Opening up about gender fluidity could get messy
Pink News introduces us to a gender-fluid father who identifies as a straight lesbian.
Perhaps Pink News has merged with The Onion? No, they say the father wants to raise awareness.
A young father has opened up about his gender fluidity, in a bid to raise more awareness regarding the subject.
Jas Sutherland always knew he felt like both a male and a female, but said that until recently, he never though he could be open about it.
However, now, he says he can transition between his two personas regularly and is determined to generate a better public understanding about what it is to be gender fluid.
It must be so exciting to reinvent the wheel.
Why do we have to conceptualize it that way? Instead let’s conceptualize it the opposite way: “feeling like” a female or a male is just a formula we paste onto our sense of self (which is another such formula, it’s formulas all the way down), and we could use a different formula. It’s possible that nobody really “feels like” a female or a male at all; it’s possible that we all just feel like ourselves – our selves – and the categories are external and imposed.
Maybe we all just feel like people…or maybe not even that, maybe we all just feel like a set of senses and thoughts and actions.
I, at least, don’t feel like either a female or a male, nor do I feel “gender fluid” in the sense of alternating between the two. I feel like someone who is seen as a female by the rest of the world. In here? I couldn’t really tell you. A secret agent, a dissenter, a taker of notes.
He made the decision to come out four months ago after consulting a life coach who he says helped him come to terms with his identity, as did seeing more gender fluid stars – such as Ruby Rose – in the spotlight.
“I have had theses feelings for many years but just suppressed it,” he says.
“Knowing I didn’t want to change sex or be a cross dresser it was hard to find myself with that.
“It was not until the term came out that I felt comfortable coming out myself. Stars like Ruby Rose have certainly made life easier for the rest of us.”
So he’s a straight lesbian. Whatevs.
Fun game – imagine the results if a woman attempted this kind of nonsense. Imagine if I decided to call myself a “straight gay man”. I would be relentlessly abused and trashed for appropriation, colonisation, and other bad sounding words. It would be Peak White Feminism.
Only bepenised people get to redefine words to suit their own whims like this.
A hike up Peak White Feminism is definitely on my bucket list.
(I just can’t not make jokes about this stuff.)
Uh, so “colonisation” of straight gay men is not a bad sounding joke word?
Confuseder and confuseder, is how I identify now (but that can be fluid too).
I vaguely recall reading about some school of anthropologists way back when, who decided that the racial classifications of black, white, etc., were too crude. They set out to do a better job … and gave up when the number of “races” exceeded 300 and change. They realized that people just vary in a myriad of ways that don’t map onto discrete categories.
I’m hoping that something similar could happen with the current multiplying of gender categories; that they’ll multiply to the point of collapsing under the sheer weight of labels, and more people could see* that personalities are all over the place on a huge number of dimensions that aren’t linked to biological sex, or at least not strongly linked. And that, for example, people who really enjoy adorning themselves with stuff like jewelry, makeup, bright colors, and so on aren’t behaving in a way that’s inherently masculine or feminine.
Relating back to the previous “categories” thread I agree that we can’t know whether some gendering in identities and expectations would still exist after the kind of collapse I envision. And if they did, of course they should be respected.
*Where “see” means “agree with me,” of course.
@Rebecca:
My partner has on more than one occasion (un-ironically as well) identified herself as a gay man in a woman’s body, and is also in the grey asexual category. This is an anecdotal example to be sure, but denying that people with women’s reproductive setup do this is most assuredly hyperbolic.
Please note that the “straight lesbian” thing appears to be a joke referencing Eddie Izzard. Will also note that the source for the “straight lesbian” comment is the Daily Mail, not Pink News, and even the freaking DM describes it as a “lighthearted comment”. Given that it’s the DM, I’d give it a 50/50 that the comment was even made. :P
Given that our society so heavily links biological and social gender, I don’t find it all surprising that people find identification with either/or, particularly when expression of that identification seems to skew heavily towards a society calls THIS male, and society calls THIS female metric. Not everybody is indifferent to the question in the way our bloghost is*, and hey-look-ready-made categories!
My take away from the article is that hey, this person found a way to describe themselves that makes them happy, and their friends and family are cool with it. At least they’re no longer agonizing over whether or not it’s ok to be *gasp* feminine in polite society.
* No criticism of bloghost intended, simply a note that hey, people are, like, different and stuff.
Actually, I feel very much like what you said– I *am* genderfluid, provided we say that’s a thing, but it’s like rewriting a small percentage of my brain to operate in ‘male mode’ or ‘female mode’ for limited periods of time.
Furthermore, I’ve noticed I have to be in quite a comfortable environment to feel at all at ease in female mode. Male made is great for when I don’t feel entirely safe. Which is *exactly* what you would expect from a mental trick learned to cope with a misogynistic world that defines woman as the vulnerable gender and men as the ones who shape their environment.
Binary trans people often describe a sensation that their body is wrong for them, and this sensation exists independent of social roles and perception by others. These people would be trans even if society became completely egalitarian regarding gender, and language became completely neutral wrt gender. I don’t know how this works for genderfluid people.
Re ‘straight lesbian’ – what Sutherland is saying is that he is consistently attracted to women, regardless of his fluctuating gender feelings. Maybe someone can come up with better labels.
@PatrickG comment #6: “My take away from the article is that hey, this person found a way to describe themselves that makes them happy, and their friends and family are cool with it. At least they’re no longer agonizing over whether or not it’s ok to be *gasp* feminine in polite society.”
This person is co-opting the identity of “lesbian” and that is no more acceptable when a male does that than when a white person co-opts the identity of a black person. Lesbians exist. We are not a fantasy in some guy’s head. We are not an abstract concept which exists so this guy can be “happy” and their friends and family comfortable. This dude can work out his own stuff around being feminine without co-opting the experience or name of “lesbian.”
One guy’s comfort does not trump an entire group of women’s rights to name ourselves and talk about our experiences in a coherent way. I know this runs counter to the current trend that everyone can be everything, individual identity is sacred, and things like political class analysis is so passe, but I’m comfortable being a mean old 2nd wave dyke bitch on this point. My individualism matters too, right?