I go on Facebook and encounter an image of an (apparently) male person staring in the mirror, caption says this person is trying on his mom's clothes while she's out; reflection in the mirror shows an (apparently) female person in bra and briefs staring back; thought bubble says "Wow, I look BEAUTIFUL"; caption below says "... and then she knew who she really was".

I am one of those people who were born male -- by which I mean born with the physiological equipment that tends to lead obstetricians to assign newborn infants to the male category -- who then subsequently identify with the girls and women instead of the boys and men. There is a pervasive notion that the core of identifying that way, the reason for it, the important part, is all about being a sex object, a desirable beautiful person.

And I do mean pervasive. It's everywhere. You can find this notion expressed by trans women and by trans exclusive women who mock them; you can encounter it among the socially aware who support transgender and other gender-variant people's rights and concerns but also from transphobes and social conservatives who are dismissive of us.

There's certainly some pushback, but not enough to keep me from wanting to push back against it myself. So maybe this is something you've heard several times, but maybe you need to anyway. This attitude is annoying AF and I get tired of encountering it.


* I first started thinking of myself as essentially one of the girls and only technically one of the boys when I was about eight. Third grade. There were a lot of things about being a girl that just seemed right, and superior. Being pretty wasn't an important item on that list. I'm not sure it was ever on the list at all.

* When I came out in 1980, at the age of 21, I began trying to explain that who I was inside (and who I had been for years, inside) made it appropriate to think of me the way you think of girls and women, and that I didn't aspire to be a man or have any interest in being measured by the standards associated with them, but that, outside, I was male. The male part wasn't wrong, just the man part. I never had any interest or intention of passing as a female person -- beautiful and sexy or otherwise.

* I'm not saying I never had any interest in being found sexually attractive and desirable. As a teenager and young adult, I developed a dislike for the asymmetrical situation, where the girls were being hit on and pressured and cajoled and sought after for sex, and where the boys were expected to do that hitting ond pressuring and, if they didn't, were assumed to have no such interests. You know the drill: sex as something where the female people are the commodity and the male people are the market. I didn't want to play at that table. I wanted reciprocity. I wanted to be desired in the same way that I desired, and to be no more a sexual consumer than the objects of my own desire were. So, sure, I ended up wanting those aspects of being human that are marked "female" in our society. But...

* In my particular case, the people for whom I felt sexual attraction were, in fact, female people. That meant I could not get this reciprocal and egalitarian sexual experience as easily as folks with same-sex attraction. It also meant that, although I did want to be sexually desired, the notion of literally being a sexy attractive female person myself didn't have as much appeal to me as it might have for someone who found male-bodied folks sexually interesting.


In a world where women in general are often treated like the only important thing, the only thing that matters if you're female, is to be sexually desirable to men, it should not surprise any of us that the attitude towards someone born male who says they identify as one of the women is to reduce that identification to an identification with being the sex object. And to map it directly onto the sexualized idealized female form with its idealized shapes and curves and associated apparel.

Not that there's anything wrong with wanting that, if that's what you want, but the people for whom that is true are not the only show in town. And, in the social climate where this is the pervasive default assumption about all of us born male who identify with the women and girls, you have some responsibility to avoid perpetuating that this is what it's all about.



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


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

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






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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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



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Do you counsel young people trying to sort out their gender identity? You should read my book! It's going to add a new entry to your map of possibilities when you interact with your clients!

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


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



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

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I occasionally hear some cisgender woman express her dismay about AMAB girls and women fervently embracing the status of being an object of desire. She might say, "Maybe it's because you haven't been exposed to it all your life like we have, but you sometimes act like none of you never heard of women's liberation and the importance of not just being treated as a sex object". Or with more exasperation, perhaps, as "Yeah, trans women are women, but I'm so tired of seeing the intro posts with the posed photos... it's like they're saying that's what a woman's existence boils down to -- being somebody's fucktoy".

Male and female people, cis and otherwise, can make lists of things that are less available to them in social life because of gender. For the folks perceived as male, these may include things like the opportunity to nurture relationships and the ability to be with children without being viewed as likely child molesters; and for the folks perceived as female, things such as being regarded as likely leaders, being taken seriously and followed when they speak with authority. The sense of being excluded from these things unfairly is considered legitimate, and to rejoice in having gained access to them anyway, whether by transitioning or by other means, can be high-fived as a well-deserved trumphant celebration.

But when people who were not originally designated as female celebrate being perceived as sexy? That often gets seen as trivial fluff.

In discussions with cis women who spend a lot of their time analyzing what the rigidity of sex roles deprives people of, I encounter some of that. "Oh, seriously, that's something you think you'd enjoy? Honestly, it's very tiresome and annoying, and most women wish it would just go away".

It's one of the most interesting "grass looks greener on the other side of the fence" perceptions. Talk to a bunch of cis hetero males and they'll often emphasize the power that comes from being the wanted component in a partnership. "Whether you've got a company that everyone wants to work for, or you're a really skilled expert that all the companies want to hire, if you're the one that everyone else wants, you get to call the shots, you know? Or let's say you're a famous movie producer, and all the actors want to be cast in your movies. But you also get that if you're the actor that everyone wants to get to play starring roles in their movie, right? So how can women not be experiencing that as power? I think it would be wonderful".

The envied women say it feels like always being a gazelle or an impala on the veldt with tigers constantly trying to take you down and prey on you. The never-ending harassment, the pushiness of the sexual pickup attempts, the constant reminder of the possibility of sexual coercion, none of that makes them feel like they're the ones in control of the situation. "And when you add in the way you're so often just seen as sex on feet, that you get reduced to this and the rest of who you are and what you're doing doesn't count, hell no, we don't feel like we have the power, not the way you make it sound".

So when it comes to transgender women (or other feminine-spectrum identifying folks originally designated male), when we indicate that we want more of that kind of experience in our lives, or we post our "hey check me out, how do I look?" selfies as part of our introductory posts on Facebook, we are sometimes made to feel like we're airheads. TransBarbies whose most important social-political concern is the chance to be whistled at.



