GenderSphere.com

So yeah, hi. Been a while since my last post. Did NaNoWriMo and then worked a month of holiday retail. Glad to have my routine back and will get back to a more regular posting schedule.

Speaking of the holidays, I hope that whatever you celebrated with the season (or not, as the case may be), that there was joy and not too much drama. A very happy new year is wished for all.

For some reason, an old memory resurfaced of a long ago Christmas. I was a “typical” tomboy as a kid, whatever that means. Definitely not a girly girl. Didn’t do make up or skirts or hair styles that required mousse or hairspray. Give me jeans and t-shirts any day! I wasn’t necessarily a big sports or outdoors kid (did play basketball, though), but was a bit mechanical with gadgets. I was a total bookworm. Still am, though not with as much time as I should allow for reading. Read the rest of this entry »

And I mean this in the most literal sense! Despite being female bodied, almost nothing about me could be described as feminine.  Wearing a dress is simply bad drag (really, I mean it) so I just don’t do it.  I shop in the men’s clothes sections at stores (except for key undergarments). One woman I dated told me that she didn’t think I was very butch because she found my hand movements when I talked to be feminine (I do use my hands a lot).  I told her I was simply in touch with my inner gay boy.

The one thing I find that I have to really work to “control” is my speaking voice. Despite outward appearances, I was raised as a girl and certainly internalized even the most subtle of expected behaviors. Among these is vocal inflection.  I work part time in a retail setting, and I have caught myself, more than once, turning out a particularly female inflection.  What do I mean by that?

Have you ever noticed how a woman’s pitch and tone will go up a step or two, and the ending question (may I help YOU?) seems to go up another step from there? I have no idea where the socialization for that came from and really I have only noticed it in myself over the last couple of years. I’m not sure I have done it all this time, or if it’s a new thing, or if I am only suddenly aware of it.  But I do know it bugs me.  I feel like I am sort of betraying my inner self and outward visual expression.

Now, there is NOTHING WRONG with a female voice (being lesbian, I’m actually rather fond of it). But coming out of me, it just seems wrong. It feels like a charade and definitely not a real part of myself. Now, when I speak to customers, I make a very concerted effort to control my own voice.

What I am still thinking about and trying to determine is what that higher voice is supposed to mean. The women’s studies major in me thinks it might be an artifact of  kyriarchy, the notion of women as subservient and needing to be/sound timid in order to “play” their roles. I can be shy, but timid, no. As we now train new staff in the store for the holidays (all women on staff), I hear that new inflection in many of them, especially the younger women. Perhaps as we find and strengthen our own voices, the impulse to change that inflection fades away.  I am still a little baffled about why I shift into that higher voice, and continue to work on removing that impulse.  There is nothing wrong with my own solid, mid-tone voice. Hopefully there will come a day where everyone’s own natural voice is just fine, and there is no high pitch adjustment needed to reflect a role, position, or task. I can serve a customer without having to assume some sort of “gender role” to do it.

Going to take more thinking, this one.  Anyone else have any thoughts?  Ever noticed this yourselves?

Part of doing this site includes hearing about what other people are doing to write/think/speak/sing/do to further gender discussions and awareness  I’ve been out of touch for too long.

This makes me very excited about a new book of essays from S. Bear Bergman, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You. There’s a terrific interview on Genderfork.com (a banner resource as well).  Read the interview.

I am really looking forward to getting and reading the book!

Lyrics, from “Wicked Little Town” (Tommy Gnosis version):

Forgive me,
For I did not know.
‘Cause I was just a boy
And you were so much more
Than any god could ever plan,
More than a woman or a man…

The whole song is grand, check out all of the lyrics.

This verse started floating through my head today as I was watching some nonsense on TV and a character was called a “horrible woman”. Cue the music above.

Why, today of all days, did a word I have heard countless times before and will hear countless times again, suddenly flash through my head lit like a neon sign? I am thinking way too much and this gender theory re-entry thing is having a bigger impact on me than I had expected!

