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When I came out 44 years ago, I set out to follow in the footsteps of the social change agents I admired. I had a real and personal cause. Not that I'd been looking for one, I'd mostly been drawn towards social justice movements to distract me from dwelling on my personal life dissatisfactions so much; it felt good to care about someone else, and to feel drawn in to a righteous commitment, you know?

I have obsessed a lot lately with the sense of not having made any impact despite 44 years of making the attempt. I do occasionally see that this isn't an entirely fair appraisal --

a) I may have been there in various times and places where I was supportive of someone else's self-investigations or where I was perceived as some kind of role model, and then someone *else* went on to make the social ripples I never made; and

b) There's a lot of aggregate accomplishment, of changing the overall zeitgeist of our society about gender, where the same forces that made it possible for me to develop my sense of identity drew strength from me and others like me and it made an environment where yet more people could come forth with variant identities

c) Certainly, having a vision of a differently configured society has been a great and wonderful shield, protecting and insulating me from internalizing and worrying about the views of the society I actually live in. And I have a powerful distrust of Missions where one sacrifices one's personal life and personal happiness for some Higher Cause that's all about bringing about a world that one never actually gets to.

How much of it is ego? Wanting the satisfaction of having an impact, of watching the ripples become waves? Certainly some of it and probably a lot. I like to sit at the piano and smash big powerful chords down loudly. I like to craft sentences and paragraphs that make ideas resonate with people. No doubt about it, and no room to pretend otherwise. I want to rock my world.

At least some of it is a sense of responsibility and even duty, though. I promised myself as a child that if I ever figure out why it's like this, why my presence seems to bring out the mean streak in other people and they mock me and express contempt instead of receiving me warmly, I would fix it, not just for me but for anyone else like me. Whether it's a misstep that I made in understanding life and people or something that the rest of the people have gotten wrong about or whatever, that it has to be fixed.

And that's the part that is reluctant to let me rest and keeps prodding me to try to Do Something, to figure out a new and different approach that might finally work.

—————

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

You ever notice how large a percent of the social argument is about whether to treat your difference -- the factor setting you apart from the conventional assumptions -- as a verb or as a noun?

I have noun hunger; I wish the way I am to be understood as a thing and not a behavior, an identity not a way that I am acting. I don't want to be an adjective or an adverb, a How You Are rather than a Who You Are.

I know enough to be cautious about seeking to be seen as innately different, though. I'm also a psychiatric survivor, a person who's been a resident of a place with bars on the windows and locks on the doors and they take away your shoelaces and your belt. They treated us as innately different. "Ruined useless brain-damaged crazy people, that's Who They Are." So it works both ways.

In my opinion, we of the sexual/gender identity variant sort have done a good job of setting forth how we want to be perceived, claiming the noun, I am this different kind of self. This isn't the entirety of who I am, but it's good shorthand starting point.

I get some pushback sometimes. Good. It's nice talking to the ones who agree with me but if you want to change the world you live in you've got to communicate with the ones who don't. I mean, it's why we push.

So I propose more testimonial personal descriptions of why marginalized people want the noun treatment. The difference in how it feels. Why shouldn't we be entitled to not having our selves painted as a behavior and, since we're variant, a misbehavior? That's the whole point, I'm not being different on purpose, I'm being me; maybe it happens to be different from you being you, however plural you may be and however singular and nonbelonging I am.

I'm not saying nobody ever gets to judge me, I'm accountable for myself. But "different" isn't wrong and you don't get to treat it as wrong.

—————

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

Back in December, when I reviewed Cyrus Dunham's *A Year Without a Name*, I noted the author's fleeting worry that an ambivalent attitude towards the identity he transitioned to could be seized upon by transphobes as proof that this whole transgender thing is being embraced by people who might get buyer's remorse and reject it all later.

Torrey Peters takes it to the next level and wades headlong into it, giving us a character who has, in fact, detransitioned. It's not a screed against the danger of having a transgender identity available as an option, but rather instead another novel that upends the neat little identity-boxes and the oversimplifications.

Amy/Ames, the detransitioned character, has not abandoned their she-identity because it did not fit, but because it fit a little too well, opening up an enticing menu of desired options and outcomes that left her as Amy too vulnerable in a world where vulnerability is a liability. The extra social cost of being trans, on top of the interpersonal emotional price tags of being a woman in this society, was too much, and if the response was to close down, to deny one's feelings and be as oblivious to them as possible, why not go the whole way and retreat back into being one of the guys?

Amy/Ames' former lesbian partner, Reese, is the second of the three primary characters. Reese, unlike Amy/Ames, has not detransitioned and is still coping with life as a trans woman. She, too, finds fulfillment and connection an ongoing challenge but she's in it for the long haul, and resents Ames for abandoning her.

Katrina is Ames' boss, and his current lover, and at the book's opening she does not know that Ames lived as a transgender woman. Ames has assumed the female hormones taken during that time ensured sterility. Incorrectly, as it turns out: Katrina is pregnant.

The premise of the book is that Ames is totally not ready to occupy a social and psychological role as a male parent, feeling utterly like a fake man. Reese and Amy had been planning to adopt before they broke up, and Ames comes up with the solution that the three of them jointly should raise this baby.

Katrina is gender-nonconforming in various ways herself. She tops Ames in a BDSM-flavored dynamic and has never felt as ease in the conventional woman role. This is her second pregnancy; she was married, became pregnant, and miscarried, and to her horror realized she was glad because it gave her an excuse to break up the marriage and escape from the projected identity-assumptions of all their married-couple friends.

