"We shouldn't call it 'homophobia', that's misleading", my Facebook friend writes. "It's not like those haters out there are hiding from us with their teeth chattering and worried that we're gonna get them. The word should be something like misogyny for hating women, what would that be, misgayism or misqueer, or an 'ism' word, but not a word that makes it sound like they're scared of us the way people get scared of heights or cats or something".

But although I've seen this sentiment quite a few times, there doesn't seem to be any consensus emerging about what else to call it, so 'homophobia' is still the word that's in use.

Besides, I don't think it's entirely wrong to think of it as a phobia. As being about fear.

I've got a scene in my book Within the Box where Derek is at risk of being locked up as a dangerous involuntary patient despite not having done anything threatening to anyone. He finds this bewildering.

But he's always found the anger and hostility bewildering, too. People so upset just because he has behavior patterns that are more like those of the girls, that he acts like a girl instead of acting like a boy.

But then he turns the question to a different angle:

What if they felt threatened by me? I never did anything to hurt anyone, but I broke some unspoken codes of conduct, how boy children are expected to behave, how other boys like us are supposed to be, how one’s students can be expected to act. If somebody doesn’t act the way you thought they would, you end up not having much confidence about your sense of what they might do next.

And of course if there’s a right way to be a boy child student, and we all know what it is, we’re secure in thinking we know how it’s supposed to be, but if there’s one who isn’t like that, then either he’s wrong or our thinking is wrong. Our thinking includes the notion that it matters, having everyone being the way they’re supposed to be, so there isn’t even any room for ‘he isn’t the way he’s supposed to be but it doesn’t matter’. So that’s a different kind of threat, but yeah, that too.

This is actually about sissyphobia, since the provoking behavior is gender noncompliant behavior and not same-sex attraction. Not that the hateful fearful violent people were making that distinction.

I do come to the topic of homophobia partly as an insider and partly as an outsider, being a heterosexual femme. I have had my own fears that could be considered homophobic fears, and I have been on the receiving end of the violence and hate that may be partially fear-driven too.

So what's so scary?

Girls and women have a significant excuse for heterophobia. Decade after decade they've gone on marches and addressed classrooms, trying to get a cultural consensus that "no means no". That it is not tolerable that just because someone is interested in having sexual contact with you, they might impose it on your whether you want it or not.

If there were a similar significant risk of gay people pushing their sexual attentions onto people who didn't want to have sex with them, violating their "no", sexually assaulting them, I could clearly see that that would be a legitimate source of homophobia. But I've never had anything like that happen to me, I've never had any of my friends or colleagues tell me it's happened to them, and the overwhelming majority of the cases where same-sex sexual contact has been imposed has been ostensibly heterosexual male people calling another male homosexual and making intrusive sexual contact while angrily yelling that this is what the victim of the violence obviously wants. I had variations on that theme take place in junior high and high school but mostly it was confined to threats and verbal assaults and the destruction of personal property like books and clothing and whatnot.


Then there's the specter of somehow being stalked by "being gay", as if the sexual orientation itself were somehow predatory and involved in chasing people down and converting them against their will. This is something that needs to be distinguished from the notion of a person crossing the line and imposing themself sexually. It's usually painted as a threat due to the difficulty of negotiating a good heterosexual situation. Sort of like hungry people at a restaurant being barred from getting the food they want, so they're threatened with the prospect of settling for something else that's more readily available.

The cisgender version of heterosexuality has very polarized rules and roles. Obtaining a string of heterosexual encounters with a wide range of different partners is something that is perceived and treated very differently when one is female than when one is male. Sex is portrayed as a conquest, as something that the male person makes happen and the female person says "yes" or "no" to, and to say "yes" too often or too easily obtains for her a set of unpleasant labels and epithets. So sex is set up as an adversarial contest of wills and he wins if he makes sex happen. Therefore it is against that backdrop that same-sex opportunities are positioned as a threat: "You're such a loser that you can't conquer any female partners, therefore this is all that's available to you".

That's a pretty hollow threat though. One might face the prospect of being a loser and failing to secure heterosexual contact with any female people, but unlike the hungry person in the restaurant, sexual appetite isn't the kind of imperative that one dies from absence, and there's autoerotic release available and nonsexual friendship and companionship.