Part of me, I think, is envious of those who KNOW they are a woman or a man (though how they know will probably be topics of posts another time). I really don’t have a problem being somewhere in between, but I admit to having a little envy about it. I suppose this is natural for anyone who feels “outside” of any particular group, that ‘grass is always greener on the other side’ thing. Would it be easier to KNOW for sure one way or another? Probably not. Feminist writings abound with the reactions to pressure on how to be a “proper” woman. There are certainly many interpretations on what a “proper” woman is, influenced by class, ethnicity, culture, economics, religion etc etc etc.

How does anyone figure it out, anyway?

Me, I think the best I can do is hang on for the ride most days. I’m definitely not MORE than a woman or a man. A hybrid, perhaps. A little envious of those who are firmly one or the other. But also not envious of having to reckon with the forces of influence that try to dictate the structure of woman or man (not that those forces still don’t attempt to influence me). The fun continues!

So, this blog is a way for me to sort of “return” to really thinking about gender on a larger scale. This is something that originally began many years ago, when I became close to and dated a MTF woman. I’ve known her only as her, and am grateful for the education that she started for me. Around the same time, Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw was released and I saw her perform. To say my mind was blown by all of these things would be an understatement. Some of why I felt like I never fit in was starting to take some form, some meaning.

Over time, I drifted away from participating in discussions about gender. I am trying to figure out why, and I think there were multiple reasons. One, the language of gender, the number of self-descriptive terms, was exploding and I found it hard to keep up. Two, even with that explosion, I never felt like I was seeing myself reflected in any of that language, and three, I didn’t make the investment of carving out my own space.

This is not to say that I haven’t thought about gender over the years, or tried to continue expanding my horizons. I’ve read, discussed, befriended, considered, etc etc etc. It’s always been a matter close at hand and I’ve kept my eyes and ears open. Because I have been trying to find and understand my own sphere of gender, I’ve embraced opportunities to continue expanding my horizons.

And when I decided to start this blog only days ago, I knew that part of the process would be to more formally re-engage in gender discussions. I found a bunch of people to follow on Twitter, a list that will surely expand. And in following them, I am discovering ways in which the language has continued to evolve.

The most striking of the terms new to me is cis. Cis/gendered, cis/sexual… I did some Googling to get definitions and found an interesting array of posts. Basically, cis/gendered means the opposite of trans. That is, someone who was born female and remains female is cis. Someone who is born male-bodied and takes steps to be/live female is trans. Cis/sexual seems equivalent to homosexual, though I am still not sure if both people in that relationship would be cis/gendered as well, as opposed to, say, a lesbian relationship where at least one partner is trans.

The context in which I have seen cis used, so far, has been from folks who self-ID as trans. Because it’s new to me, I’m having a bit of a defensive reaction to the term. The context has struck me as being full of anger from people who have encountered cis-folks who scorn/dismiss/trivialize trans-folks. That’s a righteous anger. One blog post I found neatly explains why cis-folks should not find the term offensive. There’s also some uncertainty from someone would be a cis-person about why she needs to be described in this manner. And another who feels that the terms cis and trans simply reinforce a binary.

Well, I am still trying to figure it out. Maybe it’s just too new to me and I need to see more usage, context, etc. More than that, though, I think I agree with the notion that cis and trans reinforce a binary, which I find myself resisting more and more. It also seems to reinforce a notion of “other” meaning not “me” which reinforces divide between communities.  I fully recognize that there are cis/gendered/sexual folks who completely reject trans folks and do not support any efforts for trans rights, which I think is mindbogglingly closed minded. There are no equal rights for anyone until there are equal rights for everyone, and keeping some folks away from the table does not change that.

I remember when the term transgender first hit the ground running; it was an umbrella, meant to describe anyone outside of “traditional” gender constructs. Transsexual applied to those who more formally changed from a birth gender to an opposite or chosen gender. This definition of  transsexual seems to have diligently hung on to its meaning. I am not as sure that transgender has done the same; it seems often to be used interchangeably with transsexual. Once again, it comes down to highlighting those in between spaces and how those of us in those spaces find/use our own language.

Outwardly, despite my soft butch visage, I would be cis. Inwardly, because I don’t feel any resonance with the messages of our 21st century info-overload gender construct female culture, I could argue that I am trans. But that seems disrespectful of my trans friends who undertake the journey to change their gender from one to the other.