A significant amount of the story is told as backstory, filled in in flashbacks: we see Reese as a boy, pre-transition, at the ice skating rink, skating with the girls who are his friends, wanting to blend in with them, resenting it when they're all taken to MacDonald's afterwards and he alone gets a boy toy with the Happy Meal. We get to review the Amy-Reese breakup in slow motion, with Amy being distant and unresponsive and Reese pursuing an affair with Stanley, who in one pivotal scene calls Reese and Amy "queers" and fights Amy in a sidewalk brawl. We're shown the attenuated communication between Amy and Reese that led up to Reese turning to outside connections for her emotional needs.

It's neither just an edgy new sitcom nor a feel-good tossed-salad of spectacularly nontraditional identities. There's a sharp edge to the ending, which flings the three of them hurtfully against each other and remains unresolved. So it's a reminder that we continue to hurt each other in our neediness and desperation, and are only now in the process of forging a way forward more united than adversarial and resentful.

—————

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

In my November 16 post (the "Transgender Lack of Awareness" post), I returned to a recurrent theme: that the mainstream transgender message doesn't make me feel included and recognized. Quite the opposite. Even when there's an effort to mention nonbinary trans folks and emphasize that a person's gender is valid regardless of their body, I feel left out, omitted.

Well, I'm currently reading several books that are likely candidates for what are called "comps" in the world of querying lit agents and publishers: books that your own book can be compared to because of similarities. One such book is A Year Without a Name by Cyrus Dunham.

Dunham refuses a lot of blocky klunky binary either-ors and dives straight into the gooey ambivalent conflicted territory he had to transit, and shoves it back at us, demanding that we consider it. He opens with a preface in which he indicates that his testimony of gender identity being a complex and nuanced thing without certainty could be seized upon as evidence that transgender identities are being embraced by people who will get buyer's remorse later and wish to de-transition.

And that's a big part of why so many trans people embrace the mainstream narrative. "I always knew I was born in the wrong body and was actually a [person of the opposite sex's gender], that's a solid irrevocable fact", goes the narrative. "I had to transition and get a new name and new pronouns because that's how you do it, and to do otherwise would make me horriby disphoric and suicidal, whereas transitioning totally makes me whole and comfortable in my own skin and validated". If you don't say it that way, the world looks back at you with dubiety and tells you "You don't seem like [that gender] to me, and since you aren't sure yourself..." and suggests that you're disturbed in the head, that these weird notions are obviously delusions brought on by the stress and so on and so forth.

But Cyrus Dunham appears to recognize that there's a problem with that: if young people contemplating these matters are led to feel that authentic trans people have that kind of absolute certainty, where everything is quite clear, where the correct identities and the correct courses of action are obvious and compelling, ...but that isn't how the young people going through it feel at all.. isn't that, itself, telling them that their identity isn't real and valid?

It takes a special courage to step forward and say "My identity and understanding is not clear and sharp and plain. But that doesn't mean it's less important than yours or doesn't count for as much". And to testify directly about the ambivalences, the worries about compromises, the contemplation of alternatives, and the presence of conflicting feelings and attitudes and inconsistencies in thought.

Dunham doesn't tell us that each gender identity exists objectively and that a person comes to recognize which one is authentically theirs. "The more I suspected people thought I was a liar, the more impossible it seemed to tell the 'truth'. There were so many truths; I didn't know how to locate one. Lying was embedded in every gesture, every statement, every interaction; every time I reaffirmed the presumption that I was female, which was constantly. I resigned myself to being incapable of not lying...I hesitate to call the exhausing day-to-day of embodiment 'dysphoria', that catchall for the pain of having a body that doesn't align with one's sense of self. What was a sense of self, after all: a delusion; mental illness...And if I admitted I was dysphoric, I'd have to deal with the fallout. I'd have to decide whether to do something about it".

He also asks the complicated question "Why do I need this?" rather than positing it as self-explanatory, rather than embracing "this is what you do if you realize you are trans". He writes:

"My story isn't resolved enough for me to believe that I have an unquestionable right to my own gender-confirmation surgery. I do believe it, in one part of myself. At the very least, because I know I should. Because it's my body, and I have to live in, with, and as it. Let me pilot it.

But it's not that simple for me. My brain monologue sounds like this, spoken in a cacaphony, not a linear progression of ideas: My breasts have felt invasive since they started to grow; every time I remember they are there, which is constantly, I am defeated; I have the right to augment my body in order to make it livable; the only reason I need the surgery in the first place is because the tyrannical gender binary has made me believe that my breasts are incompatible with my felt gender".

Cyrus Dunham accepts the turmoil as a legitimate part of identity and does not set out to vanquish it in the name of certainty. At least not internally. When he decides to proceed with top surgery, he -- like so many other trans people in his situation -- finds it necessary to oversimply for the moment, to package his situation in terms that the world is prepared to understand:

My confession of utter transness sacrificed nuance for legibility. I defaulted to the trope that I was born in the wrong body. That I had the soul of a man. Which implied that I believed in such a thing as a man in the first place. Which implies that I believed that, were I to live as a man, I would finally be okay.

But I didn't have time to be rigorous. I just needed them to believe me...

The week before the surgery, I got a letter from my insurance provider:

A request has been made for coverage of "top" surgery to help with your change from female to male gender. We are unable to approve at this time. We require that you must have a desire to live and be accepted as a member of opposite sex for at least six months. The letter from your therapist indicates only "recent months". Therefor [sic], you don't meet our requirements that you desire to live and be accepted as male for at least six month [sic].

