I go on Facebook and encounter an image of an (apparently) male person staring in the mirror, caption says this person is trying on his mom's clothes while she's out; reflection in the mirror shows an (apparently) female person in bra and briefs staring back; thought bubble says "Wow, I look BEAUTIFUL"; caption below says "... and then she knew who she really was".

I am one of those people who were born male -- by which I mean born with the physiological equipment that tends to lead obstetricians to assign newborn infants to the male category -- who then subsequently identify with the girls and women instead of the boys and men. There is a pervasive notion that the core of identifying that way, the reason for it, the important part, is all about being a sex object, a desirable beautiful person.

And I do mean pervasive. It's everywhere. You can find this notion expressed by trans women and by trans exclusive women who mock them; you can encounter it among the socially aware who support transgender and other gender-variant people's rights and concerns but also from transphobes and social conservatives who are dismissive of us.

There's certainly some pushback, but not enough to keep me from wanting to push back against it myself. So maybe this is something you've heard several times, but maybe you need to anyway. This attitude is annoying AF and I get tired of encountering it.


* I first started thinking of myself as essentially one of the girls and only technically one of the boys when I was about eight. Third grade. There were a lot of things about being a girl that just seemed right, and superior. Being pretty wasn't an important item on that list. I'm not sure it was ever on the list at all.

* When I came out in 1980, at the age of 21, I began trying to explain that who I was inside (and who I had been for years, inside) made it appropriate to think of me the way you think of girls and women, and that I didn't aspire to be a man or have any interest in being measured by the standards associated with them, but that, outside, I was male. The male part wasn't wrong, just the man part. I never had any interest or intention of passing as a female person -- beautiful and sexy or otherwise.

* I'm not saying I never had any interest in being found sexually attractive and desirable. As a teenager and young adult, I developed a dislike for the asymmetrical situation, where the girls were being hit on and pressured and cajoled and sought after for sex, and where the boys were expected to do that hitting ond pressuring and, if they didn't, were assumed to have no such interests. You know the drill: sex as something where the female people are the commodity and the male people are the market. I didn't want to play at that table. I wanted reciprocity. I wanted to be desired in the same way that I desired, and to be no more a sexual consumer than the objects of my own desire were. So, sure, I ended up wanting those aspects of being human that are marked "female" in our society. But...

* In my particular case, the people for whom I felt sexual attraction were, in fact, female people. That meant I could not get this reciprocal and egalitarian sexual experience as easily as folks with same-sex attraction. It also meant that, although I did want to be sexually desired, the notion of literally being a sexy attractive female person myself didn't have as much appeal to me as it might have for someone who found male-bodied folks sexually interesting.


In a world where women in general are often treated like the only important thing, the only thing that matters if you're female, is to be sexually desirable to men, it should not surprise any of us that the attitude towards someone born male who says they identify as one of the women is to reduce that identification to an identification with being the sex object. And to map it directly onto the sexualized idealized female form with its idealized shapes and curves and associated apparel.

Not that there's anything wrong with wanting that, if that's what you want, but the people for whom that is true are not the only show in town. And, in the social climate where this is the pervasive default assumption about all of us born male who identify with the women and girls, you have some responsibility to avoid perpetuating that this is what it's all about.



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


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

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






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

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Today I want to talk about sexual feelings. Surprisingly, we don't do that often. We discuss sexual orientation, and gender identity; but our thoughts and attitudes about sexuality itself are often the same as the ones held by the prevailing culture and we're prone to repeating them, unexamined.

Consider this paragraph:

The habit of using women as sex objects may explain why seeing other men with long hair used to make, or still makes, some men so irrationally angry... Why was it so important for those men to be able to tell at a glance the boys from the girls? One reason may be that only in this way could they be sure with whom they might be free to have fantasy sex. Otherwise they might be daydreaming about having a great time in bed with some girl only to find out suddenly that "she" was a boy.

-- John Holt p 71-72, Escape from Childhood (Dutton 1974)


We immediately giggle about the fragile defensiveness of the homophobic guys getting all upset at having momentarily entertained a fantasy of this nature, and we're all quite familiar with the notion that the loudest and most emphatically heterosexual males are the ones least secure in their sexual orientation. But quite aside from all that, why is it or why should it be so disconcerting to make a cognitive or behavioral error that involves our sexuality? It isn't solely due to the historically disparaged status of gay sexuality, although that certainly plays a role in this example.

