I approach the topic of maleness from a different angle than most people. It isn't irrelevant to who I am; I do identify as a male person. But it means different things to me than it apparently means to most male people, or, for that matter, to most non-male people.

I'm a sissyfemme, one of the girl people, someone whose gender is queer instead of the expected value for male folks. Most of them grew up internalizing a lot of beliefs and attitudes about how a boy or a man ought to be, a lot of notions about how to compare themselves to other males and how to assess themselves.

For me, it was more like having been issued something, like a vehicle or an office or an identification number or something. I didn't choose it but nobody else did either. "Here, this is the morphology from which you'll be living this life", you know? Or at least once I came to be of an age where I observed myself to be more like one of the girls than one of the boys, that's the way I ended up thinking about maleness. It didn't contradict me being more like the girls. It also wasn't wrong. They simply didn't have much to do with each other.

I'm certainly not the only person for whom maleness and man-ness aren't coterminous:

"Yes of course, I have a male body. But why does that mean I have to go with the other males? Are we only going to be talking about our bodies? Are we only going to be talking about our dicks and beards and how weird it is when you start to grow hair around your nipples?", I asked quizzically. "Or are we going to be talking about being men? Because if we're talking about being men, you and I both know that I don't have much to add to that conversation".

-- Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story, pg 276

...Reactions from Grindr and OkCupid users enlightened me. I either have to be a drag queen, transsexual, or woman for my identity to make sense to some people. I am a cisgender male who occasionally wears makeup and might dress in drag three or four times a year. I am not a drag queen because I am not in possession of that fierceness. I am not a transsexual because I was assigned male at birth and I identify as male. I am not a woman because I am not a woman. Some women do have penises and they are still women. My penis is a man’s because I am a man. Can I make this any clearer? I urinate standing up.

-- Waldell Goode, Queen Called Bitch, pg 134

It's a fine enough morphology, and overall I have few complaints. At puberty, I gained a lot of strength without having to do anything, that was kind of cool. In general I like the aesthetic design of narrowness. Growing dark hairs in all kinds of places that either previously didn't have hairs or only had pale soft nearly-invisible ones didn't immediately rock my world, but I became fond of them pretty soon. I almost immediately resisted the expectation that I was going to start scraping them off my face with a razor: "Why, what's wrong with them? I kind of like it!"; getting a swollen bulge in my larynx was a bit offputting, to be honest, as I was a narrow skinny teenager and now looked like I'd tried to swallow something I shouldn't have with unfortunate results, but I liked the new baritone voice.

I was brought up with a somewhat puritanical set of adult teachings about the body and the parts that we were supposed to always keep hidden, the private parts of the anatomy. Less an emphatic "that's dirty" than an awkward embarrassed adult self-consciousness combined with anger and disapproval when some kid was being exhibitionist. The body parts in question were referenced mostly in terms of body-waste disposal, both by the various adults and by the other children, with a far less recurrent and far more veiled reference to the reproductive and erotic functionalities, so it was like pee/poop/{sex}.

Having a main part among these covered-up bits be extrusive and hanging out instead of tucked away didn't seem like a great design feature in a world where everyone either stammered and blushed or busted out in coarse crude vulgarity if they had reason to discuss such things.

I didn't have any direct experience of the primary alternative morphology, of course. Like everyone else, I got the version I was issued without any option of test-driving them both first. I was somewhat curious about what it was like, I suppose. I liked girls in general and thought they were cool so I didn't associate their form factor with anything negative, but there were areas of life in which I was in competition with them -- to be perceived as mature, self-controlled, on the road towards adulthood and responsibility -- and in that competition I was definitely a male who was keeping up and giving them a run for their money, beating them at their own game, the inverse of what the tomboy gals were doing on the playground.

Jack and Jill Magazine came in the mail once a month. I remember the story and the illustration: "I'm tired of being peanut butter", the girl's thought-bubble proclaimed -- she being the middle kid and feeling like the middle of a sandwich where the youngest and oldest kids got more attention. I found her cute, as drawn. Attractive. I had discovered touching myself, "tickling" private parts in a way that felt good, and it somehow got connected with looking. Yeah, first kink, I was such a pervert, a pretty non-uptight pervert who didn't worry I was doing anything wrong but at the same time I sure didn't want anybody to know.

At any rate, the erotic was pretty quickly linked to fascination with female morphology, looking at it, thinking about it. And soon enough this prompted some perplexed thoughts about what it meant to be female, insofar as the place I was "tickling" was specifically the place they didn't have. By early adolescence, I had learned that they "have one" too -- that in the analogous area they had a place that made the same kind of sensations and felt that way.

What was less obvious, less discernable, was whether or not they liked thinking about male bodies if and when they did that to themselves. Or whether looking at us gave them the same feelings I got from watching girls in their female shapes, taut jeans and dance leotards and swim suits and other apparel where you could see their shapes, especially right there where they were different.

Just as most of what is socially packaged as attractively masculine is irrelevant and foreign to me, most of the small array of presentations of male anatomy as visually erotic and desirable hits me as pretty hilarious and impossible to take seriously. Underpants with hot dogs or bananas depicted on them, that sort of thing. Or the associations with weaponry and the obsession with size. That all feels like it has more to do with the whole masculine thingie about being an adversary and conqueror than with the body contour itself being something that could evoke erotic appreciation. Oh well, I've read things written by female authors expressing a combination of mirth and dismay about wedgies-r-us bottoms (swimwear and underwear), "boob tray" tops that contort breasts into silly shapes, and other processes that convert the female body into something utterly without dignity. Still, the relative lack of cultural awareness of how people who desire the male body experience it as an object of desire creates a certain dubiety about any attempt to package it as such.

Not being someone who has wished to be female rather than male, I'm not a central candidate for being accused of autogynephilia, although yes, that has happened. I don't tend to view my identification with the women and girls as having anything much to do with my fascination for their physical architecture, and certainly not with any visualizing of myself as a person in possession of that architecture, since those are two entirely different things. But be that as it may, I have imagined being female and that imagining was definitely erotic in nature. But how can you act upon someone else's nerve endings without some notion of how that would feel? Reciprocally, being on the receiving end of someone else's tactile attentions is nowhere near as much fun in the absence of imagining the pleasure they're getting from it. We all do that, don't we? I don't think erotic emotional experiences are intrinsically gendered, but they may be sexed, even if only as a consequence of the architectural differences.

Maleness is one thing; being a man is something else. To echo what Jacob Tobia and Waldell Goode said, I don't have anything to add to the latter except from the outside, but maleness itself is part of my experience and identity.


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


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

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






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

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This is me, a first grader, and I want to write about something very important.

First, pretend I'm you when you were a first grader, because the person who actually is me might not remember this, or I wouldn't need to write it down now and it's important.

---

I remember being four, so maybe there's no reason to think you won't remember being seven. Let's talk about being four. Nursery school. Sitting around a ring to hear the story being read. Little rows of kids, some in front, some behind them, up close. You're already worrying that this is going to get pedophilic. Yes I knew the word pedophilic when I was in first grade. I thought it was a totally creepy concept and of course I memorized how to spell it. No, this isn't that stuff. I didn't know the word when I was four but I felt the concern and got the general notion, minus the specifics, so back when I was already that much aware of the notion, this other thing happened, or was happening, around that time, and I wanted to write about that.

---

Bodies had dirty parts. No they didn't that's too simple. Parts that could have something to do with dirty. Diaper parts, potty parts. Don't put your hands in it, it's dirty. Don't talk about it, talking about it is dirty. That's too simple too but I bet you know what I'm talking about don't you.

Then something that people act as if it is kind of dirty but kind of not. There are parts that the girls have and parts that the boys have. It's described like if you are a girl you get these parts, like being a girl is first and then you get the parts. And boys. They have different parts. Boy parts. It makes you different. Well then it's having these parts, that's what makes you a girl, you weren't a girl and then got these parts. No. Well then having these parts doesn't make you different.

Liking the way they look. Pee from there, it's down there, it's dirty. Not to talk about not to think about but we think about it they call this dirty and it's liking the way they look. Oh I assumed. I didn't know some liked the way themselves looked. Oh I hadn't thought about. What if people with girl parts like me, the way I like theirs, and they're nice I like them anyway. But what if?

Yeah, little rows of kids, some in front some behind them, up close. Someone, somewhere, is playing with the waistpants band of the person in front of them, the latter someone being me. This unknown person wanted to slide a thumb under the edge of my underpants. I wasn't horrified, nor was I elated. I knew it was in that argued-about "dirty" territory. I could stop it. It felt like I was doing the unknown person a favor by not stopping it, and I liked that feeling and I was curious. Content warning update: that's as bad as it gets, we were four. As for the sensations themselves... nothing I saw any lure for. Although I found that I liked the idea that this person had been one of the tomboyish girls in our class and she'd done this to me.

We were defining our boundaries, and our sense of being in control of them, and we were experiencing ourselves as our own curators, granting or denying access, and we were doing that at four.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be an unfair situation if a five year old or a six year old started it, because they're bigger and more advanced, but you aren't protecting us by pretending all that stuff didn't come onto the scene until we were sprouting boobs and whiskers. Just because we're not sexless doesn't make it okay to do stuff to us like we're sex toys. Point is, we were *not* sexless. Or we were not sexuality-less and we were also not necessarily genderless (although some of us certainly might have been).

You're never going to understand it if you keep pretending it wasn't there all along.


—————


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


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



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

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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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It is important to be aware of one's privileges and to try to maintain some awareness of what life is like for people who don't have them.

Sometimes our social situations can seem paradoxical or complicated, where one type of identity can look privileged when compared to another in one aspect, but then it looks to be the other way around when you look at a different aspect. That's not a good reason to avoid trying to expand our awareness, though.




