Lesbian Gay and Bisexual (1975) ---> LGBTQ (2010): Those of us with a variant / atypical gender identity became grouped with the people with a minority form of sexual orientation. Why? Well, in our culture, a person whose body is perceived to be male but whose observable behavioral characteristics are feminine will usually have been assumed to be gay, and treated as such -- homophobia definitely included.

So we've been regarded and treated in much the same way, and that gives us experiences in common. And reasons to join forces politically and socially, as an immediate consequence of that.




Generally speaking, if you're gay or lesbian, people understand that you are different, whether they perceive you as an oppressed minority, a standout spectacle against a backdrop of duller conventional people, an immoral pervert, or whatever. There's widespread agreement: you either have sex with people of the same sex, or you don't, and doing so marks you as different in a heterocentric and homophobic society.

If you're gay or lesbian (or even if you're bisexual), people rarely walk up to you after knowing this bit of information about you and say "Well, I really don't see why you insist on this notion that you're different".

Gender, on the other hand, is an identity. There isn't a specific behavior that, if you engage in it, definitely makes you this gender as opposed to that behavior.

When I was in graduate school, I wanted to do my dissertation on feminine male people, male people who identified as being more like women and girls than they were like other male people in general, and to delve into how they saw the world of heterosexual prospects and possibilities, non-hetero opportunities, and how they negotiated their sense of sexual self. But one of my sociology professors told me, "There's a problem with that. 'Considering yourself feminine' is something that takes place in a person's head. You can't operationalize it as an objective difference, it's just subjective. And then you want to interview them about what else they think and feel about sex and sexuality. It's all intercranial. That's not sociology. Now, you could focus on people who say 'Yes I wear a dress' or 'Yes I wear women's undergarments'. That is an objective behavior. You either do that thing or you don't".

But there's no behavior that I identify that makes us "us", that determines that this male person or that male person is femme.




One response I could make to this situation is to point out that it isn't so simple for gay and lesbian definitions after all. Sexual appetite isn't the same thing as sexual behavior. What about gay and lesbian virgins, who have never had sex? And while we're at it, what constitutes "same" versus "other" sex? We have intersex people in this world. If an intersex person becomes sexually involved with a person who isn't intersex, does that make them heterosexual, regardless of whether the partner is male or female? See, sexual orientation involves how people think of themselves too!

But my goal was not to undermine the identities of gay and lesbian people, but to deal with people telling me my gender identity is a figment of my imagination.

And yes, people do tell us that. It's a part of the experience of gender variant people, it's something we generally have to wade through a lot more than our gay and lesbian colleagues and allies. "Oh, so you think you're a woman because you like to attend the ballet? That doesn't make you a woman! Oh, you like to dance the ballet? So did Nureyev and Baryshnikov. Oh, but you want to dance ballet in a tutu? But it's just a sexist social convention that marks it as female apparel, that doesn't mean you're a woman if you wear it! Oh, but you cry at movies, you care more about cooperation and listening than you do about competition and risk-taking? Are you saying men can't be nurturant counselors or good communal hippies?"

And if we focus on the fact that other people throughout our lifetime have altercast us as being wrongly gendered for our sex, if we testify to a lifetime of being called butch or tomboy or sissy or whatever, "well, all guys get called that, it's part of razzing and hazing and we all go through it".


Gaslighting

The term originates in the systematic psychological manipulation of a victim by her husband in Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 stage play Gas Light,[6] and the film adaptations released in 1940 and 1944.[7] In the story, the husband attempts to convince his wife and others that she is insane by manipulating small elements of their environment and insisting that she is mistaken, remembering things incorrectly, or delusional when she points out these changes.

Unless you just climbed out of a dark cave after raised by wolves you know damn well that our world has gendered expectations. And that, no, we do not all get equal doses of being identified as variant, as sissy or butch.

We're in the position of begin tagged by others for this then being told it's all in our heads.



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

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


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



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

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These are the ladies who lunch and strategize about intersex policy changes. Kimberley Zeiselman writes as a person who is aware of her generally privileged social location; she describes a life in which she's been at ease to move comfortably from Boston to Manhattan and back, and to journey with her husband to China and stay for a month in order to adopt children. I think sometimes the juxtaposition, of a life otherwise unencumbered with stress, against the specific experience of a marginalized identity, can make it easier to focus on the difference that having such an experience makes in a life.

Zeiselman is intersex. She is an example of CAIS, where the body's structure is completely impervious to the androgen hormones that, for most people with XY chromosomes, causes their body to develop with male morphology. She was regarded and raised as a girl, perceived as a female person with no questions raised by doctors, parents, or herself until the day when a persistent abdominal pain led to a poorly-explained operation. An operation where the particulars of what the surgeon was going to do were cloaked in euphemisms and lies.

Our culture has oscillated back and forth between an attitude that doctors know best so we should trust their judgment and a respect for patient self-determination and the importance of doctors explaining the options and letting the patient decide. In June of 1983, when Kimberley Zeiselman and her parents were asked to consent to abdominal surgery, the pendulum was strongly towards fully informed consent. But the fifteen-year old Kimberley and her family were told that she was at risk for cancer and that her ovaries needed to be removed for her health and safety.

But those weren't ovaries. Nor, as Zeiselman points out in a later chapter, was the risk of medical complications anywhere near as clear-cut as that. The surgeons removed Kimberley's undescended testicles, and put her on a lifetime regimen of hormone treatments. Why? Because it's what doctors thought they should do in cases like this. Eek, oh how embarrassing, got to get rid of those at once, hide this shameful fact so no one can find out. Cloak everything in lies and silence.

Kimberley Zeiselman learned the classic Yankee emotional inscrutability as part of her cultural inheritance. It was a world where internal turmoils aren't expected to be shared, just endured. The scene in the book where she discovers what had been done to her, and the fact of her difference, is stark and cold. The doctor writes her a prescription for anti-anxiety medication, then suggests "maybe it's time we dig out your old medical records so that you can better understand the surgery performed and put your fears of cancer to rest". Then the doctor leaves her alone in the room to read the account of how her testes were removed and found to be healthy and with no signs of malignancy.


We often learn shame by being protected from shame. When people whisper to us and wait until there's no one to overhear, the need for secrecy and the fear of exposure are taught to us. Zeiselman struggles with the shadow of inferiority and inadequacy. So much of her experience is expressed in the negative, in the things she doesn't participate in. In the years before the medical procedure, her best friends got their menarche but she was left behind wondering why she never got her period. After the operation, still not knowing anything about her intersex condition, she knows she will not be able to get pregnant and give birth.