Cyrus Dunham's willingness to show his actual unedited internal processing in all its vulnerable uncertain state allows for a rare thing: he describes someone like me as a hypothetical possibility in his writing:

If I was truly transgressive I would be able to tolerate the simultaneity of my breasts and masculinity and see them as co-morbid rather than contradictory

I do like to feel truly transgressive, it's a confident brave look, but in truth I've spent my life unsure. Unsure if I were embracing this 'explanation' because I so badly needed an explanation, not because it was the right one. Unsure if claiming an identity that had no specific external objective characteristic had any substance at all to it. (My sociology research professor once told me gay men could be studied because you operationalize them as men who have sex with men; crossdressers because you operationalize them as men who dress in clothing designed and sold as women's clothing; but you can't operationalize 'thinks of himself as one of the girls and not one of the boys' because that only takes place inside his head). But yeah, I have a sex (male), I have a gender (girl, femme, woman, sissy), and my transgression is to insist that neither one is wrong, neither one needs to be changed. I'm not a transitioner.

So -- interestingly -- Dunham's openness creates a space for me to feel included, whereas the conventional/mainstream narrative about what it means to be trans, with the litany of officially sanctioned viewpoints, never has.

It was my intention from the start that in Within the Box I was going to put my own internal processes, including self-doubts, on display. So that makes A Year Without a Name a very good choice for the comparable lit section of my forthcoming query letters.

—————

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 a third book, Within the Box, which isn't published yet, 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

This is Transgender Awareness Week, Nov 13-Nov 19, culminating in the Day of Remembrance. Transgender is nowadays defined as follows (courtesy of Wikipedia): "A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth." By that definition, I'm transgender.

There's a good chance you know all that, or I probably wouldn't be popping up on your feed, but let's pretend you didn't, and the above paragraph was a learning experience for you. Are you glad on my behalf, that my peculiar and marginalized identity is now being recognized and celebrated and authenticated instead of shoved into the shadows?

I wish I felt that way.

I am still lurking in the shadows, not because I want to be, but because the transgender umbrella is covering me -- not so much protecting me as blocking me from being seen. The awareness that the Awareness Week celebrates doesn't include me or people like me, while at the same time the definition, which does, makes it easier to dismiss us with a faux-inclusive wave of the hand: "and them too".

In the public imagination and in the shared social comprehension of what being transgender is all about, transitioning occupies the central space. That's the act of presenting to the world with the cues and signals that would position one as a member of the gender not typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth, and living as such, using the pronouns that go with that gender and having other people do so as well, as part of being accepted as a normative person of that gender.

When we ask "Wait, what about the rest of us?", a large percent of the people who constitute our social world will quickly say, "Hey, you are valid as a member of your gender with or without a medical transition. Lots of trans people go with a hormonal transition only, and many don't even do that. So, hey, you're totally included! What's inside your underwear is nobody's business but your own, lots of trans men have a vagina and lots of trans women own a penis, no big deal."

But just as being transgender isn't defined as modifying one's body, neither is transitioning. With or without any sort of medical process, there is still the pervasive assumption that a transgender person is one who presents to the world as, and wishes to be viewed as, a member of the gender not typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.

So now that we've cleared that up, we ask again "So, what about the rest of us?". And a smaller chorus of the enlightened and socially aware say, "Hey, there aren't just two genders. There are dozens, maybe thousands. You could be trans and identify as nonbinary, as genderfluid, or bigender. Not everybody falls into either male or female and we recognize that. What, have you been hiding under a rock somewhere, you didn't notice the whole thing about 'they' being some people's pronoun?"

That's still a problem though. That still combines "gender identify differing from what's typically associated with sex assigned at birth" with "pushing away from the sex assigned at birth". Rejecting that sex. Not wanting to be perceived as that sex. Hey, if being male doesn't force me to be a member of the gender typically associated with it, why do I need to reject that sex? So, once more, with feeling: what about the rest of us?

People who were assigned a sex at birth and who agree with that assignment. But whose gender identity is other than the gender typically associated with it. People who don't wish to disguise or distance themselves from the sex they were assigned at birth but who want to proclaim their atypical gender.

The transgender umbrella defines us as included in "transgender" but nobody talks about it this way. We aren't transitioners. We're doing something different.

If you're going to cover us, give us some coverage, instead of covering us up by claiming you've already included us.

Real-world fallout: in several socially-aware communities that are strongly accepting of transgender issues and rights, I've been contemptuously dismissed. "You're not trans, since you're perfectly fine with being male, so stop being a special snowflake!" And in several political and social communities for LGBTQIA+ people to join together, I've been silenced or ignored: "He's said a lot of things that are at odds with our queer values today". Loose translation in both cases: "You're not doing it right". In other words, the same attitude that transgender people in general have gotten from the mainstream.

I could definitely use an increase in awareness 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

There is definitely a personal emotional stake when you write about yourself, about what happened to you, and then make it available to others. It's different from writing fiction. I mean, you can have a significant ego investment in being the author of a work of fiction, and it can leave you vulnerable to dismissive or hostile opinions of readers and potential publishers and whatnot, but at least what's being rejected is your creation, your art. When it's autobiographical, it can also come across as a rejection of you personally: that what happened to you, what you went through, isn't interesting or important. Or that you, as the main character, are not interesting to read about.

That vulnerability is heightened when the specific portion of your own story that you're trying to share is a segment involving psychiatric hospitalization and diagnosis. There's the general shadow of being examined and found to be mentally out of order, to be not processing things as a healthy stable person should. That sort of raises the stakes -- or at least it can, depending on whether you agree that you were indeed in a deteriorated state of mind during that segment. I don't. So in Book #3, Within the Box, I'm inviting the reader to weigh the evidence and think about whether I was the person in the story whose mental processes were worrisome or if, instead, I'm the person in the tale who makes the most sense, whose reactions and behaviors were the healthy ones.

