Reviews for my second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, continue to come in at a slow trickle. I missed this one when it first came out in January, and discovered it while doing a vanity search on Google just the other day.

Margaret Adelle provided a review in both video and written (Goodreads) form.

It's not exactly a round of applause for the book.

I tend to think it is bad form for an author or other artist to react or respond to negative reviews, because it tends to come across as resentment that anyone would be anything other than impressed with the piece and makes one look thin-skinned and unable to tolerate criticism. I'm going to risk it this time because Margaret Adelle brings up some salient points, even if I don't agree with them all fully.

There's one central aspect of Margaret Adelle's commentary that I want to react to in particular: she sees me, or at least the "me" represented as Derek in my book, as intruding into women's space, and doing so rather arrogantly and cluelessly.



There exists an attitude: that, hey, if I identify as a woman or a female or as femme or girl or whatever, I therefore get to go into any place that is earmarked and designated for them and their use. Or, rather, us and OUR use. That if that's my identity, it would be blatant bigotry for anyone to question my presence and participation there.

Well, sometimes that is arrogant. I know many of my trans sisters and brothers will be appalled to hear me say so, but I do say so. It is sometimes even true even if your marginalization or oppression is worse than what cisgender women face. (Or you think it is). Not that your -- or my -- presence in such spaces is always inappropriate, just that oversimplified "answered it for all situations and for all time so I don't need to even think about it" types of answers are indeed arrogant. In the board game Monopoly, you can acquire a Get Out of Jail Free card, but when it comes to marginalization and intersectional oppression nobody gets a "Gee I'm Oppressed So I'm Automatically On the Right Side" card.

Margaret Adelle finds me (or, rather, the me that I was in 1985) arrogant in assuming that because I was marginalized as a sissy femme, I have every right to use academic women's studies as a springboard for trying to make a social movement for sissy femmes like me come into existence. That I was entitled to go into those classrooms and start speaking as an authority. That I was entitled to get credentials in women's studies and start speaking from within feminism itself as a self-designated spokesperson (spokes-sissy?) for these concerns.

As she points out, the story arc concludes with me realizing that I can't. That feminism is not my movement, and that I need to find a different way to have a voice in society. But she has limited patience with my process of getting there.

Is there not a middle ground for acknowledging that as a person with no social place at all to go, I had some latitude for taking my issues into the spaces where I took them, while also seeing that at least in some cases I was intruding into spaces that were not where I belonged?


Among the other concerns that are a part of the axe I brought to grind are matters of courting and flirting and pursuing sexual relationships. Here, too, I was approaching these matters as a femme, evaluating my thoughts and deeds as if I were a girl like any other girl in my priorities and needs, but in the passages where I've written of such things -- the trajectory of my attempts to have a girlfriend in my life -- this critique evaluates me as a man who expresses an indignant sense of entitlement, a man who clearly thinks intimacy ought to be coming my way because I'm oh so feminist and sensitive and stuff. Creepy.

Some similar comments were elicited by some other reviewers when they were reviewing my first book, GenderQueer, as exemplified by the January 2021 panel discussion hosted at Kramer's Bookstore.

The conceptual space in which the romantic interests and behaviors of girls might be assessed by others isn't exactly the same kind of "women's space" that is entailed by a classroom or an activist movement, but undeniably I was doing my best to lay claim to it, asking that my behaviors and priorities be evaluated in the same way that those of a female person of the same age would be looked at, but this, too, is perceived by some as arrogant: those same behaviors are turned and examined instead as the behaviors of a male person who protests that since he is such a sensitive feminist kind of fellow, he is owed some romantic outcomes that aren't happening, and he's all bitter about it, and it's not a good look.


At least some of that is a fair cop. I am indeed headstrong, and I have spent most of my life focused on my stuff, defining it as a social cause, but undeniably it is all about me. That is part of what the book's about: that being marginalized doesn't give a person (in this case, me) carte blanche.

I dared to think of myself as one of the girls, and to evaluate my own self accordingly. Some of the outcome of that may have been intrusive and arrogant, but I think on balance it was liberating for me at a no-more-than-reasonable cost to the rest of society.

The burden is on me to make the case for it, of course.


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


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

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






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

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That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, which became available in February, (ebook versions became available in April) has started to bring in some reviews!






"How do men navigate the world of gender identity in a society that forcefully upholds gender norms? And how are men able to explore their privileged role in society while trying to engage in women’s studies and feminist theory?