Zeiselman's emotional habits carry over into her writing. She often skitters away from immersing the reader fully in what she was feeling at the time. She often summarizes events in places where, as reader, I wanted fully fleshed-out scenes, a more immersive experience. When her intersex condition is first revealed to her, Zeiselman gives us glimpses of the shock, and the intensity of her curiosity and being haunted about the impact of her stunning discovery. Tellingly, she wants the news to be shocking to the other people in her life, for them to react as if a bombshell had gone off in their midst, as if unless someone is willing to scream on her behalf there can be no screaming.


Kimberley Zeiselman becomes a policy activist, leveraging her connections in society to make a difference for intersex children. Sometimes the weariness of policy defeats and fighting the same battles recurrently make it sound like Sisyphus rolling his boulders. The medical policy on clitoris reductions for CAH intersex babies is the most formidable boulder. CAH — Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia — is a phenomenon affecting XX people in which the adrenal gland releases high levels of hormones that prompt the body to develop male attributes. The tissue that constitutes a clitoris tends to be larger, anywhere on a continuum from typical clitoris size to the size of a penis. And as Zeiselman added her voice to that of other intersex activists to outlaw nonconsensual surgery and leave the decision in the hands of the patients, she found the medical establishment insistent on their right to pare down or remove this tissue in the name of normalizaton.

Kimberley Zeiselman learned advocacy of behalf of others from raising her children, fighting for their right to a tailored and appropriate course of education. She took her skills and experience into the intersex rights fray, fighting her own fight, only to eventually end up largely immersed in a specific battle that centrally affects CAH intersex children. The identity called intersex is actually a constellation of several different situations, and enunciating the identity intersex is not only a rejection of the medical terminoligy that calls these conditions disorders, it's also a commitment to solidarity. Not all intersex people are identically situated but they can be unified politically as a marginalized community of people finally demanding a voice.

XOXY: A Memoir, Kimberly M. Zeiselman. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2020. Available from Amazon and other retailers; Facebook author's page



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

My book 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.


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"I was born this way", he says. "I know some of you think there must have been some event, or situation or whatever that made me like this, but honestly I've always been into dicks since before I knew what sex was".

I can relate; I can recall knowing the biological facts of life about how babies get made, but not knowing diddly about sexual appetite and sexual attraction. My understanding at the time was that the only time people did this behavior was when they wanted to have a baby. I had no idea that it felt good or that there was a hunger for it.

And at that age I had definite feelings for female contours, I mean yeah specifically there where they're different from male people. Their different architecture makes everything shaped differently down there, so that when they wear pants it makes shapes that are specific to their anatomy. And I liked to look at it, I liked the way it felt when I did. And oh! *blush* Was this ever kinky and perverted or what?! I mean, that's where you pee from, so I had to keep this secret lest I be mocked mercilessly by the other kids.

So anyway, yeah, I too seem to have been born this way.




In pretty much any discussion of what floats your boat and gets your motor running, sooner or later someone's likely to say that it's shallow and wrong to have the hots for slender blond people with seductive eyelashes. Or perky green-eyes freckle-faced redheads for that matter. Someone is going to say that you should care about who the person is, not what they look like, all that superficial stuff.

And now, added to that, we sometimes encounter the notion that it's shallow and wrong (and transphobic too) to care that someone has a penis instead of a clitoris, or vice versa or some other variation on that theme. We should accept someone as being of the gender with which they identify, and that goes all the way down to not imposing binary intolerant attitudes about what body parts a person has inside their underwear.

Well, I'm not without some limited experience. I've tried participating sexually with someone who had a penis. I didn't care for it. Call me shallow if you wish, judge me and find me wrong if you must, but I seem to have my sexuality wired to the physical architecture that's traditionally dubbed female.

Meanwhile, some folks don't much care to encounter people who find their physical morphology sexy. Or who find the combination of their physical morphology and their overall gender identity and expression sexy. "Chasers are disgusting. They have a fetish and that means they aren't interested in us as people. We want to be accepted as ordinary members of our gender. What's in my underwear is really nobody's business and I don't want to get involved with somebody who has a thing for that, that's creepy".

I don't mean to discredit that feeling or that attitude. Those who find chasers creepy shouldn't have to step back from saying so.

And there are people who don't opt for medical transitioning. And people who can't afford it. I'm totally on board with their gender identity not being any less valid.

But one size does not necessarily fit all. Some of us find the notion of being chased for the specific combo of our gendered self-expression and our physical morphology quite appealing. I do. I'm a girlish femme, of the starched crinolined variety, a good girl with only a modest naughty streak. I happen to be a male girlish sort, a person with physically male morphology. I present as male, expecting to be perceived as male, in hopes that those people who are attracted to feminine male people will take notice of me. The female folks among them are people I'm potentially going to enjoy connecting with.

There are intersex people who kind of like being appreciated, not merely tolerated in a non-judgmental way, for their variances, for the specifics of their physically unusual selves. Author Hida Viloria, for example, describes her own enjoyment of being able to penetrate her partners with her clitoris, and mentions several people who were pleased to find her to be a person with something extra to offer.

Is it shallow and venal? I don't know. I feel like I don't want someone to reward me for being a nice admirable person by handing out sexual access like a door prize. I feel like I want to be lusted after. I want someone to have the hots for my bod and appreciate that I'm a nice person. I get the hots for people because of their physical contours and I crave reciprocal hots for mine.

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My book is scheduled to come out March 16 from Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon for pre-orders (paperback only for the moment).

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Marie, a transgender woman, does not like my distinction between sex and gender.

I identify as a person who has both a sex and a gender, the first of which ("male") I explain as my physiological or morphological physical structure and the second ("sissy" or "femme" or "girl") is who I am as a person, which isn't defined by my body or its parts.

Marie objects to the way I speak about physiological sex. She considers herself to be both wholly a woman and fully female, but has not sought out bottom surgery and says that if I establish that my sex is male on the basis of having physical male parts, that language could be used to say that she is male because she has a penis.

Is there room for us both?


"Biological sex is ALSO a social construct"

Marie says that "biological sex" is a social construct, just as gender is. She brings up the existence of intersex people to illustrate how the notion that there are two biological sexes is not an empirical physical fact at all. She says all this as a prelude to dismissing sex as different from gender: if they're both social constructs, and gender is defined as social, sex isn't a different thing, it's all gender. (And hers, she says, is all female; she goes on to state that I sound confused about what I am; I don't consider myself confused at all though).

What does it mean when we say something is a social construct? It means that we are relying on definitions that we've learned socially in order to interpret the thing, whatever the thing may be, so our interpretations have those socially learned definitions stirred into them, they aren't just inherently there in the "thing in itself". The implication of saying that something is a "social construct" is that it could be constructed differently — that whatever inherent characteristics may be attached to the "thing in itself" could be interpreted different if we had different socially learned definitions to apply to that thing.