Querying a book -- trying to get a literary agent interested in it, so that it could perhaps get placed with a mainstream publisher and end up being read by a lot of people -- is by its very nature a vulnerability-making prospect. No matter what you've written, putting it out there in hopes of getting a rare thumbs-up isn't a particularly pleasant experience. It isn't a seller's market, at least not for unproven / unknown authors. Your query goes in a big pile and the people to whom you sent it will accept only the tiniest handful of prospects and reject the rest.

I am out at work. Both as a genderqueer person and as a person with a history of psychiatric diagnosis. I've nearly always been so, wherever I've worked, refusing to be silenced or shamed. Since I was out in my private life (which was as public as I could make it), there was always the risk that an employer or colleague or coworker would encounter that, so I preferred that they know in advance. It was my litmus test for whether the venue was a place I'd want to work: if you can't deal with it, hire someone else!

My current employer is the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which is actually involved in psychiatric intervention and treatment of people, which makes it a little trickier if someone were to develop the opinion that I'd been quite rightly diagnosed and perhaps have a brain that processes things in a less than ideal fashion.

I'm seeking early-reader opinions and feedback on the book, and among the other places I've sought them, I have made such an announcement at work. Three colleagues I know fairly well from ongoing interactions asked for a copy of Within the box. That was in December. Having not heard a peep, I sent a follow-through email to the three of them on July 6, "Checking in with folks who requested a copy of Within the Box...If any of you would like to discuss the book, shoot me an email!". No reply so far. It's a bit hard not to imagine them reading and going "holy shit" and developing a rather worrisome new view of their coworker Allan. I mean, I am kind of putting them in a position where they either need to set aside some conventional assumptions about institutional behaviors and professional behaviors or else reconsider whatever opinions they'd previously developed about me. What if that went the wrong way?

All of this vulnerability is quite predictable, very much "you opted for this situation going in" stuff. Including the likelihood that if I get upset about any of this, or depressed about any of this, or worried or angry about any of this, that my less-than-cheerfully-stable response to it could get interpreted in a light that other people's behavior generally doesn't. Yes, I did know all that going in. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't believe it needs doing, and I also wouldn't be doing it if I didn't have a lot of confidence in my ability to cope with it.

In fact, to be honest, I'm actually a bit too close to arrogant about it. Picture me staring at you sardonically and laughing and telling you, "After what I've been through in my life -- including the events from the tale I'm hawking in the form of this book -- there's not much that the world is likely to dish out to me that doesn't leave me saying 'I've survived worse', ya know?', so bring it on!"

Maybe that arrogance needs to get reined in now and then. I'll admit, it does occasionally get intense for me.

—————

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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My third book, Within the Box, is about a gender-variant person in a rehab facility. And rehabilitation is approached as a type of psychiatric practice, with the facility being run by psychiatrically trained personnel. So the book is also about the clash between a gender-variant person who doesn't think they have something wrong with them, and an impersonal psychiatric practice that considers all of its clients to be pathologically impaired.

A lot of LGBTQIA+ people get seen by psychiatric services. If you don't already have a politically critical perspective on the profession, it is time for you to develop one. Even if you have found some good in their services.

To start with, the psychiatric establishment is fundamentally conservative: that which is typical and normative is defined as that which is healthy. Different is intrinsically regarded as pathological. Clinical names are affixed to each of the ways in which people seem to follow a different pattern than the mainstream pattern.

This works against you on two different levels, simultaneously: first of all, every one of your decisions, preferences, tastes, priorities, and so forth are subject to being evaluated for being different from those of your peers, and considered to be possible symptoms of some unfortunate condition that they watch people for.

Then, on a broader level, they often regard a specific difference, such as what they call "gender identity dysphoria", as a pathology. Until 1973, "homosexuality" was tagged as a mental disorder. It is true that they removed it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and thus no longer define it as a psychiatric ailment, but many individual psychiatrists continued to believe it to be so (since that was how they were trained). With gender, being trans used to be conceptualized officially as a disorder; then they shifted to only defining it as a pathology if it was making you miserable. But again, attitudes often linger behind official definitions.

People in the LGBTQIA+ community often turn to psychiatrists because they are seeking help with coping with the friction between themselves and an unaccepting society. This is sometimes very specific and official help, such as the requirement that in order to obtain medical transition, a person needs to be assessed and under the ongoing care of a psychiatrist.

Their role as gatekeepers and enforcers of the most stereotypical gender norms for people desiring to transition has been commmented on often. But the psychiatric profession serves a larger and sneakier role as excuse-maker for patterns of life that don't need any excuse because there's nothing wrong with the person in question.

If you aren't particularly happy and satisfied with your lot in society, that does not mean something is wrong with you.

If you are different from the normative, that does not mean there has to be some underlying brain difference or chromosomal variation that made that happen, which "makes it okay" since it isn't your fault. Because if there's nothing wrong with it, it doesn't require an excuse.

What do you have on your desk that you can safely toss without doing any damage? Maybe a box of paper clips, or that handful of dice you use for that game? Select a spot on your floor, and then toss your items at that spot as a target. You see how they spray all around and some of the individual items are pretty far from the target? But you didn't throw them differently than the others. Their different landing position doesn't have a "cause" or a "reason" different from what happened to the other items. When our differences are tagged for investigation into "what caused it?", the implication is that our difference is a wrongness in need of explanation that the normative ones don't need.

Think about it.

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

You don't need anything from me in order to be different from me. You can simply be you, and leave me to either notice or not notice, care or not care.

But if you feel the need to explain that you aren't ashamed of this difference, that you don't consider this difference an inferiority, and that you would not wish this difference away even if you could, then you may feel the need to tell me that not only are you different from me, you are glad of it. That you would not want to be like me.

