Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation | a book review

Hi, y’all, I read books so you don’t have to. When I chose this book, Gender Outlaws, I had ambitious ideas. But as soon as I started reading it it became obvious that this book was going to be too scattered, facile and HILARIOUS to attempt to do anything more ambitious than a short takedown of some of the more absurd concepts presented within.

So, let’s get started!

The fun starts on page 22, before the book even begins in earnest. Kate Bornstein and S Bear Bergman transcribe for us an IM conversation they had about creating this book. Do you ever imagine yourself saying the smartest, wittiest things and then hope the exact right situation will present itself and you’ll have the perfect opportunity to gracefully deliver your practiced genius? Right, well, for most of us, that perfect situation never comes up and we’re forced to hold our tongues forever. And the world never sees our genius! What a pity. Bornstein and Bergman have figured out a way around all that though. Contrive the circumstances required to insert your well-crafted witticisms.

The lesson, as I’ve come to understand it, is it’s a goddamn good thing that for most of us the ideal situation never arises because people and their ideas ain’t all that, and sometimes are downright fucked up creepy rape fantasies.

Page 22:

Kate Bornstein: Is this where I ask you if you’d watch me fuck Sarah Palin?

S Bear Bergman: One of my lovers has the idea that all world leaders should be fucked up the ass on a regular schedule, to promote flexibility and compassion.

Holy shit, did you read what I just read? Sarah Palin needs to be down with rape to, you know, HELP HER BE MORE FLEXIBLE.

Oookay. Moving on.

CT Whitley’s essay on the benefits of being a transgender man in corporate America seems to be more about how CT Whitley is trans Jesus and less so about…anything else. Here he talks about his unique abilities:

In my journey, I have learned to call up elements of my past female life into my current male one when that style will strengthen my position. My masculine and feminine vocabularies meld to create negotiation platforms where I can undertand and be understood without gendered limitations, expressing myself freely and clearly across sexes and genders.

Is it just me or do you get the sense that CT Whitley is down with actionable items, shifting the corporate paradigm, thinking outside the box, and presenting non-trivial webinars? CT Whitley’s been synergizing all morning.

Paradigm? Called it:

As a transgender man who has used my female past and male present to navigate an unknown world, I used my multi-gendered experience to challenge and manipulate the paradigm rather than to reinforce it; I was able to improve my office environment as well as to propel my career.

You may have missed it because it was difficult to hear over all the “manipulating the paradigm” but I’m pretty sure CT Whitley just told us it takes a man to create a more woman-friendly office environment.

To be heard by men, brevity was key and intonation was a frivolous indulgence I could not afford, but cultivating the all-important air of dominance was well worth my while.

Challenge the misogyny? Why, never! I used that shit to propel my career and enjoy my new dominant corporate position! Challenge the misogynist norms, ha, that’s funny.

Women who present as feminine and communicate in a typically feminine manner see no upward mobility, regardless of their inputs into projects and discussions.

If I didn’t know trans theories of femininity I’d have thought this was an odd thing to say. But since I no longer have that luxury, I’ve come to know this line of thinking very well indeed. He’s making clear that women are not oppressed and held back on the basis of being women, but rather that certain women are held back on the basis of being feminine. Women aren’t oppressed, femininity is. Disgusting and the wage gap suggests otherwise.

Knowing how to utilize and maximize communication styles between men and women helps me to be a better advocate, to assert my voice when others are being silenced.

You can’t be an advocate if you can’t name the problem. And in case he wasn’t clear the first time he’s really driving the point home now: It takes a man to free women.

Raquel (Lucas) Platero Mendez contributes an essay on Maria Helena, a woman who wore sneakers and pants in Catalonia on March 26, 1968 (she was arrested for it). The essay insists that Maria Helena is trans so I implore you to read that date again. No, that’s not 1908, that’s 1968. Is it reasonable to assume a woman who wants to wear pants, even in Fascist Spain, is trans? Or is it more likely that she’s pissed off and tired of the fact that everywhere else in the world women have been wearing pants and sneakers for quite awhile now and why can’t my country hurry the hell up and start joining the 20th century too? I’m belaboring the point of the date because by 1968 the weight of the cultural consciousness must’ve been excruciating to a woman living in that time and not allowed to participate in the forward progress of women.

Yet your story allows me to reveal the cost of making one’s masculinity visible.

Just a reminder that Maria Helena wore sneakers and pants. Sneakers and pants. Masculinity or gender neutral clothes designed for freedom of movement? I know you know I’m going with the latter.

Janet Hardy, famous among neanderthal kinksters for her vanity press, submits an essay about how she’s been living as a biological woman in a relationship with one biological man for a good long while and why that’s queer. Longtime followers of the kink community’s vanity publishing will recall that she did something similar when she wrote The Ethical Slut and went on to live the very same monogamous, heterosexual, suburban life described above. If Janet Hardy has taught us anything it’s that all it takes to be queer and polyamorous is to be a straight monogamous person.

In this passage she uses genderism to explain why despite all that she and her husband are queer:

The person who made a beautiful garden so that I could enjoy it through my office window, who cooks enormous unclassifiable crock-pot concoctions that we can’t finish in a week, who reminds me to drink enough water and to take my B vitamins so I won’t get too stressed–that’s my wife.

He’s nurturing and he cooks homey food. So obviously he must have an inner woman inside of him.

Telyn Kusalik implores us to stop doing identity politics:

But the debate doesn’t have to be about who is and is not a woman. These sorts of considerations become irrelevant if we start organizing our events, meetings, and working groups in terms of experience of sexism, rather than identity.

No offense meant to Telyn Kusalik but that’s exactly what feminist groups are. They’re not called Woman Groups. Women who don’t feel they’re oppressed on the basis of sex already don’t join feminist groups. You dig?

it is much easier to demonstrate how you are perceived than to prove that your identity is valid.

What? No. What? Identity? Is valid? What? No.

The ideal feminist space would be open to all those who experience sexism [...] due to manifesting qualities that are seen as “feminine” [...]

Once again we are reminded that it is not women who are oppressed and marginalized in society but rather the all-important femininity. Poor femininity, will nobody ever think of the femininity.

I don’t know what this means but I feel I’d be doing a disservice if I left this passage out:

We could talk about our sexual orientation in terms of what gender presentations we are attracted to rather than what identities we are attracted to.

I don’t know.

Sherilyn Connelly likes porn. Here, let him tell you about it:

All things considered, I’ll take being fetishized as a sex object over being assaulted or killed as a freak.

So glad you thought to ask women how that affects our lives in the patriarchy, Sherilyn. Really cool job you’re doing there of breaking down gender norms.

As may be obvious by now, shemale porn is my favorite kind. The reason is simple: representation. In it, I can actually see people who look like me. My heart and soul are female, but it’s not how I was born; I look more like shemale porn star Joanna Jet than genetic female porn star Jenna Jameson. I think Joanna’s prettier anyway.

So there you have it. Representation is the key to ending oppression and feeling accepted. Luckily, women are so heavily represented in porn that we’re well on our way to world domination. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a porn star’s face being jizzed on. Forever. George Orwell said that.

Then and now, I like scenes of a transsexual with a pretty genetic girl. A pretty transsexual with a genetic girl is even better. But a pretty transsexual with a pretty genetic girl is one of the sexiest things ever to me, since I aspire to be a pretty transsexual and I’m attracted to pretty genetic girls.

So, you know, porn, he’s into it.

But most of the audience wants to see a pretty tranny with a large or at least healthy-looking member. There’s a reason why the career of a tranny porn star grinds to a halt if she gets vaginoplasty, aka sexual reassignment surgery: she ceases to be a chick with a dick and is now just a chick. That market is quite saturated, and the beauty standards are different.

I guess this porn aficionado thing is something I can’t already read all over the internet so I’m glad this guy can fill that gap in my life.

It’s just so small and unobtrusive, lacking sound and fury yet not signifying a damn thing.

My note next to that passage reads “lol can’t write”. I think I’ve said enough.

but nobody told me that having a dick made me a first-class citizen.

Privilege-blindness isn’t really something to brag about.

and have Joan Didion give my first novel a glowing writeup in The New York Review of Books.

Nothing could be less likely. Literally, nothing.

Scott Turner Schofield is another contributor who uses words to say things:

cleaving gender from sex, body from self.

I could make a cheap grammatical dig here but even if I correct it in my head and make it “cleaving gender to sex…” IT STILL DOESN’T MAKE ANY DAMN SENSE. Feel free to enlighten me.*

Being born female makes me a man that good men may look to for ways to understand and honor women, a person that people may look to for ways to find and appreciate themselves. Like they say, “mistakes” are just lessons waiting to be learned.

I don’t know who says that but okay. So, holy crazy self-aggrandizing batman or what? The competition for trans Jesus is getting tight.

Julia Serano! Has shit to say!:

But performance doesn’t explain why certain behaviors and ways of being come to me more naturally than others.

Gender is natural, etc, etc.

People who make a point of calling me effeminate rather than feminine.

I guess this means something but I don’t know what.

Because gender doesn’t feel like drag when you’re a young trans child begging your parents not to cut your hair or not to force you to wear that dress.

So gender is natural or it’s haircuts and clothing? You don’t get to have it both ways.

So don’t you dare dismiss my gender as construct, drag, or performance. My gender is a work of non-fiction.

Sure is. Patriarchal non-fiction.

Sam Peterson. He also wrote something for this book. It’s, um, interesting. Here, you read it:

Prejudices get in like sugar ants in the kitchen: They find a miniscule leaving from a disgusted fruit and there’s a swarm. All of a sudden it seems okay for me to talk smack about fat people, or fags, and the next thing I know I’m having to Hazmat the entire storeroom. These self-scrutinies are the regular checkup, the testicle I knead for marbles and peas, and I can do it myself now that I have the how-to manual crated from the frontlines of the Third.

Wow. I know what you’re thinking and no, “disgusted” isn’t a typo (on my part anyway). And “Third” isn’t Reich, eye or base. It’s wave. But that’s as far as I can take you. You’re going to have to walk blindly into the darkness of kneaded testicles because I’m gonna lag faaaaar behind the group and sprint back home when you have your backs to me. BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO KNOW. AT ALL. LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.

Fixity is what made my bones leaden and who stuffed my body into starchy slips and knee socks when these knees were made for corduroy and band-aids.

Blah blah girls wear slips, boys wear corduroys, genderist bullshit blah blah blah.

This new feminism is compassion: ever softening, ever bending to meet you, ever stroking the cheek of outcast fairy princess boys. It is Neverland for the bullied and broken who can finally be children–not forever, but at last.

Creepy pedo-speak aside, it’s just another call for women to fall back into their socialization and take up mothering the poor wee boys who were bullied. I ain’t your mother.

Third wave feminism expanded the landscape, embraced kink, scraped off the mold of dogma, and explained how somone could dress like a little girl in public, be a Daddy in bed, and still be a feminist.

I must’ve missed this seminal text and I’ve even read a Valenti book or two in my time.

my sexual gender is a mutant cephalopod with more limbs han Kali-ma, and they all want to embrace and caress you into a delicate froth of submission.

I’d like to not be anything’d into submission by you, bro, thx.

You will slide out beside me, and take me for a dip and a spin.

No I won’t.

Mercedes Allen says:

Some people have the temperament to do sex work.

Is that related to the temperament to be a good slave? Or the temperament to make a fantastic battered wife? God, some women just fucking KICK ASS at being raped and beaten. I’m in awe.

I kept seeing transfemininity as beautiful.

What the fuck is transfemininity.

Cisgender (non-transgender) women never stop learning their femininity (or their own latent masculinity); cisgender men likewise. How can we say that we’ve “arrived” at the flick of a scalpel.

Female isn’t interchangeable with femininity.

[someone] can live in the closet as a crossdresser and still come to realize the more important realities of womanhood.

Or, alternatively, you’re just making shit up.

A man can trust that his MTF partner understands the ruthless repression of emotions that were imposed upon him through his youth.

This is starting to sound a little desperate, right? Like maybe this should’ve gone in your OkCupid profile and not a book? But anyway, patriarchy harms men too blah blah.

Those of us who have lived in two genders have a front-row view of the battle of the sexes.

Uh, fighting for freedom as women isn’t a “battle of the sexes”. Holy what the fuck.

I don’t even know where to begin with the simon iris story…uh, poetry…thing. It’s really something and even though it makes pretty much no sense to me I thought it’d be unfair to not share at least a bit of this whatever you call it.

where his mood shifts and becomes my demeanor careening untamed.

and

i embrace gender for the love of bending bodies.

Not all genderists are that transparent so I appreciate that at least.

Fran Varian‘s Daddy Gets the Big Piece of Chicken could very well be my favorite essay in this book. It is just…

I walk slowly toward him. I understand the way my short black dress hugs my body. I understand that my shoes and my seamed stockings insinuate a garter belt, and that my red lips and the gardenia in my hair are exotic to him. I am bigger than the women he is with but not a damn one of them can walk the way I walk and I know that he knows that. He licks his lips: he is so very, very transparent.

Yup.

But I know that you are pleased. I can see it in the way you shift up in your chair, the way you take my hand in yours and run your thumb softly over my wrist. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?” But you know who I am, and you know the answer to that question.

I don’t know how I got written into this story but I would like to be taken out. SOONER RATHER THAN LATER PLEASE.

I want you to pull that flower from my hair and put it in a bowl of water beside your bed before you undress and claim me.

That’s how sex works when you’re a woman. You get claimed. Everyone knows this, stop looking so skeptical. I SEE YOUR SIDE EYES AND I’M IGNORING THEM.

Okay, this is my favorite line in this whole book. I may have even had to wake up my boyfriend to read it to him because OH MY GOD, JUST WAIT, WAIT TIL YOU READ THIS:

We both know that I can eat chicken and put a sexist jerk in his place.

NO, THERE IS NO CONTEXT FOR THE CHICKEN. IT JUST SAYS THAT WE BOTH KNOW S/HE CAN EAT CHICKEN. I HAVE NO IDEA. I LOVE IT SO MUCH OH MY GOD.

Everything’s gonna be downhill from “We both know that I can eat chicken” but I’m gonna plug along anyway:

I want to feed you because you have constructed a masculinity that loves femme women.

Hooray. I love free association.

Award for most baseless, off the wall, woman-hating assertion goes to Ryka Aoki for:

I realized that while most women would feel safe calling the police to report an assault [...]

Tracy Chapman would like a word with you.

I am using the binary to get what I want.

Thanks?

I find the patriarchy not guilty by reason of insanity. Besides which, it’s not just the patriarchy: It’s the crazy matriarchy, and the stepsisters and brothers and the twittering cousins and the whole nutty family that keeps threatening to disown you. I am not going to stop cooking rice porridge or hoping for a comfortable house with a garden simply because my batshit relative tells me it’s not subversive enough.

The matriarchy. ‘Cos that’s a thing.

Esme Rodriquez:

“Boi” is a label that queers the stability of patriarchy and the policing of bodies (lived genders). “Boi” questions the interpretations of masculinities and redirects theory, practice, and methodology.

How? What’s the mechanism of action?

Most people strive to find comfort in the stability of their identities.

They do? Or you just made that up?

I do not aspire to recreate or reconfigure bipolar ideologies regarding sex and gender [...] Instead, I search for freedom of gender expression, gender identities, and social justice.

A conceit with no basis.

Tay sez:

He’s much more fluid than I, as in, he paints my toenails when I’m asleep and I do not paint his.

Which gender is born with the toenail painting gene?

j wallace sez:

being manly is about knowing what tool to use.

No comment.

Scars are manly.

Still no comment.

Sassafras Lowrey has opinions, sure does:

femininity was just one more way to fuck with gender.

Yay?

Andrea Jenkins on torture:

torture can be defined as doing the same goddamn thing over and over expecting different results [...]

Pretty sure that saying is about insanity and not torture, but whatevs.

E.S. Weisbrot sez:

Curious about the combinations, they were interested in my collection.

Oh boy, ham-fisted alliteration. Yay.

Evin Taylor on “cis” privilege:

Gendered privilege is the collective advantages that are accepted, most often unknowingly, by those who are not positioned in opposition to the dominant ideology of the gender binary.

Right, so no woman is gender privileged. Glad we can agree on that.

Kate Bornstein to S Bear Bergman:

People attacking you for being misogynist are flailing cruelly and thoughtlessly. They’re operating on a politic of power, or a politic of identity at best.

They conveniently leave out what Bergman did to be called a misogynist. Funny that.

So, that was a book. And I read it. And if the publishers or editors are reading this: You need to proofread and fix your digital version. It’s a hot–wait for it–tranny mess. (That was me applying the lessons I learned in the book–QUEER THE SYSTEM BY TRANNYING ALL THE THINGS)

Everyone else: You’re welcome for not including any of the “poetry”. You owe me one.

*See Sargasso Sea’s comment for correction.