-first-draft corrections and is being circulated to beta readers for feedback. Provisionally title Within the Box. Contact me if you're interested.

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

From Within the Box -- my third autobiographical book and current work-in-progress -- this snippet is a stream-of-consciousness monologue.

The book contains many such. After all, as a person in a "work on yourself / rehab" clinic, I'm focused at this point, both officially and in real life, on myself, and whether some portions of what's going on in my head are counterproductive & unhealthy or not. So naturally I'm self-obsessing. More than usual, I mean.

At this point in my life, I'm not much inclined to default towards "yeah I'm fucked up". I stand up for myself. I'm dubious about professional therapists and leery of their power. But I'm willing to consider that I might be defensive and hiding stuff from myself that I need to confront.

Mark Raybourne, to get you started here, is my designated individual counselor. I spend more time in group sessions of various types but I do get one-on-one sessions as well. As you'll see shortly, Mark and I haven't exactly hit it off.

------

Mark Raybourne wants me to think about whether my tendency to not give a shit whether other people approve of my behavior or not is a tendency that has unhealthy components. Okay. You can consider it a defense mechanism, but you can also consider it the necessary attitude if you’re going to move forward. I couldn’t afford to care. I was under attack. I had to believe in me. They had to be wrong. Yes, that installs the worry that this is a coping mechanism. Yes, I worried about that. That maybe my default assumption that I was right to believe in me and reject them as wrong was incorrect, and I...for some reason...deserved this.

I can’t talk with Mark about this, because he’s Mark and he’s not good at this. Yeesh. I think he means well but seriously, inept counselor-person. I don’t feel at all understood by him.

But still, back to his question.

Them. There’s a them. People not approving of me. I didn’t get why. I was a conscientious kid. I remember being in second grade and this girl in our class said something had been stolen out of her desk just now and several people in desks next to her said this one guy, who sat in front of me, that they’d seen him steal it. I knew he hadn’t done it, not in that time frame. I didn’t like him. He was nasty and he was stupid. He was one of the kids who picked on me whenever he could. He was mean. It wasn’t him. I’d have seen him do it. I’d been staring at people in my vicinity for the last ten minutes, just thinking about what would happen to each of us as we got older, became older kids. Anyway, I said so. My word didn’t carry much weight. I thought it should, because I thought everyone knew I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me.

I remember thinking that I could not care what the other people in the classroom thought. I felt like I’d done the right thing. I also felt like it was important to do what you think is the right thing. To care, and to act.

Yeah, so now at the age of twenty three, I want to reach out to them. Communicate. Share a concept, a set of thoughts, a model that they, too, might find helps them make sense of their experiences. Stuff about gender and sex and sexual orientation. Changing people’s map of the possibilities.

This is 1982. We know there are gay people. And we’ve heard them say we all should stop thinking there was something wrong with them. They liked who they were. They weren’t hurting anybody. They found how to seek out each other, and that’s who they wanted, others who were like them. So quit being all paranoid about it being a way of life that’s somehow stalking you. The lesbians in particular have explained that being on the constant never-ending receiving end of sexual interest from people you aren’t sexually interested in is not an experience that only hetero males might ever have to wade through. Yeah, fucking hell, sometimes there are people who get hot for you and you aren’t so inclined. Learn to deal with it, get used to it, unless they’re coercive it’s not the end of the world. Even the coercive ones don’t get to define our lives.

We also know there is transition. It’s in the media, part of the news. I’ve read Conundrum: From James to Jan. And also accounts written by that tennis player, Renee Richards. Oh, yes, of course I’ve thought about it. Things written by transsexual women resonate with me. A lot of them do. Some of them do not. The notion that it’s the wrong body, that does not. I often feel like I’m rejecting that notion the same way gay guys reject the notion that in order to find male people sexually attractive, they should have been female.

Yeah, it finally congealed for me. That I’m a male person, essentially one of the girls, in the same way that transsexual women know it, but in my case the male body is okay, it’s that there exists an identity of malebodied people who are girls or women, whose attraction is to female people. So they’re neither transsexuals nor gay guys. It’s something else.

And that’s who I am. I’m one of them.

So... joining other people... I’m open to advice on how to be the most open listener and still stick up for myself, and especially how to find people who would want to have this conversation.

I’m not trying to join them to have a community. I’d like that too. I’d be pickier about who I’d try that with. But for the message stuff, I want everybody I can get. I want to change your head. All you folks.