Interestingly, one experience that might provoke you into doing that is me telling you that am glad I am not like you.

"It's not the same", a primal part of me rushes to shout. "There were always a whole bunch of you, defining yourselves as normal, and singling me out as the one that the rest of you were glad you didn't resemble."

That's true enough, but put a pin in it for a moment. (I won't forget that aspect of things, I assure you. I just want to focus on something else today).

Is it only sheer weight of numbers that makes our situations different? Is your reaction to my difference otherwise equivalent to my reaction to yours?

There, too, I tend to rush forward to say that you folks who are in the majority are fearful and easily threatened by difference, your defensiveness making it get all hostile. And that, too, makes our situation different.

But I need to be honest. I disapproved of you, growing up. I felt superior to you. I definitely thought you folks were doing it all wrong. Your hostility may have made me emphasize how much I didn't want to be like you, but I was already partway there before I fully noticed that. And if I'd been a lot more plural -- that is, if there had been a whole bunch of people like me, people I could compare notes with and discuss you folks and your behaviors and antics and your way of being in the world -- we might have solidifed each others' contempt for how you are. For how wrong you are.

Oh, is this news to you? It really never occurred to you that marginalized folks like me were rolling our eyes at you not just for your unfair and oppressive practices, and not just for going around acting like your identity and personality and behavior are good and praiseworthy and ours is not, ...but that we find your difference from us to be creepy and repulsive and pathetic and disgusting? Okay, we mostly don't give voice to that because we mostly had a lot more reason to outgrown that kind of provincial narrowness. Unlike you, we were in a situation that prompted us, at least most of us, to think a lot about fairness and equality and being careful and thoughtful about passing judgment on folks and their perceived differences. About hating on difference for its own sake.

Well, true confession time, then. I have a better understanding of your hostile xenophobia hatred than I tend to let on. That. Does. NOT. Make it. Okay. If you try to draw that conclusion, I'm going to stick you with something sharper and meaner than a pin.

But what it does do is encourage us to set aside the notion that all such oppressive and hateful behavior originates in a desire to be oppressive and hateful, which would leave you and your majoritarian kind utterly incomprehensible to us who have been shoved to the social margins. It actually opens the door on the possibility of forgiveness. If there's understanding, if you get it, if things click into place for you and you see us and see how wrong this adversarial difference-hating is, then yeah, for me at any rate forgiveness is in the works.

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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

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

With me so far?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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

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

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

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

Androgyny and the Male-Default-Identity Thing

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

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

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

Gender is Installed Deep, Exceptions Included

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

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

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

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

The Significance of an Alternative

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

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

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

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

Trans Women and All That

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

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

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

Conditioning and Inverting

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positioning and Joining

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for your time.

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

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

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

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

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

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Index of all Blog Posts

Here's what happens: we come together because of what we have in common, the ways we're regarded as Different, the ways we're badly treated, the ways we don't get included and the ways in which we have to live in a world not designed around people like us.

And out of that comes a narrative, a story that we tell the rest of the world to explain who we are. But the narrative always oversimplifies. It leaves out some of us, those whose experiences and identities are a bit unusual even among the misfits we've connected with.

Let's pretend for a moment that we could see identities and experiences as if they were visible shapes. The constellation of all the people with gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual morphology variations making us exceptions to the rule, might look like this, let's say:

But the description of us that the LGBTQIA+ community asks people to embrace and become more tolerant of and supportive of ends up looking more like this:

Some individual stories are out there, accessible, but the ones most likely to get promoted and retold as representative of "us" are the ones that fit into the big general boxes, where a small handful of identities are represented to the world as "what it's like to be one of us".

Just for the sake of illustration and discussion, let's say that the big red box at the top is labeled "gay and lesbian", and it contains a bunch of widely publicized notions about how gay men and lesbian women are different from hetero people. As you can see from the smaller red figures that the big red box encloses, this description does directly include and accurately describe a lot of actual real-life gay and lesbian people. So the things that the world is told about what they feel, what they believe, what's important to them, what it's like to be them, those fit a lot of people and makes them feel recognized and supported and promoted. But you'll notice some smaller squares in that vicinity that are partway or entirely outside of the description. In one way or another, those people's felt experiences or their viewpoint or understanding of what it means to be gay, etc, aren't being included in the overall LGBTQIA+ rainbow message to the world about what it means to be gay or lesbian.

We can make the big red box at the bottom the transgender box, a similar set of generalized descriptions and narratives that stands in for the real-life people, and again it speaks truthfully and accurately for many but is a bit of a misrepresentation for some of the others.

And the smallest of the "large" boxes can be the public face of being intersex, although this diagram probably makes their voice in our society look larger in proportion than it really is. Once again, it gets some of the individuals pretty accurately but misses the boat for others.

I want to address the entire LGBTQIA+ community about what it feels like to be one of those smaller points that doesn't fit the big public description of us very closely. Trans people whose actual experience and attitudes don't correspond to the public presentation of what being trans is all about -- including some who prefer not to be called "transgender" for precisely that reason. And bixesual and pansexual and orientation-fluid people who don't feel very well-defined by the generally publicized notion of what it is to be lesbian or gay. And all the rest.

How it feels, a good portion of the time, is that we aren't truly included. That the loud voices of LGBTQIA+ social activism aren't talking about us. That We're once again being left out, the same way the mainstream world was leaving all of out of consideration.

Then, to add additional insult to the injuries, when we try to speak up and dissent just a little bit from the one-size-fits-all messaging that's being promoted all over the internet and airwaves, we're often corrected. Oh no, what you just said is wrong, because it contradicts the party line we're trying to establish. So get with the program, don't be saying Wrong Things like that. Yeah, how do you think that feels?

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

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

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

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

———————

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

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I've been waiting for an idea to inspire me. What to blog about. Then I started reading the current book assignment for a book club I'm in. It happens to be Demystifying Disability by Emily Ladau, and it is not about gender identity, sexual orientation, sex vs gender, or LGBTQIA+ issues. It is about identity politics, though, and it starts off by doing something that annoys me, which makes the matter a good thing to blog about.

The fact that it isn't about gender or related matters makes it a good detached "exhibit A" for discussing the annoying stuff. Because it annoys me when I encounter it within our environment, and I definitely do, quite often.

I should state for the record that I'm only through the first chapter of Ladau's book and the remainder of it may be provocative and informative.

The annoying practice

Ladau kicks the book off with a tour of vocabulary and why you should use these words and phrases and why you should not use these other ones. The explanations are short and choppy and don't provide much analysis: "The way we talk shapes how we think, and the way we think shapes how we talk", she informs us. This term is outdated, hence bad, don't use it. This term is reductionistic, hence bad, don't use it. Sometimes the reasons are more personal: "It makes my skin craw", or "I don't like euphemisms".

She declares herself not to be one of those judgmental people who have no tolerance of someone who uses the wrong words: "It's totally normal to worry that you'll mess up on what to say...if you get it wrong, just apologize, move on, and try to do better in the future".

But when you spend the first 25 pages on nomenclature, and only provide superficial explanations for why saying things with these words and not those words is important, and to whom, it still looms in significance and emphasis.

The real reasons

Whenever an out group begins to stand up for itself as an identity, having a different vocabulary to describe the differences than what the mainstream majority uses helps to do these social tasks:

• It underlines group identity and polarization from those who are not us. We do this; they do that. It signals one's allegiance, much like the wearing of berets or khaki or jeans have sometimes done for people at various times. It's likewise similar to the wearing of one's hair a certain way. It reminds everyone which group we're in.

• The lack of explanation itself serves a purpose: it emphasizes embrace of the group over retaining individual nitpicky differences in perception. It puts a higher priority on group loyalty than on respect for individual dissent.

Why I dislike it

• First off, I do my own thinking and I can follow yours if you bother to share it. Don't treat me like I'm too stupid to consider the real thought process. And if you didn't engage in any real thought process and you're just handing down "because everyone in the group all says so" wisdom you absorbed when you joined up, you shouldn't be writing as if from a position of leadership on the topic.

• Visualize the mainstream folks for a moment. Think about the ones whose initial response is to be dismissive of ideas they aren't familiar with, but who are willing to listen. They're following along with the culture's ongoing dialogs at home. Well, when you come out with a bunch of "is" declarations that lay out what is right and what is wrong, and don't unpack any of your thinking, you haven't given the mainstreamers any reason to consider your viewpoint. In fact, you've given them ammunition to be contemptuous of us.

• Then there's litmus testing. Other people whose situations put them into the same camp with us may arrive at a sense of identity from having analyzed their own situation. That means they may not be camp followers who have absorbed the appropriate vocabulary lesson when they first show up and attempt to communicate. The mindless thoughtless and arbitrary "never say this, always say that" approach often causes people to label them as enemy, as wrong-thinking outsider, instead of listening and recognizing that they're us.

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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

Just a couple of decades ago, we had no term, and no concept, for what we now call "cultural appropriation". Like "genderqueer", it's a new notion we can now use to frame our understandings of social inclusion and social justice.

As with the subject of gender variance and diversity, cultural appropriation is not something that should be oversimplified. We should use tools such as this concept of cultural appropriation to add a more nuanced understanding of social patterns, to illuminate what are actually fairly complicated situations and draw our awareness to some patterns that we should be keeping in mind.

In contrast, there's very little benefit gained from trying to use it as a rule, as a policy in and of itself that replaces having to think. Stating "all cultural appropriation is bad" won't take us very far, and even asserting that "dominant groups should not engage in cultural appropriation of more marginalized ones", while more useful, doesn't banish the need to look at situations from multiple angles.

Here are a few example situations I'd like to use as discussion-starters:

EXHIBIT A: Since the 1990s, New York City has had fast-food Mexican restaurants sprinked throughout several of its boroughs with the name "Fresco Tortilla" or "Fresh Tortilla".

They aren't owned by Mexican-American people, nor are they staffed by people of Mexican ancestry. They are universally run by people of Chinese ancestry instead.

When I first came to the city myself, it didn't have many Mexican restaurants (not even many Taco Bells), nor did it have a very large population of people of Mexican descent. Fast-food Chinese places were ubiquitous by comparison. There was less competition to contend with in opening and operating a place that served inexpensive Mexican food, and it is my understanding that an immigrant of Chinese descent learned the cuisine and then moved into this niche, and when it became successful brought other family members in to open establishments at other locations.

Mexican people in the United States are marginalized and viewed disparagingly, have a history of being economically oppressed here. Chinese people, like other Asians, have often had a rough time here as well, but have been an established community in New York for a long time.

In recent decades, many more ethnically Mexican people have moved into the New York City metropolitan region. Opening and running Mexican food restaurants is a likely avenue to financial stability, as it is a popular cuisine.

Is the presence of a chain of Mexican restaurants run and operated by Asian personnel a cultural appropriation issue? Was it less so when there were far fewer families of Mexican origin potentially competing for this niche? Or was that actually making it more of a concern?

There hasn't been a public phenomenon of Hispanic or specifically Mexican people complaining about the situation. Does that mean it isn't problematic? So we aren't being charged with the responsibility of noticing it, we're just being called on to react with the correct reactions when someone makes the charge of cultural appropriation? Does that make it a valid defense to respond "Well, nobody complained about it before now" when someone accuses you of cultural appropriation?

