Feminists and, for that matter, other women of a certain age, fondly recall the concept of the "tomboy" and are sometimes inclined to reflect on their "tomboy" heroes. The author points out that it's a concept largely in decline, and this book is a contemplation of that notion and what might be lost if it disappears.



I myself am on several Facebook discussion groups that examine gender, and among those (to the dismay of some of my trans colleagues) I participate in a group devoted to dialogue between "gender critical" feminists and folks who ascribe to gender politics such as LGBTQIA+ concepts. The dismay is because a lot of trans folks regard the gender-critical contingent as being so closeminded that they are not worth the effort, and I will admit that the group is definitely dominated by "gender bad, feminism good" anti-trans people. These are people who would celebrate femininity-rejecting females who still call themselves women but see trans men as jumping the fence instead of helping to dismantle the fence, and their views of trans women are hostile, seeing them as invasive males pushing into womens' spaces where, as far as they're concerned, they totally don't belong.

This book, Tomboy, does not come from that perspective. But many gender-critical feminists will find themselves nodding in agreement with Davis when they read. And I'm inclined to think that they should pay attention to how she's positioned her arguments in this book: she's reaching a wider audience.



Both Sides, Now

Lisa Selin David, the author, very openly embraces the general concept of "the more options, the better" as far as how to deal with gender, and she is quite emphatically not anti-trans. But her viewpoint is not rooted in transgender experience. She's approaching gender from a non-trans tomboy vantage point.

I believe we should see representation of trans kids, non-binary folks, and masculine cisgender girls in the media, and that we have the knowledge and infrastructure to make room for them all

She conjures up the notion of a person who conceives of themself in a way that sticks up a hand and holds off cultural-social notions about how someone of their morphological sex ought to be: "I'm a girl and I like playing ball or with boys so those things must be okay for girls"

Davis celebrates the world in which being trans is an option, where it's a path away from simply being told "you are doing it wrong" based on the physiological equipment you were born with. But she mourns the decline of the concept of the tomboy, as an identity one could claim, be seen as, live within.

Davis early on dives into the question of built-in versus socially created differences, and identities, including male versus female in general and then the notion that trans people's gender difference is built in. In contrast to the many authors who stake out a turf in favor of "it's all biological" or "it's all social", Davis is cautious and even-handed, exhorting us to consider all the possibilities. She does point out that we should consider the social conditioning of any researchers evaluating these matters, since their own sociallly-supported assumptions can play a substantial role in how research is designed and how the results are interpreted. But just as one might be on the verge of deciding that this author is really on the side of social causation for all such observations and apparent differences, she declares pretty emphatically that there are, indeed, compelling reasons to believe there are built-in differences, drawing on Debra Soh's research.

Davis oscillates: she provides a set of studies and evidence about biological differentiation, natal hormones and brain structure and whathot, then after a couple paragraphs devoted to that, introduces other studies that appear to contradict those findings, and then gives consideration to how the variables are operationalized and defined — what constitutes "masculine" as an outcome and how is it not also socially determined? As a technique, it drives home that we aren't really in a position to lay claim to any certainty.

Davis describes "tomboy" as an identity embraced and often praised in childhood but with the expectation that the girl will grow out of it. A big part of this, for both external observers such as parent and for those who are the tomboys themselves, is the inferior status of girls and of femininity — that it is less than what the boys exhibit and who they are. Those gender-critical feminists I mentioned above, they tend to perceive femininity as imposed, artificial, composed of slave stuff, how to be a person who is useful and supportive to the people who matter, at her own expense.

Davis acknowledges the existence of sissies — males who are the mirror-image of tomboys — and acknowledges that we have it harder. "There is no positive term for a boy version of a tomboy, not sissy (derived from sister) or Nancy boy" The ambivalent acceptance of tomboys versus the near-universal hostility towards sissies is, in fact, exactly what drove me to conclude that I was not cisgender. Not that I wanted to transition. Not that I should have been female. Not that I wished to be perceived as female. But that as a sissy, who I was was so socially unacceptable for a male person that it ended up constituting an entirely separate gender identity, that I am totally not a man, was not a boy, that despite being male (which I do not reject in any way) who I am has very little to do with my anatomy and everything to do with how and who I am, which situated me among the girls growing up, and in a more complicated way with the women now.

