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

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

I wish I felt that way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could definitely use an increase in awareness here.

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

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

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

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

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. I was going to start echoing it on Substack as well but we're not off to a good start. Anyway, please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Index of all Blog Posts

"List some books that are similar to yours. (500 characters or less)" reads the query manager entry for both Kristin Nelson and Stephanie Rostan, two professional literary agents.

It's not explicitly required by all lit agents and publishers, but some folks advise including a "comp titles" section on any query letter.

I haven't tended to, but it was definitely in my formal proposal (which, in turn, is required by some lit agents and publishers for any nonficton queries, and memoirs are nonfiction), and I had a standalone Comparable Titles snippet I could include whenever it was a part of what was requested.

So now that I've generated at least a rough draft of my third book's query letter (see previous blog post), I've started work on assembling a list of other books that Within the Box has some important resemblance to.

"You may be intimidated or skeptical, thinking either that your idea has to be unique in order to pique their interest, or that your book needs to be similar to others, or else there won’t be an audience for it. The reality here, like with most things in life, is somewhere in the middle", says Kevin Anderson.

Yeah... I'm not aware of any other first-hand account of being in a rehab clinic that turns out to have similarly sinister overtones. Or a genderqueer person's narrative about having their inability to function well socially attributed to their drug-addled mental instabilities instead of pinned to marginalization and society's biases and attitudes. But let's see... books with a lot of internal thought-processing and which invoke a sense of a possibly unreliable narrator who may be more messed up than she thinks she is, in a place or in the care of people who are supposed to be taking care of folks but may be doing something a lot more evil...

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh looks promising. It's a first person narrative from an unguessably different individual, one who seems sharp but perhaps damaged goods in some not fully explained way. Definitely an outsider. She's not institutionalized but works in one (a juvenile reformatory prison). A facility that is at least officially and nominally about doing good but pretty evidently, from the narrator's observation, isn't. A narrator who cares about her interactions with others and is vulnerable on a number of parameters, but not in the usual manner; she's an interesting mixture of impervious and insecure. And Eileen is even more self-immersive than Within the Box -- very little action and events have occurred in the first 60 pages.

Dennis Lehand's Shutter Island takes place in a high security forensic psychiatric hospital. The main character and his companion are federal marshals brought in because one of the committed inmates has gone missing. But readers learn pretty early on that the main character has some hidden agenda of his own involving a murderer who killed someone in his own family, a murderer committed to this same facility. And he may not be wrapped as tightly as he likes people to think. Something's totally up with the shrinks running the place, too. They're not playing honestly with the agents; the marshals don't believe the inmate could have escaped without assistance from at least some staff members, perhaps highly placed ones. And now, 50 pages or so in, I'm seeing signs that they may be doing conscious and deliberate things to manipulate their federal guests... or is it the narrator's paranoid imaginings?

I'm also 45 pages into A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. The first person narrator is the younger sister of Natalie, a brilliant high school student who created entertaining stories but whose imaginings are going very dark and twisted. Natalie is clearly suffering -- she says so -- and her behaviors are impacting others in her family negatively, making her situation different from that of a person who may merely be perceived by others as deranged.

You get more of that from A. Mark Bedillion's Psychiatric Survivor. Or that's my expectation at any rate. I haven't started it yet, it just arrived in the mail. But it's billed as "from misdiagnosed mental patient to hospital director", and it clearly comes from the critical perspective that we call the psychiatric patients' liberation movement or the anti-psychiatric movement. So it is unlikely that the author will position himself as believing he needed to be in the facility, and equally unlikely that the people running it will be portrayed as agreeing with him.

Another couple books I picked out as prospects are Good as Gone by Amy Gentry, which a brief inside peek revealed itself to me as a suspense tale in which a daughter returns after years of being missing, but the mom actually isn't at all sure that this girl is really her. That creates the worry that the situation may be a dangerous one for her family. And An Anonymous Girl from Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, the first couple chapters of which shape up as a psychological chess game in which a girl swipes another girl's invite to a paid research project involving personal questions about moral choices, and in which the psychologist running it knows she was not being honest about how she came to acquire the invite.

Then there's The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins) -- unreliable narrator, substance abuse, questionable mental status, blackouts (so maybe she's hiding stuff from herself and us)... but I think there's a risk involved in comparing one's unpublished book to something that's sold quite that successfully. Still, I won't rule it out.

Oh, and I'm still waiting on the arrival of Upstairs in the Crazy House, another memoir from a psychiatric survivor.

