GenderKitten Makes Presentation, March 12
As promised, a review of my talk at Life in Nassau / Nassau LGBT Center in Plainview.
It's hard to believe that was over two weeks ago. I'm still in the process of recovering from bronchitis infection. Two days before the presentation I started having some early symptoms and I was quite worried that the cough (it started with a cough) was going to take away my voice before Thursday night; I spent Thursday afternoon drinking hot herbal tea and gargling with salt water and nodding or making hand gestures or monosyllabic grunts as replies to anais_pf... but it worked out well, I had the energy and the voice to do it and, frankly, I nailed it!
I did a pretty decent job of maintaining eye contact, and no one complained of not being able to hear me, which was a relief since I'm very quiet-spoken and people often DO complain about that when I address a group.
As I explained earlier, I used a lot of material from my November 14 blog posting, including the three illustrations I used there, printed onto nice sturdy 24 inch x 36 inch posterboard suitable for ongoing use if I get the chance to make the same presentation elsewhere.
The main, most important diagram, was this one, the one I refer to as the distribution diagram:
Orange is male, green is female, left is masculine, right is feminine. I described the distribution graph as being what you'd get if you hurled a mango snowcone at the wall and then followed up with a mint snowcone that landed somewhat to its right.
The main departure from the blog posting was the development of representative characters. I first introduced the room to "Dan", conventionally masculine male over on the left side of this distribution graph. Then I introduced his girlfriend "Karen", a conventionally feminine female over on the right.
With the two of them as examples, I sort of fleshed out the experience of having your own experience match up with cultural expectations, showing how for the two of them there wasn't any need to have different terminology, "SEX" and "GENDER", and why they would find it confusing and unnecessary to make the distinction, even as tolerant friendly non-judgmental people.
At the same time, I made the point that the distribution diagram shows that there always WILL BE orange particles over on the right and green ones over on the left - because any time you have a scattered distribution like that, with overlap between the two populations, those kinds of points will invariably be present.
Then, from there, I described myself, and using myself as an example, described the situation of being one of those outlying points, a gender invert, in my case a feminine male person. I described myself in much the same way I'd described Dan and Karen, fleshing out the experience, but now I could show how messages about male-bodied people would describe such people as masculine (which I am not), and messages about feminine people would describe such people as female bodied (which I am not), and by doing so I illustrated why it was so useful and necessary to distinguish between SEX and GENDER.
A couple people who don't normally attend Life In Nassau, but who had met me through a separate ongoing Queer Munch, came to hear the presentation, and they along with a couple Life in Nassau regulars who also have alternative gendered experiences, asked questions at the end and elaborated on a lot of the points I'd been making, which added depth to the talk.
One of the more telling snippets of feedback I heard was from someone who does not consider herself gender-atypical but who has been exposed to the general concepts of being genderqueer and so forth: "I really liked it that your talk was not all full of instructions about 'Don't ever say this' or 'You should never do that'... your talk was all positive and accepting of people with all kinds of gender identities and differences. Most of these things I've gone to before, it's been all about what we have to be careful about in order not to offend people or oppress their sexual identity or whatever. I liked this a lot better".
Good! I'm not trying to position myself or those in my situation as fragile victims of evilbad normal folk. I'm convinced that if they understand us, they'll adjust their behavior accordingly simply from due consideration for our circumstances. Or enough of it that when they don't we'll sass them back and that will be sufficient. Personally I'm not interested in playing the victim card nor in whipping out my scars and playing "my oppression trumps yours".
I've begun negotiations to present at SUNY / Old Westbury, where I was a women's studies student in the late 1980s, perhaps to some womens' studies classes or perhaps to the independently-run women's center on campus. I also want to connect with Identity House and/or other LGBTQish centers in Manhattan to begin exploring the possibility that I have content that they're not currently presenting, and hence would make my presentation there.
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Index of all Blog Posts
It's hard to believe that was over two weeks ago. I'm still in the process of recovering from bronchitis infection. Two days before the presentation I started having some early symptoms and I was quite worried that the cough (it started with a cough) was going to take away my voice before Thursday night; I spent Thursday afternoon drinking hot herbal tea and gargling with salt water and nodding or making hand gestures or monosyllabic grunts as replies to anais_pf... but it worked out well, I had the energy and the voice to do it and, frankly, I nailed it!
I did a pretty decent job of maintaining eye contact, and no one complained of not being able to hear me, which was a relief since I'm very quiet-spoken and people often DO complain about that when I address a group.
As I explained earlier, I used a lot of material from my November 14 blog posting, including the three illustrations I used there, printed onto nice sturdy 24 inch x 36 inch posterboard suitable for ongoing use if I get the chance to make the same presentation elsewhere.
The main, most important diagram, was this one, the one I refer to as the distribution diagram:
Orange is male, green is female, left is masculine, right is feminine. I described the distribution graph as being what you'd get if you hurled a mango snowcone at the wall and then followed up with a mint snowcone that landed somewhat to its right.
The main departure from the blog posting was the development of representative characters. I first introduced the room to "Dan", conventionally masculine male over on the left side of this distribution graph. Then I introduced his girlfriend "Karen", a conventionally feminine female over on the right.
With the two of them as examples, I sort of fleshed out the experience of having your own experience match up with cultural expectations, showing how for the two of them there wasn't any need to have different terminology, "SEX" and "GENDER", and why they would find it confusing and unnecessary to make the distinction, even as tolerant friendly non-judgmental people.
At the same time, I made the point that the distribution diagram shows that there always WILL BE orange particles over on the right and green ones over on the left - because any time you have a scattered distribution like that, with overlap between the two populations, those kinds of points will invariably be present.
Then, from there, I described myself, and using myself as an example, described the situation of being one of those outlying points, a gender invert, in my case a feminine male person. I described myself in much the same way I'd described Dan and Karen, fleshing out the experience, but now I could show how messages about male-bodied people would describe such people as masculine (which I am not), and messages about feminine people would describe such people as female bodied (which I am not), and by doing so I illustrated why it was so useful and necessary to distinguish between SEX and GENDER.
A couple people who don't normally attend Life In Nassau, but who had met me through a separate ongoing Queer Munch, came to hear the presentation, and they along with a couple Life in Nassau regulars who also have alternative gendered experiences, asked questions at the end and elaborated on a lot of the points I'd been making, which added depth to the talk.
One of the more telling snippets of feedback I heard was from someone who does not consider herself gender-atypical but who has been exposed to the general concepts of being genderqueer and so forth: "I really liked it that your talk was not all full of instructions about 'Don't ever say this' or 'You should never do that'... your talk was all positive and accepting of people with all kinds of gender identities and differences. Most of these things I've gone to before, it's been all about what we have to be careful about in order not to offend people or oppress their sexual identity or whatever. I liked this a lot better".
Good! I'm not trying to position myself or those in my situation as fragile victims of evilbad normal folk. I'm convinced that if they understand us, they'll adjust their behavior accordingly simply from due consideration for our circumstances. Or enough of it that when they don't we'll sass them back and that will be sufficient. Personally I'm not interested in playing the victim card nor in whipping out my scars and playing "my oppression trumps yours".
I've begun negotiations to present at SUNY / Old Westbury, where I was a women's studies student in the late 1980s, perhaps to some womens' studies classes or perhaps to the independently-run women's center on campus. I also want to connect with Identity House and/or other LGBTQish centers in Manhattan to begin exploring the possibility that I have content that they're not currently presenting, and hence would make my presentation there.
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Index of all Blog Posts