These questions are explored in Allan D. Hunter’s latest nonfiction memoir, *That Guy in Our Women’s Studies Class* (2022)...

*That Guy in Our Women’s Studies Class* is dense, and it is not for the casual reader. The memoir is chock-full of advanced literature references, extensive thinking and debates on feminist theory, and thought-provoking theory about society and the way the world is structured. For readers not interested in women’s studies, feminist theory, sociology or psychology, this book may not be the best choice. But for a reader who is ready to question privilege and social identity, this book is the way to go..."

— Adrienne Harris-Fried. Mass Media — University of Massachusetts


+ + +


" 'Hi, I’m Derek Turner, I am interested in feminism and I want to take this course.'

So proceeds with great determination this young 'sissy femme' who is male and heterosexual, yet with a feminine nature, as he describes himself in this 'nonfiction memoir' which reads more like a novel...

Derek’s determination to succeed and be heard is marvelous: he helps bring political awareness to the staff and residents of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital, where he has managed, creatively, to find a place to live while attending school; inserts a fresh voice in classroom discussions about the abuses of patriarchy; and even shakes up the school’s Catalyst newspaper.

This era marked the blossoming of feminist theory, and readers will relish the roiling discussions about pornography, rape, power differentials, racism, sexual liberation versus feminism around works by writers then very much in vogue like Marilyn French, Vivian Gornick and Andrea Dworkin...

A Reader’s Guide at the back offers provocative questions about themes that Derek is pursuing, how he adjusts his understanding over time and what a change agent is...this work will spur readers to go back and check out some of the inspired texts."

— "Not your classic feminist", Taos News (Staff Writer review)




+ + +


"Everyone who wants to walk in the shoes of this courageous, intelligent sissy activist will enjoy his two-part autobiography, *GenderQueer: A Story from a Different Closet* and *That Guy in our Women’s Studies Class*. The first describes growing up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he struggled with being different and identifying what that meant, with no role models like himself, nor people to discuss his struggle with. The second describes his ongoing intellectual, social and academic search during college, where he enters a Women’s Studies program and struggles to be accepted in as a heterosexual male who has found that the people with whom he identifies most strongly are “radical feminists.

In addition to the joy of following the personal history and growth of this brave author, those interested in feminist history and woman’s studies will find this book enlightening, as it includes a wealth of material for future reading...

We look forward to Hunter continuing to help us understand the unique beauty, skills and challenges faced by the many sissy males in our society!"

— Mim Chapman, Author, Sex-educator and Relationship Coach Santa Fe, NM






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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. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



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

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That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class takes place predominantly in three venues: a facility for homeless people with psychiatric histories located on the grounds of Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital, a SUNY college campus in nearby Nassau County, and, later, a larger SUNY campus farther out on the island.

At the story's open, I -- via my alias in the story, Derek Turner -- am living in the facility while commuting to and from the first SUNY campus where I'm taking my courses.




My books are nonfiction and autobiographical, but I did change all the names, including my own for the sake of consistency, to protect the privacy of a small hanful of characters. I extended that to the naming of the two schools involved, which was probably kind of silly... can't hurt, but there are a limited number of likely campuses and some readers might conclude that the first one is probably SUNY College at Old Westbury.

It has historically been a progressive and experimental campus. It started out with a commitment to student authority in the design of one's own curriculum and course of study, and then later was structured around a mission to provide education for marginalized people who were often bypassed and left out of the opportunities for higher education. The Feminist Press was founded and originally located there, so the flyleaf of quite a few feminist publications were marked with the fact that they'd been printed at SUNY @ Old Westbury.

It's a fairly small college, although some other colleges in the SUNY system have yet smaller enrollments, and yet it sits anchored on a large plot of land (originally the Clark estate, if I recall correctly); students attending there are somewhat isolated and insulated from Hicksville, the nearest community of any size. Old Westbury itself -- the village -- is a world of mansions and old money, horse stables and yet more privacy and isolation, and is not socially a home to the college campus.

Architecturally, the buildings are bright and 1970s-futuristic, neither cubist modern nor self-importantly imposing; a good portion of the pedestrian travel routes take students outdoors or through glass tunnels, and it's a world of windows and walls projecting at interesting and unexpected angles.






