Current stats on the querying process for Within the Box:

total queries to lit agencies: 498
rejections: 401
outstanding: 97

Until a couple days ago I was getting bogged down by the unrelenting turndowns, with nobody expressing any interest. The closest I had come to a positive response was an agent saying "This looks interesting but I don't handle this genre so I'm forwarding this to So-and-So my colleague". From whom I never heard a subsequent peep.

But over the weekend I opened a reply email that said "I really like your premise, but the writing didn't send me quite as much as I'd hoped. I can't offer you representation but please feel welcome to requery me if you revise it".

That may not seem like the kind of reply that would send me over the proverbial moon, but let me unpack it a little.

Lit agents might have been uniformly turning me down because they knew the market well enough to conclude that no publisher was going to go for a book about that stuff, at least not from someone who isn't already a market draw. Which would mean I couldn't fix the problem, nobody was going to agent this book. But she was saying she liked the premise.

Lit agents also might have been turning me down because of my lack of a Platform. It's something that they want from their nonfiction authors, that you already have a built-in audience, a following likely to buy your book. It's not something that they tend to look for from a fiction author (although they still care very much whether you've been previously published, and by whom, and how well it sold). I think it's stupid that they grade autobiographical memoirs by the same criteria that they evaluate a stock market portfolio management guide or a chronicle of the people who settled a Pacific island. Memoirs ought to be split into Famous Person Memoirs and Representative Memoirs and Expertise Memoirs and Memoirs That Entertain. If people have heard of the author, it's a Famous Person Memoir, and agents can sell those the easiest. Representative Memoirs are where you don't need to know the specific individual so much as you need to know about the Group, the collective cluster of people associated with some known social phenomenon — soldiers of the Vietnam war, the first women elected to American political office, the software developers of the first wave of widespread personal computer use, these are all identities where if you knew the book was about what that was like, you might want to read it. Expertise Memoirs come from really qualified experts in their field, publishing nonfiction for them is like gettting published in a relevant academic journal. You need to show the publisher that you are regarded as someone who really knows your topic. That leaves Memoirs That Entertain where it's a well-told story that just happens to be nonfiction, it's a person's actual experience, but it's entertaining whether despite or because it's true. I mean, that's how I'd divide Memoir up, but of course I'm not a lit agent.


My book falls into Representative Memoirs, using my system, because I write as a genderqueer sissy male coming out in the early 1980s. It's not about Allan Hunter, it's about the social experiences that eventually yielded words like "genderqueer". But it's also a Memoir That Entertains. It's a fun story, it's as good as a movie, it has drama and tension and characters and dialog and concepts and danger and escape and an unreliable narrator and a reason to question what is or is not actually happening here.




So...::coughs:: the query that elicited this reply was the FICTION version of my query letter, pitching it as a psychological suspense tale, to a lit agent who doesn't handle any nonfiction.

"I really like your premise, but the writing didn't send me quite as much as I'd hoped. I can't offer you representation but please feel welcome to requery me if you revise it". ——> as a work of fiction; she's saying that about it as if it were a work of fiction. The nonfiction agents have shown no interest. Oh, and I would guess that 90% of my queries describe the book as memoir, nonfiction.


The thing about positioning this book as a work of fiction is that it puts me up against fiction authors. They get to structure plot for the purpose of making a good story. I'm competing with them while trying to relay what actually happened when I was in the hospital that I alias as Elk Meadow in the book. I'm not going to say that I didn't take any liberties when writing Within the Box. I'm describing hour-to-hour events that actually took place in 1982. Of course I'm painting specific renderings of things I only remember in the general, same as when we're in conversation and I'm telling you what I said to someone yesterday in the drug store or the supermarket, we all know I'm not claiming to recall each literal word of each sentence, but I was like this, yeah? It's an honest memoir in that sense. I did move a couple of events because they helped paint people's character even if that's not when (or even to whom) they happened.

A lot of fiction authors are drawing from real-life events. "Write what you know", we're advised, and so of course fiction authors are people who draw inspiration from events and experiences they've been there for.

We could dive into a whole philosophical treatise about what is fiction and what is nonfiction, but that's actually not my focus — I'd be happy to market it either way. Rubyfruit Jungle didn't lose any impact because it was positioned as a work of fiction.

Third major observation: the lit agent's instructions for querying had said to upload a query letter, the first ten pages, your "about the author" self-summary, word count, ever been repped by an agent before, have you ever been published, synopsis, one sentence pitch, descrip of potential audience, and a short list of comparable books. Most of those I have a limited ability to modify, especially given that I'm not a great author of short little "bumper sticker" summaries. But it says that "the writing didn't send me quite as much as I'd hoped" is after reading ten pages.

I have reached out to three different significant contacts to ask for recommendations for an editor. I want to consult someone who can help me shape it as a work of fiction. Especially the first 50 pages (the max that they tend to request shorter than the whole manuscript), the first 30 within that, the first 20, first 15, first 10. First 5, god help me, and lately a tiny handful of them only want to see the first 3.

I'm nervous about going up against fiction authors. This is their craft, and I just picked it up the best I could because I think I have stuff to tell. I just have to hope that I've told my own story really well.

And I'm off to get some help with that.


Those of you who write: do you spend a lot of time wondering how to position what you've written? What to call it?

Do you like selling it, the experience of marketing what you've written, however you go about it? I'm thinking more in terms of "do you feel utterly inept at it and have no sense of how to go about doing it", rather than "do you feel like you've prostituted your skillset and you feel exploited" but really however your thinking is on it, the experience of getting the publication world to opt in?