—————

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

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

My third book is in post-first-draft corrections and is being circulated to beta readers for feedback. Provisionally title Within the Box. Contact me if you're interested.

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

On a general-purpose, socially-progressive message board, someone posted to ask about the wide array of gender identity terms now in use, citing the available gender choices for one's FaceBook profile:

The list includes these choices: Trans Male, Trans* Male, Trans Man, Trans* Man, Transgender Male, Transgender Man, Transsexual Male, and Transsexual Man. Do these terms describe different genders? Or do these terms all define the same gender and are personal preferences for what people wish to call their gender?

Pretty quickly, someone else replied:

Those aren’t distinct “genders”. They’re phrases representing various preferred ways for people to describe their gender identity.

I replied directly under that:

^^^ This.

Don’t think of the genders the way you think of the elements on the periodic table of the elements, or the nutritional components of the human diet. Think of genders as each being one or more person’s articulation of their gender identity as a response to our society, which presented them with a Problem. The Problem was (and still is) that society divides people into male and female and treats the male people as all, indistinguishably, having a box of characteristics in common — let’s call it the Boy Box, later to evolve (for all the males, in the same predetermined way) into the Man Box. The female people get the Girl Box / Woman Box. The reason it’s a Problem is

a) It’s a generalization, and then the exceptions are treated like we’re wrong, evil, sick, pathetic, and/or unsexy and heterosexually ineligible in particular;

b) It hits people on an intensely personal level and is very hurtful to the exceptions to the rule, which sucks, and it isn’t really a lot of fun even for the people who do (mostly) fit the original description; it’s very depersonalizing about something that’s intensely personal, and it’s limiting;

c) It isn’t just a generalization even to start with. There’s a large dose of “prescriptive” stuff that never fit anyone of any conceivable sex, so much as it represents what our social structure would like people to be like for manipulative and exploitative reasons. (I’m personalizing social structure as if it had “likes” but it’s a useful way of thinking of it anyhow).

That's my thumbnail sketch version of what gender (and gender variant people) is all about.

Not everyone here on the LGBTQIA+ rainbow would endorse that view, though. Most centrally, not everyone agrees that gender is social and that it's all about personality and behavior and all that. Some people think of gender as a built-in characteristic that exists independent of social beliefs and concepts.

For instance, in a different but similar context, a participant in a FaceBook LGBTQ group wrote:

Hey, gender is real. We're born with it. You should read what Julia Serano wrote in Whipping Girl, we're born with a wiring diagram in our brains that tells us what gender we are, and for some of us it's in conflict with what society considers us to be. If it were all social, we'd all just go along with what society says.

Well, I did read what Serano said, thank you very much, it's right here on my bookshelf. First off, she says we should not think of this as gender. She's talking about a wiring diagram that sometimes says the body we are born with isn't the one we were designed to inhabit:

It seems as if, on some level, my brain expects my body to be female...brain sex may override both socialization and genital sex...I have experienced it as being rather exclusively about my phyisical sex...for me this subconscious desire to be female has existed independently of the social phenomena commonly associated with the word "gender".

Other people, however, are more emphatic that they realy do mean gender when they talk about something hardwired into their brains. They will describe a range of things that I consider to be socially attached to a given sex -- like whether you wish to adorn yourself with cosmetics and dress yourself in a skirt, or whether you'd rather play pool and drink beer all evening than sip cosmopolitans and giggle about the latest episode of Sex and the City -- as being caused by some kind of coding in the brain, perhaps genetic, perhaps induced by prenatal hormones.

I don't know about that. I see a problem with that notion.

One of my LiveJournal friends recently wrote on the topic:

Isn't it OK to categorize myself in order to present a somewhat-accurate description of who I am? Like identifying as an introvert or an extrovert? But we don't call "introvert" a type of "gender" or "race". Introversion is a personality characteristic -- would you rather have a lot of friends or a few close friends, do you derive energy from social interactions or do they wear you out?

Let me riff on that notion. Let's suppose that after a sufficient number of years of successful gender activism we reach the point that none of these characteristics are associated any more with whether you have a penis, a vagina, or some other biological merchandise. Well, at that point the gender identities are free-floating; each of them represents a certain way of "being in the world", a batch of personality traits and behavioral tendencies, but now that they are no longer in any way anchored in any particular physical body structure, they aren't appreciably different from notions such as being an introvert or being an extrovert.