The majority of commuter students are suburbanites from nearby communities, whereas a substantial number of the resident students were recruited from traditionally underserved populations from wtihin New York City, along with an additional sprinking of international students. Since the era covered in my book, there have been additional dormitories and additional classroom buildings built, so some of this description may be a bit dated, but I think the depiction still holds for the most part.

Much of the faculty was attracted to the site by its special missions, and then from the cameraderie of being among similar-minded educators with a shared sense of vision and purpose. To an extent that has also been mirrored by the attitudes and perspectives of the students, although mitigated by the presence of students who attend because it is affordable and conveniently located.

It is a small enough community for the students to become known to each other by experience or reputation, and, from that, to demand things of each other, to develop expectations and a sense of accountability.


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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. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



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

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

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My publisher requested any final author's edits on my second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, to be sent in so they can finalize the setup in preparation for rolling it out.

I've been slower and more methodical at this stage than I was with the first book, which had been through a wide variety of shakedown cruises with agents, publishers, and editors. This one, less so. I made contact with people I was in relationships with during the timeframe covered by this book, and likewise with academic colleagues who were classmates of mine, and received invaluable feedback that I used to revamp some of the descriptive passages.

As with the first book, the most likely delay will be waiting for the Library of Congress to provide the CIP (Catalog-in-Publishing) block.

Sunstone Press also sent me a rendition of the front and back cover and spine for me to make any final modification (I did, in fact, catch a typo), and it looks gorgeous.

So I'm once again going through that "it's starting to seem real" phase!

This book is essentialy a sequel to GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, picking up shortly after I came out in 1980 and covering my endeavors to use academic feminism as a platform to say what I wanted to say to the world about gender and sissyhood and being a gender invert.


A 2022 publication date is still expected.

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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

———————

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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"All I've taken away from your long-winded blatherings is that you are a straight, cisgender male that has feminine qualities", says Thomas. "Why can't you just embrace that, instead of needing a special word and claiming it's your identity? As far as I can tell, all this makes you... a straight cis male. You're like the male equivalent of a tomboy. Hey, most of us don't fit every stereotype, you know!"


Actually, "sissy" -- the male equivalent of a tomboy, as Thomas says -- was indeed one of the first "special words" I tried using to describe my situation.

So, sure, I can sit myself down and listen. I don't have to be all "you are wrong" and argumentative. I can consider you to be pitching an alternative formulation for me to consider. There are several communities of people I wish would do me the same favor, instead of telling me I am wrong if I say things differently than what they've decided is their truth.

Thomas -- who is totally on-board with gay and lesbian issues, and the concerns of transgender people who actually transition -- is echoing the sentiments of a lot of my gender-critical feminist colleagues. They, as you may know, are questioning the current social concepts about transgender people who transition.

Unlike Thomas, who sees me as very definitely not transgender, the gender critical feminists tend to conflate my situation and everything I say about it with the transgender phenomenon.

But where Thomas (and others who think like him) and the gender critical feminists tend to agree is: what I'm saying, and what I'm claiming as my identity, isn't valid or doesn't make sense.

Great. I'm a unifier.

Both the gender-critical feminists and Thomas keep telling me I should consider billing myself as a feminine male man.

Let's consider that.

I grew up with my childhood in the 1960s and my puberty, adolescence and early adulthood in the 1970s. That means I came of age alongside of feminism, and the voice of feminism told me double standards were unfair -- that if it was okay for girls and women to be feminine, it had to be okay for boys and men to be feminine. That it was sexist to have one set of traits, behaviors, characteristics, etc expected or required from one sex and a different set from the other. Which is in large part what the gender-critical feminists and Thomas and his ilk are offering me as an alternative formulation to how I present my gender identity these days.

I embraced those feminist ideas. They said I was valid. They said the people calling me names and telling me I wasn't "doing boy" correctly were not valid.

I embraced those ideas but they were insufficient. They didn't dive deep enough into the situation I would be in as a sissy feminine male person attracted to the female folks. That's mostly because feminism is about female liberation, and female experience. So the specifics were all about the aspects of female existence where sexist double standards impacted female people. Without specifics, just rejecting the notion of sexist double standards can be a lot like saying, As Anatole France did, that "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread".

Feminism dove into an immense number of situations to untangle how unequal priorities and treatments and expectations affected women. I didn't have access to a similar library of analyses of the situations I found myself in as a heterosexual sissy male in patriarchal society.

