Coming to Terms With It


I don't have the power to make the things I say and write be important to you. To be relevant and capable of explaining a lot of things that you were concerned about.

I think that a lot of the things I say and write are important and powerfully explanatory, but for the most part I don't have what you could call a following. It's an interesting word, following. When I was a juvenile, it had a kind of stuffy "congregation of the church" official kind of vibe, but now I'm more likely to associate it with TikTok and FaceBook and YouTube, places where you get other people to follow you and listen to your videos or read your posts.

I am frustrated because of this. Obviously I want the experience of being regarded as important. Let's be upfront about that, I definitely have an ego invested in this. It would be fun and would feel really satisfying to wow people. Musicians have that, the desire to really affect an audience, to have so many people tuned into you. Oh, and incidentally I am a freaking musician and I think more people should be listening to my music because once again I think I'm better than the miniscule size of my audience ever gave testimony to.

So in terms of desire and me putting focus on it, I'm definitely craving the experience of feeling important and connected to a set of listeners.


Please treat all the preceding paragraphs as Item 1. The observed fact that I crave that kind of attention. You're invited to be cynical. Children do that, but we don't necessarily give them attention because we agree with them that their ideas and opinions and perspectives are important. We often regard it as immature, but cute and some of us regard it as selfish if it persists in adults where it is a lot less cute. So here's Flouncy Derek, getting all frustrated because he's not getting the attention he craves.

Back to me not having the power to make the things I say and write be important to you. Communication is a competitive market. I'm not doing well in that market. I don't seem to have the skillset. I don't think that should be terribly amazing to anyone, insofar as I've been trying to explain myself as a marginalized outsider person. I don't know how to do the communication-market magic stuff. It's not that I am cynical myself about the process of selling what one has to say — I could admire the trait of being good at it, and I can definitely envy it — but my frustration does have me wondering if there aren't better ways to share stuff that you really want other people to pay attention to. Making it available to them is easy; but how do you make them aware of its availability when they don't already know what it is you're selling?

Say a shorter version of it, they say. Give me a Synopsis. Explain everything in one page. Please summarize what it is that your book says in one sentence. Give me the bumper sticker version.

This limits what one can say. I just applied to enter a writing contest.

(Admittedly Cynical Reason: claim another award in the text of my query letter)

I see a contest where nonfiction is eligible and what you submit is a full 1st 50 pages. After so many contests where they want you to submit 500 words, a page, 275 words, 100 words, etc, this appeals as a chance to communicate more. But on page two of the application, they ask for a Synopsis, 100 words maximum.

The usual description of Synopsis is "boil down your book into a single page; include all spoilers", which is a horrendously reductionistic request, but to do a 100 page version utterly defeated me. I wrote

1982. Derek, nursing student, is kicked out of program, refused to pressure patients to take medications. Parents think he has drug/alcohol problem. Sell him on idea of fancy rehab and life-coach facility.

Derek's genderqueer (sissy femme), wants facility to make him better speaker.

They're pushy, tell him he's in denial. Other residents initially resent him for being disruptive.

They're slickly manipulative, he's stubborn, they treat his femininity as pathological, he tries to get something out of the program but they're headed for a collision.

Want real synopsis? I need more than 100 words, I don't do bumper stickers.

That's a hundred freaking words.

There has to be a better communications process. I have my author's group where people read from what they've written and give each other feedback. What I visualize is something hierarchical but not in the sense of bosses and employees or captains and lieutenants and sergeants, but instead a hierarchy of communication itself, with little groups that meet often being a part of somewhat larger groups that meet a bit less often and concepts that get a lot of endorsement or generate interesting conversations are more likely to be brought forward into the larger group. Or something like that. I mean, I have more specific ideas but if we were to do this, I'd need to listen to other people's ideas pretty early on.

Call the preceding paragraph Item 2, if you will. This notion of a communications funnel. Local smallgroup passing on that which communicates in a meaningful sense to the next larger group.


That notion, Item 2 (even if it's not how our markets are really structured) suggests that I should select topics and insights that aren't mine or, even if they are, precede the stuff I'm attempting to publish, and trace back to some point where it's easier to make sense to people.

