You don't need anything from me in order to be different from me. You can simply be you, and leave me to either notice or not notice, care or not care.

But if you feel the need to explain that you aren't ashamed of this difference, that you don't consider this difference an inferiority, and that you would not wish this difference away even if you could, then you may feel the need to tell me that not only are you different from me, you are glad of it. That you would not want to be like me.

Interestingly, one experience that might provoke you into doing that is me telling you that am glad I am not like you.

"It's not the same", a primal part of me rushes to shout. "There were always a whole bunch of you, defining yourselves as normal, and singling me out as the one that the rest of you were glad you didn't resemble."

That's true enough, but put a pin in it for a moment. (I won't forget that aspect of things, I assure you. I just want to focus on something else today).

Is it only sheer weight of numbers that makes our situations different? Is your reaction to my difference otherwise equivalent to my reaction to yours?

There, too, I tend to rush forward to say that you folks who are in the majority are fearful and easily threatened by difference, your defensiveness making it get all hostile. And that, too, makes our situation different.

But I need to be honest. I disapproved of you, growing up. I felt superior to you. I definitely thought you folks were doing it all wrong. Your hostility may have made me emphasize how much I didn't want to be like you, but I was already partway there before I fully noticed that. And if I'd been a lot more plural -- that is, if there had been a whole bunch of people like me, people I could compare notes with and discuss you folks and your behaviors and antics and your way of being in the world -- we might have solidifed each others' contempt for how you are. For how wrong you are.

Oh, is this news to you? It really never occurred to you that marginalized folks like me were rolling our eyes at you not just for your unfair and oppressive practices, and not just for going around acting like your identity and personality and behavior are good and praiseworthy and ours is not, ...but that we find your difference from us to be creepy and repulsive and pathetic and disgusting? Okay, we mostly don't give voice to that because we mostly had a lot more reason to outgrown that kind of provincial narrowness. Unlike you, we were in a situation that prompted us, at least most of us, to think a lot about fairness and equality and being careful and thoughtful about passing judgment on folks and their perceived differences. About hating on difference for its own sake.

Well, true confession time, then. I have a better understanding of your hostile xenophobia hatred than I tend to let on. That. Does. NOT. Make it. Okay. If you try to draw that conclusion, I'm going to stick you with something sharper and meaner than a pin.

But what it does do is encourage us to set aside the notion that all such oppressive and hateful behavior originates in a desire to be oppressive and hateful, which would leave you and your majoritarian kind utterly incomprehensible to us who have been shoved to the social margins. It actually opens the door on the possibility of forgiveness. If there's understanding, if you get it, if things click into place for you and you see us and see how wrong this adversarial difference-hating is, then yeah, for me at any rate forgiveness is in the works.


—————


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.

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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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Safe spaces exist so that those of us who are marginalized minorities can be with each other, speak and listen to each other, in an environment where we won't be mocked, belittled, or harassed by people who don't share our experience. They exist so that we can find words to express and explain our situation, in a world that previously only had derogatory, judgmental, pathology-labeling words for our difference.

Separatism is similar, but more political in scope: that oppressed marginalized people can come together with those who share that specific situation, to unify and decide collectively what to do about their oppression, without the interfering presence of people who are not in that same situation. Separatism is deliberate and positive identity politics, the position that our political interests require a polarization of ourselves against those who are not us, so that we can assert ourselves on our own behalf.

In both cases, they define a negative space, the "people that we are not". The Other. The ones who don't belong here.

Since the act of Othering a bunch of people so quickly conjures up images of prejudicial bias against some category of people in the worst and most blindly hateful sense, we tend to be quick to distinguish between Othering people for factors that are built-in and biological or essential to their being, and Othering people for their attitudes and viewpoints and behaviors and perspectives, which we can politicize without being haters. And yet we often do Other people on the basis of essentials anyway! The argument is that if a person's inborn characteristics in this social context mean that they invariably have a different social experience, and hence a different perspective and world-view, then we aren't really Othering them because of their skin color or their sex characteristics or the pattern of their sexual attractions, we're Othering them for the privileged and oppressive mindset that invariably comes as part of the experience of owning those identities in this society.

That's not to say that we don't sometimes Other people strictly on the basis of what they think and believe and how they behave, and would accept anyone as one of us regardless of any of their biological innate identity characteristics. Because we do that a lot, too.

Othering people and tying it to one of their innate categories, in pure form -- regarding them as permanently, always Other -- creates a situation that can't be readily fixed by any kind of political activism. If they are as they are because their experience (as a cisgender heterosexual white male, for example) invariably means they will have a mindset that you and your colleagues must oppose, then you've just defined an enemy that, by your own definition, you can't change. So your problems with them will persist for as long as they do.

Othering on the basis of views and perspectives, meanwhile, looks a lot less malignant on the surface. "We don't hate anybody, but we hate the following views and beliefs and attitudes". On the one hand, it's entirely reasonable that we get sick and tired of rehashing the same points over and over again, so we create the safe spaces or the separatist environments so we don't have to.

But Othering on the basis of views and perspectives, in pure form -- regarding the matter of these toxic beliefs and viewpoints as fully and permanently settled, that they are wrong and evil and totally not up for discussion ever again -- is eventually problematic, too. It creates a litmus test where anything voiced that has even the superficial appearance of belonging to one of the banned viewponts is considered sufficient evidence of being wrong and not up for any consideration. Since the banned-as-wrong views never get discussed, they become undefined and not clearly understood by the people who fervently refuse to give them any consideration. This breeds increasing intransigence and refusal to listen, and an ever-broadening scope of "wrong thinking" that we, as the good people in this safe space or separatist enclave, need to avoid.

Feminist author Lisa Weil and I connected in the course of corresponding about each other's books (hers: In Search of Pure Lust; mine: That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class). She said her book has often been celebrated for preserving a crucial part of lesbian feminist history, but that people have generally avoided addressing one of her central points -- she views her book as "a critical reflection, specifically on the polarizations of identity politics and performative allyship and all the resulting damage and waste".



