An Open Letter to my Gender Critical Colleagues & Friends
I understand that you think what I should be saying is that sex-specific expectations of male people are sexist, limiting, and harmful. And that I should leave it at that and not be embracing a bunch of gender-positive rhetoric and going on and on about having a marginalized gender identity.
Well, that's actually where I started, embracing the basic feminist "sauce for the gander" concept like it was a get out of jail free card as long ago as when I was in sixth grade. I grew up with feminism as my defender, a shield against the attitudes that if you were a male you were supposed to be a certain way that wasn't expected of your female classmates and friend.
It wasn't sufficient. If it had been, I would not have ended up coming out and claiming an unorthodox identity.
I don't expect you to say "Oh, well, gee, in that case of course you're correct" or anything like that, but give me a chance to explain. I like to be understood even by people who don't end up agreeing with me.
Androgyny and the Male-Default-Identity Thing
Feminists saw that as women they were perceived as Other, disqualified from a lot of what was granted to adult humans. A lot of this special Other treatment was wrapped as veneration and adoration, even while a lot more of it was unadorned dismissive contempt for the lack of necessary male attributes, without which female people couldn't be allowed or expected to do a wide range of things. Feminists called it all limiting and wrong and demanded it all be discarded; they demanded to be perceived and evaluated simply as generic people. The generic person, though, was male; a cartoon stick figure without a skirt or lipstick would be considered male; our species was 'mankind', and 'he' was a generic pronoun that just happened to also be male.
So when feminists opted for women to be thought of as generic people, they were accused of wanting to be men. They were told that they were discarding the Special Other status that was women's privilege to wear, and that this was very sad and would ruin the family and so on and so forth.
I surely didn't just tell you anything you didn't already know, but now let's look at a bunch of hypothetical male people who want to opt out of gendered assumptions about male people. It's not a mirror-image situation because the generic undifferentiated human is already male-by-default. To say "view us as generic people and not as 'men' per se" doesn't invoke any of the notions about how women are or what the strengths of womanhood include, because those are marked-off special as only applicable to the Other.
Gender is Installed Deep, Exceptions Included
The pattern of behaviors and interpretations and perspectives that makes up gender isn't kin to a simple blocked-out behavior like wearing pants. You can decide on Tuesday that because of the weather and the planned activities everyone should wear pants. Instead, it's more like the behavior of using Spanish as your language. If that's the language you were exposed to throughout your life, you converse in it, you can read it, write it, speak it, and within your head, you think in it, even to yourself. But if you grew up exposed to English instead, and then on Tuesday it becomes apparent that it would make more sense if we all used Spanish -- perhaps because today we will be in Spain, let's say -- switching this behavior isn't at all a simple matter of deciding you're going to do so.
Gender is deep. We have roles in our head and we've learned them all our lives, and those roles are gendered. I don't mean the klunky Tinker-toy sense of roles, like she's the Mommy and housewife and he's the breadwinner, but more fleshed-out examples, role models, archetypes of how to be a woman or a man, a whole library of contrasting roles that we know, that we admire and emulate.
You probably have heroes, feminist heroes you look towards as inspirational and as celebratory of an alternative identity for women; they may not be public figures that other folks have heard of (although they might be); they may be brave stubborn passionate brilliant fiery individuals that you happened to have encountered at some point. People who are admirable women and are the antithesis of the Barbie and the subservient helpmeet and the dainty proper lady and the other prescriptivist examples that the world tried to spoon-feed you as models to emulate.
These alternative role models may represent a pathway out of the original imposed gender, but one thing they are not is genderless. Not unless you have to stop and ponder for a moment to even come up with what sex they are, wondering as you do so why it matters and why it's relevant.
The Significance of an Alternative
Robin Morgan once wrote -- confessionally -- about being an early feminist in the days when feminism was just dividing from the male left, and speaking dismissively about sex role conforming women who were doing and being what society told women they should be and do. Some hostile and judgmental things were said about stay-at-home moms and trophy wives and beauty queens and whatnot. But really it didn't take long for the women's movement to swing away from that kind of divisiveness. Feminists needed to be on all women's side, and perhaps more to the point here, they needed to create options and alternatives; if the old conventional roles were demeaning and unfilfilling and limiting, then just making it so that women had other options should be sufficient.
When I came out in 1980 as a sissy, a femme, a male person whose deep behavioral patterns were mapped onto the girl model rather than the boy model, I did not make any serious attempt to condemn the man identity that had been shoved down my throat and which most male people embraced as their own. It was certainly an identity that I did not want for myself, but I didn't feel like I was linked elbow-in-elbow with a mighty groundswell of male people who felt the same way. Far from it.
I'd spent most of my life disapproving of them, these boys and men and their way of being in the world. Just as they disapproved of me and called me things that indicated they regarded me as acting and thinking like a girl.