I sometimes feel like responding, "Look, you can't have it both ways. Entire theories of women's oppression have been formulated that revolve around the notion that males fear their own craving for the female body and for that reason set out to control women. Well, if sex objectification is a central issue for female people's experience of gender, you shouldn't trivialize a similar centralization of the same topic when people in the male situation examine the workings of gender".

Trans women may not regard themselves as ever having been male, but they started off barred from a range of women's experience and women's existence, so they still have the experience of staring at this phenomenon from the outside. Being deprived of it.


I personally am one of the odd gender-variant folks whose identity is subsumed in the "Q" rather than the "T" of LGBTQIA. I am not a transitioner and I don't present as female; I neither pass nor seek to pass. That puts me on a somewhat different trajectory in approaching this issue. I'm perhaps more inclined to emphasize the priorities in life that make me one of the girls and not one of the boys, and the tastes in movies and books, porn and erotica, and nuances of behavior, as ways in which who I am is femme, the self that I am is a person who is one of the gals and not one of the guys. I can't strike a pose and display my feminine appearance and say "See?" Not because I don't have a feminine appearance, but because to see it requires a mental translation that most people aren't equipped to make; it's discernable to people who can abstract the feminine as a way of being in the world and then apply it as a style to the physically male body without finding any conflict or discrepancy in that.

My own sexual orientation is not towards male folks, and that probably worked against me developing any particular interest in having the appearance of a female person (the existence of lesbians not being sufficient to offset that). Instead I found myself pining for a visit to a world where the dynamics were inverted. To be sought after, to live in a world where the people to whom I'm attracted might seek me.

More analytically, I already knew how to want. But since I'd always considered myself to be one of the girls, therefore an equal to them, for me to want meant also wanting to be wanted in return, mutually, and reciprocally. And to not want sexual access doled out as a reward or favor or earned on merit. That's unappealing. A gal needs to be craved a bit, prized and cherished.



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

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


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

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

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"Oh, great", the gay and lesbian readers may be thinking. "First they want in, and make us expand what we call ourselves to include them, and use this ever-expanding acronym. And now they want to kick our identity out!"

Don't worry, you've got company. "Transgender / Cisgender" is inadequate too. I'm not trans. I was assigned male at birth. I identify as male. Not trans, right? I identify as femme, as girl, gal, woman. When I was assigned male, I was also assigned boy. I'm not cis. Because I'm all sissy. I'm not a man.

I'm not kicking anyone out. I'm coming out, which means I'm coming in, and for me to be in, some of the assumptions have to go out, so get used to it, because I'm not going back in, so let me in. It's complicated. Get used to that, too!


Let's start with the simple complicated. You've seen the genderbread person and the gender unicorn posters, right? The ones that give a nice simple explanation of why sexual orientation and gender identity is so much more complicated than "are you a boy or are you a girl" and "so are you straight, gay, or bi", right?






I'm male, that's my sex; I was assigned male at birth. They assigned me that way because they saw a penis. I've never dissented with that. It's the body I was born with and it's not the problem. I'm male. Male is not my gender identity, mind you. I'm one of the girls, that's my gender.

You with me so far? You see where those answers appear on those posters?

OK, then, with that in mind, let's move on to sexual orientation. I'm attracted to female folks.

Straight, gay, or bi?

Umm... sex or gender? I'm a male girlish person. Male people attracted more or less exclusively to female people are het, right? But women loving women, those are lesbians, aren't they?

This time the posters don't clarify much. Gender Unicorn gives me the choice of "physically attracted to "women", "men", or "other genders". Well, that doesn't help. I said I was attracted to female people, I didn't say anything about their gender identities!

Let's try the other poster. Genderbread says I might be "sexuallly attracted" to "women and/or feminine and/or female" people. That's a lot of and/or. The chart also gives me the option of "men and/or masculine and/or male" people. What happens if I'm attracted to masculine female people?

Both posters also address romantic (or emotional) attraction but the options are the same. And neither of them deal with the question of gay or straight or bi. It's just as well, because those terms can't handle the complexity of what's on those charts.

And the charts oversimplify matters too much.

Someone else might be attracted to feminine people, to people whose gender identity is expressed to be "woman". They might find a masculine female person uninteresting from a sexual standpoint. They might find a feminine male person to be of erotic interest. What defines sexual orientation may differ from one person to the next.

There's something else that the charts leave out about sexual orientation. Neither of them mention how the person wishes to be sexually perceived. Both charts have a space for gender expression but that's about gender, and I'm talking about sexual orientation. I'm referring to which of a person's characteristics one wishes to be found sexy on the basis of. That, for example, someone wants to be perceived as a sexually attractive woman, to be appealing to people whose attraction is towards women. It's not necessarily the same as gender or sex. I know several cisgender women who do not like being found sexually attractive as sexy female people. It's not how they prefer to market themselves in the universe of sexual orientation. I know both intersex and trans people who are revolted at the idea of "chasers", of people who are (or would be) turned on by their physical morphology. I know others who would feel very disappointed if their partner was not turned on by their physical morphology.

In my case, I'm into female boyish people who are attracted to male girls. Yeah, try to find that option on your dating app!



———————

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

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


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

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

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To explain the difference between sex and gender, I often say that as a generalization, there are two sexes, male and female, plus an assortment of exceptions that are largely ignored and erased; and that further generalizations are made about the personality, behavior, nuances, priorities, etc of those two sexes, and some non-factual stuff imposed on it as well for ideological purposes, and those generalizations (distortions included) are what gender is.

I wrote something along those lines two weeks ago in my blog post titled "Clarifying Gender Inversion".

And, as I often do, I received responses from some people denying that, even as a generalization, we can be said to fall into two sexual categories. For instance, eroticawriter wrote this comment on LiveJournal:

While I agree with a lot of what you've said here, you're wrong that "on a biological basis there are two sexes, and a handful of variations that we can dump into 'intersex'". When it comes to sex, gender, sexuality, etc. there is no binary except the cultural constructs imposed by patriarchy and colonialism.

