The Jill-O-Lantern Problem
Last year around this time I carved a pumpkin and playfully dubbed the result "Jill O Lantern"
One person who saw the photo on Facebook posted the question "Why do you call it a 'Jill o'Lantern'? I don't see anything feminine about it. If you want it to be a Jill O Lantern you should make eyelashes, or do lips in a kiss shape to indicate lipstick, or put some hair with a bow in it, so people will know it's supposed to be a girl lantern".
Umm, well that was sort of the point. There's nothing about the design of a conventional Jack o'Lantern that's intrinsically male. It's an old old observation: generic characters with no distinctive sex markers apparent are altercast by average viewers as male characters.
There are some strong cues that identify a person as a woman or girl, clothing and adornments that aren't typically used by males in our society. If your body is such that people who see you cast you as a woman, you don't need to utilize a double-handful of those strong cues (and indeed the city sidewalks are decently well-populated with female people wearing jeans and sneakers, a t-shirt, sporting short hair and not carrying a purse). But in the absence of something to communicate feminine gender, a fully generic appearance recreates the Jill o'Lantern problem.
Trans women are sometimes criticized for going way over the top with the full-on Barbie paraphernalia, with fingernail polish and make-up and overtly girlish clothes as well as the full repertoire of nuances and gestures and voice tones and so on. But if you happen to be a person who was born male (i.e., assigned male at birth) and have wider shoulders and narrower hips than most people born female (i.e., assigned female at birth), and are tall for a woman, and have big feet for a woman and more of a square jaw and an enlarged larynx, you might find that, in the absence of using as many strong female-indicative cues as you're able to, people won't read the gender signal you intended them to read.
I have my own Jill o'Lantern problem. I don't consider myself female and don't attempt to present in such a way that people will believe me to be female-bodied. Yet I identify as a girl, a gender inverted person, a male who atypically has more of the pattern of behaviors and inclinations of girls than of boys, and who identified with the like-minded and similar-behaving girls rather than identifying with the similar-bodied boys. And in response to that self-description, people often say to me "Oh no, you seem entirely masculine to me, I don't see that at all, you're completely male".
Instead of flouncing around indignantly and whining that my experience is being denied and negated by meanspirited people (something that I admit I do on some such occasions), let's give it some serious consideration, shall we?
First, let's dispense with the obvious oversimplifications and babytalk-level stuff. I don't disavow being male-bodied so anyone who is saying I seem "entirely masculine" or "completely male" who is in any shape way fashion or form deriving that from my physically male body is speaking of irrelevant things. Therefore we shall assume they are referring to my personality and behavior, how I think and feel and behave. I think we can also dispense with overly absolute notions, as if there are behaviors that only boys and men ever display or behaviors that all girls and women display - that eliminates any legitimate use of "I saw you do this once, that means you're a boy" or "I've never seen you do this and girls always do, so you're a boy".
So we're looking at generalizations and trends. Both boys and girls (and men and women) sometimes do boy things and sometimes do girl things, behave in boy ways and behave in girl ways, but in general boys and men tend to do more of the boy things in boy ways more often and do the girl things in girl ways less often when compared to the women and girls. And in that context, saying "you seem entirely masculine / completely male to me" is tantamount to saying "in general, your behavioral pattern would stand out when compared to the behavioral pattern of a bunch of girls, you do significantly more of the boy things in boy ways and less of the girl things in girl ways than the girls in general would do; but when your behavioral pattern is compared to that of a bunch of boys, your pattern would not stand out, you'd seem entirely typical".
If that is true to some observers, it is in contrast to the expressed observations of other people who have said the opposite. It is also in contrast to my own observations, but my own observations introduce an entirely separate level of information, the internal world of thoughts and feelings. External observers see and interpret my behaviors; they don't directly perceive my feelings, know my thoughts, have access to my world-view and my priorities and all that stuff.