Davis describes the 1990s and the rise of a different approach to gender: a very gender-polarized world but one in which the girls had serious Girl Power, as represented by the PowerPuff Girls, a world in which embracing pink and unicorns and sparkles could be combined with having power and being heroes and being decisive and emphatic and having one's way. This was different from being a tomboy, and Davis spends a lot of time questioning the embrace of things considered masculine as the pathway to female empowerment, since it embraces the notion that anything considered feminine is inferior and anything masculine superior.

This is the anti-tomboy form of girl power, and it raises the additional complicated question: if power isn't dependent on being boy-like, what is the attraction of boy stuff for those female people who find themselves oriented to it? It's different in situations and cultures where there are (still) no mechanisms or routes for people considered and viewed as female to possess power. David describes girls in Afghanistan and the occasional possible role of being dressed as, and behaving as, a boy, in that culture if one's family had had no boy, so as to dis-embarrass the family for not having a boy child. The attraction of the role here is more clearly power, opportunities utterly unavailable to those perceived and treated as girls.

This is, of course, how those gender-critical feminists view transgender men. That they are doing it solely to attain social power denied to people viewed as women.

Ultimately, David outlines the same perspective that I've embraced for quite some time: that there may be (and probably are) differences between male people and female people, in our brains and in our behavioral patterns, but to the extent that there are, there is more variation within each sex than the amount of variation between the sexes, so there are a whole lot of outliers for each sex who more closely resemble the descriptions appended to the opposite sex.

There is a sort of social funnel, which both Davis and I myself have spoken of: a sense that a person in society learns "this is how a person like you should assert your identity", not limited to the baseline starting identity of "I am a boy" or "I am a girl" but with a ready script available for those who think "I am a boy who is not like the other boys" or "I am a girl who is not like the other girls", complete with a prescription for what one is supposed to do about it. In 1796, being a sissy or a tomboy didn't come with even the remote possibility of a medical transition, so that was not on the table as an option. In the hypergendered 1990s, on the other hand, there was no model for being a tomboy that one could embrace readily; but there was a model for being a transgender man and a set of options for how one could transition.

Davis focuses a lot on dress, the social signaling device that informs the world of which category one falls into, and discusses how tomboys often dressed as boys. Oddly, she doesn't tend to discuss hair, in a world where cutting one's hair above one's ear and otherwise short and close to the skull has for a long time been likely to cause one, especially as a child, to be categorized as a boy and not as a girl. And when Davis does get around to mentioning hair, it receives equal billing with shoe choices!



If They Go Against the Flow, Must Be Built-in...Right?

We may see PFD [Pink Frilly Dresses] as a gender constraint imposed upon children but see the rejection of it, in favor of tomboyism, as something that comes from within. But we don't know if tomboys are doing their own thing or conforming to the stereotypical expectations of a different sex

At the core of oh so many online arguments about LGBTQ identities is the matter of whether or not our difference is built-in. So many people believe that it is. Some of them appear to me to be embracing that notion based on the (in my opinion misguided) belief that if everyone sees our differences as built-in, they will have to accept them, and therefore us, whereas if they think any degree of choice is involved — and they tend to subsume "social" into "choice" — people could say we chose this and therefore deserve what we get. My recurrent reaction is to invoke the Nazis and the US Southern racists, who definitely believe that the people they hate (or hated) have built-in differences, and it totally didn't keep them from, or is currently keeping them from, being hateful and murderous.

But, yes, on many a message board or forum, I have encountered people saying "It must be built-in, being trans, because there's no social pressure to be trans, there is only social pressure to be normal for your sex."