There would no longer exist such a thing as a cisgender person. Nobody would assign you any identity at birth based on what you pee from. And with no cisgender people, there would also be no transgender people either, or genderqueer, nonbinary, or any other identity category of that nature.

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

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

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

———————

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————

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

Most of the books on my LGBTQIA+ shelf are either memoirs, where someone is telling from their personal experience what it's like to be a transgender man or a butch lesbian or intersex person or whatever, or they're explanatory books that set out to shed light on the situation of gay or trans or genderqueer people but don't do so by telling a narrative story. Then there are a few fiction books that sort of do the same thing as the memoirs, where the story about a nonbinary child or a pair of gay men in the 20s serves to illuminate what those social experiences are like.

When I began reading Black & Bold by Kevin Mosley, I started out thinking of it as one of those explanatory books, laying out the issues specific to black gay men in our society, and it does indeed do a good deal of that, but I came to realize as I read onward that it's actually more of a self-help book.

This is Kelvin, who having come to terms with his own identity, is reaching a hand back in love and support, saying, "You can, too!" A warmth and supportive reassuring presence is palpable throughout. There are guided meditation-like contemplative thought exercises and affirmations at the end of each chapter.

The most central pastoral care message that comes through is about rejecting self-hate. Mosley talks about the social hostility and negative messaging and how important it is to scrutinize these and set them aside and to feel good about yourself as a valid person -- a message that has applicability to everyone but of specific relevance to folks growing up black male and gay.

Reciprocally, there is a solid message about the emotional positives of being out, both for internal self-acceptance and for external social possibilities.

There is some thoughtful elaboration on the specific ways that being gay or growing up gay is different for black people, although not as much as I was expecting. Mosley is writing for a primary audience of black gay guys and hints and indirectly references a lot of this, though, and much of that may be self-evident for those in that position. That is partially a part of the tradeoff of writing a supportive therapeutic guide rather than a sociopolitical theory book -- the voice is clear and the material is well-organized and entirely absent of jargon, but it relies on more shared assumptions that remain unstated or only peripherally examined than a theory or a manifesto piece might develop.

That's not to say that these issues are unexplored altogether. The author makes the important point that, when compared to the predominant culture, the black community is more respectful of and affected by religion, making religious views of sexual behavior and sexual orientation a stronger force. Mosley spends a lot of time unpacking Christian-positioned judgmental responses to being gay, and does it without an antagonistically anti-religious framework, reaching to an audience that will contain many people who continue to consider themselves Christian, as well as people who don't but have been deeply affected by the embrace of those perspectives within their community.

Another theme often addressed and evoked even without a lot of academic analysis is intersectionality (although he doesn't use the word) --

A person who identifies with the struggles of living their life openly gay might still consider themselves superior to people with different abilities or skin color. Their experiences and identities do not automatically erase their potentially preprogrammed racist tendencies. This is why we often bear witness to gay white men executing racial crimes against a gay black man.

Mosley mentions how being a member of multiple deprecated outgroups increases the likelihood of being viewed negatively -- by police profiling, for instance -- and, on the other hand, how not also belonging to yet other such groups can ameliorate the judgmental attitudes that some people in the community are inclined to bring --

For the white man, he has his skin as his first line of defense. Before he is gay, he is white, and because we live in a twisted world that still indulges in the practice of racism, they are more likely to get fairer treatment from self-acclaimed moral police and preservers of outdated customs.

Mosley puts very little focus on ranting about what needs changing in the world, though, and mostly aims to hold a kind mirror to the individual reader, so as to help them make the internal changes from which they will benefit. He urges us to question the kind of stereotypes that polarize the world. He relates the story of Andrew, a young man worrying that anyone who figured him for being gay would be hostile, perhaps violent... he is conversing with a guy he has a crush on and two older black men approach and he's anticipating an attack, only to have it turn out that they're a couple -- his crush's two gay dads!

This is not to say that we are not discriminated against or that every crime against our race and sexual identity is imagined. If you look behind the veil, self-hatred and the inability to accept yourself for who you are is the first form of discrimination you experience.

Mosley is a mixed bag on inclusivity. Clearly he is writing about, and for, black gay men, but in discussing the processes of inquiry and self-examination, the acts that might lead to coming out as gay, he attempts to incorporate some other possibilities for the reader's consideration. He stirs in bisexuality and pansexuality the best, mentioning in several places that gay versus hetero is not an either-or consideration, that there is fluidity and complexity in attraction and expression and behavior.

