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.

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Index of all Blog Posts

"We shouldn't call it 'homophobia', that's misleading", my Facebook friend writes. "It's not like those haters out there are hiding from us with their teeth chattering and worried that we're gonna get them. The word should be something like misogyny for hating women, what would that be, misgayism or misqueer, or an 'ism' word, but not a word that makes it sound like they're scared of us the way people get scared of heights or cats or something".

But although I've seen this sentiment quite a few times, there doesn't seem to be any consensus emerging about what else to call it, so 'homophobia' is still the word that's in use.

Besides, I don't think it's entirely wrong to think of it as a phobia. As being about fear.

I've got a scene in my book Within the Box where Derek is at risk of being locked up as a dangerous involuntary patient despite not having done anything threatening to anyone. He finds this bewildering.

But he's always found the anger and hostility bewildering, too. People so upset just because he has behavior patterns that are more like those of the girls, that he acts like a girl instead of acting like a boy.

But then he turns the question to a different angle:

What if they felt threatened by me? I never did anything to hurt anyone, but I broke some unspoken codes of conduct, how boy children are expected to behave, how other boys like us are supposed to be, how one’s students can be expected to act. If somebody doesn’t act the way you thought they would, you end up not having much confidence about your sense of what they might do next.

And of course if there’s a right way to be a boy child student, and we all know what it is, we’re secure in thinking we know how it’s supposed to be, but if there’s one who isn’t like that, then either he’s wrong or our thinking is wrong. Our thinking includes the notion that it matters, having everyone being the way they’re supposed to be, so there isn’t even any room for ‘he isn’t the way he’s supposed to be but it doesn’t matter’. So that’s a different kind of threat, but yeah, that too.

This is actually about sissyphobia, since the provoking behavior is gender noncompliant behavior and not same-sex attraction. Not that the hateful fearful violent people were making that distinction.

I do come to the topic of homophobia partly as an insider and partly as an outsider, being a heterosexual femme. I have had my own fears that could be considered homophobic fears, and I have been on the receiving end of the violence and hate that may be partially fear-driven too.

So what's so scary?

Girls and women have a significant excuse for heterophobia. Decade after decade they've gone on marches and addressed classrooms, trying to get a cultural consensus that "no means no". That it is not tolerable that just because someone is interested in having sexual contact with you, they might impose it on your whether you want it or not.

If there were a similar significant risk of gay people pushing their sexual attentions onto people who didn't want to have sex with them, violating their "no", sexually assaulting them, I could clearly see that that would be a legitimate source of homophobia. But I've never had anything like that happen to me, I've never had any of my friends or colleagues tell me it's happened to them, and the overwhelming majority of the cases where same-sex sexual contact has been imposed has been ostensibly heterosexual male people calling another male homosexual and making intrusive sexual contact while angrily yelling that this is what the victim of the violence obviously wants. I had variations on that theme take place in junior high and high school but mostly it was confined to threats and verbal assaults and the destruction of personal property like books and clothing and whatnot.


Then there's the specter of somehow being stalked by "being gay", as if the sexual orientation itself were somehow predatory and involved in chasing people down and converting them against their will. This is something that needs to be distinguished from the notion of a person crossing the line and imposing themself sexually. It's usually painted as a threat due to the difficulty of negotiating a good heterosexual situation. Sort of like hungry people at a restaurant being barred from getting the food they want, so they're threatened with the prospect of settling for something else that's more readily available.

The cisgender version of heterosexuality has very polarized rules and roles. Obtaining a string of heterosexual encounters with a wide range of different partners is something that is perceived and treated very differently when one is female than when one is male. Sex is portrayed as a conquest, as something that the male person makes happen and the female person says "yes" or "no" to, and to say "yes" too often or too easily obtains for her a set of unpleasant labels and epithets. So sex is set up as an adversarial contest of wills and he wins if he makes sex happen. Therefore it is against that backdrop that same-sex opportunities are positioned as a threat: "You're such a loser that you can't conquer any female partners, therefore this is all that's available to you".

That's a pretty hollow threat though. One might face the prospect of being a loser and failing to secure heterosexual contact with any female people, but unlike the hungry person in the restaurant, sexual appetite isn't the kind of imperative that one dies from absence, and there's autoerotic release available and nonsexual friendship and companionship.

But another form it takes is the fear of being perceived as gay. What's interesting about that is that the most emphatic and noisiest homophobes are nearly always males, but as I just discussed, the ensconced roles and rules of cisgender heterosexuality cast it as the boy-role to make sex happen. So why would it matter particularly if a lot of female people were to perceive one as gay? The suspicion here is that it's actually mostly a concern about what other male people think that's the driving force in this fear.


Of my own fears, my own homophobic responses and hangups, the one that it would be most logical for me to have would be the fear of being perceived as gay and harassed and violently attacked for it. That's certainly happened a lot in my life! But my reaction has been indignation and outrage, and I haven't been much inclined to modify my appearance or behavior to make the queer-bashers less likely to think I'm an appropriate target.

I have at times in my life worried that female people in general might dismiss me from consideration due to thinking I'm gay. That's in part because I'm not cisgender. I'm femme. I'm girl. And I'm very alienated by that whole cisgender heterosexual expectation that as the male person I'm the one who's supposed to be trying to make sex happen and wear down a female person's resistance and reluctance and all that. That totally doesn't fit who I am or how I want to be with someone in a sexual or romantic relationship or encounter. Through most of my life, I've held onto the hope that women would find me interesting and sexually fascinating and would do things to make sex happen between us, that they'd choose me and communicate that to me.