I am not a cisgender person; my gender identity is something other than what people tend to assume it to be. To use the conventional language, it's a different value than what my mom's obstetrician scribbled down on my birth certificate, where I was assigned male at birth.

Almost nobody I interact with has seen my birth certificate, of course. They are reacting to visual cues and interpreting those as indications of a specific physical morphology, the same physical morphology that led the doctor to write "male" on my birth certificate. There are ways to modify one's visual presentation and provide different cues so that people are less likely to assign the same value that got put down on one's birth certificate -- and many transgender people make use of these techniques, to present as their real gender.

In a world that still very much regards sex and gender as the same thing, the way one presents as one's true gender is to present as the sex that causes people to assume you are that gender.

I don't do that. I identify as genderqueer, not as transgender; what I want of the world is to be regarded and accepted as sharing a gender with the girls and women, but specifically as a male person, not as a female person. This is a different attitude and a different expectation than wanting to be regarded and accepted as a woman, period, full stop. Not all transgender women are transitioners, people who transition from male to female, people who present to the world so as to be regarded and classified and treated as indistinguishable from any other women. But that's the most widely shared understanding in our society of what it means to be transgender.



There's a lot of stuff I don't have to endure that transitioning people have to deal with, and I am aware that being insulated from this constitutes a privilege for me.

a) BATHROOMS -- As an adult I hardly ever face any harassment or discomfort related to people thinking I'm in the wrong bathroom. I'm not targeted by the hostile anti-trans laws and policies that have been enacted in certain places. My presence is hardly ever perceived by anyone else in a bathroom as a potential threat or as a deviant behavior.

I'm not completely unable to relate to the situation I've heard others describe, though. I had a lot more trouble with being in the boys' bathroom as a child, as an elementary school student. Young boys can be intrusive and uninclined to respect any semblance of boundaries, the communal bathrooms were a space of relative insulation from adult behavioral monitoring, and children can be particularly intolerant of differences and inclined to label and target those they regard as weird. Or queer, you could say.

I didn't like being in there with them. They made it plain that they thought there was something wrong with me, that I wasn't normal for a boy, and I didn't feel safe there. They were also very crude, scatological, obscenely nasty in their talk about bathroom functions and body parts. They were occasionally violent or physically intrusive.

But I really don't experience any of that as an adult.


b) MEDICAL -- Not all transitioning people participate in a medical transition, one that involves hormones or surgery or hormone blockers or other physical interventions. But those that do have to contend with the vagaries of insurance coverage and the possibility of doctors acting as medical gatekeepers and creating hoops to jump through, qualifying criteria that one must meet.

Medical transitioning can also be extremely expensive, requires recovery and recuperation time, and as with all medical procedures has risk factors, the possibility of complications or unwanted side effects and so on.

My gender identity has never exposed me to any of that. It's not something I've ever had to cope with.


c) HOMOPHOBIC CIS HETERO DATING-SCENARIO HOSTILITY -- Awkwardly titled, but what I mean is the reaction of cisgender hetero people to the existence of people of the sex they're attracted to who happen to be transgender people who have transitioned, and their equation of them (and to the possibility of sexualized behavior that would involve them) to homosexuality.

This is primarily an issue for transgender women targeted for homophobic hostility by cis het men. Such men often consider female people to have engaged in a sexually provocative behavior merely by being female and daring to have an appearance. Instead of attributing responsibility for their attraction to their own sexuality, they will often attribute it to the women to whom they are attracted. So in a similar, parallel fashion they regard transgender women as either enticing them or attempting to do so. Add in their homophobic concern about possibly having a sexual interest in someone who was born with a physical morphology that was designated male and it takes the form of accusing transgender women of doing a perverted and invasive form of sexual aggression just for existing and presenting as female in public.

Since I don't present to the world as female, you'd think I'd be completely immune to this. I actually haven't been -- my behaviors have often been treated and regarded as the equivalent of presenting as female, with the same attribution of attempted enticement, and I've had the furious anger expressed to me, and on some occasions violence as well.

But I don't tend to experience much of it as an adult interacting with strangers and casual acquaintances. When it has occurred, it has mostly been a reaction from people who have had opportunity to perceive me over time and form an opinion or belief about me. And, as with the bathroom hostility, it was far more of an issue when I was younger, although more from the older end of primary school years, puberty and adolescence rather than elementary school.


d) MISGENDERING / WRONG PRONOUNS, ETC -- I'm constantly misgendered and I'm so used to it I can scarcely imagine a life in which people correctly gendered me. I'm not, however, constantly seeking to be altercast by other people as an identity that that they already know and recognize (and altercast other people into on a regular basis), and I think that's relevant. There's an investment in the possibility of acceptance that creates a vulnerability.

I'm not sure my situation is safer from microaggressions or less fraught with daily emotional wear and tear, but at a minimum it is different.