Circling back to Item 1, the ego stuff, ...I really don't know if it's how people in the publishing industry thing of it, but to me, it's like a conversation, very awkwardly conducted:

Author: I have stuff to say

Market: Who can you sell it to?

Author: That's what I was going to ask you, dammit!


Back to my lack of skillset.

Then somehow I'm supposed to leverage my sense of connection to those people so as to find the people to whom I could say more without losing them or failing to make sense to them.

God I hate this. I hate this process. Flouncy Derek: You people are hard to make sense to, I have stuff to say, I'm not very good at what I set out to do, and I'm very frustrated!!



Item 3: Acceptance


I once said — as recounted in the very damn book I'm trying to sell — that I think the Serenity Prayer should be inverted, like so:

God, grant me the wisdom to know the difference between the things I cannot change and the things that I can, the courage to change the things I can change, and when all else fails, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

I'm 65. Retirement age.

I actually retired once already from pushing this specific gender agenda. This whole notion that I had something important to say. I put it down when I left college, grad school, 1992. Not toting a PhD. Not having made a mark in academia with my ideas. Then I picked it all back up in the mid-2000s, intially just thinking and processing and rereading the things I'd written.

So I picked it back up and (again) pushed and spoke and wrote. (And yeah, again got all full of self-worship for how exquisitely damn GOOD it was).

But once again it hasn't caught much fire.

I don't want to use "acceptance" as an excuse for not trying any more. But if I'm going to keep doing this, I need some protection from how utterly frustrating and demoralizing the experience is.


Oh, as long as we're on the topic, here's the shit I usually append to the bottom of my blog posts. What is there about self-marketing that I don't get? It's like shouting into a void.
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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.

———————

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

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Index of all Blog Posts

So many of us crave a world where it doesn't matter. "It" meaning our difference, the thing that, in this world, has set us apart. Marginalized us. Sexual orientation. Race. Gender identity. Whatever.

Raise your hand if you've run into people who have told you "Well, then, quit making an issue of it, why don't you? Just be you! Don't be so quick to stick a label on yourself. Why does it matter what sex you are, or if you like boys or girls or both, or any of that stuff? Let's all just be people!"

What do you tell them?

I totally get the inclination to roll one's eyes and sigh and say "You just don't get it", believe me. But rolling my eyes at them and telling them they don't get it isn't likely to expand their understanding.


From the snippet of Within the Box I'm reading to my author's group on Sunday:

“I don’t think none of us really knows what it’s like to be in another person’s skin”, George says. “But it’s not just because of pride that I’m always aware of being a Black man. World ain’t gonna let me forget it. We all have our own shit we have to sort out, but I don’t think it’s right to make out like seeing people with racial attitudes is hostile when this happens all the time.”

We can't draw attention to ways in which we're prevented from "just being people" and make an attempt to change that unless we can describe the pattern and, yes, stick a label on it. Something to call the phenomenon.

But yes, to those of you who don't see why "it" should matter, yeah, it shouldn't, and glad to hear that to you it doesn't make any difference, that actually is a good thing, even if you're annoyingly oblivious about the ways in which the world won't let us forget about it yet.



I've often found it useful to compare being genderqueer to being lefthanded.

In today's world, being lefthanded does not marginalize me. I can "just be people" despite being lefthanded. The world does not make an issue of it and draw my attention to it. I've never been treated substantially differently from how other people are treated because of being lefthanded.

I do still live in a world where being righthanded is the default, the standard assumption. Sign-in sheets at meetings have the pen glued to the wrong side of the clipboard, and I have to stretch the cord awkwardly to write my name on the form. Desks with the little table attached have the tables on the right instead of the left. But you know, these are trivial things; the truth is that it's simply not a "difference that makes a difference". Kids in elementary school didn't invent an array of hostile mean-spirited things to call me because of it. I didn't grow up hearing hateful epithets that meant "lefthanded person". I haven't faced discrimination in employment or housing or banking. Or singled out for special treatment by the police. Politicians aren't telling voters I'm a threat to their way of life and things need to be done about people like me.