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


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

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






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

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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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Index of all Blog Posts

It's there in the part of my mind where I care the most. That's the area where I'm most likely to express my difference from you and your perspective. On any subject, I mean. It's not that I mostly think like you; or that I don't. It's that if I don't care about the difference, if it's not part of the topics where I care the most, then I'm less likely to express that there is a difference. So the stuff I emphasize, that's what's important to me. More or less by definition.

It doesn't mean I'm not interested in communication. I'll listen even if I strongly disagree. Whether I'm currently emphasizing or currently empathizing, I do want to communicate.





















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


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

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






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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I understand that you think what I should be saying is that sex-specific expectations of male people are sexist, limiting, and harmful. And that I should leave it at that and not be embracing a bunch of gender-positive rhetoric and going on and on about having a marginalized gender identity.

Well, that's actually where I started, embracing the basic feminist "sauce for the gander" concept like it was a get out of jail free card as long ago as when I was in sixth grade. I grew up with feminism as my defender, a shield against the attitudes that if you were a male you were supposed to be a certain way that wasn't expected of your female classmates and friend.

It wasn't sufficient. If it had been, I would not have ended up coming out and claiming an unorthodox identity.

I don't expect you to say "Oh, well, gee, in that case of course you're correct" or anything like that, but give me a chance to explain. I like to be understood even by people who don't end up agreeing with me.


Androgyny and the Male-Default-Identity Thing

Feminists saw that as women they were perceived as Other, disqualified from a lot of what was granted to adult humans. A lot of this special Other treatment was wrapped as veneration and adoration, even while a lot more of it was unadorned dismissive contempt for the lack of necessary male attributes, without which female people couldn't be allowed or expected to do a wide range of things. Feminists called it all limiting and wrong and demanded it all be discarded; they demanded to be perceived and evaluated simply as generic people. The generic person, though, was male; a cartoon stick figure without a skirt or lipstick would be considered male; our species was 'mankind', and 'he' was a generic pronoun that just happened to also be male.

So when feminists opted for women to be thought of as generic people, they were accused of wanting to be men. They were told that they were discarding the Special Other status that was women's privilege to wear, and that this was very sad and would ruin the family and so on and so forth.

I surely didn't just tell you anything you didn't already know, but now let's look at a bunch of hypothetical male people who want to opt out of gendered assumptions about male people. It's not a mirror-image situation because the generic undifferentiated human is already male-by-default. To say "view us as generic people and not as 'men' per se" doesn't invoke any of the notions about how women are or what the strengths of womanhood include, because those are marked-off special as only applicable to the Other.


Gender is Installed Deep, Exceptions Included

The pattern of behaviors and interpretations and perspectives that makes up gender isn't kin to a simple blocked-out behavior like wearing pants. You can decide on Tuesday that because of the weather and the planned activities everyone should wear pants. Instead, it's more like the behavior of using Spanish as your language. If that's the language you were exposed to throughout your life, you converse in it, you can read it, write it, speak it, and within your head, you think in it, even to yourself. But if you grew up exposed to English instead, and then on Tuesday it becomes apparent that it would make more sense if we all used Spanish -- perhaps because today we will be in Spain, let's say -- switching this behavior isn't at all a simple matter of deciding you're going to do so.

Gender is deep. We have roles in our head and we've learned them all our lives, and those roles are gendered. I don't mean the klunky Tinker-toy sense of roles, like she's the Mommy and housewife and he's the breadwinner, but more fleshed-out examples, role models, archetypes of how to be a woman or a man, a whole library of contrasting roles that we know, that we admire and emulate.

You probably have heroes, feminist heroes you look towards as inspirational and as celebratory of an alternative identity for women; they may not be public figures that other folks have heard of (although they might be); they may be brave stubborn passionate brilliant fiery individuals that you happened to have encountered at some point. People who are admirable women and are the antithesis of the Barbie and the subservient helpmeet and the dainty proper lady and the other prescriptivist examples that the world tried to spoon-feed you as models to emulate.

These alternative role models may represent a pathway out of the original imposed gender, but one thing they are not is genderless. Not unless you have to stop and ponder for a moment to even come up with what sex they are, wondering as you do so why it matters and why it's relevant.


The Significance of an Alternative

Robin Morgan once wrote -- confessionally -- about being an early feminist in the days when feminism was just dividing from the male left, and speaking dismissively about sex role conforming women who were doing and being what society told women they should be and do. Some hostile and judgmental things were said about stay-at-home moms and trophy wives and beauty queens and whatnot. But really it didn't take long for the women's movement to swing away from that kind of divisiveness. Feminists needed to be on all women's side, and perhaps more to the point here, they needed to create options and alternatives; if the old conventional roles were demeaning and unfilfilling and limiting, then just making it so that women had other options should be sufficient.

When I came out in 1980 as a sissy, a femme, a male person whose deep behavioral patterns were mapped onto the girl model rather than the boy model, I did not make any serious attempt to condemn the man identity that had been shoved down my throat and which most male people embraced as their own. It was certainly an identity that I did not want for myself, but I didn't feel like I was linked elbow-in-elbow with a mighty groundswell of male people who felt the same way. Far from it.

I'd spent most of my life disapproving of them, these boys and men and their way of being in the world. Just as they disapproved of me and called me things that indicated they regarded me as acting and thinking like a girl.