I have spoken of these types of Othering in their "pure form" for a reason. They aren't toxic and can be quite beneficial when deployed as tactics. As temporary or partial approaches. As strategies rather than absolutes.

My employer, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, is seeking feedback from "WSW" -- women who have sex with women -- to get a better sense of any health inequities affecting that population. I am a femme, albeit a male one; I don't tend to refer to myself as "a woman" but other people who were also identified at birth as male, including some who still refer to themselves as such, sometimes do identify as women. I could, if I thought that what this inquiry was trying to get at was something that really ought to include me, take the position that for purposes of this survey I am a WSW insofar as I am a person whose relationships and attractions are indeed towards women.

But I don't have to defend my option of doing so by taking the position that every single time the word "woman" is used, it always includes me. And in this particular instance I don't think that it does.

Meanwhile, on Facebook, there are several groups defined as being for lesbian feminists. They are having discussions that I'd like to participate in. The questions that are required to apply to join make it plain that they would not regard me as an appropriate participant.

If they formed other groups in which they didn't exclude me, it would be a tactic, a strategy. There are no doubt ways in which my experience as a person seen and regarded male all my life does mean my presence would be disruptive and divisive some of the time. But to the extent that they only discuss the things they discuss in groups I can't join, they make it an absolute. I suspect most of them would find that my views and perspectives actually mesh with theirs and that I have some interesting contributions precisely because of my different viewing angle. Things that might help with the larger project of contending with the world's shared toxic world-views and changing them in a life-affirming direction. But they aren't going to ever know that.


I think safe spaces and separatism are useful and necessary as long as some of the time you come out from behind that wall and communicate with the people who are on the outside of it. With the Others.


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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.

———————

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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Dear NeuroDiverse Comrade:

I'm sorry you found what I posted to be offensive. I totally respect your right to speak out and fight back against the marginalization you get subjected to in our difference-intolerant society. You're tired of the attitudes that get doled out to people who have a mental illness diagnosis. I get that.

But -- speaking as a person who has received enough official psychiatric diagnoses to collect them like postage stamps, including bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic, and borderline -- we need to have the right to decide for ourselves whether our difference is a pathology. And while I don't mean to dismiss whatever efficacy you've gotten from the treatments your doctors have provided, we do get to critique the medical-model interventions that have been pushed at us, sometimes without our having the option of refusing.

Let's backtrack in history just a bit, shall we?

GAY PEOPLE were considered not only immoral and perverted, but mentally ill. Being gay was a pathology, a wrongness of how the mind worked, messed up if not necessarily willfully deficient in morals.

WOMEN, straight as well as lesbian, were often told that if they had any issue with fitting themselves in to the patriarchal society and its expectations and limitations, well, the problem was within them.

TRANS people, of course, were long thought to be suffering from a pathological "gender identity dysphoria", and regardless of whether our society's approach to accommodating their condition involves helping them transition or instead trying to reprogram them, we start with defining them as mentally disordered for thinking of themselves as a gender that doesn't match their body.

And GENDERQUEER and NONBINARY and GENDER NONCONFORMING people have had both forms, too, sometimes having our very existence defined as a pathology and at other times our reaction to how we're treated and regarded defined as a pathology.

Designating us as mentally ill has long been a part of dealing with the inconvenient and problematic. It pinpoints the location of all social problems that involve us as being inside us. It says we aren't oppressed, nor are we understandably traumatized by our social situation . It says nobody is going to understand us any better by listening to us and empathizing with what we have experienced, because we don't make sense, our brains themselves are messed up and full of misbehaving neurons.

It's a belief that grew out of the desire for a disease model for all human suffering. We had become very good, very effective, at dealing with infections and physical maladies, things that could be studied by reducing things to symptoms and causes within the body's own processes. It was hoped that all human pain and suffering would turn out to boil down to that model.

It's also cheaper, a concern of insurance companies and public policy makers who have budgets and cost containment to consider. Pills are a lot cheaper than open-ended counseling, let alone the prospect of social upheaval and structural social change.



But you wish to lump me in with people who blame you for failure to achieve milestones of success. "Oh, you don't understand that I have a mental disability. Since you question the legitimacy of mental health treatment, you clearly think we're all fakers and malingerers and we should just dust off our asses and get over it. Well shut up, we have no time for your privileged hateful cluelessness. You need to quit spouting your bullshit about how it's all just capitalism or patriarchy or whatever, because you're just victim blaming even if you're too dense to see it!"

You're particularly upset that I challenge the claims that the mental health industry makes about its pills. You don't want to hear that studies show that the brain compensates for psychiatric pharmaceuticals if you keep taking them over a long period -- that the drugs that inhibit reuptake of neurotranmitter chemicals cause the brain to maintain fewer receptors or to produce less of the chemical, and the drugs that try to limit certain chemical reactions tend to cause the brain to increase its sensitivity to those chemicals. Which makes the drugs have less effect while creating a physical dependency on the drug that can make it difficult to withdraw from it.

Well, statistics can't tell us that that's necessarily how your body is reacting to what you take. Statistics don't work that way. Research can show that a tendency exists but not that it will happen for everyone the same way. Perhaps psychiatric medication does wonders for you. I'm no one to question what anyone else finds useful or helpful in their search for ways to cope with their situation.

But we are opposed to involuntary modification of how people's minds work, and that means not only opposing direct forced treatment but also misrepresentation of the medical facts. Medical consent has to be fully informed consent. And despite decades of claiming that mentally ill people have a chemical imbalance in our brains that their perfect pills fix, the way that insulin fixes diabetics' inability to produce their own insulin or the way that people without working thyroid glands need to take synthetic thyroid, it just isn't so. Schizophrenia is not a olanzapine deficiency disease. Bipolar is not a lithium deficiency disease. Depression is not a zoloft deficiency disease.

That doesn't mean they don't help you or that you should not take them if they do, but drug companies and doctors lie to patients -- they oversimplify and they misrepresent, and they do not trust patients to make their own medical decisions -- and nowhere is that a more prevalent pattern than in the specific area of mental health.



