Here's a short bite from Within the Box where Derek is thinking back to some interactions with one of his LPN classmates earlier in the spring.

I like this section because it fleshes out and explains some things about Derek, including shedding some light on his current attraction to April, another patient here in the rehab facility. It also lets me insert some complicated stuff about the intersection of gender identity and sexual orientation, hopefully without it feeling like a lecture or breaking up the narrative flow

------


The ‘April and Jake’ thing prompts me to think about Marjorie for the first time in months. Marjorie Turpin. Nurses’ training school, another LPN student from my class. A class of about 35 students, me being one of only three males. A fairly warm crowd, overall. Women being themselves, in a way that you mostly only see when they vastly outnumber the male folks to the point that they don’t consider our presence very much. Teasing and banter and joking around. Our teachers, too. Ms. MacDonald and Ms. Jackson, professional and efficient but clever and amusing, down to earth, guiding the new crop of caregivers. It was a good place to be.

I fit in. I had fun there. I joined in with the teasing and joking and cleverness as well as soaking up the biomedical science and the technique of making a bed with military tautness or giving an injection. Marjorie Turpin was fun. I liked her. I don’t know when the name teasing got started... maybe when Ms. MacDonald spoke of the obsolete cough syrup called turpin hydrate. But then there was the TURP operation procedure (trans-urethral repair of the prostate). In one form or another, the syllable “turp” kept cropping up in our lessons and each time it did I’d make eye contact with her and pretend like it was named in her honor.

I liked my classmates and our cameraderie and wished for more time with them, casual time, off-the-clock time to just hang out and get closer. One day I asked a cluster of them if any wanted to go out for dinner together after Friday afternoon class finished and got a series of declines and excuses. I asked a few others separately. Penny said not this week but some other time. And Cynthia had to get back to the kids. Marjorie, however, said sure, and we agreed where we’d meet up.

I was standing out in front of the Pizza Hut we’d settled on, waiting. A friendly dark-haired fellow came over, asked if I were Derek, and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Patrick. I’m Marjorie’s husband”. Oh, okay, cool. I looked around but didn’t see anyone else following from the direction he had come.

“Where’s Marjorie?”

“Well, she’s not coming”.

I was confused. Disappointed. I asked if he wanted to order anything. He looked at me oddly then said he had to get back. He had departed by the time I got the parts to click together inside my head.

Well, yes, actually, it was like that, I mean, yes, I found her attractive, I would totally go in that direction with her if that were an option. But honestly, I hadn’t been consciously thinking of it that way. It’s like I’m one of the girls one minute, then, suddenly, no I’m not.

How do lesbians handle this? Is it a problem for them too, the same way? Where these are the people that you like, the people you want as your friends, but yeah you’re also attracted to them and you want that to happen too, some of the time? Do lesbians also not start off making a distinction, like “potential lover material, this one” or “I like her as a friend but only as”, and instead just respond open and warm and let things develop however they develop? Because that’s what seems to come natural to me.

Then there’s the militant heterosexual sissy attitude: It is not my responsibility to make things go in a sex direction just because I’m the male.

The Marjorie event wasn’t unusual for not resulting in me ending up with her as my girlfriend, or affair partner. What was unusual was her picking up on the presence of that kind of interest on my part.

So it’s another part of the communication problem. I want to broadcast to the world that there are people like me. Femme people, male people, sissy heterosexual male people, and we have these natures and these interests. Then I want to be sufficiently readable that people can pick up on me being open to possibilities, or specifically interested in them personally for that matter, without me behaving in some pushy intrusive way. Without me pretending to be someone I am not, donning male courting and flirting behaviors. Behavioral drag.

Of course I’d apparently been intrusive, maybe even creepy, from Marjorie’s vantage point. Hadn’t intended to be. I don’t tend to censor my flirtatiousness in situations where it might be inappropriate because for the most part nobody notices.

It’s all rather complicated. I long ago reached the point of being unapologetic and proud of who I was, my identity, and to talk at people about it, to come out, to insist on myself as a valid self and a valid sexuality. What I really really wanted, though, was to talk with people about it all, and finish sorting everything out.

—————


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

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.



———————

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




———————


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

———————

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 so painfully self-conscious.

In the book I’m working on, I’m writing about dropping in at Identity House, circa 1986. So I’m conjuring up the memories. Coming up the stairs and opening the doors and then being afraid to make eye contact with anyone.

“Hey there, welcome”, said a thirty-esque guy with wire-frame glasses.
“Hi”, I nodded back at him. I broke eye contact and glanced around. A woman with spiky styled blue-tipped hair and wearing snug dark blue jeans was sitting on the arm of a couch, watching a red-haired girl stapling paper to a large green sheet of construction paper. A black guy with large oval earrings was singing softly along with his radio over in the other direction.

I felt awkward, as I often did in gay and lesbian environments. Didn’t want to display overt interest in the attractive girl; lesbians presumably don’t come to gay and lesbian centers to be stared at by guys. Didn’t want to focus attention on any of the guys, lest they get the wrong idea. Stupid social clumsiness. Like they’re going to think anything faintly approaching friendliness from me is an act of sexual aggression. Yeesh.

Do you want to know where that came from, that overwhelming fear of being perceived as person with [gasp!] sexual lusts and interests and appetite? Here’s what that has to do with being a sissy –

Let’s start with the boys. As a sissy I was periodically accused of harboring sexual interest towards my male classmates and other acquaintances. I’m using the word “accused” advisedly – the notion that I had any such feelings was addressed with significant hostility, contempt, outright hatred. If I had indeed felt such feelings, these attitudes would have made it difficult for me to feel comfortable with my identity and my nature, and I would have had to wrestle with that, I think. In my case, I didn’t; if I had ever been inclined to find males sexually attractive, any such signal was rapidly drowned in the noise of being accused of it, mocked for it, having my face rubbed in it, so to speak. After a few years of that, I was less likely to be friendly, to be curious or interested, to expect to be included or welcomed. Standoffish and snobbish elicited their own forms of the same basic hostility, so I was trained to a mild and non-judgmental presence, neither recoiling from them nor paying any attention aside from getting out of their way.

Well, that left the girls. Here’s the situation with the girls: they made observations about unwanted and intrusive sexual attention from boys, observations that were the precursors of #metoo, that lots of boys were sexually creepy, with “hands problem”, selfishly pushy about sex. And also that, within relationships or on dates, boys would press for sexual activity, not caring about the girl as a person, and what self-respecting girl would want to get close to that? I, as a self-respecting sissy, most assuredly didn’t want the girls thinking of me that way. I wanted the girls to respect me as they respected themselves. Oh, I wanted sex, all right, no question about that, but I wanted it to mean something. I wanted a girlfriend. I wasn’t opposed to the idea of casual sex, but if it was going to be casual sex it had to be mutual, and it had to take place in such a way that both of us felt OK about our participation, and not like we’d been throw down into the sewer.

I go through life walking on eggshells terrified that someone’s going to think I’m sexually interested in them. That’s part of my experience as a sissy male, that people react to the possibility of me being interested in them with disgust and irritation.

In an LGBTQ context, like Identity House, you might think it would be easier, right? But although I was for once not in a context where males having sexual interest in other males would be stigmatized as something disgusting, I was walking into that situation with a lot of unease and lack of general comfort about people thinking I had sexual interest in them. I was afraid the boys, if they misread me and got the wrong idea, would later think I was being judgmental or prudish or rude; I didn’t have a well-developed repertoire for turning aside sexually interested people gracefully. Then there were the girls, of course. It was easier, to be in a situation where they’d be less likely to assume any guy they encounter was likely to be on the verge of expressing unwanted sexual interest. But on the other hand, most of them would be lesbians and I was afraid that it might be especially annoying to a lesbian to encounter some guy in a place like Identity House and pick up on him being attracted, because presumably she isn’t hanging out at gay and lesbian centers in order to be stared at or focused upon by males.


This was the situation in which I found myself as a young adult. It was very much an empowering insight to rethink that situation, for the first time, by comparing it to that of women my age. They were widely considered (and expected) to be, to varying degrees, wary and cautious about expressing their sexual interests and appetites. It was socially understood that even when they did, in fact, feel sexual interest towards a person, they might have ambivalent attitudes and feelings about acting on it, including the act of letting that interest be known and perceived. (Admittedly, they seemed to do a far better job of coping with unwanted attentions, but perhaps that came with practice)

Here was a model for accepting this kind of hesitant and uncertain sexuality without regarding it as pathetic, damaged, unhealthy. In fact, being aware of one’s own complex feelings about sexuality was often portrayed as a sign of a good healthy respect for one’s self, in contrast to which enthusiastically availing one’s self of sexual experiences whenever the opportunity held some degree of appetizing attraction was seen as a possible sign of lacking sufficient standards or appropriate boundaries. In my case, it was liberating to be able to view myself as a non-pathological sexual creature, ambivalences and wariness about my own sexual interests included. Maybe it wasn’t a very practical way to be in the world if one were male, but when I considered it this way, it looked like I would be not so far outside the normal if I had been female. Or if I considered myself to be the same kind of person that they were.

And it meshed with the rest of how I saw myself. It immediately fit. I’d always emulated the girls, admired them, measured myself against them as my role models.

I stopped feeling ashamed and stopped worrying that I was sexually broken, some kind of basket case. I liked who I was and now that could see my sexual nature from this vantage point, I liked my sexuality as it was. And I realized I wasn’t going to find a suitable expression of it within any of the behavioral models offered to men. If I were going to make it work, I would do so by looking at how women, the people who were most like me, had made a successful go of it.

———————

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

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



A Lesson from the Workplace



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

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

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

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



Why I am Not a Lesbian – the Reprise



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

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

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

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



An Exploration of Comparative TERFitude



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

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

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

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

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

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

———————

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

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



———————

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