Anyway, I am going to go read Eddie Izzard’s* Believe Me.* Much more interesting, and less dismissive, I think (though I have only just started - maybe he has a chapter where he rails against everyone remotely like him who chose a different path and calls them sellouts).
I don’t see myself as a victim. I only partially see myself even as a former victim. But a perpetrator as well. To whatever extent it is true that masculine boy-identified or man-identified (i.e., cisgender, gender-normative) males have been hostile and nasty to me in my life, the main factor making it not equally true that I’ve been hostile and nasty to them with no more provocation than they had was that they outnumbered me by a large margin.
If you think this is all about “Oh, pweeze feel sowwy for me, people did bad mean things to me in junior high”, chalk that up to one more failure to communicate on my part, if you want to, but you could also go back and try to read with the advice from the author that, no, that wasn’t supposed to be your takeaway.
And yet, isn’t that the first third of your 95,000 page book (longer than Fahrenheit 451 and The Great Gatsby put together) that you were willing to walk on a publishing contract rather than cut?
Roughly the same size as Anne of Green Gables, a bit shorter than Wuthering Heights, and was there some point you thought you were making about the size of my book?
And no, the first third of my book is about me as hostile perpetrator, actively antagonistic towards conventionally masc male guys, as well as being harassed by them. It’s about being polarized. It’s an important and necessary first third of the book if I want my readers to be shown, not told, how the sense of identity develops.
Well, whatever idea it is you’re trying to get across, I wish you all the best in achieving that goal. I just don’t think I have it in me to re-read the multiple threads you’ve posted on the subject; I’ll simply take your word for it. Thanks for listening and responding to your critics, me among them.
That’s one of the main reasons transmen take such extreme joy in their beard coming in. Especially those who are shorter than cisgender men; most (maybe all) of them grow beards to both be more readily perceived as a man and to be perceived as being more manly.
Is it in dispute that a beard is associated with men and masculinity?
Well, I certainly associated it with maleness, but I’ve segmented what I’m calling “masculinity” off entirely from physiological maleness; and within that paradigm I guess I never gave it much thought. I came of age in a world of clean-shaven short-haired older men (parents’ generation) and more socially conservative men, versus longhaired males with facial hair who were called “sissy hippie commie queer” by the former group.
Yes, I occasionally heard longhaired bearded fellows returning the taunts of “are you a boy or are you a girl” with the response “I’m not the one who scrapes off all of his most prominent secondary sex characteristics, mister smooth cheeks” or some such thing, but really I never thought of beards or facial hair in general as being associated with masculinity as distinct from biological-morphological maleness.
Yes, I’d like an answer on this too. Do you prefer pink things as to blue things? Did you like playing Barbies rather than with G.I. Joes? Give us some concrete examples.
I’ve yet to personally know a man or a woman who is absolutely “this” or “that.” Examples:
My 6’4" state trooper friend is muscled and “performs” uber-masculinity when his job calls for it. He is also an expert quilter, belongs to quilt making clubs, and often goes to craft fairs.
Another friend is of the Pamela Anderson mold and often plays the sexxxy 101% babe role. She is a heavy equipment operator and master truck mechanic.
I dress really well and wear makeup to work. In other avenues of life I mostly wear guy clothes; at this moment the only “girl thing” I’m wearing is underwear. I have lots of traditionally male interests but one of my scholarly specialties is 1960s - 70s housewife humor, which is totally immersed in heteronormativity.
All to say: few people are the cookie cutter gender model. Humans are more like lasagna and society is the better for it.
Neuroscience shows that our brains don’t really gel until the early 20s. My thinking/impulses/character are very different 30-years on, and in some aspects radically so. In fact, I’m different in a lot of ways from when I was forty.