Coming out was actually about letting go of a lot of that. I didn't need to negate and replace their definition of how to be a male person properly. What I needed was to establish an alternative.


Trans Women and All That

I understand that you aren't at all comfortable with the transgender model, because hopping over the fence between sexes because the grass looks greener on the other side leaves the fence intact. Instead of dismantling sexist expectations, it seems to reinforce them, spreading the notion that if you exhibit characteristics associated with the other sex, that is who you are and you should disavow the tension between sexist expectations and how you are in this world by transitioning. You say that presenting as, and being seen as, a member of the sex they fit in with better, means embracing, not discarding, the notions that a person of that sex should have these behaviors and these personality characteristics and these priorities and values and so forth.

Well, I can see how that could be a valid worry and concern if transitioning were to be the only alternative to conforming to the expectations originally imposed on you.

But once again it isn't necessary to condemn and disapprove of other folks' way of coping with the expectation-tension. What's important is to establish an alternative that functions differently.


Conditioning and Inverting

As we're growing up, our identities take the form "I am a person who". How we think about ourselves, how we position ourselves against the backdrop of others, how we regard ourselves as fitting in, or not, among these established identities and roles.

Those of us who -- for various reasons -- gravitated towards sticking our tongues out at sexist gender expectations developed an "I am a person who" self-image that included "I am a person who doesn't try to be like they say people of my sex ought to be". And usually, because we get accused over and over of being more like a member of the other sex than of our own, our self-image ends up including "I am a person who is like a person of the other sex (and so what?)".

There may sometimes be a carefully nuanced person who grows up evaluating each and every one of these gendered expectations (and counter-expectations) and meticulously selects each characteristic with total disregard for whether it is associated with their own sex or with the other -- or we can at least toss that notion in as a hypothetical way of growing up -- but a lot of what actually happens for a lot of us is a kind of inversion. We -- unlike the other kids -- decide we are comfortable with the notion that we're like the other sex. And the more that the conventional expectations are shoved at us with judgmental hostility, the more we may push back against the demand that we personify the expected patterns for our sex by thinking of ourselves as "not like that at all".

Does this make us just as much a prisoner of gender as the conforming kids, just on the other side of the fence? Generally no, I think: we're less likely to internalize the most dehumanizing portions of the conventional expectations, because they're unpalatable to everyone, conformist and nonconformist alike, but unlike the conformist kids, we're not being pushed to embrace these. So the male nonconforming folks are less likely to internalize the most constricting aspects of "dainty", and butch women don't tend to internalize the most toxic parts of masculinity either.

But this inverted reaction is still gendered. It's a formulation in reaction to something. It should not be confused with a magical immunity to gender socialization.

I think a lot of feminist women do not always realize this phenomenon takes place, perhaps in themselves personally or perhaps instead in their butch friends and colleagues and associates. Feminism describes women's oppression, and the imposed content of femininity as part of that, so the entire content of femininity as conventionally enshrined in the role model is suspect, something to push away from in the name of being fully human instead of constrained by oppression. So the traits that lie outside it are often viewed as normal-in-the-absence-of rahter than being perceived as gendered masculine stuff.


Positioning and Joining

Feminism does contain threads of analysis about how patriarchy is inimical to male happiness and male well-being. That the set of sexist expectations and roles that constitute masculinity are bad for male people, and that feminism is therefore good for us too.

I sought them out, and found them, and rejoiced in them. But they aren't the most repeated and the most recognized parts of feminist analysis. I meet feminists online all the time who don't see male people as having any affirmative stake in feminism's success. Many more would agree that what feminism is about most certainly isn't the rescue of male people from what's imposed on us by patriarchy as males.

So although I found validation and recognition within feminism, I mostly found people unable to see what I could have to complain about.

I could not really contribute to what was being said, either. Inserting a contribution and having it become a part of what people understand to be feminism would first require that I have the authority to criticize it for what it lacks. And I don't. It isn't my movement. I don't get to set its priorities. Most people familiar with feminism, if asked about the male relationship to it, would say adversarial.

When I looked around for where else I could say what I needed to say, I found that I could speak as part of the gendered rainbow, that I could participate as a genderqueer person and try to establish that alternative identity. A non-transitioning male identity for male kids who grew up thinking "I am a person who is like one of the girls, not the boys". An identity that does not conflate sex with gender but embraces the apparent mismatch.

I haven't been welcomed with enthusiasm across the board, to be sure. I am occasionally perceived as a threat. I am often seen as violating ideological standards, and it sometimes offends other gender-atypical people who tell me I am not saying the things I'm supposed to be saying, that I am saying other things I really should not be saying.

But there's no fundamental barrier that renders me an illegitimate participant as completely as being male bars me from participating in feminism as a feminist.

Thank you for your time.



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


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


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






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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I started this blog in 2014. I'd recently finished my first book, the one eventually titled GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, at that time being pitched as The Story of Q: A GenderQueer Tale. Lit agents who gave personal responses to my queries often said "Your problem as a nonfiction author is that you have no platform. Nonfiction authors need a platform, a ready-made audience of people who are already listening to them".

So I started blogging, in an attempt to create that platform.

After a couple of years of random interval posting, I settled down to a more disciplined routine of cranking out a weekly blog post. And pretty early in, my blog posts began to resemble lesson plans and lecture presentation points.