"There's nothing oppressive about making a generalization", I often reply; "the problem comes when the exceptions are treated like there's something wrong with them! Believe me, as a sissy feminine male I'm fully acquainted with the experience of being treated like there's something wrong with me for being an exception to the rule, I've been told that I'm not the way boys or men are supposed to be all my damn life. Legitimacy doesn't require numbers and numbers don't convey legitimacy; cisgender normative people outnumber us but that doesn't make their way of being in the world correct and ours incorrect or sick or wrong".

But my critics are adamant: no, "the binary" is an oppressive ideology, our sexes do not divide up into two categories even as a generalization, and I need to get with the program. (eroticawriter was not the only person to make such a comment; someone within one of the Facebook groups I belong to did likewise, and then later deleted their post and, along with it, my reply to it, perhaps because they did not like the way the discussion was playing out)

I consider them to be wrong about this. More about this below, I promise.

But first, I want to talk about the larger phenomenon I think this is a part of: the notion that there's not a "real" reality in life or nature; instead there's the white male cis hetero able-bodied English-speaking privileged reality... and then there are different, equally legitimate, realities for the rest of us.

That is technically true, 100% true, but in a truly vast number of situations it's irrelevantly true. Let me explain.

Point to the North Star, would you? If it's not visible for you at the moment, wait until it is. Every one of us occupies a different position, so the direction of the North Star is going to be different for each and every one of us. That's 100% true. But if you drew a perfect straight line from every single one of our pointing fingers to the center of the North Star, you'd end up with almost the exact same thing as what you'd get if you just drew a line from the center of our sun to the center of the North Star. All our differences are so minor in comparison to what we have in common that we can ignore them. Even having some of us do our pointing in midwinter while others aim their fingers on the summer solstice, when the earth is on the opposite side of the sun, just doesn't make enough difference to count. And that's the usefulness of the notion of objectivity — not that things really do have a single meaning regardless of the viewer to whom they have meaning, but that many things, perhaps most things, have so little variance in what they mean that we can safely ignore the differences in our social and physical locations.

And it's politically dangerous to discard the notion that anything has actual real meaning. If oppression is all a matter of perspective, then gee, develop a new perspective and get over it. Or at least quit complaining about it because to me (or so says the clever social conservative, at any rate), you're not oppressed and hey, that's my reality and you just went on record as saying there's no objective reality just your reality and my reality and his reality and her reality and so on. (See the problem?)

Like the story of the blind folks and the elephant, we may each only have a partial picture of the truth, and we should keep that in mind when we communicate, but we should also remember that there was a real elephant with a real elephant-reality and elephant-truth about its self whether any individual blind guy had a comprehension of it or not.

OK, back to the physical sex binary, as I promised. Let's posit, for the sake of discussion only, that my critics are right and that I'm wrong. That the majority of human being do not, in fact, fall into the two categories "male" and "female" and instead there are a multiplicity of varied sexes about which no generalizatons can be made that would divide them up neatly into two camps like that, even with the exceptions left over as a minority. What if that's true?

* Well, that makes cisgender people a minority, for starters. Most people were assigned either male or female at birth. But we just posited that it's NOT true that male and female people are a majority. That means most people's actual sex is something other than what they were assigned at birth.

* Defining heterosexuality becomes complicated. There's no coherent meaning to the notion of "opposite" sex if we're not in a two-sexes-generally-speaking kind of world. I suppose we could say that a person is heterosexual if they are attracted to any of the multiple sexes that differ from their own. But heterosexuality the institution -- the structure of expectations and interlocking behavioral dance steps, the courting and flirting and other romantic and sexual behaviors that assume two opposite sexes? That becomes divorced from any underlying pair of sex categories to which the majority of people have ever belonged. It's a restrictive ideology without any visible anchor and it's going to require some explaining to show how it could have gotten there.

* It's unlikely that we would have a single broad category called "intersex" to describe all the people who are neither male nor female. That's not how people tend to generalize. Remember that the people we now call "intersex" are not a single sex that differs from male and from female, a third sex, but are instead a plethora of multi-varied sexes. Here's a person with XY chromosomes who has a vagina and labia, and testicles inside her labia. Here's a person with a four inch clitoris who penetrates his female partners during sex and uses tampons when he gets his period. Here's someone with a vagina but no uterus and who has never developed breast tissue and who has a full dense mass of facial hair. All those people exist in the world that I recognize as reality, of course, but in the world that we are positing, the world in which male and female people are not a majority, all these people we're describing would not be regarded as an exception to the rule, because we have no general rule, remember? Instead, I suspect we would have a name for each of the ten or fifteen most common sexes. Perhaps we'd have some kind of "etcetera" category for the smallest minorities left over. We don't have that, though; we have a situation where we have categories male, female, and, just barely acknowledged in a whisper, intersex, the "etcetera" category into which we cast all the exceptions. If the males and females together don't constitute the majority, indeed the overwhelming majority, this needs explaining, just like the ideology of heterosexuality.

* Insofar as most people identify as either "male" or "female", in order for it to be true that the majority of people are not either male or female, we're saying that most people do not correctly know their own sex. And that is a rather pompous assertion that certainly needs some explaining! Oh, it's possible, I suppose... we could say people have "false consciousness", that the notion of a sexual binary has been imposed on us all and we've been socialized and brainwashed into believing in it, even though it doesn't really exist in the real world. But who is responsible for this illusion? The cisgender people? They're a minority within this supposition, remember!? And while minorities can sometimes oppress the majority, they don't tend to do so by making the majority believe everyone has the same identity as the oppressive minority; instead, they usually establish their own identity as a privileged special identity that justifies their position over the others, an identity that they can lord over the others.

It's possible but I don't see a compelling case for it, and all my experience has been to the contrary. I've been to the nude beach and I've been inside locker rooms and I've been in a neonatal nursery full of newborns. I'm not going to pretend that I am not socialized into awareness of categories used by my culture, but I don't seem to have to shoehorn a huge bunch of not-really-either people into categories they don't fit into in order for a two-sex categorical system to work for the overwhelming majority of human beings.

If you wish to put forth a theory that explains how an ideology supporting a completely fictitional belief in a physical sexual binary was created and is maintained against the evidence of a non-matching physical reality, feel welcome to do so, but I regard that as an extraordinary claim, one that is not necessary in order to acknowledge the existence, dignity, and self-determination of intersex people, or the similar legitimate existence of people who do not fit general patterns that describe the two primary sexes, such as gender inverts and genderfluid people and agender folks and demiboys and demigirls and so on.