But another form it takes is the fear of being perceived as gay. What's interesting about that is that the most emphatic and noisiest homophobes are nearly always males, but as I just discussed, the ensconced roles and rules of cisgender heterosexuality cast it as the boy-role to make sex happen. So why would it matter particularly if a lot of female people were to perceive one as gay? The suspicion here is that it's actually mostly a concern about what other male people think that's the driving force in this fear.


Of my own fears, my own homophobic responses and hangups, the one that it would be most logical for me to have would be the fear of being perceived as gay and harassed and violently attacked for it. That's certainly happened a lot in my life! But my reaction has been indignation and outrage, and I haven't been much inclined to modify my appearance or behavior to make the queer-bashers less likely to think I'm an appropriate target.

I have at times in my life worried that female people in general might dismiss me from consideration due to thinking I'm gay. That's in part because I'm not cisgender. I'm femme. I'm girl. And I'm very alienated by that whole cisgender heterosexual expectation that as the male person I'm the one who's supposed to be trying to make sex happen and wear down a female person's resistance and reluctance and all that. That totally doesn't fit who I am or how I want to be with someone in a sexual or romantic relationship or encounter. Through most of my life, I've held onto the hope that women would find me interesting and sexually fascinating and would do things to make sex happen between us, that they'd choose me and communicate that to me.

But in the long run, faced with what was painted as a pretty binary choice between being thought of as femme and gay or being thought of as masculine and cis and straight, I decided of the two, being considered a typical boy creature was the worse of the alternatives. When my article "Same Door, Different Closet" was being considered for publication back in the early 1990s, one of the academic reviewers said my model of heterosexuality "didn't depend on a committed effort to avoid sexual feelings and experiences with men". Or perhaps more to the point, wasn't anchored in the need to avoid appearing gay to others.

The world doesn't get to dispose of me or decide for me what my sexual orientation is. Thousands of people thinking of me in a certain way doesn't conjure it up as my reality. And as far as the prospect of other males having a sexual interest in me and misreading the signals, well, as one of my lesbian friends pointed out, it's hardly just heterosexual males who occasionally have to cope with someone being sexually interested in you and you don't reciprocate, and it's not exactly the end of the world. No big deal. Get over it.


To get back to the role of fear in this hatred and violence, though, I'll end with this additional snippet from Within the Box:

You try to get a handle on why people would be hateful and oppressive and you just end up finding them guilty of being horrible people with no justification, and there’s no understanding for that. But I can understand scared. I don’t know what to do about it, but it’s a starting point.

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


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

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






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

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The assault on abortion rights was never about abortion per se, it's been all about returning us to patriarchy, pre-feminism. And all the Otherisms like racism that are part and parcel of it.

Whenever feminists made that claim, many folks said "You're pontificating. You're making it into a bigger thing than it really is. Seriously, the world is not all about women's oppression. I don't mean it doesn't matter or isn't important but it's just a part of the picture".

But the radical feminists said "This is the big picture. The entire history of social politics is whether there is sexual equality or there is not. All the other stuff is a subset of it. Patriarchy means old men got young men by the balls by first controlling women, hence sex, as a commodity. Patriarchy means controlling reproduction too, anchoring it to individual means of supporting the children. Patriarchy is a departure from tribal / communal responsibility for the children in a general sense. It isn't done just to divest general responsibility for children, though; it is done because it diverts so much individual young people's energy into channels so that their lives are obsessed with finding a relevant mating opportunity once those channels have been significantly narrowed and all sexuality officially pinned to one model. It also makes women and men adversaries, necessarily fearful of each other's motivations. However much she loves and cares for you, her social situation means she has to find a socially and financially stable partner because children. Perhaps he finds you fascinating and attractive but he is not wanting to be roped into supporting children just in order to get close to you.

Birth control and abortion meant it didn't have to be that way. They shifted the social possibilities. Or, if you prefer, the shift in social possibilities made room for making birth control and abortion services available.



I'd like to point out that pre-patriarchy there was tribal responsibility for the children. And there was no complex property to hand down. Pre-patriarchy was largely pre-agriculture.

What we know is that we, as a species, can exist multiple ways, can configure ourselves multiple ways. We adjust. It's not all hard-wiring. There are some hard-wired things but they can be rendered in a lot of different ways.