So no, I am not going to simply let you classify me as a privileged non-disabled asshole, and I'm not going to hide in the corner and stop representing the concerns of activist psychiatrized people.

—————


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


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



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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I'm straddling a fence, with one foot hanging down on either side.

When gender-critical feminists say that people with XY chromosomes and penises who match the social definition of "feminine" should not have to transition socially or medically and present as female in order for their identities to be valid, they are right. And they are right in saying that rhetoric from transgender activists tends to say otherwise, they're right about that too.

But when they say that such people can't transition because they aren't and cannot be female, and that they're propping up gender stereotypes not challenging them, I stand with my transgender feminist sisters. They are right in saying transgender excluding feminists are fundamentally in the wrong, and when they claim that there is outright bigotry involved, I agree with them there also.

If you are in either camp, and feel strong emphatic hostility towards the other, you really need to read this, because *both* of you groups of people are stomping on my toes and it needs to stop.


"Should Not Have To"

In their outward-facing messaging to the general public, transgender people have explained that there are people who were assigned female at birth (AFAB) but who are actually men, and deserve to be evaluated by the same standards as other men, to be thought of as indistinguishable from men who were considered male since birth. And that, similarly, there are people assigned male a birth (AMAB) who are actually women, and who are entitled to be thought of and considered women, indistinguishable from the women who were perceived as female since birth. This is what the general public has been hearing since the 1970s when I was a teenager and it is still the message that the average person understands about trans people.

This message celebrates transition -- in the social sense if not necessarily in the medical sense as well -- as the end-all and be-all of wonderful self-affirming possibility for people whose identity is at odds with the expectations that are attached to their physiological body type.

It is not so much that trans voices are saying that a person in that situation has to transition; it's more that they are saying loudly and often that they can and have the right to and that a caring loving world would support them in doing so. And their numbers, and established voices, make their message a loud shout when compared to the voices of other gender-atypical people who opt for a different approach and walk a different self-affirming path.

When you add in the fact that they inclusively define "transgender" as applying to anyone whose gender identity is different from the sex they were assigned at birth, this single narrative and the lack of any loudly spoken narrative that goes a different direction comes across as "anyone whose gender isn't what it was expected to be on the basis of their assigned sex is one of us, and we transition".

Even the exceptions aren't much of an exception. I just saw a meme on Facebook that asserted "TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN. TRANS MEN ARE MEN. NONBINARY PEOPLE ARE VALID". Well, there, you might be thinking, see, they are including other possibilities after all! But not so much. There is a complete lack of any detail, any specifics, about the nonbinary folks. Consider: the meme could have just said "TRANS AND NONBINARY PEOPLE ARE VALID" and left it at that. But by restating again that trans women are women, we're reminded that, oh yeah, the point is to not distinguish them from other women. Likewise for the trans men being men. Then when we get to the nonbinary people, saying "are valid" has the general effect of a vague wave of the hand: "And them, whatever the hell it is that they consider themselves to be, which we're not bothering to learn about or describe, they're cool too, okay?"

What you hardly ever see is a message from the transgender community stating "MEN WHOSE BODIES WOULD BE CONSIDERED FEMALE ARE VALID MEN WHETHER THEY DRESS TO FIT EXPECTATIONS OF MEN OR NOT. THEY DON'T NEED TO TRANSITION TO BE VALID". Or that "YOU DON'T HAVE TO CHANGE YOURSELF TO MATCH SEX EXPECTATIONS, AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO CHANGE YOUR SEX TO MATCH YOUR GENDER EITHER". And when you do see such messages, they were usually written by us, the minority of people who do not fit the widely shared social concept of transgender any more than we fit the expectations that describe cisgender people.

There is a lot of passive acceptance of us within the wide trans community, but there's also some real hostility. Our situation is different so we describe it differently, making different points than those that trans people in general tend to repeat, and that alone can get a person labeled "transphobe" and evicted from a support group.

Some people are blunt and coarse in their opposition, saying "You're not doing it right, if you're a trans woman you are female, and if you're still calling yourself male then you aren't trans".

But there is more fully thought out opposition too. One trans woman told me, "What happens to those of us who actually worked hard to transition? What happens to those of us who have nearly been brought to bankruptcy because we have felt the disconnect, have suffered through, had gone through the torment of society making us suffer for it, and worked hard to make the suffering cease? If your ideologies are to be a new 'norm', that would render all of our hard work meaningless."

Gender critical feminists look at the mainstream transgender message, the one about transitioning as the solution, the one that describes people assigned female at birth as "TRANS MEN ARE MEN", and people assigned male at birth as "TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN", and what they see is people hopping over the fence instead of helping them tear the fence down. They say that this leaves all the societal expectations of female people fully intact -- the transitioners who were born female will be regarded as men, hence not contradicting the stereotypes about female. And that the voice advocating this as a solution is shouting down the voice that was saying "WOMEN WHO DON'T DO FEMININITY AND DON'T CONFORM TO YOUR EXPECTATIONS OF FEMALES ARE WOMEN". And advising such people to become men instead.

"Can't"


The flip side, though, is the position that gender critical feminists take when they opt to declare that trans women aren't women. "Having a surgeon rearrange your body tissues into the approximate shape of a female body doesn't make you a woman. Dressing in high heels and a bra and putting on makeup doesn't make you a woman."

Feminists have for years and years said that our socially shared notions of how a man should be are an embrace of toxic and destructive traits. And that actual male people, in pursuing that ideal, have wrought pain and destruction and violence. They have refused to excuse the guys, rejecting the notion that "boys will be boys", and said, "No, this is political. Males aren't the freaking weather, something that simply is the way that it is and everyone has to just adjust to it. No, males should be held responsible for their behavior, for their entire way of being in the world."

Feminists have, of course, been accused of hating men. For daring to criticize them. For calling them out on their destructive and sadistic behavior. For holding males accountable.

