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I purchased and wore my first skirt not for transgender reasons but for feminist reasons. It's sexist to designate a garment as only for one sex when there's nothing about it's physical design that makes it accommodate one body structure and not the other. I liked skirts, they looked more comfortable than pants in the summer, and they looked fun to wear. And there was no reason I shouldn't wear a skirt if I wanted to, so I did. I wanted to flaunt my attitude towards sexist expectations.

There also were what could be called transgender reasons as well, though. The entire reason I had such a vested interest in challenging sexist expectations was that I'd been one of the girls as a child, growing up, and had retained that history and sense of self up through junior high and never fully stepped away from it.

Being a girl didn't mean wanting to wear skirts or needing to do so in order to feel fulfilled or appropriate. It meant being the way I was; what I wore and what my body was like had nothing to do with it. Girls were more mature than boys as children, more social, less antagonistic and violent, more patient, far more self-disciplined and able to hold themselves up to an internal standard, smarter, better at classwork, more sensitive, and more elegant overall. And I was competing with them, keeping up, proudly their equal. And the boys were an embarrassment, pathetic disgusting creatures for the most part, and I didn't want to be thought of as one of them.

I never sought to be perceived as female. I was proud of being a girl as good as any other girl despite being male. So I didn't crave a purse of my own to take to school or yearn for my own pair of oxford patent leather shoes.

Years later, the skirt thing was a way for me to be back-in-your-face to a world that had gradually managed to make me feel like maybe something was badly wrong with me.

None of this is entirely alien to a 2018 transgender community's view of being transgender. But it was pretty foreign to the 1980-vintage understanding of what it meant to be transsexual. And unlike a person in similar circumstances who did want to present as female, to be thought of as female, to transition to female, my experience mapped pretty comfortably to 1980-vintage feminism. I saw it as a feminist issue and framed it accordingly.

These days I frame my issues as those of a genderqueer activist doing identity politics, so I've had feet in both camps.

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There is political tension between some feminists and some transgender activists. I want to look at that in more detail today.

If you are transgender or are more familiar with a transgender perspective, come along with me for a view from a different window. The way transgender people talk about sexual polarization and the assignment of traits and roles to the two binary sexes is worrisome and problematic to many feminists, because it erases gender inequality (as if men and women were equal, just different) and instead stresses the inequality between cis and trans people (as if cisgender female and cisgender male people were equally privileged, whereas transgender people are at a social disadvantage compared to them, with less power).

Feminists also tend to be uncomfortable with what they see as a certain type of gender essentialism from transgender people. Feminism argues against the notion that there are all these built-in, inherent differences between men and women, whether it be a built-in appropriateness for the wearing of a skirt or a set of behavioral characteristics like being accommodating or flirty or whatever. Transgender spokespersons often embrace the notion that men and women are quite different, that they are different types of people with different ways of being in the world--it's just that some people's physical configuration got them misclassified as one of those two identities when in reality they belonged in the other category. Or, to put it another way, feminists see themselves as trying to tear down the political fence between the sexes, and they perceive the transgender phenomenon as consisting of people who consider the grass to be greener on the other side of the fence, and tunnel under it to get to the other side, leaving the fence fully intact. Transgender paints the world pink and blue. Transgender people appear to celebrate the liberation of the skirt not because guys as well as gals should be able to wear them but because it's trans-affirmative for AMAB people to wear one.

Now let's switch. If you are a feminist, or are more familiar with a feminist perspective on gender issues, let's examine how feminist political behavior often looks to transgender people.

First off, for a person who (like I myself) considers that who they is one of the girls or women despite being male (or being in a body classified by other people as male at any rate), the presenting edge of feminism is the declaration that the female experience is less desirable, although for social-political reasons, not because being female is itself a less desirable condition. Still, that paints transgender women as a political "man bites dog" (or a "cat chases dog") phenomenon: if women are oppressed by men, and the situation female (in all its social aspects) therefore a less desirable situation, why are there people who clearly qualify to be considered as and treated as male doing their best to opt out of it and seeking to be accepted and regarded as women? Well, there are answers to that within feminist perspectives and feminist thought, answers that don't disparage the males (or "people assigned male at birth" if you prefer) who do not wish to continue to be subjected to the situation male; but those aren't the answers that many transgender people encounter when they hear feminists speak about transgender women. Instead, they hear feminists get defensive about this very question, as if transgender people had said to them that there is no women's oppression--see, here are people who could have lived their lives as men but they opt to be women instead. Transgender men, meanwhile, embody what so many people think lots of women would want--not out of penis envy but male-privilege envy. Transgender men, in fact, are often welcome in feminist circles, where they are viewed as female-born people who have chosen a transgender pathway as a coping mechanism for escaping the femininity cage imposed on women. But transgender people don't see this acceptance as a counter to feminist's suspicion and dubiety towards transgender women, perhaps because it is a quiet and low-key acceptance.

Feminists appear to many transgender activists as rigidly committed to binary ideas of power: that the only relevant unfair distinction within the polarization of men versus women is that of power, that it and only it is desirable, that men have it over women, period, end of story, and that therefore no male person or person perceived as and categorized as male can have any legitimate complaint about gender and how gender is set up in our society.

I'll confess that I have found it difficult to enunciate within a feminist context why I have a personal stake in this, why masculinity is toxic to me as a male and why and how it is in my personal political best interests to resist it, as opposed to doing so for chivalrous pro-women reasons. I will tell you that I have found within radical feminism a strong strand of thought that overturns the desirability of power over other people, itself, as a patriarchal notion, but I will also tell you that ordinary everyday feminism as one may encounter it is more likely to come from the more binary "who benefits / who suffers?" kind of analysis, the "culprit theory of oppression", and it does indeed leave no point of entry from which to be a sissy femme male activist against patriarchy.