Patriarchy is one way. Feminism and associated social movements for equality were in the process of giving us a different world. Some folks don't like this historic shift at all and they're doing their last-stand best to return us to the previous world. The current chapter in American politics should be titled "Episode V: The Patriarchy Strikes Back". The long-term odds are against them but they're scaring me to the core to be honest about it.



The Kalahari desert San people, one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies, obtain everything they need with an average of 7 hours work per week from each person. And they're doing this in one of the areas of the planet that nobody wanted because it's a freaking desert.

Humans didn't switch from simply wandering around plucking what was growing (and hunting down an occasional critter) to staying put and tending stuff in the ground, keeping animals penned up and having to feed them, and defending all that from the other humans who were still wandering around -- until the alternative was starvation.

Agrarian civilization is a stupendous amount of work, it's a precarious existence with a lot that can go wrong.

All evidence shows it first took off in small fertile areas surrounded by deserts. Dense populations with too many people to obtain their food from the desert. Dense populations that depleted the resources in the fertile area where they originated.

The focus of patriarchy, as pointed out by Marilyn French, is control, obedience, personal sacrifice for the greater good, authoritarianism, fear of other groups. If you think of an entire society with the mindset that individuals have when they are in danger and feel threatened, that's the shared mindset of patriarchal society. It's us in scarcity mode. It's contagious (it entrenches and expands and drives out hunter-gatherer groups). And other than survival there's nothing good about it. It's also rigid and extremely tradition-bound and resistant to change, hence it lingers long after there us sufficient abundance to not need it. It isn't EEEEVIL incarnate or anything, as if there's a Devil and this is his agenda, but patriarchy isn't particularly praiseworthy and it sure as hell isn't pleasant.

And not only do we no longer need it, it's toxic for us in our modern circumstances. Our survival now depends on flexibility, cooperation, and coexistence, not rigidity and intractable adversarial competition.


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Preemptive reply to any mention of "mansplaining patriarchy": This is no time for silence, I neither present this as all my own independent thinking nor attribute it all to others, I'm not into the whole "man" thing, and I won't shut up.


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


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



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

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

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

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

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

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


"Should Not Have To"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Can't"


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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



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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quit acting like choice is a dirty word.



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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.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * *

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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It kind of started with third grade, along with the rest of it. That's when I first remember feeling different and being proud of it. I was good, like the girls. Not like the boys. Boys were bad. Of course I was proud of it. Boys were mean and stupid, an embarrassment. Embarrassing to me, because I was a boy myself, so people would see me as one and treat me as one and expect me to be like them, and I wasn't. So naturally I did things to distinguish myself from them and get people to think of me the way they thought of the girls, in other words as who I really was, what I was actually like.

Last September, I blogged about being a genderqueer third grader, but one of the things I didn't specifically write about was the fighting. Boys fought. Girls didn't. On the playgrounds, in the neighborhood, with their friends or against their enemies, boys got into fights. Shoving and trash-talking would escalate to hitting and wrestling, usually culminating in one boy straddling the other boy's chest and pounding his face and shoulders while his arms were pinned until he said he gave up.

So it was logical for me to drop out of fighting. It would go a long way towards distinguishing myself from the boys and being viewed more like one of the girls. Up until then, yeah I could dish it out, I knew how and I was reasonably adept at it. But grownups didn't want us to. It was against the rules at school and you could get into trouble for it. Most importantly, they talked about boys and how immature we were, and how we were discipline problems and couldn't be trusted, like if the teacher had to leave the room for a moment. A teacher would often ask a girl to take names of anyone acting up in her absence.

So I did that. Yeah, little Mahatma Gandhi, no kidding, I went totally nonviolent as a nine year old as part of showing I was different from the other boys, as good as the girls. It was easier than you might think. Little boys aren't all that efficient at inflicting pain; their punches insult more than they bruise. Also, they're surprisingly formal and stylized in how they escalate from taunting and shoving and daring and when I simply refused to lift fists they'd get frustrated and insult me harder, then get contemptuous and accuse me of being a sissy, which was sort of like trying to insult a witch by implying she's a witch if you see what I mean, and then they'd stalk off in disgust.

So anyway, since this is titled "Sixth Grade", you probably see where this is headed. The three years between being a nine year old and being a twelve year old are some pretty long years. I'd been the target of some really intense bullying and harassment, mocked and giving the most insulting pet names people could come up with, and the physical confrontations had gotten scarier. They'd circle me, several of them, egging on the principal assailant and adding additional threats. The adrenaline made my stomach churn and my voice shake and they could see how they were making me feel and they liked it, they got off on it, they found me quite entertaining. Meanwhile, they'd gotten a lot more efficient at hitting and hurting, and I was out of practice and hadn't learned what they'd learned in those intervening years. Somewhere along the line I had ceased to feel like I had a choice: I couldn't fight.



Mark Fiveash was one of those boys, the ones who thought it was funny and clever to make fart sounds with their armpits and clown around ridiculing and tormenting people for the entertainment of his amused followers. Sixth grade teacher Mrs. Mason had asked him to put the film camera up on the shelf and he held it between his legs with the lens barrel facing out and mugged for the classroom. I scowled my opinion. Then he made as if to insert the lens under Cindy Salter's skirt.

"That's rude", pronounced Betsy Johnson in the desk to my right.

I nodded. "Act your age".

Joey Joiner's seat was behind Betsy's. He leaned over and commented, "You never laugh at anything Mark does. Why not?" I said he wasn't funny, simple as that.

It was Joey who was waiting for me when the end of day bell rang. And he didn't bring a crowd. It was just him. "Fight me", he urged. Like he was suggesting that we go ride bikes together or something. "C'mon, fight. Put your fists up". Joey was a fairly quiet student, put off a little bit of a tough attitude but wasn't among the people who typically harassed me at recess or lunchtime. He was also not particularly large. I was taller and skinny as I was I probably weighed about the same. So by himself he didn't seem especially scary.

I wasn't going to fight him. I didn't do that. He didn't get louder and make increasingly boastful threats but he was relentless, intractible. He wouldn't get out of my way. To get home I first had to cross the grassy school campus. The initial throng of students leaving the building had thinned away and we had the schoolyard to ourselves and still we stood there deadlocked. So I started walking slowly towards him, my hands at my side.

If he had continued to demand a fight but didn't physically interfere with me leaving, that would have worked, but he saw how that was going to play out and began peppering me with punches to the face, shoulder, and chest. "C'mon, just make a fist!"

I walked into the punches and reacted as little as possible and kept going at the same pace. Joey began taking more care with what he was doing and made each punch land hard in painful places. It hurt, it really hurt. I was also shocked that he was doing this: how can someone just keep on hitting a person who hasn't done anything to them and who won't fight back?

He kept hitting me on the eyebrows and cheek and I got more sore and each impact hurt worse until with maybe thirty yards of grass between me and the sidewalk he succeeded in making me cry. I was hurt and I was angry and outraged, and I couldn't keep going on, couldn't take any more, and that frustrated me too, broke me. I turned around and walked back and into the library, which was still open. He followed me, still whacking me when and where he could, until he saw that I was going inside.

The librarian had seen the end of it and now saw me coming in crying and furious. "I'm so sorry, that was horrible, that was so mean! Are you OK? Want a tissue? I don't understand how people can behave like that. There's a bathroom down there if you want to freshen up. Stay here until you feel a little better, stay as long as you want. You can call someone if you need to."

I appreciated the sympathy and the protection. She let me sit in a dark office sniffling until the shock wore off. Then I thanked her and carefully looked out the windows before deciding Joey wasn't lurking in wait for my reappearance, then I headed home.



A couple weeks later, Mrs. Mason made a statement about how important it was for boys to treat girls and women with respect because their greater delicacy entitled them to this important consideration, and I snapped, "It's supposed to be that we're equal". I wasn't on the road to becoming a men's rights activist, exactly, but I was starting to sense a fundamental unfairness to the whole setup, a sense that I was not just a bullying victim but was being badly treated on a systemic basis.

There were double standards afoot. Karen Welch, the girl who lived across the street from us, was in Mrs. Mason's class too. She had a boyfriend, Tommy. I had had a girlfriend in third grade but not since, and missed having that in my life, missed it very much. And now boys and girls were starting to be interested in each other more often, to be boyfriend and girlfriend. That part was good, but it should have been me. Not with Karen, I didn't particularly like Karen, but I liked a lot of the girls and if anyone was going to have a girlfriend it should be me, not loud rude typical boys like Tommy.


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For the most part, I regard the manuscript of my book as "finished", with the only changes being outgrowths of suggestions or requests from my editor.

But last weekend at my high school reunion, a guy who had been in 8th grade with me approached and described this event: "I had a squirt gun and I came up to you in the cafeteria and squirted you in the face. You just sat there and didn't react and I wanted a reaction so I kept on squirting you. And after a moment you got up and broke your cafeteria lunch tray over the top of my head."

I did, of course, remember the event. I haven't racked up a lot of experience smacking people aross the head with lunchroom trays, so my foray into that activity sort of stands out in my mind. Why didn't I include the event in my book when I wrote it? I don't know for sure; maybe I found it a bit too cringeworthy, or maybe I had a disinclination to portray my 8th grade self as violent. This incident stands out as a solitary "man bites dog" event against the everyday backdrop of the biting going the other direction, and it was my goal, during the original composition of the autobiography from which my book was distilled, to convey how intensely and mercilessly I was picked on, and how alienated and hated I felt. Maybe that's it. Also, I did have a mention of a bunch of disgusting food being dumped all over my lunch when I was trying to eat, so maybe a second mention of an event in the cafeteria seemed too redundant.

Either way, having it brought up to me during the reunion, and hearing it described from the perspective of the other party to the encounter, got me thinking.

A couple years after the event, my next door neighbor laughed about it and said "Oh yeah, you were famous. Everyone was talking about that. There were people who even saved some of the plastic fragments of the broken tray as souvenirs". So let's designate it as memorable. And part of the purpose of attending the reunion was to drum up interest in the book among people who were there for some of the events described within it.

Then there's the interaction I've been having with my editor. He'd like to see more emotional vividness in the early part of my book, more of a sense of what I was feeling at the time. "It's too dry and emotionless. You need to tell it with all the bloody bits... readers want to feel what your character is feeling". But what I was feeling, from pretty early on, was shut down. I'd been told over and over again to not let the bullies see that they were getting to me, and it had become apparent to me that no one was going to intervene — and that I just had to suck it up. So the lunchroom tray incident makes a nice bridge scene in a way: I start off NOT REACTING, and (as we now know from his own description) the boy with the squirt gun wanted a reaction so he kept going, kept squirting me over and over. Then I do react, smashing the tray over his head. So it's got some expression of frustration and anger, and at the same time it contributes to the narrative that I am becoming increasingly unreactive and stoic at this time in my life.

And in retrospect, I think it is good to show my main character (i.e., me) as someone other than a passive victim to whom bad things are happening, and to show how indignant and outraged I was when being treated this way. So in it goes.

I have yanked the short mention of someone dumping a huge glob of mushed-up food all over my lunch and inserted the entire squirt-gun and lunchroom-tray scene as a better replacement.

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I was around 8 or 9 years old when I first experienced the boys' bathroom as an unsafe place. The other boys would talk about dicks and shitting and piss, had quite the case of pottymouth on them, and they quickly noticed that I was a prudish and prim and prissy kid who didn't join in and wasn't comfortable around them. They'd cluster around me sometimes when I went in, to ask me obscene questions and enjoy making me uncomfortable, and I didn't much care for their company, especially when combined with the intermingled necessity of having our pants open and our private parts exposed.

That made it all the more startling when, just a few years later, adult males accused me of loitering and being up to something disgusting. They didn't specify what but said I should knock off the phony innocent act and they better not catch me hanging out there, do my business and leave, and I should be ashamed of myself.

I went to summer camp one year in my grandmother's home town where no one knew me. I went in enthusiastic because it would be a fresh start, instead of being among people who had already singled me out as someone to ridicule and harass. That made it so much worse when the same behaviors spontaneously generated themselves and made me fully aware that it was me, not something uniquely messed-up about the people on my block and at my school.

I was showering in the locker room after gym class and when I headed back to the area with the lockers and benches to put on my street clothes, the other boys watched with expectant amusement. I tried to ignore them and just get dressed but after a moment I realized my underwear was missing from my locker. "Where are your panties, Alice? Did you leave them at home?" I stared from face to face, miserable, expecting someone to toss them to me along with further mocking comments but instead everyone was delighted to make suggestions about how I might find them. Eventually a theme developed: I should really go check out the stalls, they think I might find them there. I did: floating in a filthy unflushed toilet.

When I was 19 I was at a party outdoors and a guy there decided I needed some attitude adjustment. He punched me a couple times then an hour or so later came up to me, pretending he wanted to apologize, offering me his hand, and then punching me again when I went to take it. Suddenly his friends had flashlights shining in my face and blinding me while he proceeded to kick and chop at me while everyone laughed. The consensus seemed to be that I had it coming for being such a sissy fag.


So I felt like I'd been through some experiences that were pretty nasty and creepy and I hadn't done anything to deserve such things happening to me. I didn't know why but I promised myself that if I ever figured out what caused this to happen to me, there was going to be some settling up about it. I was going to show the world, get some justice, have some satisfaction.



Now I want to fast-forward to the current era and talk about something I did just the other day: I told some gay men and some transgender women (male to female) that the group I was trying to start, a group for people like me, wasn't really intended for them. (Although they could participate as allies and supporters and be welcome in that capacity)

That not only sounds and feels highly suspect, it's hard not to label it inexcusible bigotry. I mean, WHAT?? I'm starting some kind of group and keeping out gay men and transwomen??

Let me explain how that came about...



In the last 2 weeks...

• I finally got pushy enough with Long Island LGBT center to prompt someone to call me back. It didn't go well: "I'm director of programming... so you're offering your presentation as something we could include in programming, well thank you but no thanks we don't need any additional programming". I wasn't expecting it to feel quite so much like dealing with an Institution; I was expecting it to feel like dealing with a fervent social change activist who maybe would be dismissive of my perspective on some kind of political grounds, but this made me feel like a salesperson being told "no we don't need what you're selling".

• I posted to my liberal-intellectual internet message board and was told I am not gay and I am not transgender so I should shut the fuck up, that gay people's concerns are legitimate and transgender people's concerns are legitimate but I'm just a cisgender hetero guy who has some traits socially considered "feminine", just like most guys do, and apparently I just want to be a special snowflake and pretend that I have a social cause. With less hostility, some of the others posted that I can't be a movement unto myself and that I need to network with others like me, if I can find them; and if I can't find them then maybe I really AM a special snowflake and that when I speak I'm not speaking for anyone other than my own individual self and, if so, why should anyone care what I went through if it's not still happening in any meaningful way to anyone else like me?

• I decided that was a good point and went into Identity House on International Coming-Out Day and had an individual session. I figured my need and desire to participate as an activist and shed some light on my personal gender identity as a social cause was, indeed, a personal need, something relevant to my own emotional health and well-being. It went... OK. The two peer counselors didn't treat me like "WTF are you doing here, you're just a hetero cis guy". On the other hand, they were less helpful than I'd hoped for as far as connecting me up with Identity House people who might be interested in hearing more about this as another gender identity needing political attention. They DID say they'd put me on the email list for a Gender Exploration Group to be scheduled for sometime this fall, which I could be in, and when I indicated an interest in doing what they were doing, i.e., being peer counselors, said they'd put me on the list of people who could be called the next time they do an in-house training. That would get my foot in the door as well as being something I think I'd be decently good at and would enjoy doing.

• And meanwhile, I started a Meetup group titled "OTHER Victims of Homophobia, Transphobia, & Sissyphobia". I figured that plus the descriptive blurb I wrote about it might get me in contact with other people like me in a way that my blog and my participation in genderqueer and transgender and related Facebook groups has not. What happened instead was that about eight people quickly joined my Meetup group and the ones who wrote anything at all about themselves either identified as gay males or as transgender women (MTF). And because I was specifically trying to see if I could find and network with other malebodied people who identify as girl-like or effeminate, and/or as girls or women, but not with intention of presenting as female-bodied or becoming female-bodied, I found myself informing them that they could be supporters and welcome here in that capacity but that the group was intended as a group to bring together males OTHER than gay guys or male to female transgender who had been victims of homophobia-and-company.


So...

How politically legitimate is it, how legitimate CAN it be, to be starting a group that disincludes gay people and trans male-to-female people? I'd prefer that you not judge me blithely but at the same time let's not dismiss this concern lightly either. It's a question that goes deeper than this one Meetup group, but rather has to do with my entire gender identity itself.

From my vantage point, I was mistreated for being a sissy and so I set forth to come out and confront the world as an activist sissy. But the gay question is the Giant Pink Elephant in the Living Room. When people were being hostile towards me for being a sissy-boy, they expressed it as hostility towards gay guys. When people expressed sympathy and tolerance towards me, they expressed it as sympathy for and tolerance of me as a gay guy. And the reason I still perceive a need to change the message that kids hear out there is that some hypothetical kid like me growing up is going to hear some continuing hostility towards sissy guys, identifying them as gay, and they are going to hear a strong social dissent that says it is perfectly OK and downright fabulous to be a sissy gay guy.

I could already hear that social dissent in the 1970s when I was a teenager, but it wasn't helpful to me. No one was saying it was OK to be someone like me.


But it means I'm distancing myself from gay guys, making a point of saying I'm proud that I'm not. Or rather that I am proud of who I am and who I am is a sissy-guy who is not gay, which still collapses to the same thing.

Maybe that's part of why it's so damn difficult to find others like me.

On top of the other problems that come with it, we're setting ourselves up to be perceived as homophobic. And/or as protesting awfully loudly, like we're in denial or something, because why else (people tend to ask) would people go around asserting that they aren't gay? So maybe the other sissy males who are not attracted to male-bodied people don't identify as sissy in order to avoid being more rapidly and completely designated as gay, and don't identify as "sissy but NOT gay" in order to avoid being designated as homophobic and closeted and in denial and gay.


The transgender part of it is somewhat different. Although I was occasionally taunted and mocked as a kid by someone explicitly calling me a girl, it has generally NOT been the case that people assume that because I exhibit feminine qualities I must be a male-to-female transgender person. (Gay continues to be the default assumption). It's only where and when I go to the trouble of explaining that I am a male-bodied person who is a girl inside that I find a lot of my space taken up by the Little Pink Elephant, the assumption that anyone who is born in a body designated as male but who identifies as a girl or woman is going to want to transition, is going to identify as female as well as girl or woman, because, after all, girls and women are female.

Outside of one Facebook group, I have not been accused of being transphobic or politically incorrect about how I am attempting to identify. But I've found it difficult for people to comprehend. A lot of people are willing to believe that there is something primordially female in some folks born in male bodies, but they find it less easy to understand that a person born in a male body could possess the personality and behavioral characteristics and patterns of a girl or woman and could come to consider that to be a far more essential definition of SELF than the physical body, but not reject the body itself as any more wrong than being a woman is wrong. "What does it mean to be a woman if you're not female?", people ask me. I'm talking here about people who accept the transgender phenomenon, not the people who go around saying "If you got a dick you're a man not a woman". They could understand if I said I was SUPPOSED to have been born female, that I'm a woman inside and therefore this body is a birth defect. But they don't comprehend how I could feel and say "I am male and I am a girl and there's nothing wrong with me that needs fixing, get used to it".



My mind these last two weeks has returned to the question: WHY is it so damn difficult to put these ideas out there and WHY do I not find them resonating with other people? WHY do they not have the explanatory power for other people that they do for me? (I'd think that even for people who aren't at all like I am, these ideas would explain a lot of things they've observed in the world and they'd go "Aha, lots of things just clicked into place for me").



Maybe I'm the only one. (Seems unlikely, but what if?)


And then there's Douglas Hofstadter, who in his book Gödel Escher Bach spoke of systems of expression (mathematical languages or computer programming languages or any other formal system) and how, for any of them, there are things that are true but which can't be derived or expressed according to the rules of those very systems of expression. That's the essence of Gödel's theorem, but Hofstadter took the idea and ran with it in more universal directions. At one point he posits a high-end audiophile's sound system and asks (paraphrased *) "Won't any such system have sounds that they can't play because those very sounds, themselves, if reproduced with accuracy and volume, would be destructive to the delicate parts that comprise the sound system?"

Perhaps in the gendered world as it is familiarly constituted, the experiences I am trying to express are not expressible — that the act of expressing them interferes directly with their expression, that the architecture of ideas and language that we use to express things somehow contains a sort of Bermuda Triangle of entwined connotations that makes these particular notions impossible to convey, as every attempt to do so conveys something else instead. (Seems unlikely and quite the conceit on my part to entertain such a notion, but yeah, obviously I've done so).

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