Queer theory emerged in the 80s as gay males started making this kind of systematic examination of the situations of non-heterosexual people. A lot of those observations were accepted, embraced, and incorporated by feminists as part of an expanded understanding of patriarchy. But transgender women and radical feminists had gotten off to a bad start and have never been on speaking terms, and don't tend to listen to each others' concepts and ideas. So as queer theory also started incorporating the experiences of transgender people, feminist theory and the nascent queer theory pushed off from each other somewhat, leaving lesbian feminists occasionally stranded or pulled on from both camps.

Me too. As I said, I grew up with feminism and found validation from it. But it wasn't examining my situation and neither were the new truths and assertions from transgender activism addressing it or speaking for me or giving me anything to hold onto.

The simple feminist "erase all gender expectations and have a unisex world" prescription, as voiced by Thomas and the gender critical feminists as described above, has shortcomings which I've addressed in these previous blog posts:

Androgyny & Unisex vs Being Differently Gendered

To Oppose Patriarchy: It's Different For Men

The people calling me names and telling me I wasn't "doing boy" correctly did not understand that I'd lost interest in "doing boy". The identity being shoved at me was social, not biological, and I declined it. I wasn't doing boy differently via being feminine and seeking acceptance as such; I reached the point where I had no interest in being accepted as a boy of any sort.

If we cannot use the word "oppression" to describe men's plight, how can we speak of it? That, of course, is the point: we cannot. Because patriarchy does not recognize the ultimate destructiveness of tyranny to tyrants, the fathers have no word-and therefore no concept-for the kind of dehumanization, the severe characterological damage, done to men by their use of violence of all kinds to dominate women and all "others". Men who are becoming conscious must find their own language for their experience.

-- Sonia Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: the Metaphysics of Liberation

That is exactly what I sought out to do in the 1980s as a women's studies major (a tale which will be made available when my next book, That Guy in our Women's Studies Class, comes out next year), and what I am continuing to do now in writing these blog posts.

I can't do so "as a feminist", within feminism, as a part of the feminist community. Feminism, as I said, exists for the purpose of female liberation, and speaks from female experience; I can't really modify any part of it or add to it without being perceived as an interloper and an invader, at least by some, and while some people in the LGBTQIA world often also see and regard me as a hostile invasive force, it's constituted around multiple variant identities instead of one primary identity, which affords me more room to say "me too, move over". But that does mean finding ways of expressing my situation in terms and within concepts that are in use there.

It isn't phony: when I first came out in 1980, I specifically conceptualized myself as a fundamentally different identity from straight guys, gay guys, or transsexual women. I didn't see my concerns as the concerns of men within patriarchy but as the concerns of heterosexual sissies within patriarchy. So I'm not barging in to use the LGBTQIA voice for expediency reasons.

But I speak with my own voice. You should consider it, listen to it, regardless of your embrace (or lack of it) of either the transgender people's theories or the theories of feminism, and don't be in such a hurry to conflate everything that doesn't seem to come from your own camp with whatever you don't like about the perspectives you currently disagree with.

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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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My book's been in print for a year! Have you read it yet? Here are some reasons why you should —


• Today there is the widespread notion that when people question their gender identity, they end up JOINING a crowd of people who identify a certain way. Having the social support of other people who are like you are is a good and healthy thing, but this also bolsters the notion that people are doing this in order to fit in. Which is the opposite of explaining one's identity as someone who does not.

GenderQueer is the first-person account of growing up as a gender misfit in an era long before "genderqueer" was trending. It's the story of arriving at an understanding and it sheds some light on how variant gender identities arise when they did not exist before.


• The "Q" by itself — the majority of genderqueer accounts have been written by people who first identified as same-sex attracted (gay, lesbian, or bisexual/pansexual) or else as transgender. This particular tale is from the vantage point of someone who never had dissonance about the male body in which he was born, and was not attracted to other male people sexually. Just femme.

A lot of people can check off multiple checkboxes when they identify as part of the LGBTQIA spectrum, but explaining the differences can be complicated when the examples involve more than one such identity. This is genderqueer by itself.


• I don't know about you, but I have a growing library of first-hand accounts of what it's like to be a transgender woman, what it's like to be a gay man, what it's like to be a lesbian, what it's like to be a butch lesbian, what it's like to be a transgender man, and so on.

If you think it is important for us to be visible, if you think public education that explains our identities is necessary and relevant, you should support writers who tell these tales and provide these examples.