In response, feminists have generally tended to say they don't hate male people for being male. They hate the way these male people manifest in the world, their entire way of thinking, feeling, their priorities and values, their behaviors and even the things commonly regarded as personality traits, these are all interlaced and interrelated. And as a whole, they are oppressive and oppositional and hateful and fundamentally a social problem, the world's largest and most central social problem, the social problem from which all of the others stem. Patriarchy from the structure of corporations and nation-states all the way down to the way a five year old boy learns to handle social interactions. How men are.

So if the goal is to change that, end that, shift away from that pattern, and along come some male people who say "We're bailing out on that, we don't want that identity", you'd perhaps think they'd view this as a positive development, or at least to contain some important positive elements.

But gender critical feminists, the primary modern inheritors of the mantle of radical feminism as it existed in the 70s and 80s, have made very little effort to examine male efforts and voices, or to engage any of us in deliberate dialog. It's mostly been a combination of "Nope, you aren't women. We're women. You aren't us" and "Fixing men's problem with what society expects of males is not our job".

If the existence of men -- that toxic, lethally destructive bundle of traits and behaviors, that interwoven and fully integrated patriarchal identity -- is a problem that needs to be addressed and brought to an end, then either males need to have a different identity available to us or else there needs to cease to be males.

When a group's collective traits are persistently described and defined as horrible, and it is also asserted that these traits are fundamental to who the people of that group are, the word for that is "hate".

Not all feminists hate men, and in my experience the overwhelming majority do not, but within the feminist community when an individual woman shows up, angry about women's situation and what has been done to women, and she not only hates how men have behaved but also believes males are intrinsically and naturally like this, that male people are inherently oppressive and violent and adversarial and have, built into us from the Y chromosome onward, all these horrendous traits... when the individual woman shows up and says so, her feminist sisters do not tell her "Ooh, sorry, we don't really want that attitude here, we can't go around viewing the male as being The Enemy innately". Of course not. They understand how the fury can lead to feeling that way, and solidarity among women is more important than litmus-testing something as relatively harmless as having a bigoted bias against males as inherently morally inferior beings -- especially given how many male people harbor bigoted attitudes about the intrinsic inferiority of females!

But that means that yes, in and amongst feminists are some individuals that feel the male is intrinsically inferior -- and when you start with that premise, your attitude to any of those who say they consider themselves women and wish to be regarded and accepted as such is about what you'd expect.

My transgender sisters are right. The response of gender critical feminists has taken the form of a lot of bigoted hate. For the most part, those feminists who don't feel that way about it aren't ready or willing to contradict those who do.


Some will continue to reassure themselves that it's just that fence-jumping behavior they're objecting to -- that instead of tearing down gender, the trans people are just hopping over to the other side. Well, in the 1970s, early 2nd wave feminism was often hostile and condescending about women who were wives and mothers or otherwise conformed to society's expectations of female people instead of being the resistance to that, being gender nonconformists. But they outgrew that, and came to the realization that all women are in this together and need to be allies whether they are compliant with expectations or openly rebellious. Robin Morgan, for instance, apologized for some of the things she'd said about femininity-track women. With that in mind, back to the trans people. We are all in this together and we cope at the individual level as best we can. Some of us are in a position to stand out as noncompliant nonconforming people who violate gender expectations. Others need to find a safe place to escape the penalties for being anything of the sort, and a modicum of compassion for those who seek gender asylum is not inappropriate here.


———————


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


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



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

———————

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

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Index of all Blog Posts

There's a feminist group where the prevailing attitude isn't too enthusiastic about transgender women and their politics.

I had said something there about perhaps viewing sexual transitioning as male people's grapping with the "man" identity that is imposed on us and thinking about it that way. "It's not up to women to save men from themselves, whether they identify as trans or not", she replied.

That's worth a reply.



I'm reminded of what Robin Morgan once wrote about "feminism for the sake of women" -- she said that if equality and simple justice for women "... were the sole reasons for and goals of the movement and consciousness we call feminism, they would be quite sufficient...nor is it necessary to apologize for feminism's concerning itself 'merely' with women, or to justify feminism on the 'please, may I' ground that it's good for men too."

(from The Anatomy of Freedom)

Morgan, however, was in the process of noting that nevertheless, it is of benefit to males as well. Patriarchy, and its rigid gender roles, is not good for us, any of us, and feminism, in moving against that, represents the possibility of our freedom from that.

One thing this means is that as feminist activity over the last few decades has moved some social pieces around and freed up some possibilities, it is inevitable that some males will take any opportunity that this motion generates, to move towards their own freedom.

Look... there cannot be a feminist success without the males changing. We can't remain in the same patterns, exhibiting the same behaviors, clinging to the same values, if feminists are to succeed at what they're doing. You know that very well. Demanding change from us has been central to your social demands. So, my feminist comrades... how did you picture that change taking place, may I ask? Did you envision us kicking and screaming and resisting the whole way? Surely you know better!

So some of the changes, as they actually occur among the males, will be more optimal from your vantage point than others.

You're right, it isn't your responsibility to lead our changes. It also isn't your authority. (Or if you claim authority, with that comes responsibility. You can't have it both ways).

But either way, it doesn't mean feminists have no vested interest in our processes.


If you never took some time to wonder exactly what you would do if you had been born male, how you personally would steer a life that would honor your self authentically yet not violate feminist principles, then I suggest you do so. Otherwise, how would you ever look upon any of us and recognize whether or not we're doing what you would?


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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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Index of all Blog Posts

Carol Hanisch said "the personal is political" and feminism embraced that. Radical feminism looked not only at the big structural elements of oppression and the institutionalized unfairnesses that were ensconced in laws and policies, but at individual personality characteristics and the behaviors that go with them. The value systems and priorities that come directly out of a person's way of being in the world, a person's most fundamental personality attributes. And they said that masculinity was a political problem, the political problem, that being a man at the local individual level meant supporting patriarchy inside of every interpersonal interaction.

There are, of course, readers who are wanting to fling their hands in the air and protest, "No, you mean toxic masculinity. Not all masculinity is toxic!"