Consider a woman on the subway and a passenger with a camera on an extension stick who photographs her body from under her skirt, and then masturbates later to the image. If she were aware of it at the time it was happening, it's obvious why that would be experienced as creepy and invasive, but what's interesting is to pose the question to women about how they'd feel about it if they did not realize it at the time and that it wasn't made public in any fashion, so no one else would ever know about it either, but that it did in fact occur and they somehow learned of it later. People I've asked say it's still horribly invasive, a violation of their boundaries, one that makes them angry and creeped out to contemplate.

We can mistake a stranger on the sidewalk for a friend or colleague and generally not offend, even if during our confusion we interact with them physically and/or say things of a personal nature out loud -- as long as none of it has sexual overtones. We can slip into a packed elevator and end up brushing up against body parts and the question of whether or not it's offensive hinges mostly on whether or not there's an interpretaton of sexual intention in it. So it's not a matter of boundaries per se, so much as it's that boundaries work differently when it comes to sexual interaction, we tend to be a lot more sensitive and triggery about it than most other matters. I doubt that I'm saying anything you don't already know, but we don't tend to theorize about that and what it means; we tend instead to discuss sexual interaction as if all reasonable attitudes and thoughts about it could be derived from general principles of human interaction and autonomy.

If a man stares at the crotch of a nude statue or painting, or at the breast of a woman during a social interaction... the image becomes stolen. Notice that stolen images come in two forms: looking at something one is not authorized to look at and looking lustfully at what one is authorized to look at...

Stealing images of women's bodies is a troubled activity that pervades many heterosexual men's adolescent and postadolescent social experience...

-- Timothy Beneke, Proving Manhood: Reflections on Men and Sexism

Ignoring the heterocentricity of Beneke's language (he himself acknowledges it) -- I am reminded of thoughts I've had about butch people, as a person who is not butch, that in part what I think of as butch is a openness and confidence about their sexual lusts, that who they are to themselves and to the world at large is a person who sexually covets people, who do not avoid the perception that they are sexually predatory (for better or worse, with or without a leavening of some degree of respect for others' boundaries). Now, I think those things as a non-butch person, and perhaps am obliviously opaque to what butch experiences are truly like. What I know more about are the feelings of many people who are not butch in this sense, who, however post-prudish we may be in our current lives, still have residual carryover fears that whenever we are perceived as sexual, as having sexual desires, we will be thought invasive, dirty, even disgusting:

Gather on a hill of wildflowers
A certain kind of piney tree
Hot sweet piney tea
Oh Gather Me
And on a hill of wildflowers
Oh Gather Me
A writer who's in need of sleep
A lady who's in loving need
Don't hold the sprout against the seed
Don't hold this need against me

Melanie, from the inside cover of the album Gather Me


Another locus where we see the vulnerability of sexual feelings on display is the matter of sexual exclusivity and monogamy. I myself am polyamorous and hence I don't take it for granted as inherently normative and natural, but it's certainly a trend and perhaps not entirely attributable to the history of patriarchal marriage and property and inheritance, although once again, yeah, those matters do play a role here. Polyamorous people often point out to other folks that we form friendships and don't feel a need to require our friend to not have any other friends; people who are parents can love multiple children and not feel like they're being unfaithful. But sexual-romantic love is probably more frightening, its attractiveness being part of what makes it so frightening, and that high-stakes high-vulnerability situation is probably also a factor in why so many people feel safer if they are their partner's only partner. Or think they do, at any rate.

A corollary of that much vulnerability is the possibility of great power, of having a form of emotional dominion over the other person's vulnerability. The kink scene (BDSM) is one where power play is recognized as a factor and overtly played with, negotiated, discussed. It's obvious when it's on display in the form of bondage restraints and punitive devices like whips and floggers or reflected in the language of domme and submissive, sadist and masochist, master and slave; but whether it is out in front like that and recognized as a component of intimacy or not, power inequities are present in intimacies that involve so much vulnerability. It need not be permanently ensconced in such a way that one partner always hold power over the other, or in such a way that the player identified by sex or gender or role is always the one in whom the balance of power is vested -- in fact, the spark of excitement in a sexual relationship may depend quite a bit on the vulnerability shifting and trading. But that's a different thing than a hypothetical situation in which the participants are never invasive, always consenting, balanced in autonomy and self-determined authority at every second. And that's part of what frightens us. It's risky and there's a threat of being deprived of our agency and our sense of integrity and personal balance. To the devoted advocate of total equality and the elimination of all oppression, as well as to the fearful conqueror who needs to always be the winner, love is not a safe endeavor.