TEACHER

I was supposed to be an academic, you know. A college professor somewhere, with a classroom of students, a professor who also wrote articles and made presentations at conferences and all that stuff. (My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, which should come out later this year, goes into how that didn't happen as planned). I guess the weekly blog posts became a type of make-believe exercise for me, of creating a curriculum, a weekly installment of professor Allan Hunter's course in genderqueer politics and experience.

I was supposed to be not only an academic but also a provocative social presence, a maker of big ripples. The kind of thing where people talking or writing about gender issues would respond in part to what I'd said. Where the things I'd said had become ideas that people would feel the need to react to, whether they agreed with me or not. Where the things I'd said changed the dialog. Modified the conversation and inserted new ideas into the discussion.

I wanted to provide a way of looking at these things that would make some things click into place for a lot of people, would make some things suddenly make a lot more sense to people. I've had people tell me that did happen, so I got to have some of that experience, if not quite as much of it as I'd hoped for.

I wanted to find my people, to be the person who created an IDENTITY that other folks would claim as their own, people for whom the things I said really clicked; I wanted to someday be in a room entirely filled with gender inverts, both male and female, heterosexual males who were femme, whose personae were like girls or women but who didn't wish to present as if they were female, and heterosexual female people who were masc or butch, where who they were as people make them 'one of the boys', but who didn't opt to wrap themselves as male. I daydreamed of conferences attended by gender inverts, and bars and other businesses that catered primarily to gender inverts, and even entire parts of town that were known to be the gender invert sections, you know? Well that didn't happen. To a limited extent I occasionally "found my people" -- where someone would comment that I had put into words some experiences and notions that they'd never seen in words before and that something I said totally captured how it was for them -- but not often enough or with enough people to make a movement like that.

More often, I got some likes on my posts and some dissents. I received replies and responses that gave me some indication that I had made sense, and other reactions that made it clear that I hadn't, that I was just confusing people, and overall a sense that most people had only understood a part of what I'd said.

Which is how it would have been if I'd been a college professor. I mean, that's pretty standard. You do your lectures, you provide some readings and you lead some discussions, and you see that some students get part of it and others are a lot less clear on it, and it's rare that a lot of students fully understand all of what you've presented.


THE RIPPLE MAKING THING

The way I view society, after decades of studying it pretty intensely and trying to inject my ideas into the social conversation, is that most people find a cluster of people where they're comfortable. A social environment. And they embrace and absorb the worldview that is shared as part of what defines that social environment.

If that sounds snotty, like I'm putting folks down for not doing their own thinking, well, even my most radical gender concepts and ideas are just a subtle departure from a body of thought that's already out there. I have some specific original content -- the specifics of being a gender invert and how that's different from being transgender, and how it's similar and yet different from feminist women's rejection of rigid sex roles and sexist expectations and all that -- but the original stuff fits on top of an established set of thoughts about gender and sex and identity and variation from the social norm. And that's a really good thing, because otherwise it would be impossible to explain.

We aren't just mindless puppets who passively soak up ideas from the social world around us and then parrot them. It often seems that way, to me and to other frustrated individuals, but new thinking does get stirred in, and those new notions and concepts get introduced somehow. Perhaps there are ideas "whose time has come" and a lot of people begin putting the same notions into words at the same time and that's when they get some traction.

I suspect there's a talent for being a ripple maker. I suspect it's akin to the talent some people have for being able to go to a party and make a splash, to be different and yet to have one's difference make one stand out all new and shiny and interesting, instead of one's difference making one not fit in and just look wrong and out of place to everyone else. It's the kind of talent that lets one person's YouTube channel or their tweets get millions of views. Whatever it is that comprises such talents, I don't appear to have them. I never have.

My second book will soon be out, but in contrast to the first one it's less centrally on-topic. It explains why my first book is wrapped and positioned as LGBTQ and not as a radical feminist male's political coming-out, but it was the first book that really sets out to explain being a heterosexual sissy, a gender inverted male. It could be that, nevertheless, the second book catches fire and draws attention to me as a person speaking important ideas that are worthy of social attention, but it seems unlikely.


MOVING FORWARD

I've been doing this for a long time, and it is crossing my mind (not for the first time by any means) that I don't have to keep doing this. I can put it down. I can move on to other interests and let my life have a different focus.

I may not do that -- when I've contemplated that in the past, I ended up circling back to it, unable to leave these issues alone for long. Still driven to push them, to speak up about them, because it needed to happen. And because I had a right to speak.

But it's personally important to me to remind myself that I don't have to do this any more. It's not an obligation. Even if it needs doing, I don't seem to be spectacularly talented at doing it, and I do get to live my own life, in whatever way seems likely to bring me satisfaction.


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


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



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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Replying to last week's blog post, my feminist colleague Emma wrote: "Perhaps you could ask a question pertinent to your point and then use the answers to develop what you want to say. For example, are you trying to talk about the idea that feminists have critiqued masculinity but then, when some men have rejected masculinity, critiqued that too?"

Yes, thank you.

Can I elaborate a little first? I'll try to keep it brief.

a) When feminists critiqued femininity, they did not say "we are not women". Quite the contrary. What they did say was "We are people, we are humans, we deserve to be evaluated by human standards, not special standards that only apply to women." For which they were accused of rejecting their womanhood and trying to become men, if you'll recall.