Reviews and purchase info here: https://www.genderkitten.com


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My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, will be coming out late this year and continues the story. This time, the tale will be about joining: in the early 1980s, when there was no LGBT community in today's sense, I set out to join the people who were most visible in dealing with gender — the feminists. Specifically, I decided to enroll in women's studies where our classes would involve discussing these issues and raising these questions.

This was before the arrival of gender studies, and as a male-presenting individual I was perceived as a guy, and hence an outsider coming to the table. To be seen as male was to be perceived as benefitting from patriarchy, and not seen as someone with my own legitimate issues with the workings of gender.

It's a nuanced exploration of privilege and marginalization and intersectionality.





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

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


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

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

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There's been a delay -- my book will not, as previously indicated, come out in January -- but I do now have an official release date! GenderQueer: A Story from a Different Closet will be published by Sunstone Press on March 15, 2020.




So here's what the delay is about: if you pick up a nonfiction book, you're likely to see a block of text on the copyright and dedication page that tells you how the Library of Congress has categorized the book. Libraries and other institutions make use of this.

It's called a "CIP Block".

Here, for example, is the CIP Block for the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond:


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Diamond, Jared M.
Guns, germs, and steel : the fates of human societies / Jared Diamond.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-393-31755-8
1. Social evolution. 2. Civilization—History 3. Ethnology. 4. Human being—Effect of environment on. 5. Culture diffusion I. Title
HM206.D48 1997
303.4—dc21 96-37068
CIP
W W Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York N.Y.10110
www.wwnorton.com
W.W.Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London, W1T3QT


Sunstone Press is a publisher that does release nonfiction books that are purchased by libraries and is therefore a participant in the Cataloging in Publication program. More info.

Since I hope for my book to be acquired by libraries and to become assigned reading for women's and gender studies programs at colleges, it seems very much in my best interests to have my book enrolled and given a CIP block.

Well, the Library of Congress apparently doesn't always move with great alacrity when a publisher sends in a manuscript. And that's what the wait has been about.

Between now and March 15, I should be getting a listing on Amazon for advance orders. I'll keep y'all informed.


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As a consequence of my mother dying and an unusually high volume of other friends', relatives', and associates' lives coming to an end within the last year or so, I've heard a lot of summaries of people's lives, condensations of who those people were around some ongoing themes or primary accomplishments.

I've been doing this all my life. Or all my adult life at any rate. I started when I was 21.

Trying to explain being a person whose body is male and yet whose persona is feminine. Trying to become understood by other people in those terms. Trying to get people to add that to the list of possibilities and accept it as a valid identity.

I've had limited traction. I've put a lot of energy into it but it has mostly gone into spinning my wheels without propelling me very far forward. I've had limited effect. Perhaps I am not very good at what I set out to do; perhaps I lack the talent or the appropriate skill-set or something. I don't have a significant following of people listening or reading what I have to say on the subject.

I've occasionally seriously considered putting this down and walking away from it. I mean, the problem with being Don Quixote is that you do not merely fail to defeat your windmills, you don't even get the satisfaction of having the windmills become aware that you're making the attempt. It gets discouraging.

When I was 22, at the end of a year in which my initial efforts had caused me to be detained in a psychiatric facility and disenrolled from college, and in which attempts to "find my people" had gotten me nowhere, I began to question whether these ideas really made sense, or even if they did, whether they were anywhere near as important as they'd seemed when they first came into my head. I came out of that period of questioning convinced of two things: I didn't have to do this, it was not my duty; but yeah, they made sense of my life and they made sense of society around me, and without them there was a boiling meaningless chaos, and so I was inclined to continue to hold onto them, and in believing in them I was driven to continue to try to communicate.

Many years later, at the end of my 30s, my plans appeared to have collapsed around me with no significant progress made: I'd come to the New York area again seeking to "find my people" but the lesbian gay and bisexual scene such as it existed in Manhattan in the 1980s was just starting to open to transsexual (now called transgender) people, very few of whom were coming to participate; and I didn't find a space in which I could explain my own situation and find anyone with similar identity or experience. I'd also latched onto the idea of majoring in feminist studies: I'd write about this stuff and interact with classmates and teachers and I'd connect with people instead of just finding kindred souls within the pages of feminist theory books! But that hadn't quite panned out either, and now my graduate school career was over with no PhD or teaching position in sight. But I'd obtained an MSW in social work along the way and landed a job and figured over the years I'd make professional connections and get to inform policy makers and write grant proposals and create relevant services to bring my people together somehow. But the social work organization had disbanded and I'd been cast adrift and, finding myself unable to get a job offer in social work, had taken an office job developing database software. Lucrative but not relevant to my "mission". And I'd connected romantically with people several times only to always have them unravel, leaving me concerned that I couldn't maintain a relationship or that I wasn't a desirable partner. So I started to think of myself as someone in early retirement, a social activist driven from the field with nothing to show for it.

