This blog is part of a series I'm writing while I'm updating the fifteen year old "My Gender Workbook" for Routledge Press. I'm asking for your voice to be included in the spiffy new version, because you are so much more than the first version of the book could have predicted. Every couple of days, I'll be posting a new question for you to ponder. If the question tickles your fancy, by all means please speak to it. For more about this update, check out the original blog. Thanks for your help.
In the original version of My Gender Workbook, I sent out a request for identities. I wanted to show the vast number of ways that people define their gendered lives. A lot of people wove their gender and sexuality identities together. Many included race, age, ability and class as more or less primary gender modifiers in their lives. Some gender outlaws broke rules of gender in simple yet profound ways.
You can take a look at the current list of 101 Gender Outlaws answering the question "Who am I" on pages 80 to 89 of My Gender Workbook. But there's no need to look at the list to describe yourself, right?
So now… how about yourself? Please write me a couple of sentences that describes how you break the rules of gender along with the influence of any number of the following factors:
race — age — class — religion — sexuality
humanity — looks — ability — mental health
family/ reproductive status — language
habitat— citizenship—political ideology
These factors are in no particular order, and the list is by no means complete. But a lot of our gender is dependent on modifications from at least a couple of factors from this list. I'm calling them vectors of oppression or, more benignly, spaces of regulation. Each of these factors privileges us or limits us or regulates our lives. And each of these factors has a direct impact on our genders—making us gender outlaws.
You DO NOT have to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer — there's LOTS of other ways to break dominant culture's rules of gender. Please tell me yours!
NEW EXPANDED SUBMISSION GUIDELINES FOR THIS QUESTION ONLY
Twitter is the very best way to answer. Response length is maximum 420 characters, THREE tweels maximum for this particular question. Your tweets do NOT have to be addressed to me, but DO remember to put the hashtag #MNGW on ALL your tweets about this or any other gender-y thing that might pop into your adorable li'l head.
If you're so amazing and/or complex that it's going to take longer than three tweets, that's just fine. You can answer in the comments section of this blog, or you can email your answer to mynewgenderworkbook at gmail dot com. Please do try to keep it to a couple of sentence maximum.
kiss kiss
Auntie Kate
I’m coming out as awesome (gender: awesome. orientation: awesome. default definition of relationship: awesome.), and by awesome, I mean transgressive. I’m a Jew*ish*-feminist-transguy survivor, advocate, and teacher of consent, a scholar and a shepherd, a loving kinkster and a co-creator, because who wants to create alone. I’m embracing transitionality and trying to grow into something beautiful- this world needs more agents of change!
i gender in layers like i’m getting ready to go out in the cold. you might think you’ve got it figured out, but really there’s more hidden just underneath.
In no particular order:
Multi-ethnic, almost out of my twenties, hindu-raised but now kabbalah student, also believer of many truths, androphile, androgyne but male nevertheless, with a dangerous gift, multi-lingual, european (living all over europe), urban nomad, storyteller and artist, tested as gifted and gorgeous on occasion.
Thinks that is pretty much me.
(I rather comment anonymous, however you can see my email. If you wish, feel free to contact me)
I love Jesse’s comment btw. Coming out as awesome. That is just awesome.
I find myself as a continuing flux of masculine and feminine energy. So on the surface I’m androgynous. I feel there is a duality in energy that can be described as masculine/feminine but, its not two separate components, rather two different sides of the same complex ball of soul that we are. I find both energies equally beautiful and strong. I’m also pansexual Its the soul that attracts me.
orientation – I’m gay
language/ideology – I don’t believe in masculinity, femininity, or androgyny. I don’t mean I’m against them I mean I don’t believe they exist. People roll their eyes or even get annoyed but its how I see things.
I do believe in a spectrum of gender/sexual difference, but not a spectrum from one point to another, a rounded amorphous spectrum, like color.
looks – I no longer know if I like how I look anymore, the answer was once a clear cut “no”, now its just “I don’t know”. And the question of looks always seems to touch on gender, how a man, or a gay man, should want to look and whether or not he should care.
Who am I?
I’m mutable.
I see myself in other people and other people in myself. (stop that sniggering at the back). I show a different face to each facet of my world and I wear a different costume for every stage. Dishonest? Maybe. But that mutability, that fluidity, that empathy… that IS the real me. How do you pin down a river?
My gender? Just another costume I wear. Yes I have a female body. Yes I identify as female. But only because the dresses are pretty. It doesn’t matter if I dress butch or girly, it always feels like drag, like a costume. I think that if I was assigned male at birth I’d struggle more in society, but as it is I can get away with wearing pretty much anything under the gender radar. If I’m in a lacy vintage dress and pink lipstick, who’s to know that I’m revelling in my drag queenliness? If I’m rocking a waistcoat and cords, it comes over as lesbian chic. But so what? Gender, sexuality, identity: it’s all one big dressing up box.
What’s at the centre? Who am I when I’m totally unobserved, with no expectations mutating my sense of self?
I have a schroedinger’s soul: sadly happy, seriously flippant, frightenedly frightening, lovingly hateful.
Well, you did ask.
About myself: I’m a person. Forget rules.
i am a girl and not lesbian. but i am not against with lesbian. i think lesbian is totally okay! they can do whatever they want.
grik-canajan ethnic, multilingual, 41, working class upbringing turned professional, sufficient looks and ability to get by for the most part in a judgmental world, hypomanic, childfree, leftiste. Also relevant to me is past work in the sex trades as an exotic dancer and domme, which greatly shaped my sense of self, gender and sexual expression (in positive ways, luckily).
body: female and petite. Presentation: either very girly or sortabutch (think: an old grik guy called Spiro with the fedora and the three piece suit, or more lately a 70s male salsa star from the Fania daze).
** I relate very much to Wordgeek Sarah above: ” It doesn’t matter if I dress butch or girly, it always feels like drag, like a costume.” And now that I’m comfortable with that, life is better. 🙂
I utterly attitude and revalue your bushel on each and every target.
I’m a rule breaker because of that I can’t make my own draft.I am a happy go lucky person. I go with the flow. In short, I cannot trace my own pattern of activities.