That's not true, on so many levels.

First off, as Davis points out, the very act of identification is an act of selective autoconformity. To identify as one of the girls is to embrace every factor or observed tendency that tends to reinforce one's identification with the girls, whereas any factor or tendency that seems to make one other than one of the girls becomes something that one wishes to avoid. Likewise, and reciprocally, for one who identifies as one of the boys.

That totally fits my own experience: I was not free of gender, I totally fence-hopped, not wanting to be seen and thought of as one of those boy people, so any ancillary or peripheral thing I did that seemed to slot me in with boys, if it didn't matter to me one way or the other, I'd avoid it. Whereas any similarly trivial thing that provoked the observation that girls did that or that I did that like a girl, yeah, I'd embrace that. So that's social. I was responding to social cues, not biological ones. Davis points out that nonconforming people — whether trans or cis-but-GNC like tomboys — are all doing that, as part of asserting their/our identities.

I think it is useful and important to realize that the overwhelming vast majority of the concepts and thoughts and notions that are inside our heads are not formulated by ourselves as individuals. We aren't puppets mindlessly absorbing social instructions, but what we actually do is choose from an array of socially shared ideas that other people also understand when we pick them and express them. Only a tiny handful of our own ideas are literally our own, never before expressed (as far as we know, at any rate), never before given a name, and thus requiring us to name them and then describe them. And even then, on the rare occasions when we do that, we still have to tie these new ideas to existing ideas, and most likely that's how we formulated them to begin with. If that were not so, we'd find it spectacularly difficult to express them to anyone, ever.

Our species is mulling over gender, thinking it over, and that mulling-over process is taking place in our individuals minds and lives and expressions, and it is something very much still in process.

Tomboy, Lisa Selin Davis, NY: Legacy 2020


—————


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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



—————


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


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



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

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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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Index of all Blog Posts

Sometimes people ask me what it was like to come out genderqueer in 1980, when there was no term for that.

Most often, these questions take one of the following forms:

"How is that possible? I don't understand. You came out as something you'd never heard of, that didn't exist yet? Isn't that just refusing to be put into any box and saying you're an individual?"

or, mostly from people who've read the book --

"Well, in your book, it's like you know who you are, but you're still going around unsure, and you keep figuring it out whenever something new happens, but it takes, like, forever before you believe it. What made it finally click?"


So let me tell you about this really vivid image that came to me when I was right on the verge of coming out.

CW: Dark imagery with self-harm activities

I was on a bus, and it was circling through neighborhoods, different parts of town, you know, to let people off where they belong.

For a long time, different types of straight people were getting off, all excited and chattering away with each other. Sometimes couples holding hands, sometimes in clusters. On this block would be athletic guys and cheerleaders, let's say. Then at the next stop it would be educated-sounding people with briefcases, flirting the way people do in offices. There were different ethnic parts of town, where the cultural differences in dress and behavior were different from the previous stops. I don't mean people were being delivered to ethnic barrios and ghettos but rather that they were getting off to join in cultural expressions that called to them, and where they would be accepted. Then it's like there were different sexual attitudes or viewpoints, like a stop where everyone was dressed in leather and carrying paddles and whips, then one where everyone was holding Bibles and dressed in Sunday suits, and one where the people were accusing each other of cheating and were all angry and yanking on someone's hand or trying to hit each other, but still getting off together.

Then we seemed to come to the gay section of town. Nice dressed guys with an earring and a bandanna sticking out of a pocket, saying clever things as they got off at one stop, then the next stop had muscular guys in skimpy clothes, and at the next stop several guys in drag vamping and sashaying, then some couples holding hands and being sweet to each other.

Then lesbians for a few stops, a cluster of cute perky women with pool sticks high-fiving each other and laughing at some kind of in-jokes, then some menacingly tough gals slouching their way to the door, a handful of academic women in serious conversation...

