Dear Hearts,
I’m thrilled to write that I’ve been asked by Routledge Publishing to update my fifteen year old book, My Gender Workbook. We struck a deal, I’ve got the green light, and I’ve begun writing My New Gender Workbook. I’m so excited!
WHY AN UPDATE?
I’ve been in touch via Twitter, my blog, and YouTube with a lot of people who regularly read and use My Gender Workbook both in class and daily in their lives. It turns out that people really like the principles of the book—but that many of the cultural references and contexts—even the way some quiz questions are phrased—are out of date, and this sometimes gets in the way of grasping the important stuff. So, an update would involve a page by page combing out of outdated references. For example…
- There’s much more awareness of intersections of oppression and marginalization.
- There’s a much more sophisticated understanding of & experience with the Internet.
- The geopolitical world has grown vastly more polarized since the book came out.
- In a few places in the world, reat strides have been made in sex-and-gender freedoms.
- At the same time, many ghastly practices of policing sex and gender have been uncovered.
- Sex-and-gender activism has become globalized, and shuffled into the deck of social activism.
- Young Female-to-Male has replaced Middle-Aged Male-to-Female as the face of transgender in the world.
- Sex and Gender activism & awareness has become increasingly polarized along lines of class, race, and age.
WHERE DO YOU COME IN?
As in the original book, I’ll be looking for a great many voices other than my own. In the original, there were hundreds of voices other than mine, appearing in lists, text boxes and call-outs. In the new version, I’m aiming to include even more voices. My idea is to maintain a running commentary of multiple voices all through the book.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
All submissions for the workbook should be in the form of tweets, or at most double tweets—that is to say, all submission should be no longer than 140 to 280 characters, including the mandatory hashtag: #MNGW (My New Gender Workbook). Why so short? The very best voices in the original workbook were short, articulate, and right to the point.
SO—WHAT DO YOU WRITE ABOUT?
Any gender-related topic you damned please.
However, over the course of the next 4-6 weeks, I’ll be asking specific questions on this blog and on Twitter. There’s going to be a new question every couple of days. But you don't have to wait for the questions. If you’ve got anything to say in 140-280 characters, I WANT TO READ IT, and I promise I will.
HOW DO YOU SEND IN YOUR SUBMISSION?
The best way is to use Twitter. Remember, two tweets maximum. All submission tweets must include the hashtag #MNGW or they very likely will slip through the cracks and we most certainly do not want that!
You can also post your answer on this blog. If you do, make sure you give us a way to reach you if we need to.
Or, you can email your submission to: mynewgenderworkbook at gmail dot com.
Please note that we will use no one’s words without their express permission.
Finally, there's no promise that your name will appear next to your words, or that your words will be used. Everyone whose words are used will be credited with the name of your choosing in the acknowledgements.
There’s only one more rule for submissions: don’t be mean.
ENOUGH ALREADY—HERE’S THE FIRST QUESTION
What’s your gender?
____
I cannot WAIT to see your kickass smart answers to this simple li'l question.
Please do retweet and repost and link to this blog to as many places as you can—even the surprising places.
Thank you in advance for all your help and support.
Big love,
Auntie Kate
“oppression and marginalization” Not much has changed. At an large event a few years ago I was told upon entering a class on gender roles that it wasnt for me by the rather well known presenter. Why? Because it was geared towards ftm,I am mtf.I wasn’t asked to leave but it was as if my opinions or feelings about gender roles were insignificant. Other then outward appearances what difference in the struggle to be who we are? note:I’m not some late life bloomer Ive been in the community since the 70’s.
Non-gendered. But if forced to define, Male-to-Androgyne. Generally I’d rather just stay as non-gendered though, as gender makes no sense to my POV. I wish people would stop trying to force me to choose.
Oops.
Non-gendered. But if forced to define, Male-to-Androgyne. Generally I’d rather just stay as non-gendered though, as gender makes no sense to my POV. I wish people would stop trying to force me to choose. #MNGW
(Second ‘tweet’ I suppose). I really wish you didn’t ask that question in a way which presupposed that people have a gender. #MNGW
My Gender Epitaph
CIS female 1961-2011
Trans male 2011 – ?
Human 1961-?
zengender – all, nothing, fluid, evolving
Female-assigned-at-birth young man, androgynous, secretly a little bit genderqueer but happy to live as a man.
My gender would like to thank the formative influences offered by both Dr. John Money circa late 1960s, and Dr. (hon.) Kate Bornstein, 30 years after that. My gender views this dichotomous pair as a question/answer or call/response system.
My gender also would like to thank the formative influences of Toshiro Mifune and Audrey Tautou, as well as Bugs Bunny.
Does that answer your question? 🙂
Oh yes, Enoch Root. That answers my question quite nicely. Th-th-th-that’s all folks! xoxo K
Kate, every time I think you have rocked my world for the last time, you rock it again.