In the 1950s our culture had many shared beliefs about gender differences that by 1970 had been brought into question, most centrally by the feminist movement. So here we have elements of femininity (and masculinity) that were originally seen as built-in but later seen as socially constructed, and the possibility that they could be constructed quite differently was widely recognized.

Are our notions of "biological sex" as loosely tied to anything that isn't similarly flexible and arbitrary?

I personally don't think so. I can't know for sure, since I can't magically get my head outside of socially learned concepts, and this is an important point, this lack of certaintly, but my strong suspicion is that if we could indeed magically "reset" social beliefs about sex over and over again in random ways and then have the resulting culture try to describe human bodies, we'd end up with descriptions that we would recognize as "male" and "female", with the changes mostly around the handling of variations and exceptions. In other words, I do think our culture's insistent shoehorning of people into two categories and denying variations and exceptions is a social construct, but I don't think it's likely that any of those alternative-reality resets would fail to come up with the observation that for the most part people tend to fall into two primary categories based exclusively on their physical morphology.

The descriptions and terms might be different but we'd still recognize them as descriptions of the human body and the sexes that we know about. Perhaps they would speak of whether the urethra comes down the barrel of the tingly erogenous tissue or instead comes to a separate opening farther below, and with that as the initial distinction they would note that most (although not all) of the people with the separate urethral opening have a comparatively small tingly-erogenous-tissue organ with much of it embedded below the surface of the pelvic muscles, and that most (but not all) of the people with the urethra-down-the-barrel configuration have two glandular masses at the base surrounded by a loose envelope of tissue, whereas the majority (albeit not all) of those with the separate opening have similar glandular masses internally located and significantly higher up, and so on and so forth.

Scientists often use what they call a "double blind" test, which means neither the researchers nor the participants know how previous participants have categorized or classified something. I believe that, within the limitations of different words and terms being used or created, human observers stripped of all our current cultural beliefs about what the sexes are would describe two (not five, not fourteen) primary structural configurations as the main pattern, plus a double handful of variations and exceptions. And those two primary patterns would be quite recognizable to us as what we call "sex".

Gender is different. Almost any component of gender is arguble as to whether it would reliably show up again and again if we did these magic "resets": aggression and adversarial tendencies? nurturing and caregiving behaviors? attention span differences? verbal fluency? math skills? social awareness and facilitation of the social peace? visual-spatial skills? visual sexual erotic responsiveness? We don't know whether these would necessarily be observed to be sex-linked differences or if our culture's beliefs about them have more to do with history and various ideologies and prescriptive attitudes. That is why we call these things gender and distinguish them from sex, which is the "thing" to which they are attached by social definition and connotation and so forth.



The Female Penis

I do see why Marie wouldn't appreciate being told that insofar as her body includes a penis, it is a male body. Marie says she is female, therefore this is a female penis. "There have been enough gatekeepers going around saying I don't count as trans unless I intend to have bottom surgery, and I don't see how all that gatekeeping is making things better for anyone", she says.

Suzanne interrupts to explain that she is the proud owner of a clitoris, not a penis. It was incorrectly described as a penis when she was born, and some people might still call it that if they didn't know any better, but it's a clitoris; it's hers and she's female. She has a friend, Malcolm, a transgender man, who has a mangina. "The identity of a person's body parts is a matter for the person to decide. Defining something as a vagina or a penis or whatever, that's socially constructed along with everything else, OK?"

It does seem like it would be useful when considering questions like "what sex is this person?" or "what organ is that?" to ask the question "according to whom?" That would enable me to say that I am male, not because my body is inherently male but because I have classified it that way myself, without imposing an unwanted definition on Marie, who is female, who classifies her body in that fashion.

It also lets us reference altercasting, of which I have spoken before. Altercasting is the assignment of identity by other people. Transgender people tend to speak in terms of having been "assigned male at birth" (AMAB) or "assigned female at birth" (AFAB). That's actually not a process that occurs just once (when someone is born); instead people continue to assign other people to a sex (and to other identity-factors). When some (or most) other people tend to altercast a person in a way that contradicts the identity that they claim for themselves, that creates a tension, usually an unpleasant one, whether we designate it as "dysphoria" or not, whether we identify as "transgender" or not.

Intersex people have tended to get altercast as one of the two binary sexes, and then their physical divergence or variations from the norm for that sex become treated as something wrong and in need of fixing. This coercive and invasive practice destroys physically healthy tissue for the sake of imposing an altercast physical identity on people without their consent, perhaps the ultimate form of this tension. But any of us may have reason to interpret our physical morphology in a way different from how others have done. I'm not trying to take that away from any of us.

The tension I experienced in my lifetime has not been because I disputed the categorization of my body as male, but because I was at odds with the additional meanings that are culturally associated with maleness. Gender. I was being misgendered but without being mis-sexed.


A New Color in the Spectrum

I don't identify as transgender. I don't consider myself to be a female person who was incorrectly identified as a male person. I consider myself to be a male person who has correctly been recognized as a male person.

But there is a huge component of characteristics, behaviors, personality attributes, priorities and choices and stuff, that are assumed about a person who is perceived as male. These were wrong. My constellation of attributes and characteristics were recognized by others as being more like what tends to be assumed about people who are classified as female. They said so. I saw it myself, I clearly fit in with the girls, not the boys. These traits had far more to do with who I was, as a person, than my biological plumbing did. Other people made an issue of it, it wasn't "normal". Meanwhile, whenever I was treated as self-evidently one of the boys, I experienced it as being misgendered, that's not who I was. So I, too, made an issue of my difference.

It's not the same situation that Marie is in. Similar, but not the same. It's something else. I'm a gender invert. I'm an authentic person. I have authentic political and social concerns. They are different concerns than those of Marie and other transgender women, although we have things in common and should be supportive of each other. Clearly we're in the greater LGBTQIA (or MOGII *) spectrum together and should be allies.

But I will not be silenced as the price of Marie's comfort level.


* MOGII = "minority orientation, gender identity, and intersex"


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I'm with my Mom in her hospital room. Her body flung a bunch of clots into her circulatory system; one of them wiped out some brain functioning, mostly motor and sensory stuff but some cognitive functions are messed up too; the worst of them plugged up her femoral artery and it cost her most of her left leg, so she's in bed with no knee or anything below it on that side; yet another tried its best to claim her other leg as well, but the surgeons sliced deep into her calf muscle and removed the clot, and after a few iffy days she had enough circulation in that foot that they stopped saying they might have to remove her right leg as well.