And they're right. We need to avoid oversimplification. There are many butch women whose trajectory in life has been a "yeah, so?" response whenever accused of acting masculine, butch women who found identify and validation there. There are transgender men as well who embrace masculinity as the best mirror of who they legitimately are. There are cis men who accept the mantle of what's expected of them but spend their lives contemplating how to be a good man in the modern world. So yes, there are people aligned with masculinity who value courage and willingness to risk, and the willingness to not be defined by the pack even if it means being a socially cut-off isolated individual, and a cut-to-the-chase raw honesty.

But whether toxic masculinity is just the extreme "turn it up to 11" overdose of masculinity or if it is a specific emphasis on the most antagonistic elements, toxic masculinity exists.

We live in the interesting times of long-wave culture wars coming to a decisive turning point: these are the last gasps of patriarchal hegemony, with patriarchal value systems's claims to legitimacy pushed back against the social ropes. And at the moment, the patriarchy's values are personally embodied to the hilt in one Donald Trump. This election, like the one before it in 2016, is all about patriarchy versus its opponents, and it is raw and undisguised, and we've had four years of seeing that on display.

It is because patriarchy is on the ropes that the masks are off. It is because they are on the losing side of history that they have given up on the middle and along with it the pretentions to debonair chivalry, the gestures of "we will take care of you, we are compassionate in our authority and power".


The Specifics

• Belligerence — masculinity values fighting, being aggressive, the notion that you get your way with other people by intimidating them with the threat of attacking them, and backing that up with actual violence when need be. Our nation has tried to cast itself on the world stage as a "good citizen" country that doesn't invade and conquer, but we've barged into several countries with tanks bombs and soldiers, and have more secretively toppled the duly elected leaders of others, and so we've exhibited plenty of belligerence. Donald Trump's entire way of interacting with everyone, domestic and foreign, official politics or unofficial interpersonal interaction, is belligerent; he is the personification of the notion that you get things done by intimidating others.

• Defensive Fragility I: making mistakes or ever being wrong -- masculinity values absolute certainty and decisiveness, the attitude that there is something weak and ineffectual about considering alternative possibilities or remaining aware of your own fallibility. Our nation has a long tradition of believing itself to be anointed by God, American exceptionalism, that our way of doing things is guaranteed to to correct. We've made legitimate overtures to the rest of the world to come together respectfully and work out our differences peacefully -- the US is most directly responsible for the existence of the UN -- but a lot of our nation's behavior has had a wide streak of "we are giving the rest of you the opportunity to follow our lead and do things just like us". And we don't take kindly to criticism. Donald Trump is the quintessential stereotype of a person who can't ever consider the possibility that he is, or was, wrong. He will never apologize and will stick to his guns no matter how often he's shot his own foot off with them.

• Defensive Fragility II: needing others or ever being dependent on others -- masculinity is all about "going your own way" and "attending to my needs myself", and if the non-toxic form of that is about stepping up and doing what needs doing instead of waiting for someone else to do so, the toxic form exhibits utter contempt for anyone who ever needs anyone else for anything. As a nation we've become increasingly toxic in our insistence that we don't need the blessing or agreement of any other nation or people, we're going to do whatever we want and the rest of the world can go fuck themselves. We had the sympathies and compassionate regard of the overwhelming majority of the world after the 9/11 World Trade attacks, but squandered it as casually as tossing a piece of trash into the waste bin, attacking Iraq with no provocation and no coherent explanation. Donald Trump is very vocal about not needing anybody and not caring if his actions do not need with their approval. The Republicans in Congress and in his own administration found that out, often to their dismay: he doesn't need them, or believes that he doesn't and behaves as if he doesn't.

• All Differences are Superior/Inferior -- masculinity has a tendency to see every distinction as one in which one possible kind is better than the other, that there's always a "right way to be" or a "right kind to buy" or "best form of it to use". This is an outgrowth of the belligerence and the tendency to see everything in terms of the potential for competition and conflict. Feminists highlight this as "othering" and show how this tendency spreads oppression by encouraging people to see folks different from them as inferior and then use that to justify taking advantage of them whenever the possibility exists. Our nation began with a lot of lofty lip service about equality, and as a nation we've valued equality in principle, but parallel to that has been the long history of ways in which we've treated categories of people as less worthy, less human, as subordinate or substandard, or pathological and evil and in need of being eliminated by whatever means necessary. Donald Trump has made a career of disparaging the different, and tailoring his appeal to those who view themselves as "normal" and who also resent anyone who isn't "like us" who dare to demand their rights as fully human beings.

• Coercion and Control -- masculinity, again as an outgrowth of the belligerent anticipaton of conflict, tends to value winning more than any other goal, to the point of losing track of what goal made winning in this or that case important in the first place. This also goes hand-in-hand with the defensive fragility about ever considering the possibility of having made a mistake. The US became the poster child for this kind of masculine manifestion in the Vietnam War, where there was less and less clarity on what we were there for or what our goals were, but where nevertheless our leaders pursued winning the war as the first and most important consideration. Donald Trump epitomizes the spirit of "winning isn't the best thing, it's the only thing", and it means there is nothing he considers off-limits if it facilitates him winning.

• Polarization -- masculinity tends to carry the attitude into any confrontational argument or dissent that "you're either with me or you're against me". This, too, is an attitude that carries over from imagining being in a fight. In direct physical conflict, nuances of perspective and opinion aren't relevant, it's all about whether you're someone else representing a risk that I should attack lest I be attacked or I can count on you to fight on my side. Our nation has often played the polarization game outside of wartime, doing its best to force nations to take sides and divide the world-map into US and THEM factions. It was our behavior all throughout the cold war. We've never been very open to a multifaceted way of viewing international economic or political configurations, preferring the either/or and pressuring everyone else into buying into that. Donald Trump is the polarizer-in-chief, doing more to divide us internally than anyone else who has ever occupied the office. There is to be no forgiveness, no consideration of understandable reasons why someone would do something we would not ourselves do, nor any willingness to think of alliances as complex and shifting things. Everything becomes "us versus them".