We've all been in an occasional social situation where any kind of acceptance as "one of us" was completely out of the question, and we've all had at least a few occasions where it was not beyond the bounds of hope that people would. Rejection and hostility and mockery tend to hurt more sharply in the latter situation.


The main reciprocal side of all this is that transgender people who are transitioners occupy an identity that, at this point in our culture, is known and recognized. Some of the people who know or recognize it are hostile to it and don't regard it as authentic or legitimate, but they've been exposed to the concept.

I don't have that. There is still almost zero social awareness of people who seek to be recognized as having a gender that doesn't match their sex, and to have that hybrid mismatched combination authenticated. This means that the loud social voices that promote understanding and acceptance do not include people like me. It means that allies and thoughtful conscientious people remain unaware of our experiences and have no idea how to accommodate our feelings. It means that structured organizations to promote the equality and social well-being of gender-atypical people are not "us" to people like me -- they are, at best, potential allies, hypothetical groups to which we would logically belong if we could make them aware of us and get them to move over and make room.

I do often feel more marginalized (rather than more oppressed) than conventional transitioning trangender people. But I have societal advantages, too.

I pledge to be the best ally to my transgender brothers and sisters that I can be.


—————


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


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



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

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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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When I was a graduate student, I lived in a communal house with a bunch of other folks, each of us renting a room and sharing the common space such as kitchen and laundry and living room.

There was one resident I didn't get along with particularly well. He addressed me dismissively, with a smug contempt for my bookish ways. I think he considered me arrogant and pretentious. His nickname was 'Taxi' because he had once been a cab driver.

One fall, we started having problems with the washing machine. During the part of the routine where it would pump out the water from the wash or rinse cycle, the plumbing suddenly couldn't handle the water fast enough and it would back up and splash all over the floor. The drainage system was ancient and primitive: the drain pipes went into the ground and spread out in a fan with holes to let the water out into the soil, no sump, no generalized septic tank. (Water from toilets did get routed to a septic tank but everything else was expected to be slurped up by the sand).

I could visualize what we needed, in the abstract, and told the others in our household. "What we need", I told them, "is some kind of reservoir vessel with an opening in the top to let the water flow in from the pipe, wide enough and deep enough to hold all the water that was in the washing machine, with a drain at the bottom that goes on out to the regular drainage system. So when it backs up, it just fills the reservoir, which holds it until it can drain away at its own speed".

Taxi scoffed. "No. We buy a big sink from the hardware place and put it next to the washer and the drain connects to the bottom of the sink. Stick the hose from the washing machine over the lip of the sink and wire it to secure it".


Taxi was a person who thinks in the concrete and pragmatic; he may not have even seen that the sink he was suggesting was a match for the reservoir vessel I'd conjured up in the abstract. To my chagrin, I realized he'd not only proposed something that would solve the immediate problem of soapy water splooshing all over our floor and leaving us with a mess, but had also found a way of giving us an additional useful device in the process: items could be hand-washed in the sink. I had been visualizing something like one of those big plastic buckets like spackling compound comes in, with the existing hose coming in through an opening in the top and a hole being cut in the lower rim or the bottom and a second hose somehow cemented in place, and the entire contraption needing to be secured somehow in mid-air, and considering and rejecting a wide range of materials to pull all this together. Practical and pragmatic has never been my strong side, I'm afraid. His sink idea, I had to admit, was an unbeatable solution.

I found the whole situation very irritating.




One problem I have with pragmatism is that it often means perceiving the world in its current form as "the world you have to live in" and doesn't leave much space for visualizing the world as it should be. It doesn't have to have that effect -- there's a definite pragmatic and practical element in inventing things and creating strategies for change. But as a mindset, the type of thinking that is dismissive of abstract thought and concentrates on the importance of the here and now and the solid and the immediately available is a type of thinking that's prone to being dismissive of any notions about changes to the big picture.

Gender is an abstraction. Madison Bently, first person to use "gender" in the modern sense, defined it as "the social obverse of sex". An obverse is the front side of something, hence the outward-facing front of sex. It's the beliefs, understandings, roles, behaviors, personality traits, feelings, archetypes, nuances, priorities, values, charisma, and all the other stuff that humans attach to the bare fact of a person's biological plumbing. More to the point, calling it gender and distinguishing it from the plumbing itself is a recognition of the fact that the stuff we associate with having a penis or having a vagina isn't directly and inevitably a consequence of it. Some of our notions about how the folks who sport a clitoris and labia are inaccurate, wrong, biased, factually incorrect. And some of our other notions are only accurate as a generalization, so having that particular biological configuration doesn't mean having all the associated gender traits.

But for the overly pragmatic, parts is parts. You either got this type of plumbing or you got that type of plumbing. And yeah, beliefs are out there, they exist as things that are real, too, and you can be this way or that way but the world's gonna be this way or that way about it when you do, so that's part of the real world you should take into account. You wanna go against the current, sail against the wind, you should not expect to get very far very fast. That's the pragmatic truth.

Visionary idealism, the mental construction of the world as it really ought to be, depends on a clean slate with preconceived notions bracketed off as much as possible. When it comes time to consider tactics for actually changing to world to make these visions come to fruition, it is necessary to bring back in all the awarenesses that we bracketed off, to examine the real and to study it in detail. But while it's in the foreground of your thoughts, you'll have a difficult time imagining how it could be any different, or assessing within yourself what feels like the natural way for things to be in the absence of pressures pushing you and everything else into different forms.


I do talk with big words, and I write in long sentences and long paragraphs. Putting abstract thought into words is an art form and a challenge. These are not points that are easy to make to people in short choppy sentences and phrases. Our language is utilitarian, reflecting the inherent nature of concrete things, which are self-evidently what they appear to be. Tree. Rock. Knee. Eat. Sleep. Sex. The terms for abstractions tend to be longer words, words we use less often, and they tend to be more vague in their meaning, requiring the use of a bunch of them when one is painting a verbal picture. Ambivalently conflictual relationships. Internalized self-image. Projected and eroticized expectations of gender performance. Patriarchal hegemonic subject-object oppositional dynamics. Etc.

I don't do it to show off my vocabulary or impress people with how erudite I sound. I do it to communicate. To paint the right picture, so that it makes sense. (I'll admit to the ego factor: I do think I'm kind of good at it).


If you only want to converse in sentences that could fit on a bumper sticker, you leave yourself open to hostile reverse-snobby people who like to characterize us as delusional people who think our plumbing doesn't count and who want the world to go along with our delusions. In a limited space and with short attention span, they can claim they make sense and you don't.


—————


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


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



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

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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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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

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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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Personal Style, Presentation and Flair: Patched Jeans

sewing, sissyhood, sex v gender


Presentation is part of gender, because we are social creatures; it's not all about how we identify within our own heads, it's also how we seek to be perceived and treated and interpreted by others.

Unlike a transgender person who wishes to be perceived and thought of as a typical person of their gender, I'm poised on a more precarious and less defined balance beam, not wishing to be perceived as female but hoping to convey that I'm femme. And I don't wish to wear skirts all the time!

One thing that has emerged as a major trademark personal style of mine is my patched jeans. What started out utilitarian -- I had jeans that I liked with worn-out spots and holes in them, and decided to preserve them by patching them -- became a fashion statement in and of itself.


Selfie One:




Selfie Two:





Those were the first two pairs of seriously patched jeans in my wardrobe.


Details of the first pair:

Pair One overview:



Pair One, left leg: a constellation of small patches:



Pair One, right leg: adding some color:



Pair One, rear view:




Details of the second pair:

Pair Two overview:



Pair Two, rear view, showing transferred pocket:




For the next two pair, I added in some freehand embroidery.





Details:

Pair Three, Star:



Pair Three, Left Leg:



Pair Three: crotch -- a patch that blends in



Another view:



Anchor points: solidifying the attachment of the back pockets:




———————


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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Everyone need to explore that question on occasion. In my case, I've spent the last 10 years disagreeing with the transgender "party line" that has developed around sex versus gender -- that gender (how one identifies) matters, whereas sex, if it even exists (instead of just being binary reductionistic rhetoric), is unimportant and nobody's business. "Trans women are women", goes the party line; "trans men are men; and what someone has inside their underpants isn't any concern of yours".

I have dissented with that, saying that, first off, I identify as a male girl, or male femme, and I'd feel just as erased if people started treating me as indistinguishable from cisgender women as I do when people treat me as the same as cisgender men. My lifetime experiences and the specifics of my situation that make me who I am involve not just my sex and not just my gender but the unorthodox atypical combo of the two.

I have said that the mainstream transgender attitude -- although it superficially says that your physical sexual morphology does not matter and shouldn't be the focus of anyone's attention -- it's actually expressing the fear that if someone happens to be woman or femme but their physiology is of the sort that a crowd of random strangers on a nude beach would call "male", then their gender is less valid than if they had the physical configuration that those same strangers would describe as "female". So we should be polite and not pay any attention to the physical structure.

I've said that attitude is fearful and actually sexually conservative, and that what I'm doing is more progressive and radical. I'm demanding acceptance as a femme and being in-your-face about being male of body, not seeking to present as female.



So... about the possibility of being wrong...



What if the route to true sexual equality, and attaining a world where the physical parts you were born with do not matter as far as determining who you get to be, lies with the species as a whole learning to ignore sexual physiology?

What if the route I'm proposing doesn't work -- either because people won't let go of gendered expectations if they take notice of a person's physiological construction or because with an observable difference they'll make generalizations, and even if they aren't the same generalizations we'll be reinventing gender all over again?