It's a huge insult to body integrity; it's almost impossible for me to be here without identifying with her situation and recoiling from it in horror, thinking life would not be worth living, that I wouldn't want to continue like that, and of course she does feel and express a lot of that (to everyone else's dismay). But she wants out of the hospital and to regain control of her life, since dying doesn't seem imminent. She sent me downstairs for a grilled cheese sandwich, bypassing the hospital dietician's tasteless pablum (and ate half of it, which is more than she's been eating off the hospital trays), and then asked me to help her sit up and swing her legs over the side of the bed (this is something physical therapy has been working towards, but my Mom is pushing the issue; she wants maximum mobility and she wants it now).


She and my Dad both fall into that difficult-to-explain middle space when it comes to understanding and accepting me as genderqueer. On the one hand, they've never rejected or made an issue of my femininities. Didn't seem bothered by my lack of interest in sports or my preference for girl playmates when I was a little boy. Didn't join their voices to those of other adults — relatives, neighbors' parents, people from church and school — in questioning why I wasn't more like other boys. And there's no way it wasn't brought to their attention, so they had to have dismissed these concerns as immaterial and irrelevant. The way I was was fine with them. They even suggested a career in nursing back when I was in my early 20s.

On the other hand, I've been out and have tried to be vocal about it since 1980, taking a public stand as a male feminine person, explaining it as a social issue, but their reaction has consistently been "Why do you want to talk about that? That's a personal matter, it's private and nobody else's business and it isn't polite to bring it up". In short, they're OK with me being a male person who happens to have some feminine traits or to have made some choices and decisions that are viewed as appropriate for women and girls, but not so OK with me defining who I am in those terms. They don't like me distinguishing myself from other identities, from straight, from cisgender, from transgender, from gay, in order to explain that my identity is different, that it's something else.


My reading material this week has been Hida Viloria's Born Both, an intersex memoir. Once again I'm finding the thoughts and experiences of intersex activists to be very topical and relevant to my own even though I'm not intersex myself. A great deal of the focus of Born Both is the distinction between viewing one's self as an (otherwise) ordinary man or woman with a physical (medical) intersex condition, or viewing one's self as an intersex person, a person whose body is intersex (not male or female) and whose gender is hermaphrodite (not man or woman). That definitely resonates with me, kin as it is to the distinction between viewing myself as an (otherwise) ordinary male guy who has some feminine traits and behaviors or instead as a gender invert, a male girl or male femme.

Late in the book Viloria writes about her discomfort with the formulation "cisgender": it is a term that sometimes been defined as that state where one's gender matches one's birth sex, and sometimes instead as that state where one's gender is consistent with the gender assigned to one at birth. The problem for Viloria (and for intersex people) is that in the case of the first definition for cisgender, a person who identifies as intersex would be cisgender (the birth sex is intersex and so is the gender identity), which is misleading, and in the case of the second definition, intersex people would be labeled transgender instead because virtually no one is assigned "intersex" — but that's misleading too. The possibility of "intersex" gets erased by binary assumptions that are built into transgender versus cisgender definitions.

And again I find myself nodding with recognition, because I often feel erased by the same definitions. In my case, I have a body, which is male, which was assigned male when I was born, and which continues to be assigned male by anyone who views it. So my sex is cisgender, right? Well, I have a gender too: girl, or femme — definitely not guy or boy or man. Yet my assigned gender, both at birth and as an ongoing act of assignment-by-others, is perennially boy, guy, man. So my gender is trans. The problem for me is that there is a very lazy distinction between sex and gender in the definitions of cisgender and transgender. Those definitions erase the possibility of someone having a current sex that does not "match" their current gender. In other words, they erase me.


Viloria also identifies as a "hermaphrodyke". Her gender is hermaphrodite, her sexual orientation is towards women, and she thinks of herself as a lesbian, not as a straight guy. She of all people would not be inclined to box in everyone as either male or female, and hence as objects of attraction to her as either one orientation or the other; but although in her book she describes times when straight women were attracted to her as a straight guy, and gay men to her as a gay guy, her own appetite seems linked to those set of morphological characteristics that make up classical female body structure. That is true for me as well. There do exist viewpoints among people within the LGBTQIA communities to the effect that no one should have a morphological preference. That it is transphobic or chauvinistically binary to go around requiring that the people to whom one is attracted be in possession of a standard-issue penis or that they own a conventionally defined vagina or whatever. Reciprocally, there is a suspicious mistrust for people whose sexual interests are expressed specifically towards transgender people. Trans women and trans men often find it creepy and objectifying in a fetishy and dehumanizing way to encounter folks who want to become sexually involved with a trans woman (or man) when they themselves identify as women and men, not as trans women or trans men.

But among nonbinary people there has emerged the term skoliosexual, i.e., "to be attracted to transgender or non-binary/genderqueer people". Not all non-cisgender people are people whose identify is anchored in the binary identity opposite to the one they were born into (or assigned to at birth), and as a consequence some of us actively prefer to connect with people who are affirmatively attracted to us as we are, for what we are, for our configuration. Viloria proudly described partners who found her intersex body intrinsically attractive and relays similar tales and experiences from other intersex people she's compared notes with.


My mom is an attractive woman. She has nice curves, nice female shapes even at 82. I'm seeing a lot more of it than I'm accustomed to — hospitals are like that in general, and in her case she keeps feeling so hot that she can't get comfortable, so she's almost become a naturist here. There's a first-tier reaction of turning away from it, embarrassed by proxy. She's from an era and a culture where you kept yourself covered up, especially if you were a woman. But being attactive, being perceived as attractive, is a part of her identity, part of how she thinks of herself: she brushes her hair here, and puts on makeup: blusher, powder, lipstick. She isn't seeking to be attractive in order to prompt active sexual behavior from anyone (she's got that situation handled; she's got my Dad), but because it is woven into her concept of who she is. For me to find her so, on the other hand, is inappropriate, disturbingly so to most people. It's supposed to be so taboo that it would be impossible for me to see those contours in sexual terms. We've put a lot of energy into supposed to when it comes to sexuality. As a culture we invest in shoulds and should nots and leave little room for people to feel what they feel, alleged sexual revolutions beside the point. Poke at this particular one and you'll see that under it is the hidden notion that male people can't help acting on any sexual feeling that they experience. The #metoo movement says that's bullshit. I do too. The attraction is there because my mom is female. Not because I'm imposing a litmus test that says I can only find someone attractive if they're female. I'm pretty sure I'm not imposing much in the way of shoulds here if you see what I mean. I can also state with confidence that finding her attractive doesn't make it likely that I'm going to climb into her hospital bed and commit acts of sexual assault. People don't recoil in quite the same way at the notion of a daughter seeing her Dad as a sexually attractive man. But that's because there's a preconceived notion about what male sexuality is like, one that lots of folks hold in their heads without being fully conscious of it.