But guess what? It wasn't always like that. Did you know? If I'd been born in the 1800s I might have had the back of my left hand hit with a ruler if my teacher saw me writing with it. It was considered to be the wrong hand. There was judgmental hostility. And if we go back even further, there was a time when it was associated with the devil. Not just wrong in the sense of incorrect, but wrong in the sense of evil. I might have been considered by the community to be morally depraved. It could have affected my ability to work and live and basically "be a person". It could even have played a role in getting me burned at the stake as a witch!

So if I'd been alive back then, it would have been fair to describe myself as a marginalized person for being lefthanded. It would have been legitimate for me to make a political issue of it, to point out that this was unfair and unreasonable.

Moving back to the present era, yes, I hope that having an atypical gender identity will someday be no more problematic than being lefthanded is. Maybe people will still make cisgender assumptions about people by default, but it will be no more oppressive than those signature clipboards and desks.

But a big part of the process of getting there is drawing attention to how that is not so yet, and testifying to what it's been like and why it's unfair and so on.


—————


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.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. I was going to start echoing it on Substack as well but we're not off to a good start. Anyway, please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

"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.

—————


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.

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

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

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

---

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


—————


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


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



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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I am neither trans nor cis.

That's been a recurrent theme in my blog posts, along with the sense that my identity often gets erased whenever someone tries to divide the world up into either trans or cis.

Why?

Because I'm definitely not cis, but the mainstream narrative about what it means to be trans does not include people like me.

Many people like to declare that transgender is an umbrella term that includes everyone who isn't cis, regardless of how our gender identity may be different from what it was assumed to be originally. But that doesn't work if you then go around and make statements and assertions about how things are for trans people, and how the rest of the world should think of trans people and how it should treat trans people, if you don't keep people like us in mind when you make those kinds of statements.

And, mostly, we aren't included. We aren't covered. Except in the sense of being covered up by that kind of thinking.



Meet Cindy. She's a transgender woman. She wants to be seen and treated as a woman, and to live as a woman, and not to be regarded and treated as different from the other women. Sound familiar? That's what I call the "conventional trans narrative". It's how we're told to think of trans women.

Keep in mind that we're also told that if you're not a man, and you're not a cis woman, this must be you, that you're a trans woman and that this is how it must be for you.

Cindy posts memes on Facebook, to explain to the world how things are for trans women. One of them says "I wasn't born in a boy's body. I'm a girl. This is the body I was born in so it's always been a girl's body".

Another meme says "Don't deadname transgender people". Cindy explains that she picked a name that is considered a girl's name, so she could blend in, instead of being constantly jarred by being called a name that is considered a boy's name.

A third meme that she has posted says "It's creepy to focus on what's in someone else's underpants. It's none of your business".

The things that Cindy needs, politically and socially, are real and valid and worthwhile, and I support her and I try my best to be her ally in all this, but my situation is not Cindy's situation, and her memes aren't about me or anyone else like me, and yet that's what the world understands "transgender" to be.

I don't want to be under that umbrella. That's not me.


I have no interest in passing. I'm not female. I'm femme. I was born with the physical configuration that our world calls "male". I call it "male", too. That's my body. I'm not ashamed of it. Not only do I not need surgery or hormones, I also don't need you and the rest of the world to think of me as female. Because I'm not. I'm femme. I'm one of the girls, always have been. Never wanted to be a boy, never felt ashamed that I didn't fit in with the boys, and therefore I am not cisgender. I'm a male femme. I'm genderqueer. My gender is queer, unusual, unexpected, different from the norm.

Not all of us want to blend in with the cisgender people of our gender. Not all of us want the world to avoid noticing that our bodies are different from those of most folks of our gender. We aren't all like Cindy.

So if you want to include us, and not erase us, you need to keep that in mind when you say things as if you're speaking for all transgender people -- at least if you're then going to claim that "transgender" includes everyone who isn't cis.

Personally, it's a label I choose not to wear. I don't call myself trans and I'd rather you didn't either. I'm genderqueer, not transgender.