Coming out was actually about letting go of a lot of that. I didn't need to negate and replace their definition of how to be a male person properly. What I needed was to establish an alternative.
Trans Women and All That
I understand that you aren't at all comfortable with the transgender model, because hopping over the fence between sexes because the grass looks greener on the other side leaves the fence intact. Instead of dismantling sexist expectations, it seems to reinforce them, spreading the notion that if you exhibit characteristics associated with the other sex, that is who you are and you should disavow the tension between sexist expectations and how you are in this world by transitioning. You say that presenting as, and being seen as, a member of the sex they fit in with better, means embracing, not discarding, the notions that a person of that sex should have these behaviors and these personality characteristics and these priorities and values and so forth.
Well, I can see how that could be a valid worry and concern if transitioning were to be the only alternative to conforming to the expectations originally imposed on you.
But once again it isn't necessary to condemn and disapprove of other folks' way of coping with the expectation-tension. What's important is to establish an alternative that functions differently.
Conditioning and Inverting
As we're growing up, our identities take the form "I am a person who". How we think about ourselves, how we position ourselves against the backdrop of others, how we regard ourselves as fitting in, or not, among these established identities and roles.
Those of us who -- for various reasons -- gravitated towards sticking our tongues out at sexist gender expectations developed an "I am a person who" self-image that included "I am a person who doesn't try to be like they say people of my sex ought to be". And usually, because we get accused over and over of being more like a member of the other sex than of our own, our self-image ends up including "I am a person who is like a person of the other sex (and so what?)".
There may sometimes be a carefully nuanced person who grows up evaluating each and every one of these gendered expectations (and counter-expectations) and meticulously selects each characteristic with total disregard for whether it is associated with their own sex or with the other -- or we can at least toss that notion in as a hypothetical way of growing up -- but a lot of what actually happens for a lot of us is a kind of inversion. We -- unlike the other kids -- decide we are comfortable with the notion that we're like the other sex. And the more that the conventional expectations are shoved at us with judgmental hostility, the more we may push back against the demand that we personify the expected patterns for our sex by thinking of ourselves as "not like that at all".
Does this make us just as much a prisoner of gender as the conforming kids, just on the other side of the fence? Generally no, I think: we're less likely to internalize the most dehumanizing portions of the conventional expectations, because they're unpalatable to everyone, conformist and nonconformist alike, but unlike the conformist kids, we're not being pushed to embrace these. So the male nonconforming folks are less likely to internalize the most constricting aspects of "dainty", and butch women don't tend to internalize the most toxic parts of masculinity either.
But this inverted reaction is still gendered. It's a formulation in reaction to something. It should not be confused with a magical immunity to gender socialization.
I think a lot of feminist women do not always realize this phenomenon takes place, perhaps in themselves personally or perhaps instead in their butch friends and colleagues and associates. Feminism describes women's oppression, and the imposed content of femininity as part of that, so the entire content of femininity as conventionally enshrined in the role model is suspect, something to push away from in the name of being fully human instead of constrained by oppression. So the traits that lie outside it are often viewed as normal-in-the-absence-of rahter than being perceived as gendered masculine stuff.
Positioning and Joining
Feminism does contain threads of analysis about how patriarchy is inimical to male happiness and male well-being. That the set of sexist expectations and roles that constitute masculinity are bad for male people, and that feminism is therefore good for us too.
I sought them out, and found them, and rejoiced in them. But they aren't the most repeated and the most recognized parts of feminist analysis. I meet feminists online all the time who don't see male people as having any affirmative stake in feminism's success. Many more would agree that what feminism is about most certainly isn't the rescue of male people from what's imposed on us by patriarchy as males.
So although I found validation and recognition within feminism, I mostly found people unable to see what I could have to complain about.
I could not really contribute to what was being said, either. Inserting a contribution and having it become a part of what people understand to be feminism would first require that I have the authority to criticize it for what it lacks. And I don't. It isn't my movement. I don't get to set its priorities. Most people familiar with feminism, if asked about the male relationship to it, would say adversarial.
When I looked around for where else I could say what I needed to say, I found that I could speak as part of the gendered rainbow, that I could participate as a genderqueer person and try to establish that alternative identity. A non-transitioning male identity for male kids who grew up thinking "I am a person who is like one of the girls, not the boys". An identity that does not conflate sex with gender but embraces the apparent mismatch.
I haven't been welcomed with enthusiasm across the board, to be sure. I am occasionally perceived as a threat. I am often seen as violating ideological standards, and it sometimes offends other gender-atypical people who tell me I am not saying the things I'm supposed to be saying, that I am saying other things I really should not be saying.