Whenever I think about a world where people don't know or don't notice a person's sexual configuration, and are forced to set aside their gendered expectations and just deal with the person as a generic person, I am reminded of the Ms. Magazine story from the 1970s, X: A Fabulous Child's Story by Lois Gould. I regarded it as an adorably cute what-if sort of tale to get folks thinking about sexist expectations and all that, but I have also said that in real life it would mean putting everyone inside burquas and chadors and making the body something that one should never see, and that didn't seem like a healthy situation.

But the transgender activists I'm referring to aren't saying "the body is not to be seen" but rather "the body is not to be acknowledged". That's an important difference. They're saying learn how a person identifies and treat them accordingly and tune out any awareness you might have about the person's physiology.

Is that possible?

I think it's definitely possible at the individual level, possible that this one person or that one person could do so. We learn what is and what is not significant. We live in a culture where it isn't of very huge significance whether one is redheaded or blonde or brown-haired. I can easily believe that someone who doesn't have any better visual memory than I do might be unable to recall whether a person they saw had this hair color or that.

There's a mental process of categorization, in which we encounter a stranger and make some snap judgments so as to have something to go on as far as interpreting them. This describes the worst of stereotyping but it is also, less egregiously, a reliance upon our human skill of pattern recognition. It isn't all bad. Even recognizing a living organism as another human depends on this process. Interacting with someone as an undifferentiated human isn't terribly practical, not when we can narrow it down, not when we're prepared to reevaluate our snap categorization if it doesn't seem to apply after all. Age is important to some extent, as is culture and the possibility of a different language being spoken and a host of other such things. Could we learn to suspend expectations based on sex and enter into each such interaction fresh, with no generalizations?

Perhaps that's not so different from what I'm asking. The trans activists are saying people should learn to not assign anything on the basis of so-called sex, which may not be as apparent and as perceived anyhow. I am saying people should learn of the possibility of gender identities other than the most common for a given sex -- that if they encounter a male person, they may expect masculine, they may expect a man, but should be prepared to re-evaluate if subsequent experience indicates that that may not be the case, and they should know of the other, less common possibilities.

Maybe I'm just splitting hairs unnecessarily with this disagreement. Undeniably, transgender social rhetoric has changed the world, and I benefit. I live in suburbia -- in a northern and socially progressive state to be sure, but in an area that has its share of Republican voters and Catholic (in particular) socially conservative citizens. Yet I go out in public in a skirt and no one says anything.

Is the world substantially safer for a kid such as I was as a kid growing up today? Do I need to establish the specific identity that I conjured up for myself in 1980?

I'm still inclined to think that I do. I don't think that the me that I was at 13, 15, 16, 19, would ever have identified as transgender. Perhaps as nonbinary but that's not sufficiently out there, any more than genderqueer is. And the mainstream transgender approach just strikes me as...fragile. Incapable of withstanding the contempt of common-sense evaluation. I think my approach is considerably less so.

But it's a useful exercise to consider that maybe I'm making too much of a minor distinction in how to express an idea. I'll give it more thought.


———————


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

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


Yeah, let me explain and unpack that a bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


———————

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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———————


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

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


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



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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Our local Green Party chapter recently had Cynthia BrianKate, a transgender and intersex activist, as a presenter / guest speaker.


In the weeks before her appearance, she expressed dismay that last fall I had signed a petition favoring "dialog, not expulsion" of the Georgia chapter of the Green Party. Cynthia BrianKate joins many other trans activists and supporters within the Greens in thinking that the Georgia chapter is unapologetically transphobic and full of TERFs and TERF sympathizers and should get booted to the curb, so why was I supporting these folks who were running to their aid?


I owe Cynthia, the Lavender Caucus of the Green Party, and transgender activists in general an explanation, perhaps an apology. Let's start with explanation.



The Georgia chapter of the Green Party signed or endorsed a statement about women's sex-based rights. I read it. I would not have signed it myself. I felt like it contained language that was insensitive to trans women at best and denied the legitimacy of their identity at worst, depending on one's tendency to interpret dog whistles.

But I'm not a fan of "You said something wrong! You are bad and must be punished! I am absolutely right and you are absolutely wrong and there's no room for discussion" types of stances. So when I was approached and asked if I would support -- literally -- dialog with the Greens, as the next step, not expulsion of them -- I agreed. And (perhaps foolishly) thought I could bridge communication gaps between the parties involved.

That's really it in a nutshell.



Here are some additional details and elaborations.

Why (you might be wondering) would I think I was in a position to mediate between these parties?

I was born male. I’d place the timeframe as between first grade (when I don’t recall any awareness of it) and second grade (when I do) as when I became conscious of being at odds with gender expectations. Specifically that who I was was more akin to being one of the girls. And I was proud of that.

But I never felt dysphoria about my body. I was okay with being a male person, a person in a male body, who was one of the girls and not one of the boys.