There's a reasons for that (I think): the masculine experience was artificially designated as the default. As in "The race of man", and "early man", and "mankind" and all that. So when women embrace a non-gendered neutral human identity, it bounces back socially as switching genders, because the neutral is the man-identity. I'm not pointing anything out to you that you hadn't previously pointed out to me, right?

Please keep that in mind when considering WHY ON EARTH some male who wants to reject masculinity doesn't just embrace the non-gendered neutrality of unisex human, not man. Saying "consider me unisex, not manly" doesn't invoke or conjure all the "special" traits marked as feminine. Because they're exceptions. The male is already the model for society's preconceived notion of the unisex generic human.


b) As a male, I don't get to say my stuff "as a feminist". It's not my platform. I don't get to use it.


c) The gender platform, including but not limited to transgender folks, can be my platform. It exists, it has concepts and terms, and I can speak to people as a person with a gender-atypical identity of some sort. It gives me a starting point.


d) Please, please, consider honestly for a moment what you would do, if you had been born male and rejected the identity foisted onto you by patriarchal society. Not for chivalrous concern-for-women reasons but for your own selfish reasons, that the MAN identity and all its priorities and traits and behaviors and ways of being in the world, totally wasn't for you because it's toxic and the opposite of being a self-realized life form and all that.

Do you think I'm going about it wrong?

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


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



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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I post in a lot of Facebook groups -- transgender groups, genderqueer groups, feminists groups, generic LGBT groups.

In one of the feminist groups, a participant took exception to me using transgender terms and transgender rhetoric. I replied that I'm just trying to communicate and I can lay things out using other words. I proceeded to explain a lot of the same things deriving my points from radical feminist theory, concepts and notions well-established as part of feminism.

"Ooooh", this person answered back. "So now you're going to mansplain feminism to us".




There's a reason I am mostly positioning what I have to say as part of the LGBTQIA dialog about gender these days. It's not that I am more fervently in agreement with what transgender activists have to say about gender. I have a lot of dissents with them, too, in fact. Been kicked out of a few when having a dissenting opinion was upsetting to people: the Trans, Enby & Genderqueer Network booted me to the curb, as did Transgender Support 30+, Non-Binary Gender Pride, Nonbinary Femmes, and GenderQueers+ ... so it is not as if feminists have a monopoly on "if you aren't saying exactly what we already agree with, you must be one of THOSE people, the wrong people, and we don't want you here".

But I'm less easily stripped of the authority to have an opinion in the first place. I identify as a genderqueer femme who is male. It isn't orthodox for transgender and it isn't exactly typical of what nonbinary and genderqueer people tend to say when they identify, but in general the rainbow has enough diversity and rhetoric about inclusiveness that it's hard for people to say I don't qualify or get to identify as I do. Individual lesbian, gay, trans, bi, genderqueer, or nonbinary people may take issue with what I say, but they've got less of a structured mission statement to point to that says I don't belong there.

But within feminism, as a person calling myself male, I am not regarded as a person for whom the platform exists.


My second book, *That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class*, comes out later this year. It explores the limitations of participation for a male person with political gender issues. Feminism was a beacon of light at the time I came out.

Some people ask why I bother to post in the feminist areas, especially the ones that don't condemn TERFs. It's feminist theory. The LGBTQIA world still has nothing to compare to it. It's the single most important political perspective to emerge from the 20th century. It has brilliant insights and develops a world-view that's coherent from top to bottom, individual behavioral nuance to ensconced political structure. And I'm a student and a participant, even if some of the world's feminists are not inclined to acknowledge me as a feminist.

But I can't effectively use it as my platform.



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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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Meme (n.) -- an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.


When I first came out as an identity not yet on people’s maps, I was intrigued by the rapid spread of popular snippets, little ideas that raced through communities as trendy notions you were supposed to know about if you were cognizant. “Hey”, I said to myself, “if I could figure out what makes an idea catch on and take off like that, I could leverage that to get the word out, to spread awareness of people like me existing in the world!”

And although I was not particularly witty and clever nor anything akin to popular, I watched people’s behavior to see what caused them to latch on to one thing instead of another as an item to pass on as if it were the Most Brilliant Thing Ever.

Eventually I decided that there was no identifying characteristic that was making the phenomenon happen around any specific morsel of an idea. If anything, the near-emptiness in content made it slightly more likely to become the newest trend, rather than any element of profundity or exceptionally clever twist. What I saw were people listening to the crowd and trying to discern early on what was being embraced so they could embrace it a little bit before other people, who would then copy them by embracing it themselves.

That’s not strictly 100% true (some appreciation of quirkiness does seem to play a role), but by and large these trendy ideas were being popularized because they were popular. People were competing to see who could jump on the next bandwagon before it became fully crowded, and would jump to the next one when they could sense it, but it was bandwagon behavior at the root. People weren’t adopting these memes because they agreed with them or thought they were insightful or cute. They were adopting them because they were catching on.



One of my friends, a performance artist, ends one of her pieces with the final line “If you live long enough, you become relevant”. After 40 years of trying to come out as a sissy-esque femme who accepts his nature and his physically male body, I may have lived long enough to attain relevancy, as genderqueer is trending. It isn’t all specifically my version of genderqueer, but yes, there are more and more people pushing away from the expectation of transgender “passing”, of asserting the vlable identity of their gender independent of their physiology or their presentation.


