Some People See Me as THE STRAIGHT DOPE

In My Humble Opinion
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TL/DR in advance: How much of what y’all are saying about my posts have to do with the subject (and how I write about it, in particular) and how much do you think would be the same if I were blogging about a different topic?

For comparison:

Let’s say that, hypothetically, instead of a weekly blog about being genderqueer and trying to get a book on the subject published, I was doing a weekly blog about being a psychiatric system survivor and getting a book on THAT subject published.

(I assume a good number of you are well-aware that I tend to post periodically in that vein. But I don’t do a weekly blog about it. And I’m not threatening to :p)
… and the subject of those posts included things like:

• the Mad Pride movement, what it is, what its goals are

• my personal experience being locked up and how we patients were treated

• what “sanity” actually means, how the concept is used in society, what is real, how do we know, what does it mean socially and politically to utilize a concept that delegitimizes the thoughts and purposes of a category of people, and other philosophical things that tie in with the overall issue

• my personal frustrations with the Mad Pride movement and its internal politics

• retrospective on myself and the years in which I worried a lot about my own mental and emotional state, and what I went through seeking counseling

• the sociology of how people perceive “deviance”, and how “madness” does and does not overlap with “criminality” and “sickness” and “sinfulness” or “badness” and how all these different perceptual categories work, what they have in common and how they differ

• my own, and the Mad Pride movement’s, frustration with the Disabilities movement of which we are sort of, and yet sort of NOT, a part…

• dangerousness and the notion of predicting it and the social possibility of locking people up for what you think they might do versus only locking people up for what they’ve done, and the various social attitudes towards that, and the role of the concept of “mental illness” in doublethinking our way around the way in which we, as a society, do this

• emotional states in general, and my own in particular, and the process of coping strategically with them, done partly as an internal monologue and partly as a critique of and elaboration on conventional notions of how a healthy person copes with feelings and stress and distress and whatnot

• the sociological need for interpredictability and the sharing of a worldview and the corrupting effect of an enforced definition of “reality” and “normal behavior” and how no one can be sane in an insane world, etc

• and, of course, my ongoing efforts to get a book on the subject published

Got it? OK, to what extent would the “special snowflake” complaints (about me doing navel-gazing posts, about me being a lot more fascinated with my own obsessions than anyone reading them is) be roughly the same as they are with the genderqueer stuff? And also to what extent would they be likely to evoke the same complaints about being arcane and opaquely written and hard to understand ?

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But you’re not writing about the psychiatric system, you’re writing about your own experiences and whatever research/study you’ve done into a sub-set of gender issues. I’d argue one has a larger audience over the other, especially if you’re being particularly esoteric.

And even at the bullet points you laid out, my eyes still glazed over.

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Others have asked this, but I’ll ask, too, since I’m not so familiar with your history.

How does being genderqueer manifest itself in the real world? What actions do you take (or would like to be able to take) to express being genderqueer?

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My guess is he wants to specifically reach effeminate straight young men who have a similar story and viewpoint, as well other anyone else who might see themselves as genderqueer and can identify with feeling marginalized for it.

But he has indicated wanting to change mental paradigms so that people treat him as who he is, rather than isn’t. Which suggests a more general audience.

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This has been very interesting.

I attended highschool with AHunter3 and finally found the time to navigate to his writings today having heard about them at the 40th reunion he has noted in previous missives.

I concur with the sentiments of some that the longer pieces are difficult to navigate. That said, I find most of the writings of folks in the humanities to be of similar nature…impenetrable by commoners such as myself.

I also agree that AHunter3 appears to be in the middle of his quest rather than answering it. But that is not overtly novel. Who isn’t still wondering who they are, how they got there, and whether their journey is complete?

What fascinates is the rather large following of folks who care enough to take the time to generate some very thoughtful comments. Even those comments that are rather snarky (and some do seem to have found, of late, a handy place to pile on in my opinion) clearly show that the sender(s) of snark has/have wrestled with the prose enough to be irritated, or somewhat negatively moved by it. That said, as an outside observer I think all of you, kind and not so kind, are to be commended. You have created a nice space for sharing of ideas.

In reading the comments one does wonder what it is that has drawn you to the postings of AHunter3? Are you following along as some do NASCAR races waiting for a wreck? Or are you drawn to the process…watching to see what will unfold. Of course there are many other possibilities, but whatever the reason he has proven an ability to draw an audience. Perhaps that portends well for his book.

For what it is worth, I doubt AHunter3 is writing here to push this manuscript.

I don’t see that in him. Rather, I think, as some have suggested, that he is still trying to sort it all out. As I am sure he has indicated in previous writings, he was an odd bird in school. Quiet. Seemingly uncomfortable with others, perhaps the same with himself. Difficult to get to know and, unfortunately for that reason, easy to dismiss given everything else that is going on in one’s life at that stage of development.

I think he is finding his stride and I think he will continue to do so. I applaud his dedication to working it out. Many of us don’t. And for that reason I felt moved to register and comment here. In part to show support given some of the comments I read today. In part to also applaud those of you who are clearly caring individuals. Nice group of folk. Interesting way to end a day.

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Then it should be written for a general audience. As it stands now, at least using his blog articles as our only real example of his writing, it’s not even close.

AHunter – I’m sure you have something worth saying, but it truly is opaque, verbose and seemingly aimed at academics. I really would take most of the criticism here to heart. Hopefully you were posting here for some critique as well as spreading your story and views. People do want to help, and you’ve gotten some good advice.

