Socially Constructed ≠ False

Yet another thing that bothers me: the conflation of “socially constructed” with “false.”

The fact that something is socially constructed doesn’t mean it’s not real. I see a major blind spot about this when it comes to gender. Is gender a social construct? Yes. It is therefore imaginary? No.

Romance is a social construct. Is the love you think you feel for your sweetheart therefore false or pretend?

Money is a social construct. Are your paychecks fake? Are your bills a figment of your imagination?

Of course not. To call something socially constructed is to describe its origins, not its realness, its presence, its morality, or its effect on people’s lives. A person who claims to have a gender isn’t lying, deluded, or wrongly perpetuating the system anymore than a person is when she tells you she is poor.

Public Comment

Apropos of the last post, I just thought I’d note that I’m always open to questions and requests for post topics. I can’t promise to write about everything, but I’m happy to hear suggestions and queries. I really appreciate them when I’m having blogger’s block.

If you have an idea on the tip of your tongue, let me know in the comments here. Otherwise, feel free to email me (slbond at mail.com) if you have questions or suggestions anytime in the future.

Tips For Crafting A Masculine Presentation

(This is DD’s 100th post.)

I keep a running list of topics to blog about (total nerd, I know), and the item “masculinity tips” (meaning tips for crafting a masculine presentation) has been on there for weeks. I’m not exactly a disciplined writer — the posts I end up actually writing are the ones that make me feel like my skin is on fire and writing is the only way to put it out. That particular idea, lacking such a spark, has been languishing on my list, neglected.

So I was pleased to read Farore’s comment yesterday evening, which gave me the prod I’ve been needing. Farore wrote:

Anyway, uhm, Bond, you said to nome that you’d be willing to maybe help them out with passing – is there any chance I might be able to ask for some advice? As a disappointingly curvy, female-bodied agendered person with a “pixie face” (as my mother calls it) it is really, really hard to get anyone to gender me correctly, obviously – my gender does not even occur to most people as an option – but I would really like it if I could even get people to wonder, or even to gender me as male now and then.

As I said in the thread, I can’t guarantee my advice will be useful, but I am happy to share my thoughts. My intention here is just to write a fun post with some (hopefully) useful advice — this isn’t a treatise on butchness or genderqueerness or anything else.

Also, I respect and admire the vast galaxy of genders. This is aimed to a very particular audience (female-bodied people who want to look more masculine, but aren’t trans men*). Please don’t construe that narrow focus as a dismissal of other kinds of people. I can only write what I know. [*Not that these might not also apply to trans men. But that's not my thing so I'm not presuming or planning for it.]

Before we get started I just want to say that, in trying to a find a place where you can survive in the gender system, step one is the attitude. The gender system is a system. All systems can be hacked. All games can be played. This is a science experiment. You’ve got to try different things and see what works. I don’t know what will work for you, but I do know that you’re up against a coherent system with a readily available set of rules. You can’t control how people read you, but you can control the cues and messages they’re parsing. Observe yourself, observe how others read you, decide which observations you like, determine which conditions produce them.

And one more thing: The Sartorial Butch has a wealth of great thoughts about buying and wearing men’s clothes as a female-bodied person. If that’s your thing, you should be reading that blog.

Which brings me to my first point.

Plots And Thoughts

A friend of mine — one Captain Optimistic — just started a new blog, Plots And Thoughts, where he’ll be writing political strategy and analysis. It’s only four posts strong, but Plots And Thoughts is already packed with smart and downright righteous commentary. I especially recommend his post about Bart Stupak, theocracy, and the progressive agenda.

Keep up the good work, Captain.

Gender Conformity Test

Can you make a character that reasonably approximates your gender presentation on The Sims (any version), including underwear, formalwear, etc? If so, congratulations — you are gender conforming!

I’m kidding, of course, but there’s something to it. My best friend just got The Sims 3. Just like on every previous game, you cannot make a butch Sim. We scrolled through every single option, and for the most masculine one in each category of women’s clothes (because crossdressing is impossible), I kept saying, “I would never wear that. I would never wear that.” There was nothing even in the right order of magnitude. We did find one tolerable suit on the website. Yes, one.

Granted, this is a pretty much exactly how I feel about women’s clothes in real life. But in real life, it’s not physically impossible to wear clothes designed for the other sex.

Anyone else have a gender conformity test?

Edited to add: I thought of another one. In Butch Is A Noun, S. Bear Bergman says one test for whether one is transgender is, (paraphrasing) Do you have any problems using the public bathrooms of your assigned sex? I like this because it applies well to a range of transgender people. Genderqueers who identify as neither ladies nor gents, masculine cissexual women and feminine cissexual men whose appearance is out of line with gender standards, and transsexuals at most any stage of transition all may have trouble, in one way or another, using the bathroom that matches their assignment.

New Look

Any thoughts on the theme change? Am I screwing up my branding?

I was getting sick of the sight of the old style.

Ideology Vs Identity: Judaism, British Law, And The Attempt To Divorce Religion From Ethnicity

[Note: Per the context of the original case, when discussing Christians in the post I am referring to the dominant, mainline groups of white, Northern European Protestants, both in Britain and in the US. My apologies for not making this clear in the original text.]

I’ve been thinking about the British “Who is a Jew?” case lately. See here and here for the background. A brief summary, from the afore-linked Tablet article:

The case in question concerns a 12-year-old boy, referred to court documents simply as “M,” whose application to London’s Jews’ Free School was rejected on the ground that his mother’s conversion to Judaism was not overseen by Orthodox rabbis. The case has forced a reexamination of whether Judaism is a religion, a race, or an ethnicity.

The rub is that, in Britain, some religious schools receive public funding. Religion is sanctioned a valid basis for such schools, and for their admissions decisions — but race and ethnicity are not. Jewishness, of course, is a complicated intersection of all three. More from Tablet:

One of the more misguided-seeming solutions to the problem of how to gauge Jewishness if not by matrilineal decent was the Court of Appeals’ introduction of a “religious practice test,” which gives points for things like going to synagogue and doing charitable work. Under such a test, who is deemed most worthy? The student who donates the most? Who prays the longest? The flagellant?

Among those painted as hardliners in the ongoing debate is a Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet. To underscore his point that matrilineal descent is all that concerns him, and that observance matters not at all, he has said that “having a ham sandwich on the afternoon of Yom Kippur doesn’t make you less Jewish.”

I know next to nothing about British law, so I won’t venture to comment on what the court will or ought to do. I am interested, though, in exploring the implications the case has for Jewish identity, and the extent to which the relevant laws are incompatible with Judaism and Jewishness in the first place.

Firstly, it occurs to me that the attempt to cleanly divorce religion from ethnicity is pretty Christocentric.* Judaism can’t be separated from culture and ethnic origin — yes, Judaism is a religion, but if Christianity is the religion of the various schools of the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, Judaism is the religion of the Jews, an ethnic group (or several overlapping ethnic groups, actually). [*By Christocentrism I mean Christian ethnocentrism.]

I don’t understand enough about other religions to describe how they shake out in terms of principles vs tribal identity (anyone want to help me out there?), but suffice to say that Christianity — the dominant religion in Britain, not to mention the rest of the Western world — posits that religion is a belief system one adopts because one believes it is true. Judaism, on the other hand, is a system of belief and behavior one maintains because it is ours.

The Sartorial Butch

I’m very grateful to beelisty for pointing me toward The Sartorial Butch, a really fun blog for, of course, well-dressed butches. SB is smart and funny and has great, butch-specific (and general) style advice. Check it out.

A Note On Male Privilege And “Passing”

Some quick thoughts spurred by recent posts over at Rebecca’s…

If this is male privilege — seeing things from the perspective of the male “gazer,” thereby failing to fully empathize with a female “gazee” — then there is some extent to which I have it; I could easily have made the mistake Rebecca did, and have, more or less.

I have male (masculine) privilege in other ways, too — people tend to respect my personal space, I don’t get catcalled or similarly hassled, people listen to what I say. I noticed a definite shift when, all those years ago, I first cut my hair short, and I’ve noticed a deeper, though subtler, shift now, as I’m more and more often read as male,** and more and more seen as closer to being “one of the guys” than “one of the girls” by my friends.

[**Just for the record, when dealing with strangers I seem to get male pronouns maybe a quarter of the time, that is, of the time that I get pronouns at all, which isn't that often, given how circumscribed such interactions are. I have no idea how many of the pronoun-free interactions have me gendered male, and I definitely get some long looks as people try to figure it out. I'm being perceived as female a majority of the time, no doubt, but that 25% or so has a pretty huge impact on my experience given that most adults get read as the other sex, what, less than 1% of the time? Never?]

I can’t deny that most of these things make me happy; I’ve worked pretty hard for them. But I wish they didn’t come with a negative flip-side for more feminine women. At the same time, many of them have negative side effects for me, too, since I’m not actually male — I don’t get catcalled, but I do get harassed for being a dyke. People tend to automatically respect my personal space, but that doesn’t stop them from making stupid, puzzled comments about my gender. And I live in anxious anticipation of the day when being read as male isn’t just a fun affirmation of my presentation. It’s all well and good to get a “he” or a “sir” in the checkout line, in hallways, etc.; what happens when I get one in a public bathroom? What happens when a cashier calls me “young man” and then notices the name on my credit card?

You Are Here

I don’t feel male and certainly cannot say I’ve always felt that way, but these days being a woman feels like an old car I can’t sell, can’t give away, and there is no bus, there is no train, so I just keep fixing it and fixing it. I love this car because we’ve been so many places together, I’ve had it for so long, I had my first kiss in it maybe, it belonged to my mother before me, and there are whole weeks and even months when everything works, it takes me everywhere I need to go and I even like it, like the look of it. But then goddamn it’s gone and broken down again and this time late at night in a bad neighborhood, and this time in the middle of an intersection, and this time by the side of the highway so far out of cell phone reach I’m going to have to wait and wait and hope that someone saves me.

I don’t feel like a man but I don’t feel like a woman either, and these days it feels like a waiting game, “How long can she last this way?” And I have no idea what to do here. Make peace? Revolt? I’d like a rulebook. I’d like a map with clear, bold lines dividing each thing from the others, and a big yellow arrow, YOU ARE HERE. I’d like to know exactly what is possible. Can I live this way? Can I live this way my whole life? I’d like you to put me through to your manager. I’d like to talk to someone who can answer my questions.

Like is it normal to feel like your sex is a freaky accident you do your best to accept? Should you then accept it, or refuse to? Should you change it? Would the other one be any better? Is it an old car you should take to the junkyard? Or is it an in-law, a relative you learn to love although you didn’t choose them?