• Oversimplification -- masculinity, with a military focus on quick decision and operating in fear and opportunistic aggression, tends not to trust complex thought in general. This feeds the notion that everything is actually quite simple and that anyone who claims to see complexity is weak and indecisive and wrong by definition. As a nation we've shifted from a faith in science (although one that automatically rejected any critical questions of how the science was put to use) to a sort of pride in not thinking too much. We still have good universities and educated people, but culturally we value them less, and have shifted to a shorter attention span that doesn't easily get immersed in complex explanations. Donald Trump has made denseness a virtue and continually exhibits the utmost contempt for actual thinking, insisting that everything worth thinking about has immediate and obvious answers.


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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

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One of the changes that some people have been advocating for since the police killing of George Floyd is to "defund the police". In some quarters, it's certainly a less than popular idea--nervously worried people glance at each other and try to visualize what our world would look like if the police all just packed up and went home. Most of these worried citizens haven't required a rescue from the predations of dangerous people in the last year, but still they think of the police as necessary protectors, a force without which there would be violent crime threatening us around every corner.

Me, I think there's something out of whack when our official organized response whenever there's a conflict between people is to go in with the attitude that somebody is the bad person, that somebody is the perpetrator, the evildoer. As if no two people could ever end up frustrated and feeling mutually thwarted and angry unless one of them was a bad person and the conflict was their fault. I think if you're a parent and your children are fighting, or you're a teacher and your students are furious and yelling and making threats, or you're a supervisor on the job and your employees are arguing and screaming and shoving each other, that you go in with the expectation that you need to listen to both sides, and the anticipation that there's going to be some way that everyone can get what they need out of the situation or at least enough of what they need that there's a solution everyone can live with. I'm not saying it's always going to work out that way, mind you, but you go in with that attitude. Not with the attitude that someone's in the wrong and needs to be stopped and then punished. And frankly if that's not your approach, if you don't go in looking to see how to make peace between these squabbling people, you're not a very good parent, a very good teacher, a very good supervisor. That over time you're going to contribute to the problems and make the fighting worse.


So why do we have police, when what we generally mean by "police" is a professional force that goes in to intervene specifically looking for lawbreakers to arrest? There are, in fact, some police forces in some locales where the officers are more inclined to go in and get people settled down and listen to all sides and remind the people in the community that we need to stick together and work together. That does exist. But you know, and I know, that that's the exception, not the general rule. People who aspire to become police officers don't imagine themselves doing inpromptu counseling sessions on the sidewalk. The people who wince at "defund the police" aren't worried about not having mediators in blue uniforms to get both sides listening to each other and working towards a mutually acceptable solution either. Instead, we've all been brought up to think of the police as the ones who get the bad guys. They have fast cars and radios; they have sticks, guns, and handcuffs on their belt. They will stop the criminals and put them in jail. Yeah, that model.

I'd like to see the police as we know them replaced with people who have been trained in defusing and mediating. And if the existing people wearing police badges feel like they didn't sign up for that, replace them with people who took social sciences and humanities courses in college.

I'm reading a book, mainstream entertainment fiction. Michael Connelly, The Closers. Like the overwhelming majority of police procedurals and mysteries, it's about murder. Because our steady diet of laudatory praise and respect for the police is centered around murder. It's not so easy to see why the enforcement of the rule that you shouldn't go around killing other people is somehow reinforcing our existing social inequalities--I mean, yeah, sure, you can no doubt come up with a scenario or two where somebody is in a situation where they have a moral right to kill someone (their rapist, the slaveowner who stands in the way of their freedom, etc), but it's a reach. We think it's a rare situation where killing someone isn't just plain inexcusable.

But most of the situations that police officers intervene in aren't murders. They investigate property crimes and occurrences of people shouting and shoving, and respond to situations where one person feels threatened by another; they look for violations of drug laws and they watch for people misbehaving in their vehicles; and they show up to investigate when there is vandalism or theft.

We didn't always have them around, you know. Yeah. We haven't always had a professional police force in the modern sense. Furthermore, the history of their existence is pretty tangled up with maintaining and enforcing an "us versus them" division or two in our society. The kind where one group is defined as "them". The bad people, the criminal elements that the other group needs to be protected from. And in the United States, the number one "them" group has been black folks. The entire notion of "criminals", the widely shared belief in a "them" who would otherwise threaten our safety and security here in our own homes and on our downtown sidewalks, is heavily interwoven with our notions about race. It's not always painted as overtly so, but we're made to fear the anger and hate of black people. (Why, because maybe we think they've been mistreated and deprived and just might have an understandable reason to be angry and hate us, ya think? Little bit of white guilt turned inside out to become a fear of a righteous wrath, perhaps?) Several white people have pointed out that it's an act of white privilege to call the cops any time there's a possible conflict, especially when the people with whom we're having a conflict are nonwhite people. They point out that for a nonwhite person to make a similar call, there's a legitimate worry that the police, upon arrival, will not help but will instead treat them as the cause of the problem. I watched a video earlier this week where a group of black teenagers called the police when they'd been physically attacked by someone else, only to have the police pull out guns on them when they showed up.

Meanwhile, we have the calls for social justice. I've never liked that phrase. "Justice", as in Department of Justice, as in dispensing justice from the judge's bench in the courtroom, is part and parcel of the police model. The notion that somebody is a culprit, an evildoer who is at fault and deserves for bad things to happen to them for the evil that they've done.

You can't really have it both ways. If it's a better approach to get everyone talking and listening instead of barging in designating somebody as the bad person, I don't think that changes when the alteraction is not about a cluster of teenagers arguing in a parking lot but instead is about different broad social factions arguing about oppression.


———————

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.

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If you’re a radical feminist and you’ve raised objections to transgender women being in certain women-only spaces – separatist feminist groups, perhaps, or other events designated for women only – please do me a favor and list the times and places where you have written about or spoken about transgender people as a challenge or a noncompliant response to patriarchal definitions of sex and gender.