(That, therefore, causes me to toss in this side-question: is the inner world irrelevant, relevant but less so than externally observable behaviors, more relevant, or definitive all by itself in such matters? To me it seems pretentious to ask of other people that they understand me in a different way than they already do based entirely on how I perceive myself internally. Doing so would not cause me to make more sense to them than I do now, however much it might make me feel better. I don't see how it would be different than demanding that people treat me like I'm the emperor of Japan or the sexiest rock star in the western hemisphere - why should they? But I'm inclined to accord it *some* relevance, this inner world that others don't get to directly see. I suppose if pressed about it I end up saying there are a whole froth of tiny micro-behaviors that people do see even if they don't identify them, and they are subject to unconscious interpretation, and that if interpreted through the lens of one set of assumptions they have a clearer and more consistent meaning than if interpreted through another; and that these micro-behaviors are the iceberg-tips of a person's internal world)
Returning to the matter of observable behaviors, though, I think it is important to realize that a different internal world comes into play during such observations: the internal world *of the observer*. As with the reading of a novel, the meaning that the reader/observer arrives at is not due entirely to the content that is read. Instead, the author encapsulates some intended meaning in words and the reader, upon reading those words, has some meaning evoked, meaning that is dependent on commonality, shared references and experiences-in-common. And because the reader's prior experiences will only overlap to a matter of degree, the meaning thus evoked will differ from one reader to another. And that brings me back to my Jill o'Lantern.
I think people who experience me as "entirely masculine / completely male" often experience my behaviors as entirely masculine because I am completely male. That is, prior to the time that they observe a behavior, they have already altercast me as a man or boy based on me being male, and through the lens of that identity-assumption there are more behaviors than not that make sense interpreted as feminine behaviors *or* as masculine behaviors, with somewhat different intentionalities and moods and priorities being imagined of me and bestowed upon the behavior to explicate the behavior's meaning to the observer.
Which, naturally, kicks me back to square one. The square from which I ask the observer to suspend that identity and try the different alternative one I've suggested and, with that one as the new lens, see if my behaviors make sense as the behaviors of a girl or woman, and if so whether they fit better to an observer than they did when viewed through the prior lens of assumptions.
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One person who saw the photo on Facebook posted the question "Why do you call it a 'Jill o'Lantern'? I don't see anything feminine about it. If you want it to be a Jill O Lantern you should make eyelashes, or do lips in a kiss shape to indicate lipstick, or put some hair with a bow in it, so people will know it's supposed to be a girl lantern".
Umm, well that was sort of the point. There's nothing about the design of a conventional Jack o'Lantern that's intrinsically male. It's an old old observation: generic characters with no distinctive sex markers apparent are altercast by average viewers as male characters.
There are some strong cues that identify a person as a woman or girl, clothing and adornments that aren't typically used by males in our society. If your body is such that people who see you cast you as a woman, you don't need to utilize a double-handful of those strong cues (and indeed the city sidewalks are decently well-populated with female people wearing jeans and sneakers, a t-shirt, sporting short hair and not carrying a purse). But in the absence of something to communicate feminine gender, a fully generic appearance recreates the Jill o'Lantern problem.
Trans women are sometimes criticized for going way over the top with the full-on Barbie paraphernalia, with fingernail polish and make-up and overtly girlish clothes as well as the full repertoire of nuances and gestures and voice tones and so on. But if you happen to be a person who was born male (i.e., assigned male at birth) and have wider shoulders and narrower hips than most people born female (i.e., assigned female at birth), and are tall for a woman, and have big feet for a woman and more of a square jaw and an enlarged larynx, you might find that, in the absence of using as many strong female-indicative cues as you're able to, people won't read the gender signal you intended them to read.
I have my own Jill o'Lantern problem. I don't consider myself female and don't attempt to present in such a way that people will believe me to be female-bodied. Yet I identify as a girl, a gender inverted person, a male who atypically has more of the pattern of behaviors and inclinations of girls than of boys, and who identified with the like-minded and similar-behaving girls rather than identifying with the similar-bodied boys. And in response to that self-description, people often say to me "Oh no, you seem entirely masculine to me, I don't see that at all, you're completely male".