So, am I trans, or cis, or neither/both?

To be continued, to be determined. To be myself, whatever I am!

Almost every time I have been in a position to worry about using a women’s bathroom, it has been in a bus station. NYC, Boston, Springfield MA. I remember these times/incidents rather clearly. (what does it say that I think of using a bathroom as an incident?) Usually it was wintertime so there were more layers of clothes, making my chest more concealed. I’d walk in or past a woman who would turn around and look, wide eyed, at the door. I’d just smile. Or someone would say, “this is the women’s room!”, to which I would reply, “I know!” with a smile. More than once, I did my best to hurry because I was afraid of being accosted by some security person. Luckliy, that never happened to me. I do know that others have been accosted (or worse).

How does someone like me, somewhere on a visual scale around ambiguous to masculine (depending on the day and the perception of the person viewing me), try to put another woman at ease? How to make my appearance non theatening? Because I get read as male and am using the women’s bathroom, the immediate response by these women is panic and fear, or so it seems by the look in their eyes. They have no idea that inside, I have my own panic and fear for being mis-read and hassled for it. I would also not dare use a men’s room – would it be worse to be mis-read in the wrong direction in there? I am not ready to find out.

So how do I/we ameliorate all of this fear? I know gender neutral bathrooms would be the best solution, but I wonder how realistic that is on a large scale… Whose responsiblity is it to create the “safe” space for the bathroom? It would seem to fall on us outlaws to look a little less outlaw-ish, which is sort of ridiculous since that robs us of the same freedom of expression that “traditional” gender representations allow. It SHOULD also fall on others, the non-outlaws, to open their eyes and widen their experience. But it doesn’t.

Meanwhile, I am lucky that I don’t find myself needing to use public bus station bathrooms much these days, though I do have to use other public restrooms. And almost every time, there’s a flash of panic about needing to come and go “unseen” so that I can minimize misperceptions and over-reactions. Or a conscious shifting of my upper body to make my chest more visible. Despite this, people’s eyes don’t seem to go below the neck and once they think I am male, nothing else disavows them of this perception. I honestly don’t have any problem being read as male in most situations, but the bathroom seems to be a universe all unto its own…

No, that title does not have anything to do with Lost. It’s a line from a Dar Williams song, “As Cool As I Am”.  One of the catalysts for my starting this blog was hearing this song in concert recently, and this line took on a whole new dimension.

Welcome to my new blog! For many many years, I have thought about gender. It’s been in regards to myself and through the course of meeting many other gender outlaws – people who have physically transitioned from one sex to another, as well as those who have found other places “in between”. Kate Bornstein, gender activist and educator extraordinaire, turned on the light for me (and many others), with her book “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us” and her one woman show, “The Opposite Sex is… Neither.”  Prior to these, gender was about man/woman.  Butch/femme.  Pick your binary expression. While I like to call my gender “soft butch” now, I never honestly “felt” butch “enough”.  Didn’t seem to wear the right clothes, have the right swagger or attitude.  All of this was my own self reflection based on what/who I was seeing. When I was in college (as a women’s studies major at a women’s college, even), butch/femme had fallen out of favor as a positive expression, so I went for the androgynous expression.

Over the years, I’ve drifted in and out of awareness of what’s been going on in gender discussions.  Then I started following Kate on Twitter and we had a brief exchange where I used the phrase “spheres of gender” (see the About page for more on that).  And the soundtrack for one of my favorite films, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, found its way back into heavy rotation (coupled with Dar Williams’s playing her cover of “Midnight Radio”).  And at the same time, I was reading “Labor of Love” by Thomas Beatie.

It was, in a manner of speaking, a perfect storm to get my mind’s wheels spinning on gender once again.  This time, in this age of the blogosphere, I decided to funnel that energy into this blog. I want to shine my own light on my “in between” space. Do my own examinations of language and expression, and reflections on what I see in the world. I want to go beyond a linear spectrum and look at all dimensions of gender.

I invite you to join me on this journey; let’s see where it takes us!