Other LGBTQIA possibilities that might lead someone to ponder the possibility that they're gay are nowhere near as well addressed, though. He makes repeated mention of being part of the "LGBTQ+ rainbow" and attempts to separate gender conformity from sexual orientation in a "myths" section titled "Allowing boys to play with dolls will make them gay", but doesn't ever really unpack the possibility of how gender variance or gender nonconformity can be present as something utterly different from being gay.

He makes a better attempt to dismantle the inverse situation, of being gay without necessarily exhibiting gender nonconforming traits, in a different myths section titled "Gay people live flamboyantly" --

It doesn't suddenly turn us into label-loving fashionistas who want to wear feminine lingerie and put on tons of makeup... as a matter of fact, one of my closest gay friends plays football, drinks Guinness through a rusty funnel, and doesn't hesitate to knock a few teeth from the mouth of a homophobic if the moment calls for it.

-- but in many more places throughout the book he re-conflates the notion of being a femme or expressing as such with being a gay male, without holding it up for examination. As anyone who reads me regularly is probably well aware, treating gender and sexual orientation and physical morphological sex as being the same thing is a hot button for me and does get me up on my soapbox.

Before I climb up on it, let me make the disclaimer that Mosley isn't doing it any worse than many a transgender author has done in their narrative story, or worse than I see in many memes posted to LGBTQ spaces.

But on a chapter exercise on page 17, asking the reader "What is your primary sexual orientation?", he lists transgender, queer, and intersex as choices. Transgender and genderqueer are not sexual orientations, they're gender. Intersex is not a sexual orientation either, it's morphological sex.

And while it's nice that we're told that at least one gay fellow is a football hooligan who beats up homophobes, the book is rife with unexamined comments that imply that there's something gay about being feminine if you're male, and when you do that within a book designed to reach out to uncertain self-questioning people exploring their identity factors, that reiterates our culture's mainstream message that gender is an aspect of sex and of sexual orientation.

After years of attempting to blend in, I threw in the proverbial towel and dared to be myself... I slide into my rainbow dress, strut the streets , and stomp this battleground with my 6-inch thigh-high boots.

That's positioned as the author coming out gay. Not as the author coming out femme.

The alpha male and his supposed superiority over his counterparts are an urban legend that has fed the ego of brutish and selfish men who think little of everyone else. These guys perch on the fragile branches of delusional misconceptions...peering down on anyone who acts or talks in a way that is not considered fitting for men in their ranks. But laughably, despite all their show of brute force, it appears that the antidote for toxic masculinity is gay.

That's in a section that comes so close to indicting sissyphobia, misogyny, and homophobia as interrelated but separate processes, and yet for a lack of closer examination doesn't quite do so. Is the antidote for toxic masculinity gay even when the gay person in question is the football fan with the rusty beer funnel? How about the sissy femme male whose attraction is towards female folk, is he not an antidote? When stated as it's stated in the paragraph above, it's conflating being gay with being femme.

When Mosley discusses his own coming out, he says many people said he wasn't telling them anything they didn't already know.

This meant this huge secret I thought I had successfully kept from the world was not so much a secret as much as it was me living in denial...Meanwhile my "shame" was hanging out to dry for anyone to see. I wonder if it was because I dressed as Amy Winehouse for that Halloween party at Chad's?

Why would dressing as Amy Winehouse signal that someone is gay? Well, because we live in a culture that conflates femininity in males with being gay, but when you just toss this out without pinning it to the wall and untying those threads, even in a throwaway line, it adds one more underline to the notion that dressing as a female person would dress means you're attracted to the same sex.

Well... we do live in a world where we grow up hearing those equivocations. And if you happen to be attracted to the same sex as a male and you also happen to have some femme (or for that matter a lot of femme) in your disposition, it's natural, I suppose, to think of them as the same phenomenon. Hateful people react to your femininity and say you must be gay, and despise you for it, and when lo and behold it turns out you are indeed gay, you reject their judgment but have less reason to question the notion that they recognized you as being gay because you were so femme.

Black & Bold -- A Guide to Self-Love: Conquer Sexual & Racial Inequality, Proudly Identify as Black & Gay by Kelvin Mosley, publication forthcoming, © 2021
Kelvin Mosley is a member of the LGBTQ Writers Facebook group I'm in.

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————

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

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Index of all Blog Posts

I won't be quitting my day job, but it was nice to have this arrive in yesterday's mail.

Fledgling authors get warned a lot about discouragement and despair in the querying and submitting phase, and I would still consider that to be the hardest and most demoralizing slog to get through. But if, like me, you get published by a small publisher that's in no position to do promotion and marketing and advertise your book, you'll most likely face a second discouraging phase once it's actually in print and it seems like no one is reading it.

My sales didn't take off like a skyrocket, going ever-higher and higher, but they also didn't hit an initial max as all my blog readers and followers and friends obligingly went out and bought a copy and then plummet afterwards. Instead, I got a sawtooth of good sales periods interrupting the doldrums and a gradual accumulation, ultimately doing nearly twice as well as I thought I was doing. Later, I'll do an analysis to see if (as expected) the upticks in sales corresponded to when I did author readings or had new ads out.

This is for the first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet. In the most recent months reported, sales have fallen off as my attention (and blogging and advertising) has mostly focused on the second book. But I'm releasing combo ads that tout the two books as a continuing tale (which is true) so maybe that will fuel another good month or two for the first book.

—————

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

Once upon a time there was a culture, and as you might expect, the people in that culture held beliefs about how life was for them.

The predominant notion, the one held by the mainstream of people, was that relationships were sort of like parallel lines, moving in the same direction, although that direction might change from time to time; there would be some zigs and some zags, but the lines never touched, and were not supposed to.

Something like this, if you were to draw it like a diagram:

zig zag parallel lines

This is fundamental to our culture, they said; this is the floor upon which everything else resides, so this is important!

Well, there were people who interacted differently, and experienced matters differently, and they were considered by the mainstream to be doing something they were not supposed to. These folks spoke with each other about their own experience and discarded the predominant notion, and formulated their own beliefs about how life actually was.

Relationships were actually like cells, and all cells touched adjoining cells and there was nothing akin to the untouching parallel paths that the mainstream folks liked to describe.

They began drawing this symbol and wearing it on their t shirts and putting it on flags that they carried at their rallies:

"What's WRONG with the mainsteam people?", some of them asked each other. "Why do they insist that reality is something it so obviously is not? We have shown them, we have pointed, and still they deny the absolute truth of the touching cells -- why?"

"Oh, they do it specifically because they hate us", came the answer. "It's a lie, since the truth is plain to see. The purpose of the lie is to have an excuse to condemn us!"

And in mutual support and solidarity, they embraced the understanding they had as the foundation of liberty and equality and all possibility of peace, so that lies like this could not bring them down again.

Then one day some other people who also interacted with a different pattern than the one prescribed by the predominant culture spoke up and said "Actually we do have the lines. We also have cells but for us the cells don't touch each other. They're separated by lines. We think you've got it a bit wrong. It's really more like this:

separated cells

And the touching-cell activists frowned in disapproval of these new dissidents. "We support you for being hated on and attacked by the dominant culture group, but you really need to listen. You are falling into their trap by believing in separation. Your model would leave cells so that they don't adjoin each other and that is the real essence of what is bad about the mainsteam insistence on parallel lines that never touch. So you need to get over that, okay?"

Meanwhile, the mainsteam folks were quick to condemn the new dissidents the same way they had done for the touching-cell folks, because they were all threats to the essential doctrine of separate parallel lines. It was okay to zig and zag but not to touch!

Pretty quickly the new dissidents got mad and began saying that the touching-cell folks were lying and were full of hate, because the baseline truth was right there in plain sight if one cared to look, and this intolerance could not be excused just because the touching-cell movement people considered themselves outcasts and therefore social victims of the mainsteam.

This is, of course, a metaphor, and you probably already anticipate the visual punch line:

floor problem

Before you say "Yeah yeah, blind men and elephants, etcetera, and 'why can't we all just get along' thrown in at the end, seen it and heard it before", the point is actually not so much "Gee why can't we just get along", nor is it "let everyone have their own reality and don't condemn anybody else", really. The point I'd like you to take back from this is that things look differently based on how the light falls on them and the angle from which one views things, but if, instead of contradicting what someone else is seeing, you get them to start there and move their eyes far enough to see how the other interpretation can be perceived as part of the same overall pattern -- then you have a chance of communicating.