I don't know if the conflict and friction between feminists and transgender activists is merely receiving more press coverage or if it is indeed worsening. It certainly seems to me to be intensifying. Transgender activists have more social power now than they did decades go when Jan Raymond flug down the gauntlet with The Transsexual Empire; they have labeled feminists who do not regard transgender women as real women TERFS (trans-exclusive radical feminists) and with considerable success have painted them as hateful bigots who need to be shut down, as people who have nothing positive to contribute to the dialog, as people against whom physical violence is deemed appropriate.

I'm not much disposed towards physical violence myself but I find this sufficiently frustrating that I will admit to fantasies of grabbing transgender activists in one hand and feminists in the other and smacking their heads together. Stop it!! We should be listening to each other, all of us. The stakes are high, and this is counterproductive infighting that benefits the status quo. Quit trying to trump each other's victim card. If social liberation is only an acceptable goal for whoever happens to be the most oppressed, we're never going to make any progress. Read each other's material. (And mine, dammit. You can learn from perspectives that differ from your own, and I come to you explicitly as an ally of both but member of neither of your two camps, with my own vantage point).

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Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/50258.html

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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Item: When rallying in protest against yet another incident in which the victims were blamed for their own victimization, one of the oppressed said, "I am so tired of people asking what the Victim could have done differently. It's not the Victim's behavior that caused this. It's the Perpetrator's behavior that has to change! It's the Perpetrators who are doing this, not their Victims!"

Item: When asked about a proposed support group to help privileged people realize the good that they would personally gain from ending inequality and oppression, one of the oppressed said, "I don't feel like We should be giving our energy to Them, supporting Them and nurturing Them in the changes They need to make. That's what We always do, that's always been Our role, devoting Our time and effort into helping Them cope and make Their lives better. We need to give Our energy to each other for a change instead!"

I've participated in both of those conversations, in various forms and at various different times, and I figure chances are good you have, too. In the case of the first item, it's pretty compelling that perpetrators or oppressors are ones whose behaviors are most in need of changing; they're the ones most directly perpetuating the status quo and least involved in doing things that would bring meaningful social change.

It's the second item where things get trickier. If you're like me, you're situated sometimes on the marginalized side and sometimes on the mainstream side of the various dividing lines. Maybe you're female and of a racial or ethnic minority but able-bodied and a US citizen. Or perhaps you're a diagnosed autistic-spectrum person living in an economically depressed and politically repressive nation but you're male and not of a minority sexual orientation or gender identity. So at some point in your life, because your own experiences with being marginalized and oppressed makes you personally sympathetic and politically committed to allying with other oppressed people, perhaps you too have found yourself trying to get feedback about what you should be doing and how you could be doing it better, how to be a better ally and supporter. Yeah, maybe you admit to yourself that you hope for some pats on the back or high-fives for being a relatively good person over here on your mainstream and privileged side of one of those dividing lines, as opposed to being one of the jackboot-wearing sneering oblivious ones who are mostly just part of the problem. But if that desire for approval is self-serving, the desire to check in and get some critical feedback is at least in large part motivated by wanting to do a better job at being a socially conscious and righteous person, trying to listen and stay informed, right?

But most likely you would not be here, reading this, if you had never also been on the less favored side of one of those dividing lines. So chances are good that you've been a participant in at least one or two conversations and discussions in which people on your side, the marginalized and oppressed side, have found it important, essential, and liberating to see the mainsteam established privileged folks as Them, as the Problem, as the Oppressors. Why? Because although they are largely oblivious to what they do, they do hurtful things, and they occupy positions of power that give those hurtful things destructive energy. And because you, you personally and all these other people here in the room with you, the others who share your definitional situation, you didn't start this, they othered you folks first. And so, as a group, you spent years, decades, lifetimes, feeling inferior in the face of a definition of Normal that was devised around Them. You felt apologetic and wrong and in need of changing yourself for not being like Them. Or you felt inappropriate and illegitimate any time you were caught behaving or expecting equal treatment as long as you had this Difference defining you as less than, as not entitled. How could you and your people ever rise up against that without starting off with a rebellious and self-assertive "It's us against them, and we are on our side instead of against ourselves from now on" --?

If they're treated or invoked as absolute rules, the two items are contradictory. They are mutually exclusive. If it is Their behavior that needs to change, and We are agents of social change, we can't focus our energies entirely on ourselves and expect to accomplish what we want to accomplish. We do have to affect Them. We do have to succeed in affecting Them. We do in fact have to succeed in transforming Them into people who are no longer on the opposite side of a meaningful dividing line. As no longer The Problem.

That's not to say that the most important method of having an effect on the privileged isn't, indeed, to become stronger and self-affirmed people. Nor is it to deny that oppressed people do need to turn to each other and devote their strengths to each other.

But once we have done so and have turned away, in large part, from blaming ourselves and embracing this external definition of ourselves as wrong, deviant, inferior, and undeserving of equality, we do need to affect them. And we do need to maintain a mindspace that has room for the concept of those people, the folks who are defined as Them, ceasing to be a Problem. We need to have in our heads the imagined possibility of ourselves winning, which means ceasing to be oppressed. Furthermore, we need to interact with individuals as individuals. Each person among them who is trying to detach from ongoing participation in the patterns that keep us down is a potential ally.

Each such person will continue to breathe air and walk the streets against the backdrop in which people in their majority / privileged / mainstream / oppressor category are still doing the damage, being the Problem. But that doesn't make them not allies, not at the individual level. It occasionally means that their best intentions fall short of being any kind of guarantee against egregiously wrongful individual behavior. They'll disappoint us. It will sometimes seem like a frustratingly bad return on our invested time and emotional energies.

Remember, though, that they represent the locus of change.

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People often indicate that they think I'm doing all this in support of other people's social struggles. I'm not.

People often reject or dismiss what I'm saying because they don't regard me as having any authentic social concerns of my own. But I do.

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I'm not doing this for chivalrous reasons, I'm doing it for my own selfish reasons. I vehemently DO NOT WANT the masculinity thing and all that comes with it. When something is being socially forced upon one, and one doesn't bloody want it, and is harassed and tormented and physically beaten for not accepting it and wearing it and conforming to it, you can call it oppression or you can invent a new word for it—I don't care—but YES goddammit I get to complain about it. It's intolerably wrong. It's a social evil.

It is time to tie some sets of concepts together with metaphorical twist-ties.

First, the zero-sum notion of oppression: that wherever oppression exists, there are the oppressed, who suffer, and the oppressors, who benefit. The sense that we care about social justice for the oppressed but we don't have to concern ourselves about the experiences of the oppressors, who are the evil ones.

Second, that masculinity is the basket of characteristics of males, of men, who are the ascendant sex, the oppressors of women. Because this is a patriarchy. What you get when you twist-tie those two notions together is the sense that males cannot be oppressed as males, and masculinity is specifically imposed upon a person on the basis of being male, hence the experience of being expected to be masculine and being harassed and tormented for not being so is "not oppression" and not something a person can authentically complain about. Oh, if we can toss another variable into the analysis, like being gay, well, being gay puts a person into a category that has been oppressed so now we can care about being bashed and hassled for not being a masculine man...as long as we comprehend it as a mistreatment that exists because the victim is gay.

In early January my blog post was about Oppressor Guilt and specifically addressed the notion that oppression benefits oppressors. I asked people to imagine that they were given the option of being one of the oppressors or not having oppression at all:

Join me in this thought experiment. Pretend I have magical wish-granting powers and I offer you this choice: you can either be the alpha oppressor yourself and have hegemony and power over all the other peoples, with all the benefits and luxuries that that entails, or you can live in a world that is totally without oppression, a world of equality and voluntary cooperation. (And no oppressor guilt anywhere to be found).

I could point out that if you choose to be the oppressor, you lose the moral high ground, even if you're only making that choice in a hypothetical scenario. Because then you're essentially saying that your real objection to oppression is that someone who isn't you gets to be the oppressor, and you want to hold that position. But for the second time, that's almost so obvious that it's not interesting. You didn't choose that anyway, did you?

I was co-posting my blog to the Straight Dope back then, and one person on the Dope replied

I would [opt to be an alpha oppressor], in a heartbeat. I know many others who would as well, I'd say probably the majority of the people I know.

Perhaps I should have restricted the question to people who care about social justice. Either way, though, it is necessary to acknowledge that at least some people would prefer an oppression-free world: they would not consider themselves better off as oppressors than they would be if they lived in a world that didn't have oppresion. That's sufficient: oppressors could have real justification for wanting out of the overall situation, for their own selfish non-chivalrous reasons. There is no excuse for trivializing or dismissing their intense desire for a non-oppressive and fair world, if that's their political sentiment, or for deciding that only those who are identified as the oppressed are entitled to complain and to seek change.

My first serious attempt to be a social activist about this sissy-hating coercively masculinizing society took the form of trying to connect with the radical feminists and to join them in seeking a nonsexist world. It made so much sense, so much self-explanatory obvious sense, that I didn't really look into other options. I set off to become a women's studies major in college, and prepared to present my case and explain my personal take on it.

But I was mostly assumed to be there for chivalrous reasons. I found other males who were supportive of women's issues. I went looking for more intense and fervent males who were more wrapped up in it, and found increasingly apologetic males fervently pleading guilty to our part and our participation in perpetuating patriarchy. I interacted with the women, my colleages and my professors, and found a lot of women happy to see men caring about women's issues and a few women who didn't want men to be movers and shakers even in a minor way within their movement. I found some gay rights activists who had connected their oppression with the larger picture called patriarchy. But I did not successfully explain why and how I was here for my own reasons, to contend with the specific things the patriarchy had done unto me.

Chivalry is not popular among feminists. A voiced concern for the fragility of women was used to restrict women from experiences and opportunities, and the various attempts to revere women as having a special and superlative nature led to pedestals and gilded cages. Chivalry is not about equality. It is, if anything, a somewhat fetish-toned fascination and valuing of a noble difference. It can be creepy and objectifying and no matter how effusive the praise for the people in the noble category, it may not benefit them.

The political chivalry of people becoming all wrapped up in seeking social justice for some other downtrodden group is also a little offputting and worrisome, and for that reason many white people in the late 1960s were told that they could not play a large role in black people's struggles, that if their concern were real they should go back to white communities and fix racism there. And with that history already established in American social-justice corridors, the more radical feminists were the least interested in men trying to do leadership things. And even the act of speaking, of putting experiences and concerns into words and defining them as one's issues, is a bit of a leadership thing.

Let's pick another notion to twist-tie into this bundle: the image I've used several times in this blog and elsewhere, of liberal progressive people behaving as if they had been issued a set of index cards with all the categories of marginalized people they need to concern themselves with listed on them. And how abrasively hostile they can be (and historically have been) to folks whose identities aren't (yet) on those cards. What's that all about? Well, there's a difference between that notion that a people should be free from oppression and the notion that a person should be free from any inconveniences or irritations. And face it, not everyone is adept at making a social analysis on their own. But this attitude is also influenced by the notion that there are oppressors afoot, people utterly undeserving of our sympathy because they're getting away with stuff already, as beneficiaries of the oppression of marginalized categories of people they don't belong to. So it's related in a big way to the "Who is Most Oppressed Sweepstakes" phenomenon.

Patriarchy is a social system that intrinsically depends on a masculinizing process. In other words, a social system that is rotten to the core and hurts everyone everywhere is rooted in part in that exact process, of forcing males into this mold. Don't tell me I benefit from what is being forced on me. I'm not politely declining it out of concern for the unfairness of it for other people, I'm selfishing shoving it away from me because I. Don't. Want. It. I'd rather be dead. I would risk hostility and retributional violence for the opportunity to speak against it. I have risked throwing away my entire life by dedicating it to this one single endeavor, making it the purpose of my life. Not because I owe it to the world (I don't) or because I, as a male, wish to make restitution for what my sex has done (even though I do) but because this is personal, this is my vendetta against what was done to me.

Final concept to tie in my twist-tie: repositioning. Saying what I came to say within the context of feminism didn't work because I was perceived (inaccurately) as participating chivalrously. But if one way of explaining my situation to people doesn't work, I find another.

I am genderqueer. The things I describe and make complaints about are things that happen to genderqueer people. It's my own cause, something I care about for my own reasons. Meanwhile, genderqueer people are oppressed as a part of the larger phenomenon called patriarchy. If you oppose patriarchy, consider me an ally. But also consider yourself informed: I have nary a chivalrous bone in my body. I am in this struggle because it is my struggle.

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Some people prefer for books and movies to feature characters who simply and nonchalantly happen to have an LGBTQIA+ identity. They say they're tired of the never-ending parade of movies showing LGBTetc people as victims, tired of portrayals of us always playing the victim card. Dissenters say it's misleading to portray happy happy gay people (etc) having fun, all divorced from social problems or any evidence of being marginalized.

Marina Vidal, the protagonist of A Fantastic Woman, is no victim. She faces a tougher and more transhostile everyday life than Ricky does in Boy Meets Girl, but this is no Boys Don't Cry. Santiago filmmaker Sebastián Leilo includes and shows us the violently hateful attitudes and ingrained double standards, but pits against them a savvy and willful main character, played by Daniela Vega.

The film was shot with exquisite appreciation of texture and lighting and color, and it's beautiful to watch. There's also a good soundtrack, used as a musical background tapestry rather than as auditory cues to tell us what to feel and when to feel it. The performances are direct and spare, with reaction shots understated; the people in Leilo's movie are mostly self-contained, each in their own compartmentalized lives even as those compartments collide.

Marina and her older lover Orlando are in the process of setting things up to live together: she's moving into his apartment. Her bags and boxes are still on the floor. Marina rises from their bed to find him mentally unfocused and having trouble breathing, and urges him up and out of the apartment, but she miscalculates his clarity of mind and leaves him momentarily braced against the wall while she locks up, and he turns and foolishly starts to descend the stairs by himself then falls, bouncing down the steps. He dies in the hospital.

Identities are not merely the selves that we carry around inside us; identities are also projected onto us by all the other people who perceive us. Outside the treatment room into which Orlando has been wheeled, Marina is perceived as a non-family member with limited connections to him, then as a creature of dubious sexual identity who is illegitimately using a feminine name, and soon is being peppered with invasive questions by a police social worker who apparently suspects that Orlando was abusing or exploiting Marina and that Marina retaliated in self-defense and killed him.

When Marina calls Orlando's family and reports his death, she is informed that they will take care of the arrangements. The medical staff have been thanking her for bringing him in but telling her there's nothing she can do here. Marina recognizes that it's a good time to leave the institution; she anticipates that further interaction with any of these people will be unpleasant. But the police come after her to detain her for further questioning. And she's right: it isn't pleasant.

When life keeps smacking you in the face and subjecting you to indignities and mistreatments, you get to the point that the next smack doesn't catch you by surprise. Marina is not shocked by what she is subjected to. She is cold and self-possessed in constrained disapproval, and sometimes provoked to anger, but her hurts are a private thing. At the moment the part of her that's hurting is the loss of Orlando. She sees his ghost, haunting her at the edges and around the corners of the places she passes through.

Most of Orlando's family are among the hostiles. Younger male relatives are violent and hurl homophobic invective, calling her "faggot" and "fudge packer". Orlando's brother wants the apartment back immediately and lets himself into it, invading her home without her permission and taking her dog. Orlando's ex-wife is cordial but states that of course Marina will not be attending the funeral services, it would not be appropriate, the family must be protected from such as her. Only the brother Gabo speaks to her as if she were a person, and makes some attempt to apologize for his family, but his tolerance does not extent to a willingness to oppose the family's wishes.

Orlando had given the dog, Diabla, to Marina. Diabla had been in the family but no one had opted to be the primary dog-caretaker — allergies or other issues got in the way. When the dog is taken from the apartment in her absence, Marian is spurred to determination and an escalating anger, and she confronts the family over it.

Daniela Vega gives us a dignified and emotionally grounded Marina. Bad things happen to Marina but she copes, survives, and thrives in her successful life. Hers is the power to endure. She's invincible.

In Spanish (spanish-language title Una Mujer Fantástica), with English subtitles.

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One of the reasons white suburbanites in the segregated suburbs get a rush of fear when they see a handful of black people in their neighborhood is guilt. "They must hate us, they must be bent on revenge and inclined to do violence, because I sure would be if the things we've done to them had been done to me".

Oppressor guilt of this sort is of very dubious benefit to the oppressed. Yes, it's possible that such guilt motivates people to try to be more fair, to set aside their prejudices, some of the time, but what I've observed is that the fear of retaliation gets expressed as a doubling down of oppressive reactionary tactics. The white suburbanites vote for "law and order" politicians and ask for police protection, and the police doing the protecting then do the things that gave rise to Black Lives Matter, stopping people for the infraction of Driving While Black and interacting with them as active threats to the community.

It should not come as a major surprise that right-wing conservative politicians ride the wave of these kinds of fears, identifying an out-group as the Culprits who are to blame for things not being the way they should be. Jews, the natives, Catholics, immigrants, the insane, gay people, atheists, someone who is already a marginalized people who can be pointed to as the epitome of what's wrong with today's society, some group that we can blame. This kind of appeal resonates with fearful oppressors whose oppressor guilt makes them fantasize a horrible day of vengeance that they need to be protected from. If those scary people can be branded a menace, we can hate them with justification and feel less guilty as we trod them down.

But it's not just the conservatives, surprisingly enough. The left is also really really fond of the idea of having a culprit to blame. They use a different model, of course: rather than identifying a powerless outgroup, they target the most privileged and powerful. Rich white heterosexual able-bodied men. Now, faced with the choice of designating already-marginalized members of an out-group as the perpetrators or instead designating the rich straight white guys, it seems compellingly clear that the conservative folks are doing a much more horrible moral wrong in their choice of a social scapegoat.

But that's almost so obvious that it's not interesting. What's more interesting, I think, is a closer exam of the left's designation of Culprits. Let's go there. Instead of preaching to the proverbial choir about the evil wrongness of the conservative right in blaming powerless out-groups for the ills of society, I'll perhaps be able to challenge you a bit, are you game?

You know the drill: those privileged straight cis white guys are the culprits because they are the oppressors; oppression benefits them, right? They have power, so if they wanted things to be any different, things would be different, and they aren't, so it's totally their fault that things are unfair and unequal, yes? And since they won't change things without pressure, we just have to light the fires and then hold their damn feet to the fire, ain't that so? They bloody well are the culprits, then, aren't they?

Join me in this thought experiment. Pretend I have magical wish-granting powers and I offer you this choice: you can either be the alpha oppressor yourself and have hegemony and power over all the other peoples, with all the benefits and luxuries that that entails, or you can live in a world that is totally without oppression, a world of equality and voluntary cooperation. (And no oppressor guilt anywhere to be found).

I could point out that if you choose to be the oppressor, you lose the moral high ground, even if you're only making that choice in a hypothetical scenario. Because then you're essentially saying that your real objection to oppression is that someone who isn't you gets to be the oppressor, and you want to hold that position. But for the second time, that's almost so obvious that it's not interesting. You didn't choose that anyway, did you?

Let's look at your choice. You're saying you see more benefit to living as equals, that it would be more to your personal advantage to live in a world that didn't have oppression in it. I am in complete and utter agreement with you.

Well, unless you think rich white cis able-bodied guys are biologically different in their brains or something, you just realized that they don't benefit from oppression. Let me say that again for emphasis: rich white privileged cisgender English-speaking able-bodied male folks, the folks with the greatest possible number of privileges imaginable in our social system, do not benefit from oppression. Oh, they benefit from being in their social location and not a far more marginalized social location, sure, no doubt about that, but they are not better off than they would be if they lived in a world that didn't have oppresion. You said the latter was preferable to you. Extend that to them, the awareness that it would be preferable to them, too.

It is important to understand that our social system works a lot like a Parker Brothers© Monopoly™ game: the winner of the game isn't winning the game because of being a horrible selfish person, but because the rules of the game reward being a selfish person who bankrupts all the other players on the board, and even if everyone tried to play nice and be less competitive while playing Monopoly, the game still rewards the most competitive person who acts in that fashion. It's the rules of the game. Not the personality characteristics of the players, but the rules of the game.

I will not at this point elaborate on why and how we have ended up playing a social game in which competing to marginalize other people while concentrating advantage into our own hands happens to be the objective, but we have.

This is a blog about being genderqueer. The relevance of all this is that oppressor guilt is not our friend; straight cisgender people are not our enemy, nor should our communication with them be geared towards shaming them and holding them personally responsible for our situation. Most of them don't understand what we have to go through, except to the extent that we explain it and they choose to listen. Even then they may not get it. And it may threaten them, threaten their existing ways of understanding sexuality and gender and so on. They're going to ask dense and annoying questions. Often. Their fears will drive them to distort what we've said and twist its implications into ridiculous interpretations. It's going to continue to piss us off.

But honestly, I don't think they dreamed all this up one day in the primordial paleolithic Boys' Bathroom and then imposed it on us. They don't have to put up with what we have to put up with (and I myself don't have to put up with some of the stuff that many of you do, to be honest), but although the suffering of marginalized people is worse, I think we need to move beyond the simplistic temptation of designating a culprit. Ignorance is enough of an enemy.

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In my Jan 16 blog-entry ("The Limits of Radical Androgyny") I promised to cycle back to an interesting subset of people in society, the folks who dissent from what we gender activists say — but not for the usual reasons. Instead, these are the ones who say that of course gender variance should be socially acceptable, but they claim that they don't see any sign that it isn't now or hasn't been so, and that we make mountains out of molehills, that there's just no social problem there to speak of.

Oh, if you give examples, they may concede that there some background attitude that we have to contend with, but they'll say it's no worse than, say, the pressure on people to be right-handed. Easy to ignore.

I'll have to admit I've often found such folks frustrating to deal with. What's up with these infuriating people, who say that the social forces we've struggled against all our lives are no big deal? In contrast, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the mindset of the conservative gender-orthodox, the unapologetic prescriptivists with all their fears of horrible things happening if we don't maintain and shore up gender norms and keep men men and women women and so on.

Well, after listening to some of the dismissive people over the course of 35 years of gender activism, I think I've noticed some patterns that may help to explain them a bit, although, as ever, these are reductive generalizations that may not apply to everyone.

PATTERN ONE: Defensive Denial

I've never been in the military and have not spent much time being shot at, but I am told that if you are part of a combat detail and have to attain some objective while people are shooting at you, the best thing to do is to tune it out as best you can and do whatever tasks you have to do with your full attention on them.

In graduate school, my friend Vivian spoke once about crossing a dark campus parking lot at night and how no one ever bothers her the way many female students reported being accosted and harassed. She doesn't move the way a person moves when they are wary and worried about something happening; she moves with complete self-assured confidence, a middle-aged butch lesbian that nobody is going to mess with. Of course, being a middle-aged butch lesbian is no guarantee against unwanted creepy attention in a parking lot, but because her image of herself is so thoroughly that of a no-nonsense person who would not tolerate such things, she broadcasts that self-image, it is manifest in the way she walks, the way she looks at people, the way she holds bags and car keys and so on.

I've deployed a similar technique in a different setting myself, especially in my younger and more volatile days. I would be determined to sit across from some damn school official or organizational bureaucrat and have a conversation, and I discovered fairly early on that if I presented myself to the receptionist and waited to be given permission to go on back, I'd be waiting a long time or would be told that the person in question was not willing or interested in meeting with me. But if I strode past as if I worked there myself and was very busy with whatever mission-task occupied my attention, that would often work to get me past the gatekeeper and would nearly always suffice once I was in the corridors I didn't properly belong in. There is a lot of authority conveyed simply by acting like you know what you're doing and that you belong where you're at.

This is all defensive denial, in various forms. The tricky part can be remaining aware on a detached intellectual level that the risk really does exist, but without dwelling on it and becoming functionally aware of it.

Gender socialization pressures are abstract and complex, and for all of us they are a constant unmitigated backdrop. Defensive denial, which is a great coping mechanism especially for anyone who is somewhat gender-atypical, can become an unconscious habit that I think some people engage in without any awareness, a sort of second-tier defensive denial in which it erases its own tracks from the mind.

PATTERN TWO: Signal Lost Amidst the Noise

If you step out your front door tomorrow morning and find yourself face to face with a grizzly bear, you may make a number of pertinent observations in the first couple moments, but none of them is likely to be the bear's sex.

That's a facile example, in large part because we aren't sexually turned on by bears. Well most of us aren't. At least not actual genuine non-human ursine bears at any rate. We take notice of each other's sex and make a big deal of it in our heads, generally speaking, because sexuality and sexual attraction is a big deal to us, and, for most people's sexuality, the sex of other people is a highly relevant consideration.

But to a less extreme degree, a person who tends to tick off other people's awareness of oddity and atypicality in assorted other ways may have an effect on them where they don't notice or care that that person is also gender atypical. There are many patterns of expected behavior, especially socially interactive behavior, and one interesting effect of being in violation of one or more of those expected patterns is that observers, having already seen and assessed the individual as peculiar in this way and perhaps that other way, take less notice of yet more departures from normative patterns. Or they conflate them into their mental impression of that person's already-perceived oddities.

A person from a foreign culture that isn't often encountered in some environment is seen as foreign and exotic; if that person is also exhibiting atypical gender behavior, the atypical gender behavior is often perceived as part of that person's foreign exotic ways and not as a phenomenon unto itself.

So such a person — a person who is experienced by others as atypical in a variety of other ways — may indeed not experience much social pressure about conforming to gender norms.

PATTERN THREE: Obsequious Denial

Some people who cave to social pressures to be a certain way pretend to themselves and to others that they have not, in fact, allowed social pressures dictate to them how they should be, and then deny that the social pressures amount to much of anything, since by denying the latter they can more easily deny the former as well.

This is also a pattern I've seen from time to time. A resident of the Bible Belt attends church despite having been an agnostic before moving there, and denies having been made to feel that they won't be accepted among their work colleagues and that the neighbor's kids won't be allowed to socialize with his children. He has some reason or rationale for why he has decided to go to church on Sundays, but it isn't social pressure, nope, haven't experienced any of that down here, really. I could stay at home and work on my lawn or watch TV, nothing to prevent me from doing so, I just decided it's kind of peaceful to get away from my daily routine and the stained glass windows are pretty...

When it comes to gender variance, the people I've seen evincing this behavior are most often folks who aren't very far-flung from the official gender norm for their sex, just variant enough that they may have to conform a bit more than they wish to in order to be spared the remarks and glances and other reactions that gender-variant behavior tends to elicit.

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Basically, movements like ours tend to have two goals: to reach out to others like ourselves, in the belief that if you're like us it's easier to have the support of other similar people than to be isolated; and to do social change, to modify how we're treated by others, to stop the mistreatment or oppression, to change the law or the social structures, so as to make the world safe for ourselves.

Today, I want to focus on the second priority, the social change fork.

I don't know what your experience was, but I first ran into hostility, directed towards me for being different, when I was a kid in school. I found it startling, shocking; I hadn't expected it and didn't understand it. Why were these people so hateful and mean?

Looking back on it with the additional benefit of hindsight and a lifetime of thinking about it, I'm aware of a couple of things that escaped my notice in 4th grade:

• To a lesser extent than what they were displaying, but still definitely present within me, I was hostile to THEIR differences from ME as well; mixed in with my anger and hurt was some outrage: how DARE they, I mean LOOK at them, they're pathetic, something's wrong with them, how can they be that way instead of being like me and then on top of that be so wrongheaded as to think I'm the one who deserves to be made fun of? They should look in a mirror, yeesh!!

• They had a notion of what my differences meant. It was all distorted and badly wrong in a lot of ways, and it was shot through with contempt and ridicule, and basically didn't reflect any meaningful understanding of me, but they apparently THOUGHT they understood what it meant to be like me, and they were largely in agreement with each other.

We tend to form our notions of dogs in large part from our experiences with dogs, but our notions of hippopotamuses almost exclusively from what we've heard about them and how they're depicted.

When it came to male-bodied people (or people perceived by their classmates and teachers as male) who act like girls and share the interests of girls and so forth, I was often the first direct experience for many of the other kids in 1st and 2nd grade; they hadn't formed a lot of attitudes yet, and although there was some of that basic xenophobia thing — "eww, why are you like that, you're different?!?" — it didn't get bad until later.

The boys and girls who had class with me talked about me to other kids, because it's an item of curiosity, something to be described with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. Their description of me and how I act was formed from their experience of me, although of course shaped by how my behaviors seemed to them, and would not have tended to include much of any self-description by me of my own behaviors and how I saw them.

Within a couple of years, most kids my age had HEARD OF people like me, partly from this process (where kids describe someone that had been in their class who was like me) and partly from things they picked up from TV or things their parents or other adults said. Girlish boys were held up to ridicule for them before they met me, and still, in many cases, before they'd had much actual contact with anyone like me. So they observed a few things, sufficient to make them think "ooh, he's more girlish than any of the other boys in class, let's torment him, it'll be fun", anticipating that I'd rise to the bait and prove my boyish masculinity to their satisfaction... and when I didn't, and didn't try to conceal how I was, they had their first live one, one of those sissy boys they'd heard about. The circus was in town. Come see the weirdo!

This is the situation for marginalized minorities in a nutshell. Mainsteam people (e.g., cisgender conventionally binary people in our case) know about us primarily from what other mainstream people have said in the process of describing us to each other. There's a certain amount of not-very-friendly xenophobia ("ewww, you're not like me, why aren't you like me?") that probably can't be attributed strictly to social structures or "isms" of various negatively discriminatory sorts, but they're heavily fertilized and fed by what's inside the package of shared social attitudes towards us, the stories that the mainsteam have told themselves about us, and yes, in many cases they are also reinforced by institutions, social structures, systems that perpetuate our situation.

Laws can be overturned, policies can be set, and systems, especially formal systems governed by rules and whatnot, can be modified to make room for us, and to make those kinds of changes, it has proven useful and effective to appeal to mainstream people's sense of justice and to point to our injuries and the damages done to us and the unfairness and unnecessary nature of these hurtful things.

But formal structural rule-based aspects of society are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Attitudes may to some extent follow the path initially set by court decisions and institutional policy decisions, but for attitude changes to become pervasive, there has to be understanding, not just compliance.

Race — I dare say this as a white-skinned American who has never been on the marginalized side of racism — the concept that racism is wrong is easy for racially mainstream people to understand. People are born with one set or another of certain ethnic physical characteristics that we categorize as "white" or "black" or whatever; the people thusly categorized are otherwise not inherently different, and treating them on any level — institutionally, personally, culturally, etc — as if they WERE inherently different is wrong, immoral, unfair, has caused great pain and suffering. OK, in actual practice embracing and enacting a racism-free world is not quite as easy or as simple as we once hoped, but as a CONCEPT it has turned out to be something that people could grasp sufficiently well to make overtly racist attitudes socially unacceptable and viewed as reprehensible. Or possibly it only looks that way to me because it's 2015 and the long rough slog it took to get to this point stretches far back into our cultural past.

At any rate, gender and sexual identity, in my opinion, are largely NOT understood clearly by the mainstream folks. I think we're getting a decently generous batch of politically correct compliance and parroting back to us of the most common phrases likely to appear in newspapers and magazines about differently gendered people and our experiences, but it is accompanied by a lot of perplexity and pushback from people who resent being pressured to parrot those phrases when it makes no sense to them, they don't get it. They have some attitude, some annoyance, and some lingering xenophobia ("why can't you just be normal, why do you want to be a special freaking snowflake?"), but not such a high prevalence of real hostility and contempt so much as bewilderment.

Me, I'm not a 4th grader any more. I'm sure of myself and my gender identity, I am not plagued with nervous self-doubts about my difference, I understand how the pieces of the puzzle fit together, and I'm willing to be in the circus sideshow. Yeah, come see the weirdo. Ask your questions. Wanna hear my story? I'll tell you how it is, what it's like. Don't worry about offending me, I've heard worse, I assure you. Interact with me. Think about this stuff. I want you to understand. The more you mainstream folks understand the more you will hold attitudes that I want you to hold because they just plain make sense, not because everyone will point fingers at you and tell you you're an insensitive privileged cisgendered boor of an asshole who should be ashamed of yourself.

That is how I view our activity. I'm glad we're winning at the policy-change level, but the current rising trend towards correcting people for microaggressions and castigating them for triggering behavior and otherwise trying to roll out social change by demanding compliance before understanding, that doesn't appeal to me.

Even the phrase "social justice" is getting on my nerves lately. The word "justice" is a heavily loaded term. We live in a punitive society. The systems that dispense justice largely do so by identifying evildoers and perpetrators and violators and wrongdoers, and then punishing them, as well as or sometimes instead of stopping them from continuing to do so. And they are all of them systems that rely on authority, coercion, power over other people, to lend force to their implementations of justice. Oh, I understand anger, all right, and the gut-level desire to see the shoe forced onto the other foot, oh yeah WE shall coerce YOU and designate you as a perpetrator of our oppression and FORCE you to stop it, punishing each offense, identifying it as a social misdemeanor against us, connected historically with how we've always been treated up to this point, and if it makes you feel disempowered in the process, yay, so much the better, assholes. But it's morally wrong, it's tactically wrong, it's factually wrong, and it's, dammit, politically wrong.

I don't believe in the Culprit Theory of Oppression. I don't think the white cisgender able-bodied male people gleefully plotted everyone else's plight in the primordial paleolithic boys' bathroom and then subjected us all to this. I also don't think people intrinsically benefit from having power over other people and therefore are unfair beneficiaries whenever someone else is disempowered and silenced and marginalized and oppressed. Furthermore, if it were true, it that really were the case, YOU CAN'T FIX IT since if it is intrinsic, you are, by definition, saying that you would oppress if given the opportunity to do so; that anyone, ever, with the opportunity to oppress will do so; that anyone set up to be in a position of protective power to enforce equality will use that power to oppress, instead, because, well, it's intrinsically beneficial to them to do so.

It's a measure of how marginalized (ha! so to speak...) I am within our own activist communities that I just got booted from a Facebook group, the Genderqueer, Agender, Neutrois, Genderfluid, and Non-binary discussion. The precipitating event? Someone had posted a link to an article about Triggering. In the article, the author, Gillian Brown, said "Triggering occurs when any certain something (a 'trigger') causes a negative emotional response", and then went on to explain the necessity of preventing triggering from occurring, and the necessity of stepping in to protect people and keep the space SAFE by reminding people to put trigger warnings. I replied with some derision: by that definition, we would all have to preface anything that might cause a negative emotional response in anyone with a trigger warning. It's a silly definition. More to the point, this is simply not how I think we best make the world a safe space in which to be genderqueer people. We make the world safer by making ourselves understood. We make the world safer for ourselves by stepping out, being brave, being seen, letting people point and ask questions, by risking hostility and derision, by being brave enough to SHOW that we aren't going to be intimidated by the risk of hostility and derision, by not being ashamed of who we are.

It didn't go over well, apparently. (I can only conjecture; my membership in the group evaporated without any private message and I can only assume they decided I was a trigger and made people in the group feel unsafe).

OTHER NEWS

I haven't blogged in an embarrassingly long while. A big part of it is that I'm metaphorically holding my breath while an agent is reading my entire manuscript, trying not to become unduly hopeful that she'll represent me, but not succeeding in that attempt. I can't help it. I may be setting myself up for a horrible letdown but I am full of excitement and joyful daydreams.

I have, however, at least succeeded in not just sitting motionless in these endeavors. I've continued to send out query letters. And as a matter of fact, I got a request for a partial (a request to read the first 50 pages) from a query letter and therefore, for a couple weeks at least, for the first time ever, had two agents simultaneously expressing interest and reviewing my writing with the possibility of representation. Unfortunately, this second agent soon wrote back on June 3:

> We were impressed by From a Queerly Different Closet: The Story of Q's
> holistic approach to the underwritten topic of growing up queer.
> However, we struggled to engage emotionally with Derek because of the
> lack of specificity in prose. For example, it was difficult to
> understand why, in middle school, Derek found boys' behavior to be
> "bad" (rather than merely displeasing or disruptive), when Derek had
> not expressed a desire to be "good" or why Derek was ostracized
> growing up without knowing how exactly he was teased in each school he
> attended. Without such basic details, it was difficult to get a sense
> of Derek's personality and essential conflict. Ultimately, this meant
> that we couldn't completely fall in love with the story.

That was such a thoughtful and personal rejection letter that I did something I never do in response to rejection letters: I wrote back!

> Hi, and thank you for the most thoughtful rejection letter I've ever
> received!
>
>
> This is the type of feedback I was hoping to get except, of course,
> accompanied by something along the lines of "please address these
> concerns and send us modified chapters" instead of "not quite right
> for our list".
>
> I don't suppose y'all liked what's there well enough to want to work
> with me on it to see if I could address some of these concerns? (It
> can be hard for me as the author to "see" only what is on paper
> instead of seeing through it to the story that I already know —
> especially after editing it to a smaller size).
>
> If not, well, thanks again for such a personal and encouraging reply.

No subsequent reply though, so onward I move, on my still-neverending quest for a lit agent.

Current Stats:

Total Queries (Story of Q): 562
Rejections: 524
Outstanding: 37
Under Consideration: 1

As Nonfiction, specifically, total queries: 373
Rejections: 343
Outstanding: 30

As Fiction, total queries: 189
Rejections: 181
Outstanding: 7
Under Consideration: 1

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As promised, a review of my talk at Life in Nassau / Nassau LGBT Center in Plainview.

It's hard to believe that was over two weeks ago. I'm still in the process of recovering from bronchitis infection. Two days before the presentation I started having some early symptoms and I was quite worried that the cough (it started with a cough) was going to take away my voice before Thursday night; I spent Thursday afternoon drinking hot herbal tea and gargling with salt water and nodding or making hand gestures or monosyllabic grunts as replies to anais_pf... but it worked out well, I had the energy and the voice to do it and, frankly, I nailed it!

I did a pretty decent job of maintaining eye contact, and no one complained of not being able to hear me, which was a relief since I'm very quiet-spoken and people often DO complain about that when I address a group.

As I explained earlier, I used a lot of material from my November 14 blog posting, including the three illustrations I used there, printed onto nice sturdy 24 inch x 36 inch posterboard suitable for ongoing use if I get the chance to make the same presentation elsewhere.

The main, most important diagram, was this one, the one I refer to as the distribution diagram:

Orange is male, green is female, left is masculine, right is feminine. I described the distribution graph as being what you'd get if you hurled a mango snowcone at the wall and then followed up with a mint snowcone that landed somewhat to its right.

The main departure from the blog posting was the development of representative characters. I first introduced the room to "Dan", conventionally masculine male over on the left side of this distribution graph. Then I introduced his girlfriend "Karen", a conventionally feminine female over on the right.

With the two of them as examples, I sort of fleshed out the experience of having your own experience match up with cultural expectations, showing how for the two of them there wasn't any need to have different terminology, "SEX" and "GENDER", and why they would find it confusing and unnecessary to make the distinction, even as tolerant friendly non-judgmental people.

At the same time, I made the point that the distribution diagram shows that there always WILL BE orange particles over on the right and green ones over on the left — because any time you have a scattered distribution like that, with overlap between the two populations, those kinds of points will invariably be present.

Then, from there, I described myself, and using myself as an example, described the situation of being one of those outlying points, a gender invert, in my case a feminine male person. I described myself in much the same way I'd described Dan and Karen, fleshing out the experience, but now I could show how messages about male-bodied people would describe such people as masculine (which I am not), and messages about feminine people would describe such people as female bodied (which I am not), and by doing so I illustrated why it was so useful and necessary to distinguish between SEX and GENDER.

A couple people who don't normally attend Life In Nassau, but who had met me through a separate ongoing Queer Munch, came to hear the presentation, and they along with a couple Life in Nassau regulars who also have alternative gendered experiences, asked questions at the end and elaborated on a lot of the points I'd been making, which added depth to the talk.

One of the more telling snippets of feedback I heard was from someone who does not consider herself gender-atypical but who has been exposed to the general concepts of being genderqueer and so forth: "I really liked it that your talk was not all full of instructions about 'Don't ever say this' or 'You should never do that'... your talk was all positive and accepting of people with all kinds of gender identities and differences. Most of these things I've gone to before, it's been all about what we have to be careful about in order not to offend people or oppress their sexual identity or whatever. I liked this a lot better".

Good! I'm not trying to position myself or those in my situation as fragile victims of evilbad normal folk. I'm convinced that if they understand us, they'll adjust their behavior accordingly simply from due consideration for our circumstances. Or enough of it that when they don't we'll sass them back and that will be sufficient. Personally I'm not interested in playing the victim card nor in whipping out my scars and playing "my oppression trumps yours".

I've begun negotiations to present at SUNY / Old Westbury, where I was a women's studies student in the late 1980s, perhaps to some womens' studies classes or perhaps to the independently-run women's center on campus. I also want to connect with Identity House and/or other LGBTQish centers in Manhattan to begin exploring the possibility that I have content that they're not currently presenting, and hence would make my presentation there.

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