If you can’t—if you never refer to transgender people except to accuse transgender women of invading women’s or feminists’ space—you’re a bigot. You could easily enough define a group or an event as being for people who have endured the experience of being, being seen as, and being treated as women and girls for a lifetime, without rejecting transgender women’s self-identification as women.

More to the point, radical feminism in particular has identified masculine behaviors, masculine priorities, masculine value systems, and the rest of what constitutes the identity “man” in this patriarchal society, as politically and socially harmful. Radical feminists have shown that these personal, individual-level traits and characteristics are reflected and writ large in our institutions, where they represent a threat to all life on this planet and are responsible for imperialism and colonialism, slavery and racism, hierchical authority and autocratic concentration of power, the obsession with control and the fondness for coercion, and the myriad forms of oppression that our species has suffered from for millennia.

In light of that, it’s extremely difficult to shrug away your complete lack of recognition and interest when significant numbers of male-born people have tossed aside the identity “man” and opted to join women instead.

Radical feminism has indicted males for being men. It has refused to excuse male behavior as natural and therefore inevitable. I grew up hearing this. I grew up nodding along with it, agreeing, because I, too, found these behaviors and attitudes and values detestable and inexcusably wrong. I grew up male. It’s the body in which I was born.

I’m not asking you to call me “woman”. I’m demanding that you recognize my situation, regardless of what label gets attached to it. You’ve demanded that males change, that they cease to behave as men. You need to come to some kind of terms with males who reject an identity as men, since a hypothetical success in your overall endeavor implies exactly that outcome, does it not?

Surely you do not believe that someone born male has an inherent nature different from your own (and inherently patriarchal in its effects)? If you think the set of social problems associated with men that feminism has identified are inherent in people born male, if you think patriarchy is that nature writ large, you’ve declared an Enemy. You’ve declared us inherently evil, our presence intolerable on a biological level. If that’s actually what you think, feel, and believe, then...

Own it, embrace the vision as espoused by Valerie Solanas, but be honest about it and where you’re coming from.

But most of you, you don’t. Most of you aren’t in this space, this world-view. You just aren’t inclined to point fingers at any sisters who might be; you don’t want to divide women from women. As I said last week, when I was blasting transgender people who only speak of radical feminists in order to label them TERFs,

in any social movement, there’s a tendency to embrace the participation of people who come to the same conclusion for different reasons. This is especially true if the different reasons don’t appear to divide the people into groups who disagree about important goals and objectives.

Most radical feminists do not hate males categorically, nor do they regard anyone or anything as their enemy. This is obvious to me from reading and listening. But be that as it may, “most” is not “all” and you do have among your tribe those whose hatred for patriarchy and for the ways and behaviors and institutions of men goes on to exist as a categorical hatred for male people, and, with it, the belief that we are innately your enemy and that it is inherenly in our nature that you cannot trust us. You know it as well as I do; you’ve heard your sisters say so just as I have. Of course a good feminist has better things to occupy her time and energy than to spend it criticizing her sisters and being divisive. If legitimate and understandable anger gets warped into hatred sometimes, so what? Look at all the people and institutions that have chosen to treat radical feminism as their enemy! Yes, I get that. But that does not mean you should join your voices to theirs, and it does not mean you don’t really and truly need to come to terms with our existence.

By “come to terms” I mean in a non-kneejerk fashion, a nuanced consideration of transgender women as women, of antipatriarchal males as people who are not men, of people assigned and treated as male being activists who speak within the feminist tradition.

Gender is socially defined; that process of defining is very much a PLURAL process — that is to say, Joe Jones and Sue Smith do not each define gender inside their own heads as if in a vacuum, but rather instead they do so in interaction with the culture of which they are a part.

Out of all the Joe Joneses and Sue Smiths of the world, there are some for whom it is true and correct that WHO THEY ARE is at odds with the gender expectations of the world around them but the plumbing, the bodies themselves, is not at issue, because FOR THEM gender as they apprehend it in their minds leaves room for them to be who they are (despite being at odds with expectations) and be physically the sex that they were born as. Then there are some for whom gender and plumbing are irreconcilable; WHO THEY ARE is not only at odds with other folks' expectations but also cannot be apprehended in their minds as making sense in the bodies in which they were born.

In between, perhaps, are those who might accept that in some hypothetical alternative reality, where their biological sex would NOT have the social meaning it has to everyone around them that it does in this reality, who they are might NOT be at odds with the world's gender expectations, but that's not the world they get to live in.

You are perhaps unimpressed with the transgender phenomenon because you perceive it as people hopping the fence and fitting in on the other side, leaving the fence intact. I understand that sentiment too, but unless you intend to point fingers at each and every person who makes concessions to the things they don’t have the power to change, it’s an uncharitable jump from there to rejection and condemnation of transgender people. It harkens back to the 1970s and the hostility of some early feminist activists towards women who wore makeup, lived as stay-at-home moms, or married wealth and live ensconced in jewels and furs as some male’s trophy. You outgrew that. Outgrow this. People do what they decide they must do.

Aside from which, you’re way out of date if you think of transgender people strictly in binary “male to female” (or “female to male”) terms and the imperative to “pass”.


It’s just a matter of time before you have to take a principled stand. Phyllis Schlafly was born female and Camille Paglia was both born female and chooses to identify as a feminist. I think I’m not being unfair to posit myself as a better feminist ally than either of them.


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There’s a false dichotomy between “born this way” and “choice”. We encounter it in the MOGII communities, where there’s a rapid embrace of the notion of inherent genetic and brain differences, first for gay and lesbian people and, more recently, for trans folks.

That’s not the only place you find it, though. That same ongoing discussion can be found in the perpetual arguments about free will versus determinism. You ever dropped in on those? The backdrop for those discussions – often hinted at but not always explicitly identified – is the criminal justice system and whether or not it is morally defensible to punish criminals for their illegal deeds or if, instead, we should recognize that they are products of their environment and did not choose their behaviors. If you want to delve back further, this argument dates back to whether God shall punish evildoers for the evil that they have done or if they were preordained by God to have done those things in which case it isn’t their fault.