All this time I'm happy for all these other people as they get off, because they're at home and going to events and situations that make them happy, and we all get to have that, right? and life is good, diversity is good, you know?

And the bus starts letting off trans people, in my head somehow I know that's who they are, people who have transitioned or are in the middle of transitioning, going out... not into trans neighborhoods, but transphoric ones, where they'll be accepted and meet nice new partners and friends and associates.

By the time the bus has finished making those stops, some with louder partying people and some with quieter, more serious folks, the bus doesn't have many people left on it, and I'm getting uneasy and wishing we'd hurry up and get to my stop, the place where people like me get off.

Because, before, there were bright lights, streetlights and storefronts and traffic lights and lit up businesses and people's houses and all, but now it's mostly dark out there. The bus stops and some people shuffle to the front, talking to themselves and gesturing with abrupt jerky motions. We go around the corner and there's barbed wire and broken glass everywhere, it's some kind of industrial part of town, like old warehouses, big buildings with no windows. At the next stop someone all hunched over and bent goes down the aisle, rubbing at their crotch with one hand, masturbating in public, and holding an open bottle of vodka in the other. I watch out the bus window to see someone else getting off the bus who suddenly takes out a handgun and shoots themself in the head as the bus pulls away.



Clearly, this is all wrong, I must have missed my stop, I have to start over.


So it's like instant replay. I look longingly at some of the nice hetero groups as they get off, but no, even though I'm a male person and my attraction is to female people, I'm not like them. I grew up being one of the girls. One of the churchy girls makes eye contact and smiles kind of regretfully. I watch some of the femme gay guys and how they seem comfortable and confident. Being femme, being sissy, means I've been targeted by homophobia along with them, but I don't belong there either. I'd really like to follow the lesbian pool player with the jaunty denim jacket and the little leather cap, but she shakes her head.

I watch the trans people at the next few stops, seeing them descend the stairs. I wish I could follow them. They've been riding the bus for a long time and they're celebrating. But this isn't a neighborhood I can live in either.


Yes, I know how I am, but I don't know what it makes me. I could put it in words. Watch. I don't even have to say anything out loud, it's as if people can hear what I'm thinking, and I can hear them the same way. Simplifies things. "Wait", I 'say' to the last group of well-dressed trans women. "I was always one of the girls too. Never wanted to be like the boys. I just want a girlfriend, but I don't want to be a boy".

"Well you look like a boy. We could give you some tips if you want."

"But I'm not female, I'm a male girl"

The trans woman glances at her friends and they slowly shake their heads. "Nobody in these parts is gonna get that". They get off together.


I could put it into words, but there's nobody to say "Oh, yeah, I get it, that makes sense to me", let alone "Yeah, welcome home, you're one of us".

There's almost nobody left on the bus once again, and the ones who are, they don't look so good, and there's no lights outside, and I don't like this... what's going to happen to me?



It wasn't easy to believe I should get off the damn bus in the middle of nowhere, in the dark. With no community. It wasn't easy to stop going back and rehashing all the identities that didn't fit, the stops where I didn't belong, in hopes that I'd somehow missed something, somewhere.

But eventually I had to.

That's what it was like.




———————


Do you want a broader sense of what it was like?

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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Kitten Robe

backstory, sewing, violence, sissyhood, insinuendos


I was unsure about whether I'd end up blog-posting about my robe project. Wondering if it wasn't more than a bit off-topic, you know? But then I got into a conversation with someone who'd attended the same schools as me, initially discussing shop class but that got me to thinking about how home ec was required for girls only when I was in junior high.

So yeah, learning how to sew from a pattern on a sewing machine is gendered. Sure, there are tailors and other male-bodied folks who sew, but you could make that case for any activity, including vamping in sexy lingerie. And people in my gender-atypical FB groups often post selfies showing themselves modeling or posing. So why not?

Also, there's a scene in my book where my mom teaches me how to make a shirt from a pattern when I'm 18, and I make this brilliant red-and-gold paisley shirt, and then about a year later I'm wearing that shirt at a party and get beaten up, with a lot of references to me being sissy and probably queer and therefore that I'd had it coming. And I hadn't really ever gone back to sew from a pattern since then, not until now.

I wore out my old summer bathrobe (it was hanging in tatters) and what with me being at home due to Covid / unemployment, it made sense to do a creative project, so my partner (who is quite adept on the sewing machine) proposed that I make my own. So I picked out a fabric and she helped me select a sewing pattern and I was soon ensconced in chair, pinning and cutting and turning that pile of cloth into a garment.


The fabric arrives:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2617_sm.jpg

Separating the pattern pieces:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2620_sm.jpg

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2618_sm.jpg

Our dining room table repurposed as a working surface:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2625_sm.jpg

Cutting the fabric as per the pattern pieces:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2629_sm.jpg

Stacking the cut pieces on the back of the couch until needed:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2630_sm.jpg

Pockets: the goal here is to have the print pattern on the pockets merge exactly with the underlying print on the robe front:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2633_sm.jpg


https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2634_sm.jpg

Pinning in preparation for sewing the pocket down:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2648_sm.jpg

Belt Loops:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2652_sm.jpg

The sewing machine: not fancy but portable and functional:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2653_sm.jpg


Now just lay down a stitch in a straight line...
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2657_sm.jpg

Not too bad!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2664_sm.jpg

Finished seams:
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2661_sm.jpg

It's starting to be a robe!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2662_sm.jpg

Close to the edge...
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2669_sm.jpg

Sleeve!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2677_sm.jpg

Finished product!
https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2678_sm.jpg

https://www.genderkitten.com/WS4/ah3files2/Robe/IMG_2680_sm.jpg


———————

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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I’ve recently read a couple books that both fall loosely under the rubric of coming-of-age / coming-out stories. Neither is a new release but they were recommended to me and sat waiting on my “to read” pile.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson, John Green and David Levithan (Penguin, 2010).

A lot of lesbian and gay lit offerings are effectively romances, and romances tend to emphasize the romantic relationship (hence the designation), and end happily ever after (HEA) or at least happily for now (HFN). Although Will Grayson, Will Grayson is in part about coming out and having that first sexual-romantic connection, it’s actually not a romance in the conventional sense. The emphasis is on friendship and loyalty among friends; the romantic relationships described in the book end up being in the background. This book portrays the tensions within an ongoing gay-straight friendship and the complexities in a formerly romantic-sexual relationship between the exes who still care for each other.

The “gimmick” of the book, if I may call it that, is that two boys of the exact same name take turns as the story’s narrator. One Will Grayson is gay but not out yet, and hasn’t had any meaningful sexual experiences as of the start of the book. The other Will Grayson is straight but similarly inexperienced (he’s rather introverted and has embraced a philosophy of never drawing attention to himself if he can avoid it). The authors handle the back-and-forth tradeoff between the two narrators by having one Will’s chapters all in lower case while the other uses normal start-of-sentence capitalization. It works.

The storyline and the two narrators revolve around central figure Tiny Cooper, “the world’s largest person who is really really gay”, also “the world’s gayest person who is really really large”. The exuberantly flamboyant Tiny is a theatrical creative. I coincidentally just now read a news article via a link within a Facebook group about how many gay men feel marginalized within the gay community over body image, especially the notion that to be successful in love and sex and socialization, a gay male needs to be neither skinny nor fat but perfectly sculpted instead. (It’s a complaint that mirrors those made by straight women about mainstream society). So it strikes me as healthy that we have here a heroic and popular extra-large gay person.


My Razzle Dazzle, Todd Peterson (iUniverse, 2015)


This is a period piece where the action takes place just a few short years before my own coming-of-age experience (and hence the events in my own book). Todd Peterson is just about the right age to have been my babysitter when I was a child. There are a lot of events and specific descriptions I can readily relate to as a consequence: the girls jumping rope on the playground and what it was like to play with them, the boys and the specific ways in which they were hostile to both girls and sissies, the “feel” of the school hallways and classrooms. Also, for that matter, the later career in software development, although I didn’t get into that as early in my own life as Todd Peterson did.

There are other elements of the story that are quite foreign to me though, in particular the phenomenon of roller derby, the experience of competitive skating on banked tracks and so on. Todd Peterson made the transit from enthusiastic fan to eventual team member of the Bombers, and his sense of accomplishment and belongingness among the skaters is as much a journey of identity and self-actualization as his coming out as a gay person. This is something that’s often not well-explained, that a marginalized identity on the basis of gender or sexual orientation tends to be a prominent factor in a person’s identity, but not to the exclusion of other things that may be developing concurrently in that same person’s life.

As with Will Grayson, My Razzle Dazzle alternates narration, this time between the current-era Todd Peterson who is reminiscing about his coming of age years, and the Todd Peterson he was as a child and young adult. The tradeoff this time is handled by having the historical reminiscent Todd Peterson written in the third person, while the modern Todd writes in the first person. And this works well too. The overall impression is that of Todd the author sitting in a comfortable armchair and discussing the events of the previous backstory chapter and their impact on his life overall. It gives him a way to theorize and make sense of those events and how they shaped him.

I do note that My Razzle Dazzle is yet another “exhibit a” for my discussion of gender inversion and sexual orientation, or, more specifically, why people identifying as gender inverts as I do are likely to be males attracted to females or vice versa. Todd Peterson doesn’t make a distinction between being, or being perceived as, feminine or sissified, on the one hand, and being gay, attracted to other males, on the other. In an early chapter he describes playing double dutch with the girls, turning the rope and doing his own jumping in turn, and then being harassed for that by the other boys. There is, of course, no reason why playing jump rope with the girls means that one is attracted to other guys, or why having sexual fantasies about other boys would make a fellow feminine. But Peterson doesn’t say this or explore this distinction. And why would he? The people around him don’t make make such a distinction! Sissy means gay to them, so in accepting himself as a gay male, Todd Peterson looks back at sissy characteristics and interprets them as traits of a gay male child. Similarly, in a later chapter, he muses about the possibility of coming out to his family and one of his friends points out that he crosses his legs “like a girl” and from this and other such cues and expressions says “they may already know”. Because of this phenomenon, the people I suspect are most likely to identify as gender inverts will be sissy-femme males whose attraction is not towards other males (because those that are continue to identify as gay guys not as gay gender inverted guys), and similarly so for butch-masculine female folks (because the butch gals who are lesbians tend to conflate their butch attributes with their lesbianism rather than seeing it as a separate component of marginalized identity).

One notable exception to that is Jacob Tobia, whose Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story is definitely a gender-inversion testimonial, a description of being femme that is definitely not conflated with sexual orientation. I reviewed Sissy last year.

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My book is scheduled to come out March 16 from Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon for pre-orders (paperback only for the moment).

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I've uploaded my 1982-vintage unpublished book, The Amazon's Brother, to my theory web pages.

This was my first attempt to put these ideas into writing and reach people. Have an effect on the world.

Well, actually it wasn't my first. The first attempt was handwritten and was scribbled down in excitement, much of it written in the middle of the night. It didn't go over well; the most tangible outcome of that was being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.

So it's more accurate to say that The Amazon's Brother was my first serious attempt to say these things carefully with a considered effort to make sense to people.

The first half of it, titled "Sissyhood", was -- like my current book, GenderQueer -- an attempt to use my own experiences as an "Exhibit A" example. The second half, "Patriarchy", was social theory.


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I'm still plugging away on the second book to be extracted from my autobiographical tome. This is a complete rewrite; the original text of the autobio is not directly usable, unlike the portion I used for the first book, so I just reference it for notes and reminders. With the scene that I wrote yesterday, I'm up to 96 pages, which should come out to be roughly a third of the final manuscript.

I'm a participant in an author's group where we bring up to 1800 words' worth of our work-in-progress and read it out loud to get feedback. That's helping immensely, not just for the direct advice but for the overall sense of connecting to an audience and hearing that yes, they find the story entertaining and engrossing.

Plotwise, I'm at a point where my main character (that's me, of course) is in the first year of women's studies classes, a college freshman, successfully making an impact with professors and connecting with some of the other students, but hasn't yet been able to explain the whole "male sissy" thing in such a way that people understand what these social issues are all about.

In the second year I will show him (i.e., me) getting established on campus as an outspoken political type, with a reputation mostly associated with militancy about pyschiatric rights and homelessness, and known for being that guy who is into feminism. He (i.e., me) also gets a romantic interest! The second and third year together should be no more than another third of the book; the first year section is longer because it has a long retrospective backstory portion and has to do a lot more initial setup.

The big challenge all along was whether I could manage a sufficient balance between complex intellectual ideas versus interactive personal stuff with conversations and characters and all that. So far so good, I think.



By the time of the events in this story begin, I had come out in 1980 as a heterosexual sissy, a person with an identity that was different in the same general way that gay & lesbian and transsexual (see next paragraph) people were understood to be different, but, well, different from those identities. I had even written a book by 1982, The Amazon's Brother. But I was very isolated; I wasn't connecting with anybody who understood WTF I was talking about and I had no one reading what I'd written. I hadn't succeeded in getting a publisher interested.

The scene that would later be called the "LGBT" community did not include gender variance back then, not really. It was all gay rights. I viewed gay people as allies (particularly lesbians who were likely to be feminists) but not really comrades in the same cause. Transsexual people -- yes, that was the word in use back then, nobody was saying "transgender" yet -- were people who transitioned by getting operations and taking hormones, and there was no sense of other kinds of trans people who didn't want to align their physical sex with their gender identity, so I didn't see myself as fitting in with them either, aside from which their presence in the community was mostly just hypothetical. They were so thin on the ground number-wise that a person did not actually encounter them at community centers and so on; officially there was probably starting to be some inclusiveness, some mention on fliers about them as part of what gay and lesbian centric organizations were about, but really it was all gay and lesbian, and mostly gay guys for that matter.

I hitched to New York to become a women's studies major in college. (The book's backstory section covers how I made the decision to do that, and my adventures getting there). I figured that the things I wanted to talk about -- that the expectations for people of a given sex were socially created, not built-in natural, and that the intolerance for people who were different was sexist -- would be right on topic for the women's studies classroom.

And besides, my head was deeply into feminist theory by this point anyway. I felt like the whole way society is set up, its overall values and structures, is a direct consequence of how gender is set up, that society is a machine and it runs differently depending on how gender gets configured. And feminist theory, especially radical feminist theory, made the same claim, that this was the political axis around which all social issues revolved. Not class, like the socialists believed. Not race, like the 60s activists had mostly believed. This. And that insight, incidentally, is something I still find missing from most gender discussions even to this day -- we do a lot of identity politics about who is marginalized and oppressed and unfairly treated, but not so much discussion about whether global warming, the military confrontations and economic deprivations, or the buildup of religious intolerances and so forth are all the way they are as an outcome of how gender is socially organized on this planet.

The trajectory of this book will bring my main character (i.e., me) to the limits of the role that a guy can authentically play in women's studies and in feminism, just as he's getting an academic article published and burning his final bridges with the graduate school department and leaving without a PhD to go figure out some other way of approaching all this.



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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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As a sissy femme male, I'm quite qualified to talk about the whining thing. When males complain about masculinity being imposed on us, it's always seen as whining. Compare to female people speaking about how femininity is foisted upon them: anger is among those things femininity denies to women, and to step outside of feminity as they do is to be seen as erupting in furious anger. But anger isn't outside of masculinity. Whimpering and asking for sympathy solace and understanding is. And so it is inevitable that we're perceived as whiners.

But to an extent everyone who raises their voices to complain about a social issue is viewed as whining. Around us are always people enduring the same thing but not making noise about it, and around us is an entire society in which the social issues we speak of are not new. If others can endure it and it's been endured for decades or centuries, who are we to expect it to change on our behalf?

I've had various friends who grew up in Jewish or Black households telling me about how it was for them growing up. A common occurrence was being put in their place by their parents, being told that they had a lot of nerve complaining about whatever they were complaining about at the time, when their life was so easy compared to the life of great-aunt Rachel or your grandpa's uncle Raphael. He was born a slave and made to work in the hot sun and shipped in chains to the market when he was 12. She was marked for extermination and hid from soldiers and eventually caught and sent to the concentration camp and starved and then gassed to death in the showers. Admittedly, my friends' complaints to their parents were often about being required to clean their rooms and being denied permission to attend a weekend party with their friends, but if you extend the logic of their parents, people are just whining if they complain about racism or antisemitism today because they aren't property in chains or the target of an explicit genocidal pogrom. That's ludicrous.

Social justice discussions shouldn't be about whose oppression-scars are ugliest and most traumatic and dismissing the insufficiently injured people's complaints as unjustified whining.

We do admire the tough survivors. The woman who shouldered her way into a men-only world and always had to prove herself better to be perceived half as good, and outlasted them and thrived there. The middle-class suburbanite confronted by a would-be mugger who upsides him with her purse and whacks him with her cane resulting in him yelling for help. The fifh grader who knees her would-be abductor in the balls and calls 911 while he writhes on the ground. The lesbian in graduate school who describes crossing campus at 1 AM and approaching a cluster of young men gathered close to her car, only to see them scatter as she strides close, exuding "don't fuck with me" confidence. The gay femme on the subway who responds to threats and harassment with a loud and entertaining ridicule that has the whole car applauding and the belligerent harassers slinking away.

But the fact that some people do indeed go up against pervasive unequal treatment and don't let it stop them doesn't mean we as a culture don't need to stop the unfair unequal treatment. Presumably no one responds to the story about the brave fifth grader by saying "Oh, we don't need to protect children from sexual predators and abductors and abusers, they should be able to handle themselves like that girl did".

When I'm accusing of being a whiner, I'm often reminded by my accusers of my various social privileges. I'm not perceived as female and I can safely walk with no real fear of assault, threat, or harassment. I'm not exiting gay bars in sight of bigots weilding crowbars. I'm not put in a position where I can't pee in any available public bathroom without someone calling the police. What has a sissy male like me to complain about?

Well, let's see, I do get let in on the homophobic violence. It's mostly better the older I get but as recently as last month I had a pair of young male belligerents asking me if I were a boy or a girl and then calling me faggot. Then there's the social isolation, that's always a big one. My existence is tolerated but I never quite fit in. Like so many other Different people this is at the core of my experience. In particular it has been a problem throughout my life to negotiate sexual interaction, courting and dating and finding someone to be in a relationship with and all that. Oh, and I do face discrimination in hiring and promotion and similar differential treatment. Not because I am directly perceived as a gender invert and discriminated against for being in that category, that's true, but because I am perceived as pathological, as impaired or otherwise not normal.

Some people would reply to that list by saying that the gay bashing is something I should be protected from, but that the world does not owe me dates or sex, and that I'm not socially entitled to a sexual relationship. Yet for me, it's the latter that was the dealbreaker as far as just silently and stoically coping with what the world deals out to me. I was able to come to terms with the intermittent violence and random hate. It was like bad weather; I tried to be prepared and if I got caught, well I'd dealt with it before and survived. But being left out in the cold and never have the connection that I craved? Devastating. Go figure. Each person has their own scale of tolerable versus intolerable offenses. We should listen to each other and put down those litmus tests for deciding who has a legitimate social issue and who is just whining.



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