Would it be more of a problem if the people doing it were not themselves a historically marginalized ethnic minority?

EXHIBIT B: One of Paul Simon's most successful albums was Graceland. The music is a combination of heavily influenced and directly lifted from indigenous African musical culture, was recorded in South Africa, and features African musicians who are named and credited. Many people view the album as a mostly successful effort to introduce this music to a wider audience.

Still, Paul Simon is a white person and he was making money and furthering his career through the use of folk music traditions of a different culture, definitely an oppressed and marginalized one.

Does it make it okay that he had the permission and direct participation of African musicians, and credited them on the album?

Unlike the case with Fresco Tortilla, there have been some African musicians who have complained about Graceland and Paul Simon. What percent of the original culture have to approve before it can be considered that they have given permission? Or do we assume that because of their lower social status and clout that they aren't able to give consent, in the same way that minor children can't consent to sex?

The counterargument has been made that if mainstream music and its musicians makes no effort to be stylistically inclusive, music on the margins will never find a wider audience. That the alternative to Graceland would be the major record labels signing contracts with indigenous people to record music that is unlike what the mainstream musical audience is accustomed to -- something that Paul Simon was less in a position to make happen, and which, as the record companies would have pointed out, would not have been anywhere as likely to result in those recordings being purchased and played.

That's a specific example of a more universal response to the charge of cultural appropriation, by the way: if we don't let ourselves be influenced and inspired by traditions and creativities that originate anywhere but within the cultural confines of the mainstream, if we don't learn from and emulate anything except the dominant culture, that clears us of being cultural appropriators but aren't we then turning our backs on the rest of the world, shutting our ears and eyes to what they might have to teach us?

EXHIBIT C: Back in the 1950s, Harry Belafonte released an album of music from various world cultures, titled An Evening with Belafonte. Among other tracks, it included a recording of "Danny Boy".

"Danny Boy" is considered Irish and is associated with Irish cultural pride. And the Irish people, subjected to centuries of English domination and the conflicts referred to as "the troubles", can be considered marginalized and oppressed.

But not only is Harry Belafonte also a member of a readily-identified marginalized group (as with the Chinese people operating Fresco Tortilla in the first example), he is also in this case not appropriating a song that arose as part of Irish indigenous culture. The song was written by an English composer, and set to the tune "Londonderry Air", which itself was not so much a long-established Irish tune but rather a somewhat garbled annotation of one, written down by a songcatcher in the 1800s, a tune the original of which is apparently more closely represented in "The Last Rose of Summer".

How authentically a product of a given culture does a cultural work need to be in order for its use by someone of a different culture to be liable for cultural appropriation?

If a white fashion model styles her hair not in an historically established ethnic fashion, but instead in a style promoted in modern times within fashion magazines that happen to target specific ethnic communities, is she doing cultural appropriation? Does it matter if the fashion magazines pushing the style have white owners?

All of these examples are somewhat deliberately retro, referring to things that happened (or first happened) long before our society began discussing cultural appropriation. That minimizes the tendency of people to respond with whatever views on the specific incidents are already on record as public statements (although less so in the case of the Paul Simon example). It's also a way for me to try to split the discussion of cultural appropriation itself from condemnation of people for doing it. Even there, we don't have a consensus on whether or not it's a valid defense to say "That was a different time and you can't judge people in the past for violating the standards of today". It is, after all, a variation on "Well, nobody complained about it before!" ...

Overall, I can't conjure up any rules that start with "Never" or "Always". Not that anyone appointed me to be the issuer of rules. But for myself, for my own behaviors and my own social responsibilities as far as cultural appropriation goes, I can't write for myself any guidelines that start with "Never" or "Always".

I take the concern seriously. Not because I do not wish to offend. I'm actually okay with offending people sometimes. I have several skirts in my wardrobe and I wear them when I feel like it, with very little restriction as far as where I am or what I'm doing. I manage to offend a few people who don't think male people should wear skirts.

But I understand and agree with the sentiment that it isn't fair to snag someone else's self-expression, one that is tied to their identity and solidarity, if their identity is a marginalized one. And it isn't fair to swipe someone else's meaning-imbued symbols and expressions of their concepts and faith and convictions and use them as adornments and trinkets. The question of if and when a situation falls into that description is a complex one, and there will be disagreements about them, but I am willing to do my best to listen and take other folks' perceptions into consideration.

For my own part, I've been told on occasion by cisgender women that I should not be wearing a skirt because it's theirs; I do it anyway; I go to Ethiopian, Chinese, Czech, Indian, Greek, Persian, etc restaurants and eat their cuisine, and I learn how to cook a decent subset of what I like, and (at least back in the pre-COVID era) we like to have dinner guests so I often serve these cultural appropriations to others, but in the privacy of my home. I'd feel less entitled to open a chain of restaurants (if I had the skill and the means to do so) and serve other folks' cuisines, and even less so if the ethnicity were rare and relatively unknown and I somehow had the clout to establish my restaurant chain as the single definitive source of that type of food.

I have a garment in my possession, a beautiful dashiki I bought from a street vendor in Manhattan; it is gold and green and red and black and I bought it because I liked the way it looks. I didn't think about cultural appropriation as I was buying it, but by the time I got home with it, I had begun realizing it could most certainly be perceived as that. I haven't worn it. I'm thinking maybe I will wear it in the privacy of my home when I have reason to think I won't be out and about, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea of being in public with it on. Not because I don't want to offend so much as because I can see how it might be offensive, if that makes any sense. It's a shame because for me it conjures up memories of countercultural guys from the early 1970s. But the fact that that's my cultural association for this item of apparel, and not tribal African wear, more or less highlights why cultural appropriation can be a problem, doesn't it?