If any of these titles or descriptions conjures up the names of other books you think I should take a look at, let me know!

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

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

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

Derek is genderqueer, or nonbinary -- or rather that's likely what Derek would call himself in 2023 -- but it's 1982, and 23-year-old Derek is finding it a challenge to explain to people. He views himself as needing help becoming a better communicator. His parents view him as having a drug and alcohol problem.

They reach a compromise: he'll check himself into a very modern upscale facility that promises to help people work on all their issues. It's strictly voluntary. “But we’d want you to give it a real try”, his Dad says. “Don’t stalk out the first time you think there’s some policy or some person that isn’t perfect. You won’t get anything out of it unless you go in intending to get something out of it.”

Dr. Barnes and his staff think Derek is in denial about his situation. He insists he doesn't have a drug or alcohol problem, but he's never been able to keep a job or complete any projects, including two attempts at college and a more recent attempt to complete nurse's training. And he's constantly deflecting, bringing in social issues and political theories. “You can’t go out and fix the world and solve its problems when you haven’t dealt with the mess in your own life”, Barnes tells him. “I think you’re just afraid to confront your own worst enemy, because unfortunately he isn’t out there with expectations and roles, he’s right there where you are.”

But Derek is finding the facility heavy-handed and coercive. They've gotten off to a bad start -- nobody asks his reasons for coming there or what he hopes to get out of the program. He thinks being a heterosexual femme is relevant to why he's had difficulties fitting in socially and doing well. That and the resulting isolation which have left him deprived of the easy interactive social skill-set that most people have. He wants to work on that, but the institutional staff seem bent on working on him in ways he isn't consenting to.

The other patients in the program don't warm to him immediately; he's disrupting the program and they're also being judged by the staff on how appropriately they react when someone behaves disruptively. Derek watches and observes. “Therapy here is all about residents proving that they can be an obedient part of Dr. Barnes’ echo chamber. Anyone who doesn’t echo doesn’t advance to the higher levels”, he says.

Within the Box is a psychological suspense tale. Derek can't be sure they aren't right; maybe he seized on this weird notion about gender because he so badly wanted an answer other than "horrible unlikeable person with a hideous personality and atrocious social skills" for why he's been reviled and hated, and it's really a defense mechanism, like they say. And the reader is invited along to wonder who is right, and whether the institution is benign or awful, whether Derek is arrogant and stubborn or bravely resistant.

Arching over all of this ambivalence is the issue of safety: if, indeed, the institution is unduly coercive, and Derek is openly resistant to them, is he being paranoid about worrying about what they might do in response, or is he on safe grounds because, as Dr. Barnes himself said, “You all know you can leave any time you want"?

Within the Box. 72,000 words, nonfiction, a personal account (memoir) rendered in the style of entertainment fiction.

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

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

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

Cory is a fifteen-year old, bright, gay, friendly, but a bit wary of the other kids because he has been called a freak. And it hurts. The hostility and ridicule hurt. He's also lonely, and pines for the someday when he would have a boyfriend. The loneliness hurts, too.

The Boy in Makeup, by Anthony Connors-Roberts, is a cute, warm tale in the gay coming-of-age genre. It's aimed at a young adult audience and does a good job of showing what it's like to be a marginalized identity without too much graphic violence or excessive darkness. In fact, it's a pretty optimistic and welcoming view.

Cory's crush Ben is sweet and kind, his parents and his best friend Lizzie are totally supportive. There are hecklers and harassers, but they are background, people without fully developed characters. Just stuff you have to endure.

The one major exception is Mr. Harris, the faculty member with the intense hangup about male students wearing makeup. Cory has to avoid him as much as possible or be confronted with the demand that he remove all the cosmetics from his face. Which is something he hates to do, because it's a major part of his self-expression.

There's enough tension and frustration around that to stand in for a more general canvas of disapproval and nonacceptance. And while my memories of being fifteen, and those of lots of gay guys my age as well, involve much more hostility, all signs point to genuine progress, and it is nice to see so many characters who take being gay in stride as a part of the normal world.

Structurally, there is a context-switch rather late in the story, where after more than a hundred pages of seeing events from Cory's perspective, we're briefly watching things unfold from Ben's viewpoint instead. It's more typical that an author either starts alternating contexts early on or sticks with one character. I didn't find it jarring, though. Roberts is explicit in doing so, and while I was surprised by it, it didn't throw me out of the story.

Last year I came out as gay to the school. Hardly anyone was surprised, mainly because I had been wearing full-on makeup for a while, and I had never been one of the lads

- p. 6

I have to get on my soapbox now. Reluctantly, because The Boy in Makeup is such a sweet little book that being critical of it feels like attacking kittens or something.

But although the book makes a gesture or two towards inclusivity for the myriad other identities on the LGBTQIA spectrum — for instance, the introduction of the transgender girl Jenny — it participates in the ongoing conflation of being femme (or of behaving and being seen as one of the girls rather than one of the lads) with being a gay guy.

The narrative could have, for instance, included at least one gay guy who isn't discernably feminine. Cory's love interest, Ben, although introduced as a football playing masculine boy, is depicted throughout as joyful and smiling, interested in makeup if not quite to the same degree as Cory, and only doing football to please his dad.

The reporter smiled. "But Ben, why the need for makeup to tell everyone that you're gay?"

And hey Anthony, why would wearing makeup mean that you're necessarily gay?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not oblivious. I understand that if you grow up attracted to males, and you also have the mannerisms and personality traits that are associated with girls and women, you're going to be called sissy and fag, you're going to be marked as a girlish male who is homosexual, because the world doesn't distinguish between feminine and gay when the person in question is male. So since both of the things you're regarded as are true, they'll seem connected to each other for you, too.

But, so? For the cisgender heterosexual mainstream world, being male means you're expected to be attracted to the girls and to be masculine in your various personality and behavioral traits, so to them that's all bolted together as a single identity. But when they go around asserting that this is what being male is all about, it erases gay guys, it leaves you on the outside of how they're defining male, and marks you as an anomaly, as weird, as, well, queer.

And in a similar way, whenever I encounter "does girl things" = "gay", it erases me, a heterosexual femme, and makes me feel unincluded and marked as a peculiarity that can be ignored, doesn't count.

It doesn't have to be that way. Jacob Tobia's book Sissy is from the standpoint of a gay male who is femme and who likes makeup much like Cory does... but it's about a second coming out, what Tobia refers to as a "coming of gender", of making a separate identity-statement about being one of us femme people. (2019 review)

Anthony Connors-Roberts. Amazon: The Boy in Makeup eBook and paperback. 2023 (self-published), 197 pgs

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think about it.

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

I haven't had any book reviews of my books show up in quite some time, so I was pleased to get a notification that Amanja Reads Too Much, a book blogger with a long pending stack of books to read, had gotten to That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class and her review was now up.

---------------------------------------------------

February 2, 2023

I previously reviewed Allan D. Hunter’s first memoir, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet. This book is a follow up that focuses more on his status as “outsider” all the way from high school, to college, grad school, and beyond....

Interested in feminism he enrolled in college as a women’s studies major. He stood out as the only male in any of his classes. Some women welcomed him as an enlightened male, others took objection with a perceived invasion of a woman’s safe place.

That Guy in Our Women’s Studies Class candidly discusses social issues beyond feminism as it also explores race and class struggles. Hunter is honest and open about his time spent homeless and “in the system.”...

For those who aren’t part of the LGBTQ community it will be upsetting to learn that there is a lot of infighting still going on today. Well, it’s upsetting to those of us in the community as well. Hunter experienced it through being genderqueer, I’ve faced it through being bisexual (why don’t you just pick a side?!), and many others experience it from other angles. Even outsider groups are not immune to judgement and discrimination...

Hunter is a strong writer and the memoir is a surprisingly quick read. Both of his books are strongly recommended for anyone looking to branch out their reading list to more than just one closet

(snippet; for full review click link below)

AmanjaReads

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Speaking of my books, I am still seeking interested readers to read my third book, a work-in-progress now in the midst of second draft (working title Within The Box), and give me feedback. I'm particularly interested in getting beta readers from these demographics:

• People with any connection to women's studies or feminism, especially if their connection dates back to the heydays of the second wave, 1970s-1990s.

• Anyone from the psychiatric rights / mental patients' liberation community.

• LGBTQIA folks, especially those who participate in organized gender politics

• Currently or formerly homeless, or homeless advocacy workers, or people who provide services to same

• People who provide services to folks with psychiatric diagnoses, especially residential services

If you're interested, shoot me an email, a PM, or post a reply.

—————

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 now in second draft. 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.

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Folks seem to think I need their acceptance, that I need them to think of me a certain way in order for my identity to be valid.

That's not really true.

Let me clear some things up for you.

I don't need you to think of me as one of the girls. I'm alerting you to the fact that I've spent a lifetime thinking of myself as one of the girls. Knowing that should make it easier for you to anticipate or understand my behaviors, which is something people have often complained about, that I'm weird and incomprehensible. If this FYI about myself makes it easier to understand me, good.

I don't need you to accept me as queer, as a genuine member of the LGBTQIA+ rainbow. The term "genderqueer" lets me explain my situation using a word you may have encountered before. So I use that terminology. If that makes it easier for you to understand me, good.

I don't wish to pass. The annoying default way of reacting to people like me is to assume we want to be viewed and accepted as ordinary boyish boys, or manly men, but we aren't pulling it off successfully and hence must be feeling like a failure at it. I'm not, and I never was. I don't need or want your acceptance of me as boy or man. But I also don't need you to embrace the notion that I'm different from them, that I'm actually more like the girls and women.

I don't seek to pass as a boy or man. I don't need to pass as a woman or girl. I don't need to pass as cisgender or genderqueer or transgender, as hetero or gay or lesbian or anything else you ever heard of.

I started speaking up because other people kept making an issue of it. Bringing it to my attention. Some being nasty and hostile about me not being right for a guy, and others being embarrassed on my behalf and trying to be supportive about me being ok and trying to reassure me that I was valid as a guy anyway. It got on my nerves and I felt like it was time I said out loud that I like how I am and I'm not trying to hide or slip under the social radar.

So now occasionally I get people telling me "just accept yourself". Or tsking about my need to get everybody's buy-in on my special snowflake identity.

But I wasn't putting it up for a vote.

—————

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

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

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

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

———————

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

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————

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

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Haven't been blogging lately... fell down the author's rabbit hole. I'm 37,000 words deep into book three :)

Here's an excerpt -- it's a flashback sequence in which I'm thinking back to junior high days and another misfit named Malcolm, who hung out with me in seventh grade.

The narrator's voice is me-at-23 thinking back, so if the analysis at the end comes across as somewhat unsophisticated and even a tinge homophobic, that's intentional.

----- from In the Box, "July 28, 1982 (Day Ten)" ----

Nobody in our high school was out as gay. At least as far as I know. This was circa 1974-1977. Small town. Esoteric town, to be sure. But not terribly safe to be different from the categories of people available to be categorized as. There was no role for Out Gay Guy. Anyone opting for the role would have had to have created it from scratch. I have a strong sense that I can relate to that.

I met Malcolm in seventh grade at Valdosta Junior High. Earlier, 1972. We’d been in some youth church group which is where he knew me from. I don’t know, Methodist Summer Youth Program or equivalent. He did one of those “Hey, I recognize you” things, and although I had that facial agnosia thing going on for me, where I’m slow to recognize people out of context, I thought I’d for sure seen him before, so when he explained, it fit.

Malcolm liked to talk to me, and early on seemed to find it amusing to try to shock me.

“Let me tell you about these people” was Malcolm’s general presentation.

“These people like feet”, he’d tell me. “Like they’re hot for it, you know? And they hang out around libraries...”

Malcolm, I think in retrospect, probably quickly reconfigured his estimate of my sophistication and experience. Way downward.

“Do you know Betsy?”, he asked me. “She’s in our classroom for homeroom. Do you think she’s cute?”

I always had, since fourth grade. We all had. Betsy had it.

“Well would you ever want to stick your hand inside her skirt and feel around?”, he posed.

“Umm, no, yeeck, I’ve known her for a long time, that’s creepy”.

Malcolm insisted, “She would. You don’t believe me? She would. She’d let you do that. Or somebody. But it could be you.”

I was in seventh grade, mind you. The concept that the girls might have these same feelings for us like we did for them, I mean interest in the shapes and textures and wanting to touch or perhaps to be touched like that....this was all new information, or alleged information, all under consideration. With a lot of rather intense interest, yeah, I wanted to know. Did I ever.

But the way Malcolm was describing it back then... he was like a bridge person, honestly, echoing a lot of the things I’d overheard the boy boys say about girls; and still at the same time he made more sense to me. Nobody’d ever asked me about whether I’d want to put my hands up inside some girls’ skirt or not. Not that directly. Definitely not Betsy Johnson. Or maybe Betsy Johnson. It really changes how you think about it if you think maybe they want it to happen. Malcolm was saying the girls liked it. That would be wonderful. It would be so awful if it was just me, being a pervert, a creep, wanting to touch girl parts. Which was how I still worried, down deep inside, might be the case. So of course I never wanted anyone to know.

Yeah...so., Malcolm. We hung out during recess at Valdosta Junior High. I really didn’t have many friends so someone who wanted to hang out with me and be company, that was nice.

One of the interesting kinds of people Malcolm told me about at some point were boys who got fantasies about other boys, and wanted to touch them. Wanted to do sex with them, he told me.

My seventh grade self looked back blankly. I held up my hands and banged my middle fingers, left and right, into each other, tip to tip. I told Malcom, “That’s not possible, it wouldn’t work!”

Malcolm shook his head. “One of them goes up the butt of the other one. Like being with a girl. It feels a lot the same”

I ewwed a face at him. Gut reaction.

“Well they also lick and suck. With mouth and tongue”. Malcolm looked back at me, confident and gentle. “I’d like to do that if you’d let me”.

“Yecch no”, I replied.

So that was my first real-life first-hand experience of gay guys. Totally not some creepy invasive thing where one guy has a lot of power over the other. Or some creepy salivating begging person who just seems pathetic to you. Or any other stereotype, really. We were both fascinated by difference. He had a lot of interesting tales to tell. I hadn’t thought about sexual variation as a plot device for a story, but yeah it was intrinsically fascinating. Got me thinking more about where the way I was might fit in to all that.

He hit on me. Yes, that happened. He didn’t act like I had no choice, or he was entitled, or fawn at me like oh please, I need this from you. He was okay with it not being something I wanted, and we stayed friends and it totally didn’t matter. Or I assume that’s how it was for him. I have no reason to think otherwise. He was totally non-sulky about it and never brought it up again.

—————

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.

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On a general-purpose, socially-progressive message board, someone posted to ask about the wide array of gender identity terms now in use, citing the available gender choices for one's FaceBook profile:

The list includes these choices: Trans Male, Trans* Male, Trans Man, Trans* Man, Transgender Male, Transgender Man, Transsexual Male, and Transsexual Man. Do these terms describe different genders? Or do these terms all define the same gender and are personal preferences for what people wish to call their gender?

Pretty quickly, someone else replied:

Those aren’t distinct “genders”. They’re phrases representing various preferred ways for people to describe their gender identity.

I replied directly under that:

^^^ This.

Don’t think of the genders the way you think of the elements on the periodic table of the elements, or the nutritional components of the human diet. Think of genders as each being one or more person’s articulation of their gender identity as a response to our society, which presented them with a Problem. The Problem was (and still is) that society divides people into male and female and treats the male people as all, indistinguishably, having a box of characteristics in common — let’s call it the Boy Box, later to evolve (for all the males, in the same predetermined way) into the Man Box. The female people get the Girl Box / Woman Box. The reason it’s a Problem is

a) It’s a generalization, and then the exceptions are treated like we’re wrong, evil, sick, pathetic, and/or unsexy and heterosexually ineligible in particular;

b) It hits people on an intensely personal level and is very hurtful to the exceptions to the rule, which sucks, and it isn’t really a lot of fun even for the people who do (mostly) fit the original description; it’s very depersonalizing about something that’s intensely personal, and it’s limiting;

c) It isn’t just a generalization even to start with. There’s a large dose of “prescriptive” stuff that never fit anyone of any conceivable sex, so much as it represents what our social structure would like people to be like for manipulative and exploitative reasons. (I’m personalizing social structure as if it had “likes” but it’s a useful way of thinking of it anyhow).

That's my thumbnail sketch version of what gender (and gender variant people) is all about.

Not everyone here on the LGBTQIA+ rainbow would endorse that view, though. Most centrally, not everyone agrees that gender is social and that it's all about personality and behavior and all that. Some people think of gender as a built-in characteristic that exists independent of social beliefs and concepts.

For instance, in a different but similar context, a participant in a FaceBook LGBTQ group wrote:

Hey, gender is real. We're born with it. You should read what Julia Serano wrote in Whipping Girl, we're born with a wiring diagram in our brains that tells us what gender we are, and for some of us it's in conflict with what society considers us to be. If it were all social, we'd all just go along with what society says.

Well, I did read what Serano said, thank you very much, it's right here on my bookshelf. First off, she says we should not think of this as gender. She's talking about a wiring diagram that sometimes says the body we are born with isn't the one we were designed to inhabit:

It seems as if, on some level, my brain expects my body to be female...brain sex may override both socialization and genital sex...I have experienced it as being rather exclusively about my phyisical sex...for me this subconscious desire to be female has existed independently of the social phenomena commonly associated with the word "gender".

Other people, however, are more emphatic that they realy do mean gender when they talk about something hardwired into their brains. They will describe a range of things that I consider to be socially attached to a given sex -- like whether you wish to adorn yourself with cosmetics and dress yourself in a skirt, or whether you'd rather play pool and drink beer all evening than sip cosmopolitans and giggle about the latest episode of Sex and the City -- as being caused by some kind of coding in the brain, perhaps genetic, perhaps induced by prenatal hormones.

I don't know about that. I see a problem with that notion.

One of my LiveJournal friends recently wrote on the topic:

Isn't it OK to categorize myself in order to present a somewhat-accurate description of who I am? Like identifying as an introvert or an extrovert? But we don't call "introvert" a type of "gender" or "race". Introversion is a personality characteristic -- would you rather have a lot of friends or a few close friends, do you derive energy from social interactions or do they wear you out?

Let me riff on that notion. Let's suppose that after a sufficient number of years of successful gender activism we reach the point that none of these characteristics are associated any more with whether you have a penis, a vagina, or some other biological merchandise. Well, at that point the gender identities are free-floating; each of them represents a certain way of "being in the world", a batch of personality traits and behavioral tendencies, but now that they are no longer in any way anchored in any particular physical body structure, they aren't appreciably different from notions such as being an introvert or being an extrovert.

There would no longer exist such a thing as a cisgender person. Nobody would assign you any identity at birth based on what you pee from. And with no cisgender people, there would also be no transgender people either, or genderqueer, nonbinary, or any other identity category of that nature.

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

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

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

———————

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

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In the matter of being a gender nonconforming person, I've heard it said that we need to rally to make it okay for boys (or males) to cry and be soft and wear pink, to wear earrings and skirts and dance ballet.

But mostly that's never been an issue for me. I could already cry: who was going to stop me? I bought my first skirt at a thrift store; there may have been many people who didn't think male people should wear skirts but short of them tackling me and beating me up and taking it off my body, it's not like there was a lot they could do about it. I don't mean to belittle the real occurrences of violence towards gender transgressors. I've been assaulted a few times during my life. But in general, broadly speaking, I don't need other folks' cooperation in order for me to do things that are considered feminine. Instead, the disapproving factions would need my cooperation in order to have things their way.

The place where I found myself vulnerable to the impressions and opinions of others was sexuality. Sexuality is a need, a hunger for a participation. To have access to another person's body, to be found attractive and to be wanted, to play and fondle and nibble and hug... all this requires the active cooperation of others.

As I left childhood behind and came into adolescence, I suddenly needed for there to be a pattern change in the world. Among the delightful sea of attractive and interesting female people, I needed there to be some who would find a sissy femme male person like me to be attractive and interesting in return.

The conventionally masculine boys tended to have that. Some individuals more than others, of course, but in general they could look around and see attractive girls who seemed to be attracted to boys who were similar to themselves, and this would encourage them to think this would happen for them personally.

Me, I looked around and was faced with the sense that what I wanted, what I hoped for, just wasn't done. Wasn't how it was.

And that is how it came to be that I started to think I shared a situation with gay and lesbian people. My gender being different meant my sexuality was different. I was still male and still hetero but none of the observable patterns of heterosexuality matched up with me being a sissy femme kind of male.

Like gay and lesbian people learning that they probably won't find what they crave until they look beyond the conventional looking-places and outside of the conventional flirting behavior patterns, I came to realize I was different, I was queer, and I had to approach this all differently from what I saw other people doing.

You hear people saying over and over that sexual orientation and gender identity are two entirely different things. Yes and no. What people usually mean by that is that being femme, as a male, is not the same thing as being gay. Or that being a transgender woman if you were designated male when you were born is not the same thing as being a gay male. And mirror-image for the lesbians and gender-atypical female people. That being butch isn't identical to being a lesbian, and neither is being a transgender man. All that is true.

But where having an atypical gender identity for a person of my sex has made all the difference has been in the world of courting and kissing and flirting, the world of trying to meet possible partners.

Because all I need in order to wear my hair long and put in earrings and so on is that you refrain from physical attacks on me, and most people, even the disapproving sort, aren't predisposed to do that. But the coupling-up stuff intrinsically requires a lot more from people. It won't work if I'm not understood. It won't work if I'm not seen and recognized. It won't work if my identity is invisible to people and they've never imagined any such person.

And understanding is a much larger ask than "just leave me alone", if you see what I mean.

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

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

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Index of all Blog Posts

"Hello", the direct message begins. "I am a senior administrator of the 'Transgender Safe Spaces'* Facebook group. Unfortunately, I need to let you know that your post from yesterday has been reported. Reported AGAIN, I should say. Whenever you post here, I get several reports on it.

"We need to have a conversation. I absolutely do NOT wish to censor you. I value alternative perspectives and ideologies because they provide me with an opening out of the bubble that social media has become. Frankly, I think your posts are well thought out and intelligently planned. I can't even say I disagree with you after reading some of your posts. But we're getting report after report from our members".

I click into the chat bubble and write back: "Hi! So what's the next step? You agree that I have something relevant to say, even though some percent of the people in the group find what I've said problematic."

The group admin replies, "I don't think we should all be hearing nothing but echoes of the things we want to hear and believe. It is good to be exposed to things that may or may not fit our own perspective. But unfortunately, not everyone agrees with that. We tend to unfriend people when they say something that contradicts our own feelings and we boot people from groups when they don't echo the group mentality. So I'm in a bit of a predicament as an administrator. You see things differently than others do. The biggest thing I see is that people aren't expecting it. People want an echo, not a controversy. They want to feel like it is a safe space, one that reflects themselves. So someone comes along with a thought that doesn't fit and they react negatively as if their safe space has been compromised".

"So far", I answer, "you've been making my points for me. I don't know what I can do that I'm not already doing. I am open to suggestions for how to modify what I say to make it more palatable, but I already feel like I expend a lot of effort trying to reach people where they are at and bring them to the perceptions that I'm trying to share with them. It's not like I can go to some other group where I'd fit in better. I don't fit in anywhere, exactly. Transgender people promise it's a big umbrella, that if your gender identity is any different from what other people assigned you as at birth, then HEY you're one of us! But apparently I'm not quite so welcome if I think thoughts that aren't like everyone else's and express them because I'm tired of being silenced and my peculiar form of gender identity denied. I'm tired of being spoken OF but not getting a chance to speak FOR MYSELF"

"I don't want to censor you", the admin repeated. "This has become a group that values selfies of transgender peple asking if they pass, or stories about abuse and trauma, or questions about hormone shot placement. I don't think there is anything wrong with your posting, but I'm afraid this is the wrong audience. I think you need to find a better place to post, where conversations and long-format posts are more embraced. I'd like to keep you around but I also need to help people feel like the group is a safe space".

But it isn't a safe space.

It clearly isn't a safe space for a minority individual who isn't like the others. Such as me. It isn't a safe space for individuals who do not fit in.

The people it is "safe" for are the most normative participants, who are being kept "safe" from the horrible threat of having to be aware of someone who is different, whose experience is different. Someone weird. Peculiar. QUEER, you could say.

This is not a cute little irony to be spoken of with a wry smile. This is a catastrophic falure of the entire purpose and mission statement of LGBTQIA+.

Trans communities are becoming unsafe spaces for queer folks.

Watch your eggshells.

I will be walking on them.

* The actual name of the Facebook group has been changed at the administrator's request.

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

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

My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in late 2021. Stay tuned for further details.

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

———————

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

————————

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Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/84154.html

Another brave child steps through a door. Seanan McGuire's "Wayward Children" series revolves around the notion that doors present themselves to children who -- for various reasons -- don't fit in this world, offering them an opportunity to live for awhile in one or another alternative world where the principles and rules of physics and society and anything else you can imagine may be quite different.

These are stories for kids who feel like space aliens here. I just answered a query on one of my Facebook groups, a meme that read "Sometimes I feel I am not from this world. The gender binary is a myth. Why do you feel like a visiting alien?" McGuire's "Wayward Children" series is not just for those of us whose Difference is about gender, but yeah, most of us know that 'space aliens who belong somewhere else, not here' feeling quite well, don't we?

Across the Green Grass Fields breaks some of the patterns set by the previous books in the series. For one thing, this book is less dark, overall. In this one, no one is dying with their hands chopped off or their eyes surgically removed while they were still alive and conscious; none of the main characters has to experience their lover and companion being killed by their sister, and there are no animated corpses plodding along without their animating spirit. Another thing setting this book apart is that there's no mention of the school, the refuge in the world that we know for all the kids to retreat into when they lose access to their alternative worlds. Be all that as it may, this latest installment fits in nonetheless -- those of us who've read the other books see how this one continues the larger pattern. Regan will end up at the school after the events told in this story.

Regan, the main character, happens to be intersex. Complete Androgen Insensitivy Syndrome (CAIS). XY chromosomes, like a boy, but without a boy's conventional external parts, with the parts that cause one to be classified as a girl instead. She doesn't know this until she becomes concerned that her body isn't changing like that of her friends and expresses this to her parents. From their behavior, she realizes they're keeping something from her, and after some initial relucance they tell her. This is all new and startling information, and she shares it with her best friend, but her best friend is freaked out by it and rejects her.

But the story as a whole is not Regan being intersex. The story is about a girl who ends up in a world populated by centaurs and minotaurs and other variations. It's just a story in which the main character happens to be intersex.

An often-stated wish of LGBTQIA+ readers is for more books where we can read about characters who are like us, not books that are about coming to terms with that difference and coming out and so forth, but ordinary adventures and romances and mysteries and science fiction and fantasy stories where we have people like us appearing in them. Just normalize us into characterhood! Author Seanan McGuire has previously given us lesbian characters (Jack from the first three tales) and a transgender character (Kade) and didn't make the stories About Being a Lesbian (etc), but that's fairly commonplace now. To have an intersex main character in the same sense is considerably less so.

Like all of the books in this series, Across the Green Grass Fields is delightfully whimsical, conjures up a world we can believe in and might want to visit, and lets us follow the tale of a brave hero from the middle school age range. It's written to be appropriate and enticing to readers of that age but to still be fascinating and entertaining to an adult audience as well, and it succeeds in both instances, and I do recommend it.

Now, in the spirit of "a word from our sponsors", a comment about LGBTQIA+ and all that --

Inclusion means, or should mean, more than "Yeah, okay, those people can march with us too, sure, why not, give them a rainbow t-shirt to wear". It means learning about how it is and has been for people whose identifying letter in that acronym are something other than your own.

I'm not intersex myself, but I try to do that, to read and learn about all the different identities and situations that fall into the LGBTQIA+ cluster.

It means including the other folks' situation in your own thoughts and statements. And that, in turn, means more than simply remembering to use the letter "I" as well as "L", "G", "B", and "T". It means undersanding how the issues may look different to them. In the case of intersex, since that's the identity highlighted by this book, for instance, they often hear other people mentioning intersex to counter arguments about physical sex -- as in "well, intersex people exist, so attempting to speak of physical sex, like what makes you female is having a vagina, is factually wrong, physical sex doesn't really exist". Intersex people themselves don't tend to make that kind of statement. And in fact most of the intersex people I've known do not like it when sex and gender are confused! It erases their situation when people think they're the same thing as transgender, or genderqueer or bigender or genderfluid. Because it is their physical sex that sets them apart as different, as being neither male nor female in their body structure. Most of them are not happy if your main takeaway from hearing about the existence of intersex people is that sex -- as distinguished from gender -- doesn't exist!

That's just an example. I could make similar points about bisexuality. That it brings viewpoints and experiences to the table that are different from what lesbians and gay people go through. Think of the Chasing Amy experience -- being rejected by one's lesbian friends as "one of us" for becoming involved with a guy.

At a minimum, we should put the same expectations on ourselves that we put on people who say they are our cisgender / straight allies. We expect the latter to educate themselves. We expect them to go a bit beyond refraining from running around saying transgender and homosexual people are sinful and perverted.

In the name of inclusion, we need to do that for each other.

———————

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

———————

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. It's expected to be released in late 2021. Stay tuned for further details.

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

———————

Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/83958.html

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June 2025

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Page Summary

Transgender Lack of Awareness Week
The Comparable Titles Game
First Draft of Query Letter for *Within the Box*
BOOK REVIEW -- *The Boy in Makeup*
The Psychiatric Connection
Another Book Review of *Guy in Women's Studies* + Still Seeking Beta Readers
Self Defined
The Coarseness of Our Accommodations
Excerpt: Reminiscing about Malcolm
Gender and Its Variants
It's All About the Sexuality
Unsafe Spaces
BOOK REVIEW: *Across the Green Grass Fields* by Seanan McGuire

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Style: Ivory Alcea for Mobility by branchandroot
Resources: Mitsuba Aoi

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Entries tagged with lgbtqia

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Transgender Lack of Awareness Week

The Comparable Titles Game

First Draft of Query Letter for Within the Box

BOOK REVIEW -- The Boy in Makeup

The Psychiatric Connection

Another Book Review of Guy in Women's Studies + Still Seeking Beta Readers

Self Defined

The Coarseness of Our Accommodations

Excerpt: Reminiscing about Malcolm

Gender and Its Variants

It's All About the Sexuality

Unsafe Spaces

BOOK REVIEW: Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

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