We do try to hammer out some rules for boundaries, and establish them so that we share the same notions of them, so that we can expect of each other that these notions have been established and agreed upon:

• No one gets the right to have sex with someone. You aren't intrinsically entitled to it. The intensity of your lust for it doesn't entitle you to it. People get to say no and you don't get to smash through that.

• No one gets the right to be found attractive by someone either, though. You aren't entitled to be flirted with, not by someone who has been observed to flirt with someone else, not by someone you wish would notice you.

• Everyone does have the right to like who you like, sexually speaking, though. It may be long lanky freckled longhaired guys with long curly eyelashes, or women with big butts and plump faces and wide shoulders. You have the right to be attracted to people in part because they have a penis, or a clitoris. Or skin of a certain hue. That's not to say that our sexual tastes are 100% free of being politically and socially problematic, mind you; we may harbor biases and we may have eroticized certain things as an outcome of contextual discriminations or ongoing oppressions, and perhaps we would all benefit from challenging those things within ourselves, especially when our sexual tastes appear to reinforce and mimic existing social stratifications. But be that as it may, this is not a venue in which "should" gets to intrude and supplant our inclinations. We don't tolerate being told that we aren't allowed to like what we like.

• It's not a meritocracy, where you get rewarded for your socially desirable good-citizen / good-person characteristics. You don't get to earn a high sexual desirability score by getting checkmarks on a list of admirable traits. I say this as an actual Nice Guy™. You don't get to earn sex.

Sexuality is historically something we've regulated maybe more than anything else in human life, maybe even more than reproduction. At the same time, we don't trust regulating it and rebel almost immediately against any attempt to restrict and channel it. But we fear unregulated sexuality too.

There has been pushback against structuring consent into a formal and overtly spoken package, and there have been people who have spoken or written fondly of how much more "natural" and less clinically oppressive "animal" sex was or would have been before we tried to tame it and shame it and channel it with our institutions and regulations. I myself vividly remember being very unhappy at the age of 19 when it seemed to me that I was attending the university to get a degree and become economically successful in order to qualify for a female partner who "would then let me do it to her", and wanting very much instead to be found desirable for who I was. I also remember reading a description of a commune in California which was attempting to unravel middle-class sexual mores and create something egalitarian, and their approach was to set up a sleeping-with schedule in which all the women would rotate through all the men, a different one each night. I could readily imagine a group of people who knew each other and loved each other deciding to embrace a group marriage that worked that way, but to walk in and join up as an interested stranger? Being assigned by schedule to a sequence of beds felt instantly oppressive, invasive, degrading. If some people wanted that kind of system, and consented to that, fine for them, but if such a thing were imposed on people? Hell no!

I knew a self-identified witch, a woman of indeterminate middle age back when I was barely out of my teens, who once told me "The problem a lot of people have is that they believe that they are their minds and that they have a sexuality. The truth is, you are a sexuality and you have a mind." I've come to see the wisdom of that viewpoint. We tend to have a very limited and nastily derogatory notion of sexuality. Gutter crude and selfish and focused on immediate nerve endings and their satiation and all that. But if that's all sexuality was, we'd simply masturbate and be done with it, why involve other people? Whereas suppose that what the sexual urge really leads us to do is not merely to get our rocks off, or even find someone cute and sexy with whom to get our rocks off, but instead to seek out and find, or if necessary create, the truly ideal context in which to connect, get our rocks off, and raise the resulting children, all with safety and comfort and with the maximum integration of all that we wish to bring into that intimacy. When you start thinking of it that way, it starts looking vibrant and noble and socially progressive; and if that is who we are, and our highly intelligent human minds tools of that, hey, that's a pretty good deal, yes?


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This post had its origin in my replies to a couple of Facebook posts about "Eww, did you see how that female performer was barely dressed? Way to be a role model for our teenage daughters!" and "I took my daughter shopping. Everything available looked like it came from Sluts R Us and I wouldn't let her have any of it and we got into a big argument".

While I agree that girls should be free to be energetic young people whose worth is not derived from how sexually attractive they are, I don't think it's a single-faceted issue.

• Starting at the mid-teen years, girls rapidly begin taking on the appearance that society around them says is the epitome of sexual attractiveness, desirability. To have that is to have POWER, not just to be found pleasing to others. The power aspect of it is well-represented in our cultural portrayals.

• Feminism in the late 70s and early 80s made us rethink a lot of that. It's all about the male gaze, the male appetite; there are limits to how much power can really come from being a commodity, no matter how fervently sought after. But it's not like feminists (let alone the rest of society) reached a clear consensus on the whole matter. Being REDUCED to being a sex object is obviously always bad, and any kind of double standard causing women to be assessed on the basis of their appearance while men are assessed for their skills and accomplishments is also obviously bad, but are there female-positive components to this sense of power stemming from being desired that aren't just patriarchal illusion?

• The movement against slut shaming begins with the perspective that blaming girls and women for provoking unwanted sexual attention is blaming the wrong party. But it has become also a recognition that a girl or woman has the right to be sexually forward without that constituting a blanket permission for any and all sexual attention.

Liberation means not only that it should be OK to be in public and not get sexually harassed regardless of what you're wearing. It also means that it should be OK to, yes, actually be seeking sexual attention. Not only does no mean no; "hey cute boy" means "hey cute boy".

What needs reexamining is NOT just the expectation & pattern that boys will be sexually aggressive to the point of invasiveness (and that that's ok because "boys will be boys", barf smiley here). What ALSO needs reexamining is the the expectation that girls will be, or should be, sexual gatekeepers, the sayers of "yes" and "no", the reactive party, reacting with "yes" or "no" in response to the boys' sexualized attentions. But unless we're going to tell girls that the only acceptable model for being sexually forward is to grab a cute guy and make an overt pass at him, many girls who wish to be sexually forward will sometimes do so by dressing provocatively.

I don't think teenage girls should be pushed into, or pushed away from, sexuality. Girls should not be pushed period. Girls should get to experiment to whatever extent they want to (respecting the boundaries of the boys or, for that matter, other girls) and also should get to refrain from doing so to whatever extent they don't wanna.

I'm leery of the way that positioning one's self as visually sexually desirable is such a specifically gendered thing — asymmetry is always worrisome when we're concerned with sexual equality. On the other hand, if 13 and 14 year old girls are being told that it is sexual power, that their deployment of their own appearance is a way of being sexually aggressive, telling them not to is telling them "you don't get to use that", and that's just as gendered a message, yes?



The whole consideration of visual sexual attraction and attractiveness is definitely gendered. Even people who don't ascribe to many other beliefs about built-in differences between the sexes are often inclined to agree that male people are more wired to have sexual feelings in response to the appearance of someone of the sex they're attracted to. I would tentatively put myself in that category, by the way. It's not something I'm going to claim certainty about, but I fit the pattern myself despite the many ways in which I'm gender-atypical.

I jump off the consensus boat quickly, though, when people start reaching additional conclusions based on that.

• I've heard people say that because of men's strong sexual response to seeing women, it is inevitable that men will approach women and be the ones to try to make sex happen. As I've said several times here, that's not the case for me and people like me. I explained it on my OKCupid profile like so: there are zillions of attractive women and I see them all the time as part of my daily life; if these attractive strangers were intermittently approaching me to make a pass at me, I would be doing the same to them, but they don't; and I long ago learned that most women find it annoying and threatening to have complete strangers approach them and express that they feel sexual attraction. They are rumored to be interested in sex mostly in the context of an ongoing relationship, which I can relate to, I have always wanted a girlfriend. The accusation of only being after sex combines with the expressions of anger and annoyance and the lack of successful outcome and quickly teaches that just because these attractive women are attractive doesn't identify them as sexual opportunities. Hmm, well, if the endeavor is to find a girlfriend, being visually sexually attractive isn't a good signifier of being a good prospect for that; zillions of women are visually attractive so that's nothing special or unusual, whereas I only connect well to a tiny minority. And in addition that means there's no reason I should be the one doing the approaching if the goal is to connect with someone for an ongoing relationship, since the visual sexual appeal and the differences in our susceptibility to it is largely irrelevant.