But there's no fundamental barrier that renders me an illegitimate participant as completely as being male bars me from participating in feminism as a feminist.
Thank you for your time.
-----
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.
My third book is about go to into 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. 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
Well, that's actually where I started, embracing the basic feminist "sauce for the gander" concept like it was a get out of jail free card as long ago as when I was in sixth grade. I grew up with feminism as my defender, a shield against the attitudes that if you were a male you were supposed to be a certain way that wasn't expected of your female classmates and friend.
It wasn't sufficient. If it had been, I would not have ended up coming out and claiming an unorthodox identity.
I don't expect you to say "Oh, well, gee, in that case of course you're correct" or anything like that, but give me a chance to explain. I like to be understood even by people who don't end up agreeing with me.
Androgyny and the Male-Default-Identity Thing
Feminists saw that as women they were perceived as Other, disqualified from a lot of what was granted to adult humans. A lot of this special Other treatment was wrapped as veneration and adoration, even while a lot more of it was unadorned dismissive contempt for the lack of necessary male attributes, without which female people couldn't be allowed or expected to do a wide range of things. Feminists called it all limiting and wrong and demanded it all be discarded; they demanded to be perceived and evaluated simply as generic people. The generic person, though, was male; a cartoon stick figure without a skirt or lipstick would be considered male; our species was 'mankind', and 'he' was a generic pronoun that just happened to also be male.
So when feminists opted for women to be thought of as generic people, they were accused of wanting to be men. They were told that they were discarding the Special Other status that was women's privilege to wear, and that this was very sad and would ruin the family and so on and so forth.
I surely didn't just tell you anything you didn't already know, but now let's look at a bunch of hypothetical male people who want to opt out of gendered assumptions about male people. It's not a mirror-image situation because the generic undifferentiated human is already male-by-default. To say "view us as generic people and not as 'men' per se" doesn't invoke any of the notions about how women are or what the strengths of womanhood include, because those are marked-off special as only applicable to the Other.
Gender is Installed Deep, Exceptions Included
The pattern of behaviors and interpretations and perspectives that makes up gender isn't kin to a simple blocked-out behavior like wearing pants. You can decide on Tuesday that because of the weather and the planned activities everyone should wear pants. Instead, it's more like the behavior of using Spanish as your language. If that's the language you were exposed to throughout your life, you converse in it, you can read it, write it, speak it, and within your head, you think in it, even to yourself. But if you grew up exposed to English instead, and then on Tuesday it becomes apparent that it would make more sense if we all used Spanish -- perhaps because today we will be in Spain, let's say -- switching this behavior isn't at all a simple matter of deciding you're going to do so.
Gender is deep. We have roles in our head and we've learned them all our lives, and those roles are gendered. I don't mean the klunky Tinker-toy sense of roles, like she's the Mommy and housewife and he's the breadwinner, but more fleshed-out examples, role models, archetypes of how to be a woman or a man, a whole library of contrasting roles that we know, that we admire and emulate.
You probably have heroes, feminist heroes you look towards as inspirational and as celebratory of an alternative identity for women; they may not be public figures that other folks have heard of (although they might be); they may be brave stubborn passionate brilliant fiery individuals that you happened to have encountered at some point. People who are admirable women and are the antithesis of the Barbie and the subservient helpmeet and the dainty proper lady and the other prescriptivist examples that the world tried to spoon-feed you as models to emulate.
These alternative role models may represent a pathway out of the original imposed gender, but one thing they are not is genderless. Not unless you have to stop and ponder for a moment to even come up with what sex they are, wondering as you do so why it matters and why it's relevant.
The Significance of an Alternative
Robin Morgan once wrote -- confessionally -- about being an early feminist in the days when feminism was just dividing from the male left, and speaking dismissively about sex role conforming women who were doing and being what society told women they should be and do. Some hostile and judgmental things were said about stay-at-home moms and trophy wives and beauty queens and whatnot. But really it didn't take long for the women's movement to swing away from that kind of divisiveness. Feminists needed to be on all women's side, and perhaps more to the point here, they needed to create options and alternatives; if the old conventional roles were demeaning and unfilfilling and limiting, then just making it so that women had other options should be sufficient.
When I came out in 1980 as a sissy, a femme, a male person whose deep behavioral patterns were mapped onto the girl model rather than the boy model, I did not make any serious attempt to condemn the man identity that had been shoved down my throat and which most male people embraced as their own. It was certainly an identity that I did not want for myself, but I didn't feel like I was linked elbow-in-elbow with a mighty groundswell of male people who felt the same way. Far from it.
I'd spent most of my life disapproving of them, these boys and men and their way of being in the world. Just as they disapproved of me and called me things that indicated they regarded me as acting and thinking like a girl.