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"I think you have a misconception", my women's studies professor told me. "Feminism is not 'for women who step away from traditional feminine expectations and roles'", she said, making air quotes. "Feminism is for all women. We want to support women's freedom to choose their own options, and that includes being a mother, or a receptionist. It even includes being a sex object". She paused and sighed. "In my day we were trying to get away from that, but now lots of women are seeking it. Anyway, my point is, feminism isn't about telling women how they're supposed to be. It's fine to not conform to the expectations that are projected onto women but it's also fine if you do, if it's what you want for yourself".


I understood her point, but it was still nevertheless true that lots of women who were not traditionally feminine had felt a special resonance with feminism. Feminism told them it was okay to be the way they were, in a world where everyone else was saying otherwise, so of course they had a special interest in it!

I just finished rereading Tomboys!, a collection of short reminiscences edited by Lynne Yamagushi and Karen Barber. The subtitle is "Tales of Dyke Derring-Do". It is specifically about the experience of growing up unfeminine, or masculine if you prefer. Tomboyish, hoydenish, boisterous and forward and irrepressible, physical, nervy, athletic, competitive, immodest and not demurely amenable. Hell on wheels.

The women writing the pieces were definitely seeing themselves as revolutionary insurrectionists, and they saw it as specifically feminist bravery. How could they not?

Anyway, I'm reading these stories again, and, not for the first time, wishing for a similarly compiled collection from tomboyish women whose sexual orientation was towards male people. In particular, I'd be interested in reading how they negotiated a sexuality that didn't require betraying their personalities and behavioral patterns as tomboys in order to be sexual participants with male partners. And how they structured their relationships.

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I suggest we split what we call "identity" into two components. I apologize if I’m repeating myself; my thoughts keep returning to this notion the way a tongue seeks out a sore tooth. I’m talking about a simple split here – not like the myriad aspects of identity portrayed in the Genderbread Person and other such formulations (useful though they may also be at times). I’m suggesting the usefulness of distinguishing simply, between self-chosen identity and identity that is assigned to us by others (which I refer to as altercast identity). I have my reasons for proposing this, which I’d like to go into. You see what you think, OK?



A Lesson from the Workplace



I’m currently working at the NYC Dept of Health, assisting in the coding of data from survey forms that track Naloxone distribution. So on a day-in, day-out basis I’m staring at a lot of survey forms, and one of the questions asked of respondents is their race. Respondents are asked to tick off any categories that apply (they can select multiple answers): White, Black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native, Don’t Know, or Other. Or that was the original set of choices; "Hispanic or Latino/a" was added to later editions of the form. Why? Well, originally, "Hispanic" (yes/no) was a separate question from race. But enormous numbers of respondents were checking the "Other" box on race and writing in "Latino" or "Hispanic". Clearly, they experienced being Hispanic as a race, something that (more often than not) they identified as instead of white or black, not in addition to it.

But it doesn’t stop there. On both the old forms and the new forms, people check "Other" and identify as "Puerto Rican", "Dominican", "Cuban", "Mexican", "Salvadorean", "Chilean". Nor is this trend by any means confined to folks from Spanish-language cultures. People are selecting "Other" and self-identifying their race as "Irish", "Czech", "Russian", "Iranian", "Mixteca", "Filipino", "Ethiopian", "Jewish", and so on.

On the one hand, -- hey that’s interesting, the social construct of "race" appears to be converging with what we would have called "ethnicity" or even "country of origin", and given the lethally poisonous history of the ideology of race, that could be viewed as a healthy and positive development.

On the other hand, the original thinking behind asking people their race included a concern for whether or not our services were reaching populations that have historically been underserved. And when you look at it in that light, the intention is not so much "how do you identify yourself, race-wise?" but more "how would other people most often categorize you and regard you?" – because the latter is the factor that most directly shapes how people are treated (or mistreated or neglected in the offering of treatment and so forth).



Why I am Not a Lesbian – the Reprise



A few weeks ago I posted a blog post titled "Why I am Not a Lesbian". It was controversial; it upset several people, most commonly transgender women who identify as lesbians. In retrospect, perhaps I should have titled the post "Why I am Not a Lesbian and Also Not a Heterosexual Man". I kind of thought the latter portion of that was sufficiently well-developed in the essay, but I guess I didn’t give it as much emphasis. I did state that being in possession of a penis and associated physical structures does not define me as a man and therefore doesn’t define my attraction to female people as heterosexuality.

But the part that lit the controversy-fire was saying that my identification as a femme, a feminine person, a girl, does not define my attraction to female people as lesbianism either. I was talking about myself, about my identity, but my assertion was taken as if I were saying that what is true for me should be considered true of anyone else who has the kind of physical plumbing that is traditionally and typically considered male. In other words, as if I had said "I am not a lesbian because although I have a woman or girl gender identity, I have a male body, and hey, you over there, you aren’t a lesbian either, you silly AMAB!"

(I found this frustrating; I thought I had been quite clear that the problem is that "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are insufficient terms, because they assume that sex and gender are the same thing or have the same value, and so they don’t have a socket for someone who identifies as a male girl, as I do)

I present as male, or, at least, make no effort to change my presentation so as to elicit an altercast categorization by other people as female, and so I am viewed as male. In this culture that is coterminous with being viewed as a man. I don’t really make an effort to package my appearance so as to be viewed as a male, but I have a physical body such that, were I to go to a nude beach and be seen from a distance by a thousand complete strangers who know nothing of how I identify, I would be overwhelmingly categorized as a male person. If I show up at the local lesbian bar, I will be perceived there also as a male person. And not as a lesbian. And that is significantly a part of my identity experience.



An Exploration of Comparative TERFitude



I have a respected acquaintance and political ally who, if someone were to call her a TERF ("Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist"), isn’t a person on whose metaphorical feet I could honestly say the shoe does not fit. She reads this blog. I am not going to defend all of her positions, and indeed I’m about to attack some of them. But not all of them.