Over the course of my 40s I retraced my steps, mental ones and actual physical locations, trying to get a clear sense of what had happened in my life and whether or not this was still something I wanted to do, and if so how I was going to proceed. It took awhile but increasingly as I looked back on who I had been and what I'd attempted, I saw it as worthwhile and began to think about what to do next.

From the self-examination activity there came an autobiography, and as it took form I began to think "this is what to do next; show people what it is like, don't theorize about it, show them!" And from the autobiography came the distilled and augmented story that I'm trying to market as GENDERQUEER: A STORY FROM A DIFFERENT CLOSET. My memoir and coming-out and coming-of-age story.

Five years into the process of trying to get it into print, I still don't have much to point to except a massive pile of rejection slips (mostly digital, and hence a virtual pile in an email program's folder). It continues to be frustrating.

I've had an occasional success though! Firstly, back when I was a grad student I got an article printed in an academic journal, and it has generated discussion and affected some of the people who've read it over the years. It's some of my best writing and I'm quite proud of it. Same Door, Different Closet: A Heterosexual Sissy's Coming-out Party

Secondly, I've twice had signed contracts with publishers who were promising to publish this book. It didn't happen, but that's a different situation than if I'd been querying for five years and never gotten a serious nibble.

I blog and I post into Facebook groups for genderqueer and other gender-variant groups and/or LGBTQ-in-general groups. I don't have the audience I wish that I had, with a multitude of followers subscribing and commenting. But I reach a few people.

And I've had the opportunity to speak to some LGBT groups and to college women's studies / gender studies classes on campus and in some other venues (including BDSM lifestyle conventions, interestingly enough) and although my audiences have not been huge, I've had people come up to me later and say how relevant my presentation was, and that they've never had those thoughts or feelings validated in that way before.

Anyway, I am now on the cusp of turning 60. It seems increasingly likely that yes, this is going to be "what I did with my life". My life's work. My primary lifetime project.

So... if you encounter someone like me -- perhaps someone who wanders into your Facebook group and says "I don't know what to call myself... I was thinking maybe genderqueer, or perhaps nonbinary... my body is male and I don't think it is wrong, and I don't want people to think of me as a female person, I'm not... but who I am, my identity, is feminine or femme or like basically I'm one of the girls or women" -- do me a favor and tell them about me. Tell them I call it being a "gender invert". Refer them to some of these blog posts. And if my book is published by then, tell them to read my book.


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

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


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



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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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


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

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

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


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Women's Studies Coordinator Ann Peiffer and I were chatting after the evening of my final presentation at Mars Hill. We were talking, in part, about one male student who wants to be an ally and the limits of a person's role in someone else's struggle. I started talking about a critical turning point in my career as a women's studies student:

"When I became a grad student, it was in sociology. I was having some friction for trying to use a feminist perspective in my papers and for wanting to do a feminist project for my dissertation. But right around that time, a women's studies certificate program was being pulled together, they didn't have their own department yet but they crosslisted courses from English and History and Art and Anthropology and so on. Anyway, I was encouraged to take their feminist theory course.

"Unfortunately, the people who had pulled that together were mostly from the English department. And they had used poststructuralist theory to justify teaching authors like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker even though they weren't dead white European guys, you know, questioning the social construction of 'excellence' and all that. So that's what they were teaching as feminist theory. And it was... well you know, you've read that stuff, ...

"So after a few weeks I said, 'This is what you're teaching grad students as feminist theory? Your own students will theoretically someday be teaching undergraduate students--is THIS the material you want them to put out there to introduce new students to feminist thinking? It's opaque and really difficult to understand, and then when you understand it, it strips all the meaning out of things. You can't say women have a justifiable anger or a moral right to equality after you've just explained that everyone's sense of what is right is caused by their location in culture and time and that no viewpoint is privileged.' And I went on for a bit about how poststructuralist feminist theory is a problem for feminists."