And to drop this timeframe into a larger context, I graduated high school in 1977 and came out in 1980. How I identified would nowadays be called "nonbinary" or "nonbinary trans" or "genderqueer", but there was no such word and no so such concept back then; and although I recognized that my situation had stuff in common with the situation of gay folks and also with trans people, I did not find a social home in that community. What community? Trans people themselves weren't really very included with the gay and lesbian folks yet. No one was saying LGBT in the 70s, let alone LGBTQ.

The political people who were saying the most relevant things were the feminists. That double standards, where the same behavior or trait is valued differently depending on whether you're male or female, or where people have different standards of how you're supposed to be and behave, were sexist and wrong. That the attribution of masculinity to male people and femininity to female people was social, not built-in.

So I went to the university and majored in women's studies. Essentially I ran off to join the feminists.

I can't claim that I was fully accepted and understood in that community either, but it's important for people like the Lavender Caucus folks to understand that for most of my life the LGBTQ community wasn't an "us" that I belonged to. It wasn't a place where I was understood and my identity embraced.

Trans people back then didn't include people who didn't transition (or at least want to). At a minimum, if you identified as a woman, you were supposed to want to be perceived and thought of as female-bodied. You were supposed to want to pass.

Nowadays, the "big tent / umbrella" definition of transgender includes people like me, but because of concern for people who can't or don't do a medical transition, the attitude from the tent feels like our genital parts are an embarrassing thing that should be ignored lest they make our gender identity less valid. That makes it still not a completely warm and welcoming home for me, if you see what I mean. I'm not a cis woman, I'm male not female, and my tendency is to be in your face about being both a femme girl and a physically male person.


In my previous blog post, I wrote about how feminists tend to see gender as chains, as constraints. They believe that if we could get rid of sexist expectations and sexist notions, there would be no gender, because being male or female of body would have no social implications as far as how people think of you, or how you would think of yourself. (Interestingly, some of the people who commented on that post dissented to say that only TERFs would believe that, that real feminists embrace gender).


I don't fully agree with this "gender is just bad let's erase it" view, whether it is or isn't a typical feminist belief. I say "not fully" because I agree with it somewhat. Where I dissent is that we -- you and I and all of us -- we live in this world, this social world, and we are affected by gender; there may come a day when gender no longer exists, but before that can happen there first needs to be a world where you can be any physical sex and it doesn't determine your gender, and before we can get to neutral no-gendered-expectations we've got to create some social space for inverts. You can't move directly from a world where male people are boys and female people are girls to a world where being male isn't associated with being boyish and being female isn't tied to being girlish. You first have to confront some male girls and female boys and get to the point of recognizing them as okay people.

Mainstream trans rhetoric may seem at first glance to be there, but it's really not. Instead of saying "There are male girls and female boys and they can be proud of that", it says "If you say you're a girl, you're a girl; if you say you're a boy, you're a boy, and it's not polite to conjecture about what's in people's underpants". And lurking in the shadows of the hidden physical attributes that you're not supposed to conjecture about is the remaining fear that if you have male bits down there you aren't as girl as someone with female parts, and vice versa for the boyish folks.


TERF, of course, means trans EXCLUSIVE. As in "excluding trans women from what we mean when we say 'women'". And this exclusion plays right into that area of sensitivity, making an issue of whether a person was born with a vulva and clitoris or born with a penis and testicles instead. Hardly a surpise that trans activists perceive it as an assault on trans identities.

Is it always?


Trans women are women, period. But is it ever okay to exclude them?


Feminist women often consider people who were viewed and treated as female since their birth to be in a different social situation than people who were initially perceived and treated as male. The latter, they say, have been beneficiaries of male privilege even if they identify as women and are now perceived and treated as women. And, they sometimes also say, we want to organize as the former, as people who have always been in the social situation of being regarded and treated as female in a patriarchal society.

I am open to that argument even if many transgender activists are most vehemently not.

I have to say, though, that in any plural convocation of people who were taking that position, I have found at least a handful of genuinely bigoted intolerant hateful folks. Women who believe people who were born with penis and testicles were also born with a violent nature, a desire to dominate, a predisposition to destroy and kill and subjugate. An evil nature. Women who believe that patriarchy is male people expressing themselves and their natural built-in traits, and that males are the problem. Other feminists in their midst don't call them on it. And they won't embrace me as a feminist nor my trans sisters as women, because of it.

But because I was open to an argument that treats sex as one thing and gender as another -- because I treat them as separate components of my own identity -- I could see some possible merit to the "sex based rights" position, even if it is often voiced by trans-misogynist hateful people.

So for that reason I signed in support of having an actual dialog, and to find out where the Georgia Greens were actually coming from.


———————

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 and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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I often feel like a tomato.

You know that a tomato is a fruit, yes? A fruit is a ripened flower ovary and it contains seeds. I often feel like a tomato in a world where fruits are generally sweet and vegetables are generally savory. I clearly fit in with the veggies, but my fruitness isn't invalid or wrong, I really am a fruit. It would be wrong to measure me against oranges and lemons and strawberries and say "Ewww, this tomato isn't sweet AT ALL, it completely flunks as a fruit!" because I don't aspire to those standards. I want to be measured against the potatoes and onions and kale, where you can see that I shine. But that doesn't mean I want to pass as a vegetable. I'm not ashamed of my seeds. My fruit-ness is every bit as valid as my savory-ness and dammit you folks have got to get over your attitude that fruits are sweet and veggies are savory. You have to accept specimens like me as valid in our own right.


Let's talk about dysphoria for a moment. Author Julia Serano makes an important distinction between being alienated from one's own body structure and being unhappy about other folks' social expectations:

Perhaps the best way to describe how my subconscious sex feels to me is to say that it seems as if, on some level, my brain expects my body to be female...

I am sure that some people will object to me referring to this aspect of my person as a subconscious "sex" rather than "gender.". I prefer "sex" because I have experienced it as being rather exclusively about my physical sex, and because for me this subconscious desire to be female has existed independently of the social phenomena commonly associated with the word "gender".

— Julia Serano, Whipping Girl pgs 80, 82

The common phrase is "gender dysphoria" but in light of what Serano is specifying here, I'm going to replace that term with "sex dysphoria".


Now let's talk about sexist stereotypes, and feminists, gender-critical feminists and even the feminists who nowadays get called "TERFs". They reject sexist expectations and sexist restrictions, you know that, right? Well, even the ones who don't spend their energy arguing against transgender people's identities often find it hard to understand dysphoria. "Oh, I hate to see so many people feeling like in order to be the kind of person they are, they have to reject their body", they will say. "Don't they realize that if we got rid of sexist attitudes, there wouldn't be a different set of expectations foisted off on you depending on whether your body has a penis or not?"

So their ideal world would get rid of those sexist social attitudes, which would mean that if your body was of the sort that gets designated female, you would not be expected to be alluring and seductive, nurturant and sensitive and understanding, verbal and emotional, delicate and able to be vulnerable without severe discomfort. Nor would you be expected to be decisive and authoritative, bluntly-spoken and aggressive, rationally logical and spatial, and bravely courageous in the face of frontal attacks, for that matter.

But that would not fix the dysphoria that Julia Serano is talking about. Do you see that?

So we're talking about two separate things here: sex dysphoria and sexist expectations.

Now follow me, because we're doing to dive right between them.

Check out the elementary school classroom, 4th grade.

Many girls who in 4th grade were happy with and proud of their bodies internalize a lot of social messages — from fashion magazines, diet ads, beauty contests, Instagram and Tik Tok, from their peers and their parents — that they should be skinny and slender and waiflike. And by 8th grade many of these same girls hate their bodies, consider their bodies to be *all wrong*.

From the outside we say "there is nothing wrong with this person's body, the problem is with harmful social messaging that has made her feel otherwise", but that's not how the anorexic herself sees it. We realize that and along with that we realize that we need to provide positive body-confirming alternative messages if we want to make this phenomenon dissipate; we realize that saying "Oh c'mon, girl, you are mentally ill to think that, and by going around repeating that you're too fat you are contributing to the harmful message that's got you destroying yourself" would not be productive, and surely would not be supportive.

I bet you see where I'm headed with this. This is a person who would be okay with her body if it weren't for society's messaging, but because of society's messaging is not okay with her body. And yes, this can happen with gender messaging the same way.

SOCIAL DYSPHORIA is where a person would be okay with their body if it weren't for social messaging — sexist expectations to use the feminist terms — but BECAUSE of social messaging has come to hate their body and to see it as being wrong for them.

This phenomenon definitely exists.

Saying it exists doesn't erase the realness of the kind of dysphoria that Julia Serano talks about. So it has to be okay within the trans community to recognize it, and to not see this as an attack on their trans identities.

Julia Serano ALSO wrote:

Perhaps the most underacknowledged issue with regard to the transgender community... is the fact that many...strategies and identities that trans people gravitate towards in order to relieve their gender dissonance are also shared by people who do not experience any discomfort with regards to their subconscious and physical sex....

— Julia Serano, Whipping Girl pgs 27-28


Neither the feminist community (which often tends to reject transgender people for their apparent rejection of feminist understanding of sexist expectations being the problem, not the body) nor the transgender community (which is often suspicious of any perspective that looks like it might invalidate transitioning) has provided much of a home for folks whose problem is social dysphoria.


I don't have social dysphoria myself. They didn't get to me. They didn't make me reject my body. I'm a proud tomato.


I get to be an activist. I get to tell people that YES your gender identity doesn't have to match your physical sex.

It doesn't make me a transphobic TERF and it also doesn't make me an antifeminist person who is propping up gender ideology. If what I've written upsets you on occasion, check your own privilege as a participant in a social voice that's larger than mine is.


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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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