Once upon a time there was a culture, and as you might expect, the people in that culture held beliefs about how life was for them.

The predominant notion, the one held by the mainstream of people, was that relationships were sort of like parallel lines, moving in the same direction, although that direction might change from time to time; there would be some zigs and some zags, but the lines never touched, and were not supposed to.

Something like this, if you were to draw it like a diagram:



This is fundamental to our culture, they said; this is the floor upon which everything else resides, so this is important!




Well, there were people who interacted differently, and experienced matters differently, and they were considered by the mainstream to be doing something they were not supposed to. These folks spoke with each other about their own experience and discarded the predominant notion, and formulated their own beliefs about how life actually was.

Relationships were actually like cells, and all cells touched adjoining cells and there was nothing akin to the untouching parallel paths that the mainstream folks liked to describe.

They began drawing this symbol and wearing it on their t shirts and putting it on flags that they carried at their rallies:



"What's WRONG with the mainsteam people?", some of them asked each other. "Why do they insist that reality is something it so obviously is not? We have shown them, we have pointed, and still they deny the absolute truth of the touching cells -- why?"

"Oh, they do it specifically because they hate us", came the answer. "It's a lie, since the truth is plain to see. The purpose of the lie is to have an excuse to condemn us!"

And in mutual support and solidarity, they embraced the understanding they had as the foundation of liberty and equality and all possibility of peace, so that lies like this could not bring them down again.




Then one day some other people who also interacted with a different pattern than the one prescribed by the predominant culture spoke up and said "Actually we do have the lines. We also have cells but for us the cells don't touch each other. They're separated by lines. We think you've got it a bit wrong. It's really more like this:



And the touching-cell activists frowned in disapproval of these new dissidents. "We support you for being hated on and attacked by the dominant culture group, but you really need to listen. You are falling into their trap by believing in separation. Your model would leave cells so that they don't adjoin each other and that is the real essence of what is bad about the mainsteam insistence on parallel lines that never touch. So you need to get over that, okay?"

Meanwhile, the mainsteam folks were quick to condemn the new dissidents the same way they had done for the touching-cell folks, because they were all threats to the essential doctrine of separate parallel lines. It was okay to zig and zag but not to touch!

Pretty quickly the new dissidents got mad and began saying that the touching-cell folks were lying and were full of hate, because the baseline truth was right there in plain sight if one cared to look, and this intolerance could not be excused just because the touching-cell movement people considered themselves outcasts and therefore social victims of the mainsteam.



This is, of course, a metaphor, and you probably already anticipate the visual punch line:




Before you say "Yeah yeah, blind men and elephants, etcetera, and 'why can't we all just get along' thrown in at the end, seen it and heard it before", the point is actually not so much "Gee why can't we just get along", nor is it "let everyone have their own reality and don't condemn anybody else", really. The point I'd like you to take back from this is that things look differently based on how the light falls on them and the angle from which one views things, but if, instead of contradicting what someone else is seeing, you get them to start there and move their eyes far enough to see how the other interpretation can be perceived as part of the same overall pattern -- then you have a chance of communicating.


And yeah, I had specific groups in mind. Of course I did. The mainstream view is the cisgender heterosexual patriarchal floor plan. The touching-cell folks are the second wave radical feminists. The new dissidents are the gender identity activists, including trans and genderqueer and nonbinary people.

I don't care who you are, quit holding on to the notion that in order for you to be right, they have to be wrong. Quit using their hate and intolerance as a reason for ignoring their perspective. Of course hate and intolerance is wrong, and of course their insistence that your truth is wrong is, itself, wrong. But be leery of the possibility that their hatefulness and their refusal to listen to you is being mirrored in your own behaviors.

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


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.

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"It's surprising to me that you aren't sure the trans community will accept gender queer people who don't transition", my friend writes in response to something I had posted. "Many such people do identify as trans and are active in the community, particularly in specifically non-binary spaces".


Yeah, let me explain and unpack that a bit.

Early this week, in another, very different space, someone else had posted something dismissive about trans people -- there was a photo of a bathroom door with all kinds of alternatives to the conventional male and female bathroom silhouettes along with the notice "We don't care, just don't pee on the seat" or something to that effect; the person posting it had then written a screed about how fragile and self-immersed and pathetic these kids these days are, etc.

So I wrote some descriptions of the shit I'd had to put up with from my classmates, the sissyphobia and homophobia and misogyny bundle, you know? What it had been like being harassed for being sissy and femme. And how since they had made an issue of it and acted like it was my secret shame, I damn well had the right to make an issue of it myself to say I was proud of my identity.

I got some likes and some supportive comments but I also got people saying that this shouldn't make it necessary to transition because I'm just as entitled to walk around in the body I was born in as those bullies were. So I explained that I am not a transitioner, that I don't present as female, that I identify as femme but also as physically male.

"Oh", they said. "Well, that makes more sense. But these pathetic people we're talking about, they don't do that. They have to change their name and their pronouns and put on a dress and tell us we have to accept their identity".

So these transphobes are seizing on nonbinary people like me who don't transition and using us as a weapon to attack our trans sisters and brothers.

That happens. It isn't rare. It's a thing.

Now, let's consider the kind of things I myself say. I'm not merely a genderqueer person who does not transition. I'm a loud and pushy genderqueer person who is tired of feeling erased so I make a lot of noise about having an identity that is different from the type of trans identities that comprise the main cultural narrative about being trans. I'm constantly mouthing off about not being a transitioner. I'm often challenging language used and generalizations made in transgender / genderqueer groups when it doesn't leave room for people who consider themselves women or femme but don't present as female.

My behavior reminds a lot of trans people of those transphobes. Because identities like mine have been weaponized against them. Used to attack the legitimacy of their identities.

We should not let them divide us that way. Those nasty creepazoids don't legitimately accept my identity. They use the word "just". As in "See, you can just be nonmasculine and still be male". They trivialize my experience and my identity. They will go on to say I don't have a separate gender identity, I'm just a man who likes to eat quiche and watch chick flicks or something. They plug their ears about how polarizing it is to be perceived as male but to be (and to be perceived as being) a person with the priorities and tastes, behaviors and attitudes that are expected of girls and women and not the ones associated with boys and men. They pretend they are fine with that as long as I don't transition and ask them to accept me as female. They pretend they aren't participating in the problem, that it wasn't them calling me names and exhibiting attitude and dropping insinuendos about what's wrong with me.

My trans sisters and brothers who transition are my kin. What works for me does not work for them. They have the right to be, to exist socially without being misgendered or condescended to. Nobody has any justification for questioning the route they have taken, which validates their identity and lets them stand proud. They need a supportive medical community and insurance coverage, they need to be allowed to pee without people questioning or challenging their gender identity, they need to be able to walk down the sidewalk in peace and in safety. And they need to not have identities like mine thrown in their faces like gender was some kind of One Size Fits All boutique and cisgender bigots are suddenly the fashion aribrators.

You do not have my consent to use me as a goddam weapon.


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

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


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



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

———————

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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Imagine walking down the hall and encountering this argument:


BOB: I don't know what you folks are going on about. Look, there are two sexes, male and female. If you're female, you're a woman. If you're male, you're a man.

KIM: You're wrong. Sex isn't binary. People aren't just male or female. There are intersex people. That proves that gender is a lot more complicated than what you just said. There are a lot of different genders, not just two!


If I were the one walking down the hall and hearing this, I would want to tell them that they're both wrong. First off, sex isn't gender. Sex is your physical morphology. Gender is identity and role, all that social stuff.

If you were a person who basically agreed with Bob, you most likely wouldn't be here reading my blog. So I'm not going to waste your time and mine developing the counterarguments to Bob that you've already heard and can make as well as I can.

But to Kim, I would want to say: "We don't need it to be true that there are more than two sexes in order for our nonbinary gender identities to be valid. You shouldn't even bring up physical biological sex in this argument. It just confuses the issue. I've got all the parts that caused my mom's obstetrician to mark down that I was a male baby. I'm not remotely intersex. My body fits the textbook description of male. I'm femme, though. I'm all gal. I was never into that boy stuff, I always knew I was one of the girls. Saying that the plurality of binary physical sexes is what makes nonconforming gender identities valid implies that our gender identity isn't legit otherwise".



I do get crossways with transgender activists and nonbinary activists over this physical-body stuff on occasion. They'll sometimes respond to what I said about having conventional textbook-description male parts and saying I'm a male girl or a male femme with a burst of defensive anger: "Excuse me but having a penis doesn't make you male. Biological sex IS A MYTH! You shouldn't go around saying that having your set of physical parts makes you male because then you're saying that if I have a penis that makes me male, and honey don't start that shit with me, I have never been male. I was mistakenly assigned male at birth!"

But no, biological sex is not a myth. The notion that biological sex defines gender, that is a myth. The notion that everyone is supposed to be either male or female, and that anyone who isn't is an embarrassment who needs to be corrected surgically as soon as possible, that is a myth. But it is indeed one's physical bits that defines one's sex. So we need to discuss sexual physiology, even though it's not determinant of a person's gender identity. Or maybe precisely because it is not determinant of a person's gender identity.



Despite the existence of real intersex people, we are a sexually dimorphic species. In general, like most complex animal life forms, we're either male or we're female. Our species is not a species that reproduces through the interaction of three, five, or thirty-seven different sexes doing a wide variety of reproductive behaviors. It's a species that reproduces though the interaction of two fundamental body designs, and intersex people who reproduce don't really modify that fact. Nobody alive today or at any time in recorded human history gestated in an organ that was not a uterus. Nobody ever got their chromosomes from gametes that were neither sperm nor ova. There isn't a sex that is neither male nor female that produces sex chromosomes that are Z or W instead of being X or Y and which encode the sexual possibility of developing into a specific body that isn't male or female. You could write a great science fiction tale about a species that was like that, but that's a fictional and imaginary idea of intersex, not a real one. And since real intersex people exist, we should pay real attention to them for a minute instead of just using them as a rhetorical argument about how human biological sex is nonbinary.


Some intersex people are CAH (i.e, they have Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia). These are people whose sex-encoding genes are just like those of most people whose bodies present as female, but where a variation in the adrenal gland's behavior causes them to have a lot of the type of hormones that make a person's body take on male attributes. This adrenal gland behavior is caused by their genes, but not the ones on their sex chromosomes, so the biological roulette of what sperm's codes went into the egg isn't causing this. At birth, CAH people's bodies may be designated male. More problematic, their bodies are often recognized as intersex and the doctors reach for their sharp scalpels and whack away the offending phallic clitoris. This -- and not the rhetorical flourish of discarding the entire notion that biological sex exists at all -- is probably the most significant political concern of real-life intersex activists. To get doctors to quit doing this. To let CAH babies make their own decisions about their own bodies when they are old enough to do so.

Other intersex people are CAIS (i.e., they have Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome). These are people whose sex-encoding genes are just like those of most people whose bodies present as male, but other genes of theirs (not on their sex chromosomes but elsewhere in their genetic code) make their body unresponsive to the hormones that make the body take on male structures. So their bodies at the time of their birth will nearly always be designated female. Unlike the CAH people, they aren't at high risk for being carved up by surgeons when they're still infants, but at puberty they won't get periods; the fact that they have undescended testes (usually) instead of ovaries may be discovered, and even though they are old enough to voice an opinion, doctors sometimes pick up those sharp knives and cut out their testes without asking. Or the doctors may mislead the CAIS patient (and their parents, who typically have medical authority) about the risks and consequences. This is another of the intersex activists' political concerns, fully informed consent for CAIS intersex people.


CAH and CAIS intersex people can generally reproduce. But despite being intersex, the physical architecture and the chromosomal arrangement with which they participate is going to follow either a male textbook description or a female textbook description.

But what about intersex people who are neither XX nor XY at the genetic level?

The Turner pattern, where a person has a single X instead of two, also called XO configuration, creates a female-structured body with some modified shapes (shorter, broader chest, some differences in the face, and so on). They are often infertile. They don't tend to be designated anything other than female at the time of birth. A few do not have a uterus or ovaries. If they are able to reproduce, they do so with the structures and capabilities of female people, and their genetic contributions will work within the sexually dimorphic reproductive pattern like those of female people.

The Klinefelter pattern, where a person has an XXY configuration, creates a male-structured body with some mildly modified shapes. They are almost always designated male at birth. At puberty they may not develop secondary sex characteristics, or may develop them less strongly than other males.