Instead of flouncing around indignantly and whining that my experience is being denied and negated by meanspirited people (something that I admit I do on some such occasions), let's give it some serious consideration, shall we?
First, let's dispense with the obvious oversimplifications and babytalk-level stuff. I don't disavow being male-bodied so anyone who is saying I seem "entirely masculine" or "completely male" who is in any shape way fashion or form deriving that from my physically male body is speaking of irrelevant things. Therefore we shall assume they are referring to my personality and behavior, how I think and feel and behave. I think we can also dispense with overly absolute notions, as if there are behaviors that only boys and men ever display or behaviors that all girls and women display - that eliminates any legitimate use of "I saw you do this once, that means you're a boy" or "I've never seen you do this and girls always do, so you're a boy".
So we're looking at generalizations and trends. Both boys and girls (and men and women) sometimes do boy things and sometimes do girl things, behave in boy ways and behave in girl ways, but in general boys and men tend to do more of the boy things in boy ways more often and do the girl things in girl ways less often when compared to the women and girls. And in that context, saying "you seem entirely masculine / completely male to me" is tantamount to saying "in general, your behavioral pattern would stand out when compared to the behavioral pattern of a bunch of girls, you do significantly more of the boy things in boy ways and less of the girl things in girl ways than the girls in general would do; but when your behavioral pattern is compared to that of a bunch of boys, your pattern would not stand out, you'd seem entirely typical".
If that is true to some observers, it is in contrast to the expressed observations of other people who have said the opposite. It is also in contrast to my own observations, but my own observations introduce an entirely separate level of information, the internal world of thoughts and feelings. External observers see and interpret my behaviors; they don't directly perceive my feelings, know my thoughts, have access to my world-view and my priorities and all that stuff.
(That, therefore, causes me to toss in this side-question: is the inner world irrelevant, relevant but less so than externally observable behaviors, more relevant, or definitive all by itself in such matters? To me it seems pretentious to ask of other people that they understand me in a different way than they already do based entirely on how I perceive myself internally. Doing so would not cause me to make more sense to them than I do now, however much it might make me feel better. I don't see how it would be different than demanding that people treat me like I'm the emperor of Japan or the sexiest rock star in the western hemisphere - why should they? But I'm inclined to accord it *some* relevance, this inner world that others don't get to directly see. I suppose if pressed about it I end up saying there are a whole froth of tiny micro-behaviors that people do see even if they don't identify them, and they are subject to unconscious interpretation, and that if interpreted through the lens of one set of assumptions they have a clearer and more consistent meaning than if interpreted through another; and that these micro-behaviors are the iceberg-tips of a person's internal world)
Returning to the matter of observable behaviors, though, I think it is important to realize that a different internal world comes into play during such observations: the internal world *of the observer*. As with the reading of a novel, the meaning that the reader/observer arrives at is not due entirely to the content that is read. Instead, the author encapsulates some intended meaning in words and the reader, upon reading those words, has some meaning evoked, meaning that is dependent on commonality, shared references and experiences-in-common. And because the reader's prior experiences will only overlap to a matter of degree, the meaning thus evoked will differ from one reader to another. And that brings me back to my Jill o'Lantern.
I think people who experience me as "entirely masculine / completely male" often experience my behaviors as entirely masculine because I am completely male. That is, prior to the time that they observe a behavior, they have already altercast me as a man or boy based on me being male, and through the lens of that identity-assumption there are more behaviors than not that make sense interpreted as feminine behaviors *or* as masculine behaviors, with somewhat different intentionalities and moods and priorities being imagined of me and bestowed upon the behavior to explicate the behavior's meaning to the observer.
Which, naturally, kicks me back to square one. The square from which I ask the observer to suspend that identity and try the different alternative one I've suggested and, with that one as the new lens, see if my behaviors make sense as the behaviors of a girl or woman, and if so whether they fit better to an observer than they did when viewed through the prior lens of assumptions.
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