Ann Peiffer nodded. I continued, "Well, the professor got annoyed and said 'Why don't you try being silent for awhile and experience what it is like to be marginalized. Do you realize you are a male student telling feminist women that we aren't doing feminism right?' And... of course she was correct. Highly embarrassing. But it was more than just that moment's conversation. It really rocked me back in my tracks. It made me question whether I could say the things I wanted to say, about my experience and identity and all that, from within women's studies. And eventually I decided it just wasn't going to work".



On March 29 and March 30, though -- 25 years after I abandoned my PhD attempts and left academia behind -- I made a successful reappearance in the women's studies classroom. Things are different now. Women's studies has embraced the wider subject matter of gender and, on many campuses, has relabeled and repositioned itself as Gender Studies, or as Women's and Gender Studies, or as Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies. And since last fall (dating back to when I thought my book was about to come out in print), I've been pitching the idea, via my publicist John Sherman, that those departments should consider having me as a guest speaker, to present my perspectives. Mars Hill said yes, so I rented a car and took off early Wednesday morning, driving for 11 hours to get there in time for my first presentation, to the evening-class session of Women and Society. Ann Peiffer met me and took me out to dinner for a first chance to talk a bit, and then took me to the classroom and introduced me, and I was on.


I have a generic presentation structure that I've been using, sort of a baseline skeleton, and then I vary it depending on the type of audience. I described "the binary"-the traditional simplified notion that there are two and only two categories, the man over here with his male body and masculine characteristics, and, distinctly different and other from that, the woman over here with her female body and feminine characteristics. Then I put up my main diagram, the scatter chart.



"This is STILL an oversimplification. It assumes all people are biologically either male or female, so it ignores intersex people. And it treats the other characteristics, all the behavior and personality and nuances and priorities and tastes, all that stuff that is typically associated with the two biological sexes, as if masculinity and femininity were polar opposites like left and right, when actually it might make more sense to think of them more akin to sweet and salty, where someone could be one, the other, both, or neither. And it pretends that people occupy one point on the graph, but people change constantly, during the day or according to their mood and so on. But it is LESS of an oversimplification than the original binary because it shows that you have a lot of variation within each sex, and that you have a lot of overlap, with some of the female-bodied people being way over here on the masculine side and some of the male-bodied people being way over there on the feminine side, even though the same general rule still applies, that men in general are more masculine and women in general are more feminine".

Talked about how generalizing isn't evil and this generalization isn't wrong, AS a generalization. Talked about moving from descriptive to prescriptive.

Then I introduced my cast of characters, individual people that I use in my presentation as a way of explaining the different experience of the same social world that conventionally masculine males and feminine females have when contrasted with the experiences of those expectations and predictions and assumptions by the folks who are outliers, masculine females and feminine males.

My characters have a mixture of sexual orientations, and I used that to illustrate the ways in which gender characteristics interact with sexual orientation. After awhile I identified myself on my diagram, my own location and my own experiences as a male femininine person sexually oriented towards female folks. I compared how my own experiences juxtaposed with those of the other characters I had described. This lets me contextualize my own situation, to show how it fits in against the backdrop of other folks' experiences.

We discussed the process of figuring out one's identity when the default mainstream expected identity isn't a good fit, and how a person comes to arrive at a divergent understanding of themselves from among the ones that are out there, socially available as alternative identities.


The next morning, after breakfast, I made the presentation a second time, to the daytime session of Women and Society, and then a final time (with some modifications for the shift in audience composition) to Safe Haven, the campus group for LGBT students and allies. I felt like all three went well and I had attentive people at all three of them and definitely felt like I was reaching them and that they were following what I was saying.

I had several good questions during the post-presentation discussion periods:

I find it interesting that you choose to have a beard. Does it interfere with your ability to get people to perceive you as a girl? (I reiterated that I accepted both my biological sex -- male -- and my gender -- girl, or feminine person. And we made some guesses about what girlish people would do with various male physical characteristics if they were the ones who had them instead of guys. I kept going back to the limitations of expressing as a male girl in a culture that has no notion of what a male girl would typically look like)