What would we do without you?
My gender is irrelevant.
– Sass Rogando Sasot, Philippines
My gender is both super complicated and oversimplified. I suppose if I had to label my current gender, it would be genderqueer transfag. Who knows what I’ll call it in an hour, week, or decade, though…
I’ve never had a problem w/having been born & socialized female, but others tell me that they read me as an effeminate gay boy. Being pursued by high-femme women & subby guys almost exclusively but attracted to dominant butch men has been frustrating to say the least, but the alternative of not being myself isn’t tenable.
Draw a hexagon and then connect opposing corners with straight lines. Is this a representation of a cube or a flat shape? That’s my gender
I’m a trans* boy who still sometimes clings to his femininity like a baby blanket that should probably be thrown away.
Information-bearing entity! Form of: person! I choose you!
Male to hopefully soon Happy TS. Stuck hiding from family but most of my friends and co-workers are happy for me.
My gender is something that has been shattered and reassembled a million times. Each of its pieces is a story, a poem, a movement, a moment, a blessing.
My gender is as irrelevant as it is irreverent – and just another way to keep everyone around me guessing as to who I really am.
Trying to feel what gender I ‘really’ am inside, has always felt like trying to figure out, as an atheist, what religious people mean when they talk about the ‘soul’. I look and look and can’t seem to find it. It sounds real important that I do, but is it, really? I look at this body, still not feeling what others say it means, and I’m starting to think I can do without.
I identify as genderqueer, androgyne, and genderfluid. What all those mean for me, though, is ever shifting. Although I recognise that gender is NOT in fact a spectrum going from female to male on the ends, I still feel like I am “somewhere in between the two” as far as my own gender is concerned, rather than some third gender. That’s where the androgyne comes in, since it contains elements of maleness and femaleness. The genderfluid portion is mainly a reference to how I present which can vary from ultra butch to ultra fem/me pretty regularly.
And I’m never entirely sure what I really am, which makes it hard to demand respect for people about my identity. Like, “How can we respect your gender if you don’t even know what it is?” I dunno.
my gender isn’t what i thought it was, or what anyone else said it was. It’s such a mash-up of ideas, feelings and influences that its become something that’s on the tip of my tongue, almost said, but still outside of any words that will do it justice.
My gender is a process of becoming, just when it begins to appear stable it shifts again. It’s generally made up of a combination of ‘trans’ ‘queer’ (or ‘genderqueer’) ‘femme’ and sometimes ‘transman’, for context. My effeminate gender is more easily expressed through this body which has been adapted by medical interventions related to FTM transition.
So, so, so glad you are doing this Kate! Your work and meeting you made all the difference to me more than a decade ago when I was sorting myself out. Would LOVE to see some work on long term identity development stages and moving in and out of needing to figure out who we are and nail that down with words. There are good models for race and other identities and we need good models for gender!
My answer to the above: I don’t know and I really don’t much care any more. Isn’t that strange? I’m just a human wanting to get to know other human. I don’t know what to have the baby call me yet, though!
I can’t seem to help rambling — very sorry! Take what you want and leave the rest.
I don’t think you could get a consensus from all involuntary celibates, but I think we are a gender of sorts. Our confidence has been so badly destroyed (to the point that its existence is denied!) by ‘therapy’ and the mainstream. Most of us wouldn’t even think to view ourselves as a distinct variety. (Yet when I was involved in the world incel ‘community’, those who dated were only able to attract other incels,which also hints to me that we are a special ‘type’.)
Most of us believe we need to be cured. Popular opinion is that we are all Aspies and/or we have mental illnesses, or maybe we have no social skills. The piece de resistance is that we’re told we have no sex because we don’t have any confidence, so we also lose or negate our faith in ourselves.
I no longer believe any of this, and I wait patiently for the day someone will actually hear me or help me instead of wanting to change me.
We keep doing ourselves damage by blaming our personalities, but I think we lack the subtle outer physical characteristics required to help others see us as something more than a friend. (Note that I said ‘subtle’; we’re not necessarily ugly, though many of us are physically different in obvious ways too.)
Most other incels don’t agree with me at all, I guess because a personality can be changed, so that gives them what they perceive to be hope.
But there is other hope to be found. My body is obviously limiting; however, I’ll have to print off an entire mint of those special little cards of yours for my brain.
I’m a woman. I’m a man. I’m a transwoman. I’m a drag queen. I’m a transqueen – perhaps even a fauxqueen. I’m a tranny and I love it! I am queer! My gender is queer and I thank God/Buddah/whoever and my parents for creating me. I love my identity and I love being queer!
OH, why didn’t I find this earlier :((( I would have loved to answer your questions about Gender to bring Girlfags into your book 🙁
I’m a female-identified Girlfag 🙂