• On a second tier, the same type of conclusions get bandied around when discussing who does what once there have been cues and clues and signals that yes, there's mutual interest in having sexual activities take place. The woman is portrayed as the object of desire, which positions the man as the one with the appetite, the hunger, and from this it is often concluded that he will be doing things to her, that he will be the active party who is in control of sexualizing their interaction, with her control deriving from being the brake pedal, the reactive party. That hasn't been my experience. The person whose appearance provokes sexual interest on the other person's part is not required to be passive or to have participation limited to being reactive. Nor, incidentally, does the experience of being visually sexually attracted directly translate into having an inclination to do anything in particular, and in fact it can be a somewhat paralyzing experience. The most forwardly seductive people I've known conveyed a sense of awareness of their desirability and used it as an aggression: "You want; I can MAKE you want; I can make this happen".

In fact, the confidence and the projected sense of enjoyment and delight at doing so, of conveying "I have selected you and I'm going to have you", is a strong enough component that it outweighs the importance of the appearance itself. It's not what she has so much as how she uses it, in other words. The usual procedure that involves leveraging her own visual attractiveness goes something like this: she draws a specific guy's attention to her body and then to her eyes so as to express "yeah, I made you look, and we both know you want it".

• That behavior, in which the woman uses her appearance in a sexually aggressive manner, is not the only or even the most typical sexually aggressive behavior that I've seen women use. She may instead make a physical or verbal declaration of sexual interest that is focused on how the object of her attentions is attractive to her, making it all about her own appetite. Those expressions do not tend to focus on her own visual sexual appeal, so her own visual desirability isn't really a factor.

One thing the two modes have in common is confidence. Whether she's expressing "I know I'm hot and I can focus that on you and make you want me" or "I find you hot and I want you and therefore I will have you", her self-assurance makes it sexy and makes it work.

• And that brings me back to focusing on myself and my own situation. We all find confidence attractive, don't we? So where is a genderqueer girlish male-bodied person like me going to acquire sexual confidence from? This is no passing tangential subject, it's right at the dead-central core of things: how does a male-bodied person who identifies as girl exude sexual confidence and therefore a decent shot at being found sexually attractive by those he finds appealing?

Let's unpack that quickly. Yes, it has totally been a lifelong concern for me that girls and women to whom I was attracted would not be reciprocally attracted to me in the same way. I think precisely because I always thought of myself as essentially identical to them, it mattered a great deal to me that it be reciprocal. Meanwhile, as you'll recall, we started off saying that it's widely believed that female folks are less sexually driven by visual appearances. So that right there is going to make it difficult to believe that mirror-image parity is possible, so how *do* I find my way towards a sexual confidence?

I think we can posit the existence of some degree of female visual-based sexual interest. When I was in grad school in the early 90s there was a 4-day discussion on the women's studies discussion list about an event in which three women students on bicycles pedaled past a male student and one of them catcalled "Bow wow wow puppy chow!". And there was a Diet Coke ad on TV a few years ago in which several office women stare appreciatively out the window at a cute guy on a construction crew down below. When we say women are less sexually driven by visual appearance, perhaps we mean they feel it the same way that guys do but with fewer exclamation marks, or perhaps we mean they are interested and find it appealing but that it's less specifically sexual for them. And by now, having written this, I find myself backpedaling: I myself am suspicious whenever there's a formulation that says that the female version of anything observed first in males is "lesser". Well, I did say I wasn't certain.

Women often say that they dress for themselves. I think most of the time they do not mean that they have no consideration or concern for how they will be viewed by others (especially the sort of others that they may hope will find them sexually attractive), but rather that the important thing is that they themselves feel well put together, sexy and confidently at ease with their chosen appearance and presentation. For me it started in the same space. I didn't really know if there was an ideal visual presentation available for me that would provoke sexual interest in the type of women I'd like to be sexually interested in me. I could hope that there was, and I could choose the choosable aspects of my appearance (such as grooming and the way that I dress). Having done so, I stirred that in with my confidence that I was good company, a caring person, a fascinating person with a fascinating mind, someone fun to be with.

Nowadays I have the added advantage of knowing from experience that, yeah, it works, it can happen at any time, and sometimes it does.

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