The difference between being a guy who has some feminine attributes and being a male girl is the same as the difference between being a woman (or man) with some sexually ambiguous characteristics and being an intersex person. It's the difference between noun and adjective, it's the declaration of a phenomenon, a thang. Before 1980 I knew myself to be a male person who had more in common with the girls than with the other boys; I was aware that that made me subject to being classified as a fag, a sissy queerboy, which wasn't right but neither was it right to say that no, I was a regular guy, a straight boy. After 1980 I knew myself to have an entirely separate gender or sexual identity, something just as different as being gay, but not that, and not being male-to-female transgender either. Something else. Something folks hadn't heard about yet, weren't talking about, had no awareness of. It was a sense of identity instead of a box of attributes. It converted the attributes into normative aspects for a male girl instead of peculiar aspects for a guy. It explained my experiences in political terms instead of implying that character defects on my part had brought my experiences upon me. It made a huge difference in my self-esteem.

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A gender invert is someone whose gender is the opposite of the gender associated with their physical sex. Male girls. Female boys. I'm a male girl and I identify as a gender invert. Hi!

The other component of being a gender invert is accepting both one's physical sex and one's unexpected gender as natural and correct.

(I just realized the other day that although I've been blogging about this stuff since 2014, I've never done a blog post specifically about the term!)

Origin

Havelock Ellis popularized the term "gender invert" back in the late 1800s. At the time, he was promoting the notion that homosexual people of either sex were essentially people who possessed a bunch of characteristics of the opposite sex. That notion got challenged and discarded. Most researchers now agree that being a feminine male, or a masculine female, is not what causes a person to be a gay male or a lesbian. ₁ So the term "gender invert" was basically discarded and left to rot on the sidewalk.

I'm reclaiming it. Just because it has nothing to do with causing sexual orientation doesn't mean that gender inversion itself doesn't exist. Or that it isn't a useful term. Our society is now familiar with male-to-female and female-to-male transgender people, transitioners who address their situation by bringing their sex into compliance with their gender. "Gender invert" can refer to a similar person who continues to live a life as a male girl or a female boy, someone who embraces rather than seeks to fix the apparent disparity between sex and gender.


The Umbrella Thing

People often offer me other terms to use instead. I am told that I could refer to myself (and to people like me) as "nonbinary transgender". As opposed to the binary transgender people who transition male-to-female or female-to-male. But as a gender invert, I am operating with some binary assumptions myself, for better or worse: in order to describe a person as having "the opposite" gender from the gender that normally goes with their sex, we're sort of assuming two body types (male and female) and two genders (boy and girl), because only in a binary two-category system do you have an obvious "opposite".

I don't mean to be disrespectful to intersex people or to people whose gender identity isn't binary like that. But most of us who are alive today grew up in a world that uses a binary system for categorizing people by sex. And like most identities, the identity of gender invert exists against the backdrop of society and its existing library of categories.

Yes, I suppose "gender invert" is technically an identity that falls under the transgender umbrella, since anyone who is a gender invert would have a gender identity other than the one that other folks assume them to have. And "gender invert" also falls under the genderqueer umbrella, since anyone who is a gender invert has a gender other than the normative, expected gender, therefore is queer, gender-wise. And since you can't express "male girl" in a strict binary system where everyone is either male (and hence a man or boy) or else female (and thereby a woman or girl), "gender invert" fits under the umbrella term "nonbinary" as well.

I now have all the umbrellas I need.

What I don't have is enough specific recognition of my situation. Like lesbians who felt more erased than included by the use of the term "gay", and preferred to see the word "lesbian" to reflect an awareness of them, I want to see "gender invert" spreading as a concept and as a terminology.


What gender inversion ISN'T -- aka what not to say to a gender invert

• Being a gender invert is not another way of saying you have a masculine or feminine "side". All of me is feminine. Side, back, front, top, bottom. I'm not less feminine in my gender than some other kind of person. A gender invert is not someone halfway inbetween a person who is cisgender and a person who is transgender and getting hormones and surgeries. I find the "side" thing and the assumptions that I'm only semi-feminine to be negating and insulting.

• Obviously, since we're not living in Havelock Ellis's time, we all know that gender identity isn't the same as sexual orientation, right? Actually, weirdly enough, you know where you see these elements conflated with each other a lot? For gays and lesbians. Someone affirms a proud gay femme's identity by saying "Oh sure I always knew you were gay, totally flaming" and then describes the person's childhood femininity. Or speaks of their daughter's incipient identity as a lesbian by describing how butch she was in fourth grade. Well, I should not attempt to speak on behalf of gay or lesbian people who also identify as gender inverts, but yeah, do try to separate the two components in your mind and think before you speak. Me, I'm a sissy femme girlish male whose attraction is towards female folks. I need the term "gender invert" because we don't have a term for someone like me.

• No, this isn't about committing genderfuck or cleverly trying to "undermine gender" and I'm not an agender person and I'm not particularly genderfluid either. Some people are. Here's a respectful and sincere salute to those who are. Nope, I'm gendered. I'm differently gendered, I'm queerly gendered, but I'm genuinely gendered. I have a gender identity.


But why?

I suppose in some ways being a gender invert is a bit old-fashioned, like being bisexual instead of pansexual or something. Perhaps it appears to you like a step backwards, reaffirming those binary categories even as it tries to carve out a noncompliant gender identity from them.

I don't think it is. I think it's like coming into an ongoing argument about whether to allow limited medical marijuana use or keep it completely illegal -- and saying it should be 100% legal for all uses, recreational and otherwise.

If it had ever already been established that it's normal and healthy that some percent of female people are extremely masculine, and similarly that some portion of male folks are entirely feminine, it would be a different situation, but it hasn't been and it isn't. And since it hasn't been established that way, proclaiming the desirability of androgyny and/or a gender-free world in which individuals aren't encouraged to identify with either of those moldy old gendered identities is making that the goal post. For those supporting our side of the debate, that is. The other side maintains its goal posts in the traditional gender conformities. I've never been much of a sports fan but I'm pretty sure that means all the action is in between neutral territory and traditional territory.

I'm moving the goal posts.

But moving the goal posts isn't why I'm doing this. I'm doing this because this is who I am. The fact that I think it's progressive is just an added benefit. The fact that some may think it's regressive and old-fashioned instead is just an added burden.

I'm speaking out about it either way.


You, when speaking about the many identities covered by the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ acronym, or when compiling a list of identity flags for a pride day illustration, please make a mention of gender inverts. I'd appreciate it. I'm here, too.



₁ See for example "Same-sex Sexuality and Childhood Gender Non-conformity: a spurious connection", Lorene Gottschalk, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol 12, No. 1, 2003



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The transgender community has given us AMAB and AFAB — "assigned male at birth" and "assigned female at birth", respectively. There are things I like a lot about that formulation. It makes a radical departure from the notion that such characteristics are just right there, inherent in the person and self-explanatory, and instead draws our attention to the categorizer, a person who makes the classification.

That's an important shift of focus. Without it, a hostile skeptic may say, for example, that John is male but "thinks he is" or "dresses up as" or "wants to be thought of as" female, as if John's perceptions are in error and the reality is that John is male. But with that important shift in focus, we are drawn to the fact that some human being categorized John as male — an act that involves perceptions just as much as John's own, a human social act that is not immune to errors or differences of opinion. "Is male" gets suspended, replaced with "is regarded as male by _____".

There are a few things about the AMAB / AFAM formulation that I'm a bit less fond of, on the other hand. The "at birth" part of the phrases creates the implicit sense that the folks who assign such classifications to people do so just once, when the individual is born, and then they close up shop. That's not at all how things work, and we need a term and a concept to refer to the way that people go around doing this to us all the time, every day and in every situation. People categorize us and treat us accordingly, and we cope with that (some of us with more friction and dismay than others) because it is a real part of our social reality, being categorized and regarded in this fashion.

Another thing I'm not so comfortable with regarding AMAB / AFAB is that it makes no distinction between sex (by which I mean physical morphology, the contours of the body) and gender. I think that among transgender activists there may have been the perception that using AMAB and AFAB made as much distinction between sex and gender as they needed to make: Jane, who was given the name John by her parents, was AMAB — assigned male at birth — but is a woman, female; Jane is therefore transgender and it's no one's freaking bloody business what Jane's physical morphology is or what surgeries or hormones she takes, because the authenticity of Jane's identity as a woman shouldn't be subjected to a litmus test. That, I think, is more or less the lines along which the transgender activists were thinking when they reached their consensus around the use of the AMAB / AFAB nomenclature.

The problem with that is that transgender people are not the only gender-variant or gender-atypical people who have these concerns. Let me introduce you to Miguel, Sophia, and me, Allan.

Miguel was designated "female" by the hospital doctors (AFAB, you could say), but not without some discussion and some interesting notes in the medical charts. The doctors observed a vaginal opening and a urethra that did not pass down the barrel of the penis, and there did not appear to be testicles, but penis there did indeed appear to be. Surgery on Miguel was contemplated, and the simplest, in the opinion of the doctors, was to truncate that penile appendage and classify Miguel as female. Today, Miguel identifies as a man, and uses male pronouns and presents as a man and prefers to be classified by other people as a man and treated accordingly, at least in a world where the only other everyday-accessible option is to be classifed and treated as a woman. Miguel, however, does not identify as male. Or as female. Miguel identifies as intersex. And if it's "no one's freaking bloody business what Miguel's physiological morphology is" (or was), Miguel gets silenced and erased, unable to speak about his identity and situation.

It would be more useful for Miguel to be able to use separate terms for the categorization by other people of his physical body as "female" and for the categorization of his gender as "girl" (then) and "man" (now) — sex and gender as two different things, both of them being characteristics that other people go around classifying people, assigning people to categorically, and treating them accordingly. And having both of those terms and concepts in front of us makes it easier to point out the obvious: that perceiving and categorizing a person as female (sex) nearly always leads to folks also perceiving and categorizing them as girl or woman (gender).

Sophia's tale is different. She was born with fairly typical female morphology, assigned female, and based on that treated as a girl growing up. She has never, as far as she can recollect, ever thought she was male, or thought she should have been male. The "girl" thing, on the other hand, was always complicated and problematic for her. Because she was perceived as female, she was categorized as a girl and treated accordingly, but she experienced this as people treating her as someone she was not, as someone with vastly different characteristics than the ones she actually had. When she was encountering people for the first time, such as the first day of classes in a new school, people expected her to think and behave more or less in the generic way they expected all girls to think and behave. After they had more experience interacting with her, people's behavior towards her changed: they regarded her as "doing it all wrong", holding her in contempt or disapproving of her for not meeting their expectations. And her own reaction was to feel anger and frustration when regarded and treated as a (typical) girl and rebellious pride when regarded and treated as a (misbehaving, atypical) not-very-girlish girl instead.

Sophia identifies as a butch. She does not regard herself as transgender. She expects "she / her" pronouns and does not present visually to the world in such a way as to prompt the average person to categorize her within their heads as a man. Her physical morphology is classified, both by her and by anyone familiar with it, as female. The lesbian community understands butch as an identity, recognizes her presentation of herself as butch, and treats her accordingly, and the qualities and characteristics that are assigned to her along with that identity are a pretty decent fit, one that does not cause her friction and dismay the way being perceived and treated as a girl did while she was growing up.

Sophia's identity, as perceived by others, could therefore be expressed as "female" (sex) and "butch" (gender).

Outside of the lesbian community Sophia has less assurance of being perceived and treated accurately. The larger culture doesn't have the same awareness of "butch" as a gender identity. Sophia herself says she is unable to make any distinction between homophobia towards her as a lesbian, misogyny towards her as a woman stepping out of the confinement of sexist expectations, or ignorance of the possibility of a female person having butch as their gender identity. From her vantage point it's the same ball of wax however you cast it.

Then there's me, Allan. My story is a lot like Sophia's, except with some factors inverted. I was born with reasonably typical male physiology, assigned male on that basis, and raised and treated as a boy growing up. Like Sophia, I didn't like the effects of that treatment and experienced it as people treating me like someone I was definitely not. And, again like Sophia, people would start off expecting me to think and behave like a generically typical boy and then, given sufficient familiarity with me and my ways, treated me instead like someone to be contemptuous of and hostile towards for not matching those expectations. And I, too, felt irritation and resentment when treated like one of the boys and was proud of my difference when it was brought to my attention.

Unlike Sophia, I don't have a ready-made community in which I can identify as and be quickly and easily perceived as a femme. I don't have that kind of social home where I get to experience that. I never have. There is a sort of femme identity in the gay male community (although it seems to be less established as a subtype of gay male than butch is for lesbians and instead is perceived more like a negative and unfortunate stereotype about all gay males). But insofar as my sexual attraction is towards people with a female morphological architecture, and the gay male community is defined around sexual attraction towards male folks, that's not of any use to me.

Which may well be a problem for butch women who are not lesbians, as well. We have more cultural awareness that not all lesbians are butch or all gay guys femme than used to be the case, but there's less cognitive appreciation for someone being a heterosexual butch female person or a heterosexual femme male person.