If you're a proud transgender activist, and you want to speak out on behalf of transgender men and women, go for it. If you want to include all of us who aren't cisgender when you speak up, sure, I can use all the help I can get, but if you're going to be inclusive, you have to actually include.



—————


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


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



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

———————

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

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

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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I say I'm not a socialist; I'm less than enthused when you want our group to affirm in one of its planks that we are.

You say, "I'm surprised and disappointed, Allan". You say, "I really would have thought that you'd be on the side of the poor and the working class. That you'd see that the system is rigged against them, unfairly. I never knew you were a friend of the bankers and corporations and such an ally to the rich and powerful. But seriously, you think capitalism is fair and that people get what they deserve in the free market?"

So we need to have a conversation.




A lot of my friends and associates in the Green Party, among feminists, and within the LGBTQIA+ community, when they say "socialist", mostly mean "Gee, capitalism is unfair, most of the people doing the work don't get the benefits, and it's set up that way, and I'm against all that" and so on.

But would you consider yourself a radical feminist for thinking, "Gee, it's a man's world and it's unfair to women"? Radical feminism is more than just that, there's an attempt to get a handle on why, and how it works and what to do about it and how it should be instead. Socialism, as I think of it, is that way too. It contains a theory of what the oppression and exploitation is, and why it exists; it identifies causes and mechanisms of power and inequality, it defines relationships between categories of people. It diagnoses the problem and it proposes a solution.

Radical feminism says that it all started with sex and reproduction, that sexual inequality arose between the male and female people of our species -- that it wasn't inevitable or natural, and doesn't have to be that way, but somehow became that way, a male supremacy system where men had power over women, and that later that inequality became a blueprint for disempowering and oppressing other categories of people.

Socialism says that it all started with property and control of the means of production, that wealth inequality arose between those who owned or controlled the land (and, later, other means of production, e.g. factories etc) and those who did the labor. In the era when Marx formulated his theories, it was radical to insist that it wasn't inevitable or natural to have a nobility and a working class. Socialism says it doesn't have to be that way, but it became that way, and that fundamental inequality became a blueprint for disempowering and oppressing other categories of people as well.

I hope that when stated that way, you can see that all the intersectionality in the world still leaves us with a disagreement between these theories. They can both be right about the oppression of the working class and the oppression of women, and about how one form of oppression can be mirrored in how yet another category of people get oppressed. But they can't so easily both be right about their sense of where the root of the problem lies. And it goes deeper, as roots tend to.



Radical feminism, or at least most of it, does not posit that male people are inherently the enemy of equality or that they represent a permanent threat of oppression. But socialism specifically fingers the ruling class, the wealthy oligarchs, the wealthy, as inherently oppressors. The social construction of their class directly depends on exploitation and oppression of the majority, and their very existence, along with the system that enshrines them, are the reason the problem exists in the first place.

Part of the difference is due to the realness of biological sexual dimorphism and the artificiality of class. There is the sense that the ruling class are who they are because of their behaviors, because of their participation in the system that rewards them and exploits the others. In contrast, in a radical feminist context, while the same case can be made that male people are responsible for their participation in patriarchy, we assume they would still be male whether they participated or they didn't, collectively and individually.

Socialism points a finger. "Those people", it says, identifying the ruling class, the rich owners of the means of production, "it is their fault, they are the reason capitalism exists and they are the force that perpetuates it".

Radical feminism, despite its (un)popular image as a hateful indictment of men, actually is a lot more nuanced. Most radical feminist theory recognizes that if male dominance isn't built-in biological as part of nature, it has to be explained; something besides maleness needs to have caused it and to be responsible for the problem.

So socialism has a central adversarial streak. It has culprits in a way that radical feminism does not. Radical feminists may state that males benefit from patriarchy, and have a tendency to support the patriarchy in their behaviors because of how they perceive their personal interests, but they also tend to state that feminism will be of benefit to everyone, not just women, whether men realize it or not.

This makes a significant difference to me. There is an undertone of hate and blame, of culprit-blaming and resentment, in socialism. I find it detrimental, conservative, politically cancerous.