I do think it is relevant to organize around social experience that people have in common. When feminists come together politically, they often wish to join with other people who have also had a lifetime, ongoing experience of being seen as, viewed as, treated as a woman. As with the intention behind the race question on the surveys, this isn’t about how one self-identifies. It’s about how other people have altercast one, how other people have categorized one with or without one’s concurrence or dissent from those assumptions.

Raise your hand if you remember Rachel Dolezal. Is there anything inherently wrong with identifying as a black person if you happen to be the pale-skinned descendant of European ancestors? I think not; I certainly don’t take issue with it (although it's not my call to make). But Rachel Dolezal occupied a position that was intended to be staffed by a person who had the relevant political social experience, the experience of being perceived as and treated as black, and that was not, in fact, her experience. And that is why we regard her has having done a Bad Thing. For purposes of evaluating her appropriateness for that position, it’s not about her self-chosen identity as black, it’s about having been (or not having been) on the receiving end of being altercast by others as black and treated accordingly.

Some lesbians are "political lesbians", not in the sense of being lesbians who are also political people, or even who are also political about being lesbians, but in the specific sense of choosing to constrain their sexuality so as to express it only with other people who have been in the political situation of being altercast all their lives as girls and women. I’m not saying they do not also find the female form to be physically attractive, or to find the womanly character traits and personality attributes to be romantically desirable in and of themselves, but a fundamental reason to them for being lesbians is to not give their erotic energies over to anyone except other people who have been in that political situation, the altercast identity of being female and woman in a patriarchal society.

In light of their existence within the larger lesbian community, I personally would find it arrogant and inappropriate for me to identify as a lesbian. Your mileage may vary. I do not speak for you. But whether I like it or not, whether I prefer it or abhor it, I am perceived as a male, a man, and treated accordingly, and as a consequence of that I do not have their experience, the one they define themselves by. I would like it if they were to listen to me for who I am, and for the experiences that I have had as a sissy male who rejected masculinity and was proud of being a sissy male, because my story is also relevant to patriarchy and feminism; and I would like to be with female people who do not wish or need their interactions with male-bodied people to revolve around assumed differences. Around me "being a man". I’m not one. I’d like lesbians to understand that. But I do not opt to call myself a lesbian, nonetheless.

My colleague has a reprehensible habit of referring to transgender women only in the dismissive, not listening to anything they might have to say aside from their identification of themselves as women, and she rejects that. She doesn’t reject it with nuance and she does not carefully split the matter of identity and then explain the ways in which a transgender woman isn’t what she means when she says "woman". It is hostile and it is contemptuous, what she is doing, and it is wrong, and I may have to part company with her over it. Splitting identity factors as I am suggesting here would be a useful tactical tool for her, and she could do so and thereby cease negating the identity of transgender women as women while still being able to say "we do not, however, welcome you at our separatist feminist enclave, which is for women who have been treated as girls or women for a lifetime". She could do so and then also participate in (or even host) other meetings which do not exclude transgender women. And which could, incidentally, include me as well.

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There's a brand-new genderqueer memoir out, a genderqueer coming-out and coming-of-age tale going to print, and I'm jealous. Obsessively insanely jealous. I wanted mine to be the first.

Those of you who've been reading my blog regularly are aware that I didn't have such an intense reaction when I discovered Audrey MC's Life Songs: A Genderqueer Memoir. Well, there are two reasons for that: firstly, Life Songs is basically and primarily a transgender story, a tale of transitioning to female by someone assigned and regarded from birth as male, and then very late in the book the author tacks on a throwaway line about how being a transgender lesbian is "so limiting in its binary construct" and so she now identifies as genderqueer; and, secondly, Life Songs is essentially self-published. So on balance I didn't feel authentically beaten to the punch.

SISSY: A Coming-of-Gender Story by Jacob Tobia is the genuine article. Jacob happens to be a gay male and their experiences of being a genderqueer femme were shaped by that, but this is not a gay coming-out story with a nod towards nonbinary appended. This is the real deal.

"I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am a glimmering, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, beautiful, human person, and I don't identify that way for fun. I don't identify that way because I think it makes me interesting. I don't identify that way as a hobby. I use that language to describe myself because it is fundamentally who I am."

As large as being (and coming out) gay did loom in Jacob's teenage years (and how could it not?), it's pretty much incidental to the main narrative they're telling, so yes, there's finally a book being published about what it's like to grow up genderqueer, as a sissy, a feminine male who actually embraces their identity as feminine male, one of us.

And published? Putnam, baby. G. P.-freaking-Putnam's Sons. Yeesh. I have dreams of getting my book picked up by the likes of Seal Press or Sibling Rivalry or something. Compared to that, Tobia is Cinderella in a gold carriage and I aspire to a pumpkin on a skateboard that I can push down the road and call a coach. Did I mention jealous? Jacob Tobia may be in for one seriously bitchy review here.



First, though, some of the sparkly bits. Sissy has some real gemstones.

One of my favorite takeaways is Tobia's replacement of The Closet with The Shell. That being self-protective, and not being cowardly, is the reason people aren't Out yet; that when threatened, one may retreat into one's shell and that there's no reason or excuse to belittle this as if we aren't entitled to put something between us and a hostile world. That we don't owe the world an honest testimonial to our identity, as if it were our secretive lying behavior that causes the surrounding society to make hetero cisgender dyadic normative assumptions about everyone. It's not our doing that makes that the norm that we have to push off from and differentiate ourselves from in order to come out! If we owe a coming out to anyone, we owe it to ourselves, but there's really no excuse for the community to mock people who don't do that, or haven't done so yet.

Tobia at several points talks about what it's like to be in a world that has no term and no concept for who and how we are —

As a child, I understood that my difference was beautiful, was natural, was fundamental. I knew just how special my gender was. But without a name, without language to put to what I was seeing and feeling, I had no way of sharing the importance of my difference with others.

... and later, starting college ...

The problem is that there are generally no lines written for people like me. There was no role for a gender nonconforming person at Duke, hardly even a role for a gay boy. Without realizing it, just by doing what they were used to, by following the rules suggested by the structure around them, my classmates had erased me

... and again in the vivid confrontation at Duke with their classmates and the organizers of a retreat called Common Ground. This time there is a specific conflation of sex and gender: the participants are told to sort themselves:

"Today we'll be talking about gender... we'd like to separate the room into two groups: women—sorry, female—and male participants"

Tobia pitches a totally appropriate hissy fit. It's frustrating living in a world that perpetually, obliviously insists that whosoever is biologically male is a man, that sex means gender, that dividing the room along this fracture line creates two groups each of which will contain the people who belong in it. Tobia starts with warning the organizers that the male group had better be focused on the male body, male morphology, and not about the experience of operating as a man in this world. "Because if we're talking about being men, you and I both know that I don't have much to add to that conversation."

As someone who has spent a frustrated lifetime trying to put these things into words myself, I kept on bouncing in my seat and occasionally raising my clenched fist and cheering.

The showdown with the Common Ground participants is the closing bookend to Tobia's college experiences. The opening bookend took the form of a couple weeks in the wilderness with a different campus retreat group, Project WILD, that hiked into the Appalachian mountains. In the natural setting, temporarily cut off from ongoing social reinforcements and structures, they found gender polarization withering away. "Bodies no longer signified behavior or character traits; breasts were breasts, nipples were nipples, genitals were genitals, hair was hair, none of them bearing ideological weight." It has a lasting effect on Tobia, providing a taste of how things could be different, but less so for the others who disappointingly retreat into their gendered shells once back in the school environment.

It's appropriate and consistent that these bookend-moments are events that are designed to get people in touch with themselves and each other. Tobia is active in the church in his pre-college days and despite living in the south (North Carolina) spends most of the book's trajectory in social environments that are tolerant and open in a modern sense. This is not the Bible-thumping Alabama conservatism of Jared Eamons in Boy Erased, and the issues that Jacob Tobia had to cope with are the same ones that still plague our most issue-conscious and woke societies now. Most of Tobia's story is about a person who is out and proud as a gay person but still trying to figure out how to come out as someone who is differently gendered. It's us, and it's now. Tobia gives us the much-needed "Exhibit A" to enable society to talk about genderqueer people with some understanding and familiarity.

After I came out as gay, I never officially came out as genderqueer or as nonbinary or as trans or as feminine.

I have no idea why Tobia proclaims that they never came out as genderqueer. Maybe they meant specifically to their parents?! It's a worrisome disclaimer at the time it's issued, because this is before Tobia goes off to college, and although the story up until this point includes a lot of secret femme behaviors and tastes, it seemed to me that there was still room for the story to be all about a gay guy who, now that they're writing a book, opts to identify as a sissy femme as well. But fear not, it's not so. It's a coming-out story if there ever was one. Tobia tells many people in many ways, many times. It's just more complicated because when you tell folks you're gay they don't generally get all nonplussed and stuff and ask you what that means, exactly; but coming out nonbinary or femme or genderqueer is nowhere nearly as well understood.

Now, Jacob Tobia does equivocate sometimes, and they of all people should know better! Whilst looking around for a social circle in high school that wouldn't be a badly uncomfortable fit for theirself as a still-secretly femme sissy, Tobia muses about the degree of homoerotic locker-room experiences among the jocks and compares it to the substantial amount of homoerotic anime available to the nerds. Look, hon, if you're going to write an essay about how being femme is its own thing, try not to step on the hem of your own dress. We get another misdemeanor offense like that when the college essay is being crafted — an essay about going forth in public in high heels — and Tobia refers to it as "an essay about wearing high heels and being the gayest thing on this planet." T'weren't so much as a mention in that essay of noshing on dicks or craving male sexual companionship, and just like the Common Ground people treating male as the same as man, this is a problem. Some of us sissyboy folks might like to go forth in high heels ourselves (although that's not quite my aesthetic taste) despite not also being gay guys, and we get just as erased by this conflation as by having "male" tied to being a man.

Be that as it may, gay male culture has not exactly been an unmitigated embrace of femme culture. There are scores and hordes of eligible gay guys posting personal ads and specifying "no sissies" or "no feminine nellies" or "masculine presenting only," and shrinking away from anything feminine as gross, like they think we sissies have cooties or something. There's a scene in Sissy, after Jacob has dashed across the Brooklyn Bridge in stilettos to earn money for an LGBTQ shelter where the masculine gay interviewer asks if comporting like this isn't "playing into stereotypes." So it is a politically flouncy act for a gay femme to put it out there and in your face and to underline their pride in being this way, femme, specifically as a person who is also that way, gay.


In the aftermath of Project WILD, Jacob Tobia finds themself back on a campus in the midst of fraternity and sorority rush (ugh!) and the intense gender normativity and polarization drives them away from the connections made with classmates in the Appalachians.

"In the vacuum that was left, I did what came most naturally: I started hanging out with the queers... within about a month, I'd cemented msyelf as the first-year activist queer, attending every meeting of Blue Devils United, our undergrad LGBTQ student organization… .

Yeah, well, convenient for you. To have a structure like that in place where a person like you would fit in on the basis of sexual orientation (which is almost always going to be the majority identity that brings participants in; you get a roomful of gay guys, a smattering of lesbians, a couple token transgender folks of the conventional transitioning variety, right?). I did promise bitchy, didn't I? You got a platform from this. You made social political connections where you could start off recognized as an activist gay student, something people could comprehend, and over time, even if they didn't fully get that your issues as a femme person were something other or more than an expression of gay male concerns, you could push those too, get them out there, explain them to people who started off believing you were in this group for your own legitimate reasons, marginalized for being gay.

Aww fuck, I can't win with this whine, can I? It's not exactly going to fly for me to try to claim that hetero sissies are more oppressed or that gay sissies are privileged in comparison. Well, Jacob Tobia, one thing you reinforced for me is that if I feel the need to bitch and whine, I should go ahead and be proud of being a sore loser, I should refuse to be classy even if the people I'm jealous of, who seem to have advantages I don't have, are good people with more than a compensating amount of situational detrimental oppressions to offset all that.