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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Index of all Blog Posts

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?

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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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Dear NeuroDiverse Comrade:

I'm sorry you found what I posted to be offensive. I totally respect your right to speak out and fight back against the marginalization you get subjected to in our difference-intolerant society. You're tired of the attitudes that get doled out to people who have a mental illness diagnosis. I get that.

But -- speaking as a person who has received enough official psychiatric diagnoses to collect them like postage stamps, including bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic, and borderline -- we need to have the right to decide for ourselves whether our difference is a pathology. And while I don't mean to dismiss whatever efficacy you've gotten from the treatments your doctors have provided, we do get to critique the medical-model interventions that have been pushed at us, sometimes without our having the option of refusing.

Let's backtrack in history just a bit, shall we?

GAY PEOPLE were considered not only immoral and perverted, but mentally ill. Being gay was a pathology, a wrongness of how the mind worked, messed up if not necessarily willfully deficient in morals.

WOMEN, straight as well as lesbian, were often told that if they had any issue with fitting themselves in to the patriarchal society and its expectations and limitations, well, the problem was within them.

TRANS people, of course, were long thought to be suffering from a pathological "gender identity dysphoria", and regardless of whether our society's approach to accommodating their condition involves helping them transition or instead trying to reprogram them, we start with defining them as mentally disordered for thinking of themselves as a gender that doesn't match their body.

And GENDERQUEER and NONBINARY and GENDER NONCONFORMING people have had both forms, too, sometimes having our very existence defined as a pathology and at other times our reaction to how we're treated and regarded defined as a pathology.

Designating us as mentally ill has long been a part of dealing with the inconvenient and problematic. It pinpoints the location of all social problems that involve us as being inside us. It says we aren't oppressed, nor are we understandably traumatized by our social situation . It says nobody is going to understand us any better by listening to us and empathizing with what we have experienced, because we don't make sense, our brains themselves are messed up and full of misbehaving neurons.

It's a belief that grew out of the desire for a disease model for all human suffering. We had become very good, very effective, at dealing with infections and physical maladies, things that could be studied by reducing things to symptoms and causes within the body's own processes. It was hoped that all human pain and suffering would turn out to boil down to that model.

It's also cheaper, a concern of insurance companies and public policy makers who have budgets and cost containment to consider. Pills are a lot cheaper than open-ended counseling, let alone the prospect of social upheaval and structural social change.

But you wish to lump me in with people who blame you for failure to achieve milestones of success. "Oh, you don't understand that I have a mental disability. Since you question the legitimacy of mental health treatment, you clearly think we're all fakers and malingerers and we should just dust off our asses and get over it. Well shut up, we have no time for your privileged hateful cluelessness. You need to quit spouting your bullshit about how it's all just capitalism or patriarchy or whatever, because you're just victim blaming even if you're too dense to see it!"

You're particularly upset that I challenge the claims that the mental health industry makes about its pills. You don't want to hear that studies show that the brain compensates for psychiatric pharmaceuticals if you keep taking them over a long period -- that the drugs that inhibit reuptake of neurotranmitter chemicals cause the brain to maintain fewer receptors or to produce less of the chemical, and the drugs that try to limit certain chemical reactions tend to cause the brain to increase its sensitivity to those chemicals. Which makes the drugs have less effect while creating a physical dependency on the drug that can make it difficult to withdraw from it.

Well, statistics can't tell us that that's necessarily how your body is reacting to what you take. Statistics don't work that way. Research can show that a tendency exists but not that it will happen for everyone the same way. Perhaps psychiatric medication does wonders for you. I'm no one to question what anyone else finds useful or helpful in their search for ways to cope with their situation.

But we are opposed to involuntary modification of how people's minds work, and that means not only opposing direct forced treatment but also misrepresentation of the medical facts. Medical consent has to be fully informed consent. And despite decades of claiming that mentally ill people have a chemical imbalance in our brains that their perfect pills fix, the way that insulin fixes diabetics' inability to produce their own insulin or the way that people without working thyroid glands need to take synthetic thyroid, it just isn't so. Schizophrenia is not a olanzapine deficiency disease. Bipolar is not a lithium deficiency disease. Depression is not a zoloft deficiency disease.

That doesn't mean they don't help you or that you should not take them if they do, but drug companies and doctors lie to patients -- they oversimplify and they misrepresent, and they do not trust patients to make their own medical decisions -- and nowhere is that a more prevalent pattern than in the specific area of mental health.

So no, I am not going to simply let you classify me as a privileged non-disabled asshole, and I'm not going to hide in the corner and stop representing the concerns of activist psychiatrized people.

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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.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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

Yes, thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you think I'm going about it wrong?

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

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

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

———————

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

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Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/88638.html

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Entries tagged with identity politics

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Self Dissatisfaction

Political Grammar

BOOK REVIEW -- Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

REVIEW: Cyrus Dunham's A YEAR WITHOUT A NAME — A Nuanced and Eloquent Trans Narrative

Transgender Lack of Awareness Week

The Emotional Knife Edge

Maleness

The Psychiatric Connection

Differentiation

The Paradox of Male Identity & Bonding

Self Defined

An Open Letter to my Gender Critical Colleagues & Friends

The Coarseness of Our Accommodations

The Words That We Use

Cultural Appropriation

Separatism, Safe Spaces, and The Other

BOOK REVIEW -- In Search of Pure Lust by Lise Weil

Identity: Joining, or Formulating?

Dear NeuroDiverse Comrade:

Dear Feminist Colleagues: How would YOU address it?

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