In other words, the notion that they didn’t choose is used to excuse behaviors that are labeled criminal or immoral.

So if we slide back over to the arguments about whether gay and trans people have choice, the argument that they don’t starts to look a lot like gay and trans people’s identities are being excused and forgiven, as if they needed to be excused or forgiven. As if being gay or being trans was akin to being a thief or a murderer or something. Uh huh.

Are you in a big hurry to buy into the notion that who you are needs to be excused or forgiven, on the grounds that “you can’t help it” ???

Why are our identities on trial? In all these discussions, there’s an unquestioned taken-for-granted assumption about what needs excusing or forgiving in the first place. If you want to discuss criminal justice and punishment, for example, how about we discuss Officer Daniel Paneleo, he whose chokehold on Eric Garner resulted in “I can’t breathe”, and, behind him, the entire police-enforced structure of racist social control. Do you want to start off from the position that Officer Panteleo can’t help it, that he’s a product of his environment and should not be held accountable? That we can’t expect him to change? That he was not a maker of choices? That he is not responsible?

It’s a false dichotomy. When a person makes choices, the kind of person that they are dictates what kind of choices they will make, and yet those are still choices. There isn’t one “self” there who is a decision-maker but who is “affected by” or “determined by” their own biology or their socialization and upbringing, as if those are external to the “self”. They aren’t. A person’s identity consists of all of their environment, their personal history, their built-in nuances from genetics and biology to the structure of prior beliefs and values – that’s all a part of who the person is. If you take all that away there’s no “self” left to do any deciding. But if we consider all that stuff as part of who the person is, the expression of that self takes the form of choices that the person makes. It’s how we experience ourself, as choice-makers.

I certainly do. In second grade, I looked around; I saw girls behaving one way and boys behaving a different way, generally speaking. I was in situations where I chose my behaviors, and the behaviors that I chose were the ones more typical of girls than of boys. I was proud of it, and rejected the notion that I should be ashamed of it. Could I have made a different set of decisions and still been true to who I was? No! But they were still choices. I was affirming who I was.

Last month I was assaulted by an angry individual on 14th Street in New York. I was wearing an orange skirt at the time. He was coming my direction in heavily congested foot traffic and collided with me as we passed; I thought it was an accident but a split-second later he came up from behind me and began pounding my back and head, all the while yelling, “I didn’t hit you! I never hit you!”. Now, sure, social forces and his personal history and widely shared beliefs about gender-appropriate behavior no doubt shaped his worldview, but he also made choices. His choices are a part of who he is, and I hold him responsible for all of that. I could make the same point about the people who shot up the Pulse nightclub in Florida awhile back. I’m not out to pin the blame on the culprit, nor am I a true believer in the moral sanctity of retributional punishment, but we are activists here; we are active. We act. So let’s get one thing established: if I am allocated choice at all to any degree whatsoever in my life, I choose to be as I am, a gender variant individual, and if you think to hold me morally accountable, bring it on, baby. I wouldn’t want to be any different and I make no apologies for who and how I am.

Quit acting like choice is a dirty word.



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It’s a well-worn trope, an ancient meme: masculine guys are a problem for us sissies. They bully us, they oppress us, they’re hateful to us, and so forth.

I said “masculine guys” rather than “cis het males” because I’m not really focusing on how they identify but rather how they come across. I’m talking about masculinity as that set of personality and behavioral traits that are historically and conventionally associated with males; they’re presumed heterosexual and most of them probably are, although some are not.

Certainly some of the problem is homophobia – or, more precisely, sissyphobia – on their part. But even when you bracket that off, there is a tension there.

I know because I feel it. They set my teeth on edge sometimes. It can be like chewing on a strip of aluminum foil even when they aren’t bigoted sissyphobic assholes. And I suspect I have the same effect on them.

I don’t personally happen to be sexually attracted to the male morphology – it’s just not a set of shapes and contours that does anything for me. As for them, the masculine guys, some of them find males sexy but it isn’t the norm. But I exhibit characteristics of personality and behavior that are more commonly present in the people they are attracted to – female people – which is why those characteristics are called “feminine”. And for me? Well, it’s an oversimplification to describe the women I’m attracted to as being the same people as these masculine guys except expressed in female form, but yeah, they’re usually women who have been told over and over that they behave like guys, so it’s an oversimplification that works here.

I find it jarring to be around the masculine guys. The tension is sexual whether either of us experience it as sexy or not. Have you ever heard women complaining about feeling groped or undressed just from the speech and look of guys they encounter, of being leered at, spoken to in a jocular familiar tone with a wink in the voice and face even when it’s not a literal overt wink, something that’s subtle enough that nothing has been said or done that one can really object to. I’ve heard those descriptions, and along with them the assessment that sometimes it’s like swimming in sewage whenever you’re out and about. And I’ve nodded because I know the feeling.

Meanwhile, the masculine guys apparently find it jarring to be around people like me. I can’t say for sure what they’re feeling because I haven’t been directly inside their brains, but they often complain that sissy guys, by resembling women in various little unsettling ways, are teasing or provoking them, and it tends to make them angry.

Neither one of us may actually be doing anything to cause this feeling in the other. I didn’t start off with that charitable attitude though. I totally thought it was them and that they were being contemptuous and amused and invasively disrespectful of my dignity, broadcasting it as a threat. I disapproved of them and broadcasted back my resentment. If they weren’t actually doing anything, aside from simply being who they are, you could say I was bigoted and biased against them for being different. I definitely felt like I was “doing it right” and they were not being the way people are supposed to be. If this is true, then the only sense in which I can say they oppress me is that they significantly outnumber people like me, so their disapproval becomes a surrounding environment.

Interestingly, I became a lot more tolerant of people with masculine characteristics when I became aware that a lot of the women I found fascinating were expressing those traits. Doesn’t make sense to only hate them in guys. Especially while complaining that I’m being put down for exhibiting the same traits that are celebrated in female folks, does it?

None of this excuses hostile homophobia / sissyphobia, etc. But I don't think I'm an inherently better person than they are.


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