And yeah, I had specific groups in mind. Of course I did. The mainstream view is the cisgender heterosexual patriarchal floor plan. The touching-cell folks are the second wave radical feminists. The new dissidents are the gender identity activists, including trans and genderqueer and nonbinary people.

I don't care who you are, quit holding on to the notion that in order for you to be right, they have to be wrong. Quit using their hate and intolerance as a reason for ignoring their perspective. Of course hate and intolerance is wrong, and of course their insistence that your truth is wrong is, itself, wrong. But be leery of the possibility that their hatefulness and their refusal to listen to you is being mirrored in your own behaviors.

—————

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

Here's a snippet from That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class --

Queenie’s perspective seemed to be mostly formed around belonging to an already-existing category that people knew about, while mine on the other hand was all wrapped up in theory, describing myself as belonging to a hypothetical group that I then had to describe.

If I was understanding correctly, all the gay males that Queenie had grown up knowing about painted their nails, wore dresses and skirts and high heels, did their hair, carried handbags and purses, and referred to each other with female pronouns. Or at least except for the ones trying to keep it hidden. That was how you did gay. It wasn’t a thing separate from doing femme.

My first book, GenderQueer, was a story of gradually arriving at a gender identity that wasn't already out there available for me to join, because "genderqueer" wasn't a term or a concept in our society yet.

Guy in Women's Studies on the other hand, mostly is a description of my primary attempt to join, to link up to a community, a culture, a movement. To be a part of. To participate.

Not only was it an era before "genderqueer" was trending, it was also an era before the rise of academic departments and majors called "gender studies" or "women's and gender studies" or "women, gender, and sexuality studies". Instead, what existed were departments of women's studies. That was the main place that gender and biased gender expectations were being discussed, or at least the main place where I, a male, could enroll and attend.

So that's where I went.

I think both modalities have their limitations as well as their strengths. When you seek to join an existing identity, you are to some extent fitting yourself into a pre-existing box. So in the case of gender, here we have people rejecting the notion that they should fit themselves into the gender box that is designated for a person of their physical morphology... but who then look around for a different existing box to move themselves into. I'm serious: I'm in a dozen or more Facebook groups devoted to being gender-variant in assorted ways, and in all of those groups there is a constant trickle of young people coming in to post, "I came out as nonbinary and ace aro when I was 16 but lately I've been wondering if I'm actually demiboy and grey ace or even demisexual? The thing is, I don't know if I can really say I'm a demiboy though since sometimes I like to wear skirts in the summer, and I don't want to be a fake, what do you think?"

So yes, people really are measuring themselves against these identities and then worrying in a way that's at least a little bit like the original friction of measuring one's self against the original imposed binary gender identity that society tried to impose. I mean, yeah, on the one hand, there isn't enormous social pressure to pick that particular box, the way there is with the original pink-and-blue box pair. But on the other hand, these aren't young people who are saying "Well, a good portion of the descriptions of 'demiboy' and 'grey asexual' apply to me, but there are also ways in which I don't fit the assumptions, so whatever, something like that". They're fretting about it. Needing to find an identity, an existing label that fits them like tailored clothing.

To formulate one's own identity definition, of course, rescues one from that sense of perhaps picking the wrong box. But the limits on this side of the divide are all about going it alone, not having any kind of social pre-existing understanding of the kind of person you're claiming to be and having, instead, to explain it all to people. Many of whom may not find it all that interesting to listen to such a complex and detailed self-description. And while the people trying to pick the correct existing box often seem to walk around with an internal doubt, a sort of impostor's syndrome, those of us who have gone around inventing our own labels and identities and spent time trying to live our lives espressing and explaining ourselves in those terms get a lot of external doubt, the dismissive and sometimes hostile attitude of other people that we're fakes, that our identities can't be real because if they were real, why hadn't they heard of such identities before?

—————

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 am neither trans nor cis.

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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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ahunter3

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Genderqueer Gets Reviewed... by, umm, I think, an AI ?!?

An Expanded / Revamped Scene

Update -- Status of Within the Box

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The Paradox of Male Identity & Bonding

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2022 PostMortem on That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class & Etc

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An Interior Monologue Snippet

Gender and Its Variants

On Being a Non-Transitioner

BOOK REVIEW -- Black & Bold by Kelvin Mosley

It's All About the Sexuality

Separatism, Safe Spaces, and The Other

My First Royalty Checks (book one -- GenderQueer)

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Identity: Joining, or Formulating?

Passing Phase

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