I spend a lot of time and energy complaining that MOGII / gender-variant communities are too much geared towards a kind of groupthink, where there is hostility and condemnation for anyone who doesn’t use the right words or echo the sentiments and viewpoints that have been embraced as the Right Way to Think of It. I shouldn’t let it surprise me. People within communities – any type of communities – tend to engage in the bandwagon-hopping because it is how human networks operate, it’s how the collective self, the “us” that forms a community, does its thinking. But I do, I grouse and snarl and complain about it, expecting all the individuals to examine ideas carefully and to be ready and willing to dissent from those around them and offer a different perspective at least a dozen times per week, and to quit chasing the bandwagons.

That may seem natural to me simply because I’ve been a loner for so long, a social hermit without a group. Like so many other MOGII kids, I was a misfit growing up. But in my case, coming out didn’t provide me with entry into a group of like-minded misfits. I sought it, fervently and desperately, wishing to belong. But because it didn’t happen for me, I suppose I developed less of the interactional patterns that lend themselves to bandwagon-jumping.

Which (I should keep in mind) means I’m not necessarily “a more independent thinker” so much as my tendency to independence has been an accident of not having found a place to fit in.


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Part of what “femininity” means to many people, not just by association but embedded in the definition, is a capacity and an inclination to care, to be empathic, to listen and to provide supportive efforts, both of the practical variety and in the form of expressions of understanding and concern. When people are discussing male (and/or Assigned Male At Birth) people who are feminine (femmes, sissies, girls, women), the traits and expressions that they focus on may not emphasize compassion and tenderness, but at least for some of us it is it’s pretty central to why and how we think of ourselves as feminine.

“Everyone should”

In the decade after I first came out as a sissy (which was my word for it, specifically as a heterosexual sissy in order to untie the confusion between gender and sexual orientation), I mostly embraced a feminist analysis of sexist polarized gender expectations: there was no damn reason to foist onto male people all that masculine adversarial belligerence and selfishness and emotionally truncated immaturity.

One way of reading that interpretation is that all of us male people possess the same capacity and tendency to be compassionate as female people do, and that as a male feminist (or profeminist or whatever) person I was just being loud about saying so. And during this era of my life, I did tend to de-emphasize the notion that I was inherently different from other males, because I was positioning my own politics to fit within that feminist framework.

Another, more nuanced take on that is that all of us male people could be that way but that male role socialization and the conformity of typical males to those masculine expectations meant that most males did not develop those traits, whereas those of us who rejected sexist roles and rules and embraced healthy traits labeled “feminine” were far more free to develop as compassionate and tender people. That was more the approach I put into words when discussing the matter in those days.

But when I first came out, the central insight was that I was different from men in general, that how and who I was made me not one of the men but instead one of the women, and that that was why my experiences and, in particular, my frustrations with heterosexuality, were as they were. The political analysis that posited that I was actually a surviving, relatively healthy person in an unhealthy sexist world came a bit later. And now, when I am positioning my politics within queer theory and LGBTQ identity frameworks, I’ve returned to that. (If all the other males wish to say that they, too, are not correctly described by “masculinity”, that they, too, are actually far better described by the components that make up “femininity” instead, then they can certainly say so, but these days I speak for myself and, to an extent, for others who identify as I do). So here is the notion that the sissy femme is perhaps inherently inclined to be more compassionate and tender as an expression of innate femininity. I have often described the “differences between the sexes” using the Snow Cone analogy. Hurl a mango snow cone at the wall, then pick up a mint snow cone and throw it against the same wall but make the center of impact a bit to the right of where the mango cone’s center of impact was. You get a spray of colored ice with orange-colored flecks interspersed with green-colored flecks, lots of overlap, and even though as a group the entirety of the mango particles skew to the left of the mint particles, there are individual mango particles even way over on the right where the mint flecks predominate, and likewise for mint ice-flecks on the far left. So being a sissy femme is being one of the exceptions, genuinely different at least in the statistical / generalization sense, and hence, to whatever extent female people in general are innately more compassionate and tender, the feminine sissy may be feminine in exactly that way, among other ways.

Take your pick. Any way you go at it, it’s a set of character and behavioral traits that I claim to exhibit and to which I aspire and which forms a big part of my sense of who I am.

Not Just Selflessness

As with the entire basket of attributes called “femininity”, compassion and tenderness are often not seen as things that benefit the person who has them. Instead, they’re often thought of strictly in terms of the benefit that they accord other people. Feminist analysis has often pointed to how women are placed in a position of providing multiple kinds of service and support to men, and that this is among them, yet one more form of social labor for which women are exploited and from which energies they are alienated, their efforts along these lines appropriated for men’s use. But we have to be careful not to fall into the pattern of devaluing those ways of being in the world that are part of the feminine, of ratifying the patriarchal definition of them as second-tier and inferior.

We can’t really do that without taking a frank look at the benefits to the feminine person of being compassionate and tender.

I first became really and intensely aware of this from experiencing its absence as a child: I was capable of being a caring person, of being a good listener, a sympathetic and supportive friend, but as a boy (or person perceived in those terms) it felt like no one wanted it from me. I was jealous of the kind of emotional sharing and reciprocal connections I saw among girls my age and felt strongly that I could participate in that, would be good at it if given the opportunity, and felt very much left out. Over the years of thinking about this and analyzing it more fully in the years after I came out, I came to think of this flavor of emotional intimacy as something for which we have an appetite, and from which we derive personal pleasure from the connection. Conceptualizing it as some kind of selfless sacrificial service to others denies this; and it’s wrong. It’s the same kind of cognitive mistake that a person would be making if they were to think that no one gets sexual pleasure from pleasuring someone else, or has an appetite prompting them to do so. On an emotional level, we get off on being compassionate to others and making them feel loved and understood and cared for. It is seldom spoken of in this fashion, to be sure, but in order to claim it for myself and to explain that being deprived of it is indeed a deprivation, being blatantly honest about this aspect of the experience seems vital.

Then there is the ancillary social aspect of being perceived as such. It should be easy enough to see why one might wish to be thought of as a compassionate and tender caring person. Alternative gender identities are proliferating, and one fake-tolerant pseudoliberal response to it takes the form “you can identify as whatever the heck you want, hey you can identify as a pine tree if that suits you, and more power to you, as long as you realize that I don’t get it and probably never will”. The problem is that we don’t need anyone’s permission or cooperation to be who we are within the interiors of our own heads or even, to a significant extent, within our everyday behaviors; but like everyone else we receive the identitities projected onto us by everyone else who perceives us, and, again like everyone else we derive some degree of social comfort and satisfaction from being perceived in ways that are congruent with how we perceive ourselves. Cisgender males are generally perceived as men and expected to be masculine, and they are, and they get the received / perceived signals like a warm friendly thumbs-up, a confirmation of identity.

There are specific nice things that come with being seen as compassionate and tender, and woven into them, for us, the confirmation of identity in which we are vested.

Finally, going back to the notion that caregiving is a service that others do benefit from, there are transactional advantages to being the resource to whom other people turn in order to obtain it, being in demand for it. In the interpersonal economy of human interaction, it is definitely to the advantage of a person who has these traits to be appreciated for them, to be sought out for them. Just like being a good cook or being a funny person who can be counted on to tell entertaining stories and jokes, having a capacity to give people something that they benefit from brings them to you and in the resulting interaction it is something of value for which those others may give other benefits and services in exchange.

Against Trivialization

I said up above that when people think or talk about sissy femme male (or AMAB) people, compassion and tenderness isn’t typically what they will choose to emphasize. More often they make it all about lipstick and high heels, being prissy and fabulous, and behaving seductively.

Now, there’s definitely a positive good in fun, frolic and frivolity. Joy and pleasure are among the components of life that have been devalued in favor of anger and seriousness and sacrifice and all that, and I am happy to be in the tradition of Emma Goldman, who said that if she can’t dance at it, then it isn’t her revolution. So let’s not even trivilialize the playful accoutrements of femininity…

But yes, a part of the devalorization of the feminine – as attested to by Julia Serrano in Whipping Girl, among other prominent places – takes the form of treating the entire feminine package of traits as if there’s very little of real substance going on there.

You’ll get no traction from me if you devalue compassion and tenderness. There’s absolutely nothing trivial about it. These are among the most noble and important of human characteristics and I have always been proud of being a part of them and them a part of my identity, and never had any sympathy or interest in a masculine identity that seemed founded on disparaging all that, of treating it as weakness or dismissing it as less relevant than winning and triumphing over opponents and whatnot.

I am a proud sissy and I have never for a moment looked across the aisle at conventional masculine males and felt that I was in any shape way fashion or form LESS THAN.



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In order to get published, promoted, distributed, represented, featured, etc, you first need to have a critical mass of people paying attention to what you're saying. People begin taking you seriously enough to pay attention to you once they realize that other people, not just themselves, are encountering what you've written or said, which in turn is largely dependent on being published, promoted, distributed, etc.

This is the "platform" conundrum I am up against. Publishers (and literary agents too) want to know if the authors who query them already have a built-in audience of people. People who read their blogs, who watch their YouTube videos, who read and follow their tweets and retweet them, who come to hear them lecture.

I have had some of them informing me that getting a book published is no longer a mechanism for reaching people with your ideas. It is something that you do when you are already successfully reaching people with your ideas.



I have a prepared "about the author" statement that I include in my queries when the instructions for submitting to them say to give some background information about yourself, your prior publications (if any), your education (if relevant), position of employment or expertise (ditto), and, yes, your platform. At the end of it, after describing my academic background and history of being a gender activist and so forth, I have this:

About the Author's "Platform" — Many literary agencies and publishers, when they request the nonfiction author's bio, are primarily interested in knowing who will buy the book based on the author's reputation and stature in the field. This isn't that kind of memoir. No one (except maybe my Mommy) will read it simply because I'm the author; the book is interesting (and marketable) as a "representative" or "illustrative" memoir, the story of what it is like to be a particular TYPE of person (genderqueer, in this case).

Yes, I'm aware that that's probably not what you meant by "platform", that you're less interested in whether I'm a household name than in whether or not I have a following of potential readers and purchasers of my book. Well, I blog weekly; in this day and age, no one leaves comments directly on blog pages, but I post links to my new blog entries in a couple dozen gender-centric Facebook groups and I have a modest but supportive audience who follow me there.

The whole situation is frustrating, but I believe it makes it difficult, not impossible, to get traction. I keep reminding myself that I have twice had a publishing contract for this book, and if it had indeed gone into print I would have reached many people and more people would pay attention to the things that I say and write because I was a published author on the subject.

It's also useful to remind myself that only some people will not pay serious attention to a person's thoughts and ideas until and unless they believe that a lot of other people are also being exposed to what that person thinks. There are, fortunately, people who will get quite excited about or supportive of a line of thought that "clicks" for them, no matter where it comes from or who else is likely to be exposed to it.

