Genderqueer is Trending: Good News & Bad News
After decades during which the only folks who'd ever heard of genderqueer besides genderqueer folk themselves were gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans, there is now more and more newspaper, magazine, and TV coverage of it as a social phenomenon.
Washington Post
Cosmopolitan
ABC sitcom
ON THE ONE HAND, AS WELL AS THE OTHER and any other hands you can conjure up, for that matter, it is an unadulterated good thing that we're not as invisible as we were. So let's be clear on that much: the remainder of this little opinion-piece should not be taken as meaning that I think having some social visibility is a mixed blessing. It's not. There's nothing mixed about that. It's all good.
No, my concern is with some of the forms that it seems to be taking. Specifics that are present (or, more to the point, absent) in our new visibility that could cause problems for all of us. Specifics that are absolutely NOT inevitably part of finally getting some social visibility, they just happen to be part of how our social visibility has developed.
And that problem is this: I don't think anyone consuming mainstream explanations of genderqueer are going to be able to visualize how any of us could have come up with this sense of identity if it weren't already trending.
It is being portrayed as a New Happening Thing, a bandwagon of gender identity that we're jumping onto in order to be cool, to be a part of an edgy new phenomenon.
Let me contrast this up for you a bit. People have some sense at this point of what it might be like to come of age and find yourself attracted to the same sex, and can imagine not only what it might be like in a world that already has a gay and lesbian community with public places where you could meet others like yourself, but also, I think, what it might be like if there WEREN'T. To be like that in an era or in a place where you might not know you weren't the only one. To find the feelings and attractions and confusions and have to figure them all out on your own. To run headlong into the attitudes and assumptions that can make life difficult if that happens to be your situation.
And how about being male-to-female or female-to-male transsexual? Yes, I think people do have a sense at this point of what that might be like, including perhaps growing up in a small town where you'd have to sort that out and figure a good portion of it out on your own. How complicated and how confusing that must be. The situations that would be messy and untenable and difficult to negotiate, and the loneliness and isolation and lack of feeling understood by the people surrounding you.
You're nodding, aren't you? You see where I'm going with this. A considerable number of people out there understand in some sense that we ARE genderqueer and they might be able to get a passing grade on a multiple-choice exam that asked questions about pronouns and apparel and filling out applications that require a M or an F and bathrooms and how one moves and talks and gestures and so on. But if they were asked what kind of shit we would be going through in an environment that did not as of yet have much of a consciousness about being genderqueer, and they were asked to describe what folks like us would have to go through and the things we'd have to process in our minds to come up with a self-awareness of being genderqueer all on our own?
Feel free to contradict me, but I think the average liberally tolerant person who knows about "genderqueer" would think--if not necessarily say to our faces-- that if there weren't already a subgroup of people already out there "doing genderqueer", we'd never come up with it on our own; that it isn't a real gender or sexual identity the way that being lesbian or gay, or even trans, is, with real suffering and alienation anchored in the way that who we are isn't what is expected based on our bodies. I think they'd pause and think on it for a few moments and then say that we'd choose from among the nearest-best-fitting of the other sexual / gender identities: many of us would consider ourselves gay or lesbian, many would identify as transsexual, and quite a few would decide that we were straight and cisgendered. And not suffer to any measurable degree as a consequence. Because we have no narrative. People know (sort of) what it's like to be us (due to us telling them) but not much about what it is like to be one of us and failing to fit in as mainstream, as exception to the rule, or even as exception to the exception to the rule.
Important disclaimer: All of the above is quite self-serving insofar as I've written a coming-out story, so of course I'm inclined to see reasons why my story addresses an important void.
But even so.
Mine is just one story. I cannot write the story of what it is like to be nonbinary genderfluid. Because that's not my experience. Someone else needs to. I can't explain what it's like to be asexual in a sexualized world that attraction-codes people on the basis of their bits. Someone else needs to.