There is an XYY pattern as well, the Jacobs pattern. They are almost always designated male at birth. There are some mild differences in body shape but it often goes undetected.

There are also mosaic situations, such as XO/XY where some of a person's cells have XO and others have XY. A person with this configuration may be born with a body that presents as typical female, typical male, or ambiguously intersex. Or even more rarely, there is XX/XY, the closest to the legend of hermaphrodite, wherein, depending on which cells in which part of the body have developed according to which structural patterns, may result in both ovaries AND testes developing. There is the theoretical possibility that a person could produce both viable sperm and viable ova and could therefore participate reproductively as a source of sperm and/or as the person providing the egg, but there's no case of this on record.

I haven't said anything about the political intersex considerations for people with these forms of intersex because I'm less familiar with them. Self-determination, certainly. The right to choose whether to receive supplemental hormones (or hormone blockers), the right to fully-informed consent not muddled by the outdated attitude that any variation needs to be hidden and "fixed", the attitude that difference is shameful and inferior and wrong.


The takeaway from intersex awareness is not that sexual dimorphism is an evil lie that supports the gender binary and the "anatomy is destiny" conservative belief systems, but that people who vary should have the right to make their own decisions about their own bodies, and should be regarded as normal variations, not sick pathologies.


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

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


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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

When I saw that Sophie Labelle, author-cartoonist of Assigned Male Comics, had published a book, I ordered a copy. It was described as featuring a gender nonconforming main character coping with high school, and I'm addicted to stories of how people formulate their unconventional gender identities and how they experience themselves during these formative years.

I wanted to see what Labelle would do with more space to expand into, the opportunity to dive deeper into things with more nuance and complexity than a four-panel strip provides.

(Ciel is NOT a graphic novel, by the way. It's concise at 188 pages but it's made up of text, just so you know).

The early part of the book left me feeling a little bit like everything about gender and identity was still being painted in primary colors, all platitudes and overly simplified viewpoints that imply more agreement among LGBTQIA people than actually exists. Labelle's Ciel refers to "another gender...than the one the doctors gave me at birth when they looked at my genitals (which are nobody's business, by the way!)" and goes on to complain that for children in many societies, "they're designated a girl or a boy, their room are painted a certain color, and they're given certain kinds of toys to play with".

But Sophie Labelle shifts to more politically complicated territory later on in the story. Tensions are explored around questions of sexual orientation and how they collide awkwardly with nonbinary gender identities, with characters such as Frank, who is involved with Ciel's best friend Stephie, a trans girl. Frank is starting to get facial hair and unclear on whether or not Stephie, who was assigned male, will also.

"You know, she wouldn't be any less a girl if she had a beard like a Viking, or an Adam's apple, or a low voice", Ciel tells him.

"But it would be a little weird."

"Why?"

"People might think I was going out with a guy, or something."

"And that would be a real tragedy, right?"

"That's not what I mean! Some of my friends say I'm gay because I'm going out with Stephie, and I don't care."

"Good."

This conversation gets Ciel wondering about facial hair. Ciel doesn't identify as a boy or a girl. And although Ciel is taking puberty hormone blockers, they're not firmly committed to continuing to do so.

Over and over again, the characters in Labelle's book, in pondering their own identities and their expressions of them, find themselves considering how they are viewed by others. It's an unavoidable part of identity. Sociologists sometimes call it "altercasting" — the act of assigning identities to other people. We all do it, not always with bad intentions, not always with narrowly limited categories, but even when we are aware of all this diversity, we still tend to listen and watch and then regard a person as a trans woman or a genderfluid nonbinary person or a lesbian trans girl or whatever. And we all also spend time and energy imagining how we are perceived, and we take it into account when choosing how to interact, how to present.

In Ciel's case, there is the matter of what name to use. The school's records have Ciel's proper name down as "Alessandro". Ciel is somewhat awkward about asking to be referred to as "Alessandra" instead, more comfortable about asking ahead of time than correcting a teacher who started using the other name. Ciel is even more open and out on their YouTube channel, where videos openly explore what it is like to be trans and gender-nonconforming.

That provokes the most polarized and antagonistically hostile reaction that Ciel experiences in the book — from another transgender person. A video blogger named Bettie Bobbie posts: "Hi everybody! Today I watched a video that made me want to puke, about a gay boy who invented a gender for himself by saying he's neither a boy nor a girl...if you ask me, this video harms real trans people like me."

Sophie Labelle shows us that the world of LGBTQIA identities is intricate and that we struggle with identification and expression, and that there are hurt feelings and resentments and anger sometimes. This is honest and fair.

Through Ciel's tale, Labelle does a slow exploration of presentation by a gender nonconforming person (I would describe Ciel as genderfluid, myself, but the term isn't embraced in this story). Ciel's choice of clothing is presented as an internal dialog, facing the closet several mornings and deciding against the ostentatiously colorful apparel they're drawn to and instead putting on more drab and mundane garments. Only towards the end of the book does Labelle pull back and let us see that choice against the backdrop of Ciel's expectation of their classmates' attitudes and reactions.


Ciel, by Sophie Labelle, Second Story Press 2020 Toronto CA

https://secondstorypress.ca/kids/ciel


———————

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

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


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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Like most people born with a penis and testicles, I was AMAB: assigned male at birth.

I don't refer to myself as transgender because I don't seek to be perceived as a female person. And I don't tend to identify as nonbinary because I don't seek to be perceived as someone who is neither male nor female.

I identify as genderqueer and, more specifically, as a gender invert.

* * *

There are a lot of ongoing discussions, especially within the trans communities, about how you don't have to be on hormones, don't have to get an operation, to be valid as a transgender person. About how the legitimacy of one's identity as transgender does not depend on changing one's body.

The ones who do — the people conventionally designated as "male to female" or "female to male" — are nowadays often referred to as "binary transgender". And the assertion that you don't have to be binary trans in order to be authentically trans is an affirmation of nonbinary transgender identities.

The fact that there are so many posts and statements saying so is a clear sign that a lot of people think "transgender" means that if you were assigned male at birth you wish to be perceived as female, accepted as a woman, not differentiated from cisgender women, that you present as female, that you do everything at your disposal to do so successfully, that you seek to pass. And reciprocally the other way around if you were assigned female at birth.

That's what the term "transgender" means to a lot of people out there, both within the trans community itself and in the mainstream.


Hello. I am a person who could identify as a "nonbinary transgender" person.

I don't choose to do so. I don't feel like it communicates. I feel like it just confuses people. They make one set of wrong assumptions when they see me and mentally assign me as a male person. If I tell them I'm transgender they make a different set of wrong assumptions and I'm no better off.

Meanwhile, out there are a bunch of male-to-female and female-to-male transgender folks. A handful of them are "truscum" or "transmedicalist" and don't consider anyone to be authentically trans unless they seek a medical transition. Then there are quite a few more who don't have that kind of absolute judgemental definitional thing going on, but who will admit to missing the days when the only kind of trans people were binary trans. I'm not going to say they're right, especially since so many of my friends and colleagues identify as nonbinary transgender. But I have to confess, I sympathize with them and their viewpoint. Many of them have been around as long as I have. That means they lived through decades when most of society had only heard dirty jokes and porn references to trans people. And some of them feel like they did the hard work to get transgender issues in front of the social consciousness and now all these newfangled nonbinary trans people want to be a part of the phenomenon.

There's a reason why there aren't more people identifying as I do, as gender invert. It's because they haven't heard the term. Nobody offered it to them as an option to consider. So they went with "transgender". Or "nonbinary". Or "nonbinary transgender".

But what if you were assigned male at birth, you consider your body to be, in fact, male, but your gender isn't masculine, isn't man, isn't guy, isn't boy, that instead you are femme, one of the girls? Or if you were assigned female at birth, recognize your body to be female, but have never been a girl or a woman, and instead you're all man, all guy, all boy, totally a masculine individual?

If you say "transgender" and folks know you were AFAB they'll almost universally assume you identify as "male". If you say "transgender" and they understand you were AMAB, they'll assume you to identify as "female".

Specifying "nonbinary transgender" just shifts the problem. Now people are likely to assume that you don't want to be identified as any named sex or gender. That you're declaring yourself to be neither male nor female, neither man nor woman.

If what I'm saying resonates for you, you're welcome to come join me as a gender invert instead.




———————

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

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


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

———————

This 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