Do you like complicated truths and complex explanations? Is it complicated enough for you yet?

All of this so far has focused on the act of assigning sex and gender (and sexual orientation, too) identities. I've talked about those assignments either "fitting" or "not fitting", as if each person had an internal identity code that was just there inside them. That one's own identity is "just there", that it "just is".

But gender identification of one's self is also a verb. (So, for that matter, is sex identification). I think it is possible but not compellingly likely that our brains are hardwired to make us think of ourselves as male or female, girl or boy, butch or femme, or any of those other identity factors. What I am very confident of is that we recognize the patterns in the social world around us, and then we mentally place ourselves where we think we fit, and that is the act and the art of identifying. We may, in fact, "try on" various available identity-formulations, seeking that fit, until something clicks and we embrace it as a good one. Usually, that will also involve wanting to be perceived (and hence assigned) that same identity, or a reasonably close approximation of it, by the other people we come in contact with us.

There is a tendency within the larger LGBTQIA+ community to embrace the notion that our differences are built in, biological. Maybe they are — for instance, there may have been something inherently in me that shaped my tendency to resent being treated as a boy and to take rebellious pride in being seen as akin to one of the girls instead. The fact that I'm describing "identification" as an active verb, a verb that involves "choosing", doesn't mean the choices made can't be motivated by built-in differences. But I think a lot of the fondness for the "biologically built in" explanation is motivated by the questionable notion that "if we are this way by nature, we can't be blamed for it as if it is a 'behavior' we have chosen, and they'll have to accept us". People really shouldn't endorse a theory just because they like one of the conclusions it would let them draw if it were true. Firstly because it's intellectually dishonest, in the same sense that the Republican Party in the United States Congress were being intellectually dishonest if the real reason they said "the President shouldn't be allowed to pick a Supreme Court justice in his final year in office" was that the President, at that specific time, happened to be a Democrat. Secondly, because if the theory is ultimately dependent on discernable scientific fact (in this case, the existence of actual biological differences in the brain), research may prove it to be wrong and then you've spent years explaining that the reason it is OK to be gay or transgender or whatever is that it isn't a choice, it's built in, so that can backfire. Finally, the conclusion may not inevitably follow from the theory being true anyhow. Did you know that the mental health professions claim that the various mental illnesses are biologically built in? Did you know that genocidal racists have quite often believed that the people they were killing were biologically different and hence inferior? It is entirely possible for our culture to accept that people with LGBTQIA+ identities are fundamentally born that way and still to want our rights stripped from us and for our identities to be fundamentally illegal and for us as individuals to be subjected to extreme violence for being who we are.

Anyway, so now we have two forms of identity: the kind that is attributed to people by others, the identity that folks assign to you; and the kind that you carry around inside your head, the category that you recognize yourself as belonging to. And for each form, there is both a sex and a gender variable to think about.


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So I was examining all my previous blog posts the other day, to see how often and in what detail I had blogged about the psychiatric system and being a psychiatric survivor, and found to my surprise that I haven't really covered any of that.

Which, to those who know me from the message boards I frequent, must be sort of like hearing from Al Sharpton that he blogged for two years and somehow never got around to discussing racial oppression and race relations in America. I mean, psychiatric oppression is notoriously one of my "climb up on soapbox" issues.

Maybe, possibly, I was disinclined to spoiler my own book. For those of you who read last week's blog entry about my transformative event listening to Pink Floyd? Well, the immediate fallout was that I tried to come out on campus as a different gender and sexual orientation; and the fallout from that, 3 months in, was being asked by my dormitory resident advisor to get some kind of bill of good health from the mental health clinicians across the street. And when I attempted to cooperate with that I found myself on a locked ward, treated like someone for whom a lack of coherent mind had already been established. And yes, it's an important axis around which the final section of the plot of the book revolves. But I don't have to reiterate the narrative that's in the book. I have other interests in writing about it.

When the request was made of me by the RA, I didn't find it surprising. I was a young college student who was talking to a lot of people about gender and sexuality. If I had been a person who seemed obsessed with anything that constituted a set of unusual and new ideas, there would have been the possibility that folks would think I was crazy, but ever so much more so when the obsession-topic was so directly focused on SEX, right? Thanks to Sigmund Freud, we're all very much exposed to the notion that disturbances of mind come from disturbances of a sexual nature. If we tend to think that some middle-aged guy who liquidates his retirement fund to buy an expensive red sports car is expressing some sexual insecurity, isn't that an even more likely armchair diagnosis when some college student starts risking social standing to tell people he's really a girl and that neither the assumptions normally attached to guys nor the assumptions normally attached to effeminate guys are appropriate?

Yeah, I was totally not surprised that there was a reaction basically amounting to "maybe you're not OK in the head and should talk to a shrink about this".

And reciprocally, I knew from my own firsthand experience that before I had a clear healthy understanding of my identity, I'd found the whole subject matter of sexual identity and gender to be emotionally threatening. I'd been squirmy and uncomfortable about it even while I was obsessing about it all the previous semester, trying to figure myself out. So from the outside, yeah, sure, it seemed reasonable that my current excitement and inclination to start talking with a lot of intensity about this stuff could be perceived as a kind of acting out of unresolved tensions and worried uncertainties. The fact that I now felt I was in possession of important answers rather than haunted by disturbing questions didn't change the fact that the subject matter was a sort of ground zero for emotional and cognitive stability issues.

As it turns out, approximately two years AFTER this, long after I'd successfully pried myself loose from the university's affiliated psychiatric system and gone on my way and had begun composing my first serious effort to write and publish a book about my gender identity, I found myself seriously craving something akin to a consciousness-raising group, some sort of sharing and counseling experience from which I could hone my ability to express what I was trying to express and get some feedback from other people on what I was trying to say... and let myself be talked into checking myself in to another such institution. Yeah... fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on ME, highly embarrassing, but yeah...

Whereas the first institution was an old-fashioned central-casting loony bin, with us patients mostly padding around between TV sets, cafeteria, domino games, and an occasional session of "occupational therapy" doing arts and crafts stuff, interspersed with being shoved into seclusion and tied down and shot up with thorazine and all that, the second institution was new and shiny and ostensibly modern in approach and attitude. "The staff all wear street clothes and so do the patients. No bars in the windows, it's more like staying at a hotel. And they won't try to put you on medication, they don't believe in that approach, instead there will be biofeedback and dramatic role play. And the patients all participate in each other's therapy. Everyone is here to work on their own shit. Not at all like that snake pit you were in before".

Yeah. Right. Oh yes, the staff did all wear street clothes but unlike us they had keys to the locked doors. No bars on the windows, to be sure, but the screens were made of heavy metal mesh that created a barrier you weren't getting past without some industrial-strength cutting tools.

And, yes, patients "participated in each other's therapy", all right. Here's how that worked: when you first came in you were assigned to a social status called "level 4". To eventually get out, you have to be gradually promoted to "level 1", and at each level-promoting opportunity all the patients on the ward gave feedback but the final decision-making authority lay with the psychiatrist running the place. One of the behaviors for which you would be evaluated was the kind of feedback you provided about other patients' progress. Making and expressing your own observations that coincided with the opinions of the staff would definitely work in your favor; expressing attitudes or perspectives that did not coincide with those of the treatment team, on the other hand, could work against you. In short, the psychiatrist operating the facility was manipulating the entire social environment, controlling what positive feedback and what negative feedback each patient would receive, and making it so that the institutional message was being effectively echoed by all the other patients, by penalizing them if they did not participate in that fashion.

They didn't much appreciate it when I analyzed all of the above, pointed it out and designated it as a reward-and-punishment behavior-modification tank, a Skinner box. They invented a new social status for me alone, effectively a "level 5", removing from me some of the privileges I'd originally had upon my first arrival.

Oh, and it was largely true that they did not believe in medications. They were achieving their results without them, mostly. Not so much in my case, though, so I was eventually told that I would need to start taking a drug called Navane. I took that as my cue that it was time for me to leave. Using a table knife from the cafeteria, I took out the screws attaching a retaining slide lock from one side of a set of double doors, then escaped through the gap between the doors despite the chain looped around the handles. Hitched out of the state and haven't been tempted to place myself in psychiatric custody at any time since.



Psychiatric diagnostic labeling has political significant for gender activists in particular, and I think everyone in this movement should take note of these things:

• Delegitimizing — Any time a person's behavior is attributed to their disturbed mental condition, that is code for "you can ignore what they're actually saying because it doesn't make sense and there's another, more hidden, reason for why they're saying it that's different from their stated concerns and objectives".

Usually this is couched as an act of kindness — instead of seeing yon person as a destructive maniac doing horrible things, please see that person instead as acting that way because their brain is misbehaving and don't hold it against them; and if they express hateful wrathful attitudes or creepy desires and intentions, don't take it as face value that they really feel that way and really want to do those things, there are underlying reasons causing them to "act out" like that.

But if you start with the assumption that the person in question is expressing exactly what they intend to express, it is obvious that regarding them as impaired in this fashion has the effect of discounting and disregarding them. And if you then coat that very political act in the drape of kindness, it doesn't appear to be a hostile act and those who engage in it need not feel guilt or share for having silenced someone's voice.

• Depoliticizing — It is normal and natural that a person who has been made to feel marginalized, marked as inferior and different, oppressed, subjected to hostility and violence because of the category they are perceived by others to be in, and so on, feels painful emotions as a consequence and has a mind plagued by self-blame and self-doubts and other recurrent cognitive content of that ilk. That is the essence of what it means to be a victim of such social processes, that it gets inside your own head. Psychiatry and the surrounding penumbra of "mental health" counseling services often focus on the victim and the victim's thoughts and feelings, to attempt to provide ameliorative and supportive services. Doing so, by itself, though, identifies the problem as being located in the victim.

A political approach to marginalization and oppression and such categorical social exclusions is to identify the problem as being located NOT in the victim, at least not in the primary original-causal sense, but instead being located in SOCIETY which has done them wrong.

Even the therapeutic act of talking about what one has been through and processing one's feelings and thoughts can, and should, be political. It is important for victims to see the experiences they have been through as due to an ongoing social phenomenon in need of fixing. If this perception does not take place properly, the victim typically continues to blame themselves, for having reacted as they did emotionally.

Carol Hanisch wrote the quintessential article on the subject, "The Personal is Political", back in 1970, published in both The Radical Therapist and in Notes From the Second Year, the first being a compendium of writings about psychiatric liberation and the second being a compendium of writings about women's liberation, thus underlining the connection between gender activism and a radical questioning of psychiatric practice.


• Gatekeeping — For transgender and intersex people in particular, another issue of concern is the role of the psychiatric establishment in disbursing available medical treatment. Hormones and surgery that are desired by a person in order to allow them to perceive and to have others perceive their body as their gender identity and sense of ideal bodily integrity require are quite often restricted to those who have been deemed appropriate for those treatments by a psychiatrist.

At a time when a person is in the most intimate and personal portions of the process of defining themselves to themselves and to the world around them, they are put in a position of having to entertain and engage with someone else's notions of acceptable identities and appropriately gendered behaviors. Persons seeking surgery or hormonal intervention that would typically make it more likely that they will be perceived as female people often have to adopt the most ridiculously pink Barbie doll mannerisms and express the corresponding priorities and interests or else risk being deemed an inappropriate candidate for the medical services they seek; likewise for individuals seeking medical interventions that are socially associated with being perceived as a male person — anything deviating from the most narrowly constrained uptight masculine in activities and interests, gestures and thinking patterns, can cause a psychiatric professional to withhold access to the sought-after procedures.


• Pigeonhole-Defining — The psychiatric profession is not ignoring the phenomenon of people claiming variant gender identities. New terminologies have appeared within the psychiatric lexicon over the course of years, phrases such as "gender dysphoria" and so on. And in all fairness, not every recognition of a gender-variant identity is necessarily infused with the stigma of being considered a mental disorder, although they've certainly done their share of providing us with that kind of recognition.

They do, however, tend towards a kind of thinking in which there are a finite set of phenomena and each legitimate phenomenon is accorded an official name and often some theories about causality, even where pathology isn't being evoked. In the case of transgender people, for example, they have largely come to the point of believing that such people exist (as opposed to believing that someone who thinks of themselves in those terms has a mental disorder, which is certainly progress). Some of them believe that the phenomenon of transgender people is always caused by a biological built-in difference in the brain. Many of them harbor the expectation, consciously or not, that normal transgender people are exclusively heterosexual, do not deviate from the sex role of the gender to which they are transitioning, that they all do wish to transition, and that any ambiguity or multivariate expression of gender indicates that the person has not properly adjusted or perhaps is not genuinely a transgender person in the first place.

It's a very different mindset than one that says gender is mostly a social contrivance and that, as such, there are an infinite number of healthy ways to self-perceive and to socially present as a gendered person. The latter is about freedom and the authenticity of one's own representation of gender identity; the former is about slotting every person into a finite number of officially legitimated category-boxes.

To the extent that they've promoted this kind of thinking within the LGBTQ+ community itself, they've contributed to an environment where young people, in particular, think in terms of there being a specific and limited number of possible legitimate genders, and that it is their task to worry about which one they really are.

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