If we don't, I fear that a few years will tick by and then some other trendy phenomena will make stories about us less new and shiny and we'll get written about far less often, without ever causing people to understand why any of this MATTERS.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
Washington Post
Cosmopolitan
ABC sitcom
ON THE ONE HAND, AS WELL AS THE OTHER and any other hands you can conjure up, for that matter, it is an unadulterated good thing that we're not as invisible as we were. So let's be clear on that much: the remainder of this little opinion-piece should not be taken as meaning that I think having some social visibility is a mixed blessing. It's not. There's nothing mixed about that. It's all good.
No, my concern is with some of the forms that it seems to be taking. Specifics that are present (or, more to the point, absent) in our new visibility that could cause problems for all of us. Specifics that are absolutely NOT inevitably part of finally getting some social visibility, they just happen to be part of how our social visibility has developed.
And that problem is this: I don't think anyone consuming mainstream explanations of genderqueer are going to be able to visualize how any of us could have come up with this sense of identity if it weren't already trending.
It is being portrayed as a New Happening Thing, a bandwagon of gender identity that we're jumping onto in order to be cool, to be a part of an edgy new phenomenon.
Let me contrast this up for you a bit. People have some sense at this point of what it might be like to come of age and find yourself attracted to the same sex, and can imagine not only what it might be like in a world that already has a gay and lesbian community with public places where you could meet others like yourself, but also, I think, what it might be like if there WEREN'T. To be like that in an era or in a place where you might not know you weren't the only one. To find the feelings and attractions and confusions and have to figure them all out on your own. To run headlong into the attitudes and assumptions that can make life difficult if that happens to be your situation.
And how about being male-to-female or female-to-male transsexual? Yes, I think people do have a sense at this point of what that might be like, including perhaps growing up in a small town where you'd have to sort that out and figure a good portion of it out on your own. How complicated and how confusing that must be. The situations that would be messy and untenable and difficult to negotiate, and the loneliness and isolation and lack of feeling understood by the people surrounding you.
You're nodding, aren't you? You see where I'm going with this. A considerable number of people out there understand in some sense that we ARE genderqueer and they might be able to get a passing grade on a multiple-choice exam that asked questions about pronouns and apparel and filling out applications that require a M or an F and bathrooms and how one moves and talks and gestures and so on. But if they were asked what kind of shit we would be going through in an environment that did not as of yet have much of a consciousness about being genderqueer, and they were asked to describe what folks like us would have to go through and the things we'd have to process in our minds to come up with a self-awareness of being genderqueer all on our own?
Feel free to contradict me, but I think the average liberally tolerant person who knows about "genderqueer" would think--if not necessarily say to our faces-- that if there weren't already a subgroup of people already out there "doing genderqueer", we'd never come up with it on our own; that it isn't a real gender or sexual identity the way that being lesbian or gay, or even trans, is, with real suffering and alienation anchored in the way that who we are isn't what is expected based on our bodies. I think they'd pause and think on it for a few moments and then say that we'd choose from among the nearest-best-fitting of the other sexual / gender identities: many of us would consider ourselves gay or lesbian, many would identify as transsexual, and quite a few would decide that we were straight and cisgendered. And not suffer to any measurable degree as a consequence. Because we have no narrative. People know (sort of) what it's like to be us (due to us telling them) but not much about what it is like to be one of us and failing to fit in as mainstream, as exception to the rule, or even as exception to the exception to the rule.
Important disclaimer: All of the above is quite self-serving insofar as I've written a coming-out story, so of course I'm inclined to see reasons why my story addresses an important void.
But even so.
Mine is just one story. I cannot write the story of what it is like to be nonbinary genderfluid. Because that's not my experience. Someone else needs to. I can't explain what it's like to be asexual in a sexualized world that attraction-codes people on the basis of their bits. Someone else needs to.
If we don't, I fear that a few years will tick by and then some other trendy phenomena will make stories about us less new and shiny and we'll get written about far less often, without ever causing people to understand why any of this MATTERS.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts