Shannon's Queerest Space

Don't worry, this won't be boring. I promise.

In 1996, i had my first "encounter" with trans identity and existence when i read Leslie Feinberg's amazing Stone Butch Blues, undoubtedly one of the best books i've ever run across. It was, to say the least, a mind-opening experience. I quickly followed Feinberg's book with Kate Bornstein's great Gender Outlaw. Suddenly, i found myself questioning the sex of everyone i met on the Metro, passed on the street, or saw walking outside my window. "How do i know," i wondered, "If that person sitting next to me in a dress has a clitoris or a penis? Does it matter? Do i care?" It was a totally new way of looking at things, and it definitely rocked my world -- but in a very exciting way.

Since then, i have immersed myself (more or less) in trans writings, literature, and theory. I've also been fortunate enough to meet some great transpeople, including my beautiful aunt. And i encountered a decent amount of postmodern and queer theory in my Women's Studies courses. All of that opened up to me an entirely new way of seeing gender. I have come to believe not only that gender identity (how we experience ourselves as male, female, masculine, feminine, a combination thereof, or something else entirely) and sex (what's between our legs, how developed our breasts are, and the "shape" of our chromosomes) are completely independent of each other but also that there are as many genders as there are human beings. This whole "man/woman" thing is something that our society (and most others) has cooked up to limit who/what we can be and to keep us segregated into strict, heterosexist social roles.

Look around you. Not all men look, act, or feel the same. Nor do all women. No matter what gender label we were given at birth, humans are an incredibly diverse group of beings. Yes, we have cultural ideals for what men and women "should" be -- men are supposed to be macho, hyper(hetero)sexual, unfeeling, physically strong, and aggressive; women are supposed to be emotional, sensitive, physically weak, skinny to the point of starvation, scared of bugs and mice, and stupid when compared with men. Not many of us fit those ideals (and thank goodness, too!). Chances are that each of us has some combination of characteristics that our society deems "masculine" and "feminine."

Our cultural ideals of who men and women are "supposed" to be are also affected by our race (African American women are supposed to be strong no matter what the circumstances), sexual orientation (all gay men are supposed to be nelly queens), class (working class men are supposed to be brawny and stupid), ability (those who are visibly disabled are not supposed to have any sexuality in this culture), nationality (men all over the world wear what we in the US would consider skirts or dresses), historical period (ever seen pictures of men in medieval Europe in flowing robes and wearing wigs?), and a host of other factors. So there is no one way of being a man or a woman. Everything (and i say that cautiously) that we are is filtered through the culture(s) we grew up in. What we here in the US consider "manly" or "womanly" may well be seen in very different ways by billions of other people. So the body you're born with in & of itself doesn't determine how you'll act or what you'll consider "appropriate"; if it did, we wouldn't see the amazing cultural diversity that exists in this world. No one forces you to dress or act "correctly" when you get up in the morning. No matter how you feel, you do have the choice to wear either a suit or a dress, suspenders or a slip (although there are certainly consequences for getting caught in the "wrong" clothing, particularly for people with penises). Consciously or unconsciously, each of a makes a choice about how we dress and act.

So what is "man" and "woman"? Good question! I know that i don't have an answer. What i do know is that we learn in our society that infants born with penises are boys (and will grow up to be men) and that infants without penises are girls (and will grow up to be women). But what about those babies born with "ambiguous genitalia" -- genitals that doctors can't easily identify as either a clitoris or a penis? Despite the inhumane treatment many of them receive from the Western medical establishment (see my intersex links for more on that), the existence of intersexed people proves that, like gender, genitalia also are on a spectrum. Human bodies do not fall into two distinct categories; our genitals come in all shapes and sizes, just like height and hair color and skin tone.

So if our bodies don't determine our gender, if cultural definitions of genders are so vastly different, and if both gender and sex exist on a spectrum, why do we insist that everyone is either a man or a woman? We certainly wouldn't want to tell everyone that ze must choose to be either tall or short, black or white, to have blonde hair or brown. That would be pretty unfair to those people who have a medium-sized height, light brown skin, or red hair. Why would we want to force those people to deny part of who they are just to conform to a misinformed idea that there are only two heights, two skin tones, or two hair colors?

Exactly the same with gender. We live in a world that insists each of us be either "man" or "woman". If you stop and think about it along the lines of the analogies above, it seems kind of stupid. As a society, we sure are missing a lot of richness and diversity by forcing folks to be either one or the other. And doesn't it seem rather ridiculous that we expect all six billion people on earth to fit into one of just two gender/sex boxes? I talked to my parents about this years ago. Mom insists that it's "natural" for people to be either "men" or "women," that "all cultures" see "just" male and female. But we've already seen above that "man" and "woman" aren't natural but are constructed (made, defined) by the society we live in. And not all cultures do see "just" male and female; trans people are revered members of many societies, including in some American Indian tribes. And even if all cultures did have "just" male and female, that doesn't necessarily make it right -- after all, all cultures are probably also racist and/or ethnocentric, sexist, classist, ableist, and lookist. Those certainly aren't values that we'd want to repeat just because "everyone else is doing it"! 

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This stuff is some of what i've picked up from my classes and readings and discussions and lots of thought over the past four years or so. And i think it's pretty cool and amazing and really love it. And then it started to affect me on a more personal level. I've attended three of the four annual True Spirit Conferences, held each year in the DC area since 1996 and sponsored by the American Boyz. During the last two (1999 and 2000), i've had an extremely difficult time with "reentry" -- going back into the "real world" where everyone i meet tries to force me to be either a "man" or a "woman." The week immediately following True Spirit has proven since then to be among the hardest weeks of the year for me. It's incredibly difficult to leave a space where at least some of the attendees are open to gender fluidity, to people not fitting into either given gender category, where some people either think i'm trans myself (i've had a few folks ask me when i was going to start hormones) or, even better, are okay with my being neither.

My feelings are certainly not happening in a vacuum, however. My gender presentation (how i choose to look, act, and dress) is relatively androgynous. I've certainly never been a "good woman" in the Phyllis Schlafly sense of the word. I've worn relatively gender-neutral clothing for as long as i can remember (i always chafed when i was younger and Mom insisted that i wear dresses to movies or church), and i've never enjoyed either sports or dressing up. I claimed the label "feminist" in sixth grade and stopped shaving my legs and armpits during my senior year in high school. I did, however, always identify solidly as a girl/woman. (And that's not a history that i'm interested in rewriting. Unlike when i came out as a dyke and looked back and found lots of hints of baby-dykeness, i'm relatively content to let me-in-the-past be as much of a girl/woman as anyone ever can be.)

I was somewhat surprised when i left Vassar in 1995 and found myself out in the "real world" where i got stared at occasionally, in large part, i'm sure, due to my unabashedly hairy legs. Then i shaved my head in June of 1998. (Love it! It's great! The only thing between the washin' and the goin' is the towelin' off. And as someone who used to sing in my chorus, Bread & Roses Feminist Singers said, it's "pet-me hair." I love getting my head rubbed by my friends -- or by strange women to whom i've been introduced and whom i find attractive. It's a wonderfully sensual experience. :::bashfully grinning:::) But, oooo boy, did the staring increase after that! What with my usually-androgynous clothing, hairy legs, small breasts, and shaved head, i get that "Is it a boy or a girl?" look a lot. Half the children i volunteer with are convinced i'm a boy; most of the others aren't sure. On the days i show up in a skirt (which i will wear when it gets too miserably hot for pants and since i can't wear shorts to work), the kids laugh at me for being "a boy in a dress." Sometimes random children on the street will ask me "which" i am. Adults do that covert i've-learned-not-to-stare stare. And i even get "Sir'd" on occasion, which always weirds me out because i can't "pass" as a boy for anything once i start talking, nor do i feel like one.

One of the most difficult parts of this whole process has been dealing with the fact that everyone is trying to put me into a box, a box that i don't want to fit into. Based upon my female genitalia, i'm certainly supposed to know what "feeling like a woman" is like. I don't, though. If anyone can tell me what it's like to, in the words of Aretha Franklin, "feel like a natural woman" (or a man, for that matter), you'd probably be eligible for some big award or something. So i don't know what it feels like to be a woman. But i've never wanted to be or be seen as a boy/man. And i don't want to change my body; i'm comfortable in my own skin. (These last two are the reason i don't identify as trans.) And the gender that i "do" (a cool sociological concept that highlights the fact that gender is, however unconsciously, something we do to send out messages about ourselves) is obviously falling off people's radar screens.

On one level, i'm perfectly happy being outside our binary sex/gender system (the idea that everyone is either only a man or only a woman and has either only something that is obviously a penis or something that is obviously a clitoris and that penis = man and clitoris = woman). It's subversive. I want to help explode the restricting, constricting, confining gender boxes. It allows me to be and act however i want to, without worrying about whether or not i'm being too "feminine" or too "masculine" (although, admittedly, i have a long way to go until i get rid of my internalized, knee-jerk reactions against all that is hyper-feminine). And being genderqueer has the potential to be a hell of a lot of fun. I do feel very much that i'm in the vanguard of a new movement, a new way of seeing gender and being gendered that most of our society hasn't yet begun to contemplate. And that's exciting. I love the idea of being part of a serious cultural/social revolution, a revolution very different from the limited goals of the gay & lesbian movement.

The really hard part of this journey so far has been trying to figure out how to live in the world as neither "M" nor "F," neither man nor woman. The Western world (indeed, probably most of the world, period) is based upon people fitting into one of those two boxes. And if i don't, it's kind of like i cease to socially exist. Most people will have no idea how to interact with me or talk about me if i say i'm neither. Or they'll just stare at me blankly, assuming i'm crazy to be thinking like i am, that i've done entirely too much reading in graduate school, or that i'll grow out of it. I still don't know how to deal with all of that. So i'm frustrated and frightened and discouraged and lonely -- and a little bit scared, too, that the more androgynous my gender presentation gets, the more vulnerable i am going to be to physical/emotional/psychological queer-bashing. I know i'm walking a line that most people in our society don't even know exists. And doing so is subversive. And that very subversion puts both our very social/cultural fabric and me at risk.

I long for a world where i don't feel every day like i'm "the only one." I know i'm not because i've met other genderqueers. (Some of them even have webpages!) But i don't have any in my daily personal life, and that's hard. I want to walk down the street and not feel like folks are trying to place me in a box, to figure out what i am. I want to sit on the Metro and see lots of other people like me who defy the gender system. The friends that i've told have all been amazingly supportive and wonderful, and i'm incredibly grateful that i have them in my life. For all but one of them, however, i have to do some educating when i talk about being genderqueer. And that takes a lot of energy. I long for a world where there are more than just a few of us who know that this whole man/woman thing is a crock. I long for a world when neither i nor anyone else has to choose either "M" or "F," where gender doesn't matter as much, and where anyone can be any gender(s) ze wants to.

In the meantime, however, i'm struggling to find my place, to create a space for myself in the world we currently have. Join the revolution, won't you?

If you identify as genderqueer, i would so much love to hear about your identity and experiences. I am yearning to hear from others like me. Please drop me a line at hugdyke @ gmail.com. I would be eternally grateful to hear how this is all working out for you. :-)

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Well, i just wanted to add a little to this, five months after i initially wrote it. Not a whole lot of the above has changed. All the issues are still there, and nothing has really been miraculously resolved. What has changed, however, is the desperation i was feeling above. For some reason that isn't at all clear to me, i'm not feeling as upset about all this as i was then. I think that part of it is because my focus has shifted from fighting a Global Gender Revolution to just creating a space for myself to be genderqueer in my own daily life.

I've been concentrating more on just telling the people who know me so that they can (and hopefully will) change the way they see me. Whenever i tell someone else and that person thinks of me in a new light, that makes it just a little easier because someone else "knows." As my friend Marty pointed out to me, i can't control the perceptions of every random person i meet on the street. I hate that, but i know she's right. What i can at least try to influence, however, are the perceptions of my friends, family, and coworkers. I've told most of my friends and my parents and sister. I came out to the Women's Studies Program in the spring newsletter. I tell classes whenever i lecture to them on transgender. A few people here in Sociology know, although coming out to them is harder than telling my friends. But maybe that's just because i've already told most of my friends, so that's in the past.

And i still struggle to talk about it with my parents. They know, but bringing it up isn't easy. But i am perfectly aware that, if i don't talk about it with them, they aren't going to take the effort to do so because they're more stressed about my genderqueerness than i am.

Most of the people in Bread & Roses don't know, either, which is a stressful situation since B&R is supposed to be "women-only" space. If i tell them, are they going to freak out and ask me to leave? I don't think they will because i've been in the group for five full seasons now and ('least as far as i can tell) they like me and we're so desperately small right now that we need every voice we can get. But i'm not sure about that. And even if they don't kick me out, they might freak out anyway. Which wouldn't be particularly fun. And we're going this summer to the Sister Singers Network festival, another "women-only" space that i worry even more about being at. At least i know the women in B&R; i'm worried that the SSN festival is going to be some atrociously anti-trans, anti-male (they had a debate over whether or not to allow men be on the stage crew during the festival), lesbian feminist-type space where there are no radical Generation X queers, in which case i will definitely have a shitty time that weekend. (Visions of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival are plodding through my head.)

So i'm struggling with the continual coming out process. But mostly my life is going on relatively uneventfully, with my biggest traumas being over getting GW to give me approval for my thesis. Having come out as genderqueer to lots of the people in my life has made things a lot easier than they were back in May when i wrote the previous entry here. I still have the Global Gender Revolution in mind; i'm just trying to start a little more close-to-home until i get my daily life figured out. Then it's going to be watch out, world!

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Throwing in another update, here, while i'm working on moving this page to my new site....

After worrying about what to do for months and stressing about the Sister Singers Network festival, i decided that i needed to come out to my chorus. I came to the conclusion that they needed to know what was going on with me, i needed their support, and if i wasn't going to get it, i needed to know that. So i sent an e-mail out to our group's yahoogroup (always the easier way to do things in so many ways, e-mail). I'm pleased to report that i've gotten nothing but support from each and every one of them. They've all been open to my identity and its funky variations, which has been really nice.

I also ended up having a great time at the SSN festival. It was a little weird to be in such a woman-centered space. Partly that's because my identity was completely erased. But it's also because of that irritating reliance on essentialist notions like, "Isn't it great to be in a room with so much woman's energy?," whatever the hell that is! People were just assuming that gender is so simple and easy. But then people practically everywhere assume the same thing, and it's not like i was under the impression that SSN wasn't going to be a woman-centered space.

Only two of the workshops were designated as women-only spaces, which i respected (although frankly i wasn't interested in the topics of either one anyway, which made that easier). I brought up gender issues in one workshop and once when talking informally with several of women from another chorus, and no one freaked out or ran screaming from the room. A couple people thanked me for bringing up trans issues and my own gender identity, which felt really good to hear. And i was fascinated to listen to another woman talk about her own chorus's experience dealing with trans members (sounds like they've handled it wonderfully).

So i was really glad that i went. I heard some great music, met some cool people, and was courageous enough to talk about myself. I'm also really happy that i came out to Bread & Roses. They've been a good source of support for me, and i'm grateful for their openness to rethinking their concepts of binary gender.

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Wow. It's been a while since i've written anything on this page. Between being really busy all the time and, until recently, living in Dial-Up Land, updating my website has taken a backseat to a lot of other things. But i've now joined the land of DSL and am moving my website again (to a place not connected to my ISP, so i can hopefully leave my site here indefinitely).

In the last, what?, six years, i've continued to try to come out about my genderqueerness to people in my everyday life. And i've mostly succeeded. All my current and (recent) past coworkers know. All my friends know. Everyone in Bread & Roses for the last six years has known. My brothers may or may not know, depending on whether or not they've ever read my website. I really don't talk about it with my sister. My mom still struggles but works very hard to be supportive of how i express myself -- like buying me a red cummerbund and bow-tie for the tux i bought a  year and a half ago.

I'm out to all my coworkers at the National AIDS Fund, and they're all very supportive and interested. We started a brown bag lunch series about a year ago, which i now organize, and i gave the first brown bag on transgender and genderqueer. And i feel an equal amount of affirmation from both people who are on my "level" in the organization and those who are "higher up" (although with an organization of 12-ish employees, talking about hierarchy can become somewhat ridiculous in some ways).

I continue to give my Trans 101 presentations at any opportunity, and people are consistently very interested in hearing more about genderqueer. My supervisor at my long-standing volunteer organization now knows because i gave her a copy of an essay i got published in a book on transgender and feminism since my piece talks about her organization. She hasn't given me any reaction at all or ever brought it up. But assuming she read it, she knows.

I'm not yet out to my new neighbors, although i mentioned to one person about not being comfortable in either the "man" or the "woman" box. And it's still really hard for me to come out to a group of strangers -- like this baby shower i was at yesterday, where it ended up there was only one man and me. Unfortunately, almost everyone assumed that i was a woman, too, and several made comments about how great it was that everyone there was a woman except one person. It just doesn't seem appropriate in a situation like that to come out about my gender identity. Maybe i'm rationalizing my fear of rejection, but i don't want to make someone else's baby shower all about me and my identity. Staying silent doesn't seem right, but neither does shifting the focus from the "guest of honor" to me.

Most importantly, my girlfriend of 4-1/2 years has been fantastic. She totally supports me and embraces my identity at every possible turn. She is constantly affirming who i am and how i see myself, and it's wonderful.

I've also recently begun volunteering at a local program for "children with gender-variant behaviors and their families." I've only had one meeting with the kids so far, but i am so excited about this that i can hardly stand it. There were two children at the first meeting i went to, and i really enjoyed getting to meet them. I am so, so eager to get to meet the other kids who come to the group and to find out about them and what they're like and the issues they face and how they deal with having non-conforming gender presentations. My dream is to eventually be "hooked up" with one of them as a mentor. But that will probably take some time, as i get to know them and their parents better and as they get to know me.

Oh! And i should mention that my chorus went to another Sister Singers Network festival last summer. They are definitely working on becoming trans-inclusive. I proposed two workshops and had both accepted -- Trans 101 and a workshop for choruses who have become, are thinking of becoming, or who have decided not to be inclusive of non-women members. There were only a few people at the former, at least half of whom were in my chorus. But the latter had about 15-20 people in it, with only one or two from my own group. There also was one transwoman there (whom i recognized as trans, at least), and as far as i know, she had a good time. I know that i loved having here there.

So i continue to wage the Global Gender Revolution in my own daily life, in whatever ways i can and in whatever ways i'm relatively comfortable.

Long live gender non-conformity and gender non-conformers!

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