But in the long run, faced with what was painted as a pretty binary choice between being thought of as femme and gay or being thought of as masculine and cis and straight, I decided of the two, being considered a typical boy creature was the worse of the alternatives. When my article "Same Door, Different Closet" was being considered for publication back in the early 1990s, one of the academic reviewers said my model of heterosexuality "didn't depend on a committed effort to avoid sexual feelings and experiences with men". Or perhaps more to the point, wasn't anchored in the need to avoid appearing gay to others.

The world doesn't get to dispose of me or decide for me what my sexual orientation is. Thousands of people thinking of me in a certain way doesn't conjure it up as my reality. And as far as the prospect of other males having a sexual interest in me and misreading the signals, well, as one of my lesbian friends pointed out, it's hardly just heterosexual males who occasionally have to cope with someone being sexually interested in you and you don't reciprocate, and it's not exactly the end of the world. No big deal. Get over it.


To get back to the role of fear in this hatred and violence, though, I'll end with this additional snippet from Within the Box:

You try to get a handle on why people would be hateful and oppressive and you just end up finding them guilty of being horrible people with no justification, and there’s no understanding for that. But I can understand scared. I don’t know what to do about it, but it’s a starting point.

—————


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.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

[warning: multiples forms of hostile & derogatory language]


There's a form of knuckle-dragging stubborn refusal to consider other folks' social situations that pretends to be common-sensical and harmless. And tries to portray anyone making a complaint about common widespread behaviors as rigid and rule-oriented, judgmental and humorless.

The problem with intolerance is not limited to the proud jerks who brag about how intolerant they are and who say deliberabely confrontational things to rile people up and make us angry.

But let's start with them anyway. One problem with folks like that nowadays is that such statements are so freaking outrageous that you feel stupid taking them seriously. Someone starts a discussion about how people like their coffee and one of these loud cheerful folks says "Just like my women: black, hot, chained to my bed, and whipped twice a day". Or "Strong and manly, don't pour me none of that faggy fairy flavored stuff, it was probably Evian water before it transitioned and I don't want none of that tranny stuff". They count on you feeling awkward about getting indignant in front of everyone present and saying "THAT WASN'T FUNNY, you asshole". They count on people accepting that it was to be taken as a joke. If confronted, he's going to spread his arms wide, shrug, and say "Yeesh, you don't think I'm being serious, lighten up willya?"

That's a problem if what is being "joked" about is just an extreme form of things said in all seriousness right there in the same social context.

I've been at a dinner table where some people who did beat their kids would say funny things like "I brung you into this world and if you don't watch it I can take you right the hell back out" or "Yeah of course I'm taking him with me when we go out swamp fishin' this Sattiddy... just the right size for trolling for alligators". See, it sets a tone where it sounds huffy and indignant and self-important if you later object to "I'm gonna raise a knot on your head if you interrupt me once more" or the obviously dead-serious affirmation that "A kid DOES need a good lickin' now and then. That's just good parenting. Nobody ever got anything but properly straightened out by a close familiarity with their Daddy's belt".


The bigger problem, though, is the weather people.

Do you know and understand about the weather people? Those are the ones who accept some forms of people-behavior as being Just How Things Are, just like the weather. Complaining about the weather never did make it change, now did it? What you do with the weather is, you adjust, you accept, and you COPE. Anyone who seriously snivels and whines about it is not being an ADULT.

But people are not storm clouds. Storm clouds are not going to listen to your complaints. It would be irrational to expect the storm cloud to ever change its behaviors in response to you. But people have a personal responsibility for their behaviors. So when a behavior is truly egregious and is something you should not have to tolerate, it does not MATTER that the behavior is long established and not likely to go away the first time you complain. It does not MATTER that people will defend such tradition-honored asshole behaviors and argue against you and get annoyed with you for attacking them. If you're pretty solidly sure of your ground and feel strongly enough about it, this is how it's done. They don't have to like it. But they have the capacity to change, and whether by patient explanation or angry call-downs or any other tactic of communication, it is appropriate to make those challenges to those ensconced behavioral patterns.

But here come the weather people, acting all reasonable, saying "OH well it's not that you're WRONG, but c'mon, they always do that, and you're making too big a fuss, and they do not MEAN ANYTHING BAD by it, the most outrageous ones are just being ridiculous and funny and the serious ones aren't saying anything that's all that horrid. I tell you what, let's just lighten up. You can have your opinion and it is OK that you said it out loud, but since no one was intending you any hurt you need to do something about that angry TONE of yours"

Weather people at beer bashes and parties twenty years ago were saying "Yeah so people shouldn't drive home all drunk and stuff, but they're going to do it anyway and you should not be bringing everyone down being all dead serious, and they're grownups and most of them aren't all that drunk so give it a rest, willya?"

And thus it becomes rare and difficult to actually SAY anything about our social issues. No one wants to be tagged as the wet blanket, the ponderously-serious social misfit who doesn't get how inappropriate it is to lecture folks and so on.

But hey, are all these same people going to sit down in a circle tomorrow afternoon and be part of an honest talking and listening space, and we should bring it up with them then instead?

No?

So if it's going to be said at all, it has to be said in the spaces where the offenses occur.


—————


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

When I was a graduate student, I lived in a communal house with a bunch of other folks, each of us renting a room and sharing the common space such as kitchen and laundry and living room.

There was one resident I didn't get along with particularly well. He addressed me dismissively, with a smug contempt for my bookish ways. I think he considered me arrogant and pretentious. His nickname was 'Taxi' because he had once been a cab driver.

One fall, we started having problems with the washing machine. During the part of the routine where it would pump out the water from the wash or rinse cycle, the plumbing suddenly couldn't handle the water fast enough and it would back up and splash all over the floor. The drainage system was ancient and primitive: the drain pipes went into the ground and spread out in a fan with holes to let the water out into the soil, no sump, no generalized septic tank. (Water from toilets did get routed to a septic tank but everything else was expected to be slurped up by the sand).

