(from here)
I’ll start this now, but after posting I’m off to get some sleep and won’t be back for a few hours.
I’m biologically male, with no notable departures from traditional male morphology. Starting back when I was 7 or 8 and intensifying through the end of my elementary-school years, I considered that the people who constituted “we” or “us” was composed of the other girls and me. They were smart, self-disciplined, and valued in themselves and in each other certain characteristics: being well-behaved, not just in the sense of obedient but in the sense of paying attention to what adults valued and considered important and internalizing that predictively so as to be good citizens; being good to or at least restrained to a civilized degree in how one treats other kids; and being smart and industrious in school. The other boys were mostly all impulse and noise, randomly destructive, crude, VALUED crude, considered what we (the girls and me) were doing to consist of no more than knuckling under to adult authority (they didn’t seem to see that we took pride in it), and they seemed sort of dense and stupid.
I knew I was a boy, physiologically speaking, and I had no problems with the plumbing. I didn’t spend time wishing I had girl parts, it didn’t translate to that for me. I craved acceptance from the girls but I was also in competition with them. I was initially out to prove that I was just as good as they were. I was a BOY who was one of them and could keep up and measure up in all the relevant ways. Just like an ethnic kid who wanted to be recognized as just as able to read and write and speak proper English as the kids who had been born here, but who wasn’t trying to hide his heritage.
Over time I had less and less of a sense of allegiance to the rest of my sex. Back in second grade I might have felt a moment of male-centric triumph if I beat Tess and Rhonda and Sharon in the weekly spelling bee — THERE! HA! you girls don’t always win! — but with the other boys obliviously uninterested and peculiarly obsessed with beating each other up and sports teams and telling scatological jokes, I more and more sought my recognition and approval from the other girls as well as competed with them.
Other kids harassed me and called me gay. (Using words for it that were more in vogue in that time and place than “gay”, though). I was spectacularly unpopular and considered weird and creepy and for a few years I just thought they tossed this accusation out because it was considered insulting.
I didn’t talk with other boys much, and as a consequence I discovered my own sexual feelings without any input from other people. I had a secret, I was a pervert, harmlessly so as long as no one found out, but I really liked to look at the front of girls’ pants where they had that different shape there, and to think about them. I only gradually figured out these were “sexual feelings” and were widely shared and expected to be shared, even though, yeah, quite a few people did indeed consider all that stuff to be dirty and taboo. But by the time I was in 6th grade I was happily anticipating that in a few short years I’d be at an age where my perversion would be considered natural, but I’d have a special advantage because I liked girls and thought well of them and was like them in most of the relevant important ways, so obviously they’d rather be with someone like me than with one of those, you know, typical boy-people.
It didn’t work out that way (you probably didn’t need me to tell you that) and instead trying to practice heterosexuality was a complicated and frustrating experience for me. And during those same years the background harassment where people accused me of being gay got a lot worse and adults joined in and people expressed a lot of contempt and sometimes got violent about it.
Heterosexuality isn’t just a pattern where people of opposite sexes get together and pursue sexual interests because each is interested in the body of the other. It is driven by roles and expectations which are very very GENDERED. There are expected boy behaviors and expected girl behaviors, and on top of that the same behavior by a boy is regarded and understood differently than if a girl had done it and vice versa. And the behaviors built into the boy role are all wound up in the same personality and behavior patterns that I’d never wanted to have anything to do with. THAT WAS NOT ME. And the person that I was, who was much more akin to who the girls were that I was trying to get close to? I was not being understood, because, as I said, the same behaviors (ranging from very overt behaviors to little nuances and gestures and stuff) are interpreted very differently when the person is male as opposed to female. Girls I was interested in often didn’t know I was interested in them. And on other occasions when they seemed to think I might be interested in them and they were open to possibilities, they would behave according to the role script that called for me to do something more pushy and overt than anything they were doing. And this was bad enough when I was 14 and 15 and 16, it only got WORSE as girls got older and a lot more irritated by and bored with the constancy of male sexual attention and the risk of being labeled “slut” if they didn’t act like sexual interest was unwanted and unappreciated.
With all that not happening for me, I began to wonder if maybe all the folks insisting I was gay might be on to something. They way they spoke of it, being girl-like if you were male was the same thing as being gay, like one causes the other or the two are identical, and yeah I was certainly more like the girls than I was like one of the boys. I didn’t have the hots for staring at boy bodies but maybe that wasn’t all there was to sexual orientation. So one of my few male friends wanted to do some stuff and I tried it and didn’t care for it and when he kept wanting to I got annoyed and thought him selfish. A year or so later I had an opportunity to try it with a stranger who was showing interest in me and I wondered if, well, maybe it would be better if it weren’t someone I was friends with and already thought of in a different way. Instead, it was worse.
In college I was a virgin and other students seemed to be circling around me constantly making insinuations and innuendos about me being gay — not all of it hostile, mind you, a lot of it was liberally tolerant and the winks were accepting winks. As far as hooking up with girls was concerned, well, I felt like my inexperience and girlness and shyness and lack of mannish behaviors were just making things impossible.
I read several books like CONUNDRUM: from JAMES to JAN and the RENEE RICHARDS story. These stories of people born male who had realized they were girls and had then gone on to get surgery to get their bodies to match who they were… it was the first time in my life I’d had such a powerful feeling of YES someone else like me!!! Except… well, they weren’t quite. My problem wasn’t really that I was supposed to be a girl-bodied person. I mean, if I could buy a spaceship ticket to a planet where all the sex roles were diametrically inverted, I’d be right at home without having to change my body. No, for me it wasn’t the body, it was what it meant to everyone. I was not the person they assumed I was when they saw a male bodied person.
This was 1980. We did not have the word GenderQueer back then. There wasn’t a word for it, for the way I was. Consciousness of gay and lesbian experience was still pretty new and even more so for transsexual people (that was the term used then, I never heard transgendered until years later). I figured out that there was nothing WRONG with me and I figured out how I was, as a sexual and gender identity, and began writing about it and tried to get my professors and other students interested in it. People could not understand what the hell I was on about and became worried that I was bonkers and asked me to talk to a psychiatrist. I agreed and signed a release form which did not state that I thought I needed to be locked up for my own good but that’s what they treated it as and I was therefore locked up in a looney bin for trying to come out.
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I don’t know what the word “simply” adds to the sentence about considering myself an effeminate heterosexual. The term for it that I invented for myself in 1980 was “heterosexual sissy”. It did not prove to be simple. I don’t say “sissy” any more because it confuses people more than it explains: to some people it means “coward” and within the kink community a “sissy” is someone male who gets off, to some extent, on the humiliation of being reduced to acting in role as and dressing as a girlish person. I don’t find any of the being-a-girl stuff remotely humiliating. “Effeminate” has its own problems and I’ve never cared for it but I’d consider it.
To answer your second question, yeah, you might. Then again you might not. I don’t have exaggeratedly girly-girl mannerisms. But people who have no information one way or the other seem to end up thinking I’m gay a bit more often than not. Then some people think it’s “something” but not necessarily that.
I would be at ease with the “lesbian in a male body” formulation except that apparently it was a corny hafl-serious come-on used by lots of guys bantering with lesbians and as a consequence it is not a phrase well-received by lesbian people. Or so I’ve been told. I suppose it’s arrogant for any male-bodied person to describe himself/herself as a “lesbian” but then you could say the same for describing one’s self as a girl or woman. The whole “what to call it” issue is one I’ve never resolved to my satisfaction.
So why GenderQueer?
Because the way in which I have this weird and differently gendered sexual identity is NOT THE ONLY ONE that’s out there, still unpublicized and largely unrecognized. Note that the thread title is Ask A GenderQueer Person. If you asked a different one you might get a different story.
But also because, well, dammit, finally there’s a word out there that is IN USE and refers to sexual and gender identity, that’s about being DIFFERENT in those elements from the conventional, and which, even if it doesn’t apply only to my situation, isn’t WRONGLY applied to it. And I’m really really tired of not having a name I can call it that people have ever heard of. The GLBT community has opened their spectrum and said, in essence, “Oh, and there are perhaps others besides the categories we’ve specifically mentioned who are also outsiders in this respect”. Thank you, thank you, yes there are and I really appreciate you sharing your rainbow with me. It’s been lonely.
) ; she did not want to be my first, too much of a Mrs Robinson role for her liking to deflower me, but we had a 4 year relationship not long after I was no longer virginal.