Getting to critical mass is to some extent a random thing, a matter of chance. The longer I keep doing this, the more likely it is that my writings will affect someone who has something of a platform of their own, either in the sense of having the ears and eyes of a lot of people or in the sense of knowing some specific key personnel whose attention to this project could help propel it forward. That would, of course, include literary agents and publishers, who certainly possess the power to make my book a success.


Meanwhile, none of the other modalities of communicating with people make more sense to pursue instead of focusing on trying to get my book published. I already have a blog; a small handful of people read it and I don't know how I would increase that. I already post links to my new blog posts all over Facebook, and that's one reason I have the handful of readers that I do have, but again I don't know any magic tricks for drawing more attention to them. I have a Twitter account and I tweet about my blog posts, but I'm a clumsy and clueless twitterer and I'm not likely to suddenly become adept at expressing myself usefully in postage-stamp sized textmorsels. I've addressed some groups, giving presentations and leading discussions, but it's not easy getting booked when one has no authoritative position or official role and does not have a book published. I've even made a few YouTube videos, but they don't tend to pull in people any more rapidly than my blog posts do. And meanwhile, I've got a book, already written, so it kind of makes sense to continue to try to get it into print.

(Be all that as it may, if you have suggestions for how to get more people to tune into my thoughts and words, or for more useful ways in which for me to render them and make them available, by all means give them)

I probably should hire someone to make a home page for me, perhaps with the table of contents (i.e., "Index of all Blog Posts", see below) embedded in it. Or at least find out if I could afford it, etc. I could do something along those lines myself, but graphic design is not my strong suit and my HTML skills are pre-CSS, HTML 1.1 edition stuff at best.


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Person A (on a message board):

What exactly is your sexual orientation?


Person J (i.e., about nine replies down):
...apparently I need a Wikipedia page and a science degree to know for sure? No offense meant, but I had no idea of all these labels and what they mean.

Is this helpful? To have all the labels so people can put themselves in boxes? Or on a scale? I guess it is or people wouldn't do it. I know I'm completely naive so would anyone care to venture why? To identify with others?





I think that for the majority of people, all such labels are unnecessary. That's because the majority of people have a majority orientation, and there's absolutely 100% nothing wrong with failing to deviate from what's typical, there really isn't! :) And labels exist for the purpose of differentiating. It sometimes seems unfair to us weirdo deviant atypical folks that mainstream folks get to strut around simply thinking of themselves in an undifferentiated way as "just people, you know, normal people", but I can understand it and I don't think it's oppressive. I don't even think it's oppressive for most of you to go around treating everyone and expecting of everyone that they will be normal in all the ways you are normal, as long as you're willing to be nonjudgmental and adjust accordingly when folks explain "nope, I'm different".

So you want to know why so goddamn many labels and such complexity and never-ending proliferation of categories? That's also a reasonable question.


When you're a mainstream person, you get a pretty unified and consolidated experience about your sex / gender / orientation. Like everyone else who is part of human culture, you get a barrage of messages from other people, messages that are aimed at all people with your kind of body, messages that are pointed to all people with your kind of personality-and-behavior, messages that focus on all people who share your sexual appetite's object of desire, messages that speak to all folks who harbor your general sexual-romantic tastes and expectations, and so on.

What makes this ongoing experience unitary and consolidated is that, for mainstream folks, they don't contradict each other! The messages for folks with a body like yours, for example, say that such people will find people with this other specified bodytype to be sexy and attractive (and you do), that you will have a personality matching a certain description (and, hey, it happens to be mostly true for you), that the sexy attractive people that you're attracted to will tend to have a different set of personality and behavioral characteristics (hmm yeah, pretty much true for you), and that the actual WAY that sex and courtship and attraction and relationship-formation will tend to take place will be according to the following overdone movie script or TV sitcom set of scenarios (yep, watched them, and corny or oversimplified or not yeah they aren't foreign to you). So those messages reinforce each other. They don't prompt a bunch of questioning inside your confused little head.

Not so for some of us outliers, the exceptions to the rule. (And for some of us weirdos, the exceptions to whatever general rule you can make about the exceptions to the rule, and exceptions to whatever generalizations you can make about those folks as well).

Oh baby, things are a snarly mess on our side of the experience-continuum. The messages aimed at people with our type of body describe a personality that is not ours, or perhaps indicate that we'll be attracted to a body-type other than the ones we find attractive, or describe our likely sexual behavioral patterns in ways that completely don't mesh with how things are for us, and so on and so forth. And there are messages we hear specifically about the exceptions and those are generally not good messages either — in part because they tend to be the general consensus not of us about ourselves but of you normal folks and whatever conclusions y'all have reached about the deviant-from-normal folks you've run into or heard about or observed from the outside — and in part because they tend to be prescriptive messages that designate us as wrong, examples of how not to be. We hear those too, and bouncing back away from those as well as bouncing back away from the non-fitting normal messages means we do spend a lot of time contemplating all this shit. Or many of us do at any rate.

Well, guess what? We don't reach a single unified and consolidated "minority opinion" consensus! Instead, first you get a sort of first-tier "voice of the exceptions" and after that's been out there and ingested a bit you get the next tier of dissenting exceptions who AREN'T that way and THEY put out a second set of descriptions of experience and identity and after that's hit the airwaves / magazine covers etc you get another tier and another tier.

It's like one of those statistical graphs where you've got a long tail fading off from the concentrated blob that represents the main trend.

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