Socialist thought contains an inconsistency in how class is viewed. Historically, Marxist thought on the relationship between classes and individuals who were of those classes held that people's identities and interests are shaped by their class. As one of the original prototypes of what became the field of Sociology, this theory tended to treat individuals as blank slates. As I said before, it was radical for its time to posit that the built-in nature of people did not differ, that we were all the same at heart, and that only our social conditions turned us into lords of the manor or peasants of the field. And the classic finger-pointing was actually aimed at the class of people, the ruling class, and not the individual people who comprise it. So it isn't entirely fair on my part to say that socialism hates individual wealthy people and blames them as culprits, as in the formal sense it doesn't, it views all individuals as puppets of their upbringing and social status. But while you can have a revolution against a class of people, when you line them up against the wall you still end up dealing with individual people.

In order to explain how the masses of people are kept from always already being in a state of revolution against the minority of wealthy bourgeois ruling class, Marxism, and the socialist thought that built upon it, speaks of false conscousness and class consciousness. But when you start off with individuals painted as blank slates whose consciousness is caused by their class membership and social situation, there isn't much room to examine the process of perceiving, realizing, knowing. Or of being misled, fooled, deluded into believing the ruling class's ideologies and propaganda about proper place and capitalism as a meritocracy and so forth. Socialist consideration of consciousness, identity, and social participation is clumsy and limited.

Radical feminism's view of the individual isn't a blank slate model. There is a strong thread of thought within radical feminism that revalorizes emotional cognitive processing, both as a critique of patriarchal worship of emotionally detached logic and reason, and as a key to intuition, seeing past what has been taught, seeing through even an omnipresent social ideology.

It's inherently better at not collapsing the individual person into their membership in a category, and to see all the categories and all social structures as participatory behaviors of individuals, not as things in themselves.

The socialist will often consider the individual person who has privileges within the oppressive world and think to themselves, "This person has the power to stop the oppression but doesn't". Or they may not merely think this to themselves but say it loudly, while pointing the finger.

It isn't like that. Power, first off, isn't what the world tends to think it is. What patriarchal ideology says that it is. Power over other people isn't a substance that the powerful possess, the way one possesses a candy bar. Power is a social relationship. It is defined within social structure, and, within that structure, the powerful are as thoroughly defined by it as the powerless. Radical feminism shows us that all structures are dances, verbs, processes that individuals engage in, and do not have genuine existence as nouns outside of that. But one individual, one dancer, can't use the power defined for that position to do completely other things with it. One can occasionally abdicate, but in leaving the dance floor one leaves behind the power; one does not get much opportunity to weild that power to stop the dance. It just doesn't work that way.

There is power to effect change, and it lies in communication. To modify the dance, one must engage with the other dancers and compare notes and change behaviors, and there are ways in which the privileges and opportunities of the powerful do make some actions possible at the individual level that are not available to the less privileged, but to far lesser and more intricately nuanced degree than implied by the socialist's glare.




The socialist shows up at the meeting with a military bearing, serious and ready to engage in the struggle, committed to the cause, deliberately dangerous to the oppressors and adversaries, and prepared to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to triumph in the revolution. It's an attitude, a way of framing the approach. Sometimes you can almost see the olive drab fatigues and the cartridge belt.

View it from a radical feminist perspective. It's hard to get more masculine than military. The adversarial oppositional approach, the erasure of sensitivity in favor of blunt realpolitik, the sacrificing of gentle inclinations, the cessation of patience and flexibility in favor of demands and the undercurrent of threat.

Communication, as I said, is power, the real power to change things. One communicates by being open, sharing, listening, caring, merging one's perceptions with another's. We are all socially situated and none of us had more than a peripheral range of choice in picking our social situation. Blame has no useful role, and picking fights with the other dancers in the dance won't often increase the likelihood of listening and learning. Anger has a valid role in communication but it needs to be accompanied by compassion.



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

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


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in late 2021. Stay tuned for further details.



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

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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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"You must be so happy to see how far things have come since your own teenage years", people often say. "Back then, nobody was talking about being gender variant, it was all either you're gay or else you're straight. Now the kids are free to just be however they are and gender isn't an issue!"