Coming out was actually about letting go of a lot of that. I didn't need to negate and replace their definition of how to be a male person properly. What I needed was to establish an alternative.
Trans Women and All That
I understand that you aren't at all comfortable with the transgender model, because hopping over the fence between sexes because the grass looks greener on the other side leaves the fence intact. Instead of dismantling sexist expectations, it seems to reinforce them, spreading the notion that if you exhibit characteristics associated with the other sex, that is who you are and you should disavow the tension between sexist expectations and how you are in this world by transitioning. You say that presenting as, and being seen as, a member of the sex they fit in with better, means embracing, not discarding, the notions that a person of that sex should have these behaviors and these personality characteristics and these priorities and values and so forth.
Well, I can see how that could be a valid worry and concern if transitioning were to be the only alternative to conforming to the expectations originally imposed on you.
But once again it isn't necessary to condemn and disapprove of other folks' way of coping with the expectation-tension. What's important is to establish an alternative that functions differently.
Conditioning and Inverting
As we're growing up, our identities take the form "I am a person who". How we think about ourselves, how we position ourselves against the backdrop of others, how we regard ourselves as fitting in, or not, among these established identities and roles.
Those of us who -- for various reasons -- gravitated towards sticking our tongues out at sexist gender expectations developed an "I am a person who" self-image that included "I am a person who doesn't try to be like they say people of my sex ought to be". And usually, because we get accused over and over of being more like a member of the other sex than of our own, our self-image ends up including "I am a person who is like a person of the other sex (and so what?)".
There may sometimes be a carefully nuanced person who grows up evaluating each and every one of these gendered expectations (and counter-expectations) and meticulously selects each characteristic with total disregard for whether it is associated with their own sex or with the other -- or we can at least toss that notion in as a hypothetical way of growing up -- but a lot of what actually happens for a lot of us is a kind of inversion. We -- unlike the other kids -- decide we are comfortable with the notion that we're like the other sex. And the more that the conventional expectations are shoved at us with judgmental hostility, the more we may push back against the demand that we personify the expected patterns for our sex by thinking of ourselves as "not like that at all".
Does this make us just as much a prisoner of gender as the conforming kids, just on the other side of the fence? Generally no, I think: we're less likely to internalize the most dehumanizing portions of the conventional expectations, because they're unpalatable to everyone, conformist and nonconformist alike, but unlike the conformist kids, we're not being pushed to embrace these. So the male nonconforming folks are less likely to internalize the most constricting aspects of "dainty", and butch women don't tend to internalize the most toxic parts of masculinity either.
But this inverted reaction is still gendered. It's a formulation in reaction to something. It should not be confused with a magical immunity to gender socialization.
I think a lot of feminist women do not always realize this phenomenon takes place, perhaps in themselves personally or perhaps instead in their butch friends and colleagues and associates. Feminism describes women's oppression, and the imposed content of femininity as part of that, so the entire content of femininity as conventionally enshrined in the role model is suspect, something to push away from in the name of being fully human instead of constrained by oppression. So the traits that lie outside it are often viewed as normal-in-the-absence-of rahter than being perceived as gendered masculine stuff.
Positioning and Joining
Feminism does contain threads of analysis about how patriarchy is inimical to male happiness and male well-being. That the set of sexist expectations and roles that constitute masculinity are bad for male people, and that feminism is therefore good for us too.
I sought them out, and found them, and rejoiced in them. But they aren't the most repeated and the most recognized parts of feminist analysis. I meet feminists online all the time who don't see male people as having any affirmative stake in feminism's success. Many more would agree that what feminism is about most certainly isn't the rescue of male people from what's imposed on us by patriarchy as males.
So although I found validation and recognition within feminism, I mostly found people unable to see what I could have to complain about.
I could not really contribute to what was being said, either. Inserting a contribution and having it become a part of what people understand to be feminism would first require that I have the authority to criticize it for what it lacks. And I don't. It isn't my movement. I don't get to set its priorities. Most people familiar with feminism, if asked about the male relationship to it, would say adversarial.
When I looked around for where else I could say what I needed to say, I found that I could speak as part of the gendered rainbow, that I could participate as a genderqueer person and try to establish that alternative identity. A non-transitioning male identity for male kids who grew up thinking "I am a person who is like one of the girls, not the boys". An identity that does not conflate sex with gender but embraces the apparent mismatch.
I haven't been welcomed with enthusiasm across the board, to be sure. I am occasionally perceived as a threat. I am often seen as violating ideological standards, and it sometimes offends other gender-atypical people who tell me I am not saying the things I'm supposed to be saying, that I am saying other things I really should not be saying.
But there's no fundamental barrier that renders me an illegitimate participant as completely as being male bars me from participating in feminism as a feminist.
Thank you for your time.
-----
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.
My third book is about go to into 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. 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