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It might be worthwhile to try a structured writing format that forces you to be concise. Maybe put your thoughts in a Haiku or something. Really. I think there is great value in whittling down your ideas to their very essence. Nothing inherently wrong with stream of consciousness if you can make it work, but most of us aren’t Jack Kerouac.

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I’m trying to figure out what genderqueer means in practice. As mentioned upthread, is it wearing women’s underwear? How does a non-masculine heterosexual male manifest his behavior?

Yeah, this isn’t clarifying anything. That describes a plurality of people at that age.

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I think the mental illness angle might be more interesting since the topic lends itself to more entertaining stories and insights (from both you and us), and I think people can relate to it more. It is a “different” experience, but it is experienced differently by different people. That makes it more engaging, I think.

I think one problem we have with your posts is that we feel lectured to. You are a nice lecturer and all, but I always get the sense you want us to listen more than engage beyond simple validation. Like,you never end your blog posts with discussion questions. You never say anything like “Does this experience jibe with anyone else’s?” A couple of blog posts ago, you talked about how being a misfit in childhood shaped you. You missed an opportunity to ask us what our misfit experience was like and how we have coped with it.

That said, even if you were to post about a totally different subject, if you post the same kind of posts every week–posts that basically express the same idea just in slightly different ways–it will eventually get old. We will eventually tune out or “pile on”. This is why successful blogging is hard work.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk

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I must confess, once you mentioned you had a publisher, I was looking forward to rereading the material, after you’d spent some time working with a professional editor!

(My opinions on the writing would remain unaffected by a queer gender topic switchout, I’m certain.)

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If the writings of an author are impenetrable to the target audience, it is the fault of the writer, not the audience.

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For myself, I read ones where the thread title especially catches my eye–this one especially, given the multiple possible meanings of both “straight” and “dope.” I don’t actually read many of the essays, but I have been browsing back over a few more of them today. One tidbit I found interesting is how in middle school a kid squirted AHunter3 in the face with a squirt gun and AHunter3 broke a lunch tray over his head. It struck me how today both of them would have been suspended, possibly expelled–the one for having a “weapon” (zero tolerance and all) and the other for the violence.

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Which is where, again, some specifics would go a long way.

I’m a guy who passes you on the street. Or I’m your co-worker, or your boss, or your neighbor, or your cashier at the grocery store. What do you want from me? What does “treating you as who you are” consist of?

I can understand things like, I want to be called by such-and-such pronoun, or I want you not to laugh at me because I wear a top hat, a muumuu and fuzzy bunny slippers on Casual Friday. Lengthy, meandering, fractalized, circumlocutory expeditions through a forest of generalities and jargon are much less clear.

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I post in AHunter3’s threads because I am sympathetic to his efforts to get his voice heard, and I want him to know that I’ve heard him. But I also post to let him know when his “voice” isn’t clear (which is often, IMHO) and/or when I think he’s stepping on his own arguments. I kinda feel if someone is going to lecture to me with a wall of text, they better brang it in terms of substance and food for thought. Given his ambitious aims, he needs people to hold him to this standard as much as possible.

And I also tune in for the comments. Sometimes I don’t understand what AHunter is talking about, but I can gleam a clue from the replies.

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I don’t think posting as a survivor of the psychiatric system is truly analogous. That’s an experience that objectively happens to people. It’s not a product of self-reflection and analysis.

I think a better example would be if you blogged about having a self-diagnosed medical condition that you believed was rare, unrecognized, and life-altering, and wanted to talk about it so others could accept its existence. So week after week, you post about how this condition affects you. You post about being challenged by others regarding the existence of your condition. You post about being misdiagnosed by the medical community and why you think they can’t get it right. You post about why you align yourself with certain support groups and how these groups question your participation. You post about your childhood and how having the condition rendered you as an outcast. Etc.

But when you actually describe your medical condition, the symptoms don’t seem all that unusual. They don’t seem all that debilitating either. It’s hard to understand why these symptoms are considered a condition, let alone one so distinct from all other conditions that it needs a special name. Moreover, it’s hard to discern what you really are asking of other people. Acknowledgment of your condition? Or special accommodations, like the equivalent of a wheelchair ramp?

If you blogged like this, then yes my response would be the same.

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Now, I am going to take this snippet of your quoted post at full face value. Because there is exactly zero about this entire part of the world that is amusing or ironic.

Therefore, there is in my mind exactly zero chance that " LGBTQRSTUCX63M " was a witticism. After all, poking fun at the acronyms used by members of the community that AHunter3 is a part of is not tolerated here.

Please define every single letter and number in that acronym. Fight some ignorance and list them all.

Thank you.

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Dude, from context Jennshark is part of that community, too–are you trying to straightsplain to her how she isn’t allowed to say something you deem to be insulting to her?

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Jennshark is a lesbian, IIRC. I think there is a chance that it was a “witticism”.

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Yes, there’s a medical term for that. It’s called “adolescence”, and most of us manage to move on from it. Gimme an example. Just one. One thing he does which he considers so outré.

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I’ll even go first. The last music I bought was a CD by Lykke Li, a Swedish singer who specialises in breathy 60s-styled dream pop with song titles like Sadness Is a Blessing. I like the genre: Regina Spektor, Imogen Heap, Saint Etienne, Grimes, I’m all over that stuff. If it’s chiming girl-pop with 60s production and little-girl vocals, I’m all over that shit. Mind you, the second to last album I bought was Once More Round The Sun by Mastodon because I like growling stoner metal too: Baroness, High On Fire, Karma To Burn, Red Fang, The Sword, all equally my bag. Why, it could even be said that I like stuff which is traditionally considered feminine as well as things that are more typically masculine. There. Your turn, AHunter3. Concrete example.