I could visualize what we needed, in the abstract, and told the others in our household. "What we need", I told them, "is some kind of reservoir vessel with an opening in the top to let the water flow in from the pipe, wide enough and deep enough to hold all the water that was in the washing machine, with a drain at the bottom that goes on out to the regular drainage system. So when it backs up, it just fills the reservoir, which holds it until it can drain away at its own speed".

Taxi scoffed. "No. We buy a big sink from the hardware place and put it next to the washer and the drain connects to the bottom of the sink. Stick the hose from the washing machine over the lip of the sink and wire it to secure it".


Taxi was a person who thinks in the concrete and pragmatic; he may not have even seen that the sink he was suggesting was a match for the reservoir vessel I'd conjured up in the abstract. To my chagrin, I realized he'd not only proposed something that would solve the immediate problem of soapy water splooshing all over our floor and leaving us with a mess, but had also found a way of giving us an additional useful device in the process: items could be hand-washed in the sink. I had been visualizing something like one of those big plastic buckets like spackling compound comes in, with the existing hose coming in through an opening in the top and a hole being cut in the lower rim or the bottom and a second hose somehow cemented in place, and the entire contraption needing to be secured somehow in mid-air, and considering and rejecting a wide range of materials to pull all this together. Practical and pragmatic has never been my strong side, I'm afraid. His sink idea, I had to admit, was an unbeatable solution.

I found the whole situation very irritating.




One problem I have with pragmatism is that it often means perceiving the world in its current form as "the world you have to live in" and doesn't leave much space for visualizing the world as it should be. It doesn't have to have that effect -- there's a definite pragmatic and practical element in inventing things and creating strategies for change. But as a mindset, the type of thinking that is dismissive of abstract thought and concentrates on the importance of the here and now and the solid and the immediately available is a type of thinking that's prone to being dismissive of any notions about changes to the big picture.

Gender is an abstraction. Madison Bently, first person to use "gender" in the modern sense, defined it as "the social obverse of sex". An obverse is the front side of something, hence the outward-facing front of sex. It's the beliefs, understandings, roles, behaviors, personality traits, feelings, archetypes, nuances, priorities, values, charisma, and all the other stuff that humans attach to the bare fact of a person's biological plumbing. More to the point, calling it gender and distinguishing it from the plumbing itself is a recognition of the fact that the stuff we associate with having a penis or having a vagina isn't directly and inevitably a consequence of it. Some of our notions about how the folks who sport a clitoris and labia are inaccurate, wrong, biased, factually incorrect. And some of our other notions are only accurate as a generalization, so having that particular biological configuration doesn't mean having all the associated gender traits.

But for the overly pragmatic, parts is parts. You either got this type of plumbing or you got that type of plumbing. And yeah, beliefs are out there, they exist as things that are real, too, and you can be this way or that way but the world's gonna be this way or that way about it when you do, so that's part of the real world you should take into account. You wanna go against the current, sail against the wind, you should not expect to get very far very fast. That's the pragmatic truth.

Visionary idealism, the mental construction of the world as it really ought to be, depends on a clean slate with preconceived notions bracketed off as much as possible. When it comes time to consider tactics for actually changing to world to make these visions come to fruition, it is necessary to bring back in all the awarenesses that we bracketed off, to examine the real and to study it in detail. But while it's in the foreground of your thoughts, you'll have a difficult time imagining how it could be any different, or assessing within yourself what feels like the natural way for things to be in the absence of pressures pushing you and everything else into different forms.


I do talk with big words, and I write in long sentences and long paragraphs. Putting abstract thought into words is an art form and a challenge. These are not points that are easy to make to people in short choppy sentences and phrases. Our language is utilitarian, reflecting the inherent nature of concrete things, which are self-evidently what they appear to be. Tree. Rock. Knee. Eat. Sleep. Sex. The terms for abstractions tend to be longer words, words we use less often, and they tend to be more vague in their meaning, requiring the use of a bunch of them when one is painting a verbal picture. Ambivalently conflictual relationships. Internalized self-image. Projected and eroticized expectations of gender performance. Patriarchal hegemonic subject-object oppositional dynamics. Etc.

I don't do it to show off my vocabulary or impress people with how erudite I sound. I do it to communicate. To paint the right picture, so that it makes sense. (I'll admit to the ego factor: I do think I'm kind of good at it).


If you only want to converse in sentences that could fit on a bumper sticker, you leave yourself open to hostile reverse-snobby people who like to characterize us as delusional people who think our plumbing doesn't count and who want the world to go along with our delusions. In a limited space and with short attention span, they can claim they make sense and you don't.


—————


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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They repurposed the word, you know.

Before Wordle meant that annoying game that everyone keeps posting about, Wordle was a tool for analyzing a chunk of text and displaying the words that the author used most often.

This was the Wordle of my first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet:




Well, here's the Wordle for That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, which from its title might seem likely to be more akin to an academic text full of scary polysyllables and insider terminology. It mostly isnt:




If you want to see a genuinely abstruse academic paper's Wordle for comparison's sake, here's what my 1992 paper "Missing in Action: Radical Feminism and/or Poststructuralist Feminism in the Academy" looks like:




—————


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

It's a trope of both literature and film. We have two protagonists thrown together by circumstances, allies working together. They don't particularly react to each other as attractive romantic possibilities, and instead we find them interacting as people with skills and talents, areas of expertise and passionately held principles. And they come to regard each other very highly for this, to respect each other as a colleague who is a formidable force to be reckoned with. Then there's that moment when they've just pulled off a triumph or gotten past a major hurdle and they look at each other for the first time with erotic interest; their eyes meet and their lips meet and things get all sexy and steamy.

Raise your hand if you have no idea what I'm talking about. No one? Good... so hang on to that image, if you will...


So: the Nice Guys thing -- I first ran into the complaint about Nice Guys from a website called Heartless Bitches International, back in the 1990s. I'm under the impression that HBI were the folks who publicized the concept and made it a part of our shared social repertoire. They said Nice Guys were the ones always complaining that women don't really want nice guys, that women gravitate towards sexually predatory jerks. Or to be more specific about it, they complain that women don't really want to date nice guys. That nice guys get "friend zoned", treated as friends who aren't heterosexually eligible. The Heartless Bitches' complaint about us (yes, us, because for presumably obvious reasons -- if you've been reading my blog -- that description certainly hit home so far) was that we only pretend to like them, that our real motivation is to worm our way into their affections by being nice to them, in hopes that they'll dispense sex to us. And that when that doesn't happen, we get all bitter and hostile. And this all means that we really just viewed the women as sexual opportunities, as sex objects, and were only being nice as a ploy to make them like us, and think we're entitled to have sex happen as a consequence of being nice, which, when you sum it all up isn't very nice at all, now is it?


Well, look, Ms. Heartless... may I refer to you as HB? (It's one thing for you to refer to yourself as a bitch, but...) Look, HB, I wasn't pretending to like you as a person. I really do, I admire you and greatly enjoy your company, and no, it's not a calculated attempt to sneak my way into your pants. Do I hope that some percent of my associations with women I like and admire will develop like the romantic films and stories, where one day a moment will come...? Oh hell yeah. Sure I do. I'm attracted in your direction, why wouldn't I hope for such things? Frankly, I think that for a lot of people who have never thought of themselves as genderqueer, or as nice guys for that matter, they'd like for more of that kind of thing to happen in their lives, so it's not just us.

But somehow it's creepy to hope that one day she'll decide I'm kind of hot and that she wants to kiss me and make out? "She" isn't a specific person; it doesn't have to be you, personally. This trajectory doesn't have to be how all my nice warm collegial friendships with female people end up going, and I don't expect them to. I'm certainly not thinking about it every moment of the time we spend together.

Let's revisit: I grew up with girls saying they were tired of being treated and regarded as sexual opportunities instead of as people. And we Nice Guys, perhaps we are the males who grew up liking girls as people, like their company, share their values, and want their approval as a person, as well as being attracted to them. That's certainly where I'm at. So -- Ms. HB, over here, she says she prefers the bluntly honest horndog, the fellow who clearly signals that his interest in her is of a sexual nature.

What's the complaint here? Oh yeah, that we Nice Guys go around claiming that you prefer the bluntly honest horndog aka sexually predatory jerks and don't want really want to date nice guys, although you're fine with having us as friends. Sounds like we're pretty much in agreement with how things are.

Oh, but we're bitter and hostile about the situation. That we act like we're entitled to have it play out differently, that we deserve better. Hmm, yeah, I can see how that impression could develop. Mind you, when I do my complaining, I complain about the overall situation, not about one individual woman or her sexual preferences. I've heard some of the bitter and hostile guys, incels and all that, making it sound like we, the nice guys, are the victims of a social situation that puts us in double-binds where we're damned if we do and damned if we don't, but that you, Ms. HB, and your sisters, are free to act in a different pattern if you so chose, and that since you don't so choose this is somehow all your doing. I'm personally going to plead Not Guilty on that one, but I concede that there's a lot of that behavior coming off the Nice Guys in general. It's not nice and it's not fair, but people are often hostile towards individuals when what they're actually angry and frustrated about is how things are set up socially. A lot of us Nice Guy types don't like aspects of our gender role, that's what it comes down to, and we complain about it being unfair, and sometimes we get downright adversarial and confrontational about it. Sometimes we act like the individual person in front of us is somehow personally responsible for setting it up that way. And is free in a way that we are not. That's just wrong.

(Hell, it's a patriarchy, and women, including you, Ms. HB, have been complaining about the unfairness to women of these rigid roles and pointing out how you're constrained by them, so it's quite amazing that Nice Guys can be so opaque about how no, you and your sisters didn't personally set it up this way. But the whining Nice Guy who is doing this didn't personally set it up this way either, and neither, for that matter did the bluntly honest horndog fellow, whose bluntly honest tendency to treat you like a sexual bonbon right from the outset is only preferable under some circumstances).

Let me explain a couple things from a personal vantage point, if I may.

First off, some women do prefer Nice Guys. You personally, Ms. HB, are free not to, and I'm still on board with being your friend. But the sexist courting and dating scenario paints the honest horndog fellow as the male who is doing it right, so it's harder for us to figure out how to make our situation work.

Second, let's posit for the sake of example that I'm attracted to you from the outset when we first meet. That's not special. I'm attracted to an incredibly large percent of your very cute morphological variety, and at the stage where I've only just met you that isn't any more personal for me than it is for you, you see what I'm saying? And just like a lot of nice girls, I tend to want to feel personally appreciated for who I am and treated individually and not like an interchangeable Tab A, and even if that were not true, I've heard all the nice-girl complaints about being treated like sex objects and sexual targets and opportunities, so no, of course I'm not going to express to you the fact that I find you sexually attractive, I don't even know you!

Thirdly, let's assume some time goes by and we do get to know each other, and I'm liking you. I'm liking you on many levels. Well, when that happens to you, do you, umm, find it awkward to express a type of interest that would move the connection in a romantic direction? I sure do, so I wait. Not only is it not my responsibility as the person with the male anatomy to be more blunt and honest in saying so, I'm totally into being less so precisely because of how it's all set up.


-----

All of the above set of notions and concepts are things I more often express as "I am of a different gender than the one that is conventionally assumed of male people". You do need to realize that there is more than one way of putting things into words. If you never before thought of Nice Guys as people unhappy with sexist expectations, or as people whose assumed gender is a bad fit for who they actually are, it may be because they aren't being called that, aren't typically discussed that way.


You do, I assume, realize that Nice Guys, in the sense promulgated by the Heartless Bitches International characterization, is labeling from the outside, right?

Well, that was true of the label "bitches" too, wasn't it? Good on you for reclaiming it.

I'm following your example.



—————


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


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



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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

We live in a world of individual actors. We live in a world organized and controlled by social structures. Social structures can be oppressive, and as individual actors some of us seek to struggle against them.

The relationship of individiual actor to structure is most centrally this: the structures do not exist anywhere except in the minds of the individual actors.

Unless it is even more centrally this: the thoughts, perceptions, and understandings of individual actors are, if not utterly defined by the social structures in their heads, then at least strongly shaped and channelled and interpreted by them.



Since the social structures that we wish to change exist only inside of people's heads, we are -- by definition -- trying to change individual people, trying to modify the contents of other people's heads. That's where the social structure lives. So -- again, by definition -- we have a critical perspective on the mindset and attitudes and belief systems and types of awareness that are in other people's heads. We are constantly making value judgments and evaluations about which portions of what we see and encounter in other people's heads is harmful, a part of the social problems we're trying to change, and which portions are either a part of the solution we're working towards or have new insight and awareness that might be part of other efforts, seeking other solutions, perhaps seeking to modify the contents of our head accordingly.

We are uneasy with being judgmental, or with being judged by others, and we often find it awkward and difficult to reconcile acceptance and kindness and general love for our fellow comrade sufferers with our ongoing need to change what needs changing.

All the nouns that refer to social structure and social institution are verbs and adjectives as well if you turn them to a different angle. Formal patterns of interactive behavor make up organizations, laws, plural composite entities of any sort -- society. A dance is a structure -- it is made up of rules and routines, form and shape and timing. Yet the dance is also composed entirely of dancers dancing. The behavior has a certain quality, a 'danciness', if you will, that makes it different from other ways of moving or other structured physical interactive behaviors, a different that allows us to recognize it as a dance (and as dancers dancing) as opposed to (for instance) football games (and football players playing).

As anyone who has been in the position of teaching a new dance can tell you, the possibility of the dance is dependent on having a shared set of rules and expectations and notions and concepts, a shared blueprint explaining to all the dancers how to dance. Even if the notions are spread spontaneously (and yes, this can happen, does happen, sometimes), the spread must take place somehow. And there's a final critically important element, in addition to a set of notions about how to do the dance and the fact of sharing it -- the dancers must be aware that the other dancers also share these notions, so that they will have the expectation that the other dancers will indeed be doing their part in the dance.

So that's social structure: it's all in our heads, collectively speaking; and it requires that what's in our heads is shared and expected to be shared as a collectively agreed-upon reality.

Social change: there is enormous, perhaps infinite, possibility for social change, since social structure exists only in our heads, but the following things must occur if social change is to occur: new notions of how to interact must be conjured up in a consistent pattern, they must be communicated so that they are shared notions, and the communication must saturate to the point that we have the reasonable expectation that the individuals we encounter share an awareness of the new pattern.


Behaviors take on a political impact because of political context. There is often not one dance and its moves that are within people's awareness, but several, and while sometimes someone will announce what dance we're about to do, it transpires at least as often that the dancers convey with their opening gestures and positioning shifts which dance they prefer, and they take their cue from what seems to be the sense or the primary direction opted for in the room at the time. So there may be an old way, a set of behaviors that are part of the previous structure, and also a new way, with modified behaviors that make up part of the new strucutre, and the dancers are familiar with both.

The gesture, the word phrase used or the nuance of expression, become politicized in this way. "You said 'handicapped' here, and I think we want to say 'disabled' instead", someone may suggest. It's not limited to language by any means, but language is a key space in which we see it occur. Things that we say take on political impact that has little to do with any intrinsic harm or rightness about those terms and phrases but because of the larger patterns that they are components of, the larger world-views and understandings and patterns of behavior that they come to symbolize or represent to us. A person may be affronted over your use of "service recipient" where they prefer "client", affronted in ways that sometimes exasperate people who focus on the item or element directly objected to, not realizing the extent to which it's not the item in and of itself that is problematic, but that it tends to be a component of a larger structure, a way of looking at or thinking of something that isn't the only way, and in an area where social change is being attempted or desired. The person expressing their affront may lose track of this fact as well.

Everyone on the dance floor has a responsibility for our moves. All the dancers want a degree of predictability and pattern, and where there are multiple possible patterns there are choices to be made, and we are responsible for our choices. At the same time, we are all caught up in many many dances we can't afford to sit out, and at any given time there are many dancers who have some notions of how the dance could go differently but who haven't communicated those notions to you yet, so you don't know the new possible pattern.

How many dancers must have a new dance in their heads as a shared notion before their movements on the dance floor can actually constitute a new dance that others can join?

One of my college professors often spoke of the attitudes they'd had in the 1960s: "Most of our students don’t engage with course content as political. When we were students ourselves, we took over administration buildings and the police were sent in, and we printed our own manifestos and taught our own alternative classes in the hallways. Teaching the truth about the Vietnam war and race and how the people who write the textbooks take money from the corporate conglomerates that benefit from the war. But this is a different era."

It was a time when there was a widely shared notion, a notion so widely shared it was expected of you that you shared in it, that those who were seeking social change were a critical mass and that its success was inevitable.