I aspired to this; I went to college to be an activist about this peculiar sense of identity and I tried to connect and to become part of a community. I rode into downtown New York City and hung out at Identity House and marched in parades and tried to connect there too. But mostly I met gay guys who came to such groups or events in order to meet other gay guys, or trans women who wanted to talk about surgery, hormones and passing. I even attended a bisexual support group for awhile, thinking/hoping that even though "this wasn't it," that the mindset of people in such a group would be more conducive to someone espousing sissy lib and socially interested in connecting with a butch or gender nonconforming female person who found sissy femmes attractive. No such luck: the bisexual gals tended to interact with males in a conventionally gendered way, according to the heterosexuality script I was trying to avoid. And one consequence of all that is that I didn't become a part of an environment where I could be a spokesperson. (I had similar problems when trying to hang with the feminists, by the way; they didn't regard gender issues as my issues, and saw me as a supporter only).

I suppose it's fair to say that heterosexually inclined sissies get bought off. We're not as often in situations where our queerness can't be ignored; our sissyhood doesn't get us found in bed with a same-sex partner at the motel or in the dormitory, and we don't get seen holding hands with a same-sex partner while walking down the sidewalk. We don't go to designated social scenes that would draw attention to our identities, the way the patrons at Pulse in Orlando did. So it's easier for our difference to be tucked and bound and hidden. And so far there hasn't been an "out game" for us to join so there's been no counter-temptation to offset that.



Hey world, you still need my book, too. Buy Jacob Tobia's, yes, buy it now. It's powerful. Buy it and tell everyone about it, spread the word. But an author in Tobia's situation can't directly attack and dismantle society's equation of sissy with gay. When someone comes out as a gay sissy, it corroborates the stereotype that sissies are gay and gay males are sissies, and because of that, a heterosexually inclined young sissy boy reading Sissy or watching someone like Jacob Tobia in a television interview may not feel very reassured that who they are is someone that it is okay and possible to be. Furthermore, all the gay sissies in the world, along with all the lesbian butch women, can't fully dismantle the gender-polarized scripting that constitutes heterosexual flirting and coupling behavior. Oh, they threaten it: whenever gay or lesbian people connect, it challenges the notion that sexuality requires the participants to be rigidly assigned to a sexual role by their biology. Even in a gay or lesbian relationship where one person is the butch and the other person is the femme, you don’t start out where each person is automatically assigned to being the butch or the femme because of what sex they are. It may be a negotiation between the two people, or perhaps a person comes to feel that the butch role or the femme role is the one that fits them best. And of course lots of relationships don’t use butch and femme at all. But the real challenge has to come from genderqueer people who participate in biologically heterosexual encounters, finally making it so that heterosexuality itself is no longer dependent on those binary polarized oppositional roles.

Well, also history. I came of age and came out in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The entire community of marginalized orientation, gender identity and intersex people (MOGII **) has an interest in learning how being gay or being trans etc. was and has been over time and in different settings. In particular, being genderqueer/nonbinary is often seen and spoken of as if it's an affectation, something that no one would come up with on their own if it wasn't already out there, trending and looking edgy and stuff. So hearing stories from people like me who came to a genderqueer sense of identity before there was such a term (trendy or otherwise) should help retaliate against that attitude.


Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Google, Kobo, and most other likely venues. Support gender-variant authors and buy a copy!



* Tobia's preferred pronouns are they, them, theirs

** As an alternative to the ever-expanding LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA, LGBTTQQIAAP acronym, MOGII is becoming a popular way of designating the community. We're together in this because our sexual orientation, our gender identity, or our physical body is different from the mainstream.

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I finally got to see Boy Erased after having missed it when it was playing in a few regional theatres.

Jared Eamons (Lucas Hedges) has one of the stormiest coming-of-age and coming-out experiences: he's in college and [CONTENT WARNING / spoiler alert] gets raped by another religiously inclined boy, Henry (Joe Alwyn), who, like so many rapists, doesn't appear to see rape itself as a fundamental moral failure; instead, Henry is focused on the wickedness of same sex erotic behavior and whimpers to Jared afterwards about his remorse for the bad things he's done. When Jared, to Henry's apparent surprise, isn't particularly warm and friendly to him subsequently, Henry becomes worries that Jared will inform on him, so he preempts that by outing Jared to his parents and to people on campus.

You can be excused for wondering why being outed as a rape victim would cause anyone to reach any meaningful conclusion about the victim's sexual orientation, but Henry doesn't allude to his own involvement or factor in the violence involved; he simply tells everyone that Jared has been engaging in homosexual activities.

As it turns out, Jared has indeed been aware of sexual feelings towards males, and when confronted and accused decides to be honest about that.

That sets the stage for Jared's father Marshall (Russell Crowe), a socially conservative clergyman in a southern Alabama church, to arrange for Jared to attend a gay-to-straight conversion program, "Love in Action", a Christian-centric day facility operated by Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton).

"Love in Action" is a total institution in the classic Erving Goffman sense; Sykes and his staff evaluate the program participants not only on their own behaviors and attitudes but on what opinions and feedback they provide to the others attending. That means they control all of the approval and disapproval that anyone can receive within the program. Denying that you have any problem, any worrisome attitude or unhealthy compensation mechanism, is itself always a symptom, proof that you aren't dealing with your issues, so no one can disagree or differ from anything that they are accused of. And of course this way of treating you is defined as therapeutic, as something you're being subjected to for your own good. It is, after all, love in action.

There is a considerable amount of internalized self-hatred and self-rejection in Boy Erased, and it is convincingly portrayed. Michael (David Joseph Craig) is a rule-worshipping martinet, bristling with disgust and contempt for Jared and the other sinful wicked people brought to the program; Henry the rapist is clearly tied up in revulsion for his own attractions and urges; Jared himself spends much of the movie accepting that he belongs here, worrying that God will condemn him to hell for being this way. There is a scene where Brandon (a camp counselor brought in to give masculinity lessons, played by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers) first berates Jared for going into the toilet unaccompanied and accuses him of going in there to masturbate, and then stands behind him commenting lasciviously on how Jared pees. And from the top, Victor Sykes, an "ex-gay" convert himself, gets a discernable amount of prurient delight from hearing the confessions of his fallen guilty charges; he doesn't believe Jared when Jared details his homosexual sins as consisting in their entirety of laying down next to another guy (Xavier, by Theodore Pellerin) for a spate of platonic hugging. Sykes wants to hear more juicy morsels to pass judgment on.

The scenes where Brandon gives lessons in how to be manly men, instructing the boys on how to stand and what positions to hold their wrists in, etc, are campy and silly and reminiscent of Kevin Kline's sendup in In and Out. But given how silly it actually is to aspire to this thing called masculinity by mindlessly emulation, that's probably not easily avoided.

Boy Erased subtly underscores a fundamentally Christian problem with a homophobic agenda: having already gone on record as disapproving of heterosexual sexual activity except when restricted to marriage, the conservative Christian churches have painted themselves into a bit of a corner; they can't simply run camps like "Love in Action" as boot camps for enthusiastically heterosexual activities without contradicting a lot of what they stand for. As a consequence, throughout this movie we see a somewhat anachronistic approach to the condemnation of gay sexual activity, treating it as an unpicky, polymorphously perverse way of being entirely too interested in sex in general, rather than a failure to lust sufficiently for the opposite sex.

Nicole Kidman plays the mom, Nancy, who is largely ignored and bypassed by her husband in his rush to handle the crisis of his son having gay sexual feelings. She never joins in the judgmental condemnation and later comes to Jared's rescue and stands up to husband Marshall in the process. This is consistent with conservative men being more hostile to gay males than women from the same culture are.

The most important point, though, is that "Love in Action" does not function as a straightening clinic. It's a recloseting clinic. The clients who attend are not reshaped into heterosexual people and there's very little pretense that this is happening. Instead they are told to "fake it until you make it", to go through the motions, to study what passes as normative heterosexual and gender-appropriate and exhibit those characteristics. The camp's pressure on the participants is to go along with the program, to appear to agree more than to understand and be truly motivated by it. Appearances are all. Other boys in the program advise Jared to say what will give the counselors the impression that he is making progress. It's how you get out of here.

Boy Erased is based on Garrard Conley's book Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith and Family


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The #MeToo movement has revealed a cognitive disconnect in our society between people who think sexually predatory behavior is inherently and inexcusably wrong and people who think it is only wrong when it crosses certain thresholds or boundaries.

In the latter camp are people who say that if we aren't careful, we're going to make it illegal and reprehensible and socially unacceptable to be a sexual male.

Why male? Because saying predatory male sexual aggression is mostly about as necessary and useful as specifying female menstrual supplies when discussing tampons. Because sexually aggressive predatory behavior is generally assumed to be as naturally a part of maleness and male sexuality as having periods is inherently a part of being female.

Feminist theorists have pretty much always said that this isn't so. That the connection of males to this behavior is a part of institutionalized heterosexuality, that it's not biologically built-in that way. This simultaneously means that it can't be excused on the grounds that it is inevitable and inherent in males and also that it is sexist to project this behavior onto males as if it were automatically a component of their character.

But if it isn't biologically built-in, if it is indeed a social construct, what happens when someone who thinks of himself as one of the girls ends up being attracted to them as well?



Me. On the most fundamental level, I'm what happens. It's the core of my story. Certainly there are other aspects of the tale, other areas of tension between the gendered expectations that people assumed about me and who I actually was--from interest in an ongoing connected relationship as differentiated from interest only in casual sex opportunities on down to things like how I move and sit, and so on. But if there's a central axis around which the greatest tension lies, it's around the behaviors that get called things like "sexual initiative", "sexually aggressive behavior", "putting the moves on", "making your play", "seducing" and, yes, "being sexually predatory".

Basically I'm not. It's not behavior that comes to me automatically, and since it is perceived as selfish and pushy and exploitative of women (and certainly not feminine), well, as someone who always thought of himself as one of the girls, I wasn't at all happy to be perceived this way and recoiled away from it. So that's what happens.



But that's not the only thing that happens. People like me get seen as examples of what happens when a male is not taking the initiative to put the moves on sexually attractive female people. And what doesn't happen is any kind of simple fluid coming together and connection, any discernable heterosexual success rate that makes our behavior look like a good strategy. People see that, observe that, and incorporate that into how they understand the world, that's what happens.

And there is social hostility and marginalization of feminine males, girlish males, as we all know, but more specifically to the point there is condescension and a disparaging attitude towards the prospect of us as heterosexual participants. We are pitied. The female people who might become involved with us, however briefly, are also pitied. Our sexuality is perceived as pathetic.

#MeToo voices seldom speak at any great length about males whose sexual behavior is not invasive and geared towards making sex happen, initiating sex. Their focus is on the problematic ones who do. When a different set of voices are expressing uncomplimentary opinions about nonvirile effeminate men who are unsexy for failure to grab and take, they seldom go on to discuss sexual assault and sexual harassment and rape and such things. It's almost as if no one can see both sides of the coin at the same time, or remember what's on the side opposite of what they're currently facing.



Not all male people who consider themselves atypical of the male gender or consider themselves femme or otherwise not part of the masculine construct, are opposed to taking sexual initiative. Some are quite emphatic about saying that being feminine does not mean they are sexually passive or strictly reactive to someone else's overtures. Indeed, I suppose the grab-bag of supposedly feminine traits contains enough material for someone to claim several aspects without selecting that specific one. I have to admit that I'd be interested in sitting down with other femmy males who are sexually aggressive and trying to get a better understanding of how and why this is compatible with thinking of themselves as feminine, how they handle the perception of this, how it all fits together for them. But yeah, I haven't been nominated to speak for all the sissy femme guys, and I don't. But for some of us it is not only a part of the picture but rather central to it, the behavior and the nuances of feeling and attitude towards sexuality and towards other people, the economics of sexual supply and demand and questions of self-worth and dignity, the role of tenderness and responsiveness in sexuality and the concomitant avoidance of the belligerent and the offensive crude.



Recently I have had the opportunity to pitch my book to feminist publishers who wanted a shorter and more concise query letter than what I usually use, and in the process of honing a new tighter letter that gets to the point quickly, I found myself pitching my book as a what-if: what happens when someone who thought of himself during childhood as one of the girls grows up and ends up being attracted to them as well?

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