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Let’s Talk (My?) Gender

A photo of Theo on stage with a questioning look on their face. It says "Gender?"

Or maybe your gender? Our genders?

Last summer, my neighbors in my political group asked me to speak to them about my gender, gender journey, and also the current state of trans rights. (The latter’s not great!) This is a modification of what I discussed with them.

Header photo by Lindsay Ladd of Ginger Fox Photography.

Before I share my own journey: Leveling setting

If you do not believe that trans people are real, please hit “x” to close your browser. If you believe your sky daddy deity of choice is against transness, you have bigger problems and attend to your own house before throwing rocks at others. If you believe trans people don’t deserve human dignity and rights, to quote the late David Lynch on this topic, change your heart or die.

Terminology and concepts to discuss gender (so we’re all on the same page)

Transgender (trans) is an umbrella term that simply means you don’t identify with your gender as assigned at birth. It is a value-neutral word.

Cisgender (cis) is a term that simply means you identify with your gender as assigned at birth. It is a value-neutral word.

Nonbinary is a term that simply means you do not identify as strictly male or female. It is an entire spectrum with outliers and currently ever-evolving. It is a value-neutral word.

Transition means that a person has changed something about their gender presentation, usually to the outside world. Social transition contains things like changing your name or pronouns or dressing differently. Usually things that are completely reversible. Medical transition contains things like using hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or getting surgeries, and may be less irreversible (but not always!).

Gender and sex are different terms. Gender is your expression and internal identity (how the world sees you and how you see yourself), and sex is your biological characteristics expressed through genetics that can be modified through modern medicine.

Gender and sex are both social constructs. This means that our culture and society dictate what that means. Continue reading “Let’s Talk (My?) Gender”

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Assigned F(aggot) at Birth

I hold a book "written" by Erica Kane called Having It All.
Erica Kane truly had it all. Including her own book! Yes, this may be a photoshop of me and the book, but the book is real. All My Children commissioned a marketing promo stunt book by a fictional character.

I arrived nameless as the doctor put a pink bow on my head: a diluted scarlet letter F.

My parents believed with their whole hearts that I’d be a boy. No reason. No shadow penis on an ultrasound. Only faith in my father’s chromosome-carrying sperm.(1)

I imagine, on that snowy evening, when a nurse asked them for my name, they both blinked, and my mother continued watching Remington Steele.

My father abhors being wrong, especially when a woman (girl) tells him so. But perhaps he clocked my birth as a half-win, proof of his virility against his ex-wife’s divorce petition stating his infertility.

Perhaps he considered my moments-old self the test run for his future baby boy. A lady from his Missouri Synod Lutheran Church wrote that exact sentiment in my baby shower card, and I read it 35+ years later.(2)

This left naming me up to my mother.(3)

Names are powerful. They speak to destiny. Continue reading “Assigned F(aggot) at Birth”

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The Trans Rights Readathon Is Upon Us!

Book covers of the books I'm reading for the trans rights readathon

The Trans Rights Readathon launches this Friday! This decentralized readathon helps raise money for great trans causes while reading books by trans authors.

This year, I’ve pledged to read 8 books and aim to raise $4,000 for the Lavender Rights Project!

Please donate to help me reach this goal!

Thanks to generous donations, we’ve raised $695 so far.

You can boost this TikTok, Mastodon, BlueSky, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and follow my reading updates on TikTok, Goodreads, and Storygraph.

I’ll be reading:

  • Bad Boy by Elliot Wake
  • Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky
  • Heartstopper Volume 2 by Alice Oseman
  • Heartstopper Volume 3 by Alice Oseman
  • Heartstopper Volume 4 by Alice Oseman
  • Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt
  • The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You by S. Bear Bergman
  • The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White

By donating, you’ll help trans people in need connect legal services, economic justice needs, and housing. The Lavender Rights Project is a wonderful nonprofit created for and by trans people. They serve the Puget Sound Area and do some legal work nationally. One of their current major efforts (in collaboration with Chief Seattle Club and King County) is building a 35-unit building providing permanent supportive housing for QT2BIPOC in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

The Readathon provides a source of joy and celebration, which as a nonbinary trans masculine person, let’s have more joy, please! It’s a chance to uplift trans authors and provide material support to trans people. Let’s drown out the hate and keep on dancing.

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What to Do (And Not) When Someone Comes Out to You

Pride glitter in a rainbow

Let’s be clear: coming out exists because you assumed we were cishet until we told you otherwise. Coming out exists because invisibility is erasure. Coming out exists because our current society deems anything outside of cis-heteronormativity1 as “other” at best and “deviant and condemnable” at worst.

In his June 25, 1978, Gay Freedom Day speech “That’s What America Is,” San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk2 asked every LGBTQ+ person to come out. He did not side-step the harsh realities of coming out and linked it directly to what coming out is: a political act.

The political is the personal when your personhood was not included in your nation’s founding laws. When your humanity and rights are debated and legislated in the public square3, you face the real consequences. Civil rights are not a cutesy problem of wedding cupcakes and websites. It’s the economy, stupid, when you can be fired from your job, evicted from your home, denied medical care, and a thousand other pieces that allow a person to function in society because you’re queer or trans.

Milk correctly identified that “There will be no safe ‘closet’ for any gay person” under far-right fascism. There is no “acceptable” way to be queer to cishet bigots.

I’ve come out to a lot of cishet people over my life.4 I’ve been violently outed. I’ve had cishet people shrug their shoulders and not care. I’ve had many cishet people be shocked. I’ve been called every anti-LGBTQ+ slur and dragged to conversion therapy. I’ve been out for the majority of my life, and I still too often brace myself for the worst.

In my experience, cishet people, even those who consider themselves allies,5 do not know how to behave when people come out. So let’s talk about that.

Continue reading “What to Do (And Not) When Someone Comes Out to You”