So add that to the pile: that social change itself, as a real fact, is a part of our mindset, and that we expect everyone we encounter to have that same awareness, along with its attendant responsibilities.

———————


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


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



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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I was in fifth grade in 1970 and so I came of age alongside of feminism. Feminism said it was sexist to have a different yardstick for measuring the behavior of people depending on their sex. That was a good message for me, since from about 2nd grade onwards, people brought to my attention that I acted like a girl instead of like a boy. I don't know what that conjures up for you, but it seemed to have something to do with being goody two shoes and prim about language and being crude and dirty for its own sake. Feminism backed me up when my reaction was "Yeah, so? The girls are doing it right, what's wrong with you and the other boys?"


The message of feminism was that if a way of being, the roles and behaviors and so on, was who or how you were, that was more important than what sex you were. If you were brave, you were a brave person and it meant the same thing whether you were a girl who was brave or a boy who was brave.

I have had people listen while I recounted my expriences and then tell me "well, fine, but that did not mean you were a girl".

We have phrases in the English language. "For all practical purposes". "For all intents and purposes". I understood "girl" to be a role, a way of being thought of, a set of expectations, a pattern. I didn't specifically think I "was a girl". It was more that I realized that for all intents and purposes I was one of them because how I was, my patterns, made me fit in among them and not among the people I shared a physical sex with. I knew I was male and had no problem with that, it just didn't seem terribly important for defining who I was.


The feminist message was a unisex message, a gender-neutral message. You could even say it was a gender-neutralizing message. A lot of feminists say that should be enough. I once thought so too.

But male has been the default sex. We had the word "man" meaning human and yet also meaning male human. It was more than nomenclatural and linguistic, there was and still is a deep-seated tendency to see the generic condition of the species as male. Female is the special condition, the exception. It means that male traits are projected as human traits, but traits marked as female are not. They don't apply to males and they don't apply to generic humans, only to female humans. So when feminists demanded that female humans be seen as people first, not as special exceptional cases, they were accused right and left of wanting to be men.

Feminists were actually doing a transgender thing. They weren't calling themselves men in the sense of male, but the generic human was marked male and feminists were now claiming that generic human for themselves.

It just doesn't work the same way when a male person does it. Claiming unisex or asking for unisex human expectations instead of gendered ones does not invoke any of the associations and notions that are attached to female people. Because those traits aren't unisex. They're tagged as special, exceptional, belonging to women only.



———————

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

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


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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Hi! Want to moderate a discussion panel? Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to lead these four folks to some sort of accord, or, failing that, to moderate their debate fairly and give each one a chance to support their positions.

I'll let them introduce themselves as they deem appropriate --


Lillian: Hello, I'm Lillian. I'm a gender critical feminist. I'm 70. When I was young, I was part of the feminist second wave that attacked the notion that biology is destiny, that if you were born male you were designed to live *this* life but if you were female you were destined to live *that* life. As feminists, we indicted gender roles and gendered assumptions about people. Because they aren't necessary for the functioning of society -- except the unfair parts -- and they aren't good for us as individuals. They are restrictions! We opposed sexist double standards and sexist expectations and assumptions. Anyone might be a leader. Anyone might be a nurturant caregiver. Anyone might be a belligerent asshole. Anyone might be an empty-headed doll-person. None of that is due to whether you were born with a penis or a vagina! Sex polarization that divides us up into women and men is a tool of patriarchal oppression and it exists to the detriment of women. Women are oppressed. Now, me personally, when I was first in the women's movement, well, we were white and straight and didn't pay enough attention to other people's situation. But we've become more intersectional and we listen to black women's voices and the voices of women who come from poverty, disabled women, and other forms of additional marginalization. But first and foremost, society is a patriarchy; that's still the bottom line for me. If men don't like it, they're in charge so all they've got to do is stand down and change it and quit opposing us.


Sylvia: Well, I guess you could say I was also involved in attacking that 'biology is destiny' thing. Hey, everybody, I'm Sylvia. I am trans. Back when I was figuring that out, the word was 'transsexual', and that's still what I prefer to use, but I don't want to offend anybody. I had gender dysphoria, the body I was born with was not my destiny. It wasn't right for me, and I knew it from pretty much the time I was old enough to understand the difference between boys and girls. I know some of you younger folks say things differently, you'd say I was assigned male at birth. Well, I had to get myself unassigned, because my gender didn't match that assignment at all. I changed my body to match my gender. Now, I understand the notion that we ought to have equal attitudes to a person no matter if their body is male or female. Or whether it came with a penis on the front of it or a vagina instead, if you like that language better. I understand saying that what your body is like shouldn't matter and we shouldn't have sexist beliefs. But that's not the world I got to live in. Maybe someday society will be that way but not in my lifetime. Not in yours either, probably. Getting sex reassignment surgery was something I could get within a few years, and I did, and it has made it possible for me to live my life with people seeing me and treating me like who I am -- a woman -- and I don't see why anybody's got any cause for having a problem with that.


Jesse: My name's Jesse and my pronouns are he, him, his. I was assigned male at birth. When I was younger, there was an attitude that what you were supposed to do if your gender didn't match your designation was to go out and get hormones and surgery, and if you did that and you could *pass*, then you were authentically trans. Well, some of those surgeries are expensive and not everyone can afford them, and there's medical issues with procedures, and hormones too, and during my generation we pushed back against that elitist attitude. Because you don't need to have anything specific done to you to make your gender identity valid, okay? It's fine to get gender confirmation surgery if that's what you *want*, and you can afford it and it's safe for you and all that. What is *not* fine is to go around telling people they aren't trans enough if they don't, you hear what I'm saying? And I am a man. Trans men are men. Trans women are women. You body is not 'who you really are', so yeah count me in as well on kicking that 'biology is destiny' off the map. What's up with people deciding they get to decide who you are based on what's inside your underwear? That's creepy. Anyone with that attitude, go perv on someone else, all right? Meanwhile, I hear what you're saying about gender being confining, but it can also be liberating and you ought to think about that. There are strong notions about how to be a man that go beyond being an okay person, it's heroic and inspiring to connect with that. Women, too, womanhood is a powerful notion. I got nothing against people who want to be agender or whatever, but I like being a man.