I have a female friend who has only recently realized she is genderqueer. She is always wanting to talk to me about it, she isn't finding this easy, and I don't know what to say to her to help her get through what she's going through (None of us had any easy pat answers to this, but several of us encouraged the male student who had posed the question to realize that by making himself available as a sounding board, someone she feels she CAN talk to, that that is being supportive. I asked if she likes to read, and suggested some memoirs and narratives, adding that it is helpful to read about how someone else who is like you came to terms with it)

I see on your handout you say you are polyamorous. Can you talk some about that? (I hadn't brought it up in the presentation. I talked about how a combo of 1970s vintage "hippie" ideals of free love and feminist critiques of sexual possessiveness had always appealed to my sense of how I thought things should be. And I talked aobut how multiple partners kept me from becoming so immersed in a relationship that I was a boring mirror that just reflected my partner's interests and didn't bring much to the relationship, and also how getting different feedback from different partners makes it easy to get a more 'objective' sense of how my behavior is coming across, instead of wondering if it is me or if it is just her).

There was a follow-up question, essentially What about jealousy? (I mentioned that as an atypical male, I was never going to be fully at ease with the idea that my partner would not miss the interactions with more conventionally masculine males if she'd had such relationships in the past, and that polyamory was a way of not asking her to give that up; and that, reciprocally, when I find a woman who does find me sexually appealing, I don't tend to think of other males as direct competition -- "Go have other boyfriends, sure! It may be easier for me to say that and not be worried about being replaced, because there's a low likelihood of her connecting with guys who are a lot like me". Went on to say that no one wants to be abandoned but that polyamory means not needing to discard one person in order to be with someone else. And I described the relationship summit, a periodic formal opportunity to air grievances and concerns and do a "state of the relationship" assessment, and said that poly people talk about jealousy all the time, that it is openly discussed.)

Can you describe a time when you had an effect on someone where you saw them go 'Whoa' and really change their perspective? (I described a gay rights activist I had appeared with long ago; he had told the audience he was sick and tired of gay guys being stereotyped as less manly or sissy, and he told them it wasn't manly to gang up on one guy and beat him up as a group. He challenged them: 'If you have a problem with me being gay, come up here and say it to my face.' It got a lot of appreciative applause in a 1980 classroom of Human Sexuality students; they appeciated the guts it took for him to take them on like that. He was less impressed with me when I spoke to the same classroom immediately after him. He said "So, your whole thing is that you don't want people to think you're gay, is that it?" I tried to explain about being a feminine guy and the assumptions that people make. "So? People think I'm straight lots of times, you don't think that gets awkward? Look, straight is the default. You shouldn't go around saying you're not gay, that just says you think being gay would be horrible. It's not necessary for you to go around saying you're the default". So I said back to him, "Well, YOU just spent several minutes explaining to this classroom that you aren't a sissy, that you're all masculine. Isn't masculine the default for males?" And he started to answer fast and then looked at me and it was like I could see that light bulb going on for him)

Do you experience dysphoria? (I think I gave a bad answer on this one. Or partly bad. I said "no". I said I had never felt like my body was wrong. I had come to believe that if people perceived me as female, I would be treated more as who I actually am, but the body ITSELF, physically, wasn't the problem, it was what people assumed because of it. I think I should have created a distinction between "physical dysphoria" and "social dysphoria" and said that most of the emotional content of dysphoria, as conventionally described, was very much what I have experienced, but that we do not tend to distinguish between "dysphoria because they think I am a guy or man" versus "dysphoria because my body is a male body"--the first one is social and the second one is physical. I should do that in the future: along with distinguishing between sex and gender, and between transsexuality and being genderqueer, I should create this distinction about forms of dysphoria.

What would you say to a cisgender heterosexual male who wants to be supportive of lesbian gay and transgender people and their rights? (This is where we came in. Before Ann Peiffer gave her own reply, I said that I would say to such a person 'Try to be aware of how YOU have been oppressed by homophobia and transphobia and sissyphobia and so on. Even as a cis male hetero person, there have to have been moments and situations where something you did drew some attention or comments. And all your life you have seen what happens to gay and sissy and gender-atypical people and, at least in the back of your head even if you were not conscious of it, some part of you was thinking I DO NOT WANT THAT TO HAPPEN TO ME. So you learned to tuck your odd corners under where they will not be seen, even if you had to do far less of that than gay and genderqueer and transgender people. That means things got taken away from you. Reclaim that. Avoid any self-censoring that is designed to keep observers from perhaps categorizing you as gay or whatever. And then you are participating in part for your own reasons, which is a good thing'.)


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