Well, there's definitely been progress, but we haven't exactly Arrived yet.

Have you watched any movies lately or read any good novels that feature femmy males who fall in love with the female heroes of the storyline, and don't masculinize themselves to become heterosexually viable?

Who are the role models to whom a girlish, definitely non-masculine male would turn if they want to see an example, perhaps somebody to emulate?

I think there are more boxes now, but people still want to put you in one of the boxes, and I don't see a box that would fit me. Or would fit the person I was at fifteen, at nineteen, at thirteen.

• Portrayals of male people who are asexual or aren't sexually attracted and don't crave a romantic and sexual relationship would not be good models. I was, and at that age it was intense and complicating my life.

• Portrayals of male people who aren't uncomfortable with the assumptions and projections that people make about male people -- people expecting masculinity, expecting a set of priorities and behaviors that are associated with boys and men, especially sexual prorities and behaviors -- would not be good models. I had related to the girls, not the boys, all through elementary school. The whole 'boy thing' was foreign to me, something I wanted nothing to do with.

• Portrayals of male people whose sexual and romantic fascinations were for and towards other male people would not be good models. I had been taunted and harassed and threatened around the assumption that males who were feminine or acted in any way like one of the girls were gay and wanted male sexual attention. I didn't have those feelings, and existing cultural icons who were male, femmy, and gay didn't represent to me someone who was like me, because sexual orientation had been made an issue for me as a sissy femme person.

• Portrayals of trans gals who transitioned from being someone perceived as male to someone who presented as female were a mixed prospect as role models, because although it was a way of saying "see, being male doesn't keep this person from finding a valid identity as a feminine person", it also tended to underline the notion that the maleness was wrong. I didn't have dysphoria about my body and didn't want to be accepted and regarded as a girl or woman just like the others, as a cisgender woman in other words. I wanted the sexual attractions and romantic hungers I felt to be mutual, and since mine involved attraction for female people, to be mutual I would need to be with someone female who had a reciprocal appetite for someone who was male. If I presented as female and got involved with someone whose attraction was towards female folks, I was going to be a disappointment. Even if they were willing to settle for me because they were attracted to me as a person, I didn't want to be settled for; and I wasn't ashamed of my body and thought someone could find it cute and sexually appealing. I wasn't going to find someone who did if I was going around presenting as female.


The correct box isn't out there yet. Some kid who resembles the person I was as a teenager, coming along now, is going to be miscategorized as transgender, or as femme gay, or as generically nonbinary and asexual, for lack of a better box.

(And yeah, I can hear those of you who are just itching to say "People shouldn't be put in boxes, just be yourself, all this stereotyping is bad, think outside the box dude" and so forth. You are right but you are wrong. People wish to be understood. First-tier understanding tends to begin with generalizing, with categorizing folks and treating them as a typical member of that category. That is NOT a bad thing -- it's only bad when people don't move past that and learn the unique things about the specific person. It's only bad when they continue to treat the person as the box, as the stereotype. You get stereotyped by strangers, whether you realize it or not. It serves you well. You package yourself to be taken at first glance as something reasonable close to who you actually are. You don't know what it's like to not have that available to you unless you have had to live with no appropriate role or notion to wear as a default identity, no stereotype to play to as a starting point. You'd have a less dismissive take on these boxes if you had to walk around without one for a few years. In other words, you might want to check your privilege).



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

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


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



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

———————

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

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You've seen the gender unicorn and the similar posters that break down elements of sex and gender and sexual orientation and so on?

Today I want to write about one of the ones that often falls through the cracks: PRESENTATION.

It isn't gender identity. It isn't physical morphology. It isn't sexual orientation. It's how you market yourself, appearance-wise, to the rest of the human community, to be seen as a certain gender. It's also your success or failure in doing so: how you are perceived by others, largely as a consequence of your presentation.


I happen to be wearing a skirt tonight. No particular reason. I own skirts, I like them. This one is a Talbots, denim, in my size (15), and I am fond of it because it has back pockets and belt loops. For a person who wears jeans a lot, having skirts that accommodate the same pocket and belt paraphernalia is a plus.

And I do wear jeans a lot. I am femme, I am gal, and I look good in jeans. I patch my jeans when they age and make an art project of them. I don't cease to be femme or cease to be gal when I'm in jeans. Cisgender gals are still gals when they're in jeans, so why shouldn't I?

I have facial hair. I didn't grow any until I was 15, but then my body's hormones made them. They were soft and natural and I liked them. I have no issue with my body. It's the one I was born in. It makes hairs in places where most girl-people don't get hairs. Yeah, look: I'm not required to try to pass as a cisgender woman in order to qualify for my gender identity. If the majority of women grew hairs here and it was the boys who didn't, they'd cultive them, they'd adorn them, they'd make sure you saw that the had them. My body grown hairs here.

I'm femme, or girl, or gal. I don't owe you or anyone else physical femaleness. Any more than I owe you XX chromosomes.


There are two parts of the presentation phenomenon:

a) My efforts, and how I think of them, to elicit from you and the rest of the world a gender assignment that comes close to the truth; and

b) How it goes over, how it is perceived.

Both of these belong on the gender unicorn. They are a part of what makes us us. They're different from our gender identity itself, although they're usually affected by it. They're not necessarily the same value as what we were assigned by birth, although they could be, for those of us who are cisgender.

Presentation is social. It's like marketing. How one brands one's self. Look, see, I have physical male characteristics that I could choose to get rid of, but I also choose garments and adornments that most people who identify as "men" would not wear. My selections are made with an awareness of other folks' possible perceptions.

We're all limited by the possibilities that are in other people's heads, although we can riff on themes that people are familiar with. None of us is 100% free from the matrix of gendered expectations and the array of gender identities that people think you and I might have.


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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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Hey, sister, got a moment? Any chance we can reconcile?


You find it bewildering that as a femme-identifying person, I refer to myself as male. You find it appalling and maybe even transphobic when I explain that what I mean when I say I'm "male" is that I was born with a set of physical equipment that, in our culture, has historically been designated "male", although many other people (perhaps including you) may have this same set of bodily components and call those physical structures something other than "male".

You say "Why can't you just call it a penis? A penis isn't male. It's just a penis! Girls can have a penis. Boys can have a vulva".

Well, yeah, I know girls can have a penis. I'm a girl and I've got one. Are we both cool and totally down with the notion that having a penis doesn't define our gender? Can we please have a little moment of peace and solidarity and not be quick to hate on each other for using language a bit differently, and for coming at this situation from different angles?

You identify as transgender. I don't. That means you're a part of a subculture, a community; and you folks, collectively, you got your own way of expressing things, and you also got your own history. Let's talk about the history thing for a sec.

I'm 61; forty years ago, when I was 21 and first coming out, trans people explained the situation to the larger surrounding culture like this: trans people realized at some point in their life that their gender was the gender typically found in the other type of body, and so they'd ideally get hormones and surgery and transition, so that their body would match their gender. And what they said they wanted from the surrounding world was to be accepted as a normal and ordinary person of that gender and that sex. And most trans people wanted to "pass" — they didn't want to receive social acceptance only from a handful of people who heard their life story and learned about transsexuals and all that, but instead they wanted to look and otherwise present in such a way that strangers who didn't know them would just automatically treat them as the gender that they were.

Fast forward to the more-or-less present era. Trans activists interact with lots of transgender people who can't afford hormones and surgery even if they want them, and lots of people who are blocked from having access to the medical interventions they want because doctors and insurance companies are playing gatekeeper. They also interact with a lot of transgender people who don't want the whole package of medical options for a variety of reasons. There's a risk of significant loss of sensation and function when doctors rearrange biological tissue, and there are systemic repercussions to hormones with risk factors and so on and so forth.

Well, it's really fundamentally a human rights issue that the body you inhabit should not detract from the legitimacy of your gender identity. So the social message changed, to become a lot more inclusive. You were valid as a trans person (woman or man) whether you passed or did not pass, and, in fact, fuck "pass". Identities are what are valid; your body doesn't matter! And they didn't use "male" and "female" to refer to bodily architecture because that can imply to some trans people that they've got the wrong body for their gender identity.



I apologize if I've misrepresented the transgender movement and its history in that short summary. I'm writing from the outside. I try to learn and listen but if I've distorted things, I'm sorry, but I hope I mostly got it right.



I'm not trans. I heard the 40-years-ago version of what trans was, gave it some thought, decided nope, that's not me. It's something else. I haven't been a part of your community these 40 years.

So I've got a different history, with different understandings and stuff. I'm hoping you'll be compassionate and interested in a story that's different from yours, so you can see how I got to my viewpoint, ok?

I came out in 1980 as a sissy. A person in a male body whose personality and behavior were a mismatch for what's expected of male people, but a good match for the expectations for female people. I did not want to be perceived as an ordinary typical female person any more than I wanted to be perceived as an ordinary male person. I wanted to be perceived as what I'd been harassed about and accused of all my life: an effeminate sissy girlish male person. The world apparently thought I should be ashamed of that, but I was proud of it. And I was finally angry about it and ready to take a stand. To be in your face about it. Yeah, I'm male, and I'm one of the girls. Get used to it. Deal.

My attitude is that until the world nods in agreement that yeah, male girls exist and no, it's not a damn affliction or an embarrassment, a failure to be sufficiently manly... until then, there's always going to be this notion that if you're perceived and recognized as a male-bodied person, you'll be regarded as less of a man than a masculine man and less of a woman than a physically female-structured person who has boobs and vag and all that.

Not only don't I want to pass, I want to "anti-pass". I want, as I said, to be up in people's face about the lack of correspondence between my body and my gender identity. You've got a male girl here. Flying pride flags about it, no less, got that?


So... you don't use "male" to refer to physical stuff like testicles and penis. You basically use "male" to mean the same thing as "man" and "boy" and so on. I, on the other hand, do use it to mean the physical stuff. My attitude is we've already got plenty of gender words ("man", "boy", "masculine", "feminine", "guy", "dude", "gal", etc), and the word "male" is historically about the raw physical architecture (including other species and also things like hose couplings and electrical plugs), so why can't we keep that word for sex and use existing gender words for gender? This isn't about invalidating anybody's gender identity, it's really not. Yeesh, do I sound like J. K. fucking Rowling here? Seriously?


You ask "Well, why can't you just call it a penis, why do you have to say male?". I say "I want a goddam adjective. An already-recognized adjective to describe me as a person-with-penis-and-associated-bits. I don't want to use a long klunky phrase like 'person with a penis and testicles and adam's apple and absence of a vulva and clitoris and breasts, person who happens to be dyadic or endosex as opposed to intersex and most likely has XY chromosomes and doesn't have a period and has spermatotrophic hormone and a vas deferens'".

If I don't specify that when I say "male" I'm talking about my plumbing and not my personality and inclinations, people often assume I'm saying I have a "male side and a female side", like genderfluid or bigender people. Which isn't it at all. I'm no less feminine than you are. I'm not less male than a rooster. I'm not in-between, either sexually (as intersex people may consider themselves to be) or genderwise. I'm solidly male and utterly feminine.

I'm talking about mine. MY parts. I'm not calling your parts male. I'm calling my parts male.

Not everybody is either male or female, just as not everybody who is male is a man and not everybody who is female is a woman. But the fact that sex isn't binary doesn't mean sex doesn't exist. By the way, intersex people can't talk about being intersex — and distinguish intersex from being nonbinary or intergender or genderfluid or whatever — if they can't talk about bodies and why their atypical body has marked them as different and marginalized them. Most of the intersex activists I know really want to distinguish sex from gender. Because otherwise they get erased.


In a similar way, I can't do the political activity of getting in people's face about being a male girl if I can't say "male girl" and can't talk about the body that caused my girlness to be perceived as something wrong and in need of fixing, or as reason to provoke dismissive contempt.


I personally identify as genderqueer and, more specifically, as a gender invert. I'm a speaker, a blogger, and an author. I just got a book published (and BTW you should read it if you have any appetite for coming-of-age / coming-out stories). I'm not going to go away or shut up.

Does this help?



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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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