Allan (me): I'm Allan. I never bought into all the junk that gets glued onto a male, beliefs and assumptions and all that, because I didn't get issued all that stuff along with the body in which I was born. I grew up with messages about what it means to be a man, and also messages about what it means if your body is male and you don't match that description. Feminism told me that was sexist and I could ignore it, so I did. Until I couldn't. The world was too much in my face about it to ignore. So I became an activist. And yeah, biology isn't destiny. I agree that gender has its positive uses. Androgyny means expecting everyone to be in the middle, like beige or something. I'm not androgynous, I'm femme. Meanwhile I understand about it being easier to change your body, or to just change your presentation, how you look to the world, to get folks to think of your body as the body that goes with your gender, so that they'll get your gender correct. But the world got in my face and I'm returning the favor, I don't want to pass, I want to take the fact that I am male but also feminine and shove that at people. My body is not the problem, it's people's notion that if your body is male that makes you a man, a masculine person. That's what's got to change. We don't change that by converting male people to female people so they can be correctly regarded as women. Damn right our gender identity is valid regardless of our body. That means I get to walk down the nude beach with my flat chest and facial hair and my penis bouncing against my testicles and that doesn't make me a man. I want to be accepted as femme without lipstick, corset, boobs, or tucking. And patriarchy is in my way. I don't care if you want to call me a feminist or what, but I'm in the struggle against patriarchal oppression for my own damn reasons. And, yeah, I get to call my body male. I don't need to believe that I'm female in order to validate my gender identity. That's the whole point. It's *not*, and yet I'm still as femme as anybody.


———————

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

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


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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

So I was asked to participate in a dialog involving gender-critical feminists and transgender activists.

There's a political group with chapters sprinkled all around the country. One chapter endorsed a statement from some women's group about womens' "Sex Based Rights". An LGBTQIA action group within that same political group said that by doing so, that chapter had done something transphobic and transmisogynistic and that they needed to retract their endorsement and apologize to all the transgender women who might have been offended by their endorsement, or else get kicked out of the political group.

And what were these "sex based rights"?


Content warning: Potentially inflammatory material from here on out. And serious, guaranteed-inflammatory content as you go farther down. Trigger warning issued. Trigger warning with flames and radioactive emblems. Proceed at your own risk:

Well, some of the supporters of that local chapter said this was about remedies that had been designed to address women's exclusion from various forms of political and social participation. A sort of affirmative action for women to offset the effects of patriarchy, of women's oppression. They said that including transgender women ran the risk of diluting that original intention, and that it made more sense to use language that guaranteed representation of transgender women AND transgender men but did so separately from the original remedies, which had been designed with cisgender women in mind, i.e., women who had been regarded and labeled and treated as female people for their entire lives. They also said some women's political groups wished to operate as cisgender-women only because they had always been separatist, not allowing men to participate, and the lifetime experience of transgender women was a mixture of factors making their situation different from that of the women who'd been in those groups all along.


"I can see where that's going to be a problematic position for trans people", I said. "Still, there may be a way to bridge some gaps here. They do have a point about experience and identity. As a genderqueer person who identifies as a male girl, I respect transgender people who don't want to include people like me, because they believe being trans is biologically built in, that if I'm a woman I'm female, and that the only healthy thing to do about being transgender is to transition. My situation is different from theirs. As long as they're not denying the validity of my gender issues I don't mind if they want to run groups that I'm not welcome in".

I checked in with the LGBTQIA Action Group, the LAGs. "Oh, yes", they said, "we sent those demands to the chapter that endorsed that horrible statement. We want them to take our concerns seriously. We'd love it if they'd have a dialog with us, but they refuse to respond!"

Then I went back to the local chapter supporters, the pro-discussion folks calling themselves Dialog. I told them "I got the impression the LAG folks are open to listening if the people in Dialog and the specific chapter that endorsed that statement will listen to them in turn".



Then I went off to read a copy of the original "Sex Based Rights" statement, the endorsement of which had kicked off all this. Winced a lot. Yeah, the statement has a lot of language that, if not blatantly transphobic, felt like it was chock-full of dog whistle terms and phrases. I decided I didn't like the phrase "sex-based rights" itself. In general, I think people don't have rights based on their sex. You may have remedies that have been made available to your sex on affirmative action grounds but a right is an intrinsic entitlement. Men aren't entitled to something intrinsically as a consequence of being men, or male, or both. Whatever they're entitled to is either because they're human, or human adults, or else it's situationally male or about being men because of something that they and only they experience. Are women? I could formulate some rights that all pregnant or potentially pregnant people should have, perhaps, or that all menstruating or potentially menstruating people should have, but if I did, those rights came from those situations. Whatever. I sure wouldn't have endorsed the statement I was reading. But it didn't seem so horrible that I'd demand that anyone who did be kicked out of the organization.




"I'm ready to discuss the matter with Dialog", the LAG activist said, "but I have no interest in wasting my time with TERFs who say I'm not a woman. If they want to talk with us and apologize for what they've done, hey I'm right here, but in this organization it is already an accepted principle that trans women are women. That means in any situation where we're talking about women, if they try to excluse trans women, that's a hate crime and they don't belong in our organization!"

I said, "Look, some of them seem to be trying to incorporate and accommodate an understanding of trans people. Many of them don't like the term 'cisgender' for themselves but they aren't all insisting that trans women aren't women. One person suggested the phrase 'natal women'. Do you acknowledge a reason why they might legitimately want to meet politically by themselves as 'natal women'?"

"Trans women are natal women", the LAG activist replied.

"Wait, not even all transgender people claim that being transgender means you were born that way. I know it's a popular viewpoint but you wouldn't kick someone out of a transgender group for saying they weren't born trans, would you?"

"You're wasting your time with those TERFs. If they want to apologize and retract their message of hate, I'm right here. But they won't because they're bigoted fascists".

"Listen", I said, exasperated. "you've clearly got the stronger political position. Inclusiveness is always going to look more justified than a reason to exclude someone. So I'm sure you can pressure them into saying the kinds of things you want to hear, or get the organization to boot them out if they won't. But this is also a public education opportunity. Do you want them to see the light, or do you just want them to feel the heat?"

The LAG activist shrugged. "It's a settled issue. If they're going to be doing hate crimes I want them kicked out, simple as that".




"Frankly", declared the Dialog member, "I don't care what their viewpoint is. Not while they're calling us 'TERFs'. That's a slur. It's used to discredit us. They call us that while they're beating us, there was a women's march in London, did you hear about that? These men, calling themselves transgender women, barged in and chased women down side streets, attacking them. And the police did nothing!"

"So you don't like being called 'TERF'. You don't like the word that they use for you", I said. "You see the irony in that, don't you?"

"Transgenders are trying to invade our women's spaces and take away our rights as women. They want to erase women's identities. They aren't women. They're men. They're male. The correct word for adult male people is 'men'. Not 'women'. They want to invade women's prisons with their penises and rape women. They want to hide in women's bathroom stalls and molest little girls. And we're not gonna put up with it!"



"Okay, Dialog folks", I said, addressing the group. "Even if you don't think the LAG people are genuinely open to listening to anything they don't already agree with, you need to care about public opinion. You need to care about how the rest of the organization is going to view you. And although the LAG folks sound inflexible, you are managing to sound even more so and it's not a good look".




I picked up my old battered copy of The Women's Room, the book cover that has "LADIES" crossed out and "WOMEN'S" inked in over it. "I understand why you value the word 'women'. I think it was either Robin Morgan or Gloria Steinem, relating the story of having a sit-down with the newspaper editor, and explaining why they didn't like the newspaper referring to adult female people as 'girls' since adult males were always designated as 'men'.

"And the editor said, 'So what would you prefer...ladies?'. And the feminist women practically held their noses and winced. That term, 'ladies', was polluted with notions of screening out those who aren't ladylike, all that 'act like a lady' crap, you know? They wanted the newspaper to use the term 'women', they told him.

"The word 'woman' was nearly entirely associated with the physical body. In our society, girls become women not by 'proving' you are one, the way boys 'become' men, but by going through biological puberty. Even the creepier social associations, like 'Has he made a woman out of you yet' — like being heterosexually active 'makes you a woman' — even those had mostly biological meanings, more than social attributes. So by choosing the word 'woman', it wouldn't look like feminists wanted to be the new arbiters of which adult females get to qualify.

"I get that. Why you liked the word. And I get that it's been in political use by feminists since then.

"But you aren't going to convince anybody, anywhere, that you're being anything other than bigoted and biased by saying transgender women are factually wrong about being women. I'd think feminist women more than anyone would understand that word use is politically loaded. Think back to how 'man' was supposed to mean 'any human being' but it excluded women, and how 'he' and 'him' were used to mean any person. The dictionary said that was correct. But feminists said word use changes when society changes. And the feminists made our language change. You also sound pretty silly saying biology is destiny, by the way."




LAG people: "But trans women were not born with male organs. If she is a woman those are her organs so they're female organs. And those Dialog...persons... they are TERFs. It means Trans Exclusive Radical Feminists. That's what they are. I don't see why they don't like being called what they actually are".

Dialog people: "No one is denying their right to exist. They have a right to dress and behave however they want. They can see themselves however they like and have any understanding of themselves they feel comfortable with, but they have no right to impose their ideas on others or claim rights that were originally based on addressing the historical denial of women's rights as a sex".

LAG people: "See, we told you. Hateful transphobes. Kick them out. I don't have time for this shit"

Dialog people: "Words have meanings. Male people are men. Men are male people. A person with a penis is male. These men calling themselves transgender women are mentally ill. Men are not women. Males are not women. A person with a penis is not a woman. See, we told you, hateful patriarchal misogynists. You can't make us agree with their bullshit".

LAG people: "See, they're bad. Bad people are bad. Which is bad. Which makes them bad. The things they are saying are defined as bad. Sure, we're open to a dialog. A dialog about how they are bad".

Dialog people: "Four legs good. Two legs bad. Four legs good. Two legs bad..."



I want my two months back. I'm particularly disgusted with some of the Dialog folks, who seemed determined to live up to the worst things said about them by the LAG contingent seeking to have them kicked out. But both sides had some participants who originally seemed to be trying to find language that the other side would accept, at least long enough to have a conversation. People who were making the attempt in good faith. And there were other people trying to speak to activists on both sides, I wasn't the only one doing this diplomacy act. But our louder and more insistent colleagues shouted us down on both sides.

They should all be glad I'm not God. Because you know what I'd do if I were? You know those cruise ships that are languishing out in the ocean because of coronavirus? I'd like to put everyone from both groups onto those ships, and I'd confine one Dialog member and one LAG member to each cabin and quarantine them there together. They deserve each other.

———————

You're secluded in quarantine yourself, come to think of it, 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 from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts